Microsoft is confirming today that it’s planning to refocus Windows 10X on single-screen devices. “The world is a very different place than it was last October when we shared our vision for a new category of dual-screen Windows devices,” explains Panos Panay, Microsoft’s Windows and devices chief. “With Windows 10X, we designed for flexibility, and that flexibility has enabled us to pivot our focus toward single-screen Windows 10X devices that leverage the power of the cloud to help our customers work, learn and play in new ways.”
Microsoft isn’t saying exactly when single-screen devices like laptops will support Windows 10X, nor when dual-screen devices will launch with the OS. However, Windows 10X will launch on single-screen devices first. “We will continue to look for the right moment, in conjunction with our OEM partners, to bring dual-screen devices to market,” says Panay.
If there’s one person that can pull off moving Windows forward, it’s Panay. I feel like this move points towards Windows 10X becoming the default version of Windows people will get when they buy a new PC – a Windows 11, if you will. It will have a new UI, and run Win32 applications inside containers.
I’m interested to see if they can finally pull it off.
What me more interests is:
Will Windows 10X like Windows 10 be publised as Install-ISO file and/or as DVD, too?
Or will it only be existing as preinstalled system?
If the first one is thrue, you then can testing it in any Virtual Machine of your choice and can install it on your already existing hardware.
If the second one is true, you definitly need to buy new hardware to use Windows 10X.
Windows 10X is currently only available as an emulator download from the Windows Store so it is very easy to test with a virtual machine. Of course you can “easily” transform any emulator image into a vhd/vhdx/wim/esd/iso/img but Microsoft essentialy went out of their way to make testing Windows 10X inside an emulator as easy as possible. The only disadvantage that I could find is that the emulator is based on HyperV which is only a part of the Pro-and-up editions, not Home. Of course by going the “vhd2wim” route you can try it on already existing hardware as people already have done succesfully
Disadvantage? I would think it’s only more tech savvy users testing out operating systems via emulation and they are probably running Windows 10 Pro. I wish there was even more separation between the Home and Pro versions. Why can’t I still not turn off automatic updates on a “Pro” OS.
MJ,
Let’s face it, windows 10 pro is less “pro” than windows 7 pro. Mark my words, in the next decade “pro” will come to mean any computer capable of running 3rd party applications outside a walled garden. Regular users will loose this ability unless they pony up for a “pro” version.
Nope, not facing that. Windows 10 Pro is exactly as Pro as Windows 7 Pro and differs from Windows 10 Home in the same way that Windows 7 (Starter, Home Basic and Home Premium) did: Ability to connect to a domain and be centrally managed.
Of course in the Cloud-age this now means Windows 10 Pro now also has an Azure AD option and management by Intune while Windows 10 Home has added a Microsoft Account connection and Family/Parental Control.
The only real change is the addition of IIS to Windows 10 Home, this used to be a Windows 7 Pro feature.
Your prediction for the next decade does seem spot-on. I am not sure if this will be a net gain or loss for home users. I quite like the current middle ground where home users can configure Windows to install from the “store only” but can easily switch that to “warn” or “anywhere” and think this is a good way to balance safety and freedom at the moment
avgalen,
With windows 7 pro you could fully disable unwanted telemetry and had better control which updates you’d get. With windows 10 even pro you can only postpone “feature updates” until a future date, not block them permanently (of course you can kill the windows update service all together but then you don’t get the security updates).
This is possibly outdated, but it describes what I mean…
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wintp-insider_update/how-to-disable-windows-update-in-windows-10-pro/3a9d4a23-3c40-47da-ba30-0e249047e3da?page=1
Obviously microsoft got tons of flack over forced updates and has given owners more control over when to schedule updates, but as I understand it, there are still forced feature updates eventually. These are more recent…
https://www.howtogeek.com/410183/microsoft-abandons-windows-10s-forced-updates/
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/windows-10-cant-turn-off-updates/0c85867d-581c-4144-b4f1-d1557fc54fea
Of course now that they’ve stopped bumping the major windows version number, it’s always “windows 10”, but I would argue these forced feature updates are basically creating new major versions of windows anyways. Some users may not want new apps & “features” to be added to our computers without permission.
Yes it interesting, I manage a bunch of machine control devices and we basically just don’t have them connected to the web except we we need it. Can’t you just disconnect those devices you do not want updated from the network?
If those machines need network access, why wouldn’t you want automatic security updates?
I’ve considered leaving devices permanently disconnected when possible, air-gaped even like some intrinsically safe systems, but then I realise I’m not omnipotent and return to reality!
No, it’s not really convenient to disconnect my personal PC from the Internet. LOL I would just prefer to manually apply an update exactly when I wish. It’s annoying to wake up, logon to my PC and see it has rebooted overnight. I am usually in the middle of something and sometimes browser tabs don’t recover or whatever. It’s not something that happens often because I normally remember to just get updates on Patch Tuesday but it should be an option for a “Pro” user.
Replying to MJ here because there is no proper Reply button on MJ’s post. 2nd hit on Google, dated Dec 16 2009:
How do I stop Windows Update from restarting?
