Arrrrrr?
Phrased differently: Microsoft announces the end of support for a product. If you want to pay for it, they will make an exception and continue to support it just for you.
I understand people dislike Windows 11, but complaining about life cycle management isn’t going to help that.
I mean, that’s not exactly news. Windows 10 came out in 2015. It will stop receiving updates after 10 years just like every Windows version has.
Is this news? This is expected, it’s what they did with 7 and XP after those reached full EOL, which happened on the day they said it would for 7 at the time 7 launched, and a few years after the date they said when XP launched.
The 2025 date has been known since 2015 when 10 launched and is the standard Microsoft ten year support cycle for operating systems.
And yet, in spite of this, every single time the tech media published these breathless and shocked articles about how horrible it is that Microsoft is suddenly dropping support for their ten year old systems.
These articles are like clockwork. I’d say we’ll be getting them for Windows 11 in about seven or eight years, but they have a new “modern” lifestyle they’ve adopted for it that’s more based on last major update release or something and it’ll probably come sooner than that this time around.
Generally I would agree with you, as the 10 year lifecycle you described is what’s to be expected. With Windows 10 however, Microsoft said on release it would be the last Windows and they move to windows-as-a-service. So Windows 10 not being the last Windows and the upgrade path being closed by default for many older PCs is newsworthy.
