Windows Holographic: A Familiar Battle Between Minimum and Recommended Specs (Premium)

Yesterday, Brad revealed that the latest Insider build of Windows 10 includes an app that explains the minimum specs required to run the coming Windows Holographic shell and its VR/AR applications. But don't be fooled: As is always the cast, Microsoft's minimum requirements in no way map to what you really need to run this software.

We've been dealing with this strange dichotomy since the dawn of the Windows age in the mid-1980's. Microsoft sets minimum requirements that are usually hard-coded into a Setup routine in order to prevent customers from even installing something that won't work on their particular mix of hardware. But the experience will still be terrible, especially for those who come in at the low-end of the spectrum.

To understand why the Windows Holographic minimum requirements are a complete smoke-screen, let's look at two things: The minimum requirements for Windows itself. And the minimum requirements for a full-featured VR solution like Oculus Rift. (And let's do so with the understanding that even the highest-end VR solutions today cannot display the holograms we'll see in Windows Holographic, which is technically an augmented reality, or AR, solution, and not "just" VR.)

According to Microsoft, Windows 10 requires the following:

1 GHz microprocessor or SoC (system on a chip)
2 GB of RAM (or 1 GB of RAM for an upgrade from Windows 7/8.1)
16 GB of storage for 32-bit Windows 10, or 32 GB for 64-bit
DirectX 9-compatible graphics card
800 x 600 resolution display

I challenge any human being to run Windows 10 on such a system an have an acceptable experience from a performance and reliability perspective. Such a PC will boot and run Windows, slowly, and will struggle to run even a single app at a time. Yes, it "runs." But it does so very poorly.

A closer reading of Microsoft's Windows 10 specifications page will also reveal some disturbing additional information that further undercuts the believability of these specs. For example, several specific Windows 10 features like Windows Hello, Continuum, Cortana, and more require other hardware support. And there are a lot of caveats that have to be seen to be believed, including the need for additional storage to upgrade PCs with 32 GB or less of storage, the complexity of driver availability for all of your devices on an upgrade, and much more.

Beyond that, Microsoft no longer provides recommended specs for Windows for some reason, as it used to. (In fact the word "recommended" doesn't even appear once on this page.) So I will turn to my own recommendations from the Windows 10 Field Guide, which read as follows:

RAM. For all but the most casual of users, 2 GB is woefully inadequate for Windows 10. I recommend 4 GB as a more realistic minimum, and I recommend at least 8 GB of RAM for getting real work done on a real PC.

Disk space and technologies. I recommend a minimum of 64 GB of storage for mini-tablets, tablets, 2-in-1s and other PCs....