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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

I think the article makes a good point about the arbitrary red line drawn between two CPU generations with no justification whatsoever, but "heaps of trash" isn't the strongest argument against this. Arguably, Intel releasing new CPUs causes that even more heaps of trash, probably orders of magnitude more than Windows. It's a silly argument IMHO.

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Releasing new CPUs doesn't make older ones unusable; making an OS incompatible with them without good reason does.

The article wording might not be the best, still it's spot on: users whose software will require Windows 11 (or simply who won't feel like going back after upgrading) will be forced to ditch their system, which in a world dominated by Windows, therefore many users with the same problem, is a lot more likely to turn into trash rather than sold as used.

>Releasing new CPUs doesn't make older ones unusable; making an OS incompatible with them without good reason does.

All those Windows 7 computers didn't become unusable once Windows 8 came out.

That's because Windows 8 wasn't incompatible with the same hardware that could run windows 7. You're making my point.

The article criticizes Windows 11 insane hardware requirements, not Microsoft for making a new version of Windows.

>That's because Windows 8 wasn't incompatible with the same hardware that could run windows 7.

That only matters if people actually upgrade their Windows 7 installs to Windows 8 installs. And since it was a paid upgrade to an OS that was arguable worse than what people had, people probably skipped out.

How Windows upgrades worked before Windows 10 was that you upgraded to a new version of Windows when you bought a new PC. Every other means of upgrading was minor at best, since it wasn't available through Windows Update for free.

They became unusable, practically speaking, when support ended (unless they're off the grid, or if you don't care to be part of a botnet). Microsoft now says support for Windows 10 will end in 2025; all those unsupported computers became landfill at that point, even if they still run perfectly fine.

I don't think it's a silly argument at all. Windows 10 will meet its EOL in 2025, meaning that our computers only have 4 more years left in them (or you switch to something like linux, but that's not really an option for most people for obvious reasons). This will make the computers unattractive on the second-hand market. IMO a computer should be serviceable for longer than 7 years.

>IMO a computer should be serviceable for longer than 7 years.

How many Windows PCs are actually getting security updates for less than 7 years? Your CPU will have to be like 8 years old when you stop getting security updates for Windows 10 and you can't upgrade to Windows 11.

>Your CPU will have to be like 8 years old when you stop getting security updates for Windows 10 and you can't upgrade to Windows 11.

Yes, and I'm saying that's unreasonable. Look no further than this very thread and you'll find plenty of people using 10-year old computers without issue.

>the arbitrary red line drawn between two CPU generations

I've seen people theorize that it's because of the availability of UMIP instructions

According to WikiChip, UMIP got added in Zen2 (Ryzen 3000), while MS supports Zen+ (Ryzen 2000).

I don't believe that's the case, but I might be missing something. UMIP makes a system more secure, but it isn't a hard requirement for any feature-wise assurance? For example, TPM+UEFI+Secure Boot is required if Microsoft wants everyone to have full disk encryption by default, which makes sense. UMIP, not so much.

Can't be true as Coffe Lake doesn't seem to support it yet win11 will work on that

The CPU minimums seem to be some collusion with hardware makers. The 8th gen is really 6th gen Skylake with some tweaks as is the 9th and even 10th gen. I think the line being drawn at DDR4 as the minimum requirement would actually make sense.

Is it abritary? I was wondering if limiting to new to newer CPU's would enable them to stop supporting/rip out a load of legacy code?

Also, is this actually a good opportuinty for Desktop Linux?

I'm sure it's not arbitrary, but they haven't provided an explanation either. That makes it practically arbitrary, and creates rightful frustration.

I think 64-bit requirement already lets them to strip down a lot of legacy stuff. Perhaps they just want to compile Windows with certain optimizations on, but I don't know that either.

It hasn’t in recent years, PC fleets have been aging forever. 36 month refresh cycles are more like 50 months these days.

This is straight up a way to keep intel alive.

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