Mac Fanboy Reviews Windows 11

hello and welcome to the new snazzy laboratories if my microphone sounds a little bit echoey right now trust me that's the least of my problems we are still unpacking there is crap strewn everywhere we have walls to paint sound paneling to hang lighting to figure out it's going to take some time so please be patient and bear with us we will figure it out eventually but in the meantime make sure you're subscribed and leave a like down below because we will be doing a studio tour soon but today well everyone is bagging on a certain company with a certain product and i couldn't help but add to the fire that is microsoft with windows 11. now look okay i am a mac first user i grew up on a mac that is the system that i'm most comfortable with but i'm not a i have used windows before i in fact use windows almost daily i have one desktop computer at my house and it's a pc running windows so i have pretty much experience with windows from windows 8 there on and so i am actually kind of excited about the new windows 11 and it looked really good to me but i'm hearing a bunch of reports that it's apparently not or something so i went through and i installed it on my vr pc that i actually built in this video a couple of weeks ago which you should definitely check out if you haven't seen it already and yeah let's check it out and see if it's any good [Music] okay i've only been using windows 11 for a few hours now but i gotta say my initial impressions are actually really good good job microsoft now look i know a lot of windows people are super pissed about the new version but i don't really know why there's a mac user there are a number of changes that i think are excellent so one of the things that windows in my mind has never really done that well is have any visual cohesion everything is different it looks like it comes from different eras nothing's really looks like it's designed by the same team that has changed in windows 11 and while the visual changes are notable and we'll talk about those in a minute the bigger changes come in just the fluidity and the speed of the os so windows has always been fast faster than mac os i mean no doubt about it but one of the reasons that mac os felt better was that there were actual animations windows 11 has created a perfect hybrid in my opinion where the animations are really quick and snappy unlike in mac os where i often feel they take too much time but they also exist and they look good and it makes the kind of user experience improve overall because it feels like there's actual design going on and things are you know fluid and they're meant to move and it just feels great there are a number of really small changes that probably only weirdos like me will super note um like the squared corners now being rounded um the scroll bars on the side now being kind of more like ios and mac os but you can still move your cursor over them and they will expand stuff that's a big deal but you don't really think about like scrolling scrolling previously in windows used to just scroll instantly as you moved your scroll wheel down it was a horrible experience everything seemed really juttery and mac os for a long time but especially once the iphone came around really adopted this fluid type of scrolling motion frame interpolation in scrolling exists in windows now and it feels fantastic it's it's not as good as mac os but it's pretty close i mean i move one click on my scroll wheel and it ramps up the speed and then slows it down it feels like a natural motion which is really really great there's also new theming and glass so look at this window right here one of the problems with previous versions of windows was that you would i don't know like with windows aero in windows vista it was obviously horrible because everything was like too translucent and glassy in appearance but it also clouded information that you actually needed to see and i think mac os does this too where like in macos big sur they will tint the entire window and it screws up your brain's internal white balance or black balance because they're messing with the content that really should not be messed with windows 11 does this really nicely because of course the window that needs to say the same color down here does this is all readable and very visible in the file explorer but then up here up top we have this very nice glass that just lets a little bit of color through now if i move the window around you can see where it follows the line but it's so so opaque it's so non-transparent that it's not overwhelming at all and i think that the end result is something that looks really really great in areas and apps where you don't need the content like this to be you know specifically contrasty the settings app for example is one where you get the effect of the whole entire desktop through the window and i think it's appropriate there but that's not the norm and so most windows just maintain their standard color but then the top has a little bit of fun that comes through and i think that's a really great balance of making something look good without messing with the content okay a lot of the visual improvements um kind of go hand in hand with improve functionality so let's talk about that starting with settings settings in windows have always been disgusting i've i've hated them forever because nothing seems to make sense it's impossible to find the thing that you want to modify and with windows 10 particularly you have this weird fragmented crap where like some of it was in the modern ui but but some of it wasn't windows 11 has improved a lot now it's not perfect you still can with enough work and effort for example if i go here in a networking internet advanced network settings and more network adapter options you can still find old windows underneath the service i mean this is like straight out of windows 95 but the majority of settings are now accessible through an actual settings app they're more cohesive and some stuff that used to pop up those old windows while they do still exist are less common and most of these settings have just been merged into the settings app and it works really really really great the layout is super smart there's a pane on the left side that allows you to pick the over kind of overreaching category and then there are visual layout and representations here on the right and it works really really well so for example if i want to change the taskbar i just go into taskbar i can go into taskbar behaviors and check it out i can align it to the left which is something that i will be doing because they've done a thing that mac os does and i don't like it look at that by the way that's really fun they even have an animation when you change where the taskbar is aligned totally unnecessary