> Any new Windows version has transformed the previous generation of PCs into trash since people moved from DOS as a main user interface to Windows 3.
The difference is that earlier hardware upgrades were important and did improve performance heavily. 2001 just saw the advent of 1 Ghz CPUs [0]. In 2011, quad-core CPUs at 3.5 Ghz were the standard, probably a performance upgrade of an order of magnitude, at least. But since then? The i5 2500 does still hold a bit of water to the Ryzen 5 5600 [0]. Sure, it has more cores and more single-core performance, but it's nowhere near that much of a difference. Windows 10 still runs perfectly fine on this hardware, even better than Windows 7 did - and not by accident, MS did optimize that!
The difference is that earlier hardware upgrades were important and did improve performance heavily. 2001 just saw the advent of 1 Ghz CPUs [0]. In 2011, quad-core CPUs at 3.5 Ghz were the standard, probably a performance upgrade of an order of magnitude, at least. But since then? The i5 2500 does still hold a bit of water to the Ryzen 5 5600 [0]. Sure, it has more cores and more single-core performance, but it's nowhere near that much of a difference. Windows 10 still runs perfectly fine on this hardware, even better than Windows 7 did - and not by accident, MS did optimize that!
This is absolutely a new low for Microsoft.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_microproces...
[1] https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500-vs-... (yes, I know it's MemeBenchmark, but the general values should be solid enough)