Prakash Sangam:
Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Tantra’s Mantra where we go behind and beyond the tech news headlines. I’m your host Prakash Sangam, founder and principal at Tantra Analyst. In today’s podcast, we bring our focus back to Copilot plus PCs. This time it is discussing a major event that PC market leader Lenovo held a couple of weeks ago in Berlin.
The event was called Lenovo Innovation World. During the event, the company announced a slew of Copilot plus PCs based on Intel’s latest Intel Core Ultra 200v, also known as Lunar Lake, AMD AI 300, as well as Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X plus 8 Core SOC. These PCs almost cover all the market segments as well as tiers. So in a sense, with these, Lenovo is making Copilot plus PCs mainstream.
The Innovation World event itself comprised of embargoed analyst session with lots of in-depth discussions with the product managers and executives as well as a glitzy private event with media customers and partners present. We also had walk-ons from Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, Stability AI and Formula One.
I had the opportunity to attend the event in person. So is my guest, Olivier Blanchard, who is the Research Director at Futurum Research. Olivier, welcome to the show.
Oliver Blanchard:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Prakash Sangam:
Olivier and I’ll talk about the event, what caught our eye, what are key takeaways, Copilot PCs in general, what feature holds for them and so on. But before that, let’s do some quick introductions.
Olivier, it’s your first time at the show. Could you please give a quick background on what you’ve been doing and what are your research areas?
Oliver Blanchard:
Sure. Again, Olivier Blanchard, I’m a Research Director at the Futurum Group. My coverage areas are actually quite broad. I cover semiconductors, although I try to steer that mostly towards devices and edge. I also cover devices. That’s everything from mobile PC XR to IoT and IOT, which bleeds into my next coverage area, which is also automotive.
Then finally, because just in case I get bored and I don’t have enough work on my plate, I also cover policy, which ranges from everything from IP regulations to antitrust and issues like US versus China and trade tariffs. All of that good stuff, which again is a really good tie-in to AI and chips and semiconductors and devices. For me, it all forms one giant continuum, but it does have a lot of different moving parts and I try to focus on all of them at some point.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah, indeed. It’s pretty broad. A lot of these are interlinked as well. It’s like one giant tech industry now with different aspects. Right? Olivier and I go back like what? Eight, nine years now, we can always meet at events like this and so on. So I thought why not talk about these events on the show. So yeah, welcome again to the show. So let’s get started. So what was your overall impression of the event, Olivier?
Oliver Blanchard:
You know, I thought the event was good. I mean, it’s always like kind of good and bad, but I was pretty impressed specifically with Lenovo and their lineup. I have some notes for them though a little bit. But I think it’s notes that are probably useful for all PC OEMs and it deals with silicon diversity.
Now that Intel has finally introduced their Lunar Lake Core Ultra chips to the market, and we’re seeing the first PCs powered by this processor, we finally have all three, right? We have Intel, we have AMD, and we have Qualcomm with their Snapdragon X platform. Yeah.
So it’s great. It creates more choice, but also it makes it more difficult for buyers on the consumer side, as well as buyers and ITDMs on the commercial side, to navigate these new paradigms of which of three instead of two processors should I get for my particular use cases?
What are the price point differentiators? What are the performance differentiators? Which one is most likely to future proof my organization? Which one is most likely to meet all of my compatibility, interoperability, security, and even power consumption standards? It just resets that conversation for everybody.
I felt that with Lenovo, we had the same nomenclature that we’re already familiar with, with ThinkPads and Yoga and all of these different lines of PCs. But there’s not necessarily a clear differentiation yet in the branding, the nomenclature, the part numbers, and the names that allows prospective buyers to know exactly just at a glance, to know if they’re buying a Snapdragon powered ThinkPad, or if it’s Intel, or if it’s AMD. It’s still a little bit difficult to navigate that.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah. I mean, some might say that, and it’s not too different because there are already two vendors now that there’s one more. But I think this new Copilot plus PC is a different breed together. When Intel and AMD were competing, they sat down to what is good at, for what, and so on. But now with this, now that is almost a redefinition in terms of performance and battery life, and everybody is competing for this new breed of PCs.