but a nice change when you open something that hasn't been opened before it expands the size of your taskbar and the widgets the icons move around that's what mac os does with the dock and i've always hated that i don't know why windows decided to copy that but if you left a line that'll just continue to open stuff up on the right in any case um yeah the settings are really really great um you can still find the windows 95 settings pane but what i find the most kind of value add is actual searchable settings now that existed in windows 10 but it was pretty much worthless this time around it's really really good and for basic stuff like your network settings and sound and stuff that used to be jammed in old windows there is a new kind of control center pane where you can manage this stuff directly inside of your system tray which is really really fantastic you can add and remove these hot icons as you want um you can obviously get to the settings from here as well this is well laid out it's kind of copying mac os but mac os kind of copied ios and android and the same happens here it's just it's good settings finally don't blow chunks okay let's talk the taskbar because while i did crap on it a little bit in terms of the functionality department it is massively redesigned and massively improved one thing i should note however on alignment is that you can no longer pin it to the left side and right side of the displays you can do that in mac os you can do that on windows 10 windows 11 nope can't do that which is kind of weird there are a number of changes here and a lot of them are really really great if you move over into your kind of calendar uh notifications pane this has been massively redesigned the calendar looks excellent interestingly there's no integration with any calendar app so it just does nothing it's just a paper calendar basically on your wall but on your desktop i have to think this is going to change and then you have notifications above there when they arrive that are viewable and actionable one of the things that i really like is that not all notifications display in the bottom right of the display like they used to in windows 10 and like they do in mac os 11. if an app doesn't believe itself to be an urgent notification then it can just automatically put those inside of the notification pane without alerting you which is really great and it just you get a little red dot that says hey there's notifications in here really subtle really excellent especially for people who don't really want notifications on their desktop that's me i'm talking about windows and mac wise don't like them go away great job microsoft okay let's talk about the start menu because this is the thing that looks probably the most stark and different um we've moved away from kind of the the same holdover design that made it into windows 10 but was kind of just removing and emaciating some of the features in windows 8 that people didn't like and it's completely redesigned it looks really really great at the top you have a search you can also obviously click the search bar down here and search actually seems really cohesive now i don't have enough apps and files to make a declarative statement but while i don't think there have been any changes to kind of like the kernel there are some underpinnings that based on what i've read search should be massively improved and that does seem to be the case which is great because search in windows has always sucked rocks at least compared to spotlight in mac os which can freaking find anything okay back to the start menu you have your pinned apps which you've always had but interestingly some of them are spam which has always been the case but what's weird is that like with uh candy crush it's not just installed as part of windows so photo editor here this is a third-party app if i click it it doesn't actually just open it goes and actively downloads itself from the microsoft store so the bloatware is there but it's not actually installed if that makes sense luckily it is very easy to remove these apps you just right click them press install press on install and they go away so even though these are just shortcuts you can get rid of them very easily i would just like them all to go away but it's kind of a bummer because in principle this could be a really cool feature if it says like hey you know what are you trying to do and you're like well i'm a content creator and it's like okay here's 15 apps you might want and if you click davinci resolve it just goes and finds itself from the windows store and automatically installs that would be cool but it doesn't do that not yet anyway you can still get an access to a full list of apps which is fairly basic and simple and then there is the recommended pane which recommends not only applications but also files as well fairly cohesive fairly comprehensive i like it so that's the start menu we've already talked about the search menu now we get to well whatever they call this thing it's basically spaces for mac os you can have multiple desktops and so i can take a window i can drag it into maybe i can't do that there we go i have to open the new desktop and then i can manage multiple layouts and multiple desktops from within this kind of environment one thing that's really interesting is that you'll notice that the taskbar changes so i have obs open in desktop one when i move over to desktop two uh obs actually goes away so that's kind of interesting um i'm not a multiple desktops guy never have been sorry don't like them don't care for them don't want them but if this is something you're into that's really great what's right next to that you say ah this is widgets widgets are now available in windows 11 and you can access this ping quickly by just pressing windows w so that opens and closes it which is pretty nice um the widgets are basically just like really really really simplified web apps and right now they only appear to come from microsoft themselves one would presume that in the future there will be third-party widget extensions available it's fine okay you scroll down and this gets into your standard kind of news aggregation bing riggum roll that we're used to but up here you can add and customize these widgets now interestingly they're all kind of dual column you cannot change the width so you can change the length of the widgets and obviously the larger or smaller you make them the more or less information is displayed some apps benefit from a really large layout and some do not but that is the case um i think this is fine it has the potential to be really good right now it seems a little underbaked and not fully utilized but the fact that it's easily accessible is nice i don't think it's any worse than mac os's abysmal widget functionality