1. in higher use than its successors
2. only had one possible successor
3. the successor did not support hardware in use at the time
?
I'm sure it won't stop them, as you say, but really Microsoft, as someone who used to be a (relatively rare at the time) defender of yours, get fucked. The Raymond Chen camp is truly dead (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...)
2. ... I mean, that's every version of Windows. XP? Vista. Vista? 7, etc. The last time you had two choices of Windows was in the '90s.
3. It does support hardware in use 'at the time'. I upgraded from 10 to 11 on existing hardware.
If you mean older hardware, 98 and NT4 were the last to support the 486, yet 486s were still in use by the time of release of Me/2000 (I sadly had to interact with said 486s in a school lab). XP -> Vista made the jump from a Pentium 233Mhz minimum to 800Mhz minimum, /and/ caused many issues due to the introduction of WDDM causing a lot of graphics hardware to become incompatible.
This is nothing new. Those pulling the shocked pikachu face perhaps just haven't been around the Windows block enough to realize... this is nothing new.
> It does support hardware in use 'at the time'. I upgraded from 10 to 11 on existing hardware.
Of course it supports some hardware in use right now. But core requirements were generally just speed, now even if you have a fast processor, you're SOL if your system doesn't support TPM and specific models. Vista had more compatibility issues than usual with peripherals, but that's quite different from having to toss the whole machine. And even then: Vista was released in 2007. You had 7 more years to stay on XP.
Not only are we handwaving the obvious reality that hardware used to have a shorter effective life because it was advancing so rapidly, but the Pentium 233 came out in 1997. XP went EOL in 2014. That's almost 20 years of hardware support. My family has various machines from 2015, 2017, etc. that otherwise work perfectly fine but don't support W11. I have an older laptop with a 4 core (8 HT) 2.6 GHz CPU (3.6 Turbo) with a 1 TB SSD and 16 GB of RAM, amply powerful, but nope, no Windows 11.
Not just speed but instructions.
> you're SOL if your system doesn't support TPM and specific models
TPM support at this point in time is very old, roughly 7 years or so, along with processor model. Newer processors lack the appropriate features to support the security features of Windows 11, i.e. VBS.
New OSes have new features which require new hardware; new being highly relative here as it's quite old hardware at this point.
In fact, let's compare this pointless consumer-hostile debacle with XP, where MS went out of their way to actually improve security by heavily revamping XP and keeping it alive longer than it would have been. Meanwhile, the obvious reality that's going to happen this time around is people are not going to throw out their machines, those machines are just going to stop getting security updates. Great work, Microsoft.
So really then, what is it you're trying to advocate, that this is all...good? Or is it just argument for argument's sake?
Good for you. There is plenty of hardware out there without TPM 2.0, that is not allowed to upgrade, even if they in every other aspect are more than capable enough.
Starting with this in 2021 https://christitus.com/update-any-pc-to-windows11/ and likely (I'd have to check) integrated into Chris Titus's WinUtil by now.
Some combo of tweaking registry values or zero sizing a DLL has done the trick so far (but perhaps not into the future with upgrades and patches).
Now let's have a long prattle about our environment stewardship: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sus...
Microsoft (well, the Windows part) is looking more and more like the Apple and Sun in that article. It’s the #2 or #3 user-facing OS these days. The fancy new programming environment happened and most stuff moved there, but it’s JavaScript and the browser rather than C# and .NET. Running old software is becoming a niche and getting more so by the day.
I've given up on my hobby projects because it was to the point where each time I got a few hours to look at them I'd spend it all doing updates or adjusting to deprecations.
One thing that struck me rereading Joel's article: those shiny new APIs he rattled off, indeed almost none of them gained any traction. And he was spot on about the UI framework fragmentation too.
Recently Windows Phone popped up and a lot of the same themes popped up, for example changing the SDKs repeatedly, charging for the privilege of using the app store (so much for giving the tools away), etc. I think part of the issue is that Apple somehow gets away with doing this sort of thing but Microsoft doesn't have anything close to the marketing chops to brainwash people into getting screwed over and liking it. Maybe because they go out of their way to make it a positive experience to buy new Apple products, rather than a trip to a dealership for a new car
But perhaps one difference is that with consoles there's a free Sisyphean "reset" with each generation, which never happened with the phone. That gives a spot to enter the race.
Plus the whole thing with the phone carriers...in the US at least I'd wager that if the carriers don't offer your phone, and the salespeople don't talk it up (which phones are going to give the salesperson the most lucrative commission, by the way? Don't forget accessories...), then that's the ball game
Fortunately there might be hope on that. Pathetic that it had to be someone presumably doing it on their own time, after all we know how resource-constrained a small business like Microsoft is
https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/comments/1l65ji8/things_a...