Best I can tell you're arguing that 9% market share by units sold is some kind of failure. Now go look at who has the highest market share by revenue. Hint: it's a fruit company.
At least as recently as 2014, I was aware of some random Windows 3.1 (yes) machines running in a corporate data center owned by a very recognizable Fortune 500 company. At the time, they were upgrading all their Windows PCs from XP to 7 and this 3.1 box showed up. I confirmed that it was, in fact, real.
True story- when XP was released, all of the people "in the know" (among Windows users) used Win2k.
Nobody wanted to upgrade to XP. It was called the Fisher-Price OS because of the way they made the GUI colorful with oversized icons/shapes and rounded corners everywhere.
The old rule of thumb was that every other version was the good one, so people were naturally skeptical of XP (and after having seen ME, who could blame them). Not sure if that holds anymore, or if there is a good one.
>You can imagine the storage tank as a large thermos flask, but it never gets empty. The hot water with a temperature of 98 degrees Celsius is at the top, cooler water layers at the bottom, with the cold water still having a temperature of about 50 degrees. A pipeline of about 400 meters connects the storage tank to the pump house where four pumps ensure that hot water reaches the tank. It is pumped into the top of the storage tank and is also taken out here when needed. If hot water is added at the top, the same amount of cold water is taken out at the bottom. So only the quantity ratio between hot and cooler water in the storage facility changes but not the total amount of water. At maximum output of 200 Megawatt thermal, the storage facility can provide heat for about 13 hours.
It appears to be resistive when the electric part is being used, but looks like it also takes waste heat from a coal combined heat and power unit, and some other industrial heat sources.
I think the electric heat part is to help provide load balancing so theyre probably aiming for cheap and simple as it'll be used intermittently.
It is possible to have heat pumps at the other end of district heat systems, to let individual units pull heat from the shared source and also feed it back im when in AC mode.
Good point (I'm personally on your side), but what is needed from both EV-cautionary and ICE-cautionary commenters is some odds ratio or data on both, rather than impressionistic and qualitative quips about either.
I don't understand this logic. The vast majority of people don't care what version of Windows they're running. They'll just keep running Windows 10 without a care in the world. Just like they keep running Windows 7.
For an example of just how many people don't care about EOL'd operating systems:
Microsoft's mainstream support for Windows 7 ended in January 2015 (and paid "Extended Security Updates" service ended in January 2020) and yet 21% of Firefox users are still running Windows 7:
Steam users are not a "fair representation of all users" either. The gamer demographic is biased towards newer and faster hardware than the average user, and the newest greatest hardware is only going to be supported on the latest OS version(s).
I agree. I claim that both sets are biased, whch is why we can't use the steam charts or Firefox usage data to draw any conclusions about the broader population
I think Firefox users are much more likely to be contrarian with their software decisions. I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to extrapolate from from data on Firefox users to the general population
Perhaps, because win7 is known for being "the last good windows" with some privacy. It may or may not be true, but a lot of people are adamant about not using linux while also trying to maintain privacy, hence they use win7. I imagine such users would probably use a browser like firefox.
Nah there was definitely some kind of fundamental qualitative change from 7 to 8/10. I dont think the post-7 versions of windows will ever be loved like 7
When Windows XP PCs started to become obsolete, one way to extend their life (at least for people that only used them to browse the web) was to install Firefox. I've actually helped someone do this when their freemail provider stopped supporting IE 8. There's people for whom a new computer is an expensive purchase and they will use it until the wheels fall off.
Not sure how that’s relevant to someone who can’t upgrade because of unsupported hardware. You can’t get autoupgraded to an OS your hardware doesn’t support. And most such people would happily continue using Windows 10 without caring (or knowing, most likely)
I don't think Microsoft would want to make that same mistake again. I would expect Microsoft start pushing Windows 11 automatically through Windows Update for anyone on Windows 10, or at least start pushing heavily through popups/notifications to start the update like they did with Windows 10.
That wouldn’t work if the person’s computer doesn’t support Windows 11, though, which is the entire argument the blog post is making. That because windows 11 won’t work people will just throw away their computers and create more electronic waste.
