Review: Windows 10

Before we go any further, let's get this out of the way: You should upgrade to Windows 10. If you're using Windows 8, 7, XP, ME, or 3.1, you should upgrade. Maybe wait a couple of weeks for the biggest bugs to be squashed, but do it. Why wouldn't you? It's free, it's easy, and it's a huge improvement on whatever version you're using.

Windows 8 came out in 2012, chock-full of Grand Proclamations About The World. Two-in-one devices are taking over! Touchscreens are great! Old apps are stupid! Who cares about settings menus! Interesting ideas, the lot of 'em. Almost none came true as quickly as Microsoft hoped. To the vast majority of Windows users, stuck on laptops and desktops, its big icons and relentless focus on gestures and full-screen apps felt like a futuristic anachronism, an operating system designed for gadgets that don't exist. So people either resisted upgrading, or regretted it.

The subtle, remarkable feat of Windows 10 is that it manages to introduce equally powerful new ideas without being so overbearing. If you upgrade your laptop from Windows 7 and steadfastly refuse to use any of the new features, the new OS will feel mostly like an aesthetic makeover. The design is cleaner and flatter, with heavier contrast between icons and backgrounds and a slightly darker overall look. It's more consistent, too, as if Microsoft's designers finally made it deep into the menus. But it's the same Windows you've always known. Start Menu and everything.

The Start Menu, actually, is a perfect microcosm of what Windows 10 does well. It's totally familiar to anyone who's ever used Windows before, slotted in the bottom-left corner with its quick shortcuts and list of apps. But off to the right in the menu, there are the ever-flipping Live Tiles with information about the weather, your inbox, and the score of the game. Live Tiles were always a good idea—the problem was that they took over the screen and left you without any sense of your place in the OS. Now, they pop up semi-opaque over whatever you're doing, with a really smart mix of shortcuts and information.

There's a tremendous achievement in that balance. Windows 8 was full of jarring movements, from full-screen app to full-screen settings to full-screen Start; unless you knew the complicated gestures and keyboard shortcuts, getting around was a chore. Now, there are multiple ways to do almost anything, and very few things you have to know. In other words, there's no right way to use Windows, and that's a big deal.

There are far fewer "What the hell is this and how did I get here?" moments in Windows 10 that Microsoft felt it was able to do without any kind of startup tutorial or guide. Instead, the OS watches you use it. If you don't discover certain features over time, like the really handy Action Center that shows notifications and some quick settings toggles, Windows will nudge you toward them. But you might not discover everything, and that's OK! Just use Windows the way you want to, and don't worry about the three-finger trackpad gestures you're missing out on. (And Alt-Tab. Apparently nobody uses Alt-Tab to switch between apps. You should be using Alt-Tab.)

All that said, though, there is one thing about Windows 10 that will sooner or later change the way you use your computer: Cortana. Microsoft's omnipresent virtual assistant is not just a thing in your taskbar that will tell you the weather and show you news (though it is that, too), it's the most useful way by far to navigate Windows. Forget trying to do complicated stuff, like equations and research—most of that doesn't work anyway. But for opening apps, finding settings menus, and searching for files and folders across Windows, there's absolutely nothing better. You can type in the search box, or just say "Hey Cortana" and start talking.

Despite how futuristic that feels, Windows 10's speech recognition is rough right now; typing's easier. But even if it feels new and unfamiliar, don't write off Cortana. It's the best, most dramatically new and paradigm-shifting thing about Windows 10.

Cortana's present across Windows 10, but she's particularly well-integrated into Microsoft Edge, the new browser that I can only hope will someday finish its euthanization of Internet Explorer. (For now, IE is still lurking in the shadows, opening every once in a while as if to remind you how awful it is.) Edge is simple, fast, and reliable, which any good browser should be but almost none are. It has a neat screenshot feature, which lets you capture, annotate, and share a webpage—handy for anyone who builds websites, probably not useful for everyone else. But it's fun! The best of Edge's features are about making the loud, noisy, complex Web a little easier to figure out: the cleaned-up Reading View, or Cortana's ability to dive into the quagmire of restaurant websites and surface phone numbers and operating hours. It's brand new, so there's a lot still missing—extensions, download management, and many other little things—but it works. In the many weeks I've been using Windows 10 I haven't installed another browser.

