Does the increased density mean that the speed also goes up? It would be nice if a 7200 RPM drive could finally saturate SATA3 bandwidth.

You aren’t wrong that these functions don’t NEED NPU. But it helps with performance and offloading. What they also doing is opening APIs for software developers to use NPU and built-in models. For example, Adobe and Zoom use it for background filters. Again, with no CPU/GPU load.

And for your final point - this is not anything new for a company to try selling you a product that you don’t necessarily need. Their job is to make it attractive enough for you to upgrade.

I think it’s just bad marketing. Microsoft, as they often are, just messed up their marketing strategy with mixing controversial and creepy stuff like Recall and actually useful things like local TTS and STT, translation, image recognition and manipulation stuff. All these ML functions offloaded to an NPU are good additions to an OS. Computers with NPU don’t have to be Copilot+ branded to be useful.