Navigate to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update. Double click “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installation,” then choose Enabled and click OK.Dec 16, 2009
@MJ, yes I understand, but isn’t that more a commentary about how you work on your one personal PC than the OS update service? You could be just as easily complaining about a power failure on a desktop, on a laptop there are even less excuses because you’ve got a battery backed system with the various user configurable options for both sleep or hibernation!
I admit I’m a bit biased because of the personal experiences I’ve had with what I would consider to be poor quality IT micro-managers. Most of the problems blamed on updates were caused by them being lazy and taking shortcuts or not doing stuff at all when it should have been done weeks or months earlier, which they then tried to blame on a more recent system update.
I’ve found the Win 10 update system with it’s various phased releases to be very effective. By setting a few select systems as canaries I typically get weeks of advance warning of potential problems. I can’t see how one machine is a problem at all, maybe thousands that you can’t access directly, but then you can do as I do and have the bulk of them on a later release schedule!
cpcf,
I’m a bit biased as well in part because I’m not a normal windows user any longer and my phone only rings when there are problems. So the majority of my experience with windows these days is problematic, haha. Like when a windows update was deleting user profile data, I got the call. We escalated to microsoft, who at the time infuriatingly said it was by design and we would need to make adjustments to our application. Of course when news of widespread deletions blew up they retracted the update (while falsely claiming they didn’t know about the problem).
Anyways, I do realize most of the time windows 10 will work for most people and on the whole it isn’t nearly as bad as what I’ve seen. I reserve most of my judgement for areas in which I feel the vendors are inching closer and closer towards controlling what owners can do on the hardware they own. That’s fair game to me.
I was extremely fortunate to have grown up when I did because today I think the barrier has gotten much higher for tinkering with hardware and it continues to get harder. Take DOS, I learned so much on there because the low level stuff was so easily accessible. Kids today using android/chromebooks/ios/windows don’t get much of an opportunity to be exposed to the inner workings of anything. /trip down memory lane
It’s all pretty light on detail, I wonder what “refocus” means in practice relative to the earlier announcements. Lots of ambiguous terms, single-screen devices being a major ambiguity.
I’m not cynical, but it feels like WinRT meets WinPhone.
cpcf,
I get a similar feeling, but like you said there aren’t any details, Doesn’t seem worthwhile for the verge to written an article about it, oh well.
This post and article is light on details because it is a “vision” document not a technical document. Basically Microsoft thought in October that “split dual screens” would be the most important feature of Windows 10X but they are now realising that the Containers/Emulator/Sandboxing is actually the more important feature. Technically nothing has changed yet, just the mindset of people
avgalen,
Regardless of what you call it, it’s low on substance. The main tidbit here, which has already been rumored, is that they’re pushing back dual screens due to OEM circumstances in favor of single screen windows 10x devices. As far as the platform goes, it sounds like they’re taking another stab at building a chromebook from microsoft.
From the blog:
(emphasis mine) This makes it sound like microsoft intends to provision or maybe run “legacy” win32 apps from their datacenters rather than locally. Again, zero details, but if true it could mean microsoft has finally found a way to effectively lock down owner computers while being able to say “yes windows 10x will support your old windows applications”, which is something that’s held back microsoft’s previous efforts to restrict platforms while not simultaneously pissing off it’s customer base. It would kind of suck to require internet access to run your own applications, but that’s what the “cloud” euphemism means. Hypothetically it checks off consumer backwards compatibility expectations while putting 3rd party software under microsoft’s control, something that has eluded them.
There’s an awful lot of speculation here of course, but this is microsoft’s fault for throwing around buzzwords without detail or context. It reminds me of the confusing as hell “.net” campaign nearly 20 years ago and nobody understood what they were talking about although I suspect most people won’t remember that anymore. Oh well, we’ll have to revisit the topic when microsoft actually comes out with meaningful details.
You hear “cloud-powered virtualization” and your mind goes to “putting 3rd party software under microsoft’s control”. Instead of thinking of it as an extra way of running (legacy) applications (more choice) you think of it as the only way of running (legacy) applications (less choice). That is quite cynical.
Also, you hear “cloud powered datacenters” and you immediately think “Microsoft datacenters only”. Have you even heared of https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/ ?
The Verge article was indeed short on details but that is because it was based on a blog post that wasn’t about details. It even mentioned “more details next month at Build”. Bringing up some [b]campaign[/b] from nearly 20 years ago when discussing a basic “this is where Windows is now and this is where we are going” blogpost makes no sense to me
avgalen,
Indeed it is. And though I have little basis for making any assertions, cpcf put it very well: “the lack of reported detail leaves them to our imagination”.
Actually in this case, yes I believe that (outside of enterprise customers) any cloud features likely will be tethered to microsoft data centers. I’d be surprised if it weren’t the case.
So we all agree then, it lacks informative details. What we disagree on is whether there’s anything newsworthy without details. Oh well, I just hope the next article about this has more substance.
Well, it’s more of an obscure inside joke now, I don’t expect it to make sense 🙂
If 10X turns out to be just another polished turd with a new UI, that was supposed to be streamlined, it will be disappointing. I want it to be much slimmer, boot as fast as a Chromebook, and not hog 30-GB of drive space in the Windows folder.
