So Microsoft has this whole event scheduled for tomorrow morning. 11am Eastern, "the next generation of Windows," Panos Panay standing in front of a giant screen probably wearing that half-zip sweater he always wears. I've had it circled on my calendar since the start of the month, back when they teased it with that weird video of a staircase turning into the number 21 and then a Windows logo. Cute. Very mysterious. Except here's the thing — we already know almost everything they're going to say, because a full build leaked onto a Chinese enthusiast forum about a week ago and every tech site on the planet has spent the last several days picking it apart screenshot by screenshot.
I'm not even mad about it, exactly. I'm just tired of it happening every single time now. Remember when a new OS reveal was actually a reveal? I do, and I've been doing this blog long enough to have written about several of them. This time the surprise died before the keynote even got its invite out the door.
For anyone who missed it: the leaked build (people are calling it 21996, if you care about internal numbers, which I sort of do) shows a genuinely different Start menu. It's centered now, sitting in the middle of the taskbar instead of jammed in the corner like it's been since 1995. Rounded corners everywhere. New icons that look like they were designed by someone who just discovered fondant. A redesigned Settings app. Some kind of Widgets panel that slides out from the left, which if I'm honest looks a lot like the old Windows Vista sidebar gadgets nobody used, just with better fonts this time.
I downloaded the leaked ISO Tuesday night out of pure curiosity and threw it in a VM rather than risk my actual machine, which, lesson learned from 2015 when I put a Windows 10 Insider build straight onto my main desktop and spent a weekend fixing audio drivers instead of doing literally anything else I'd planned. The centered taskbar is the thing everyone's arguing about and honestly I get why. My first instinct was that it felt like Microsoft playing catch-up with macOS, which, fine, maybe it is, but after using it for twenty minutes I kind of liked it? It's a small thing. It shouldn't matter this much to me. It does anyway.
What bugs me more than the leak itself is what it says about how these events work now. A company spends months building toward one carefully staged morning, and some Insider build with telemetry still half-enabled gets shared to a forum, and by the time the actual presentation happens its basically a recap. Game companies deal with this constantly too: trailers leak, release dates leak, whole plot points leak months out. At some point I wonder if companies should just stop pretending the reveal is a reveal and do a slow rollout instead, like Apple mostly does with hardware rumors, except even that gets picked apart by supply chain leakers a year in advance now. There's no version of this where something stays secret until the company wants it to. Maybe there never really was, and I'm just noticing it more because I'm older and crankier about surprises being ruined.
Anyway. I'll still watch tomorrow's stream, because apparently I hate myself a little, and because there's always a chance they show something the leak didn't cover — pricing, upgrade eligibility, whether this is a free update for Windows 10 machines or if they're going to pull an old-school paid-upgrade move on us. My money's on free, because alienating people mid-pandemic while everyone's stuck working from a five-year-old laptop seems like a bad look even for a company that's made some genuinely bad looks over the years.
One more thing while I'm complaining: if this really does require a newer processor and TPM chip like some of the leaked system requirement rumors suggest, half the machines in this house are getting left behind, including the one I'm typing this on right now. That would be a very on-brand way for Microsoft to celebrate a decade of me writing about their operating systems on this blog. Cheers to that, I guess.