The Copilot+ PC brand is dead: Microsoft and PC makers quietly pull back

Microsoft has quietly dropped the Copilot+ PC name it launched with Qualcomm in 2024. At this year's Snapdragon Summit, Surface CVP Brett Ostrum confirmed to Windows Central that the company's newest Surface computers are no longer sold under that brand.

The category set a new hardware baseline for AI-first Windows PCs, and its exclusive features were reserved for machines that met a new set of system requirements. The launch did not go smoothly: security researchers soon found that Recall, the flagship feature of the new devices, was insecure, so Microsoft delayed it and shipped the first Copilot+ PCs without the AI experience meant to sell them.

What Microsoft and Qualcomm say now

"These are not called Copilot+ PCs. They do meet all the requirements of our previous bar for what Copilot+ devices are," Ostrum said, adding that Microsoft still leans into the narrative around AI at the edge and hybrid solutions.

Qualcomm's SVP of compute, Kedar Kondap, gave a similar answer. He said the point of Copilot+ PCs was to define a category of devices with a certain bar, such as a 45 TOPS NPU, and that the same experiences are now offered without the Copilot+ PC terminology.

The spec stays, the marketing name does not

The baseline for Copilot+ experiences still exists; it just no longer carries a marketing name. NVIDIA, for example, has avoided the brand for its upcoming RTX Spark platform, even though every RTX Spark PC meets the Copilot+ specification. Windows Central notes that the rocky launch and Copilot's weak reputation likely contributed to the decision to retire the branding, which was an odd fit anyway, since these PCs have little to do with Copilot itself.