No matter what Microsoft does, there’s an outcry of righteous indignation. The announcement of Windows 11 is no exception. On the one side, you have the loud chorus of traditionalists shouting: Bring back Windows XP! No new features! No new design! On the other side (or maybe even some of the same people?) they are decrying the system requirements for Windows 11, angered and outraged that they won’t be able to run the new OS.
It actually makes me sad for the people still running Windows 7 or older, when I think back to the days of how slowly those systems booted and how lacking they were in capabilities. But the voices rising up against the inability to install Windows 11 are louder, on account of what one Apple-focused site claims are "dramatic increase in system requirements," which is pure clickbait. The system requirements are almost ridiculously low (see below).
Cherchez la Utility!
Microsoft has cobbled a feature onto its old system health utility that’s supposed to tell you whether you can run Windows 11. I tried this on three computers all of which I confirmed to have TPM 2.0 (one tech site points out that Microsoft’s own documents contradict this requirement) and are using Secure Boot. For all three, the utility reported that I can not run Windows 11 on them, even though all far surpassed the other minimum system requirements of a 1GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, and 64GB storage. Even for Microsoft’s own Surface Book, Windows 11 was a no-go!
What’s more, the utility reported the wrong OS versions: One running 21H1 was reported as being 2009 (October 2020 Update), and the same for a system running a preview build of 21H2. The Settings app’s System > About page clearly showed the correct OS versions.
My takeaway is that if the utility is flawed at being able to even identify the currently running OS version, perhaps it’s flawed in its ability to identify whether you can run Windows 11 on the hardware. Another hypothesis is that the utility is testing whether your PC supports all of the new features in Windows 11, like an NVMe SSD for the gaming DirectStorage feature and an HDR monitor for the new Auto HDR feature.
More PCs will be able to run the new OS than this utility now reports, because something is off with it.
Why Doesn’t Microsoft Want You to Run Windows 11?
This harks back to a strategy Microsoft used with Windows 10, used because the company wants you to buy a new PC. Why? Microsoft isn’t making any money by letting you upgrade your old PC for free. Even the utility discussed above, after reporting that you can’t run Windows 11 on the current system, says that you have two options: Continue getting updates for Windows 10 till that party’s over, or buy a new PC.
Another possible reason the utility is set up this way is that Microsoft wants to limit the number of existing PCs that can run Windows 11. The company wants to roll it out gradually. New Windows versions always have glitches, and you don’t want all 1.3 billion Windows PCs to suffer from these simultaneously.
In truth, I don’t have a big problem with either of these reasons Microsoft may not want all existing PC users to upgrade to Windows 11. People with iPads or iPhones a few generations old are well aware of their device’s inability to run current versions of iOS, and Android devices are notoriously often not upgradable to new OS versions. If some huge error appears in the future for Windows 11, it’s best it be relegated to a few early adopters rather than to billions.