Microsoft has agreed to pay €20 million to settle an antitrust complaint filed by Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), a European cloud providers association. The deal aims to address concerns about Microsoft's cloud product licensing practices, also, Microsoft will develop Azure Stack HCI for European cloud providers and compensate CISPE members for recent licensing costs. On the other side, CISPE will withdraw its EU complaint, cease supporting similar global complaints, and establish an independent European Cloud Observatory to monitor the product's development.

The settlement excludes major providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and AliCloud. While CISPE hails this as a victory, critics argue it's insufficient. AWS spokesperson Alia Ilyas said that Microsoft was only making "limited concessions for some CISPE members that demonstrate there are no technical barriers preventing it from doing what's right for every cloud customer". Google Cloud suggests more action is needed against anti-competitive behavior, and UK-based cloud company Civo's CEO Mark Boost questions the deal's long-term impact on the industry. Boost stated, "However they position it, we cannot shy away from what this deal appears to be: a global powerful company paying for the silence of a trade body, and avoiding having to make fundamental changes to their software licensing practices on a global basis". Despite resolving the CISPE complaint, Microsoft faces ongoing regulatory scrutiny worldwide. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority launched a cloud computing market investigation in October 2023 while the US Federal Trade Commission is conducting two separate probes involving Microsoft. The first FTC investigation, initiated in January 2024, examines AI services and partnerships of major tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The second focuses specifically on Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia, assessing their impact and behavior in the AI sector.

By the time you're reading this, it's already too late to sign up for the old price, if you were planning on getting or extending your Game Pass, since as of today, Microsoft has increased the cost for both PC and Xbox owners. On top of that, Microsoft has added a new tier for Xbox owners and made its lower tiers a lot less interesting. However, as TPU is a PC centric site, let's start with the bad news for PC owners. Depending on where you live, the price increase varies, but on average, Microsoft has increased the price by US$/€2/£2. However, some lower income countries are only seeing an increase of US$1, although we're not sure why Switzerland ended up in this group. However, the exchange rate is clearly affecting some other countries either negatively or positively where some countries end up paying a little bit more and others a little bit less.

Now for the really bad news for Xbox console owners. Xbox Game Pass for Console is no longer available to new subscribers, but those already on this tier that have automatic renewal enabled will be able to continue to have access to the same tier and perks that it's been offered with to date. In its place, Microsoft is introducing the Xbox Game Pass Standard tier and the fundamental difference between it and the Xbox Game Pass for Console package is that subscribers no longer have access to day one releases, but they gain access to online multiplayer games and the full back catalogue of games. There's no word on how long those subscribed to the Xbox Game Pass Standard tier will have to wait to gain access to new releases yet, but the new tier isn't available immediately either, so we'll most likely find out in due time.

The recent launch of Copilot+ PCs, a collaboration between Microsoft and Qualcomm, has taken an unexpected turn in the market. While these devices were promoted for their artificial intelligence capabilities, a Bloomberg report reveals that consumers are primarily drawn to them for their impressive battery life. The Snapdragon X-powered Copilot+ PCs have made a significant impact, securing 20% of global PC sales during their launch week. However, industry analyst Avi Greengart points out that the extended battery life, not the AI features, is driving these sales. Microsoft introduced three AI-powered features exclusive to these PCs: Cocreator, Windows Studio Effects, and Live Captions with Translation. Despite these innovations, many users find these features non-essential for daily use. The delay of the anticipated Recall feature due to privacy concerns has further dampened enthusiasm for the AI aspects of these devices.

The slow reception of on-device AI capabilities extends beyond consumer preferences to the software industry. Major companies like Adobe, Salesforce, and SentinelOne declined Microsoft's request to optimize their apps for the new hardware, citing resource constraints and the limited market share of AI-capable PCs. Gregor Steward, SentinelOne's VP for AI, suggests it could take years before AI PCs are widespread enough to justify app optimization. Analysts project that by 2028, only 40% of new computers will be AI-capable. Despite these challenges, Qualcomm remains optimistic about the future of AI PCs. While the concept may currently be more on the marketing side, the introduction of Arm-based Windows laptops offers a welcome alternative to the Intel-AMD duopoly. As the technology evolves and adoption increases, on-device AI features may become more prevalent and useful. The imminent arrival of AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Lunar Lake chips promises to expand the Copilot+ PC space further. For now, however, it appears that superior battery life remains the primary selling point for consumers.

