Windows 10 support could end early on some Intel systems When Microsoft introduced Windows 10 and its "Windows as a Service" model, the company promised Windows users a steady stream of updates to their machines. The days of being stuck on an old version of Windows would be forgotten; once you were on Windows 10, you'd have access to the latest and greatest forever. But that support came with a small footnote: you'd only receive updates for the "supported lifetime of the device" that you were using Windows 10 on. It now appears that the first victims of that policy may have materialized. ZDNet's Ed Bott has written that systems built around Intel's Clover Trail Atom processors—generally low-cost, low-power machines released between 2012 and 2015—are blocked from installing Windows 10 Version 1703, known as the Creators Update. Attempts to install are met with a message saying that "Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC." Acer had suggested there may be a fix for this but it has not materialised yet. Whatever the situation turns out to be for these particular machines, the situation demonstrates some uncertainties introduced with the Windows-as-a-Service model. The "supported lifetime" of many devices is not well-defined, and Windows 10 users could find themselves with considerably fewer years of device support than they would have received under the old system. See http://ift.tt/2uwiVtl
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