Microsoft: Tough Hardware Requirements for Windows 11 Are 'Non-Negotiable'

> "In conclusion, TPM 2.0 is not just a recommendation—it’s a necessity for maintaining a secure and future-proof IT environment with Windows 11," Hosking adds.

> with Windows 11

I'm not a programmer or a sysadmin or anything of the sort — am I reading this correctly? The way Hosking worded that makes me think TPM exists to solve a problem with Windows security?

Well when they said Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever, subject to online servicing going forward including the sophisticated telemetry and forced updates to accomplish it, it seemed believable at the time.

The stated goal was to get everybody on the same Windows version and keep them that way, which would seem to make lots of things simpler for so many people involved.

Lots of people took it at face value and everyone going back to some of the earliest Windows 7 machines was welcome to freely download Windows 10 whenever they were ready. After a while users began to be more strongly encouraged to leave W7 behind before eventually it was an automatic W10 "upgrade" unless unprecedented effort had been made by those who wanted to stay on W7.

And of course all the multitudes that preferred Windows 8 most of all ;)

Windows 11 continues to turn the screws in a most obvious way, that for many of these users Windows 10 will turn out to be the last Windows they ever use (whenever they have a choice). But not for the reason originally envisioned. Simply because Windows 11 came to exist. And made the user's once-expensive (and even more-expensive to replace) hardware un-necessarily obsolete. It was bad enough in its current form as of last year, and it's gotten way worse since then because they've put effort into making it worse. On top of the natural decline from the neglect to put that effort into at least staying as good as it was, if not making things better.

A lot of the stuff both then and now starts to look more clearly like weasel-words than ever.

Could end up with way more unpatched W10 machines in future years, of way more different "versions" than there ever were before W7 was declining in the mainstream. Even though Win8 was already out plus XP and Vista were not completely insignificant, there's more versions of W10 than all of them combined. When a need comes to re-install Windows, if W11 won't install, people will use older and older W10 recoveries from different years that don't seem like they might be autoupdated back to the same level of security they had before they formatted in preparation for the clean install.

On a much more threatening landscape than there was when W7 was scheduled to be deprived of ongoing correction to the security defects it had failed to fix before shipping to begin with.

I hate how they give the impression that 'hardware' is the issue when the reality is the lack of a TPM chip is the only hardware that's missing. It's bizarre that they're making TPM a requirement when most people don't care, and Windows 11 is such a downgrade in usability right now.

Doesn't really matter.