ASUS announced their ExpertCenter P700 yesterday - another "AI-powered" business desktop that'll mostly run Excel and Outlook. The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processors pack 50 NPU TOPS, which sounds impressive until you realize most business apps don't use AI acceleration.
50 TOPS for What Exactly?
Let's be real about what happens in corporate environments: Karen from Accounting isn't running stable diffusion models. She's opening PDF invoices and complaining that her computer is slow because Acrobat Reader DC is still a memory hog. The 50 NPU TOPS will sit idle 99% of the time because Word 365 doesn't need neural processing to check your grammar - it already does that server-side.
ASUS claims "4.8X-faster AI computing performance" compared to standard desktops, but fails to mention this only matters if you're actually running AI workloads. Most enterprises are still figuring out what AI even means beyond ChatGPT in a browser tab.
The two form factors - 15-liter Mini Tower (PM700MK) with RTX 5060 and 8.6-liter SFF with RTX A400 - are solid specs. But slapping "AI" on the marketing materials doesn't change the fact that these are just decent business computers with neural processing units that'll never get used.
Copilot+ PC: Microsoft's Latest Requirement
The Copilot+ PC certification is Microsoft's way of forcing hardware requirements for features most users will disable. Live Captions, enhanced Search, and "Cocreator" sound neat in demos but get turned off within weeks because they're distracting.
Had a user yesterday ask me why her computer kept interrupting meetings with "live captions" nobody wanted. Took me 20 minutes to find the setting to turn it off.
ASUS's AI ExpertMeet software does meeting transcription and "automated summaries." Great, another AI tool to generate meeting notes nobody reads. The real-time translation feature might actually be useful for global companies, assuming it works better than Google Translate.
The watermarking for "content authenticity" is solving a problem that doesn't exist yet. Most business content is still PowerPoint slides with clip art, not deepfake videos that need digital signatures.
Security Theater with Actual Security
The ExpertGuardian suite includes NIST SP 800-155-compliant BIOS and discrete TPM 2.0 chips. This is actually useful - firmware attacks are real, and TPM hardware encryption matters for compliance.
BIOS Self-Recovery and Kensington locks address real enterprise concerns. The bundled McAfee+ Premium subscription will get immediately replaced with whatever enterprise antivirus the company already uses. We bought 200 of these types of machines last year and half the bundled software got disabled by group policy within a week. IT spent more time uninstalling vendor bloatware than deploying actual business applications.
Competing Against Better-Known Brands
ASUS is fighting uphill against Dell OptiPlex, HP EliteDesk, and Lenovo ThinkCentre. The P700's 27.8dB noise level is genuinely impressive - business desktops that sound like jet engines are annoying in open offices.
The MIL-STD 810H certification means these can survive being dropped by facilities management, which happens more than anyone admits. Last month our facilities guy dropped a whole cart of new PCs during move-in day. Half the Dell OptiPlex units had cracked cases, but honestly they still boot fine.
Reality Check
Local AI processing sounds great until you realize enterprise IT prefers cloud services they can blame someone else for when they break. The 50 NPU TOPS will sit idle while users continue using ChatGPT in Chrome tabs because that's what actually works.
That said, these are probably decent business computers underneath the AI marketing fluff. Ryzen AI 7 350 processors are solid, the specs are reasonable, and ASUS generally doesn't screw up hardware. Just ignore the AI branding and buy them as fast business desktops that happen to have neural processing units for future-proofing.
The real test will be pricing. If ASUS can undercut Dell and HP while delivering equivalent reliability, the AI features become a free bonus instead of an expensive gimmick.