Microsoft’s Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi published a story yesterday on the Windows Experience Blog in which he revealed what Microsoft believes is going to happen in regards to Windows 11 in 2025.
For Microsoft, it is the year that hundreds of millions of Windows 10 users will upgrade their devices to Windows 11, or purchase new devices.
He gives a few reasons for why that is the case:
- Windows 11 is the most secure version of Windows.
- There is this awesome new AI-powered PC, which Microsoft calls Copilot+ PCs.
- Copilot+ PCs are “up to five times faster than the most popular 5-year old Windows PCs still in use”.
- Windows 10 is reaching end of servicing in October 2025.
- 80% of businesses plan to refresh their PC portfolio by the end of 2025 (IDC study).
- 70% of consumers “will refresh their PCs in the next two years” (IDC study).
The expectations make a whole lot of sense from Microsoft’s perspective. Windows 10 is installed on hundreds of million of devices. It is the most popular Windows operating system. It will run out of support at the end of the year.
Windows customers have little choice therefore, according to Microsoft.
Mehdi forgets to mention a few key points. These tell quite the different story. One of a company that willfully made decisions that throw millions of customers under the bus.
Windows 11: the upgrade problem
The Windows operating system used to be one that offered continuous upgrades. If you bought a PC with Windows XP, you knew you could upgrade to the next version. Similarly, PCs running Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8 could be upgraded to the next version of Windows when Microsoft ended support.
Customers who bought Windows 10 probably thought the same thing. Upgrade to Windows 10 or buy a PC with Windows 10, and you could continue using it after support ends, as Microsoft would certainly allow upgrades to the next version of Windows.
Then came Windows 11, and everything changed. Microsoft introduced new minimum requirements for certain hardware components. Any PC that did not meet those could not be upgraded easily.
Windows Update does not offer the upgrade at all, and attempts to upgrade manually are also met with incompatibility errors.
While there are ways around that for most systems, Microsoft made sure to make these as uncomfortable as possible. If that was not enough, the company explicitly stated that it would not guarantee anything. In other words, customers who install Windows 11 on incompatible systems are on their own.
Estimates suggests that the incompatible PC count is in the hundreds of million. Many of these PCs work perfectly fine and it would be wasteful to put them on dumps just because they cannot run Windows 11.
Microsoft hopes that these customers buy new PCs with Windows 11 and it has done its fair share make other options look less attractive or disable them entirely.
The extended security updates injustice
Windows 10 customers may extend support for the operating system. This is called Extended Security Updates. They are limited to security updates, but since Windows 10 is not getting lots of new features either anymore, it ensures that the system remains secure for as long as the updates are provided.
Consumers and business customers alike may subscribe. The extension is available for the first time for consumers. When Microsoft offered the extension on Windows 7, it made them available only to organizations.
Consumers may extend support for a year. This costs $30 and guarantees security updates until October 2026.
The injustice becomes apparent when you compare the one year period to the offer for organizations. Organizations may extend support by up to three years.
Microsoft never revealed why.
A three-year extension would give consumers two additional years. Considering that Microsoft did already pledge three years of additional support for organizations, it would probably not be that much of a hassle to offer the same extension period to consumers as well.
AI is not there yet
2024 was not the year of AI, at least not on Windows. Microsoft did introduce an AI chat in Windows, but it offers the same functionality as AI chat apps and AI websites. The plan to introduce Windows-specific features that would be useful appears to have been cancelled, as Microsoft removed the few options that Windows users had in an update.
Copilot+ PCs were introduced in 2024 as the best computers for AI. But owners of these systems are still waiting for killer features.
Recall was a fiasco for Microsoft. The company had to pull it after security and privacy issues came to light. The recently relaunched version did receive a fair share of criticism already as well, and it is unclear whether Recall will ever be introduced to customer PCs, as it is only available on test systems at the time of writing.
Copilot+ PCs may indeed be faster than five year old PCs, but so are most PCs that are sold in 2025. It is not a key characteristic of this special type of PCs.
Without meaningful AI features, Copilot+ PCs become modern PCs. They do have advantages when it comes to AI operations, which may appeal to users who run AI apps or services on their devices.
Most computer users probably won’t in 2025, unless Microsoft releases a product that is useful and makes use of the AI capabilities of the processors.
Closing Words
There is a discrepancy between Microsoft’s public statements and reality. AI is not there yet, and that is the key feature of Copilot+ PCs. Security would benefit from a three-year extension of support offer for consumers. It might even please some of the company’s home users for a change.
Windows 10 users who do not want to pay Microsoft for an extension and cannot upgrade their devices to Windows 11 have little options.
The free option is Linux. Switching to Linux is not as daunting of a task than it was ten or twenty years ago, but there are downsides that users need to be aware of.
Still, Linux is free and support is guaranteed for a long, long time.
