To them its not their problem. Microsoft is perfectly fine with their being two classes of users. One that was the ‘good consumer’ and bought new hardware they didn’t need. And the other who is stubborn and won’t, but will now be punished by increasing vulnerability to their systems. I wouldn’t put it past them to push out a patch that will actually increase vulnerability to really hurt those that won’t (or can’t, they don’t really see the difference) switch over.

Its a scam at the end of the day. I’m running a GTX 1080Ti with a i7 8700K, and it doesn’t meet the ‘minimum requirements’. Meanwhile a cheap laptop without a GPU and a slower processor meets the requirements simply because it is ‘newer’. What Microsoft has done is required hardware manufacturers to put in a sort of signature that tells Windows it is a newer piece of hardware. And that is actually required for the installation. The actual specs aren’t important.

I’m sure manufacturers have to pay Microsoft for the privilege of this little signature. Of course they aren’t complaining because those consumers with years old machines that are perfectly capable will be forced to buy new hardware, making it a small investment for them. And they can’t really call out Microsoft, since doing so means they don’t get the signature on their hardware if they do, and that will make their hardware worthless for Windows machines.

They’ll likely start pressuring software developers to drop support of older Windows as well. When I say drop support, I mean push out patches that require it, and remove older patches from online repositories.

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