Engadget Podcast: Microsoft's Surface and Windows head on Copilot+ AI PCs

Microsoft made some unusually major moves ahead of its Build developer conference: It announced a new Copilot+ initiative for powerful AI PCs, which will be led by the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. These machines are powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips, and they come with a special version of Windows 11 optimized for Arm mobile chips and AI. Basically, Microsoft is doing for PCs what Apple did with its M-series Macs four years ago.

In this bonus episode, Devindra chats with Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's head of Windows and Devices, about the new Surface devices and the Copilot+ PC initiative. We still don't know how well these new machines will perform, but it sounds like Microsoft has certainly heard our complaints about Arm-based Windows devices.

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Transcript

Devindra: Hey everyone, this is Devindra here. I had a chance to chat with Pavan Davuluri, the head of Microsoft Windows and Devices, basically the team in charge of Surface and Windows. And we talked about the new Copilot Plus Surface PCs, the Surface Pro and the Surface Laptop, and the whole new Copilot Plus initiative in general.

It's kind of a big move for Microsoft. We've reviewed quite a few of the ARM based Windows PCs and you know, they have not worked out so well. So I think this could be different, at least from the benchmarks we've seen. We still need to test these things, but I think Pavan is also aware of Microsoft's own issues around this kind of hardware and they're aware that this seems like a big push for them and a good opportunity to kind of shift to a mobile platform, just like Apple did.

So anyway, here's my chat with Pavan.

Devindra: Pavan, thank you so much for speaking with us, how do you feel about these new devices and Copilot Plus as an initiative?

Pavan: I'm excited. It's been a multi-year journey for our team. So I'm excited to share. I think the work that we've been on for some time now. And I'm also excited because I think it's the start of a journey for us.

So we had an opportunity to tell our story, bring a bunch of product and value out there and then I'm excited to see what people will do with it.

Devindra: Awesome. I remember when there were rumblings about this I think for the past year we were hearing that Microsoft was doing something maybe with ARM chips again and with Qualcomm and we saw the new Snapdragon benchmarks I think last fall.

And we started getting a little excited and also a little worried, because personally, I have like a love or hate relationship with Windows on ARM, I reviewed the first Surface with Windows RT, it was, it was a worthy attempt, and then most recently we've seen the Pro X devices and all those things, and recently I did the Pro 9 with 5G, and even then I was like, I don't, I just had a lot of issues with it.

So, what did you guys learn from your past experiences with Windows on ARM that you brought into this one?

Pavan: That's a good question. I do remember your thoughts on them at the time, and we actually did pay attention to them yeah, as a team, collectively. There's a couple of things I think that we learned that were meaningful.

One that I think we've addressed in the conversation. Current generation of the Snapdragon X parts that Qualcomm team has delivered. Performance matters. And so one of the foundational investments we've made in much more performance CPUs, both in terms of the CPU energy efficiency, but also peak performance of these CPUs.

We love multithreaded performance because it matters to the operating system, but we wanted to make sure we had good sustained and peak performance. I think that's a significant improvement from our previous generations that we, you know, we learned about. The second big thing was the work that we did on what we're calling Prism, the new ARM emulator.

We, we certainly learned through that journey that emulation performance matters both in terms of the efficiency of the emulation itself and the breadth of catalog compatibility with emulation. So that was a big lesson learned. I think we've made good progress. The third thing really and hence it's been a multi year journey, is making sure we have great performance.

Native arm app experiences for us. And so we have worked across the breadth of the windows ecosystem to go deliver on great app experiences, and we are very excited that our collective ecosystem partners across a range of top app categories. Now, those apps are native. And so whether you look at you know, Disney and Spotify had one in the spectrum, it'll be photoshopped or, you know, your most used browsers.

I think at this point in time, Mhm. Certainly they're all native. Our ecosystem is certainly committed. And then the big thing for me was the biggest developer on Windows is Microsoft. Microsoft bringing native apps has been a huge thing for us. And so I'm super proud of the Edge team having a native version now for us.

The M365 app estate really is native. A bunch of our security products are native. Your inbox apps, your calculator is native. And so, yeah. I think those are big lessons learned and be a problem to bear.

