CES 2025: The return of the mini PC

Small form factors turn heads but Copilot Plus more likely to open wallets

Life

HP Z2 Mini G1a

The success of Apple’s MacMini has not escaped PC manufacturers. At the CES in Las Vegas, the mini PC seems to be on the rise. These are compact PCs that come without a keyboard, mouse and screen, making them attractively priced.

The mini PC is certainly not a new phenomenon, although until now it was mainly unknown manufacturers who marketed such devices. For example, the new generation of mini PCs combines a Qualcomm processor or Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 chips with a neural processing unit (NPU) for local AI acceleration and comes with Microsoft’s AI helper CoPilot.

You won’t find CoPilot Plus anywhere yet in classic PC towers, which are going a bit out of fashion anyway. Consumers prefer a compact device they can put on their desk. The PC tower lends itself better to expansions and often still has a CD player on board. CoPilot Plus can already be found in several laptops, but they are still on the pricey side.

Asus was first PC manufacturer to announce a Copilot Plus-capable mini PC back in September. The full specifications of its upcoming NUC 14 Pro AI were revealed shortly before CES. Asus’ mini-PC even has a Copilot button on the front and is almost identical in size to Apple’s latest Mac Mini. The Asus model also looks nice, which cannot be said of every mini PC.

In fact, Taiwanese company Geekom is unveiling three new mini PCs at CES, one with AMD’s Strix Point CPUs and one with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor, both compatible with Copilot Plus. The third model is powered by Intel’s unannounced Arrow Lake-H laptop processors, and will have to make do without Copilot Plus.

Other brands are also showing mini PCs; for example, Acer is launching the Revo Box AI, and HP is demonstrating at CES the deep black Z2 Mini G1a.

It may be some time before Copilot Plus features run on traditional high-performance desktop PCs. Intel’s latest Core Ultra desktop CPU arrived in October with an NPU just short of the 40 TOPS requirement that Microsoft mandates for Copilot Plus features.

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