In-Depth with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview
by Andrew Cunningham, Ryan Smith, Kristian Vättö & Jarred Walton on March 9, 2012 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Microsoft
- Operating Systems
- Windows
- Windows 8
What comes next?
Microsoft released the beta version of Windows 7 to the public in January of 2009. At the time, it was basically feature-complete, but Microsoft made some tweaks and incorporated them into a release candidate build that it released in early May. The OS was then released to manufacturing in July, and public availability followed in October.
Microsoft’s stated goal for Windows 8 is to ship later this year, and using Windows 7’s timeline as a reference we can see that they’re still more or less on track for that. What we don’t really know is whether Windows 8 is as far along in the Consumer Preview as Windows 7 was in its beta—that will be the main factor in determining how quickly the rest of the development process goes by.
We also know nothing about product editions or cost at this point. Now, we didn’t know these details at this point in Windows 7’s cycle either, but if you’ll recall, the evaluation copy of Windows 7 offered in the beta and release candidate stages was clearly branded as “Windows 7 Ultimate,” suggesting that the multiple product tiers introduced in Vista would stick around to at least some degree. Everything in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is branded as, well, a Consumer Preview, meaning that Microsoft could really go anywhere with respect to product editions at this point.
In an ideal world, I’d love to see the company sell one edition of Windows that did everything Windows was capable of doing, but in our flawed reality I would settle for the death of the Ultimate edition, which has always had trouble justifying its existence (remember Ultimate Extras? Neither does anyone else). The few extra features it does offer (Bitlocker, primarily) would roll nicely into the Professional edition, and would be a suitable answer to the new version of FileVault introduced in Lion last year.
Unfortunately, I think Microsoft is all-too-likely to maintain the status quo in this case. People who do apples-to-apples comparisons of the OS X and Windows pricing structures are missing the point a bit—Apple has a nice high-margin hardware business that helps to subsidize its software development, which means it can more easily offer upgrades where $29 gets you a new OS that you can use for every computer in your house. Microsoft is a software company, and its bottom line depends on Windows—drastic price cuts would be awesome, but I don't think they're in the cards.
Conclusions
I was a huge advocate of Windows 7 when it came out, both personally and professionally. I immediately upgraded all of my systems just after release, and shortly after I started pushing it on my friends and family (I spent most of Thanksgiving 2009 upgrading systems). I spearheaded a migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 where I worked at the time, a small shop hesitant to change and frightened of the new. I thought it was a great upgrade—it provided a host of much-needed updates with few of Vista’s real or imagined shortcomings—and I thought that any computer that could be upgraded to run Windows 7 should be upgraded to run Windows 7, from the fastest multi-core desktop workstation to the lowliest netbook.
My reaction to Windows 8 is more tempered, assuming that what we see here in the Consumer Preview is more or less representative of the final product. I think it has the potential to be a killer tablet operating system, and for my part I think it’s quite usable on a laptop and desktop, but I have my doubts that more skittish users and businesses are going to be able to see past the newness of Metro.
The other problem Windows 8 is going to have is that, while it offers some nice under-the-hood updates, and while Metro is much more usable with a mouse and keyboard than some pessimists will lead you to believe, it’s not the essential upgrade for PCs that Windows 7 was. Thanks in part to the user-facing and under-the-hood improvements in Windows 7, desktops and laptops don’t need a new operating system like they did three years ago when their only options were the aging XP, the flawed Vista, or the alien landscape of Linux.
If you’re reading this, the chances are good that you’re a technology enthusiast with a decent system, and you’re the ones to whom Windows 8’s under-the-hood enhancements will appeal the most. Give the preview a test drive, evaluate whether you’ll use the new features, and give Metro a fair shake—like it or not, it’s the future of the platform, and it’s well-implemented here. If you’re happy with Windows 7, though, this isn’t the must-have upgrade that its predecessor was, and Microsoft’s long-term support cycle—mainstream support until 2015, extended support until 2020—means that you’ll still get significant software updates (new DirectX and IE versions and a handful of other backported features) for awhile and security updates for even longer. You’ve got time to wait for Windows 9.
We'll continue to cover changes in Windows 8 as it progresses toward its eventual release, at which point I'd like to post an updated version of this article covering new stuff and any features we missed this time around. If there's something missing in this review that you'd like to see covered, you can contact me at andrewc@anandtech.com, or find me on Twitter (I'm @Thomsirveaux).
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yannigr - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
May I say something here?Sorry for my English in advance.
I don't know if your work at Anandtech is a full time job or more like an occasional work. When you see a site like Anandtech you think that this is more like a big company with full time employees not a site with people that come and go just to write an article, or a review, at their spare time with hardware that they buy or if they are lucky get from the big companies as a gift for a presentation/review.
So when you are thinking Anandtech (and this is where maybe we misjudge you) as a big company you don't expect to read stuff that you read from a 16 years old kid in a small forum with 2-5-10 thousand members about his last review. I can not accept an excuse like this that you give. If you are in the BIGGEST and MORE RESPECTED hardware review site on the internet, and I don't think I am wrong here, you buy hardware that you also DO NOT LIKE or is not good enough for YOU. Why? Because that is your job or/and because you are writing for ANANDTECH not YannigrTech.
