As documented on the Windows 10 Enterprise and Education and Windows 10 Home and Pro lifecycle pages, Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. The current version, 22H2, will be the final version of Windows 10, and all editions will remain in support with monthly security update releases through that date. Existing LTSC releases will continue to receive updates beyond that date based on their specific lifecycles.
[…]It’s important for organizations to have adequate time to plan for adopting Windows 11. Today we’re announcing that the next Windows LTSC releases will be available in the second half of 2024.
You will move to Windows 11, whether you like it or not.
As part of work’s Enterprise agreement, we have access to the LTSC releases. For the places we need it, we stick with the 1809 LTSC release since Microsoft has promised updates until 2029-Jan-09. After 1809 they switched to “only” 5 years of support for the LTSC releases. They’re going to be supporting Win10 for a while to come…
Mostly we encourage people to use Win11 though. It’s fine enough and MS clearly wants people to use the latest releases as much as possible. Since the LTSC builds can’t be upgraded (only clean installed), may as well not create too many future headaches for ourselves.
Will it be based on Windows 10 or Windows 11? Even if it comes with only 5 years of support, you are still getting a much fresher codebase than LTSC 2019.
What irks me more than anything else about the push to Win 11 is that many many small clients cannot justify the expense to install / replace perfectly good hardware. I’ve clients / associates with NUC or similar i7 based systems that cannot get Win 11, it’s an absurdity. Trashing hardware of that generation just to get the latest OS seems at best horrendous environmental vandalism. to me it is unconscionable behaviour. Of course it’s possible to implement workarounds, but that is not the point, and it leaves them at the mercy of a change in MS policy, the fix could evaporate overnight.
Of course some will say the end users aren’t forced to move to a new well supported platform, but that is far from true. Many small companies service big companies, and those big companies put mandates on the platforms they are prepared to support and / or interface with, and they do so without good technical reasons, it’s just corporate bastardry initiated by the lazy.
cpcf,
Follow the money. Planned obsolescence = new OEM sales = profit.
Unfortunately most of the tech industry are guilty and frankly I don’t believe they’ll ever take their environmental impacts seriously in the absence of regulatory threats. Sure their marketing departments will put out puff pieces saying that they’re helping, but still the planed obsolescence and unserviceable products continue, it’s all BS designed to get us to buy more. Will we ever put an end to this?
The “problem” is that computers have matured to the point that any improvement is incremental at best. A PC built in 2012 is just as useful, capable, and compatible as a computer from 2022, for most any office/bweb browsing workloads. Heck, a Pentium 3 machine running XP can still use “new” USB Mice, keyboards, transfer data to a USB stick, browse the web, work office documents etc etc.
The industry is not what it was 20 years ago. You don’t have to upgrade your PC because it maxes out at 64MB, and Office 98 won’t run on that. You don’t have to deal with overdrive processors because software demands Pentium instructions and you have a 486. Basically every computer made in the last 15 years will happily run most OSes, and most software, outside of games and other super high performance jobs.
And the thing is, there’s a lot of people out there still using their 10 year old desktop, their 8 year old laptop… Because it works.
Microsoft have therefore had to get creative in how to make people upgrade. The incentive to upgrade that we had 20 years ago isn’t there any more, as hardware has matured so much, so Microsoft have to engineer artificial limitations in order to sell more software.
The123king,
Yes, absolutely. Younger generations probably can’t appreciate that an upgrade used to be a night and day improvement for the entire desktop experience. With the exception of high end gamers or applications, CPUs can last most users a very long time now. Upgrading the memory and disks solve the most critical bottlenecks and possibly the GPU for casual gaming, but I find older CPUs are still plenty good for ordinary desktop use cases.
What I find troubling about microsoft’s planned obsolescence is that while it will likely be effective in yielding more windows OEM sales for microsoft, it will clearly cost consumers substantially more to discard existing hardware and buy a new system for that new OEM license. Why the hell don’t microsoft just sell users a win11 license for the hardware they have so they just have to pay for what they want/need. Yeah, I know MS are trying to stick with the “yay windows upgrades are free now” marketing, but I feel that planned obsolescence to increase sales is worse than charging for OS upgrades. They’ve promised free upgrades while pulling the rug out from under people’s feet.
I honestly think it is about control of the platform more than it is about Windows revenue. That said, those two things are very intertwined longer term.
What they really want is to demand that Windows be more locked down and more heavily instrumented. They can make these breaking changes in a move to Windows 11 more easily than an “update” to Windows 10. A new version gives them more latitude to retire or evolve features ( including the UI ).
New computers will come with Windows 11 but Microsoft does not make any more money on those licenses than they did with Win 10. For happy Win 10 users, there is really very little reason at all to upgrade beyond an emotional drive to “use the latest thing”.
Win 10 is being supported for quite a long time really. As noted above, Win 10 will remain fully supported until 2030. Outside of gaming, I am not expecting any APIs that cause Win 11 applications to stop working on 10 anytime soon. It will not be Microsoft but the game HW requirements that drive the upgrade cycle in that niche ( big niche ). I don’t really agree that MS is forcing upgrades or promoting e-waste in any serious way.
