Say, some specific feature(s) or instruction(s) Coffee Lake+ and 2nd Gen Ryzen+ CPUs have that earlier ones don't have, which Win11+ requires? I mean, besides the arbitrary blocks Microsoft has put into the WinPE installer and into Windows Update to prevent Feature Updates from being installed on "unsupported" machines? (Now they went even further and began actively blocking older chipsets, meaning, the actual motherboards themselves, too...)
Well, there is really only one reason, to force people to buy new computer systems. However, this is just business and nothing else.
I installed Windows 8.1 on 8th gen Intel which is unsupported and doesn't get the updates. Apart from updates, everything runs normally without any issues so what is it ? The answer is that Microsoft and Hardware manufacturers are partners in crime, supporting each other to rip the end user. Most certainly back room deals.
It's all bulls**t, I'm using w11 22h2 on a 2013 xeon e5-2697v2 that doesn't have "support" but the truth is that it works well and is faster, it uses less cpu in everything compared to w10 21h2/22h2
Ok. What about the firmware support? Does your manufacturer provide a fully compliant bios for Windows 11? (uefi 2.6 firmware specification was launched in 2016, in theory vendors could support 6th and 7th gen) I understand their intentions, but it's too aggressive to block the installation. I would rather have a watermark saying "unsupported platform, security compromised" than not being able to install windows 11 out of the box.
Just the notion that if Enterprise and Education versions should be required to have TPM 2.0, then all versions should.
Have installed 11 on a 7 years old machine and it works just fine. It even updates with all available updates MS offers.
It runs on all >core2duo/quad systems, and updates don't even check for the minimum system requirements. EDITED for that dumb... below: This is for the OP: How many threads are we going to get about this subject?
Oh please.. I am running MSI CR-620 (i3 core with 8GB) which unsupported CPU and no TPM 2.0 and I got work around just fine... Need close this threading.. ATGPUD2003
Microsoft says your CPU is not supported != Windows X will crash on CPU Y due to CPU instruction incompatibility.
I believe this will change with vNext. Probably, a future Canary Channel build will outright refuse to install or boot with CPUs which lack Mode-Based Execution Control, or some other instruction/feature required for HVCI to work.
I hear that story since Windows XP was released. Don't worry with Microsoft. There are much worse companies selling your data. The "security" that we are talking about is how hard is to get windows 11 compromised vs windows 10. They did good with Windows 11 (if you have the right hardware).