Hacker News Reader

Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com