Windows 11 Launching October 5
Ready or not (mostly not), Microsoft will launch Windows 11 next month. The company named the date yesterday in a blog post, with the free “upgrade” and new PC pre-loads coming on October 5:
“Today, we are thrilled to announce Windows 11 will start to become available on October 5, 2021. On this day, the free upgrade to Windows 11 will begin rolling out to eligible Windows 10 PCs and PCs that come pre-loaded with Windows 11 will start to become available for purchase. A new Windows experience, Windows 11 is designed to bring you closer to what you love.”
Some have been rather critical of recent public efforts to ease the infamous hardware requirements a bit, and it remains a mess. Bottom line, unless you are on specific, fully supported hardware this is an OS best left to new PCs, with existing users of positively ancient hardware like Intel Skylake processors or first-gen Ryzen (the horror!) able to carry on just fine with a fully-supported Windows 10 install until at least 2025.
