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 Copilot+ PCs? Probably not) will be updated through the Store, while some of the system-level SLMs will be updated via Windows Update. And you thought the .NET Framework updates took a long time to download and install.

It’s not clear how Copilot+ PC impacts the two-milestone release strategy for Windows 11 24H2. But there will be a 24H2 release in May/June, and then another in October-ish. The October “final” release will not include the Copilot+ PC features, I’m told, but it will include other features we don’t know about yet. And those Copilot+ PC features will never just pop-up in what I’ll call mainstream Windows 11. Not in 24H2, not later. It’s a different product, essentially.

Copilot+ PCs will eventually include models based on coming Intel and AMD architectures that meet the 40 TOPs minimum. But Copilot+ PC features will not be backported, or downported, or whatever, to first-generation AI PCs, which is rather astonishing. Perhaps Microsoft will have a change of heart if there are enough complaints, as Google did with bringing Gemini Nano to the non-Pro Pixel 8 (and 8a). Indeed, I always figured that many AI features would simply run better on PCs with powerful NPUs, but that they would at least work on any modern PC. That’s not the case.

And that raises some questions, right?

These are questions I can’t fully answer now. I need to talk to more people, read more, and calm down a little bit. As promised (threatened?) I did immediately order a Surface Laptop 15 so that I can have something comparable to the MacBook Air 15 M3 that I bought a few months back, and that Microsoft crapped on so incessantly during today’s presentation that it started to get a little weird.

But that speaks, I think, to a few things, one of them being how emboldened Microsoft feels by the power and efficiency of this platform. And that the talk about what we now called Copilot+ PCs exceeding the Mac in key ways isn’t just talk. As I discussed with so many today—others in the press, folks from Microsoft and several PCs makers—we’ve yet to see any bad news about Snapdragon X, and that continues through today. I can tell you I’ve not heard any private concerns either, from those in the know. Everyone is unabashedly excited.

But they’re also trying to be realistic. The days of massive upgrade cycles are long over, and despite the gains we saw today, the general feeling—from PC makers, especially—is that uptick will be slow and will build over time. In other words, customers will do what they’ve been doing for many years now and just upgrade when they’re ready. And when they do, many will get a Copilot+ PC with impressive AI capabilities. It will be a real upgrade, a meaningful improvement.

The problem, of course, is that not everyone will do this. Some will buy a non-Copilot+ PC, either because that’s all they can afford or because the market will support both types of PCs for years to come, and there will be more non-Copilot+ PCs models than Copilot+ PCs. And that’s a tough one. This splintering of the market is contrary to the simplicity model that I’ve been discussing lately. (Granted, Apple has lost track of this mantra in some cases, too, mostly notably its confusing family of iPads.)

Maybe it’s OK. We have mainstream PCs and premium PCs today. Consumer, prosumer, and business-class PCs. Laptops, desktops, and 2-in-1s. There are gaming PCs of various kinds, and now PCs aimed specifically at creators, and both of these PCs have powerful discrete graphics capabilities that Copilot+ Pro lacks. That’s confusing in its own right, as those PCs will be more powerful than Copilot+ PCs in some ways, but less powerful in others. Crikey.

We can’t just flip a switch, I know. But this transition, like all transitions, will be messy. And it may not succeed, of course. AMD and Intel will enter the market, and PC makers will embrace those chipsets too. There will be Copilot+ PCs with active cooling and Copilot+ PCs with passive cooling. And this may blow your mind: There are right now some Copilot+ PC models based on Snapdragon X chips that have fans. And fan noise. And get hot. Some of what I thought was clear-cut is not necessarily clear-cut.

I will try to sort this out. I suspect that some of the information here will need to be revised because some of what I’ve been told is contradictory. Again, fog of war. But I guess the good news here, while general, is still important. Whatever one thinks of Copilot+ PC as a brand, these computers are exciting and appear to give the MacBook Air a run for its money in performance and efficiency, and some of the devices I saw today are in the same ballpark from a quality and look and feel perspective. We’ve needed an answer to Apple Silicon for several years now. That, at least, has arrived. Maybe not for the entire range of M-series chips. But it’s a good start.

More soon.