Microsoft continues to see less-than-ideal rates of people upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 – even though the OS upgrade is totally free. Even as Windows 11’s market share grows, most users are still content with Windows 10. The latest data from Statcounter highlights a 1.48% increase between April and May 2024, with Windows 11 taking up a total of 27.67% of the user base. Whilst a not-inconsiderable amount – bearing in mind these are global statistics – it’s still dwarfed by Windows 10’s 68.34% dominance of operating systems.
It’s been a rocky road for Windows 11, first made available at the tail-end of 2021. Windows 11 usership rose over the course of 2022, overtaking the outmoded Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 for market share. However, this figure has since plateaued, rising and falling no more than a handful of percent at any time.
Why aren’t people switching to Windows 11?
One major roadblock in the way of users switching to Windows 11 is the system requirements. Some users will be met with an ineligibility message: “This PC doesn’t currently meet all the system requirements for Windows 11”. This is due to many hard requirements of Windows 11 being optional features not enabled by Windows 10 by default, such as enabling Secure Boot and calibrating your motherboard to be UEFI-Only – and up until fairly recently, the eligibility checker didn’t tell you what was actually wrong. There’s also apparently a bug – completely separate from enabling the required features – that will deny compatible PCs eligibility.
What’s more, Windows 11 was (and for some, still is) unusable on some AMD CPUs: causing major performance problems and opening a slew of issues on your PC. And though Windows has patched many of the problems over the post-launch period, the operating system remains beleaguered with stability issues, poor compatibility and plain-faced user-unfriendliness. The good news is that Microsoft has a list of Windows 11 support AMD processors here.
Given that a significant portion of PC owners are casual users – less concerned with cutting-edge OS and more concerned with simply using their system – it’s no wonder a majority of users haven’t taken the time to upgrade to Windows 11.
Will Windows 10 support ending affect Windows 11?
This problem is exacerbated by Windows 10 support ending after October 2025. While Windows 10 will still be usable, procedural support will be transported over to Windows 11. What this could mean is a sharp intake of Windows 11 market share, but not by choice – but Windows 10 will likely still own a significant portion of the market with many of the aforementioned casual users still not switching over. This can even be seen in current data, with a steady 3% of users still using the 15-year-old Windows 7 OS.
Windows 10 didn’t even come close to matching Windows 7 for market dominance until the end of 2017: two years after its launch. The fact that we are approaching three years on from Windows 11 and market share is barely a quarter of the world’s total, things aren’t looking great.
However, in Windows 11’s defense, similarly complaints and issues have plagued every operating system update: historians will recall that Windows 10 was also met with vitriol and poor performance. People, by their nature, are reluctant to change – and while Windows 11’s issues certainly don’t help make that transition easier, it will eventually be accepted as the norm. From what the data shows, however, that is still some way away.