So that kind of redefines the whole competitive landscape. And I agree with you that a lot of the OEMs that we talked to, including Lenovo, he said, hey, we are supporting everybody. We are giving choice to our customers, and we let our customers choose. I mean, I think initially that’s okay, because everybody is trying to find out where these things fall in, what is good for what, and so on.
But I think next year or year after that, OEMs have to kind of message these different vendors and different models and so on to specific customer segments, if you will, right?
And this is only the beginning. I mean, if you listen to the Grapevine, and of course, it’s not that secret anymore, that there will be other players, could be MediaTek, could be Samsung as well, in the arm for Windows field. So yeah, I think, and it’s going to be an interesting balancing act for Lenovo and other OEMs on how to balance these out, right?
Oliver Blanchard:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s a good thing for consumers, but I think the market on the commercial and the consumer side need a little bit more clarity. And I think Microsoft being very invested in the Snapdragon X platform and Windows on Arm has, I think, for the better, put a lot of investment in educating the public.
And so we’re already seeing how Microsoft and Snapdragon are moving into a competitive space against Apple, which essentially is sort of like, there’s Copilot plus with X86, but there’s also Copilot plus with Snapdragon, which has still had the exclusive for a few months, which is a direct arm-based versus arm-based comparison.
And so their competitive motion there, at least their marketing, their marketing strategy, is to essentially come to the market with, look, we finally have a Windows PC that can compete against Mac, on performance, on battery life, on form factors. And that’s something Microsoft has wanted to do for a really long time.
And so I can, I can see why they’re aggressively pursuing this. I’m just not sure that I’m seeing the same clarity, the sort of same mission clarity from the PCOEMs yet. Like we know they want to compete against Apple as well, but I’m not sure that they’ve, they’re not really used to it. So I’m not sure they figured out how to message on that particular point yet.
Prakash Sangam:
I think one hurdle for them is this ecosystem approach, right? When Apple sells it, it’s basically all part of the ecosystem. And then if you’re part of the ecosystem, and you might call it walled garden, people want to be inside, not get out. I think that’s a major hurdle competing with Apple.
So although these are called Copilot plus PC’s, and that moniker comes with AI capabilities that you have to have. You have to have at least 40 AI tops for a PC to be called a Copilot plus PC. But right now, all the competition is on CPU performance, right? So it will be interesting how and when that will move to AI.
Oliver Blanchard:
Yeah, I think right now there’s kind of like two tracks to these Copilot plus PC’s. As you said, one of them is AI, because that’s part of the branding, that’s part of the brand promise, the value proposition. But that hasn’t really materialized yet. So we understand, you know, Chad GPT, generative AI, people generally understand that these capabilities exist, and they’ve experienced them in the cloud up until now, or at least for the most part in the cloud.
They haven’t really necessarily experienced them on device. The thing is, it’s not necessarily clear to a user where the processing, where the workloads are taking place, whether they’re in the cloud or on the device. So it’s going to take a little bit of time to teach and train PC users to use and look for those opportunities. For the time being, I think that AI is something that’s over the next hill.
We know it’s coming, we want to future-proof our organizations or our home office with a PC that can handle this stuff. That’s a plus for sure. But ultimately, right now, it’s about just having a better PC, and a better PC that’s not just incrementally better over the one that they could have bought a year ago, but that is substantially better with radically better battery life.
In great part because a lot of workloads that used to be pushed out to the GPU, which is very power-intensive, are now designed to be processed on the NPU, which is much more thermally efficient. That gives two advantages. One is your laptop on Copilot plus PC, especially Snapdragon, I think, is probably not going to burn your lap the way it used to, which is good if you’re wearing shorts or if it’s the summer, and your pants are not very thick, and you have your laptop and you’re running really heavy applications, it should run a lot cooler now. The other one is because of that, your battery should last you a lot longer. We’re seeing performance up to 21, 22 hours of playback on a single battery charge, which is exceptional.
