Well, Microsoft has made its move, and it's an interesting one. This week the company launched a new wave of Nvidia-based machines, and after reading through the coverage I'm left with a familiar feeling. You know the one, where you watch a beautiful piece of technology launch and think, "that's lovely, but who exactly is this for?"

The answer, it seems, is extreme power users. These machines pack serious Nvidia horsepower, the kind of thing that makes a difference if you're training models, rendering video, or doing work that would make my old desktop faint. And let me be clear, they are genuinely impressive. This isn't the useless-gadget category I keep warning my family about. The engineering is real.

But I'll ask you the same thing I asked myself: do you know a single regular person who needs this? Because I don't, and I know a lot of people with computers.

I remember when the Copilot+ PC first arrived. Microsoft pitched it as the AI PC for everyone, with battery life and on-board AI features that would change daily computing. Now, with the company leaning into these Nvidia beasts, it's fair to wonder whether that mass-market dream has quietly taken a back seat. It wouldn't be the first time. I've watched this pattern play out since the eighties: a company introduces a bold new vision for ordinary folks, the ordinary folks don't bite fast enough, and the company pivots to the enthusiasts who will actually open their wallets. My granddaughter Jess would say Microsoft is "locked in" to the power-user crowd, or something like that. She's teaching me the slang, bless her patience.

And that's fine! Enthusiasts fund the early rounds. We'd still be buying computers by the kilobyte if nobody paid premium prices for power that felt excessive at the time. Every generation of technology gets cheaper and saner after the power users subsidize the first act.

That brings me to what I'm calling AI PC 3.0, for lack of a better term. Version 1 was the Copilot+ wave: modest hardware, big promises, features most people toggled off. Version 2 is what launched this week, expensive, thrilling, and for a narrow slice of buyers. Version 3 is the one I'm waiting for, the machine where the AI actually solves a problem I have, at a price my neighbor would pay, without a fan that sounds like a jet taxiing for takeoff.

Technology should work for you, and right now these Nvidia PCs work for a very specific you. If that's you, genuinely, enjoy it. If you're a video editor or a developer these machines will probably earn their keep, and I'd rather see you buy one well-suited machine than three compromised ones. Marcus has been digging into the underlying architecture of these systems over in his deep-dives, and if you want to understand what the hardware is actually doing under the hood, his coverage is where I'd point you.

For everyone else my motherly advice is simple: wait. Not forever, just a beat. The prices on this class of machine have nowhere to go but down, and the software that makes the AI genuinely useful is still catching up to the silicon. I've sat out enough first generations to know the third one is usually where the magic lands.

So no, I don't think Microsoft has given up on the mass market. I think they're letting the enthusiasts carry the torch through the tunnel, and the rest of us will get a well-lit path on the other side. I'll be watching for it, and when AI PC 3.0 shows up, you'll read about it here first, probably with a story about some gadget from 1997 that proves my point.