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Long before Taco Tuesday became part of the pop-culture vernacular, Tuesdays were synonymous with security — and for anyone in the tech world, they still are.  Patch Tuesday, as you most likely know, refers to the day each month when Microsoft releases security updates and patches for its software products — everything from Windows to Office to SQL Server, developer tools to browsers.

The practice, which happens on the second Tuesday of the month, was initiated to streamline the patch distribution process and make it easier for users and IT system administrators to manage updates.  Like tacos, Patch Tuesday is here to stay.

In a blog post celebrating the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday, the Microsoft Security Response Center wrote: “The concept of Patch Tuesday was conceived and implemented in 2003. Before this unified approach, our security updates were sporadic, posing significant challenges for IT professionals and organizations in deploying critical patches in a timely manner.”

Patch Tuesday will continue to be an “important part of our strategy to keep users secure,” Microsoft said, adding that it’s now an important part of the cybersecurity industry.  As a case in point, Adobe, among others, follows a similar patch cadence.

Patch Tuesday coverage has also long been a staple of Computerworld’s commitment to provide critical information to the IT industry. That’s why we’ve gathered together this collection of recent patches, a rolling list we’ll keep updated each month.

In case you missed a recent Patch Tuesday announcement, here are the latest six months of updates.

2025’s first Patch Tuesday: 159 patches, including several zero-day fixes

Microsoft began the new year with a hefty patch release for January, addressing eight zero-days with 159 patches for Windows, Microsoft Office and Visual Studio. Both Windows and Microsoft Office have “Patch Now” recommendations (with no browser or Exchange patches) for January. Microsoft also released a significant servicing stack update (SSU) that changes how desktop and server platforms are updated, requiring additional testing on how MSI Installer, MSIX and AppX packages are installed, updated, and uninstalled. More info on Microsoft Security updates for January 2025.

For December’s Patch Tuesday, 74 updates and a zero-day fix for Windows

Microsoft released 74 updates with this Patch Tuesday update, patching Windows, Office and Edge — but none for Microsoft Exchange Server or SQL server. One zero-day (CVE-2024-49138) affecting how Windows desktops handle error logs requires a “Patch Now” warning, but the Office, Visual Studio and Edge patches can be added to your standard release schedule. There are also several revisions this month that require attention before deployment. More info on Microsoft Security updates for December 2024.

November: This Patch Tuesday release includes 3 Windows zero-day fixes

Microsoft’s November Patch Tuesday update addresses 89 vulnerabilities in Windows, SQL Server, .NET and Microsoft Office — and three zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows that mean a patch now recommendation for Windows platforms. Unusually, there are a significant number of patch “re-releases” that might also require IT admin attention. More info on Microsoft Security updates for November 2024.

October: A haunting Patch Tuesday: 117 updates (and 5 zero-day flaws)

This month’s Patch Tuesday delivers a large set of patches from Microsoft that fix 117 flaws, including five zero-day vulnerabilities. Though there are patches affecting Windows, SQL Server, Microsoft Excel and Visual Studio, only the Windows updates require a “Patch Now” schedule — and they’ll need a significant amount of testing because they cover a lot of features: networking, kernel and core GDI components and Microsoft Hyper-V. Printing should be a core focus for enterprise testing and the SQL Server updates will require a focus on internally developed applications. More info on Microsoft Security updates for October 2024

September: Latest Patch Tuesday update fixes 4 zero-days

Addressing four zero-days flaws (CVE-2024-38014, CVE-2024-38217, CVE-2024-43491 and CVE-2024-38217), this month’s Patch Tuesday release from Microsoft includes 79 updates to the Windows platform. There are no patches to Microsoft Exchange Server or the company’s development tools (Visual Studio or .NET). And Microsoft addressed a recently exploited vulnerability in Microsoft Publisher with two critical updates and nine patches rated important for Microsoft Office. More info on Microsoft Security updates for September 2024.

August: Patch Tuesday means patch now

Microsoft pushed out 90 updates in its August Patch Tuesday release, including fixes for five Windows zero-days (CVE-2024-38178, CVE-2024-38193, CVE-2024-38213, CVE-2024-38106, CVE-2024-38107) and one zero-day affecting Office (CVE-2024-38189). This means a “Patch Now” recommendation for both Windows and Microsoft Office. Microsoft offered several (pretty useful) mitigations and recommendations to reduce the impact of these security issues. More info on Microsoft Security updates for August 2024.

Today’s AI models do a poor job of providing accurate information about world history, according to a new report from the Austrian research institute Complexity Science Hub (CSH).

In an experiment, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama, and Google’s Gemini were asked to answer yes or no to historical questions — and only 46% of the answers were correct. GPT-4, for example, answered “yes” to the question of whether Ancient Egypt had a standing army, likely because the AI model chose to extrapolate data from other empires such as Persia.

“If you are told A and B 100 times and C one time, and then asked a question about C, you might just remember A and B and try to extrapolate from that,” researcher Maria del Rio-Chanona told Techcrunch.

According to the researchers, AI models have more difficulty providing accurate information about some regions than others, including sub-Saharan Africa.

Windows Insiders can now download a new beta version of Windows 11 that offers support for Microsoft’s new search engine based on artificial intelligence (AI); that means, among other things, it is possible to use natural language when performing a search.

For now, search functions are limited to finding images and documents in jpg, png, pdf, txt and xls formats.

To use the new AI search, a Copilot+ computer is required. And thanks to the special NPU chip in these PCs, users can try out the new search feature without being connected to the internet, The Verge reports.

As of now, the search tool works with English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese or Chinese.

Apple is about to improve its email application, Mail, on iPads and Macs. Both platforms will soon gain the same Apple Intelligence email summary and prioritization systems already available on iPhones — though not every iPhone user seems to have embraced the new systems.

What’s coming?

If you use an iPhone, you’ll already have experienced the system, which introduces a new user interface in Mail and uses artificial intelligence (AI) in an attempt to prioritize incoming email communications with smart categorization. The latter means your device can look at incoming correspondence and assign it to categories, which currently include the following groupings:

• All Mail:  All your Mail in order of receipt.
• Primary: All the messages Apple Intelligence thinks might be important to you within this category.
• Transactions: Invoices, shopping receipts, and key messages from services and organizations, along with banking messages.
• Updates: All the stuff you subscribe to. (I see this as a quick list of things to unsubscribe from.)
• Promotions: Most marketing emails, which Apple describes as capturing special offers, deals and more.

Don’t worry about time-sensitive messages. Apple says these should automatically appear in your Primary account, even if the message belongs to a different category. That means you shouldn’t miss an important delivery when it arrives. Mail also uses AI to prioritize mails it believes might be more important, placing these at the top of the Primary mailbox.

How to manage categories

You can sort of teach Mail how to make better decisions when categorizing incoming emails. When you find an email gathered within an inappropriate category you can intervene.

On an iPhone, you do this by opening the message and tapping the three dots at the top right of the message page. A menu will appear, including an option to Categorize Sender. Tap this and you can assign emails from that sender to a more relevant category or leave automatic categorization on if you choose.

You can’t yet create your own custom groupings, such as for specific projects or workgroups, though you can use Smart Mailboxes to achieve this to some extent. Most observers believe that the capacity to build your own categories will be introduced eventually.

Had you noticed?

Apple has equipped email with a tool that lets you dig more deeply into the categories active on your device. Open Mail and tap the three dots icon at top right. Here you can switch between Categories and the traditional List view and also tap the About Categories item. When you do, you’ll be taken to an About Categories page in which you’ll find interesting information, such as:

• How many of your messages are seen as being ones that matter the most. 
• How many receipts, orders, and delivery-related emails you received in the last seven days.
• The frequency and magnitude of promotional email received.

What else is coming?

The new tools will likely appear as Apple introduces new contextual awareness to its devices, which means Siri will be able to answer questions that relate to what’s on your screen or in your apps. That means you’ll be able to engage in tasks such as adding address data to contact cards, or checking your next dinner date with your gran while looking at a message from her.

What people think

Apple drew criticism when it first introduced these features, with some users not adapting to them at all. They complained about the icons used, and didn’t seem to understand how to manage the new features or the layout within Mail. But control remained in their hands; disabling Categories is simple.

On an iPhone, you open Mail, tap the three dots at the top right of the app, and then tap List View. This returns Mail to the time-based list view of incoming messages you are used to.

Which devices can use the feature?

Unlike other Apple Intelligence features, these Mail tools are available to most Apple devices capable of running the latest version of Apple’s operating systems, which basically means you don’t need to be using a recent device such as an M-series Mac if you want to use these tools.

When will these tools reach iPads and Macs?

We anticipate the new Mail features will arrive on iPads and Macs starting with the next major update, which is expected to arrive in April after extensive beta testing. That means you can expect the new Mail tools to arrive with iPad OS 18.4 and macOS 15.4, which should appear in spring. It is not clear whether these tools will form part of a wider introduction of more contextual intelligence across Apple’s devices.

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A new study by researchers from four universities claims artificial intelligence (AI) models can predict career and educational success from a single image of a person’s face.

The researchers from Ivy League schools and others used photos from LinkedIn and photo directories of several top US MBA programs to determine what is called the Big Five personality traits for 96,000 graduates. It then compared those personality traits to employment outcomes and education histories of the graduates to determine correlation between the personality and success.

The findings highlight the significant impact AI could have as it shapes hiring practices. Employers and job seekers are increasingly turning to generative AI (genAI) to to automate their search tasks, whether it’s creating a shortlist of candidates for a position or writing a cover letter and resume. And data shows applicants can use AI to improve the chances of getting a particular job or a company finding the perfect talent match.

“I think personality affects career outcomes, and to the extent we can infer personality, we can predict their career outcomes,” said Kelly Shue, a study co-author and a Yale School of Management (SOM) finance professor.

Shue also noted there are many “disturbing moral implications” related to organizations using AI models to determine personalities. “I do worry this could be used in a way — to put lightly — it could make a lot of people unhappy,” she said. “Imagine using it in a hiring setting or as part of university admissions. A firm is trying to hire the best possible workers, and now in addition to screening on standard stuff, such as where you went to school and what degrees you have and your work experience, they’re going to screen you on your personality.

“I think our study may prompt [the technology’s] use, although we’re careful in the way we wrote it up in that we’re not advocating for adoption,” Shue said.

Organizations have been screening job applicants based on personality for years using behavioral assessments such as Pymetrics games, which measure up to 91 personality traits that fit into 9 different categories.

In fact, Shue said, “a ton” of companies already heavily use these more obvious estimates of someone’s personality, “they just haven’t been doing that from pictures of a person’s face,” she said. “I’ve known students who don’t get a callback after the behavioral assessment. So, presumably they were screened out based just on personality.”

Derived from a psychology framework, the Big Five personality traits (also known as the OCEAN model) comprise: Openness (curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, imagination); Conscientiousness (organization, productiveness, responsibility); Extraversion (sociability, assertiveness, energy level); Agreeableness (compassion, respectfulness, trust); and Neuroticism (anxiety, depression, emotional volatility).

Yale School of Management

Depending on which personality trait surfaces in the AI’s assessment, a school or company might pass an applicant by. For example, someone whose photo shows a tendency toward neuroticism is less likely to be hired.

“Neurotic is a very important personality trait,” Shue said. “In much of our analysis, it seems to have substantial predictive power for labor market outcomes, often going in a negative direction.”

Or, for example, someone who is less conscientious might be passed over by college admissions. “I think it’s possible personality matters for admissions,” Shue said. “Maybe schools want people who are going to be successful in their future careers, maybe they want diversity in personality, but certainly personality does matter for a lot of outcomes.

“To the extent that a school wants to admit a class that’s more likely to have [successful outcomes] they’d want to screen on personality.”

Using a combination of computer vision and AI natural language processing (NLP) technologies, the researchers from Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Reichman University, and Indiana University, were able to determine how the personality traits played into career and educational outcomes.

While someone changing their expression in a photo could play into how the AI perceives personality, Shue said the researchers seen “stability” in results using different photographs of the same individual. “We can also use separate algorithms to determine whether a person is smiling or not and if they’re holding that smile fixed,” she said.

There has already been pushback on the use of AI in culling job candidates, as the technology has proven to be flawed based on its data sources. “As AI continues to influence hiring practices, this research invites further exploration into its ethical, practical, and strategic considerations,” the study states.

Shue said the research highlights how cognitive skills and personality traits are key to labor market success, and that if a photo can uncover personality, it could be equally important to other factors on a resume.

“The reason we think it matters is when first companies are looking to hire, the key thing they’re looking at is education, or GPA and standardized test scores sometimes,” she said. “So, then, what we’re saying is our personality measures is in the same ballpark as those other measures or variables for how much they predict career success.”

The study also highlights that individual pay varies widely, and factors like race or education explain only a small portion of this variation. For example, while education matters for income, it doesn’t account for much of the variation in pay, which also includes experience and proficiency.

