Windows 10's farewell tour – not AI PCs – set to drive laptop sales in 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Windows 10's farewell tour – not AI PCs – set to drive laptop sales in 2025

theregister.com

19 pointsrntn28 comments

I'm sure the 25% tariffs to start are going to kill pretty much all laptop sales next year anyways. I don't think anything at all will be driving laptop sales.

Don't be ridiculous. Consumers will still have plenty of American-made laptops, made from American-sourced parts, to choose from. /s

The AI PC marketing campaign as of now is not good. What exactly is an AI PC?

Many consumers are still uneasy with some AI use and just tagging this label onto a laptop doenst look to be increasing mindshare or moving units.

AI pc sounds like something so flaky that as a user you relegate all your powers to the overlords and become sumbissive in hoppes of obtaining what they thinkn is what you wantz.

Well if the ads I saw during the SEC football games on TV were any indication apparently Intel and Dell think it’s campus food delivery bots.

It's a PC that has a decent NPU. By next year every PC will be an AI PC so it won't really matter.

> It's a PC that has a decent NPU.

Nondeterministic processing unit?

Neural Processing Unit

But all they add to Windows is optical character recognition and webcam backgrounds, so really they're just ultra efficient GPUs, nothing neural about it

I assumed they would do some kind of local LLM that helped me find files, but no, the search function in windows explorer has actually regressed and no longer matches on exact substrings.

There are a lot more features than that.

Those are the only ones I noticed. After googling around there is supposed to be automatic captioning and translation in video calls which does sound useful, plus image generation in Paint

The regression is just there so they can introduce "AI" powered search next year.

Don't forget the keyboard with the AI button.

Easy: it is a "smart" PC 4.0

>What exactly is an AI PC?

I take it to mean it is a Marketing term which really means one or more of these items:

* Locked down PC where you will do what we say, not what you want to do.

* No hardware upgrades, want more memory, diskspace ? Buy a new Laptop.

* You will now need to pay 30 USD per month to use this Laptop. It is 10 USD fee for students.

* No internet connection means some functions will not work.

* We will spy on your usage, but you can press a disable button. Heard in the boardrooms "that disable button really turns on more spyware because if they find it, we really want to watch that person". ie: Recall

So wait are people going to take this as the last chance to get a non-AI-infected computer? Or is the projection here that people are going to switch away from 10 because it’s going EOL?

I don’t really think official support means much, I mean Windows is basically insecure as a platform whether or not it is getting patches, so who cares really? And I’d rather be infected by classic dumb viruses than Microsoft’s first party AI enhanced malware.

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 is supported until 2032 thankfully.

That won't stop Qualcomm from claiming AI turns a profit when reporting their earnings.

Planned obsolescence.

Umm, I guess technically it is? We've known about Windows 10 EOL date for a long time now, since it was first released in 2015.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but they have consistently supported Windows for a MINIMUM of 10 years since Windows XP (2001). That's absolutely a solid record when you compare it to the computing half-life of support that other tech companies usually give. Look at Samsung, or even Google. Hell even Apple maxes out at 7.5 years for it's longest supported device.

I don't recall EOL being acknowledged until quite recently, a quick search brings me to a "confirmation" last year [0]. Not to mention the 2015 evangelism slip up that errantly put on record that Windows 10 would be "the last version of Windows" [1]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2023/04/30/microsof...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2015/05/08/window...

They acknowledged the exact date in 2022 just before Windows 11 was released: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...

But even then, what point are you even trying to make? Windows 10, like previous releases before it, when its support end, will mean it was supported for a solid 10 years. I mean, that's a lifetime in tech; 2015 was the iPhone 6s.

Why do I recall Windows 10 being referred to as "the last version of Windows" because it was supposed to be capable of being supported indefinitely as a rolling release distro?

And I'm nitpicking, but each version of Windows 10 was its own release with a lifecycle of 1-2 years, like Ubuntu. We don't say that Arch has been supported for a solid 22 years just because it's been able to be seamlessly upgraded for that long.

Also, if most major OS and device vendors provide 7-10 years of security updates, and many of them did that before, is it really that much of a "lifetime" to anyone but the outliers?

> And I'm nitpicking, but each version of Windows 10 was its own release with a lifecycle of 1-2 years, like Ubuntu.

You must be fun at parties. /s

Yes you are right. Windows 10 had a lot of releases, more like the old service packs. And Windows 11 seems to follow the same strategy.

It's a pretty marked divergence from both their previous strategy and from the LTSBs, so I thought it bore a mention. I didn't realize there were explicit EOLs for each release, which I don't remember from the SPs.

I wasn't making a point, just contradicting the assertion that we always knew the EOL

No - Windows 10 was initially pushed as the 'final version' of Windows. MS drove this home by saying 'Windows is a service' at each update.

They backtracked once they realised they're losing money by not having the sales bump from numbered upgrades i.e. the sales bump from planned obsolescence

It's less about win10 expiring and win11 having such strict hardware requirements as to force you to buy new hardware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com