- Windows 11 is coming, but the compatibility
is a nightmare.
So we have spent the last few days digging into Windows 11.
And well, Microsoft, we got to talk.
'Cause this (oof) makes no sense.
If you're using a PC that's more than three years old,
odds are, it is not compatible with Windows 11.
Everyone pause. Cut the music.
Let me just say that one more time.
If you were using a PC that's just three years old,
you might not be able to upgrade
to the new version of Windows.
Now to put things in context, this is a massive shift.
You can run Windows 10 on nearly 20 year old,
Pentium 4 processor.
Now don't just think that you can stick
on Windows 10 forever either.
Microsoft have already set October 2025
as the end of life support for Windows 10.
The real story here is that even if you have a brand new PC
personally, I think there's a very good reason
to be concerned.
Before we get our pitchforks out
let's try to understand what's going on here.
Windows 11 is a fairly major upgrade,
one that's free and not only is there a fresh coat of paint
on the design side,
but there are welcome changes under the hood
for what really is the first brand new version of Windows
since 2015.
Now we talked about some of this
in our first Windows 11 video
which certainly wasn't based on a leaked build or anything.
And I actually discussed a lot of these with Panos Panay,
the chief product officer of both devices
and importantly Windows on the most recent episode
of my podcast, "The Test Drivers" shameless plug.
So reading into this a little closer,
Microsoft claims that Windows 11 is a big step up
with regards to security, almost more so than performance.
Of course, Windows has had a long history
of being very heavily targeted by malware and viruses.
So when you look at it from that side,
it makes sense, right?
This is a more secure version of Windows 11.
And if you're running 11 on your system,
you need to have all of these hardware security features
built in.
This seems like a play toward clearing the decks
on older, less secure hardware,
which does somewhat explain
why they're currently targeting pretty much all systems
that run Windows 10 to run Windows 11.
But as soon as you take a closer look
at these specific CPU's that are supported,
well, it's a pretty short list.
According to Microsoft to run Windows 11 as of right now,
you will need an eighth gen Intel Core processor or newer.
Ryzen 3000 or newer and Qualcomm 850 and higher right now.
Now to be fair, they are testing seventh gen Intel Core
and Ryzen 1000 right now,
but even so that is a pretty damn limited selection of CPUs.
For context, one of my favorite statistics
is looking at this Steam hardware survey.
As of right now, 96% of Steam gamers are running Windows 10.
Now unfortunately, Steam doesn't break down
the exact CPU models, but over 50% of people
have either a dual or quad core processor.
And considering that the most popular graphics card
is five-year-old GTX 1060,
I bet you that the majority of those gaming PCs
are just simply too old to run Windows 11.
So technically, any system with a one gigahertz,
dual core 64 bit processor, four gigabytes of RAM,
and 64 gigabytes of storage,
should be capable of running Windows 11,
which is slightly above what you need for Windows 10,
but there is a big but.
You also need a TPM 2.0 chip on board.
Now this is a little security chip,
either built into your CPU or motherboard,
and it's used for things like securing passwords,
encryption, making sure you have device integrity,
and it's standard on pretty much any system
from the last few years.
Where you won't find it is on older systems.
And that is the major reason why so many computers
just simply will not be able to upgrade
to Windows 11 right now.
I don't think it's a stretch.
That if Microsoft doesn't back down
from these system requirements
and specifically that TPM 2.0 requirement,
Windows 11 could be something like Windows 8,
an update that a lot of people skip.
And eventually it causes people
to just completely sour on the idea
of upgrading to Windows 11 entirely.
So why would you want to upgrade to Windows 11?
So the first and most obvious this thing
is certainly some of the new stuff
on the look side of things.
So for now I've installed the Windows 11 developer,
insider build on this Microsoft Surface Laptop Go.
This is by no means a high-end system, but importantly,
it does meet all of the minimum specs,
including having that all important TPM 2.0 module.
Now, something that if you've only seen,
some of those the leaked builds
that we certainly didn't do anything on,
but theoretically were floating around the internet,
- [Ken] Yeah theoretically.
- Theoretically, you would kind of miss some of the stuff
that's actually done on the UI side,
because that was a very early build.
So one of the things that I really appreciate
is the additional attention to detail
when it comes to things like animations, right?
So I'm gonna go full screen, I wanna go to the left,
I wanna go to the right,
everything is in a much more fluid manner
than it was on Windows 10.
With something like the systems setting screen
has been entirely redesigned for Windows 11.
There are a lot of nice improvements here,
but I think one of the things that's most interesting to me
is the kind of hardware that you can run this on.
This is a Surface Laptop Go.
However, something else that can actually run Windows 11
is this, the HP Stream.
- [Ken] Oh God.
- So the HP Stream is quite literally the minimum spec
allowed by Windows 11.
You got a dual core, 1.1 gigahertz processor,
four gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of storage.
Now of course though, the important thing to keep in mind
is that this has that all-important TPM 2.0 chip,
which means that with some patience,
I was able to get Windows 11 up and running on here
without any real difficulties.
And my immediate thought is this feels essentially the same
performance wise as Windows 10.
There's nothing here that makes me go,
oh my God, it's so slow any more than it did before.
There's no scenario that I can imagine.
The Microsoft can make the argument
that they're dropping support for devices
like this Surface Pro 5, which believe me,
we tried to install Windows 11 on,
but because even though it has a seventh gen processor,
it doesn't have the TPM support.
It didn't work.
There's no scenario that you can tell me.
