In a new interview, Microsoft Surface CVP confirms that its new Surface PCs are no longer called Copilot+ PCs, but will still support all Copilot+ features.

122 points•bj-rn•5 days ago•114 comments•

114 comments

glimshe5 days ago
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.

ternaryoperator5 days ago
This happens all the time. Mercedes is a fairly common first name for girls in Spanish countries. Then, of course Alexa, etc.
nine_k4 days ago
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.

glimshe5 days ago
Fair enough, although nobody thinks Mercedes cars will possibly replace/destroy humanity.
washadjeffmad4 days ago
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.

thefz3 days ago
> Speaking of this, I also wonder about present and future people named "Claude"

The % of people using Claude Code is minuscule compared to all the french speakers who use claude as a name, not everyone uses or cares or knows about AI coding agents.

torben-friis5 days ago
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 :).

dgellow5 days ago
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)

api5 days ago
Hey now, I love Claudish! That's my honest load bearing assessment that I'd like to flag.
bdcravens4 days ago
"crypto"
shepardrtc3 days ago
When people say they use copilot, I no longer have any idea which copilot they're talking about. Most of the time, neither do they.
henry20233 days ago
If a contractor told me they use copilot I wouldn’t trust their judgment anymore.
pjmlp3 days ago
Well, most of us are no longer able to work without AI.

Not because we can't do the job without AI, rather because there are evaluation requirements for using AI on the job no matter what, and those that can't "upskill" themselves are invited to search something else.

hizlikovboy273 days ago
five years from now, you'll start preferring contractors who use copilots, but i'm sure of it.
JohnTHallerabout 23 hours ago
Copilot+ 365 XL Max Media Center Edition, of course
advenn4 days ago
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
mzajc4 days ago
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...
someonebaggy3 days ago
Pre-USB keyboards used a similarly horrific combination for Print Screen, which was also the only key that didn't report when it was released. This was for the same reason - the key was added after the keycode list was standardized.
ndiddy4 days ago
I have a laptop with a copilot key, this maps it to right Ctrl on Linux. How well it works depends on how your specific keyboard implements the Shift+Meta+F23 keypress so your mileage may vary. https://github.com/mishoo/exorcise-copilot
jmou4 days ago
I have been able to reclaim my Copilot key with keyd. https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd

  [ids]
  *
  
  [main]
  leftmeta+leftshift+f23 = rightcontrol
chrismorgan4 days ago
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.

smugtrain4 days ago
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.
simonklitj4 days ago
A keyboard key is not generally considered a consumable, though.
drooopy4 days ago
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.
throwa3562625 days ago
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...

fodkodrasz3 days ago
Mine is used for background retouches, and possibly speech recognition when dictating (Firefox had to download a model the last time I think...).

The potential is there, software just needs to catch up.

As usual Microsoft messes up marketing and abandons the possibly usable tech before it spreads. Then competitors will be successful with it and Microsoft will lag behind. Good strategy, bad execution, as standard MS practice.

GeekyBear4 days ago
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.

bfrog5 days ago
These things are a waste of sand.

Could’ve added more gpu or cpu or cache and people would’ve been happier.

Cyan4885 days ago
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.

Marsymars4 days ago
> 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?

samrus5 days ago
We cantnrun local models on them? They must have some sort of api exposed right? Qualcomm has the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine iirc
solarkraft5 days ago
You can do cool experiments with them. But nothing a typical consumer is likely to care about.
InfraScaler4 days ago
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

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