Is This The Most Useless PC Addition Ever? Dedicated Copilot Button On Minisforum’s Compact Rig Is A Mysterious Move
It looks like Microsoft Copilot is coming to a mini-PC format, though certainly in a way we didn’t predict.
This is happening with the recently unveiled Minisforum UH125 Proa compact PC with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H (Meteor Lake) CPU and a physical Copilot button.
By now you may have noticed the immediate oddity here, namely that the Copilot button is an invention for Copilot+ PCs, added to allow quick access to the assistant given all the AI tasks you’ll undoubtedly be tackling. And yet this Minisforum machine has a Meteor Lake CPU, as noted, which currently falls short of the minimum hardware requirements for a Copilot+ PC and all its AI extras – the NPU isn’t strong enough in these Intel chips.
Currently, only the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (and Plus) CPUs are suitable for powering a Copilot+ PC.
Mind you, that will change in the future, with the upcoming Lunar Lake or Arrow Lake processors on the Intel front, which will have the NPU goods to qualify – and we can only assume that this particular Minisforum chassis has been designed with further iterations in mind. So going forward it will run one of those next-gen Intel chips and be a Copilot+ PC (with more need for that physical Copilot button – possibly, but we’ll come to that in a moment).
It’s important to note that Minisforum makes no mention of this mini PC having Copilot or even the Copilot button. There’s nothing at all in the product information, which further reinforces the idea that the manufacturer is testing a new case here (which could also use AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips in the future, as well as the next-gen Intel silicon we’ve already mentioned).
For those wondering about the price, the Minisforum UH125 Pro is available to pre-order now, starting at $439 (around £340, AU$650) for a barebones system (without RAM or storage) – though those are early bird prices. Units will ship on August 10, we’re told.
How useful would a dedicated Copilot button be?
There’s no shortage of new AI PCs touting Copilot, with laptops sporting a dedicated key for summoning the assistant at a moment’s notice. While this makes sense as a shortcut on a notebook keyboard right in front of you, the same isn’t really true for a button on the chassis of a mini PC (or a full-size rig). After all, you’d have to reach over to press it (and your computer might even be in a hard-to-reach location)—hardly convenient.
So all in all, the addition to a desktop PC is a bit of a mystery, especially one that doesn’t qualify as a Copilot+ PC anyway. We’ll see if the idea of a dedicated button on a desktop PC catches on, but in the meantime, you can still use the Windows key + C shortcut – but not for long, as Microsoft is killing it in what seems like a cynical move.
Through Video cardz