Devindra: Gotcha. I will let you know, like, I'm personally, maybe I'm weird about this, I'm more interested in what's going on with Windows on ARM than the AI stuff.

I think the AI stuff is cool, has a lot of potential, but we've lived through Windows on ARM for a long time. Like, oh, this is finally here, you've got good battery life, you've got a lot of stuff. Can you tell me, like, these improvements, will they trickle down to the existing devices? Will the Surface Pro 9 5G, the Pro X, will they get benefits from these changes to Windows?

Pavan: Some benefits will trickle down to those. Some are going to be platform dependent, and so a lot of the work that we did was really are learning to make the OS and the silicon platform a deeper, more synergistic vehicle for delivery. And so, in those instances, the OS improvements are tied to the platform themselves, but not all, some of them.

And we continue to look at ways of finding ways Find a way to, you know, bring them back to our broader ARM install base but I think we're going to prioritize the Snapdragon X series going forward. Gotcha.

Devindra: Is there a new name for what you're doing with this Windows? Microsoft has been very, very big on different Windows names, like RT and we, we've gone through a couple.

Are you guys calling this anything differently? Referring what this Windows on ARM is versus the old stuff?

Pavan: It's Windows 11. Okay. And in, you know, in my mind's eye, there isn't, there's only one flair of Windows, it's Windows 11. And that's true for consumers Devindra, it's true for our commercial customers, it's true for developers, in my mind, you know, importantly.

So we don't want people to have to think about all of that, we want them to be able to build apps for us to be predictable in certain set of ways that matter to them, and then unlock the ability to build devices and, you know, people have choice on the kinds of products and platforms they want to build.

Devindra: Gotcha. And these first batch of devices, the Surface Pro, interesting, you guys aren't using the numbers anymore. I see Surface Pro 11th generation is how you're referring to it in documents, and the new Surface laptop, these are Qualcomm powered machines right now, but we're also, you talked with Intel, you talked with AMD, they were here, or they at least said that they have hardware coming out.

Can you tell us how that will fit into the Surface lineup, or are we just thinking about Qualcomm Surface devices for now?

Pavan: Our partnerships with AMD and Intel have been longstanding indeed. Certainly for the Windows ecosystem at large, the operating system itself, but also on Surface. And I think we will make decisions on what silicon we use in Surface products based on how do we best build a system that serves end customers and certainly represents innovation in the Windows ecosystem.

And we look forward to working with all of them.

Devindra: Gotcha. Yeah. And you guys also have a lot of partner hardware coming out, which I was surprised to see. Normally, when this happens, you have your devices and you're like, Hey, everybody, follow along. But you have them now. You have all the major manufacturers.

You have new machines coming. Can you talk about the process of basically coordinating that? Because I feel like that makes Copilot Plus feel like a true initiative and not just Microsoft putting a flag in the ground saying, Hey, everybody follow us, right?

Pavan: You nailed it. I think that is exactly the intent.

And that is the, I think first I will say I am Deeply grateful for the partnerships across the windows ecosystem. So you saw the major partners out there today. They have been with us again on a multi year basis on this journey. For sure. I think for me, having been on the windows team and in the past in the surface team for some time, I think the level of partnership we have seen from them and from us is the thing that I have not seen before.

I guess it's probably the simplest way to describe it. They have been great in terms of Making sure we were building product with. the value prop that actually mattered and delivered to them. That was, you know, a great place up front where they were part of the product making journey with us. We've had a deep co engineering cycle, because building these great systems at the end of the day does require both the hardware platform, the silicon, certainly the operating system, app layers to all be equipped.

This is sort of the idea of the system configurations that they talked about. And so we went through, you know, a whole generation of co engineering with them together. And then now, when it comes to going to market, and telling our story, and landing our customers through it, I find that we are deeply aligned together.

Because I think, to your point, whether it's performance, and, you know, fundamentals that we can go deliver on, or unlocking new AI things, it's a thing that, you know, it captures all of our imagination, and all of our mind share. It's a thing I think they're as excited about as we are. And you're right. It doesn't, I don't think it's a meaningful exercise across the industry if our partners are not there with us.

