A Tale of Two 24H2s (Premium)

I am writing this from the future. Well, a future. A near future that is only a baby step, or a half-step, toward a better future. Or something.

OK, I'm being coy here. Sorry. What I'm really doing is running Windows 11 version 24H2 courtesy of a Windows Insider Preview download of the latest available Dev channel ISO that I installed on an HP EliteBook and then upgraded to the latest build (as of this writing, at least). The result is familiar, of course, it's just the next version of Windows 11 and not all that different, at least from a cursory, surface-level examination. But it also hints at bigger changes to come. And I am interested in both, the small changes that will arrive in the short term. And the bigger changes that are coming later this year.

I discussed Microsoft's strategy with this release in Understanding Windows 11 Version 24H2 (Premium), but the short version is that there will be, in effect, two 24H2s, one that we get soon, most likely to accommodate the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite-based PCs that will arrive later this month and in June, and the other a broader release that provides what we expect will be more full-featured and pervasive hybrid AI functionality throughout the system. The 24H2 I'm using, the version we can all test now via the Windows Insider Dev channel is the former 24H2, the more evolutionary, shorter-term 24H2.

You can argue that I'm a bit late to this. When Microsoft first revealed that it was, in fact, testing 24H2 in the Dev (and, at the time, Canary) channels in a rare and unexpected bit of transparency, I should have immediately enrolled a PC or at least a virtual machine (VM) in one of those channels. And you're right, but I had just arrived in Mexico City at the time (early February) and was busy updating the Windows 11 Field Guide for a Moment 5 update that is only now fully deployed in stable (sorry, the General Availability channel). Plus, it didn't seem like there was all that much going on with 24H2 at the time, nor did we then know that 24H2 would first arrive mid-year. So I did what I usually do when it comes to the book: I created a to-do list in Notion to list out and then prioritize the features coming in that release so I could cover them in the book as we got closer to the release.

But as we learned more about 24H2, not just the schedule but also the feature set, it became obvious that I'd need to get started on this. The final belated push came when a reader asked about Microsoft tightening the noose yet again on local accounts. And so late last week, I finally got started. Though, to fully understand the changes, I had to reinstall 24H2 from scratch multiple times to be sure what was happening and what we could do to work around this new behavior.

As you may recall, the initial version of Windows 11 didn't offer those using the Home edition to create a local account during the initial Setup. And the second version, 22H2, did the same for Pro. In both cases, there wer...