That's the invisible hand of Intel pushing their good buddy MS to burry the Meltdown/Spectre vulnerable family of products from officially supported software. EDIT:Or at least those family of products too old to be patched to a sufficient degree. Once you view the product requirements through that lens, it makes a lot more sense. Additionally the TPM/Secure Boot requirements allow them better "control" for lack of a better word over OEM Windows licensing, but their masquerading it as a security feature (even though w10 supports it) kinda blew up in their face.
Between that and trying to push a new MS store that allows them to take a cut of 3rd party software a la the play store/steam/etc is the real reason Microsoft suddenly switched gears from W10 being the "last" version of Windows to "hey guys, everyone upgrade to W11, it's totally different see, we moved the start menu!"
> MS to burry the Meltdown/Spectre vulnerable family
> Once you view the product requirements through that lens, it makes a lot more sense.
No it doesn't. You can disable these mitigations in kernel right now and there is no guarantee that intel won't have any vulnerabilities in future micro-architectures. So you need the support to enable/disable future mitigations in kernel anyway.
Yes, it does. Because this is a officially supported hardware list (read: liability to support, which heavily influences enterprise and business purchasing and upgrade decisions). It's important to remember that "support" in this context does NOT mean function, that's an entirely separate and unrelated issue. Put another way, Disabling those mitigations does not prevent the product from functioning, but it will allow MS and Intel to deny support and push a new product as a fix instead.
Just because you can disable the mitigations or that the new family of products may well be flawed (in a similar manner, or in entirely support manner) is frankly irrelevant, and suggesting as such entirely misses the point.
This is a business (Intel) pushing a product through a partnership (With MS) with the idea that they'll both see boosted returns from upgrades to newer hardware families and in turn new OEM/Enterprise licensing. Why fix the problem when you can bury it under new quarterly sales.
Between that and trying to push a new MS store that allows them to take a cut of 3rd party software a la the play store/steam/etc is the real reason Microsoft suddenly switched gears from W10 being the "last" version of Windows to "hey guys, everyone upgrade to W11, it's totally different see, we moved the start menu!"