I literally daily drive a laptop with a 4c/8t processor (6700-HQ) so I'm not sure what you're talking about other than perhaps the lower end i5s
Edit to add, my other laptop with a third gen i5 is 2C/4T and getting pretty long in the tooth though, so I wouldn't go out of my way for something that old though
I was very confused by your comment so I took a poke around Intel ark. I see what you mean now, most mobile processors for 4th and 6th gen (probably the most common generations for used PCs that are incompatible with 11) have 2c/4t on the U series processors, but looks like any HQ processor gets a full 4 cores and if it's an i7 it gets hyper threading, putting them closer to parity with their desktop counterparts
Yep, I meant U series, which (at least where I live) were covering vast majority of the market. There was occasional HQ here and there, but not that often. AMDs offerings at the time were mediocre and nobody really used them so for me, that era basically overlaps with Intel U series hegemony when speaking about laptop cpus.
Yeah I hadn't realized how much laptops from that era sucked compared to now. Granted, that was around the time manufacturers actually started actually trying to make laptops better, but really only current laptops feel similar to desktops and even then because they're just designed to "race to sleep" any kind of workload that actually pushes them for more than 15 seconds at all it falls over so quickly compared to a moderate desktop.
Desktops with 4th gen and newer chips however have so much life left in them, so it's an absolute crime that Microsoft's sending them to the metalchipper
11 losses support for 7th gen or earlier and non-TPM enabled equipment.
You might still be able to find something newer that lacks TPM.
Alternatively, we don't really know why they chose 7th gen as the cutoff for sure. It is quite possible that they're just going by Intel's own support structure. Until dropped support for 7th gen due to an age out scenario so it's absolutely possible that in another couple of years still drop support for 8th gen.
Prices of Windows 11 incompatible hardware have been dropping like a rock all year as companies upgrade their fleets, and it'll get far more pronounced once consumers start getting squeezed to upgrade to continue using software XYZ