Please Standby (Premium)

The other night, I prepared for bed as I often do here in Mexico, by removing whatever collection of PCs and phones are on the bed–I've been working on a major update to the Phone Link chapter for the Windows 11 Field Guide–and bringing them out to the table I use as a desk in the living room. In this case, there were two laptops, a 14-inch HP ZBook Firefly I've been reviewing, and an older 16-inch laptop I keep here in Mexico.

The ZBook was almost fully charged, which I know because I had detached it from the power cable in the bedroom a little earlier in the night. And its lid was still open, as I had been using it before we went out that night. So I closed the lid, stacked it on top of the other laptop, left them both in the living room, and came back to the bedroom and read a bit before going to sleep. A series of events that normally wouldn't warrant any discussion.

Except that I woke up the next morning and everything went south.

It all started normally enough: I made and then drank some coffee while I read the news, put in my contacts and cleaned up, and then opened the lid on the ZBook in anticipation of using it in my docked setup here to record First Ring Daily with Brad. It didn't power on.

Hm.

Recently, I've been discussing how the Windows PC experience has turned into a roulette wheel of reliability issues, where you never know what you're going to get each day when you power up a laptop. This comment has been generally true for years, I suppose, but left unsaid until now is that I'm specifically referring to PCs based on Intel's lame duck "Meteor Lake" chips, the first-generation Core Ultra chips that I've used in every Windows 11 review laptop this year.

There is something wrong with Meteor Lake. Maybe multiple somethings.

I'm writing a separate piece about Intel's belated come to Jesus moment with efficiency, the first major milestone being the Lunar Lake family of chips that will debut in new Copilot+ PC-based laptops this coming holiday season. But what you need to know now is that Lunar Lake is a major architectural change when compared to Meteor Lake, with dramatically better integrated graphics and NPU, one that dispenses with Hyper-Threading for the first time in a mainstream Intel processor in over 20 years.

That's fascinating on its own. But it's even more fascinating when you consider that Meteor Lake was itself a major architectural change when compared to its predecessors, with dramatically better integrated graphics. It was also the first mainstream Intel processor to included an integrated NPU, and Intel was so impressed by this feat that it created the AI PC brand to describe PCs built using it. And yet.

There is something wrong with Meteor Lake.

That Lunar Lake is so different from Meteor Lake, which we now know to be a one-off, is perhaps a clue, though there are, of course, other reasons this happened. One of them being the need to meet the needs of the Copilot+ PC specific...