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Windows 11 Has Reached 1 Billion Users Faster Than Windows 10 (theverge.com) 85

Posted by msmash from the for-the-record dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Windows 11 now has one billion users. Microsoft hit the milestone during the recent holiday quarter, meaning Windows 11 has managed to reach one billion users faster than Windows 10 did nearly six years ago.

"Windows reached a big milestone, 1 billion Windows 11 users," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the company's fiscal Q2, 2026 earnings call. "Up over 45 percent year-over-year." The growth of Windows 11 over the past quarter will be related to Microsoft's end of support for Windows 10, which also helped increase Microsoft's Windows OEM revenues.
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Windows 11 Has Reached 1 Billion Users Faster Than Windows 10 More

Windows 11 Has Reached 1 Billion Users Faster Than Windows 10

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  • End of Support (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Himmy32 ( 650060 ) on Thursday January 29, 2026 @12:17PM (#65956726)
    It's amazing how fast something can happen when forced...

    • When one doesn't have tpm2 or whatever it's called...
      My t5500 doesn't mind...

    • Re: End of Support (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kenh ( 9056 ) on Thursday January 29, 2026 @01:09PM (#65956932) Homepage Journal

      Windows 11 was released in October, 2021 four full years before Win 10 went off support... That doesn't seem very "fast" to me...

      • 1 billion is a big number. Nothing feels fast when the target number gets big.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Himmy32 ( 650060 )

        "Up over 45 percent year-over-year."

        Yes, but this article is about the rate increase this year which is undoubtedly attributable to end of support.

      • How fast did Windows 10 hit the one billion mark after Windows 7 went off support? That's the real comparison.

    • Re:End of Support (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday January 29, 2026 @01:25PM (#65956980)

      Well Windows has always been forced. Literally nearly everyone who got a new version of windows got it because it came with their new PC, or with a hardware refresh through their employer. Then along came Windows 10, the first truly optional and free upgrade, and Microsoft used all sorts of dark patterns and popups and nags to get Windows 7 users to accidentally install Windows 10, and Windows 7 also reached EOL at some point.

      So yeah it's still significant how quickly this happened, despite it being forced because it always has been forced.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by G00F ( 241765 )

        95/98 where good. NT was great. xp, 2000, 2003 was good. windows 7 had some reason but was largely good. windows 8 trash, windows 10, well not as bad as 8, and somehow upgrading to it was at least not as bad as 11..... and 11 was kind of better than 8. Oh yea, vista was garbage.

        But 10, and 11 forced MS online only accounts and onedrive and all the spyware and store front crap.... If the Gov was only as corrupt as they where in 90s they would have been taking to cort a dozen times over.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's interesting how Microsoft gets a lot of flack for this, but other companies don't.

        I'm not saying it's right, but with Android and ChromeOS and iOS, upgrades are basically mandatory if you want to stay on a supported version and relatively safe from exploits. They push you pretty hard to install them, and when they stop supporting the hardware their answer is "buy a new one".

        For me personally, the main issue is that every new version of Windows requires a lot of tweaking to get it how I want it, so upgr

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      The height of the PC waste dump piles serve as Nadella's phallic temples.

      • Interesting to note that every "perfectly capable" PC tossed on the eWaste pile represents another windows user that chose to spend money upgrading to Win 11 rather than switching to "perfectly capable" Linux at no cost what so ever.

        Why couldn't Linux advocates seal the deal and make 2026 the year of the Linux Desktop? They had 4 years (since Win 11 went GA in Oct, 2021), why couldn't they make the case for Linux?

    • Lot of people implying that hardware requirements would prevent people from switching. This might have been true for some, but apparently for many users it wasn't (which made sense; the TPM requirement is for very old PCs). So "ending" support for Windows 10 did what Microsoft wanted, moved users to Windows 11.

      By the way, I just recently tried to update an old Windows 10 PC (of a family member), and Windows Update simply offered me to extend the support by a year.

