Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. Microsoft had originally claimed Windows 11 would be ready to download for this ‘holiday season,’ which led many to expect a November or December release, but I suppose they must have been talking about Halloween instead.ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. The company’s announcement mentions that laptops from Acer, Asus, Alienware, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Microsoft’s own Surface family will be available with Windows 11 starting October 5.

It seems there will be plenty of new hardware ready to go with Windows 11 pre-installed as well. We’ve reached out to Microsoft for clarification on this front. That said, I’d imagine users who are keen to upgrade to Windows 11 immediately can probably do so by joining the Windows Insider Program, or manually installing the ISO (the latter will be the only way to install the OS if you’re running on officially unsupported hardware).

We expect all eligible devices to be offered the free upgrade to Windows 11 by mid-2022. The upgrade will then roll out over time to in-market devices based on intelligence models that consider hardware eligibility, reliability metrics, age of device and other factors that impact the upgrade experience.

That means new eligible devices will be offered the upgrade first. Following the tremendous learnings from Windows 10, we want to make sure we’re providing you with the best possible experience. The free upgrade to Windows 11 starts on October 5 and will be phased and measured with a focus on quality. On that date, an update for the new OS will begin to roll out to users on fully compatible devices, but it’s also when the first new devices preloaded with Windows 11 will become available in stores.Īs with its larger Windows 10 updates, Microsoft is using a phased, very gradual update rollout, which means casual users may have to wait until mid-2022 to get the update. Microsoft today announced that its new OS would begin to roll out on October 5 - just a few weeks away. Windows 11 has a release date, and it’s a fair bit sooner than many of us anticipated.

Windows 11 release date october