Windows 10 may soon be getting a price rise for the brand new addition to the OS’s line-up, according to shock new reports.
Windows 10 users are currently gearing up for the next big Creators Update from Microsoft, which will bring with it a raft of new features and tweaks this month.
The Fall Creators Update is set to drop on October 17, and will boast the new Timeline feature, Microsoft’s Fluent Design System and mixed reality support.
And it’s now been claimed that alongside the Fall Creators Update Microsoft will introduce a price rise for the latest edition of the OS.
ZDNet reported that Microsoft will launch the new Windows 10 Pro for Workstations edition around the same time the next Creators Update drops.
And they claimed that the release could also signal a change to the way Microsoft licenses and prices Windows 10 for its PC maker partners.
These price increases could then potentially be passed onto end-user customers.
ZDNet have been contacted by a number of sources, one of which said the tech giant would start licensing Windows 10 by processor family.
One customer claimed they were told there could be a price increase of around £53 for systems with processors with four or fewer cores.
For machines with Intel Xeon processors that have more than four cores, there could be a reported price increase of roughly £175 per OS.
Express.co.uk have contacted Microsoft about these claims and are awaiting a response.
Windows 10 Pro for Workstations will be available around the same time that the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update becomes available.
It will also be available as a paid upgrade to Windows 10 Home or Pro users, but the price for the upgrade has not been revealed yet.
A Microsoft spokesperson told ZDNet they had no comment on the Windows 10 Pro for Workstations pricing.
The news comes after over the weekend Express.co.uk revealed why PC users who have not upgraded to Windows 10 need to make the jump.
It was reported that Microsoft have been patching out security bugs in Windows 10 but NOT immediately rolling those out to Windows 7 and 8 users.
This lag in updates leaves potentially hundreds of millions computers at risk of an attack.
The exploits that hackers and malware are taking advantage of is being fixed in the big Windows 10 releases.
However, this is only slowly filtering back to Windows 7 and 8 in the form of monthly software updates.
The news was revealed by researchers on Google’s Project Zero team.
It’s feared cybercriminals comparing the various builds of Windows will notice these holes in earlier versions of Windows and take advantage of it.
Google researchers outlined their fears in a blog post.
Google Project Zero researcher Mateusz Jurczyk said: “Microsoft is known for introducing a number of structural security improvements and sometimes even ordinary bug fixes only to the most recent Windows platform.
“This creates a false sense of security for users of the older systems, and leaves them vulnerable to software flaws which can be detected merely by spotting subtle changes in the corresponding code in different versions of Windows.”