Dell is shifting focus away from AI PCs after discovering consumers show little interest in purchasing computers solely for AI capabilities, according to PCWorld. The company plans to re-emphasize consumer and gaming segments while bringing back its popular XPS line, though Copilot+ PCs will remain available. PC prices may increase by 20% due to RAM shortages, creating additional market challenges as manufacturers adjust their AI-focused strategies. Last week at CES 2026, AI-capable Copilot+ PCs were all over the convention show floor, with many PC makers promoting their so-called "AI PCs" with NPUs and other cutting-edge features. AI PCs have been hyped since 2024 as the next evolution of home computing, but it appears consumers aren't buying into the new technology.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Local AI tools are more powerful than ever, but most of the magic ain't happening on NPUs--much to Microsoft's disappointment, I'm sure. For the last few years, the term "AI PC" has basically meant little more than "a lightweight portable laptop with a neural processing unit (NPU) ." Today, two years after the glitzy launch of NPUs with Intel's Meteor Lake hardware, these AI PCs still feel like glorified tech demos. But local AI is here!

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Microsoft wants to redefine the Windows AI PC. Copilot Actions is the first step. Microsoft's Copilot Actions is what happens when Microsoft begins rethinking the future of Windows and how AI is integrated into the operating system. Imagine agentic AI being turned loose inside your PC and performing tasks without your supervision.

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.

Should Microsoft and the PC industry have paid more attention to the GPU during the development of AI and Copilot PCs? After a year's time waiting for Copilot PCs (and their newfangled "Neural Processing Units" to take off, I can't help but wonder. Microsoft launched the Copilot PC initiative on May 20, 2024, and began shipping them on June 18. Since then, Microsoft has supported Copilot PCs with a handful of features, rolling them out first for PCs with the Qualcomm Snapdragon chips inside and then later for PCs powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 2 chips and the AMD Ryzen AI 300 processor. Qualcomm is essentially blameless, delivering a potent PC processor with most AI capabilities and long battery life.

AI PCs are in vogue, especially laptops. But most consumers aren't totally clear on what an AI PC even is, much less which models qualify as one. It doesn't help that AI PCs can be physically indistinguishable from the versions without AI. Here is a simple checklist for determining whether your laptop is capable of performing AI tasks using those newfangled NPUs. In the "Settings" app (key combination Win I), go to "System" and then scroll down to "About."

Since AI has diffused into every aspect of the technology sector, I've been more than a little tempted to try my hand at some of AI's cooler applications. That growing temptation finally culminated in me building a desktop PC just for AI -- to try my hand at vibe coding apps just for fun. My budget wasn't that high, so for the build I landed on an AMD Ryzen 5 2400G CPU with a base clock speed of 3.6GHz, and an Nvidia RTX 3090 video card. That combination was validated by my fellow PC builders online as entirely suitable for AI, so I felt confident I was onto a good thing. My new PC worked well for my newest hobby, allowing me to dabble in making simple apps in DeepAgent.

In 2022-2023, AI-powered PCs made quite a splash with their automatic generation and built-in virtual assistants. Those features are cool, sure, but they're a little gimmicky at first blush. That said, amid the hype, the real standout feature emerged: battery life. Thanks to smarter resource management and power-efficient chip architecture, AI PCs became long-lasting devices that didn't need to be plugged in all the time. Let's take flying cross-country with a traditional laptop, for instance.

Almost a year since Microsoft announced its controversial Recall feature, and after several delays, the company has finally started bringing it to Copilot AI PCs today. The launch comes just a few weeks after Microsoft started testing Recall broadly with Windows Insiders. There are also a few other AI-powered features coming along with this release, including an improved Windows Search and Click to Do, which lets you quickly use AI features from within your existing apps. As usual, the release won't immediately roll out to all Copilot PCs, instead Microsoft is gradually releasing it over the next month (and likely monitoring potential issues along the way). Recall was one of the biggest announcements at Microsoft's Copilot debut last May, but almost immediately, it came under fire for some glaring privacy issues.

AMD is targeting both low-end and high-end AI PCs at CES 2025. The company unveiled a new family of Ryzen AI Max chips meant for "halo" Copilot AI PCs, which will sit above existing Ryzen AI 9 systems. Clearly, AMD wants AI PC options for everyone. To its credit, AMD's Ryzen AI Max chips seem like powerhouses. They feature up to 16 Zen 5 performance cores, 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units and 50 TOPS of AI performance with AMD"s XDNA 2 NPU.