Windows Weekly 878 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theratze here, richard Campbell is here. We'll talk about Moment 5, some other new features we haven't yet mentioned AI, microsoft 365. What's with the Dropbox integration? And, yes, there's an Xbox segment in which Paul will rail once again about the lack of Activision games on Game Pass. You know, we come to expect it every week. Windows Weekly is next. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit.
00:40
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, Episode 878. Recorded Wednesday, April 24th 2024. If you build it, you are dumb. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft With these cats right here. Mr Richard Campbell of Run, as Radio he is in. I don't know what that Radio he is in. I don't know what that is he is in.
01:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was only a baby in the 60s. I don't know what that was.
01:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know it's some sort of hand gesture. He's in Sweden and Arlanda, which is, of course, the home of the airport for Stockholm. So we're just going to say Stockholm, I think Good place. Are you going or?
01:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
coming. It's the East Boston of Stockholm. I'm on my way home. So I was in Euro yesterday and did the show and then had a nice drive across the country, visited some castles and things, and then now it's the evening, lovely, and I fly out tomorrow morning.
01:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had lunch at home.
01:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had soup. That's morning. I had lunch at home, I had soup. That's Paul. I like salad. I don't know what we're talking about. Therodgecom is his home. That's where he lives, and together we are going to discuss the latest from Microsoft. Yes, discuss the latest from Microsoft. What is the latest?
02:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
from old Microsoft oh Leo there's so much going on today.
02:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's an armish day. Oh, I'm sorry.
02:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. Leo's been dealing with me like 15 years or something. He assumed that was sarcastic. No, there really is stuff going on today. That was my mistake. There's some good stuff.
02:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what? So what's going on?
02:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's happening? Sorry, leo, was like oh, here we go again.
02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, no, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, nothing's happening.
02:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My mistake, my mistake.
02:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, there's stuff happening yeah.
02:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think so. So we've been waiting for these Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips to show up. I had talked about going out to New York and going through a briefing that many other people also went through, not seeing anything worrisome and seeing lots of good things, and one of the things I couldn't talk about is that they also discussed another chipset called Benchy Marks. Oh Well, yes, benchy Marks marks, but also the snapdragon x plus, right? So they promised me they were not going to pull an intel and have too many tiers or skews, whatever, but actually there are going to be four skews all together, at least at launch three of the x elite and one of the x plus.
03:22
Um, the is a, a lower end chip, although on all the same benchmarks that they always tout. It's not all benchmarks, right, but, um, it still comes out ahead of the you know, apple M three, the, the high end uh AI chip sets from Intel and AMD as well. So it, it has those same advantages. Um, or PC makers, the advantages, this will be the less expensive, right, because obvious. Well, maybe not obviously, but if it's not obvious, um, these things are going to target the kind of premium ultrabook part of the market, right, and we don't have anything with regards to pricing or anything like that. But I think it's fair to assume that, especially based on previous qualcomm based pcs etc, etc. These are all going to be north of $1,000. So maybe this one comes in a lot closer to $1,000 or even just under $1,000, depending on the device. We'll see.
04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we have the world-famous, explaining what the name means diagram.
04:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this was not something they showed us. Oh, maybe it was actually, Was it I?
04:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
don't know, snapchat, get branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies and or its subsidiaries. I'm guessing this is their slide. Yes, Qualcomm.
04:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Company of the future. Company of the future yeah, so, unfortunately, poetry, design language, there's all kinds of examples Like, if you have to explain it, maybe it's not as good as you think it is, and I would say that for this branding it's like yikes. So you know, if you're familiar with Intel or AMD chipsets, you know that there's like a naming convention they use and it's always terrible. And Snap or Qualcomm landed right in the right space for that, because this is terrible. It's meant to describe to someone who cares about this stuff, the generation, the tier. Remember there are four of those elite, or you plus.
05:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's crazy so there's x elite and x plus yeah, when you look at these, you look at these numbers, it's very clear that exactly one kind of die, and these numbers are based on testing oh, it's binning.
05:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think this is all about bins.
05:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's that was my okay that they're not going to say that, but that was my assumption. In other words, these things, uh land where, like in the sense that jet or uh, manufacturing chipsets is still a little bit magic, a little bit science, they don't, they're not all exactly the same and these things are going to run like they are stable at some frequency and they deliver some level of performance across whatever benchmarks, and thus we will name them differently.
05:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was my assumption. Snapdragon X is the series and we know there's Generation 1, so that's going to be the same for everything Snapdragon.
06:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
X1.
06:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then there's two tiers or plus right.
06:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So e or p.
06:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
E or p, and elite meaning all 12 cores work, and p meaning right 10 of the 12 cores, but that's not enough granularity, so they've added a, a skew number, which obviously is completely directly correlated.
06:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so these range from 64 to 84 for this first gen, the 64 is for the plus right, um, the, the 60, the, the snapdragon, x plus and then the lowest end, x elite, are almost identical. Um, I'm struggling to remember what the difference was between them. Oh, it's never, of course, the.
06:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, it's 12 course right, and then it Versus 10. They just bench the clock speed plus the boost speed and that was so.
06:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When you go from plus to the lowest level elite, you're going up two cores. You're going from 10 processor cores to 12. When you go from that one to the mid-level X elite, the difference is this dual core boost capability right when it can run faster for some unsustainable it all sounds like benchmark data, like they just bench it and if it can do it, you mark it up.
07:11
And then the highest end one is a higher clock speed, a higher dual core boost speed and a higher number of the GPU is a what's the right term. Larger teraflops, more teraflops, more floppage, more floppage. And then everything else is the same, so there was an article today.
07:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Scores are the same.
07:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There was an article today. I know, listen, I don't want to give this guy any airtime. That guy is a nut and he does not deserve this attention.
07:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, good.
07:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The fact that this was spread on TechMeme and then everyone's writing about it is like guys, come on.
07:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did not bookmark it because I feel like we'll see when we get them. Anything else is speculation.
08:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, just to give you a broad overview of what he's referring to, someone wrote an article that said they're lying, these are all made up. Everything they say is made up. The performance is not this good, and it's one of those things I know for a fact, you know. So here's the thing Benchmarks are benchmarks. I mean whatever these devices are going to go out in the world. I've always qualified this Like we're going to review these things. Yeah, people are going to run benchmarks. They're going to compare them to each other, to intel and amd pcs. They're going to compare them to m whatever, max, how soon?
08:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
will we be getting them? I guess is the question yep, because so qualcomm's making this very aggressive claim that they, they're they M3, the latest Apple processor.
08:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well in the benchmarks they care to mention. So, for example, with the M3 in particular, the way that the Snapdragon chipsets beat it are, I think, multi-core benchmarks. Whatever those are Single core is very close, I think the M might actually be a little bit ahead. Are Single core is very close, I think they might actually be a little bit ahead. It doesn't beat out the M3 Max, the M3 Pro necessarily, although it's competitive.
09:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's the base.
09:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
M3 that it beats out. It's the base M3. I just want to be clear about that. On the PC side, the x86 side, they're comparing them to different chips, different benchmarks. So it's a little screwy. But if you think about what the high end of that market is, they're always going at the high end chips. So that's not, they're not screwing around that much.
09:26
But Intel Core Ultra, which is a first gen AI PC chipset, you know, kind of in a side family of the core. The normal core comes in seven and nine variants. I now have a nine and I've only had seven so far. The typical one for the Core Ultra seven is like a seven one, fifty five. The typical one for the core ultra seven is like a seven one, 55. I think I don't remember the nine model number, but the nine is more powerful, like, as I was referring to, the eye on the core eye chips as well.
09:51
And then on the AMD side they're comparing it to like the 7,900 slash 8,900 series, hs. These are HS on AMD. I don't not a hardware guy, but it's sort of like the. What used to be H right on the PC side. We now have just I think they're all just P now right, the one thing in the middle. They don't do you and H or whatever the chip, whatever the nomenclature was, whatever it was. So they are comparing it to very high end chips, so to speak.
10:16
Then again, I mean anyone and I had this discussion with people the day I visited Qualcomm not people at Qualcomm, but people like me, nerds that anyone who has used these devices that are based on the Intel Core Ultra chipsets, you know it's kind of underwhelming, right. Battery life has gone down. Performance is middling. We know that the MPU performance is terrible. They're promising to fix that by the end of this year.
10:39
Amd is a little bit less well-known because there just aren't that many chips or PCs out in the world with these things yet. But look, they're all in the mix, they're all in different places, If we're being honest with ourselves. Yeah, I'm sure If you could find a real Microsoft fanatic, they would love for this thing just to kind of destroy the M3 or whatever that means. But, realistically speaking, as long as it's comparable for the people that want a Windows PC and having used this MacBook Air I've had now for what I don't know five or six weeks, whatever it's been I want a Windows PC. I've got to tell you I love this thing on so many levels and my review is going to be glowing. But where it falls apart for me, honestly, is the macOS user experience. I just don't like it.
11:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's inconsistent, it has some gaping holes and there's not enough ads in there and I I think they yeah, yeah disappoints. That's actually what I meant by gaping all.
11:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm glad you were able to figure that out. Um. No, I know, listen, it's a, it's um, it's a matter of personal taste well, uh, because I strongly prefer the mac over the yeah, no, it's absolutely.
11:44
it's a matter of personal taste. I just find, because of the, there are no workarounds to some of the problems I have. There are just things I can do in Windows I can't on the Mac, and maybe there are third-party utilities for some of this stuff. Maybe I don't know. I've tried to do things the Apple way and I really like. I love some of it. Some of it's fantastic and it's made me a full-screen convert, which is kind of weird. I kind of rejected all that stuff.
12:11
No, I love that and that's something we just don't have on the Windows side. Effectively, there's good and bad. I don't mean to just crap on it.
12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We can fight it out when your review comes out. Okay, I think the main thing to point out at this point is it's one thing to say benchmarks outperform the M3. And I'll grant them that it's. Another thing is how do you use it and what software are you using? And so if you've got Windows on ARM and you don't have all the programs, you want, I mean Apple. Silicon has been out for a few years. I think they've got all the stuff that's important is moved over.
12:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not really the issue. It used to be um, okay, I, that's good to know, but you, but you're right. But you are right in that the it's, it's real world experience, you know like it's one, yeah, by the way. That's all that really matters.
12:59
The story you referenced earlier was that yeah, well, but he, this person's claim is that they're lying about the benchmarks. Right, it's like guys, we're gonna have everyone's gonna get to run their own benchmarks on real hardware. We're gonna see what those numbers are. And, by the way, the truth, benchmark numbers have leaked those aren't fake, but those are.
13:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It would be pretty dumb of qualcomm to lie on benchmarks when they're about to release a product.
13:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You You're going to get busted every time Like don't be crazy and, by the way, this is one hit away from being dead. So if they pulled that nonsense here and then it came out, oh my God, they lied and it's completely different. Guess what? It's over, folks, it's over. That would be a strategic era of epic proportions.
13:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And for nothing. Everybody wants this chip step to exist. It just needs to be good yep. So you're carefully positioning it to be the best. It's not.
13:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not even essential the way pcs are today and I include max in this list is that for most people, we have our opinions about user interfaces and which system's better and all that kind of stuff.
14:06
But we run apps, we get work done, we walk on it, we move on to the next thing, whatever it is, and, like I said, I don't think most people are sitting there with a timer saying you know, this one's one-tenth of a second faster to do this and this one's one-tenth of a second faster to do this other thing. We, we want to get work done and, like I said, I think the goal here is we'll see how it lands on benchmarks. We will, because everyone's going to do that. But I think the important thing is what's the real experience in real world? And we've got the years of work that Microsoft's done to improve all the compatibility and performance, yada, yada, and then finally, we have Qualcomm showing up on the hardware side. So it's going to come together. We're going to find out. I I've yet to see. Anything to make me concerned is how I would put it.
14:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and all of YouTube will create both synthetic and actual benchmarks of various applications, various, you know, processes and we're going to know like.
15:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll tell you what our audience cares about. They're going to say well, what is? How did Paul and Richard feel using it and does it, you know? Does it feel snappy? Does it do things fast? Does it do this?
15:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
stuff Give me a little tingle in my belly.
15:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know Well by the way you're, you're sort of joking, but there's something to that because, honestly, um, there there is a. Because, honestly, there are these logical hard numbers and things like that. You can say, look, I've averaged X number of whatever hours of battery life. This is like an objective fact, it's my workload, whatever it is. But there is that kind of more emotional side to something like this that has to do with the design of the machine. You know, some of the appealing things about this Mac, the MacBook Air, is that it doesn't have fans, doesn't make any sound, never gets hot, never coughs, stalls, stutters, pauses it just. Whatever you want to do, it just does.
