Enlarge / A rendering of the Copilot button. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is all-in on its Copilot+ PC push right now, but the fact is that they'll be an extremely small minority among the PC install base for the foreseeable future. The program's stringent hardware requirements—16GB of RAM, at least 256GB of storage, and a fast neural processing unit (NPU)—disqualify all but new PCs, keeping features like Recall from running on all current Windows 11 PCs.

But the Copilot chatbot remains supported on all Windows 11 PCs (and most Windows 10 PCs), and a change Microsoft has made to recent Windows 11 Insider Preview builds is actually making the feature less useful and accessible than it is in the current publicly available versions of Windows. Copilot is being changed from a persistent sidebar into an app window that can be resized, minimized, and pinned and unpinned from the taskbar, just like any other app. But at least as of this writing, this version of Copilot can no longer adjust Windows' settings, and it's no longer possible to call it up with the Windows+C keyboard shortcut. Only newer keyboards with the dedicated Copilot key will have an easy built-in keyboard shortcut for summoning Copilot.

If Microsoft keeps these changes intact, they'll hit Windows 11 PCs when the 24H2 update is released to the general public later this year; the changes are already present on Copilot+ PCs, which are running a version of Window 11 24H2 out of the box.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

In October 2025, Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 10 for most PC users, which means no more technical support and (crucially) no more security updates unless you decide to pay for them. To encourage adoption, the vast majority of new Windows development is happening in Windows 11, which will get one of its biggest updates since release sometime this fall.

But Windows 10 is casting a long shadow. It remains the most-used version of Windows by all publicly available metrics, including Statcounter (where Windows 11's growth has been largely stagnant all year) and the Steam Hardware Survey. And last November, Microsoft decided to release a fairly major batch of Windows 10 updates that introduced the Copilot chatbot and other changes to the aging operating system.

That may not be the end of the road. Microsoft has announced that it is reopening a Windows Insider Beta Channel for PCs still running Windows 10, which will be used to test "new features and more improvements to Windows 10 as needed." Users can opt into the Windows 10 Beta Channel regardless of whether their PC meets the requirements for Windows 11; if your PC is compatible, signing up for the less-stable Dev or Canary channels will still upgrade your PC to Windows 11.