yeah let's go Windows 11 is no ordinary update but
sitting through microsoft's dull and bug ridden announcement stream you never
know it which is why a lot of what we're going to talk about was actually pulled
from the fine print on microsoft's website and from our own first-hand
experience with the leaked build from last week
the good news is that there is a lot to talk about
the bad news is that well not all the news is good news
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at first glance Windows 11 is little more than a major interface redesign on
top of what is fundamentally Windows 10 but on closer inspection there is more
going on under the hood than we gave it credit for in particular enhanced
support for hybrid architecture processors with both a mix of
performance and power saving CPU cores
like Intel's lakefield that is going to be a big deal in very little time
sorry for that the most obvious improvement is of
course though the new visual design it's a frosted glass aesthetic with multiple
theme styles rounded corners on Windows and a center aligned taskbar an
optimization that microsoft made clear was for touch users
do you feel that the new start menu clearly lifted from Windows 10 x is
powered by the cloud which appears to be code for we included bing search as
usual but hey now your recent documents will sync across devices if you're using
office 365 so that's pretty cool
there are more useful changes of course snap layouts let you quickly and easily
tile Windows in different orientations similar to how the fancy zones power toy
works today except it's significantly more user-friendly
and significantly less configurable microsoft says that nobody else lets you
do that with this many Windows nobody else lets you do this and that ended up
being one of the biggest revelations of the presentation Linux has apparently
been renamed to nobody else os they do
bring something new to the table here though Windows groups this way will
group together in the taskbar and be treated like a single item so you can
switch to and from a window layout on the fly and your multiple virtual
desktops can now be customized with different wallpapers to make it easier
to keep track of them it's kind of like customizing your water bottle with the
stickers you get for free with your order from lttstore.com
what's more they finally fixed the issue where Windows would rearrange themselves
semi-randomly when monitors are disconnected and reconnected so instead
they will minimize Windows that were on the removed display and then put them
all back when you reconnect this is going to make docking a laptop way less
frustrating although i'm not sure what happens if you disconnect the display
then interact with those programs then reconnect it i guess we'll see
there's more for all-in-ones and touch displays in general as well touch
targets are bigger now with more visual feedback and there's a new on-screen
keyboard that we didn't get to properly test drive just yet that looks a lot
like the iOS keyboard right down to the ability to move the cursor around by
holding the spacebar but that's all boring productivity stuff what about
gaming well after debuting on the xbox series x
auto HDR is coming to Windows and direct
storage support is baked into Windows 11 at the os and driver level that's going
to bring Windows more in line with xbox from a feature standpoint and personally
i am really excited to see both of these in action i mean given the Windows
team's historically terrible HDR
implementation i'm hesitantly optimistic
about automatically converting older non-HDR games to HDR but direct storage
which allows your GPU to access your system's game drive or really any other
drive directly should substantially improve loading times in games once it's
supported investigating these features is going to make for some really
interesting videos and you're going to want to make sure that you're subscribed
xbox game pass is now integrated into the xbox app that comes with Windows and
we got more promises of cross-platform play as is the tradition by now though
we have no idea how many titles will support it if it's going to be difficult
to support it if it's a system-wide thing or what though at least with sony
also finally talking more favorably about cross play it feels like the light
at the end of this tunnel is finally visible
the additions to pen input look pretty sweet and microsoft has added haptic
feedback to simulate the feel of different tools as you're using them
there's not really a whole lot else for us to say about that because they only showed it briefly and the same goes for
screen rotation which is much more streamlined now with Windows rotating
smoothly with the display and tiled Windows in landscape mode stacking onto
each other rather than arranging unpredictably like they used to speaking
of unpredictable teams is now integrated
into Windows directly i can't say i predicted that when did
everyone start using teams am i out of touch no it's the children who are wrong
there's now a dedicated icon for teams then that gives you what looks like a
searchable jump list of recent contacts and buttons for interacting them and i
i'm just not sure this is what anyone was asking for but hey at least