“Another way of looking at it,” Shue said, “is among people with say 12 years of education, there’s still huge variations in income within that group.”

The study also drew from previous research conducted on how personality traits could be revealed through an analysis of someone’s face. For example, a 2020 paper published in the scientific journal Nature noted a growing number of researchers had shown a link between facial images and the Big Five personality traits.

Other follow-on studies revealed how facial recognition technology could pick up on a person’s political affiliations through a facial image. That study used more than one million images to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberals and conservatives.

“Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%),” the study published in Nature revealed.

The newest study focused on four main objectives:

• Human Capital: Cognitive skills and personality traits are crucial for labor market success, but scaling personality measurement is challenging.
• Methodology: Researchers developed “Photo Big 5,” extracting personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, with strong predictive value for career outcomes.
• Predictive Power: The Photo Big 5 predicts school rank, compensation, seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career growth, with modest links to GPA.
• Ethics: The method improves accessibility and resists manipulation, but raises concerns about discrimination and autonomy.

A subsection of the study also cites literature about how a person’s facial image can uncover someone’s genetic makeup or even how pre-natal environment can contribute to personality.

Genetics, Shue said, can explain 30% to 60% of the variation in personality across individuals. There’s also research showing early childhood hormone exposure affects personality and how people look.

“So, then, I don’t think there’s a stretch to say there’s a strong genetic as well as environmental component to how we look, there’s a strong genetic-environmental component to our personality,” she said.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has said it is unlikely to equip its new US plant in Arizona with its most advanced chip technology ahead of its Taiwan factories, raising concerns about supply-chain hurdles for tech companies.

Speaking at a university event in Taiwan, TSMC CEO and Chairman C.C. Wei attributed the delays at TSMC’s Arizona factory to a combination of complex compliance requirements, local construction regulations, and extensive permitting processes, according to a Reuters report. 

Microsoft began 2025 with a hefty patch release this month, addressing eight zero-days with 159 patches for Windows, Microsoft Office and Visual Studio. Both Windows and Microsoft Office have “Patch Now” recommendations (with no browser or Exchange patches) for January.

Microsoft also released a significant servicing stack update (SSU) that changes how desktop and server platforms are updated, requiring additional testing on how MSI Installer, MSIX and AppX packages are installed, updated, and uninstalled. 

To navigate these changes, the Readiness team has provided this useful infographic detailing the risks of deploying the updates. A rundown of recent Patch Tuesday releases is available here.

Known issues 

Readiness worked with both Citrix and Microsoft to detail the more serious update issues affecting enterprise desktops, including:

• Windows 10/11: Following the installation of the October 2024 security update, some customers report that theOpenSSH (Open Secure Shell) service fails to start, preventing SSH connections. The service fails without detailed logging; manual intervention is required to run the sshd.exe process. Microsoft is investigating the issue with no (as of now) published schedule for either mitigations or a resolution.

Citrix reported significant issues with its Session Recording Agent (SRA), causing the January update to fail to complete successfully. Microsoft published a security bulletin (KB5050009) that says: “Affected devices might initially download and apply the January 2025 Windows security update correctly, such as via the Windows Update page in Settings.” Once this situation occurs, however, the update process stops and proceeds to rollback to the original state.

In short, if you have the Citrix SRA installed, your device was (likely) not updated this month.

Major revisions

For this Patch Tuesday, we have the following revisions to previously released updates:

• CVE-2025-21311: Windows Installer Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability. Microsoft has released an updated group policy (SkuSiPolicy.p7b) to better handle security related issues with VBS scripts included in the knowledge note, “Guidance for blocking rollback of Virtualization-based Security (VBS)”.
  
• CVE-2025-21308: Windows Themes Spoofing Vulnerability. Microsoft recommends disabling NTLM for desktop systems to address this vulnerability. Guidance on the  process can be found here: Restrict NTLM: Outgoing NTLM traffic to remote servers.

Microsoft also released CVE-2025-21224 to address two memory related security vulnerabilities in the legacy line printer daemon (LPD), a Windows feature that has been deprecated for 15 years. I can’t see things improving for these print-related functions (given the problems we’ve seen for the past decade). Maybe now is the time to start removing these legacy features from your platform.

Windows lifecycle and enforcement updates

The following Microsoft products will be retired this year:

• Microsoft Genomics: Jan. 6, 2025
• Visual Studio App Center: March 31, 2025
• SAP HANA Large Instances (HLI): June 30, 2025

Of course, we don’t need to mention the elephant in the room. Microsoft will end support for Windows 10 in October.

Each month, we analyze Microsoft’s updates across key product families — Windows, Office, and developer tools — to help you prioritize patching efforts. This prescriptive, actionable, guidance is based on assessing a large application portfolio and a detailed analysis of the Microsoft patches and their potential impact on the Windows platforms and apps.

For this release cycle from Microsoft, we have grouped the critical updates and required testing efforts into different functional areas including:

Remote desktop

January has a heavy focus on Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) and network protocols, with the following testing guidance:

• RD Gateway Connections: Ensure RD Gateway (RDG) continues to facilitate both UDP and TCP traffic seamlessly without performance degradation. Try disconnecting RDG from an existing/established connection.
• VPN, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth Scenarios: test end-to-end configurations and nearby sharing functionality.
• DNS Management for Operators: Verify that users in the “Network Configuration Operators” group can manage DNS client settings effortlessly.

Local Windows file system and storage

File system and storage components also get minor updates. Desktop and server file system testing efforts should focus on:

• Offline Files and Mapped Drives: Test mapped network drives under both online and offline conditions. Pay close attention to Sync Center status updates.
• BitLocker: Validate drive locking and unlocking, BitLocker-native boot scenarios, and post-hibernation states with BitLocker enabled.

Virtualization and Microsoft Hyper-V

Hyper-V and virtual machines receive lightweight updates:

• Traffic Testing: Install the Hyper-V feature and restart systems. Monitor network performance and ensure no regressions in virtual network traffic or virtual machine management.

Security and authentication

Key areas for security-related testing include:

• Digest Authentication Stress Testing: Simulate heavy loads while using Digest authentication to uncover potential issues.
• SPNEGO Negotiations: Verify Secure Negotiation Protocol (SPNEGO) functionalities in cross-domain or multi-forest Active Directory setups.
• Authentication Scenarios: Test applications relying on LSASS processes and ensure that protocols like Kerberos, NTLM, and certificate-based authentication remain stable under load.

Other critical updates

There are some additional testing priorities for this release:

• App Deployment Scenarios: Install and update MSIX/Appx packages with and without packaged services, confirming admin-only requirements for updates.
• WebSocket Connections: Establish and monitor secure WebSocket connections, ensuring proper encryption and handshake results.
• Graphics and Themes: Test GDI+-based apps and workflows involving theme files to ensure UI elements render correctly across different view modes. Some suggestions include foreign language applications that rely on Input Method Editors (IMEs).

January’s updates maintain a medium-risk profile for most systems, but testing remains essential — especially for networking, authentication, and file system scenarios. We recommend prioritizing remote network traffic validation, with light testing for storage and virtualization environments. If you have a large MSIX/Appx package portfolio, there’s a lot of work to do to ensure that your package installs, updates and uninstalls successfully.

Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families (as defined by Microsoft) with the following basic groupings: 

• Browsers (Microsoft IE and Edge) 
• Microsoft Windows (both desktop and server) 
• Microsoft Office
• Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server 
• Microsoft Developer Tools (Visual Studio and .NET)
• Adobe (if you get this far) 

Browsers

There were no Microsoft browser updates for Patch Tuesday this month. Expect Chromium updates that will affect Microsoft Edge in the coming week. (You can find the enterprise release schedule for Chromium here.)

Microsoft Windows

This is a pretty large update for the Windows ecosystem, with 124 patches for both desktops and servers, covering over 50 product/feature groups. We’ve highlighted some of the major areas of interest:

• Fax/Telephony
• MSI/AppX/Installer and the Windows update mechanisms
• Windows COM/DCOM/OLE
• Networking, Remote Desktop
• Kerberos, Digital Certificates, BitLocker, Windows Boot Manager
• Windows graphics (GDI) and Kernel drivers

Unfortunately, Windows security vulnerabilities CVE-2025-21275 and CVE-2025-21308 both affect core application functionality and have been publicly disclosed. Add these Windows updates to your “Patch Now” release schedule.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office gets three critical updates, and a further 17 patches rated important. Unusually, three Microsoft Office updates affecting Microsoft Access fall into the zero-day category with CVE-2025-21366, CVE-2025-21395 and CVE-2025-21186 publicly disclosed. Add these Microsoft updates to your “Patch Now” calendar.

Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server

There were no updates from Microsoft for SQL Server or Microsoft Exchange servers this month. 

Microsoft Developer Tools (Visual Studio and .NET)

Microsoft has released seven updates rated as important affecting Microsoft .NET and Visual Studio. Given the urgent attention required for Office and Windows this month, you can add these standard, low-profile patches to your standard developer release schedule. 

Adobe and third-party updates

No Adobe related patches were released by Microsoft this month. However, two third-party, development related updates were published; they affect GitHub (CVE-2024-50338) and CERT CC patch (CVE-2024-7344). Both updates can be added to the standard developer release schedule.

In a few years, every new employee entering the workforce will already have become accustomed to using AI to solve problems and help with tasks – and they’re going to want the same tools at work as those they use at home. That’s the important take-away from new research that shows about a quarter of US teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork.

We know, because we’ve seen it already; once powerful technologies take hold in the school room, they tend to proliferate across business markets later. We’ve seen it happen before with the Mac, the PC, iPad, and iPhone. We’ve seen it happen in the evolution of photo-sharing sites and social media. 

We’re going to keep seeing this happen in the future.  You don’t have to like it, but you have to accept that once a technology reaches critical mass in the schoolroom, it appears in business later.

Tomorrow’s world

Tomorrow’s employees have grown up with that tech, meaning Gen Z is also set to be Generation AI. This is going to become increasingly important to business users, who will need to make the right investments today to ensure they have appropriate tech (including experience and policy) in place. 

This is something that’s evidently important to device, service, and operating system vendors, as each and every one of them is now engaged in a rapid sprint to deploy AI in their offerings. Apple, of course, is a little unique in that it is attempting to weave privacy into the systems it provides, including Apple Intelligence, something that will be seen as of increasing importance to business users as they seek to lock down their information, both in competitive terms and also to meet data protection requirements. 

For digital natives, privacy is a currency they want to control

It’s interesting to see how Generation Z sees privacy. These digital natives want to control the digital narrative concerning their lives, have grown up with the internet, and are more likely to digest information in video than written form. 

They also understand how things work. That means they know about the privacy settings on their devices and are more likely than older generations to use them.  They are prepared to share personal information in exchange for personalized services, but are concerned about misuse, abuse, or tracking of them or their data — and don’t have much faith in the ability of companies to protect that information. 

This implies that, when they begin their working lives, they will prefer workplace solutions that provide both convenience and privacy. But as the digital transformation experience accelerated by the iPhone-led smartphone revolution showed, they will still use AI — even if companies don’t approve the services they prefer.  

This is why it is important today to test and rate existing AI systems against your own business security and privacy policies.

Invest in infrastructure

By the time your next generational employee intake takes place, you’ll want to ensure the use of AI across your organization has been tested, verified, and has become mature. Otherwise (and not for the first time), current generations will be leaving it to subsequent ones to figure out how to shave the corners off the wheel, giving those who’ve already figured out how to build better roads for those circular objects the edge when it comes to supporting any kind of customer journey. 

It remains to be seen the extent to which AI will either unleash the creativity and innovation its proponents promise us, or confine human endeavor to an Overton window defined by the people who build the AI systems we use. But we already seem unable to leave the vehicle. 

There is one more thing for business users planning their AI deployments to consider, and that’s Apple. You see, despite Siri, Apple already has a strong grip on Generation Z — its market share among US teens continues to grow. They like Apple and its services.

While they don’t see Apple Intelligence as a particularly big draw yet, in the fast-moving long game of AI deployment, so long as Apple focuses on things they care about — such as privacy — and delivers AI that does what it says it does, the company’s resurgence in enterprise markets will continue. That means demand for Apple in the workplace will continue to grow, and it will remain essential to open things up with employee choice schemes and consider Mac, iPad, and iPhone deployments across US business. 

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Support for Microsoft 365 ends along with Windows 10

PixieMe/Shutterstock

Although Microsoft announced some time ago that Windows 10 will only be supported (free of charge) until October 14, 2025, the switch to its successor Windows 11 is only taking place slowly.

According to calculations by security provider Eset, 32 million PCs in Germany are still running Windows 10. The situation is similar in other countries. One reason for this is that although the switch to Windows 11 is free, there are stricter hardware requirements which , according to studies by Lansweeper, around 50 percent of computers in Germany do not meet.

