Understanding Windows 11 Version 24H2 (Premium)

Windows now follows a more chaotic and less predictable upgrade schedule than at any time in its history, making it difficult to know when new features will be added to the platform. This, tied with Microsoft’s historic inability to communicate effectively and a more overt effort to behave non-transparently, is problematic for those customers who rely on Windows.

This isn’t new, nor is it news. Uncertainty has been the hallmark of Windows since the introduction of Windows 11 in 2021, and given the time and effort I’ve spent trying to make sense of the nonsense in the intervening time, there’s little reason to step through that history now. It is what it is, as they say.

That said, the constant change will continue throughout 2024, and what I would like to do is examine what we can expect from Windows this coming year. This information is, by definition, incomplete, a moment in time understanding that will be updated in future weeks and months as Microsoft marks milestones publicly, with announcements, and less desirably, simply just releases new features out of the blue, with no warning or testing whatsoever. Again, it is what it is.

Here’s what we know.

Microsoft will release at least two feature updates in 2024, one relatively minor, and one more major. The minor update is called Moment 5 internally, and it’s now winding its way through the formal release process, with a preview update release this past week and a public, stable release due on Tuesday, April 9, Patch Tuesday. The major update is called Windows 11 version 24H2, and it is a formal, annual Feature Update (capital F, capital U) that impacts the Windows support lifecycle.

In keeping with this era of constant, unpredictable change, everything else about these updates is different from that of their predecessors. And in keeping with their relative scope and important, the differences we see in Moment 5 are minor while the differences in 24H2, as I’ll call it, are more notable.

Moment 5, like its predecessor Moment 4, is applicable to Windows 11 versions 22H2 and 23H2. That is, PCs using either version will get the same cumulative update and the same set of functional updates—new features—it contains. This is one of those slice in time things, as 22H2 and 23H2 are built on the same code base, a first in the short history of Windows 11, but a confusion nonetheless.

You may be wondering why this is so, or why this matters. But the answer is simple enough. Microsoft’s handling of Moment 4–a literally momentous release that brought us Copilot and many other new features—is licensing theater, a power play by which the software giant undermined its own product support policies so that it could force a strategic new capability—in the form of Copilot and its AI-based features—on those corporate customers that would have skipped 24H2 had that been the vehicle for this functionality (as originally planned). Yes, this is yet another form of enshittification, a strategy by which Microsoft ignores customer choices and by forcing unwanted features on them because doing so is in its best interests.

Microsoft has never explicitly said that the next release of Windows will revert to the normal schedule and the support policy promises doing so entails. But it’s reasonable to believe that will happen, as Windows 11 version 24H2 will be marketed as a major upgrade. But this return to normal doesn’t mean that 24H2 will otherwise be treated like its predecessors. Indeed, almost everything is changing.

To date, Microsoft has delivered each Windows 11 Feature Update, including the original release, in the late second half of the year. It would be nice to describe this schedule as “every October,” as that’s what it feels like. However, in reality, Windows 11 Features Updates are not a fixed-time milestone, something that happens all at once on a specific day. Instead, they occur over time, generally in a September through November timeframe, with straggler PCs not picking up some of each’s new features until weeks or months later.

From what I can see—and here I am relying in part on leaks and rumors from trusted sources of such information—Microsoft will expand this rolling release “strategy”–a loftier word than this plan deserves—dramatically. More specifically, it will finalize and release 24H2 in mid-2024, much earlier than ever, but will continue adding new features to 24H2, perhaps through Moment bundles, but certainly through individual feature updates, through the end of 2024, wrapping things up in November or December, similar to previous Feature Update rollouts.

The caveat, of course, is that no Feature Update is really ever “wrapped up,” as Microsoft adds new features to Windows every month and will continue to do so. But for purposes of this discussion, the “thing that is 24H2,” the thing that in previous eras would have been a single release, is a more amorphous set of feature updates that will begin in mid-2024 and continue through the end of the year.