15:52
I ran, I loaded up Resident Evil. It's dramatically possible, right? Yep, it's no drama. I played this thing all the way through until I couldn't play it anymore because I played the free version. I played the first segment, whatever. And this thing, the battery life went down a little bit. The machine didn't get hot, it didn't make a peep, it was fine. And, by the way, while I was doing that, I still had everything running in the background. I didn't close anything. You know, like every time I open the lid, it comes on, which I know is a ridiculous thing to say there's a lot of laptops that don't work that way. I have dozens of laptops here. Let me tell you something it's a roulette wheel and it's a roulette wheel on the same PC. I have an HP Dragonfly Pro that I love and it is. I could give you six possible things that could happen when this thing, when I open that any given time which is yep, anytime it's, it is unpredictable.
16:49
So there there are things. I think the thing that the good thing about the mac for me was that it kind of opened my eyes to some things I had kind of taken for granted on the pc side and it made me realize like I need to watch for this stuff because this can be better and that's the type of thing I'll be looking for on these Qualcomm based PCs Right the instant. On promise, we've always had the 10 to 20 hours of battery life. We've always been promised the you know effortless, hitchless performance, the you know the compatibility, yada, yada, yada. You know all the things.
17:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So if they really are pulling down 45 tops, that's LLM class performance. Like you should be able to run a pretty damn large on device language model.
17:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which, by the way, I bet it does that great. But if I open notepad and I have to wait three seconds for it, you're done, it's dead to me.
17:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean it can't remember with hyper threading where as soon as you had a couple of different apps running and it would start to bonk between the processors and none of the benchmarks ever showed that. But in normal, real work behavior, that interaction became a huge issue. They re-architected the CPU after that. This is a great question. What is the interrupt level going over to the npu? Like what? How do they ship memory on those things like? And until we're really doing work on, until you're in a flow calling between different bits of software that are a normal part of work, you're not going to find those kinds of things yeah, I can't wait to find out.
18:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I expect to have a number of these come through the house this year, right?
18:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I'm looking forward to your candy crush benchmarks.
18:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But really, when are we going to see these? That's my question.
18:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so no one has said explicitly, privately or publicly, but what they've been been saying. Qualcomm is mid-year, but we know, look, we know Microsoft is going to announce Qualcomm based surface laptop and or devices. Anyway, we know devices. There was a leak A20. Yeah, right, before build. It will probably be part of the build keynote or something as well, I would imagine. Right, I just, you know, at least mention it.
19:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It doesn't mean they'll give a date either. It'll just be on pre-order.
19:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll ship them, we'll, ship them, we'll we'll have some idea of what an actual machine looks like. We've seen some leaks of some Lenovo PCs as well. I'll bet it's silver with a screen. Yes, so one of the the Lenovo. I don't know if this came up last week or it happened since, but one of the the first one that leaked was like an idea pad or something like that. It's like a slim. You know the type of thing that would be fanless, right? The second one that yoga style lenovo yeah.
19:32
The second one was a more typical thinkpad t-series laptop like a t40 or whatever s, which you know used to be the slim thing before the x1 series came around. But all those t's are tanks right like. Well, they can be, but the S is the thinner one, right? So the S1's a little thinner, but it could have full-size ports. Yep, I mean, that's you know, it targets a business market and whatever.
19:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can kill a small animal in times of need. Well, okay.
19:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, according to a source I do trust, there will be 13 and 15 inch Surface laptops built on some Qualcomm X something, snapdragon, right. We know from a leak that the Pro, the Surface Pro, will at least be on X Plus, because that's what leaked and we already have people like, but I wanted to get the X Elite version. It's like you don't even know what these things are. Shut up, you know, let's just see what it looks like, relax. But you know, surface, I mean mean obviously the goal there has always been, and sometimes they have achieved, um, fanless right without any, um, you know, active cooling, uh, that's studio two is a beautiful machine, but fanless it is not yeah, I mean, one of the tough things for me is like, since I got the macbook air, I've gotten two so far.
20:46
I'm getting another one's arriving today. I get these like Core Ultra 7 or Core Ultra 9 laptops in and they're beautiful. They're beautiful and you turn the thing on and it's like, oh God, like you, it's tough and I think we have a little bit of I don't know ptsd in the pc world with this stuff. Like we're just, you know it's a little, get a little twitchy with it. But um, like I said I I just want this to be in the ballpark. It doesn't have to be better all across the board, etc. Etc. But um, it'd be nice. I'm not going to complain if it is, but um, you know I, I would would like a Surface laptop or similar. That's just like the MacBook Air, right, but running Windows. That's what I want.
21:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, yeah, that's what you want.
21:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You want a MacBook Air that runs Windows first person, and I know I know, put down the keyboard, everybody. I know I can do that with Parallels and blah, blah, blah, and I will, just to try it, but I'm not going to, that's just. I'm not going to force you. No, no, I mean, I'm going to test it. I haven't yet. By the way, I've used it on multiple Macs in the past, but I uh, for right now, I'm just, you know, before I write the review, I just want to, um, or publisher, I just want to use the Mac, right for the Mac. Um, so we'll get there, and I don't really.
22:06
The ability to run Windows and Windows apps on a Mac is obviously useful in a number of levels, but the notion that I buy a Mac and then run only Windows, like in virtualization, is, yes, possible and be stupid. I would just not do that. But so that's my take on that. Maybe you disagree, I don't know, let's see. Oh, and, by the way, one thing, that that you know, um, why do they have four SKUs, right, like what? Why did this happen? Uh, other than the fact that maybe they were seeing, uh, um, uh, unreliable results in the manufacturing?
22:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and now this is they want to make sure they use 90% of the dye, and making four SKUs does it.
22:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why this comes out so late and you're right, when I look at this skew comparison table, it's so obviously binning, because this is you know. I mean, they're basically the same chip, it's it's pretty clear, and they can only run it at a certain speed, if it's you know. So that's pretty well.
22:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The x plus is interesting to me, I that one. They. They literally have fewer cores.
23:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So in that case, they cut the cores off. They had defective cores Right.
23:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, what they're saying is you know and this was the whole Surface thing you know when Microsoft took that radical step to compete with their best partners and make their own PC. There's this kind of yin-yang good-bad aspect to the whole PC market where we have all this choice and then the bad side is we have all this choice. It's like nobody knows what the hell any of this stuff means and it's like here's an idea, just make the best one and sell that. But one of the promises of the PC market is that we have a range of not just choice but also prices. So having an X-plus chipset allows them to charge the PC maker less and allows the PC maker to have a lower end product. Not that it's going to be a cheap piece of like educational plastic or anything, but maybe something that's in the $800 to $1,000 range instead of the $1,200 to $1,500 range or whatever those.
24:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wherever these things may lay, we don't know, and the performance range is not that high. I'll defy you to really know the difference between that plus unit and the top elite unit. Yeah well, I have to exactly using where it's like damn it. If only I had 12 cores, 10s, not cutting.
24:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, everybody, everybody asterix listening to watching this podcast, and the asterix is not literally everybody, but most people. Like we all think the same way. We're like we have to have the big one, right, yeah, like when I am, when I I bought a macbook air, not a macbook pro, but when I bought it, I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna max out the ram. You know, like I just that's the way we think, it's kind of it, you can justify it. It's like a future know, that kind of thing. I came in the door because of the cheap one, but what I want is the.
24:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the two for me. I mean the price range. Well, it's.
24:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I have to say I have had the M1 Max, the M1 Max, the Mac, the M2 Mac, the M3 Max, Mac. Right, I can't, and you must know the dramatic difference between all this there's you know there is no difference. I mean, I know when I like, okay, so I compile my Lisp code and it might run 50% faster. On the M3 Max, you went from a half a second to a quarter second, yeah, but it's a few milliseconds and it's just not something you would ever notice.
25:25
I mean, I it you. In other words, you can notice it if you're looking at granular numbers, but you're not noticing it when your fingers are on the keys. You really aren't you know, yeah, it's just not so I, I, that's I.
25:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, in a way I was sort of talking around that earlier I mean, I, I think day-to-day use, like when I use the macbook air, I don't notice anything, and that's the lack of drama. To a windows guy it's kind of noticeable, right. Uh, those the lack of drama adds up over time. But the the flip side of that is if you encounter like a little problem here and then a little problem here and then a little problem, and that keeps going, and there it's different things especially, or the same thing, it doesn't matter, that adds up too, you know, and that's what they have to try to get past. And we'll see how you know, we'll see how it does. What you want is that I noticed there are no problems. Not, I noticed there are constant problems.
26:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it takes a while to notice there are no problems because you just yeah. Well, hopefully.
26:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And there are people who load up 100 Chrome tabs and then say oh look, this thing's slow.
26:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know what I one thing I mean again, not to keep going on about the Mac. The one thing that's kind of incredible about the Mac is that Windows is perfect for compulsive people, because we are the types who will like turn off apps, so they're not hogging resources, so we can do this other thing, which is completely bypasses the way the system works. But we do this because we've had bad experiences in the past and we never forget or forgive and it's like well, you know I remember fragmenting my back in
26:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
windows xp they screwed around with and they're like you're like dude.
26:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was like 25 years ago where's the uh auto exec dot bad, I'd like to get exactly.
26:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yep, so this is the world and we. When you move to a mac, the MacBook Air anyway, you don't even know what to do with yourself.
27:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like I mean, this is works. I don't get it. You're not supposed to pay attention to any of that stuff.
27:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, and you're not supposed to on Windows either, and depending on the computer, I mean, it can be semi-successful at that. But the fan, you know, whatever I mean, I've had to render video repeatedly on Windows PCs, sometimes just because for some reason it glitched in the middle of it. You know, like I don't, weird things happen. You know there are gremlins in the system, is all I'm saying. So I hope they. You know, the one of the sides of the whole conversion to ARM is they are leaving behind some of the legacy dead one. I think it's going to help Rather than being like, oh, I'm not going to be able to run WordPad. It's like that's cute, but the thing runs for like 20 hours. Could you just maybe be happy about that? I don't know.
27:58
So we'll see. I'm excited. I would consider buying one. I am curious how Linux will run on them, I think. Oh, so you're ruining a, so you're ruining a kind of an article I'm halfway done with, which is that A job? And I get? I meant to. Yeah, no, I meant to get this up before they announced this stuff and I, you know, I just am so busy, but it occurred to me because the way my brain works, like, yeah, you know, windows is going to benefit from this chipset switch, right, absolutely, but so is Chrome OS and Linux, right, I mean, and these things are already a lighter weight, uh, especially Chrome OS, and uh, in Chrome OS's case, more modern in the sense that there's not a lot of legacy baggage. There is more modern in the sense that there's not a lot of legacy baggage there, and that's. I mean, what if this thing?
28:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we've all been waiting for to make windows better, also makes these other platforms?
28:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep, and now we have something that runs for 15 or 20 hours, whatever it is, and is super simple and normal people can use it.
29:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't have to worry about whatever I mean and I'm just saying longer because it is a more efficient OS- I mean, it's a, it's a I.
29:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Once that gets into your brain, it's hard to get it out because we've been so excited for the windows part of it, but the truth is that it's good for everybody. It's going to float all boats, yeah, and and I obviously have been arm-based Chrome OS versions in the past and probably now still but it's kind of coalesced around the whole x86 thing. Oh, that's not so.
29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, there are a lot of arm-based.
29:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Chrome OS. Okay, good, lots of them. Then I would say there's some advantage to that, because they can run Android apps and Android apps would run whatever it is, yes.
29:49
Right. I mean, would they run better? I, that's my thing, that's my thinking on that. So anyway, I don't want to put too much of a wedge in the spoke there, but but it did occur to me, you know so. So you're kind of half joking, I know, but but also half serious, like you want to try Linux on these things. I think Linux and Chrome OS will benefit from this, and the question is, what if they benefit more? I mean, we'll see.
30:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, one of the vendors runs with this in a big way. Make a really beautiful machine.
30:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope that they make drivers available, so that I mean there are plenty of ARM distros. That's not the problem, Yep.
30:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so that I mean there are plenty of ARM distros, that's not the problem. Yep, yeah, so that's that's a tricky area, because that would have to come probably from PC makers like the, the one of the areas where they don't like this, but one of the areas where PC makers benefit on the Windows side with ARM, is that Microsoft supplies all that in the form of class drivers. Right, and this was a big sticking point back in the Windows RT days, where they did not want this. This was not the way the world worked, you know, and they were like and you know, they didn't want Microsoft taking over more of the stack.
