Windows 10 Will Cut Off Devices With Older CPUs (pcworld.com)

Reader Baron_Yam shares a PCWorld report: No Windows 10 Creators Update for you, Microsoft says -- at least, not if you happen to be the unlucky owner of certain older Atom-based Windows devices, and other aging models in the future. After stories arose of failed attempts to upgrade such hardware to the Creators Update, Microsoft confirmed late Wednesday that any hardware device that falls out of the manufacturer's support cycle may be ineligible for future Windows 10 updates. In the case of the four "Clover Trail" processors (part of the Cloverview platform) that have fallen into Intel's End of Interactive Support phase, they will be ineligible for the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft confirmed. Instead, they'll simply be offered the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, plus security updates through January, 2023, the end of the original Windows 8.1 support period. The problem, however, is that Microsoft's language opens up the possibility that any unsupported hardware device could be excluded from future Windows 10 updates. "Recognizing that a combination of hardware, driver and firmware support is required to have a good Windows 10 experience, we updated our support lifecycle policy to align with the hardware support period for a given device," Microsoft said in a statement. "If a hardware partner stops supporting a given device or one of its key components and stops providing driver updates, firmware updates, or fixes, it may mean that device will not be able to properly run a future Windows 10 feature update." The reader adds, it's not a case of "feature updates are not recommended and may not work", it's a case of "we will block feature updates to your device".

Comments

same mistake they did with Windows Phone

[Anonymous Coward]

It's, in a way, the same key mistake they did with windows phone:
- they released WP7, and offered no upgrade path to WP 8, basically rendering obsolete all 7 phones when they released WP8
- they released WP8 and the 8.1 update. They even managed to gain some market share.
- they announced WP10, saying that "all devices running 8 will be updated". They even released betas that were working on the older phones, except...
- on the day of release they dropped support for almost all the phones they sold, breaking the promise to update them and making almost all of the existing OS market share obsolete
- when releasing Windows 10 they were saying that "this is the last Windows ever" promising to finally kill version fragmentation, except with the creators update they didn't update all their phones, dropping the support again and making the last few phones remaining obsolete
- now that they have nothing to kill on the phone side, probably the same executive moved to the pc section...
Good luck with this

Re:Linux.

[nateman1352]

I agree with you on the fundamental premise of "put Linux on it" to get better privacy and usually longer support lifetimes... but this is actually bad advice in this particular narrow scenario. These Clover Trail SOCs don't have Linux drivers! Moreover, all Clover Trail systems shipped with 32-bit UEFI with no legacy boot support (aka no CSM). None of the major distros have put any effort in to supporting this platform. These computers are pretty much Windows only, the only sane option seems to be to run Windows 8.1 on them.