Over 60% of Windows users are still using Windows 10, with only about 35% or so – and falling! – of them opting to use Windows 11. As we’ve talked about many times before, this is a major issue going into 2025, since Windows 10’s support will end in October of this year, meaning hundreds of millions of people all over the world will suddenly be running an operating system that will no longer receive security updates. Most of those people don’t want to, or cannot, upgrade to Windows 11, meaning Microsoft is leaving 60% of its Windows customer base out to dry.
I’m sure this will go down just fine with regulators and governments the world over.
Microsoft has tried everything, and it’s clear desperation is setting in, because the company just declared 2025 “The year of the Windows 11 PC refresh”, stating that Windows 11 is the best way to get all the “AI” stuff people are clearly clamoring for.
All of the innovation arriving on new Windows 11 PCs is coming at an important time. We recently confirmed that after providing 10 years of updates and support, Windows 10 will reach the end of its lifecycle on Oct. 14, 2025. After this date, Windows 10 PCs will no longer receive security or feature updates, and our focus is on helping customers stay protected by moving to modern new PCs running Windows 11. Whether the current PC needs a refresh, or it has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-backed protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC.
↫ Some overpaid executive at Microsoft
What makes this so incredibly aggravating and deeply tone-deaf is that for most of the people affected by this, “upgrading” to Windows 11 simply isn’t a realistic option. Their current PC is most likely performing and working just fine, but the steep and strict hardware requirements prohibit them from installing Windows 11. Buying an entirely new PC is often not only not needed from a performance perspective, but for many, many people also simply unaffordable. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not exactly going great, financially, for a lot of people out there, and even in the US alone, 70-80% of people live paycheck-to-paycheck, and they’re certainly not going to be able to just “move forward with a new Windows 11 PC” for nebulous and often regressive “benefits” like “AI”.
The fact that Microsoft seems to think all of those hundreds of millions of people not only want to buy a new PC to get “AI” features, but that they also can afford it like it’s no big deal, shows some real lack of connective tissue between the halls of Microsoft’s headquarters and the wider world. Microsoft’s utter lack of a grasp on the financial realities of so many individuals and families today is shocking, at best, and downright offensive, at worst.
I guess if you live in a world where you can casually bribe a president-elect for one million dollars, buying a new computer feels like buying a bag of potatoes.
My 2009 Mac Pro: 64 GB ECC RAM on triple channel, 2x 6 core xeons, a Vega 64, 4xNVMes (mojave, Windows 10, haiku and freebsd) – no Windows 11 support.
My ThinkPad W530: 32 GB RAM, 4 TB of SSDs, quad core i7, TPM 1.2, dual boot Windows 10 and FreeBSD – no Windows 11 support.
My (dead) Surface Pro 3: 16 GB RAM, TPM 2.0 for heavens sake, 1TB NVMe, a MICROSOFT PRODUCT – no Windows 11 support
Poop, really. I own a computer that came with Windows 11 (a ThinkPad P1) that I promptly upgraded to FreeBSD, Windows 10 and Linux.
And still, I do a lot of my work on a HP 712 with 60 MHz and nextstep 3.3 because it never crashes or requires a reboot and doesn’t distract me with animations, unecessary eyecandy, popups, notifications and the sort.
Potentially billions of computers hitting the handfills. Save the planet, indeed.
I will do my best to buy some of those machines before they hit the landfill. That 2009 Mac Pro must run Linux really well and would even make a decent Proxmox homelab.
The Thinkpad could be a daily driver in my world.
None for sale. Although I will probably sell the Mac Pro in a few months, as I am about to finish my transition away from Mac OS.
It also has Thunderbolt and I even managed to get video out via USB-C. =)
I believe it runs Linux well, since it runs FreeBSD perfectly.
>And still, I do a lot of my work on a HP 712 with 60 MHz and nextstep 3.3
Please tell us more 🙂
My crazy workflow when I need to focus 100% is:
1. I have X11 on my ThinkPad, I log into Teams via ungoogled-chromium, telnet into the ThinkPad, remote X. Teams in Chromium via X11 is just slow enough via 10Mbps for me to be able to send messages in case of emergency, but ignore the flood of random team chat messages.
2. My work is in a NFS mount, and I can use text editors in nextstep just fine. Then, via telnet, I can call git on the ThinkPad, or use Azure CLI.
3. Telnet security: the ThinkPad is connected via Wifi to my network (I got multiple vlans on both wired and wireless networks), and connected directly to the HP 712.
