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During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.
"We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell's slice of machines. "And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can't run Windows 11." He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year.
↫ Tom Warren at The Verge
The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won't or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it's absolutely bonkers to me that we're mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should've 100% forced Microsoft's hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen.
Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there's also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don't have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering – rightfully so – but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on.
At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday December 03 2025, @10:18AM (2 children)
I never understood why Dell never attempted to make their own operating systems out of BSD or Unix, like Sony and HP. Or Apple.
It is because when the courts forced M$ to cease the illegal per-processor licensing fees [justice.gov], M$ pivoted immediately to similar requirements but dressed up as partnerships and advertising partnerships. The courts never caught up.
In short, the OEMs are under the belief that they must offer an option for pre-installed Windows. But in order to acquire the licenses at a cost which has a chance of being profitable, they must knuckle under to M$ demands that no other systems be provided or at least not made feasible to buy. Dell has had systems for sale with GNU/Linux pre-installed, but good luck at even finding them and fat chance at actually placing an order for one.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Thursday December 04 2025, @03:45AM
Well, earlier today I happened to wander past Dell's site, peered at some laptop, and noted that one of the OS choices was Ubuntu.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday December 04 2025, @07:59PM
I'm not sure that's correct. They have to offer a pre-install option for Windows if they sell machines with Windows because that's a tautology. The bigger issue is that it can cost money to support Linux for newbs and MS requires that every computer being sold by a licensed OEM be preloaded with something. Presumably under the excuse that they're bundling without paying.
Really, the whole thing is a pretty big scam as MS doesn't even provide discs any more and doesn't require that the OEM do so either.