Last January at CESMicrosoft chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi declared 2024 as “the year of PC AI”. And whether you believe that prediction will come true or not—many new PCs are equipped with onboard AI-accelerated neural processors, but not all of them—you can't deny that Microsoft tried very hard ARRIVE make it happen.
This year, Mehdi is Back with another prediction: 2025 will be “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh.” This year, it's also no coincidence that most Windows 10 PCs will stop receiving new security updates.
Mehdi's post included little, if any, new announcements, but it laid out the general perspective on how Microsoft is handling the Windows 10 shutdown, trying to strike a balance between carrots and sticks. The carrot includes new Windows 11 features (both AI and otherwise) as well as the performance, security, and battery life benefits inherent to all-new PC hardware. It's worth noting that support for Windows 10 will end in October 2025, and Microsoft has no interest in extending that date to the general public or extending official Windows 11 support to older PCs.
“Whether an existing PC needs a refresh or has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-based protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC,” Mehdi wrote.
Microsoft and its partners clearly benefit more from users buying new PCs than when Microsoft offers free operating system updates for existing machines. It's also true that many PCs are not officially supported can run Windows 11 wellespecially with carefully considered hardware upgrades.
But it's also the case that many users of older, incompatible PCs could benefit greatly from an upgrade at this time. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it limited support to PCs and processors that were no more than three or four years old at the time. By the time October rolls around, those machines will be seven or eight years old. PCs that don't run Windows 11 will have a lifespan of a decade or more. In that time, CPUs and GPUs have gotten faster, laptop screens have gotten bigger, and older hardware has had plenty of time to Battery drain and physical wear and tear.
A limited time escape
Mehdi declined to mention what Windows 10 users want stay Windows 10 users have a way out. The company's Extended Security Updates (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. Note that you will have to pay for the privilege: $30 for one year of updates If you are an individual and from $1 to $61 per user for schools and businesses, with costs increasing significantly in the second and third years.
Windows 10 still accounts for half to two-thirds of all Windows users worldwide and in the US, according to admittedly noisy data from sources such as Statcounter and Steam Hardware Survey. Leaving many Windows PCs unprotected from security threats has the potential to cause major problems, which may explain at least part of why Microsoft really wants to see more upgrades this year. now. But even if 2025 do became “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” it's hard to see how that could happen fast enough to take most of those Windows 10 PCs out of circulation.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.