We're now only a few weeks away from the launch of the next big Windows 10 update. This update is being called, somewhat confusingly, the "Creators" update. This is also what they called the last update in April. This is to draw attention to the fact that the new features are also targeted at content creators. However, for those of us that are tasked with managing and applying these updates, using the same name is not ideal when you need to be precise in describing what's installed!
As Microsoft has announced previously, their current plan is to release two big updates to Windows 10 every year (as opposed to the usual monthly updates that largely address security issues). Therefore, while it may only seem like yesterday that your PC rebooted for an age to apply the last big update (and in some cases, this may literally be the case - these updates are slowly rolled out to users over weeks and months rather than being pushed to everyone on day one), it's almost time for the next one.
So what's new? There's a new version of their Edge browser (maybe this one will actually work!). The changes here include PDF reading enhancements, the ability to show a web page in full screen mode, and the ability to pin specific websites onto the Windows 10 taskbar.
Android and iOS users will be able to link their phone to Windows and easily push web pages open on their phone onto their Windows device to continue using. This is just the first step in a process to allow a lot more sharing between phones and Windows.
There will be a few other additions that may be useful to some, but most probably won't notice. Also, there's the usual security improvements and various other efficiency tweaks.
One other thing of note here is that Microsoft have recently annouced that users with a certain type of Intel processor (Atom) will no longer receive these feature updates. This is the first (but almost certainly not the last) of updates being denied to a certain set of users. In this case, Intel themselves have stopped supporting the chip, so Microsoft have decided they cannot continue to test Windows on an unsupported CPU. This will likely become a larger problem over time as more and more PC components are abandoned by their manufacturers. In the past, this wasn't a problem for Microsoft, as they would support the components for the version of Windows its currently running, but would drop support in the next one. However, now Windows 10 is here for the foreseeable future, this approach isn't possible. Microsoft have announced that, in this case at least, while these machines will not receive these new feature updates, they will continue to supply security updates to them for several years.