Last January at CES, Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi declared 2024 the “year of the AI PC.” And whether you believe that prediction came true or not (many new PCs come with neural processing units that speed up AI, but not all), you can’t deny that Microsoft worked hard to make this happen.
This year, Mehdi is I’m back with another prediction.: 2025 will be “the year of the Windows 11 PC upgrade.” This year is also, not coincidentally, the year that most Windows 10 PCs will stop receiving new security updates.
Mehdi’s post includes few, if any, new announcements, but it sets the tone for how Microsoft is handling the demise of Windows 10, trying to strike a balance between carrot and stick. The carrots include the new features of Windows 11 (both AI and otherwise) and the performance, security, and battery life benefits inherent to new PC hardware. The problem is that Windows 10 support ends in October 2025, and Microsoft isn’t interested in extending that date for the general public or expanding official Windows 11 support to older PCs.
“Whether your current PC needs an upgrade or has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-backed protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC,” Mehdi writes.
Microsoft and its partners obviously benefit more when users buy new PCs than when Microsoft offers free operating system upgrades for existing machines. It is also true that many PCs that do not have formal support can run Windows 11 perfectlyespecially with carefully considered hardware upgrades.
But it’s also the case that many users of older, incompatible PCs could really benefit from an upgrade right now. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it restricted support to PCs and processors that, at the time, were no more than three or four years old. By the time October rolls around, those machines will be seven or eight years old. PCs that can’t run Windows 11 will be almost a decade old or more. In that time, CPUs and GPUs have gotten faster, laptop screens have gotten bigger and better, and older hardware has had plenty of time to drain its battery and suffer physical wear and tear.
A limited time escape hatch
Mehdi declined to mention that Windows 10 users who want stay Windows 10 users have an escape hatch. The company’s Extended Security Update (ESU) program for Windows 10 will allow users and businesses to continue receiving updates for at least a year after October 2025; End users can only get one year of additional updates for their home PCs, but organizations can get up to three additional years. The caveat is that you will have to pay for the privilege: $30 for one year of updates If you are an individual and between $1 and $61 per user for schools and businesses, with costs increasing significantly during the second and third years.
Windows 10 still accounts for between half and two-thirds of all Windows usage worldwide and in the US, according to admittedly noisy data from sources like Statcounter and the Steam Hardware Survey. Leaving many Windows PCs potentially unprotected against security threats has the potential to cause big problems, which probably explains, at least partially, why Microsoft would really like to see a lot of updates this year. But even if 2025 does becoming “the year of the Windows 11 PC upgrade,” it’s hard to see how it could happen quickly enough to take most of those Windows 10 PCs out of circulation.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technique.