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

Will Copilot+ PCs become ubiquitous? Probably. But when is still the question.

- BY MARK HACHMAN

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 (fave.co/4kORFMP)—the engine of AI—capable of 40 trillion operations per second, or TOPS.

A year later, the numbers are beyond grim. They're abysmal. In 2024, shipments of Windows PCs with 40+ TOPS totaled just 0.5 percent of the total PC market, and 0.6 percent of all Windows PCs—1.3 million units in total, researcher IDC found. In the first quarter of 2025, the firm says, that total nudged upward to 1.9 percent of the entire PC market, and 2.3 percent of all Windows PCs sold during the period. That's just 1.2 million units more.

Microsoft pitched a vision of the PC where AI would be the tool by which users would build, create, and search, using AI-powered apps like Paint Cocreator (fave.co/3Vj3lfn) and Recall (fave.co/4IEcY3y). “Today, we are bringing real joy and a sense of wonder back to creation on the PC,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said at the launch of the Copilot+ PC program at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

Customers, however, simply haven’t bought in.

Microsoft has used laptops and tablets like the Surface Pro 11th Edition, seen here, to show off its AI applications.

A CASCADE OF NEGATIVE EVENTS