The label is gone, the spec stays
Two years after launching Copilot+ as the badge of honor for AI-ready Windows hardware, Microsoft has stopped using it. The new Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch announced this month carry no Copilot+ branding at all, even though both comfortably clear the hardware bar the label was built around.
Brett Ostrum, corporate VP of Surface, confirmed the change in an interview with Windows Central at the Snapdragon Summit. “These are not called Copilot+ PCs,” he said. “They do meet all the requirements of our previous bar for what Copilot+ devices are. We still lean into the narrative around AI on the edge and being able to have a hybrid solution out there.”
That quote is about as close to an official funeral as the brand is going to get. Microsoft has not issued a formal announcement, which fits the way this whole thing has unraveled: quietly, device by device, without anyone admitting the experiment failed.
How the brand lost its meaning
The requirements behind the label still exist. An NPU with at least 40 TOPS of throughput, plus enough RAM to feed it, marked a laptop as capable of running local AI features. The trouble is that hardware moved faster than the marketing did. NPUs that hit 40 TOPS are now standard in mainstream and high-end processors from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, so the badge no longer separates anything. A compatibility checkbox that every mid-range laptop passes is not a selling point.
The launch did not help. The flagship feature for Copilot+ machines was Recall, the always-on screen snapshot system that shipped with security so weak that researchers tore it apart publicly. Microsoft delayed Recall, rebuilt it, and the Copilot+ name spent its first months associated with a privacy mess rather than a feature lineup. Windows Central notes that OEMs started dropping the moniker from their marketing over the following two years, and Microsoft itself stopped mentioning it. The dedicated Copilot+ landing page now redirects to a generic “performance PCs” page.
Qualcomm’s Kedar Kondap was unusually blunt about it at the same event. The point of Copilot+ PCs was to define a hardware bar for NPU experiences, he said, and now that the bar is met everywhere, the same experiences ship “without just using the terminology.”
Why now
A few pressures converged. The Ars Technica report points out that Nvidia’s incoming RTX Spark laptop GPUs are getting the marketing spotlight this cycle, including on Microsoft’s own upcoming Surface Laptop Ultra. Machine-branded AI features need a story, and “this laptop runs Copilot well” is not it anymore.
There is also the awkward fact that Copilot itself has a reputation problem. The assistant has been stuffed into every corner of Windows, and user sentiment has not followed. Meanwhile the memory chip shortage made the 16GB RAM floor expensive to meet, so Microsoft released new Surface for Business laptops with 8GB and publicly committed to making Windows 11 run well on 8GB. A hardware brand whose minimum spec is unaffordable in a shortage year is dead weight.
What it means if you buy laptops
Practically, little changes. The NPUs are not going anywhere, and the local AI features are not going anywhere. New Surfaces with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus carry an 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, well past the old bar. Microsoft has also tested Copilot+ features running on discrete GPUs, which would extend the feature set to machines without qualifying NPUs.
Where the brand came from
The Copilot+ label arrived in May 2024, pitched by Microsoft and Qualcomm as the badge for a new class of Windows machines with dedicated AI silicon. The bar was an NPU clearing 40 TOPS plus 16GB of RAM. From the start it fought uphill: the flagship feature, Recall, shipped into a wall of security criticism and had to be pulled and rebuilt, and the brand spent its first months associated with a privacy scandal rather than a feature list. Over the following two years, OEM after OEM dropped the moniker from marketing, and Microsoft itself stopped using it in Surface product names.
By the Snapdragon Summit this year the retreat was formal enough that both companies’ executives talked about it openly. Qualcomm’s Kedar Kondap framed it plainly: the point of the branding was to push a hardware bar for NPU experiences, and now that the whole industry clears it, the same experiences ship without needing the terminology. That is a fair summary of what the label accomplished. It got NPUs into every mainstream laptop design, at which point a badge marking their presence stopped meaning anything.
Microsoft has not said whether the AI features themselves get unlocked more broadly now that no tier carries the name. That is the question worth watching. If Recall, Cocreator, and the rest stop being gated to a hardware tier, the two-year branding exercise will have worked as an accidental subsidy: it pushed NPUs into every design, and the label can retire having done its one job.
The software side of Copilot continues regardless. Microsoft recently rebuilt the assistant with new modes, and Nadella has called the refreshed Copilot a new OS for work. The hardware sticker is gone; the assistant in the taskbar is not.