Nextstep has incredible applications for general productivity. I print my project diagrams directly from it via postscript on an A2 printer, and it also interfaces directly with my Lexmark CS317dn – I managed to get even duplex and color working by removing the unicode parts of the postscript description file.
Frogfind works ok, too. =)
I use my HP 712 almost every day.
This is something I wish more people understood: Windows 11 doesn’t just require TPM 2.0, it also requires a list of specific CPUs. It’s the reason some laptops that shipped with Windows 10 (and hence have TPM 2.0, since TPM 2.0 was a requirement for PCs shipping with Windows 10) won’t get Windows 11.
This also means that the market for x86-64 CPUs capable of running the latest version of Windows is officially a duopoly, since Zhaoxin/VIA Technologies was cut out from the Windows 11 compatibility list.
I do understand the CPU requirements. But, given the fact that I’ve an unsanctioned installation of Windows 11 running on it, and it ran faster and with longer battery life than Windows 10, and the TPM 2 worked fine, and, AFAIK, the CPU supports all the instructions that required CPUs support, then why isn’t it supported?
Shiunbird,
Whether it works fine or not doesn’t matter. The point is planned obsolescence to increase OEM sales,. The cut off is kind of arbitrary. and some of the computers excluded even outperform those that are included…it doesn’t really matter to MS.
As for TLS2, users keep proving the “requirement” only exists in the installer and not windows itself. I don’t know if MS have a plan to make it actually mandatory and not just a fake requirement as users keep demonstrating. They could make TLS2 mandatory at any point but I suspect internally they explicitly instructed engineers not to do so because Microsoft needs an exit strategy…”Yeah, we publicly insisted you wouldn’t be allowed to upgrade to win11, but we changed our minds because win10 is creating a marketshare problem for win11. At least we got some of you to go out and buy new windows licenses am-I-right?”. Of course they wouldn’t say it this way.
I think MS’s endgame is something like the Windows 365 Link (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/link) which, after Enterprise customers dogfood it, will probably be pushed onto home users.
sydbarrett74,
I agree many vendors keep pushing for this and most consumers dread it. So many monthly subscriptions not only gets expensive but it completely cripples user ability to function independently. This will amount to a dark ages in computing history when the server side dependencies inevitably get shut down. This has already begun to happen but I have a feeling it’s just going to keep getting worse as companies tightening the leash.
TBH it’s a microcosm of what is happening with every large US company, and with the US economic landscape generally. Prices are being jacked up as high as possible, demand is being manufactured artificially through forced obsolescence, people are being paid less and can no longer afford things. The housing market caters to speculators while huge numbers of people remain homeless. And the quality of everything is going down. Even groceries – e.g. I can only rely on one brand of chicken now, the others are almost always rotten on arrival a week before their sell-by date. It’s an obvious death spiral; the question is just how far and how fast it will get into the “death” part.
Basically. Market saturation is a thing, and Windows has reached it.
The best thing would be to nationalize Windows and have MS move on. People forget, once peak capitalism is hit it’s time to move to socialism.
You end up requiring more complexity to fix the system, and then it crumbles under its own weight. AFAIK, historically, systems don’t revert to their simpler, more functional ways, on their own. Especially when touching privigeles is involved.
The simple truth is that a system that can’t provide for society and preserve the planet does not work and must be rewamped or replaced, as these are signs that the system simply does not work.
It blows my mind that the world has gotten a few times richer during the last 3 decades and yet states are always bankrupt or unable to finance what is required, retirement standards have been reduced,
Is it realistic for Microsoft to offer ongoing support indefinitely for no cost?
That doesn’t feel a realistic ask tbh.
The alternative I see is Microsoft offer an ad-supported version. And cover the costs of maintaining it that way. Which is what they are doing for Win 11 predicting the same situation will repeat itself as it did for XP and now 10. And we’ve seen the response to that!
Win 11 is a decade old now and it’s replacement will have been available for nearly 5 years.
Even in the Linux/FOSS world, no distro offers an unpaid security support cycle as long as Microsoft dó on their desktop.
Win 11 is not a decade old, I think you meant “Win 10” 🙂
What’s Windows 10? It’s “the last OS you will ever need”.
If you know anything about MIcrosoft, they can’t afford “not to” “support” (emphasis on the quotations there) their desktop OS for “free” in the case of Grandpa and Grandma. It’s imperative.
