Ask Paul: November 21 ⭐

Happy Friday! Later today, we’re flying back to the U.S. to spend the holidays with friends and family. But first, let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with some great reader questions.
? Never the twain shall meet
helix2301 asks:

Any idea when the Snapdragon features of copilot plus that are exclusive will be available to all?

I don’t see Microsoft adapting all or even most Copilot+ PC-exclusive features to work with non-compliant PCs (meaning, those with no NPUs, or low-end NPUs). But Microsoft’s October declaration that “every PC will be an AI PC” was confusing, and I sort of did a double-take, wondering if something major was changing.

Parsing the original announcement, a “normal” Windows 11 PC and a Copilot+ PC are still different things, with the latter essentially being a new Windows 11 SKU, or product edition, with specific unique features. And though I don’t like that weirdness, it feels temporary, like Media Center or Tablet PC Editions, both of which worked similarly in offering unique features outside the normal Windows product edition differentiations.

So, there are two questions that come out of this, I guess.

The first is what happens to Copilot+ PC? There are at least two possible outcomes. Either every PC becomes a Copilot+ PC, rendering the specification dead because now all mainstream PC processors and PCs have capable NPUs. Or Microsoft literally just gives up on this, at which point your question kicks in and we’ll see if we get those features everywhere via GPUs or CPUs, or just go back to the cloud. (A third horrible possibility is that they keep increasing the hardware requirements to include ever more powerful NPUs, but I don’t see this one happening now.)

The second is what happens to the PC in general? And I think that’s what the October announcement points to. It’s not about bringing Copilot+ PC features to non-Copilot + PCs, it’s about advancing Windows across the board to support natural language conversational capabilities as an obvious way to interact with the system and, in the future, with agents and other AI capabilities. All the features discussed in the main announcements fall under the Copilot umbrella, not Copilot+ PC, which is a terrible, confusing name. It’s all just software and the AI runs in the cloud. So all PCs can handle all those capabilities.

But there will be overlap. Obviously, all the normal Copilot features will work on Copilot+ PCs too. And we’re starting to see individual features in individual apps start to offer choices of local and cloud-based AI processing.

Two examples.

Notepad has AI writing tools now, and they are cloud-based and use AI credits and all that nonsense. But they’re testing using local AI for some of that, so those with Copilot+ PCs can use some of those writing tools locally, with no need for AI credits or a Microsoft 365 subscription.

And I don’t think we wrote about this, but the latest PowerToys update includes a new version of...