A better strategy than slapping an "Copilot+ PC" label on trash laptops with trash silicon from Qualcomm [1] [2].
[1] Take a hint. Maybe someday Qualcomm silicon won't be trash. Often you see companies change their name for no good reason but Qualcomm is never going to be able to sell laptops until they change their name to something else or at the very least change their branding so nobody draws a line between the terrible past and a possible future. They should ask Copilot for a better name.
[2] Personally I think "Plus" is a bad smell in branding, right up there with "One". Sure, Purina One is a premium product but all XBOX ONE does is prove that nobody gets a game console bought by their mom anymore because how could you explain to your mom that an XBOX ONE > XBOX 360?
I wish there was a way to buy windows 11 LTSC with a version of MSOffice stripped of copilot, OneDrive, and all the modern windows fluff.
It’s wild how unreliable and complex windows has become, how can it be that Dropbox from 10 years ago was better than MS baked in cloud “backup”.
On the other hand, even though SharePoint is hot garbage the browser based Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook are getting better all the time and increasingly can work from the browser so maybe it will be a non issue and Debian or something becomes and option.
I'm not going to lie, seeing all these comments complaining about W11, people not wanting to upgrade from W10, exploring possibility to migrate to Linux and then THIS title, I laughed. Well played, Microsoft, well played...
This all sounds like a nightmare of confusion. Especially for my parents and in-laws. Not to mention all of this is gated by a subscription fee and usage limits. It’s so depressing to see this rush to destroy anything useful about computers.
For anyone that has a need for Windows (I dual boot for gaming), but hates most of the "features" like myself, look into installing with a autounattend.xml file, that worked for me like a charm.
I generated one using the following page: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
Would have been nice to have this tool when I did a clean reinstall for Windows 11, I used OOBEFly which worked well enough to remove a bunch of things.
Personally I've switched back to using Linux as my main OS for my home gaming machine after 15 years. I've kept a tiny partition for Windows 11 for the odd multi-player game (BF 6) but I'm not logged in anything but game launchers on that OS.
As someone who disabled cortana first thing I did and am hesitant about win 11, I do feel like AI on the desktop is an idea whose time has come. I'm not so sure about pushing people into using voice though. But having AI that can analyze whats on your screen (on request) seems useful.
Hopefully in the EU this will be part of all of the "essential" services that I can just uninstall. It's been so nice running Windows 11 with things like Edge and the nagging it would occasionally do completely removed.
By all means I’m pro AI - but I feel like Microsoft has no idea what they’re doing with Copilot. I have to use the windows shitstack for work and I was open to trying some of this stuff out. Truly a hammer looking for nails scenario. Sounds like they’re focused on being able to interact with Windows solely with text / voice… because someone asked for that, I guess.
Findings summarized:
They added a chat window with a half-rate model and access to OneDrive and sharepoint. Obviously useful integrations like setting up meetings based on a thread or creating tasks are not present.
I don’t care about email summaries or drafts. I talk with developers and our emails are precise.
Github copilot:
The shared naming is confusing. There’s not even a shared UI language between the two. I use it because I don’t have Claude code at work. They’ve added some little things like pulling errors from the terminal but it’s mostly just a chat window. Meh.
Also if I edit the file outside the editor (maybe stash some changes with git) before approving edits things get broken and the LLM will start adding in old changes and it becomes part of the context and it’s kind of a mess.
Copilot (browser):
-separate ‘work’ and ‘web’ mode for some reason. As far as I can tell it can see my web page in ‘web’ mode but I lose my OneDrive and sharepoint junk. Minimal utility. ChatGPT is better.
Outlook/teams: It’s totally inconsistent and missing integrations. Long email thread? Let’s use Copilot to avoid having to draft a meeting invite with everyone on the thread! There’s a context menu option to do this!
Oh, ok. They removed that in the past week.
Oh ok. It has no context of what I have open. I have to describe the email I’m currently in to their sidebar. This is already not worth my time.
Hmm. It made zero attempt to schedule a time where everyone is available.
This goes on, and I wanted to try because scheduling with our big wigs is a pain. No dice.
Post meeting. We’ve got takeaways. Convert these to MS Todo tasks? No dice! No integration. Want to find teams messages or schedule from teams? Also no.
Excel: neat for making formulas. But sometimes I want to do LLM classification or structured response on a tabular level. That’s the next thing.
Also includes a useless chat window.
Powerpoint: also useless. Strangely, I can’t use another powerpoint as a reference for a powerpoint. I want to create clipart. Make a theme. They have ‘make a slide with copilot’ that I actually like, if I could use what it generates as a theme and apply it for all slides.
