Sept. 26, 2021, 10:41 p.m.
Windows 11 is great, if you can get it
Windows 10 evolves into a pretty, fresh experience -- but you might have to work to get it.
Good Screen
Hey, remember when Windows 10 was going to be the last version of Windows? Well, Microsoft has different ideas. I’ve spent a few days fiddling about with Windows 11’s release preview — the same thing that’ll be offered to millions of PCs from October 5th — across a powerful gaming-focussed desktop and a 2-in-1 laptop-tablet hybrid that weighs less than half a kilo.
The short of it is that it’s very good, and that it’s pretty polished; let’s have a chat about how it is to look at, use, and touch.
Modern Design, With Compromises
You can tell Panos Panay led the team behind Windows 11. Microsoft’s Surface and Windows chief largely built his name at the company by getting teams to build products that felt meticulously thought through and that were full of attention to detail, even if it took iteration after iteration to get the ideal version of the product. He’s the closest analogue to Apple’s Jony Ive the company has, and — to steal his own words — I’m pumped that he got his hands on the software side of things.
A lot of attention has been paid to things that are delightful, but that folks might not notice — from the bounce of every icon on the taskbar as it’s launched, minimised, or maximised, to the calmer sound effects and the gentle animations as you interact with buttons in the Action Centre.
Of course, the taskbar now lives in the centre of the screen — though you can switch it back to the bottom-left corner, if it bugs you — and while it’s an adjustment to your muscle memory, it’s something you get used to very quickly. As a recovering macOS and iPadOS user, the combination of gentle icon animations and a centred taskbar invoke pleasant memories of the dock, and for desktop users with ultrawide displays it’ll be less of a drag than hauling your cursor all the way over to a corner.
That isn’t to say that it’s a perfect redesign, however. Every version of Windows has at least one system utility that hasn’t been redesigned for a few versions, or that an app that’s just a way to obscure decades-old ideas. While there are certainly improvements in this space — the modern Settings app is way more comprehensive, and is less reliant on old-style Control Panel bits than before — there are still lots of places that haven’t had a facelift since the Windows Vista days1. I, for one, remain frustrated that Task Manager doesn’t at least have a dark mode.
In short, it’s a very pretty OS, one that feels coherent for the first time in a long time — so long as you’re not doing hardcore system maintenance.
No Major Must-Haves (Yet)
Design aside, though, if you don’t have a touch-focused device there’s not much to fall in love with.
Microsoft was really pleased with the Widgets panel — effectively an evolution of the “news and interests” bit in the taskbar of Windows 10 — but it’s a bunch of news items you’ll probably find anywhere, and that will insist on opening in Edge regardless of your default browser. There’s also deeper Teams integration, with a button in the taskbar that lets you start a group video call or text conversation with minimal effort, but it effectively requires you to have friends who use Microsoft Teams, so it’s a non-starter for now2.
There’s a new Microsoft Store, too; Microsoft has decided to allow standard Windows apps into the Store without them having to be repackaged. Zoom and OBS are already in the Store; Mozilla’s hinted Firefox will likely head there, and there’s the potential for apps like Discord to come along and finally kill the perception issues Microsoft’s long-maligned store has. But nothing’s guaranteed, and we won’t know if there are major changes for sure until a wider release.
The big under-the-hood changes for folks who play games require hardware upgrades; Auto HDR needs an HDR-capable display, and DirectStorage — designed to cut load times dramatically — requires a fancy NVMe Solid State Drive, as well as for developers to actually deploy it in a game.
In short, then, a lot of the things that will make Windows 11 worth it for some users are going to take a while to take full effect — and that’s okay; in the meantime, you get a nicer user experience, and that’s just as important, at least in my book.
The Touch Experience
Microsoft has spent the better part of the last ten years screwing up touch.
Windows 8 was supposed to make touch a first-class citizen; it was going to make us all want laptops with touch screens, or 2-in-1s, or all-in-ones with touch screens. The problem was that, simply, it tried to ignore non-touch computers entirely. If you didn’t have a touch-enabled device, upgrading meant you got a whole lot more familiar with your scroll wheel, drudging though endless bits of white space in new-style “Metro” apps, desperately asking why the Shut Down button was now hidden among something called a charms bar.
