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Is Microsoft Quietly Killing Off Its 'Copilot+ PC' Brand? (windowscentral.com) 68

Posted by EditorDavid from the Linux-is-my-Copilot dept.
"Copilot+ PCs" were Microsoft's official branding for Windows 11 "AI PCs" that met their system requirements. But the 2024 launch "didn't go smoothly," writes Windows Central, after security researchers discovered its proposed "Recall" feature was woefully insecure: This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand, and over the last two years more and more OEMs have dropped the moniker from marketing materials and product names. In fact, even Microsoft has seemingly stopped mentioning it. I've noticed that none of the Surface PCs launched in 2026 include the Copilot+ PC moniker in their product names, unlike the Surface PCs that launched in 2025 and before. Now, you have to go digging to find any mention of Copilot+ compatibility in specification sheets... It's also worth mentioning that NVIDIA hasn't gone anywhere near the Copilot+ PC brand for its upcoming RTX Spark platform, even though all RTX Spark PCs meet the Copilot+ PC specification bar. I suspect that's a deliberate decision.

It seems pretty obvious that the Copilot+ PC brand hasn't resonated with the market, and OEMs and Microsoft itself are now quietly pulling back on that branding. The specification baseline for Copilot+ PC experiences still exists, it just no longer has a pretty marketing name tied to it.

Is Microsoft Quietly Killing Off Its 'Copilot+ PC' Brand? More | Reply

Is Microsoft Quietly Killing Off Its 'Copilot+ PC' Brand?

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  • Waste of a keyboard key... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Saturday September 26, 2026 @08:04AM (#66351242)

    Lots of keyboards ditched more useful keys to fit a copilot key, and then on top of that it's generally awkward to remap back to useful (commonly they replace a modifier key, and mapping some key to a modifier key is usually difficult). Even in KDE trying to make a shortcut out of it doesn't work because it doesn't recognize XF86Assistant,

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Unless Microsoft Bob 1/1 autos are trading on eBay for thousands of dollars, I’m pretty sure we all know which recycling furnace that crapware should end up in.

      Its been 20 years since Microsoft made a quality peripheral. Kind of mirrors their OS releases, since many would argue the last time a Microsoft OS didn’t try and cosplay as Something M’Whore-Else was Windows 7.

      Sad how VMs are used to remember the better days of personal computing. Before we all became The Product being bought and

    • Re:Waste of a keyboard key... (Score:4, Informative)

      by r1348 ( 2567295 ) on Saturday September 26, 2026 @09:05AM (#66351292)

      The sad part is that the Copilot key is also on the keyboard of the T14 I bought with no OS last year. So even explicitly choosing the non-Microsoft option gives you the Microsoft crap.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      You should be able to map it doesn't recognize XF86Assistant e.g. to F13. No idea how to do this on Wayland, though.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Lots of keyboards ditched more useful keys to fit a copilot key,

      Actually, the key the Copilot key took over was the Context Menu button on most keyboards. If you pushed it, you got the equivalent of the right-click menu. Unlike the Windows key, it likely never got much use, so it remained a mostly useless key.

      It's so useless many keyboards chose to omit the context key or put other keys there. Some replaced it with another Windows key, others used custom function keys.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        Thing was keyboards were *already* ditching the context button. My kid's laptop lost the right Ctrl key, and my kid happened to get used to using the right ctrl key to do shortcuts so it was very jarring when that became the copilot key and had to switch to the other side of the keyboard. Especially since accidentally hitting it was so intrusive.

  • Did /. Quietly kill off all other editors to let David rise above? Seems only 'EditorDavid' remains. GG /. It has been a good ride.

  • Quietly? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 )

    Did Copilot write this? Anytime I see "quietly" I get the feel AI wrote it.

  • They are not (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26, 2026 @08:45AM (#66351266)

    Microsoft said the same thing with Notepad, that they were removing copilot. All they did was remove the branding and left the AI functions intact. Users will reject it less if it isn't an "AI button." Having one button that does everything doesn't make sense in a UI so they will introduce buttons for specific tasks. They plan to remove the branding but leave integrated AI features. They are slowly boiling the frog until AI is fully integrated.

    • As far as I can tell, Microsoft is not killing off CoPilot. In fact, I just (yesterday) got an email which included some new branding I've not noticed before:

      "This invite was sent by Copilot on behalf of <my manager's name>"

    • They are not killing off CoPilot. It's one of the AI's I use (others being Gemini, Venice AI and Brave's Leo/Ocacia), and it has a list of features that it will be rolling in over the next 2 months - notebooks, studios and the capability of moving Q&As into different notebooks. (Notebooks being the equivalent of files in Windows Explorer, and Studios being the equivalents of folders, except that there can't be >1 level of nesting)

      However, if you have noticed, the CoPilot+ PC branding is how they

  • "This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand"

    Copilot+ never had a proverbial or real shine, it was a still born birth. Its corpse could be studied by future tech-archeologists, theorizing why.

