Microsoft is killing off the ‘Copilot Plus PC’ brand

Two and a half years ago, Microsoft made a bet: that consumers would seek out 'Copilot Plus PCs' — machines with enough built-in AI muscle to run local models and deliver features that cloud-dependent devices couldn't match. The branding was everywhere. Now, according to a report from Windows Central, Microsoft and Qualcomm are quietly retiring the label. The move suggests the category never caught on the way the company hoped. Part of the problem was timing: the AI PC push arrived before most people knew what to do with one. Part of it was fragmentation — every manufacturer had its own spin on what 'AI PC' meant. And part of it was that the features themselves, from live captions to image generation, felt incremental rather than transformative. The hardware wasn't the issue. The story was. And now Microsoft is moving on, leaving the 'Copilot Plus' era behind without much fanfare.