Functional, but not supported

To urge more users to upgrade to Windows 11, Microsoft recently announced in a blog post that Microsoft-365 apps will no longer be supported on Windows 10 devices after October 14, 2025. “To use Microsoft 365 apps on your device, you will need to upgrade to Windows 11,” it continued.

The blog post raised numerous questions, and has since been deleted by Microsoft. However, there was no correction or explanation.

What the software giant was actually getting at is shown by a support page on the subject that was updated in December. Here, too, Microsoft points out that Microsoft 365 apps will no longer be supported under Windows 10 after the end of support in mid-October. At the same time, however, the company explains that the applications will continue to work as before. However, to avoid performance and reliability problems over time, an upgrade to Windows 11 is strongly recommended.

The reasoning: “Microsoft 365 is subject to the Modern Lifecycle Policy, which requires that customers keep the product or service up to date according to maintenance and system requirements and use Microsoft 365 on a Windows operating system for which support is currently provided.”

License versions not affected

The situation is somewhat clearer for Office versions with a one-time license: Based on the Fixed Lifecycle Policy, “Office Home & Student”, “Office Home & Business” or “Office Professional Plus” will continue to be fully supported under Windows 10 — as long as they do not reach the end of support themselves. Support for Office 2016 and 2019 will also end at the same time as Windows 10.

Nvidia unveiled a new platform at CES called Cosmos. It’s a world foundation model (WFM) development platform designed to advance and accelerate Physical AI for robots and self-driving vehicles (which are also, in fact, robots).

Understanding digital twins and physical AI

I’ve written before about Physical AI in general and Nvidia’s initiatives in that space specifically. 

The “Physical AI” concept involves creating complex virtual environments that simulate real-world physics, where digital replicas of robots and systems can learn and optimize their performance. 

For factory robots, as an example, an Omniverse customer would create a “digital twin” of the factory in a virtual reality space. Every detail of the factory floor would be replicated, with the distances between objects exactly the same as in the real, physical factory. Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in the real factory feed data into the twin, keeping it in an identical state.

Crucially, the virtual twin in Omniverse is programmatically endowed with physics — gravity, inertia, friction, and other physical qualities that are applied to anything happening in the twin. Companies can design, simulate, operate, and maintain their factories virtually through twins.  And they can train robots and robotic systems in Omniverse. 

The newly announced Cosmos works in conjunction with — and dramatically  amplifies — the ability of Omniverse robot training through the creation and use of World Foundation Models (WFMs).

What in the world are ‘World Foundation Models”?

If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase “World Foundation Models,” that makes sense, because it’s pretty new and most likely coined by Nvidia. It conjoins the existing (but also recent) concepts of “world models” (AI systems that create internal representations of their environment to simulate and predict complex scenarios) and “foundation models” (AI systems trained on vast datasets that can be adapted for a wide range of tasks).  

According to Nvidia, WFMs are an easy way to generate massive amounts of photoreal, physics-based artificial data for training existing models or building custom models.  Robot developers can add their own data, such as videos captured in their own factory, then let Cosmos multiply and expand the basic scenario with thousands more, giving robot programming the ability to choose the correct or best movements for the task at hand. 

The Cosmos platform includes generative WFMs, advanced tokenizers, guardrails, and an accelerated video processing pipeline. Developers can use Nvidia’s Omniverse to create geospatially accurate scenarios that account for the laws of physics. Then, they can output these scenarios into Cosmos, creating photorealistic videos that provide the data for robotic reinforcement learning feedback. 

Again, a great way to understand this is to compare it with the LLM-based ChatGPT. 

I recently wrote about how Google’s LLM-based tool, NotebookLM, is fantastic for learning something complex. At the time, I described the following use case: 

“Rather than reading advanced material, it’s far faster and more engaging to let NotebookLM’s ‘Audio Overviews’ feature create a life-like podcast for you to listen to. It will create a ‘study guide,’ a FAQ, a ‘briefing guide,’ and a timeline, enabling you to quickly look at dense content from multiple angles, perspectives, and levels. You can start by asking the chatbot to explain it to you like you’re a sixth-grader, then a high school senior, then an undergrad, and on up until you’ve mastered the material.”

In this scenario, you’re “training” your brain by taking an existing data set and telling the chatbot to give you that same data sliced, diced, and re-formatted in eight or more ways. 

This is also how WFMs work, in outline. The developer takes existing training data and feeds it into Cosmos, which creates more training scenarios that are as usable as the original set. They can turn 30 scenarios into 30,000, which the robot uses as if actual trial-and-error learning had taken place. 

Cosmos’s output looks like real-world training data, but it can rapidly train robots in thousands of scenarios. 

Robotic’s ChatGPT moment

Nvidia implies that Cosmos will usher in a “ChatGPT moment” for robotics. The company means that, just as the basic technology of neural networks existed for many years, Google’s Transformer model enabled radically accelerated training that led to LLM chatbots like ChatGPT. 

In the more familiar world of LLMs, we’ve come to understand the relationship between the size of the data sets used for training these models and the speed of that training and their resulting performance and accuracy. 

Elon Musk pointed out recently that AI companies have exhausted human-generated data for training AI models. “We’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge…in AI training,” he said. 

Data for training robots is also limited — but for a different reason. Training data in the real physical world is simply slow and expensive. Unlike human-generated text, which has already happened at scale over centuries, robot-training data has to be generated from scratch. 

Likewise, robots and self-driving cars can essentially “learn” how to do their jobs and navigate complex and unfamiliar terrain. Cosmos (working with Omniverse) should dramatically increase the amount of training that can take place in a much shorter time frame.

Driving safety

The idea of testing autonomous vehicles with massive sets of physics-aware data is a vast improvement over how self-driving cars and trucks have historically been trained — which is that they drive around in the real world with a safety driver. 

Driving in the real world with a person as backup is time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes dangerous — especially when you consider that autonomous vehicles need to be trained to respond to dangerous situations.

Using Cosmos to train autonomous vehicles would involve the rapid creation of huge numbers of simulated scenarios. For example, imagine the simulation of every kind of animal that could conceivably cross a road — bears, dear, dogs, cats, lizards, etc. — in tens of thousands of different weather and lighting conditions. By the end of all this training, the car’s digital twin in Omniverse would be able to recognize and navigate scenarios of animals on the road regardless of the animal and the weather or time of day. That learning would then be transferred to thousands of real cars, which would also know how to navigate those situations (with no animals harmed).

If Nvidia is right, and we have arrived at a “ChatGPT moment” for robotics, then the pace of robotics advances should start accelerating, driving major efficiencies and mainstreaming autonomous vehicles on public roads globally for many companies (not just Waymo in a few cities). 

One fascinating aspect of the new generative AI world in which we live is that predictions are futile. Nobody knows how all this will develop. 

And this appears to be true with predictions about how long it will take for everything to become extremely robotic. It’s probably all going to happen much  faster than anyone thinks. 

When we talk about Android upgrades, it’s all too easy to miss the forest for the trees.

It’s a familiar tale here in the land o’ Googley matters — and with some wacky-seeming changes on the way for Android upgrades in 2025, the myopic musings are only getting louder.

Surely you’ve seen these sentiments, right? One just popped up in my feed the other day, in fact, with a saucy-seeming headline stating that the current Android 15 update is “a waste of a software upgrade.”

In it, the author notes that Android 15 doesn’t introduce many obvious front-facing changes to a phone’s look and feel and is consequently, as he puts it, a “useless” update.

It’s a déjà-vu-inducing view — one we inevitably hear after virtually every Android update. Now, though, it includes a new variable as part of its argument: the fact that Google is shifting away from its annual cadence for new Android versions in 2025 and moving instead toward a twice-yearly pattern for official operating system rollouts. And thus, the thinking goes, each individual update is bound to become even less significant.

For anyone staring only at the surface and without the deeper context of everything happening in the Android software ocean, it sure sounds like an sensible conclusion. But my, oh my, you’d better believe there’s a lot more going on here — and Google, unfortunately, has never been great about making regular phone-owning folk aware of that bigger picture.

Specifically, we’ve got two pesky misconceptions we’re gonna hear plenty more of in the months to come. Let’s tackle ’em both and get to the bottom of why they’re misguided, shall we?

[Get level-headed knowledge in your inbox with my free Android Intelligence newsletter — three new things to know each Friday and my free Android Notification Power-Pack as a special welcome bonus!]

Android upgrade misconception #1: Android updates don’t matter

Ah, yes — a classic complaint and one we’ve been hearing for ages: “This update barely changes anything! I guess I didn’t really need it after all.”

And look: I certainly get why it could seem that way. There’s a reason why each new generation of a physical product tends to look different from the last. We mealy-mouthed mammals need an obvious, front-facing visual that confirms to us something is new and exciting, lest it seem like more of the same.

But as I’ve been reminding folks for years now, an Android update is about much more than what you see on the surface.

Sure, the shiny new stuff is nice. Who doesn’t love exploring fun new features and interesting interface improvements? Those are the elements most of us relate to most readily.

But the most important parts of an Android update are typically what’s under the hood and often even invisible to us from the outside.

Each new Android update, y’see, includes an array of engine-room enhancements along with noteworthy privacy, security, and performance strengtheners — things that go beyond the little fixes provided in those separate monthly patches. Beyond that, each update introduces both expansions and restrictions to APIs, which are what permit third-party apps to interact with your phone and data and perform a variety of advanced functions. Frequently, the updates better control how and when apps are able to access different types of data and make it more difficult for them to take advantage of permissions.

You may not immediately see all that stuff, but — oh, yes — you’d better believe it matters.

That aside, even in terms of front-facing features, Android 15 actually includes a surprising amount of interesting stuff — everything from the introduction of a platform-level place for securely storing important files to an intelligent auto-adjusting vibration control, a new and more effective system volume panel setup, and a useful new charging-time home control screensaver. And that’s just the start.

Now, could Google do a better job of (a) showcasing this stuff and (b) educating everyone about the importance of all the less visible advantages each new update introduces? Absotively. That’s been a soapbox subject of mine for something like 737 years now.

But just because it isn’t in your face doesn’t mean it isn’t there — or that the update itself doesn’t matter. At this point, at least, it’s just up to you to do a little discovering (or, ahem, to read a pithy weekly newsletter that points you to all the pertinent info) and wrap your brain around the benefits both front-facing and unseen.

Android upgrade misconception #2: iPhones get more with their annual updates

Whoo, boy — is this ever a fun one.

From the earliest days of Android, there’s been a popular perception that Apple does way more for its iDevices and gives iPhone owners a major advantage over us Android-appreciating animals.

With no disrespect to the Apple adorers among us, this couldn’t be more off-base.

Again, Google doesn’t do a great job of highlighting this and helping average Android phone-owners appreciate the bigger picture — but, well, go go gadget self-quote summoner:

With Android, operating system updates are only half the story. For well over a decade now, Google’s been pulling what were once core operating system elements out of the operating system proper and treating them as standalone apps instead. That means those elements — all of which are still considered part of the single-bundle operating system in the land of iOS — get updated numerous times a month, all throughout the year. And those updates reach every single Android device within a matter of days, regardless of which company made it or how long ago it was released.

A perfect example of that principle in action is how Google recently made a quiet under-the-hood update to a system-level utility called Google Play Services that gave all Android phone-owners with 2019’s Android 10 or higher a trio of important new security features — instantly, universally, and without any manufacturer or carrier involvement.

Those types of underemphasized updates arrive on Android all the time — with random rollouts like that as well as with the now-standard quarterly feature drops and monthly security patches, too.

And all of that is still but one tiny example of the effect we’re talking about here.

Back to that self-quoting magic:

Time for the biggest and most rarely acknowledged reality check of all: At this point, nearly every single element that’s considered a significant part of an annual Apple iOS update is handled in an a la carte manner on Android — with multiple monthly updates that impact close to every still-functioning Android phone. In other words, even Android phones from eight years ago get updates numerous times a year that are all virtually equivalent to an entire iOS operating system rollout. Those updates just aren’t packaged neatly or presented cohesively, and most people don’t consider how all of the small-seeming pieces add up.

It’s no exaggeration: When you look at an average Apple iOS update, nearly every high-profile addition tends to be something that’s handled by a standalone app in Android and updated year-round — whether we’re talkin’ updates to messaging and video calling, voice-to-text translation, or system-level tools like the browser, maps app, notes app, and mobile payment applications. 

Heck, the same even applies for updates to things like Gemini, which occur nearly constantly on Android but only as part of those annual bundled OS updates on the Apple side of the mobile divide, with its equivalent.

