 All right, it is Windows 11 time. Microsoft announced this new operating system just last week and now they've released a preview build that anyone can go and grab and download and install onto their machines. Now whether or not you should do that, that's entirely up to you, but it's kind of my job. So I've gone into the head and installed it on my desktop PC. I want to take you through a bunch of the new changes in Windows 11. So there's a new start menu, there's a new interface with all sorts of design changes, there's a new store, there's a bunch of new new new and there's some familiar stuff as well. So this is Windows 11. So the first thing you'll notice when you first play around with Windows 11 is it's centered. The taskbar, centered. The start menu, centered. Yes, it's centered. It looks a lot like Mac OS, Chrome OS, that sort of thing. Like it really feels like you're using an Android phone, like it's a launcher basically. I can see all of my apps, I can go back and pin apps and I kind of don't mind that. I feel like it's a lot more simplified and I feel like that is the big thing about Windows 11. I will go into all the design changes but simplification and just the design tweaks, that's the big thing you're really going to notice the first time you use Windows 11. Now talking about design tweaks, let's take a look at the system tray. Now before you'd have had a volume sort of fly out that would be up the top here, but now Microsoft's kind of simplified it. You can control the volume from down here, there's airplane mode, quick settings you can get to or you can jump into the full settings interface here. Now look at settings, it looks completely different to Windows 10 settings. There's a navigation bar down the side. I no longer have to sort of dig in, like say you're going to Windows update, I can check my update history and I'm like okay let me just go check my Bluetooth devices. Like I can really quickly get between sections. Now this will take, if you're used to using Windows, it will take a couple of hours to get used to. It really kind of threw me off trying to work out where all the settings were, but as I've gotten used to it I really like this. Like I just really like where Microsoft's heading with this simplification and I feel like you'll find this obviously elsewhere in Windows 11 as well. Now let's look at File Explorer. Now File Explorer used to have this sort of ribbon interface that used to be very much like this. Now they've actually removed that in favour of a command bar and I think we're going to see this sort of interface show up a lot more in Windows 11. It's not quite there everywhere just yet. If I look at Notepad this uses like an old menuing system, but I think we're going to see this show up a bunch and I kind of like it. It just feels again a lot more simplified. I don't want to say the word simplified a hundred times in this video, but really that's kind of what it's all about. Now another area that's changed, obviously the Notification Centre as well, or Action Centre as Microsoft calls it. So you get your notifications, you can obviously swipe those away easily. You've got the calendar that pops out here, you can obviously shrink that so it's a little bit more customisable there, but it just looks a lot better. And if I dig back into the settings I can actually show you some of the UI changes here in the dark mode. So we're obviously in light mode now, if I go into like start and run that will be all light mode. If I flick over to dark mode it takes a few seconds for it to sort of like change. You'll notice that the settings panel will also change as well. Now I prefer the dark mode personally. So here we go, we're in dark mode now. So this just looks a lot better, I just prefer the start menu here, File Explorer obviously be dark as well. They haven't quite put dark mode everywhere, I'd really like to see this in the run, I'd like to see this in Task Manager and stuff like that, but hopefully that will come before this actually ships. And there's also a bunch of different themes that Microsoft's added in here. So I can put this theme on, which is a default one, or maybe this one. And this kind of shows off some of the subtleties to Microsoft's design here. So let me just show you. If I hover over like this orb here, you'll see the colour sort of shining through on the window here. And immediately if I switch away, so say I bring up like settings, you'll see that colour is no longer there. But as soon as it's in view the colour is there, so it gives it that sort of like depth in the design. I kind of like that real subtlety of Windows 11. It's those real subtle changes that just makes it look and feel like new. So not everything is perfect in settings. So I was really hoping if I dug into stuff like the mouse settings, and I wanted some additional mouse settings, it wouldn't do this and throw me into this sort of like old interface of Windows. And you know, the control panel is still there. Like, obviously, I feel like that's there because Microsoft wants people to be able to get to that stuff that they rely on. But I don't like the way that it kind of shoves you into this old interface. All these settings really should be in the settings by now. And I'm not quite sure why they're not. Now one of the other real big UI changes to Windows 11 is widgets. Now instead of being buried in a taskbar here, they're actually got their own button now and it slides out from the left. So you'll see there's a bunch of different widgets. There's weather widget, there's you know, I'm getting updates on the Euro soccer games. There's news, all that sort of stuff. I feel like we're eventually going to get third party ones from developers, but they're not quite there just yet. So you can choose from a bunch of Microsoft ones. Now these Windows widgets may remind you of Windows Vista, but you can't actually grab these widgets and sort of drag and drop them on the desktop just yet. I don't know whether that will come to Windows 11 or not, but they're kind of contained within their own system here. And one of the things I really don't like about this though is if I click on the new section here and I want to see one of these articles, it will throw me into Microsoft Edge, which isn't my default browser. And it seems like Microsoft is not adhering to the default browser stuff here. I really hate that and it's actually a big part of the search as well. So say I search for the verge, like once again, I have Chrome set as my default browser. It's going to throw me into Edge. Now I kind of get why Microsoft's doing this because they want to force people into Edge, but I feel like it's really icky and I really wish they wouldn't do that and they would respect my browser defaults. Now beyond some of the surface level UI work, there's actually some really interesting multitasking changes here. So obviously in Windows you've been