| Windows adoption is largely driven by corporations. Most corporates align on a common policy of migration to every second major Windows release following this pattern: Windows NT 4, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10 With Windows 2000, Windows Vista, and Windows 11 skipped. Which is a shame as these same corporates who have fleets of Apple Mac computers normally migrate annually about 6-9 months after each major annual MacOS release. I hypothesis the reason may be that Windows upgrades tend to be major IT projects with historically large testing and remediation activities, whereas MacOS upgrades are small, introducing a small number of feature enhancements. New Mac computers also are only compatible with the latest MacOS release further encouraging rapid corporate adoption. |
Those have a much longer support period, though. MacOS 11 works on any Mac from 2013 (or occasionally 2014) on. Windows 11 appears to require at least a Kaby Lake processor; those mostly showed up in mid 2017. Many corporates would still have Skylake or earlier machines knocking around; my work machine is a Skylake MacBook Pro, and that's in a large _software_ company.
This is particularly a problem because Intel has been in a bit of a rut; there's not that much difference between a Skylake chip from 2016 and an Ice Lake one from 2020, particularly on the desktop, so there are a lot of Skylakes still in circulation.
Which is all a bit odd, really; traditionally it has been the opposite. But as Apple's support periods have grown, Microsoft's seem to have shrunk.