> sold relatively recently will have significantly less time supported.

OK but the 2025 EOL wasn't a secret, it was announced alongside the Windows 10 release a decade ahead of time, as well as the extended support date of 2029.

So you had a decade of notice for EOL, and currently you have 4 years of notice that you'll need a TPM 2.0.

Maybe you think that's unreasonable, but I'm not so sure.

99% of buyers don't know what a TPM is or if they have one. They also weren't shown such a notice when they bought their PC at Walmart.

Virtually nobody buying a windows machine new today knows that their new machine has less than 4 years of life if it's 7th gen if they even know it's 7th gen.

There may still be machines in retail channels sold new next year since Intel merely stopped taking orders for said chips last year.

If it's EOL in 2025 you could have machines sold new that become unsupported in 3 years whereas the average lifespan of a PC is 6 years.

Why are you defending a metacorp planning on creating untold tons of toxic waste and destruction of millions of dollars of consumer value.

It ought to be illegal to sell a new cimp with less than 6 years of supported life from date of sale and buyers ought to be entitled to a partial refund if this promise isn't kept with the retail seller expecting to get their money back from the OEM who has a contract with suppliers like Microsoft not to do stupid shit like this to necessitate such refunds in the first place.

I'm not defending Microsoft, personally my belief is that:

a) The intel stuff they're pushing is silly and should be loosened, and made part of their Windows 10 label OEM thing

b) TPM 2.0 will be a massive step forward for security, possibly the most significant since XP Service Pack 2, and I understand why Microsoft is getting aggressive about this.

Frankly, I think most people discussing this don't seem to know what the hell they're talking about. I'm really just presenting facts.

What is the practical benefit of TPM 2.0?

If you're asking about TPM in general, the answer is, among other things, cryptographic identity tied to a device. So, assuming it's everywhere, no more phishing for user credentials, no more password re-use attacks, no session exfiltration, and those are just a few - there are many more. Personally, I would rank those threats as being the top threats for the vast majority of users and organizations, so that's not nothing.

If you're asking about 1.2 vs 2.0, 2.0 makes considerable progress on the original specification both in terms of hardening of the TPM and its capabilities, allowing for it to be used in a much more broad set of authorization and authentication schemes.

If tomorrow every user had a TPM, and major services supported it, it would massively change the security landscape - I really can't stress enough that it eliminates some of the most widely exploited attacker techniques.

It wasn't announced that eol also meant "and throw away your perfectly working hardware"

> you have 4 years of notice that you'll need a TPM 2.0.

It's very uncharacteristic for Windows. Totally unprecedented, both for consumers with no tech knowledge and for the more technically inclined.

This is the first time in the history of Windows where a large portion of the install base will be (ostensibly) totally unable to upgrade.

When you buy a Mac or a Chromebook, you expect this sort of thing. On Windows, though, the expectation has been that windows would at least try to run on the oldest platform even remotely usable, e.g. Win10 (2015) would run on the old Core 2 processors (2006).

It's not the end of the world, it just feels a bit slimy. I'm not one to cry "planned obsolescence" but this restriction (if it's hard enforced and not "just" requirements for OEM licensing) is clearly an attempt to nudge people to buy new hardware. Which is fine. Just unexpected.