Why? It's not like Windows 10 will suddenly stop working for you. That will keep being supported until 2025 which, at 10 years total, is quite plenty. Sure, you won't get any of the new shiny features of Win 11 but if you're PCs are so old, then you won't need them anyway.

Also, feel free to switch you and your family to Linux.

To be fair, Windows 10 will be 10 years old at that time and their PC will be over 11 years old which is an eternity in technology time. 11 year old HW is not very energy efficient and is often vulnerable to various side channel attacks that need SW mitigations which make them even slower. Newer HW is more secure, while being more energy efficient to boot. Even if Microsoft would continue support for ancient hardware, the chances are Nvidia and AMD would drop driver support for what they consider to be legacy hardware, like they alwasy do.

I also keep my 15 year old PC (Core 2 Quad) going for my parents but I moved it to Linux as I can't expect Microsoft to keep supporting such old hardware for free forever and at some point, the SW and HW industry have to keep moving forward and that sometimes means removing support for legacy stuff even if that means cutting some users with old hardware off (they still can keep using their systems after all, just not run the latest and greatest SW).

Is Apple doing better officially supporting hardware overs 10 years old?

No its not. For casual use, 15 year old PC is very much fine and works perfectly in many use cases ie for our parents. You may swap for SSD but that's it, it can be blazingly fast for the tasks required.

Forcing everybody to move into Linux when they can barely handle Windows is quite a stretch, there might be licences to software which won't work, same for hardware. Lets not forget whole world isn't on HN level of computer expertise to debug issues.

I doubt it. The first Athlon 64 was launched late 2003.

Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You can keep using whatever HW and OS you have as long as you wish. What's your point?

It's a rolling release, so with 21H1 it's only half a year old.

And I don't care what they do. It will be the last Windows for me.

To be fair, the PC won't be that old. Every single machine with Zen (1st gen Ryzen and Threadrippers), for example.

Come, now, we all know it's mostly hobbyists keeping 15+ year old PCs running with Linux

I had a bunch of old Dell Precision workstations and I eventually got shot of them because my electric bills were becoming more and more eye-watering. I built a cheap PC that (with virtualisation) can carry out all these old machines workloads and more, and my power bills were a fraction of what they were previously. Quite an eye opener for me with regards to how energy efficient new stuff is.

I love fighting planned obsolescence and reducing e-waste by repairing and keeping stuff working as long as possible but at some point old hardware should be replaced if funds allow it for the sake of energy efficiency and the environment.

Aye, I was thinking more about older desktop machines rather than laptops, which by their nature are designed to be as power efficient as possible to extend how long you can run off of just the battery.

And again just to restate to others, it's worth upgrading if you can afford it. After I dumped those old Dells, I reckon I saved the nearly the price of a whole PC each year after kitting out with newer gear (until the price of electric went up again).

Apropos Windows 11, it seems there may be ways around the TPM requirements, though not ideal:

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm...

What I'm trying to say: 10 years is not that much for computers these day?

While this is true, Windows 8.1 started to pester me about my hardware constantly on an older (but not old at the time) PC when it was getting towards EOL with an obnoxious popup.

I think there weren't that many advances in raw speed. The only thing it is missing is HEVC hardware decoding (i don't remember if it has h.264, possibly not)

What I'm trying to say: 10 years is not that much for computers these day?