Their performance is the reason why so many systems
are going to lose compatibility with Windows 11.
So Ken, why do you think the TPM
is going to revolutionize my Windows 11 experience?
- Let's talk about this
from what we have out here today, right?
Let's say you wanna go to a store and buy a Ryzen 5000 CPU
latest and greatest and supported motherboard.
Tell the audience what our biggest problem
is here in the office,
going to a store like Microcenter or Best Buy today
and getting our hardware to work.
- It would be installing your CPU,
trying to get your computer to boot for the first time
and it doesn't work entirely because the BIOS
is not supporting that particular CPU.
You can update it, but then you have to swap the chip.
You have to take off your cooler.
It's a bit of a mess and it's something
we have to deal with a lot.
- And we have to deal with that a lot today.
Now imagine, a consumer goes into a store,
buys Ryzen 5000, let's say in the best case scenario,
their motherboard works.
But if it took this long from the launch of 5000
to have some motherboards have the BIOS to make that work,
imagine, having Windows 11
needing this to be a necessary thing
in these boards to be enabled by default.
And you're waiting for all of the motherboards in stock
to be cycled
and actually have that automatically enabled.
Otherwise the consumer has to do a lot of work on their own,
which I mean look benefit of the doubt,
a lot of people that will build their own PCs
might find a way to make that work.
But there are multiple points in this chain
where this change is a lot.
- One of the biggest sort of things to me,
when you look at the contrast here
with the support for Windows 11
is to look at what Apple is doing.
Obviously, phones, computers are a little different,
but the iPhone 6s is now going into its seventh year
of support, right?
Mac OS is right around that same time.
Even with the Mac Pro it's actually closer
to like eight or nine years.
The reason, and I believe this,
that Apple drop support for older devices
is because they don't think that the performance
is going to be up to the task
for whatever kind of features they add.
Now you can agree or disagree with that.
I think there are certainly an argument
to be made that every operating system
should just let you do your thing.
It might not be recommended,
but if I wanna try to load up the latest version of Mac OS
just let me do it on an old system and if it sucks
that's on me, right?
I do kind of subscribe to that train of thought.
But if you're gonna remove older systems,
do it for good reason like performance
not for some arbitrary reason, like "better security".
Which, what?
- As you mentioned earlier in the video,
when an HP Stream,
that is probably one of the wimpiest computers
that we've ever seen, for sale today,
is more better supported for Windows 11
than a 1000 series Ryzen.
- It's crazy town.
- It's absolutely crazy.
And just because of one little tiny chip,
and they haven't even clearly defined
the whole security thing is with TMP.
So it's like TPM,
- It's fine. It's fine.
- I don't even, it doesn't even matter.
- We're like 30 minutes in this video
and we still can't keep it straight.
- I hate this whole thing.
It's just...
- Look. I'm gonna just lay my cards on the table here.
I don't think this is a big surprise.
I don't think this policy is going to hold.
I think Microsoft is getting way more backlash on this
than they're gonna be willing to sort of take.
And my thought is, they're going to relax the restriction.
They're gonna recommend TPM 2.0,
maybe some features will be locked behind it.
- This is more trouble than it's worth.
- Absolutely.
- Like granted, again,
this is all coming up on the fact that we're talking
about something that isn't even in beta yet.
This is just dev preview.
- But the operating system itself is actually pretty close
to the RTM like release.
A lot of what I think they're doing between now and October,
whenever Windows 11 comes out
is more of like the little bug fixing and the patches,
but like the actual core operating system,
as far as I understand,
is pretty close to what will be shipping later.
- Yeah.
- Just, look, if you're Microsoft,
you've been riding a great wave of positivity lately, right?
And I mean, we both said it
after watching the Windows 11 launch event,
wow, there's a lot of great stuff coming.
They have so many of these good guy moves
of like all their stuff they're doing
with the Android apps and with the Microsoft store,
or Windows store and everything.
Why would they throw that away on something
as arbitrary as this.
- Consumers will just see this version of Windows
does not work with my computer.
In worst case, you bought that computer
or built that computer this year, and it just doesn't work.
These things aren't cheap either.
- No. Like a PC should last you five years minimum,
6, 7, 8 years.
I mean, these are all totally what the hardware
is capable of.
And it's totally what I mean,
you look at something that launched with Windows 10.
I mean, that was 2015.
Like stuff is old and yet still runs it completely fine.
Like it's not a performance thing.
It's a completely boneheaded policy thing.
- And let me throw a thing that Matt thrown in
in another conversation that we were having about this.
This is the worst time to do stuff like this, right?
It's not easy to buy computer hardware period.
Whether it's a laptop or desktop,
the chip shortage is crazy all around.
And we're not even talking
about how much these TPM modules cost in the aftermarket.
- Even if your system is capable of taking one,
'cause a lot of systems, is a little questionable
on whether your motherboard supports it,
whether your CPU supports it.
It gets very, very complicated
to actually know if this is all gonna be up and running.
Most be like whatever.
So very curious, what do you think about Windows 11?
And do you think Microsoft will stick with this decision
or will they backtrack and allow anyone
to essentially install Windows 11?
I'm very curious to see what you think
in the comments below.
Also make sure to go and check out my episode
of the Test Drivers with Panos Panay
where unfortunately we recorded with him
before learning all this stuff.
I'd love to ask him about it now, but check that out.
And until next time, Ken, will you play us out
with a wonderful ode to Windows of ye olden days?
(mimics Windows shutdown sound)
That was beautiful.
- Thank you.
- There's a tear in my eye now.