I’ve been writing for more than a year about how Microsoft needs to overhaul Windows on handhelds and use an Xbox OS UI on top, keeping the complexity of the Windows desktop hid

Jason Ronald, Microsoft's VP of Next Generation, wants to bring "the best of Xbox and Windows together" on existing gaming handheld PCs.

Microsoft is promoting Windows 11 and its new Copilot+ PCs at CES 2025. Notably absent from the company's announcements is any mention of a possible Windows 12 release. Instead, the tech giant is positioning 2025 as a crucial year for Windows 11 adoption.

“I would say it’s bringing the best of Xbox and Windows together, because we have spent the last 20 years building a world-class operating system, but it’s really locked to the console,” says Ronald. “What we’re doing is we’re really focused on how do we bring those experiences for both players and developers to the broader Windows ecosystem.”

Microsoft has said that it plans to bring the best of Xbox and Windows gaming experiences for handheld devices.

Last January at CES, Microsoft chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi declared 2024 the “year of the AI PC.” And whether you believe that prediction came true or not—many new PCs come with AI-accelerating neural processing units onboard, but far from all of them—you can't deny that Microsoft did try very hard to make it happen.

The Xbox handheld is all but confirmed to be real, but we have a long time before it will come out. Here's all the information we have so far about the console.The Latest Tech News, Delivered to Your

The future of Microsoft's handheld gaming plans includes a marriage between the best of Xbox and Windows. That's according to Microsoft's Xbox hardware veteran Jason Ronald, who also teased that the company would have "a lot more to share later this year" on what exactly its Windows-powered handheld vision might look like.