(box lands on table)
It finally happened.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to another video.
Now in today's episode,
we're going to be checking out the physical copy of Windows 11.
That's right. This is a thing now.
Great news for all the people out there
who like to have physical copies of things.
You can now purchase Windows 11 Home and Pro in beautiful physical form.
And what's even better is they're exactly the same price as the digital copies.
So that's $139.99 for Windows 11 Home.
And $199.99 for Pro.
Although on Amazon right now,
the physical copy of Home is $0.99 cheaper than the digital copy.
So... act now if you want to get that.
But yeah, this is a really interesting kinda... thing we've got going on here because
when Windows 11 launched back in October, back when it officially released,
there was no physical copy available and people have kind of been wondering
if Microsoft was going to even do a physical release.
What's interesting though is Microsoft never announced anything about this.
They just put it out there for people to discover themselves and eventually
a few people did.
The tech press caught wind of it.
And well, here we are.
Though, this is not the first time that Microsoft delayed a physical release of Windows.
That actually happened back in 2015 with Windows 10,
where the USB version, at least was not available
until one month after the operating system initially launched.
So if you wanted to get your hands on that physical copy, you just had to wait.
Though they took considerably longer this time to release this version here,
which I find kind of interesting.
Though, if you were certain that you saw
a physical copy of Windows 11 on Amazon in these prior months, you were
probably looking at one of these listings which appear to be genuine at first.
They look kinda convincing, but if you take a little bit of a
closer look, you'll notice a couple of major discrepancies.
Though, Amazon appears to be taking action.
I looked today and two of those listings were taken down, which is good news.
So yeah, if you're wanting to purchase this...
be sure to buy it from the official listing on Amazon,
which I'll have both of those linked down below.
And if you haven't been able to tell by the size of the packaging,
this is a USB copy and I'm pretty sure it's the only physical release
that we're going to get.
I'd be very surprised if Microsoft releases
a DVD version of Windows 11, at least in retail form.
They might do it for OEMs.
But anyways, let's go ahead and without any further ado, open this up
and take a look at what we've got inside, which I'm sure is what you guys
have all been waiting for.
And there we go.
So here's the inner packaging.
We open this up, we've got this pop out brochure here.
"Welcome to Windows 11"
"Getting started"
It tells you what you've got to do.
And on the other side here, you've got a screenshot of the desktop.
It tells you a little bit about it.
Some text blurbs there.
Right here is your activation key.
If we take this out here on the back, sure enough...
Yep. That is the product key.
So we're going to keep that in here, safe and secure for now.
But what I'm sure you guys are mostly interested in is the USB drive itself.
So let's take this out here and see-
I'm actually curious to see the size of this thing.
It just says "Windows" there on that side.
On the other side "WIN 11 Home/Pro"
Oh, that's interesting.
So it's got both of them on here, I guess.
And you see you got the...
Oh,
That's interesting, that's the Windows 10 logo... huh.
I find that very surprising because...
Because... this was...
on those Amazon listings, they also had the Windows 10 logo
on the USB drive and that I thought was a sign that they were fake.
I'm still sure that the listings are not actually from Microsoft because
they're under a different brand name.
But I find that interesting that Microsoft did not change the logo here.
So these might have been just reused
from copies of Windows 10 with a new sticker on here.
Becuase yeah, that is a sticker there that just peels back.
So. Huh.
That's interesting.
I mean, I guess it's good that they found a use for leftover USB drives.
Oh, and something that I almost missed.
If we take a look underneath the USB drive holding area,
there is this booklet here:
"Microsoft Product Guide"
which is in multiple languages, as you can see.
And it just contains your regulatory information,
tells you not to eat the USB drive, all that good stuff.
I definitely really like the packaging.
I think it's very simplistic and it definitely would look nice on a shelf
next to the Windows 11 ice cream that I have.
If you guys missed that video, check it out here.
Yes, It's a real thing. And it's very, very bizarre.
But yeah.
So yeah, it's actually-
that's kind of funny that the Windows 11 ice cream
is technically the first physical Windows 11 product.
And if you were wondering Windows reports this as a 28.87 gigabyte USB drive
which I found kinda surprising, I thought this was gonna be, like,
an 8 GB drive at the very most, maybe a 16, because Windows 11
only takes up a fraction of the space on this drive.
And on top of that,
the partition for Windows 11 isn't even utilizing all the space on the drive.
There's just over a gig and a half of unallocated space.
And yeah, I mean, if you're in the market for a copy of Windows 11 for a new PC build...
I would just say get the physical copy.
I mean, why not?
It's the same price as the digital.
And you're gonna be getting a box you could put on a shelf like I said,
and an almost 30 GB USB drive
that you could format and repurpose for whatever you want, which...
I mean, hey, I'll take that any day.
Why not?
I think it makes total sense, by the way, that they're including both the Home
and Pro Edition on one USB drive.
I mean, sure,
if you bought Home, you could install Pro from this technically, but
you could just download that from Microsoft's website,
you could download the installer.
So I think it makes total sense from a logistical perspective
to just have one USB drive for both versions.
But yeah, I mean that's pretty much all I wanted to cover today, guys.
Yeah, definitely a bit of a shorter video for this channel, but...
We could install this honestly, in a VM, but...
there's nothing really special from here on out.
This is just a standard copy of Windows 11.
The install process is exactly the same, obviously, so...
Yeah, that's all I've got for you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed this one,
if you did, be sure to give it a thumbs up,
be sure to get subscribed,
notifications, all that good stuff.
And as always, I want to thank you all so much for watching.
Thank you all very much for the support that you've given this channel
that has allowed me to purchase stuff like this for videos.
I really, really appreciate it.
And as always, I will see you all in the next video.
(outro music)