[therealmarv]

And we all know this a limit made on purpose (by a marketing team?). They probably could use this additional hardware everytime it's available on new PCs and allow a kind of legacy mode for Windows 11 on old PCs. But hey, some marketing genius came up with the idea to sell Windows 10 ESU (Extended Security Updates) membership to end consumers this time.

[IntelMiner]

Windows 11's hardware requirements were made to coincide with CPU's that had hardware mitigation for Meltdown and Spectre attacks, as part of their attempt to push the general baseline of security for average users

[technion]

I've seen this argument from Ms a lot but let's be real, of the ways typical home windows users are compromised spectre isn't a thing, and isn't hasn't done a thing about, for example, how readily windows let's attackers make a script look like an image .

[CamperBob2]

But I couldn't possibly care less about Meltdown and Spectre. It's not clear why anyone does, unless they are running a cloud provider.

In fact, history suggests that the malicious actor who is most likely to hose my PC or otherwise interfere with my workflow is.... Microsoft.

[IntelMiner]

And a lot of other users "couldn't possibly care less" about downloading MP3.EXE files off Limewire

other users today "couldn't possibly care less" about keeping their systems updated let alone running any kind of Anti-Virus

Unfortunately throwing its hands up and saying "nobody cares so why bother" isn't really a great look for a software vendor

[CamperBob2]

Show me a single Meltdown or Spectre exploit that has affected real users.

Can't? Then you're just selling tiger-proof rocks. Expensive ones.

[IntelMiner]

"Everything is working, what do I even pay you for!"

[CamperBob2]

Also meant to call out the irony of your "MP3.EXE" example earlier. Whose bright idea was it to use DOS-era file extensions to drive executable functionality, then hide those extensions from the user by default? That would be Microsoft. The bad guys just took advantage of their lack of actual cybersecurity horse sense.

The paranoid stupidity surrounding forced Spectre and Meltdown mitigations, whose carbon footprint is probably getting close to that of Bitcoin at this point, is just another example.