With that said, the idea of “the grands” upgrading on their own from 10 to 11 is pretty far fetched. They’d prefer to stay with 10… in 5 years or maybe less, they will all say “I need to get a new PC” and rush out an buy some $500 Dollar Tree quality “whatever” running 11.
Yep, typo
Meant win 10 🙂
I don’t think the “grandma” applies in the same way it once did. These grandparents have more or less grown up with windows professionally their whole careers, and almost certainly at home too.
While all pensioners might not be “technical”, and might need help, those who don’t know how to use a computer and/or the Internet are few and far between these days. People are used to and conditioned to replace phones and tablets every few years now. So the concept of replacing their computer isn’t an alien one. After a few years, they’ll buy a nice new machine because their current one can’t run something or other. Or their OSnews grandkids insist upon it
I fully accept people may Choose not to ofc. And they will be in the same boat as those who stuck with XP.
Adurbe,
I am in agreement with you here, however it’s also microsoft’s own fault that they ended up here. After all microsoft’s solution to the lackluster demand problem in upgrading from windows 7 was to make windows 10 upgrade free and then force users to upgrade. Today they still haven’t solved the demand problem.
I don’t think they can realistically expect many users to buy new hardware and new OEM copies to upgrade to windows 11. Microsoft knows many consumers won’t be upgrading on their own and I think it’s very likely they’ll end up with long term win10 EOL stragglers. This is bad for microsoft because it fragments their own market control. Even though Microsoft has denied it publicly, they likely have a plan to onboard these stragglers later, they just want to give everyone the chance to pay up first.
Indeed. If they would have pushed for unbundleing the OS from the hardware, they could have forced people to get used to paying for Windows. As it stands, Windows is “Free”, and people are used to that drug.
Realistically, MS could stop Windows feature development and only release security updates and everyone would be fine with that.
Flatland_Spider,
I agree. Most people begrudge upgrading these days. I think there are two main factors: 1) Computers have matured and the mostly superficial changes aren’t drawing people in, 2) the rise of anti-features, tracking, ads, forced ms accounts and changes that are being forced down our throats that consumers never wanted. It’s a far cry from the 90s when people were quite literally lining up in the streets to get their hands on a new version of windows.
> Is it realistic for Microsoft to offer ongoing support indefinitely for no cost?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: Users have paid the price of support (through initial purchase of their system) and continue paying it (through microsoft’s mining of the user base). Microsoft is happy to enjoy the spoils of users locked into their software ecosystem, why shouldn’t it also bear the cost?
Software is written by people. And people deserve (and indeed need) to be paid for the work they do.
To fund that lower ticket price, advertising and data mining is the way the industry has gone, because people are unwilling to pay for software anymore.
Even FOSS stalwarts like Debian don’t offer security updates for this long, let alone forever. I consider it unreasonable to expect that.
> To fund that lower ticket price, advertising and data mining is the way the industry has gone, because people are unwilling to pay for software anymore.
Nope, the industry has gone that way to increase their profit margins. Still plenty of people and/businesses pay for microsoft software. They’re even increasing their spending through bundled subscriptions.
Microsoft enjoyed and continues to enjoy all those benefits, now it should pay the price of maintaining it.
You are correct that Debian doesn’t support one version this long. You are also omitting that Debian doesn’t arbitrarily enforce a Hardware Compatibility List and that you can upgrade to the next version as long as your hardware can reasonably run it.
It doesn’t matter that Debian version -1 isn’t supported anymore, because the next version is an “apt-get dist-upgrade” away. Your hardware in all likelihood won’t stop working either, because Linux doesn’t have incompatible driver model shenanigans. (Unless you go out of tree.) Linux users mostly don’t care about Linux distributions that are 10 years old. We are using and enjoying the current ones in a near seamless update cycle.
Microsoft can at least provide the promised 10 years of support from the time the device hit the market, not the time the OS was released. There are laptops from late 2016 that can’t officially run Windows 11 because they don’t have the right CPU, so they won’t even get the promised 10 years of support.
Or MS could create a thin client OS and have everyone get a Windows subscription to Windows 365.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/windows-365-link%E2%80%94the-first-cloud-pc-device-for-windows-365/4302687
They have two great options from Google. ChromeOS could be forked as EdgeOS, or MS could use Android.
Now that I think about it, MS Forking ChromeOS isn’t a bad idea.
