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

Last January in KESMicrosoft Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi has declared 2024 “the year of the AI-powered PC.” And whether you believe this prediction has come true or not—many new PCs come with built-in artificial intelligence-accelerating neural processors, but not all of them—you can’t deny that Microsoft tried very hard To Do it.

This year Mehdi came back with a different forecast: 2025 will be the “year of the Windows 11 PC upgrade.” It’s no coincidence that most Windows 10 computers will no longer receive new security updates this year.

Mehdi’s post contains few, if any, new announcements, but it sets the tone for how Microsoft is handling the shutdown of Windows 10, trying to find a balance between carrots and sticks. The carrots include new Windows 11 features (both AI and otherwise), as well as the performance, security, and battery life benefits of all-new PC hardware. The bottom line is that support for Windows 10 will end in October 2025, and Microsoft has no interest in extending that date to the general public or extending official support for Windows 11 to older PCs.

“Whether your current PC needs an upgrade or has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware protections, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC,” Mehdi writes.

Microsoft and its partners apparently benefit more from users buying new PCs than from Microsoft providing free OS upgrades for existing PCs. It is also true that many formally unsupported PCs can work fine with Windows 11especially with carefully considered hardware upgrades.

But it’s also true that many users of older, incompatible computers could greatly benefit from an upgrade at this point. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it limited support for PCs and processors that were no more than three or four years old at the time. By October these cars will be seven or eight years old. The computers that won’t run Windows 11 will be around ten years old or more. During this time, CPUs and GPUs got faster, laptop screens got bigger and better, and older hardware had plenty of time to drain the battery and suffer physical wear and tear.

Temporary escape hatch

Mehdi refused to mention that Windows 10 users who want 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 continue receiving updates for at least one year after October 2025; End users can only get one year of additional updates for their home computers, but organizations can get up to three additional years. The caveat is that you will have to pay for this privilege: $30 for one year of updates if you are a private person and from 1 to 61 US dollars per user for schools and businesses, with costs increasing significantly in the second and third years.

Windows 10 still accounts for between half and two-thirds of all Windows users worldwide and in the US, according to notoriously noisy data sources such as Statcounter And Steam Hardware Review. Leaving so many Windows PCs potentially unprotected from security threats could cause big problems, which probably explains at least part of why Microsoft would really like to see a lot of updates this year. But even if 2025 does will be the “year of the Windows 11 PC upgrade”, it’s hard to imagine how this could happen quickly enough to put most of these Windows 10 PCs out of circulation.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technique.