Copilot+ is a reason not to buy one of those laptops. It’s a privacy and security nightmare.
Is it that different than standard Windows? Either way I’m just hyped that it seems the age of ARM desktops is upon us, I definitely won’t be using any “Copilot+” branded OS though.
the age of ARM desktops is upon us
I remain unconvinced that this is some big paradigm shift, and that the instruction set itself is mostly irrelevant for battery life and performance per watt.
Yes, Apple achieved a big jump with its first M1 at delivering some pretty amazing performance per watt, compared to contemporary chips from Intel.
But a closer look has shown that each successive generation of M-series Apple Silicon has been chasing higher performance at the cost of energy efficiency. Which is fine, but shrinks the gap.
And then, if you look at AMD’s low power x86_64 CPUs for laptops, you’ll see that they’re also able to deliver significant power savings compared to Intel. Comparing like for like, in terms of TSMC node, you see that AMD performance per watt seems to be in line with Apple’s. It’s just that Apple’s comparative advantage in business/legal strategy (not engineering) has them locking up TSMC capacity earlier.
Finally, a comparison of Apple’s mobile ARM SoCs to other manufacturers’ mobile ARM SoCs (including Qualcomm and Samsung) shows that Apple has a significant performance/efficiency lead over even other ARM chips.
So it’s probably not the instruction set. It’s just the engineering of the chips themselves, boosted by Apple’s business/logistics strategies getting their products to market first.
I’m not following this story closely but my understanding is that Copilot+ ones have a magical special chip (and keyboard button) and they take screenshots every few seconds so you can search your history. But, at least in the beta releases, they didn’t bother to mask passwords or really anything. You could have a private key in a screenshot.
I would hope by the final release, they add the bare minimum of security and encrypt it all but that’s not really good enough. It’s a misguided attempt to shoehorn Copilot into everything when A.I. can’t even wipe its own ass yet. Maybe someday. Probably not, though.
It’s clearly a gimmick and not an improvement. Press the “copilot button” and get help! But the copilot button isn’t a new button. It’s actually left-Shift + Windows key + F23. Modern computers don’t have F23 key but you can simulate it. I sure hope no hackers learn how to do that and search your entire history!
What you are thinking of is Recall, which is a selling point of Copilot+ PCs. As a correction, recall is opt-in, password protected and encrypted in the latest versions. Hitting the Copilot key will launch Copilot, which is a GPT4 AI assistant with image capabilities. Copilot+ itself just means the pc has
at least 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of at least 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second) onboard.
As well as the copilot key on laptops.
Pretending it’s not locked down like the og surface arm devices, I’d consider getting one and totally drop some flavour of linux on it, 3:2 is a great aspect ratio for laptops.
Otherwise yeah, I wouldn’t go anywhere near it
Edit: apparently I don’t need to pretend, this hasn’t been an issue for a while so that’s actually great
It is not bootloader locked, Linux support is WIP
EDIT: Source here https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/1dnu5nw/comment/ladiom2/?context=3
If you mean app compatibility, the only programs that will have issues are those needing AVX2
Wasn’t even thinking about that, I have an old surface rc2 that’s totally useless because MS abandoned it years ago and it’s locked down so you can’t install an alternate os on it. To be fair, I’m not sure how useful it could be but it’s really about the fact I can’t do what I want with hardware I own.
Edit: apparently this (locked down) hasn’t been an issue for a while so that’s actually great
They’re BIOS locked and only accept Windows keys. On the plus side. Tuxedo is developing Linux notebooks with the same powerful, low-power ARM chips.
Yeah, I assumed so, really dislike that you can’t do what you want with hardware you own.
Edit: apparently not locked down, which is great