in fact it's probably better maybe not in the sense that there are a lot more widgets for mac os than there are for windows 11 right now but the implementation on it on windows looks way better why can't we just go to something like dashboard again that just made sense it just worked it was cool it was a screen you could pull up had a bunch of widgets you could make the screen go why are we burying it in like half of the menu of the screen just get out of here it's a widget it's supposed to be easy to access oh last thing i forgot to mention that is super cool and i actually can't believe that microsoft is the first one to do this but when there's an app using your microphone and or webcam there is a little red icon that appears in the bottom right this serves two purposes number one obviously it visually denotes that an app is using those devices to alert you as a user now the mac does do this with the webcam but only the webcam and only when you're using a macbook pro or an imac the second thing it does is if you click that icon then a pane opens for you to adjust settings and or adjust permissions for the device and app used which is really really cool and permissions in general are just massively improved in windows 11 so if i go into the settings click apps and then i go into i don't know cortana because i know this uses the microphone check it out microphone is turned on i can turn that off and no longer will cortana be able to use the microphone this is a really great change now i do wonder if permissions are restricted to apps installed through the microsoft store and secondly and this is a big downside in my opinion you don't have the ability to turn those off by default so it does not ask you for me permissions it just uses them but once you see that an app is using those devices that you don't want to use those devices then you can act on it it's better than nothing it needs a little bit of work but holy smokes great start okay let's talk apps pretty much every default app in windows 11 has had at least some form of upgrade but some of them are fairly small so i wanted to highlight the three apps that i think have the nicest improvements from windows 10. the first one being photos one of my major frustrations with windows is that there's never been like a good multimedia viewer app like you could open photos but then it was weird and the old photos app in windows 10 was not very good and it kind of synced with onedrive all the time which i don't necessarily want and then there was like paint where you could paste multimedia inside it was just a mess okay the photos app is kind of a culmination of preview and mac os photos if that's your point of reference and combines them into one and i think it's actually pretty powerful so i can go in here i can click a photo there's a comparison tool which i think is really pretty handy i can favorite specific photos which is really great if i want to look at them at a later date and then of course i have basic editing options so you know we're talking real basic like a couple of filters and saturation and contrast they don't call it that which is kind of frustrating and then you can save a copy or save that over the top of the original image great okay but what's more interesting about that other than the really rudimentary editing tools are the fact that there is the ability to edit photos like a pro microsoft calls it by using extensions from third parties now unfortunately i think that microsoft's tools are just too basic mac os's photos tools are way better by default and so you're already gonna have to use these extensions where you might not have to on the mac however if you are more interested in in-depth photo editing without going out and buying like lightroom for example this is a really great idea of editing inside of the native photos app on your os but with third-party utilities and extensions i wish apple would copy this and i think that's pretty great there's only a few right now i presume they're going to get better and more frequent over time okay there's one last thing that has been done with the photos app and they've kind of integrated windows movie maker inside of this app now it's not going to be as fully featured as something like imovie but it's it's not incredibly far off you open a project you've got all your files over here you've got your timeline or storyboard you can add transitions and text and all that stuff for what 99 of people are going to want to edit a video about this is totally sufficient frankly we could probably edit this video in this app we're not going to because we're in a masochist but you could um okay next app that's going to be the clock app now at the very rudimentary level it's it's basic right we've got a world clock stopwatch alarm timer who cares what is interesting is that they have an integrated pomodoro timer so this is for people who want to work like really hard for 30 minutes and then take a break for a specified period of time and then do another 30 minute sprint or whatever you can adjust this timer as long as you would like it to be or as short as you would like it to be you can choose to skip breaks and what's great is this is integrated right into the os so i can press start focus session move it up into the corner and for 30 minutes i have to work and after 30 minutes it's going to say hey it's time for a break buddy go up stand up walk to your legs and then come back in five minutes and it'll it'll give you another timer when it's it's time to begin again unfortunately this isn't fully featured enough to say like okay i'm in productivity mode or i'm in school mode only let me open canvas and microsoft edge and microsoft word and nothing else like no it doesn't let you do that but that may be added over time but this is mostly for people who are responsible and can be productive on their own terms it does have microsoft to do integration and spotify integration this is really great to enhance your productivity and if you use microsoft to-do's you might use microsoft teams which is now built right into windows 11. now if you don't use teams don't be afraid i think saying microsoft teams is like oh i don't want microsoft teams on my computer i'm not into teams no no no once you install windows 11 this is available by default but it's not really bloatware you just open it up and it says hey it doesn't look like you have a teams account do you want us to sign up for one it's free we'll use your email what's your phone number and you're done and now you suddenly have a microsoft teams account at which you can message other people and other people can message you so i have a conversation going to benjamin carroll my cinematographer i can start a video call i can start an audio call or i can click the window and