Microsoft is quietly burying the "Copilot Plus PC" brand it spent two and a half years pushing.
According to a report from Windows Central, Microsoft's new 12-inch Surface Pro and 13-inch Surface Laptop meet the technical requirements for the Copilot Plus PC label, but the company isn't using it. Surface Corporate Vice President Brett Ostrom told the outlet, "These are not called Copilot Plus PCs." Qualcomm SVP Kedar Kondap was also quoted in the same report. The shift comes two and a half years after Microsoft rolled out the Copilot Plus label to mark PCs with enough on-device AI hardware to run Copilot features locally.
Dropping the name on machines that technically qualify says more than adding it ever did. The whole point of a hardware sub-brand is to give shoppers a shortcut for "this one's better" - and if Microsoft won't use it on its own flagship devices anymore, that shortcut clearly wasn't working. It also echoes Intel's rocky history with "Ultrabook" and "Centrino": both were meant to signal a tier, and both faded once the underlying tech became standard rather than special.
Expect the Copilot Plus checklist - fast NPU, enough RAM - to keep existing quietly in spec sheets, just without the marketing sticker attached.