- Microsoft has fixed Windows 11? So we made a video a couple
months ago, talking about how, while there's a lot of nice
new features in Windows 11, one of the big downsides
is the compatibility. The initial list of what
systems could be upgraded to Windows 11 was incredibly small. The justification for
that wasn't super clear, and a ton of people were running the tool that would tell you
if Windows 11 would work, and even, supposedly, correct systems that had
everything you need were saying that they were not actually functional, so we did a video breaking that down, and since then, some things have changed. So just to refresh, one of the big issues with Windows 11 is that it requires, asterisk, a TPM 2.0 chip, and it is there to help ensure the integrity of Windows and your files and whatnot,
it's there for security. Now this has been shipping
for a little while. Most brand new, in fact, pretty much any brand new
computer you buy today will have a TPM chip. However, a lot of even
fairly modern systems from three, four years ago may not. In addition to this, Microsoft also has
limited the specific CPUs that can run Windows 11. Now if you go to look at the
system requirements page, it says, "Oh, you just need "a one gigahertz, dual-core processor." Easy, basically, everything has that, but in reality, you also
need to have a processor which is specifically
whitelisted by Microsoft to be fully compatible with Windows 11. Now many people have run Windows 11 and the early betas on much
older or worse hardware, and it's not difficult to run. "I tried the public beta
on my Core 2 Duo laptop, "and it was fine. "Not that big of a difference, "although I think I had an issue "with the chipset driver
not installing properly." Yeah, funny you should mention that. So if you can run Windows 10, technically, you can
pretty much run Windows 11, but Microsoft, this time around,
has heavily raised the bar to actually run the OS. Makes sense, right? Well, sort of. So since then, they have
made some tactical changes in the way that you can
actually run Windows 11. If you're running a system which is not technically
supported by Windows 11, but at least, meets those very
easy minimum requirements, then you can upgrade to Windows 11, but you have to actually wipe your drive, do a fresh install from an ISO, and then you have to
agree that, basically, there's no support guaranteed and no security updates guaranteed and you're doing it at your own risk, which seems a little bit aggressive for a new version of Windows. This is certainly the step
in the right direction that I had hoped for when
I did my original video. It's silly to lock out millions
upon millions of people with three-, four-, five-year-old PCs that are perfectly powerful and capable from running the newest
version of Windows, especially because Windows
10 has a shelf life. You can't just sit on it forever. It's only going to get a
few more years of updates, and then that's going to be that. If you have a system, you
can upgrade it to Windows 11. The downside, though,
is that the guarantees of security updates or patches or anything like
that just simply aren't there, so for all we know, you could install Windows 11 on launch day on your three-year-old
Ryzen 1000 processor, and then five minutes later, you just never get another
update, but we don't know this. I doubt that they will
cut off updates that fast. Some people have had problems with games. So that is one thing I've not done as of recording right now. I have not done a lot
of gaming on Windows 11, but some specific games aren't working. I'll just say, personally for me, using a lot of productivity
apps and whatnot, I've had no problems,
everything has just worked and launched right out of the box. "I hate things like
removing folder thumbnails," and it's, "Harder to switch
default web browsers." Skazzy, yes, so of course, our brand new channel sponsor, Opera, as I have went to go and
set up Opera on my device, as soon as I went to go change
the default web browser, it's not like, "Oh, quick,
one little click thing." First of all, it asks, "Hey, are you sure you wanna try Edge?" No, I don't wanna use Edge. After that, then I have
to not only switch it, but there's seven or
eight different things where I have to switch it for HTM files, HTML files, this and that. And even after all of that,
and I've got Opera set up as my default browser pretty
much across the board, I'm using Twitter on Windows here, and I try to open a link. It opens up Edge, for some
reason, I don't know why. I can't get it to stop doing that. Look, I have nothing against Edge. I, of course, prefer Opera, of course, link in the description, but regardless of what
browser you wanna use, if you wanna change the default, it is now far more difficult. "Tried the release preview version "on my main gaming PC and it's fine. "No blue screens so far. "It's just Windows 10 with a new skin." I totally agree, and in a lot of ways, it really is a new skin for Windows 10. Short of apps being updated and whatnot, a lot of that core code base and everything is very
similar to Windows 10. They've been building the foundation over the last few years,
then they've got Windows 11 to go (popping lips) right on top. "If I wanted MacOS, I'd
use MacOS." (laughs) I will 1000% agree that this
is very MacOS-y, but also, I mean, look, different
strokes for different folks. I personally think that Big
Sur feels and looks very nice. I like that sort of design aesthetic, and I think that, personally for me, Windows 11 looks better than Windows 10. "I like the glass look, I
hope search is improved, "and I hope I can change the position of the task (laughs) bar." So I will say that the taskbar, to me,
actually, is totally fine, but yes, you can change
the actual design of it. So by default in Windows 11, your taskbar is centered on bottom. However, in about five seconds, you can open up the taskbar settings and just set the taskbar
alignment to left, and it is exactly the
way it was in Windows 10. I think it's fine, as we were
putting this video together, there are a lot of features and there's a lot of small things. There's an entire video just doing, "Here are 100 random, cool
features in Windows 11," but to me, it's when you put them all together does it really start to feel like the more cohesive package. So I've been using Windows 11 on the Microsoft Laptop
