I thought they said that Windows 10 would be the only version of Windows forever, and that everything would be updates of Windows 10. Did they change their mind or did I misunderstand in the first place?
The continuous build integration system for windows makes it so that new builds come out every week. Under the hood W10 and W11 are the same thing barring UI refresh and regular feature updates.
Its Windows 11 because marketers know most people are technically illiterate and want higher version numbers. Its mainly about the UI refresh to pull more people away from Apple and build out the MSFT store.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-ve...
Well, then why does it require TPM and EFI, and drop support for all CPUs more than ~5 years old?
Instead, it was made by an employee making an off-the-cuff comment without context.
It would be a lot worse if this was a Windows 10 update that was incompatible with the majority of Windows 10 machines!
The comment above is 100% correct.
Just because Apple left v10 it doesn't absolutely mean Microsoft is just doing it to copy it. You're talking absolute nonsense. Apple doesn't even call it macOS 11 publicly so it doesn't even make sense from a marketing perspective.
Got some other reason in mind? I'm very confident it wasn't backwards compatibility, by the way, so please name a specific program that would have errored if you claim that. Windows lies about its version to old programs.
This Reddit post says otherwise[1]:
Microsoft dev here, the internal rumours are that early testing revealed just how many third party products that had code of the form
if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9"))
{ /* 95 and 98 */
} else {
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/new_wind...
The only plausible version of that I've seen was Java code, and the Java runtime would not have returned "Windows 9" to that API unless deliberately changed to do so.
Not to be rude, but did you skip the second line of my post after reading the first one? Your reply confuses me if you didn't.