neowin[.]net/news/microsoft-extends-windows-10-life-for-consumers-if-they-pay-30/
Microsoft obviously values Dell, HP, Lenovo etc. FAR more than us lowly consumers. Win11's hardware requirements have little to nothing to do with Microsoft leveling up Windows security -- the same features are mostly all there in Win10. Newer CPUs simply lessen the drag on performance, which is immaterial if like most you don't turn VBS on. It did however encourage buying new PCs & laptops, making those selling PCs & laptops happy, which IMHO was Microsoft's sole intent. Again IMHO, the pricing and availability of extended service updates for Win10 confirms that, & flips us off.
While Microsoft will develop & release Win10 monthly updates for 3 years, starting in October 2025, consumers can only access them for the 1st year, at a cost of $30 US. Win10 EDU [Education] gets the big discount, because Microsoft doesn't want millions of students getting introduced to Linux & Apple -- many [most?] would never go back. Businesses that have their entire IT wrapped around Windows don't have a choice, so they pay the brunt of Microsoft's coders doing the grunt work, developing those updates.
This may all change as the Win10 EOL approaches. The $30 cost and only one year availability may turn out to be trial balloons, the 1st bid in attempting to mitigate public outcry. Or it may signal a change in attitudes among Microsoft execs. At 1st they could care less if you installed Win11 on non-compliant hardware. Since then, methods for doing so have been gradually eliminated. Those methods were [are] often based on things Microsoft's developers overlooked, so when a trick went away it might have been because of an update that simply replaced Windows code that had a glitch. Or it could have been intentional. We'll probably know as October 2025 gets closer, if Microsoft tries to make it harder to upgrade Win10 to 11 on officially unqualified machines.
When Win7 reached EOL, folks had a choice -- stick with Win7 or upgrade Windows. And there was a hack available to receive the same extended security updates as biz. With millions [billions?] of people officially locked out of a Windows upgrade, the demand for such a hack will be magnitudes greater -- instead of being hard to find there will likely be multiple versions freely available. And there's always the LTSC [long term servicing] &/or IoT versions available online. If you think that last option might interest you, it *might* be worthwhile to download the required files now -- today there's a limited audience, but come October 2025, it will likely be popular enough to attract cyber criminals. Since you won't find the files on commercial, better protected sites, it wouldn't be anywhere near impossible for them to inject malware into those ISOs.