this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Windows 10 came out in 2015, 10 years seems like a plenty decent lifespan.
Windows 11 came out in 2021, so 10 users will have had 4 years to upgrade.
Windows 10 was supposed to be the "last version" of Windows and Windows 11 requires a lot of hardware that older machines simply don't have, most notably TPM. Microsoft creates thousands of tons of ewaste for no reason and the owners of this ewaste have to spend thousands or millions to replace machines that are perfectly fine.
Yes, you can circumvent these restrictions, but not as a business.
In other words, despite fanbois' attempts to claim that Microsoft has long since reformed, it's still trying to slowly tighten the noose on being able to install other OSs (and by extension, the ability to perform general-purpose computing without corporate overlord approval as a whole).
Of course there's a reason, you said it yourself: TPM.
With TPM, Software will be able to cryptographically verify that the OS and Hardware are all unmodified. This'll be an end to piracy and end to unauthorized modifications to your PC ("We've detected that you've installed an Ad Blocker, please remove it before accessing your banking website")
This won't happen overnight, but the forced hardware upgrade is all about control (Microsoft over you) and creating a walled garden to drive profits (like Apple).
You can take a look at Android's attestation and how it prevents running your banking apps on a rooted cellphone as an example of things to come.
Windows 10 was never meant to be the last version, one guy said it and somehow it stuck. It was never the plan though.
Do they even make business class computers without TPM chips anymore? To my knowledge it has been a standard feature for years.
a) it's not only about business class machines b) There are still millions of computer that are perfectly capable of running Windows 11, except an artificial requirement called TPM. My 2014 Haswell machine (that I'm typing this comment on) is not "modern", but can be used for 99% of "non-gaming" tasks just fine. But it can't run Win 11. I personally run Linux anyway, but you can't require that.