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Windows 12 release date in 2026 possible, with AI features that may force CPU upgrades
(www.notebookcheck.net)
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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remember when windows 10 was supposed to be the last os they ever made
Dude, they're still struggling with Windows 11 adoption because of the unreasonable requirements of a TPM 2.0 capable motherboard/CPU... and they are asking people to upgrade their CPUs again?
They only started seeing real growth in Windows 11 numbers as of January of this year. Windows 11 finally hit 73% last month while Windows 10 is down to 27%. Linux continues to gain marketshare, and there's no telling if the reason that Win 11 is finally gaining marketshare is from people dumping Windows entirely for other options. Mac and Chromebook shares have been growing as well! It took Microsoft four and a half years from release to break 50% Win 11 adoption and they want to release Win 12 on year five while forcing more upgrades when half the people who got in just upgraded?
This on top of trade wars, actual wars, and an AI arms race that is making buying PC parts obscenely overpriced... and they think people will fucking go for this?
The suits at Microsoft are out of their fucking minds. Even businesses won't want to upgrade this soon after many only just making upgrades to meet Windows 11 requirements just recently.... because businesses are also facing the same increased costs due to the above issues!
So we're not out of the woods yet
The OS desktop environment has stagnated over the past 15 years.
Many businesses have transitioned from a 3-4 year rotation on desktops/laptops to every 5-6 years today. Hell my work laptop is 6 years old and I don't forsee replacing it for another 3-4 years. For work functions there is no significant improvement to upgrading more frequently today.
So if they launched W12 next year, widespread adoption will likely not occur until 2032-2033 or at the Win11 EOL whichever comes first.
The developers today are working on a system that will not become mainstream for 8+ years. They want to launch in the next 2 years knowing it will not be adopted for years.
They ignoring the reality of today's market and building to meet the latest fads. It's Windows 8 all over again.
Yeah, most peoples needs have largely plateaued IMO.
I think it is why AI (Mostly just LLMs) have gotten so much hype. It's something different. Desktop environments aren't going to get much better. Mobile phones have been black rectangles for a decade with very little improvement. AI is something new, and feels like an advancement, even if 99% of the proposed use-cases have failed to actually work.
god i hope they fuck this up
They're already fucking this up with vibe-coding Windows 11, so if they seriously go all-in on this, Windows 12 will be a bigger disaster than fucking Windows Vista and Windows Millennium Edition combined.
...and frankly, I think they will. They've bet the farm on this AI shit, and they need to force it into everything to justify it's fucking existence even though Copilot is the most dogshit out of all these dogshit generative AI systems.
vista was great on compliant hardware. w11 is very much not.
Right, but that's just it, they're basically pulling another Vista if they release Windows 12 later this year.
As the article reasonably posits, it's way more likely that they'll just degrade the experience for people without NPUs, which in other words means decreased performance on older hardware, a la Vista on non-compliant hardware. Yes, Vista fucked up rollout by claiming that some hardware was Vista ready when it wasn't, but basically the same could happen here regarding lack of NPUs.
whoof. i still don't understand what makes an npu different from a vector coprocessor (except the proprietary api) so if they're smart about it they'll fall back to gpu use. they will not be smart about it.
Wish granted (wiggles nose)
Yes. They are stupid and don't deserve their huge paychecks.
They could've done basically nothing. Maybe security updates. And they would've had a decent brand that kept bringing in money. Their leadership is worse than doing nothing. A dog would make a better ceo.
Windows 7 was arguably the last OS they ever made.
This line of thought goes all the way back to NT, and even then IBM would have some comments.
DOS was the last one they built, and they made a really decent GUI for it before they switched to NT.
Wasn't 7 just an visually updated NT.
You skipped vista, XP, and 2000.
everything after w2k is NT. by kernel version, its
haven't checked 11 but i bet you they bumped the major again.
And they still haven't even finished making PowerShell anywhere near as functional as Bash or any other Linux shell environment. First version of PowerShell came out exactly 10 years after the first version of NT.
I don't outright hate PowerShell but it's clearly a hacky afterthought after realizing Linux was eating their lunch in the server space via quick rollouts to thousands of computers at once through Bash scripting.
I find PS pretty great. Probably the best improvement to Windows since going 32-bit.
For sure, it's a vast improvement, but there's still so much you can't do with it.
Mostly because unlike Bash and DOS, which are CLIs that get GUIs slapped on top, PowerShell is a CLI slapped on top of a GUI.
I disagree, you can do almost anything with powershell. There isn't always an exact command for it, but like 95% of Windows configuration lives in the registry. If you know what to change, you can make powershell manage any setting. Which is similar to the way that Bash controls Linux, through modifying config files.
I do wish they had more/better tools for configuring the OS, but it works pretty well if you know the arcane magic of Windows.
And when it comes to being a functional script, I'd take powershell over bash any day. That's preference, obviously, but objects instead of strings makes it way easier to move data from one process to another.
Windows 10 arguably became passable for stability about 3 years after release... but you still had to cut out the advertising bloat, spyware, and all which undermined any gains of stability because that shit was just fucking annoying.
wasn't advertised as such though
It was certainly the last one that I voluntarily used.
No, because that was a shitty headline that mischaracterized an employee’s one-off statement and was then held up as gospel truth by the internet.
it was from a press conference where they said they were done with version numbers and that windows 10 would basically be supported forever. that's not mischaracterisation
It was from a low-level spokesperson’s statement at a press junket that the (then-current) internal versioning system was being abandoned.
It’s absolutely a mischaracterization.
i linked the junket in question.
Yes, like Arch but for windows
No, that is not what they said. Stop spreading this propaganda.
that is exactly what hey said.
Absolutely, it was at the height of the "software as a service" phase and they were doing rolling updates for the Windows Insider program. For a hot minute they absolutely planned on it just being "Windows" from then on.