Everyone's favorite plaintext editor, the Windows Notepad, now has Spellcheck. The latest update to Notepad in Windows 11 adds spellchecks, along with spelling suggestions. The company had released Spellcheck and Autocorrect to Insiders in March 2024, and has now rolled the feature out to the regular userbase. The feature is enabled by default. The app now also has an autocorrect feature that, well, automatically corrects common typos the way a fully fledged word processor would. Both Spellcheck and Autocorrect are now enabled by default, and can be turned off in the gearwheel screen. Starting with Windows 11, Microsoft turned many of the popular Windows Accessories to UWP apps. These used to be Win32 apps in previous Windows versions. The company continuously updates these apps through the Windows Store platform, and we've noticed that Notepad got several new features it never had over the past three decades, including tabs, session restore, and now Spellcheck.

ASUS announced a press event on July 17 to launch at least nine notebook designs powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" mobile processors. All these notebooks are AI PCs that meet Microsoft Copilot+ requirements. Each of the 9 designs will have several variants based on the processor model, discrete graphics, and other hardware differentiators, making up dozens of individual SKUs. The AMD "Strix Point" mobile processor is based on a 4 nm monolithic die. It combines a 12-core/24-thread CPU based on a combination of "Zen 5" and "Zen 5c" cores, a 50 TOPS-class NPU, and a powerful iGPU based on the RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture, with 16 compute units.

Among the notebook designs ASUS plans to announce on July 17 are the ROG Zephyrus G16 (GA605), the TUF Gaming A14 (FA401), the TUF Gaming A16 (FA608), the Zenbook S16 (UM5606), Vivobook S14 (M5406), Vivobook S16 (M5506 and M5606), ProArt P16 (HN7606) and ProArt PX13 (HN7306). With these, ASUS is covering pretty much all its notebook market segments, including enthusiast gaming, performance gaming, boutique ultraportability, mainstream, and creative professional.

Microsoft really wants you to use Windows 11 with an online Microsoft Account. This lets the operating system integrate the single login for Microsoft Store, all the apps on it, Office or 365, Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, and more importantly, put a face to your name (making you and your machine identifiable to it). Some users, particularly power-users, tend to avoid this, by preferring local accounts—an account that's authenticated and maintained locally by the machine. Microsoft is viewed as making it increasingly difficult for users to create local accounts, particularly on the client versions of Windows, such as Windows 11 Home and Windows 11 Pro.

The Windows Setup by default flows you into creating a Microsoft Account, or logging in from one. Over the past several versions of Windows, Microsoft has made it harder, if not impossible, to create a local account during Setup. In what could be a step closer by the company to wean the market off local accounts, Microsoft removed the online Help page that guides users on how to switch from a Microsoft Account to a local one, as Tweaktown found out. The publication dug the page out using the Wayback Machine. Will Microsoft completely remove the ability to create local accounts? We don't know. All versions of Windows 11 and Windows 10 sit on the Windows NT architecture, which requires some form of local accounts. The Microsoft Account itself is layered on top of a local account. So, the ability to create a local account shouldn't go away for those who really want one, but it will be close to impossible for the vast majority of users trained by Google and Apple to have online accounts on their phones.

Schneider Electric, the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, has today announced the availability of its APC Back-UPS Pro Gaming uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) in Europe. Celebrating 40 years of Legendary Reliability and leadership in critical power protection during 2024, the new, stylish, and state-of-the-art UPS has been designed to protect gaming equipment from power outages and deliver a robust power connection, despite energy spikes and failures.

Back-UPS Pro Gaming has been specifically designed with gamers, streamers, and influencers in mind, delivering uninterruptible power protection, even in regions where the grid is unstable, keeping GPU-powered PCs, leading consoles, streamers, and gamers connected to both their online gaming experiences and audiences, regardless of power disruptions. To deliver robust protection, APC Back-UPS Pro Gaming UPS features sine wave battery backup power - delivering the smooth electrical current required by sensitive electronics and AVR (Automatic Voltage Regulation), and helping to protect against power irregularities that can result in glitches and buffering during an outage to extend the lifespan of gaming equipment.

