content: Yes, it's deliberate, and in every practical sense, it is forced and in many cases means the hardware is little better than bricked.  In most other situations, this would be illegal. It reminds me of the Nest systems that Google remote bricked because they figured it was too hard to support them and they disliked the idea of leaving them functional without their control.  Companies being able to forcibly render hardware useless via software - even if it remains physically intact - is a very, very bad road to go down, and this is square in that territory. If this were done by malware or a hacker, the responsible party would likely be jailed for this if caught.  Never mind the argument that Windows 10 is in fact malware, Microsoft gets a pass on this because they're Microsoft, or so it seems.