I keep coming back to the “But Why, Though?” section of Cathode Ray Dude’s “Quick Start, Episode 7: Crimes… And Felonies.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs&t=2670s
The tone-deafness isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. One of his comment replies says “I came so close to putting a screenshot up of an article from The Register about how AI is happening because ‘win 11 didn’t trigger a refresh cycle'”.
Microsoft is doing this with Windows 11 because they want to force new purchases after people looked at what they already had and said “Nah, this meets my needs.”
Through some mix of savvy and “partnerships”, they decided that getting people to pay to upgrade a Windows 10 machine would be less profitable for them.
This CRD episode threw me off because it’s so wrong: There is one laptop manufacturer out there that’s still innovating: Apple. There is a reason Macs were the best mainstream Windows laptops money could buy before the switch to Apple Silicon. So, PC OEMs already know what they have to do in order to keep innovating: copy Apple. For example, they could make sure every mainstream PC laptop out there is passively-cooled instead of shipping Core i3 laptops with frickin’ fans.
But the American obsession with “more value for your money” prevents them from doing that. It’s the same reason every car from the Detroit Big 3 is unreliable junk while Toyota still makes reliable cars (CRD was wrong on that one too). Or why American houses have lots of features and rooms but are built out of frickin’ wood that gets eaten by insects. The problem with the PC platform on the hardware side is that’s it’s dominated by companies doing things the “more value for your money” way, when actual value is on premium design. The software side is another story altogether ofc.
…or, as was said often during the heyday of Pirate Parties, you can choose to compete on one of three things: Price, Features, or Service. (Valve competes with pirates on service. Pirates intentionally allowed DVD movies to compete with them on features.)
…and all these companies are fixated on competing on a specific interpretation of “price” and “features” that prevents them from following Apple on those fronts.
(The sad thing is, this whole mess probably started around when everyone including Apple started following Microsoft’s lead with that Flat Design nonsense.)
The groups that Microsoft cares most about: Enterprise, developers, and gamers are all upgrading their machines often enough that they are not buying new machines just to run Windows 11. They may prefer to run Windows 10 but they are certainly not being forced to buy hardware.
Enterprise users that need to stay on Windows 10 can pay for it. Anybody that does enough other business with Microsoft, like Office 365 or even Azure, is going to see the Windows 10 support costs discounted to nothing.
The geeks will either override the Windows 11 install checks or “find” access to the Windows 10 updates still being released to paying Windows 10 subscribers.
So, the people actually forced to upgrade are people that Microsoft does not really classify as customers. Since they have a hardware business, the best way to convert these hold-outs into customers is to force a hardware purchase.
Where is the downside for Microsoft?
Many of us are very much looking forward to getting some good used computer kit deals later this year. In emerging economies, these machines will be refurbished and sold. Many of them will have Windows 11 installed ( supported or not ).
The landfills may not actually be that much busier than usual.
LeFantome,
I wouldn’t jump to this conclusion, at least not universally. I’ve worked for windows shops that upgrade windows but aren’t keen on upgrading old hardware unless they have to. Don’t underestimate how cheap companies can be, haha.
The problem for microsoft is much of what they do relies on network effects. Home users may not be the most profitable, but they are the most numerous and carry a lot of weight when it comes to shoring up or detracting from windows 11 network effects.
If a majority of consumers stay on windows 10, network effects will force software and game publishers to continue supporting windows 10, which means postponing upgrades to microsoft’s latest dev tools. Historically artificial software incompatibilities added to these tools is one of the tricks microsoft’s has used to wean users off of older versions of windows “your version of windows is not supported”. But if the network effects factor windows 10 over windows 11 it will backfire. MS doesn’t want to reveal it, but they really are in trouble if they loose control over the upgrade cycle.
I don’t know what will happen, but I think they may end up in a similar spot as windows 7 users who were reluctant to upgrade.
If MS was smart, they would start pushing their Surface line with some nice discounts to companies. They could cut out Dell, HP, etc and get more profits that way. People run Windows, they don’t run Dell.
As far as vulns in Win10 no longer being patched after this October, maybe there’s some hope that a third party like 0patch can step in here. For a reasonable annual fee, those who prefer 10 can get some assurance that at least the most severe security bugs will get patched.
You have a choice. You can own your computer and data and privacy, or you can let someone else own them. You can let yourself be driven to replace useful hardware with new crap, or not. You can work the way you want and keep your thoughts to yourself, or not.
