The Windows 10 April Update (1803): The Littlest Big Update
by Brett Howse on May 25, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Software
- Operating Systems
- Windows
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
We’re about three years into Windows 10, and we’ve seen a lot of changes to the OS, as well as the servicing model, in those three years. The move to no longer offering major OS updates every couple of years with a new name, and requirement for purchase, is very welcome, and has likely been the biggest success of the Windows 10 launch. Microsoft has also refined the servicing model to a more consistent pattern of two updates per year, and while that can either be a pro or a con depending on where you stand, they’ve met that over the last couple of updates. With the Windows 10 April Update, which is version 1803, we’ve got arguably the smallest update yet in terms of new features, but that’s not really a bad thing. Three years in, the OS is mature enough that it’s good to see the company dialing back on the major interface changes, and hopefully focusing more on consistency, and reliability.
There’s still a lot of new features for the April Update, but only a handful of what you’d consider major feature additions to Windows. There’s Timeline, Nearby Share, Focus Assist, and Progressive Web App support being the most noticeable user-facing features, but there’s also a lot of little changes under the hood as well, such as more use of their Fluent design language across the OS, a continued movement of replacing the Control Panel with the new Settings app, and improvements to visibility of privacy information, among others.
Windows 10 Version History | |||||
Version | Version Number | Release Date | |||
Windows 10 Original Release | 1507 | July 29, 2015 | |||
November Update | 1511 | November 10, 2015 | |||
Anniversary Update | 1607 | August 2, 2016 | |||
Creators Update | 1703 | April 5, 2017 | |||
Fall Creators Update | 1709 | October 17, 2017 | |||
April Update | 1803 | April 30, 2018 |
It’s also worth discussing the state of Windows right now in the grand scheme of Microsoft. Terry Myerson, who has been the EVP of Windows and Devices for Microsoft for almost five years, and who has been the driving force behind the new Windows 10 model of constant servicing rather than large updates every couple of years, announced his departure from Microsoft in March of this year. Microsoft is in the middle of a transition from their legacy applications such as Windows and Office, to a cloud computing company based on services, and Windows is no longer going to be the driving factor there. As such, the former crown jewels of the company are being pushed to the outskirts. It’ll still be an important platform for Microsoft, but growth for the company is going to come from other places.
What this will mean for Windows 10 is likely going to be a reduction in resources allocated to its development, although that’s speculation at this time. It would not be surprising to see future updates scaled back in terms of frequency though. Considering the maturity of Windows 10 now, and the major foothold it has in the enterprise, a yearly update would likely make more sense anyway, so this might not be a bad thing.
We’ve also seen the latest April Update falling into some issues with delivery, thanks to some critical bugs found right before it was set to ship. This delayed the shipment of the new update until the very last day in April, which was only symbolically important because someone decided to call it the April Update. In reality, it wasn’t being pushed to anyone in April, but was available for people to manually get it. But as of this writing, the official rollout seems to be very slow to start, so perhaps there’s other issues holding up deployment, much like the incompatibility with the Intel 600p. That’s unfortunate, since the Fall Creators Update was pretty quick to rollout, but even with a massive beta test network in the Windows Insider Program, it proves again how difficult it is to do Windows as a Service on a regular schedule.
But, once it does start rolling out through Windows Update, there will be some new things to check out, so let’s take a look at some of them.
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damianrobertjones - Friday, May 25, 2018 - link
Backups can be your friend.voicequal - Saturday, May 26, 2018 - link
Update to 1709 also lost the WHS/Essentials connector for me. Doing my best to defer 1803 until 1709 EOL, or until I actually need one of the new features.damianrobertjones - Friday, May 25, 2018 - link
Updated a load in work, all my home computers, all without issues. Sucks to be you if you did. The millions of people that have no issues seldom say stuff.Zan Lynx - Saturday, May 26, 2018 - link
I did four machines. They all updated without problems.bill44 - Friday, May 25, 2018 - link
When can we expect a proper color management system in Windows 10?Been waiting 2+ years, it's been promissed several times, but now the topic is dead.
Wih wide gamut displays, 10bit color, HDR, we need something better (Apple colorsync?) than sRGB 8bit SDR on our desktop. First, proper color managent, then sort out the current HDR mess.
3D Dynamic LUT support would be nice!
serendip - Friday, May 25, 2018 - link
My Windows Atom tablet has a display bug with the latest update that's probably related to the Intel GPU driver. When using the built-in Windows movie viewer, the screen blanks out for a few seconds when starting and stopping viewing. It doesn't happen with VLC.DiscoDJ - Saturday, May 26, 2018 - link
I own a small computer business in a town of 55k people. Since May 22nd we've had three cases of customers calling and complaining of issues after a Windows Update. I'm have no way of knowing if the update involved is 1803 or the 5-18 monthly update.All 3 machines have suffered from failure of the user account to load properly. You end up at a black screen with no icons other than recycle bin.
Clicking on anything does nothing. Right clicking...ditto. Keyboard commands work, but I haven't found any combination that will fix this.
So I pulled the HDDs (not SSDs) and backed up the user data and reinstalled Windows.
At that point I noticed something interesting. There were extra partitions on the each HDD that were not standard to the factory install (2 HPs, 1 Dell.). It was like the update was creating a new partition before installing.
I am admittedly confused, but like I said, reinstalling Windows from scratch (including all updates) solved the issue, and didn't cause any further issues.
Gunbuster - Saturday, May 26, 2018 - link
it is a reinstall. that's why you get a windows.old dir too. they should not be calling it an updateChristopherFortineux - Friday, June 8, 2018 - link
The extra partitions are for roll-back.B3an - Saturday, May 26, 2018 - link
I wish someone would benchmark Win 10 April Update compared to the original Win 10 release. Would be interesting to see if anything has improved at all. And i mean from gaming to app loading times, start up times, battery life and network performance.