Qualcomm spends millions on marketing as it is found better battery life, not AI features, is driving Copilot+ PC sales

Who'da thunk, battery life sells battery powered devices.

Is this really a surprise to anyone outside of the AI hype machine?

Copilot+ is a reason not to buy one of those laptops. It’s a privacy and security nightmare.

That tracks, AI is somehow twice as annoying as nfts and I've been dying for a decent ARM / RISC-V Linux laptop.

I turn everything that mentions Copilot off. I don't need this crap and I never asked for it to be made.

Linux support also appears to be coming along nicely (though not ready yet).

I feel like narrow AI tools duped me for a while, but the more I started to really use Chat GPT professionally, the more I've likened it to professional mimicking software. It essentially works to pyt out responses that sound the most convincing but have nothing to do with putting out responses that are actually at all accurate. These are terrible tools outside of asking basic questions, idea generation, and generally summarizing existing information you feed into it. I use it to help me make lists and better phrase emails and company messages at this point and nothing that actually requires any actual fact finding.

I spent a good 20 minutes trying to remove copilot from my windows 10 machine last night. It embedded itself into the taskbar, the edge explorer, and I finally had to go into system components to disable it. No doubt there will be another ms update that will revert all these settings again

I have actually come to prefer using AI instead of a search engine at work for most things sysadmin related (using DuckDuckGo’s AI chat feature), but I 100% have found that Copilot performs far worse than competing products. Having it that engrained in the computer is a very negative feature, despite the battery improvements.

I got the Surface Pro X a few years ago purely for battery life, performance be damned. Great decision, and it fit my use-case perfectly. Maybe a little too perfectly for Qualcomm, because I have no reason to upgrade to something more performant when all I cared about was the battery life.

Edit: This recent push towards Windows on ARM is also benefiting these old WOA devices. Programs that would barely run before (because they were compiled for x86 and had to be emulated on a chip that could hardly handle all that extra overhead) are now getting native ARM version releases that run way better. In my experience, my Pro X's performance has effectively been improving as time goes on, so I have even less of a reason to get anything new.

I know how Microsoft can increase battery life by between roughly 50%-100%, depending on model.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-laptop-7th-edition

Battery capacities34

Surface Laptop 13.8”: Battery Capacity Nominal (Wh) 54 Battery Capacity Min (Wh) 52

Surface Laptop 15”: Battery Capacity Nominal (Wh) 66 Battery Capacity Min (Wh) 64

Offer a 100 Wh battery.