As the article notes, the increase seems to be driven mainly by users in Asia, where recycling and reusing older hardware is quite common. I wonder if third-party companies are offering extended security patches there, which could make affordable second-hand Windows 7 machines more appealing for people who just need them for browsing or light tasks. It would certainly make sense given recent fiascos and Microsoft’s current stance on AI, especially with generative AI being used to develop system-level code.
You don’t understand freedom then. You’re free to not use windows, and Microsoft are free to make their product how they see fit.
I use windows every single day. I use copilot for work almost every day in multiple different flavours (windows client, vs code, GitHub, and even made a mcp server using copilot agent to use in teams for departments at work to use to get info from various databases), and I know the privacy aspects of it. In windows in copilots settings you can do what I said - turn off learning from your usage, and turn off personalised content using your other data. You can even disable the copilot app from starting on boot the same way you do every other program, through task manager.
Sane with recall - it’s entirely “on device”, encrypted, secure, optional, and isn’t even available on 99.9% of devices as they don’t have an NPU.
There is no need to try and disable/remove them - just don’t use them if you don’t want to. Why do you think you need to disable/remove them?