Prakash Sangam:
The AI workload as such, I think it’s not very clear how it will pan out. But in my view, I think rather than waiting for this boondoggle of a killer AI app, I think especially the enterprises, it will primarily initially at least moving some of the existing applications like security and some of the enterprise applications run on CPU right now.
A lot of these which run 24-7 on the laptop, move them to NPU so that they run efficiently and keep CPU free, which will make the PCs run much cooler and much longer. So it is more of a moving existing features and applications to NPU rather than waiting for this huge applications to come and solve all of our problems, right?
Oliver Blanchard:
That’s right. Yeah, it is. It’s exactly that. So I think that the priority right now is just a much more efficient PC. It’s faster, the boot-ups are faster, they are less likely to crash. They have this terrific battery efficiency improvements. But also I think that something that’s driving this is, and we don’t talk about this enough probably because we talk about the specs and we talk about the Copilot plus PC ecosystem and all these processors.
But there’s like a more important driver of adoption here, and it’s the end of support for Windows 10 next October. Especially in the enterprise or in the commercial segments, what we’re seeing is that companies are realizing, oh no, we need to upgrade a lot of our PCs. This Copilot plus ecosystem launch of this leapfrogging into this new era of AI capable PCs with this terrific performance.
It’s just the perfect timing to replace Windows 10 machines with Windows 11 machines, whether they’re Windows on ARM or X86.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah. I agree. I think Windows 11 will be a great intersection of opportunities for PCs for even the enterprises. But at the same time, I think they are waiting on which way to go, right? Now, we have three SOCs. If it was earlier, that mode have been much simpler and easier. Right now, basically, they have to evaluate a little bit more than what they would have otherwise done.
In the enterprise side, Windows and ARM or Snapdragon XElite and X plus PCs, they are still under trial, right? The case is not made yet there. It’s concerns about app compatibility and so on.
So I think it’ll be interesting early next year when the enterprise procurement cycle starts where these all three stand, right?
Oliver Blanchard:
Yeah. Yeah, it will. We just did a study on this in July, where we specifically looked at Copilot plus PCs and perceptions about Windows on Arm and Snapdragon versus Intel versus AMD, Ryzen. One of the interesting things is I think those two-thirds of organizations would run through their evaluation of a new PC platform inside of six months.
So that’s good news, right? That two-thirds can do it that quickly. Our study was basically 70 percent enterprise, 30 percent mid-market. Only about a third would take six months to 12 months to evaluate a PC or a new PC platform. So we’ll know pretty quickly. Yeah, by the beginning of the year, Snapdragon, Copilot plus PCs will have been in pilots for long enough for companies to know.
But the other factor here is also that we’ve seen really good penetration over the last few years of another ARM-based PC, which is Macs. Macs have been, what are they at? Like 22-23 percent penetration in the enterprise now. So what that’s done is it’s created this ARM-supported motion in the enterprise and in small and mid-sized businesses already.
So the on-ramp for the adoption of ARM-based PCs, thanks to Apple, ironically, since they’ve had some issues with Qualcomm in the past, as we know. Apple has paved the way for the Windows on ARM adoption to go a lot more smoothly.
Prakash Sangam:
That is even more significant because if you look at consumer space, it is, I think as I mentioned, ecosystem-bound. So if you’re part of Apple ecosystem, it’s very hard for you to get out of it. But that doesn’t exist in enterprise. So if you’re liking Mac on the enterprise side, and liking the ARM performance, then moving from expensive Mac, and with a lot of limitations and so on, to a Windows PC with equivalent performance, it’s a much easier and simpler shift rather than for consumers in my view.
Oliver Blanchard:
Right. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. Yeah.
Prakash Sangam:
So, and PC is a very tough business, right? With very small margins and so on. So, what do you think Lenovo needs to keep doing, to keep winning and keep their market leadership position ongoing as we move forward?
Oliver Blanchard:
Yeah. It depends what they’re trying to do. So obviously, gaining market share. That market share has to come from somewhere. So, I’m assuming they’re going after Dell and HP primarily. You know, having attractive laptops. On the consumer side, it’s sort of having the sexiest laptop, basically. And having additional ports so that content creators can put in their micro-SIM cards and things like that is kind of important. obviously, battery life is super important as well.
