Affordable Copilot PCs on the Horizon: Microsoft's AI Push at Lower Price Points

More Copilot+ PCs could be coming soon, and at a new low price of just $800

Battery life for days without spending a whole paycheck? Sign us up One of the few issues I found with the new Copilot+ PCs from Microsoft and Qualcomm is the price. The cheapest Copilot+ PCs at MSRP are the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and Microsoft Surface Pro 11, which cost $999. While cheaper than the other Copilot+ PCs, neither Microsoft product is exactly budget-friendly. Neither Surface unit ranked on our list of Best AI PCs, as the competition offered a better quality experience. Leaving the experience of a good Copilot+ PC locked behind a $1,000 price tag. But there is some hope for those waiting for a good, affordable Copilot+ PC with an all-day battery life. Well-known leaker Evan Blass has released new information (via TechRadar) from a slide that details new Qualcomm Snapdragon X chipsets. With new chips in the Snapdragon X family, we could have a new line of Copilot+ PCs that are more affordable than the current Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus lineup. In the slides provided by Blass, it seems Qualcomm is planning to release new Snapdragon X Plus 8-core processors with 1.7 TFLOPS (tera floating point operations per second), 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of NPU performance, plus support for Wi-Fi 7 and up to three 60Hz 4K displays. The chips will be manufactured using a 4-nanometer process and feature 30MB of total cache. Blass' comments on the slide indicate Qualcomm expects laptops featuring the new Snapdragon X Plus 8-core chipsets will start at just $800. If the latest leak from Blass is true, and the slide does fit with previous marketing materials we've seen from Qualcomm around the Snapdragon X launch, we could soon have $800 laptops that offer premium-level battery life. For all the boasting about the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus chipsets' NPU, one of the best features of the Copilot+ laptops has been battery life. Our list of laptops with the best battery life was pretty much dominated solely by Apple's M-powered MacBooks up until this summer. But the new Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X Elite) laptop managed an astounding 19 hours and 1 minute on the Laptop Mag battery test, which is longer than the MacBook Pro 16 M3 Max's 18:05 battery life. While not all Copilot+ PCs offered the XPS 13's incredible battery life, all of the laptops lasted for well over the 10-hour mark with most coming in around 14-15 hours. If we can get a laptop for just $800 that offers 14 hours of battery life? That may put our favorite budget laptop the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425) out of business. Qualcomm has not officially confirmed new Snapdragon X Plus chipsets, but the company does have some big plans for IFA Berlin next week with a pre-show press conference on September 4th at 1PM CEST | 12pm BST |7am EST | 4am PST.

CoPilot+ PCs could finally get more affordable soon - here's what's coming

Microsoft has painted its new range of Copilot+ PCs as the future of Windows laptops, and for the most part we agree. But it's hard to turn a computer into a mass seller when it costs over $1,000 (sometimes significantly more so). Fortunately, that could be addressed soon with a new range of much more affordable Copilot+ PCs that are allegedly on the brink of launching. That's because well-known tech tipster Evan Blass has just shared a slide from Qualcomm that details what we can expect from the next generation of Snapdragon X chips that will power upcoming Copilot+ PC models. According to the slide, we could see eight-core chips with 1.7 TFLOPS of output, support for three 4K displays running at 60Hz, Wi-Fi 7, and 45 TOPS of artificial intelligence (AI) performance. The slide also notes that the chips will be made using a 4nm process and will come with 30MB of total cache. What was missing from the slide was any hint at price, but Blass filled in that gap, saying that notebooks equipped with Snapdragon X Plus chips will start at $800. That's a significant saving on the current range, like the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, and could help to make Copilot+ PCs a lot more accessible to a broader swath of users. That lower price will apparently come from a few cut features. The 1.7 TFLOPS output is noticeably less than you'll get from existing Copilot+ PCs, and that alone will go a long way towards accounting for the reduced price. But if you'd rather have a more affordable device, you might not mind. The slide supposedly comes from a presentation by Qualcomm, the company that makes the Snapdragon X chips found inside the Copilot+ PC range. While we can't independently verify its accuracy, Blass has a pretty strong track record when it comes to accurate leaks. Blass suggests that we will find out more about these chips at the IFA 2024 event in Berlin next month, where Copilot+ PCs are known to be making an appearance. IFA runs from September 6-10, and it would be an ideal opportunity for Snapdragon to unveil its new eight-core chips to the world.