Apple on the other hand….they really do encourage e-waste as they regularly force abandonment of platforms that work just fine. The biggest hammer they use for this is the OS itself. Apple stops supporting older hardware in newer OS releases and then they start demanding that applications use newer features that force the applications to abandon support for older OS releases as well. Within a given OS release, Apple may also decide to artificially disadvantage older hardware. Having Airplay only work on hardware after an arbitrary point comes to mind when the WiFi and processing capabilities of the newest unsupported hardware is more than enough to support such a feature.
tanishaj,
Well, considering that they’ve done millions of these in-place version upgrades before and they’re still doing it, it doesn’t look like a contributing factor.
Consumers do have to pay for the windows licenses bundled with new hardware. And arguably this is the big motivator for microsoft’s planned obsolescence. I suspect the real reason microsoft stopped doing things this way is because their customers simply saw less and less benefit to upgrading.
Where do you see that? Enterprise versions maybe, but not home and pro as far as I see.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-home-and-pro
This all applies to microsoft. You can literally replace “apple” with “microsoft” and it would be true. In fact as a developer one of my longstanding gripes with microsoft is how microsoft is using visual studio to break 3rd party software support for EOL versions of windows even though the software itself would still work fine on old versions of windows otherwise. Microsoft uses this as a stick against stragglers who didn’t feel like upgrading because 3rd party software still works.
Both companies are guilty of policies that make it harder to keep reusing hardware, albeit they go about this in different ways. Honestly I don’t follow your logic. Could you explain why you’re giving a pass to microsoft but not apple?
I very much agree with you. What makes a system modern and usable is really the software. I daily drive a 2008 iMac and rarely run into limitations with it. I run Microsoft Teams meetings on it and can share my screen to do demos of our cloud based applications. I ran a test version of an embedded NVR application in a container yesterday to give some feedback on the features. I just transcoded 24 GB of H.264 video into about 8 GB AV1 video on that iMac ( it took a while but it just ran in the background while I worked — even with that happening the machine was fast enough that I barely noticed while I authored my presentations, created spreadsheets, and checked my email ). That said, I had to put Linux on it to get access to up-to-date and usable applications. The version of MacOS that this machine supports and the applications that support that OS would absolutely not allow me to collaborate seamlessly with others professionally.
You make an excellent point about hardware in that hardware interfaces have not been changing as frequently as they did in the 80’s and 90’s. It is not just keyboards and mice. I use a small recording device that I presents itself as USB storage. I use bluetooth headphones. I can plug devices into it the iMac to charge. I still get the odd DVD fully of files from customer sites and the ones they burned last week load just fine. The iMac is networked two different ways ( ethernet and WiFi ) to my latest technology router. Amazon would drop me a high-capacity and current technology SSD for this machine for cheap and have it here tomorrow. This machine is 15 years old and yet it is natively compatible with the other tech stuff in my life without me having to think about it much at all. Think about a PC in 1996 compared to the original IBM PC in 1981. How much of what you want to use with your computer would have still worked on the older machine back then? None of the software. Certainly not the USB sticks, CDs, and DVDs I was using with the 1996 machine. Serial and parallel ports lasted quite a while I guess.
I just built a new gaming PC with my son a few days ago. The motherboard had pins for serial ports, parallel ports, PC speaker, LED indicators, and host of other stuff that the case did not support. Instead, the case has a couple of USB 3.1 connectors and regular headphone and microphone jacks. As your comment notes, most of what I might use those connectors for would work just as well on my 2008 iMac ( if slower ) and probably even on that machine from 1996. USB has been around 30 years!
That said, the reason we built a new gaming PC is because his “old” one which is not that old really was running into limitations. Most notably, it did not have enough GPU RAM for some titles. Both RAM and CPU were also minor pain points for him.
It is not just gamers, there are A LOT of regular people that are doing high-resolution photo and video editing these days for example. That is no longer just a professional level activity. And video editing still pushes even modern hardware pretty hard.
Running virtual machines or containers is getting more common as well which of course is resource intensive.
And it is not just developers running machine learning workloads these days either.
So, while your typical email using and web browsing grand-parent, along with your typical office worker, can certainly be totally productive on old hardware, it is not yet completely true that “you don’t have to upgrade your PC”. It depends on what you are doing and a lot of what regular people are doing still pushes their computers hard enough to require new hardware.
Even some of the above though do not need much more horsepower than we have. 10 years from now perhaps we will not need the latest and greatest even for some of these things. I am in the camp that thinks that stuff like audio and video resolution have natural ceilings beyond which there is just no point. Once we can do 8K video editing on our desktop systems, the need to upgrade will fall away for that use case as well. Once I can run the Whisper large model in real-time on the 24-bit FLAC files on my machine, what benefit does additional performance bring?
Gaming may even get to that point for similar reasons where even the hard cores will be satisfied. If I can 8k game at 120 FPS with 128 GB worth of textures on my GPU, what exactly is the extra hardware going to do for me?
I mean, maybe it will all be holograms and we will all move into the metaverse and I will still need to upgrade every 2 years. We will always find new things to do with the power. It is just that the list of things we are trying to do does not seem to be keeping pace with the power of the hardware which I think is your point.
