Ask Paul: July 16 (Premium)

It’s the Ides of July, or something, so let’s kick off the weekend early again with another great set of reader questions.
Educational discounts
jwpear asks:

Is Microsoft moving away from offering student discounts on devices? Recently noticed that there was no way to check if one qualified for a student discount when looking at the Surface Laptop 4. I see it for other Surface devices. Maybe they're just doing this because Surface Laptop inventory is low due to component shortages.

I can’t imagine that Microsoft would ever walk away from discounting PCs and other products for the education market. It’s already in a tough spot with regards to Macs, in particular, and it doesn’t help that Chromebooks are coming at the market from the low-end. I suspect it’s either a bug or what you describe, that perhaps Microsoft is getting ready to launch new Surface PCs.
Taskbar layout in Windows 11
hrlngrv asks:

Will MSFT add anything to the left side of the taskbar?

It doesn’t appear so. When I first saw Windows 11, I figured that the right side of the taskbar would change dramatically and be made much smaller, because the whole thing seems so lopsided. That didn’t happen, exactly, though they did bundle a bunch of UI into a single thing now called Quick Settings (WINKEY + A) and switched the clock/time/Action Center to a notification center/calendar display (WINKEY + N). As for the left side… it’s still empty, and I bet that doesn’t change.

Or will they leave it available for shifting everything to left-aligned?

I have a hard time imagining Microsoft not letting customers customize the taskbar so that things are left-aligned as before (which is currently a feature), use the old Start menu, or let them also move the taskbar to different screen edges. There are too many people who would want that and, for businesses, not having to train people on a new UI is key. That said, only some of this works now.

What would you want on the left side if you had the Start button and pinned icons centered?

There are two things that could be interesting, but I assume these were tested internally and voted down. The first would be simply moving the Start button over to the far left. The second would be literally centering the entire taskbar so that what we used to call the tray area (which I believe is now called “the taskbar corner,” which is terrible) is “attached” to the left of the various application shortcut buttons, and that whole thing was centered. Then the taskbar could expand and contract, and change spacing, as more applications ran and their icons were added to the mix.

The thing is, I don’t understand why the tray area stuff needs to be right-aligned and in a fixed position but the Start button doesn’t. If anything, people access Start more, and you can make a case for keeping that thing in the same place it’s been for over 25 years.

All this said, I’m getting used to Windows 11 as-is...