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Windows 11 Home
The standard consumer edition of Windows 11 — the version that ships pre-installed on most new retail laptops and desktops.
Platform
Windows
Edition
Home
Released
October 2021
Support ends
Still supported
System requirements
1 GHz 64-bit CPU (2+ cores) on an approved list, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, UEFI Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, DirectX 12 / WDDM 2.0 GPU.
Windows 11 Home is what the overwhelming majority of new consumer PCs ship with out of the box. It carries Microsoft's strictest hardware gate of any Windows release to date -- a TPM 2.0 chip and UEFI Secure Boot are hard requirements, not just recommendations, which is why a meaningful share of otherwise-capable Windows 10 PCs can't officially upgrade. It lacks a few features reserved for Pro and above (BitLocker device encryption's full control panel, Group Policy management, Remote Desktop as a host, Windows Sandbox), which is the usual reason a Home user later upgrades to Pro rather than reinstalling from scratch. Feature updates arrive roughly once a year (most recently 25H2 in late 2025) rather than the old twice-a-year cadence.
Release dates, support windows, and system requirements come from Microsoft's and Apple's own published lifecycle pages (linked above) — always confirm there before relying on this for a production/enterprise deployment decision, since support policies occasionally change.