able to sort of snap Windows side by side in Windows 10 and a bunch of different Windows operating systems over the years, but Microsoft's gone a little bit of a step further here. So if I hover over the maximize button, you'll see a bunch of different snap layouts. That's basically what Microsoft's calling these. And it's really an easy and quick way of surfacing all the different sort of snap modes that Windows has had for years and just making them really easy for people to discover them and use them. So look, there's this three by three snap mode here. I'm going to launch that up. I'm going to put paint here and I'm going to put Xbox here and there you go. Immediately I've got three apps side by side and I can obviously snap these back into place where they were, minimize them, all that sort of stuff. It just makes things a lot more accessible. There's also a bunch of gaming improvements in Windows 11. I'll talk you through some of those. Now this is the new Xbox app. I say new, but it's actually been around for sort of six months. You might recognize it if you've been using on Windows 10. Either way, you get access to game pass, all your social stuff and obviously the store as well. And it's basically the sort of like hub for the export stuff. So eventually it will have X cloud integration. So you'll be able to stream Xbox games to your PC. That's not there quite yet, but this is what's there right now. Another feature they're bringing from the export side is direct storage. So if you have an in-app device that's connected to a PC, you can actually export your game to the direct storage. Which will speed up all of your game load times on compatible games. Now you'll need an MVME, PCI free or four SSDs to really take advantage of this. And I don't believe it's quite there in the preview build yet, so we'll have to see how that works out. Dynamic refresh rate is a new Windows 11 feature and it basically lets your device refresh at dynamic rates. So what that means is can be really important on laptops. So actually dynamically alter that so you might be running at 60hz the majority of the time but it will shoot up to 120hz when you're doing stuff like inking or you're scrolling and stuff like that. What that does is it saves battery. Okay so up next is the Microsoft store. Ah yes the Microsoft store, the Windows store, the Windows app store, whatever you want to call it. It's getting massively overhauled in Windows 11. So as you can see this is the brand new store here and it looks a lot different to the Windows 10 one. There's a obviously an apps section, there's a gaming section, an entertainment section but really it's been sped up, it looks a lot better and the big key thing is that you might actually get some apps in here that you care about. So Microsoft is allowing developers to add in Win32 apps. So I think we're going to see a bunch of like desktop apps appear in this store in the coming months. WinZip's there today, there's a bunch of PWAs as well, Microsoft is allowing those in the store. So I think we're going to see some pretty interesting apps appear here and obviously Adobe's on board as well. One of the other key changes to the store is that Microsoft is allowing developers to bring their own commerce engines to the store. Now what this means is they can keep 100% of their revenue if they do this. So they use their own payment platform system or a third party one and they don't have to pay Microsoft a penny. I think that's huge and it could mean we see a bunch of new apps that we haven't seen here before. Microsoft's been a lot more open with this store and I think that's great for developers and end consumers at the end of the day. Hopefully we'll see a bunch of new apps and maybe some familiar storefronts like I really hope that we see Steam games and apps appear in here. Maybe if it just links out to Steam. I don't care, I just want this to be a central location where I can just get all the apps I actually care about. And speaking of the store, there's a big missing part of this that we can't test just yet and it's Android apps on Windows. That was a huge announcement when Microsoft made that last week. They're going to be running alongside Windows apps so you're able to side by side these applications just as if they were Windows apps. So what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to go into the store and search for something like TikTok and you might find like the Android version of it. It'll say go out to the Amazon app store. I think this is a big deal beyond just the Android apps as well because I feel like it's going to mean that Microsoft's going to open their store up to rival app stores. Now I know a bunch of you are probably watching this thinking why do I need Android apps on my Windows PC and I think that's a fair point but there are some apps like home automation apps like Ring and stuff that just aren't available on the web and I feel like just getting those Android apps on my PC, there's probably only one or two that I really care about but it'd be really nice to have them on my PC. Speaking of other things that are missing from this preview build, the Microsoft Teams integration. So that was also another big deal that Microsoft announced last week. We can't quite test it just yet but basically what it's going to mean is Microsoft Teams is going to be integrated into the taskbar so you can like right click send someone a message or start a video call them all that sort of stuff. Now this is only integrated for consumers at first and not commercial customers so I'm not sure exactly when that's going to arrive for commercial customers in Windows 11 and I think one thing that Microsoft Teams getting integrated into Windows 11 says about Microsoft is I don't know what's going to happen with Skype like that used to be bundled with Windows 10 and now it's not so bye bye Skype. There are some questions that remain around Windows 11 though. Can Microsoft create a consistent UI across the OS? How will Android apps run and most importantly will your PC even get Windows 11? Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to answer exactly what the minimum requirements will be for Windows 11 PCs just yet. Now we've obviously got months of testing to go so some things will change but it really feels like Microsoft's trying to strike a tricky balance between security and the traditional openness of Windows. I think between now and October which is when we're expecting Microsoft to launch Windows 11 we're going to hear a bunch more about this new operating system and I'm hoping we're going to see some surprises along the way and just some general improvements to what's already looking like a pretty solid foundation. Okay thanks for watching our first look at Windows 11 we've obviously been covering a bunch more of this at theverge.com so check that out and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.