Microsoft says Windows 11 now has one billion users, 'up 45% year-over-year', which is probably no surprise after Windows 10 was put out to pasture

Microsoft released its 2026 second-quarter earnings report yesterday, and it turns out it made lots and lots of money. The tech titan reported revenues of $81.27 billion, although its shares reportedly fell 4% after the announcement of slowing cloud growth. Swings and roundabouts, ey?

But enough about the financials. The news I was most interested in came in MS CEO Satya Nadella's opening remarks, in which he revealed that its current OS has reached a significant milestone: "One billion Windows 11 users, up over 45% year-over-year".

It's not difficult to see why this might be the case. After all, Windows 10 experienced something of a slow death in 2025, as Microsoft turned off the lights and pushed the majority of users over to Windows 11. Sure, there's the Extended Security Updates program for those that really want (or have) to dig their heels in, but otherwise it's unsurprising that vast numbers of regular PC users have eventually made the switch, reluctantly or otherwise.

Not that Windows 11 is a particularly bad OS these days, at least in my opinion. It's had some seriously shaky moments, for sure, but as someone who uses it every day, I'd say it's currently in a reasonable state. Certainly, it's no Windows Vista or Windows 8. But it's the future of Windows overall that has me worried.

Currently, it's relatively easy to ignore the AI-ification of Windows 11. Sure, Copilot likes to plonk itself on your taskbar in a fresh install, and I'm not entirely happy with suggested AI prompts popping up in the settings search bar.

There's nothing wrong with the size of my mouse pointer, thanks. But while there are still a myriad of ways to tweak Windows to your liking (including this handy tool that scrubs Windows 11's AI features off the face of the earth), it's clear that Microsoft is going all-in on an agentic OS future, and Nadella's opening remarks were littered with the company's AI achievements.

If any of us were under the impression that more and more AI integrations weren't the future of all of Microsoft's offerings, now's the time to reconsider.

Windows is changing, slowly but surely, and if all you want is an OS that gets out of the way and allows you to use your machine in a traditional fashion, I think that's likely going the way of the dinosaur in the next few years. Unless the whole AI bubble thing eventually pops some of Microsoft's aspirations. You never know.

Of course, there is one big alternative. You could make the switch over to some flavour of Linux. Our Joshua has experienced a remarkably smooth transition to gaming on the platform, but my hardware colleague Jacob Fox has had, shall we say, a different experience. He's still plodding along with it, but as I write this article, we're currently chatting about broken Ubuntu drivers.

Some things change, some things stay the same—but Windows 11 is where many of us are at. All I'll say is this: strap in, folks. I think the next few years with Microsoft's OS ecosystem might end up being something of a wild ride.

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3. Best handheld gaming PC: Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS ed.

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