Macs have beautiful “Retina” displays that are sharp and vibrant. Windows laptops can also come with great displays, some of which are even sharper or better overall, but you have to really hunt through the great many models available to find one with a sharp screen.

With that said, if nice displays is part of your list, avoid the cheaper, lighter MacBook Air laptop. It uses Apple’s older displays, that are nowhere near as nice as the more recent Retina models. 

This is where it all started for Windows. The original Windows 1 was released in November 1985 and was Microsoft’s first true attempt at a graphical user interface in 16-bit.

Development was spearheaded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and ran on top of MS-DOS, which relied on command-line input.

It was notable because it relied heavily on use of a mouse before the mouse was a common computer input device. To help users become familiar with this odd input system, Microsoft included a game, Reversi (visible in the screenshot) that relied on mouse control, not the keyboard, to get people used to moving the mouse around and clicking onscreen elements. 

Some interesting features include the ability to switch between a keyboard and mouse mode and a tablet mode, for those computers like the Surface Pro 3 with a detachable keyboard. 

Windows 10 is a service, which means it gets better through periodic software updates.

The great news is you usually don’t have to do anything! If you have enabled automatic updates, new updates will automatically download and install whenever they’re available, so you don’t have to think about it.

 

On the left side of this page, you’ll find a list of all the updates released for this version of Windows. You can also find more information about releases and any known issues. Installing the most recent update ensures that you also get any previous updates you might have missed, including any important security fixes.