Microsoft
Microsoft is all-in on its Copilot+ PC push proper now, however the truth is that they’re going to be an especially small minority among the many PC set up base for the foreseeable future. This system’s stringent {hardware} necessities—16GB of RAM, no less than 256GB of storage, and a quick neural processing unit (NPU)—disqualify all however new PCs, maintaining options like Recall from working on all present Home windows 11 PCs.
However the Copilot chatbot stays supported on all Home windows 11 PCs (and most Home windows 10 PCs), and a change Microsoft has made to latest Home windows 11 Insider Preview builds is definitely making the function much less helpful and accessible than it’s within the present publicly accessible variations of Home windows. Copilot is being modified from a persistent sidebar into an app window that may be resized, minimized, and pinned and unpinned from the taskbar, identical to some other app. However no less than as of this writing, this model of Copilot can now not alter Home windows’ settings, and it is now not attainable to name it up with the Home windows+C keyboard shortcut. Solely newer keyboards with the devoted Copilot key may have a straightforward built-in keyboard shortcut for summoning Copilot.
If Microsoft retains these modifications intact, they’re going to hit Home windows 11 PCs when the 24H2 replace is launched to most people later this 12 months; the modifications are already current on Copilot+ PCs, that are working a model of Window 11 24H2 out of the field.
Altering how Copilot works is all properly and good—regardless of how shortly Microsoft has pushed it out to each Home windows PC in existence, it has been labeled a “preview” up till the 24H2 replace, and a few quantity of change is to be anticipated. However discontinuing the just-introduced Win+C keyboard shortcut to launch Copilot feels pointless, particularly because the Win+C shortcut is not being reassigned.
The Copilot assistant exists on the taskbar, so it is not as if it is troublesome to entry, however the function is outwardly vital sufficient to advantage the primary main change to Home windows keyboards in three a long time. Certainly it additionally justifies retaining a keyboard shortcut for the overwhelming majority of PC keyboards with out a devoted Copilot key.
Individuals who need to proceed to make use of Win+C as a launch key for Copilot can accomplish that with customized keyboard remappers like Microsoft’s personal Keyboard Supervisor PowerToy. Merely set Win+C as a shortcut for the obscure Win+Shift+F23 shortcut that the {hardware} Copilot secret is already mapped to and you will be again in enterprise.
Win+C has a sophisticated historical past
Andrew Cunningham
The Win+C keyboard shortcut truly has a little bit of a checkered historical past, having been reassigned over time to a number of less-than-successful Home windows initiatives. In Home windows 8, it made its debut as a shortcut for the “Charms” menu, a part of the working system’s tablet-oriented consumer interface that was designed to partially substitute the previous Begin menu. However Home windows 10 retreated from this new pill UI, and the Charms bar was discontinued.
In Home windows 10, Win+C was assigned to the Cortana voice assistant as a substitute, Microsoft’s contribution to the early-2010s voice assistant increase kicked off by Apple’s Siri and refined by opponents like Amazon’s Alexa. However Cortana, just like the Charms bar, by no means actually took off, and Microsoft switched the voice assistant off in 2023 after a couple of years of steadily deprioritizing it in Home windows 10 (and largely hiding it in Home windows 11).
Most older variations of Home windows did not do something with the Win+C, however in the event you go all the best way again to the Home windows 95 period, customers of Microsoft Pure Keyboards who put in Microsoft’s IntelliType software program may use Win+C to open the Management Panel. This shortcut apparently by no means made it into Home windows itself, even because the Home windows key turned customary gear on PCs within the late ’90s and early 2000s.
So pour one out for Win+C, the keyboard shortcut that’s all the time making an attempt to do one thing new and never fairly catching on. We will not wait to see what it does subsequent.
