Windows 12 could be another costly upgrade for supporters of Microsoft operating systems. A new report reveals that the AI-dominated OS will require AMD and Intel CPUs with a dedicated NPU. Possibly surfacing in late 2026, the follow-up to Windows 11 may also rely on subscriptions.
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!
god i hope they fuck this up
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.
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.