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Microsoft brought Windows, AI, and Arm processors together at a Surface event on May 20th, and we're tracked all the announcements here or go back and check out our live updates and reactions. The big news of the day was Microsoft's new class of PCs, dubbed Copilot Plus PCs. These computers have processors with NPUs built in so they can do more AI-oriented tasks directly on the computer instead of the cloud. The AI-oriented tasks include using a new Windows feature called Recall. Microsoft also announced a new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro Tablet powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors. That means they should be thinner, lighter, and have better battery-life while also handling AI and processor heavy tasks. And Microsoft wasn't the only one at the event showing off new laptops. HP, Asus, Lenovo, Dell, and other laptop makers all have new Copilot Plus PCs. We'll have to find out if thinner laptops that get better battery life can combine with AI tools like Copilot to change what we expect from Windows PCs. As Tom Warren wrote in his Notepad newsletter ahead of the event, "It's clear Microsoft has grown tired of Intel's failed attempts at a comeback, so it's going all in on these latest Qualcomm chips — and bringing its closest PC partners along for the ride." Below, we'll bring you all the latest news and updates. A weekly newsletter uncovering the secrets and strategy behind Microsoft's era-defining bets on AI, gaming, and computing Subscribe Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge We've heard the story so many times, that this is the time that Windows on Arm will work and we'll get a revolution in powerful, portable, long-lasting PCs. For a decade, the story has been fiction. This time, though... I don't know. It sort of seems real. On this episode of The Vergecast, Tom Warren joins from Seattle to tell us all about Microsoft's latest event, what a Copilot Plus PC is, how the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop feel, why Recall could be the AI killer app Microsoft needs, and more. If Microsoft is right about how good the Qualcomm X chips are, this could be one of the biggest weeks in Windows history. Don't forget to subscribe to Notepad! Read Article > Image: Samsung Microsoft announced a whole passel of Copilot Plus PCs at its Surface event on Monday, and Samsung's entries are a 14-inch laptop and two 16-inch ones, known collectively as the Galaxy Book4 Edge. If you preorder them today, Samsung will throw in a free 50-inch TV! Come on down! The 14-inch Galaxy Book4 Edge starts at $1,349.99 with a 12-core 3.4GHz Snapdragon X Elite processor with 4.0GHz Dual Core Boost, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD (up to 1TB). It has a 14-inch, 120Hz 2880 x 1800 AMOLED touchscreen capable of up to 500 nits brightness, with HDR and VRR and 120 percent of the P3 gamut. It has two USB 4 Type-C ports, HDMI 2.1, and a combo audio jack. It weighs 2.6 pounds. Read Article > Microsoft's AI upscaling for games on Copilot Plus PCs is limited to specific games. Another tidbit from the FAQ: At initial launch, Super Resolution will be available in a limited number of games available through the Xbox app for Windows PC: 7 Days to Die, BeamNG.drive, Borderlands 3, Control, Dark Souls III, Dying Light, The Forest, God of War, Resident Evil 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Skyrim SE, Sons of the Forest, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, Unturned, Warframe, and The Witcher 3. Is that just Microsoft putting its best foot forward, or do games need patched individually? Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Microsoft has just announced a new Surface Pro, which is part of the new wave of Copilot Plus PCs. The new Pro, which is technically the "11th edition," starts at $999, comes in four colors, and is powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X processors. The base model comes with a 13-inch LCD screen, but you can upgrade to an OLED in some of the higher-end models. The chip is the star of the show here: it's what enables a lot of the AI features Microsoft touted onstage, what makes possible the 14-hour battery life Microsoft promises, and more. The basic silhouette of the hardware hasn't changed much, save for the new Flex Keyboard attachment. The tablet with an integrated kickstand has been a Surface staple for years now, and Microsoft continues to refine it rather than trying to reinvent it. Read Article > Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge The Surface Laptop for non-business types is here, and Microsoft hopes that after four years of Apple Silicon, its new Arm-based "Copilot Plus PC" has a shot at MacBooks. The sapphire and slightly pink dune color options are fetching in person, and the 13.8-inch screen size feels generous for the machine's small footprint. I spent a few minutes playing around with the new Recall feature, which lets you search for things you were looking at on your computer — whether they were in an email, on a website, or in a slide deck. AI-powered search helps you find the right information and presents it in a kind of everything-timeline so you can (hopefully) find the info you're after and see it in its context. Honestly, it looks like a super useful feature I could use, like, yesterday. Read Article > What will Microsoft's Recall remember? From the FAQ: 📎"You can select specific apps or websites visited in a supported browser to filter out of your snapshots." 📎"Recall also does not take snapshots of certain kinds of content, including InPrivate web browsing sessions in Microsoft Edge." 📎"Recall will not store DRM content." 📎"Note that Recall does not perform content moderation." 