I'm still running Windows 7 Ultimate and it works just fine, thank you.
A recent alarmist article opines that the "sunsetting" of Window 10 support will mean that millions of computes will be instantly obsolete and have to be scrapped, producing a pile of e-waste larger than the moon. Made ya click! Yea, it is just click-bait nonsense.
I am still running Windows 7 Ultimate on my three lame-ass outdated and reworked laptops. I can buy these all day long on eBay for $50 or less, and they are easy to work on and do all I need them to do - write stuff, balance my accounts, surf the web. I am not doing video or gaming, so I don't need or want a "state of the art" computer in my life.
So what will happen to all those Windows 10 computers? I mean, Windows 10 is one generation old, it has to be obsolete, right? Well, no, as evidenced by the fact that so many people continue to use it and find it perfectly acceptable. Yes, Google Chrome constantly warns me that it "cannot update" until I upgrade to Windows 11. But frankly, these "updates" just put in software to disable my ad blocker or track me even more on the Internet - or put ads in various pages. Frankly, we'd all be better off with an ASCII text interface - at least you could actually see the bullshit these sites are doing to us!
But beyond all that is the crazy notion that you have to have the latest-and-greatest model of phone or laptop or pad or e-watch or clothes or car or house or whatever. It makes a lot of money for Apple when people line up overnight to buy the latest iPhone, and for years, Apple reaped record profits from this sort of idiocy before it started to wear off. But it ain't dead yet. McDonalds opened a chain of coffee shops called "CosMc" (Cosmic? Get it? Yawn!). People lined up starting at 3AM to be the first in line at 6AM to get.... a cup of coffee.
Idiocy isn't dead just yet.
I noted before that being on "the bleeding edge" is never a good place to be. The latest phones end up catching fire before the manufacturer fixes the problem - you are better off with last year's model! In fact, if your phone does everything you need it to, why bother upgrading? It isn't going to run faster or work better, it will just cost you more money. And let's face it - we all need to spend less time looking at screens anyway.
There are other reasons not to be an "upgrader" and one that resonates with me is the staggering amount of productivity lost to upgrades. New systems require new training and that can be as costly as the devices themselves. Every time I have bought a new smart phone, there is nearly a day lost to dicking around setting it up, transferring files and apps and learning the new features. Granted, I am retired, but learning new tech, as you age, is about as appealing as root canal.
In industry, though, it can mean countless thousands of man-hours wasted by learning new systems which really don't do more than the old systems - and often less. The quick and easy Macros we all had in WordPerfect were lost in Microsoft WORD, whose "learning" macros never seemed to work quite right.
And in terms of browsers, who in the world loves Chrome's "Hotkeys" which I have tried to disable time and time again. Yes, it is so convenient to have a single keystroke which, if hit by accident, erases all of your work! I mean, who needs that kind of crap?
Eventually computers break and have to be replaced. And people will migrate to newer systems and discover the joy of an Operating System that SPAMs them with advertisements (No, really!). In the meantime, I will be content with my "obsolete" software (some 20+ years old!) that was long-ago paid for in full, with no subscription fees or updates necessary or wanted.
Quite frankly, these may be the last computers I will ever own!
