It took me an embarrassing number of decades before I realized they were called (silicon) chips after American snack chips. I always thought it was a weird thing to call something that was plainly a carefully sliced thin sliver and not a piece chipped off anything.
As I did with potato chips too, but that was an established term in American English and it took me a very long time to realize one was named after the other.
I think this is kind of a good thing, that way companies can’t sell old cpus to people who don’t know any better.
But the other side to this is that those new old stock CPUs just became e-waste when they could have been sold at a discount to people who could make use of them despite their age. Perfectly good parts containing precious natural resources and people's labour getting thrown away because Microsoft said so.
You can still buy them, build a computer with them, and use it, even with windows. Windows supports them just fine. Just oems can't sell them in a new PC it with windows pre-installed. Used PCs are also fine. You really don't want a world where you got like 6 versions of a core-i7 in the same store, ranging from 8th generation to 13th, confusing everyone not tech-savvy enough to know (and care) about the difference, so like 95% of people. It also prevents more shady companies from seeking you an old Gen processor, conveniently omitting the details of which generation it is, unless you check the fine print
There are also inverse market effects to your e-waste argument: if companies keep buying old Gen, CPU manufacturers might not scale up production of new generations because demand on old ones stay high, preventing prices of new gen from coming down due to lack of scale.
Finally, this practice isn't new, it's been like this for literal decades. There was just some very shady "journalism" going on recently, picking up this change and just misreporting it going full "fake news" on the subject. This is basically a follow up on that "wave".
Fuck Microsoft and all, but this headline and article are basically bullshit. The requirements for Windows 11 aren't changing. This requirement covers future models of PC released by OEMs. It doesn't affect existing models, home-builds, second hand, refurbished, end-of-line, surplus, etc, etc.
I've seen a lot of cheap little "appliance" machines-- fanless devices meant to be network routers, NAS devices, signage controllers advertised as running on like 4th and 5th generation laptop CPUs.
Maybe not new, but probably some refurbished ones out there.
Though, I was in Bogota and at a Panamericana store selling new computers I was surprised how many of them were sporting Windows 10 stickers. Didn't look close enough at the CPUs though.
It doesn't affect refurbished computers. It doesn't affect used computers. And all those still run windows 10 and 11 just fine. You're just not allowed to sell a windows license pre-installed on new computers with these old processors anymore.
It seems that (no matter how hard people try) Microsoft will always stop supporting some CPUs for no reason. It's utterly pathetic, don't get me wrong, but it wont stop people from installing Windows 11 on "unsupported" hardware.