Qualcomm spends millions on marketing as it is found better battery life, not AI features, is driving Copilot+ PC sales
Qualcomm spends millions on marketing as it is found better battery life, not AI features, is driving Copilot+ PC sales
On-device AI features aren't that useful for consumers yet, but long battery life is.
Who'da thunk, battery life sells battery powered devices.
So let's keep making phones thinner and thinner while simultaneously growing the camera bump instead of making a flat profile with, say, 2 days of life!
So on one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, I think lightness is a thing people care about. I recently needed to get some photos backed up off an old phone of mine, and I didn’t realize how heavy my current one is until I picked up my old one. Thinness is irrelevant, but a 50% weight difference is not. Other than that, I don’t think most people get much utility out of more than a day of battery life, so 1.5 days new degrading down to 1 seems reasonable and in line with what most people want.
Exactly. I really liked my old phone, the Moto G Power, which:
- had no camera bump
- had 2+ days battery life
- was pretty affordable (I think it was $250 new?)
I still have it for stuff around the house (gets like 3-4 days w/o the SIM), and I would totally still be using it as my main phone if it still got security updates. The screen is a little larger than I want, but it has been a solid phone for me.
I got a Pixel 8 mostly because of the longer software support and GrapheneOS support, and I honestly don't care about the camera, and the big bump is pretty annoying. I really wish I could just have my Moto G Power w/ a small screen and longer software support. In fact, I'd totally use a Pinephone if it had reliable calls and texts, better battery life, and better audio quality. I really don't need much, I just need a phone that will keep working for years and not need to be recharged throughout the day...
You're missing something though: phone cell or battery capacity has been getting bigger, not smaller. The issue isn't the batteries, it's the other hardware and software needing more and more energy. Modern phones are much faster, have better screens at higher resolution, brightness, even refresh rate. All of this uses energy, even with modern technology being as awesome as it is. Qualcomm, TSMC, ARM, and Apple put quite a bit of work into making these things as efficient as they can be, but we keep demanding more and more from these devices. For many they replaced laptops after all.
It's a bit like complaining that your new ultra high performance sports car is getting bad range, and complaining about the fuel tank or battery instead of the engine. The tank has only gotten bigger or at least stayed the same, but the engine has gotten hungrier and hungrier with each generation.
My phone has a 22000mAh battery. I never consider charging it unless I'm going to the woods overnight, and then only to be sure I have a power bank.
Sounds like my old Ulefone! I once dropped it while getting out of my car and it put a 1.5" diameter dent in the door frame.
Damn and here I thought my 13200Ah phone I charge once a week was big. I wish more phones went down the route of massive batteries, it's so much better than being thin and barely lasting a day of normal use.
Ah but if our batteries last longer people won't have to buy phones as often, someone think or the shareholders
Copilot+ is a reason not to buy one of those laptops. It’s a privacy and security nightmare.
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 Framework didn't exist and Linux worked on it, I'd probably get one when my older ThinkPad dies. I'd love something with a ton of battery life, and I don't need much else (my workflow is basically a browser and a terminal).
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!
that it seems the age of ARM desktops is upon us
But what for? It's just as proprietary as x86 and drivers are more of an issue.
Linux support should be here soon
Is this really a surprise to anyone outside of the AI hype machine?
Not really no, it also likely isn't a surprise to the engineers and project managers working on these products. Which is likely exactly why they have standout battery life: the project managers knew AI wouldn't sell so they made the laptops appealing via conventional means anyway.
I turn everything that mentions Copilot off. I don't need this crap and I never asked for it to be made.
My company hired an AI person and I was sure to tell him I stripped the registry values from my computer. I'm an admin sooo
Linux support also appears to be coming along nicely (though not ready yet).
Linux support also appears to be coming along nicely (though not ready yet).
Linux, as in kernel: Yes. Qualcomm doesn't develop FOSS GPU drivers, though. freedreno only supports older Adreno GPUs.
