It’s been a sort of consistent trend through the past few months, as I’ve written about how Windows PCs are evolving rapidly. Mind you, only on the hardware aspect. The form factors bring a broader potential for relevance and utility. Dual screens have taken forward the convenience first hinted at by convertibles (the promise of a tablet-esque experience doesn’t hold much ground anymore), while augmented reality headsets bring forward a screen-free dimension to computing. A pursuit for a slimmer laptop hasn’t stalled. The present is melding into the future. Important to point out, that this vision is mostly being dictated and developed on by PC makers. Basically, hardware. Microsoft’s input has been very limited, on the software part of things. Windows 11 is stuck, where it is.
You’d have noticed them. Those headlines simply seem to write themselves every month. Month after month, year after year. Windows 11 updates breaking functionality out of the blue. Cue chaos, irritability and some (okay, generous) swearing. Look at this very recent, and concise sample. The March update broke whatever it is that it broke, to cause performance dips and in some cases, the blue screen of death (yes, that debilitating feeling of a BSOD) on PCs, irrespective of Intel or AMD chips. The month before that, an update hampered the ability to use the Windows taskbar, which meant users couldn’t access apps they’d pinned for quick access, or the Start menu.
A few symptoms of a bigger problem with Windows 11. In complete contrast to the sort of confidence, Microsoft tends to put forward at keynotes and with announcements. For all the philosophies and confidence (rightly so too, for the most part) around artificial intelligence (AI) within Microsoft 365, basics are still very missing from Windows as a computing platform. If your VPN app functionality gets broken by the April update, and you’ve to wait a month for that to be fixed, underlines big problems that still remain persistent.
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These are the sort of things that simply don’t happen with the Apple MacBook portfolio, or indeed the macOS software that underlines the experience. There are two sides to the recommendation coin. If you have a budget that’s big enough to fit an Apple MacBook (just any MacBook; they’re all equally reliable), I’d always suggest you buy a MacBook. That is, you’ll be better off with a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro, instead of an expensive Windows 11 laptop (read, thereabouts of ₹1,00,000 and beyond) from Dell or Lenovo, for example. If your budget is around ₹30,000, ₹50,000 or even ₹70,000 (unless a deal drags a MacBook Air within this threshold), you don’t have much choice but to brave it out.
Don’t believe me? A former Microsoft engineer (he now works for visual analytics platform Tableau), Andy Young, called out Windows 11’s performance “comically bad” in a post on X, at some point last month. There’s a video attached (you should feast your eyes on this) of Windows 11 in action on a machine with an Intel Core i9 processor and 128GB RAM. That’s the top-spec chip series from Intel’s previous generation, and we all know generous 128GB of memory is. His tweet has since become host to many similar responses from users, pointing to Windows 11’s performance woes. What chance do you really have on a mid-range or an expensive laptop you’ve just splurged on?
Microsoft’s directional problem with Windows
For all the goodness of artificial intelligence (AI) assistance that’s envisioned as Copilot gets embedded into Windows 11 and all of Microsoft’s services that you use regularly, there are experience gaps that the operating system has at its core. Some of it stems from wanting to try and do too much. There is a new Outlook and a classic Outlook. There is a Microsoft Teams (classic) and a Microsoft Teams. Clutter is one way to describe things, and that’s before we even get into the small matter of preloaded apps that most Windows PC makers leave for you as a surprise.
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The distinct feeling from all this is, that Windows 11 continues to be a work in progress because Microsoft wants to be seen doing something with it. That may not be the right approach. There was a time when I preferred Edge over Chrome in the browser stakes, but not so much anymore (it keeps adding bloat, what can I say?).
If you don’t like advertisements showing up willy-nilly on your computing devices, Microsoft has more bad news for you. Not only do the Google Chrome browsers on PCs get a dose of pop-ups urging you to switch to the Microsoft Edge web browser instead, but there’s been a sense of emboldening since. Microsoft, very recently, began testing ads placed in the Windows start menu. Apps you should download or would like to download, are more to the point. That’s been confirmed with the latest Windows 11 update (dubbed KB5036980), which positions ads as “recommended” apps. Is there a way to turn these off? Perhaps, but I’m yet to intuitively discover that method.
I pen these observations from the vantage point of having used a macOS machine as my primary computing device for the best part of a decade now. Everything simply works, updates don’t bring us to the doorstep of reliability eccentricities and the combination of performance and reliability which always set the benchmark, has reset that benchmark with some aplomb since the Intel chapter was followed by Apple’s own M chips. In this period, I have made multiple genuine attempts to use a Windows 11 laptop or convertible as my primary work machine, but that’s never been a successful pursuit. The reasons aren’t hardware, or specs, or the PC maker. The reason is singular – Windows 11 is simply a mess.
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By moving the Start button to the middle alignment on the taskbar, Microsoft didn’t open up some breathing space on your desktop. Instead, there’s a new button that you can click (or even hover over, be scared) that immediately hijacks about a third of your display with stuff you don’t really want to see – a news feed filled with topics I have no interest in, prices for stocks I wouldn’t ever be able to afford and a mish-mash of some more stuff (I was too turned off by now) including ads for apps to download, some deals on new gadgets and a feeling of incompleteness. Then there’s another button on the system tray to invoke Copilot. This could have been designed better.
Do you know why Windows 11 is comparatively inferior to macOS Sonoma, with performance and reliability if we were to get as much parity as possible between specs? The reason hides in the foundation. Windows 11 has been built atop a tweaked Windows 10, which was atop a modded Windows 8 and so on. That’s been the story for almost 30 years now. Why else do you think the Windows Explorer app remains inferior to Apple’s Finder?
The one thing that Windows PCs do better than Apple Macs can, despite the latter having potentially significantly better hardware? Gaming. No one can take that effort with developers away from Microsoft.
Vishal Mathur is the technology editor for the Hindustan Times. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice-versa. The views expressed are personal.
