Making Sense of Windows 11 in 2025 (Premium)

Windows 12? Windows 11 version 25H2? Something is changing, and in this epic piece, I try to make sense of the unknowable.
? First, a bit of background
In late 2024, I did the unthinkable: I enrolled my beloved Surface Laptop 7 in the Dev channel of the Windows Insider Program so that I could test Recall, Click to Do, and the other Copilot+ PCs that Microsoft is testing.

For anyone interested in what's coming next, this is the ideal configuration. Sure, anyone can test future Windows 11 features in the Insider Program, but the Copilot+ PC-specific features always come to Snapdragon X-based PCs like Surface Laptop 7 first. And yet, I did this unwillingly, not wanting to screw up what had been, to that date, a drama-free experience with what is still my favorite laptop.

But I did it.

Helping matters, I knew--or believed--that I could always recover Surface Laptop 7 back to a factory fresh configuration by using the belatedly released Windows 11 on Arm ISO--which not coincidentally arrived just ahead of Recall being tested in the Dev channel--or, better yet, the Surface Laptop 7 recovery image that Microsoft provides. That latter tool isn't as seamless as I'd like: I had to try three times before I created a recovery USB drive that would actually boot and start working on my laptop. But with that done, I felt that I could safely submit to the stupidity of the Insider Program. Damn the torpedoes and whatnot.

At that time, the Dev channel was testing updates to Windows 11 version 24H2. So whatever new features I tested would likely appear in that version of the product at some point. And that's what happened over the past four months or so. Nothing ever truly makes sense or happens logically in the Insider Program, for the most part. But many of the smaller and app-related features I'd see early on this laptop started making their way to stable, or what Microsoft officially calls the General Availability channel. But the bigger features, the Copilot+ PC features, haven't. Not yet.
?️ Ch-ch-changes
Time stands still for no one, and as 2024 turned into 2025, I knew we would eventually get some form of clarity on what Microsoft was planning for Windows this year. We've been talking about, but not getting, a Windows 12 release for years now, the assumption being that once Microsoft's quickly evolving AI functionality crossed some threshold, it would make the shift. But 2023's release of Windows 11 version 23H2, and Microsoft's spastic early release of Copilot in Windows 11, came and went without a branding change.

And then 2024 happened. For the first time, Microsoft split a major release of Windows, called Windows 11 version 24H2, in two. The initial release appeared with the first Copilot+ PCs in June, but it was available to anyone who wanted it a month earlier. And then Windows 11 version 24H2 arrived on Intel and AMD-based x64 in late 2024. This version brought deep--but rarely discussed, and never in any detail--architectural...