Microsoft has quietly dropped the "Copilot+ PC" label from its newest Surface hardware, even though the devices meet every technical requirement the company once insisted defined the category. The shift signals that the two-year marketing push to sell Windows laptops on local AI processing power has run its course.
The branding that vanished
When Microsoft announced the Surface Pro 12-inch (2nd Edition) and Surface Laptop 13-inch (2nd Edition) this week, the Copilot+ PC name was absent. Brett Ostrum, corporate VP of Surface, told Windows Central that the new computers "are not called Copilot+ PCs" despite clearing the bar. "They do meet all the requirements of our previous bar for what Copilot+ devices are. We still lean into the narrative around AI on the edge and being able to have a hybrid solution out there," he said.
Both devices run Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus processors with a Hexagon NPU rated at 80 TOPS - double the 40 TOPS minimum Microsoft set for the program. Kedar Kondap, SVP of compute at Qualcomm, described the original initiative as a way to define a device category around NPU performance. "So from that perspective, it's more offering the same experiences, probably without just using [Copilot+ PC] terminology now," he said.
A label with baggage
The Copilot+ PC landing page, which as recently as May called the machines "the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever," now redirects to a generic "performance PCs" page where the term appears far less prominently. Several factors likely contributed to the retreat. The Recall feature - a flagship Copilot+ capability that takes continuous screenshots for later search - arrived with alarming security vulnerabilities that persist as a concern among privacy advocates.
The broader "AI PC" concept has also lost momentum. Jitesh Ubrani, research manager at IDC, told Ars Technica in January that "general interest in AI PCs has been wavering for a while, since cloud-based options are widely available and the use cases for on-device AI have been limited." Dell reinforced the trend this year by killing the AI-focused laptop branding it launched in 2025, with its 2026 lineup barely mentioning AI PCs at all.
What's replacing the message
Microsoft has already confirmed a "Surface Laptop Ultra" arriving this fall with Nvidia's RTX Spark GPU. The discrete graphics push may end up dominating marketing attention over the Copilot narrative that has been in market for years. The Copilot+ campaign did achieve one goal: it gave consumers a reason to consider new hardware during a post-pandemic sales slump. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January 2025 that Copilot+ PCs accounted for 15 percent of premium laptop sales in the US over the holiday season.
But the qualification bar may also have created friction. Ubrani noted that the RAM requirements - 16GB minimum - strained supply chains. "This indifference (between on-device and cloud-based) from a demand perspective might work in favor of PC OEMs, as they don't need to provide large amounts of RAM," he added.
Why this matters for IT and development teams
The Copilot+ branding retreat does not mean the NPU hardware inside these machines disappears. The Surface Pro and Laptop 2nd Editions still ship with 80 TOPS NPUs that Windows can use for local inference, camera effects, and any future on-device workloads. What changes is the procurement signal. Without a clear "AI PC" label, IT buyers lose the shorthand they used to justify hardware refreshes tied to generative AI roadmaps. The hardware capability remains; the marketing wrapper that made it legible to budget-holders does not.
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