Microsoft says it’s time to replace your old Windows 10 PC

Last January at CESMicrosoft’s chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi has declared 2024 “the year of the PC AI”. And whether you believe that the prediction has come true or not – many new PCs come with neural processing units that accelerate AI on board, but far from all – you can’t deny that Microsoft he tried very hard to make it 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 that most Windows 10 PCs 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 the carrot and the stick. Carrots include Windows 11’s new features (both AI and otherwise) and the performance, security, and battery life inherent in new PC hardware. The catch is that Windows 10 support ends in October 2025, and Microsoft is not interested in extending that date for the general public or expanding official Windows 11 support to older PCs.

“Whether your current PC needs a refresh, or if it has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-backed protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC,” writes Mehdi.

Microsoft and its partners obviously benefit more from users buying new PCs than when Microsoft provides free OS updates for existing machines. It is also true that many PCs formally not supported it can run windows 11 fineespecially with carefully considered hardware upgrades.

But it’s also the case that many older and incompatible PC users could benefit greatly from an update at this point. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it limited support to PCs and processors that, at the time, were no more than three or four years old. By the time of October, these machines will be seven or eight years old. PCs that can’t run Windows 11 will be around for a decade or more. In that time, CPUs and GPUs have become faster, laptop screens have become bigger and better, and old hardware has had a lot of time to exhaust its battery and suffer from physical wear and tear.

A limited time Escape Hatch

Mehdi refused to mention that Windows 10 users who want stay Windows 10 users have a loophole. The company’s Extended Security Update (ESU) program for Windows 10 will allow users and businesses to continue to get updates for at least one year after October 2025; End users can only get one year of extra updates for their home PCs, but organizations can get up to three extra years. The caveat is that you need to pay for the privilege: $30 for a year of upgrades yes you are an individual and between $1 and $61 per user for schools and businesses, with costs increasing significantly for the second and third years.

Windows 10 also accounts for between half and two-thirds of all Windows usage worldwide and in the United States, according to admittedly noisy data from sources like Statcounter and the Steam Hardware Survey. Leaving many Windows PCs potentially unprotected from security threats has the potential to cause big problems, which probably, at least partially, explains why Microsoft would really like to see a lot of updates this year. But even if 2025 it does becomes “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 Ars Technica.