Microsoft says it’s time to replace your old Windows 10 PC

Last January in CESYoussef Mahdi, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, declared 2024 to be “the year of the AI-powered personal computer.” Whether you believe this prediction has come true or not — many new computers come with AI-accelerated neural processing units, but not all of them — you can’t deny that Microsoft He tried hard to .do it.

Mahdi this year Back with another forecast: 2025 will be the “Year of Windows 11 Update for PC.” This year is also, not coincidentally, the year most Windows 10 PCs will stop receiving new security updates.

Mehdi’s post includes few, if any, new announcements, but it outlines how Microsoft is approaching the retirement of Windows 10, trying to strike a balance between stick and carrot. The islands include new Windows 11 features (AI and more) and the performance, security, and battery life benefits inherent in brand-new PCs. The problem is that support for Windows 10 ends in October 2025, and Microsoft is not interested in extending that date to the general public or in extending official Windows 11 support to older PCs.

“Whether your existing PC needs an update, or has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-backed protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC,” Mahdi wrote.

Microsoft and its partners clearly benefit more from users buying new computers than when Microsoft provides free operating system updates for existing devices. It is also true that many PCs are not officially supported It can run Windows 11 wellespecially with carefully considered hardware upgrades.

But it’s also possible that many users of older, incompatible computers would benefit greatly from upgrading at this point. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it restricted support to computers and processors that were no more than three or four years old at the time. By October, these machines will be seven or eight years old. PCs that can’t run Windows 11 will be approximately a decade old or older. In that time, CPUs and GPUs got faster, laptop screens got bigger and better, and older machines had more time to drain their battery and suffer physical wear and tear.

Limited time escape slot

Mahdi declined to say that Windows 10 users want this He spends 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 getting updates for at least one year after October 2025; End users can get just one year of additional updates for their home computers, but organizations can get up to three additional years. The caveat is that you will need to pay for the privilege: $30 for one year of updates If you are an individual and Between $1 and $61 per user For schools and businesses, with costs escalating dramatically in the second and third years.

Windows 10 still accounts for between half and two-thirds of all Windows usage worldwide and in the US, according to data from Noisy. Sources like Statcounter and Wipe steam appliances. Leaving too many Windows PCs unprotected from security threats can cause major problems, which at least partly explains why Microsoft really wants to see a lot of upgrades this year. But even if it is 2025 He does It’s the “Year of the Windows 11 PC Update,” and it’s hard to see how it could happen fast enough to put most Windows 10 PCs out of circulation.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.