Microsoft's Surface Laptop Is Marked Down by $350 While Apple may have the first-party laptop market cornered with the MacBook lineup, Microsoft's Surface laptops have been steadily improving over the past few years, and are now an increasingly appealing option. Last year's seventh-generation Surface Laptop is currently marked down by $350 on Amazon for the base model, bringing the price down to a tantalizing $849. While the screen is a somewhat rare 3:2 aspect ratio, it's an excellent panel for everyday use and productivity. It can reach a decently bright 600 nits, which should be plenty for a quick work call from the park, and it has a 120-Hz refresh rate, which should smooth things out a bit, even if you don't plan on gaming. It's a touch panel as well, in case you like to get physical with your Windows, but I'm still not super enthused by the touchscreen support in the Microsoft OS.

It's been one future that sci-fi has promised since Star Trek. Microsoft now says that that future is arriving, at least within a small corner of Windows 11. Microsoft is promising that you'll be able to use natural language to change aspects of your Windows 11 Settings menu, and Windows will go out and make those changes for you using "agents," or small bits of AI that will work on your behalf -- at least if you own a Copilot PC with an AI-accelerating NPU onboard. Microsoft has begun to use its Surface devices as a showcase for its latest software, and the new 13-inch Surface Laptop and 12-inch Surface Pro are no exception. They'll serve as launch vehicles for Windows Recall, semantic search, and Click-to-Do, but also brand new features like agentic AI and relighting features for Photos, object editing and sticker generation for Paint, and more.

Live Captions are more useful than I thought they'd be. They not only caption any video you have (like a video of a wedding or graduation, say) but they will also translate any audio -- whether that's on the screen or via the tablet microphone. Just make sure you enable that in the app's settings.

It's the dawn of a new era in Microsoft's eyes as the first wave of Copilot PCs are now available as of June 18. This "new class of Windows PCs," as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes them, contains hardware designed to run as many generative AI processes locally as possible, rather than having to rely on data centers. These laptops all have an Arm-based Snapdragon chipset from Qualcomm that includes a neural processing unit (NPU) to handle such tasks. Microsoft has stipulated that Copilot PCs need to have at least 40 TOPs (tera operations per second) of NPU performance, and 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage at minimum. The systems each have a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard and they're all slated to have strong battery life.

Microsoft made some unusually major moves ahead of its Build developer conference: It announced a new Copilot initiative for powerful AI PCs, which will be led by the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. These machines are powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips, and they come with a special version of Windows 11 optimized for Arm mobile chips and AI. Basically, Microsoft is doing for PCs what Apple did with its M-series Macs four years ago. We still don't know how well these new machines will perform, but it sounds like Microsoft has certainly heard our complaints about Arm-based Windows devices. Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News! Devindra: Hey everyone, this is Devindra here. I had a chance to chat with Pavan Davuluri, the head of Microsoft Windows and Devices, basically the team in charge of Surface and Windows. And we talked about the new Copilot Plus Surface PCs, the Surface Pro and the Surface Laptop, and the whole new Copilot Plus initiative in general. We've reviewed quite a few of the ARM based Windows PCs and you know, they have not worked out so well. So I think this could be different, at least from the benchmarks we've seen.

We knew more computers were coming that would feature a native version of Microsoft's AI Copilot toolset, but we didn't quite know how many were set to be announced. Companies like Dell, Acer and HP have all just announced computers that have adopted Microsoft's AI software and NVIDIA's AI hardware. The age of the AI PC is upon us. These Copilot PCs could really change how we interact with computers, bringing natural language nuance to a bevy of everyday tasks. The PCs all feature a dedicated key to bring up Copilot and are stuffed with Arm-based Snapdragon X CPUs, which include powerful onboard neural processing units (NPUs) for AI tasks.

Every trip around the sun, we prod, poke, and test hundreds of products here at WIRED. Most of them are just fine. Not boring--few things are truly boring these days. But a lot of what we see doesn't register more than a notch or two on the excite-o-meter. However, every so often, we get a product in our hands that clearly stands out, either by pushing its category forward with some new innovation, or perfecting an established and already noteworthy design.

If 2016 was the year of putting failures behind it, Microsoft's 2017 was a year of focus. Over the past 12 months we've seen the software giant successfully execute on its plan to become a major cloud competitor. It's a massive part of Microsoft's business now, and it will only continue to grow into 2018. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also revealed that the company's future is in artificial intelligence, Mixed Reality, and quantum computing. We've seen early work in all three areas this year, even if quantum computing and true artificial intelligence are still a ways off in the industry.

Microsoft's 2017 may as well be known as the year the company turned away from the consumer and, sadly, back toward the enterprise. This past year was notable for two casualties: Microsoft's phone business finally died, as did Groove Music, the music subscription service that Microsoft abandoned in favor of Spotify. In fact, you could argue that Microsoft's software and services didn't succeed nearly as well as its hardware, where a new generation of Surfaces and Xbox One consoles were generally well received. It didn't help that management seemed to feel that staid enterprise Azure and Office 365 represented Microsoft's future, either. Now, question marks hang over Microsoft's plans for 2018. The spark is there, but will consumers care?

Last year, we saw VR surge in prominence, but our picks this year are more conventional -- not to mention more diverse. The usual suspects include the iPhone X and Surface Laptop for getting helping us get things done, and the Nintendo Switch and the Sonos One for their ability to let us luxuriate at home and on the road. There's some more unexpected stuff on our list, too, like the easy-to-use DJI Spark drone as well as the Mighty, a tiny music player that won over much of the Engadget staff. Ultimately, we appreciated these picks for the ways they made our lives more pleasant, even if only a little. Apple's latest iPhone is a radical departure from the company's tried-and-true smartphone formula, but you'd better get used to it.