Did you know Windows 12 may be coming as soon
as the end of 2024? That's what the latest reports are saying. Windows Central released
an article and they say they have sources that are saying that Microsoft is changing to
a every-three-year cycle for a major new version of Windows. And at this point, it seems
like it's a lot more than just speculation. We even have an apparent code name for Windows
12, which is "Hudson Valley". Previously, the next version of Windows was just
being called "Next Valley". Now they actually have a name for it. So that kind
of lends credence to that they really are getting closer to releasing this. Oh and as
for the thumbnail, of course it's a joke, but it does really seem like the Windows logos
are getting a lot more simplistic over time. Now you might be thinking that, doesn't it seem
like they just released Windows 11? Why are they releasing a new one in just three years?
Well, actually Microsoft used to be on a three year schedule for releasing major versions
of Windows. And that kind of changed for Windows 10. And I think it skewed a lot of people's
perceptions, because I have the dates here. So Windows XP was 2001 and then Windows
Vista was actually a deviation from the norm and came out in 2007, but they were originally
planning on releasing that in around late 2003, which would have been like two and a
half years. It just took way longer than they thought. And then Windows 7, again
was about two and a half years in 2009. Then Windows 8 was 2012, three years later,
and Windows 10 was 2015. So usually it's about every three years, or at least that's
the plan. Sometimes they go longer, sometimes shorter, but that's the average. And
that's probably what they're going to go back to. Now that doesn't mean they're not going
to release any kind of updates in between. Apparently they're going to go for a annual
update - annual major feature update within each version. And then every three years would
be like the major redesign. And actually the yearly feature update thing has already
happened. Before you probably know that with Windows 10, they were releasing a
major feature update every six months. Whereas this past year they switched to once
a year and there was no major feature update in the early half of 2023. It's going to
be in the second half of 2023 for Windows 11. And apparently even considering
the annual major feature updates, they're supposedly going to release even smaller
little feature releases every few months possibly. So we saw that with the release of the
weather widget. That was a pretty small thing, but they released it off schedule, I guess
you could say. So we might see a little bit more of that going forward. And a lot of you
are probably finding this pretty funny because most people apparently have not switched
to Windows 11 yet even, and Steam did their recent hardware survey where Windows 10 had
a 59.43% market share, Windows 11 was 35.75%. So by far, many people still use Windows 10.
Maybe that's because of the system requirements, or maybe it was because Microsoft, in my opinion,
definitely rushed to release Windows 11. It was really not that great at the beginning, very
buggy. They did fix a lot of that at this point, I think it's fine. But you know,
it's hard to get past the reputation. Just like with Windows Vista,
it was fine by the end of it, but it kind of sucked. And we kind of know
the meme where every other version of Windows is good and every other one sucks. And
at this point, hopefully that actually holds true because the next version would be
the good release according to that pattern. Now, as for possible features and changes with
Windows 12, some people are speculating that it's going to be a complete buildup from the ground up
compared to Windows 11, which was like a basically re-skinning of Windows 10. Under the hood, Windows
11 is just Windows 10 again. So it's possible that they're going to be redoing that because one
other thing that people have been talking about and reporting about is something called CorePC,
which is going to basically be like a more modular version of Windows, which kind of Windows 10 was
in a way, but maybe this is just even more so. And basically it would allow Microsoft
to adapt the Windows installation to the device. So you could have very
basic Chromebook-like devices that really have not many resources and require
a very lightweight operating system. They would have a more basic version of Windows 12,
whereas a desktop PC would have the full thing. And to me, that does seem like something that
might require a architectural change from a lower level than just changing the look of the
OS. Now as for features on the user facing side, I think it's safe to say that it's going
to be a lot of AI stuff. Microsoft has been partnering with OpenAI and really been
pushing AI with Bing and the Bing Assistant. And even in recent dev versions of
Windows 11, they have the Windows Copilot, which they announced a while ago. It's in
basically beta with the dev channel of the Insider program. And it's basically
like having the Bing chat assistant in Windows. Now at the moment I did
try it out. I was not very impressed. At this moment, it basically is just taking the
chat out of Edge and putting it on the side of Windows. You can use some commands like asking it
to change to dark mode, but if you ask it to do specific stuff, it doesn't even realize that it's
in Windows 11 running in the desktop operating system. So you can ask it to do something
and it'll say, "I can't help you do that. I'm just a large language model", stuff like
that, which is not helpful at all. Or it would even be better if it just said, "I'm not
able to do that yet." But at the moment, it just seems like it has no idea what
you're talking about. So hopefully that gets improved. And depending on
how the technology of AI progresses, it might even be possible that they integrate
the AI directly into the operating system, so it doesn't even have to send requests
to the internet. Although I would kind of be surprised if they did that because
Microsoft requires you to be accessing the internet really to install it anyway.
So they're probably going to want to have a lot more control over an AI model. Just
for safety sake would be their argument. So all that being said, kind of the main
thing I would really like to see is the AI having a much more hands-on ability
with the operating system. So it could navigate through settings itself
and look for stuff and not just be able to do hard-coded pre-programmed
things like changing the dark mode. That's not even that interesting.
It's no more difficult than to go into the settings and change it there.
But for example, if you could ask it, "Hey, I'm looking for that program I
installed a while ago that did this, but I can't remember what it's called." And it
knew what that was. That'd be pretty awesome. Or asking it maybe even to go and change
some arbitrary setting or maybe a setting within a program. Like you'd say, "I can't
figure out how to change this setting in Microsoft Word," and maybe it could navigate
through those settings and literally find what you might be talking about. That
kind of stuff would be really awesome. And I would like to see that. I'm sure
that kind of thing will happen eventually, but will that happen in Windows 12? I guess
we'll have to see. Probably not right away, hopefully soon. As for a redesigned UI, really the
only thing we've seen is during one presentation Microsoft did, they showed off what looked
like a new UI that had a floating task bar. It wasn't pinned to the bottom. And then
there were some icons at the top right and left of the screen, closer to what
you see with macOS. So you had like the battery and stuff up there instead of at
the bottom right, like the current task bar is. So who knows how much of that
we'll see. And also maybe more widgets. They added widgets in Windows 11,
but it's kind of still just pinned to the task bar. I'd really like to see
stuff that you can pin to the desktop, kind of like we had in Windows Vista
but got rid of, I'm sure that kind of stuff will make a comeback. Though I would be
really interested to know what you guys think. Does any of this excite you, or are you just
going to stick to Windows 10 as long as you can? Or maybe there's some other features that
I didn't mention that you would like to see, and that would just put you
over the edge and definitely get Windows 12. Let me know that
kind of stuff down in the comments. If you want to keep watching, the next video
I'd recommend is where I was talking about the lost F13 through F24 keys on the keyboard. Did
you know those used to exist? And actually you can still take advantage of them. Definitely
a cool video. I'll put that link right there you can click on. So thanks so much for
watching and I'll see you in the next one.
