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LAHAINA, MAUI—At Snapdragon Summit 2025, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon held a brief conversation with Tareq Amin, CEO of AI solutions provider Humain AI, around the future of agentic AI. The conclusion of the talk, though, surfaced a hardware surprise: the introduction of the Horizon Pro PC, which the AI firm posits will be a pioneer in bringing agentic AI to the enterprise—and herald, in time, the end to today’s idea of the IT hardware refresh cycle.
Pretty heady claims, yes? But the idea is all about a change of mindset in the age of AI. According to CEO Amin, Humain (a portmanteau of “human” and “AI”) isn’t doing this to grapple in the hardware market as a PC maker. Instead, it’s looking to change the model entirely.
(Credit: John Burek)
Amin gave the example of Windows, which has been around since 1981 but fundamentally uses the same basic paradigm—clickable icons and app-centricity—as the through-line of its design throughout the decades. Humain’s solution, instead, upends all that for the AI age: allowing for locally run AI tasks where privacy and speed are concerns, and cloud-assisted AI where that makes sense. And doing it from a task-based interface that handles lots of complexity under a veneer of natural commands.
Humain One: Drop the Apps, and Just Ask for What You Want
The Horizon laptops will be based on Humain One, an operating system that relies on user commands to run multi-part requests in the background, via agents, to execute business productivity work, or perform everyday tasks for consumers and students. This nascent OS taps into multiple services, and what we think of today as applications, via multiple layers of AI models working in concert with each other. Rather than you executing a complex task by opening multiple applications, then piecing together your own outputs and inputs from those apps to get where you need to go, this agentic AI front end runs all of that in the background for you, and serves up results.
(Credit: John Burek)
The LLM that Humain’s AI tech runs on was originally trained in Arabic, and the laptop was designed in Saudi Arabia. We got only a brief look at the OS, which, to be frank, is early days and looks like it was in demo form for the Snapdragon Summit reveal. Right now, it looks just like a UI layer that acts as an overlay over Windows (here, Windows on Arm). Six tiles in a grid on the screen invite you to Generate Images, perform Knowledge Retrieval or run Doc Summarizer on your local documents, dig into stocks (“Stock Research Agent”), perform Story Generation, and more.
(Credit: John Burek)
As you can see, the demo version was a mishmash of likely business-oriented tasks and educational goals; when the time comes, the selection of the tiles on the UI will be customized for the specific Humain laptops and their matching markets. In addition to the Pro enterprise models, Horizon laptops will also be offered for students and consumers, and the UI will be geared toward the kinds of things they do and need.
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(Credit: John Burek)
In our brief time with a Humain Horizon Pro during a press scrum, it was clear that the concept is just getting started. Horizon One looked less like an all-encompassing OS than an app itself, of sorts. Indeed, the implementation shown was something of a launcher overlay atop Windows on Arm. It was easy to get back to what we know as Windows.
Really, the Hardware Isn’t the Point
In the initial launch materials, Humain claims that “the PC can operate up to 100 times faster than human thought,” as unquantifiable a speed claim as we’ve heard. Still, Amin asserted that the laptop will feature more verifiable traits such as a “zero latency wake time,” battery life better than 18 hours on a charge, and much reduced power consumption versus competing systems (on the order of up to 40% less). Much of that will be bound to the Snapdragon X Elite chip that powers it, and the reliance on the Qualcomm chip’s efficient NPU for many tasks.
Recommended by Our Editors
(Credit: John Burek)
The Horizon laptop on display, according to a placecard and a sneak peek at the specs page within Windows on Arm, was running not the new Snapdragon X2 Elite line announced at the summit but a first-gen Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100, paired with 32GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. Connectivity is what you’d expect, including Wi-Fi 7. Amin noted that Humain sourced the panel, a 2,880-by-1,880-pixel OLED screen, from Samsung, in an effort to create a cutting-edge laptop.
(Credit: John Burek)
But to a large extent, that’s all beside the point. On stage, Amin asserted that this will be a “premium” enterprise solution, but come in at a very aggressive price that will turn heads: up to 40% lower than comparable enterprise solutions, and sold on a subscription model. He didn’t disclose any numbers, but noted that the elimination of current IT-typical hardware refreshes every X number of years would make this a sea change in how businesses equip employees with PCs in the AI agentic age. The subscription model, in essence, would be a laptop lease and would incorporate hardware upgrades over time without time-consuming validation processes.
(Credit: John Burek)
Amin also pointed out that Human will offer a student version of the Horizon, the Horizon S, with a connected modem option, and that 500 initial models will be given away to students in an unspecified geography as part of the Horizon launch. Also on tap will be a Horizon Ultra, but no details were shared on that model. Pricing and availability specifics were also AWOL, but interested parties are asked to “register their interest” in the Horizon at the Humain Web page.
(Credit: John Burek)
(Note: PCMag is attending Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit by invitation, but in keeping with our ethics policy, we have assumed all costs for travel and lodging for the conference.)
About Our Expert
John Burek
Executive Editor and PC Labs Director
Experience
I have been a technology journalist for almost 30 years and have covered just about every kind of computer gear—from the 386SX to 64-core processors—in my long tenure as an editor, a writer, and an advice columnist. For almost a quarter-century, I worked on the seminal, gigantic Computer Shopper magazine (and later, its digital counterpart), aka the phone book for PC buyers, and the nemesis of every postal delivery person. I was Computer Shopper’s editor in chief for its final nine years, after which much of its digital content was folded into PCMag.com. I also served, briefly, as the editor in chief of the well-known hard-core tech site Tom’s Hardware.
During that time, I’ve built and torn down enough desktop PCs to equip a city block’s worth of internet cafes. Under race conditions, I’ve built PCs from bare-board to bootup in under 5 minutes. I never met a screwdriver I didn’t like.
I was also a copy chief and a fact checker early in my career. (Editing and polishing technical content to make it palatable for consumer audiences is my forte.) I also worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of “Dummies”-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I’m a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University’s journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
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