hi everyone kevin here today we are going to take a first look at the leaked build of windows 11. microsoft is planning an official event on june 24th where they’re planning on formally announcing windows 11. i’m a windows insider i’m also a windows mvp and microsoft has been so tight-lipped about sharing any details and then yesterday some screenshots of windows 11 showed up on baidu and shortly thereafter some builds started appearing where you can install windows 11 on your pc to give it a test drive and let’s just say that someone’s probably going to lose their job over this if microsoft can find out who actually leaked it and that in and of itself is also a very difficult task lucky for us though we can see what’s coming up and what windows 11 will likely look like and one caveat to call out before we jump into this this is just a sneak peek at the development process at this point in time before windows 11 is officially released there’ll probably be some additional features there’ll also be some additional polish but this is what we have to go on so let’s jump on the pc and let’s check out windows 11. when you launch windows 11 for the first time you’ll see the out of box experience or what’s also referred to as ubi and you’ll have to select things like well what country are you in what type of keyboard layout do you want to use and what account you want to sign in with so you’ll just have to work your way through all of these different screens before you can see the latest version of windows 11. one item of note during the setup process you need to sign in with either a personal microsoft account or a work or school microsoft account there’s no option to just sign in with a local account and i think a primary reason for that is a lot of the functionality within windows 11 relies on you having established some type of account in a moment we’ll look at the start menu and we’ll see a feature called recommended to be able to provide recommendations microsoft needs some knowledge over who you are as a user to be able to provide the most relevant recommendations one other item of note during the setup process you’ll also see a prompt asking you how you plan on using your device are you going to use it for gaming creativity or maybe you’re just going to focus on business now presumably depending on the option that you choose here this will affect what the windows 11 experience looks like for instance if you select gaming here maybe you’ll see solitaire and candy crush as recommendations on the start menu if maybe you go with creativity they’ll push the video editor and maybe if you select business down here you’ll see word excel and powerpoint promoted to you here i’ll just select gaming and let me select business and let’s see what that does next we see another screen where microsoft asks you whether you want to save space on your pc with onedrive and this is the first example of microsoft promoting one of its services to you now i personally use onedrive and i think it offers a lot of value but this will likely be a way to get people to go from the free 5 gigabytes and to upgrade to microsoft 365 where you get a lot more space and once we finish running through all of those prompts our computer is now being set up and it’ll take a few minutes and check that out this now drops us into windows 11 so we get a first look at what this looks like and just to confirm that this is in fact windows 11 i’ll press the windows key and the r key at the same time that brings up the run dialog and i’ll type in winver this will tell me the windows version and right up here i can confirm that this is in fact windows 11 and it’s build 21996.1 now that we have that out of the way let’s take a look at what’s changed and what windows 11 is like right here on the desktop i see this beautiful and modern image it looks pretty nice to me and right here let’s start with the desktop in the top left hand corner we have the recycle bin and this has been a mainstay of the desktop on many many versions of windows and right beneath that the only app that’s featured on the desktop is microsoft edge you can tell based on this placement that microsoft really wants you using their browser by giving it such a core position next let’s shift our focus down to the taskbar and probably one thing you’ve noticed already is my start menu is no longer on the left hand side and i don’t have my app tiles on the taskbar next to it instead the entire cluster has been moved directly into the center so it’s now all center aligned if you’re coming from let’s say mac os or maybe chrome os this probably looks very familiar to you if you don’t like this center placement within settings you can always move it back over to the left hand side so it feels more familiar with what you’re used to with windows 10. looking over at all the different app icons one thing i really like is microsoft doesn’t include all that many app tiles directly out of the box so they’re really going for simplicity over overwhelming people with far too many apps and of course as you use apps you can pin them yourself to the taskbar one other item you might have noticed here on the taskbar windows now has a new logo and it really does kind of look like a window now you simply have four rectangular squares all next to one another and this also aligns with microsoft’s fluent ux design pattern on the taskbar itself i have similar controls to what i’m used to with windows 10. here i could right click on one of the apps that’s on my taskbar and i could pin different items i could also get back to frequent items here i can move around the position of my different app tiles so the functionality here is pretty similar to what you’re used to next let’s click into the start menu to see what has changed there i’ll click on the windows logo icon and this opens up the new start menu so here it’s broken up into two separate categories here i see all of my pinned apps and down below i see different recommendations with pinned when i went through the ubi flow i had to indicate what i was interested in and i said i was interested in gaming and so here you see xbox and you see solitaire i also said i was interested