microsoft has something akin to imessage and facetime built in so
that's cool i guess there was a brief mention about dictation and voice
commands as well so presumably that is also an upgrade to compete with siri on
macOS ah macOS they made a big deal about how teams
works on any platform and it wasn't the only thing that felt like an unnecessary
dig at apple even the faq page on their website has this kind of thing in place
of genuinely useful information guys
microsoft we want to know how much it's going to cost standalone obviously
computers cost anywhere from here to here i guess we'll know soon enough though
when it pops up in the Windows store yes the Windows store
now with the ability to show movies tv shows and other content regardless of
the streaming service and integration with the amazon app store yes my friends
you can now run Android apps directly in
Windows there's no word yet on whether side loading is possible or if you're
stuck with the amazon store but this is still really cool as for why they're
doing it our best guess is that if enough people run Android apps on
Windows developers will finally buy into microsoft's pitch about how it's super
easy to port your apps natively to the Windows store and enjoy microsoft's
industry-leading rev share and support for outside payment processors finger
guns and i guess the end goal then would be to kill the Windows store's current
ghost town vibe speaking of things deceased but now brought back to life
the new widgets panel is nothing like gadgets and vista microsoft describes
them as a beautiful sheet of glass powered by ai in effect they're pretty
much the news and interests panel that microsoft added to Windows 10 in the 21
h1 update but with some additional features and the ai is
well it's news that um is tailored to your interests
they can be brought up or dismissed by swiping in from the left edge of the
screen on a touchscreen or clicking the icon in the taskbar of course the
biggest question is pricing and availability they didn't talk about this
much in the presentation but from the faq we've put together that it will be a
free update for Windows 10 users and it'll start shipping in late 2021 on new
pcs with standalone copies available in early 2022 as for pricing if i had to
guess i'd say it'll be a hundo for home and a hundo plus for pro otherwise smart
people would all just buy Windows 10 which costs that amount and then upgrade
it for free another thing microsoft didn't tell us
and buried in the faq system requirements
as we've already seen Windows 11 requires secure boot and tpm 2.0 to
function as a security measure this is
hands down going to create the most confusion for end users around this
launch and microsoft makes their own life more
difficult for no apparent reason because instead of just saying when you go to
install it hey you need this trusted platform module chip and secure boot
enabled in your UEFI BIOS microsoft just gives you this ambiguous error that says
your system isn't compatible why Windows 11 also requires two or more CPU
cores four gigs of RAM 64 gigs of storage and a directx 12 compatible GPU
don't have all that stuff i don't know go buy a new pc i guess says microsoft
what's more troubling however is this note that Windows 11 home edition
requires an internet connection and a microsoft account to complete first time
setup and this is a weird one you actually get fewer features for using a
microsoft account desktop wallpaper is no longer synced with your microsoft
account between devices though i personally actually just found that feature kind of annoying and the
timeline feature has been removed
there's more the taskbar is now locked to the bottom of the screen the start
menu no longer has support for folders or groups live tiles are gone the menu
itself cannot be resized and tablet mode is gone and replaced with the new touch
inputs not all the changes we had to dig for are bad though cortana mercifully
won't bug you during first time setup nor take up unnecessary space on the
taskbar by default so it's just baffling that the stuff wasn't touched on during
the event because a lot of it seems pretty important to me
now it's unclear how the Windows 11 leak occurred before the big reveal today
some have speculated that it was on purpose but what we know for sure is
that it was a significantly older build than what they just showed and that
there's no immediate pressure for you to upgrade the october 14th 2025 retirement
date puts Windows 10 service life at just over 10 years that's just a few
months short of Windows 7's was it a good operating system
i don't know if it'll be remembered as fondly as Windows 7 was but it was
definitely better than the mess that was Windows 8 so here's hoping then that
microsoft finally manages to break the good bad good bad pattern and keep that
positive momentum going when Windows 11 finally reaches our pcs
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necessary thanks for watching guys go check out our first look of the leaked
build of Windows 11 for some more Windows goodness i promise there's
more information in there than in microsoft's presentation today Anthony
was real salty about having to get up at six to sit through that thing i had to
desultify the script a little
i did not water it down i desalinated it