From Gordon Kelly at Forbes:
Right now Windows 10 is undergoing a massive upgrade to the so-called ‘Creators Update’. But suddenly Microsoft has confirmed millions of Windows 10 users will never get it…
Speaking to PC World, Microsoft said that despite pledging Windows 10 feature updates until October 13th 2020, this will now depend on users running relatively modern hardware. In short: if a manufacturer stops supporting your hardware at any point then Microsoft may not longer upgrade your version of Windows 10.
“Recognizing that a combination of hardware, driver and firmware support is required to have a good Windows 10 experience, we updated our support lifecycle policy to align with the hardware support period for a given device,” Microsoft said in a statement.
“If a hardware partner stops supporting a given device or one of its key components and stops providing driver updates, firmware updates, or fixes, it may mean that device will not be able to properly run a future Windows 10 feature update.”
And the result of a device or component no longer being supported is severe. When updating users will simply receive the message: “Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC”.
And to make matters worse, at present Windows 10 will not tell users which piece of hardware is responsible for the cancellation. A user will have to check every part of their PC, from the processor and RAM to the hard drive, graphics and network card.
This brutal (and frankly over generalised) decision follows in the wake of Microsoft blocking Windows 10 Creators Update upgrades for computers using older Intel Atom ‘Clover Trail’ processors without warning or explanation. Conversely it also said new Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Ryzen silicon will also be made incompatible with older versions of Windows to force them onto Windows 10.Brutal snobbery: confirmed.
Once again, Darth Microsoft is altering the deal, making Windows 10 look like an ever-less-attractive option for organizations (and individuals) who may not want to be forced to upgrade all of their hardware in order to switch to an operating system that they're not what wild about, to start with. Still, even with the banality-of-evil tone of this new announcement, something feels slightly different about this latest broken promise by the Redmond crew. Given how horrible the optics of this are, and how self-destructive this move should be to Microsoft's attempts to woo enterprise customers over to Windows 10, I have to think that this is almost entirely a cost-cutting measure.
After laying off unknown thousands of their staff, Microsoft are clearly not done cutting costs in their stagnant Windows 10 operations, as they shift focus to the Azure and other cloud services. Supporting the entire range of Windows-capable hardware wasn't luring users over to the new OS, so it makes a brutal sort of sense to stop doing that, awful PR be damned. It's possible that this was always the plan, that Microsoft never planned to continue supporting older hardware in spite of promising to do so, but it doesn't feel like that to me; it feels like Microsoft's ongoing failure to lure customers to Windows 10 is starting to stress their organization and operations, more broadly. The cracks have been slow to show, but this might be the cracks starting to show, no matter what their share price is doing on any given day.