It is ready. I only used to dual boot Linux, but I switched completely over 6 months ago with zero issues.
I think he mean on these new, modern ARM laptop. None has actually work well so far. This newer Qualcomm chips are those that they themselves put the effort in. Rest were few far and between - garbage from Qualcomm and rest is from community.
I spent a good 20 minutes trying to remove copilot from my windows 10 machine last night. It embedded itself into the taskbar, the edge explorer, and I finally had to go into system components to disable it. No doubt there will be another ms update that will revert all these settings again
At some point you have to ask yourself if it would be less hassle to switch now or to try and tough it out until Windows becomes unbearable.
Windows is already pretty unbearable.
I spent a good 20 minutes trying to remove copilot from my windows 10 machine last night.
On Windows 11 you can just uninstall it. I did. Win10 is old and about to be unsupported.
On Windows 11 at least, the taskbar button toggle is in the taskbar settings, the second place you'd expect to find it (the first being the right-click menu on the button itself, though there isn't one). I'm not aware of anything called Edge Explorer, but it looks easy enough to disable in Edge, and I've never seen it in Explorer.
I feel like narrow AI tools duped me for a while, but the more I started to really use Chat GPT professionally, the more I've likened it to professional mimicking software. It essentially works to pyt out responses that sound the most convincing but have nothing to do with putting out responses that are actually at all accurate. These are terrible tools outside of asking basic questions, idea generation, and generally summarizing existing information you feed into it. I use it to help me make lists and better phrase emails and company messages at this point and nothing that actually requires any actual fact finding.
Professional bullshit artists, in the sense of the technical definition given by Harry Frankfurt in his influential book:
Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false.
this is like all sports analysts
It's a good troubleshooting tool. Pasting in weird error messages that don't turn up any useful search results is pretty useful, even if the response it gives is partially inaccurate, it usually at least gives a bit more information than a search engine, which gives me more context to narrow my search terms and find a solution to the error.
It's especially useful for learning Nix, since the online documentation is a bit shit and ChatGPT seems to have enough grasp on the Nix language and how to configure things in NixOS to tell me what I'm doing wrong.
I got the Surface Pro X a few years ago purely for battery life, performance be damned. Great decision, and it fit my use-case perfectly. Maybe a little too perfectly for Qualcomm, because I have no reason to upgrade to something more performant when all I cared about was the battery life.
Edit: This recent push towards Windows on ARM is also benefiting these old WOA devices. Programs that would barely run before (because they were compiled for x86 and had to be emulated on a chip that could hardly handle all that extra overhead) are now getting native ARM version releases that run way better. In my experience, my Pro X's performance has effectively been improving as time goes on, so I have even less of a reason to get anything new.
I have actually come to prefer using AI instead of a search engine at work for most things sysadmin related (using DuckDuckGo’s AI chat feature), but I 100% have found that Copilot performs far worse than competing products. Having it that engrained in the computer is a very negative feature, despite the battery improvements.
Copilot sucks. Gemeni is a sassy teenager. Chatgpt 4o is actually halfway decent. When they announced Gemeni had a million context tokens, that was awesome. But it can't give coherent output to save its life. Useless.
Perplexity.ai is also pretty nice. As far as I understand, it's just some version of chatgpt but with the ability to search the web.
The Copilot in Windows and in Bing is quite bad, but the Github Copilot seems better. If you know of a clearly better one for programming I'm interested in trying things out.
I know how Microsoft can increase battery life by between roughly 50%-100%, depending on model.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-laptop-7th-edition
Battery capacities34
Surface Laptop 13.8”: Battery Capacity Nominal (Wh) 54 Battery Capacity Min (Wh) 52
Surface Laptop 15”: Battery Capacity Nominal (Wh) 66 Battery Capacity Min (Wh) 64
Offer a 100 Wh battery.
That tracks, AI is somehow twice as annoying as nfts and I've been dying for a decent ARM / RISC-V Linux laptop.