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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

Dropping windows 10 support is a pretty big lever to apply pressure to get people to upgrade to 11. Oh turns out you also “need” to buy new hardware to run it.

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Dropping windows 10 support is a really reasonable decision. The focus is on 11, it's been out for almost 5 years. I'm guessing they are close to releasing 12 at this point, maybe in a year or two. Supporting three entire fully fledged oses is quite alot of work. I also understand supporting newer hardware, they dropped 32bit on 11 and moved the instruction set up a bit. You gotta do a cutoff somewhere and I'm happy that they are at least allowing us to use the improved performance our modern CPUs have. I'm not happy with alot of stuff, but I get this at least.

I'd argue it's probably time to drop 32-bit x86 support, but the rest of this stuff is arbitrary and doesn't have any tangible benefit except conveniently providing hardware manufacturers with an excuse to unload new hardware onto people when there's nothing wrong with what they have. (not to mention, pardon the conspiracy theory, they're probably trying to use the TPM to turn the PC into a smartphone-like platform)

It's surprising that when we had Win7 they did that brief "XP Mode" experiment with some virtualized-penalty box.

Why didn't that go further? Presumably virtually any x86-64 box currently in circulation would be fast enough to run a VM running a full copy of 32-bit XP/Win7/Win10, or even a full carousel (or download store) of DOS and early-windows releases. It could be the most compatible Windows ever, solving the weird "64-bit systems can't run some 16-bit apps" gotcha and perhaps allowing some way to bridge in support for devices that can only be driven by old 32-bit XP drivers.

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