I Used a CoPilot+ PC for 30 Days...So you Don't Have To

So Many Choices so we have four players that are entering or that have already been in the market right now there's Apple Qualcomm Intel and AMD I've done a complete analysis of all four of those platforms in a separate video which you can check out what over here a couple days after I had to post a video literally just showcasing amd's newest processor announcement or their performance which is the ryzen ai9 HX series of CPUs based on the new zen5 architecture I'm actually pretty excited about this new platform um but then again lunar lake is right around the corner so there's just stuff coming out every now and then so it's really hard to compare everything at the same time you just have to kind of wait until you have everything in in store but you know in the meantime like I said in those Living with a CoPilot+PC (Slim 7x) videos I've been dailying this slim 7 x for you know about a few weeks and I really like this thing it's not perfect I think Qualcomm still has a long way to go in terms of optimization but I thought you know might as well just document what my experience is like using this every day yeah it's going to be fun so let's just let's just do it so Real World Battery Test today is going to be a very interesting day I will be away from the office for most of the day so I thought it would a great opportunity to test out the battery life on the slim 7x uh so I'll be doing a bunch of tasks like I'm going to be editing some photos for a client that I've been working with doing some scripting some research I think it's a perfect day to test a battery life on the slim 7x this morning I began my day with a laptop fully charged at 100% as usual I started by catching up on emails and something about this keyboard felt off I'm used to a lot of Lenovo laptops in the past and this one for some reason feels cheap and shallow but I do like the slim nature of this laptop making it easy to carry around the house I made some coffee whipped up a quick egg sandwich watched a few YouTube videos and by the time I wrapped up my morning routine at 8: a.m. I was sitting around 93% I had to run to my first appointment for my car to get some major maintenance done and the service center told me it was going to take about 4 hours so I decided to chill in the waiting area and edit some photos to push the performance of the Qualcomm CPU now this is the part where I wished this laptop had a full-size SD card reader but it doesn't so I had to use my USB hub to offload the media from the shoot I did a few days ago if you know me I'm into cars I love exploring my creativity by shooting some cool rides here in Toronto now the whole editing experience was pretty Flawless on the slim 7x I was able to listen to my podcast and just zone out the CPU had no issues handling the raw 24 megapixel photos shot from my R six Mark II applying some noise reduction and stuff like that it was perfectly fine these were the end results after spending about four hours editing on the battery and around 1: p.m. I was sitting at 11% so that's about 4 hours of heavy usage but I still wasn't done for the day I had a team meeting to hop on to so I picked up my car and tried to grab a bite before the meeting but little did I know that the restaurants in my area had no power outlets at least where you're sitting at so I'm on the last stretch of this battery run we're sitting around 7% and so luckily my studio was closed by I Some Issues.... plugged in the laptop and made it to the meeting interestingly enough during that meeting Mike mentioned that the webcam quality looked a bit off so upon close examination I notice that when you're running this laptop on battery the ISB just dials back the detail of the image resulting in moay so that was very interesting on top of that I noticed that the included 65 wat power adapter got extremely hot to a point where it almost burned my fingers seriously here's a thermal image so you can get an idea of how bad that it gets when charging also it took about 2 and 1/2 hours to fully charge the laptop now as Trackpad experience I wrapped up my day adding the final touches to the photos in Photoshop I couldn't help but notice how frustrating the trackpad is to work with the lack of glass surface really stands out and the integrated buttons just feel cheap it just lacks responsiveness as you'd expect to make things worse Taps often don't register accurately which was incredibly frustrating for the laptop at this price point I was expecting a much better experience all right so I want to CoPilot Features - A Premium for Promises talk about some of these cool pilot plus features that have been thrown our faces since Microsoft debuted a few months ago so as you can see we have four options here there's recall code Creator live captions and windows Studio Effects I feel like most of these are pretty useless so let's start with uh well recall we can't really test it out because um Microsoft pushed it and they took it back because of what all the backlash that came out of that feature so that's kind of ironic now co- create only works with Windows PCS that have t support unfortunately that slim 7x does not have toou support so I'm just going to use the image Creator which um you know I'm just going to try and see if it if it if it's any good so let's say for instance uh create an image of a turtle holding a smartphone and a laptop this photo looks like okay that definitely I don't see a laptop in any of these photos which is kind of weird but if I go to say CH gbt and put the same prompt I mean that's in my opinion a pretty I think that looks cooler than than the one that Microsoft's image Creator just generated so yeah next up we have live captions now according to Microsoft this thing only supports 44 languages and those 44 languages only can be translated to English and not vice versa I speak more than one language and the other three languages that I speak actually are not supported so I can't really test it out so yeah it's really not that useful in fact YouTube actually has live captions enabled in the player and a lot of the creators are starting to implement that so I don't know if this is as useful as you might think the last thing we have here is Windows Studio Effects now this isn't anything new because we have so many other platforms like Zoom Skype and just a bunch of other um online meeting platforms that have these features integrated on their software itself so um yeah I don't know understand why this is just targeted as a premium feature it's it's really not guys now in terms Build Quality of the exterior fit and finish I do like this title teal color of the slim 7x though be mindful that it is a huge fingerprint magnet