It’s been a long run on Windows 10, a jump from Windows 8 and a dramatic improvement of the desktop experience for users. There were rocky patches, there were zero-day exploits, but there were also more cohesive Office products that worked together to make the transition as easy as possible for necessary files. In every sense, it just worked, and it generally worked on any machine that could handle Windows 8. Of course there were devices left behind: whether the shaders were just too much for an older computer to handle, or if it was a device running long-term legacy software (like many powered microscopes, or boat softwares) it wouldn’t make the jump. Windows 11 pared this down further (Windows 10 would run on 32 bit devices, but Windows 11 was exclusively 64 bit) and forced an advancement within office computers in the process. And here we are, Windows 10 is losing support come October 2025.
It’s not as serious as it sounds: the OS will still work, but the endless slog of finding and patching bugs and closing off vulnerabilities will end for 10, after several years of faithful service.
It’s almost a relief – with how much has been changing regarding the web, the permissions computers expect to have, the average corporation’s hatred for ad blockers, Windows 10 will not change any more, so any computer that has to get off the ride now will at least also not experience AI creep or Windows Recall involuntarily. CoPilot is lovely, if you want it – but Windows 11 assumes you want it, making you uninstall rather than install products to sort them.
This marks growth. This marks a new age.
And in the tech world, that’s nice. Things have lagged quite a bit, despite all of the advancements in the field. Games are the most obvious place to see stagnation as a result of ‘perfecting the recipe’ no matter what the players want: Skyrim remains the last Elder Scrolls game, perhaps because Bethesda saw what happened to Fallout 4 and got cold feet about potentially upsetting the fragile peace they manage with Elder Scrolls players. Grand Theft Auto, on the other hand, is finally coming out with the 6th game in their own series, but not before a long, long wait as they ensured it would knock the socks off of anyone who played it. Who can blame them? 5 was a pretty big deviation itself, and to keep the pattern 6 would need to be practically unrecognizable to people who stopped playing at San Andreas.
Look elsewhere, and the signs are the same: the returns on graphics cards are slowing even though they keep getting bigger. The computers are practically spaceships. The phones have the best cameras ever. But new designs are scary, and potentially a turn-off for customers, and so they remain the extra-large rectangles they’ve been since inception.
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