If it were up to Microsoft, 2025 would be the year of the great migration from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Even if its arguments should be taken with a pinch of salt.
In an article published on his blog on the occasion of CES, Microsoft’s executive vice-president & consumer chief marketing officer, Yusuf Mehdi, declares that 2025 will be the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh. A surprising statement in itself, because Windows 11 has been around for a while now, and everyone who owns Windows 10 has repeatedly had to forgo Windows 11 over the past year to avoid installing it by default. mistake.
Mehdi also cites figures from IDC, according to which eighty percent of companies will renew their PC fleet by the end of this year. And among consumers, 70 percent will do so in the next two years.
We must here make the nuance that this renewal has nothing to do with the new features or the incredible popularity of Windows 11. The IDC analyst himself claims that this is due to the fact that Windows support 10 will end in October. Businesses that want to keep their Windows PCs secure therefore need to upgrade, and for older devices this often involves a renewal. The fact that many companies will take the step this year will be due to the fact that Microsoft leaves them little choice.
At the same time, the marketing manager suggests that Windows 11 is more useful for AI: ‘We believe that Windows 11 is available when the world needs it most. It delivers advanced AI capabilities and modern security benefits that customers expect in 2025 and beyond. The forefront of AI innovation will happen on Windows.’
These words are also very relative. It is true that Copilot only works on Windows 11 and not on Windows 10. But apart from that, most AI applications also work on Windows 10. A large part of them, like ChatGPT, run in the cloud and work through a common browser on almost any computer.
The operating system is secondary
At the same time, it is not the version of Windows that determines the AI capabilities of your PC, but the graphics card and (to a lesser extent) the CPU and the amount of RAM. A Windows 11 PC equipped with a 2018 Nvidia card is less suitable for AI than a Windows 10 PC equipped with the latest graphics cards that Nvidia is releasing this week. As far as we know, they will work on different operating systems.
Finally, it must also be said that Microsoft likes to exaggerate the capabilities of Copilot. When it introduced the latest Surface Pro 11 tablet almost a year ago, it promised that you could ask Copilot to change settings or ask questions about your system, for example. When testing this tablet a few months later, Data News found that these features refused any service. Copilot turned out to be almost nothing more than a pale copy of ChatGPT.