      • the TPM requirement is for very old PCs

        Noting that while the TPM was created ostensibly for security, it also supports and is used for DRM and vendor lock-in. Making it a "requirement" allows better implementation and enforcement of all those goals. There's no technical operational requirement for it and what it supports for most users. The end result is that requiring a TPM, and newer CPUs that also support some of these goals, simply forced people to discard perfectly good systems running Windows 10 and purchase new hardware for Windows 11

        • Or used to restore their laptop/desktop is it shits the bed and won't boot - OneDrive saved a friends bacon when his hd got corrupted. Toss in a new drive, re-install the OS, and then log into OneDrive, and there were all his files...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        > the TPM requirement is for very old PCs

        "Very old PCs" which were working fine with Windows 10. And still work fine with Linux.

        It's also weird because I remember Microsoft telling us that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows and there'd never be a Windows 11.

        • "Very old PCs" which were working fine with Windows 10. And still work fine with Linux.

          NB: Those Win 10 machines still work just fine with Win 10 installed, now with NO UNWANTED UPDATES!

  • What does that actually mean? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Thursday January 29, 2026 @12:19PM (#65956736) Journal

    Windows 11 would have virtually no users if it wasn't for Microsoft and hardware manufacturers colluding to force people into upgrades.

    Wide adoption doesn't mean it's popular when it isn't voluntary.
    =Smidge=

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by keltor ( 99721 ) *
      No and also no.

      It's just Windows 10 with a new number added.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z80a ( 971949 )

        It's Windows 10 with a webpage as start bar and a bunch of bugs introduced with vibe coding (and a better memory manager somehow)

        • It's Windows 10 with a webpage as start bar and a bunch of bugs introduced with vibe coding (and a better memory manager somehow)

          Windows 10 was already webpage as a start bar, it's why it was so easy to bring back the Windows 7 style. All Windows 11 did was change the style a bit.

          It would be more accurate to say Windows 11 *is* Windows 10. But don't take my word for it, open up your coding tool of choice and do an API call to GetVersion() and see what Windows 11 thinks it is. Also of note the most recent OS identification helper function Microsoft published is IsWindows10OrGreater()

          Not even Windows will tell you if it's Windows 11 in

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rujiel ( 1632063 )
        Are you really here telling other people that the windows upgrade treadmill is imaginary, in 2026?

      • > It's just Windows 10 with a new number added.

        I never said anything about Windows 10 though?

        =Smidge=

    • What forces a user to upgrade? Many users have chosen to remain on Win 10 for whatever reason, and they have not lost any functionality they had before Win 10 went EOL, except for security updates, and as I recall, windows updates were a big frustration (at least according to Linux advocates when they chimed in on any windows topics on /.)...

    • Windows 11 would have virtually no users if it wasn't for Microsoft and hardware manufacturers colluding to force people into upgrades.

      You can say that about literally every windows every released since 3.11. People got new windows with new hardware. The exception was Windows 10 and that first ever free upgrade that people could "voluntarily" get came with a lot of tricks to get people to update from Windows 7.

      • Well that's patently false. It wasn't until Win10 was out that Microsoft decided it would not let you install Win7 on CPUs made after ~2017. No technical limitation for that by the way, because both official and unofficial patches existed that would allow it.

        And this is not the same as the OS requiring new hardware. This is the OS deliberately rejecting newer hardware. So if you got new hardware, you did not have a choice but to upgrade Windows too.
        =Smidge=

        • I never said there was a technical limitation. I only said that throughout all of history Windows 10 is unique in that it's the one Windows version people upgraded to. Every other time, people bought new hardware and got new Windows with it. Windows has always throughout history been linked to hardware upgrades. Bitching and moaning that you can't upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 11 (as if that's something Slashdotters wanted) because of a hardware restriction is nothing more than a continuation of a quirk fro

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by 0123456 ( 636235 )

            Uh, the "upgrade" to Windows 10 was forced too. It just didn't force you to buy new hardware as well.

            My mother-in-law called us one day because her Windows computer had suddenly started looking completely different after Microsoft installed Windows 10 on it without asking. It wasn't something she wanted.

  • 45% jump in earnings, or in windows installs? (Score:3)

    by Keick ( 252453 ) on Thursday January 29, 2026 @12:21PM (#65956748)

    Do they mean a 45% increase in installs, or a 45% increase in the quarter-over-quarter upgrade rate?

    I.e., did they really gain almost a half a billion installs in 3 months? That's hard to imagine even considering the deprecation of Windows 10.

    But if they went from 10,000 users a month to 14,500 users a month that is MUCH different story.