Obvious troll is obvious, but I’ll bite a bit anyway.
Windows 10, just like Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 basically has been a 4 GB compressed image that expands into a 8 GB OS (Program Files, Users, Windows). Of course we all know that grows during actual use as swapfile, pagefile, hibernatefiles, updates/rollbacks and caches are filled but my Windows folder is currently 18 GB “Size on disk” on an install that is a few years old and has tools like Visual Studio installed that fill up the WinSXS folder by quite a bit. It also still boots in about 10 seconds and is ready for use in a few seconds after login.
Of course we would all like Windows to be slimmer and faster and have all the good features of a ChromeBook, but we would also like it to have all the good features of Windows like running our programs and games like the above mentioned Visual Studio
@avaglen, that’s pretty sweet, my devices average about 23GB for the windows folder.
I admit I’ve one main laptop that has a huge Windows folder only because I can’t bear to throw stuff away. I use this device to test and vet pretty much every application that appears on my networks, so it has a huge .msi installer cache of about 50GB and that’s my fault. Even so it boots in seconds also.
23 GB is also my “size”, but 18 GB is my “size on disk”. This difference is especially important for the Windows folder because of all the linked files in the WinSXS folder that are double-counted in the “size” property. (About 64K folders and 3 times as many files)
And of course a bigger Windows folder doesn’t mean a slower boot. Windows is just extremely aggressive in caching/precompiling stuff for quicker access so it requires a lot of space. It is also extremely conservative in keeping updates/installers/rollbacks so you can always fix Windows and programs when things go wrong
I am one of those people that wonder what happened between NT 5 (2000/XP/2003) and NT 6 (Vista/7/8/8.1/10) that suddenly blew up diskspace by so much, but ever since Vista diskspace has basically been stable. I just hate the diskspace complaint because people are so inaccurate and attribute so many problems to this when in reality the installation file is just the same as over a decade ago
(also, there are many other posts on here that I would like to reply to (alfman), but the WordPress system here basically discourages interesting discussions by disabling replies several levels deep. So I will just add that Windows 10 Pro Updates and Telemetry are now the same as in Windows 7 Pro at the end. In the past people complained about the lack of Service Packs, now they complain about having to install them within a 2 year timeperiod. Windows 10X will simply allow Win32 apps to come from everywhere. You can already test that in an emulator. New options will be extra options for Enterprise that don’t want their clients to install/run Win32 apps but need clients to run them anyway …..so virtualisation on a managed remote server is a great solution for them. They have been using Remote Desktop Apps for that for a long time
avgalen,
Yeah, I miss parts of the old system. For better or worse, wordpress takes over as the new industry standard and I deal with it quite a bit.
It didn’t used to be, but I’ll take your word that they’ve finally added the option to disable it completely. I’ll have to take a look.
As an aside, now that microsoft has stopped updating the major windows version number, it creates a new problem with looking up information online. Answers to queries are going to become less accurate over time as “windows 10” spans an increasing timeframe. Windows 10 this year doesn’t necessarily behave as the windows 10 of two years ago.
Well, it’s more about the lack of control. It rubs some people the wrong way when microsoft behaves as though they own the place.
I don’t want to make assumptions that the features are fixed especially when microsoft hasn’t made any public commitments. For example I remember back with windows 8 that early prereleases actually supported “classic mode” and allowed people to disable the metro interface, but then microsoft went on to remove it all together. Point being maybe what you’re testing is the final product or maybe it isn’t.
Obviously given the lack of information, your guesses are as good as mine. But there are technical differences between “virtualization” and “remote applications”. Remote apps can be virtualized, but whether or not they are makes no difference whatsoever to the client. Client technologies like RDP already provide remote applications today. As for building “applications that seamlessly enable cloud-powered virtualization”, who knows what that means. Often “cloud” is meaningless marketing drivel, but in general it’s used in reference to outsourcing infrastructure or services to a 3rd party provider. Take the examples of cloud-storage, cloud-email, cloud-hosting, etc. In other words you don’t need to know how/where it runs, we’ll take take of the details for you.
Time will tell what this means in terms of windows 10x. You’ve parsed their words in the context of enterprise uses cases, and maybe you’re right, but the foldable PC market that windows 10x was originally supposed to target seems more directed at ordinary consumers than businesses.
I can think of a thousand ways this could fail and ultimately bring down Windows 10X with it completely, simply due to all the expectations that consumers have of their laptops.
On the other hand if Windows 10X manages to be as easy to maintain and light on resources as ChromeOS, I can think of plenty of scenarios where it could be quite successful.
Whether this will be more of a Windows RT moment or a Windows-on-netbooks moment (where MS built up a pseudo-monopoly right up until the iPad killed the netbook) remains to be seen.
There are some interesting possibilities, but the lack of reported detail leaves them to our imagination.
Personally, I think this Win 10X announcement is more of a tactical response to Apple moving to it’s own silicon. I can see a raft of hardware specific features coming to both platforms in coming years. I’m not sure it’s going to be good for independent developers, IBM Mk.II, closed shop.