5 things Copilot+ PCs should be able to do instead of Super Resolution
Microsoft has been working hard to make Copilot+ PCs enticing after they made their debut on June 18th, 2024, especially since the initial wave of exclusive features didn't do all that much for users. The (repeated) delay of Recall was a big hit to the appeal of this whole concept, but in early October, Microsoft announced a few more features coming to Copilot+ PCs, with the first of them rolling out a couple of weeks later.
That feature was Super Resolution, an option in the Photos app that upscales your photos and images to be a higher resolution. It's not a bad option to have, but in today's world, an image's resolution is rarely ever its main problem relative to things like lighting, noise, and so on. I still feel like Microsoft is totally missing the true potential of Copilot+, and I have some ideas on what the company could do to make it better rather than waste time with relatively uninteresting features.
I've already talked about this last year when Copilot first started appearing in Windows and it could actually change certain system settings. Microsoft's response to my request for more functionality was to scrap that feature entirely in favor of a web app for Copilot, but I think Copilot+ poses a new opportunity for this feature to work even better.
Since Copilot+ is a set of features running locally on your PC, you wouldn't need the internet to process your commands, and rather than depending on the usual Copilot chat interface from the web, this could just be built into a proper part of Windows, such as Search. AI's ability to understand natural language and interpret it could enable users to change really complex settings much more quickly. For example, a user could ask their computer to change the refresh rate instead of going deep into the Settings app to do it. It could change the theme color, disable notifications for an app, and so on.