The Copilot+ PC brand is dead | Hacker News Reader

The Copilot+ PC brand is dead

windowscentral.com

122 pointsbj-rn115 comments

This is the first time a corporation has spoiled a word for me.

"Copilot" is a term like any other and when I first heard the name, I thought it was an alright, if uninspired, choice.

Now I can't hear the word "Copilot" used in any context without having negative feelings due to Microsoft's saturation campaign.

Speaking of this, I also wonder about present and future people named "Claude", a mainstream name in some parts of the world.

Happens frequently. I can't hear tremendous anymore. Just considering ai I'm fed up with load bearing, wrinkle, catch...

It got to the point where I feel irrationally hostile to a message when it claims I'm right :).

Hey now, I love Claudish! That's my honest load bearing assessment that I'd like to flag.

You’re absolutely right

Even just the term AI is now so cancerous!

A bit unrelated to that thread but I love that clip from a debate where John McCarthy interjects: https://youtu.be/pyU9pm1hmYs?t=152

“Excuse me. I invented the term artificial intelligence. I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956, and I had a previous bad experience”

(The whole debate is interesting, I would recommend if you like that type of historical things)

This happens all the time. Mercedes is a fairly common first name for girls in Spanish countries. Then, of course Alexa, etc.

Fair enough, although nobody thinks Mercedes cars will possibly replace/destroy humanity.

Please don't give them any ideas.

Although they definitely contributed to climate change through their cars so.. at least negatively impact humanity.

Yes, the people who bought the cars had nothing to do with it. It's the manufacturer's fault.

Nobody ever thought Copilot could replace/destroy humanity, it can barely butter its own toast.

No, but it was bound to replace everything that Microsoft touches, by virtue of having its buttons everywhere displacing everything else.

Thanks to MS stopping, the next Word is just not a huge COPILOT button in the middle to who you have to chat to write your stuff.

Mercedes was a name of an actual lady, a daughter of a businessman who brought the first Daimler-Benz cars to the market.

I wonder if there existed a real Alexa after whom the AI assistant was called.

Apparently not, though there seem to be two distinct stories about where it _does_ come from:

> Amazon developers chose the name Alexa because it has a hard consonant with the X, which helps it be recognized with higher precision. They have said the name is reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria, which was also used by Amazon Alexa Internet for the same reason.

I long believed a not-insignificant factor was that they had bought the trademark to alexa when they bought the company.

How often were you using copilot before hand?

More often than I was using the words Gemini, Claude or Alexa.

Really? A word?!

It looks like this one flew over your heads. Would you like having it explained to you?

"crypto"

Perhaps try pronouncing it "Copy lot", in honor of how they were planning to harvest their training data by recording customers' screens.

Facetiously, of course.

Windows

> Speaking of this, I also wonder about present and future people named "Claude"

The % of people using Claude Code is minuscule compared to all the french speakers who use claude as a name, not everyone uses or cares or knows about AI coding agents.

I use Linux so I didn't care about copilot stuff. But recently at work I got dell workstation. It costs around 5k usd. The specs are great. But it has single Ctrl key on the left side, copilot button took its place. I can't jump between words with one hand, I have to press Ctrl with my left hand, and use arrow keys with right hand. This single choice made the machine piece crap

Absolutely. Even worse, the key doesn't have its own scancode, but instead acts as lshift+lmeta+f23, so rebinding it is a real pain. I know about Hanlon's razor, but there's only so much incompetence one can accept...

Pre-USB keyboards used a similarly horrific combination for Print Screen, which was also the only key that didn't report when it was released. This was for the same reason - the key was added after the keycode list was standardized.

Even the arrow keys are weird, they report as numpad keys, but also have a special extended key flag to tell you that it's not really a numpad key.

My favorite keyboard was one that came with HP PC's ... in the late 90's I think. It had a split space bar. I think the deal was the right half of the space bar was the space bar and the left half was the backspace key.

Using it was like a magic trick. Words would just get a character truncated and merge. I could watch my fingers type and I would know what I had to do and my fingers would just merrily go on and do whatever they wanted.

There was some youtube video about a guy who set up a bike that had the turning backwards - you turned right and the front wheel went left. The funny part was that with a lot of effort the guy managed to teach himself to not be able to ride a normal bike.

It may or may not be easy, depending on your environment, but you can remap keys. I have `input * xkb_options "caps:backspace,compose:ralt"` in my ~/.config/sway/config, for example, plus `input ‹laptop keyboard identifier› xkb_file "~/.config/sway/keymap.xkb"` with that file fixing XF86AudioMicMute (which has key code 256, but X only supports up to 255 and I’m still not quite sure why this was necessary), and now remapping RShift to LCtrl which died early this year.

