Windows 11 growth reportedly stalls hard in March

Despite being packed full of new flashy features and boasting a slick new design, Windows 11 reportedly isn’t as popular as Microsoft had hoped for, and its hardware requirements might be to blame. 

After Windows 11’s explosive launch in October of last year, the latest version of Microsoft’s OS has been steadily rising in popularity and claiming more of the market share for itself, as to be expected, however, a new AdDuplex report indicates that the userbases’ growth is already dramatically slowing. 

In their report, AdDuplex state that “the usage share of Windows 11 is basically the same as it was a month ago,” which definitely isn’t what Microsoft want to hear, as currently Windows 11 only account for roughly 20% of all Windows users. 

According to AdDuplex, 19.4% of these users are on the main release build of the OS, while an additional 0.6% are running the latest Windows Insider build. 

While AdDuplex does not detail exactly why Windows 11 has seen this negligible increase in the month on month growth for the first time ever, it’s likely not all down to everyone hating the centralized taskbar, as the software’s hardware requirements will also play a serious factor.

Since Windows 11 notoriously requires an Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake or AMD Zen+ and Zen 2, or newer, CPU, Microsoft has dramatically reduced the potential userbase for their latest OS, which could be leading to this stagnation in growth, since not everyone has a PC made after 2017. 

Notably, in the AdDuplex report, we can see that not every Windows user is so keen on updating their OS, as while Windows 10 accounts for 80% of Windows users, only 28.5% are on the latest N21U (21H2) build. 

Because of this, while hardware requirements will always be a limiting factor, it’s equally possible that the majority of Windows users simply don’t want to update and change the familiar OS that they’re used to, even if updating brings in new much-requested features.