Tech Talk – Microsoft hints at some exciting Windows 12 developments

All support for Windows 10 Home, Pro, Enterprise and Education, including security updates, will end for mainstream users on October 14, 2025.

Windows 11 original release date was October 5, 2021. Microsoft has yet to announce the full lifecycle for Windows 11 but there are rumors that they are changing the lifecycle schedule for desktop operating systems with perhaps a new version every three years.

Windows 11 still feels like a new toy, yet we’ve already heard (reliable) speculation about Windows 12 (codenamed Hudson Valley) arriving as soon as next year.

What will it look like?

What improvements will we see?

Will there be new features?

We can’t answer these questions with certainty just yet, but there are whispers of new features that could be big news for businesses.

Three, in particular, have us excited.
First: (and probably most obvious) is the inclusion of more AI functionality. From automation to chatbots, AI has exploded in recent months. It just makes sense that Microsoft will harness this power to bring us a more impressive operating system.

We’re likely to see better AI analysis of our content and prompts to help us begin projects or choose apps to help get things done. It will also help us speed up what we’re doing with improved intuition for what we’ll do next.

Second: We do know that Microsoft wants to bring us faster updates and better security.

It’s likely things will be split into different sections rather than having the entire OS as a single entity as it stands today. That means updates to different elements will be able to run in the background while you continue to work, and different people may be granted access to each partition for improved security.

Finally: Microsoft also intends to make the Windows 12 experience more modular. The benefit of creating different components in this way is that higher-powered devices will get the maximum Windows experience, while lower-powered devices will still be able to do everything they need, running the Edge browser, Office tools, or web apps, for instance.

Some of these features may be reliant on dedicated hardware and upgraded equipment and we’re waiting for more announcements on that. As soon as we hear, you’ll be the first to know!

The final word
Overall, Windows 11 is a good operating system — as is Windows 10. There’s no one winner. I recommend sticking with Windows 11 on PCs that came with it and sticking with Windows 10 on PCs that can’t officially upgrade. If you have a PC somewhere in the middle – one that came with Windows 10, but that can officially upgrade to Windows 11 – that choice is up to you.

If you are upgrading a Windows 10 PC to Windows 11, I recommend backing up your PC first. You probably won’t run into any big problems, but it’s a good idea to maintain up-to-date backups anyway — especially when doing an operating system upgrade.