Report: Windows 11 Has Crossed 400 Million Monthly Active Devices
- Laurent Giret
- Oct 17, 2023
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A new report from Windows Central’s Zac Bowden today claims that there are now 400 million Windows 11 monthly active devices on the market, citing confidential data from Microsoft. And that number is expected to cross the 500 million milestone next year, surpassing Microsoft’s expectations for the OS released in Fall 2021.
In its 2022 annual report, Microsoft said last year that there are now more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 or Windows 11. However, the company has yet to share detailed data about Windows 11.
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If we use Bowden’s internal data, 400 million Windows 11 devices represent 28.57% of the 1.4 billion monthly active Windows 11 and Windows 10 devices number from Microsoft. That’s slightly higher than the 23.64% market share Statcounter gave to Windows 11 in September 2023, though the web analytics company still measures the market share of Windows 7 (3.3%), Windows 8.1 (0.61%), and Windows XP (0.34%)
Panos Panay, Microsoft’s former Chief Product Officer, proudly said in January 2022 that Microsoft was seeing “strong demand” for Windows 11, with “people accepting the upgrade offer to Windows 11 at twice the rate we saw for Windows 10.” That statement probably raised a lot of eyebrows back then, but according to Bowden, the strict minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11 didn’t slow down the adoption of the new OS.
“Microsoft’s internal expectations were set rather modestly, but my sources say Microsoft has consistently blown past these internal goals,” Bowden wrote. “Windows 11 has been more successful than the company expected from a user base standpoint. This is aided by Microsoft’s new “Moments” update schedule, which enabled the company to get new feature updates in front of Windows users faster.
If Windows 11 may be more popular than expected, there’s still a long way to go before it overcomes Windows 10 as the most-used version of Windows. And while upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 is still free, Microsoft recently stopped allowing people to use Windows 7/8 keys to activate Windows 11.