Windows 11 review: New OS has us asking, update or wait?

Speaker 1: Windows 11 is finally here. And I'm gonna tell you whether you should rush and download it on day one, or just wait a while Speaker 1: With the next version of the Microsoft PC operating system called windows 11, everyone's pretty much expecting a final chat joke, but I can't go there big cuz this really feels more like windows 10.5, but there's really not anything wrong with that because an operating system, whether it's Mac OS for your MacBook, iPad [00:00:30] OS for your iPad, Google's wear OS for your smartwatch. The more transparent it is, the better, the more it gets out of your way, the more you're gonna like it. But maybe the shift from windows 10 to windows 11 feels very subtle because the jump from windows eight to windows 10 was so gigantic. It was so big actually that Microsoft skipped an entire version number and that's cuz windows eight was really a complete from the ground up rebuild and wanted to make, uh, laptops and windows, tablets feel more like [00:01:00] iPads with big square Aole over the place on the home screen. Speaker 1: And people really didn't want that. They wanted their iPads for fun tablet stuff, and they wanted their windows systems for work and PC gaming and email and things like that. Another reason everybody like windows 10 was because it was the era of the free operating system upgrade. Before that you had to actually pay some money in order to do that, whether it was then OS 10, update for your Mac, where there was a windows update for your PC. [00:01:30] You'd be shocked to hear that for the privilege of going from windows seven to windows eight, usually had to give Microsoft $120. That's crazy. Now you'll hear me. And a lot of other people talk about windows 11 as a fairly subtle shift from windows 10, the big visual cue there is that that task bar on your desktop has moved from being left, aligned to being in the center of your screen, along with the start button and the search button. Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure they did this just so you'd noticed something was different and didn't think this [00:02:00] was still just windows 10. There's a lot more going on under new, but you need some sort of subtle UI shift that is not too intrusive to get people to understand that they're getting something new and windows 11, it doesn't remake windows. It adds a bunch of new features. It streamlined some others. It makes others more complicated. Oddly enough, although it's Microsoft. So maybe not oddly enough, but for casual and mainstream users, you're gonna run into a few new, but you're not gonna notice a world of difference. One of the big selling points for Chromebooks is that modern Chromebooks can run [00:02:30] just about any app from the Google play store in a special Android compartment on your Chromebook. Uh, that's really handy and makes your three or four or $500 Chromebook feel a lot more versatile. Speaker 1: And like it can do a lot more. Microsoft is adding similar functionality to windows 11. You will be able to eventually download and install and run standard Android apps from there. But here's the catch that feature is not included with the launch version of windows 11. Microsoft is rolling this out as part of a preview program at [00:03:00] some point in the coming months. And I would not expect it to be a mainstream part of windows 11 until sometime next year. Now that's a shame because it would've been one of the biggest changes about windows 11 that could actually get people excited about it. There are ways to run Android programs on your PC. Now there are programs like BlueStacks that are emulate. There's a, your phone app for Microsoft that I think works with Samsung phones, but none of it is particularly easy to use, not intuitive, and it's not built right into the OS. Speaker 1: A couple of the other new features I spent some time with [00:03:30] are snap groups and multiple desktops. Now these are not new concepts. In previous versions of windows, you've been able to take a, a window that you're messing and give, move it right to the corner, give it a little shake. And it would snap to let's say, half the screen, or you could move it around here in snap groups. You can take a whole bunch of apps. You hover over the maximized button and you get a little layout option. You choose where you want that to go. You repeat that with a few more apps and then you have a nice tile screen with everything that you want. If you minimize those, you may think, oh, I [00:04:00] have to set 'em all up again. But no, you just hover over one of the minimized apps in the task bar and you could snap them all back up into place. Speaker 1: Multiple desktops is where you can, let's say put all of your work browser windows and work programs on your desktop. Then get a new, fresh desktop and put all your gaming stuff on there, or put all your creative stuff on another one. And then you swap between them on the fly. The programs are not shut down. They're basically just hidden from your view. Now windows has had multiple desktops before they were kind of hard to get to Macow. [00:04:30] Wests has done it for a long time. Works fairly well there. But I have to say by putting that multiple desktops button right in the task bar, as a default and making it very easy to jump between them, it's actually easier to do my windows 11 than it is on a Mac. And that's not something you're gonna hear me say very often that said, this is gonna be more useful. Speaker 1: If you're working on, let's say multiple monitors or just one gigantic monitor, or you need to have a whole bunch of, let's say browser, windows open and narrow slices to see things. If you're a regular laptop user, you're probably just looking at one window, maybe two [00:05:00] on your little laptop screen at what? And did you hear windows 11 has widgets. Now what's a widget. Well, everybody loves widgets. Your iPhone is widgets. Your iPad has widgets. It's like these little mini apps, like a clock or the weather that just kind of hang off on the side in their own little zone. Microsoft actually used to have widgets. They called them gadgets and I think they died with the end of in oh seven. Well, now widgets are back. They're built in there's a little button you press right in the task bar at a semi translucent panel pops out from the left side of [00:05:30] your laptop screen by default. Speaker 1: And again, it's got the clock, it's got the weather. It can show you some photos from your one drive. If you store photos in your one drive, it's got a little new section that frankly looks like it's curated by the same P people who curate the terrible new section on the Microsoft edge browser, lots of sports, lots of Fox news, lots of celebrity gossip. Microsoft is making a big deal out of Microsoft teams, integration into windows 11, which basically just means again, Microsoft teams has a button right at the bottom in the task bar. I think it's called chat. [00:06:00] When you click on it, it goes surprise. We're not chat. We're Microsoft teams and that's Microsoft's version of, you know, zoom or FaceTime or Google Hangouts. Uh, it's fine to have it there. I will say the only times I've ever been invited to a Microsoft teams meeting is by people who worked at my Microsoft and probably had to use that for work. Speaker 1: So the big question at the end of all of this is should I rush out and get windows 11 right away? Or should I wait a while and see what happens or is it terrible? And should I just skip it and stick [00:06:30] with windows 10 for as long as I possibly can. If it sounds like I'm being a little Luke warm about windows 11 at first that's because re operating system launches in an unfinished state windows eight became windows 8.1, which added a ton of improvements was very different. Uh, windows 10 got the windows, 10 creators edition, and many other updates after that, it was really down the line that these OSS came into their own. That said I've been using windows 11 on a bunch of different systems, gaming lap tops, surfaces, budget laptops for a [00:07:00] while now in different preview versions and have never felt like, oh, I wanna revert back to windows 10. Speaker 1: Everything worked pretty fine for me. Once I figured out some of the UI eccentricities, my general rule of thumb is if you're gonna buy a new laptop, then there's just gonna come with whatever the new operating system is. You don't have to worry about it. If you're gonna buy a new one this month, next month for the holiday season, there you go. You're gonna have windows 11. That's it. If you have windows 10, now you could be the first guy to go out and download it on October 5th. You [00:07:30] know, it's probably gonna be fine. I think Microsoft is going to let people download it incrementally some people today, some people tomorrow, some people next week. So everyone's not all jammed in there at once. If you wanna wait for a while, that's cool. If you want get it right away. I usually say, don't do that on your mission critical machine, but I have not run into any game breaking bugs myself, but I usually suggest you don't be the first person just because no matter how widely they tested this out in the real world, there are such a huge expanse of different types of, of hardware, [00:08:00] of configurations, of, uh, combinations of graphics cards and processors and SSDs and Ram and all the crazy peripherals people plug into their computers. Speaker 1: That there's gonna be some combinations that Microsoft didn't check for, or some combinations where things just don't work. Right. And they're gonna have to be patched my final word on the subject for now. If you want to go out on day one or week one and download windows 11, as soon as you possibly can. I, that's probably fine. If you wanna wait a few weeks or a few months, [00:08:30] that's fine too.