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Fun fact: Microsoft will happily sell you today a $3500 Surface Studio 2 with a W11-unsupported i7-7820: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-studio-2/8sbjxm0m5...

Fun fact: the Surface Studio 2 is fully supported until October 2, 2024 with no need to replace the OS!

Not bad for a niche device released in 2018.

Selling an extremely expensive piece of hardware while acknowledging that you intend on making it obsolete in 4 years time, for arbitrary reasons sounds pretty bad to me. And who cares if it's niche.

Microsoft has made no secret of how long its hardware support lasts. If anything, the total of six years is longer than the Surface average of ~5.

The Windows 11 announcement changes nothing in this regard.

Edit: The first gen Surface Studio was also about five years (2016 - 2021).

It still absolutely terrible.

Ok but Microsoft's 4-6 years of support for their hardware has nothing to do with Windows 11.

Given Microsoft's track record, Win 11 will be a trainwreck.

Win 12 is what you'll want to wait for anyway.

Just renew support for Windows 7, and maybe update it a little bit. I will be dragged, kicking and screaming to Windows 12.

That's kind of every single android phone on the market though. If security updates matter.

While overall agree, Windows 10 will be supported until 2025. By then any device without TPM 2.0 support would be at least 10 years old, right?

“There’s this cheap stuff for non-customers, go figure”

I think I’ve seen a eerily similar remark on Xbox 360 when XB1 launched so… is that a part of Microsoft ethos? That time the guy said that was instantly cancelled though.

Considering how unexciting new CPUs are nowadays I'd wager that a 10 year old computer in 2025 will still be perfectly usable for basic tasks such as email and web browsing. Something like an 8 year old i7 2700k is still very usable for a lot of home users. It might not be a beast when it comes to crunching numbers, but a big portion of the population would be happy using such a chip if you pair it with at least 8GB of memory and an SSD.

I'm not a big fan of generating unnecessary waste, and computers that get replaced because of artificial cutoff points in software isn't ideal. What I like about Windows 10 is that you can boot the installer on a Core2Duo if you want, and it'll install just fine. It'll probably run like crap, but that's for the user to decide whether they want to use it or not.

I have (a secondary) Thinkpad T430s, which is going to be 9 years old later this year. Since it is i7, with 16 GB RAM and 500 GB SSD, it is still a better computer than a median laptop sold today.

I have an old 2012 Asus G75VS gaming laptop with Core i7 upgraded to SSD and 32GB RAM. It works like a charm and beats modern cheap laptops to submission as well. However I do not really care if it can be upgraded to Windows 11. It runs few particular applications, is air gapped and will stay this way until it dies in order not to get some unwanted update/upgrade.

But if it was something like my spare development laptop I'd surely be pissed off at Microsoft. The way this laptop runs

One of the ironies of this situation is that Windows 11 does well on the Core2Duos. At least the ones with 8 gigs / SSD, based on what I've seen people post online. I've seen people claim the 11 leak is performing better than 10, and 10 was running decently well on the C2D's.

They did the work to make it even faster on older hardware, and now they're just going to throw it away? I could understand if the older machines didn't get the Android compatibility layer or if certain desktop animations were disabled, but seems odd to just block them entirely.

Are you sure that they are blocked entirely?

A "hard floor" published earlier this week implied that only TPM 1.0 with a dualcore and 4gb of ram is required, although news emerged that the hard floor was revised up.

Microsoft is not handling the hard floor question well at all.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3623013/why-windows-11-requi...

I guess that's part of the problem. No one outside of Microsoft is sure. The uncertainty has completely overshadowed the launch. One minute, they're talking about "soft floors", and the next they're saying it will refuse to install.

Makes me wonder if a power struggle is going on. You'd think they would have a coherent message put together before launch. Recommended system requirements + minimum system requirements, and the justifications for both. That's what's expected from any major software launch.

The ol' fishing for outrage. Let's just toss this out there and see what bites. "We'll adjust our strategy based on what we hear."

Kinda wonder, how much of this is "we asked and never got a legit response" vs. "haHAA, gotcha bitch! NOW THATS MEANINGFUL FEEDBACK!"

i7-2700K is not just usable, it’s faster than Pentium G5600(8th Gen) and on par with i3-8100(8th Gen) in most benchmarks without overclocking.

i5-2500 with 8GB-16GB RAM (hooray for upgradable RAM) even with is integrated graphics still is winning platform for all important non-gaming consumer applications.

i bought an i5-2500k in 2011 and it runs games and everything else very well. this is the fastest “10 year old computer” i’ve ever had

Yep on games if you have a discrete GPU.

