Ah, the old Ben Shapiro logic. If you don't want your house that's at risk of flooding, don't worry, simply sell it! Someone's bound to give you a good price for it!
This is kinda funny, just thinking someone believes you can "trade in" a PC at all. Even more so when they are trying to say those same Windows 10 machines will be so useless you need to trade them in in the first place, making the value of such a trade in what, next to nothing?
Hot take from an IT guy: save your important data, make a plain vanilla W11 boot USB (nothing fancy, no Rufus tricks), wipe your hard drive to zeroes, and install W11 like normal. I've reimaged a ton of older PCs and literally never seen it not work. My 10 year old Optiplex, supposedly ineligible for W11, runs W11 just fine.
Microsoft might someday break it, sure. That's not new. Microsoft products were always, in practice, available to us at Microsoft's pleasure. This is the same company that allows massgrave to exist on github because they'd rather we pirate MS Office than allow LibreOffice any oxygen. We'll probably be fine.
Can MS be sued by EU for this? There was the thing with USB-C, because E-waste, and now the most used Desktop-OS says "just throw your PC away" for a not really needed (and artifically defined) requirement.
Alright then MS, (this is hypothetical as I haven't ran Windows as my main OS in years and don't plan on going back) since you want me to trade in my hardware, how 'bout I trade in your OS instead? :p
Hah. Good luck trying to make me dispose of the computer I built almost a decade ago and that I just upgraded. Neither my laptops nor my phones have outlived this baby.
Always wandering why it isn' t possible for Microsoft to maintain their version and update all along. Linux can do it, Android can do it. I' m not sure about Apple.
I switched to Linux years ago and I'm still most satisfied about my choice. My current laptop is from 2009 and can still go on for years. That is what you call sustainability
A testament to the shot development standards at MS. An OS literally should not in a million years be this resource inefficient, especially out of the box.
Trading in a PC.... in 2025? To who? Where? What time period, even? They must be thinking it's still 1985, and you can trade in your IBM Compatible to your nearest IBM Distributor.
I never liked Windows 10, I had way too many issues with it. However, so many companies rely on old versions of Windows and it takes them years to upgrade to the latest version. The machines I use at work still have Windows 10 installed because the software we rely on isn't compatible with Windows 11 yet. This whole "trade in your old PC for a new one" is ridiculous. Thankfully there's many Linux distros that work with older hardware so you don't need Windows!
I switched to Linux on my laptops years ago. Recently, I retired and started playing video games like Skyrim. I play on a Nintendo Switch. I considered playing Skyrim on a laptop so I could use/build mods. I bought a laptop with Windows 11 and spent forty minutes removing the bloat, ads, spyware, ai nonsense, and other dross, fixing it so it did not 'update' to restore everything I deleted, and installing my preferred alternatives (browser, search, email etc). It reminded me why I hate Windows almost as much as Mac OS (which is even more controlling). Microsoft have hundreds of engineers 'enshitifying' everything. It is more than a full-time job trying to stop them and block their 'improvements'. I am retired. I have better things to do.
I did not enjoy playing games with a laptop (hurts my arthritis, I prefer using a console and an easy chair) and resented having to reverse engineer everything I installed to keep it running but without sacrificing my privacy so the laptop now just sits in a drawer. It amazes me that anyone still tolerates Microsoft products, or any of the monopolists stuff. Why is anyone still using google search or chrome browser, why bing or any of it? Why is anyone still seeing adverts? Why is everyone still being fed by algorithms? You must chose this - but why? I always sought out better and if it did not exist, I built it, and if I could not build it, I did without. There is a lot of dumbing-down around technology. Back in C20th, we used to build our own hardware, write our own software. We were skilled hobbyists (later I got an M.Sc. to reinforce my hobby skills with theory and even ran a business for a while as an engineer). Around 2000 +/- five years, the monopolists offered 'help' in the form of WYSIWYG editors to write code for us or 'click buttons to register your account' platforms to host content for us instead of us running our own websites (blogger, wordpress, facebook, twitter etc). They dumbed us all down, farmed us like animals for data and used clickbait to get ad revenue and undermined our politics, culture, even changed our sense of being human. Now old folk can build resources but younger people can only consume. We have to re-skill and resist the seduction of the easy and free-to-use. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Never trust a tech bro, whether USA or any nationality.
Personally, I want to 'jail break' my Switch and make mods for my console version of Skyrim. I can't do that now as it is illegal but when they bring out the Switch 2 and the old console is 'obsolete' and they stop trying to get money for Skyrim, I reckon we tinkerers will get a chance to re-purpose the old console to play the old games in our own way. I reckon some exciting engineering is happening amongst the recyclers and re-purposers rather than amongst the corporates. I only buy second-hand for ethical reasons and to save money. I always install my own software based on AOSP or use a more ethical distro or alternative to the commercial options. I always debloat or degoogle or remove unwanted stuff. I wish that kind of personalisation were more common. There is a zero sum relationship with tech: either the technology controls you, or you control it. I urge you to control your own tech. Don't be enslaved by it. I feel I am in a minority in wanting sovereignty over my damn phone. It makes me sad.
I installed linux on my PC a couple months ago. The other day I wanted to log back into my windows partition for the first time in a while in order to clean up some of the files on that partition (even though the drive is mounted in linux, the windows "fast boot" option apparently leaves it in a state that linux considers read-only). Windows apparently wouldn't let me log in without a microsoft account, instead of just using my regular windows username.
So yeah, that partition's gone now. No going back!
"Trade in" like theres a dealership willing to give you some kind of fair value for your old computer.
That said, if you're willing to be extorted by Microsoft, then you get what you have coming to you.