30:51
But the truth is that's how you want that to happen. You don't, as a like an Android device maker, say no, no, we'll handle our own network drivers. We got this. It's like dude, what are you doing? Like this is this is a standard part, like you know it's. We'll see, we'll see how that a lot of people are asking questions about whether they'll be able to buy these chips, buy the motherboards, you know, build their own PCs, you know. Yada, yada. We don't know the answers to those things, but I will say there's discussions going on with Qualcomm and all of those vendors.
31:21
That's right, all of those vendors. There's no question that.
31:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Asus could build a motherboard around this and you can buy it if you want.
31:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The question is whether they allow it, and why wouldn't they? You want to sell more of these things? Yeah, we'll go for that.
31:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have two workstations in my office. One of them could be a Snapchat and set what the heck right.
31:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think this is going to be. This could wipe out Intel, if it's done right right, even out intel, if it's done right, right, yeah, even things like nasa's or little devices, that kind of run low-end, whatever they're called now, celeron type ships, and, yeah, you know, you buy like a nasa. It's like can it do hardware encoding a video? And it's like, of course it can. It's running on a snapdragon and it won't even make a peep and when you're like it's, yeah, it's going to be a big difference. I, I, that's like a huge market.
32:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sure, I'm just saying I, I this, you know, set top boxes this thing all kinds of stuff yeah, this thing in a solid state, a small solid state machine, be a heck of a home assistant engine. Like that'd be astonishing. It would do all the voice work itself, like it could do it all.
32:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, image recognizer off your video cameras like the whole nine yards right so we'll see I mean I, you know, when microsoft announced't know the what do you call it Palladium, which became what? Tpm and Longhorn, and it was all I go. This is their secret plan to get rid of Linux, which, by the way, it was. But there was a lot of fear and anger about this kind of stuff, and that might come up again now, because we're going to see what happens. Like will it be possible to buy a like a thinkpad, whatever it's called, t40s or whatever, running on a qualcomm chipset and then be like yeah, I want to run, you know, arch linux or whatever it is.
32:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I, I don't know there's no question, it's all it's. It's just, it's purely. Do you want to spend time getting the drivers in order?
33:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, well, I mean, it behooves these companies to do that and some of them, you know some of them do a good job of that on the x86 side.
33:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lenovo says they're going to do a ThinkPad, right yeah, and they are very Linux, you know pro Linux. So, or BSD, they are, but it's the issue here.
33:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See, I mentioned the Sanofsky book last week and one of the things that he, one of the issues he raises in there and I sort of alluded to it earlier was that it the system, that it doesn't work the same. You're it, you're in that case, you're, you're forcing these pc makers to accept this thing. That was sort of a reference design. Be like, you have to sell this, you can put your own box around it, but it's not this, this is it. You don't get to screw around with. You know where chips are laid out and what's in there, and blah, blah, blah. Like this is the thing and they did not like that. So, uh, and they may not like that. Now, although we're seeing and have heard of a lot of support, like a qualcomm list listed out, it's all the major pc makers are supporting this. So that tells me maybe this has evolved, but we don't know that.
34:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No one's really talking. They're also watching Apple eat their lunch with a fully integrated sock and saying where's my fully integrated sock? And now it's that. Here it is. This is a fully integrated sock. Yeah Well, it's your peripherals around it, but the CPU, GPU and MPU are dictated, or what they're set. They're on the die.
34:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought he said dick pics and I was confused.
34:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Dick pics. I'm sorry. What's this platform?
34:43
He's got like a pencil out anyway a lot of speculation. Still, this is the way the world works. I mean, we the more information we get. You know, like the first question we got in a comment about this particular news item was how much is it going to cost? It's like, do you think we might have mentioned that if we knew? I mean, like you know, it'll cost somewhere between $1,. Do you think we might have mentioned that if we knew? I mean, like you know, I It'll cost somewhere between $1,500 and $5,000.
35:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somewhere in that range.
35:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Possibly, possibly, I mean. And if you're buying a Lenovo, it is that range, because those things go on sale every time. They come back. Every day it's different.
35:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah.
35:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Never pay retail. Buy a Lenovo device not on sale. So I say this a lot, but we'll see. But again, we all seem to have landed in the same place on why they have multiple SKUs. That was my first takeaway. I was like, hmm, that's interesting and that's fine, right, I mean whatever, who cares?
35:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are worse problems in this world. Yeah, and certainly it does allow for an inexpensive board, a mini atx board, some kind of knock, like all of those possibilities. Oh my god, yes, please, oh a knock.
35:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, knock with one of these something you just like kind of here's a kind of a question Are these packages SOC packages or are they more like the Intel style? You've got a memory controller there and a chip there. No, it's a package. It's a big package, right? Yep On the die Okay. Is RAM on the die? No, yes, ah, so I like it.
36:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what apple's doing is unified ram. Yeah, but it does have the ddr5. Yeah, yeah, apple's putting ddr5 on the die.
36:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's on the die, though I think I think it is on the. I think it's all the same. I think it's exactly the same. The question is whether the storage is on the die, because I with apple, it's technically not, but yeah, but I don't know that one, I don't.
36:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't really matter because it's all soldered in, but it is really about the speed of the interconnect. Obviously that's what really matters.
36:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The shorter the lead, the better off you are. Work for the Cray XMP back in the day. It'll work for these yeah.
36:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm really interested in getting one of these. I'm bullish, I'm bullish, but I'm going gonna wait till you guys.
37:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, tell me, if they, yeah, live up. I can't wait to see when I I'm just I, I, you know you'll be the first right, paul, I mean you'll get one right away I feel, oh yeah, no, I'm a canary in this, call mine.
37:14
But I, I um, I keep qualifying this because, look, I've done this a lot and the, the macbook air has been a revelation of sorts, so it's been nice. But you know, for the most part um computers like people, they just disappoint you over time. So you know we'll um, you know we'll see what happens. But I, I'm waiting for you know, like my nature is just like waiting for that first pause, that first stutter, that first you click an app, you're like I clicked that didn't, I didn't, how come it didn't start? You click, click it again and then you're like, oh, it's moving. You know we'll see A crushing moment.
37:49
Oh, here's another mortal machine? Well, no, even like the Intel Core Ultra 9-based PC. I got a gorgeous, beautiful, unbelievable screen and boy it's like being outside. Try opening notepad. Everything stops. Yeah, it's hard's done.
38:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's crazy.
38:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's weird like it's weird, I, I think it's just dead in the water. This is, I think so too. This is I am.
38:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is it I vote, I, I always look. They clearly have the uh, the intelligence, the intellectual property, the prowess, the, whatever you want to say to do this thing. But but I, I, we may look back on the history of Intel as Microsoft shifted gears and and adopted the cloud and and became bigger than ever. And Intel was like megahertz wars, you know and I, and they went from being like an arm licensee to being, yeah, we don't need that. And it's like you know what I said we're mounting anything. I, yeah, we don't need that. It's like you know what. That's never amounted to anything. Well, they did it after it had amounted to something Like you know, Paul Ottolini I think it was the guy who brought Intel to Apple and then could not bring Intel, would not bring Intel to the iPhone, right? Are you kidding me?
39:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He wanted to, but there's scale.
39:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He wouldn't do what, wouldn't do what he wanted he wouldn't do it well and what they came out with.
39:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can see, you can see the, the, what apple lost out on because intel, the thing they created was the, uh, the atom. Uh see, like seriously too bad.
39:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Huh, I know it could have been good. The atom.
39:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that could have, yeah, could have been an Adam. God damn that couldn't be. Aside from the fact that they're both chips. Those things could not be further apart, yeah.
39:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Crazy. That's, I think, another binning thing where they just had a lot of kind of crappy you know, wafers and they said hey, what can we do with these?
39:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, I know All for a low end. No, I know a few bits off and carve it up and put it in a cheap box.
39:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I only kind of understand the intel product lineup because I just deal with it so much. But the truth is, if you look at this, you're like why do you have so many of these things? What is this that's spinning? It doesn't make a lot of sense I think it's been and why does the battery life keep going down? Like what is it's like really? I?
40:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
don't know.
40:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the cpus not may not run, but they do heat the box well, you, you, um, you know you can kind of make a vague um recommendation from the outside, like I would like, and say you know, you guys need to adopt an arm like architecture right, and they kind of slowly get into that. They do like these hybrid chipsets and then they have that core ultra finally. But the thing is I review like the same laptops every year sometimes and you can see I can go back and look at my notes how your life's going down every year. It's like so you're making this transition. I guess you've finally done it 20 years late, but you did it or doing it, and it's like, uh, what's the point of this?
40:49
Like at the end of the day, you're wasting more, you guys if it look, where you don't care about heat and sound, like a desktop thing, a workstation. Whatever you're doing, great you know those 17 people love you.
41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We should really do what happened. You know what I mean. Like I, how can the company so fumble? Those 17 people love you. We should really do what happened. You know what I mean. How could a company so?
41:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
fumble, yeah, what do you call it? Like it's a defining moment where you made the wrong decision right. Like you can look at certain products and say, oh my God, more than one occasion.
41:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I would also argue that every single time they tried to branch away from x86, they got their butt handed to them. Yeah, they wanted to.
41:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The. They tried to branch away from x86. They got their butt handed to them. Yeah, they wanted to. The customers crucified them. No, because they always, but they never bet on anything Like. In other words, they didn't say you know what we're doing it, we're going all in. They were always like no, we already have 113 different types of chips, we'll make another one. It's like, guys, come on Like you got to focus. Yeah, microsoft begged them for and not for years, for decades, to go thinner, lighter, more efficient. You know, before arm was the thing on phones, or well, it was always the thing on phones. But before phones began, the thing they, they were asking for this. They would make these references could you do one of these things? Like, could you just do this? And then you know, the iphone happened, android happened, the ip, ipad happened. Like, when are you going to do this? They just never. They always said no. I'm sorry, but they dug their own grave.
42:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's not like they didn't have plenty of opportunities.
42:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's so sad, it's unbelievably sad, because they should have they should be making it ship.
42:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it's funny. In some ways you call it innovators dilemma. It's unbelievably sad because they should have, they should be making this ship you know it's funny In some ways.
42:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you call it innovator's dilemma. Right it is, I guess. But it's funny because they're towing AMD behind them in a little trailer as they go down the cliff.
42:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like Well, but there have been a few moments in time where AMD got ahead of them. Like yeah, I went down the hill but there's still x86, but there's, you know they are still, but they I mean amd defined what x86 is today, the x, what we might call x64.
42:50
Right, they define that that's true it's forced to by microsoft to swallow. That that's right. I mean, even I don't know. There was in the beginning when amd was just like cheaper. There was still a place for them in the market. But there is, um. There is a really good case to be made today that amd is innovating more on pc chips than intel is it's not going to make much difference if suddenly qualcomm comes along with something.
43:16
Yeah well, I will say don't, don't, ever, don't overlook people's propensity to accept crap. You know like the best-selling car of the 1990s was probably like a Ford, whatever that little piece of crap was. Yeah Pinto, yeah well, whatever, yeah, like an I can't remember AMC.
43:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gremlin yeah.
43:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, some stupid little piece of junk. You know it's like well, when people can choose a computer, they choose a Mac. No, they don't Actually. They choose a Mac, maybe, or have the money, or whatever you want to phrase that, but people still choose Windows computers. I think that kind of hurts too, because it limits the necessity for innovation. Right, it's like we're doing great, we don't have to do anything. Right, like, yeah, but it could be better. Yeah, I don't know it was hard.
44:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Too much work, it's too much work. One more story, then we'll wrap this segment because we've got the whole show up. Yeah, yeah, so much more to talk about. But I think this is the most interesting thing going on right now.
44:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this is an AI and I know we're going to do that too, so yeah, just to add to the list of browser companies that are into their pre-release.
44:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're really excited. So the funny thing is unrelated to this.
44:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been using bill baldy lately and there's a there's a hump to get over with it because it's um, it's so configurable that it's almost crazy like it's the first thing that you do and you open it, it pops up a thing so well, you want email, do you want an RSS reader?
44:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, it basically says do you want 1,000 features or do you want 10,000 features? And I'm like it's hard.
44:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sure you can get it, just the way you want it, and that's great.
44:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you can, and of course it syncs. So once you do that, you bring it up on another computer and it's the thing you want. And there is some of the customization stuff on there I think is really neat. It's a great browser it really is, and it does the privacy stuff like Brave and Firefox and all that, and so that's good. And it's Chromium, so you get all the extensions and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So it's a good product. Yeah, there aren't that many people using it, unfortunately, but anyway, the only semi-major browser maker I think that has not said anything explicitly unless I missed, it was Opera and then Arc, I guess too. But we have you know. Chrome now is out there, firefox is out there. Well, actually, duckduckgo has not said anything, but the whole world's going to do this now, right, so it's happening. Momentum is there.
45:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah thing, but I, the whole world's gonna do this now, right? So, um, it's happening. Momentum is there. Yeah, an arm comes true, the big bow. All right time to take a little time out. Get yourself a cup of coffee, you know. Gather your energy because there's much more to come as we continue with windows weekly paul thurott, richard campbell our show today, brought to you by collide.
46:10
Uh, we've talked about so much about collide. Uh, I'm sure you know the name, uh, but now there's some really good news. Collide was just acquired by one password, so it's now collide by one password, and that's good. There's a synergy there. Both companies are leading the industry and creating security solutions to put users first. So they're really. You know, this is just a great partnership.
46:37
For over a year we've been talking about Collide Device Trust. It helps companies with Okta ensure, you know, okta makes sure that that person is that person. They authenticate the person. Collide authenticates the devices, makes sure they are secure and known before they're let in, and you know, joining one password just makes perfect sense. That's what they're going to keep doing. So if you use Okta and you've been meaning to check out Collide, don't hesitate. This is a great time, better than ever.
47:06
Collide, by the way, is easy to get started with because it comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks, so you can just turn it on and immediately you get that baseline protection. It's quite good, and if you've got some unusual devices or you want to extend it, you can easily write your own custom checks for just about anything you can think of. The other thing I love about Collide is you can use it on devices without MDM. So your entire Linux fleet, your contractor devices, every BYOD phone and laptop in your company they can all be protected with Collide. And now that Collide's part of 1Password, it's just going to get better. I want you to find out more. Check it out at collidecom slash dubdub. Learn more. Watch the demo today. That's K-O-L-I-D-E. Collidecom slash W-W. Collide for companies that use Okta, now part of 1Password. Okay, let's see here. What do you want to do? What do you want to do next, guys?
48:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So to me, this would have been well, I guess, because it's Windows would have been the top story normally. But yesterday, tuesday, was week D. We need a term for this. We have patch Tuesday, right for the second Tuesday of every month, I guess. Guess what do we call this? Uh, fast and fluid tuesday, mistake tuesday, I don't know. Preview tuesday this is gonna be a term for this. But the tuesday of week d, the fourth tuesday of the month, is when microsoft now puts out their preview updates for windows 10 and windows 11, and this is a an early look at the patch tuesday release for next month. So last month we got moment five. This time we're getting something much less than a moment, I guess. Um, it's less than a moment.
48:56
It's less than a moment because it's a month, it's not a quarter and this is yeah, this is stuff we've been talking about the uh big, the faux outrage over recommended apps in the start menu. Um, there's also I don't know that this was promoted, maybe I just wasn't paying attention, but they're also going to. Actually, the way they phrased it was we. You might see. I look, they literally said that word. I love it. Um, frequently used apps and start as well. These would both appear in that bottom recommended section right at this, the bottom half of the start menu. Um, yeah, you can turn these things off. I said this last week, but the the controls to disable this are already in windows now, so you can turn it all off if you want. Uh, maybe that should have been my tip. Maybe I'll do a little video on this.
49:43
The way to define this, though, is if you open up Windows Settings and search for suggestions, the top link goes to system notifications. Go all the way to the bottom, pass all your apps, and it says additional settings and you want to turn all those off. There's three of them. It says show the Windows welcome experience after updates and, when signed in, show it's new and suggested. That's not what it does. That's a full screen ad to get you to sign up for a folder backup in one drive if you don't have that enabled, and then some other features. Basically about getting you to enable things you don't want to enable. The second one is suggest ways to get the most out of windows and finish setting up this device. And the third is get tips and suggestions when using Windows. So just turn them off and then you'll never see these things that everyone was so outraged over. You know so when they come, I guess you gotta dig down again, oh yeah oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
50:36
The only thing buried deeper than this is how to change your default search engine in Microsoft Edge. It's like a, it's like the, it's like one of those hedge mazes, like you know. It's in there somewhere like you know, it's in there and it's hard to find, but it is in there and they put it in the. It's like the most illogical, but anyway. So that's that stuff, and then some how do you turn off the nag?
50:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You should switch it back to edge.
51:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, you can't turn that off. That's, that was. That's not a complaint. Yeah, I, this is one thing. I think like that, because I I run into people who defend edge, who like edge, and I listen from a functionality perspective, even from a look and feel perspective, because it kind of feels natural in windows 11. Um, I get it, I do, I get it, but the thing you need to understand is that, like for you not to be harassed by edge, you need to change nothing, like you have to accept every default.
51:27
Yes, you will take everything, you will be harassed. So even if you choose edge, it's going to go after you. Um, and that's, you're not using edge, right? That's right for microsoft, yeah, yep, um.
51:43
And then, uh, two of the other things that are in this weekday d update are related to widgets, but not the same widgets. I don't know why. I know, um, there's widgets on the desktop where you have the icon in the corner. Apparently, those icons are, can be of low quality, low resolution, fuzzy, whatever, so they improve the resolution of those. And then they're at. They've added more and, and the reason you would see different um icons down there is if you have, like, all the notifications and stuff on, so the weather icon can change if it's cloudy or sunny or rainy or whatever, and then they have, uh, different icons for, like, news alerts, like things are happening out in the world. So, uh, I turned all that stuff off other than the weather, so I don't really care about that.
52:23
And then there are these things that I thought were called cards, but they're adding um, but they're now calling widgets to the lock screen, and these are the things that started with weather, where you get that one card. I still think of it as a card in the bottom middle of the lock screen, and then more are coming, I think news and sports, and I don't remember whether they're stocks. Maybe, I don't know, there have been some changes there as well. I still don't see anything other than that one stock weather widget anywhere, and even then I don't always see it. So standard Windows experience these days, and that's about it. So, whether you're on 22H2 or 23H2, you'll get the same update if you want it now and then, if you don't want it, you can get it past Tuesday and May, because you're getting it anyway.
53:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's only a question of when, not if.
53:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, I mean you're going to bend over eventually. That's all I'm saying. So I mean you can be cute about it, but it's happening. Here we go, yep. And then since last week there have been two releases to the Insider program. One is the promised, threatened separation again of Canary and Dev. So they've gone their own ways. Dev stays on 24H2. Canary is kind of post 24H2, if you will. So a new build path. This means, among other things, that if you hadn't already made the switch, you can no longer switch between the two. So if you're in Canary, you're in Canary. Now you get to reset the machine. No way out? Right? Well, there's a way out, but it's anyone's machine I do. I do this so often. It's like the summer after high school I did construction work and I think that summer I replaced a tire on the truck almost every day all summer. So I replaced probably 110 tires over the course of the summer. I got really good at it and that's how I feel.
54:16
Yeah, that's how I feel about reset this PC. Like I do this all the time, like this is just most people would be like I don't know, I don't know. I'm like, oh yeah, let's go for it. This is fine, jump off the cliff, it's going to work great and, by the way, it's always great, it's fine. And then just minor changes and nothing to speak of there. No new build for dev channel. Nothing has happened there. And then on the beta channel, which is a little, I guess, shorter term this term, this is the stuff we're probably going to see. Um, that patch tuesday in may, patch tuesday in june, whatever it is right. Um, they're starting to roll out some changes to the widgets.
54:52
Uh, more widgets, yeah, so this one now with extra widget before the show I I spent a little time explaining to richard how, uh, I waste my time on work related things, things, and this was because of the language of this post Laurent, the guy who writes our news. We spent about an hour going back and forth on this one, on the right way to do it, because Microsoft doesn't know how to use language consistently, so I had to basically decode this, and here's what's happening Today. The widgets board has two sides and they've had different names, so let's not worry about that too much. But there are widgets and then there's a feed, and the only feed today is what used to be called the discovery feed, but it's Microsoft start feed. Whatever the name is, it's a feed, it's a news feed.
55:37
It has all those crap or quality data sources that everyone you know bitch and moan about, as they should, because it's terrible. So, responding two years later to the complaints, they made this thing extensible and they allowed, among other things, users to turn off that feed but also to install third-party feeds, of which there are zero to this day. I don't check every single day, but I checked, certainly when this thing came out yesterday, and there are no third-party feeds. This thing came out yesterday and there are no. There are no third party feeds but based on the language they use, it's a little hard to it's, it's hard to decode, but they're adding a navigation pane to the side. What they're going to allow you to do I this I know to be true is, without turning off the feed. You can toggle the feed so you can have a view. That's just widgets or widgets with a feed, I guess, right now it's the feed.
56:28
Right is yeah, maybe there could be more, but there isn't any right, they may be and this one's a little unclear, but it it seems like they may be offering the ability, as you install third party feeds, to also toggle between those feeds. So if you have like a like, if the uh I don't remember the name of it that, whatever the sport, the athletic was purchased by the um New York times, I think if you love the athletic and your subscriber, they make a feed for widgets. You could install it in widgets and you could toggle between uh no feed, the Microsoft feed and the athletic feed. I'm just making that up. No one said they're doing that, but I think that's what they're doing.
57:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're testing that in beta. I have to see who else are widget sources.
57:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are no widgets, there are no feed sources. Right now it's just a theory. If you build it, you are dumb. So far no one has come. There's an account manager in Start. So I just experienced, I think, for the first time, that thing where you open the Start menu and there's like a little orange circle on your user thing user profile page and then you click on it and it says I know we haven't asked you this before, Paul, but we're thinking let me throw it out there. Maybe you want to enable OneDrive folder backup. What do you think? Do you want to just do it? And then my options are do it now or just ask me later. So that's so. That's instable. That's not what this is. This is when you click the I think it's when you click the, the, the power button, and you will get maybe it is the user. Actually it makes more sense. It would be the user profile button.
58:04
They will ask you to do certain things related to your Microsoft account, typically, including such things as you don't have enough recovery factors set up. Maybe you should do that, which, by the way, not a horrible thing to do. Honestly. When I went on my little security jihad last end of last year. I that's one of the things I documented. It's like you, you need to have as many good recovery methods as you can, and by good I mean ones that you control, in other words, not an email address for work that may fire you, or a school that may get rid of you, or you know they need to be, uh, things that you control and multiple things right. So I'm going to hold off on whether or not that's a good one or not. It's hard to say and, in a sad reflection of how the world works, in fact, I may do an episode of Hands on Windows, just about like share if that makes sense.
58:59
Because the myriad of ways in which you can share things, like you're working on a computer and you want to get the thing you're working on on this computer. How want to get the thing you're working on in this computer, how do you do it? And I use Nearby Share, which is a fantastic feature that me and three other people on the entire planet know about. But there's also an extensible share interface where an app can register as a destination for an operation. So you drag or you right-click on a document, you say I want to share this, and then it will say well, ok, what? What things can share this thing, right? No apps have ever adopted this. That's why they're manually adding some like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and so forth, but they're basically succumb to reality. So what they're adding is email it to yourself.
59:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just email it, because that's what everyone does, right.
59:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When we get a right click now to make it, they're literally adding a Gmail icon to share so that if you have a Gmail account, you can click on it and you can email the file to yourself. And that's how fricking dumb my world is.
59:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like serious, so sad.
01:00:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It makes me so sad, but you know what? The truth is, people aren't that sophisticated, I mean I, you know. So they discovered it anyway. I I'm sure airplay, or whatever it's called airdrop, whatever.
01:00:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you'd be amazed how few iphone users know that. All you have to do is touch the top of your iphone to the top of theirs and it'll just squirt.
01:00:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, okay, do we even know this? Okay, let me tell you. I might have told the story. If you want a mind-blown moment with the Apple stuff, you can copy something to the clipboard of the iPhone and paste it on a Mac, right? Yikes? Okay, but here's one. This is the one that killed me. Speaking of the Qualcomm stuff, I was in that meeting and I took a photo on my iPhone of one of the slides and I'm like that'd be neat to put this in my notes, which are a notion on my PC. My PC is connected to the Wi-Fi network, my phone is not. It's connected to the cellular network and I was like I wonder if I could copy and paste somehow. And I did and it worked. And, goddammit magic, what is happening? Like that's crazy. Or you could be a windows user and email it to yourself through gmail because that's where we're at.
01:01:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's, you know, it's basically rocket ships and sticks and fire. I, I, I threw. It's good to have a fallback for the cavemen in the audience.
