Windows 11, planned obsolescence & criticism: 240 million PCs will become waste
Veröffentlicht am 28.08.2025
Windows 11, planned obsolescence & criticism: 240 million PCs will become waste
Planned obsolescence: Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue support for Windows 10 in October 2025 in order to generate even more revenue with Windows 11.
Of course, in the age of AI, Microsoft can and must continue to develop its operating system. However, the actual added value of forcing users to upgrade to Windows 11 is minimal for the majority of users. The fact that there will be no more security updates in the future for several hundred million computers that only work with Windows 10 is scandalous and a special form of planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is the process by which manufacturers deliberately shorten the life of a product in order to provoke premature replacement purchases and thus increase sales and profits, or the introduction of constantly new technical standards that quickly make older devices appear obsolete. The result is wasted raw materials and exploding mountains of waste.
Market researchers at Canalys estimate that the end of support for Windows 10 could result in 240 million PCs becoming waste from October 2025 onwards. This deliberately generated amount of electronic waste weighs an estimated 480 million kilograms, which is equivalent to 320,000 cars.
In times of climate catastrophe and raw material shortages, this is one of the quietest and at the same time biggest environmental scandals of recent decades. However, “buy faster, throw away faster” fits well with our era of radical market forces and ruthless greed. Silicon Valley, Microsoft, and US tech billionaires are accelerating the destructive, rapid acceleration toward super-acceleration.
The current technical discussion is dominated by the “gaps in the Windows system” and Linux distributions as alternatives, which specialists can use to circumvent the current Microsoft monopoly. These “gap debates for the few” distract from the fundamental problem of deliberately planned waste. The environmental movement must finally stop discussing energy and raw material conservation in apolitical, cute niches. One demand of the environmental movement must be to continue providing Windows 10 with security updates free of charge and without additional conditions until the global market share of the previous operating system has fallen well below ten percent. The quite successful Tesla boycott has demonstrated our power.
Axel Mayer, Mitwelt Stiftung Oberrhein (is very happy with his old computer that can only run Windows 10)
Translated without machine checking