  • Amazing What Can Be Accomplished (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crunchy_one ( 1047426 ) on Thursday January 29, 2026 @12:22PM (#65956752)
    By forcing your customers to upgrade by means of: Dark patterns, threats, coercion, arbitrary expiration dates, and on and on.

    Congratulations, Satya! We love you.
    • Name a commercial OS that doesn't also do this?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Rujiel ( 1632063 )
        Does an inescapable paucity of options excuse the behavior?
        • When they are some of the longest supporters of hardware in the commerical space?

          Yes.

          Microsoft on average will support hardware for 10 years. macOS, iOS, and Android average 7 years. Only ChromeOS supports 10 years.
      • I would say OS X, but since Apple doesn't charge a penny for OS upgrades and it comes with the hardware, I suppose you could argue that they use tactics to get people to buy new systems but that is another issue. This isn't a pro-Apple point; merely a statement of fact. Android also doesn't charge for upgrades. In fact, name another non-PC OS that DOES charge for upgrades. I bet you can't.
        • Apple kills all OS support on hardware after 7 years (4 major OS updates, and that final one will get 3 total years of security updates). Microsoft typically gives 10 years of support. This isn't a good thing.
          Android and iOS typically have the same 7ish years on hardware, again, not quite the flex you were hoping for.
          The only one that can match would be ChromeOS which typically has the same 10 years.

          And Windows 8, 10, and 11 were all free upgrades so this again matches (assuming the hardware was supported,
          • I was hoping for you to actually read my post before you replied. I quite specifically stated that you could argue a hardware leverage angle, but again the actual cost for OS upgrade in all of those cases is zero. It was exactly the "flex" I was hoping for, so again, name a commercial OS vendor in the PC market that charges for upgrades. And your claim that M$ doesn't do the same thing is ridiculous. In fact they deliberately require RAM quantities and stop supporting video cards, etc. that aren't needed in
            • I was hoping you'd actually read my post before you replied, but here we are.

              I'll repeat it again, UPGRADES to Windows 7-8-10-11 were all free. Buying the whole OS isn't upgrading. Windows offers free OS upgrades, same as everyone else.

              And Apple does deliberately require hardware upgrades and stops supporting video cards (NVIDIA), with OpenCore Legacy Patcher showing these aren't needed in order to upgrade.

              And this was all based on the starting arguement of "By forcing your customers to upgrade by means of:

            • In fact they deliberately require RAM quantities and stop supporting video cards, etc. that aren't needed in order to upgrade.

              If a video card mfg drops support for older cards on newer OSes, that isn't Microsoft's fault.

              I gave no idea where you got this "deliberately requiring RAM quantities" BS. What is the minimum RAM requirement for Win 11? Four goddam gigabytes - that's it, those evil bastards require to install 4 GB of RAM to run Win 11!

              https://support.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]

              • Why the fsck would an OS that most users use for browsing the web, email, and basic programs like a word processor and spreadsheet require 4 Gigabytes and 64 Gigabytes of free disk space just for the OS itself? Linux provides far more functionality including all the applications needed with 2 GB and 15 GB respectively. Yep ... you is a winderz yoosa alright.

      • Putting a stake in the ground for the end-of-life for a version of your OS is reasonable thing to do. What's not reasonable is when the successive version is worse, and no one wants it. Windows biggest competitor has always been the previous version of Windows. After 40 years, Microsoft should have realized why.

        Some new versions of Windows were improvements over all, but the last one for which that was true was Windows 7 (and before that was XP), and it's probably the last one that will ever feel like

      • None of them except Windows? What other commercial OSes do that?

    • A comment that ignores the fact that forced upgrades have been the Windows mainstay since computing started. Literally everyone "upgraded" Windows by having the latest version automatically on their new hardware. It has always been forced on you. If anything Windows 11 is refreshing such that the upgrade is once against tied to something to do with hardware.

      People bitch about the fact that Windows 10 was optional and available as an upgrade but forget that this fact made it an absolute outlier in the histor

      • > A comment that ignores the fact that forced upgrades have been the Windows mainstay since computing started.

        That would be wrong

        > Literally everyone "upgraded" Windows by having the latest version automatically on their new hardware.

        Buying a new computer is somewhat different from upgrading only your OS. That's what the subject is about.

