Windows 11’s Security Push May Hurt More Users Than It Helps
Microsoft’s gamble on new hardware is surprising in a pandemic- era hardware shortage
The other day, Microsoft released a free tool that lets you check if your PC is eligible for a Windows 11 upgrade, and right away users noticed there was a problem. In short, only CPU’s made in the last couple of years are able to upgrade to Microsoft’s latest operating system. Have anything older than an 8th generation Intel chip in your machine? Sorry, it’s time to buy an upgrade.
This made my social media timelines explode. And the fallout hasn’t yet stopped.
In a pre-pandemic world, this might not have stung as badly. But right now, computer equipment is hard to come by. A huge rush of demand for work-from-home systems combined with some manufacturing miscalculations has put an extreme and unprecedented crush on the market. While some parts are just beginning to trickle into stores again, it seems like a terrible time to force an upgrade on a large swathe of the mainstream computer market. Sure, not everyone has to upgrade to Microsoft’s new OS later this year, but with a kill-date listed already for Windows 10 and the marketing machine in full swing, the push is on.
If you want more detail than I can provide in the scope of this piece about why this sudden wallet-busting move is happening, The Verge has done an excellent investigation into it. In short, Microsoft wants all of their customers to be more secure. They’re hoping to use an architecture called TPM 2.0 to transition Windows into a more console-like platform, making it much harder for malicious software to run on users’ machines.
Windows 10 is fairly ubiquitous in the computing market, and Microsoft always likes to tout it’s active on over a billion devices. I’d be surprised if more than twenty percent of those were running hardware compatible with Windows 11. We do live in a world where hacks and ransomware run rampant on a daily basis, and I can see why in a theoretical vacuum it would be tempting to design a new OS platform around stomping a lot of that out through a perfect synergy of hardware and software.
However, the move towards a more console-like platform makes me nervous because we don’t really know how much control Microsoft plans to exert down the line. One of the strengths of a PC is its flexible and open nature. I can install my own software on my own hardware, I can buy games from whichever digital store I choose, and I can push my machines to do things they weren’t necessarily “designed” to do. Windows 11 feels like a big first step towards controlling exactly what Windows consumers do. Will Microsoft someday force me to buy apps only from the Windows store? Will they shut down my machine if I choose not to install a particular update? Will they start whitelisting programs the way they’ve aggressively whitelisted new hardware? And isn’t it fascinating that AMD and Intel stand to rake in a ton of money from this sudden need to upgrade?
Security is a slippery slope in the PC world. It’s great to have my personal data and machines protected, I’m not disputing that. And a game console environment is perfect for sitting down and just enjoying some entertainment. But a PC is a big expensive complex multipurpose machine, often put together out of parts by a passionate user. That type of person probably doesn’t want to jump through all those PC hoops just to be told what software they can or can’t run. And how much intense extra security do I really need on my tiny laptop I use to write text in coffee shops and stream some cloud-based games?
I know that Microsoft has less interest these days in maintaining different editions of the Windows kernel, but this security/new hardware push makes much more sense for the enterprise and business markets. Large tech companies have the budgets to do rolling upgrades every few years, and also often store the sort of data that hackers are after. It makes more sense to have an end-to-end hardware and software security chain in that arena. If Windows 11 had an enterprise edition that required these modern security chips and systems, but left consumers a few years more before fully implementing these protections, that would make more sense to me.
The vast majority of regular PC users aren’t as eager to upgrade as business or gaming users. Gamers are a weird and profitable anomaly that buy new hardware every two years to keep up with the speed of game development. Normally I would count myself among that group, but the craziness of the last sixteen months and the current hardware crunch caused me to hesitate on upgrading. My main desktop has an i7 6700 and a GTX 1070. It’s perfectly capable of running most games at high-ish settings and modern resolutions, but it won’t be able to run Windows 11 thanks to its “ancient” six year old processor. Six years might seem like a lot of time in the computing world, but it’s still plenty fast thanks to the slowdown in true innovations in Intel’s lineup that have allowed AMD to swoop in and win tons of market share.
Indeed, within the sphere of my close family, only the basic 10th gen-Intel-powered Surface Laptop Go I’m typing this on and the Dell G5 gaming laptop I recently gave to my girlfriend for her work-from-home stuff will be able to upgrade to Microsoft’s more secure Windows 11 platform. A security push is only effective if you tie up all the loose ends, and there’s going to be a ton of vulnerable Windows 10 machines still out there thanks to these system requirements. Two of them will be in my own house, and several more within the houses of my friends and their workplaces.
I also don’t know if Windows 11 will provide enough benefit on its own to push people to upgrade their hardware quickly. As the “new default” it will of course gain traction over time, but we won’t know what it really offers until it’s on more machines later this year. Windows 10 is such a great and powerful platform still, and like Windows 7 and XP before it, it seems like it’s dying prematurely. Remember when Microsoft said Windows 10 would “be the last Windows?”
Right now this might turn out just to be a PR mess. The hardware shortages could even out over the next year, and maybe Windows 11 will be so awesome that people rush out to buy new computers and get on board with a more secure, potentially less open platform. In this moment though, it sure seems like Microsoft is pushing consumers to spend money on costly and hard-to-find upgrades right after coming through an incredibly difficult time.
The messaging here is so poor and Microsoft did nothing to get out in front of it. “This is a free cool upgrade everyone go get it! But only if you have new hardware!” A “free” upgrade is a much tougher sell when it actually requires a new computer, especially in the current consumer world. The PC platform has always been a balance between security and open flexibility, but its openness is one of its biggest strengths.
I wish that Microsoft had made this security push on the enterprise side first and let it trickle down to consumers in another couple of years, when the hardware market won’t be so cramped. Plenty of capable PC’s are about to be left in the digital dust thanks to this push to make Windows more secure and also more closed-off. At least when Windows 95 did this years ago, it was offering a whole new and impressive platform, not just Windows 10 with some new feature bolt-ons and the start menu moved to the middle of the screen.