But… ouch. From https://itsfoss.com/remap-copilot-key-linux/ and other sources, sounds like the Copilot button is LMeta+LShift+F23. Why a combo when using an esoteric key not on anyone’s keyboard anyway? Ugh. That’ll make it harder to sort out, though still possible.

Can't you replace the keyboard? (I'm assuming "workstation" != laptop). I have mechanicals laying around that I would just haul with me into work.

I have a laptop with a copilot key, this maps it to right Ctrl on Linux. How well it works depends on how your specific keyboard implements the Shift+Meta+F23 keypress so your mileage may vary. https://github.com/mishoo/exorcise-copilot

I wish laptops would come with a standard TKL layout. I really need those navigation keys. Ctl-end, ctl-shift-home, ctl-shift-left, all of those things I am constantly using and feel like I'm wearing mittens when using pretty much any laptop.

My new car came with terrible tires that have little traction, but I just buy a new set. I don’t say it’s a crap car just because they cheap out with the stock tires on it. I love the car. Keychron on that workstation and be done with it.

A keyboard key is not generally considered a consumable, though.

I have been able to reclaim my Copilot key with keyd. https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd

  [ids]
  *
  
  [main]
  leftmeta+leftshift+f23 = rightcontrol

When people say they use copilot, I no longer have any idea which copilot they're talking about. Most of the time, neither do they.

If a contractor told me they use copilot I wouldn’t trust their judgment anymore.

five years from now, you'll start preferring contractors who use copilots, but i'm sure of it.

How much do you want to bet?

I would prefer contractors who use Humane AI pin

Well, most of us are no longer able to work without AI.

Not because we can't do the job without AI, rather because there are evaluation requirements for using AI on the job no matter what, and those that can't "upskill" themselves are invited to search something else.

AI assisted work is fine, Using any form of Microsoft Copilot is not.

Interesting distinction, Claude is fine then.

Copilot+ 365 XL Max Media Center Edition, of course

For something to be considered dead, it must have been alive in the first place, which was never the case with the Copilot PC brand.

The sad part of this is that all those powerful NPUs are basically paperweight.

35-50 low power TOPS taking 1/5 of the die area and not being used by anyone...

These things are a waste of sand.

Could’ve added more gpu or cpu or cache and people would’ve been happier.

When these came out, I thought, what is the average PC user going to get out of this? Faster image touchups, and...? You can't run an LLM chatbot of any comparison to free cloud models.

Oh yeah, and Recall. That worked out well.

Yep… massive waste. A dsp coprocessor hobbled by npu workflows.

> Could’ve added more gpu or cpu or cache and people would’ve been happier.

I actually wonder about this - my regular dev workstation is a Qualcomm ARM laptop - by-and-large my bottleneck for CPU-bound tasks is thermal. Would adding more CPU or cache instead of the NPU help with performance/watt?

We cantnrun local models on them? They must have some sort of api exposed right? Qualcomm has the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine iirc

You can do cool experiments with them. But nothing a typical consumer is likely to care about.

Yes, you can. Of course relatively limited, but you absolutely can run local models.

Based on my own testing, the Windows drivers are a bit restricted to do some more advanced stuff, and it may be due to some security issues in the past? at least that is what I gathered from exploring this issue with GLM 5.3

Local speech recognition is something useful that runs well on a (power efficient) NPU.

Dragon Naturally Speaking used to cost real money and wasn't as accurate as an open model like Whisper.

Mine is used for background retouches, and possibly speech recognition when dictating (Firefox had to download a model the last time I think...).

The potential is there, software just needs to catch up.

As usual Microsoft messes up marketing and abandons the possibly usable tech before it spreads. Then competitors will be successful with it and Microsoft will lag behind. Good strategy, bad execution, as standard MS practice.

Did they remove the Copilot button from the keyboard? It is one of the most annoying things. Accidentally pressing the button opens the Copilot window which you then have to manually close. There is no way to configure the button to do nothing. Not without installing apps just for that purpose. So annoying.

I have a Logitech K400 that I use with my HTPC and the trackpad on it has a gesture that maps to the Copilot button. It triggers accidentally all the time and pops open the settings UI because it's bound to nothing. The K400 predates Copilot entirely!

> Not without installing apps just for that purpose.

TBF PowerToys is first party, so most companies will accept its installation. It has many other niceties that should really have been baked into Windows in the first place, I genuinely think all windows users that care even a bit should have it by default as one of the first thing they put on their system.

For those who don't have Windows, you go to Settings > Bluetooth and Devices > Keyboard (which is itself insane), then change "Customize Copilot key on keyboard" to "None Selected".

You'd think nothing happens when you hit the copilot key, but instead, it... pops up the settings window so you can select what should happen. Not the most awful thing, but really, I want nothing to happen, period. That's why I hit "none selected" instead of "Open an app" or "Search".