        • Buying a new computer is somewhat different from upgrading only your OS. That's what the subject is about.

          And my point is that upgrading only your OS is something that literally no one did with the exception of only Windows 10. We got very comfortable with a feature or practice that has been done only very recently.

        • Every person here bitching about being forced to upgrade to Win 11 is literally saying "I want to stay on Win 10!"

          They seem to prefer Win 10...

      • People bitch about the fact that Windows 10 was optional and available as an upgrade but forget that this fact made it an absolute outlier in the history of Windows.

        Win 10 was an "outlier"? It currently has about 45% of windows market share, it was 75%+ a year ago (Jan 2025)...

        https://gs.statcounter.com/os-... [statcounter.com]

        • Not sure what you think you are saying when you are using quotes around the word outlier, but I think you completely missed the point of my post. Try reading it again with the hint: No one is talking about market share.

    • They also forced some of us to stop being their customers. A lot of businesses are perfectly fine with employees running Linux these days. Apple selling $500 Mac Minis also make it very easy for people to drop Windows entirely even if they still need Office. I've still got one (well two if you want to count an old laptop that hasn't been turned on in over a year) Windows machine at home, but it's never getting upgraded and I will not replace it with a new Windows box. If prices ever settle down and I build

      • Apple selling $500 Mac Minis also make it very easy for people to drop Windows entirely even if they still need Office.

        As a reminder, going from Win to Mac means the new Mac user has to buy/subscribe to Office for Mac, will likely feel obliged to get a proper Apple mouse/keyboard (that's a quick $150+), and if their old windows machine display was analog/VGA only, at least an adapter if not a new display (another quick $100)... so that "Screw them, I'll get a Mac" user is going to spend as much as $850 or more PLUS an MS Office subscription!

        Tell me again how that's cheaper than a $500 Win 11 box?

  • No one wanted to switch to 10.

    • Back then everybody was on Windows 7. The Windows 8 users upgraded immediately.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by znrt ( 2424692 )

        w8 was meant to be skipped. the sensible upgrade path for windows was:

        wfwg3.11 -> w98se -> nt/2000 -> wxp -> w10.

        provided you waited about a year after each release. mostly everything inbetween was toxic or didn't work sensibly. w11 is toxic but at least works. most of the time.

        • Not sure that's correct. It would have been Workgroups 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Windows 2000 -> Windows 7. After that, maybe Windows 10

          Windows 98 had its bugs, and Windows XP's first edition didn't support > 320MB. At that time, I had a 540MB HDD, which I wanted to be completely a single partition C:\, but I was forced to just keep it at 320MB. It was only after SP2 that I could have the entire 540MB as C:\. That's why, after Windows 2000, the next jump would have been Windows 7

          Microsoft s

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by znrt ( 2424692 )

            Not sure that's correct. It would have been Workgroups 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Windows 2000 -> Windows 7. After that, maybe Windows 10

            w95 was a joke, a nice graphical shell for the time but barely more than that, with no concern for security at all and no way to get around that. that didn't get minimally addressed until w98 second edition. i did forget w7 on the list, though, it was quite solid.

            Windows XP's first edition

            xp was solid too if you upgraded after a few service packs, that's what the 1 year quarantine is for. i never install freshly released comercial software, specially not from ms. let others take the burn if they feel like (and what's the rush, it's

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      Windows 10 was an upgrade to Windows 8, and to Windows 8.1 ... back when I installed it.
      But Windows Updates since then have removed pre-installed programs and made the system much slower.

      Not to mention the irremovable Cortana icon that lingered in my task bar for a few years, despite Cortana never being available in my region.

    • Not sure whether you're being facetious, but I had a Windows 8 laptop in 2015, which was a pain to use. A previous one I had already converted to PC-BSD: this one I converted to Windows 10 the moment it became available. Windows 7 was the greatest version of Windows ever, and Windows 10 followed

      Windows 11 would actually have been fine, had they not tried to forcefeed us AI, and also, had they left utilities like Notepad, WordPad and Paint alone. That's not the case w/ Windows 8 ten years ago: I had it

  • Because the actual numbers do not look good. Apparently, more people are going back to Win10 than the other way round now. With the way Win11 keeps crashing on me (on two different computers that were entirely fine under Win11), I am tempted too.

    • With the way Win11 keeps crashing on me (on two different computers that were entirely fine under Win11), I am tempted too.

