Details Matter (Premium)

I was recently organizing some older computers to give away. Among them was the second of three Intel NUCs I’ve owned, which is based on an 8th-generation Intel Core chipset. I brought it up for the first time in many, many months, noticed it was on Windows 10 version 21H1, and decided to check whether it would be offered the Windows 11 upgrade.

It was, during Setup no less, another minor data point for my soon-to-be-obsolete data set concerning this process, and I went through with it because I’d never experienced that offer before: one of the weird things about my job is that I usually force big upgrades early because I need to write about them. Anyway, that took a while, and it gave me a chance to again reconsider Windows 10, a system I’ve not used, probably, since mid-2021, when the first Windows 11 beta arrived.

To me, Windows 10 looks tired and dated today, and I can clearly see how its flat user interface was designed to work well across phones, tablets, and traditional PCs. For example, you can resize any of the modern apps, like Settings or whatever, so that it has the rough size and shape of a portrait mode phone app, and it still makes sense. It’s shocking how naïve that design paradigm seems today, and it’s disconcerting to remember that by the time Microsoft actually shipped Windows 10 in mid-2015, its still-new CEO had already killed Windows Phone internally.

That’s incredible, but Microsoft pushed forward with this obsolete design for several more years before finally giving way to a successor, Windows 11, with a new design. Windows 11 is very much a surface-level coat of paint on the solid underpinnings of its predecessor, and that’s both good and bad. But it is at least fresh and modern looking, and a welcome change.

Of course, a surface-level coat of paint is all the current Windows team is capable of. Windows 10 was a last hurrah, of sorts, for big ideas, a final attempt to make this aging legacy platform make sense in a modern new mobile world that had rendered it obsolete for most non-productivity personal computing tasks. Windows 10 was Microsoft trying to keep Windows relevant for another generation by making the system work across several different hardware platforms. Windows 11 is … what? Treading water? An attempt to keep its fed-up users from jumping ship to the Mac, Linux, or Chrome OS?

To be clear, I like Windows 11, and I hope it’s obvious that I very much prefer how it looks. That it generally works well is just a byproduct of its heritage: it’s good because Windows 10 was good too. But there is no more groundbreaking architectural work being done. The surface-level is all we have. But even that is easily scratched away. As we’ve discussed so often, there is plenty of old UI from Windows 10, Windows 8, and even older Windows versions still buried one or two levels below that surface.

I recognize this kind of thing because I’m so good at it myself: when I “clean” ...