You can use autohotkey (which you shouldn't have to but here we are)

I personally wrote the program that does all the steps necessary to remap the Copilot key, since it's actually three keys (Left Windows, Left Shift, F23), it's not as simple as it sounds to block all those keypresses while also allowing the real keys through.

You could also call it "I changed your copilot key back to Ctrl".

https://github.com/Dwedit/NoCopilotKey

This program does properly allow you to use the left shift key completely independently of the remapped copilot key, many similar programs do not have this feature.

I know what an NPU is, but never understood what features having one in a laptop unlocked for me.

they weren't for you /s

MS required the NPU to run local language models and the models are used for various AI features like live captions.

Live captions on what?

Any audio?

Thankfully some other programs ignore MS and do perfectly good live captions on the CPU, even if that CPU is over a decade old.

Offline speech recognition (using an open weights model like Whisper) is a good example of a feature that you can run on your NPU.

Sure, but it's something you can run on the NPU, not something you must run on the NPU. Whisper will run just fine on your CPU or GPU as well - as will the decades of offline speech recognition tools before.

So what's the actual feature? Slightly higher performance? Slightly lower latency? Slightly longer battery life? And that for something most people are rarely - if ever - going to use?

The battery life, if you use enough AI, is the main feature.

We laugh at Google being deadly behind with Gemini but is there a place that has fumbled it like Microsoft? I guess Apple comes close, but with them you get the feeling they were never in it to begin with.

Apple "Intelligence" being behind is now being sold as a value add by the Apple fanbois.

You can't be behind if you don't allow competition.

I dunno about people that buy their products. But being behind on AI is absolutely a positive for their stocks.

I dont think Apple is sleeping on AI, they are trying really hard. Look at their recent announcements - AI features everywhere.

They are doing a very sensible approach of not trying to be the top AI researchers around, and either hiring or using commodity stuff on their products trying to find an application.

That's what basically all big techs should have done. And Oracle too.

Again, I have no idea if they found any good use for it on their applications, but they are the only one integrating it right.

I buy cheap Android phones because they don't do AI.

Microsoft has between a 27 and 32% stake in OpenAI

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter...

Ah, the Yahoo approach.

(At the point where Yahoo was in fairly severe decline, it made a large investment in Alibaba at a very low price; Yahoo continued to advance towards complete irrelevance, but the chunk of Alibaba buoyed it up for a while.)

I pay for chatgpt and Gemini and I don't know why because you are correct.

The funny part? I'm afraid to cancel gemeni because maybe Google will retaliate by closing my Google account lol?

Siri “summarized” a two line text message for me yesterday. It’s using compute for that which affects battery life. Pure trash.

Microsoft will be fine -- insufferably boring and non-innovative, but fine. They will be the AI slop middleware for enterprise. Your average enshittified corporate AI integration will go through Office365, Windows, or some other MS product.

What won't happen is on-device models running on consumer windows PCs (the Copilot+ idea).

It will, just later than MS possibly hoped so. The local dictation, TTS and stuff will be great until then. The marketing oversold it, and the execution strategy was bad, the branding totally messed up, as standard Microsoft. The other day I just told a friend on this topic: There should be about 3 Copilot products.

- Windows Copilot / Copilot Personal: Dictation (in non English also), good voice control for pretty much all OS features. Text to Speech. Local RAG search for documents, images. Lots of place for accessibility improvements for those needing assistive technologies (which could be an important marketing aspect for Windows). Some light image editing maybe. Calendar support? No proper dedicated calendar app anymore in windows though... - Office Copilot: Proper XLS, Email features. This probably mostly cloud based. Proper calendar support, quota for cloud agentic work where you can offload some tasks, eg. email summarization, teams/slack summarization, calendar meetings organization (for multiple people, it can be a pain when some meetings need to be moved and need to organize for 5+ people) - Copilot Code / Github Copilot. The one many know here.

Nothing groundbreaking, and clear communication could communicate the value it has. Hey, Microsoft, no need to thank me, just make Start menu usable once again and do away with the rounded corners and invisible borders... Oh, and add a mandatory window header to the chrome, where windows can be grabbed to move around, plus alt+click i3wm style. VS Code is one of the worst offenders in this aspect.

The problem with CoPilot+ is that it was negative value on a PC because of the way Microsoft entrenched the related (system) services into Windows. I got a mid range laptop (Core Ultra 7, 16GB RAM, integrate Arc GPU) that I would consider ideal in terms of build quality, specs, etc..

That is until Microsoft’s bloatware starts using a ton of RAM and CPU. Something like 10% CPU use doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s massive on a laptop because it destroys the battery life. And all it’s doing is running things I don’t want that consume RAM. I’m talking 16GB of RAM 50% used up by Microsoft bloatware.

Microsoft doesn’t think, or care, about PC users anymore. Everything they’re doing with Windows makes your PC consume more resources with the goal of trapping you into another pay forever service.