The failure of Windows 8 meant that Windows 10 involved a lot of compromise. Metro apps — now given the catchier name of Universal Windows Platform apps — were targeted at folks with keyboards and mice, but they’d also work for folks who’d invested in touch, who’d be banished to a touch-first Tablet Mode the moment they got rid of their keyboards.
Microsoft called this Continuum, and they were super proud of it when Windows 10 launched… but they never actually did anything to it after launch. By default, Tablet Mode gets rid of your conventional taskbar, involves gestures that aren’t the same as the ones you’d use on your trackpad, and feels unfinished when put next to the touch-first advances of modern iPadOS.
Windows 11 finally — finally — strikes the right balance for touch. Detaching your keyboard, or tucking it behind your screen, doesn’t throw you into a different mode anymore; instead, it spaces out the icons in your taskbar, makes touch points in places like window bars bigger, and uses the exact same gestures you use when your trackpad is attached. Rather than making the whole OS bend over backwards for touch, Microsoft is just treating touch input as a Flesh Mouse, and it actually works really well.
There’s also a lot to be said about how much the touch keyboard has been improved. I found it super imprecise in Windows 10, often missing keystrokes or hitting the wrong keys entirely, but this time they’ve clearly just put the SwiftKey team to work on it. It’s a pleasure to type on, and it works better with a lot of standard Windows apps that aren’t designed with touch in mind — especially Discord, where on Windows 10 pressing backspace would close and then reopen the keyboard for no reason.
The cherry on top of this particular cake will absolutely be Android app support, which is coming after launch in the form of Amazon’s Appstore.3 While I’d rather have full-throated Google Play Store support, it’ll be nice to have a touch-first Kindle app on Windows for the first time in a long while without having to resort to something like BlueStacks.
A Formidable Upgrade — With Formidable Barriers
So it’s a pretty decent upgrade, and one I’d recommend on the whole. Whether you can upgrade is another question.
Microsoft’s system requirements for Windows 11 have annoyed a fair amount of nerds who were desperate to test it; in the name of a new security model, Microsoft won’t push Windows 11 via Windows Update if you have a PC with an unsupported processor. If you haven’t upgraded your machine in the last four years or so, chances are you’re out of luck — and even if you have, you might still struggle. Last February, I bought a Surface Go — a computer made by Microsoft — and its Pentium Gold 4415Y isn’t on the list of compatible Intel processors.4
To upgrade, I had to grab an ISO image from Microsoft’s website and effectively signed a waiver confirming my computer was now unsupported by Microsoft and was no longer entitled to receive updates. I’m fairly sure Microsoft is bluffing5 — straight after my upgrade I downloaded a set of updates without any issues or warnings — but it’s clear that they don’t want ordinary users to do this.
If you have a compatible Windows 10 machine, though, you have nothing to fear. This isn’t the kind of culture shock of Windows 8 — it’s a refinement of the last six years of Windows, one that’ll just fall into your lap at some point between now and the spring. Sit tight; I promise, it’s going to be great.
If you bring up the Run prompt and type in “dialer” you can still bring up the Phone Dialer — designed for Fax Machines, first implemented in Windows 95, and never updated since.
This will obviously change as more people have Windows 11, and have the Chat button sitting on their Taskbars by default.
You can also sideload apps, but the functionality hasn’t rolled out yet, so I couldn’t test this.
Conveniently, the Pentium Gold 4425Y in the Surface Go 2 — which is effectively the same chip with an extra 100MHz of clock speed — is supported by Windows 11. Planned obsolescence? From a company that isn’t Apple? Never!
The way I described Microsoft’s minimum requirements and their associated waivers to a friend was: “So I'm like 90% sure this whole "unsupported PC" thing is bullshit and it's specifically designed for the kind of people who see screenshots of an iOS beta and go "omg I want that right now" and get their devices enrolled in dev betas and then cry bc their phone is hot and the battery runs for two hours”.