CharlesV wrote: Sun Mar 03, 2024 7:24 pm
I have to agree with AK-47. Many people will just move to Win11 and 'be done with it'.
There are a lot of machines that cannot run win11 because of its requirements, and it is truly sad as most of that hardware is excellent stuff and will run Linux well.
The "bad" in Windows 11 is getting worse imo. Ads, telemetry, CoPilot and the forced updates are all too much ( again - imo) and coupled with the mess 'that is windows' already its too much ...
Every time a new version of Windows is released, the intransigents will complain, often loudly, that they'll never move. The more significant the changes in the next version, the louder they complain. "I will never switch from Windows XP to Windows Vista" was a common refrain, for years.
What I've noticed though, and this ties into your point about Windows 11, is that the changes are getting worse and the hardware is getting better. Windows 11 will be more advertisement-driven and contain more always-on telemetry. Meanwhile, almost any machine built in the last ten years can with the presence -- or addition -- of an SSD hard drive run a wide variety of middle-weight software without a hitch, indefinitely.
I keep wondering when I'm going to replace my last Windows machine. I bought it at the end of 2014 and it just keeps running. It won't win any beauty contests and it probably won't run the latest AAA games, but I can unplug it once a year, blow the dust out of it with a few sprays of compressed air, and plug it back in. It just keeps running. It's not incredibly fast but it runs fast enough for day-to-day tasks like browsing, text-editing, solitaire, and playing music and cat videos. We've reached the point in home computing where your processor is less important to your computing experience than your network connection is.
People, in general, don't upgrade their copies of Windows. Their copies of Windows get upgraded for them, and there was a big push by Microsoft in 2015 to upgrade any old version of Windows to Windows 10 in that first year of its availability. That free upgrade offer was only supposed to last for one year but they quietly continued it until PC manufacturers complained. To many people, and to OEMs, a new Windows release means buying a new machine. That's how OEMs make their money. If Windows can be upgraded for free indefinitely, the motivation to buy another PC goes away, which hurts their bottom line.
So as I read the tea leaves, this is a fairly unique situation. Microsoft has another unpopular product that is growing increasingly less popular over time. They are going to have to, again, push another free upgrade amnesty period for Windows 10 users, which will, again, upset manufacturers. And PC reliability has finally gotten to the point where you don't have to keep buying new machines every few years because they keep breaking or getting obsoleted by something twice as fast.
Eventually, people will not be able to upgrade to the next version of Windows for free. Either they'll need to pay for the upgrade or their hardware won't support it. And I think there are more people who will be in that situation than there were in the big
Windows 8 "broken conveyance" era. Do I expect all of those abandoned users will convert? No, of course not. Most will give up and buy a new machine as they've been conditioned to do. Some will choose Apple hardware and end up on a different planned obsolescence cycle. But for the rest? They still have a chance.