The main difference is just that Google just doesn’t do much to draw attention to it or emphasize how it all fits into the same broader picture. And — well…

What’s especially interesting is that with rare exception, there are virtually no limits to how and when those scattered Android updates apply. The nearly-nine-year-old Nexus 4 sitting in my desk drawer still gets every update to every one of those applications every month and receives the same sort of functionality Apple is delivering as part of its [latest] iOS update in small deliveries year-round. …

For as good as Apple’s support is, it typically stops entirely after a phone has passed the six-year mark since its release. And what’s almost always overlooked in the glowing headlines about iOS updates is the fact that even devices from a year or two ago frequently don’t get all of the features announced in a new iOS update. In fact, the vast majority of these latest additions and improvements have some manner of cutoff or restriction associated with ’em, even within that six-year window.

So while an older iPhone is still getting the latest update — and while that’s undeniably a very good thing! — it’s also very accurate to say that an equally dated Android device is ultimately getting more current features and updates even more regularly. It’s just framed in a very different and generally less attention-grabbing way.

Plain and simple, it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. But all of that not-so-obvious nuance tends to get lost in the shuffle of most public discussions.

Here in 2025, the level of nuance is only gonna grow greater. We’ve got Android 16 on the horizon with its extra-early Q2 timeline, then a second smaller Android update set for the fourth quarter of the year (which may or may not sport its own new number).

But that expanding framework aside, y’know all the smaller stuff we just went over? Yup — all of that is also still present and pertinent as ever: the in-between-update quarterly feature drops, the separate monthly security patches, and perhaps most important, all the ongoing week-to-week updates of system-level apps both front-facing and under-the-hood, all year long.

So, yeah: Android updates matter, all right. And with more of ’em slated to show up in the year ahead, that perspective is more important than ever to wrap your head around and remember — even if the Apple marketing machine will do everything in its power to downplay that reality and make you forget.

Want even more Googley knowledge? Check out my weekly Android Intelligence newsletter to get next-level tips and insight delivered directly to your inbox — and get my free Android Notification Power-Pack the second you sign up.

Windows 11 24H2 has been released, but behind the scenes, Microsoft is constantly working to improve the newest version of Windows. The company frequently rolls out public preview builds to members of its Windows Insider Program, allowing them to test out — and even help shape — upcoming features.

Skip to the builds

The Windows Insider program is divided into four channels:

• The Canary Channel is where platform changes (such as major updates to the Windows kernel and new APIs) are previewed. These changes are not tied to a particular Windows release and may never ship at all. Little documentation is provided, and builds are likely to be very unstable. This channel is best for highly technical users.
• The Dev Channel is where new features are introduced for initial testing, regardless of which Windows release they’ll eventually end up in. This channel is best for technical users and developers and builds in it may be unstable and buggy.
• In the Beta Channel, you’ll get more polished features that will be deployed in the next major Windows release. This channel is best for early adopters, and Microsoft says your feedback in this channel will have the most impact.
• The Release Preview Channel typically doesn’t see action until shortly before a new feature update is rolled out. It’s meant for final testing of an upcoming release and is best for those who want the most stable builds.

The Beta and Release Preview Channels also receive bug-fix builds for the currently shipping version of Windows 11. See “How to preview and deploy Windows 10 and 11 updates” for more details about the four channels and how to switch to a different channel.

Not everyone can participate in the Windows 11 Insider program, because the new operating system has more stringent system requirements than Windows 10. If your PC fails to meet the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11, you cannot join the Windows 11 Insider Program. (See “How to check if your PC can run Windows 11.”)

Below you’ll find information about the Windows 11 preview builds that have been announced by Microsoft in the past six months. (For the Release Preview Channel, we cover builds released for the current version of Windows 11, not for earlier versions.) For each build, we’ve included the date of its release, which Insider channel it was released to, a summary of what’s in the build, and a link to Microsoft’s announcement about it.

Note: If you’re looking for information about updates being rolled out to all Windows 11 users, not previews for Windows Insiders, see “Windows 11: A guide to the updates.”

The latest Windows 11 Insider preview builds Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27774

Release date: January 16, 2025

Released to: Canary Channel

This update includes a small set of tweaks that Microsoft says improves the overall experience of Windows 11. In addition, the Administrator protection can now be enabled from Windows Security settings under the Account Protection tab, which allows users to enable the feature without requiring help from IT admins.

The build also fixes several bugs, including one in which accent colored window borders were not displayed when enabled, shadows around windows were not displaying when enabled, and window launching (and other) animations were not showing.

There are three known issues in this build, including one in which Insiders joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail will lose Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into the PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking Set up my PIN.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27774.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27768

Release date: January 9, 2025

Released to: Canary Channel

This update includes a small set of general changes that Microsoft says improve the overall experience of Windows 11. It also fixes several bugs, including one in which File Explorer sometimes lost focus on the search box while typing.

There are three known issues in this build, including one in which if you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail, you will lose Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into your PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN.”

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27768.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4660

Release date: January 3, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available get labels added to previously unlabeled actions on File Explorer’s context menu such as cut, copy, paste, rename, share, and delete.

Those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get several bug fixes for issues that impacted File Explorer’s performance and reliability.

Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4660.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27766

Release date: January 3, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This update includes a small set of general improvements and fixes that Microsoft says improve the overall experience of Windows 11. It also fixes several bugs, including one in which some Insiders experienced frequent explorer.exe crashes after they clean-installed or reset their PC.

There are two known issues in this build, including one in which if you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail, you will lose Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into your PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking Set up my PIN.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27766.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2702

Release date: December 13, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a new advanced camera options page. To see it, navigate to a camera under Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Cameras and click the edit button for advanced camera options. Note that this is being gradually rolled out.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get several bugs fixed, including one in which when pointer trails were enabled, the mouse cursor became invisible with a black box behind it.

One bug is fixed for everyone in the Dev Channel, in which if you rolled back from Build 26120.2510 to an earlier build, you would see a “Your organization used App Control for Business to block this app” dialog when attempting to use or install certain third-party apps on your PC due to an incorrect policy being enforced.

There are seven known issues in this build, including one in which Click to Do sometimes doesn’t highlight any info on screen if there is no content on a connected external monitor in extended mode.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2702.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4655

Release date: December 13, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available will be able to see visual previews of links or web content they share using the Windows share window. Note that the new feature may not yet be available to everyone because it is being gradually rolled out.

The build also fixes one bug, in which window previews weren’t showing when hovering over certain open apps in the taskbar, for those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates.

Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4655.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27764

Release date: December 11, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

In this build, when right-clicking on apps pinned to the Start menu, jump lists will be shown for apps that have them, such as PowerPoint. The build also fixes a variety of bugs, including one in which File Explorer might hang when browsing a folder with lots of media in it, and another in which some HDDs were being incorrectly listed as SSD on the Task Manager Performance page.

There are three known issues in this build, including one in which if you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail, you will lose Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into your PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN.”

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27764.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4580

Release date: December 6, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available get several improvements to File Explorer, including one in which if you launch File Explorer folders from outside of File Explorer (for example, from an app or from the desktop), by default they now open in a new tab if you have an existing File Explorer window open. Note that these features are being gradually rolled out, so may not be immediately available.

Those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a single bug fix, in which Pinyin IME users may unexpectedly switch the IME from Chinese to English when switching between windows.

Everyone in the Beta Channel gets four bug fixes, including for a bug in which Windows stopped responding when you used an Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) USB printer.

Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4580.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27758

Release date: December 4, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build introduces a new advanced camera options page in Settings that includes a multi-app camera setting and a basic camera setting, the latter intended as a last resort when your camera is not functioning correctly. The build also fixes a variety of bugs, including one that could have caused Settings to crash when you selected your default audio device.

There are four known issues in this build, including one in which if you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail, you will lose Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into your PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN.”

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27758.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2415

Release date: November 22, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

This build, for those who have Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, introduces the first preview of the Recall feature that constantly takes screenshots of what you do while you work so you easily find files, web pages, and more. In addition to searching, you can use a timeline to scroll back to what you were doing on your PC at a specific day and time.

Click to Do is also included. It lets you take AI-powered actions on the screenshots taken by Recall, such as erasing objects from them, performing a visual Bing search on them, copying them, sharing them, and more.

In addition, those who have the toggle turned on to immediately get new features will soon get new Windows Hello features that have already been rolled out to the Beta and Canary Channels.

Those who have the toggle turned on to immediately get new features and other changes get a variety of bug fixes, including for a bug in which explorer.exe sometimes crashed when interacting with app icons.

Click to Do has eight known issues, including one in which there a delay before snapshots first appear in the timeline.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2415.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4510

Release date: November 22, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available can resume working on OneDrive files from a phone (iOS and Android) on a Windows 11 PC with a single click. Users will also be able to right-click and share local files under the Recommended section of the Start menu. Note that these changes will roll out gradually.

Those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a variety of bug fixes, including one for a bug in which you sometimes could not navigate by entering a path in the address bar.

Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4510.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27754

Release date: November 20, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build revamps Windows Hello in several ways, primarily to make authentication easier. Among the changes is a redesign of using passkeys for more secure and faster authentication. Users can now switch between authentication options and select passkey/devices more intuitively. Beyond that, if you hold Shift and Ctrl when clicking on a jump list item in the Start menu or taskbar, you will launch that item as admin.

The build also fixes a variety of bugs, including one that caused RAW images taken in portrait mode to unexpectedly display in landscape mode thumbnails in File Explorer.

There are six known issues in this build, including one in which if you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail, you will lose Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into your PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN.”

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27754.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4510

Release date: November 15, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available can share files directly from right-click jump lists on the taskbar in supported apps such as Notepad. Note that this feature will roll out gradually.

Those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get a fix for a single bug, in which you might have unexpectedly seen a message saying “You’re offline. Widgets are unavailable.”

Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4510.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26100.2448

Release date: November 14, 2024

Released to: Release Preview Channel

This build gets a wide variety of new features, including one in which when you right-click apps that you have pinned to the Start menu, jump lists will appear for apps that have jump lists. There is also a new section for touchscreen edge gestures. Go to Settings > Bluetooth & Devices > Touch. There, you can choose if you would like to turn off the left or right screen edge touch gesture. These features are being gradually rolled out.

There are also a variety of bugs that have been fixed, including one in which the Task Manager’s Users page could have caused Task Manager to stop responding when you used the keyboard.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26100.2448.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27749

Release date: November 13, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build adds a new shortcut “Narrator key + Ctrl + X” to copy what Narrator last spoke to clipboard. You can use this shortcut in conjunction with “Narrator key + X,” which repeats the last spoken phrase out loud, to review and copy what Narrator spoke.

The build also fixes a variety of bugs, including one in which Task Manager showed a 0 count for apps and processes, and another in which a blank entry in Settings > Privacy would cause Settings to crash if you clicked it.

There are five known issues in this build, including one in which if you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail, you will lose Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into your PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN.”

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27749.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2222

Release date: November 8, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates can hold Shift + Ctrl when clicking on a jump list item in the Start menu or taskbar to launch that item as admin. This feature is being gradually rolled out.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get several bug fixes, including for an issue in which windows unexpectedly moved around after waking from sleep if you had multiple monitors. Note that this is being gradually rolled out.

There are two known issues in this build, including one in which Narrator crashes on launch if you use one of the natural voices, and another in which your desktop background may show big black areas with multiple monitors.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2222.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4445

Release date: November 8, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, Insiders in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available have a New Folder option in the context menu when right-clicking locations in the navigation pane. Note that this change will be gradually rolled out.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also have a variety of bugs fixed, including one in which performing a search unexpectedly triggered the search happening repeatedly. Note that these fixes will be gradually rolled out.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4445.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27744

Release date: November 6, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build includes a major feature update to Prism, Microsoft’s emulator for Windows on Arm, that will make it possible for more 64-bit x86 (x64) applications to run under emulation. This new support in Prism is already in limited use in the retail version of Windows 11 24H2, where it enables the ability to run Adobe Premiere Pro 25 on Arm. Starting with this build, the support is being opened to any x64 application under emulation. You may find that some games or creative apps that were blocked due to CPU requirements before will now be able to run using Prism.

Note that only x64 applications can use these new CPU features. If you have a 32-bit app or a 64-bit app that uses a 32-bit helper to detect CPU feature support, that app won’t detect the new features in Prism.

The build also fixes several bugs, including one in which certain apps did not detect a scanner, although one was connected.

There are three known issues in this build, including one in which if you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail, you may lose your Windows Hello PIN and biometric sign-in your PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN.”

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27744.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2213

Release date: November 4, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates will have the IME toolbar hidden when apps are in full-screen mode for those who have the IME toolbar enabled and type in Chinese or Japanese. Note that this is being gradually rolled out.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get a variety of bug fixes, including for one in which RAW images taken in portrait mode unexpectedly displayed in landscape mode thumbnails in File Explorer. Note that this is being gradually rolled out.

Everyone in the Dev Channel gets a variety of bug fixes, including for a bug that caused Task Manager to show a 0 count for apps and processes.

There is one known issue in this build, in which the desktop background sometimes may not show correctly with multiple monitors (showing big black areas).

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2213.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4440

Release date: November 1, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available get a revamped Windows Hello that adheres to contemporary Windows visual design standards. The update also has a small set of general improvements. Note that all these changes will be gradually rolled out.

