This was bound to happen.
According to a new report from Taiwanese publication United Daily News (UDC,) Microsoft is raising the cost of Windows license fees for hardware makers by a much higher amount than normal. According to the report, certain OEMs are seeing licensing price hikes of between 7% and 10%.
↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central
Like every other tech company diving head-first into “AI”, Microsoft is losing money on its gamble head-over-fist, with no profitability in sight. Since admitting betting the company on “AI” was a mistake is out of the question, Microsoft has to extract the money from somewhere else to make up for it. The cost of Windows licenses for OEMs is an obvious lever to pull, as OEMs really have nowhere else to turn to (yes, desktop Linux is making gains, but not in any meaningful numbers), so they’ll take hit and pass the cost on to consumers.
The end result will be that prices for laptops will increase even more than they already have thanks to the “AI”-induced RAM and component crisis, creating a double-whammy of price increases caused by “AI”, either directly or indirectly. It’s just another category of products we can add to the cost of living crisis that’s causing untold harm and damage to hardworking people all over the world.
The price of incompetence is rarely paid for by the incompetent.
I am waiting for the lawsuits, as it now will probably make Microsoft-branded computers potentially cheaper than Lenovos and Dells. Microsoft doesn’t have a large share of the market as far as I know, but the 7-10% increase may turn into a 1-2% more expensive computer which may make a sensible difference depending on system price range.
And people will say “but Apple has been like that for 40+ years”.
And I will be hoping someone in the EU machinery smells blood in the water.
would be lovely to see OEMs going more into Linux given the pricing changes and more solid Linux offering… could it be Microslop shooting itself in the foot in the long-term?
Nope, most people don’t want Desktop Linux in the same way they don’t want an L-shaped condom. There are two major app ecosystems in the desktop space, MacOS and Windows, and Desktop Linux is only partially compatible with one of them.
10% of the license price (not the computer price) is peanuts, it doesn’t justify OEMs funding a massive compatibility effort akin to Proton (but for non-game apps).
No, the OEMs will continue to be like Dell and HP, really hiding their Linux options to make sure no one accidentally buys them other than the developers they are intended for. If they were easy to buy, they’d get returned a lot and they’d lose a lot of money as lots of the general public can barely operate a computer. Couple that with Linux only being a good experience if you’re lucky enough to have no issues sending you to the terminal or other rabbit hole time wasting nonsense… Plus professional apps like Adobe don’t work on it. Nope, not going to happen, ever.
Customised Lenovo laptops typically allow no OS options sometimes at significant discount.
Sadly, that doesn’t seem to happen [atleast in my country]. Despite Linux having crossed 10% market share here in India, OEMs still ship with Windows predominantly. The odd choice exists with DOS [or practically no OS] but proper laptops with Linux offerings are rare. People will need to essentially pay for the Windows license through the OEMs and then wipe the HDD to install Linux [as again, the odd exception exists, but they are rare in my country].
Every retail place tells their workers they lose money on computer sales. Windows licenses are likely cheaper than dealing with returns, and not being Windows would be a big driver of returns. Plus the Linux people are going to put their own distro of choice on it anyway, so no reason to waste time and money preinstalling it.
I hope they can use some of that money to solve the built-in Weather app wasteing more than 1 GB of RAM
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-s-built-in-Weather-app-wastes-more-than-1-GB-of-RAM.1364205.0.html
Looking on my Mac, The weather app, Which looks a fair bit like the Windows one, Uses about 250MB. Which is still a lot, But possibly one reason the Mac gets away with less ram.
It’s probably great that Apple still sells a model with 8GB of memory, I hope that makes them pay more attention to the system’s resources.
As a mac user, Apple’s quality has been declining ever since they decided the OS should be a yearly release for whatever reason. OS 26 shipped with a memory leak in Calculator.app that could balloon to over a gigabyte. However… yep, that is fixed. Careless as it was, it was at least a memory leak and considered a bug. The same type of issue on Windows these days seems to be “Oh yeah, 1-2GB for weather as designed. The intern did a paper in college on microkernels as an app development strategy, so the weather app is 18 independent .NET runtimes running Edge cross-compiled to F# and communicating via REST APIs on an internal Hyper-V bridge”
Microsoft have played this really well.
They increase the prices of the licence to OEM but all the blame will gonna AI and ram prices.
Until linux gets serious on the business desktop, businesses have no choice but to pay up. (And no, without an InTune level UEM, its not viable at any larger scale)
Good news for Chromebooks, I am waiting also for first devices with Fuchsia
Didn’t they pretty much cut all serious work on Fuchsia? Pretty sure it’s unofficially dead.
the true number on steam is now over 10% linux. People are waking up.