uh and also I did notice that just within a matter of 30 days I've started to see the paint come off on the um just the edge that right over here as you can see so that's a little bit concerning uh and um these Farm facing speakers they they do sound pretty good uh I do like the projection but I just don't understand why Lomo decided to not include a headphone Jag on this laptop they clearly had the room for it but they decided not to although I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this do most of you use Bluetooth headphones or do you just use uh you know wired headphones uh because personally for me when I'm editing videos I definitely don't want that latency which is why I always always edit with wired headphones uh as opposed to Bluetooth because that latency just kills the editing experience and the fact that it doesn't have it just kind External Display Limitations of sucks now for those of you who plan to use an external display with one of these new Qualcomm laptops there are a few things that you need to keep in mind one is uh there are some restrictions when it comes to high resolution High refrigerate panels so I have a 4K 120 HZ display here at home and a 4K 60 HZ display at the office now I've been playing around to see like if these laptops can support High refresh rate but unfortunately the sign only caps at 4K at 60 HZ the other thing I want to point out is that the included dongle that Lenovo provides with the slim 7x is absolutely trash so I use the HMI port on the adapter to power the 4K display at my office and turns out that I can't even push 4K 60 the only thing I can do is 4K at 25 HZ which is absolutely insane so yeah I think that was a big L from Lenovo I don't know what they were thinking I mean they should have just provided a good quality adapter it seems like there's some sort of restrictions with that dongle that they include so yeah something that I wanted to point So I Tried to Edit a Video... out okay it is Tuesday August the 13th and I have a very packed schedule today I mean I have a meeting a team meeting in like 30 minutes the pixel 9 is launching today so I have to create short formam content for that I have to edit that as well so I'm going to be using the slim 7x for that to see how that handles and then also I'm heading out to North Carolina for a workshop so uh I have to catch my flight like by 6:00 tonight so a lot to get done in a short amount of time so fingers crossed let's plug this in and get to work [Music] yeah uh I'm I'm giving up editing a video on this uh slim 7x guys it plays back the raw 4K footage shot on the fx3 no problem but the moment I start applying my color grade in it and if I start pushing the image a little bit more it's it's can handle it and if you look at some of the usage statistics here the npu is completely useless the Snapdragon CPU I mean you could see a little bit of usage here but at the end of the day like the it's like 15% It ultimately it's just a memory that's actually uh doing all its work which um goes to show that I don't think this application is that optimized for Real Time playback performance uh but when it comes to exporting it's okay um but then again if you don't have a really good editing EXP experience then the whole thing just doesn't add up now Final Thoughts I want to take a step back and talk about this whole co-pilot plus PC branding that's been literally thrown on our faces for the last couple of months to be honest I feel like it's done more damage than any good in the case of the slim 7x Leno was marketing this as unleashing your creative freedom with AI which is really not true um I wasn't really able to edit any videos it's really doesn't have the performance or the horsepower to back that up not to mention Light Room performance was okay I was able to get things done but it's nowhere near as fast as something like the MacBook Air with the M3 chip I mean that is a really efficient and it's such a good performer for anything creative focused I also feel like this dedicated co-pilot plus button shouldn't exist in the first place because I never saw myself Tak advantage of it because when you have services like Chad gbt that's readily accessible by anyone on any platform you can run that thing on a 2 three fouryear old computer and still will be able to leverage the performance of AI if you need to use it for your um you know workflow it's there but you don't necessarily need a co-pilot plus BC to get that work done the npu that's built into the S so just feels like a paper weight at this point I haven't seen any applications in my workflow that has taken advantage of that also Windows co-pilot does not work offline you have to be connected online to even utilize that application because all the stuff that they say that's on device isn't necessarily on device it's literally it needs to connect to the internet to validate each prompt to give you a response so uh yeah the the whole on device thing is just completely blown out of proportion you see having used a slim 7x for the past 30 days I've come to realize that the price doesn't justify the hardware you should be getting a precise smooth trackpad the keyboard should feel a little bit more of a higher standard but that's not the case I think that they've cheaped out on those materials which you know isn't typically a lineable thing to do but they did uh the only thing that's actually notably or in fact really good with this laptop is the display the 3K 90 HZ OLED screen is super sharp very bright color accurate and you know you can get a lot of work done and especially if you take this thing to cafes that bright display can come in clutch I did notice a few quirks as I was using this thing so first of all when I have this thing connected to my external display the display actually blinks out for a few seconds randomly out of the blue uh and also this power button on the right hand side is super delicate like I can move this thing from one place to another and then it just automatically or accidentally just turns off or puts us thing to sleep which was also super frustrating so in the end should you consider a C- pilot plus PC well if it's $800 then maybe because you're really getting great efficiency and of course a lot of the app compatibility is getting ironed out at the time I'm making this video but there's still a long way to go so I feel like at this point you should probably just skip it and consider options from AMD Intel and even Apple because they're just a little bit more refined in terms of app support I'll be happy to revisit this conversation in a year just to see how much the platform has evolved but until then I think it's time to retire this thing and just move on to something a little bit better