I'm actually just grateful that our collective team, our marketing team specifically our field team, we were able to just, and engineering, of course, you know, pull them all together. It was great.

Devindra: I think it's kind of interesting because Apple kind of did this four years ago, too. Like, we all covered the, the M series chips and everything, but they have the advantage you guys don't, right?

Like, they own the hardware, they own the software. They could be like This is a big ship, but we're just turning. We can just do it. You guys can't. You have to work with your partners to kind of coordinate all that. How long have you guys been working on, like, making this transition?

Pavan: To your point earlier ARM itself is not a new construct for us.

This particular, and we've been at it for many generations, as you know, this particular iteration has been a few years for us. I'm, you know, I'm almost, I'm drawing a blank and where do I draw the line or the starting line for the exercise? Because some of these things start as a sort of an organic, you know, thought process.

Devindra: I feel like the Pro X was this, was the point where you guys were like, Hey, here's a premium surface that's thinner, lighter, you Here's a vision of what the surface can be and then kind of the design follow that. So were you thinking about it by that point? That was three or four years ago.

Pavan: Yeah. Yeah, we were definitely thinking about it in that window of time.

Devindra: Yeah.

Pavan: Yeah. I would also say the big thing in addition, I mean, the thing that we really learned, I would say 2020, 2021, is thinking of it from a system standpoint and then adding AI as a first order construct from Silicon through, you know, platform level components, the OS to the shell layer to app experiences.

Yeah.

Devindra: I think something I say often, and don't take this too harshly, but I think timing has never been Microsoft's strong suit. I think Microsoft tends to deploy things, maybe a little too early. I saw, I was, I was growing up when web TV was a thing. I remember pocket PC devices. I remember Windows Mobile.

I had a Zune. I had multiple Zunes. So, I The timing, it seems interesting how quickly you guys jumped on AI last year with Bing search and everything and with the launch of co pilots, it does seem like you guys are kind of taking a leadership, I guess, role in timing for AI because everybody kind of had to respond to what you were doing.

Can you talk about just how that feels? Does it feel different to you for how Microsoft is approaching new technology?

Pavan: It does. It does feel different for sure. I personally find it Pretty exciting and energizing at the same time. It's a little humbling as well I think to your point there is we certainly want to be in a place where we have enough composition and you know meaningful value and completed execution, you know quality of the product itself. And so it certainly puts pressure on that to make sure we are showing up in a leadership time frame with a great product But it is a different feeling for sure and I'm kind of excited about it because I do think we have a bunch of things we have learned in the last 18 months with the starting with the Bing work that happened last year.

Through the M365 co pilot work that has happened and now we're calling the Windows co pilot runtime on device models and Windows 11. Where we have a ton of great lessons learned across the company that is a kind of a flywheel and accelerator for us. Responsible AI is one good example. That team has learned a lot.

They are now an integral part of how we think about it. Same thing applies for app teams. You know, they're collectively in an AI first world. And so it's a lot easier for us to go orchestrate work across the company.

Devindra: Can you talk more about the idea of responsible AI and how you guys are thinking about it?

Because the Recall feature seems very cool. Seems like something a lot of people could use. And then I think, like, oh man, this is, the way people are worried about people snooping in their browser history, right? There's the meme, if I die, please delete my browser history. Stuff like that. And recall is just like, oh, you've created this thing that will see everything we're doing online.

How are you guys thinking about the usability aspect of something like that, and also the data privacy aspects of it?

Pavan: Yeah, it's a, it's a really good question, and I think it's important. For us, thinking about earning permission and trust through, you know, security and privacy, I think, was front and center in our mind as product makers as we were building that feature, Devindra.

If you, you know, when you start playing with these Copilot Plus PCs, you'll see that as you go set up the PC for the first time, we are very deliberate in taking customers through a user experience, you know, onboarding journey that makes it very clear for them on what that experience is like. And And making sure we're educating them and then giving them control is fundamental.

So in the onboarding experience. The second big thing is in the ongoing use of the product, we make it simple and intuitive so you are in control and you understand what is happening. And so I think as you get comfortable over t