      What?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Hard freezes during teams sessions (only reset button helps), graphics driver crashes. All with up-to-date drivers and hardware that had zero problems under Win10. On entirely different systems. The crashes started immediately after the downgrade to Win11.

        • Let's try this again:

          With the way Win11 keeps crashing on me (on two different computers that were entirely fine under Win11), I am tempted too.

          "With the way Win11 keeps crashing on me (on two different computers that were entirely fine under Win11), I am tempted too."

          See the confusion now? Win 11 "keeps crashing" on two computers that were "completely fine under Win 11"?

    • When I bought a new laptop that came with Vista, I _paid_ for an XP license so I could go back to that.

      I upgraded to Windows 11 around the end-of-life deadline. Things were mostly the same (I've been using OpenShell for a long, long time), although my machine (and my new Windows 11 work machine) have been locking up on me occasionally, something I don't recall happening with Windows 10, or if it did, it was much rarer.

  • The spin on this is adorable (Score:3)

    by thecombatwombat ( 571826 ) on Thursday January 29, 2026 @12:39PM (#65956816)

    These numbers were released as part of an earnings call that drove the stock down more than 10%. It's taking the market with it today, it's a really, really bad day for Microsoft.

    These numbers aren't really what did it but . . . still though.

    Does anyone have precise numbers? I'm pretty sure Windows 8 was supported a full year longer into the Windows 10 cycle than Windows 11 was into Windows 10's. The adoption rate is not at all impressive considering that . . . though if they wanted to take credit for the surge in the Linux desktop . . . that is much, much, much, much bigger than the last cycle.

    Even as an old man on /. I've never been in the spelling Microsoft with a $ camp of haters, but this is just embarrassing.

  • It's like Fidel Castro bragging about receiving 100% of the vote.

  • My dog's favorite treat is knee caps.

  • "Windows reached a big milestone..."

    Shouldn't that be "millstone", as in the debilitating weight of spyware, rentware, adware, bloatware, and AI hallucinations hanging around the necks of Windows 11 users?

  • When users are strong-armed into upgrading (Score:3)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Thursday January 29, 2026 @01:56PM (#65957058)

    you get upgrades, did people really need to do this? No. And the worst part of it is Microsoft is in bed with the hardware manufacturers on forced upgrades, so instead of improving windows 10 and optimizing it we get a forced upgrade of something that is worse in many degrees.

    • No one got in bed with anyone. Microsoft provided a minimum hardware requirement. That shit exists, the fact that in the past it has been some soft guideline rather than a feature (and Windows is the last consumer oriented OS to adopt said feature given it has been a required part of Macs, iOS and Android for years) is not withstanding. Windows 7 didn't have a specific hardware limitation right? Go try install it on your 486.

      The only thing here is that for once a feature isn't tied exclusively to shitty per

  • Most of those were accidental upgrades and it left such a bad taste in their victim's mouths that they switched to linux or mac, so only about 230,000,000 of those are legit, well, the vast majority of those are forced by external factors. So, let's see, there's 39,254 users that are using it voluntarily, and I think I head three or four of them liked it, though I know one of those guys is going through some shit right now, so who knows what he'll think once he's back out of the mental hospital.

  • Much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft's avarice saved me a lot on my PC upgrade. Granted my gaming PC was quite old, one of the big reasons that motivated me to build a completely new PC when I did was Windows 11 compatibility. Given current RAM / storage prices, I saved a LOT more than the cost of a new copy of Windows.

  • For those who want (Score:3)

    by gabrieltss ( 64078 ) on Thursday January 29, 2026 @02:02PM (#65957074)
    For those who want to go back to Windows 10:

    https://archive.org/details/wi... [archive.org]

  • I look at the windows users with a sort of bewilderment.
    I guess it's all about the apps.
    Meh, nothing that I need.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by labnet ( 457441 )

      Well anyone who does engineering or embedded is forced to use windows.
      Pretty much every high end eCAD, mCAD, and dev environments that need to talk to real world hardware are windows only.

  • I want to know where do these "facts" come from. There has been story after story about Win11 having slower uptake than Win10 and how many people are moving off the Windows platform for Mac or Linux due to Win11 and now all the sudden it's the fastest to reach 1 billion users?

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