Microsoft has announced the end of Windows 10 support on October 14, 2025 and Windows 11 has minimum hardware requirements that some PC's currently on Windows 10 won't meet. Then there's the bigger consideration, where even if they do meet the Windows 11 requirements, they may not meet new AI requirements. Let's start with what they mean by the "end of support". It means Microsoft will no longer provide free software updates from Windows Update, technical assistance or security fixes. The next question you should have - what are the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11? They are:
- Processor: 1 GHz or faster with 2 or more cores on a compatible 64-bit processor
- RAM: 4GB
- Storage: 64GB or larger
- System Firmware: UEFI, Secure Boot capable
- TPM: Trusted Platform Module 2.0
- Graphics card: Compatible with DirectX 12 or later with WDDM 2.0 driver
- Display: High definition (720p) that is greater than 9" diagonally, 8 bits per color channel.
Now the real issue is whether the PC you are buying today meets the requirements to do everything you want over the next 3 to 5 years. That's when you need to start thinking about AI and whether your organization needs to meet the requirements of an AI PC. There are 2 versions of an AI PC, there's the base model, this is the one we've been talking about. The requirements are that the PC has a first generation NPU that runs at least 10-16 TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second). This will allow you to run AI applications on your device. The second version of the AI PC is a Copilot+ PC. These are the newest PC's that have some amazing AI capabilities built-in. The Copilot+ PCs have very different minimum requirements, which include:
- Processor: A compatible processor or System on a Chip (SoC). This currently includes the Snapdragon? X Plus and the Snapdragon? X Elite. (Intel processors are scheduled to release in November 2025),
- RAM: 16GB DDR5/LPDDR5
- Storage: 256DB SSD/UFS
There are several features built-in to the Copilot+ PC that organizations will want to evaluate and potentially activate.
- Recall: This is arguably the most controversial feature so we'll just start here. Recall takes a snapshots of your PC every 3 seconds. Microsoft has made some changes to make this feature more secure and to address privacy concerns. The snapshots are encrypted with BitLocker on the hard drive and utilize 25% of available storage by default. To access the snapshots, you must authenticate via proof of presence, meaning the use of biometrics. The Snapshots filter out passwords, credit cards and national ID's, they never upload to the cloud and Recall is 'off' by default. But you know what's great about it? Imagine being able to pull up Recall and ask it to find a presentation with a blue tree that someone shared with you last month. Recall will show you the snapshot and then allow you to go directly to the content.
- Click-to-do: Prompts that provide you action suggestions for anything on your screen. For example, blurring a background, summarizing text or performing a visual web search.
- Live Captioning: Allows you to translate and caption any live or pre-recorded video in any app or video platform from 44 languages into English.
- Windows Studio Effects: Provides creative filter, background blur, eye contact, auto framing and voice focus. It can filter things like your kid screaming in the background and if you're shifting your eyes between monitors, it can show you focused on the camera. It also has a bunch of other great features making it unnecessary to have extra lights or sound-proof rooms.
- Improved Microsoft Search capabilities: Instead of searching for the name of something you can describe what you're looking for and it will search across your files and your OneDrive.
- Super Resolution: Allows you to upscale and sharpen photos by 8x.
- Licensing: There is none required. You don't need a 365 license to utilize any of these features, except possibly for expanded search functionality. We are going to be testing this over the next couple weeks and will provide our feedback. It might be necessary to have a Copilot for 365 license to search across the Corporate OneDrive as opposed to your Personal OneDrive. We will post our results when we've confirmed this.
- Phenomenal Battery Life: These PCs are averaging up to 19 hours of battery life, the best being the Dell models.
- Affordability: Our pricing for a first round of a device for testing purposes was $1650 with the top-of-the-line processor available and all the bells and whistles.
But these are just the built-in features. The other obvious benefit to the ability to utilize the NPU to run other AI applications now or in the future.
Test it out for yourself. Only you can determine if these features will add value to your organization and if you need a Copilot+ AI PC to run new applications. Let us know if you need help getting a demo unit or a try and buy.
I'll leave you with this. I was at a conference last week and a representative from Qualcomm, who makes the Snapdragon processor, was on stage. He said you don't want to be the person that said "why didn't talk to you about 45 TRILLION Operations Per Second?" I think he's right. For the price, it's definitely worth a discussion.
