Microsoft Keeps Trying to Name the Future

Last week, Microsoft quietly retired the phrase “Copilot+ PC” and it’s been making headlines around the tech scene. Shortly after Copilot+ PCs hit the market 2 years ago, I got my hands on one and wrote a blog post about it. However, that blog post mainly focused on the the fact that the first Copilot+ PCs were ARM-based and lightning fast, rather than on the broader Copilot+ PC requirements. And the only interesting requirement of a Copilot+ PC was that it have a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) to run local AI models that would perform useful on-device functions in Windows 11 like Microsoft Recall (which had a rather troubled launch). More intense tasks, of course, would still leverage cloud AI models.