alt Hacker News>Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.
Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD.
>but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11
They're not artificial. POPCNT / SSE4.2 became a hard requirement starting with Windows 11 24H2 (2024) (but that's for older CPUs), and only intel 8th gen and up have well functioning support for Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), HVCI (Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity), and MBEC (Mode-Based Execution Control). That's besides the TPM 2.0 which isn't actually a hard requirement or feature used by everyone, the other ones are way more important.
So at which point do we consider HW-based security a necessity instead of an artificial limit? With the ever increase in vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you gotta rip the bandaid at some point.
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You are just arguing the requirements are the requirements.
Are they as important as stated? Microsoft says so. Everyone here loves and trusts them, right?
Windows 11 is running on my ThinkPad T530. Its CPU is very nearly 14 years old.
What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?
> You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have.
A key difference between regular software and Windows is that almost nobody buys Windows, they get it pre-installed on a new PC. So a new PC purchase means a new Windows license.