During Computex 2024, Intel announced the next-generation compute platform for the notebook segment in the form of the Core Ultra 200V series, codenamed Lunar Lake. Set for release in September 2024, these processors are generating excitement among tech enthusiasts and industry professionals alike. According to the latest leak by VideoCardz, Intel plans to unveil nine variants of Lunar Lake, including Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 5 models, with a single high-end Core Ultra 9 variant. While exact specifications remain under wraps, Intel's focus on artificial intelligence capabilities is clear. The company aims to secure a spot in Microsoft's Copilot+ lineup by integrating its fourth-generation Neural Processing Unit (NPU), boasting up to 48 TOPS of performance. All Lunar Lake variants are expected to feature a hybrid architecture with four Lion Cove performance cores and four Skymont efficiency cores.

This design targets low-power mobile devices, striking a balance between performance and energy efficiency. For graphics, Intel is incorporating its next-generation Arc technology, dubbed Battlemage GPU, which utilizes the Xe2-LPG architecture. The leaked information suggests that Lunar Lake processors will come with either 16 GB or 32 GB of non-upgradable LPDDR5-8533 memory. Graphics configurations are expected to include seven or eight Xe2 GPU cores, depending on the model. At the entry level, the Core Ultra 5 226V is rumored to offer a 17 W base power and 30 W maximum turbo power, with performance cores clocking up to 4.5 GHz. The top-tier Core Ultra 9 288V is expected to push the envelope with a 30 W base power, performance cores boosting to 5.1 GHz, and an NPU capable of 48 TOPS. You can check out the rest of the SKUs in the table below.

The European Commission has preliminarily concluded that Microsoft breached EU antitrust rules by tying its Teams communication product to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 productivity suites. The Commission considers Microsoft dominant in the global SaaS productivity applications market and is concerned that since at least April 2019, the company has been unfairly promoting Teams by bundling it with core productivity applications.

This practice allegedly restricts competition in the communication and collaboration products market, prevents customers from choosing whether to acquire Teams, and may limit interoperability with competitors' products. The Commission fears this could hinder innovation and harm customers in the European Economic Area, potentially violating Article 102 of the TFEU, which prohibits abuse of a dominant position.

TrendForce has observed that in 2024, major CSPs such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and AWS will continue to be the primary buyers of high-end AI servers, which are crucial for LLM and AI modeling. Following establishing a significant AI training server infrastructure in 2024, these CSPs are expected to actively expand into edge AI in 2025. This expansion will include the development of smaller LLM models and setting up edge AI servers to facilitate AI applications across various sectors, such as manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and business.

Moreover, AI PCs or notebooks share a similar architecture to AI servers, offering substantial computational power and the ability to run smaller LLM and generative AI applications. These devices are anticipated to serve as the final bridge between cloud AI infrastructure and edge AI for small-scale training or inference applications.

The first reviews of a notebook with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC have appeared today, and it looks like the promised performance isn't quite there. And yes, all the reviews that went live today are all based on Asus' Vivobook S 15 OLED, so it might be a bit too early to state that Qualcomm isn't delivering on its claimed performance, as other manufacturers might deliver better performance. Let's start with the battery life. The Vivobook S 15 OLED comes with a 70 Wh battery pack which enables it to deliver better battery life than many AMD or Intel notebooks, but Apple's MacBook Air 15 M3 delivers on average a 40 percent better battery life, with a smaller 66.5 Wh battery pack. Browsing the web or watching movies aren't really too taxing for the Snapdragon X Elite, but under heavier loads the battery life drops off a cliff.

When it comes to application performance, the Snapdragon X Elite offers good multicore performance in benchmarks like Cinebench 2024 and PCMark 10, but it falls way behind in most other tests, ranging from video encoding to file extraction and document conversion, with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H based notebooks often pulling ahead by 50 percent or more. Despite being equipped with LPDDR5X-8448 memory, the Snapdragon X Elite falls behind in both the memory copy and write tests in AIDA64 compared to the Intel powered laptops. However, it's not all doom and gloom, as the Qualcomm chip delivers an impressive memory latency of a mere 8.1 ns, compared to 100+ for the Intel based laptops. It also outclasses the Intel laptops when it comes to memory read performance.