Those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get a single bug fix, for a bug that caused touch keyboard crashes and the IME candidate window not to appear for some Insiders.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4440.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4435

Release date: October 25, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available can launch an item on the Start menu or taskbar as an admin by holding Ctrl + Shift when clicking. Note that this feature will be gradually rolled out.

Those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get several bugs fixed, including one in which the X button to close an app window from the taskbar wasn’t working for some Insiders. This fix will be gradually rolled out.

Everyone in the Beta Channel can now configure the Copilot key again, after that feature was turned off in Build 22635.4291. Everyone in the Beta Channel gets several bug fixes, including for one in which the PIN reset did not work when you selected the “I forgot my PIN’ link on the credentials screen in Windows Hello for Business.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4435.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2200

Release date: October 25, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates can access Windows Studio Effects in Quick Settings from the system tray of the taskbar. Windows Studio Effects delivers AI-based camera and audio enhancements on devices equipped with a neural processing unit (NPU). Note that this feature is being gradually rolled out.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get several bugs fixed, including one in which if you clicked or tapped on a letter on the Start menu’s All apps list, the All apps list may have broken. This fix is being gradually rolled out.

Everyone in the Dev Channel gets a variety of bug fixes, including for a bug in which you could not view some parts of the UI when you ran certain apps.

There are two known issues in this build, including one in which there is an unexpected amount of spacing between items in the Start menu apps list.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2200.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4371

Release date: October 18, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available can now use the new Narrator key + Ctrl + X shortcut to copy what Narrator last spoke to clipboard. It follows the pattern of using Narrator key + X, which repeats the last spoken phrase out loud.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as possible get several fixes for several bugs, including one in which Narrator would slow down after 15 minutes of continuous use with a single application.

An update for the Snipping Tool (version 11.2409.23.0 and newer) is also being rolled out to Windows Insiders in the Beta and Release Preview Channels. It introduces a new “Copy as table” feature.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4371.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2130

Release date: October 18, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get several new features, including one in which “All apps” is now just “All” on the Start menu.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get several bug fixes, including for a bug in which clipboard history did not display items you had copied.

There are two known issues in this build, including one in which if you click or tap on a letter on Start menu’s All apps list, the All apps list may break. If you encounter this issue, try rebooting or restarting explorer.exe to fix it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2130.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27729

Release date: October 17, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build adds the ability  to configure the Copilot key. You can choose to have the Copilot key launch an app that is MSIX packaged and signed, thus indicating the app meets security and privacy requirements to keep customers safe.

The build also fixes a variety of bugs, including one in which the screen went black for a few seconds for some people when using Alt + Tab.

There are five known issues in this build, including one in which some Insiders with PCs that have older NVIDIA GPUs (like the GTX 970, Quadro K620, etc.) are experiencing some issues where their displays appear stuck at a black screen and unresponsive or seeing their GPUs showing errors in Device Manager and not working correctly.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27729.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4367

Release date: October 11, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available get a small set of general improvements and fixes that Microsoft claims improves the overall experience of running Windows. They also now have the ability to share directly to apps that support sharing in Windows when right-clicking on local files in File Explorer or the desktop.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as possible get several bug fixes, including for one in which some Insiders saw an unexpected amount of spacing between items in the Start menu All Apps list.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4367.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2122

Release date: October 11, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a small set of general fixes that Microsoft says improve the overall experience of running Windows. The Disconnect and Logoff dialogs in Task Manager now support dark mode and text scaling.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates also get one bug fix, for a bug that caused the screen to go black for a few seconds for some people when using Alt + Tab.

Everyone in the Dev Channel gets several bugs fixed, including one in which some Insiders saw error 0x800f0825 when trying to install the latest Dev Channel builds.

There are two known issues in this build, including one in which if you click or tap on a letter on Start menu’s All apps list, the All apps list may break. If you encounter this issue, try rebooting or restarting explorer.exe to fix it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2122.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26100.2152

Release date: October 10, 2024

Released to: Release Preview Channel

This build gradually rolls out a number of new features, including one in which you can stop the suggestions to turn off notifications from certain apps. Select the ellipses (…) in the notification and turn it off. You can also go to Settings > System > Notifications and turn it off from there.

The build also immediately rolls out a change in which you can configure the Copilot key on the keyboard. The build also immediately fixes a number of bugs, including one in which you could not sign in to your account from the web because the screen stopped responding.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26100.2152.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27723

Release date: October 9, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build introduces several minor changes and features, including one in which you can share local files directly from within the search results shown in the search box on the taskbar.

There are five known issues in this build, including one for those using Copilot+ PCs, in which if you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail, you will lose your Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into your PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN.”

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27723.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1930

Release date: October 4, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a small set of general improvements and one bug fix, for a bug in which the boot menu wasn’t displaying correctly for some Insiders with dual-boot devices.

Everyone in the Dev Channel can now configure the Copilot key. You can have the Copilot key launch an app that is MSIX packaged and signed, increasing security and privacy.

There are two known issues in this build, including one in which if you click or tap on a letter on Start menu’s All apps list, the list may break. If you encounter this issue, please try rebooting or restarting explorer.exe to fix it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1930.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4300 

Release date: October 4, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available will see “All” instead of “All apps” on the Start menu. In addition, Windows Search runs IFilters in the Less Privileged App Containers (LPACs). LPACs are like app containers, but they deny even more permissions by default. The intent is that a process running in a LPAC has access only to the resources needed by it. This helps to minimize the potential damage that can be caused by a compromised process by limiting its access to sensitive system components and data.

Two bugs are fixed for those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as possible, including one in which items in the navigation pane became very spread out for some people.

There are two known issues in the build, including one in which live captions will crash if you try to use them.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4300.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27718

Release date: October 2, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build introduces a number of minor new changes and features. You can now drag apps from the Pinned section of the Start menu and pin them to the taskbar. For laptops on battery, a notification will pop up asking you to plug in your laptop if the battery level reaches 20% while Energy Saver is set to “Always On.” 

Several bugs have been fixed, including one in which the emoji panel closed when you tried to switch to the kaomoji and symbols sections, or after selecting an emoji, and another in which the Widgets icon sometimes unexpectedly displayed twice in the taskbar.

There are three known issues in this build, including one for those using Copilot+ PCs, in which If you are joining the Canary Channel from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel or retail, you will lose Windows Hello pin and biometrics to sign into your PC; you’ll see error 0xd0000225 and an error message “Something went wrong, and your PIN isn’t available.” You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN.”

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27718.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1912

Release date: September 30, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who’ve turned on the toggle to receive the latest updates get a small set of general improvements and fixes that Microsoft says improves the overall experience of running Windows. In addition, Windows Mobile Hotspot has been enhanced to support 6GHz connections. The new band requires chips that support the feature and updated drivers; not all chips that support 6GHz Wi-Fi in general will support the 6GHz mobile hotspot.

Those in the Dev Channel who agreed to receive the latest updates also get several bug fixes, including one in which Task Manager’s Settings page might have a white background when it should not.

There is one known issue in this build: if you click or tap on a letter on Start menu’s All apps list, the All apps list may break. If you encounter this issue, try rebooting or restarting explorer.exe to fix it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1912.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4291

Release date: September 30, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned on the toggle to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available get an updated Task Manager design in which the Disconnect and Logoff dialogs in Task Manager now support dark mode and text scaling. They also get several bug fixes, including one in which explorer.exe crashed sporadically when using ALT + Tab in recent builds.

Everyone in the Beta Channel gets several bug fixes, including one in which Work Folders files failed to sync when Defender for Endpoint was on.

There are two known issues in the build, including one in which live captions will crash if you try to use them.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4291)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26100.1876

Release date: September 23, 2024

Released to: Release Preview Channel

This build, for those using Windows 11 version 24H2, gradually rolls out a number of new features, including one in which when your device’s battery power is running low, a pop-up window will appear that asks you to plug in your device. This occurs when the battery level reaches 20% and while Energy Saver is set to “Always On.

Several bug fixes are being immediately rolled out, including one in which when a combo box has input focus, a memory leak might have occurred when you closed that window.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26100.1876.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds 22621.4247 and 22631.4247

Release date: September 23, 2024

Released to: Release Preview Channel

In this update for users on Windows 11 22H2 and 23H2, a variety of features are being rolled out slowly, including one in which the “Sign out” option is now on the account manager when you open the Start menu. To change to a different user, select the ellipses (…). A list of other users appears to make it easier to switch.

The update also fixes several bugs, including one in which Microsoft Edge sometimes stopped responding when you used IE mode.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds 22621.4247 and 22631.4247.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4225

Release date: September 20, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available will get the ability to share content to an Android device from the context menu in File Explorer and on the desktop. To use this feature, the Phone Link app must be installed and configured on your PC.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as possible get a fix for a bug in which the emoji panel didn’t work properly.

Everyone in the Beta Channel can now configure the Copilot key. You can choose to have the Copilot key launch an app that is MSIX packaged and signed, thus indicating the app meets security and privacy requirements.

Everyone in the Beta Channel gets several bug fixes, including for a bug in which some Insiders experienced a bug check when closing Notepad.

There is one known issue in the build, in which if you click or tap on a letter on the Start menu’s All apps list, the list may break. If you encounter this issue, try rebooting or restarting explorer.exe to fix it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4225.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1843

Release date: September 20, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a new feature, in which File Explorer provides you with quick access to files that have been shared with you. If you are signed into Windows with your Microsoft account or Entra ID account, you will be able to view files that have been shared with your account, such as email, Teams chat, etc. You can access this feature by launching File Explorer Home and clicking on the Shared tab.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get several bug fixes, including one in which when pressing Windows key + E, a screen reader might unexpectedly say a pane had focus, or focus may not be set within File Explorer at all.

Everyone in the Dev Channel gets a number of bug fixes, including one in which could result in the Widgets icon unexpectedly displaying in the taskbar twice sometimes.

There are four known issues in this build, including one in which if you click or tap on a letter on Start menu’s All apps list, the list may break. If you encounter this issue, try rebooting or restarting explorer.exe to fix it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1843.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4145

Release date: August 30, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available will see several new features, including one in which the Sign out option is immediately visible in the new account manager on the Start menu. There’s also a list of signed in users under the three-dot icon so it’s faster to switch accounts. The mouse and touchscreen controls have more options, and hotspots now appear on the desktop when users right-click the Windows Spotlight icon. The changes are being rolled out gradually.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as possible get fixes for several bugs, including one in which explorer.exe crashed when interacting with archive files. These fixes are being rolled out gradually

Everyone in the Beta Channel gets a number of bug fixes, including for a bug in which the [NetJoinLegacyAccountReuse] registry key has been removed.

There is one known issue in the build: if you click or tap on a letter on Start menu’s All apps list, the All apps list may break. If you encounter this issue, try rebooting or restarting explorer.exe to fix it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4145.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27695

Release date: August 30, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

In this build, Windows Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) has been improved with a new ability to recover encrypted passwords from Active Directory (AD) backup media even when there are zero AD domain controllers running.

A number of bugs have been fixed, including one in which Ctrl + F would sometimes not start a search in File Explore, and another in which the colors in the Performance section of Task Manager weren’t displayed correctly in dark mode.

There are two known issues in this build, including one for those using Copilot+ PCs, in which  If you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel or retail, you will lose your Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into your PC with error 0xd0000225 and error message “Something went wrong, and your PIN isn’t available.” You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking Set up my PIN.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27695.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4082

Release date: August 26, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as they are available will see the media controls at the lower bottom center of the Lock screen when media is being played. There is also now an option to turn off the suggestions to disable notifications from certain apps. These features are being rolled out gradually.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates as soon as possible get fixes for several bugs, including one in which explorer.exe crashed for some Insiders when closing apps from the taskbar. These fixes are being rolled out gradually.

Everyone in the beta channel gets one bug fix, in which the [NetJoinLegacyAccountReuse] registry key has been removed.

There are two known issues for everyone in the Beta Channel, including one that causes explorer.exe to crash when interacting with archive files.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4082.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds 22621.4108 and 22631.4108

Release date: August 19, 2024

Released to: Release Preview Channel (Windows 11 23H2 and 22H2)

Starting with this update, a variety of features will be rolled out slowly, including one that lets you share content to your Android device from the Windows Share window. To do this, you must pair your Android device to your Windows PC. Use the Link to Windows app on your Android device and Phone Link on your PC.

A number of bugs are being fixed, including one in which when a combo box has input focus, a memory leak might occur when you close that window.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds 22621.4108 and 22631.4108.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22610.1586

Release date: August 19, 2024

Released to: Release Preview Channel (Windows 11 24H2)

This build, for those with Windows 11 version 24H2, gradually rolls out a new feature in which when you right-click a tab in File Explorer, you have the choice to duplicate it.