Back when I was running OS/2 on the 1996 machine above ( back when I bought new hardware every year ), I was trying to do a lot of the above. I was certainly trying to game in 3D ( DOOM was a thing after all ). It was just not great yet. I was certainly trying to inject audiophile quality audio into my digital experiences ( oh the hours spent in EAC ). I “tried” to edit video and create professional video experiences. Around the year 2000, I had a home-built PVR and a NAS full of MP4 files. Sure I use Jellyfin now instead of Kodi ( XBMC back then ) but that is a distinction without a difference. The difference is that I now the files will get transcoded into whatever the player needs and the metadata gets downloaded for me magically whereas I used to spend a third of my life curating my collection, transcoding to files that my hardware would play, and embedding metadata into the media files themselves. Before, the computer I had hooked up to my TV could not handle high-quality 1080p. Now, there is an app on my TV and it seems to handle it fine. So, ironically, my desktop computer or laptop spend less time processing video than they used to 15 years ago. The same is true of the cloud really. One of the reasons that my old hardware is still fine is that a lot of the “horsepower” I am harnessing is actually running on other machines. ChatGPT works great on the old 2008 iMac but that is because it is not really running on it at all of course.
“many many small clients cannot justify the expense to install / replace perfectly good hardware. ” Its not perfectly good if it can’t run a secure operating system.
“Trashing hardware of that generation just to get the latest OS seems at best horrendous environmental vandalism” Yes, but that’s Microsoft doing it. Some governmental body should prohibit software restrictions that make this possible.
“Of course some will say the end users aren’t forced to move to a new well supported platform, but that is far from true. Many small companies service big companies, and those big companies put mandates on the platforms they are prepared to support and / or interface with, and they do so without good technical reasons, it’s just corporate bastardry initiated by the lazy.”
Everyone should be running software that is supported by the vendor, getting software updates. The problem here is 100% Microsoft, and no one else.
Unfortunately, Microsoft makes money off licenses, and they need to justify new system purchases in order to charge said licensees. Similarly, OEMs depend on selling HW, so they need Microsoft to steer the market towards new HW.
It is what it is. It is a catch 22. Small organizations can’t afford to upgrade, because of their reduced budget that don’t afford them the type of support contracts that would keep their old systems viable in perpetuity.
That being said, if an organization can’t afford the few hundred bucks that would cost to replace old HW, they have other more pressing issues than windows 10 end of support.
Nah, I’m good.
Second that. I’ll watch from the side lines.
Actually you will move to Windows 12, as MSFT has already announced it’ll be out before Q3 2025 so Windows 11 is another Windows 8 and Windows 12 will be the “oops our bad” just like 7 was to Vista and 10 was to 8.
There may be a certain amount of conscious choice in this pattern. Windows 11 has enough stink on its brand that it just makes sense for MS to wait until it is mature and the complaints have been addressed and then to release it under a new name. Instead of fighting to convince the laggards who have adopted a “never eleven” attitude, why not just release 12, get some positive press and then let everybody adopt ( or be forced to adopt ) the new version and just put up with people posting that they have been waiting for the “good” release that follows their bad ones. My favourite Windows versions have been Windows 2000, Windows 7, and Windows 10. Really though, 7 was just Vista fixed and 10 is pretty much just a finished 8 with tablet mode off by default. So MS makes big changes in the OS from time to time, people complain, they fix it, and then change the name to change the conversations.
Windows 2000 was maybe the exception to the break / fix pattern as it was, in my view, a real jump forward. It was one of the more radical advances over the versions that came before while somehow actually getting all those changes more or less right and being generally really well accepted by its users. Windows 2000 was a solid improvement on the technology in the Windows NT versions that came before it and there were some real leaps forward in terms of subsystems and APIs. That core platform was paired with what is arguably the pinnacle of the Windows 95 style UI ( a complete break with the Windows NT GUI ) and enough of the “consumer” feature set to be a real alternative to the Windows 9x product and the kinds of applications that non-enterprise users wanted to run.
I’m also a big Windows 2000 fan, but I’d suggest a lot of “break/fix” back then was Service Packs. The original Windows 2000 build had plenty of bugs, but by Service Pack 3 it looked solid. XP took two (larger) service packs. In both cases, that was two years after release, which would correspond to a Windows 11 update at the end of this year.
Sometimes I think the real effect of automatic upgrades is exposing more people to the initial, rough versions of products, rather than allowing people to move to releases after they’re a bit more polished.
“You will move to Windows 11, whether you like it or not.”
No, I will move to Linux. After 2025, the Proton will be advanced enough that it will run most of new games, especially indie (I don’t really care about the majority of AAA offerings) and I don’t use any exotic software/hardware I actually need Windows for.
Unless you play a lot of games that require Anti-cheat (and even some that do are supported!) Then Proton already works with a vast majority of games! So why wait until 2025?
1) Too lazy to overwrite a working system while it’s still supported.
2) Still waiting for some indie games I play to be fully supported on Proton
3) Few AAA games I either play or plan on playing don’t work at all with Proton yet.