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—most new PCs come with AI-accelerating neural processing units onboard, but far from all—you can’t deny that Microsoft has tried hard to make that happen.
This year, Mehdi is back with another prediction: 2025 will be “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh.” This year is also, not coincidentally, the year 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 handles the sunset of Windows 10, trying to balance between the carrot and the stick. Carrots include Windows 11 new features (both AI and otherwise) as well as performance, security, and battery life benefits found in new PC hardware. The bottom line is that Windows 10 support ends in October 2025, and Microsoft is not interested in extending that date to the general public or in extending the official Windows 11 support to older PCs.
“Whether the current PC needs updating, or has a security risk that requires the latest hardware-based protection, now is the time to move forward with a Windows 11 PC,” Mehdi wrote.
Microsoft and its partners clearly benefit more from users buying new PCs than they do when Microsoft provides free OS updates for existing machines. It’s also true that many non-officially supported PCs can run Windows 11 just fine, especially with carefully considered hardware upgrades.
But it’s also the case that many users of older, incompatible PCs would benefit more from an upgrade at this point. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it limited support to PCs with processors that, at that 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 run Windows 11 are likely to be ten years old or older. During that time, CPUs and GPUs grew faster, laptop screens got bigger and better, and older hardware had more time to drain its battery and suffer from physical wear and tear.
Limited Time Escape Hatch
Mehdi declined to say what Windows 10 users 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 one year after October 2025; end users can only get one year of additional updates for their home PCs, but organizations can get three additional years. The caveat is that you’ll need to pay for this privilege: $30 for one year of updates if you’re an individual and between $1 and $61 per user for schools and businesses, with significantly higher costs in the second and third year.
Windows 10 still accounts for between one-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 those many Windows PCs potentially unprotected from security threats has the potential to cause serious problems, which may at least partly explain why Microsoft would really like to see more improvements this year. But even if it’s 2025 it does has been the “year of the Windows 11 PC Update,” it’s hard to see how it could happen quickly enough to find most of the Windows 10 PCs gone.
This story appeared first Ars Technica.