A wide variety of bug fixes are being gradually rolled out, including for a bug in which memory leak occurred when you interacted with archive folders and another in which File Explorer stopped responding when you browsed within it.

Three bug fixes have been immediately released to everyone, including one in which a deadlock occurred in the domain controller (DC) when it started up in the DNS client.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26100.1586.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4076

Release date: August 19, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates will find that a feature introduced in Build 22635.3930 that showed a Studio Effects icon in the system tray when using any application with a Studio Effects-enabled camera has temporarily been disabled. It will be re-enabled in a future build.

Those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a variety of bug fixes, including for a bug in which  Voice Access commands weren’t working for non-English supported languages.

A wide variety of bugs are fixed for everyone in the Beta Channel, including one in which Windows Backup sometimes failed in devices with an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) system partition (ESP).

There are two known issues for everyone in the Beta Channel, including one in which explorer.exe crashes when interacting with archive files.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4076.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1542

Release date: August 19, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a new feature that adds first letter navigation support to the taskbar. When keyboard focus is set to the taskbar (WIN + T), you can press a letter, and it will jump to the open or pinned app whose name starts with that letter. The feature is being gradually rolled out so isn’t yet available to everyone.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get fixes for three bugs, including one in which the emoji panel closed when trying to switch to the kaomoji and symbols sections, or after selecting an emoji.

Everyone in the Dev Channel gets a number of bug fixes, including for a bug in which adding languages or optional features might fail with error 0x800f081f.

There are two known issues in this build, including one in which navigating between different pages in Task Manager may crash it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1542.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27686

Release date: August 15, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build includes the new Windows Sandbox Client Preview that is now updated via the Microsoft Store. It introduces runtime clipboard redirection, audio/video input control, and the ability to share folders with the host at runtime. You can access these via the new “…” icon at the upper right on the app. This preview also includes a very early version of command line support. (Commands may change over time.) You can use the wsb.exe –help command for more information.

The build also includes optimizations to improve battery life and a detach virtual hard disk (VHD/VHDx) button in Settings that makes it simpler to detach your VHD/VHDx as needed.

A number of bugs have been fixed, including one in which Dev Drive VHDs weren’t automatically remounting when the underlying volume was dismounted and brought back online, and one in the Windows Security app where if you browsed the networks under Firewall & Network protection, it showed a broken glyph (a rectangle) next to the network name rather than a network icon.

There are two known issues in this build, including one in which if you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel, or retail, you will lose Windows Hello PIN and biometrics to sign into your PC. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN.”

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27686.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1350

Release date: August 9, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates can more easily share content to an Android device from Windows share window. The feature requires you to pair your Android device to your Windows PC using the Link to Windows app on Android and Phone Link on your PC. The feature is being rolled out gradually.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get one fix that addresses an issue in which graphs on the Performance page in Task Manager did not show the correct colors when using dark mode again. The fix is being rolled out gradually.

Everyone in the Dev Channel gets several bug fixes, including for a bug in which Windows Sandbox failed to launch with error 0x80370106.

There are four known issues in this build, including one in which navigating between different pages in Task Manager may crash it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1350.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4010

Release date: August 9, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, many of those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates will see the simplified system tray with shortened date/time change that began rolling out with Build 22635.3930. The feature is being rolled out gradually.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get fixes for two bugs, one in which the dropdown at the top of the GPU section of Performance wasn’t showing in dark mode when dark mode was enabled, and the other in which if you pressed the Shift key when you right-clicked on an app icon on the taskbar, it opened another instance of the app rather than opening the expected menu.

There are three known issues for everyone in the Beta Channel, including one that causes explorer.exe to crash for some Insiders when closing apps from the taskbar.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4010.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1340

Release date: August 5, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get improvements for spelling and corrections in voice access, including the ability to dictate characters at a faster speed and have more editing flexibility with selection, deletion, and text navigation commands.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a fix for a bug in which items under “Let desktop apps access your location” section in Settings > Privacy & Security > Location had visibly flickered although there were no changes displayed.

There are four known issues in this build, including one in which navigating between different pages in Task Manager may crash it.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1340.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4005

Release date: August 2, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a small set of general tweaks and fixes that Microsoft says improves the overall experience of running Windows.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get one fix for a bug that caused sporadic explorer.exe crashes for some Insiders.

There are three known issues for everyone in the Beta Channel, including one that causes explorer.exe to crash for some Insiders when closing apps from the taskbar.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4005.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4000

Release date: July 26, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a small set of general improvements and fixes, as well as some improvements to spelling and corrections in voice access.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get two bug fixes, one in which Notification Center got stuck and would not open, and another that caused issues with launching the touch keyboard and emoji panel.

Everyone in the Beta Channel gets two fixes that address one bug in which Narrator would not work as expected when navigating through the Recent, Favorites, and Shared tab items, and another that caused the context menu in Home or Gallery to open in the wrong position when using Arabic or Hebrew display languages.

There are four known issues for everyone in the Beta Channel, including one in which files shared with you in File Explorer may not appear if there has been no interaction with that file.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4000.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1330

Release date: July 26, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates can duplicate a tab by right-clicking on it in File Explorer. (Note: This is being gradually rolled out.)

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get a fix for a bug in which no text appeared on the Windows Update page in Settings for Insiders using certain languages.

There are three known issues in this build, including one in which the BitLocker Recovery screen issue documented here may also impact Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1330.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26100.1297

Release date: July 25, 2024

Released to: Release Preview Channel

This build, for those with Windows 11 version 24H2, gradually rolls out a wide variety of new features, including pinning apps to the taskbar by dragging and dropping items directly to taskbar from the pinned section in the Start menu, using your mouse to drag files between breadcrumbs in the File Explorer address bar, and directly sharing to specific Microsoft Teams channels and group chats in the Windows share window.

It also includes a variety of changes released immediately to everyone, including being able to use OneDrive as a RemoteApp in Azure Virtual Desktop.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26100.1297.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26257

Release date: July 24, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build introduces the ability to duplicate a tab by right-clicking it in File Explorer. In addition, if you use the netsh wlan show networks command, you should be able to read SSIDs that are UTF-8 encoded. This means that Wi-Fi SSIDs with Unicode characters (like emojis) should be properly displayed in netsh output. This change is just beginning to roll out, so not all Insiders in the Canary Channel will see it right away.

Several bugs have been fixed, including one in which the address bar dropdown appeared unexpectedly while you were using File Explorer.

There are three known issues in this build, including one in which some Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels are stuck on Build 26040 or Build 23620.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26257.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.3936

Release date: July 22, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates will see updated designs for the “Open with” dialog where the group headers are removed, among a few other changes.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get several bug fixes, including one in which text suggestions for the hardware keyboard did not work.

Note that the bug fixes and new features are being gradually rolled out.

There are nine known issues for everyone in the Beta Channel, including one in which swipe invocation for Widgets may not work if the taskbar is center-aligned instead of left-aligned.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.3936.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1252

Release date: July 15, 2024

Released to: Dev Channel

In this build, those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates can now pin apps from the Start menu to the taskbar by dragging and dropping items directly to taskbar from the pinned section in the Start menu.

Those in the Dev Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get several bug fixes, including one in which explorer.exe crashed when navigating away from Home.

Everyone in the Dev Channel gets a variety of bug fixes, including for one in which some Insiders saw a bug check with error KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE, and another in which Settings > System > Power & Battery had duplicate text when showing a warning about a slow charger.

There are three known issues in this build, including one in which the Windows Update page in Settings is not displaying correctly for Insiders using certain languages (no text shows).

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.1252.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.3930

Release date: July 12, 2024

Released to: Beta Channel

In this build for Windows 11 version 23H2, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates can get quick access to files that have been shared with you. If you are signed into Windows with your Microsoft account, you will be able to view files that have been shared with your account, such as email, Teams chat, etc. If you are a commercial customer who is signed in with your Microsoft Entra ID account, you will additionally be able to view files that they have shared with others. You can access this feature by launching File Explorer Home and clicking on the Shared tab item.

In addition, those in the Beta Channel who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates can access Studio Effects in Quick Settings from the system tray of the taskbar. Note that this is being gradually rolled out and so is not yet available to everyone.

Those who have turned the toggle on to receive the latest updates get several bug fixes, including for one in which the All apps list wasn’t being read out by screen readers.

Everyone in the Beta Channel gets one bug fix, in which you can now view or interact with the taskbar after you install KB5039302.

There are seven known issues for everyone in the Beta Channel, including one in which swipe invocation for Widgets may not work if taskbar is center-aligned instead of left-aligned.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.3930.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds 22621.3951 and 22631.3951

Release date: July 11, 2024

Released to: Release Preview Channel

In this update, you can drag apps from the Pinned section of the menu and pin them to the taskbar, and when you right-click a tab in File Explorer, you have the choice to duplicate it. Note that these features and several others might not be available to all users because they will roll out gradually.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds 22621.3951 and 22631.3951.)

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26252

Release date: July 10, 2024

Released to: Canary Channel

This build begins to roll out the “Weather and more” feature, which brings finance, traffic, and sports to your Lock screen, alongside weather information. You can also now pin apps from the Start menu to the taskbar by dragging and dropping items directly to taskbar from the pinned section in the Start menu.

Several bugs have been fixed, including one that caused colors in the Performance section of Task Manager to not display correctly in dark mode, and another in which Settings > System > Power & Battery had duplicate text when showing a warning about a slow charger.

There one known issue with this build, in which some Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels are stuck on Build 26040 or Build 23620.

(Get more info about Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26252.)

OpenAI has started rolling out a number of new features to ChatGPT, according to Techcrunch.

The big news is support for reminders; the feature allows users, for example, to ask ChatGPT to remind them when it’s time to renew an ID or passport. Users can also ask ChatGPT to deliver a news summary or weather forecast at the same time every day — something OpenAI called Tasks.

Initially, the new abilities will only be available to paying customers of Chat GPT Plus, Team, and Pro.

When considering new hires, 80% of corporate executives will prioritize skills over degrees, with half planning to increase freelance hiring this year to fill in for a gap in AI and other skills, according to a new study from freelancing platform Upwork.

The study, released this week, showed “unprecedented growth” in specialized AI skills, which have surged 220% year-over-year.

At the same time, degrees continue to lose relevance when it comes to hiring freelancers, with 74% of execs focused more on proven expertise. Moreover, 78% of CEOs say top freelancers deliver more value than degree-holding employees, emphasizing skills over credentials to stay competitive. And 29% of C-suite executives consider freelancers essential to their operations, with 51% saying their business would be difficult to run without freelancer support.

Skills-based hiring has been on the rise for several years, as organizations seek to fill specific tech needs such as big data analytics, programing (such as Rust) and AI prompt engineering. In fact, demand for genAI courses is surging, passing all other tech skills courses and spanning fields from data science to cybersecurity, project management, and marketing.

The top 10 highest paid skills in tech can help workers earn up to 47% more — and the top skill among them is generative artificial intelligence (genAI), according to employment website Indeed and other sources.

Skills such as genAI modeling now earn freelancers up to 22% higher hourly rates than traditional AI and machine learning roles, according to Upwork.

Even as freelancers are reshaping workforce strategies, their rise doesn’t necessarily threaten full-time roles. “It complements them,” said Kelly Monahan, managing director of the Upwork Research Institute.

In a study released in October, Upwork found that 85% of top-performing companies — which it labels “work innovators” — view freelancers as vital, with 91% planning to expand their use over the next year. Only 71% of non top-performing companies see freelancers as critical to success, Monahan said.

While cost savings, such as not paying benefits, could sometimes be a factor in hiring freelancers, it is not the primary driver of freelance hiring, according to Monahan.“Businesses prioritize freelancers for their agility and specialized expertise, which enable them to scale resources up or down as needed and address skill gaps effectively,” she said.

According to Upwork, other reasons for the increase in freelance hiring include:

• 94% of top-performing companies say hiring freelancers gives them access to specialized skills
• 89% say freelancers make their business more innovative
• 84% say hiring a freelancer is faster than a hiring full-time employee

In addition to hard skills, soft, human-centric roles such as personal coaching have emerged among the fastest-growing skills on Upwork’s platform, with demand increasing by 74% year-over-year. “This underscores the growing importance of guidance and adaptability as businesses invest in reskilling their workforces to navigate technological change,” Monahan said. “Freelancers are enabling companies to innovate rapidly and adapt to changing market demands.”

Upwork is not alone in its findings. According to research firm Gartner, organizations are struggling to find skilled talent, and universities — once vital for workforce preparation — are lagging in updating curricula to match modern demands. As technology and work methods advance, graduates are left with outdated skills, making specific competencies more important than degrees in proving a candidate’s value.

According to Gartner, 74% of HR leaders believe organizations are shifting to skills-based talent management, but only 41% have implemented it, while 50% are still considering it.

“Approximately half of HR leaders say that a skills-based approach to talent management has the potential to solve many of the challenges their organizations face, though only one-third are actually investing in a skills-based approach to talent management, Gartner said in its report.