To strengthen rather than diminish your argument, the I7 2700K is over 9.5 years old. Source: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/61275/i...

I run a i5-2500 and still game on it via VFIO (that is, in a VM) and I can't complain about the performance. Sure, the GPU is new-ish (GTX 1070) and I don't play bleeding edge titles, but I can play everything at nearly max settings.

Still using an i7-2600 as my main workstation at work, since 2012.

Ditto. I had a 2600k until about a month ago, where my motherboard died and everyone on eBay was asking $100+ for a replacement.

Ended up buying a whole Ryzen gaming rig and selling off the parts I didn't want. Out of pocket costs were actually negative when once the old PC's parts were gone.

Was coming to respond the same thing. I used a processor from the same generation (2500k) from May 2011 to May 2021, including for gaming. Upgraded to an SSD at some point and the video card, but the processor was still fine. I would've kept it another couple years but I was having some issues (I think a ram stick had gone bad) and the easiest solution was $500 canadian for a new processor (10400F), motherboard, and ram

I'd take the argument farther - I suspect the hypothetical 2015 computer referenced would be fine for most users (with non-processor upgrades) until 2030.

To strengthen it further, the 2700k is just a refresh of the more popular 2600k, which came out in Q1 2011 (same as the even more popular 2500k).

If you want to go back further, the Q6600 came out in Q1 2007 and still offers a great W10 experience when paired with an SSD.

I’ve got a black MacBook 4G duo that seems pretty good still. It’s dated in the UI and the lcd is garbage but with an external mouse and keyboard it might be ok. I’d like to keep OSX on it but Linux would be fine or windows.

Exactly. I have a both of these actually lol.

Old HP Compaq 8200 that I use as a NAS, media server and to host an occasional Linux VM, with an i5-2400. Running Windows 10 it receives all important security updates and runs absolutely fine, despite being 10 years old. I have plans to replace it by 2025, because.....why would I? It doesn't need any more power to do any of these jobs that I mentioned.

And I actually have a Core2Duo laptop running Windows 10, with an SSD and 8GB of ram it runs "ok". Not amazing or anything, but fast enough to basically work as a browsing/YouTube machine.

First-gen Ryzens and Threadrippers, while they do support fTPM, are not supported in W11 and they won't be 10 years old in 2025.

This really gets me - my Ryzen 5 1600X and my wife’s Ryzen 5 2600 are still extremely capable chips, even if they’re a couple of generations old at this point. It’s only been 3 years since I built my rig, and two since I built my wife’s. I can almost accept the i5-4570 my daughter inherited not being compatible - but hardware just over 3 years old not making the cut is unacceptable.

That i5-4570 is at least twice (single thread) as fast as some supported cpus.

But who wants to be stuck on an older OS? It's still a big reason to upgrade before it would have been technically necessary.

Everyone who isn't the sort of "rabid trendchaser techie" that MS is trying to convert more of its users to... fortunately, the majority of slightly-computer-literate people I know are not. They use their computers to create documents, email, browse Internet, and complain about the constant churn of the tech industry. They are constantly irritated by UI changes and other updates that had zero or negative impacts on their daily use. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the norm, not "What's the latest and newest? I must have it!"

Ok true, but this is hacker news of course. I would expect most people here to be exactly that sort of "rabid trendchaser techie" :)

And of course, the question is how hard is MS going to push Windows 11. They pushed the upgrade from W7 to W10 pretty hard towards end users.

Even the most die-had MS user is not excited about Windows and hasn't been for the last decade.

Operating systems are finished products at this point.

People say this all the time, but it certainly isn't true.

I for one, I am excited about Windows 11 because its finally things coming together. 64bit only, dropping old cruft, making the UI consistent/cleaner..

If you like tech/gaming - there is a lot to be excited about. PC and Console gaming with Game pass ultimate is a hell of a deal... Plus WSLg, Android apps ... i mean come on, its pretty f'n cool.

Agree, plus some techs that were only available for their console are coming to desktop which would gain quite a lot of performance boost for low to mid tier budget desktop.

UI change is icing on the cake but more or less it's huge update for consumer OS. Obviously folks here are pretty much isolated from mass market though.

None of those things are changing the daily use habits and the usability of an OS that I've been using to do the exact same things for the past 20 years.

The internal cleanup is great; good for them, but it doesn't map out to any subtantial change in the apps you're using.

