I know, I am a couple of months late on this… on February 1st, 2018 Microsoft announced that it would be extending support on Windows 10 Editions 1709, 1703, and 1607. That means that instead of having 18 months of support, you will have 24. The bad news? This applies only to the Enterprise and Education SKUs of the product.
According to Microsoft, this is the current support calendar:
Release | Release Date | End of Support | End of Support for Enterprise/Education |
Windows 10 (1607) | August 2, 2016 | April 10, 2018 | October 9, 2018 |
Windows 10 (1703) | April 5, 2017 | October 9, 2018 | April 9, 2019 |
Windows 10 (1709) | October 17, 2017 | April 9, 2019 | October 8, 2019 |
For those of you not paying attention, End of Support for Windows 10 (1607) was earlier this week, as well as End of Additional Servicing for Enterprise, Education for Windows 10 1511.
For those of you who say that it is unfair that Enterprise and Education SKUs get longer support cycles, please remember that most customers who buy the Home and Pro SKUs are buying much fewer licenses, and the free upgrade (via Windows Update, as well as numerous other channels) makes it much easier to manage, as compared to Enterprise and Education license customers, where customers often buy tens (and hundreds) of thousands of seats, and need time to check software compatibility and to actually roll out (via their enterprise deployment tools) the myriad seats that they have.