01:01:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know. Yeah, if you're wondering why I'm wrong, it's good, it's because here come rock.
01:01:22
Yep, it's not even their email thing too like you know people using gmail, we're gonna put there, and I think it's like seriously, anyway, okay, it's fine. Um, and then there's an advertisement coming to settings. You'll be shocked um, game pass. If you don't have a game pass, they're gonna. I thought they already did this. Honestly, microsoft advertises, uh, microsoft 365, and then if you say no to that, they'll advertise microsoft 365 basic, and then they will advertise game pass in setup for windows. They also, actually, I think they do this today. Let me just go look, um, if you go into a setting, well, see, I subscribed all this stuff, so if you don't subscribe, they will advertise, yeah, microsoft 365, game pass, and actually, I think, co-pilot pro as well. So, right, like I. So I'm not sure what's new there, but, um, in case you're, getting high, I mean first, they're running out of screen space.
01:02:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, first they nagged me about edge and I ignored it. Then they nagged one drive and I ignored that too I actually right.
01:02:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so I think the title of that post is they nagged me to install OneDrive folder backup and I said nothing. Except that's not my blog post. I said a lot. Someone I don't know the Verge or someone just wrote a story like why does Windows 11 nag me so much? I'm like have you been awake? Like this didn't just happen this is I don't know Windows.
01:02:47
Mall Last week, two weeks ago, whatever it was, there was a story about Microsoft dramatically improved the performance of the Microsoft Store underneath the covers, so to speak. Right, they didn't change the type of app it was, but they improved the performance. This past week they announced via a tweet from a single employee, which I found a little off-putting that people maybe people don't know this you can go to Google, right, or some search engine. Actually go to Google, because this doesn't work in Bing and type in the name of an app and then say site colon, appsmicrosoftcom, and if you search for that, you'll find the store listing for that app and then you can click on it. And the experience today, or up until recently, was it would load. Well, back in the day it would load the entire Microsoft Store app after you approved it and then it would go to the page for that app on the store, which you know. Whatever. That's fine, right, and apparently that was too slow and too bulky or whatever for people. So Microsoft came up with a streamlined version of the Microsoft Store. It's still the store app, but it runs in a small window. It looks like an installer and you click install if you want to, and it's the store, so it runs and it installs the app and it just works normally. But apparently that was too much for some people so they decided let's just make it look like a web download. So what they do is they download, but it basically it kind of looks like a normal, like I'm downloading from the web experience, because it does download an exe, but then that exe runs and in the background it downloads the app from the store. So it's a more seamless experience, right, um?
01:04:18
A couple of caveats to this. I've never experienced it a because you have to actually opt into it as a developer. So I've never actually seen it. I never honestly had a problem with the way the system worked before. But I guess this I eventually what's going to happen is we're going to come full circle and instead of downloading webs, apps on the web, we're going to download an app from the web. It's just going to download from the store, from the web, and I, I just what's the point of the store? I don't even know what we're doing anymore. What, like, what is this weird middleman between me and my app? I don't know? Um, so I guess that's an improvement. I don't know, I'm not. It's not a big deal for me. So I think the way it works now is okay, and then this is only kind of semi-related.
01:05:01
But, um, remember when mark zuckerberg uh, a month or so ago, whatever it was he like reviewed the Apple Vision Pro? Yes, he did and, shocker, he didn't like it. Yeah, it was weird and he got a lot of bad feedback for this negative feedback. But one of the things he said was he kind of made the case that Apple was this closed proprietary system and that their thing was open, which it is not, and that this followed the battle that's always been in place between like, open Windows, android, closed Apple, mac, iphone and that this was yet another example of that, leaving aside the fact that most of Apple's competitors have in fact been closed to, um, the quest, uh, whatever, it's called the meta, whatever. What's that thing called Meta, whatever?
01:05:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is Horizon, yeah.
01:05:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Or Horizon World, yeah.
01:05:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you mean their software, yeah.
01:05:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. But now they're going to allow third parties to sell headsets of their own, and a couple of PC makers because they can't ever make good decisions decided they're going to, like Lenovo was one of them, they're going to sell these things. Okay, and so there's a loose tie in here. Microsoft is not going. The initial report suggests that Microsoft is going to be one of these companies and it's like, come on, really, and the answer is no, but they are going to allow. They're going to do some kind of an Xbox licensing something, something with some third party where it will be an Xbox edition Horizon OS device that I assume will look like what? A black rectangle on your head or something. I don't know what. The point of that is weird, but you know, I'm not a big fan of meta, mark zuckerberg or vr, but I, it sounds okay, to me, vr is the next big thing, don't you know?
01:06:55
that's what I've been told, uh, for 25 years. Um, I I don't know. I mean, I will say they just dropped the price of their quest 2 to under $200 permanently Because they have the Quest 3 now as well, right. Yeah, but at that price. I mean, like, if you want to see what all the fuss is about it.
01:07:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
More, even more people will learn how useless VR is. It's great.
01:07:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think it's important that more people have unused electronics in their closet, like I do Devices gathering dust. It's a great thing you saw something for the cat to curl up on Feathering dust it's a great thing.
01:07:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You saw something for the cat to curl up on. I try not to take a victory lap. The Vision Pro sales have been very disappointing.
01:07:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and they didn't make that many in the first place.
01:07:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they thought that well they, what could they?
01:07:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have thought. There was a very sad post on Reddit by a guy who bought 20 Vision Pros what Expecting to be able to sell them for a significant premium right, oh and uh.
01:07:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I'm sorry, are we gonna feel bad? For us didn't work out so good.
01:07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, apparently, you can go to ebay and buy them for less than retail.
01:07:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now, right, so it's like exercise equipment, you know yeah, most of the people who buy this thing. Use it for a little while, stop using it and then after a while they're like why do I have this expensive thing in my house? I don't wish it ill or anything. Oh, no, no, no, it just was apparent to me we've already tried this and it's failed.
01:08:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the problem was Apple had gone so far down the road and spent so much money they couldn't release it.
01:08:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's never going to make sense at $3,500. A thing that is as heavy as your own head.
01:08:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes you like a baby Nobody wants it at $200. That's why Meta has reduced the price of the Quest 2. Nobody wants it period.
01:08:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a very limited market If it was compelling enough. But it's not. It's not.
01:08:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody wants to put a computer on their face.
01:08:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we're all to the point where we're actually looking to spend the last time on this stuff, if the computer is cool enough, you will.
01:08:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm ready to move on.
01:08:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't the initial reaction of the Vision Pro is not ew, it's. Can I try it? And then, when it isn't good enough, then you make fun of it.
01:09:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and apparently the Apple Store employees are saying, yeah, we don't really get people in here to try it much anymore. Right, right. I think everybody was curious either got one or tried it, and that's it and it's over, right.
01:09:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the market for this thing was some tens of thousands of people.
01:09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, hundreds of thousands, probably 100,000, 200,000, maybe as much as 400,000. Apple was ready to make 800,000000 and they've now cut way back. Yeah, yeah, that's. I shouldn't gloat, it's not. It's not a thing to gloat about. I feel bad.
01:09:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but it's well. I think what you're gloating over is you warn people of this.
01:09:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not so much like I was right it not so much like I was right, it's like I I'm trying to get people to think clearly here and what I'm trying to tell you is like this thing doesn't make sense and you're like apple, you know right. Uh, I don't know. I, I I predicted and this will see, time will tell but I predicted they will not make a second one and they'll just wow, that is a bold prediction. Yeah, that would be a let it go. I think there's not a market for it and they know that now I don't know if they've had a defeat that it would be a big one for them.
01:10:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and that's the argument the mac cube thing that they made was kind of falls into this yeah, I bought that on the last day, availability that was a pretty machine, though.
01:10:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, I loved it. How about the?
01:10:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how about the apple, newton, you know yeah, but that was not, that was under scully, so no, but that might be a good example.
01:10:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just because it was a different platform. It was them trying to do something different.
01:10:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That didn't yeah I can't admire them and for trying it and building something really remarkable, yeah, but you know what I'd admire more if they were like you know what, this isn't going to work.
01:10:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just like they did with the car, like just admit it, let's just walk away well, I think that that's what's going to happen.
01:10:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just it would be imprudent, I think, for them to throw good money after bad at this point.
01:10:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The question has always been will there be a B2? Right? What's this called? You're punishing the existing customers. Hey, remember that 3,500 bucks you spent Got another one.
01:11:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they were well warned that this is not. This is you're buying the very early edition Yep? Well, warned that this is not. This is you're buying the very early edition Yep, but the dearth of stuff, the dearth of content, the dearth of apps for it, it's the price and the price.
01:11:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, when you Apple makes these iPhones, which are fantastic, they're fantastic, they're beautiful machines, no-transcript great, whereas I think the people with the first-gen Vision Pro are going to be kind of. You know, if they do make another one, it's going to be like wait, what's happening here? We'll see.
01:11:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. I feel like Meta did all searched for them and just Apple just didn't want to listen. Yeah Right, Apple said no, but ours is going to be better.
01:11:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There were those stories at the beginning that the engineers were saying that Tim Cook shouldn't release it and he wanted it. Yeah.
01:11:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a little pause. That refreshes before I float any farther, and then we'll go to Microsoft 365. And yes, there's a lot of AI news and Xbox news. And, of course, richard, even though he's in Sweden, is going to return to Scotland. The Glens are calling.
01:12:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Are you thirsty, Richard?
01:12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you thirsty? Laddie, have a wee dram on me.
01:12:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got a bag of brandy going home with me, oh nice.
01:12:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got the whatchamacallit, the bladder, the divin, the divin. How many bottles? Four, four bottles of divin. How long will that last you? Oh minutes, because you're going to give it to friends, because you're such a generous guy.
01:12:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it lasts about as long as a typical Vision Pro experience.
01:12:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a guy flying home on the plane last week there was a guy.
01:12:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Please tell me you didn't see a guy in a plane.
01:12:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, right in front of me, in the row in front of me, he had a Vision Pro on. I thought, oh, that's interesting.
01:13:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I would have hit him. No, no, no. Oh, I would have hit him right at the. I would have hit him with that thing. For me a market research.
01:13:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I watched. He wore it for about 10 minutes, took it off and that was it. Never again on the flight. Four minutes yeah.
01:13:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He was all excited about.
01:13:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I'm going to watch movies on the flight. Blah, blah blah.
01:13:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I don't know what happened. That's what the Stratechery boys were talking about. It's like you want this for being on the airplane, so whenever you listen to or read, strictly Angry.
01:13:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I understand wanting to kind of zone out from the environment. I get that.
01:13:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you're also very conspicuous with this thing on and I would not want that, not that you care and people can sneak up on you. That's what I'm saying.
01:13:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had this elbow on the side of the head. Oh sorry, I didn't even see you there.
01:13:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are great ways to zone out on an airplane starting with ambient right.
01:13:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, it's expensive.
01:13:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true.
01:13:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sleeping is a great thing you might be rested by the end of the trip.
01:14:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I could sleep every flight. I don't care if it's the middle of the day, I just want to sleep through it. Wake up.
01:14:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I almost never can. That's the dream, Actually, I.
01:14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I, I kind of drifted in and out the whole flight, uh and then but I wasn't paying attention we landed. I wasn't ready for it and I bit my lip. Boom, boom. We landed kind of hard and I guess I don't know what happened, but I bit my lip. Oh, that's awful, yeah it was terrible.
01:14:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was like whoa, we're here. We had a bumpy landing and the woman next to me grabbed my hand so hard that she put indentations of her fingernails into my top of my hand and I was like what are you doing? Who are you?
01:14:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, he'd never spoken. It's pretty funny she never spoken I. It's pretty funny. She was scared. I've had that happen to me. Yeah, yeah, our show today. My friends, it was me. I grabbed your hand, I knew it, it's my fingernails. Look, you can see the prince, this episode of windows weekly brought to you by our great friends at aci learning. We've talked about it pro for years. Right day, that's who it is.
01:15:03
It pros, now part of ACI Learning. Binge-worthy video on demand for IT and cybersecurity training. They're the best. With IT Pro, you'll get cert-ready with access to their full video library more than get this. The number keeps going up. Now, 7,250 hours of training and, by the way, that's not dusty old library footage from you know years ago how to use Novell Network. It is actually current because they have what is it? Five, six, seven studios. We went out there to Gainesville to see it and they're making content all day, monday through Friday. That 7,250 hours of training is up-to-date current training. Friday that 7,250 hours of training is up-to-date, current training. The premium training plans also include practice exams so you can be ready to take the test before you pay for it. I think that's actually one of the best ways to study for exams is to take practice exams just to see do I know this material? You do, I feel good. Virtual labs, which makes it easy for you to set up a Windows server and Windows clients without actually having even a PC, and so much more.