Really good displays, you know, soft, comfortable, like ergonomics, basically, sort of like soft touch keys. So, they’re hitting all those marks. I think Lenovo is doing great there. I’m testing a yoga right now that’s having some issues. So, I’m not sure how that’s going to go. But on the commercial side, I think they’re doing all the right things to be sexier and more attractive as an option to consumers.
And having, obviously, this sort of choice between the crazy battery life of Snapdragon or the lower, basically, the better value for your dollar of AMD processors. And then having Intel, which is sort of like, if you want Intel, we have it. It’s a very well balanced processor. These are all good. I think, obviously, they need to win on price as well. But in the enterprise, I think the main thing is they need to also win on security.
Yeah. obviously, AMD has advantages, again, on price. But I mean, I was mostly impressed with the new ThinkPad. It’s the Intel Core Ultra ThinkPad X1 Carbon. It was 850 grams. That thing felt like there was no battery inside of it when you hold it up. So for a laptop that’s already, I have the older version of it, that is such a great solid work laptop for the enterprise, to go ahead and make it even better this way with better battery life and make it that light. It’s expensive, but it’s a no-brainer.
So I don’t know. I think Lenovo is doing all the right things. If I were HP and Dell, I’d be a little bit worried right now. Lenovo could gain more market share in the next year.
Oliver Blanchard:
Yeah. I mean, and ThinkPad basically is their main beach head into enterprises. It’s famous for its long battery life, stability, and so on. And then with these new chips, I think makes their position even better. So yeah. And something else that they did, I just want to bring up the Aura edition laptops. So they had one in the consumer side, one on the commercial side.
Yeah.And essentially what it is, if your listeners don’t know, it’s an exclusive partnership between Intel and Lenovo for their top tier flagship PCs. That essentially unlocks these AI-enabled features about wellness and security and file sharing. All these things are very cool, that are very Apple-like in a way, that you can only find on Lenovo with the Lunalight Core Ultra chips and only at the very high-end.
This exclusive feature set is first of all, a plus. It’s a nice differentiator and value add that Lenovo has created. It’s good for Intel because it showcases their platform as potentially this very flagship, very exclusive high-end platform. It elevates Intel Core Ultra, but it also sets Lenovo apart from the competition.
It sets within the product line of Lenovo, it sets these two laptops apart from the rest. It’s like this is the Ultra premium stuff, and if you want those cool features, you can have them. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and to me, I think it’s the way forward for everyone. The thing is, if everyone does this, so if HP and Dell decide to do this, and within all of these PCOEM ecosystems, they also do something similar with AMD and something similar with Qualcomm.
Then the question is, does it still allow them to differentiate themselves, or does it just complicate the entire value proposition? My answer to that is, let’s hope we find out. The Copilot plus ecosystem to me is sort of homogenous. There’s not a lot of clear differentiation once you get past Intel versus AMD versus Qualcomm.
I’d like to see Lenovo, HP, Dell, Samsung, Acer and asus take this opportunity to differentiate or to clarify their differentiation. Why should I buy Lenovo? Why should I buy an asus? Why should I invest into this ecosystem? What do I have to look forward to? What benefits am I going to get from this other than predictability of performance and perhaps a better price? I think unlocking those AI features is a good way to make that case to buyers on the commercial side and the consumer side.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah, interesting. It also shows their commitment to the vendors as well. I mean, that’s kind of conundrum of the Windows ecosystem as such, especially when they’re trying to compete with Apple. The whole idea is, we don’t want to break down and disintegrate this large ecosystem with very specific features and so on.
At the same time, you have to have a differentiation, otherwise everything looks exactly the same, and then you end up being a commodity, right? So everybody is trying to compete on price and so on. So I think that is a perennial problem for Windows ecosystem, and especially this Aura thing.
A lot of these features and the modes are interesting. I think the cool feature was basically, you tap the phone onto your laptop and then instantly, and you can see all the pictures from the phone on your laptop, and move them back and forth and so on. That was developed on Intel Unison project, which they talked quite a lot about it a couple of years ago, and there was absolutely no news. I thought they were going down on it, and then now that’s the basis of this Aura edition.