Microsoft has made a last-minute decision to pull its much-debated "Recall" feature from the Windows 11 24H2 update set to launch on June 18th. Instead, the company will roll out Recall as a preview through the Windows Insider Program while it works to build user trust and address security concerns. Recall, one of the flagship features of 24H2, creates a searchable 30-day timeline of a user's activities including files, webpages, and screenshots. However, since its announcement on May 20th, Recall has faced heavy criticism over potential privacy risks from storing user data in unencrypted plain text files. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont labeled Recall a "security nightmare" after finding it logged activities to a SQLite database accessible by non-admin accounts. This raised alarms about the depths of user behavior tracked and stored locally on PCs.

Initially, Microsoft had planned for Recall to be enabled by default in 24H2. However, following the backlash, the company backtracked on June 7th, making it an opt-in feature requiring Windows Hello authentication and adding encryption. Those adjustments were still not enough to satisfy Microsoft. In a new blog post, the firm stated Recall did not yet meet its "own standards of quality and security" and that it "must be trustworthy, secure and robust" before a wider rollout. By moving Recall to the Insider Program for further testing and refinement, Microsoft is giving itself more time to get the technology right and rebuild user confidence. A future blog will provide instructions for Insiders to preview Recall on compatible Copilot+ PCs with added security protections.

Few days ago at the Xbox Games Showcase, Microsoft has pulled a rather neat surprise, announcing Gears of War: E-Day, which will be developed by The Coalition in Unreal Engine 5. Microsoft did not go into a lot of details, reveling just a few story details about this prequel to the first Gears of War and releasing the official announce trailer. Thankfully, Microsoft and the developer now shared a bit more story and technical details, also confirming that the game will support ray traced lighting, reflections, and shadows.

In an extensive blog over at the Xbox Wire, Microsoft and The Coalition talk about the story behind the Gears of War: E-Day, which will follow younger versions of the original heroes, Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago, going back to where it all started with the fight against the Locust invasion. The Creative Director Matt Searcy and Brand Director Nicole Fawcette were keen to note that the developer is working hard to recreate and improve the third-person action, storytelling, and all other things we expect from Gears of War game.

Microsoft has unexpectedly halted the rollout of the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update to Windows Insiders on the Release Preview Channel. The pause was quietly announced through an update to the original release blog post, which had initially touted the preview's new features like Wi-Fi 7 support, Sudo for Windows, Rust in the Windows kernel, and various UI enhancements. Microsoft has not provided an official reason for hitting the brakes on the 24H2 preview rollout. Brandon LeBlanc, the Windows Insider Senior Program Manager, simply stated, "We are working to get it rolling out again shortly."

However, a glimpse at the Microsoft Feedback Hub reveals a multitude of issues reported by Insiders testing the 24H2 build. Complaints range from application freezes and performance degradation to VPN connectivity problems. Some users have even taken to social media to voice their frustrations, with one describing the Arm version as a "disastrous, worst 'release' preview I can remember." The Release Preview Channel is typically recommended for commercial users and those wanting to test upcoming Windows releases before general availability. Meanwhile, the Dev Channel caters to users who are comfortable with instability and rough edges. As The Register notes, the current situation echoes Microsoft's troubled rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, which contained a data deletion bug.

Arm CEO Rene Haas predicts that SoCs based on the Arm CPU machine architecture will beat x86 in the Windows PC space in the next 5 years (by 2029). Haas is bullish about the current crop of Arm SoCs striking the right balance of performance and power efficiency, along with just the right blend of on-chip acceleration for AI and graphics, to make serious gains in this market, which has traditionally been dominated by the x86 machine architecture, with chips from just two manufacturers—Intel and AMD. On the other hand, Arm has a vibrant ecosystem of SoC vendors. "Arm's market share in Windows - I think, truly, in the next five years, it could be better than 50%." Haas said, in an interview with Reuters.

Currently, Microsoft has an exclusive deal with Qualcomm to power Windows-on-Arm (WoA) Copilot+ AI PCs. Qualcomm's chip lineup spans the Snapdragon Elite X and Snapdragon Elite Plus. This exclusivity, however, could change, with a recent interview of Michael Dell and Jensen Huang hinting at NVIDIA working on a chip for the AI PC market. The writing is on the wall for Intel and AMD—they need to compete with Arm on its terms: to make leaner PC processors with the kinds of performance/Watt and chip costs that Arm SoCs offer to PC OEMs. Intel has taken a big step in this direction with its "Lunar Lake" processor, you can read all about the architecture here.

