The Windows Forecast is a look at the future of Windows that comments on the latest news for Windows Insiders, as well as other major announcements in the Windows space each and every week. My name is João Carrasqueira, and I've been covering the world of Windows professionally since 2018. If there's something you'd like to see covered, you can reach me at [email protected].

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It's finally time! This week brought with it some big news for Windows fans, most notably the long-overdue introduction of Recall on Copilot+ PCs. What's more, that's not all that's new. Meanwhile, the weirder side of things includes a new PC that only works through the cloud. Let's break down the week's news.

Recall is finally here Along with the new Click To Do feature Close ✕ Remove Ads

It has been half a year since Microsoft announced Recall, and five months since it was supposed to make its debut. After an indefinite delay, we eventually heard it would be coming in October, and that deadline came and went with barely an acknowledgment from Microsoft. Then, after talking about Copilot+ at Ignite without much new to share, Microsoft dropped Recall for Insiders on Friday. Surprisingly, last we heard, the feature was set to be available in December, so the company has actually beaten its own deadline. After pushing the deadline back twice, but still.

Regardless of how cynical I can be about this, Recall making its debut is huge news. This was the thing that made Copilot+ PCs exciting in the first place, and the past few months without it have made these devices feel a lot less interesting. The only thing that really makes Copilot+ PCs cool is that they're Arm-based, not Copilot+ itself. That's finally changing, and I think the ability to go back through everything you've done on your PC and easily find what you were working on before could be an absolute game changer. Sadly, I don't get to test it as I don't have a Snapdragon-powered PC in my hands at this time, but hopefully that will come soon.

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The same can be said for Click To Do, the other big new feature for Copilot+ PCs. Click To Do was announced at the beginning of October, and it basically lets you ask Copilot to take certain actions on the things you're seeing on your screen. This initial implementation works only with Recall snapshots, and it can only take actions on text and images, but it will be interesting to see if it evolves to support more kinds of elements. Only having it work within Recall makes it far less useful, but that will also change in the future, so I'm definitely looking forward to that.

I think things finally seem to be on the right track here with Microsoft delivering most of the Copilot+ features it had announced. I just hope that going forward, we see more and more of these features to really make these PCs feel worth it. In fact, I've recently written about a few such things I'd love to see.

✕ Remove Ads A PC that can't run without internet? Interesting approach Link Image

Before we got the big blowout of Copilot+ this week, Microsoft held its Ignite conference, and one of the more interesting announcements was Windows 365 Link. You may already know about Windows 365, which is a subscription service for running Windows 11 (or 10) in the cloud, with access to your own personal files and apps from any device. Well, Windows 365 Link is a device that's only made for cloud PCs.

It looks and functions mostly like a mini PC, but there's no data or full-blown OS on it. It's entirely designed to just run Windows from the cloud. It has a decent set of ports and all that so you can use it like a typical PC, but that's about it.

✕ Remove Ads Related WIndows 365 Link is a mini PC that can only boot from the cloud

Like a streaming box for Windows

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This is an interesting approach, to say the least. At $349, this isn't super expensive, and I can see how some businesses may look at that and see an affordable way to give users access to their own PC without being limited to something with nearly unusable specs. It's basically just an endpoint that can connect to a much more capable PC in the cloud. I think the use case for this may be a setup for hotdesking, where multiple people may use the same physical setup, but access their private PC in the cloud.

But is it really a worthy investment to buy these devices an pay a subscription fee on top of that knowing that they can only work through the cloud? You can't use them without internet, you may not be able to easily move them to more remote locations with bad connections. I'm sure there may be some scenario where this makes total sense, but as someone who's not really a business person, I can't really see it.

Admin accounts on Windows are changing I kind of like it

Finally, I wanted to touch on a particular announcement from Ignite, even though it wasn't completely new. There's a new feature called administrator protection coming soon to Windows PCs, and it basically makes it so that administrator accounts only have the same permissions as basic users by default. For actions that require admin permissions, users need to sign in using Windows Hello, which generates a single-use token to approve whatever action is being performed.

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Now, I can see how this might get annoying, having to enter a password or PIN to change settings on your PC if you're an admin. But I think the concept is actually quite sound. Administrator permissions are a big security risk in that malicious processes can leverage those permissions to carry out attacks on your data without you ever knowing, so not every user can be granted these permissions at will. At the same time, since so many relatively basic tasks can require administrator permissions, it can quickly become frustrating to have a basic user constantly asking for an admin password.

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The idea is that on a shared PC, or a PC managed by an organization, more users can now be trusted to have administrator accounts. Since every administrator action requires authentication, and admin privileges don't persist, malware can no longer leverage those privileges to attack your computer. This makes it much safer to have an administrator account, since even that account will need to be verified each time. Malware becomes much less of a problem, and that is a good thing.

Related After the CrowdStrike disaster, Microsoft is improving Windows security to avoid outages

And Windows is coming to mixed reality?

And if you're worried about password prompts, don't fret, the feature is optional, so you can keep doing things the way they've been so far. But I think this new approach makes a lot of sense, especially if Microsoft can rework some tasks to not require admin privileges.

It's been an exciting week

With all of the announcements coming out of Ignite and the surprise launch of Recall and Click To Do for Insiders, this has been one of the better weeks for Windows fans. There are some cool things to check out and some intertesting things to look forward to. As we approach the end of the year, new features are going to wind down quite a bit, but here's hopiing to see some more fun announcements soon.

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