    • Very true. In my experience, whenever it has had to draw anything, particularly maps, it makes a royal mess of things. It's just about okay for mundane things, but if one needs precise advice on anything, go w/ the alternatives

  • AI and MS_Win11 (Score:5, Funny)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Saturday September 26, 2026 @09:07AM (#66351294)
    Two cans of garbage sitting at the curb

  • >"Now, you have to go digging to find any mention of Copilot+ compatibility in specification sheets..."

    I think the OEMs should put "Linux Ready!" stickers on the unit, box, and manuals :) Then reassign the "CoPilot" key to automatically launch a browser pointed to a Linux download chooser site.

    • As I mentioned above, the CoPilot+ PCs are Arm-based Windows offerings. Vendors who are not Microsoft should ditch the idea, and instead make them GoogleBooks - installing GoogleBooksOS on them. That way, they are selling Android based PCs.

      That's a lot better than asking customers to be ready to install a different OS on them, which would be more difficult than on x86 based laptops, given the installed firmware

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      I think the OEMs should put "Linux Ready!" stickers on the unit, box, and manuals :) Then reassign the "CoPilot" key to automatically launch a browser pointed to a Linux download chooser site.

      Why?

      Do you imagine such a move would increase sales? Really?

      I don't think the average consumer buying a laptop in a retail store has any idea of Linux and would find a "Linux Ready" sticker as informative as an Intel "VPro Inside" sticker...

      Next time you are at Best Buy or other big box electronics retailer, ask the customers in the laptop are if they want to run Linux on the laptop they purchase today?

      (I thought the appeal of Linux was you didn't need to buy new hardware, it just runs on older hardware...)

  • Thats probably their next name for it.

    • Super Clippy, it is super-snappy.

      • This isn't a bad idea. Just print up some "Clippy" stickers, the size of key. Stick it over the Copilot graphic, and if anyone sees it you'll know if they're in on the joke.

  • They might as well have put a small brown poop sticker on the laptop
    With Enshitification+ Inside written on

  • I planned to buy one at launch. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BlueKitties ( 1541613 ) on Saturday September 26, 2026 @11:29AM (#66351392)

    I went to Best Buy to try a couple of models, just assuming I'd buy one. I was shocked to realize the "Copilot" was just "crappy skinned ChatGPT in a web app." I sort of just assumed basic agentic features would be available, like modifying PC settings. But nope. It was mind-bogglingly shockingly bad. Worse, I think it's pretty clear that "agent manager" is the correct interface for AI -- it separates "the user interface a human uses" and "the interface for interacting with an AI." For some reason, Microsoft is still shoveling out "embed a chat window in every app" as opposed to having a proper agent manager built into Windows. It's a big missed opportunity, because they could have just rolled out the red carpet for Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI to have unified OS integration built directly into Windows, but nope.

    • CoPilot aside, it's good that you didn't. They are Arm based laptops: in other words, they'd be completely worthless in terms of running legacy Wintel software if you had any. If you need to buy a Windows laptop, stick to x86. If you aren't tied to it, best off would be looking at the new GoogleBooks - although they ought to introduce some in the $500 range

  • Having been forced to finally used Windows 11 for a new job, fuck M$. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow - fuck M$!
  • Copilot will go down as a case study in business school as one of the worst advised, most ham fisted self-owns in terms of credibility with the customer base ever.

  • i wouldn't trust copilot to fly a plane in ms flight sim

  • Until they announce a Copilot- branding that strips out all AI features, I'm gonna stick with Linux.

  • If you run Copilot on a machine with or without a NPU, there is nothing there to say if the Copilot+ stuff is even enabled or not. There is no "click here to verify it is working" button, or troubleshooter. There is nothing in the Windows 11 settings to indicate if your machine hits the requirements for it to work.

    So, if Microsoft can't put in a basic "Welcome to Copilot+" when you open Copilot on a Copilot+ enabled machine, that makes it so people won't care, because they won't know if a given machine

  • OEMs and Microsoft itself are now quietly pulling back on that branding. The specification baseline for Copilot+ PC experiences still exists, it just no longer has a pretty marketing name tied to it.

    So now we're discussing a change in marketing/branding?

    Wow.

  • Microsoft is known as a company that develops low quality, broken, breaking, unstable, insecure, unusable crap. Microsoft can't tarnish anything, to achieve that it would have to be untarnished to start, and when has Microsoft developed something that anyone would consider even an aluminum foil standard? If you use the typical levels of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Aluminum, Microsoft products start somewhere around: “Tarnished aluminum, left over from last night's roast, thrown in a sink, with food sc

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