Oliver Blanchard:
Yeah, they revived it. In my view, I think it’s such a consumer-friendly feature that Lenovo should enable it on all their consumer-facing PCs. This should be standard on all yoga laptops, for instance, and not make it, because like they’re premium, like ultra-premium types of features on there in the Aura edition. That make perfect sense as such. But that one should be a Lenovo exclusive across their entire line.
Prakash Sangam:
Also, that works with Intel, right? So, you know, they choosing to work with Intel on that specific aspect says a couple of things. One is, you know, there are other solutions in the market. For example, Microsoft phone link, as it’s called, or Windows Phone, which kind of gives the same features and benefits.
And if Lenovo had gone with Microsoft, then they could have brought this feature across all of their PCs, whether it is AMD, Intel, or Qualcomm. But they choose to go with Intel. That says something, right?
That’s one. And since there is a lot of AI power in this, they had to make sure they kind of prime the pump on AI on these things and not, you know, only let the app ecosystem and Microsoft do their part, right? So they wanted to do their part, and, you know, as part of that, they worked with Stability AI to port mid-journey on device and kind of give the same image creation application with what they call Lenovo Creator Zone, that they announced. That also is kind of interesting.
And I see in absence of this large killer AI use cases that everybody wants to use on their laptops, I expect that many OEMs, you know, cut their own deals, bring their own flavors of AI applications and use cases on their laptop, maybe working even with other AI model vendors and so on, right?
Oliver Blanchard:
The thing is, you don’t want to differentiate too much because if you bring an application that’s going to be popular, the reality is that, you know, most companies on the commercial side aren’t going to, you know, just only have Lenovo and only have HP, only have Dell. They’re going to have a mix of a bunch of different brands.
And so you still want to have some of these applications, some of these agents sort of be common to all of these models. So it’s more, I think it behooves Microsoft to work on this. And I’m kind of looking forward to seeing more work and more communication around how AI agents and Copilot plus sort of features will embed themselves into Word and Excel and PowerPoint and sort of like the applications that people use on a daily basis.
Prakash Sangam:
I used Yoga, Slim7x, and Galaxy Book4 Edge. Quite a mouthful. Both Snapdragon XElite laptops. I reviewed them. They work quite well. The two main observations, obviously, the performance and battery life was, you know, excellent, right, as expected. One thing I found, most of the Copilot features are, you know, some of them are usable, like the Windows effect, which kind of replaced, and many OEMs had their own proprietary features similar to that, this replaced with a Windows feature. That, I think, is useful.
Others were, you know, good to have, but I don’t know how often I would use them, right? So, you know, those features are not a selling point right now. Nobody would go buy PCs for those. And then app compatibility, I think, still, if you’re using just mainstream applications and so on, it’s good. But if you move away and have some esoteric applications, either consumer or in enterprises, that still is a challenge.
And the peripherals, I mean, our old Samsung printer, that did not work with these new laptops with the XElite. So that could be another thing that, you know, enterprises have to keep in mind if they are very old, and peripherals are zooming during this trial period, they’re checking all those out and so on.
Oliver Blanchard:
Yep. So I’m testing a lot of these laptops. I haven’t had really many issues with them. But I did on the Yoga Slim7x, start encountering some compatibility issues, and I don’t know where the problem is specifically, but it’s when I’m using the Edge browser and it’s a poly camera and conference room system, which is owned by HP.
Sometimes I’m not sure why it doesn’t recognize, it can’t bounce from earbuds to conference room system, to laptop, to application. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and it needs to work every time. I’ve only experienced that with that particular laptop, so I’m not sure if it’s just a glitch or what I wrote about it in my review as well.
Prakash Sangam:
That is the biggest issue. If everything works, that’s perfect. If something doesn’t, then there is no good resource right now, especially for consumers to find out where the issue is. Did I not install it correctly? Is it not supported? problem on the other end, not on the laptop.
