Well… I don’t know what to tell you, to be honest. How many million machines would make a representative sample? We don’t even have any idea of how many Windows 10-based PCs were actually eligible to get the Windows 11 upgrade, let alone how many of those were not upgraded on purpose. It’s all speculation at this point and that is why one can see such differences between estimates.

I haven’t looked into the most recent numbers at all personally as Windows 11 did nothing all that interesting in 2022, in my eyes at least. I will do that for the obligatory “one year later” piece in October but the general feeling when visiting Reddit, forum threads and comment sections is that most Windows 10 users who had not made the transition to Windows 11 by Christmas 2021, still haven’t. This speaks volumes.

All new PCs sold since last October come with Windows 11 pre-installed, of course, so the user base of the OS has grown overall, but this is irrelevant since that choice is practically forced upon consumers. I even know of people that got a new PC this year and actually downgraded it to Windows 10 with a separate key. They are not many, but still.

To talk from personal experience, even though I originally intended to not upgrade any of my eligible PCs to Windows 11, I ended up doing so with one of them just to get a feeling of how the OS progresses through the updates and fixes Microsoft issues. I still haven’t found a single reason to upgrade any other PC in my house.

It’s still a work in progress. I truly suspect that, by the time Microsoft delivers all it has originally promised, fixed everything and added enough new/noteworthy features that justify the transition from Windows 10, it will almost be time for Windows 12. Which is kind of funny, if you think about it, but hey. Windows 11 was never meant to be an actual new operating system anyway, by the look of things!