We can see this change in the temporary alignment of the Windows Insider Program’s Canary and Dev channels, both of which are on the same 24H2 build (26xxx), while the Beta and Release Preview channels push forward with the stable channel’s 22H2/23H2-era 22xxx builds. These 24H2 (26xxxx) builds appear to be coming to a head, in keeping with Zac Bowden’s previous leak of Microsoft finalizing 24H2—well, its initial release, anyway—in April.

The rest of that Bowden tweet is interesting and aligns with what I wrote above: 24H2 will ship first on Arm in June, which is when the first PCs based on the new Qualcomm X Elite chips are due. And it will be made available to everyone else in September/October, as per previous Windows 11 Features Updates.

There is so much to unpack there.

I’m not excusing Microsoft for screwing with the Windows 11 release schedule yet again, but the timing of the Intel Ultra Core chips, which arrived in December, out of band with previous Intel microprocessor generations, and of the X Elite chips are, of course, beyond its control. That these releases are both occurring over a weird 6 to 8 month timeframe that doesn’t align with the annual Windows 11 Feature Update release cadence is likewise coincidental and something I’m sure each of these companies wish they could have avoided. But here we are.

In the worlds of Intel and Microsoft marketing jargon, the arrival of Intel’s Core Ultra chips has unleashed the “AI PC” era, but this ignores previous-generation and non-Intel chipsets that provided NPUs (neural processing units) and their hardware acceleration of local AI tasks. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2, released in October 2023, two months before the Core Ultra chips arrived, includes an NPU, for example. And the Surface Pro X, which dates back to October 2019, was the first-ever Windows PC to ship with an NPU (from Qualcomm).

But Wintel is as Wintel does, and so the two firms are marching forward in relative symmetry, each marketing what matters most to it—Intel with its new chipsets, Microsoft with its silly Copilot keyboard key–and hoping that no one notices that neither of these things provides any real-world benefit today: The software that could make these differentiators matter is either not available at all or is so ineffectual to not matter.

And those coming innovations—lacking a better term—won’t be limited to Intel-based PCs. AMD is, of course, spreading NPUs throughout its own microprocessor lineups. And Qualcomm, the original NPU innovator in the PC space, will power a new generation of consumer-focused Surface PCs and other PCs starting mid-year. You can expect a big marketing push from Microsoft (and from Qualcomm) when that happens.

The problem, of course, is that most of Microsoft’s coming Windows-based AI innovations, the new features that will require or work more efficiently with an NPU, will not be ready in time for the mid-year launch of X Elite-based PCs. And that puts the software giant in a familiar bind: If these PCs appeared in mid-2024 and were running Windows 11 version 23H2, as would normally be the case, then some portion of the user base, especially in the commercial (business) space, would keep them on 23H2 and ignore the 24H2 upgrade. Which, again, will be a major release with a heavy focus on AI.

And so Microsoft is utilizing a suddenly familiar strategy: It will “release” 24H2 earlier than ever, in April/May, so that this major new product version ships by default on this new generation of Qualcomm-based AI PCs (and then, in turn, on back-to-school and holiday-timed PCs from all PC makers). And then it will deliver new 24H2 features, many of them AI-based and NPU-accelerated, in the second half of the year. Because these features will be delivered as individual cumulative updates (CUs), or as bundles in individual CUs, customers, especially businesses, cannot ignore them. These features will be installed on every 24H2-based PC out in the market.

This end-run around its own support policies mirrors, in many ways, how Microsoft “partnered” with OpenAI, a link-up that many have described as an acquisition in everything but name. Had Microsoft actually tried to acquire OpenAI normally, as it wanted, antitrust regulators would have had a field day and scuttled the deal. But Microsoft’s unique partnership, which is now being investigated in multiple jurisdictions, ensured that couldn’t happen. Is this the new standard operating procedure, or SOP, of Satya Nadella’s Microsoft?

There’s a case to be made: When it comes to AI, Microsoft seems a little too eager to bend the rules. And we’re going to see that with Windows 11 version 24H2, just as we did with 23H2.