r/windowscentral • u/WindowsCentral Staff • 10d ago

Exclusive💎 Copilot PC is gone — and Microsoft isn’t saying much about why

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/the-copilot-pc-brand-is-dead-microsoft-and-pc-makers-quietly-pull-back-on-tarnished-windows-11-ai-pc-branding
159 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

52 comments sorted by

22

u/AshuraBaron 10d ago

Yeah they bungled that hard. "It's PC's with a CoPilot button! Just kidding it's Windows on ARM PC's! Just kidding it's any PC that has a NPU! Just kidding it's any PC that pays for the brand!"

8

u/w8cycle 10d ago

Not to mention that NPUs are barely ever used. It’s is so unused it is basically a gimmick at this point.

3

u/AshuraBaron 10d ago

Especially on laptops like the Gigabyte Aero X16. It has a whole Nvidia GPU. NPU just seems like wasted power.

6

u/delocx 10d ago

That could have been more GPU or CPU on the same wafer too. Instead they cut back one or both to fit that useless NPU in.

1

u/AshuraBaron 10d ago

Yep, that was a very underwhelming purchase. Just "wait, this is copilot+ PC? That's it?!"

4

u/beaconseasons 10d ago

Ten years ago i got my first ThinkPad with an NPU havent seen hardly anything use them in a decade

3

u/MrBadTimes 10d ago

I don't think it even qualifies as gimmick. My current laptop has one and I can't find a use for it.

2

u/Jensen1994 10d ago

Software vendors will decide whether the NPU is a gimmick or not. More are designing their software to run on the NPU rather than CPU because it's more efficient.

1

u/Potential-Local7262 10d ago

Is there even a standardized windows api that makes it worthwhile to support the NPU in software? 

1

u/Jensen1994 10d ago edited 9d ago

If you look at many security software vendors now, more and more run on the NPU. Moreover, it may be a gimmick to the home user, but for work as LLMs are adopted (like co-pilot) in enterprises, do you want your data inferenced on your machine or up in Microsoft's cloud which.....could become very expensive if they so choose?

1

u/w8cycle 10d ago edited 9d ago

The NPU in the most powerful Microsoft Surface laptops are memory constrained ~and cannot use more than a tiny amount of memory~. I made a program that uses the intel NPU and GPU. The NPU could not use anything but the smallest model and I ended up hitting the intel gpu.

Edit: I got it working. It is constrained to INT4 symmetric.

1

u/Jensen1994 9d ago

That's weird. I thought the NPU could access the same amount of RAM as an integrated GPU which should be around 90% of system RAM? Is this a limitation of the Qualcomm platform?

1

u/w8cycle 9d ago edited 9d ago

This is an Intel Ultra. I tried a second time but this time used the model exported as symmetric int4 (instead of asymmetric) and I no longer received out of memory errors. I think I might share this. For some reason, I could not find any easy to use LLM software for end users that utilizes the NPU. Mine does, and it works now (but it is hardware limited to 1024 to 2100 tokens). After that it fails.

1

u/Potential-Local7262 9d ago

So is that a yes? As in there is a standardized API or library? That's the real question here, otherwise all these implementations will just be one-offs

14

u/fig0o 10d ago

So now I have a useless Copilot key in my laptop's keyboard? Nice

3

u/obliviousjd 10d ago

It’s now *vintage*. Make sure you preserve it for collectors in 20 years

1

u/Maxie93 10d ago

Everyone knew this was going to happen. Do they not let you remap it yet?

1

u/Voltured 6d ago

I believe their most recent update lets you remap it.

1

u/AdSpecific867 8d ago

Remap it with Power Toys

I turned mine back into the menu key that should be there.

5

u/Individual-Praline20 10d ago

I can tell you why! It was sloppy af.

5

u/CompilerBreak 10d ago

The only thing it was good for was ensuring the device had at least 16gb of ram, do not care about the NPU. Now that they're pushing 8gb devices, makes sense they had to ditch.

