Dr Lobster* wrote:At work we’ll need to pay for extended support, probably just for a year on a few machines as they will be complicated to migrate, no pricing yet last time I checked though.
There is a page quoting prices in USD of $61 for corporate users which has to be bought through volume licencing, and for individuals and/or Win 10 Home it 'will be available' for $30. Prices double every year, and are cumulative so late opters into the program have to buy the previous years they didn't have as well as paying heftier fees for the years that they do.
A few UK sites have converted this to come out at £24 for the first year for individuals (or 'millions of Windows 10 users face shock Microsoft fee' as I've seen), but Microsoft doesn't list any actual prices themselves nor is there any means to sign up to it yet that I can see
Dr Lobster* wrote:At home, I’ve had Win11 pretty much since it came out, find it annoying, but largely ok. I’ve moved over to MacOS now for most things so I’m less affected by Microsoft randomly moving things around but need to keep a Windows machine for a few things unfortunately
I actually quite like it, would really miss things like the tabbed file browser if I went back. On the general idea of migration away from Windows, both MacOS and Linux are pretty much flatlined in all the time that Windows 11 has been around. There has been a slight drop in Windows users, but that slack has been picked up by an increase in Android, suggesting that whilst there might be a small shift towards using mobile devices, when it comes to a PC it's still all about Windows.
james2001 wrote:I can half see Microsoft relaxing the hardware requirements or extending Win 10 support at the last minute, as it's just going to leave too many computers vulnerable otherwise.
I think there was an expectation that surely they wouldn't go through with this. Whether or not the requirements are particularly outrageous or not (particularly after 4 years) is one thing, but going from Windows 7/8/10 all having hardware requirements essentially unchanged from Windows Vista up to Windows 11 needing this in one step was too much.
That said, they haven't backed down at any point. They obviously are aware that people run on unsupported hardware since loopholes to force install it which could be closed never have been, and despite threatening to withdraw security updates for unsupported systems they never have, but despite all that the official line remains. At this point, I actually think it would do more damage to back down, firstly because they played the 'we need this coz security' card too hard to fold it now, and also because of how many people that might piss off who have shelled out on new hardware they otherwise weren't planning to buy.
Only thing I can see them doing is allowing particular ringfenced groups of users/classes of device to have the ESUs for free, but not a general extend of support nor any backtracking on their hardware requirements.