Microsoft drops Copilot+ branding from its new laptops

(tomshardware.com)

49 points | by anthuswilliams 3 hours ago

6 comments

  • shepardrtc 1 hour 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.
    • henry2023 1 hour ago
      If a contractor told me they use copilot I wouldn’t trust their judgment anymore.
      • hizlikovboy27 37 minutes ago
        five years from now, you'll start preferring contractors who use copilots, but i'm sure of it.
        • xena 0 minutes ago
          How much do you want to bet?
  • flowerlad 1 hour ago
    Did they remove the Copilot button from the keyboard? It is one of the most annoying things. Accidentally pressing the button opens the Copilot window which you then have to manually close. There is no way to configure the button to do nothing. Not without installing apps just for that purpose. So annoying.
    • zdragnar 1 hour ago
      For those who don't have Windows, you go to Settings > Bluetooth and Devices > Keyboard (which is itself insane), then change "Customize Copilot key on keyboard" to "None Selected".

      You'd think nothing happens when you hit the copilot key, but instead, it... pops up the settings window so you can select what should happen. Not the most awful thing, but really, I want nothing to happen, period. That's why I hit "none selected" instead of "Open an app" or "Search".

      • poolnoodle 36 minutes ago
        You can use autohotkey (which you shouldn't have to but here we are)
    • Dwedit 11 minutes ago
      I personally wrote the program that does all the steps necessary to remap the Copilot key, since it's actually three keys (Left Windows, Left Shift, F23), it's not as simple as it sounds to block all those keypresses while also allowing the real keys through.

      You could also call it "I changed your copilot key back to Ctrl".

      https://github.com/Dwedit/NoCopilotKey

    • makeitdouble 1 hour ago
      > Not without installing apps just for that purpose.

      TBF PowerToys is first party, so most companies will accept its installation. It has many other niceties that should really have been baked into Windows in the first place, I genuinely think all windows users that care even a bit should have it by default as one of the first thing they put on their system.

    • Rohansi 1 hour ago
      I have a Logitech K400 that I use with my HTPC and the trackpad on it has a gesture that maps to the Copilot button. It triggers accidentally all the time and pops open the settings UI because it's bound to nothing. The K400 predates Copilot entirely!
  • ungreased0675 2 hours ago
    I know what an NPU is, but never understood what features having one in a laptop unlocked for me.
    • GeekyBear 53 minutes ago
      Offline speech recognition (using an open weights model like Whisper) is a good example of a feature that you can run on your NPU.
      • crote 10 minutes ago
        Sure, but it's something you can run on the NPU, not something you must run on the NPU. Whisper will run just fine on your CPU or GPU as well - as will the decades of offline speech recognition tools before.

        So what's the actual feature? Slightly higher performance? Slightly lower latency? Slightly longer battery life? And that for something most people are rarely - if ever - going to use?

    • wmf 2 hours ago
      MS required the NPU to run local language models and the models are used for various AI features like live captions.
    • verdverm 2 hours ago
      they weren't for you /s
  • paulbjensen 10 minutes ago
    ...I've an idea for the rest of where Copilot is used.
  • sidewndr46 1 hour ago
    When will Copilot++ be introduced?
    • shawn_w 19 minutes ago
      Copilot.NET
    • DANmode 58 minutes ago
      They called it Claude for legal reasons.
  • ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago