Dear Microsoft: please don’t mess this up
ANOTHER MONTH GOES BY and there’s no sign of a crack in the weird wall of silence around Windows 11. As I write, it is exactly one month before the newly announced official release date for Windows 11, yet from the state of the preview builds—both dev and
Of course, the builds are perfectly stable, but they are Windows 10 with a facelift. To distinguish itself, Windows 11 needs more than stringent hardware requirements, rounded windows, and some rather gorgeous desktop backgrounds. It needs features. And as yet, we haven’t got them.
A while ago, Microsoft contacted dev channel insiders, imploring them to move onto the beta channel because some wobbly builds were coming. Could this be the Amazon App Store and the Intel Bridge tech that makes it work? The implementation of DirectStorage? So far, neither of those have raised their heads above the parapet.
By the time you read this, Microsoft may have announced these features and we’ll be running Android apps and wondering what all the fuss was about. But it’s only a month until the release date. That’s not much time to get feedback and fix bugs.
The official announcement has a carefully worded section about “continuing our journey to bring Android apps to Windows 11” that will “start with a preview for Windows Insiders over the coming months”. So no Android apps at launch? It’s starting to look like a number of recent high-profile game releases, where a barely functional product is launched then receives a patch to add features and fixes that should have been there from day one.
Still, at least there’s a new PC Health Check app that will tell you if your PC can run Windows 11 or not, as well as a loosening of the hardware
The launch of Windows 11 could go down in history for all the wrong reasons.
restrictions to include some Kaby Lake CPUs. Specifically, the one that MS sells in the Surface Studio 2, by some coincidence.
Greater minds than ours have ascertained that the harsh cutting away of CPUs older than about four years has something to do with MBEC, or Mode Based Execution Control. This is the tech that allows the mitigations for the Meltdown and Spectre exploits to run without slowing down your PC, and it seems MS wants those bad old days well and truly forgotten.
The story changed at the end of August: you can install Windows 11 on CPUs that aren’t on the official list if you do it from an ISO. You won’t be eligible for an upgrade through Windows Update, but you can take matters into your own hands. Will these machines continue to get Windows 11 updates, or be cut off? MS makes no guarantees, but a raft of PCs with security holes caused by installing a newly released OS and then not patching it would be a dreadful thing to set loose on the internet.
It’s the beginnings of a mess. An OS launching without headline features, a hard security cutoff that might not be anything of the sort, and a whole new OS where an update to Windows 10 might have done. Unless there’s something MS isn’t telling us, the launch of Windows 11 could go down in history for all the wrong reasons.
Ian Evenden’s first PC was a 286 with 640kb of memory. And who could need more than that?