I just set up a brand new Lenovo laptop today, that came with Win11. I quickly decided Win11 was hot garbage, and installed Win10, removing all partitions and wiping all drives. I never signed into a Microsoft acct on the machine, created only a local acct in Win11 and again in Win10.
When I installed 10, it never asked me for a product key, which had me scratching my head, until I googled and found that it had already activated Win10 home and how I could activate pro.
Long story short, it does appear that newer laptops have the key in their hardware somehow.
Anyway, the writing is on the wall - I can’t keep going with Windows. Which led me to lurking here.
I know all the words, and yet they make no sense. Are you being snarky? I am new here and trying to learn, and happened to have an experience relevant to the conversation this morning.