Home windows 11 struggling to flee the shadow of Home windows 10 • The Register
Many customers are nonetheless steering away from Home windows 11 as Microsoft continues to shovel AI into its flagship working system and prepares updates to mollify regulators.
The newest figures from Statcounter – there aren’t any official numbers from Microsoft itself – paint a grim image for the Home windows vendor. Home windows 10 doesn’t seem like going anyplace: in December 2022 it accounted for 67.95 % of the market share and by December 2023 the determine was 67.42 %.
Regardless of the updates lavished on Home windows 11 throughout that twelve-month timeframe, Home windows 10 nonetheless reigns supreme.
Home windows 11 grew from a market share of 16.97 % in December 2022 to 26.54 % in December 2023, though it’s debatable how a lot of that got here from Home windows 7 {hardware} being retired. The out of date working system’s share dropped from 11.2 % to three.35 % in the identical interval.
{Hardware} refresh stays a problem. Microsoft’s stringent {hardware} necessities are a blocker for some customers who may in any other case take into account shifting from Home windows 10 to Home windows 11. A PC able to working Home windows 10 would probably be simply as able to working Home windows 11 if not for Microsoft’s insistence {that a} latest CPU and different {hardware} are needed.
As any variety of guides on bypassing the {hardware} necessities clarify, there must be extra justification from a technical or efficiency perspective for Microsoft’s stance. With out a lot in the best way of tempting new options in Home windows 11, customers are voting with their ft.
Looking forward to 2024, aside from the anticipated look of one thing that might or might not be called Windows 12, essentially the most rapid replace for each Home windows 10 and 11 will probably be to make the working techniques adjust to EU regulation.
Microsoft has promised to replace Home windows 10 22H2 and Home windows 11 23H2 within the European Economic Area (EEA) with the power to uninstall Edge and internet search by way of Bing by March 6, 2024. EEA customers will even get new interoperability feeds and be requested in the event that they want to sync their Microsoft account with Home windows.
Nonetheless, aside from stripping out some failed experiments – such because the latest sunsetting of Windows Mixed Reality – there appears to be valuable little in Home windows 11 to tempt customers away from Home windows 10, and it doesn’t appear like this can change dramatically in 2024.
Even Microsoft seems to be dealing with as much as Home windows 10’s undesirable longevity. In November final yr, it announced that it could carry its AI-infused help, Copilot, to Home windows 10.
Shortly after, the corporate stated sure – there would be Extended Security Updates to maintain the lights on a bit of longer, as is customized. As standard, that is anticipated to come back at an as-yet unspecified price. ®