01:16:14
It pro from ACI learning makes training fun. That's important, fun and engaging. All the training videos are produced in engaging talk show format. They call it edutainment, but these are experts in the field. They're it edutainment, but these are experts in the field. They're not just, you know, trained monkeys. These people know their business, but and this is key they're passionate about it, and that passion is what makes it engaging. They really love this stuff and you will love it too. You're really learning from somebody who knows it and loves it, and I think that's the best kind of training.
01:16:43
Take your IT or cyber career to the next level. Be bold, train smart with ACI Learning. Visit goacilearningcom slash twit. You got that, goacilearningcom slash twit. Oh, and don't forget to use the code TWIT30 at checkout to save 30% on your first month or first year of IT pro training. Goacilearningcom slash TWIT Individuals. Don't forget TWIT30, twit30 to save 30% on your first month or first year of IT pro training at ACI Learning Goacilearningcom slash TWIT. We thank them so much for their support. Learningcom slash twit we thank them so much for their support. And if you're a club, to remember going to the discord and you will meet many, many people who've gotten their certs, gotten their first jobs, who are getting great training from ACI. There are so many of our audience members have and they're happy to share their experiences with you All. Right Back to the show we go. Paul Theriot, the show oh, it's the show.
01:17:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And Richard Campbell yes, While you were doing that ad, I got a PR outreach and this is not exactly what I'm looking for. But Google is rolling out a new experience for Microsoft 365 and Chrome OS that will allow you to, I guess you open a file from the Chromebook and it will save it to micro, like to one drive. So it's not like a full sync thing, but it does integrate with the files out. I need to go see this. It's hard for me to, based on this description, I'm not 100% sure what's going on here, but it says you can yeah, you install the Microsoft 365 web apps, connect the files app to OneDrive and then when you open files in Microsoft 365, they actually in those apps. It will actually save them to Microsoft 365 instead of locally or to Google Drive.
01:18:41
So, anyway, okay, breaking news, okay, a dozen or something. Uh, where's this? And let's see, we did week D blah, blah, blah. Okay. So we talked sometime recently about a new version of Microsoft office for, uh, perpetual users, like they don't want the subscription. This is, you just buy the office suite and that there's going to be a long term servicing channel version of it, both of which are going to bear the 2024 name, if you would like to preview the commercial version of this, which is going to happen on Windows and Mac, you can do that now. This is, like you know, the old school Office suite, right? So Word Excel, powerpoint, onenote and Outlook Word Excel, powerpoint, onenote and Outlook, but also Skype for Business, because, yep, it's 2007 or whatever.
01:19:31
Again, vizio 2024 and Project 2024. Publisher will not be included, right, that's being retired. Five years of support. We talked about how they were having that support timeframe and I haven't taken a look at this. But this is basically just if you want to, you know, preview this before it comes out later this year. You can, and it is a standalone. It doesn't connect to any of the online stuff. You can't use copilot with it and so forth, and you know who knows, maybe you see that as a benefit. I know some people do. Speaking of classic, microsoft also announced, I think, today, that they are retiring the classic, the original version of the Teams desktop app, on July 1. Now, that's fast. Yeah, that one is fast, and my guess here is that, honestly, I think the uptick on the new Teams has been good.
01:20:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I think that's what that says, Because the old Teams was so rough. It's like I'll try it.
01:20:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't hear it. I don't mean and don't ping me because I said this, but I don't hear people complaining about the new teams Like the original yeah, the original teams. A lot of complaints. I had a lot of complaints.
01:20:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've been so badly burned now that we gave you a new version.
01:20:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't make us do it again. Yes, yeah, I mean no one's more lightweight and all that stuff, but I never had a problem with, like, the heft of it. To me it was just lots of bugs and weird behaviors and I don't know. Yeah, works well for me, but anyway, they're moving pretty aggressively to get rid of that. And of course, there's also a unified Teams client, which is the new client right that will connect to both consumer and commercial accounts soon, and this will be included in windows 11, 24 H, two in the second half of the year, not probably not in the initial release, because they're still testing it.
01:21:19
And and speaking of things I only half understand because I don't, this is kind of curious to Dropbox announced a bunch of things today. The only one I really care about is some new integrations with Microsoft 365 and, in particular, onedrive, and they are allowing for the first time, their customers to co-author inside of Microsoft 365 apps, specifically Word, excel and PowerPoint, using the desktop, web or mobile client, meaning the dropbox client, which is very interesting, because on I don't know what that looks like. So to me, when I hear that, what I'm thinking is you're doing file system integration and you're using dropbox and you're just using word and it does, you know, collaboration, right, but it looks like based on well, this is a shot of the web app actually. So at least from the web app you'll be able to from within Dropbox. Whatever the experience is, you basically load these apps in place and there's a couple of light customizations where you can open or save to open in or save to Dropbox instead of, you know, onedrive or OneDrive for business.
01:22:31
My understanding is that whatever the sync technology is that Microsoft uses for OneDrive is available to third-party developers and I you know, which is what allows us to do things like files on demand. Well, let's just leave it at that. Files on demand, basically, where you can kind of just say, look, I want this folder of these files to be available when I'm offline, arbitrarily, or you double click on an offline folder but you're online, so it loads, and now it's available offline, unless you specify otherwise, and I I believe I could be wrong about this, but I think that the dropbox desktop client does that now and I think it actually uses the one that Microsoft built for OneDrive, I think Okay. So, yeah, like it's kind of a not an open standard, but like you know it's, it's certainly a proven solution.
01:23:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So if that's the case, they adopted Dropbox for some of this stuff, Like was that really the market leader? Is that why they did it?
01:23:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I still want so, because Dropbox is just storage. It's kind of a weird one to me. It's it's obviously the biggest name in specifically cloud storage. You know standalone cloud storage. But when you go to Google with Google drive or Microsoft with one drive, you know you're typically signing up for that. You know commercial, the subscription has the apps and all that stuff. And I, I apps and all that stuff and I I kind of wonder how dropbox exists in that world.
01:23:47
I, you know dropbox threatened to have their own office suite, like so well, okay, I don't remember the details of this, but they have made uh. Yeah, they were talking about acquisitions along those lines. I think one of them might be called paper. I think is their their word processor.
01:24:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they have a DocuSign solution and stuff. I'm just wondering maybe Microsoft said you know if you don't do that?
01:24:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it's a weird thing. Like Dropbox is talking about how you well, so, for example, you can integrate Dropbox storage into Teams. And I'm thinking to myself why would anyone do this? Like, if you're paying for Teams, like you're going to, you're just going to use one drive, you get a two by one yeah. Like why wouldn't you just use that? It's weird, like it's it, it, it. In a company you've got all the solutions.
01:24:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Looking for a problem.
01:24:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think so I'm. I'm a little about what their role might be. I was confused about what Citrix's role was in the face of Hyper-V and remote desktop or whatever, and they're still kicking. It's good that.
01:24:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft's not a monopoly right, I hope that's the only.
01:24:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hope that's not the only reason.
01:25:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The other way of looking at this is this is an embrace the easiest way for you to get your stuff out of dropbox and into one drive.
01:25:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I yeah, that like a dropbox is the uh, the data repatriation service, or you know, maybe I that's, I don't know. I'm sure both of them have reasons for doing this, but obviously on microsoft's side it makes sense. You want to partner with these companies and be like see, we have a healthy ecosystem we facilitate people migrating away from them very easily yeah, yeah, is that the imperial march I hear playing in the background, such as that's a spotify playlist.
01:25:38
Don't worry about that. Um, he's looking for him. Yeah, yep. And then this is just kind of a dev topic, but I thought it was kind of neat because a year or so ago, github announced they weren't going to start migrating their contributors code contributors on the service to 2FA, and they had this goal they had set up for the end of 2023. They started with the high profile users, if that makes sense, the governmental big companies you know the stuff that would like where risk is really high and, not surprisingly, this was enormously successful. I think part of the reason it was was they midstream, through this, implemented Passkeys, and their implementation of Passkeys to this day might be one of the best.
01:26:24
It's. It's really really well done. In fact, passkey usage has overtaken other forms of web auth-based 2FA. It did happen very quickly and it's stayed that way for a long time, or ever since SMS usage has dropped off. They're also trying to get people to adopt multiple 2FA methods, whether it's passkeys, security keys etc. But let's see if the numbers are. Where's the numbers? 95% opted right across. All cold contributors. Yeah, really good. They're trying out, like I said, multiple 2FA methods, including more secure methods. One point, for a million of their customers have adopted pass keys.
01:27:05
It's just I don't know. It's going great. I don't know what to say. It's just like going great. So I think they've done it right. Speaking of, by the way, the picture that accompanies my article, is a great example of how you get something right, which is a lot of companies offer you this 2FA thing and, as a typical person developers are technical, obviously, but they might not be security experts you kind of click through and you're like, okay, you know, whatever, did you save your recovery thing? Yeah, yeah, same. And then what they do is they prompt everyone who enables any form of 2FA. They actually come back and prompt you 28 days later and say let's make sure it's set up right. You know, and yeah, really smart, like I think they've just done things right. Also, and yeah, really smart, like I think they've just done things right.
01:27:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also, I have to say excellent Passkeys integration. I don't know if you guys use Passkeys with GitHub, but it's the easiest, it's the best, simplest, it's beautiful. It's a work of art I wish everybody would do this.
01:27:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, it's, yeah. No, even Google, which I lauded early on. Now I would say they've completely botched this. Like I get these weird. They default to a passkey prompt on like a new computer, but then it's like this multi-step forward you bring up a camera and take a picture, blah, blah, blah, and it's like guys, I have a code in an app, could I just do the code thing? And then you can save the passkey to the computer. Like don't make me do it on the first one, it's just too many steps.
01:28:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, github gets it right, you could use your password and log in and use the passkey as 2FA If you were a commoner, or just sign in. And since I'm using oh, I have to unlock my Bitwarden.
01:28:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is that Dashlane or bit one?
01:28:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's a beauty thing because I, because it's in there, right, yeah, it goes to all my platforms, yeah this could be like you brought up a new computer, new browser.
01:28:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, all you've done is sign into your password manager the passkey save there, you don't type anything to get into. That isn't that great. Oh, it's beautiful, it's the best. I really love it. That combination is just classic.
01:29:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, and I think maybe that contributes a little bit too to the uptake of 2FA, because people want to try Basky's.
01:29:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You got to get. I'm sure they look all the companies that make password managers, all the companies in the FIDO alliance, et cetera. They know this stuff is hard. They're like we got to get this right. You know we got to and we got to get the user experience right. And you see, like this wide range of those experiences, depending on the app, the service, whatever and most of them are kind of garbage you know frankly, and I think that's why people are like, oh, this will never take off.
01:29:32
You know. It's like you know, if you get it right it will take off. And I think GitHub, still to me, is the shining example of getting it right. Hopefully they publish their implementation so others can follow it probably yeah, they um yes, so actually they do have a resource for other. Uh, yeah, actually it's in my article, right there's a well, I don't know that they did it that way.
01:29:55
but there's a resource for, like, if you want to understand how to do this in your organization, we have like a resource for that, like, do what we did, but do it for you. Like that, best practices and whatnot. You know, number one don't be evil. I'm afraid.
01:30:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ladies and gentlemen, you are in luck. Oh, I'm still logging in. You are listening to the. It's a terrific experience. Well, it's just because I haven't logged in a bit of Worden yet. You are listening to the best darn show about Microsoft there is in the universe, Wow. Well, we haven't checked it out past Alpha Centauri, but yeah.
01:30:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel comfortable with it, though. In the same way that the NFL is the world champions, we are the champions, that's right.
01:30:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're the world champions of Microsoft Podcasts. Paul Thorat, he's on your left, richard Campbell's on your left, richard campbell's on your right, and we are glad you're here. It's. Get ready, fasten your seat belts. It's almost. Ai time. Ai time begins. You never asked for another cup of my ai.
01:31:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'd like another cup please, paul I can't remember if they announced this officially, but the bloomberg very reliable at least has said that the european commission has looked at the microsoft open ai partnership and has decided not to formally investigate it. Interesting, um, yeah, and I don't, I can't, I can't say I have an opinion on that, other than noting that of the big box regulators you know the FTC and the DOJ in the United States, and I guess I'll include the UK CMA in this list I trust these guys the most in the sense that they seem to get it right. You know, so it's fine. You know, I think we discussed this like you got to look at it.
