Last January at CES, Microsoft marketing chief Yusuf Mehdi announced 2024 as “the year of PC AI.” And whether you believe these predictions come true or not—many new PCs are equipped with AI-accelerated neural processing units, but far from all—you can’t deny that Microsoft is trying hard to make it happen. This year, Mehdi is back with another prediction: 2025 will be “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh.” This year is also, not coincidentally, the year that most Windows 10 PCs will stop receiving new security updates. Mehdi’s post included few, if any, new announcements, but set the tone for how Microsoft is handling the sunsetting of Windows 10, trying to strike a balance between the carrot and the stick. Carrot includes the new features of Windows 11 (both AI and others) and the performance, security, and battery life benefits of the new PC hardware. The stick is that Windows 10 support ends in October 2025, and Microsoft is not interested in extending that date for the general public or expanding official Windows 11 support to older PCs. who need the latest hardware-backed protection, now it’s time to move forward with the new Windows 11 PC, “Mehdi writes. Microsoft and its partners obviously benefit more from users. buy a new PC from when Microsoft gives free OS updates for existing machines. It’s also it is true that many unsupported PCs can run Windows 11 just fine, especially with a carefully considered hardware upgrade. But it is also a case that many old users, incompatible PCs can benefit a lot from the upgrade at this point. When Microsoft announces and releases the version first Windows 11 in 2021, it limits support to PCs that are, at the time, no more than three or four years old. By the time October rolls around, those machines will be seven or eight years old. PCs that can’t run Windows 11 will be old almost a decade or so old.In that time, CPUs and GPUs have gotten faster, laptop screens have gotten bigger and better, and older hardware has had a lot of time to run out of battery and suffer from physical wear and tear. 10 users who want to remain Windows 10 users have an escape hatch. The company’s Extended Security Update (ESU) program for Windows 10 will allow users and businesses to stay updated for at least one year after October 2025; End users can only get one year of extra updates for their home PCs, but organizations can get up to three extra years. The caveat is that you have to pay for the privilege: $30 for one year of renewal if you’re an individual and between $1 and $61 per user for schools and businesses, with the cost increasing significantly for the second and third year. Windows 10 still accounts for between half and two-thirds of all Windows usage worldwide and in the US, according to admittedly noisy data from sources like Statcounter and the Steam Hardware Survey. Leaving many Windows PCs unprotected from security threats has the potential to cause major problems, which at least explains why Microsoft wants to see so many upgrades this year. But even if 2025 becomes the “year of Windows 11 PC refresh,” it’s hard to see how it can happen quickly enough to get most of those Windows 10 PCs out of circulation. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
