Think about the disruption that Apple caused when they moved from 32-bit x86 being supported to deprecating it - there was a great deal of angst, and that's on

Think about the disruption that Apple caused when they moved from 32-bit x86 being supported to deprecating it - there was a great deal of angst, and that's on a vertically-integrated platform that is relatively young (yes, I know that NeXT is old, but MacOS isn't, really). Now imagine that on Windows - a much older platform, with much higher expectations for backwards compat. It would be a bloodbath of user rage. More importantly, though, backward compat has been Intel's moat for a long, long time. Intel have been trying to get people to buy non-16-bit-compat processors for literally 40 years! They've tried introducing a lot of mildly (StrongARM - technically a buy I suppose, i860/i960) and radically (i432, Itanium) innovative processors, and they've all been indifferent or outright failures in the marketplace. The market has been really clear on this: it doesn't care for Intel graphics cards or SSDs or memory, it hates non-x86 Intel processors. Intel stays in business by shipping 16-bit-compatible processors.