this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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Looking at it from a perspective other than "Windows shit, use Linux", MS' biggest issue here is that the vast majority have no compelling reason to upgrade. Currently.
To the average punter, W11 offers nothing that W10 doesn't already have. There's no new technologies that they care about, no new tentpole software that they're dying to try. Nothing. It has copilot running rampant through it, but most people don't know what that is or don't give a shit.
Give Apple their due, when they announce an OS update, they focus hard on the ways it improves over the current offering. Ways it can interact with your other devices, for example. Or even just a whole new design.
But MS advertise nothing beyond "This is new, come get it!", then wonder why no one cares.
And also, please correct me if I'm wrong, but whenever Apple releases a new MacOS version they don't put fullscreen nag messages on your machine...
They do not. Yet.
The biggest problem Microsoft has is that the biggest selling feature of Windows is its ability to be backwards compatible and run on older hardware. The fact that a good number of PCs that aren’t even 10 years old can’t even run it is the issue. Also, MacOS names for each update are unique and interesting. Windows 11 is a very uncreative name which has always been a problem with Microsoft; example: Xbox One…
Absolutely, a gazillion percent this. My main desktop doesn't have TPM. I bought a cheap micro form factor Lenovo that I thought would run Win 11, but it didn't. It had a 6-year old CPU and that wasn't supported by Windows 11. 6 years old. I realized then that this eliminated one major reason to get a Windows PC over a Mac. I think that both Mac and Linux are going to make huge gains in market-share in the next months and years.
Maybe it is worth saying that it isn't that it can't run on it, it is that Microsoft is trying to stop it from running on it. Two registry keys and 11 replaces 10 on anything 10 works on. But they don't want to tell anyone that.
But the premise is sound: to the end consumer they hear "buy a new computer" while the old one works fine, and the new ones price is starting to climb....
I genuinely couldn't tell you what the current gen Xbox is named, though to be fair I don't really pay that much attention these days.
But yeah, Windows can't really have much of a default theme update when there are a good four different window styles throughout the various settings panels.
Really? I thought it was supposed to run older software, I don't think hardware comes into it.
A lot of people are also questioning why they even have a home PC now. Their Win 10 machine is "out of date" and they need to replace it or else, but their cell phone now does much of what their PC did. Instead of installing Linux and learning a whole new OS, they just cut out their PC and just use their phone.
There's an entire generation that has never owned or used a "PC".
They use a phone at home. Maybe a tablet for "big screen things" and that's it.
A lot of them even work off of mobile devices these days.
Great point. Their strategy at this point is holding a gun up to your hard drive and saying "upgrade now or your data gets it."
I thought it was "we are upgrading now and your data gets it"
We've moved all of your data into OneDrive for your convenience, however you have exceeded your free OneDrive storage limit, please submit a payment immediately or the data will be deleted
They want us to upgrade to 11 so they can do that when they release Windows 12.
Given the Tick-Tock pattern of Windows OS and 11 being the ~~bad cop~~ tock
That honestly would probably get higher adoption numbers if for other reason than historical expectations.
Windows 3, 95, 98, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11...
The weird thing is that Windows 10 broke that model. It always used to be that the even-numbered Windows versions were worse (after, let's say, Windows 2000): ME (#4)? Bad. XP (#5)? Good! Vista (#6)? Bad. 7? Good! 8? Bad. 8.1 (#9)? Good! But then Windows 10 came out and threw the whole rhythm off.
You could pretty reasonably argue that 8.1 wasn't a true version, and thus Windows 10 was the 9th version of Windows, but that just means that 8 was the combo breaker by becoming good eventually. In either case, Windows 11 being bad restores the bad version/good version rhythm.
As a non windows user, I don't get to interact with Microsoft systems an awful lot, but to me windows 10 felt like a complete system while windows 11 always feels like an early beta for some reason. It has some kind of unfinished, wet paint quality to it.
Ironically, Windows users have generally felt that way with every new Windows version after 7. Vista was painful for a lot of people and 7 was basically Vista but with the problems finally fixed, and every version since then people have complained that the newest version feels unfinished.
And in a lot of ways they have been. In 10, there are at least 2 different UIs for navigating the system and settings. Some options have been migrated over to the newer one, some only exist there, and some still only exist in the old version of the settings. And then 11 made it even worse by moving a number of frequently used options in the right-click menu into a second menu that you have to open after you right click.
People hated 10 at first, too, but by now they've gotten used to it and Microsoft has ironed off most of the rough edges people hated. But it's been building for years and this pattern has seemingly hit some kind of breaking point with the present-day circumstances.
I don't really use Windows these days. Mostly in a VM to make sure something I'm fiddling with is compatible for the poor folks at work who have to use it. So I can't say I have any real opinions on 11 one way or the other. I couldn't really point to one thing that's vastly different or improved.
I guess, from that point of view, 11 feels mostly like it's MS adjusting the OS to better suit their revenue stream, rather than improving workflows for the consumer. Which it is, I suppose.