If Copilot fizzles or is deemphasized the way Cortana was, the Copilot key could become a way to quickly date a Windows PC from the mid-2020s, the way that changes to the Windows logo date keyboards from earlier eras.
gee i wonder if this will happen. i wonder if enforcing having a dedicated hardware button for a buzzword-fueled feature will age poorly. i guess only time will tell. there's no telling what might happen
the real question is whether or not this will replace the Office key lol
The Office Key is already a macro for pressing every single modifier key at once. Who knows what stupid this will involve, but there's not much more they can do, short of adding stupid new scancodes.
Edit: Unless the placement in the article mockup is an indication they're planning to replace the context menu key's existing functionality.
There's another article about the Dell XPS line that says they are replacing the Right Control key. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/the-dell-xps-laptop-as-we-know-and-love-it-is-no-more/
That's really asinine, but not as bad as my fear of "split the spacebar in half and put the copilot key in between the two halves."
It replaces the right control key, and isn't reprogrammable (at least so far on a Dell laptop)
I'm betting this will just be a reskin of Alt Gr. Likez pressing Alt Gr on its own does nothing right now. So why not """fix""" that?
what is it about generative "AI" that fries people's brains
Oh, this function that we just added to our software, that nobody fucking uses and that is kind of shittier at its function than the previous tools? Well, it's going to get so much better, let's fucking bake it into the hardware
both crypto and VR came and went without creating the gold rush tech was hoping for. this is the last chance for a lot of hucksters to get something going on
turns out spending $13 billion on something means you're going to try to force that to have been a good idea whether or not it was
NFTs but instead of the dumbest guy you know it's multibillion dollar global monopolies stuck holding the bag and getting increasingly desperate to find a bigger rube to pass it off on
Just like SONY and the Blu-Ray. They didn't want to lost ANOTHER media war like they did with BetaMax, and Minidiscs
it's easy to implement since it just calls out to a cloud service, and charging for it is pretty normalized so it's an easy way to squeeze subscriptions or microtransactions into software without pissing people off too bad
a lot of "we implemented AI in our software" features give users a certain amount of free usage and then charge people for more
Microsoft isn't going quite that far yet, but encouraging usage of the feature will act as an advertisement for Office 365's generative AI features, which will be a $30/mo subscription plan addon
also, business executives and investors in general are ABSOLUTELY OBSESSED with this stuff, so there's huge pressure on companies to push out something that they can claim is "AI" so the financial press doesn't accuse them of being backwards and falling behind competitors
If this is actually a new key and not just replacing an old one, there's at least the upshot that you'll probably be able to use third party software to rebind it to something more useful.
That said, fuck off with this
Oh neat, I can cheat on my essay assignments A GOOD 20 YEARS AFTER I EVER NEEDED TO!!! (sarcasm before anyone says anything, I don't want that)
Fucking hell, Microsoft. Who asked for this?
I've been switching to Linux this year and it's been actually miserable, and I'm constantly thinking "do I really want to do this?" and then I read literally any news about Copilot and I'm like "yes"
"year of the ai pc" lmao
at least "year of the Linux desktop" is going to be said every year. on the other hand, no one's going to say "year of the ai pc" in 2025.
it's funny though, i only started using the windows key once it had some good functionality, like in combination with L to lock the fucker up, most fun in settings where the machine was set up to boot automatically into an account in order to allow the user to forget their password, how convenient!
Oh yeah. I use it a lot now to move windows to other monitors. Or bring up the Emoji picker. Basically for antyhing it WASN'T designed for.
