Microsoft Uses Fallacies to Lure Users to Windows 11
If it were up to Microsoft, 2025 would be the year of the significant migration from Windows 10 to Windows 11. However, the arguments should be taken with a grain of salt.
In a blog post following CES, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi says that 2025 will be the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh. It’s a remarkable statement, considering Windows 11 has been around for a while, and anyone with Windows 10 has had to click away from installing Windows 11 multiple times over the past year to avoid accidentally installing the system.
Mehdi also cites figures from IDC stating that eighty percent of companies will renew their PC portfolio by the end of this year, and 70 percent of consumers will do so in the next two years.
We must qualify that this renewal has nothing to do with the new features or the insane popularity of Windows 11. IDC itself says that this is because support for Windows 10 ends in October. Companies that want to keep their Windows devices secure must upgrade, which often means renewing older devices. The fact that many companies are switching this year is because Microsoft gives them little choice.
At the same time, the marketing executive suggests that Windows 11 is more advantageous for AI. ‘We believe Windows 11 is available when the world needs it most, delivering the advanced AI capabilities and modern security benefits that customers expect in 2025 and beyond. The leading edge of AI innovation will happen on Windows.’
That, too, is very relative. It is true that Copilot only works on Windows 11 and not on Windows 10, but otherwise, most AI applications also work on Windows 10. Many of them, like ChatGPT, run in the cloud and work via a common browser on almost any computer with an internet connection.
Operating system subordinate
At the same time, it’s not the version of Windows that determines your PC’s AI capabilities but the graphics card and (to a lesser extent) the CPU and the amount of RAM. A Windows 11 with a 2018 Nvidia card is less suited for AI than a Windows 10 PC with the latest graphics cards that Nvidia is releasing this week. As far as we know, they also work on different operating systems.
Finally, it should be said that Microsoft likes to exaggerate Copilot’s capabilities. When it introduced the latest Surface Pro 11 a little less than a year ago, it was accompanied by promises that you could ask Copilot to change settings, for example, or ask questions about your system. When Data News reviewed that laptop a few months later, it discovered that those functions did not work. Copilot turned out to be little more than a mediocre copy of ChatGPT.
