> Windows 8.1 Update is supported until 2023 AFAIK.
Talking about 8, not 8.1
> Purely out of interest what kind of hardware is incompatible between the two versions?
Many drivers tend to break as windows goes through changes. When I tried a preview of the windows 10 creators update I had a driver stop working right. There were also serious nVidia problems that broke the old driver versions; imagine that happening with your typical company that stops providing drivers after a year.
Though the driver comment wasn't specifically about 8. Good luck upgrading XP to not-XP, even if your hardware can perform better than a modern Surface.
Windows 8.1 Update is basically a roll-up update service pack to Windows 8 and is a free upgrade. That's like complaining that the released patches work on XP SP2/SP3 but not the original XP.
If someone fails to update Windows 8 to 8.1 Update or has magically written software that works on Windows 8 but not 8.1 Update, it's on them.
>Many drivers tend to break as windows goes through changes. When I tried a preview of the windows 10 creators update I had a driver stop working right. There were also serious nVidia problems that broke the old driver versions; imagine that happening with your typical company that stops providing drivers after a year.
Those drivers are typically either using bad coding practices or relying on unsupported features or bugs. Maybe you should contact them as a customer and let your displeasure known. If enough people do that they may actually do something about it.
1) Drivers break because they were poorly written, not because of Microsoft. (I know it because I write drivers)
2) Windows barely ever changes. The lengths through which the MS devs go to preserve compatibility are insane. It's incompetent driver writers who write buggy code who should take responsibility. If you were even minimally familiar with the Windows API, you'd know. And if you aren't, here's a quote from a Windows developer:
"I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95."
Talking about 8, not 8.1
> Purely out of interest what kind of hardware is incompatible between the two versions?
Many drivers tend to break as windows goes through changes. When I tried a preview of the windows 10 creators update I had a driver stop working right. There were also serious nVidia problems that broke the old driver versions; imagine that happening with your typical company that stops providing drivers after a year.
Though the driver comment wasn't specifically about 8. Good luck upgrading XP to not-XP, even if your hardware can perform better than a modern Surface.