• Microsoft’s Windows 11 now holds just over 30 percent of the operating system’s marketshare.
• In comparison, Windows 10 has 64 percent of the market and its end of life is approaching in 2025.
• Unfortunately, for most there is little need to buy a new PC to run an OS that on the surface, looks identical to the one they’re currently using.

Despite all of the artificial intelligence it has been cramming into Windows 11, users aren’t flocking to the operating system just yet.

Data from GlobalStats pegs Windows 11 with 30.83 percent of the Windows market share while Windows 10 has the lion’s share of 64.9 percent of the market as of the end of July.

Comparing these figures to a year ago, we see that Windows 11’s installation numbers have improved slightly from 23.66 percent while Windows 10 installations have come down from 77.14 percent in 2023.

This slow rate of movement from one OS to the other tells us that Microsoft has not only completely botched this launch, folks are only moving to Windows 11 when they upgrade their computer.

Windows 11 has strict hardware requirements. Specifically, the OS requires a Trusted Platform Module 2 which many older computers don’t have. There are ways to get around this but they aren’t simple enough for the average person to bother with. This means that even if a user wants to upgrade to Windows 11, they may not be able to as their hardware is too outdated to even allow an installation.

This will likely lead to folks staying on Windows 10 long after it reaches its end of life in 2025. This becomes a problem as it means that users running what they may consider to be a relatively new operating system, won’t be receiving security updates putting them at risk. As we saw with older versions of Windows once Windows 10 came out, users were hesitant to move but ultimately did and

Try as it it might, Microsoft hasn’t convinced folks that Windows 11 is much of an upgrade to Windows 10, especially when you consider that on the surface, not all that much has changed. One of the marquee features, native support for Android apps, was canned recently and AI integration into Windows is fine, but not game changing.

Copilot+ PCs are an entirely new range of PCs that take advantage of a neural processing unit to make AI applications fly a bit faster. Unfortunately, the marquee Copilot+ feature, Recall, was held back owing to security concerns raised by users and experts.

The other integrations of AI seem to extend to ChatGPT being added to various apps and for most people, while ChatGPT can be fun, it’s not something they’ll engage with regularly.

With all of that in mind, it’s little wonder that the only reason people upgrade to Windows 11 is because they have to and that’s never going to be a winning strategy. Many have suggested that Microsoft rethink the end of life date for Windows 10 and as it stands, it may just have to consider that because suddenly forcing more than half of its customers to run an unsafe operating system or spend thousands on a new machine, is bound to land it in trouble.

Of course, folks will likely just keep running Windows 10, even if it is unsafe as evidenced by Windows 7 user representing three percent of all Windows users.