They didn’t even make the CoPilot+ stuff “not suck” before abandoning it. Now it’s just another crappy Windows service gunking up your PC. Vendors should have never agreed to it and IMO the degradation it causes is enough that most of the PCs with it fall into the range of false advertising. I can’t imagine anyone’s battery claims are taking the CoPilot+ trash in Windows into account.

Can you reinstall a generic non-OEM Windows ISO to get rid of the bloatware, or does it reinstall/re-enable itself?

I don’t think so. I haven’t tried it personally, but claims online say it’s part of Windows 11. There are hacks to get rid of it, but supposedly Microsoft is really aggressive about having it running.

The laptop was for a younger person that’s fairly tech-savvy, so it’ll work out. I’d never buy one for my parents now that I know what to watch out for.

Fresh Windows Pro install some 2 years ago, when I bought machine. Updates installed Copilot stuff, I just clicked uninstall on the annoying parts.

I'm still so mad about Intel and AMD and Microsoft colluding together to remove sleep mode. Horrible for battery life, unfixable, but Microsoft says they need to be able to wake up your laptop every hour.

They just sheepishly copied apple... with the single difference, that theirs is an open platform, where anybody can be a negligent actor, and they also don't put as much focus on the polish. Apple having a single vertically integrated ecosystem, with a narrow set of devices to support can and wills to do this properly. Sleep took 2 decades to become reliable over the fragmented PC ecosystem, so it was pretty much a mature, but dated technology. We have only 15 more until S0 sleep will get sorted out.

Or MS, Intel, AMD could apply pressure on vendors who fuck this up, including themselves, but their stuff is bought even so.

I'll also never buy a Mac again after having been tricked by the mass opinion and forced to work on that hellscape of a UX... while MS works hard to f...up windows it is still way better in most respects. Though they keep copying bad ideas from Mac, and this "modern sleep" is one of those also. But Windows has fractional screen scaling, sane keyboard shortcuts, all UI usable with keyboard, all windows can be accessed purely with keyboard. Built in tiling window manager. Machines with trackpoint... the famously good mac palm rejection is still crap, just slightly better than Synaptics... Oh. and Linux Support. Built into Windows, so the half-assed "UNIX" Apple ships is no longer missing. It is just different enough from Linux and NetBSD to always hurt when I use it anything more arcane then just "npm install", which is the main usecase for it according to the fanboys. Also I can put Linux on an oldish machine not supported by Windows 11 and still use it, with all its features.

Back to the topic: who wouldn't want always-on telemetry? :D

> the purpose for Copilot+ PCs was to be able to deliver [NPU] experiences

Maybe for developers. Not sure ordinary consumers looking for a new tablet or laptop will be asking for “NPU experiences”

Not even for developers, it is only available via the WinRT crappy tooling on top of Win32 (WinAppSDK), still behind what was originally available in UWP.

Microsoft Copilot was dead on the day Apple made their announcement that they weren’t giving Sam Altman/OpenAI any money for AI and the second nail was the announcement that Google was only getting a measly $1 billion refund (for Apple using Gemini) on the $20 billion dollars they were paying Apple for a default search position on Mac OS.

I was unaware that that brand was alive in the first place. Does Microsoft just call _literally everything_ 'Copilot' now? Nadella will be changing his name to Copilot, next.

Yeah, they usually do that. Remember things like the gazillion Microsoft365 variants and every single .NET offering out there.

Office was renamed to Copilot 365...

> Does Microsoft just call _literally everything_ 'Copilot' now?

Yes.

so can we actually remap that useless coilot button that replaced the useful menu key?

You're telling me all those laptops with the keyboard, trackpad and screen askew are tainted in another way?

Who is buying these?

What forecast suggests these BOMs are profitable?

> Who is buying these?

I needed a Windows on ARM device, so no real other options available.

For testing? Why would a tech person buy one of these?

For testing, yes, but it’s also my primary development system, so for dogfooding, and for providing a local dev environment for the things that we’re deploying from ARM-based CI/CD to ARM-based servers.

When will Copilot++ be introduced?

They called it Claude for legal reasons.

Copilot.NET

Microsoft Windows live services for Copilot.NET professional edition

Microsoft Bob powered by Copilot?

Copilot LIVE

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49844896

Instead of AI slop they should have marketed a 'reliable PC' with ECC RAM and a more bug free windows.

This would be really cool and I’m afraid, like my iPhone 13 Mini and numerous other things I like, bought by a small amount of people compared to the masses. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.

> a more bug free windows.

This is going to be difficult while they're on the vibe coding hype train.

Did his ever catch on to begin with?

By renaming Office to Copilot they instantly picked up several million users.

did they try the latest models?

...I've an idea for the rest of where Copilot is used.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com