01:31:40
It's kind of weird. You know, it's big money too and it seems like it was specifically designed to, um, you know, end run around the regulations or the regulators that would have been on them if they tried to acquire open ai. Right, it may be as simple as open ai just literally was like yeah, it doesn't matter how much money you have, we're not doing it, um, but it still looks. It just looks weird. Right, it's a it's, it's a unique um partnership and uh, but, they've done their best to try and broaden that right.
01:32:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They've signed on with all kinds of other oh my god, yeah, yeah, it's ludicrous, yeah, and I think that's part of it. It's like at some point you're saying is this still a unique relationship? Like, do we really want to fight this? Fight what's here, right?
01:32:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right, um, yeah, I mean honestly, this next story in some ways is kind of tied to that, and they don't have control right.
01:32:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They have an onboarding seat, they have an observer seat, but they don't control the company. Although, when Sachi got angry, everybody stopped.
01:32:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We do have that suspicion of a grime or worm tongue style relationship there.
01:32:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but Well, I think he's got the button right relationship there. But well, I think I think he's got the button right. He's like, yeah, azure, then what do?
01:32:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you got nice right, that's true.
01:32:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's true. Make me cancel your account.
01:32:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know like look at like you could probably get wound up on aws, but how quick is it going to be?
01:32:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, that's a good question, um, those x fill fees are going to be serious. How many terabytes do you need to move nice?
01:33:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's true. Yeah, you thought it was bad moving between chrome os and microsoft 365. Watch this, um. Yep, uh, I don't know how I'm going to handle this kind of thing. I've started writing about a lot of the SLM, llm releases as they occur, but what I've discovered is that one occurs approximately every 36 hours, and I'm not sure if I have the time or inclination to keep doing this. Right, and in this vein, microsoft and I think tied to the previous story too were, in a sense, that they kind of want to show that they can be independent as well, right as yesterday. I sense that they kind of want to show that they can be independent as well. Right as yesterday, I think. Yep, yes, they released an slm, as I called it. No one else was calling it this at the time, but it is an slm. They can run on phones. Yep, a small language model. Um, and I this.
01:33:57
The weirdness of this because I, because I cover news and I specifically cover AI stuff is there were no Microsoft announcements. Right, there was none. Now, by the way, as of this moment, there are 12 or 15 hours later they finally posted some stuff, but at the time, all that Microsoft officially posted was an academic white paper which, I can tell you, fascinating reading. You'll love it. It's almost as good as the Lord of the Rings. You need an app. This is the way. It's brutal. I mean, even the font was designed to put you to sleep. It's crazy.
01:34:26
But what they did do was they reached out to every mainstream news organization on Earth to see who would bite, and they all did Like. The New York Times wrote a 2,500 word article about how Microsoft is bringing language models down to the phone, which, not to be a jerk about it, is what everyone is doing. There is nothing unique right about this at all. Um, now, in in some slice of time, the claim they make, which is a very common claim for this kind of thing, is that they're seeing the performance, reliability, blah, blah, blah, whatever of chat GPT 3.5, which we all know is like an older LLM that runs on the clock.
01:35:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It works pretty well especially on an ARD, it works pretty well.
01:35:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And for something like that on a phone or whatever device. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that, it's excellent. The problem is, everyone's doing this. Everyone, anyone who makes language models is doing this exact thing, and every single time one of these things is announced, the claims are always the same. They make the. They do that comparison depending on what type of language model it is. If it's an LLM, the target is always chat GPT, sometimes Gemini of whatever stripe. If it's an SLM, we're going after. What are we going after? I know we're going. We're going after the previous version of chat GPT. Right, because this is the comparison. Ai is moving so fast.
01:35:46
To me, the story here was not that Microsoft released another SLM, but rather that the way they were. Like, how do we not get lost in the news cycle? Because when a day goes by and, by the way, a day went by and another one was announced I don't know if it was Meta or somebody announced another one and I didn't look, and I will, because I can't help myself, but I bet it. Bet it's better than this damn thing that microsoft released yesterday, because it's a day later, but whatever, that doesn't matter. How would you even?
01:36:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
bench that like. How do you know?
01:36:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, just based on there. In other words, I would compare, like how they say how much it is or is not better than something, something, and then see where I can compare. But I'm because, look, it's only I've been doing this for two weeks and I can already tell you it's the same thing over and over again. So, bravo to Microsoft. They got into Reuters, they got into the New York times. They normal people reading a paper Well, no, normal people don't read a paper. But normal people reading those publications, wherever they do it, on their iPad or whatever would have seen a story, like and thought and maybe thought because, who knows, they don't know anything about this business Like, oh, my God, like there's been an advance. It's like, no, there hasn't. No, there's some noise. Yeah, so the FI stuff and I'm assuming that is how you pronounce it, yes Is one of many examples of Microsoft flexing that. Look, this has nothing to do with open AI.
01:37:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think it's smart. But also this is a move towards right-sizing, right. Like I would be way more worried that we were still humming up this peak of inflated expectations if they were talking about a GPT-5 coming out. Because where are you going to get the data right? Like you've already indexed, you're going to index 8chan now you think that's going to make it better. Like you've already indexed everything you can. There isn't another exponentially larger data set to be had.
01:37:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My favorite data story, which is now over 25 years old, was Jim Gray was still alive and working on the SQL stuff at Microsoft that genius and they created something called the TerraServer to show off SQL Server 7, which was the first in-house version of Microsoft's database. The previous ones were based on Sybase and to prove the prowess of this thing, they had to come up with some gigantic data set. What were they going to use? So someone came up with the idea well, there are these companies, or the countries rather, at the time it was not companies, it was countries that have satellites and they map the Earth and we can go to them. We'll go to the United States, that'll be the best one, and we'll get all of their geolocation data and we'll map the world. We'll call it Terra Server. So they went to the US government. They got it and said you can have everything, but the united states like okay. And then they went to the russian government and they said, hey, we're doing this thing. And I said you can have everything except for russia, like cool, now we have the whole world. So they combine that data and that data took up on hard drives in a data center, something that was the size of like a cape house, like it was humongous and I got to walk through it. You know it was like a scene from mission impossible today.
01:38:40
Independent companies, do you know google maps? Blah, maps, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's nothing you know. So, yeah, how do you get data? Like, what's the version of that today? Yeah, I don't know. Every star in the sky, every space, the spec in the space, I don't have no idea. I don't know where you go from here.
01:38:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know where you go from here yeah, I don't know how you scale up. No, and I think that's the thing is they're not trying now. Now they're right-sizing. They're saying, hey, when we try and be the everything, we have more problems. And so now, narrowing the scope and sharpening the confidence numbers, to say, hey, if you're below 85% confidence, you don't know.
01:39:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. And actually the Microsoft, the SLM story we just kind of waltzed by, kind of plays into this, because I think one of the competitive concerns for Microsoft has got to be that Google and Apple both have these own platforms. These are the mainstream kind of computing platforms for people. They're probably going to continue to be that, you know, in the future. A lot of that stuff is going to run on device, but they're going to do something in the cloud. Google has their own thing, apple doesn't, and so the people, the companies, are lining up.
01:39:47
How does a company like Microsoft kind of break into this space and honestly, I think it's going to be I'm going to call this vertical use cases, for lack of a better term their uh models, their SLMs, this thing or other things, whatever. There'll be one that's really good at something, another that's really good at this and you're an app or a service maker. You're going to run something that runs on those phones and will run off the MPU on that device when it can and then do some cloud thing when it can't. There's a market opportunity there, right, like where you become the, because every time you see these LLMS, llm announcements, it's always like it's really good at this, it nails this, and I think that's we're never going to stop talking about this. This will never end. It's just going to evolve and evolve, and evolve.
01:40:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It should become plumbing, but not this week.
01:40:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's too special use, special case, I guess, or whatever right now.
01:40:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
At the moment. Bit by bit, we don't talk about GitHub Copilot anymore. Everybody uses it. It just becomes a thing.
01:40:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, right, and I don't remember the number, but the adoption on that's off the charts is something like 55%, and it is. The returns are substantial, yep. And speaking of GitHub and success, goddamn, you know, they've nailed it, it's perfect. And speaking of GitHub and success, god damn, you know they've nailed it on that, it's perfect, and they're the original. I don't mean perfect, it's the perfect combination of many advantages and it's just another form of automation that from for a group of people who make most of their living creating automations but what about all the compiler maker jobs we're losing?
01:41:31
richard, do you have any concerns about that?
01:41:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and both of them right oh boy okay, you know, compiler people, they really only want to work on compilers, they don't just trying to think like that.
01:41:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I always use it when people talk about job losses. I always say remember, we used to have a woman in a low-cut dress walking around with a tray where she would sell like cigarettes and stuff.
01:41:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do we worry about that job loss? Cigarettes, tipperillos, I mean. Sometimes, with the percept, looking back, you can say like maybe that wasn't such a great job. Actually, we're spending our time doing better things. A lot of coding people love writing compilers. That's a great little hobby Writing your own compiler. I don't know how many I've used.
01:42:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you're doing this as a hobby, I would say A get outside idiot, but no, I would say no. Well, a get outside idiot, but no, I would say no. Actually, there's a whole wellspring of ideas there because there's all these legacy.
01:42:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You often do computer science courses. I mean, that's a very common assignment. Yeah, there you go.
01:42:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but I mean, make a real world. Something Like what if you could bring C Sharp to the Commodore 64? Or something or whatever. That's a great idea. I mean, do something or whatever. Do something awesome. Do something like that, not just the language, but obviously the compiler and all that stuff, the environment, the runtime and then a framework that lets you target the specific capabilities of that device. If you want to kill a weekend, I'm just saying.
01:42:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
AI would probably be really good at that 6502 is really well known.
01:42:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could do this.
01:43:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think Hanselman was decoding some old five and a quarter inch C64. Yes, I saw that.
01:43:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I saw it literally on Facebook. He's like does anybody just throwing it out there? Does anyone have like a five and a quarter inch disc drive I could borrow Like?
01:43:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
what is it Like dude.
01:43:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He got it to work, dear father do something. I don't know Like he got it. Your father do something. What are you doing, man? Oh, it's important work, is it? No? Um, no, I think that's cool. That's, I'm joking. I thought that was fun. Um, and in the same vein that open ai had come up with a sneak peek of that video tool, microsoft came out with a freaky deaky. Do you see this thing? The boss one talking face ai. Yeah, it's really something.
01:43:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh it's video tool.
01:43:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft came out with a freaky deaky the awesome one Talking Face AI. That's really something.
01:43:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's going to be us on the podcast.
01:43:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just going to be like a picture of me and it's going to be going. I mean, it's pretty much what I do anyway. Train it with like three words and then it will just say things like literally all the time, or I don't know, wow.
01:44:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The one that gets me. Is it speaking in japanese, in your voice? Yeah? Yeah that's why I heard this in real life yeah, it's really something.
01:44:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the only way I'm gonna hear it, so I I mean that they have not released this right, this is just like they're like hey, we can do this for kind of free time yeah, so yikes and this is like it's just scary, it's weird, some of these are weird yeah my favorite is the singing Mona Lisa.
01:44:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, it's uncanny valley.
01:44:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mona Lisa is the classic. This is the she's singing. It's Uncanny Valley. Here's the singing Mona Lisa, mona Lisa's the classic. This is the. She's singing the rapping Mona Lisa.
01:44:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't think I can get the audio for you, but you can probably don't need it. Yeah, weird, they're all strange, they're all freaky. Right, yeah, it's got an uncanny streak to it.
01:45:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're all strange. Yeah, Freaky, right, yeah, no, it's very. It's got an uncanny street to it, but boy you'd be tough set to catch them all.
01:45:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is going to play into um, like the de-aging stuff you know, like the star Wars movies where they have like princess Leah, or um, the recent um Harrison Ford de-aging thing in the Indiana Jones movie, where it's just, it's just easy, it's, it's going to be, it's going to be a feature of the iPhone. You know, yeah, it's unbelievable.
01:45:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know who's going to use this as animators? I mean fantastic, for that.
01:45:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's crazy, Homer Simpson will finally have a good lip sync. I don't think that might ruin that experience. It might actually. That's kind of cool Google.
01:45:47
Last week, I think it was announced a massive reorg and it's hard not to read between the lines of that. You know, I don't know if anyone paid attention to this I kind of laser-focused right on the Pixel part of it, or I'll call it devices and services, whatever they're calling it. Because they're calling it um, because they're actually pixel and android have not ever been in the same business slash team or whatever uh, and now they are, and that's weird. Um, also, maybe this is coincidental. I might have mentioned last week the email I got from google, one telling me they're taking away all my exclusive features and giving them to everybody.
