A Month Later, Copilot+ Laptops Are Still a Mess
I’ve owned the Copilot+ laptop for a little over a month now and I still can’t get over how exaggerated the name is. This was Microsoft’s chance to compete with Apple’s M-series chips and the Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC, but still, the AI is arguably less present here than on the Windows 10 desktop I created in 2016. It’s probably for the best that the Company has delayed Recall , its main Copilot+ AI feature, due to security concerns . But now the PC line that was supposed to be Apple’s moment for Windows has fallen into obscurity.
It’s also a shame for Qualcomm, which used Copilot+ for its latest foray into laptop processors. Unlike Apple, Microsoft has no intention of moving to ARM chips on its own, so now it has a partner offering a lot of fancy new M-series-style ARM technologies to show off, and no AI apps to show them off in. Although Copilot+ was never intended to be a Qualcomm exclusive , ARM processors were expected to receive its features first. Now the processors are there, but the features are mostly missing.
This leaves me with a well-made laptop with an OLED screen, long battery life, but some compatibility issues. It’s not a bad experience, but my time with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x could have been much longer.
The co-pilot is barely here
I usually start a review by talking about design or performance, but this laptop was meant to be different, so I’d like to start with the disappointment that is, or at least once was, the main selling point of this laptop.
Right now, when I open my Copilot+ laptop, I see a lock screen that says “A New Era of Artificial Intelligence Begins” and tells me to “Buy a Copilot+ PC.” Apparently the marketing department missed notice of the recall delay.
There are currently three use cases for AI on PC Copilot+, none of which are new and all of which are very limited.
The first is Cocreator in Paint , where you can ask a bot to create an AI reinterpretation of what you draw. It was supposed to be a great way to allow artists of all skill levels to quickly generate ideas, but the two-headed turtles and multi-legged superheroes I got when I tried it show that this feature still has some work to do. There’s nothing here that you won’t find in competing features from companies like Samsung .
Then there are live subtitles. This is a nice accessibility feature, and while they are not new to Windows computers, having a Copilot+ PC makes it possible to get them with translations. They’re designed for video calls, but I found they were a little slow to update for immediate conversations, sometimes taking five to 10 seconds to display new text. Unfortunately, pre-recorded video is also tricky, as you’ll have to constantly pause the video to keep it from running ahead of the subtitles. The translation of the captions was also very different from the official subtitles in the videos I tested, and the subtitles currently do not differentiate between speakers. You’re probably better off using Chrome’s built-in Live Captions , which support translation regardless of your hardware.
Finally, there are Windows Studio effects that can blur the background or add subtle adjustments to lighting or eye contact. It also comes with some Snapchat-style filters, but none of the changes caught my fiancé’s attention when I tried video calling him. I agree that I had to do A/B testing before I noticed any changes myself, so I’m more likely to forget these options are even there, especially since most of them are already built into my most used ones video calling applications. Eye contact AI stands out here, as competing options require certain GPUs , but that doesn’t mean much if the person I’m calling can’t tell the difference.
If I sound harsh, it’s because none of these options live up to the title “Co-Pilot.” When I hear “Co-Pilot,” I imagine asking the computer to change the resolution or change the background to a new color, all in one text field. Right now, all I do when I press the dedicated Copilot button on my Copilot+ laptop is take me to the chatbot website – the same website you can access on any internet-connected device .
Of course, I can ask a chatbot for advice, but it cannot directly interact with my machine. This is nothing compared to the earlier version of Copilot that was installed on my Windows 10 computer until a recent update (which suspiciously came out after I started this review) removed it. This version of Copilot can indeed open Windows Settings pages for me, but like the Copilot shortcut on my Copilot+ laptop, it now just takes me to a much more generic and much less useful web app.
It’s clear that Microsoft is holding back on Copilot integration while it works on fixing Recall, but the result is that Copilot+ looks more like Copilot-. It can do some things that my post-upgrade Windows 10 machine can’t, but those use cases don’t match what the old version of Copilot was capable of.
Why buy a Copilot+ PC?
So why buy a Copilot+ PC if not a Copilot? The same reason you buy any laptop with an ARM processor: battery life.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, while it doesn’t live up to its AI promises, is a great laptop for students and office workers, and a big part of that is the Snapdragon X Elite chip it comes with.
Snapdragon comes from the world of mobile devices where battery life is critical, and this is where you can see Qualcomm’s expertise come into play. The company promises ” multi-day battery life ,” and in testing, I managed to get 17 hours of continuous use before it died. This was while watching a 24-hour stream with constant brightness at 50% and all battery saving features turned off, meaning anyone who primarily uses their computer as a way to access the Internet should be happy here. With some of the right settings, you can go more than two full workdays on a single charge.
