On June 2nd, Microsoft announced that they would be holding an event on June 24th to reveal “the next generation of Windows”. This is rumoured to be when Microsoft will reveal the long rumoured “Sun Valley” update which is expected to be a sweeping change to the Windows user interface that’s releasing later this year.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has called the next Windows update “one of the most significant updates to Windows in the past decade” which suggests that this next update is going to be as significant as the rumours have been suggesting. This suggests that all of the rumours we have heard over the last year are true and that we can finally expect to see a more modern user interface in Windows.

Last month Microsoft announced that they had stopped development of Windows 10x, an operating system originally designed for foldables, and that they were instead bringing the best of Windows 10X to the main Windows 10 release. This suggests that in October we could see a much more modern file explorer, action center and a centered taskbar.

However, Nadella specifically mentioned the “newt generation of Windows” instead of Windows 10. This has led to lots of speculation that Microsoft could be changing the version number to Windows 11, however, I think it’s more likely that they will simply rename to Windows and change their versioning to a style similar to what Linux distributions such as Ubuntu use. For example, instead of “Windows 10 21H2” they could name the next release “Windows 21H2” or “Windows 21.10” with the 10 signifying the month the update is released.