Windows 11 Released

Windows 11 was announced on 24 June 2021 and became generally available on 5 October 2021. The rollout was phased: Microsoft said it expected "all eligible devices to be offered the free upgrade to Windows 11 by mid-2022."

It is worth being precise about "the last Windows". On 7 May 2015, at Microsoft's Ignite conference, developer evangelist Jerry Nixon said: "Right now we're releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we're all still working on Windows 10." That was one employee, not a corporate announcement—but when The Verge asked, Microsoft did not disown it: "Recent comments at Ignite about Windows 10 are reflective of the way Windows will be delivered as a service," a spokesperson said, while adding that "We aren't speaking to future branding at this time." Six years later, it was the hedge that proved load-bearing.

The new OS arrived with a centred Start menu, rounded windows, the refreshed Fluent design, Snap Layouts, Microsoft Teams integration, and gaming work such as DirectStorage and Auto HDR. But what the industry would end up remembering was not the UI or DirectStorage. It was the hardware requirements.

TPM 2.0 and the "Hundreds of Millions Cut Off" Argument

Windows 11's system requirements were qualitatively different from any prior Windows major update.

• TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module 2.0) — mandatory
• Secure Boot — mandatory
• 8th-generation Intel Core (2017 onwards) or equivalent AMD Ryzen 2000-series or newer CPU
• At least 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage

The CPU-generation line was unusually harsh. PCs shipped in 2016–2017 with 7th-generation Core (Kaby Lake) — only four or five years old at the time of the announcement — were officially unsupported. Even Microsoft's own Surface Studio 2 was missing from the launch list; on 27 August 2021 Microsoft added a handful of 7th-generation parts—Core X-series, Xeon W, and the Core i7-7820HQ the Studio 2 uses—and the i7-7820HQ only on devices shipped with DCH-based drivers.

The most-cited estimate of the scale came from the IT asset-management vendor Lansweeper at the end of September 2021. Across an estimated 30 million devices in 60,000 organisations, 44.4% of workstations met the CPU requirement and 52.55% had a qualifying TPM enabled—so more than half of workplace PCs failed on something. That is a business-endpoint population rather than the world's Windows install base, but it pointed at a figure in the hundreds of millions.

Microsoft's framing—raising the security floor—and the counter-argument—that the OS was structurally forcing the obsolescence of still-functional PCs—ran side by side for the next four years. Microsoft did not soften. On 3 December 2024 the Windows IT Pro Blog nailed the requirement down by name: "By instituting TPM 2.0 as a non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows, we elevate the security benchmark." A support document updated the same month says installing on devices that do not meet the requirements "is not recommended", is unsupported, and that anyone who has done it should roll back to Windows 10. Several outlets reported at the time that Microsoft had dropped the TPM 2.0 requirement; the primary sources say the opposite.

The Android Subsystem — Loud at Launch, Silent at End

One headline feature of the June announcement was the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA)—a virtual machine carrying a Linux kernel and AOSP 11, so that Android apps could run on Windows. It did not make the 5 October release. A preview reached Beta Channel Insiders in the United States on 20 October 2021, with an opening catalogue of about fifty apps and games.

Google Play never came to it. Microsoft partnered instead with the Amazon Appstore—a store far behind Google Play in both catalogue size and quality. "Android runs on Windows, but almost none of the apps you want are available" was the lived experience, and WSA drifted.

Microsoft gave notice of the end in March 2024. Microsoft Learn now states it plainly: "Starting March 5, 2025, Windows Subsystem for Android™ and the Amazon Appstore are no longer available in the Microsoft Store." Three and a half years from preview to shutdown. The "Android runs on Windows" message that decorated the Windows 11 launch quietly faded as a feature almost no one used.

DirectStorage, Copilot, and 23H2 / 24H2

Among the less photogenic improvements, DirectStorage earned developer and gamer respect. By moving data from NVMe SSDs to the GPU without routing decompression through the CPU, it targeted game load times—the same technology stack as Xbox Series X/S, now arriving on PC. A genuine generational marker.

The trajectory of Windows 11 across 2023–2024 was, however, defined by Copilot. Copilot in Windows arrived in preview on 26 September 2023, in the "Moment 4" update to version 22H2; 23H2 itself shipped on 31 October 2023. On 20 May 2024 Microsoft defined the Copilot+ PC category—40 TOPS or more of NPU, 16 GB of memory, 256 GB of storage—with the first machines on sale from 18 June 2024; version 24H2 became generally available on 1 October 2024. Recall, the headline Copilot+ feature, was pulled from the launch after privacy and security criticism and did not reach Copilot+ PCs broadly until April 2025, nearly a year after it was unveiled.

Windows 11's positioning shifted from "successor to Windows 10" to "the doorway to the AI-PC era". The hardware bar moved up another notch.

Adoption — Nearly Four Years to Overtake Windows 10

Windows 10 moved fast: on 30 June 2016, less than a year after release, Microsoft said it was "running on more than 350 million devices"—the company's own figure. Windows 11 did not. Statcounter's share of the Windows desktop base:

• July 2024 — Windows 10 at 66.04%, Windows 11 at 29.75%
• July 2025 — Windows 11 at 50.24% passes Windows 10 (46.84%) for the first time, three years and nine months after release
• November 2025 — Windows 11 53.7% against Windows 10 42.7%

Statcounter's sample is page visits across roughly 1.5 million sites and mixes consumer and business devices. With that caveat, the trend was unmistakable: Windows 11 took nearly four years to pass Windows 10, and six weeks after end of support (14 October 2025) more than 40% of Windows PCs were still running Windows 10. Analysts attribute the stubbornness to old machines being kept as secondary devices after a purchase, slow enterprise change management, and Extended Security Updates—free for consumers in the EU, paid elsewhere—acting as a bridge rather than a deadline.

An OS Update as an Economic Event

What Windows 11 demonstrated was that a major OS update was not just a technical generation change but an economic event that forcibly obsoletes a huge population of PCs. The presence or absence of one chip — TPM 2.0 — left hundreds of millions of still-working PCs unable, officially, to move on.

From Microsoft's vantage point — raising the security floor, Pluton, virtualisation-based security, the runway to Copilot+ PCs — the strategy was coherent. From the user's vantage point, the experience was that a PC purchased six years ago was "no longer allowed to upgrade".

The gulf between those two perspectives would re-erupt four years later, when Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025, as a debate about environmental burden and electronic waste. Windows 11's launch already carried all of those threads quietly inside it.