Microsoft says it’s time to trade in your old Windows 10 PC

Last January in CESMicrosoft Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi announced 2024. for the “year of the AI ​​PC”. And whether you believe that prediction has come true or not—many new PCs come with built-in AI-accelerating neural processing units, but far from all—you can’t deny that Microsoft I tried very hard to make it happen.

This year is Mehdi back with another prediction: 2025 will be “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh.” This year is also, not coincidentally, the year most Windows 10 PCs will stop receiving new security updates.

Mehdi’s post includes few, if any, new announcements, but it sets the tone for how Microsoft is handling the sunset of Windows 10, trying to strike a balance between the carrot and the stick. Carrots include Windows 11’s new features (both AI and otherwise) and the performance, security, and battery life benefits inherent in brand new PC hardware. The problem is that Windows 10 support ends in October 2025. and Microsoft isn’t interested in extending that date to the general public or extending official Windows 11 support to older PCs.

“Whether your current PC needs a refresh or has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC,” Mehdi wrote.

Microsoft and its partners clearly benefit more from consumers buying new computers than when Microsoft provides free operating system updates for existing machines. It is also true that many formally unsupported computers it can work well with Windows 11especially with carefully considered hardware upgrades.

But it’s also the case that many users of older, incompatible PCs could benefit greatly from upgrading at this point. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it limited support to computers and processors that were no more than three or four years old at the time. By the time October rolls around, these machines will be seven or eight years old. PCs that can’t run Windows 11 will be almost a decade or more old. During that time, CPUs and GPUs got faster, laptop screens got bigger and better, and old hardware had plenty of time to drain its battery and suffer physical wear and tear.

Time-limited escape hatch

Mehdi declined to mention that Windows 10 users who want stay Windows 10 users have an emergency hatch. The company’s Extended Security Update (ESU) program for Windows 10 will allow consumers and businesses to continue receiving updates for at least one year after October 2025; end users can only get one year of additional updates for their home computers, but organizations can get up to three additional years. The catch is that you’ll have to pay for the privilege: $30 for one year of updates if you are an individual and between $1 and $61 per user for schools and businesses, with costs escalating significantly in the second and third years.

Windows 10 still accounts for between half and two-thirds of all Windows usage worldwide and in the US, according to admittedly noisy data from sources such as Statcounter and on Steam survey for hardware. Leaving many Windows PCs potentially unprotected from security threats has the potential to cause big problems, which probably at least partially explains why Microsoft would really like to see a lot of upgrades this year. But even 2025 does becomes “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” it’s hard to see how that could happen quickly enough to get most of those Windows 10 PCs out of circulation.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.