The UI, thanks for it being clean, but as far as I'm concerned everything after Windows 7 has not improved desktop app usability much if anything. We used to have compact UIs that maximized screen usage. Now every single UI element has tons of padding, tons of vertical screen usage in a world where everything is widescreen. The compromise of desktop OSes for mobile-like use cases has not improved the desktop story at all and judging from the videos of Windows it's more of the same.

Android apps? Every app I've ever wanted already exists on Windows or the browser. I'm sure a minuscule amount of people will want that, but I want native desktop apps, leveraging native OS features.

Game pass is great, I use it for the Xbox, but it's not a core OS feature. Anyone can implement this, it doesn't require Windows 11.

Ok, so for you, stay with windows 10. I don't see what the problem is. It's supported until 2025 at least.

Game pass already works on Windows 10. It's not in any way a plausible Windows 11 feature.

It is when the store experience is much improved and the performance is better because all the old !64bit cruft is removed.

I don't mind using an old thing at all. Unless there's a specific reason to use the new thing. I haven't heard one yet.

Presumably Microsoft will aggressively push developers to use Windows 11-only APIs to encourage adoption. I hate it, but it seems likely.

Similar to how it tried to aggressively push UWP? No doubt some developers will get sucked into the hype, but I bet the majority of Windows developers that have stayed on Win32 are not going to change. If MS tries to deprecate Win32, they will lose all their big business customers too. And WINE is so good that it got attention from MS' lawyers.

As a long-time Win32 developer myself, I like the fact that my work is usable on anything from Win95 and up. Backwards compatibility has long been the key strength of MS, so them doing stuff like this recently is playing with fire.

I'm wary of "the New Microsoft" far more than the old.

Yeah-- I think it'll be like UWP. I just hope it fails the same way. Pretty much 100% agreement with everything in your comment. The "new Microsoft" is really, really suspicious to me.

Since 2015 or so when proprietary OSes implemented all needed features and switched to adding user-hostile advertising and spyware to raise money.

Even for tech heads, Win 7 was plenty good until security patches stopped.

I've got a 10 year old PC right now using decent but not amazingly high end hardware (at the time), other than a slightly limited memory capacity it's still on par with my current (mid/high-end-ish) laptop.

I'm still using a 2013 Macbook Pro (dual boot), and honestly, I could see that being useful for another 8 years. I won't be playing games on it, but it has enough GPU to render High DPI screens just fine. (Granted I feel no urge to upgrade to windows 11 either, so I'm pretty fine leaving it on windows 10 for the next few years.)

MacOS Monterey is dropping support for the 2013 Macbook Pros...

Windows 10 will be supported until 2025 so that is a hell of a run tho!

I only just retired a machine I built in 2011, with 2009-era parts. CPU advances have not been impressive over the last decade or so.

Just checked Newegg. I built my current PC in November of 2010. It has a Core 2 Quad. Runs great.

They require an 8th generation Intel CPU. Intel was still taking orders from oems for said CPUs until April 2020 and there are computers sold new in box today that won't be supported.

Stopping trash talking about Linux was the embrace phase. WSL was the extend phase.

Not sure how not supporting old devices is extinguish for Linux but okay.

I work at MS so I have some background, but even I was vocally opposed to this.

The real pushback for hardware floor came from IHVs and PMs. IHVs don't want to support your old hardware beyond 2-5 years thanks to what they're seeing in phone market. We've had multiple user impacting bugs that graphic vendors I won't name would not fix because that version of chip is NLA. I'm still unsure why PMs pushed for this, but it was something about mix of consistency, security and performance - whatever that meant.

Check how more complicated it is to install linux and your own compiled kernels with secure boot enabled and a tpm 2.0 chip.

I did a quick bing (hah, jk I used google) but didn't find anything other than having to install some tpm2 packages to use the module.

Also, if tpm2.0 is as redundant as people are making it out to be, couldn't they just disable it in BIOS along with microsoft secureboot keys?

For BIOSes that allow such a thing, maybe... IIRC, at least for windows 8 on ARM, this possibility wasn't required or even desired: https://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/1/16/2710502/microso...

I could see this as an ecosystem thing; Microsoft is maybe trying to push OEMs into using "more capable" hardware for some definition of "more capable"?

Reminds me of the issues Vista had where it seemed to implicitly require higher spec devices. This could be a different approach to the same kind of pressure.

Not really, or at-least as far as I'm aware.

With Vista, they wanted to deprecate GDI and introduce WDDM with a desktop compositor so display and memory requirements were quite intensive for the day. No such major change with 11 AFAIK. The low-end hardware still runs just as smooth. As I said originally, it is more related to the unwillingness of IHVs to support hardware for as long as Windows does.

