The Copilot+ PC brand is dead

16 hours ago (windowscentral.com)

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.

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

    • 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.

      2 replies →

  • 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.

  • 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 :).

    • 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)

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

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...

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

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...

  • 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.

  • 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.

      2 replies →

    • > 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

    • 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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.