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Microsoft is releasing an updated Surface Mouse on October 13th, its first refresh since 2016. The new mouse adds haptic feedback for clicks and alignment cues, a customizable action button defaulting to Copilot, Bluetooth 6.0 for pairing with up to three devices, and a redesigned soft-touch body. It will cost $79.99 in black or platinum and launches alongside refreshed Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models.
Microsoft has expanded Automatic Super Resolution, its NPU-driven upscaling feature built into Windows, to Copilot+ PCs powered by Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 chips, a capability previously exclusive to Qualcomm Snapdragon X devices. The feature aims to boost frame rates in games rendered at up to 1080p, with Microsoft citing gains of up to 15% in titles like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, targeting a 60 FPS threshold.
Microsoft announced it is retiring its Microsoft 365 companion apps—Calendar, People, and Files—effective December 16, 2026, after which they will stop functioning and lose support. The company is telling IT administrators to uninstall the apps from managed devices before that date. The move comes roughly a year after Microsoft began automatically pushing these taskbar-integrated apps to Windows 11 enterprise devices running Microsoft 365 desktop clients.
Microsoft used AI agents to convert the Copilot runtime's 430,000 lines of TypeScript into 800,000 lines of Rust, a project that took about 14.5 weeks, over 135 releases, roughly $120,000 in AI token costs, and three weeks of human developer oversight to fix dozens of regressions. The Rust version now powers Copilot across VS Code, Visual Studio, the CLI, SDK, and Office apps like Excel and Outlook.
A university-affiliated blogger describes being blocked from editing a PowerPoint file on a Mac despite having an institutional Microsoft account, receiving a message saying editing isn't allowed on Mac under that license. The writer argues this stems from restrictive licensing terms tied to costly institutional contracts that effectively push users toward Windows machines.
Microsoft has confirmed that its Copilot AI assistant is experiencing degraded service, with many users receiving error messages instead of answers to their prompts. The company says it has traced the problem to a specific API endpoint and is reviewing diagnostics to find the root cause.
Microsoft will hold a San Francisco event on October 7, its first major Windows-focused gathering in over two years, to outline upcoming plans for Windows, Surface hardware, and local AI computing. CEO Satya Nadella and Windows/Surface chief Pavan Davuluri will appear alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, pointing to deeper collaboration on AI-capable PCs. The event is expected to bring updates on the Surface Laptop Ultra, a device built on Nvidia's RTX Spark platform with up to 128GB of unified memory.
Microsoft's Copilot, born from its OpenAI partnership after ChatGPT's 2022 debut, has evolved from Bing Chat and Cortana into an umbrella brand covering AI features in Windows, Edge, Office apps, Teams, GitHub and security tools. In August 2026 Microsoft merged its personal and work AI apps, renaming Microsoft 365 Copilot simply Copilot, with functionality varying by account and subscription. The branding also extends to hardware through Copilot Plus PCs and dedicated Copilot keys on keyboards.
Microsoft confirmed it is still investigating why Copilot and Copilot Chat buttons vanish from classic Outlook for Windows after upgrading to build 20026.20182 or later. The issue affects users with Copilot Chat Basic or M365 Copilot Premium licenses, blocking access to Copilot from the ribbon, app bar, or Add Apps menu.
Microsoft has updated its Copilot iPhone app to support Apple CarPlay, requiring iOS 26.4 or later and a subscription to function. The voice-driven integration mirrors chat history from the phone app, including text-based conversations, and joins Siri AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Meta AI and Claude as chatbot options available in CarPlay.
A new open-source project called Algo-Trading-Skills packages 501 reference implementations covering algorithmic trading engineering, spanning 16 technical domains and five regulatory/exchange frameworks. Each skill is backed by unit tests (over 20,000 total) and follows the agentskills.io SKILL.md standard, making it usable by Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and similar tools. It's released under Apache 2.0 and explicitly framed as engineering guidance, not financial or compliance advice.
Microsoft is expanding GitHub Copilot's coding agent to manage more of the software development pipeline, including setting up Windows development environments, running linters and tests, and opening pull requests for human review. GitHub also added agent support for Windows Subsystem for Linux, helping teams that build on Windows but test or deploy on Linux. Microsoft Distinguished Engineer David Fowler said on X that 'typing code is absolutely over,' pointing to a shift in what developers actually spend time doing.