They can't.

Consumer protection laws don't allow it.

So much of this hysteria is somewhere between guesswork and supposition.  None of it is based in reality.

How to dual boot Windows and Linux (Ubuntu flavor)

That's what I'm saying.  Win 7 will work/run on existing tech without issue, but not with Skylake and newer tech.  As the article suggests that MS and its partners will not support Win 7 with drivers/firmware on this newer tech, meaning that the OS will fail, presumably because motherboard, graphics card and other important drivers are no longer available.

This doesn't mean that Win 7 will stop running on older hardware.

essentially agreed with everything psychoak has posted in this thread.

other than that.........the tinfoil is strong in this thread! 

While my TFH is in the closet most of the time, I resemble that remark, the_Monk!

Starkers - Maybe this is what you actually mean (Oz language barrier 'n all), but the OS wouldn't have the chance to 'fail', it just wouldn't install.

It's not really possible for an OS to not install.  You can, today, install windows 7 on a skylake system.  For this to change, Microsoft would have needed to plan ahead and purposefully design the operating system with future knowledge of Intel's architecture ten years later, to break and no longer work with it after a while.

You may not be able to get everything working, but the only way they can make the stuff not work on things it currently does, is by actively breaking it.  To do so would only be possible via updates, and would result in an immediate class action lawsuit and probable criminal prosecution for sabotaging their customers intentionally.  At best, the people running the company would soon be out of a job in retaliation for losing hundreds of millions.

Unless they truly have lost all sense of perspective and think they can literally get away with murder, in which case fear for their jobs will send the government cracking down on them so hard they'll think the IE insanity was a wet dream, they wont be doing this sort of thing and they're just trying to scare up some business by making it sound like things will stop working.

I kinda said all that but just with less wear and tear on my 2 finger typing ...

In my case, verbose repartee is how I keep my hands from degrading to the point where I can't type at all.  Short and succinct isn't much good for practice.

Edit: Type ftw, really haven't been typing enough the last several months.  It's gone completely to shit!

And you're so confident MS isn't doing anything untoward!  The fact that MS keeps reissuing Win 10 updates in various guises to users who have repeatedly rejected it says a lot for me... not to mention the vague/ambiuous descriptions for patches and updates so nobody really knows what they're installing.  These things are not of tinfoil territory, they're fact.

The truth is, MS is doing everything short of downright illegal to get every Windows user onto Win 10, and because not everyone is complying, it is resorting to more desperate measures to trick, cajole, force people into using it.  Well that ain't happening here.  I'm one of millions who don't like Win 10 and who will switch platforms when their current Windows OS is no longer viable.

I really hoped the next OS [after 8.1] was going to be the best yet, but for mine, Win 10 is the worst Windows ever.... even without my tinfoil hat.

JMHO, not sure how recent that stats are but 10 has about a 12% market share while 7 is still above 50%. I'm thinking that even with the "free" upgrade that they may be disappointed with the results. They are now turning to threats and innuendo to force others to switch.

Like I said, just my humble opinion.

I defer to your greater expertise, psycho.  But, just out of curiosity, couldn't firmware do the job of detecting the OS attempting to be installed & say 'nuh-uh-uh, nixnay'?

That's exactly it!  MS is not happy with the poor uptake to Win 10.  Despite its claims that Win 10 is on so many millions of machines, many of those copies were foisted on purchasers of new machines.... they did NOT install it by choice.  Another large number of copies is on OEM machines still sitting on store shelves around the world.... and the rest are on machines of those who sucked up the 'free' upgrade.  Had it a been pay for OS, I doubt very much the abomination would be on half as many of those PCs... if that.

As for the threats; intimidation; persistent upgrade attempts; innuendo and badly worded update/patch information, MS should be hauled over the coals by whatever Senate committee deals with that sort of thing.  Smaller companies would not get away with it, and neither should MS.  If I reject Win 10, not once but several times, MS should get the message and cease to pester me with related updates, patches and so-called important fixes.  Sadly it doesn't, with altered/reworded Win 10 related updates turning up again and again.

Had I not set my updates to manual installations, the bastards would have snuck it through already... and geez, then I'd have been mightily pissed and told MS where to shove all its products.

Actually I am so confident in the fact that of all of the giant tech corps "doing things untoward" MS has been (and likely always will be) under the most intense scrutiny and that alone tends to deter any number of infractions (even if I were to indulge some of the tin-foulness in this thread) 

Here's a conspiracy for you...Cortana is just away to get people to use Bing.