it will open a chat window with just he and i uh he says hello i can like that tweet i can even go into my photos app copy this beautiful photo i took in google earth vr paste it and there you go i have sent a multimedia file and image so this is just like imessage or discord or whatever you want but it's built in to windows 11 which i think is really great and of course it's microsoft teams so i can go in here open the larger teams window and i can see activity from an organizational uh kind of point of view i can have calendar events that i can set up specifically with people timed calls we can add people and create a group chat i mean it's microsoft teams and so it's pretty cool because it is the frictionless design that imessage offers in mac os and on the iphone but with the power and functionality of something like microsoft teams and so i actually think it's going to be potentially really popular and i think it's probably going to steal market share from discord and a couple of other chat apps that people are used to using as teams become so much more common in organizations and in schools because frankly teams is just cheaper so that's why a lot of people use it but now it's actually getting kind of good the last and perhaps most aspirational thing i want to talk about is the microsoft store anyone who use windows 10 knows that the microsoft store was just a haven for crapware and abandonware most good apps were never in it because microsoft obviously takes a cut of the sale and then also because they have really really strict admission requirements that deterred most app developers from ever really trying it it was bad and windows seems to have addressed some of the concerns for windows 11 microsoft seems to be more optimistic about the future of the microsoft store because they really do want to make this the place where you come to get all of your apps so for example android apps which are soon to be coming to windows 11 it's kind of weird because they're actually delivered through the amazon app store rather than through google play services but they're purchased and delivered through the the mask of the microsoft store so it's kind of strange how things are done but it's clear that microsoft wants you to come here to get your games and to get your apps and this is their goal and at least the you know the minimum they have made what is a far more attractive interesting app than what was previously available in windows 10. so you've got nice content here you have apps that you can sort by kind of category or top charts you can specifically restrict it down to gaming and then of course you have your library section here which didn't really used to be there which is nice this shows you all available updates and so you can just do that and then you can sort through your catalog of purchased and or downloaded apps with a number of filters including kind of what specifically they are now some things are weirdly still not part of the microsoft store and i have to envision that they're going to merge together at some point um like so forza horizon 4 in order to do anything to download it to update it i have to go to the xbox app i cannot do that through the microsoft store that's kind of weird because they do have games in here these are games and you can install them through the microsoft store but these are more like mobily games and these are like gamer games and you have to manage um uh you know your game pass subscription through here it's all weird but i have to envision that this is gonna change eventually i do think that there is a future for microsoft with the microsoft store and so i'm excited to see how it plays out last couple just weird little things i've noticed while using the kind of os over the last few hours window snapping is just as good as it's always been but there's now like visual animations that show you the size of the window windows 10 used to do that but it was kind of just ugly and weird this looks way better you drag it into corners and then you can also use hotkeys so if i push windows right it goes to center and then right side of the screen so you used to just have right and left and now you can kind of use it like a d-pad to choose where on the screen you want and you can even if i hold down the windows key and push down down it will minimize down into the taskbar conversely up up maybe enough maybe not once it's been in the taskbar for such a long time if you do it accidentally i believe you can pull it back up let's see yeah see okay um here's the last really weird thing that this is there are bugs okay like the photos app crashed on us once um there's just this weird thing where we couldn't get certain image the gallery view to come up there are there bugs this is brand new os it's gonna happen okay and i have to assume these things are gonna improve over time there are some really weird frustrations like so for example we talked about how the the corners are rounded now but it doesn't seem like they've accommodated for that with the um kind of tools that allow you to expand the window if you go to the corner it's just nothing you have to go to the corner where the corner used to be in the window in order to be able to drag the window out so see how far i am away from the edge of the window if you go to where you think it should be it's not going to work which is really frustrating but these are things that will be worked out over time all in all i think windows 10 is outdated compared to the new windows 11. i think this is really cohesive i think it makes a lot of sense it's not perfect i don't know if i'll go upgrade my gaming pc today but i am excited about the prospect and future of windows 11. and if you haven't tried it i think you ought to because i think you'll be more impressed than not and i don't know why people are being so mean and rude to microsoft and how it's awful because maybe this is the mac fanboy on me speaking but i don't see anything that is worse than windows 10. it's all great it just needs a little more time in the oven well folks that's all for me in short there's a lot of potential i'm excited if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't well send it to someone who hates windows but most importantly and as always stay snappy [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 750,366

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, windows 11, mac vs pc, windows11, win 11, mac fanboy, apple fanboy, windows 11 review, pc vs mac, big sur, monterey vs windows 11, pc review, tech, review, tech 2021, buying guide, pc gaming, ux

Id: _G4aql8_shw

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021

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[u/Neeat_freak]

And why would I care if a Mac fan likes or dislikes windows?