alt Hacker NewsWindows isn't hardware. If the laptops were only capable of running a particular version of Windows XP, then yes they should either be unlocked or their firmware open sourced to allow running something else.
Windows isn't hardware. If the laptops were only capable of running a particular version of Windows XP, then yes they should either be unlocked or their firmware open sourced to allow running something else.
Linux will run on "anything" and is especially good on old OSS. So I feel like MS is the least affected by this whole proposal.
Equally, nothing stops you running XP on the device forever. (There are plenty devices out there that are.)
So this whole line of comments is somewhat off-topic to when hardware is bricked.