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Comment by a2128 | Hacker News Reader

If Microsoft cares about the environment and becoming carbon-negative by 2030, why the seemingly arbitrary hardware restrictions that are pushing consumers to replace hardware that's still modest today?

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Microsoft cares about creating end-to-end secure media delivery from the Hollywood to your monitor.

They always did, ever since the introduction of Protected Media Path (PMP) in Windows 2000, followed by tightening of the kernel access and now requiring the TPM. The end goal is to take away full control of the machines from their owners.

It's been a very long game for them, but they are almost there.

And then they will have fun.

These media copy protection schemes remind me of web application firewalls. They're both digital snake oil, but huge corporations keep buying them.

It's absurd that I have a Netflix subscription, but the easiest way to watch Netflix 4K content on my PC is to just download it from a bay filled with pirates.

>why the seemingly arbitrary hardware restrictions

HW restrictions are not arbitrary. TPM is a requirement for added security (Macs and smartphones also had TPM for a long time now), and CPUs before 8th gen don't have functional HW instructions needed for VBS (virtualization based security) which also adds to Windows 11 security hardening.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

Are they only implementing the additional hardening now? Or is it only required by now? Because obviously it worked before, so something must have changed.

Now? Hardening was in place since 2021 when Windows 11 launched. The HW requirement haven't changed since then.

But it was possible to circumvent it without any problem, which it won’t be in the future. That’s literally what the Article is about. So what changed?

The better question would be why they allowed the bypass in the first place since MS made the TPM and CPU requirements quite clear from day one, and why people are surprised the requirements are being enforced.

Well as far as I know there was no loss of functionality from the bypass, so either the requirement is completely arbitrary to deprecate old devices or there will be new features in the future that depend on the TPM.

>Well as far as I know there was no loss of functionality from the bypass

The loss was on security and potential stability, not on functionality.

So they are starting to require the additional security now? That was my initial question.

Literally no one is going to throw away a working computer running Windows 10. There are still a lot of people running Windows 7. This is a nonsensical talking point.

A lot of people don't want to go without security patches. It's barely over a year until EOL for 10.

The vast majority of people still running Windows 10 won't even know what an EOL date is or why they should care. Businesses or anyone else who really cares can pay for the security fixes that will continue beyond 2025.

>The vast majority of people still running Windows 10 won't even know what an EOL date is or why they should care

Microsoft has been doing a lot in recent years to make people care, including (but not limited to) pop-ups near EOL that throw a scare into people.[0]

[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-received-a-not...

Users are probably so use to dismissing all these pop-ups of things like the ghost of clippy trying to trick you into using one drive that they don't even know what pop up #6446 says.

Microsoft is putting a shiny new version in front of people's faces, with marketing about advanced AI features, security, etc, and then telling them their hardware isn't supported. Even if Windows 10 is still receiving security patches, your average person is likely going to have the fear of missing out on something great, maybe getting left behind in the AI race by not having Copilot. The logical next choice is to consider buying a new computer just to make sure they're running the latest and greatest, because Microsoft told them it's the only way.

If you spend a lot of time in tech circles, it's easy to get the impression that literally no one really thinks like this. A lot of us may think Windows 11 is mostly just a reskin with some integrated AI bloat that can be mostly replaced with just a bookmark to ChatGPT, but you would have a real hard time explaining that to an average non-techie. These decisions have significant effects on the choices average people make, and you can't just ignore it and assume everyone knows better

Considering there are around twice as many Linux desktop users as Windows 7 (according to Statcounter global stats), I would hardly call it a lot of people

They don't care, simple as that.

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