I think at the end of the day, they are happier with an illegitimate Windows user, than a non-Windows user. They'll nag, push, try everything to annoy, but they won't lock you out completely, because that could mean losing you for good.
Of course, I can only infer this from their past behavior.
Remember all the talk about "Windows as a service"?
Given what's happened so far, I fully expect them to try something like that at some point. "We only offer subscriptions of the latest version, and your current hardware doesn't meet our minimum requirements, so you'll have to replace it to continue using Windows." Maybe it'll trigger a mass exodus to Linux --- or perhaps more likely, back to older and cracked pre-subscription versions of Windows.
A similar scenario is not impossible. Somehow it has become acceptable to use a always-online workflows. There are complete lines of products that won't work at all if you're not online, and some will switch off after a certain time (like Adobe). There is an enormous push in that direction from all industries. People give in without any resistance. It's become normal and acceptable that pieces of code on all your devices connect to different services and send data you have no idea about. If an app stops working because you lose the internet connection, somehow it's not the problem of the app but yours. So I can imagine a scenario similar to the one you describe in a decade or two.
By cutting off at 8th Gen and TPM 1.2+2.0, they’re cutting off a lot of current and high end systems built by enthusiasts, while supporting far slower and inferior PCs.
That’s the problem. No one’s arguing they’re chasing off cheap Celeron, they’re trying to get rid of even some Threadrippers and multi-socket setups, that could have 128GB or more of RAM, for “performance”.
So, what's in those generations that might actually matter to Microsoft? As you say, it's unlikely to be about performance. Is it some instruction set, or feature flags? It's unlikely to be about virtualization capabilities, as Intel still happily sells the newest chips "differentiated" to be virtually challenged. Did those generations introduce some crypto algorithm/primitive that Microsoft doesn't want to go without? A new system management mode? On-die microphone?
Intel sales is desperate to stop brand loyalty vanishing, processors losing relevance, while Microsoft is trying to recuperate costs on cancelled Windows 10X code. Those are suspicions I have.
The “only the latest Intel enable $use_case” cliche is their default marketing narrative. Microsoft or AMD or NVIDIA normally don’t do that.
This is not the Windows Logo program, which is intended for OEMs.
There do not need to be any CPUID checks to exclude processors; just a random update will not work and Microsoft will shrug it off, well, that CPU is not on the supported list anyway.
> I don't think Microsoft would want to make that same mistake again.
The mistake of not pushing it? I still remember the uproar when people needed to Google how to say "no" to the upgrade dialog - if it did not simply install without asking, that is. I honestly can't see how they would push Windows 11 any harder.
I prefer Windows 7. I like it's UI better. MS' ideal world would apparently not include any OS besides Windows 10 and 11, which is a great shame because i think there's so many great UI features in older Windows.
Win10 is fine for most people, and each benefit of Win11 can seem a little "niche", but lots of people will fit into at least one of those little niches. Gamers in particular, who have gotten perfectly acceptable performance out of e.g. Ryzen 1x00 CPUs, will need to upgrade to get the most out of their fast SSDs or other features like Auto HDR.
The Intel 8th gneration was introduced in 2017. So people who bought a computer in 2016 can still push it to ~9 years of service life, which is pretty good for an average Windows computer if they manage to do it. I imagine your average Windows consumer will have replaced a computer once already in that span once all the installed crap has stalled the computer to inoperable speeds.
This honestly doesn't really strike me as a major issue. Especially since smartphones have like less than three years of security fixes on average.
New Thinkpads in 2017 (T470/X270/etc.) were still using 7th generation Intel chips, so it is for some users a forced update after eight years.
That said, people have hacked the leaked OEM version of Windows 11 to install on to 2010 or 2011 vintage computers, so there’s a reasonable chance Microsoft will not make 2018 era computers a hard cutoff for Windows 11 installs. Even if they do, there will probably be workarounds around allowing it to be installed it on Kaby Lake and older CPUs; we know right now Windows 11 will install on an older computer without significant issue (with some hacking, depending on just how old the computer is).
