We are excited about the new Windows 11 release, Windows XP was great, then Windows Vista was not great. But then windows seven was great. Then windows eight with the tiles, not great. Windows 10. Great. And now windows 11. No pressure Microsoft. But this is your chance to break that cycle. So today we got a Windows 11 reveal the newest next version of Windows coming as a free upgrade this holiday season to a PC near you. Now it’s funny A lot of you probably know me as a Mac user most of the time, just because I’ve used a lot of Macs here at the studio. But that’s not actually because of Mac OS, I switched to Mac OS for the most part at work because of an app because of Final Cut Pro. So I’m perfectly happy to spend time in Windows all the time. And so watching their unveiling event today actually felt more compelled to react to this windows unveiling than anything they’ve done over an apple camp lately and the desktop stuff. At the end of the day, though, it’s just an operating system, and you’re gonna have to run apps on it. So we’ll get to the app situation in a minute. But there’s plenty of interesting stuff now that we’re doing here in Windows 11.
So first of all, the whole aesthetic is refreshed pretty dramatically. So we got this new design that I would describe as very glassy like there’s a lot of shyness and transparency and glassy, translucent elements, things happen. And through here, as much as it’s probably cringe to say it, it kind of does remind me a little bit of the hype around Windows Vista when we had that super-flat, Windows XP, and then VISTA was all this glass. But of course, now it’s much brighter, and lighter. And I’m just gonna stop mentioning Vista. Now there is a new start menu in Windows 11, which might make you a little nervous if you’re familiar with them messing with the Start button and the Start menu in the past. But it’s pretty good. It’s actually centered now, by default to keep with the theme that Windows 11 should be the center of your ecosystem. But you can always move it back over to the left if you want. But yeah, it has the glassy look. It also now has suggestions for apps and documents to open that you’ve recently used makes a lot of sense here. And then similar to how on Android, you could swipe over to see a Google discover page or on iOS, or you could swipe over to see a bunch of widgets with information. Or even on a Mac, you could do this. Now on Windows 11, you can swipe over and you get a pane of widgets with information customized by AI. So it’s this glassy pullover. And I assume it’ll get better over time as it learns you. But it has some level of customization. And so you can see things like weather and news stories and social posts all over here. And you can fully swipe over to go fullscreen with this. If you want to just live here for a little bit. That’s pretty cool. Then here’s an interesting, no doubt, pandemic-inspired feature.
Microsoft Teams is now built into Windows natively. Now. Okay, here’s the thing. So Microsoft Teams, I get it, it’s their communication app, they want to use it as much as possible. But also, Microsoft owns Skype. And they bought Skype for $8.5 billion. So when I think of what Microsoft could do to like make communication easier in Windows. That’s just what came to my head. But you know, they’re trying to promote teams and make it the default messaging app and push it more among regular people. So the demos they were showing in this event, were just people having chat conversations with friends and family and just hopping on casual video calls and Microsoft Teams. Now, I don’t know about you. But I’ve always thought of teams as a business app, like a corporate video conferencing app, because that’s the only thing I’ve actually used it for. It’s literally called teams. So I kind of wonder if building it into Windows will actually have the intended effects like it’s coming out during the holiday season, which is in a couple more months. So again, we’ll probably want to be mostly done with video calls by then. But even for casual video calls, like zoom definitely broke through from the enterprise to like being the default video calling app for the world. Microsoft, like I said own Skype, but also now FaceTime from this recent iOS update will allow you to send links to people on Android phones and web devices and Windows users can jump on facetime now, so yeah, I don’t know if Microsoft Teams is going to be that thing that hard-hitting standard default. But we’ll see. I do love though the new window management controls. This is something Windows has been ahead on for a while and they’re still great at now in Windows 11. you hover over the maximize button I believe and you get all these new Multi Window snap presets. super dope for people who work with multiple windows opens all the time as I do. And also
Joanna stern has an awesome exclusive piece over on the Wall Street Journal right now that posted today. You should definitely read it. And in that she mentions, there will be Windows-like memorization, basically, with external displays. Now, so if you’ve ever had an external display with a Windows laptop in the past, it’s kind of annoying when you have a bunch of stuff nicely laid out on that. monitor and unplug it. And things all just appear on your laptop, not anymore. Now, they will memorize their location on that monitor. When you unplug the monitor, they’ll all minimize. And when you plug that monitor back in, they’ll all go back to where they were. That’s pretty dope. But the biggest new thing, the biggest, most headline-worthy new feature from Windows 11, that caught my eye the most has to do with apps. So this is the headline ready, this is what can be printed up at the top super simply, Android apps can now run natively in Windows 11. So right off the bat, that is pretty cool. They’re showing it’s compatible with the window management controls. And it can potentially give you access to a whole new suite of millions of apps that we all know and love working perfectly on the desktop or the laptop, or the two in one that you carry whatever runs Windows, you got to bring the most popular apps to Windows to get people to use Windows, right. But there are some more details behind that super simple headline. So this is made possible through a collaboration actually between Microsoft and Amazon. So actually, what’s going on here is it’s loading up the Amazon App Store for Android apps into the Microsoft Windows app store. And this is all going to be run through Intel bridge technology. So again from Joanna’s piece, she notes that you’ll be able to search through the Windows app store like normal.
And when you find an Android app in there, and you click to download and install it, you will have to be signed in to an Amazon account, because it’s coming from the Amazon App Store. And actually, the first time you ever do this, it’ll have you download and install the Amazon App Store app for Windows, which it’s gonna help. It’s just the first time but it’ll work. And then from there, you’ll be able to download all these Amazon App Store apps. It’s not 100% overlap with the Google Play Store. From my experience, it’s pretty close. But it’s the Amazon Android App Store loaded up into the Windows app store. That makes sense. So maybe the headline should really read Android apps that are in the Amazon app store will work natively kind of on Windows 11. As long as you have a Microsoft and Amazon account, basically, it just feels like a super-official sideload. It doesn’t quite feel native. But they’ll try to make it feel as native as possible. The move to do this, by the way, it makes perfect sense, like meet the people where you want them to be with their apps that they already like, it’s the same reason you can run Android apps on a Chromebook. And you can run iOS apps on a Mac, it doesn’t mean they’re going to be good. Like there’s a bunch of bad examples of them not really working great, they might suck for non touch input, they might just have functions that are broken or just don’t work as well when they’re on a computer versus when they’re actually on a mobile device. So it’s maybe the most convoluted version of it all. But at the end of the day, you can say you offer Android apps on Windows. Sure. So those are all the big new changes the huge bullet points, Windows 11 is looking fresh and clean with this new aesthetic. And I for 1am, definitely on board with that part. It feels modern. And there’s lots of other behind the scenes. And under the hood changes as well. I’m sure it’s 64 bit only for one. And there’s also a couple other more interesting new system requirements. So there is a compatibility tool that people can use now to check if their PC they currently have will work with Windows 11. But I think we’ll learn a lot more as the betas start rolling out and people start using them about graphics improvements and security and privacy and optimizations and all that fun stuff. But in the meantime, that’s when I was 11.
So not bad, I’m impressed. I think they might have just broken the cycle. They on-off I don’t want to jinx it. But I kind of like this update. We’ll see. Let me know what you think in the comment section below. If you have any strong thoughts on the new design or any of the stuff he’s talked about here. Let me know if you also actually care about running Android apps on Windows. I’d be super curious.