I just noticed that my Threadripper 1950x isn't "supported". Completely ludicrous. I'd love to see the technical justification for that.

https://i.imgur.com/wHtf0PF.jpg

Do they actually earn that much from this? They were basically throwing Windows 10 at people for free and they are not in the hardware market at all.

How does limiting the number of machines that can run it make money for Microsoft? I won't be paying for a Windows 11 upgrade (I assume it's not going to be free this time) until I need to replace my machine, which will be quite some time.

Windows 11 is a free upgrade if you have a Windows 10 license. You can't sell operating systems to consumers anymore, you have to sell OEM licenses to manufacturers, who in turn sell you a new computer with the new OS.

TPM 2.0 isn't supported on your chipset.

Yes it is. It's enabled in the firmware (fTPM) and shows TPM 2.0 available in the tpm.msc snap-in.

Dunno then, ask your motherboard vendor why it's not supported.

I don't know what they'd have to do with it. It's the CPU, not the motherboard, that's being blacklisted by Microsoft. I could upgrade to a Threadripper 2950X without changing anything else, and it'd be supported. I just don't think a "free" upgrade to Windows 11 should force me to spend $800 when there's no technical justification for it. I have a 3-year old enthusiast/gamer system, it seems crazy that a high-end CPU introduced less than 4 years ago would be unsupported.

It's not a TPM issue - TR 1950x has TPM2.0. Microsoft currently has a list of qualified CPU's which the 1950x isint on thats the issue. Seems anything 3.5 yrs. and older is getting left behind regardless whether it qualifies (hence the list) BUT this might only be applicable for the beta testing and not the actual release. WHich makes more sense that MS is focusing testing on only the latest hardware. The Windows Health Check tool that people were using was pulled down a few days ago (dont know its current status).

I know someone that had to replace a Ryzen 1xxx (1st gen) chip recently because games and other things kept crashing. They realized this was the case shortly after the warranty elapsed.

As a supposition, it might be the previously reported "Linux specific" issue for (pre week 30?) batch Ryzen 1 CPUs affecting Windows at last as well.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Se...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=new-ryze...

The second link confirms this instability was present in Ryzen 1 units from week 25, and speculation is that week 30+ are safe. Further complicating matters, there's no reported way of examining this data short of visually inspecting the top of the thermal interface: with thermal paste removed.

what's even more strange is that ryzen 1st gen chips in fact do have a tpm v2.

I think you might be mixing up segfault issues on Ryzen 1000 and RDRAND bug in Ryzen 3600. The latter affected games(and yes it’s Zen 2).

I recall that affecting SystemD, it is a different issue.

Generally at least the Linux kernel does not use RDRAND, even on Intel systems. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAND#Reception )

The third party that had this issue only mentioned problems with their Ryzen 1 chip and replacing it (I forget if it was with a 2000 series or 3000 series chip) which resulted in those issues finally ceasing.

>sort of reasonable I guess

What part of that is reasonable exactly? As far as I can tell the TPM only weakens security by storing the keys in a separate computer, once there's an exploit with that someone physically attacking your computer could easily exfiltrate keys where they couldn't if you're just typing a passphrase into EG cryptsetup.

I think the CPU list and the S states are related to https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/bitlocker-sleep-mode-vuln... in some way.

I really don't see why they limit to 2.0 rather than 1.2 They could support both easily but choose not to.

This could be their way to lower the amount of testing they have to do, but for a company the size of Microsoft that's inexcusable.

That fact the 7th gen Intel (like the 7700k that has TPM 2.0) or first gen Zen aren't supported is bad enough but that Microsoft is silent about it and even their PMs and Security employees on twitter just brush it off as "There are more requirements" is pure BS.

> This could be their way to lower the amount of testing they have to do

Given the amount of testing they currently do, this is hardly an argument.

I seriously hope the EU becomes aware of this and forces MS to change this crap. It's actually insane from a sustainability standpoint.

It would be unreasonable to force MS to list old hardware as compatible in any case, especially given that 10 is officially supported until 2025.

> do a whole lot of mumbling around to get it working

isnt that the whole point of Linux?

The whole point of Linux is to be able to liberate yourself from corpo-dystopia like: https://youtu.be/o6QiN4Frl-g

If its masters made that harder, that sucks.

>Requiring TPM 1.2 is sort of reasonable I guess. But TPM 2.0. You've got to be kidding me.

2.0 hardware has existed for a long time. Why would you prefer that they support 1.2?