During the Xbox Games Showcase today, Microsoft revealed its upcoming disc-less Xbox Series X console, alongside an upgraded Xbox Series X with 2 TB of storage and a white XBox Series S with 1 TB of storage. The disc-less SKU will be known as the Xbox Series X 1 TB Digital Edition and it will at least initially, only be available in what Microsoft calls Robot White. As the name implies, it will sport 1 TB of storage and Microsoft says it's the "perfect option for digital-first players to experience the speed and performance of Xbox Series X".

The new 2 TB SKU will be known as the Xbox Series X - 2 TB Galaxy Black Special Edition and as you can see on the pictures below, it has a rather interesting pattern made up of grey and green sparkling plastic moulded into the black. The Xbox Series S - 1 TB in Robot White is simply getting half a terabyte of extra storage over the current model and it means that the white and black Series S consoles will have storage parity. However, the press release suggests that the black model might be discontinued in favour of the white model. The Xbox Series X - 1 TB Digital Edition will retail for $449.99/€499.99, with the Xbox Series X - 2 TB Galaxy Black Special Edition coming in at $599.99/€649.99 and finally the Xbox Series S - 1 TB in Robot White will cost $349.99/€349.99. All three models will be available later this year.

AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Meta and Microsoft today announced they have aligned to develop a new industry standard dedicated to advancing high-speed and low latency communication for scale-up AI systems linking in Data Centers.

Called the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink), this initial group will define and establish an open industry standard that will enable AI accelerators to communicate more effectively. By creating an interconnect based upon open standards, UALink will enable system OEMs, IT professionals and system integrators to create a pathway for easier integration, greater flexibility and scalability of their AI-connected data centers.

Microsoft on Wednesday made the DirectSR API Preview available to game developers through the DirectX GitHub. The API aims to simplify implementation of super-resolution technologies with games. A super-resolution technology renders your game at a lower resolution that your display resolution, and upscales it to your display resolution using intelligent upscalers that attempt to reconstruct details lost to the process. This yields a significant gain in performance from the lower render resolution, and lets you max out game settings—something you could only do if your hardware was up to it. By default, DirectSR provides an upscaling technology based on AMD FSR 2.2, but the API looks for the best available technology available with the graphics drivers that are supported by the game. All three discrete GPU makers responded positively to DirectSR.

NVIDIA today announced at Microsoft Build new AI performance optimizations and integrations for Windows that help deliver maximum performance on NVIDIA GeForce RTX AI PCs and NVIDIA RTX workstations. Large language models (LLMs) power some of the most exciting new use cases in generative AI and now run up to 3x faster with ONNX Runtime (ORT) and DirectML using the new NVIDIA R555 Game Ready Driver. ORT and DirectML are high-performance tools used to run AI models locally on Windows PCs.

WebNN, an application programming interface for web developers to deploy AI models, is now accelerated with RTX via DirectML, enabling web apps to incorporate fast, AI-powered capabilities. And PyTorch will support DirectML execution backends, enabling Windows developers to train and infer complex AI models on Windows natively. NVIDIA and Microsoft are collaborating to scale performance on RTX GPUs. These advancements build on NVIDIA's world-leading AI platform, which accelerates more than 500 applications and games on over 100 million RTX AI PCs and workstations worldwide.

Today at Microsoft Build, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) showcased its latest end-to-end compute and software capabilities for Microsoft customers and developers. By using AMD solutions such as AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators, ROCm open software, Ryzen AI processors and software, and Alveo MA35D media accelerators, Microsoft is able to provide a powerful suite of tools for AI-based deployments across numerous markets. The new Microsoft Azure ND MI300X virtual machines (VMs) are now generally available, giving customers like Hugging Face, access to impressive performance and efficiency for their most demanding AI workloads.

"The AMD Instinct MI300X and ROCm software stack is powering the Azure OpenAI Chat GPT 3.5 and 4 services, which are some of the world's most demanding AI workloads," said Victor Peng, president, AMD. "With the general availability of the new VMs from Azure, AI customers have broader access to MI300X to deliver high-performance and efficient solutions for AI applications."