HR leaders, Gartner said, should prepare for a skills-focused future by:

• Assessing: Review role requirements to reduce or remove degree mandates.
• Fortifying: Ready the organization to onboard and support non-degreed talent.
• Attracting: Target skilled non-degreed talent and adjust EVP messaging to appeal to them.
• Evolving: Plan for talent management changes to adopt a skills-based approach.

New methods of assessing skills

Companies are adopting more advanced approaches to assessing potential and current employee skills, blending AI tools with hands-on evaluations, according to Monahan. 

AI-powered platforms are being used to match candidates with roles based on their skills, certifications, and experience. “Our platform has done this for years, and our new UMA (Upwork’s Mindful AI) enhances this process,” she said.

Gartner, however, warned that “rapid skills evolutions can threaten quality of hire, as recruiters struggle to ensure their assessment processes are keeping pace with changing skills. Meanwhile, skills shortages place more weight on new hires being the right hires, as finding replacement talent becomes increasingly challenging. Robust appraisal of candidate skills is therefore imperative, but too many assessments can lead to candidate fatigue.”

In Upwork’s In-Demand Skills 2025 report, the skills that are growing in importance include:

• AI Development: GenAI modeling and AI data annotation are among the fastest-growing skills, reflecting the need for technical expertise in building and managing AI solutions.
• >Data Science & Analytics: >Skills such as data visualization and data extraction remain essential for making sense of complex information.
• >Project Management: >Both in supply chain logistics and business operations, project managers are critical for keeping teams aligned and projects on track.
• >Professional Development: >Skills such as personal coaching and training and development are increasingly sought as companies prioritize workforce reskilling.

The shift toward skills-based hiring is further driven by a readiness gap in today’s workforce. Upwork’s research found that only 25% of employees feel prepared to work effectively alongside AI, and even fewer (19%) can proactively leverage AI to solve problems.

“As companies navigate these challenges, they’re focusing on hiring based on practical, demonstrated capabilities, ensuring their workforce is agile and equipped to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving business landscape,” Monahan said.

According to Upwork, 47% of Gen Z professionals already engage in freelance or portfolio work, reflecting their preference for autonomy and skills diversification over traditional career paths.

“This aligns with modern businesses’ needs for agile talent who can deliver measurable results, driving the shift toward skills-based hiring,” Monahan said. “If you are just looking to fill job roles, you will miss out on the rising portfolio career talent.”

Apple has big plans for satellite services, a new patent filing confirms. It’s the latest nugget of information to roll down Apple Confidential mountain, a plan to make it much easier for devices to maintain connectivity as they move between satellites.

If you’ve been able to use any of the company’s satellite services, you’ll already know that it takes a while to reach a connection with your nearest satellite. Apple has built a handy little visual guide to help you point your device at the best available satellite, but connection takes time —and as the satellite drifts over head on its orbit, you might eventually find you must reconnect to another station.

Space oddity

Wouldn’t it be better if your connection could automatically move between satellites once it is achieved? That kind of capability might support a more stable connection, and (conceivably) let you get more sophisticated tasks done — perhaps even calls or at least extensive two-way messaging. 

What’s new is that Apple now appears to have achieved a way that could enable that. 

As first spotted by Patently Apple, the new patent describes a handover procedure that means the connection a device has with one satellite will smoothly shift over to a second. The technology means that a satellite will generate a group configuration message for all the devices currently connected to it that, when sent, tells the connected devices to transfer their connection to the second satellite. 

The idea is that each satellite then acts as a “transparent network relay mode,” according to the patent. That, the patent claims, would enable groups of smartphones to remain connected. Effectively, this turns those satellites into always moving mobile network masks above the sky. 

Just as mobile networks will serve all the smartphones connected to them in a local area, the satellites will do the same thing. I imagine the aim is to create a seamless satellite connection users don’t have to think too deeply about, once the initial connection is made.

Sun machine

This kind of stable connection is of course essential to support voice calls and internet browsing, though Apple might not be thinking about a future satellite communications service in quite the same way. It could, for example, be simply searching for a global backbone to support its Find My services, or to deliver smart device connectivity off more traditional grids, or even be pondering a highly secure, network agnostic private and secure communications system as a premium service. 

Apple isn’t alone. 

Carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, are also now working with satellite services to provide messaging and other features to devices, and Apple will not be investing billions in its satellite partner, GlobalStar, simply to be a bystander in this race. 

It is also interesting, given the quantity of data shared with mobile networks, that Apple’s filing makes particular mention of this: “It is well understood that the use of personally identifiable information should follow privacy policies and practices that are generally recognized as meeting or exceeding industry or governmental requirements for maintaining the privacy of users. In particular, personally identifiable information data should be managed and handled so as to minimize risks of unintentional or unauthorized access or use, and the nature of authorized use should be clearly indicated to users,.”

You can take a look at the new patent here.

Freecloud

All this investment isn’t just focused on voice and messaging. Operators also recognize that as demand for mobile connectivity increases, it becomes essential to find ways to offload some of this activity to alternative networks. That’s why carriers support Wi-Fi calls — because shunting relatively unprofitable voice calls off their network enables them to offer their capacity to support more profitable services. 

Ultimately, it’s all about demand management, and satellite (particularly as 5G tech advances and 6G looms) has a part to play in the tapestry of solutions emerging to help handle the rapidly growing pressure on communications networks. Though there is something to be said for highly private communications and messaging services. Fifty-five years since the first human landing on the moon, if Neil Armstrong landed there today, perhaps he’d call Earth from his iPhone. 

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe. 

Google will no longer charge Workspace customers an additional fee for Gemini, expanding access to generative AI (genAI) features in apps such as Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. At the same time, the company is increasing the price of Workspace subscriptions by a small amount.

“Google is disrupting a market while some application vendors are still trying to monetize generative AI,” said Wayne Kurtzman, research vice president for collaboration and communities at IDC. It’s an “unusually bold first move” by Google, one that “should result in paid user growth of their Workspace platform.

“We are moving to an economy where we will experience AI everywhere, so it makes sense that we see AI included in office and collaboration applications,” said Kurtzman.

Google launched its Gemini AI assistant (formerly Duet AI for Google Workspace) in August 2023. There were two main add-ons: Gemini Business priced at $20 per user per month, and Gemini Enterprise, which cost $30 per user per month. Each represented a significant outlay for Workspace customers on top of their core subscriptions; Google later introduced more affordable add-on options that provided a limited set of genAI tools: AI Meetings and Messages and AI Security, both costing $10 per user a month. 

All of those subscription costs will end as of March 17, Google said in a blog post Wednesday.

Instead, Gemini features will be included in regular paid Workspace plans from the Business Standard plan upwards. That will allow access to Gemini in the side panel of several Workspace apps, as well as automated note taking in Meet video calls, image generation in Docs and Slides, and access to the NotebookLM Plus app. 

(Google has a detailed list of the AI features available and coming soon to each payment plan at its admin help site here.)

At the same time, the price of payment plans will increase. Business Standard will rise from $12 to $14 per user each month when paid on an annual basis; Business Plus customers will see a more substantial increase — from $18 to $22 per user a month. The Business Starter plan, which will provide access to limited Gemini capabilities, will go from $6 to $7 per user a month. 

Google doesn’t provide details on the Workspace Enterprise tier publically. 

The change to pricing will begin today for new customers, Google said. Existing customers will see the updated prices applied after March 17.

The move could be seen as the commodification of genAI; more than two years after  ChatGPT 3.5 launched, AI assistant tools have become common and vendors have shifted their attention to more advanced AI agents. Or Google may have moved on from  its attempt to convince customers to pay a premium for Gemini over and above the base subscription costs. 

“While there’s an element of truth to both, Google’s sales channel and customers may well celebrate,” J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst on Forrester’s Future of Work team, said in a blog post about the announcement.

One implication of the decision is to make genAI tools available to all employees with access to Workspace; due to the high per-user cost, many customers might have been selective about handing out licenses, dividing knowledge workers into AI “haves” and “have-nots.”

“This pricing change effectively removes a company’s need to determine who will get an AI productivity boost, and who will not,” said Kurtzman. “This should expand the number of paid seats of Google Workspace, as the value prop of usability and AI are clear.” 

It could also convince more companies to switch to the paid version of Workspace. 

“Many companies still use the free version of Google Workspace to access collaborative features that their current applications do not support,” said Kurtzman. “The inclusion of AI and a price point much lower than many competitors should result in additional paid users to Google Workspace.”

Google’s move will clearly put pressure on Microsoft — which charges $30 per user a month for its M365 Copilot add-on — to follow suit, as well as other productivity software vendors that charge an extra fee for access to genAI capabilities. (Zoom is a notable exception, having included its AI Companion in its apps at no extra cost since launch.)

As the cost of running large language models (LLMs) drops, this is a natural direction of travel: Gartneranalysts have said they expect genAI features to be included at no extra cost in office software subscriptions by 2028, according to a recent report (subscription required), as vendors seek broader adoption of their tools.

Price cuts will likely spur wider adoption. Microsoft has found it difficult to convince large numbers of customers to adopt its M365 Copilot widely across their organizations, with subscription costs one of the barriers. Microsoft has already bundled Copilot into consumer M365 subscriptions in some countries and willlikely do the same for business customers eventually.

“How long can Microsoft hold the line — and for how long — on $30/user/month? We’re betting the pricing strategy evolves,” said Gownder.

When you think about your smartphone, apps and interfaces are probably the first things that come to mind. Beneath all that surface-level stuff, though, our modern mobile devices are filled with files — folders upon folders of ’em! — just like the clunky ol’ computers we’ve relied upon for ages.

We may not come face to face with our phones’ file systems too often, but it’s valuable to know they’re there — and to know how they can work for us when the need arises. Whether you’re looking to dig up downloaded PDFs and presentations, open up ZIP files that a client emailed you, or move files from your phone to a computer, tablet, or even another Android phone or an iPhone, you’ve got all sorts of options to get down to business.

Here’s everything you need to know to tap into your phone’s file managing and transferring powers.

Manage files on your Android phone

You might not realize it at a glance, but Android actually allows you to access a device’s entire file system — even from the device itself.

The key is finding the right file manager to handle the job. That type of app makes it incredibly easy to browse, search, and interact with all the files stored locally on your device as well as clean up your local storage to free up space. You can even compress or uncompress files and add extra encryption onto especially sensitive items.

You’ll likely need just a single standout Android file manager to handle all of that and then some. I’ve narrowed down the field to two top contenders — one that’s the best all-around option for most professionals and one that offers an extra-advanced and robust file management experience with all sorts of interesting extras.

Check out my Android file manager recommendations and see which path makes the most sense for you, then keep whichever app you end up with handy for on-demand file-wrangling right from your device.

Supplement your phone’s local storage

One little-known feature of Android is its ability to connect with external storage devices like USB memory sticks and even larger-capacity portable hard drives. A phone just has to support something known as USB On-The-Go, or USB OTG, in order for the connection to work.

A fair number of devices, including Google’s Pixel phones and many Samsung Galaxy products, offer such support. If you aren’t sure if your phone does, your best bet is to Google its name along with “USB OTG”; odds are, you’ll find the answer fairly quickly.

Provided your device supports USB OTG, all you need is a USB-A to USB-C adapter like this one made by Amazon. Use the adapter to plug the external drive into your phone, then look for a notification confirming the drive is connected.

Tap the “Explore” option within the notification, and that’s it: You can now browse and access all the files on your external drive.

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Look for the notification that pops up when an external drive is connected, and you’ll be browsing the drive’s contents in no time.

JR Raphael / IDG

When you’re finished, don’t forget to go back to the notification and tap “Eject” before disconnecting the drive.

Android file transfers for Windows computers

In addition to supporting external hard drives, your Android device can act as an external hard drive for fast file transfers with any computer. And with a Windows system, it’s especially easy to make that connection.

Just plug your Android device into any open USB port on your Windows computer, then turn on the phone’s screen and unlock it.

Swipe your finger down from the top of the screen, and you should see a notification about the current USB connection. At this point, it’ll probably tell you your phone is connected only for charging.

After you connect your phone to your computer, a notification will let you prepare it for transferring files.

JR Raphael / IDG

Tap the notification and select “Transfer files” or “File transfer” in the menu that appears. If media files are all you’re planning to move, you could also use the “Transfer photos” (sometimes listed as “PTP”) option, which’ll treat your phone like a digital camera.

Once you’ve made your selection, go to your desktop and open up a File Explorer window — using whatever method lines up with your Windows workflow:

• Click the File Explorer icon in your taskbar
• Open the Start menu and click This PC or Computer
• Click the This PC, Computer, or My Computer icon on your desktop

Then look for an icon representing your phone alongside other portable devices and drives. Click or double-click that icon, and ta-da: You’ll be staring at your Android phone’s internal storage. You can now click around and browse folders, drag and drop files between your phone and PC, or manipulate the data in any way you want — as if it were any other ordinary drive.

