Microsoft's Copilot gamble is a bust. But AI PCs still feel inevitable

A year ago, Microsoft hyped Copilot PCs as the next big thing. Twelve months later, it's hard not to see them as one of the tech industry's more significant flops. The question is whether they'll stay that way. Many Copilot PCs began shipping on June 18, 2024, about a month after Microsoft announced the program at the company's headquarters a month earlier. Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Microsoft's own Surface division committed to shipping Copilot PCs, whose centerpiece was a processor with an embedded Neural Processing Unit -- the engine of AI -- capable of 40 trillion operations per second, or TOPS.