What is it about an operating system that requires more and more processing power?
I can understand programs such as Adobe Premier or Photoshop, and of course the myriad of video games, that require more and more processing power, but an OS should be a minimalist gatekeeper filing system that should in this day and age be processor and memory agnostic for the most part.
Bloatware.
Hopefully they don’t try forcing that upgrade like they did with 10. I left my machine on a few days while my fea software was running a simulation. I came back and windows 10 had installled and wiped out all the engineering software. Luckily I have backups and rolled back that upgrade. But what a pain.
It’s not really the power of the processor that’s the problem. Instead, it’s the security protocols it supports.
Among other things, Microsoft wants to stop supporting the 16-bit bios that is used in aging legacy systems. So, this new OS is only going to support UEFI. That seems to be a done deal and that alone is going to eliminate quite a few processors/chipsets that probably have more than enough computing power to run the OS, which isn’t going to be architecturally dissimilar to WIN10.
At some point, they also want to make TPM the standard. But, if they do that, there are going to be a TREMENDOUS number of PCs that can’t be supported including devices that Microsoft sold themselves as recently as a couple years ago. So, that likely won’t be a final system requirement.
I get Microsoft’s concern. They’re starting to slowly lose market share to Apple and one of the reasons that drives people to the Apple ecosystem is security. Now that Apple has migrated to their own silicon, their security has only become stronger whereas WIN10 is a mess. UEFI and TPM would help Microsoft in this regard...minimally.
“What is it about an operating system that requires more and more processing power?”
It has been standard operating procedure for MS since the beginning. “Faster processor and BUS and more RAM? Cool! We can stick a whole bunch more unneeded bloat in there and slow it right back down again!”. They have some idea all those extra resources were designed just for them, not the user or anyone else.
And we keep letting them get away with it.
#5 It takes a lot of power to spy on you : )