Mac Fanboy Reviews Windows 11

Quinn of Snazzy Labs sits down at the new studio and takes a look at Microsoft's best OS yet. Or... is it?

After several years of Windows 10 and some expecting Microsoft would never release a new, numbered version of Windows, the new version 11 has arrived. And... well... not everyone is super happy with it. Despite being an Apple user and Mac fanboy from my first interactions with computers, the new Windows 11 is generally really great and I'm a big fan.

[brddork]

Quinn broke into a high school chemistry lab and is using it for his new snazzy studio.

[sherlockmaverick]

You are NOT a fanboy, Quinn.

You're one of the most rational Mac reviewers out there, with a balance of skepticism and appreciation that is rare to match!

[mattsnyder]

Marques Brownlee: so I’ve been using *just announced piece of tech* for about two weeks now.

Snazzy: so I’ve been using windows 11 for a few hours.

[JulesStoop]

@16:40 I may misunderstand the implementation you're describing, but Photos on macOS has had this for years. If you start editing a picture, there's a menu with three dots near the top right corner where you can select third party extensions that offer extended functionality.

[braswellunleashed]

0:47 Oh Yeah Quiin, we can see you're a man of culture with that Linus Mousepad on your desk.

[AmmarMalik]

Those windows 95 settings is where you can actually change settings that matter

[agounaro]

I like the aesthetic changes in W11, but there are two missing features that for me really hurt productivity compared to W10. The first is that there's no groups or tabs or folders in the start menu for organising apps, whereas I can logically group stuff in W10. And the second is the loss of the 'do not combine' mode for the icons on the taskbar, I love that feature to quickly identify and switch between multiple instances of apps with one click. Without these features, the basic use of my computer is slowed down so, I'm hoping a future update will put these features back in. I'm sticking with W10 in the meantime because of this

[BrandonGiesing]

The biggest issue I think most have with it is how many power user features were striped out because they rushed 11 to market and didn't have time to reimplement them. For example, you mention the lack of moving the taskbar to any side but the bottom, that was because the taskbar was rewritten from scratch using XAML/UWP and they didn't have time to add it back if they wanted to ship on time to hit the holidays. Another way you can tell it was rushed is how some of the promised features got pushed to later updates (redesigned Paint, redesigned and merged Media Player app to replace Groove Music and Movies & TV, Android app support, etc.)

11 is full of stuff like this were they just reimplemented the bare min possible to get a stable OS out in time, for non-power users it's just 10 but way better design and a non-issue but for power-users, it's 10 with a better design but 100s of missing features they use daily preventing them from being able to upgrade even if they want to.

[NoobixCube]

I can't hear that intro music without thinking he's about to go into "super-fast build mode".

[benzhere]

10:20 Windows 10 has had this for the last 2 years or so, just putting icons ("ads") there and downloading them once clicked on instead of downloading them automatically. I want to say they got sued in 2019 for pre-installing apps that companies payed Microsoft to pre-install

[ChimpRiot]

In addition to running legacy software going back forever, installing subsystems for Linux and Android allow you to install and run those apps easily and they feel almost native. The apps even show up in your start menu for easy access.

[caeruleas]

Thank you for not just dumping on 11! This is a really thoughtful review of the improvements.

[HaikuOezu]

I kinda miss the Windows 10 start menu
I understand most people didn’t care for it but I took my time pimping it out with beautiful tiles for all my steam games and now they’re all gone

[vandelayindustries]

Surprised to see you're so positive about it! I use Windows for multiple hours every day, and though I was excited for the new look, I am disappointed to see so many things I used so much in Windows 10 be gone/changed in Windows 11:
- The calendar integrations
- The Start Menu tiles (yes I'm one of the seven people that liked them)
- No folders in the new Start Menu pinned apps
- Disabling the recent files in the new Start Menu doesn't free up space for more pinned app shortcuts; it still takes up the same space but with a message saying "you **could** see recent files here if you enable it"
- Right-clicking the Task Bar for the Task Manager (I know Ctrl+Shift+Escape is a thing)
- Some animations now start slow and ramp up afterwards, making them feel sluggish, instead of starting off fast and then easing down to a stop like in Windows 10
- Windows 10's "Acrylic" blur effect is far superior to Windows 11's "Mica", where the latter always shows a blurred version of your wallpaper, and the former actually shows a blurred version of any window behind the blur which looks way more natural to me
- Tapping with 4 fingers on a trackpad used to open the unified notification/control panel in Windows 10, but now it only shows the notification panel in Windows 10, whereas I primarily used it to quickly open the control panel
- You can no longer see the current seconds in the taskbar (not even by editing the registry), nor by opening the notification panel, which means that the only place you can natively see the current seconds in the OS is in the date/time formatting settings
- Virtual desktops no longer show a swiping animation when switching between them, so creating/switching/deleting similar looking desktops using the keyboard shortcuts has no visual feedback and it looks like it doesn't do anything, even if it does
- Disappointed that there wasn't a File Explorer redesign other than "add more spacing" and "simplify the ribbon" but I feel like that's still coming

I absolutely know I am nitpicking with some of these, but some of them really ruin my flow. I am hopeful that Microsoft will keep expanding Windows 11 to bring some of these features back. The rest I will just have to get used to (and I will).

[DesertCookie]

Only after hearing your experience, did I recognize that many things like the slimmer scroll bar, and smoother scrolling have been in Windows 10 as well (and rounded corners in Windows 7, for instance), they've just been dialed up to 11. It looks like they finally polished these additions. Looking at the speed Microsoft is going with their OS' really feels like there's a Valve-sized team working on them. After having heard nothing but bad things about W11's performance, not only Ryzen being broken but rightklick taking short while to open up the context menu and submenus taking their time too to open, this makes me consider upgrading for the first time.

Definitely want what you described at 10:45. That'd be awesome.

[michaelbluecastlestudio]

1:50 that’s what I feel every time I admin a windows pc for friends or family. The deeper you go the more windows 3.1 feeling comes to live. Really feels like a bunch of teams developing their one thing and then glue every snippet to one OS…Boom…the new windows. Have to try Win11 as a Mac user

[nster]

Just a suggestion, but I really like when there are chapters / timestamps for the video

[muizzsiddique]

The bloatware not actually being installed is also a Windows 10 thing. This isn't unique to 11.

[MMOTCRPG]

There's a few features you mentioned as being new to Win11 but have existed before Win11, like Windows Key + Arrow Key for window docking, and some earlier mentioned stuff I forget what exactly, maybe the photo editor or something, oh it was the Multiple Desktops feature, that was alreadyin Win10. Anyways, good review of Win11, also some really great suggestions to improve the OS. The main issue's people are having with Win11 is more to do with hardware compatibility and negatively affecting performance of certain CPU's and GPU's.

Thanks for making this video and doing a pretty in depth overview of it, for us not wanting to test it ourselves to find out, this has been a great video.

[sephiroth]

23:00 Speaking about animations for snapping. I still have them just fine on Windows 10. Running 21H1 too.. Also, Win Key + Shift + Arrow Keys will let you easily swap what monitor an app is on for multi-display systems.