Earlier this year, Microsoft officially yanked the cord on Windows 10, ending support for an operating system that had been superseded by Windows 11 four years earlier.
But the tech giant’s controversial attempts to shoehorn AI into every aspect of the software appear to have turned off a staggering number of users from upgrading. While it’s to be expected at this point that not everybody will have jumped at the opportunity to update their machine’s operating system, the sheer scale of that refusal is staggering.
As Forbes reports, a whopping 1 billion PCs are still running Windows 10 — despite half of them technically being eligible for an upgrade.
During PC maker Dell’s November quarterly earnings call, the company’s COO, Jeff Clarke, admitted that “we have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” referring to all PCs, and not just Dell machines.
“Those are all rich opportunities to upgrade towards Windows 11 and modern technology,” he said. The remaining 500 million were not eligible for the upgrade.
In other words, those who own a whopping third of the estimated 1.5 billion PCs worldwide are outright refusing to upgrade, indicating Microsoft is seriously struggling to woo them. That’s likely due to a number of reasons, from simple frustrations over a tweaked and unfamiliar interface to the need to run software that isn’t Windows 11 compatible — and annoying ads.
But given the widespread backlash over Microsoft’s doubling down on AI features, there’s a good chance a vast number of Windows users are also balking at the idea of the company shoving those features down their throats.
It’s an already familiar battle, with AI emerging as a major turn-off for consumers across several other industries as well.
Last month, Windows president Pavan Davuluri announced that the operating system would become an “agentic OS,” baking AI features directly into the software.
Core users, however, were appalled by the notion.
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