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(and, in fact, under the hood in no small part), Microsoft has grown Windows Phone up and Windows RT down to meet somewhere in the middle. As we went to press, Windows 10 Mobile was dead. Today, no one creates smartphones with Windows 10 Mobile.

      

Windows 10 in S mode is a relatively confusing development with an unclear future. Designed to compete with ChromeOS and iPads, S mode refers to a set of restrictions on “real” Windows 10. Supposedly in an attempt to improve battery life, reduce the chance of getting infected, and simplify your life, the S mode versions of Windows 10 won’t run most regular Windows programs. S mode limits users only to apps found in the Microsoft Store. You get Spotify, iTunes, but not Google Chrome or Firefox.

      Fortunately, Windows 10 S mode systems can be upgraded so that they’re no longer in S mode. For most people who want more than the basics, that’s a smart move. If you find that you can’t run real Windows programs on your Windows 10 in S mode machine, look into dropping S mode.

What do other people choose? It’s hard to measure the percentage of PCs running Windows versus Mac versus Linux. One company, StatCounter (www.statcounter.com), specializes in analyzing the traffic of 3 million sites globally and provides lots of useful statistics based on the data they collect. One stat is tallying how many Windows computers hit those sites, compared to macOS and Linux. Although their data may not be 100 percent representative of real-world market share, it does an excellent job of giving us an idea of operating system penetration. If you look at only desktop operating systems — Windows (on desktops, laptops, 2-in-1s) and macOS X — the numbers in April 2020 (according to StatCounter) break as shown in Figure 1-3. (Linux and ChromeOS, the two bottom lines, have barely more than 1 percent market share, each).

      In April 2020, Windows (the top line) had a market share of 76.52 percent of all desktop operating systems, and macOS (the second line from the top) had 18.99 percent. In Microsoft’s world, Windows 10 is king with a 73.14 percent market share. Windows 7 is a distant second, with 19.44 percent, and constantly declining, as Microsoft has declared its end of life on January 14, 2020. As of this date, users are no longer receiving support and updates for Windows 7 and are highly encouraged to upgrade to Windows 10.

      WINDOWS 10 MOBILE, RIP

      Generally, devices with screens smaller than 9 inches ran the other kind of Windows, known as Windows 10 Mobile. Yes, there were devices larger than 9 inches that used to run Windows 10 Mobile and 8-inch devices with the “real” Windows 10. The general argument went like this: If you don’t need to use the traditional Windows 7–style desktop, why pay for it? Windows 10 centers on the mouse-friendly desktop. Windows 10 Mobile sticks to the tiled world and is much more finger-friendly.

      This book talks about Windows 10, not Windows 10 Mobile. Microsoft gave up and sold its Nokia business in May 2016. Also, the company stopped fixing bugs and providing updates for Windows 10 Mobile in December 2019. Today, no one sells smartphones or tablets with Windows 10 Mobile, and the platform is dead.

      FIGURE 1-3: The worldwide market share of desktop operating systems — April 2019 – April 2020.

If you look at the bigger picture, including tablets and smartphones, the numbers change dramatically. As of April 2020, StatCounter says that 39.13 percent of all devices on the Internet use Android, while 33.1 percent use Windows. Back in July 2015, Andreesen Horowitz reported that the number of iOS devices (iPhones, iPads) sold per month zoomed ahead of the number of Windows PCs. Mobile operating systems are swallowing the world — and the trend has been in mobile’s favor, not Windows. The number of smartphones sold every year exceeded the number of PCs sold in 2011, and the curve has gone steeply in favor of mobile ever since. The number of PCs sold every year peaked in 2014 and has been declining steadily ever since. According to Statista, at the end of 2019, 60 percent of search engine visits in the United States were made from mobile devices. In other countries such as those in Asia, mobile is even more significant because people learn how to access the Internet on mobile devices and not on PCs.

      Windows was once the king of the computing hill. Not so anymore. This is good news for you — the Windows customer. Today, Microsoft is branching out to make software for smartphones and tablets of all stripes, and Windows 10 itself works better with whatever tablets and hybrid devices you might use. It’s a brave new Windows world.

A Terminology Survival Kit

      Some terms pop up so frequently that you’ll find it worthwhile to memorize them, or at least understand where they come from. That way, you won’t be caught flat-footed when your first-grader comes home and asks whether he can install a Universal app on your computer.

      

If you want to drive your techie friends nuts the next time you have a problem with your Windows 10 computer, tell them that the hassles occur when you’re “running Microsoft.” They won’t have any idea whether you mean Windows, Word, Outlook, OneNote, Search, or any of a gazillion other programs. Also, they won’t know if you’re talking about a Microsoft program on Windows, the Mac, iPad, iPhone, or Android.

      Windows 10, the operating system (see the preceding section), is a sophisticated computer program. So are computer games, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word (the word processor part of Office), Google Chrome (the web browser made by Google), those nasty viruses you’ve heard about, that screen saver with the oh-too-perfect fish bubbling and bumbling about, and others.

      An app or a program or a desktop app is software (see the earlier “Hardware and Software” section in this chapter) that works on a computer. App is modern and cool; program is old and boring; desktop app or application manages to hit both gongs, but they all mean the same thing.

      A Windows app is a program that, at least in theory, runs on any version of Windows 10. By design, apps (which used to be called Universal Windows Platform, or UWP apps) should run on Windows 10 on a desktop, a laptop, and a tablet— and even on an Xbox game console, a giant wall-mounted Surface Hub, a HoloLens augmented reality headset, and possibly Internet of Things tiny computers. They also run on Windows 10 in S mode (see the previous section).

For most people, “Universal” does not mean what they might think it means. Universal Windows apps don’t work on Windows 8.1 or Windows 7. They don’t even run on Windows RT tablets (see the “Windows RT, RIP” sidebar). They’re universal only in the sense that they’ll run on Windows 10. In theory.

      

A special kind of program called a driver makes specific pieces of hardware work with the operating system. The driver acts like a translator that enables Windows to ask your hardware to do what it wants. Suppose you have a document you want to print. You edit the document in Word, click the Print button, and wait for the document to be printed. Word is an application that asks the operating system to print the document. The operating system takes it and asks the printer driver to print the document. Then the driver translates the document into a language that the printer understands. Finally, the printer prints the document and delivers it to you. Everything inside your computer and all that is connected to it has a driver: The hard disk inside the PC has a driver, the printer has a driver, your mouse has a driver, and Tiger Woods has a driver (several, actually, and

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