This year has seen a boom in the introduction of processor chips and laptop models that come with the ability to process artificial intelligence tasks built-in. Microsoft in particular has introduced a branding for new laptops called Copilot+ PCs that indicate that a laptop has this capability.
A report by Canalys that analyzed the laptop market in the third quarter of 2024 shows that the purchase of Copilot/Copilot+ laptops with the ability to process AI tasks is not as widespread as expected.
The report says that laptops powered by AMD Ryzen Pro 7000, 8000, AI 300, Intel Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake and Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor chips comprise 53 percent of the total number of laptops marketed so far.
This percentage figure is seen as high, it is also reported that most of the market and sales of these laptops consist of the Intel Meteor Lake and AMD Ryzen Pro series of processor chips, perhaps because at that time range the Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI 300 series of processor chips had just entered the market.
As for laptops powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor, it was also reported that Qualcomm only sold 720,000 laptops in the third quarter of 2024, which is less than 1 percent of total laptop sales in the quarter.
While the processor chip shows great processing power and good battery efficiency, Windows 11 for Arm laptops show some issues such as lack of productivity software support which is a critical red flag for users.
While these laptops all come with AI processing capabilities, the main interest for buyers is actually the efficient computing power and also the combination of long battery life, which can be seen on average in many of the new generation of thin and light laptops introduced this year.
In fact, in our reviews of several laptops with built-in AI processing support, we found that this is the main reason why you want to get these new laptops, and not for their AI functionality, which Microsoft itself has not publicly introduced.