In fact, I'm using a lot more pre-installed apps than I expected. Mail is terrific, simple and usable far beyond my expectations for any built-in email app. The redesigned Office apps, like Word and Excel, are simpler and touch-friendlier than ever. Even the Xbox app, which will let you stream games from your Xbox One and play them with a USB-connected controller, works basically perfectly. Windows 10 is shockingly useful right out of the box.

That's key, too, because there's still a serious lack of great, modern Windows apps. Someday, Microsoft hopes its vision for a universal OS will make developers want to build apps for it. Someday, maybe all those apps, old and new, will live in the Windows Store alongside movies, music, and TV shows. So far, not so much. Not even close. But hey, at least until then, apps install just fine the way they always have. Not to mention, everything runs in identical-looking windows, which can be dragged and layered as you like. There are a couple of neat multitasking ideas here as well, like a Task View that looks like OS X's Mission Control, and a long-overdue support for multiple desktops; they all support any and all apps too.

The more you use Windows 10, the more ridiculous Windows 8 starts to look. Remember when everything was full-screen, or when you could only snap two windows side by side? And how there was a separate "desktop" where all your old apps went, but even the desktop was just an app? And how switching apps required the weird back-and-forth gesture from the left side? For a while there, Windows wanted to be a mobile operating system, used with your fingers and hands; now it exists in the keyboard-and-mouse-driven, multi-tasking, I-have-work-to-do universe we all actually live in.

Unfortunately, the operating system does still try occasionally to live in that other world. This may be the one OS for all your devices, but it sure doesn't switch well. When you're in tablet mode, the taskbar simplifies a bit, and everything goes back to being full-screen by default. That's fine, except it's completely different than it was when you had a keyboard attached. When it looks the same and does all the same things, there's just too much cognitive work required to remember what you can and can't do, and when. The differences make sense on devices that do one or the other, but one gets the feeling that Microsoft's vision still centers around two-in-one convertible devices. And once you're there, all you get is confused. (I'm ignoring Windows 10 on phones for the purpose of this review, partly because it's a dramatically different experience and partly because nobody uses Windows phones so... who cares?)

Microsoft has grandly referred to Windows 10 as "the last Windows." It means there won't be huge upgrades, or new versions in new boxes that cost $179. There will just be upgrades, lots of them, coming frequently to make everything better. Which is why I'm not terribly worried about some of the bugs in this version of Windows 10, like the random crashes, or Cortana's incredible ability to hear everything horribly wrong, or the fact that the Store takes what feels like an hour to open. There's no service pack coming in six months to fix a hundred things and break 50 others; Windows is just going to get better every few weeks.

In that way and many others, Windows 10 represents the obvious future of PC operating systems. It makes Mac OS X feel old-fashioned, stuck in a time where The Desktop was a thing that mattered and the only way to access the Internet was through a browser. On Windows, the whole OS is connected; it pulses with activity and life, through Cortana and Live Tiles and notifications. It's connected, to itself and your stuff and the Web. It's a powerful, productive operating system, and if it improves at the pace Microsoft promises, it's going to serve people well for many years to come.

The most important unknown, however, is the one outside Microsoft's control. How's the Windows 10 hardware going to be? People don't buy Macs because they love OS X, they buy them because of their screens, keyboards, and trackpads. Conversely, most people who hate Windows should actually hate their computer hardware. There have been huge improvement in Windows machines over the last year or so, led by beautiful devices like the Dell XPS 13. But to stem the downward tide, Microsoft needs its partners to make great desktops, all-in-ones, two-in-ones, tablets, and laptops. It's made software that can do cool things with good webcams, and good microphones, and good screens. Who will make the hardware worthy of the software?

That's still hard to say for sure. But I do know this: It's about to be a really great time to make Windows devices. Because a billion-plus Windows users finally have a good reason to upgrade.