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Publication Date: 2026-10-09 12:22:00
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Microsoft and Nvidia launched a new PC platform this week.
- Those AI-focused machines are powerful but expensive.
- They also highlight the weaknesses in the Copilot+ PC brand.
Microsoft just rebooted its entire AI PC effort.
If you watched this week’s announcement of the next generation of Windows laptops powered by the Nvidia RTX Spark, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion.
Also: Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop Ultra finally has a starting price
These are powerful PCs. My inner gadget freak looks at the new Surface Laptop Ultra and says, “I want one!” But my inner accountant is pointing to the extreme price tag and asking the obvious question: “What exactly are you going to do with this thing?”
I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer. These new workstations are designed for AI-focused developers who want to work with large language models on local hardware instead of sending those workloads off to the cloud. Those developers can probably make a decent economic case for that purchase. Running those jobs locally means you’re not paying hundreds of dollars a month to buy tokens from OpenAI or Anthropic or Microsoft.
For those of us who aren’t spending a fortune every month on AI tokens, all that processing power is an unnecessary luxury.
Welcome to AI PC 2.0
This isn’t Microsoft’s first push for an AI-centric PC platform.
The company unveiled the Copilot+ PC brand with…
