Windows 11 Released — The Retraction of "The Last Windows" and the TPM 2.0 Wall

On 5 October 2021, Microsoft formally released Windows 11. Six years after a Microsoft employee told a conference in 2015 that Windows 10 would be "the last version of Windows", that statement was quietly retracted.

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 initially excluded.

Industry estimates at launch suggested that more than 40% of the active Windows 10 install base had no official upgrade path. That meant hundreds of millions of machines.

Microsoft's framing — raising the security floor — and the counter-argument — that the OS was structurally forcing the obsolescence of still-functional PCs — would run side by side for the next four years. In December 2024, Microsoft would, fairly quietly, open a path to install Windows 11 on systems without TPM 2.0. Four years late.

The Android Subsystem — Loud at Launch, Silent at End

One headline feature at launch was the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), letting Android apps run natively on Windows.

Google Play never came to it. For licensing and policy reasons, Microsoft chose 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.

In March 2024 Microsoft announced WSA would be deprecated on 5 March 2025. The platform feature died inside four years. The "Android runs on Windows" message that decorated the Windows 11 launch event 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 directly from NVMe SSDs to the GPU, it cut load times by an order of magnitude — 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. Windows 11 23H2 (September 2023) added Copilot in Windows in preview, and 24H2 (October 2024) defined the new Copilot+ PC category — machines with NPUs delivering 40 TOPS or more, and features such as Recall, Live Captions and Cocreator gated to them.

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 — Three-Plus Years to Overtake Windows 10

Windows 10 took over 30% of the Windows base in its first year. Windows 11 did not.

• Late 2022 (just over one year in): roughly 16%
• Late 2024 (just over three years in): roughly 36%
• October 2025 (just before Windows 10 EOL): finally overtook Windows 10 at roughly 55%
• November–December 2025: retreated into the 53% range as some users rolled back to Windows 10

Statcounter samples carry their own bias, but the trend was unmistakable: Windows 11 took four years to push Windows 10 out of first place, and even at EOL roughly 40% of Windows PCs were still on Windows 10.

What Was Recorded

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.