I’m not saying Microsoft went around deleting every copy of Windows XP or Vista or 7. But can you go out and buy a new computer today with these operating systems from any normal outlet?
I don’t think you can buy a new computer with XP on it (unless it’s ‘new old stock’ - i.e. an unsold item that’s been sitting there a year or two).
There are still a few machines on sale with Windows 7 - mostly small netbooks. I believe there are still some deals where you buy a Win8 PC with a rollback-to-Win7 option, in case you hate Win8.
I can’t imagine a reason why anyone would want to buy a new machine with Vista on it.
But really, it’s not so very different to any other product discontinuation. You can’t buy a new Ford Anglia anymore.
A quick look at Best Buy showed 30/30 laptops running Win 8 and 29/30 desktops running Win 8. There was one Win 7 HP “business” system sold by a third party. There was more than 30 models of each type but they didn’t have them broken out by OS and I wasn’t going to hand count 200 desktops.
Walmart only showed 1 laptop and 1 desktop as “Store items” but both were Win 8.
HHGregg shows 15 desktops with Win 8 and 3 with Win 7. For laptops, it’s 47 Win 8 versus 4 Win 7.
Fry’s surprisingly showed 31 Win 8 systems to 23 Win 7 systems in desktops. And 98 Win 8 laptops to 125 Win 7 laptops. But all of the Win 7 systems say “In store only; while supplies last” which makes me think they’re just clearing out all the old Win 7 systems and not replacing them.
So I guess if you want a Windows 7 system from a chain “box store” style retailer, hurry up and go to Fry’s.
Security updates for XP are still available. It’s the service packages, I think, that stopped being supported. But I still get the other updates on my laptop.
I hope soon, when I get a new laptop, I can get Win 7. Like someone said, I need it for work, so while Win 8 seems to be ok for casual use, the other platform may be better for work stuff.
Right, until a year from last Monday.
And unless you have a specific app that doesn’t work on Win 8 for some reason, just go with Win 8, even for work. While you will lose a second per day getting to the desktop after you boot up into the start screen, you’ll save several seconds, at least, booting up, since 8 boots preposterously fast, especially on an SSD.
Ah, thanks… I missread your sentence, as I understood you meant that it was a year ago that they stopped offering support.
Windows 8 is a not an upgrade. The new style apps that take up the whole screen are not a step forward. They are a step back. In previous versions of windows if you wanted a program to take up the whole screen you could do that easily. If you wanted to program to not take up the whole screen so you could easily move from one program to another or compare data from two windows you could do that easily.
I want to have my email opened at the same time as I do other things. I often need to look at the email I as a reference to what I am doing in another program. Even my wife who is not a technical person needs in the meetings she attends several windows open. 1 for notes and others for the various documents that are being discussed at the meeting. She would like to take her ipad with a keyboard to meetings because it is light and easy to carry but that does not allow here to have more than one document on the screen at a time.
Windows 8 is not a complete disaster because you can get most of what you had in windows 7 easily enough with a few annoyances. But everything I have seen that differentiates windows 8 from windows 7 is not useful.
I think so too. It looks like their logic was, “Look how OS X is slowly becoming like iOS. We’ll jump 1 step ahead of them and make a desktop AND tablet OS!”
That’s a poor analogy. You can go to a Ford dealer and buy an Escape or an F-150 or a Fiesta or a Focus or a Mustang or a Taurus. Ford doesn’t assume everyone wants to buy the same model of vehicle.
This is a situation where you need to read the original WSJ article. The article is basically saying that PC sales overall are slumping, and that manufacturers like HP were burned by Windows 8 because they expected a sales leap such as what happened when Windows 7 was released. That didn’t happen.
But the article isn’t really blaming the PC slump on Windows 8, but other market factors. Companies expecting a sales leap with Windows 8 were foolish.
