Got the crossover piece already.
Upgrading OpenCore on Hackintosh machines is… interesting. Now that I have completed that mission, do I carry on to complete the ‘Upgrade the OS to a new release’ quest?
I didn’t expect this, but it looks like a decision Microsoft made four years ago has come back to bite them and bite them hard. That’s when they released Windows 11 and made it mandatory that the motherboard has to have a v2.0 TPM. A lot of people, including me, have joked about being disappointed that their computer that runs Windows 10 can’t upgrade to 11.
Well, as of now, there’s a whole lot more people that can’t afford to upgrade to Win 11 even if they want to. First, you have Trump’s tariffs making anything imported more expensive, despite how many times he says it’s the other country that pays them. Second, the DOGE debacle, which ended up costing more than it supposedly saved, causing damage to the U.S. government that will take a long time to fix, and in the meantime, that damage ripples out to the rest of the country.
The third factor is the A.I. bandwagon. Everybody loves A.I. It’s so useful, it does lots of really neat stuff. Microsoft loves it and wants everyone to use Copilot so much they force it on you. Disney’s partnering with Open AI, so who needs writers, actors, songwriters, musicians and animators when any prompt kiddie can have it generate the next Cars or Toy Story sequel? (That’s a joke that’s not really a joke. Disney: “Hey, Pixar. You’re a sequel studio now.”)
The downside of the A.I. bandwagon is the companies that make critical components for it are shifting their focus to it. Micron announced a month ago they’re shutting down Crucial and getting out of the consumer market to focus exclusively on enterprise markets (data centers and A.I.). SK Hynix says its entire memory production capacity for 2026 is already sold. Samsung increased the price of DDR5 memory by 100%.
If you haven’t already bought the components to build a computer that meets Win 11’s requirements, you may have to wait a year or more, choose less powerful components, or do something like give an old computer new life by installing Linux on it.
So, good job, Microsoft. That bullet you fired four years ago to force people to update their hardware is making its way back to you. Here’s a thought. You know all those reports of people were able to upgrade to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware? Maybe you oughta take another look at that. See if there isn’t a way to make that official. Because I’m sure it won’t turn out to be the same thing as when you claimed Internet Explorer was so interwoven into the Windows OS that separating the two wasn’t possible, then it turned out that oh, hey, I guess we can separate IE from Windows. How about that?
3 Likes
Not a fan of W11, Im looking into a linux distro that i can reimage my desktop and laptop with. Win11 is so shit to use.
So, uh, yeah. Guess what’s also going to be in short supply? Hard drives. Everyone that can’t buy an SSD is now buying hard drives, and a big chunk of the purchases are being made by data centers and A.I. companies.
Western Digital just announced at their Q2 earnings call that they’ve “pretty much sold out” of hard drives “for calendar 2026. We have firm POs. with our top seven customers.” In the Gizmondo article, WD’s CEO also said two of their big customers also have dibs on drives going into 2027 and a third has dibs going into 2028.
Looks like WD has guaranteed sales of everything they will make and it’s being purchased by companies that make up 89% of their total revenue. Will they pull a Micron and shut down their retail customer product line, which only makes up 5% of their total revenue?
2 Likes