At this point, FOSS is the alternative. Not easy, but becoming more necessary all the time.
The enshittification of the mainstream Windows OS is complete.
*nod* I installed Windows XP on a hand-me-down Thinkpad T410 I received shortly before Christmas and “running apps suited to Windows XP pretending to be Windows 98SE makes the original owner’s decision to go for Intel onboard graphics instead of the nVidia option less noticeable” wasn’t the main reason.
…the main reason is that Windows 7 is “just modern Windows without the suck” through the eyes of a retrocomputing hobbyist (especially one who hates flat design) and I’ve already got “game console except not a console” machines for when I don’t feel like fiddling around with Wine/Proton and Linux machines for when I feel like doing anything else.
…still, I will admit that it’s nice to have a laptop I can pull out which has stuff like Visual Basic 3 and 6 and Borland Delphi 1.x and 2.x on it to play with.
No need. I have an AMD video card and my gaming experience is better than Windows. All my games work fine in Linux. I download the game on Steam, I start it, I play it. That is all there is to it.
Gaming in Linux has improved VASTLY over the last few years.
My day-to-day work machine is and has been a Linux machine since 2001. I upgraded the HP prebuilt I received about a year ago into a gaming rig for the following reasons:
1. Using a KVM switch means final “I win” against games that try to pause when they lose focus or applications that try to steal focus from them. (And also means that I can use my un-KVMed ATi Remote Wonder II to scroll through a PDF or website on one display while controlling a mouselook-based game with the KVMed mouse on another.)
2. Windows has actual calibration support for pre-XInput joysticks/gamepads without having to read the source to evdev or exist in the proper forums just to discover that evdev didn’t sunset that facility of /dev/js0, let alone how to invoke it.
3. Using a separate PC means no worry about stuttering or anything else in that vein when the non-gaming PC is doing something like a long, multi-threaded compile job. (Not to mention the added CPU available to get the job done quicker.)
4. Using actual Windows means no waiting for whatever makes games start more slowly in Wine. (Seriously. Why does a 2012 PC running Windows 7 with a 65W CPU start little things (eg. GOG’s release of Triple Town) significantly faster than a 2023 Ryzen (still 65W, but with a Noctua cooler good enough to allow it to take all six cores to near-max turbo indefinitely) running Wine+Linux? It’s gotta be something like inefficient IPC emulation somewhere in Wine.)
5. Using actual Windows means no fighting to get Dungeon Keeper 2 to run at desired resolutions without crashing.
6. I’ve never had a game go to screensaver on Windows because I spent too long only touching the gamepad.
7. Booting a second machine into Batocera Linux off a thumbdrive is often the least bothersome way to get well-tuned emulators.
8. VSync is easier to get working properly on a machine that doesn’t have three monitors… especially when I run X11 KDE un-composited to ensure that I can stay logged in for months at a time without graphical glitches or compositor crashes starting to show up.
9. As someone who refuses to use Steam and hates the direction UIs are going in (especially how it’s getting harder and harder to excise Adwaita-isms from Inkscape when Gtk3-Breeze is incapable of taking care of them for me), Windows 7 is closer to Qt QWidget UIs as seen through Breeze than Adwaita or the kinds of things people tend to build with Electron, and I haven’t yet been motivated enough to resume working on my old project to build a QWidget-based Lutris-esque launcher.
10. No worry about games deciding to fullscreen and scramble up my windows by turning off the wing monitors. (Every window manager I’ve ever tried has that bug.)
11. No futzing around with figuring out how to get Proton running without Steam. Windows 7 Just Works™ for anything new enough to not need to run on the repurposed thin clients running Windows XP or Windows 98 SE that I’ve got hanging off the other legs of the KVM switch.
Microsoft has certainly not tried everything. They haven’t tried making a great OS that people actually want and doesn’t come with arbitrary system requirements.
Do you all recall how folks use to queue to get the latest release and where keen to upgrade because they actually liked and wanted the OS ? I am not a great fan of Windows but I myself recall being quite keen to get Windows 7.
Just an idea 🙂
My W10 Dell Precision 4500 from 2013 was slated as incompatible with W11 from MS Update but is running 24h2 since October and is getting regular security updates. Thanks to Rufus 3.6 a 16GB USB and official ISO from MS the license and is now fully registered as a W11 machine. easy peasy. Or you can just ignore this? https://youtu.be/J5mDUU9GCNo?si=YXQ7_Co3MfS59UQi