Businesses don’t upgrade that often, most had been running Windows XP when Windows 7 launched and even now many are still just working on their Windows 7 rollouts. It was a laughable assumption that enterprise customers would be buying very many Windows 8 licenses. That left the consumer market, which also by and large had been jumping on Windows 7 notebooks and desktops for the last few years and were also highly unlikely to be ready to buy new PCs.
I don’t agree with Steve Jobs on a lot of things, but he was right in what he said about PCs. They’ll always be around, but they’ll be like a work truck. Imagine if everyone drove work trucks, then small cars and such were invented. Many people would transition to small cars. PCs were in many/most homes because access to a lot of stuff people wanted (internet mostly, word processing/office tasks for a smaller but sizable number) that you couldn’t get to without a PC. But now that tablets so well fill the niche of users who just need to occasionally browse the internet or compose an email PCs look like work trucks to home users. People who already own one probably won’t be upgrading if they are using their tablets a lot. If they do, it’ll be when their PCs basically die–but some may never buy a PC again.
The enterprise will never replace PCs because for office tasks the tablet form factor is not conducive to people whose jobs involve mostly sitting at the same desk for 70-80% of the day doing office jobs. Even business travelers who might be issued tablets will probably still be issued laptops for heavier use, along with docking stations. In the enterprise PCs are pretty safe, only a few highly specialized jobs might go 100% tablet. Think people like utility workers that have bulky mobile data terminals built into their work truck because they are never in an office but need to access corporate networks and systems. Those guys could use a tablet (probably needs to be rugged, though.) But for the consumer market tablets are going to be the everyday, probably eventually with TV integration (try using a table to control an Xbox 360 for example–interesting experience.) Home PCs will be for enthusiasts and home workers, the equivalent of the home owners of Mach trucks and such.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a nuisance. Not as big a PITA as having to completely relearn Excel and Windows with the 2010 version, though. I still, after two years, have to stop and think “now where did they hide that menu again?”
I think another important factor was overlooked. I would guess that what drove a lot of 7 sales was widespread dissatisfaction with Vista. There was no similar antipathy against 7 that would help sell 8.
Every software development organization in the world does the same thing. When they release version N of software they stop selling version N-1 and stop supporting version N-m. Operating systems might have spanky new names, but they are basically new releases of the same basic stuff.
Selling PCs with lots of OS choices would confuse the hell out of the channel, and make life a lot more difficult for PC makers who load the OS.
That’s would be an irrelevant detail, but you’re a bit wrong anyway, because Microsoft also has more than one OS product line.
The point of the analogy is, when a supplier discontinues something, it’s discontinued. It happens.
One big problem with Vista was that it required upgraded hardware. The hardware requirements for Windows 8 is less than 7, and 7 was less than Vista.
That and if you had a “compatible with Vista” sticker instead of a “designed for Vista” sticker, then you were in for a lot of driver related pain.
I’d say we’re dealing with the same situation now. Computers with touchscreens are “designed for Windows 8”. Computers without touchscreens are “compatible with Windows 8” - you can use the program but you don’t have the hardware it was designed for.
(I also think it’s indicative of the problem that Microsoft has been able to convince people that hardware is designed to run operating systems rather than operating systems being designed to run on hardware.)
The big problem with Vista (well one) is that there were computers with compatible with Vista stickers which weren’t. I had a loaner like that - it really sucked.
To some extent this happens because there is one OS supplier and a lot of computer suppliers. And you can be sure that Intel and Microsoft talk about optimizing the processor design for the new OS. Optimizing hardware for dominant software has been going on for ages. In fact Oracle is optimizing new Sparc designs to run databases more efficiently, and before that the graphics instruction sets a lot of processors added about 20 years ago were for the type of software being run.
Judging from those around me, friends and family, PC sales are being damaged not because of the OS but because more people are building them. I am constantly barraged by people who are replacing their PCs with questions on what parts they will need etc. YMMV but this is a large increase in just the last 2 years in all age groups.
People need to quit whining about Apple’s higher prices.
Only if Apple owners stop telling people to buy Apples. I *want *to buy an Apple. I just can’t afford one.