Microsoft Quietly Sunsets Copilot+ Branding — SkimNews
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- Microsoft quietly dropped the Copilot+ branding from its new laptops roughly two years after a troubled 2024 launch, with Surface CVP Brett Ostrum telling Windows Central at Snapdragon Summit 2026 that the devices still meet every original hardware spec.
- The brand scrub extends beyond Microsoft: even eligible third-party and in-house hardware — the upcoming Nvidia RTX Spark N1X and Microsoft's own Project Zenith — is shipping without Copilot+ badges.
- The Copilot+ brand differentiated AI-ready PCs from ordinary laptops via a 40+ TOPS NPU requirement, but that threshold is now routinely cleared by mainstream processors and the original 16GB RAM minimum has become prohibitively expensive amid the AI-driven memory chip shortage.
- Microsoft purged its 32GB RAM recommendation from its website, optimized Windows 11 Copilot to run on 8GB of RAM, and shipped new Surface for Business laptops with as little as 8GB.
- The Copilot software brand lives on: one AI consultant mapped 80+ unique Microsoft Copilot products, Microsoft recently added "Home," "Code," and "Autopilot" features, and it tested Copilot+ capabilities on discrete GPUs to extend the feature set to PCs without built-in NPUs.
Why it matters: Microsoft launched Copilot+ in 2024 as a consumer-facing signal for which laptops could run on-device AI. Quietly retiring the badge two years later — while shipping Surface for Business units with just 8GB of RAM in 2026 — removes that buying shortcut and concedes the 16GB RAM minimum no longer holds.
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