MICROSOFT DROPS COPILOT PLUS PC BRANDING FROM NEW SURFACE DEVICES

Microsoft has stopped using the "Copilot Plus PC" name for its newest Surface computers, despite the devices meeting the technical requirements for the label. Surface corporate vice president Brett Ostrum said the new 12-inch Surface Pro and 13-inch Surface Laptop "are not called Copilot Plus PCs", though he said they "meet all the requirements of our previous bar" for the category. Both devices run Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus processors with a Hexagon neural processing unit rated at 80 trillion operations per second, well above the 40 TOPS threshold Microsoft originally set for Copilot Plus PCs. Qualcomm senior vice president of compute Kedar Kondap said manufacturers offering similar performance will "probably" stop using the branding as well. The two new Surface devices are due for release on 13 October.

Microsoft introduced Copilot Plus PC branding in 2024 to identify Windows systems capable of running artificial intelligence workloads locally, requiring at least 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and a qualifying neural processing unit. A Microsoft marketing page as recently as May described Copilot Plus PCs as "a class of AI PCs and laptops" representing "the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever", according to an archived version of the page. That page now redirects to a "performance PCs" listing that still mentions Copilot Plus PCs but gives the term far less prominence. The branding was closely associated with Recall, a Microsoft feature that faced criticism over security and privacy concerns.

Ostrum said Microsoft will continue to emphasise what he called AI "on the edge" and hybrid computing approaches rather than the Copilot Plus PC label itself. The shift comes as Microsoft's Surface hardware moves towards using Nvidia chips. Neither Microsoft nor Qualcomm gave a specific date for phasing out the branding across other devices.