Could be a small number of experienced users, a few thousand in every city, who have always installed Windows from optical disk.
Reliably and simply using the ISO as intended for it's primary purpose of being burned to optical disk.
Moving from CDROM to DVD to large DVD would have been the rarely-triggered optical-drive upgrading cycle driven by Windows bloat alone.
Looks like Blu-rays would be the only thing big enough now.
No.
The Windows 11 media creation tool still officially supports creating a DVD installer from ISO image for Windows 11 (including the latest 25H2 release), alongside USB drives etc. The requirements for the DVD version are still the same 8gb of space it has been for a while. As of today, the ISO is 7.2GB.
Virtually everyone uses a bootable USB thumbdrive or similar today though, and page you download the ISO from heavily encourages this, and is trivial to make with the Installation Media tool Microsoft give you.
That wouldn't require a Blu-ray.
The ISO expands quite a bit after it is installed to your SSD.
Maybe they are backing up their whole systems to the Blu-rays?
Or have big movie collections which some comments indicated was expected.
I've used USB for a while, don't think I've even used a DVD to install Windows.
Did use them to back up years ago, but now a HDD for that.
Windows 11 requires that the machine have a TPM.
You can get collections for a buck a movie, and most top movies can be bought for 6 dollars. People are waking up to the ripoff cycle of “ owning” digital media where things disappear from your collection with no warning.
Piracy and physical media are once again on the rise now that streaming became cable.
treesknees•3mo ago
>People building new systems solely for the reason of getting on board with Windows 11 are now in the market for disc drives, which is likely the main driver behind this sudden trend.
So Windows 11 is demanding new hardware, and consumers are choosing to also include a disc drive.