Computex 2024 is in full swing out in Taipei this week, and MSI has brought a boatload of new laptops to the show—and they all come with cutting-edge AMD Strix Point or Intel Lunar Lake chips inside.
This is a big deal because these are the first laptops we've seen from the company to arrive sporting these shiny new slices of silicon inside, and MSI is talking up how they'll be augmented by next-gen AI features.
In fact, all of them appear to meet Microsoft's minimum requirements for a Next Gen AI PC, so they should support all the latest advanced Windows 11 and Copilot AI features.
These new laptops are spread across a few of MSI's product lines and cover both business and productivity notebooks as well as those optimized for gaming and content creation. While we don't yet have full details on what's in these laptops, how much they'll cost or when they'll hit store shelves, MSI has said they'll all ship in 2024.
New Prestige & Summit productivity laptops
MSI unveiled at least six new productivity laptops at Computex this week spread across its Prestige and Summit lines. They're all 13-inch, 14-inch or 16-inch models and all come with Intel's new line of Lunar Lake CPUs inside.
These Lunar Lake chips all come with an onboard NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of 40+ TOPS (trillions of operations per second), so they meet Microsoft's Next Gen AI PC requirements and thus qualify as Copilot+ PCs. MSI is leaning into this AI focus as tech industry's love affair with the initialism shows no sign of slowing, and all these new laptops have "AI+" in their branding.
Most of these new laptops come with Intel CPUS inside, and you can tell them apart because they have "Evo" in the title. These include the MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo, the Prestige 13 AI+ Evo, the Prestige 14 AI+ Evo and the Prestige16 AI+ Evo laptops.
As you can see from the specs tables we don't yet have full details on what's inside these laptops or how much they'll cost, but we know they all ship with Lunar Lake CPUs and Wi-Fi 7.
If you prefer AMD in your laptops, MSI also has two variants of these laptops available with AMD's new Strix Point CPUs inside: A Prestige A16 AI and a Summit A16 AI+ laptop. If you're confused, you're not alone!
These AMD models can't offer the same Thunderbolt ports as their Intel counterparts due to motherboard restrictions, but look to be otherwise basically identical to their Intel-powered counterparts.
New Stealth & Creator laptops
If you prefer your laptops with a discrete graphics card onboard, MSI also brought some new models just for you.
The company has updated two of its big n' beefy 16-inch laptop lines with AMD's latest chips, and it's calling these new models the Stealth A16 AI+ and the Creator A16 AI+. Both come with AMD's cutting-edge Strix Point laptop chips inside, and they're also configurable with powerful discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 series laptop GPUs.
However, again we're working on incomplete information for the moment. MSI gave us a decent rundown of what to expect on the Stealth A16 AI+, but we still haven't seen the specs for the newly-announced Creator A16 AI+ laptop. While it's likely to be pretty close to what's available on the new 16-inch Stealth, we're waiting on confirmation from MSI and will update this post when and if we get it.
Outlook
These new laptops from MSI give us a glimpse of what to expect from mobile computing in 2025: AI everywhere, often with confusing branding like Copilot+ or AI+ or Next Gen AI, etc.
And perhaps that's ultimately a good thing in the long run, because with AI seen as a selling point laptop makers are in a race to cram as many TOPS as they can into their machines—and that could ultimately lead to more happiness and less work for users who can rely on these new AI features to do boring, frustrating tasks for them.
But that's the promise, not the reality. I've been testing laptops, desktops and apps on the leading edge of the AI craze since it started, and I've yet to see one that's compelling enough to make me want to put up with the frustrations of AI software.
Now that so many laptops are shipping with powerful NPUs onboard thin-and-light designs, perhaps we're about to see a real sea change in the state of AI software that could surface a slew of reasons to jump aboard. But until the software is compelling, I don't see much reason to buy these laptops unless you need one.