If you get into a challenging situation, it’s very hard for you to know how to solve it. I think that’s the major thing. For games, I think there is a good resource for you to check. But for apps, if they don’t work, you don’t know whether it is the PC, the app, the compatibility, or you’re doing something wrong.
Last question. In terms of with these many solutions out there, it means they have to spend a lot of R&D dollars to have multiple models on all these SOCs, right? So do you expect that to be a challenge?
Oliver Blanchard:
Sure. They all have to do it. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. I would very seriously challenge anyone who might suggest that Windows on ARM and Snapdragon isn’t going to work or it’s not going to be worth it. They’re not going to capture enough market share, blah, blah, blah.
And eventually PCOEMs might move away from their investment in that. And part of the reason why I feel that way is first, the response for Snapdragon has been extremely positive so far from what we’re seeing. And so it’s doing well and it’s capturing a decent amount of market share already.
And I think the more people use those systems, the more they’re going to like them. But the other thing is Microsoft itself, like Microsoft as a company, is very invested in Windows on ARM. Obviously, they’ve poured a lot of time and money into this. Their product roadmap, even with the Surface PCs and tablets, is very focused on Snapdragon, obviously.
It’s kind of like Snapdragon first and then Intel second. And so I think it’s just a nature of the beast moving forward, that now there’s three platforms, three SOCs as opposed to two. But everybody is resetting essentially at the same time.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah. And it could be even more in the future, we’ll see. And also, I think one critical thing which is really going good for Lenovo is their scale. So if you have these 20, 30 different models and variations thereof, then if you have a large market share, then your R&D spend per model is much small compared to somebody who has a smaller market share, right? So I think the scale could be in favor of Lenovo and make it more competitive compared to others.
Oliver Blanchard:
It could be, yeah. Like the number of models that they have, like their list of SKUs scares me.
I would not want to be managing that. So I’m assuming that there are two options here. Either they just bet on what they’re going to sell and they have inventory at the ready, which is a super high risk and they have to carry a huge balance. Or they have great faith in their own supply chain and their own supply chain partners to be able to respond quickly to orders.
And so let’s see how that goes. But I appreciate the effort from Lenovo to basically be the PC company that says, yeah, we have that configuration. Here it is and we can ship it on Xdate.
I think that’s a good way to be there for the customers in case their competitors aren’t. In case their competitors have like a three to six month lead time on a PC.
Prakash Sangam:
Exactly. And going forward, I think there will be some rationalization of this portfolio across the board from all OEMs. I think it’s early times, so they don’t want to take risk by not supporting something, right?
Oliver Blanchard:
Right. And it’s a moving target as well. We saw Qualcomm release their Snapdragon X plus 8 core two weeks ago, just before IFA as well. And Lenovo had a model. I can’t remember which PC had it.
I think it might have actually been several. And I mean, to me, if I’m looking for the best bang for your buck with a Copilot plus PC right now, it’s that one.
It’s not the best chip. It’s not the best SOC, but it’s almost as good as the 10 core. But it’s much lower priced. And so I think people who, whether it’s the enterprise, SMB, consumers who are looking for a budget PC, like the best budget PC in the Copilot plus ecosystem is probably a dollar for performance, any PC that’s going to have that Snapdragon X plus 8 core. It’s a little bit of a mouthful as the processor. So there’s that too. And Lenovo has those.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah. And the target for that is around 700. So which is the sweet spot.
Oliver Blanchard:
Which is crazy when you think about it. Like a PC that good with that kind of battery life, with that tiny form factor, they’re thin in that price range. It’s crazy. A year ago, it would have been double that price.
Prakash Sangam:
All right, Olivier, that was a great discussion. Thank you very much for all of your insights.
Oliver Blanchard:
Thanks for having me. I hope to see you back again on the show. Yeah, I hope we can do this again soon. I appreciate it.
Prakash Sangam:
All right. Thank you again. Folks, that’s all we have for now. Hope you found this discussion informative and useful. If so, please hit like and subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you are listening this on. I’ll be back soon with another episode, putting light on another interesting tech subject. Bye-bye for now.
