Microsoft Says It’s Time to Replace Your Old Windows 10 PC

Last January CESMicrosoft’s Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi has declared 2024 as “the year of the AI ​​PC”. And whether you believe the prediction came true or not—many new PCs have AI-accelerated neural processing units, but far from them—you can’t deny that Microsoft tried hard from Make it happen.

Mehndi this year Back with another prediction: 2025 will be “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh.” This year is also, not coincidentally, the year most Windows 10 PCs will stop receiving new security updates

Mehdi’s post contains few, if any, new announcements, but it sets the tone for how Microsoft is handling the sunset of Windows 10, trying to strike a balance between the carrot and the stick. Carrots include Windows 11’s new features (both AI and otherwise) and the inherent performance, security and battery life benefits of brand-new PC hardware. The stake is that Windows 10 support will end in October 2025, and Microsoft is not interested in extending that date to the general public or extending official Windows 11 support to older PCs.

“Whether the current PC needs a refresh, or it has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-supported protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC,” Mehdi wrote.

Microsoft and its partners clearly benefit more from users buying new PCs when Microsoft provides free OS updates for existing machines. It is also true that many officially unsupported PCs Windows 11 can run fineEspecially with carefully considered hardware upgrades.

But it’s also the case that many users of older, incompatible PCs could benefit greatly from an upgrade at this point. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it limited support to PCs and processors that were no more than three or four years old at the time. By the time October rolls around, those machines will be seven or eight years old. PCs that can’t run Windows 11 will be about a decade or more old 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 wear down batteries and wear and tear.

A limited-time escape hatch

Mehdi declined to specify what Windows 10 users want to stay Windows 10 users have an escape hatch. The company’s Extended Security Update (ESU) program for Windows 10 will allow users and businesses to receive updates for at least one year after October 2025; End users can only get one year of additional updates for their home PCs, but organizations can get more than three years of additional updates. The caveat is that you have to pay for the privilege: $30 for one year of updates If you are a person and Between $1 and $61 per user For schools and businesses, with costs that increase significantly for the second and third years.

Windows 10 still accounts for one-half to two-thirds of all Windows usage worldwide and in the United States, Sources like Statcounter And Steam Hardware Survey. Leaving many Windows PCs potentially vulnerable to security threats has the potential to cause major problems, which probably explains, at least in part, why Microsoft will want to see so many upgrades this year. But even if it is 2025 by doing Become the “year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” it’s hard to see how this could possibly happen quickly enough to drive most of those Windows 10 PCs out of circulation.

This story originally appeared Ars Technica.