Sweet summer child…
“What are the actual of cost of ongoing support compared with buying new H/W to replace kit which is functioning quite satisfactorily? I'm sure MS would prefer to keep what in effect becomes a subscription going as opposed to the one-off price of a W11 "perpetual" licence and will price it accordingly.”
Consumer price is $30 for the first year. Businesses pay $61. Educational customers $1. But it doubles each year, and so far MS are insisting that the ESU will only run for three years, so that means $210/$427/$7* per PC over the three years PLUS the cost of then buying new hardware (with a nice new MS license bundled in - hear those Redmond cash registers sing!) if they decide to stay aboard the Microsoft train.
A comparison with switching to new hardware right away obviously depends a lot on what’s being dumped and what’s bought, along with complicated formulae for amortisation and other financial things I don’t fully understand, but the bottom line is that whatever you’d like to imagine about Microsoft’s benevolent customer-first approach simply ain’t true: depending on how sympathetic you are to their need to extract cash to fund extended patch support this is at best them speaking softly and carrying a very, very large gun, and at worst, a shameless shake down of people who very likely have not upgraded their hardware because they cannot afford to.
*don’t laugh at that last one - many schools will have a few hundred PCs and extremely limited budgets.