Ask Paul: July 3 (Premium)

Happy Friday and Happy Fourth of July! Here’s a great set of reader questions to kick off the holiday long weekend.
Automatic dark mode
jt5 asks:

Do you think Windows will get the ability to switch from light to dark and dark to light depending on the sunrise and sunset like Mac, IOS, and Android have? In a related note- have you heard anything about supporting background images that change at different times in the day?

I think automatic dark mode is a great feature, and I have started using it on the iOS and macOS betas to test it out. So, yeah, I could see this happening in Windows for sure. I feel like we’ve had dynamically changing wallpaper here and there in the past (and macOS currently supports this with some themes that have light and dark versions of wallpaper for the auto dark mode switch). Not sure if that would make the cut, but in the theme of “Redmond, start your photocopiers,” why not?
Wireless earbuds
Daninbusiness asks;

Any interest in doing more wireless earbud reviews? There's a flood of them on the market at a variety of price points. For those of us not on iPhones, there's a lot of choices but it's hard to appreciate the trade-offs involved.

Not immediately, though if travel ever kicks in again, I’m going to need to figure out something with good noise cancelation. For now, I feel like I’m in a good place with the Galaxy Buds+ set that I’m using.
Windows roadmap
kitron asks:

Why is Microsoft not providing any Windows roadmap? We don’t know what’s slated for next version and the one after that.

“Why” questions are hard, but with Microsoft handing responsibility of Windows to Panos Panay a few months back, I’m hoping for some clarity and transparency. It’s reasonable for him to want/need some number of months to speak with the major players on the team(s), see where things are at, and then plot some way forward. (And fair to point out that his delay/retraction of Surface Neo and Windows 10X was decisive and clear-headed.) But COVID is going to make this more difficult too. So we might not learn anything concrete until later this year.

But we can glean some information from the current testing schedule, where at any given time, Insiders are testing the next version of Windows (Beta channel/previously Slow ring) plus some number of features that may or may not be added to Windows in some future release (Dev channel, previously Fast ring). Given the speed at which new Windows versions arrive, this may be the only way to develop Windows successfully in such a public fashion. (With macOS, for example, if Apple delayed a feature from, say, the 2020 release of the system to the 2021 release, only a few people inside the company would even know about it.)
Consumer Windows vs. business Windows
txag asks:

I keep wondering if it might have been viable for Microsoft to convert Windows 7 to “Business Windows”; the idea being to charge a lot for its annual upkeep but basic...

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