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Windows 11 in detail: Incremental upgrade spoilt by onerous system requirements and usability mis-steps

Peter2 Silver badge

So let me get this right. Microsoft's product managers must only plan the features of a version, one that is presumably intended to last a decade, that run on equipment available today.

If you expect us to use it; yes.

Ok; Win7's extended support ended on January the 14th of last year. If you were well funded then you've met that deadline and have an estate of new state of the art computers, none of which will be able to run Win11. If you weren't well funded then you probably still have computers with processors as old as Core 2 Duo's that originally came with Win7 running Win10, which again definitely won't.

The actual usable life of a modern computer is about 12 years; years 13+ tend to start running into lots of problems with hardware slowing down as components start expiring. You can though easily get 10 years use out of a computer; I still have old Core 2 Duo boxes in my desktop estate. (albeit they have grown multi monitor cards, SSD's and are maxed out with memory) these boxes still work perfectly fine for office use.

Virtually nobody does a 3 year replacement cycle; even government departments tend to go for the 5 year extended warranty these days as they are sensitive about news stories about them wasting taxpayers money. Also; throwing out perfectly good hardware through deliberately planned obsolescence is getting increasingly objectionable given the environmental costs of recycling IT equipment.

Therefore if your on a more or less mainstream 5 year replacement cycle then the next hardware refresh isn't going to be relativity complete for about 5 years; aiming for October 14th, 2025 as that's when Win10 EOL hits. So yes, if you want people to upgrade to a new OS immediately then the hardware that's out there now in desktop estates now needs to be able to run it if you expect it to be used because otherwise it's not getting rolled out for quite a few years.

Also, it being "people ready" would also be a good start; it's a bit absurd that a home user could be less impacted by switching to Linux with the Redmond theme; scroll down for screenshots than switching from a previous version of Windows.

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