PC Pro

Microsoft’s great expectatio­ns may lead it into hard times

You may not realise that Charles Dickens wasn’t merely a prolific novelist, journalist and short story writer, but also a keen reader of

PC Pro. And a time traveller. When he wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, he was referring to the incredible slew of AI-enabled laptops that would launch in the summer of 2024, knowing the lost weekends and evenings it would cause me in my desperate attempt to review them all. Although I’m still not entirely happy about his depiction of me in A Christmas Carol.

This particular issue is a tale of two CPU architectu­res, with AMD the hero for x86 with its all-new Ryzen AI 300 series. I give my largely positive verdict on this launch from p48, and if you flick through the subsequent pages you’ll discover two rather lovely Asus ProArt laptops that use them. The PX13 ( see p50) is particular­ly desirable.

Then Arm comes along in the form of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, which are powering the first flotilla of Copilot+ PCs. This month saw the debut of its Elite Plus incarnatio­n in the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus ( see p59), while the ever-stylish XPS 13 ( see p58) had me gazing in wonder at its beauty and in disbelief at its screen. All before Lenovo took our new A List award for best Copilot+ PC with the sleek Yoga Slim 7x ( see p57).

That’s not the end of this month’s AI-toting systems. UK manufactur­er PCSpeciali­st hopes to lure buyers with a £749 price for its Lafité AI AMD ( see p56), while three remarkably different laptops take advantage of Intel’s Core Ultra chips – including a debut, with a twist, for Dell’s new Latitude business series ( see p63).

So it’s safe to say PC manufactur­ers are excited about AI. The great British public? Not so much. Our readers’ poll asking about people’s attitudes towards AI ( see p25) revealed roughly as much enthusiasm as when Bob Cratchit asked Scrooge for a day off. Safe to say that Microsoft et al have some persuading left to do.

If they’re hoping that the forthcomin­g 24H2 update to

Windows 11 will do the trick ( see p26), then they may need to prepare for disappoint­ment. Having tried Cocreator and the live translatio­n feature, plus the extra video effects built into Windows’ webcam feeds, I just can’t see people being swayed.

So what happens next? Dickens, master of the cliffhange­r, has already worked on the narrative:

Microsoft was a fat, healthy company; but it turned very pale. It gazed in stupefied astonishme­nt on this small rebel group of customers for some seconds. “What!” wrote Microsoft on its blog, in a faint typeface.

“Please, Microsoft,” commented the users, “we want some more.”

At this point Dickens’ quill ran dry, and I believe he adapted the words for another piece of trashy literature, but you get the gist. Whether Microsoft likes it or not, we do demand more. Although if it could possibly avoid another deluge of laptops next month so that I can see my family again, that would be great.