Hacker News Reader

Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

"Windows 10 will be the last Windows, a continuously updated OS that you can rely on"

"Uhh, turns out we can't make that much money off of it"

"Windows 11 is the most exciting Windows OS yet!"

Your Windows 11 PC will stop receiving security updates on XX date. For your safety and the safety of the global internet community, networking capabilities will be disabled on XX. Your PC will continue to operate normally.

If you would like to continue to receive security updates, please buy a Windows 365 subscription before XX.

I wonder when they do the "5 years of security patches" thing phones did. Not sure why people accept that for phones but not computers, maybe Microsoft and Apple will realise that this will work on computers too soon?

I have a 2015 MacBook Pro which is going to be the oldest-supported model for macOS 12 Monterey, so Apple seems to be supporting computers for ~7 years.

macOS 11 still gets another two years of security updates though.

Apple is famous for not patching every security vulnerability on older versions.

https://twitter.com/grahamgilbert/status/1386862102942339073... is a public example, and I'm aware of non-public information regarding this as well.

The mainline Linux kernel will also support pretty much anything you throw at it these days anyways. My 12 year old Thinkpad almost has complete feature parity with my perpetually upgraded desktop, which is a super nice basis to build my personal infrastructure off of.

Unlimited updates :)

Can you list examples where there is not currently feature parity?

A larger portion of Microsoft's revenue is build around the business side where 5 years of security patches now buy a new device either wouldn't fly or wouldn't make sense. For home users the revenue is based around subscription services tied to using Windows (O365) not selling users on the Windows license itself which is now free assuming your device is new enough to work with subscription services that might be sold to you or the business you work for.

For Apple I'm honestly more surprised the MacBook lifecycle isn't shorter but it's also not their main money maker.

Windows 10 as "the last verson" destroyed Microsoft's and hardware OEM's best marketing opportunity. New versions of Windows always got Microsoft lots of press, people bought new hardware, etc.

It was all marketing because there were major "service-pack" level upgrades to Windows 10 -- they were just confusingly named and you still needed to know about them.

Going back to versions is an improvement even if this particular version isn't one.

I suspect Microsoft paid attention to how much marketing and hype comes around every iOS/android/macOS update and wanted in on that action. Now Microsoft can release a new number every year with its own marketing page and give the tech news sites something to write about that sounds better than “windows service pack 27273-b”

Weirdly they already had that release model and abandoned it. I suspect they trusted that the windows store would be a success and would bring the revenue instead of selling windows licenses. That didn't go well therefore they are reverting to the old model.

The first part of your statement is correct, the second is not.

The difference between the release of server 2022 and windows 11 was almost night and day, even though they are based on the same core product.

Server 2022 is actually an improvement over Server 2019, where in Windows 11 they started making similar UI messes as in Windows 8

This goes much deeper than versioning.

Which part of my statement is incorrect? You don't seem to be replying to anything that I said.

That "famous" quote is out of context nonsense. It refers to the technical changes in how the dev team creates the next version of windows by working directly on the current version. Compare the the past where a copy was uses as the base for a new windows which was developed separately from the current released version. It had/has nothing to do with the name which is a pure marketing decision.

>"Uhh, turns out we can't make that much money off of it"

Make no sense since its still an update and although it has a new name it does not need a new license. Beside that windows consumer license are not a significant revenue source since a long time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com