Windows 11 PCs, AI PCs, and Copilot+ PCs, Oh My (Premium)

With the introduction of the first Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PCs this past week, Microsoft has added another layer of complexity to the Windows ecosystem. Or, another layer of choice, if you’re more of the glass half-full type. Regardless, this addition is confusing to many, as it’s unclear which software or hardware you need to access the many new features that Windows 11 users will get this year and beyond.

So let’s sort through it.

For starters, we’ve been dealing with this type of complexity and confusion for years: Modern, NT-based versions of Windows have always come in some range of product editions, each with a unique feature set and corresponding list price. Focusing solely on the product editions individuals will see in new PCs, Windows 11 today comes in Home and Pro editions, mirroring the original bifurcation we saw in the first mainstream NT-based Windows version, Windows XP.

Of course, some things have changed since 2001: Windows 11 is the first client Windows version to ship only in 64-bit variants. Unlike Windows 10 and earlier Windows versions, there are no 32-bit versions of Windows 11, and so that’s a nice reduction of complexity and confusion, one less technical detail for consumers to have to even think about. Today’s PCs are 64-bit only, or what we call x64 (sometimes x86/64) for almost all PCs, those that are built around Intel and AMD processors.

One of the key innovations of Windows NT was that it was platform agnostic, or cross-platform. That is, where the previous platform, the MS-DOS-based Windows, was coded specifically for Intel’s x86 line of processors (chips that were, in turn, 8/16-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and then 64-bit), NT was not. In its original form, it ran on Intel x86, MIPS, and Digital Alpha-based PCs. It was later ported to the Power PC and Intel/HP Itanium platforms as well.

By the turn of the 21st century, however, Intel’s x86 processor architecture—shared by AMD—had won in the market, and Microsoft dropped support for the non-x86 platforms that Windows/NT previously supported. And it remained x86-centric for over a decade, until Microsoft in 2011 announced its first port to the Arm architecture that had/has been so successful in smartphones, tablets, and other devices.

The resulting Windows variant, called Windows RT, was a dud, and it was quickly canceled. The reasons for that are many, but for the purposes of this discussion, there are two important takeaways. Microsoft had, for the first time in over a decade, done the difficult architectural work to bring the Windows codebase to a new hardware platform. And the Arm chips of that era—Microsoft had chosen Nvidia for the initial and, ultimately, only RT systems—while suitable for mobile devices, were no match for PC workloads. So Windows RT did not allow users to install and run standard x86 or x64 (Intel/AMD-type) apps, and developers never bothered to port their apps to this platform.

There is one other relevant d…