It's linked in the article, but here's Dave's video where he mentioned all of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGj0rVZGfuk

> rationale was usually the increasing difficulty and cost of maintaining security and ensuring compatibility with modern software and hardware on aging platforms

> they simply lack a specific relatively recent security chip or a sufficiently new processor architecture

Gosh, that sounds like the exact same reason! TPM is now leveraged not only for FDE but for OS-level security. And it's not "recent". Picking a random supported i3-8 series processor, it launched in Q4 '17, which of course has TPM 2.0 supported by it's chipset. That's eight years old. You couldn't run XP on an eight year old machine (not that we complained about upgrading given the delta between hardware performance at the time) -- the Pentium 233 launched in '97 and XP in '01.

> it remains unclear why Microsoft does not allow users to opt out of the enhancements if they lack the hardware.

Security has been a paramount concern of Windows, not only for Microsoft, but the public/corporations at large. Microsoft has taken a beating for security issues over the year, and now people are demanding to /opt-out/ of it so they can complain about their self-inflicted vulnerable OS down the road? Is it really that unclear to The Reg?

Windows has required upgrades in some form or fashion over the years. This is nothing new; the only thing new is processor performance has leveled out for most non-demanding uses. And reddit.

I suppose there are those users who disable Spectre mitigations because it gives them 0.5 fps in CS2.

The rest of the article is a nothing-burger. Just someone 'supposing' what could happen years from now when Windows 12 drops.