[ynik]

Only if you measure the life cycle starting from the initial release.

Windows 10 dropped out of support only 3 years after its successor (Win11) was available; when Windows 8.1 still had 7 more years of support after its successor (Win10) was released.

There's a lot of users who never upgrade windows but instead just get whatever is the latest whenever they buy a new computer. If these people bought a new computer every 5 years, they were always fine in the past, but now for the first time run out of support (because Win10 was "the latest" for an unusually long time period).

[daveoc64]

If someone has a newer PC, they should be able to upgrade to Windows 11 for free.

If they have an older PC, then they must have already enjoyed quite some period of the 10-year Windows 10 support lifecycle.

Unless Microsoft were to go to an Apple-esque annual release cycle, regularly dropping support for older hardware, I'm not sure how they could ever manage this.