in creativity and so here i see photoshop elements and i also said i was interested in business and here i see the office apps pinned on the start menu so your selection there will influence what apps show up within this view right up above in the top right hand corner i can click on all apps and this opens up a more traditional start menu where i can see all of my different apps sorted alphabetically although you can make the argument that very few people use this view i mean seriously who goes through an alphabetical list to launch apps anymore so microsoft is really attempting to make the start menu a lot more useful by showing just the apps that you care about at the top down below this is where things get really interesting microsoft also added something called recommended to the start menu and here not only do i see app recommendations but i also see file recommendations so what is recommended well recommended looks at different signals like how often do you open an app or maybe every monday morning you go back to the same app so windows will recommend it along with apps you also get file recommendations so maybe i open these files all the time and i actually do these are files i use a lot so seeing them recommended here makes it a lot easier for me to get back to what i care about if i want to see even more recommendations i’m not just limited to this set of six here i can click on more and i have an exhaustive list of all the different files that are recommended to me so this way once again it makes it easy to get back to the work that i care about one other major change to the start menu there are no longer any live tiles and if you’re scratching your head wondering what live tiles even were well you’re probably like most people live tiles would provide you with a little bit additional context about an app for example with the calendar app you might see what your next upcoming appointment is however it turned out that just not that many people ever used it and you just didn’t really get that many developers to use it so i think that was enough justification for microsoft to eliminate it now that we’ve looked at the start menu what else has changed down here in the taskbar the next icon is the search icon and when i click on that that opens up the search experience now this is all powered by a service so it really hasn’t changed that much the ux looks a little bit different but the functionality is similar to what you get in windows 10. to the right of the search icon we have the task view and when i click on this i can set up multiple different desktops so maybe i want to have one desktop with let’s say my personal work and then i want to have another desktop with all of my schoolwork i can now separate those different desktops this is not new functionality this existed in windows 10. although the main difference is microsoft is now elevating this so it’s a lot more discoverable to the right of the task view i have something called widgets when i click on that that opens up this view over on the left hand side and it overlays my desktop here i can see my local weather i could also see stocks sports scores and here i have all of the different top stories of the day here if i click on the ellipsis i can see my connected account so presumably as i interact with all of these different widgets it’ll recommend things that are interesting to me moving on along the task bar right over here i have file explorer and when i click on this this opens up the standard view that we’re all used to but one of the main differences now is you’ll notice that all of the icons have been refreshed so they look a little bit more modern and personally i like these better than what was in windows 10. with a window open up in the top right hand corner i can click on this icon to maximize the window but when i hover over i now have all of these different options that allow me to place my windows where i want them so maybe i want file explorer in the bottom right hand corner i can click on that option and it’ll move it down now i’ve always had access to this for instance i could press the windows key with the left arrow key and that snaps to the left or i could press the windows key and the right arrow key and that snaps to the right here i could press down and that’ll snap it to the bottom right hand corner but once again you could argue that that was a little bit hard to discover so now with these different snapping assist tools i can very quickly position windows where i want them we’ve looked at a lot of the new functionality in windows 11 so what do i think of it well personally i like it i think microsoft has cleaned up the experience quite a bit it looks more modern and i’m a big fan of the revamped start menu i think recommended down here is going to be a game changer i think the big challenge for microsoft will be most people already spend most of their time in the browser and will they be able to make the os relevant again all right well that was a first look at windows 11. let me know down below in the comments are you going to upgrade to windows 11 as soon as it becomes available one of the most common questions will probably be can you upgrade to windows 11 for free and if i had to guess i would say they’re probably going to allow a free upgrade and the reason why is when windows 10 first came out microsoft had a free upgrade program from windows 7 and windows 8 to windows 10 and in fact you can actually still take advantage of that today also microsoft doesn’t want to have a bifurcated user base you don’t want a large percentage of your users left behind on old versions of your os and then only some people on your newest os you want to get as many people as possible on the same os also services are so much more important to microsoft microsoft 365 is pulling in a material amount of revenue for microsoft and if you could get all of your users on the latest version of your operating system it also becomes easier to push all of your different services or basically upsell your services if you enjoyed this video and you want to see more videos like this please consider subscribing otherwise i’ll see you next time [Music]