Even when performing more intensive tasks such as gaming, I logged several hours of gaming. Specifically, I ran Shadow of the Tomb Raider in full screen mode for three hours, which is on par with what you can get from the Steam Deck and enough for a full session. This was the maximum performance mode to improve the gaming experience, so running a less demanding game with balanced settings will stretch the laptop’s battery life even further.
Snapdragon X Elite has compatibility issues
Even taking into account their long battery life and ignoring Microsoft’s failed AI launch, the ARM chips used in the Copilot+ PCs aren’t quite the M series killers they’ve been made out to be, at least not without any apps showcasing their neural capabilities . engines.
When I tested my laptop’s Snapdragon X Elite using Geekbench 6, a synthetic test that simulates various use cases, I got a score of 2,279 in single-core tasks and 12,913 in multi-core tasks, which is well behind the 3,110/15,287 that Geekbench recorded for last year. MacBook Pro with M3 base chip .
This isn’t encouraging, especially since the Snapdragon X Elite is Qualcomm’s best laptop chip and the base M3 is Apple’s most basic laptop option in this current generation. (The M4 chip exists, but it’s only available for the iPad right now. )
Another synthetic benchmark test, Cinebench R23, disproved this, actually putting the Snapdragon X Elite slightly ahead. Here it earned 9882 points when rendering a complex scene versus 9326 points earned by the base M3 chip .
But that’s only part of the story. Overall, my testing found performance to be good but not outstanding for a thin and light laptop. What really impressed me was the compatibility.
I wanted to run two more tests on this laptop: PCMark and 3DMark, but neither of them were fully compatible with it. This is due to the ARM architecture of the Snapdragon X Elite and will be a problem for early adopters.
Most Windows applications expect users to use an x86 chip, which is a chip from Intel or AMD. Since Snapdragon chips don’t use x86 technology, some apps have to use emulation to run on them instead. This is a problem that Apple faced when it moved to ARM, but since then the MacBook maker has built a robust ecosystem of apps that fully support the new architecture, while Windows on ARM is clearly not quite there yet.
Taking the testing out of the synthetic benchmarks and into the real world, I couldn’t get apps like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Destiny 2 to work: the former would crash whenever I started gameplay, and the latter would refuse to load because it couldn’t install its app. anti-cheat engine. Even games that worked, such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider , experienced frequent crashes and required regular driver updates.
It was an unpleasant experience and I would say that for most people the increased battery life is not worth it yet.
If you want to play with what you can load, you’ll get minimal performance, although that’s to be expected given that the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x isn’t marketed as a gaming laptop. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I averaged 32fps on low graphics at 1080p, while the more modest Total War: Warhammer II gave me 46.8fps on low settings at 1080p. Red Dead Redemption 2 dropped from 7 fps to 22 fps on low settings at 1080p, which is below what I would consider playable.
For a performance laptop, none of this is surprising, since the incompatibility with games here is more of a canary in the coal mine for other applications. High-end apps like Adobe Creative Cloud run great on the Snapdragon X Elite, but expect problems to arise any time you want to go off the beaten path.
How does the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x perform like a regular laptop?
I feel bad for Lenovo because as much as I criticized this laptop in my review, the problem has nothing to do with the laptop itself and more to do with Microsoft. As a machine, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is great.
It is barely more than half an inch thick. He weighs just under three pounds. Its matte blue exterior looks premium. The 3K OLED screen is bright and rich, with little glare and wide viewing angles. The 1080p webcam supports Windows Hello and doesn’t have a notch that cuts into the screen. The sound is also about as bassy and high-quality as you’d expect from a laptop this size, with some harshness but clear and distinct vocals. The keyboard, like almost all Lenovo keyboards, hugs your hands thanks to concave keycaps that follow the shape of your fingertips.
Perhaps the only place where this laptop falters is in port selection, as there is only one USB-C port on each side of the device.
Is Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x worth buying?
Whether this laptop is worth it for you depends on whether you’re buying it as a Copilot+ PC or as a thin and light laptop with a long lifespan. If you’re trying to get access to the next generation of AI, you’re better off waiting. Copilot+ may technically be live, but its core functionality has been sent back to the drawing board, and you’re unlikely to be able to use this laptop’s neural processor until some unannounced date in the future.
If you want Lenovo’s excellent daily driver instead, the Yoga Slim 7x is a good choice. It’s easy to throw in your bag, looks great and is easy to use. Performance is also quite good for a laptop of this size, but there’s one caveat: Qualcomm chips still aren’t perfectly compatible with existing software.
If you use well-known apps and don’t play a lot of games, this shouldn’t be an issue, but if you want a little peace of mind, you might be better off with the standard Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 , which comes with a proven AMD chip. You’ll lose a bit of screen resolution, but much of what makes the 7x great can be found there too.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x starts at $1,199 for the 16GB RAM and 512GB storage model, which is identical to what I tested. RAM can be upgraded to 32GB for $69, and storage can be upgraded to 1TB for $45.