Microsoft has stopped using the "Copilot+ PC" badge it introduced with much fanfare in 2024, The Verge reports — a quiet retirement of one of the company's biggest hardware marketing pushes of the decade.
The 2026 Surface lineup arrives without the label, even though the machines still meet the category's own bar. Microsoft's Copilot+ requirements — an NPU rated at 40 or more trillion operations per second, at least 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage — were never a product line so much as a gate: Windows 11's local AI features, from live translation to Recall and Click to Do, only unlock on hardware that clears it. Those features still exist, and the new Surfaces apparently still qualify; only the sticker is gone.
The omission is not confined to Microsoft's own hardware. Coverage of the launch notes that NVIDIA's new RTX Spark PCs also meet the NPU threshold yet ship without Copilot+ branding, suggesting the label is being dropped across the ecosystem rather than from one product family.
The story fits a pattern. Copilot+ PC was announced in May 2024 as the umbrella for a new generation of laptops, with Recall as its flagship feature — a launch that immediately ran into a security backlash and pushed Microsoft into a lengthy rework. Two years on, the industry has largely folded the idea into the generic "AI PC", a phrase every vendor now uses without needing a qualification badge, while Microsoft's own Copilot branding has spread across Windows, Office, Edge and GitHub, where its meaning is far less precise than it was in 2024.
For buyers, the practical takeaway is unchanged and, if anything, clearer: the marketing name on the lid is not the specification. What determines whether a Windows machine can run local AI features is the NPU rating, memory and storage — check the spec sheet, not the sticker.