Android file transfers for Macs

Got a Mac? The Android file transfer process is a bit more complicated for you — but fear not, for it’s still reasonably easy to get going.

The main difference is that before things will work, you’ll need to download and install a program that’ll allow your Mac to interact with your Android device. Google used to have its own program for this purpose called Android File Transfer, but the company seems to have quietly phased that app out over time (which isn’t entirely surprising, as Mac owners had been complaining about its reliability for years).

What you’ll want instead is the favorably reviewed third-party Commander One. It costs $30 for a single license or $100 for a five-user team license. Once installed and configured, it’ll let you browse your Android device’s storage, transfer files in either direction, and even interact with data on the phone or tablet without transferring anything.

Or — well, skip down to the final section of this story for one other option.

Android file transfers for Chromebooks

You’d expect file transfers between Android phones and Chromebooks to be as simple as can be, considering that Google’s the driving force behind both of those platforms — and by golly, you’d be absolutely right.

Just like with Windows, all you’ve gotta do to connect your Android phone to a ChromeOS device is plug it into any open USB port on the computer, then tap the USB charging notification on the phone and select the appropriate option for file transferring.

Once you do that, a prompt to open the ChromeOS Files app should automatically appear on your Chromebook, with your phone loaded as the active storage focus. You can then simply drag and drop files in either direction as needed.

Pulling up your Android phone’s storage on a Chromebook is as easy as can be.

JR Raphael / IDG

Told ya it was easy! And you’ve got one more option yet.

Wireless Android file transfers

Good ol’ wired transfers are fast and reliable, sure — but these days, you can also opt to move files from your Android device to another Android device, a computer, or even (gasp!) an iPhone without needing any physical connection.

You’ve got a few possible paths worth considering here:

1. Quick Share (formerly Nearby Share)

Google’s own native-to-Android wireless sharing solution makes it effortless to beam files between any Android device and another Android device, a Chromebook, or a Windows computer. Just use the standard system share command within any app on Android, then select Quick Share from the list of options that pops up and follow the steps that show up to get started.

If the other device is running Android or ChromeOS, search its system settings for quick share to make sure it’s set up and ready to receive. If the other device is a Windows computer, download the official Google Quick Share Windows app to connect it.

And if the other device is running any other operating system, consider one of the next two wireless file-sharing strategies instead.

2. PairDrop

PairDrop is a free and open-source service that lets you wirelessly send files between any devices on the same network, no matter what operating system they’re running.

It works entirely on the web: All you’ve gotta do is open up the PairDrop website on both devices, then click the center area of the screen or drag and drop files to initiate a transfer.

PairDrop brings wireless file transferring to any devices across any platforms — Android, iOS, Mac, you name it.

JR Raphael / IDG

That’s it: No downloads, no sign-ups, no hassles whatsoever. And the service’s open-source code makes it clear that no data is ever stored or even touched by a remote server as part of the process.

3. Cloud storage

If PairDrop isn’t for you and Quick Share isn’t doing the trick, the time-tested tactic of embracing a middleman can get the job done.

Simply pick any cloud storage you like — Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, or any other such service. Upload the files you want to transfer into a folder within the respective app on your Android phone, then find the folder within the same app on the receiving device (or vice-versa). Or, if the sharing involves other people, share the folder with them within the same cloud storage service app.

Android file transfer: Automatic syncing with a computer

Maybe you like having certain files stored locally on your Android phone, but you also want those files to be backed up and saved on your computer. The best of both worlds, right?

Believe it or not, this is actually quite easy to pull off. Just grab an Android app called AutoSync, which is available for use with Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Box. It’ll let you create pairings between a local folder on your phone and a cloud-based folder — for free with a single folder pair and files smaller than 10MB or for a one-time $5 payment without any real restrictions.

Install the appropriate computer-side app for whichever service you prefer, make sure it’s set to sync with your computer’s hard drive — and there ya have it: Your Android device’s folder is now effectively part of your PC.

You can even have the folders stay constantly synced in both directions — so if you add or update a file on the computer, the same changes will appear on your phone as well.

That’s a wrap!

Congratulations: You’ve officially earned the title of Android file master. (For real — you can even type it into a document, print it out, and tape it to your desk so everyone knows.)

Next up: Make sure you understand the ins and outs of Android backups. They’re ultimately made up of files, too, after all — and pretty important ones, at that.

This article was originally published in August 2017 and most recently updated in January 2025.

File management may not be the most exciting subject surrounding smartphone ownership — but if you use your device for productivity, my goodness, is it ever worth your while to chew over.

Your phone, after all, is your on-the-go connection to the world. It’s the always-available PC of our modern computing era. And whether your work involves presentations, PDFs, documents, or images, you’re bound to find yourself fumbling around with files on your pocket-sized screen sooner or later.

With the right tool for the job, though, managing files on your phone doesn’t have to be a hassle. Android’s got some outstanding file manager options, and best of all? You almost certainly only need one of ’em — a single standout file manager to handle all of your file-wrangling requirements.

Read on and see which path makes the most sense for you.

The best all-around Android file manager for most business users Files by Google

First and foremost, if your Android file needs are fairly simple and straightforward, Files by Google — or Google Files, for short — is the Android file manager you want.

Google Files has come a long way since its inconspicuous 2017 debut. These days, Files is a fully featured file management tool, with all the basics you’d expect and some compelling extras — all packed into a nicely designed and easy-to-use interface that’s compatible with any Android device (even if it typically comes preinstalled only on Pixels).

At its core, Google Files makes it painless and almost even pleasant to browse through your phone’s local storage and find, share, or organize any files you’ve downloaded or transferred onto the device. The app lets you look through folders or sort items by type (documents, images, videos, and so on) and optionally move sensitive materials into an encrypted and password-protected Safe Folder.

It has a spectacular search system, too, including the ability to search for text that appears within PDFs, images, and documents on your device. It even offers a convenient way to send any locally stored files directly to Google Drive with a couple quick taps — though it doesn’t, curiously enough, actually let you browse and interact with your Drive storage or connect at all to any non-Google cloud services. If that sort of more robust all-in-one control center for handling both local and remote storage is what you’re after, the Android file manager in the next section will be more suitable for you.

Files by Google lets you browse your phone’s local storage and perform a variety of actions on folders and files.

JR Raphael / IDG

Google Files can open and now also create compressed archives, too, and it even has a handy built-in option for scanning physical documents on demand and saving ’em as neatly cropped PDF files.

Perhaps most helpful of all is Files’ integrated system for freeing up storage on your phone: Just tap the app’s three-line menu icon, in the upper-right corner, and select “Clean” to see an ever-evolving set of intelligent suggestions for superfluous files you can safely delete. Files will also show you which apps you haven’t opened in a while and make it especially easy to uninstall ’em right then and there.

All in all, Google Files is a well-rounded and intuitive file manager that handles all the file management tasks most business users will need on a phone. It’s a significant upgrade from the default file managers that come preinstalled on most non-Pixel Android devices, and if you don’t have any special requirements or advanced demands, it’s almost certainly the app for you.

Google Files is free.

The best advanced Android file manager Solid Explorer File Manager

For anyone who needs a little more mobile file management oomph, Solid Explorer is the way to go.

Solid Explorer has all the same file manipulation basics as Google’s Files app but adds in advanced options like the ability to encrypt files and even create password-protected ZIP collections. It’s also able to integrate with a wide variety of internet-based storage services — including Google Drive, along with Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and your own private servers — and then serve as a streamlined interface for managing all of your stuff and transferring data between different locations.

Solid Explorer is overflowing with advanced options for manipulating files and working with cloud storage.

JR Raphael / IDG

Solid Explorer has a clever two-panel interface for fuss-free dragging and dropping between locations, too — be they two local folders or a combination of local and cloud-based folders from any connected service. All you have to do is flip your phone sideways or open the app on a wide-screen tablet or foldable device for that setup to appear.

Solid Explorer’s smart two-panel interface allows you to view two folders together and drag and drop files between them.

JR Raphael / IDG

From variable-based batch renaming to folder bookmarking and even support for casting content to a TV or other Google-Cast-compatible display, Solid Explorer is just jam-packed with useful stuff — and yet it manages to remain reasonably simple and easy to use. (It also works exceptionally well on a Chromebook, and once you’ve bought it for your phone, you can install it onto any ChromeOS device without having to pay again.) The app’s advanced elements won’t be necessary for most people, but if your on-the-go work requires such next-level file management functions, Solid Explorer is the path to pursue.

Solid Explorer costs $3 after a free 14-day trial.

Beyond Android file managers

Important as they are, of course, Android file managers themselves are just one piece of the puzzle.

Google’s mobile operating system has some powerful native systems for beaming files between different devices, transferring files from your phone to a computer, and supplementing your phone’s local storage. With a few minutes of simple setup, you can even create special folders on your phone that automatically sync with matching folders in your favorite cloud storage service — and vice-versa.

Head over to my Android file management guide next to explore all the ins and outs of managing files on Android — including the easiest ways to wirelessly transfer files on the fly.

It may not be exciting, exactly, but you’d better believe it’ll make a world of difference.

This article was originally published in April 2018 and most recently updated in January 2025.

Technology innovations have made the digital transformation of public services essential to enhancing safety, efficiency, and accountability. Kazakhstan has taken a monumental step forward in this regard by implementing a continuous video surveillance system across 78 correctional facilities nationwide. This groundbreaking initiative has set a new benchmark for prison management, significantly improving safety conditions and operational transparency.

A digital leap for safer prisons

In response to a national mandate from the President in 2020, the Ministry of Internal Affairs launched a comprehensive video surveillance project. The system includes over 39,500 high-definition cameras strategically installed across correctional institutions and their perimeters. These cameras are connected to advanced AI-driven analytics, providing real-time facial recognition, event detection, and license plate identification capabilities.

The results are nothing short of remarkable: since its implementation, the system has identified over 32,000 violations of detention protocols, prevented 62 suicides and six escape attempts, and de-escalated 27 potentially violent conflicts. It has also reduced corruption and abuse, fostering humane treatment of inmates and improving the behavior of staff. For the first half of 2024, no cases of torture by staff were reported, a testament to the system’s effectiveness.

Innovation meets human-centered design

Kazakhstan’s video surveillance initiative goes beyond mere technological deployment. It represents a harmonious blend of innovation, process improvement, and personnel training. Prison staff have been equipped with the tools and knowledge to harness the system’s full potential, enabling proactive incident management and fostering a culture of accountability.

The initiative also supports the broader goal of rehabilitation. By improving the physical, psychological, and social conditions within prisons, the system aligns with global trends emphasizing inmate welfare and reintegration into society.

Overcoming challenges with strategic vision

Before the project, sporadic and poorly maintained surveillance systems plagued correctional facilities, resulting in inconsistent monitoring and inadequate evidence for investigations. Kazakhstan addressed these challenges by deploying a centralized, secure infrastructure that ensures uninterrupted video transmission to a Situation Center under the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

This hub manages real-time monitoring and analytics while safeguarding data integrity and privacy. The adoption of a fiber-optic private network further enhances reliability and security, creating a scalable framework for future innovations.

Charting the road ahead

Kazakhstan’s video surveillance initiative is just the beginning. Plans are underway to integrate more advanced algorithms for object and event recognition and to connect the system with other IT infrastructures, such as access control solutions. These advancements will further strengthen the nation’s ability to maintain order, prevent misconduct, and foster trust in correctional institutions.

The nation’s achievement offers valuable lessons for countries aiming to modernize their correctional facilities. By leveraging cutting-edge technology, combining it with strategic governance, and emphasizing human-centered implementation, Kazakhstan has set a precedent for others to follow.

For a deeper dive into the strategies, implementation, and impact of this project, download the full report. Explore how Kazakhstan is redefining correctional facility management through innovation and strategic foresight.

Discover the full story behind Kazakhstan’s transformative initiative. Learn more about the strategies, technologies, and future opportunities in this in-depth white paper: Global Trends in the Digital Transformation of Correctional Facilities: The Value of Video Surveillance.

Microsoft is creating a new engineering group focused on artificial intelligence: Core AI — Platform and Tools. The group combines the company’s Developer Division with the AI Platforms work teams and some employees who previously reported to Microsoft’s CTO. According to The Verge, the group will be led by Jay Parikh, the former CTO at Meta and who joined Microsoft in October 2024.

Core AI — Platform and Tools will focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft’s own use and for the company’s customers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post that AI will require a record-breaking pace of development, which means Microsoft needs an AI-focused application stack to build AI apps and tools in the future.

“In this world, Azure must become the infrastructure for AI, while we build our AI platform and developer tools — spanning Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code — on top of it,” Nadella said. “In other words, our AI platform and tools will work together to create agents, and these agents will work together to transform every category of SaaS application, and to build custom applications powered by software (i.e. ‘service as software’).”