Generating a slide deck based on a bunch of input is actually pretty cool - but the generic ‘synergy business’ lingo and clip art it uses is so cringe.
Can you imagine how awful open plan offices would be if everyone was talking to their computer!
Similarly how odd it would be to be in a closed office talking to a computer… at least until we got to startrek levels of AI.
Finally, in my experience, I cannot talk and perform complex thinking at the same time.
I can type and mouse around and stay on a flow state, where I can hold a conceptual model of something in my head and write code for it. But as soon as I begin talking that flow state begins to decay. The longer I talk the harder it is to get back into that state.
I’m happy to ask my phone questions in other circumstances, but I don’t feel it’s something I need on my computer.
19 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 43.4 ms ] thread[1] Take a hint. Maybe someday Qualcomm silicon won't be trash. Often you see companies change their name for no good reason but Qualcomm is never going to be able to sell laptops until they change their name to something else or at the very least change their branding so nobody draws a line between the terrible past and a possible future. They should ask Copilot for a better name.
[2] Personally I think "Plus" is a bad smell in branding, right up there with "One". Sure, Purina One is a premium product but all XBOX ONE does is prove that nobody gets a game console bought by their mom anymore because how could you explain to your mom that an XBOX ONE > XBOX 360?
It’s wild how unreliable and complex windows has become, how can it be that Dropbox from 10 years ago was better than MS baked in cloud “backup”.
On the other hand, even though SharePoint is hot garbage the browser based Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook are getting better all the time and increasingly can work from the browser so maybe it will be a non issue and Debian or something becomes and option.
Personally I've switched back to using Linux as my main OS for my home gaming machine after 15 years. I've kept a tiny partition for Windows 11 for the odd multi-player game (BF 6) but I'm not logged in anything but game launchers on that OS.
Who is this useful for? What is the strategy behind this?
Run it with a very restrictive firewall, and be sure to take snapshots regularly so that you could revert unwanted changes that slip through.
It at least claims to have a lot of the bloatware disabled... but IMO it's only a matter of time until they "accidentally" enable some of this.
Findings summarized:
They added a chat window with a half-rate model and access to OneDrive and sharepoint. Obviously useful integrations like setting up meetings based on a thread or creating tasks are not present.
I don’t care about email summaries or drafts. I talk with developers and our emails are precise.
Github copilot: The shared naming is confusing. There’s not even a shared UI language between the two. I use it because I don’t have Claude code at work. They’ve added some little things like pulling errors from the terminal but it’s mostly just a chat window. Meh.
Also if I edit the file outside the editor (maybe stash some changes with git) before approving edits things get broken and the LLM will start adding in old changes and it becomes part of the context and it’s kind of a mess.
Copilot (browser): -separate ‘work’ and ‘web’ mode for some reason. As far as I can tell it can see my web page in ‘web’ mode but I lose my OneDrive and sharepoint junk. Minimal utility. ChatGPT is better.
Outlook/teams: It’s totally inconsistent and missing integrations. Long email thread? Let’s use Copilot to avoid having to draft a meeting invite with everyone on the thread! There’s a context menu option to do this!
Oh, ok. They removed that in the past week.
Oh ok. It has no context of what I have open. I have to describe the email I’m currently in to their sidebar. This is already not worth my time.
Hmm. It made zero attempt to schedule a time where everyone is available.
This goes on, and I wanted to try because scheduling with our big wigs is a pain. No dice.
Post meeting. We’ve got takeaways. Convert these to MS Todo tasks? No dice! No integration. Want to find teams messages or schedule from teams? Also no.
Excel: neat for making formulas. But sometimes I want to do LLM classification or structured response on a tabular level. That’s the next thing. Also includes a useless chat window.
Powerpoint: also useless. Strangely, I can’t use another powerpoint as a reference for a powerpoint. I want to create clipart. Make a theme. They have ‘make a slide with copilot’ that I actually like, if I could use what it generates as a theme and apply it for all slides.
Generating a slide deck based on a bunch of input is actually pretty cool - but the generic ‘synergy business’ lingo and clip art it uses is so cringe.
> There’s never been a better time to upgrade to a Windows 11 PC
Bob, Clippy, Cortana and now CoPilot.
Similarly how odd it would be to be in a closed office talking to a computer… at least until we got to startrek levels of AI.
Finally, in my experience, I cannot talk and perform complex thinking at the same time.
I can type and mouse around and stay on a flow state, where I can hold a conceptual model of something in my head and write code for it. But as soon as I begin talking that flow state begins to decay. The longer I talk the harder it is to get back into that state.
I’m happy to ask my phone questions in other circumstances, but I don’t feel it’s something I need on my computer.
Happy for history to prove me wrong!