My favorite thing is when watching certain tech sites covering bad shit, they play coy with it. For example, Windows Central poses questions rather than making educated guesses. Recently, many people noticed a Thanos snap in Microsoft. Two years ago, they announced their Copilot + PC as a version of their Surface PCs. Now, in 2026, people started to notice that there is no mention of them.

The writer of the piece started noticing “over the last two years more and more OEMs have dropped the moniker from marketing materials and product names. In fact, even Microsoft has seemingly stopped mentioning it.”

There is this vague sense of “why would they do that” aura within the piece. Now, I know they speculate toward the end, but it’s this “mystery” aura that lays over it. Almost as if to say, why would they suddenly drop the branding? Why indeed. Even though they already mentioned pulling back on Copilot.

Copilot+ PC is Gone

Even when they got the comment, “these are not called Copilot+ PCs. 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.” What did they expect Surface CVP Brett Ostrum to say?

We realized that anything Copilot is toxic, so we just stopped naming it such. The biggest takedown it’s own concept was the introduction of Recall. This was the function that AI would take snapshots of your screen and store them. Just incase you had fall back to it. The biggest issue was that it wasn’t being stored in an encrypted file. So, any hacker could have plain text access to it.

The bigger issue was Microsoft shoving it into every app they had. As if we needed it in Notepad. Using Microsoft 365, the auto-prompt of using AI to start a document. Start an email when opening Outlook.

Copilot was their own undoing

Unlike other companies, Microsoft chose to bash consumers over the head with it. Microsoft eventually announced that only three percent of their users use Copilot. Not to mention that AI isn’t even as good as companies claim it to be.

The major point I’m trying to make is Microsoft sees the tide turning. Well, not turning, but seeing the way it was going. Many companies thought they could pull an Apple experience. “Here is our new thing, and you will love it.” Sony is finding that isn’t working either. The fury over AI datacenters is becoming a political thorn.

There wasn’t any mystery as to why they pulled it. As a commenter on the piece said, “Microsoft does not need to say why. We already know. Just saying Copilot causes a reaction against its mere utterance. Ironically, Apple in MacOS 27 is implementing most of what Copilot does, and even has its version of Recall, although it’s on command. We have to own that some of this reaction is people getting upset at Microsoft because it is doing the thing we don’t want and it’s en vogue, while simultaneously giving Apple a free pass for doing almost the same thing because, well, it’s Apple.”

While what this commenter says is partial true. Apple’s version is on command, which means it wasn’t forced on its users like Microsoft did.