TBF, the author’s point, more accurately, seems to be that the average user doesn’t care about the benefits of TPM enough to junk an otherwise performant PC, a practice which Microsoft’s hardware requirements promote. Nor, obviously, is the average user going to care enough to learn about enabling a vTPM in the bios, etc.
If the observation is that this spurred a waste of consumer resources for an edge-case threat scenario, I’d probably concur. It arguably would have been better to not make it a hard requirement.
However, as other comment states, there is an enormous segment of the purchasing population with incredibly deep pockets in aggregate that absolutely does care about TPM. Further, there’s probably no way MS could ensure universal OEM cooperation without “normalizing” the expectation of inclusion with the hard requirement. Sorry, consumer, it’s how the platform evolves.
The author of this article clearly has a bent in mind. The average user doesn't care about any particular technology in an OS that isn't visible, much like anything else they're not concerned with learning about. They just want to do their work, be it on Windows, macOS, flavor-of-Linux, AmigaOS, etc.
Then the author gets into gems about how users interact with their computer via GUIs, but tpm.msc (a GUI, mind you) is somehow set apart; of course Windows includes many other legacy MMCs, the most valuable being the Event Viewer. That said, even a corporate end user has no business being in tpm.msc.
The author points to blog posts from Microsoft touting TPMs and that being a reason to upgrade to Windows 11 -- except the author fails to note those are targeted at IT Pros/upper mgmt of various sorts, not the home user.
IT Pros (generally) do care about security and the benefits of new tech.
(But holy shit neowin is awful -- all of their links point to OTHER neowin articles, some of those links references back to other articles previously link -- and they even take quoted Microsoft content and add their own links in the quotes)
Author's right about one thing, the user expects security to be invisibly taken care of by the OS itself and doesn't care about how. In my experience, the first time most users learn about a security feature is when it throws up a roadblock, and from there the only thing they care about is how to get around it. The real issue here imo is how Windows expects the user to be diligent in setup, record their recovery info, and keep it in a known safe location, instead of just mashing "next" so they can just use the computer already, but that's another conversation.
TBF, the author’s point, more accurately, seems to be that the average user doesn’t care about the benefits of TPM enough to junk an otherwise performant PC, a practice which Microsoft’s hardware requirements promote. Nor, obviously, is the average user going to care enough to learn about enabling a vTPM in the bios, etc.
If the observation is that this spurred a waste of consumer resources for an edge-case threat scenario, I’d probably concur. It arguably would have been better to not make it a hard requirement.
However, as other comment states, there is an enormous segment of the purchasing population with incredibly deep pockets in aggregate that absolutely does care about TPM. Further, there’s probably no way MS could ensure universal OEM cooperation without “normalizing” the expectation of inclusion with the hard requirement. Sorry, consumer, it’s how the platform evolves.
> the average user doesn’t care about the benefits of TPM
What are those benefits ? _My conputer_ must not be protected from me while, in the same time, is running signed, remote code, from Microsoft.
The author of this article clearly has a bent in mind. The average user doesn't care about any particular technology in an OS that isn't visible, much like anything else they're not concerned with learning about. They just want to do their work, be it on Windows, macOS, flavor-of-Linux, AmigaOS, etc.
Then the author gets into gems about how users interact with their computer via GUIs, but tpm.msc (a GUI, mind you) is somehow set apart; of course Windows includes many other legacy MMCs, the most valuable being the Event Viewer. That said, even a corporate end user has no business being in tpm.msc.
The author points to blog posts from Microsoft touting TPMs and that being a reason to upgrade to Windows 11 -- except the author fails to note those are targeted at IT Pros/upper mgmt of various sorts, not the home user.
IT Pros (generally) do care about security and the benefits of new tech.
(But holy shit neowin is awful -- all of their links point to OTHER neowin articles, some of those links references back to other articles previously link -- and they even take quoted Microsoft content and add their own links in the quotes)
Author's right about one thing, the user expects security to be invisibly taken care of by the OS itself and doesn't care about how. In my experience, the first time most users learn about a security feature is when it throws up a roadblock, and from there the only thing they care about is how to get around it. The real issue here imo is how Windows expects the user to be diligent in setup, record their recovery info, and keep it in a known safe location, instead of just mashing "next" so they can just use the computer already, but that's another conversation.
TPM - trusted platform module
TPM provides security _from_ the user, not for the user.