📎"It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers." Image: Microsoft Microsoft is confident that it finally nailed the transition to Arm chips — so confident that, this time around, the company spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against the MacBook Air. On a recent morning at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft representatives set out new Surface devices equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips inside and compared them directly to Apple's category-leading laptop. I witnessed an hour of demos and benchmarks that started with Geekbench and Cinebench comparisons, then moved on to apps and compatibility. Read Article > Image: Allison Johnson Microsoft just wrapped up its special event ahead of Build 2024, and it had a lot of exciting news to share. Along with updates to its Surface lineup, Microsoft made some major announcements related to AI and a new era of PCs in partnership with Lenovo, Asus, Dell, and others. Microsoft didn't livestream this event, so if you want to catch up with everything it revealed, check out our roundup below. Read Article > Photo: Asus Following Microsoft's Windows event, Asus announced its first Copilot Plus PC laptop, the Vivobook S 15 (S5507), driven by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X-series processors. Asus says the Arm-based chip will not only improve a few current Vivobook features but also make new AI-driven programs and workloads fly with 45 TOPS of neural processing power. The new Vivobook S 15 will have the same OLED display as the previous Intel generation (15.6-inch, 16:9, 2880 x 1620, 120Hz refresh rate, and 600 nits peak HDR brightness), but this specific version will have a thinner chassis and display bezels. The S 15 is configurable with either a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite or 10-core X Plus processor, although the Elite chip will be the base version — the one with a slower integrated GPU and no dual core boost. Read Article > DaVinci Resolve can use Copilot Plus PCs' neural processing unit to apply AI color corrections. We saw the video editor's new feature demoed at Microsoft's Surface event in Richmond, where new Copilot Plus Surface Laptops and an updated Surface Pro with Qualcomm's AI-ready chips have been announced. The demo suggests the CPU and GPU won't have to break much of a sweat, if any, when offloading tasks like these. Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Image: Acer On Monday, Acer announced the pending arrival of its first Copilot Plus PC: the Swift 14 AI, which is the Qualcomm Snapdragon version of one of its popular laptops. It will come in two configurations, and both will support a slate of new AI features in Windows 11, like Recall, Cocreator, and Live Captions. One configuration comes with the base 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processor (the one without dual boost) and the other with the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus. Both have the same 45 TOPS neural processing unit, and both laptop models can be configured with up to 32GB of memory and 1TB of M.2 SSD storage. Read Article > Image: HP Buying a laptop from a major maker like HP can be infuriating — mainly because there are too many options. HP and other laptop makers do this to give us all "choice," but if you are the kind of person who uses "RAM" and "storage" interchangeably, those choices can be confounding — which might be one reason HP's using today's big AI and Windows on Arm moment to also clean up its whole lineup. Gone are the Envys and Pavilions and Dragonflies, and in their places are the consumer-focused OmniBook and the corporate-oriented EliteBook and ProBook. In both cases, the idea is to simplify things for people who just want to buy a laptop. Read Article > Image: Dell On Monday, Dell announced that it's releasing five Qualcomm-configured laptops: the XPS 13 (9345), Inspiron 14, Inspiron 14 Plus, Latitude 7455, and Latitude 5455. That's more than any other manufacturer has announced so far. The new XPS 13 is powered by a midrange 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processor with Dual Core Boost. (There will also be a 10-core X Plus version but only available in China.) The company says it will support up to 64GB of memory, up to 2TB of PCIe SSD storage (with a 4TB option post-launch), and three 13.4-inch display options: a 500-nit 1920 x 1200 non-touch IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate; a 500-nit 2560 x 1600 IPS touch display with HDR and a 120Hz refresh rate; and a 400-nit, 60Hz 2880 x 1800 OLED touch display with HDR. Read Article > Image: Lenovo Lenovo announced on Monday that it's adding two Qualcomm-powered laptops to its portfolio: one new Yoga Slim and one new ThinkPad. The Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 is the creativity-focused laptop of the two. It will be configured with a Snapdragon X Elite processor, up to 32GB of memory, up to 1TB of M.2 SSD storage, three USB-C ports with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 support, and a 14.5-inch OLED touch display. The whole laptop will weigh just 2.8 pounds and be as thin as 0.51 inches, and it has a 1080p IR webcam that supports Windows Hello. Lenovo claims the Yoga Slim's battery life will last multiple days, which, if true, could rival the MacBook Pro. Read Article > Adobe brings its full Creative Cloud suite to Microsoft's new Copilot Plus laptops. Native Arm64 versions of Photoshop, Lightroom, Firefly, and Express are available starting today, Adobe announced at the Surface event going on in Richmond right now. Illustrator and Premiere Pro won't be far behind with June arrivals. New Copilot Plus laptops and tablets with the architecture will be able to run the apps as soon as they arrive. Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Microsoft isn't gatekeeping real time translation on Windows. Instead of being stuck in Teams or another Microsoft app the new translation feature will be "available across any video calling app, any entertainment app, translated locally across the NPU." That's great because in the one demo we've seen so far it seemed to do a very impressive job of translating everything said in real time, no human translator required. Image: Allison Johnson / The Verge Just days after Apple's OLED iPad Pro went on sale, Microsoft is bringing the same core display technology to its new Surface Pro. (Also, it's now just called the Surface Pro; the company has seemingly done away with its numbering.) For the first time, Microsoft's tablet will be capable of producing perfect blacks along with all the other benefits to contrast ratio, response time, and more that come with the move to OLED. The new panel also supports HDR output, the company said at its event. The LCDs on previous Surface Pros (and on the business edition Surface Pro 10) were already impressive in terms of color accuracy and sharpness, but Microsoft always stuck to traditional backlighting, which limited just how deep the blacks could go. Now, with per-pixel control, the Surface Pro 10 can make movies and photos appear much more punchy and vivid. Read Article > Image: Microsoft Microsoft just announced the new Surface Pro, the latest in its lineup of tablet / laptop hybrid devices and the first in a new generation of what Microsoft is calling Copilot Plus PCs. The numbers are gone from the model names, which seems to signify a full reboot of the lineup. "Compared to previous Surface generations, it isn't even close," said Brett Ostrum, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Surface, at a launch event. Powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X processors (the Elite and the Plus versions), Microsoft says this new Pro is up to 90 percent faster than the previous model. It also has optional 5G, which tends to come with Qualcomm support. Read Article > Image: Microsoft Microsoft has taken the wraps off the new Surface Laptop — an Arm-based laptop for consumers that's available for preorder today, starting at $999.99 (13.8-inch) or $1,199.99 (15-inch), and shipping on June 18th. It's got one big difference from the Surface Laptop 6 for Business announced in March — it's equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite or Plus chip instead of Intel's Core Ultra, leveling the playing field, the company hopes, with Apple's powerful and efficient MacBook laptops. The Surface Laptop comes in several configurations, starting with a base 16GB of RAM (please take notes, Apple) and 256GB of SSD storage with the Snapdragon X Plus chip, but storage can be bumped up to a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM (though 64GB is available as a preorder exclusive, for now) on both the 13.8-inch and 15- inch versions with the Elite chip. Either model comes equipped with a Qualcomm Adreno GPU. The laptops also come in four colors: black, platinum, dune, and sapphire, although it looks as though only platinum is available for the 256GB base models of both screen sizes. Read Article > Microsoft's Copilot assistant is getting a GPT-4o upgrade. Like many other assistants and AI devices plugged into OpenAI's latest LLM, Microsoft just announced at today's Surface event that Copilot will soon be plugged into GPT-4o (and powered by new Surface Plus PCs). They demonstrated the integration by showing Copilot guide a player through Minecraft, using GPT-4o to see and react to what was happening onscreen. Image: Allison Johnson Image: Allison Johnson / The Verge Microsoft's launching Recall for Copilot Plus PCs, a new Windows 11 tool that keeps track of everything you see and do on your computer and, in return, gives you the ability to search and retrieve anything you've done on the device. The scope of Recall, which Microsoft has internally called AI Explorer, is incredibly vast — it includes logging things you do in apps, tracking communications in live meetings, remembering all websites you've visited for research, and more. All you need to do is perform a "Recall" action, which is like an AI-powered search, and it'll present a snapshot of that period of time that gives you context of the memory. Read Article > Image: Allison Johnson Microsoft is making a major push to put AI into laptops. It's introducing new "Copilot Plus PCs" that'll highlight when Windows laptops come with built-in AI hardware and support for AI features across the operating system. All of Microsoft's major laptop partners will offer Copilot Plus PCs, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event at the company's headquarters on Monday. That includes Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, and Asus; Microsoft is also introducing two of its own as part of the Surface line. And while Microsoft is also making a big push to bring Arm chips to Windows laptops today, Nadella said that laptops with Intel and AMD chips will offer these AI features, too. Read Article >Notepad by Tom Warren /
Microsoft is in its AI PC era
Samsung's first Copilot Plus PC comes with a free TV
A first look at Microsoft's new Surface Pro with Arm chips inside
Hands-on with the Surface Laptop on Arm
Inside Microsoft's mission to take down the MacBook Air
Microsoft Surface event: the 6 biggest announcements
Asus' first Copilot Plus PC is the Vivobook S 15
Acer will welcome its first Copilot Plus PC to its Swift 14 lineup this summer
Acer's Swift 14 AI laptop arrives this summer. HP is simplifying its laptop lineup and embracing the AI PC
The OmniBook is on the left and the EliteBook is on the right. Dell is releasing five Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops this year
The Dell XPS 13 (9345). Lenovo is releasing two Qualcomm-powered laptops this summer
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9. Microsoft's new Surface Pro gets an OLED display for the first time
The new, faster Surface Pro is Microsoft's all-purpose AI PC
The new Surface Pro is a whole lot faster than the old models. Microsoft announces an Arm-powered Surface Laptop
The Surface Laptop comes in four colors. Recall is Microsoft's key to unlocking the future of PCs
Microsoft's head of Windows and Surface, Pavan Davuluri, onstage at the company's Surface event. Microsoft announces Copilot Plus PCs with built-in AI hardware
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduces the Copilot Plus PC branding.
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