Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

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The scam knows no limit. Make sure Windows 10 isn't updated anymore and then make sure Windows 11 isn't supported "because the hardware is too old", forcing people to buy new computers.

As a sidenote for whatever reason I tried to install Windows 11 on an AMD 3700X (don't remember why exactly I did that as I typically don't run Windows). The AMD 3700X came out in mid 2019. Windows 11 refused to install for the hardware wasn't supported: I don't know if it was the mobo, the CPU, a configuration in the mobo... Really no clue. All I know is not only it failed but it failed without telling what wasn't supported. On a computer that was not even four years old.

Meanwhile my wife is happily using Ubuntu on my old sixth gen Core i7 6700K from... 2015 (first Asus mobo that had a NVMe M.2 PCIe slot so in eight years I basically just upgraded the NVMe SSD to a more recent one).

I agree with the other poster: it's an opportunity to have "old" computers and just install whatever Linux distro on them.

All that "normies" need is a browser: I switched my 67 years old mother-in-law to Linux. If she can use Linux, nearly anyone can.

On a 3700X you can just switch on the eTPM and it should work. Most bioses come with it off. And no Microsoft doesn't tell you this with a clear message.

But in my opinion this isn't really about security. It's more about DRM. Microsoft wants to appease the content providers by requiring TPM, supporting attestation etc.

This way they can support running Android apps (and other things like their own store thing they're still pushing) but keep the user from messing with them under the hood. The same way macOS does with iOS apps. If you turn off system integrity protection on Mac you will lose the ability to run iOS apps.

Actually, there's more to this than DRM. They basically killed to support to every setup that don't have DCH¹ (universal drivers). The reason being because they wanted to do state separation in future version (likely Windows 12), which will require DCH drivers.

The now canceled Windows 10x already had state separation, it used Storage Spaces to manage partitions. It's basically immutable Windows, similar to ChromeOS.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

Hmm but even an immutable OS has a strong DRM feel to it for me. Besides offering a bit more security there's a large "hands off under the bonnet" thing about it too.

macOS has it too in the form of SIP and Signed System Volume. But once you turn those things off there's suddenly a lot of content you can no longer access like iOS apps.

I believe the main reason it's because of A/B partitions for updates. The main advantage for common folks it's all about seamless upgrades.

More like the DRM folks demand this, or the platform will be no longer "HDCP compliant".

You mean HDCP? I would be shocked if computers stopped getting IP addresses just because it doesn't have DRM, lol.

You meant DHCP ?

The OP edited their post so the reply became confusing. It said DHCP at first.

Yeah, Mac has a really confusing autocorrect. It was DHCP when I had typed HDCP for sure - I would know, I had to work with Dolby and Netflix for 3 years at Microsoft.

Yeah that's what I mean. It's not really about our security. It's about the content providers'.

Incidentally, you can observe the same effect, however with a different delay, with subsequent releases of macOS versions: each time the support for some devices is dropped, their price drops, too, even though the hardware is inherently the same before and after announcement.

In the past, I used these MacBook Pros from 2012 to install additional memory and replace small HDDs with large SSDs but today this is no longer possible. Still, some perfectly good hardware can be bought cheap only because Apple doesn't support it. And if you used it back then, you can install perfectly functioning software on them like, say, Logic and use it for many years to come as an audio workstation even if Apple doesn't want to support it anymore.

Burn the ISO to USB using Rufus, and it disables the TPM requirement, which I believe is the only thing that prevents you from installing it.

That configuration is however unsupported and some applications might silently crash the whole Windows session when TPM is not available.

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