Last January at CESMicrosoft chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi declared 2024 “the year of the AI ​​PC.” And whether you believe the prediction has come true or not—many new PCs have AI-accelerating neural processing units onboard, but far from all of them—you can’t deny that Microsoft trying so hard on make it happen.

This year, Mehdi back with another prediction: 2025 will be “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh.” This year is also, not coincidentally, the year that most Windows 10 PCs will stop receiving new security updates.

Mehdi’s post includes few, if any, new hints, but it sets the tone for how Microsoft will handle the sunset of Windows 10, trying to strike a balance between carrot and stick. Carrots include the new features of Windows 11 (both AI and others) and the performance, security, and battery life benefits of new PC hardware. The stick is that Windows 10 support ends in October 2025, and Microsoft is not interested in extending that date for the general public or in extending official Windows 11 support to older PCs.

“If your current PC needs a refresh, or it has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-backed protection, now is the time to move on to a new Windows 11 PC,” wrote Mehdi.

Microsoft and its partners clearly benefit from users buying new PCs more than they do when Microsoft provides free OS updates for existing machines. It is also true that many formally unsupported PCs can run Windows 11 just fineespecially with carefully considered hardware upgrades.

But it’s also the case that many users of older, incompatible PCs will benefit greatly from upgrading at this point. When Microsoft announced and released the first version of Windows 11 in 2021, it restricted support to PCs and processors that, at that time, were no more than three or four years old. By the time October rolls around, those engines will be seven or eight years old. PCs that can’t run Windows 11 are nearly a decade old or more. During that time, CPUs and GPUs became faster, laptop screens got bigger and better, and old hardware had more time to drain its battery and suffer physical wear and tear.

A Limited Time Escape Hatch

Mehdi refused to mention that Windows 10 users want STAY Windows 10 users have an escape hatch. The company’s Extended Security Update (ESU) program for Windows 10 will allow users and businesses to continue to get updates for at least one year after October 2025; End users will only receive one year of additional updates for their home PCs, but organizations will get as many as three additional years. The caveat is that you have to pay for the privilege: $30 for one year of updates if you are an individual and between $1 and $61 per user for schools and businesses, with costs increasing significantly in the second and third years.

Windows 10 still accounts for between half and two-thirds of all Windows usage worldwide and in the US, according to admittedly noisy data from sources such as Statcounter and the Steam Hardware Survey. Leaving many Windows PCs potentially unprotected from security threats has the potential to cause major problems, which may at least partially explain why Microsoft wants to see more upgrades this year. . But even if 2025 DOING may be “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” it’s hard to see how it could possibly happen fast enough to get most Windows 10 PCs out of circulation.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.