last january cesMicrosoft chief marketing officer Youssef Mehdi declared 2024 to be “the year of the AI PC.” And whether you believe that prediction came true or not — many new PCs come with AI-accelerated neural processing units, but far from all of them — you can't deny that Microsoft tried very hard To make it happen,
Mehndi is this year back with another prediction: 2025 “will be the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh.” This year, not coincidentally, is the year most Windows 10 PCs will stop receiving new security updates.
Mehdi's post includes few, if any, new announcements, but it sets the tone for how Microsoft is handling Windows 10's sunset, attempting to strike a balance between carrot and stick. Carrots include Windows 11's new features (both AI and otherwise) and the performance, security, and battery life benefits inherent in brand-new PC hardware. The problem is that Windows 10 support ends in October 2025, and Microsoft has no interest in extending that date to the general public or extending official Windows 11 support to older PCs.
“Whether an existing PC needs a refresh, or it has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-supported protections, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC,” writes Mehdi.
Microsoft and its partners clearly benefit more from users purchasing new PCs than when Microsoft provides free OS updates for existing machines. It is also true that many PCs are formally unsupported Can run Windows 11 properlyEspecially with carefully thought-out hardware upgrades.
But it's also the case that many users of older, incompatible PCs could greatly benefit from an upgrade at this point. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it restricted support to PCs and processors that were no more than three or four years old at the time. By October, those machines will be seven or eight years old. PCs that can't run Windows 11 will be about a decade or more older. In that time, CPUs and GPUs have gotten faster, laptop screens have gotten bigger and better, and older hardware has had plenty of time to drain its batteries and suffer from physical wear and tear.
A limited time escape hatch
Mehdi declined to explain what Windows 10 users want stay Windows 10 users have an escape hatch. The company's Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for Windows 10 will allow users and businesses to continue receiving updates for at least a year after October 2025; End users can only get one year of additional updates for their home PCs, but organizations can get up to three additional years. The caveat is that you have to pay for the privilege: $30 for one year updates If you are an individual and Between $1 and $61 per user For schools and businesses, costs increase significantly in the second and third years.
According to the purportedly noisy data, Windows 10 still accounts for half to two-thirds of total Windows usage worldwide and in the US. Sources like StatCounter and this Steam Hardware SurveyLeaving too many Windows PCs potentially vulnerable to security threats has the potential to cause major problems, which probably at least partially explains why Microsoft would really like to see a lot of upgrades this year. But even if 2025 does In what became “The Year of the Windows 11 PC Refresh,” it's hard to see how it could happen so fast that most of those Windows 10 PCs go out of circulation.
This story was originally published on Ars Technica,