It's a neat little mitigation but it's ridiculous to label it necessary for a consumer OS and obsolete hundreds of millions of computers.
I'm well aware computing power for practical use cases has plateaued since around 2011, but those Coffee Lake and Zen+ systems (let alone older) are coming due for replacement/upgrade soon for anyone inside of a lifecycle cadence whether Windows 11 demanded it or not.
For anyone who isn't who cares about hanging on to old hardware, it's perfectly fine to just keep running Windows 10. All those guys saying "yOuR sYStEM iS iNSeCurE!!1!1!1" are snake oil merchants wanting to sell you something.
Increasingly hard to get this days, especially through official channels. Currently, Microsoft actively prevents you from getting a Win10 installer/image, by redirecting all the relevant links to Windows 11 pages.
> All those guys saying "yOuR sYStEM iS iNSeCurE!!1!1!1" are snake oil merchants wanting to sell you something.
You mean like Microsoft? Saying that the new system is more secure is equivalent to saying your old system is insecure, given everyone's insistence that you either are fully secured or not at all.
Really? I used this just a few weeks ago and definitely got a Windows 10 ISO.
https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows10ISO
For reference, I searched the following on Google
> windows 10 iso
Additionally, I suspected I'll need a new product key. I couldn't get that from Microsoft - every link I've managed to Google also had a redirect to Windows 11.
(In the end, I purchased an electronic license from some local software shop. Then it turned out that somehow, Microsoft considers my wife's Win7 license still valid for Win10 Pro, which is nice. I used the key to upgrade another machine, which I thought was on Pro, but actually was on Home.)
You're (probably unintentionally) exaggerating, but that's not how it works. When a new CPU comes out, all the machines on the market don't magically replace their CPUs with that one on day 1. The machine I'm typing this comment on right now was a pretty high-end one I got after those CPUs came out, and its CPU is from an older generation. In fact, I don't even recall having seen machines with newer CPUs on the market (at least not with the minimum specs I was looking at) until quite a few months later, though my memory might be hazy here. Sometimes the price points are also a factor here too.
> those Coffee Lake and Zen+ systems (let alone older) are coming due for replacement/upgrade soon for anyone inside of a lifecycle cadence whether Windows 11 demanded it or not.
That's by no means universally true; there are plenty of good machines out there that work just fine and that people want to keep using. Again, speaking from personal experience, I know my machine is perfectly good and I hope to keep using it for several more years. An older one I had from several years before that, which I gave away for unrelated reasons, was also great, and I would still use it if I had it and my current one somehow broke. There's been literally no reason for me to throw these away anytime soon other than Microsoft forcing me to. Lots of people are being forced to throw away perfectly good hardware because Microsoft/Google/Apple/etc. force them to, often via software.
As I already said, if you want to keep running Windows 10 (or 7, or XP) it's perfectly fine. Tell everyone who screams "SECURITY!" at you to screw off, they all want to sell you something.
Even if you do upgrade to a new machine, why does someone have to throw away their old one? Keep it as a sub computer, or give it a new role in your life. Windows 11 mandates TPM2 and SecureBoot, but it doesn't mandate throwing your old machine in the trash.
We are indeed!