Studio, which in a lot of ways, really is the halo device for Windows 11. Now there's a lot to talk about here, and ultimately, I'm somewhat torn on exactly who this device is for. So let's start out with
some of the big advantages. So you've got the cool,
tilty, flippy screen, which is probably one of the
more innovative ways I've seen to do a two-in-one, the design
itself on the chassis's also, I think, incredibly clever. So this is a 14-inch laptop, or vaguely, since it does have a
three-by-two aspect ratio. It's a slightly different size than most, but generally speaking, it
is still a little bit smaller than most 15- or 16-inch
laptops, and because of that, it's, while a little bit
heavy, still fairly thin, and a large reason why they've
been able to do that is by jettisoning everything that's not the Surface connector, headphone jack, and a pair of USB-C-based
Thunderbolt 4 ports, but because of that,
they had this little lip on the inside edge, which means that all
of the cooling is done by these huge vents on the bottom. New, we'd call this Surface
Laptop Studio 8 gaming laptop, but with an RTX 3050 Ti and a higher powered,
Intel 11th-gen Core i5, or i7 processor, in this case, you do have enough performance
to do at least some gaming. Is this just an excuse for
me to play some F1 2021? Well, yes, yes, it is. So there is a 120-Hertz
display on the device. Now some games, you can run at 120fps if you turn the settings down enough. I'll say, for me, most of the time, 60 is probably a little
bit more reasonable. The thing that's nice about
the Surface Laptop Studio is that it is one of these
devices that can do everything. It's an in-between size, where it's not quite a 15-inch laptop. It's a little bit of a smaller footprint. It's not as powerful as
a full gaming laptop, but you do have the 120-Hertz display. You have the dedicated graphics. On the flip side, you've
got the touch screen, you've got the tilty, flippy display. The problem, though, that I
have is that, realistically, what are you actually
gonna do with this device? Because it gets very
expensive very quickly. Going up to the RTX 3050 Ti
is a, I believe, $300 upgrade, and at that kind of price, you can afford to get a very nice actual gaming laptop, such as the Razer Blade 14, which can have a lot more performance, but obviously, without the
cool, tilty, flippy design. The keyboard is excellent. It does have a brand new haptic trackpad, which is very similar
to the kind of trackpad that the MacBook has
been using for a while. The speakers were also
terrific on this thing. (speakers roaring)
That's loud, man. It's a decently powerful laptop, but it's not that much more powerful than something like the Surface Pro 8, which in my opinion,
is a far more portable, far more practical device
to carry with you every day. - So where the Surface Laptop Studio is not exactly the best sell and it's hard to figure out who it's for, the Surface Pro 8 is a much
more interesting proposition. So this right here starts at 1199, as configured with the
Core i7, 16 gigs of RAM, and 256 gigs of storage. This goes to $1,600. Sadly though, like every other
Surface generation before it, this one does not come
with the full, complete set like I have here with a type
cover and a built-in pen. This is an add-on that is $280 on top of what you are paying for
with the Surface Pro 8, which is still ludicrous, but of course, with it being a Surface, it is not a traditional laptop. You are probably comparing
this to something along the lines of an iPad. I also like the display
on it more, though. This, as Austin had mentioned before, does have a 120-Hertz display now. On the surface- - Hey!
(Ken laughs) - This thing is really neat-looking. So it takes a lot of the design
cues from the Surface Pro X, which is great because that brought a lot of physical improvements. Most importantly, it has
the little slot in the back, where you can add in your own SSD. It is expandable, which is great. Now the thing here is that this is also using
Xe graphics, right? - [Austin] Yeah, so it's got, essentially, the same i5, i7
processors from the studio, except that these are
just a lower TDP version, but it does have active cooling. - It does have active cooling,
which is great, and honestly, unlike the Surface Laptop Studio, where when you do really intensive things, you feel the fans kick
up, this is really quiet, and I also enjoy the battery life on it. Again, it's not as good as
something like the iPad, but compared to a normal laptop and a lot of other more powerful
systems, this holds its own. It's pretty much there with a lot of the lighter
class laptops out there. It does the tablet thing way better than the previous
iterations with Windows 10, so that is definitely an upside there. I feel like Microsoft angles
these things for creatives, but I feel like a lot of
students like taking it around because of the portability. I feel like there are
a lot of professionals that would use this for applications that I can't even conceive of. Maybe an architect might want to use it, people above my pay grade,
(laughs) essentially. The bottom line with the
Surface Pro 8 is this. It is the best iteration of the
Surface Pro that we've seen. It keeps a lot of the same things that we love from previous generations, but it brought on a lot of new features from other products on Surface
that we loved, as well. This is what I wanted to
feel from the Surface Pro X, but I think this is the best
iteration of what they made. - I'm happy that Microsoft have decided to open up the availability of Windows 11. That is certainly the right thing to do. However, I also don't think
it's necessarily a great idea to immediately dive in
and upgrade on day one. Not only are there some
compatibility issues, to be fair, from my experience, it's been pretty solid
going from 10 to 11, but some games, some random
apps, do have some issues. But on top of that, without
the promise of updates on your unsupported Ryzen 1000 system, it's a little bit of one of those things where we know that it will work, and if you're an early adopter or you really wanna just
go for it, feel free, but the good thing is there is a whole lot more to
Windows 11 than meets the eye. Thank you very much for watching. Make sure to subscribe to the channel for lots more spicy
Microsoft content like this, and until next time, I will be definitely not switching to any new devices that are right there. Snapchat and subscribe to the channel.