During yesterday's Microsoft Event, in addition to the new AI features and Surface devices, the company also announced its new Surface Pro Flex wireless keyboard, compatible with the Surface Pro 8, 9, 10, and 11 models. Officially called "Surface Pro Flex Keyboard with Slim Pen," the wireless keyboard is a $449.98 add-on keyboard that doesn't include Microsoft's Surface Slim Pen 2, only an indentation at the top of the keyboard to charge it. So, without a pen, what does the keyboard offer? According to Microsoft, up to 41 hours of continuous typing while detached, a dedicated Copilot key, and a touchpad with a vibration function for haptic feedback. The touchpad can have varying pressure levels, and applications can use it to build different functionalities.

Its thin and light design measures 289x221x5.25 mm with a weight of 340 g. The dedicated Copilot key summons the AI assistant and all the functionality Microsoft plans for its Windows 11 integration, which has been completely revamped for AI. The material choice is a Alcantara polyester-blend, which can be difficult for maintenance, and the keyboard is sold in either black or bright sapphire colors, becoming available on June 18th. Interestingly, given the name "Surface Pro Flex Keyboard with Slim Pen" and a price tag of $449.98, it is intriguing as to why Microsoft doesn't bundle the Surface Slim Pen 2 with the keyboard, as it is designed with a dedicated wireless charging indentation for the pen.

AMD on Monday said that its 2024 Computex Keynote address slated for June 3, will see a slew of next-generation product announcements. "Join us as Dr. Lisa Su delivers the Computex 2024 opening keynote and shares the latest on how AMD and our partners are pushing the envelope with our next generation of high-performance PC, data center and AI solutions," the brief release said.

AMD is widely expected to unveil its next-generation Ryzen 9000 "Strix Point" mobile processors for AI PCs capable of powering the recently announced Microsoft Copilot+, its next-generation Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" desktop processors, its 5th Generation EPYC "Turin" server processors, and possibly even its next-generation Radeon RX RDNA 4 generation. At the heart of all its processor announcements is the new "Zen 5" CPU microarchitecture that's expected to introduce an over 10% IPC improvement with significant improvements in AVX512 performance over "Zen 4," which should benefit certain kinds of AI workloads.

Starting Q3 2024 in time for the holiday season, Intel's upcoming client processors (code-named Lunar Lake) will power more than 80 new laptop designs across more than 20 original equipment manufacturers, delivering AI performance at a global scale for Copilot+ PCs. Lunar Lake will get the Copilot+ experiences, like Recall, via an update when available. Building on the success of Intel Core Ultra processors and with the addition of Lunar Lake, Intel will ship more than 40 million AI PC processors this year.

"With breakthrough power efficiency, the trusted compatibility of x86 architecture and the industry's deepest catalog of software enablement across the CPU, GPU and NPU, we will deliver the most competitive joint client hardware and software offering in our history with Lunar Lake and Copilot+," said Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group.

Today, Microsoft and Surface introduced the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever: Copilot+ PCs. The all-new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are the ultimate Copilot+ PCs, delivering incredible performance, all-day battery life and brand-new AI experiences. They showcase the beauty and innovation that happens at the intersection of software and hardware.

Surface was created to lead the PC industry with innovation and technology that showcases the best of Microsoft and empowers our customers to achieve more. We've been at the forefront of new PC categories, with thoughtful designs and new features that inspire our customers. And as we dive into the new wave of AI, Surface continues to put our customers first.

Today, at a special event on our new Microsoft campus, we introduced the world to a new category of Windows PCs designed for AI, Copilot+ PCs. Copilot+ PCs are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built. With powerful new silicon capable of an incredible 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), all-day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models, Copilot+ PCs will enable you to do things you can't on any other PC. Easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with Recall, generate and refine AI images in near real-time directly on the device using Cocreator, and bridge language barriers with Live Captions, translating audio from 40+ languages into English.

These experiences come to life on a set of thin, light and beautiful devices from Microsoft Surface and our OEM partners Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, with pre-orders beginning today and availability starting on June 18. Starting at $999, Copilot+ PCs offer incredible value. This first wave of Copilot+ PCs is just the beginning. Over the past year, we have seen an incredible pace of innovation of AI in the cloud with Copilot allowing us to do things that we never dreamed possible. Now, we begin a new chapter with AI innovation on the device. We have completely reimagined the entirety of the PC - from silicon to the operating system, the application layer to the cloud - with AI at the center, marking the most significant change to the Window platform in decades.