Bifurcation? (Premium)

Microsoft's introduction of a Copilot+ PC specification is exciting but confusing, partly because these devices will offer unique features we won't ever see on other Windows 11-based PCs.

This isn't unprecedented, of course. Microsoft has long provided multiple Windows product editions, like Windows NT Workstation and Server in the 1990s and Windows 11 Home and Pro more recently. And Windows has likewise long offered some features that require specific hardware components, making them unavailable to those without.

Copilot+ PC seems to straddle these worlds in a new way, bifurcating the system further. I've written previously about the strange Windows 11 version 24H2 release schedule, and how there would be two release milestones, one mid-year and one around October. And that this change was necessitated by the release schedule for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X family of chips.

With today's reveal behind us, there's a lot more nuance to this story, and some resulting confusion. I'm not sure how obvious this is to you on the outside—as I write this, I'm at the Microsoft Campus, suffering a bit from a fog of war effect—but everything we saw today, all those new AI features coming to Windows 11, are not coming to Windows 11. They are coming, instead, to Copilot+ PCs. And only Copilot+ PCs.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. And it's not clear how accurate this is, either: When I mentioned this to Laurent, he pointed me to a Copilot+ PC FAQ that specifically says that Recall will be installed on non-Snapdragon PCs via "a Windows Update." Which, oddly enough, is not what the man who created this feature told me today. So there's that.

But assuming this is roughly accurate, we are going to soon find ourselves in a world of AI haves and have-nots, at least in the PC space. That is, key new features like Recall (with that asterisks), Cocreator, Live captions with live translation, Creative filters for video calls, Super Resolution, and so on are not part of the base Windows 11 image but are instead features that only appear on new PCs, and very specific new PCs. Each will be available when the first Copilot+ PCs start shipping in late June (though some, like Recall, will be identified as being a Preview, as Copilot is today).

Much of this is pragmatic: These features don't just run on-device, they require multiple Small Language Models (SLMs), which are only small when compared to the Large Language Models (LLMs)—OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and so on—that run in cloud datacenters. These SLMs are humongous compared to the rest of the code in Windows. In fact, most of them are bigger in size than the installation image used by Windows Setup to blast Windows 11 onto your PC. And there are multiple SLMs installed on Copilot+ PCs.

Updating these SLMs will be interesting, and it appears that each could be updated differently, depending on how they're used. For example, the SLM(s) used by the new Photos app (also unique to...