For the record, I find the three year lifecycle for Android phones very annoying. I may have my next phone be an iPhone (they can have 5-6 year support lifetimes, if I get a brand new model when it comes out) or hope the Fairphone becomes available in the US.
>This honestly doesn't really strike me as a major issue.
You're saying this from a position of privilege. There are a lot of people that don't enjoy the same financial security that you and I do that will be affected immensely by this. I know a few and this is not news in their favor.
Working in PC repair, a majority of my customers can't just up and buy a new PC just because Microsoft arbitrarily decides that whatever they have isn't good enough, even though it has sufficient performance.
The argument that the address bar is too complex and we need to dumb it down is irritating.
If we want to regress to AOL keywords then great. I would prefer we stick with an address bar. Let those who can learn the reason it exists and how to use it, learn.
edit - btw I don't mean to infer parent poster argues this point, however it is often the reason 'designers' argue for these kinds of regressions.
Yes, as someone who only occasionally uses a Mac, I always think Safari is broken until I remember Apple tries to hide everything from you for your own good.
Pure speculation, but maybe because most of the commentary on this was coming from developers.
I don't have an iPhone anymore but used to, and it was no problem that I only saw the domain, because on my phone I rarely cared about the specific address. When I'm working it's a bitch because quickly knowing the full address is useful all the time, and even at home much the same because I'm used to interacting heavily with my address bar.
I'd imagine that most people, even on their laptops, are closer to the former situation, so it's not hard for it to have relatively widespread support.
On a phone there simply isn't space to display much more than the domain name. Picking some subset of the URL to display is unavoidable, and the domain name usually going to be a better subset than the obvious other options of the start or the end of the URL. As such I see nothing wrong with it there. On desktops you do typically have enough space to show the full URL, so I dislike it showing only the domain name.
As a user it's often also helpful to understand the context of what you're reading (as long as the site has a descriptive URL structure) - is this a blog post, featured article, sponsored article, when was it written.... a good URL conveys a lot of useful information and hiding this seems highly counterproductive.
I am also very much against hiding "www.", but that's mostly from a developer/devops perspective. https/http can be hidden behind an icon, that's fine since it's a binary option, but that's as far as I'd go in accepting stripping information from URL's.
That's the kind of usage that only happens because it's available. No matter what internal information is presented to people, some will find a way of using that. But part of designing software is to curate what information to show the user, not dump an arbitrary pile of cryptic internal details on them.
URLs are mostly not fit for human consumption and don't even reliably show you what page you're on. They're a stinky skidmark on the otherwise human-accessible web.
I hope we can eventually have two clearly distinct parts to URLS - a simple domain name without www. or https:// and clearly separate, a human-readable name for the page without internal implementation details like filename extensions and symbols. Some sites are pretty close to this, New York Times is easily understandable but still filled with slashes and a redundant extension. Eg: "nytimes.com/2021/06/10/us/politics/justice-department-leaks-trump-administration.html". Hacker News is too but has a human-unfriendly "item?id=" before the (good, imo) incrementing decimal integer, not hex, not random, not padded ID number.
I'm 100% with you, but I know plenty of fairly computer-literate people who wouldn't know how to interpret a URL, and wouldn't know what to do with that information if they did.
I don't know how those two stances, or the positions between them, break down across the population, but at minimum it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it leans towards not understanding or caring.
Who is going to advocate for users if not developers? It’s like giving out that civil rights lawyers are lawyers so why is their work relevant to ordinary citizens
How is this not advocating for users? They tested the idea based on a metric they hoped would improve among users, found it didn't work, and so left it as is.
That the comments about it mostly come from developers or similarly tech-literate people is neither here nor there, comments are inherently personal. When I post on a forum about a feature, I'm generally presenting only my own opinion. When I'm implementing a feature, I'm generally basing it on the opinions of users, as best I can gather them.
Safari doesn't have enough marketshare for people to get very upset about it, and more importantly you can turn it off, which people did not trust Google to do.
