Microsoft stops insisting you need a "Copilot+ PC"

Since 2024, Microsoft has tried to sell “Copilot+ PC.” The marketing initiative was aimed at making it easy for people to know which Windows systems were approved to run AI-accelerated workloads locally.

But Copilot+ PC branding is nowhere to be found on the new Surface PCs Microsoft announced this week.

Speaking with Windows Central, Brett Ostrum, corporate VP of Surface, said that the new Surface computers “are not called Copilot+ PCs” despite meeting the label’s requirements.

“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,” he said.

Copilot+ PCs require 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and an integrated neural processing unit (NPU) with performance rated at 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) or better.

The Surface Pro 12-inch (2nd Edition) and Surface Laptop 13-inch (2nd Edition), coming out on October 13, both run Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus processors and have a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU rated at 80 TOPS.

“[T]he purpose for Copilot+ PCs was to be able to deliver [NPU] experience,” Kedar Kondap, SVP of compute at Qualcomm, told Windows Central. “So, it was to define a certain category of devices with a certain bar and metric, like, for example, a 45 TOPS NPU. … So from that perspective, it’s more offering the same experiences, probably without just using [Copilot+ PC] terminology now.”

AI PCs are old news

Copilot+ PCs are “a class of AI PCs and laptops” that represent “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever,” according to a Microsoft marketing page that was up as recently as May, per Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That Copilot+ PCs landing page, however, now redirects to a page for “performance PCs” that still names “Copilot+ PCs” but features the label far less prominently.