this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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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.
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
Tom's Guide
As well as the copilot key on laptops.
Opt-in is an improvement, but Microsoft does have a history of making nominally opt-in features practically very difficult to avoid.
But what for? It's just as proprietary as x86 and drivers are more of an issue.