Did you know Windows 12 may be coming as soon as the end of 2024? That's what the latest
reports are saying. Windows Central released an article and they say they have sources that
are saying that Microsoft is changing to a every-three-year cycle for a major new
version of Windows. And at this point, it seems like it's a lot more than just speculation.
We even have an apparent code name for Windows 12, which is "Hudson Valley". Previously,
the next version of Windows was just being called "Next Valley". Now they
actually have a name for it. So that kind of lends credence to that they really are
getting closer to releasing this. Oh and as for the thumbnail, of course it's a joke,
but it does really seem like the Windows logos are getting a lot more simplistic over time.
Now you might be thinking that, doesn't it seem like they just released Windows 11? Why are they
releasing a new one in just three years? Well, actually Microsoft used to be on a
three year schedule for releasing major versions of Windows. And that kind of changed for Windows
10. And I think it skewed a lot of people's perceptions, because I have the dates here.
So Windows XP was 2001 and then Windows Vista was actually a deviation from the norm
and came out in 2007, but they were originally planning on releasing that in around late 2003,
which would have been like two and a half years. It just took way longer than
they thought. And then Windows 7, again was about two and a half years in 2009.
Then Windows 8 was 2012, three years later, and Windows 10 was 2015. So usually it's about
every three years, or at least that's the plan. Sometimes they go longer,
sometimes shorter, but that's the average. And that's probably what they're going to go back
to. Now that doesn't mean they're not going to release any kind of updates in between.
Apparently they're going to go for a annual update - annual major feature update within
each version. And then every three years would be like the major redesign. And actually the
yearly feature update thing has already happened. Before you probably know that
with Windows 10, they were releasing a major feature update every six months.
Whereas this past year they switched to once a year and there was no major feature update
in the early half of 2023. It's going to be in the second half of 2023 for Windows
11. And apparently even considering the annual major feature updates,
they're supposedly going to release even smaller little feature releases every few months possibly.
So we saw that with the release of the weather widget. That was a pretty small thing,
but they released it off schedule, I guess you could say. So we might see a little bit
more of that going forward. And a lot of you are probably finding this pretty funny because
most people apparently have not switched to Windows 11 yet even, and Steam did their
recent hardware survey where Windows 10 had a 59.43% market share, Windows 11 was 35.75%.
So by far, many people still use Windows 10. Maybe that's because of the system requirements,
or maybe it was because Microsoft, in my opinion, definitely rushed to release Windows 11. It was
really not that great at the beginning, very buggy. They did fix a lot of that at this point,
I think it's fine. But you know, it's hard to get past the reputation.
Just like with Windows Vista, it was fine by the end of it,
but it kind of sucked. And we kind of know the meme where every other version of Windows
is good and every other one sucks. And at this point, hopefully that actually
holds true because the next version would be the good release according to that pattern.
Now, as for possible features and changes with Windows 12, some people are speculating that it's
going to be a complete buildup from the ground up compared to Windows 11, which was like a basically
re-skinning of Windows 10. Under the hood, Windows 11 is just Windows 10 again. So it's possible that
they're going to be redoing that because one other thing that people have been talking about
and reporting about is something called CorePC, which is going to basically be like a more modular
version of Windows, which kind of Windows 10 was in a way, but maybe this is just even more so.
And basically it would allow Microsoft to adapt the Windows installation to
the device. So you could have very basic Chromebook-like devices that
really have not many resources and require a very lightweight operating system. They
would have a more basic version of Windows 12, whereas a desktop PC would have the full thing.
And to me, that does seem like something that might require a architectural change from a
lower level than just changing the look of the OS. Now as for features on the user facing side,
I think it's safe to say that it's going to be a lot of AI stuff. Microsoft has
been partnering with OpenAI and really been pushing AI with Bing and the Bing Assistant.
And even in recent dev versions of Windows 11, they have the Windows Copilot,
which they announced a while ago. It's in basically beta with the dev channel of the
Insider program. And it's basically like having the Bing chat assistant
in Windows. Now at the moment I did try it out. I was not very impressed.
At this moment, it basically is just taking the chat out of Edge and putting it on the side of
Windows. You can use some commands like asking it to change to dark mode, but if you ask it to do
specific stuff, it doesn't even realize that it's in Windows 11 running in the desktop operating
system. So you can ask it to do something and it'll say, "I can't help you do that.
I'm just a large language model", stuff like that, which is not helpful at all. Or it would
even be better if it just said, "I'm not able to do that yet." But at the moment,
it just seems like it has no idea what you're talking about. So hopefully
that gets improved. And depending on how the technology of AI progresses,
it might even be possible that they integrate the AI directly into the operating system,
so it doesn't even have to send requests to the internet. Although I would kind of
be surprised if they did that because Microsoft requires you to be accessing
the internet really to install it anyway. So they're probably going to want to have
a lot more control over an AI model. Just for safety sake would be their argument.
So all that being said, kind of the main thing I would really like to see is the
AI having a much more hands-on ability with the operating system. So it could
navigate through settings itself and look for stuff and not just be
able to do hard-coded pre-programmed things like changing the dark mode.
That's not even that interesting. It's no more difficult than to go
into the settings and change it there. But for example, if you could ask it,
"Hey, I'm looking for that program I installed a while ago that did this,
but I can't remember what it's called." And it knew what that was. That'd be pretty awesome.
Or asking it maybe even to go and change some arbitrary setting or maybe a setting
within a program. Like you'd say, "I can't figure out how to change this setting in
Microsoft Word," and maybe it could navigate through those settings and literally find
what you might be talking about. That kind of stuff would be really awesome.
And I would like to see that. I'm sure that kind of thing will happen eventually,
but will that happen in Windows 12? I guess we'll have to see. Probably not right away,
hopefully soon. As for a redesigned UI, really the only thing we've seen is during one presentation
Microsoft did, they showed off what looked like a new UI that had a floating task bar.
It wasn't pinned to the bottom. And then there were some icons at the top right
and left of the screen, closer to what you see with macOS. So you had like the
battery and stuff up there instead of at the bottom right, like the current task
bar is. So who knows how much of that we'll see. And also maybe more widgets.
They added widgets in Windows 11, but it's kind of still just pinned
to the task bar. I'd really like to see stuff that you can pin to the desktop,
kind of like we had in Windows Vista but got rid of, I'm sure that kind of
stuff will make a comeback. Though I would be really interested to know what you guys think.
Does any of this excite you, or are you just going to stick to Windows 10 as long as you
can? Or maybe there's some other features that I didn't mention that you would like to see,
and that would just put you over the edge and definitely
get Windows 12. Let me know that kind of stuff down in the comments.
If you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is where I was talking about the
lost F13 through F24 keys on the keyboard. Did you know those used to exist? And actually you
can still take advantage of them. Definitely a cool video. I'll put that link right there
you can click on. So thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.