- Microsoft’s planned big changes for Windows 11 are coming soon
- Testing will start “this month and throughout April”
- Updates packing the new features will arrive “this month and every month this year” we’re told, so this work won’t all be dumped on us at once in the 26H2 update
The big incoming changes to Windows 11 that Microsoft announced at the weekend are going to start happening faster than I thought — right off the bat, in fact.
Windows Latest reports that the work to fix many of the major pain points in Windows 11 — including moving the taskbar, RAM consumption, update-related issues, and much more — is starting right now.
Pavan Davuluri, head of Windows at Microsoft, said on X that: “We will begin to preview initial changes detailed in our blog in builds with Windows Insiders this month and throughout April.”
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We should see some of this honing work going into the next preview build of Windows 11, then.
Windows Latest also spotted Scott Hanselman, who is a VP, member of technical staff at Microsoft — and has been drafted across to be a part of this project — noted on X that updates packing these features will arrive “this month and every month this year”.
Windows Latest further highlights that one of the improvements Microsoft is going to make that’s flown rather under the radar pertains to wireless connections. Specifically, we’re told that: “One of the priorities is to build a new experience that allows you to pair and use Bluetooth more easily and in a faster way.”
Hopefully that’ll mean less flakiness all round when using Bluetooth devices with Windows 11.
Analysis: fast fixing — hopefully with no breakages
It was inevitable that there would be a good deal of cynicism around Microsoft’s recent revelation of a whole lot of exciting changes coming to Windows 11. Part of the sentiment on social media is a strong current to the effect of ‘talk is all well and good, but I’ll believe it when I see it’ — and I can sympathize with that point of view.
Even Hanselman acknowledges that this is a fair enough comment, and the good news is that the exec seems confident that Microsoft is going to deliver on its promises here.
If we’re getting this work via updates every month, we’ll soon be able to see the reality of this. It’s also interesting that Microsoft’s plan appears to be getting these improvements out on a month-by-month basis, and not saving everything up for deployment all at once in the yearly update (which will be version 26H2, for most PCs, anyway).
Remember, though, that the new stuff coming into preview is one thing, and the full rollout is another. I’d imagine that testing some of these changes is going to be a prolonged activity, shall we say, and Microsoft is piling a lot on its development plate here. We know that bugs can creep into Windows 11 even with simple updates, and there’s going to be a lot of potential breakage as this project forges onwards, which may slow progress.
In short, temper your expectations, but it’s undeniable that Microsoft is on the right track here (and as I discussed yesterday, you can probably thank the MacBook Neo for the urgency Microsoft seems to have about this work now).
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