When you have the time to fast-test 8 machines you try to find an AMD system and even if it exists a system with VIA hardware. I know I must be joking with the last one about VIA. Well, I am not. I do think that if there was a VIA system in there many would be posting about how they were surprised about that. Even if they where laughing at it's performance it would have been a plus for the review.
Think a review many pages long about the next 3DMark only with AMD gpus because the reviewer don't find Nvidia gpus good enough. Many Nvidia fans would have been disappointed, to put it mildly.
Anyway the first post was written just for fun, because I know that Intel don't only have the better hardware but also the biggest influence not only at hardware sites but in people's minds too. Between two equal systems most just choose Intel because it is an Intel.
This post was whiten only because I was not expecting someone that writes for Anandtech to say that:
I only have Intel, I am not buying AMD because it is just not good enough for me.
Last. Thanks for the review. No joking here. It was interested and useful.
Andrew.a.cunningham - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
First, thanks for reading! I'm glad you found the review useful. Second, I want to try to answer some of your questions as to how AnandTech (and most new outlets on the Internet) work.Most writers who get paid are not working full-time positions. This is true both of independently owned websites like AnandTech, corporate-owned sites like IGN, or even big-time traditional publications like the New York Times. Most sites will contract freelancers rather than full-time workers both because of cost (freelancers are almost universally paid less than salaried employees and get no benefits) and administrative reasons (full-time employees mean that you've got to start paying attention to things like benefits and payroll taxes, necessitating a larger administrative staff to handle things like accounting).
Different outlets handle things in different ways - at AnandTech, the pay is OK for contractors, and most of us can bother Anand himself if we have questions about a story we're working on. On other sites (to cherry-pick an extreme example, let's call out the Huffington Post), freelancers are sometimes paid nothing, and are rather compensated with "exposure" and clips that they could in theory use to land a paying gig later on. I think what HuffPo (and, really, any profitable publication that doesn't pay its writers) does is a scam and I've got some strong feelings about it, but that's not my main point - my point is that much of what you read on the Internet is being written by people who don't write on the Internet full time. At AnandTech, even the senior editors are contracted freelancers rather than full-time employees.
Different people write for different reasons, but my goal is to make a living at it - I'm doing it because I love it, sure, but I'm also doing it because there are bills to pay. To do that, I cannot and will not spend $500 on hardware to use in a review that will earn me quite a bit less than $500. As anyone can tell you, that math doesn't add up, and since this is a review of the beta version of an x86-compatible Windows product - a product that looks and acts the same on any hardware that meets the minimum requirements - it's frankly not as important as a few of you seem to think it is. And that's all I have to say about it.
yannigr - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
I still believe that you should buy an AMD system. Not today or tomorrow but the next time you would need an extra machine. But that's me.Thanks for answering my post :-)
Andrew.a.cunningham - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
I'll look into it for sure. Trinity has my interest piqued. :-)TC2 - Sunday, March 11, 2012 - link
AMD?This isn't the point! Andrew Cunningham here hasn't downside. I want to ask, what is the problem here? The recent Intel CPUs a far superior than the amd cpus! And, if you want to know the best sides of W8 ... the amd just isn't the first choice ... :)))
silverblue - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
At the time Andrew got those machines, the best option across the board likely would've been Intel. The Atom build is thoroughly outclassed by Brazos but it simply wasn't available at the time.It's only really the past twelve months to fifteen months where AMD has actually had a viable range of mobile processors for netbooks and larger.
medi01 - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
Name something "far superior" to AMD A8 3850 that has comparable cost.TC2 - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - link
Oops to daisies :) It would make a god to tears!You and all amd-fans, are very funny!
When the conversation is about cores - "amd has twice than Intel" ?!
When the conversation is about performance - "the cost isn't comparable" ?!
When the conversation is about CPU - "amds APU is bla-bla..." ?!
When the conversation is about benchmarks - "look look, the BD is almost like Nehalem (btw. 2 generations older)" ?!
All those is UNTRUE!!! And remember well - I and many-many people doesn't give a shit about amds green presentations, cores and so ... We need fast CPU in ST as well as MT, and fast GPU! And believe me, esp. in professional segment amd got nothing significant :)))
chucky2 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I'd like for you to do an article on feature support of DirectX 9 cards under say Windows XP SP3 vs Windows 8. I know AMD dropped support for their DirectX 9 based cards before their 10.2 (Feb 2010 driver set), and then later belatedly added 10.2 as the last supported driver. My interest is in if they've dropped proper support of their cards in Vista/7/and now 8 rather than putting in the (very likely minimal) work to properly support them.Thanks for the article!
Andrew.a.cunningham - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
The 10.2 driver was only supported under Vista, but in my experience it works fine for Windows 7, which means it should work OK in Windows 8. One of the iMacs I tested on used a Radeon X1600 Mobility card - I installed the Vista-certified driver off of a Snow Leopard DVD and didn't see any crashes or instability, but your mileage may vary.