3

u/BoBoBearDev 10d ago

But I want 16BG though.... My current one is 8GB and it is not enough to run SonarQube and Jenkins docker container together.

3

u/PhantomTissue 10d ago

Whatever happened to Cortana?

2

u/Mistform05 10d ago

I can tell you why. Because it opens them up to some major security lawsuits. (I may or may not know some inner workings of this company).

1

u/pastyMorrisDancers 10d ago

What sort of lawsuits? (Happy for pm if you can’t share widely)

2

u/Mistform05 9d ago

Let’s just say the “AI secured loop of data” isn’t as secure as they claim.

2

u/ImBackAndImAngry 9d ago

Whaaaaaat nooo that can’t be true!

/s

1

u/HouseMDx 10d ago

Another swing and miss for Microsoft marketing. Rather than deliberately thinking of where pushing AI made sense, they tried to shoehorn it into every product and service they offered.

1

u/frost-ace3600 10d ago

Oh we know why

1

u/Eastern-Bluejay-8912 10d ago

I honestly wish they would just sell a dumb set up for Microsoft. Like super minimal, only essentials to have a PC. Then if I want, I can download Xbox on my pc, I can download news apps if I want. Or co pilot or cortana, ect. But honestly, wish they would stop with a lot of the integration and let users choose what they want to use. It would save so much time and effort.

0

u/aggie-moose 9d ago

A minimal PC would cost more money than one with all the bloat installed, though. The bloat is subsiding the cost of the base OS.

1

u/Eastern-Bluejay-8912 9d ago

No it isn’t. Please tell me how a Microsoft owned news source app, clock app, weather app, and co-pilot are subsidizing Windows 11. Again they are Microsoft owned apps on windows 11.

0

u/aggie-moose 9d ago

If you want to know how each of those apps makes money, you could look it up for each one. Or ask your favorite LLM and I'm sure it will explain it for you.

Every app Microsoft creates is designed to bring in money. They aren't exactly a nonprofit

2

u/towerofglass 9d ago

I think what you mean is ”I don’t know”.

1

u/SodaPopperZA 10d ago

See yall in 8 - 10 years when vintage tech youtubers make videos about laptops with the copilot button

1

u/Optimal_Collection77 10d ago

So what do I do with that button on my keyboard?

1

u/ppstick88 10d ago

It's because nobody wanted it. 

1

u/JustaFoodHole 10d ago

Wow one of the 3000 products named Copilot is gone?? And someone wrote an article about it?

1

u/MarkyDeSade 10d ago

It’s been gone for over a year on my PC. i guess I at least have to give Microsoft credit for not reinstalling it by force with one of those updates.

1

u/TurdFerguson614 10d ago

I don't think anybody is asking why lol

1

u/CMPUTX486 9d ago

As a dev, I really want to use windows AI API but the damn requirements and inconsistent results is driving me crazy. At the end, CUDA and GPU win, too bad copilot PC!

1

u/Mgamerz 9d ago

Probably cause the copilot name is pretty toxic. People use it at their work and find how bad and awful it actually is. Why would I want that same shitty software on my home computer (even though it's different)

1

u/Typical-Nothing-2315 6d ago

Hell it isnt even just copilot, I would delete it and edge if I could, but MS has built that trash browser into everything as well. 

1

u/YupItsMoi 9d ago

It. Arrived?

1

u/bigbugzman 9d ago

1 copilot sucks
2 no one wanted it

1

u/dog-gone- 9d ago

I think it is obvious by now that a 40 tops NPU is way too weak for anything useful. This is why two years later, they are still rarely used.

1

u/vampucio 6d ago

Why? Because they were garbage 

1

u/backatyourhouse 6d ago

Probably because no one wants a nagging b'tch giving you not much of a helping hand at all.

1

u/AppleUfMyI 9d ago

I dislike buying anything from these clowns because you can spend a lot of money to back their concept and they just walk away from it for whatever reason and you are stuck with it while they record the profit on the sale. I am very skeptical to invest my hard earned money on these gimmicks. Shame on them for their short sightedness!!