During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.
“We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines. “And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can’t run Windows 11.” He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year.
↫ Tom Warren at The Verge
The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won’t or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it’s absolutely bonkers to me that we’re mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should’ve 100% forced Microsoft’s hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen.
Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there’s also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don’t have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering – rightfully so – but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on.
At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.
So they see an opportunity to sell more shit at the expense of the environment.
Nice. Capitalism at is finest.
Microsoft could not care less about home users.
The key word there is “enterprise enviroments”, who thanks to a pile of new regulations, will be forced to upgrade for the sake of it.
It’s a case of creating the demand for their own product, all concert: investment funds (like Blackrock), with a stake both at MS and hardware vendors like Dell, lobbies governments to create laws and regulations about “cyber security” with step fines for those non-compliant, and also forces the whole supply chain of their companies to stay “compliant”.
Then, you cease supporting some “legacy” stuff that everyone is perfectly content to use, and PROFIT!
Just like magic.
Want to know the real problem here? Corporations learning they don’t need end consumers. They can just consume amongst themselves in circular fashion eternally and be gone with it, creating their own demand, investing amongst themselves, purchasing their own services and products, goes on.