01:46:23
But it's hard for me not to think that this is related to that. They're just spreading this stuff everywhere. In other words, google has these kind of AI capabilities. They bring them to a high-end Samsung phone or phones. Those things have great MPUs, so that stuff works well. And you kind of wonder like A, why are you making your own tentative chips then? And also B, like maybe this needs to be everywhere and maybe it will be. Maybe that's part of the point of this. We'll see what comes out of this, but this is literally around accelerating the use of AI consistently across the company and being able to come to market more quickly and make decisions more quickly.
01:47:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And Google's, you know, because they've been struggling with this question.
01:47:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I always wonder if Google's problems are more outside perception than reality. But then why would I know I'm outside? Yeah, yeah, you have to have time to give the public for sure. I wish them well, although Google, like Intel I mean Google's, you know dominant. And then it's like, well, maybe we don't need them anymore, We'll see. And then, speaking of maybe we won't need them anymore, because this is the other concern, you know, I was talking about this issue for windows with other devices and the Qualcomm chipsets.
01:47:37
When you think about AI, if Qualcomm chipsets, when you think about AI, if AI is everywhere, what's the? You know, if I can have a free service or a cheap service, sit alongside Word and help me write, why would I pay for Microsoft Copilot, right? So the graphic design version of this, of course, is Photoshop, and Adobe spent billions creating their own supposedly safe it wasn't tainted in any way image library and just kidding, but fine. And of course, you know they're putting these capabilities into Photoshop and they look awesome, right, and not just Photoshop, I mean across their Illustrator, all those tools. Yeah, all those tools.
01:48:13
And then I don't know if this came up last week, but last week they announced something about generative AI for video and Premiere, right. And so yeah, of course, right, but again, you know, we'll see.
01:48:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We've been playing with the audio features for podcasts that Adobe's made and they mostly for noise removal and, you know, lifted a motorcycle sound right out of an audio, out of an audio track, like nothing.
01:48:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just okay, that's a great example, but let me let me throw an example at you of why this is my concern. Exactly that feature is in clipchamp, which is free. Ah, right now, I'm not saying it's as good, I literally have no idea. I literally have no idea. And clipchamp is for video. But you know, using clipchamp as part of a workflow to create a, an audio podcast, is probably not a great idea, but if it's audio and video, it might be a good idea. And and but that is my point it's a great example because a company like adobe, like just like microsoft in the productivity space, or google, has the you know, this body of work and history and skills and they're going to do this great. But AI is so powerful I think this stuff is going to spread far and wide and disruptive. I don't know if you've looked at the Adobe CC pricing lately.
01:49:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's expensive, you know getting um, so all the more reason they need to implement stuff for their customer base to stay in place.
01:49:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, it's something to be said for inertia and you're used to the tools and it's comfortable and whatever and you're deeply invested in that and I get that. But you know, for people like when I came up to look at video most recently, I don't have any thing to fall back on, I don't have to use some tool. I've been when I find something like really simple and you know, stupid simple, like clip champ, which almost seems like a play school tool, that's a wonderful find for, like someone who's I'm just I don't intend to become a videographer or whatever.
01:50:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So no, and I think it's. It's an amortization of this right, but it's just going to be less expensive to do more impressive things making out an animation, creating, you know, cgi characters Like right. This used to be industrial light and magic, and now it's in your iphone.
01:50:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know that's incredible. We used to make documentaries about how they would like make terminator 2 or the abyss or whatever exactly, and it's like I do that between instagram and yeah you're stretching around on screen. I mean, I don't, I'm old, but I mean my kids. Good, you know, I can't even type on a phone. You think I'm going to edit a video on a phone?
01:50:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you're never going to make it into a tiktoker.
01:50:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul, come on, I'm absolutely not well. Maybe with the rapping AI thing I could do it the dancing old guy in the six Flag ads.
01:51:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know the guy like. Tiktok's days are numbered. I would make an Insta reel and say that's a good point, that's actually good.
01:51:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'd really go with the future, yep, and it's more of a future than Vision Pro, am I right? No, sorry, and then All back at him. So if you thought the Apple card was ridiculous, I got something for you Is there an Xbox card in my future?
01:51:28
No, there is an Xbox card, though, and I am worried about the future of our planet, so I don't look. Here's the thing. When it comes to credit cards and rewards points and all that stuff, some of them are really good and then some of them are not, and this is not good. This is not good. You can earn like three points per dollar, which is the kind of the typical midline for this stuff. If you like, use Grubhub and DoorDash, but that stuff's all over the place. Most purchases are one point, which is nothing.
01:52:03
I saw a great article it have been like um macworld, even it was. It was a mac publication where they actually went to one of those credit card expert like guys who like play the credit card game and do all the points and all this stuff, and they were like hey, is the apple card a a good? You know, buy right, good deal. You know like. Listen, let's say you spent ten thousand bucks at applecom in one year. Let's just ten thousand and you get the three points back on that. It's like 300 bucks. It's like you're out of mind.
01:52:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How do you mind like when my wife and I my adapter.
01:52:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's about it, we all yeah, or like a cleaning cloth or something like everyone's different, everyone has different needs and everyone does different things. But, like you know, we use a costco card for a lot of stuff, because you know costco gas and blah, blah, whatever it is. But, uh, amazon, we have an amazon card for amazon purchases, whatever. But, um, you know, one of the things we've done is like we fly to mexico a lot. It's always the same airline. We use that card a lot and I mean you get benefits. I'm, here's the benefit. I believe I could be wrong, but think of the last, let's say, eight sets of flights. We flew business class. Uh, seven of them, and the other one of those seats was free, right, so that's why you do it. So I'm, we're not spending any more money, we're just spending it on that card. So, uh, the Xbox man, if you want to have card that has an Xbox logo on it, I mean go to town, but don't do this thinking you're going to, there's no free games in the end.
01:53:23
No, there's little things. I mean it's just. My point is, there is you can redeem points for Xbox stuff, but there's a better way to do this?
01:53:34
Yes, exactly, if you just want to get cash, I mean, just use a Costco card. They give you, I think they give you a check once or twice a year, whatever it is, I'd spend. Spend that on xbox games. That's a much better deal, yeah, much better deal. You'd. You'd make a, and that's without me even thinking about it. There are probably other deals that are even better. So, anyway, it exists is my only point. And uh, actually, my other point is don't do it. Um, look, if you want to play this game, do I mean and do it right, but this is not one of those. This is not a solution. Indie game part of Xbox is called ID at Xbox and they are doing a digital showcase in tandem with IGN next week to promote some of the upcoming indie games for the Xbox platform. So I feel like we're in a time period now where two things are happening One every two weeks there's a new showcase for games, and two none of them are for Activision, blizzard games. What's happening?
01:54:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What are you doing? I was going to ask.
01:54:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you doing? You snuck that one in, paul, come on.
01:54:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, I pay 15 bucks a month for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. I want this money back. I don't when is it. Where's the stuff?
01:54:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe by October.
01:54:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Jeez, and I think this came up last week, but my wife and I started watching that Fallout TV series. Oh yes, I love it. And I will say video games.
01:55:04
Video game movies are not, as there aren't as many comic book movies I think this came up but most of them are garbage right. And the Last of Us TV show it was a breakthrough, wasn't it? It really was. It got some criticism for being an almost like shot by shot remake of the game. Honestly, I never played the game, so to me I was like who cares? Like that doesn't bug me. The Fallout TV show I sort of assumed it was going to mirror one of the games. It doesn't. If you look at the history, or you know the fake history of the games, it comes right after the last game chronologically. I think it's really well done. My wife thinks it's a little violent.
01:55:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's extremely violent.
01:55:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's adult Heads making holes, yeah.
01:55:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, heads crushed and blown up. The amount of damage that happens to heads in this movie.
01:55:55
I think has already surpassed Game of Thrones, like it's kind of crazy, but you know what, it's super high quality. It's kind of crazy, but you know what, it's super high quality. It's really well done. I love the alternate history thing. This is clearly like a 1950s US transistor-based future where everything was you know, nuclear war, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Awesome. I love post-apocalyptic stuff. So the only thing that would be better is if the apes from the Planet of the Apes rode over the hill at the end of the last show of the season, and then we can see what happens next year.
01:56:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it's post-apocalypse with that sort of neo -chrome. Yeah, like steampunky kind of something. Retro-futurism.
01:56:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's fantastic, I love it. It's really fun.
01:56:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
With some country music thrown in.
01:56:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's also a lot of good kind of drama to it. Without giving anything away, I mean just these kind of secrets about, like, the vault next to the main vault from the main character's vault what actually happened there. Like I, I just think it's really well done and it's a good story well told. Never played the games you know.
01:56:58
Halo TV series not so much the Doom movie right with the rock. For like one minute you see the first person view. A little goofy, not great. The first Resident Evil movie with Mila, I thought was very good, I actually really like that movie and then they go off a cliff and then go way past the cliff and keep going down somehow. But this one is, this is very good. I think people you know you should I would look at it.
01:57:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes you want to play Fallout again, though doesn't it?
01:57:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It does. And, by the way, fallout adoption has exploded in the way of this game, I think, like I don't remember the numbers, but like the amount of people playing the game has exploded. Like it's really good, I'm playing the mobile version.
01:57:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's cute and you get a Vault 32 uniform, so I can just they're promoting the TV show.
01:57:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So is this? What kind of a game is this?
01:57:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're in the vault, you're a vault master, and so you've got your vault. It's kind of like no, I mean like it's not a shooter.
01:57:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's a resource game.
01:58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you get people show up. I see somebody showed up at the door and then I got to drag him in to let me put him in this living quarters here and you know, and you have to create energy and food and water, and then there's a whole bunch of you know, there's stuff. It's a survival game. I, I guess, is how you would right it's actually pretty good it's a resource game.
01:58:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's actually a surprisingly good game and as you get, I love the whole aesthetic, the screen yeah, it's got the same thing, that which kind of emulates crt, and you can zoom in, so you can see, see, the guys are in there, I can level all the electronics are humongous because they have transistors in them. You know, it's just like. I think it's fun, like it's it's yeah, it's.
01:58:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. I I had played this before and I downloaded it again because I, after the tv show, I said, oh, you start watching it.
01:58:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You want to play fallout. Yeah, it's a good world. It's a good space for a number of seasons, like they could go in all kinds of directions oh yeah, that's the nice thing about not following the plot of the game, is true? Really, they've just, they've just got the world of the game I sort of assume the first season would be like whatever game and you're in whatever place, and then we go to like west virginia and then boston and atlantic state, whatever.
01:59:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, every season I think they're in boston this time every city I think they're in boston, aren't they? Or near boston I?
01:59:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
can't tell in the tv show. In the show, no, that's. Oh. No, they're in california, aren't they? Because there's very clearly the santa monica period.
01:59:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah that's los angeles, yeah, and they were also definitely using shots from new vegas of, uh, of outside of law, of the military bases outside of las vegas, right. So it's fun, which was a big, that's a big scene in the new vegas game, right, okay, there was I'm not saying it was a shot, but for shop but there's definitely a couple of pullbacks where it's like I have played the game looking at the exact view nice.
01:59:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See, I had to go. I went to wikipedia in a couple of places and kind of just read through the plots of each of the games and the kind of themes and all the stuff and kind of get you it, because a lot of the you know the creatures and the situations and the devices and all the stuff is obviously from the yeah right you know from the games and it's chronologically coupled to the games and it's post new vegas.
02:00:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's right. Yeah, you played positive towards that scenario. Then they have more energy, they have air to be activated like there's a lot of for you nerds in the audience, by which I mean you in the audience.
02:00:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, one of the things that I guess they're doing in the show well, one of the things that is a side product of the show is that some of the games have, like, multiple outcomes. So in some version of the game some guy might live or die, or some situation may or may not happen. And in the show they've referenced some of these things and it's of course it can only be one of the outcomes, so that becomes canon, which is a big issue in the uh, in the universe, uh, content builds or whatever. Um, to me, I don't, yeah, yeah there was.
02:00:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There was certainly a scenario playing new vegas where that base was destroyed.
02:01:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, okay, okay, that's. Maybe that's what I was. Yeah, I didn't know the exact details.
02:01:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The fact that the base is there and enhanced, more powerful than ever. It's a sign of oh, that means you played it.
02:01:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This way, that's right. That version of the ending is canon. So you know is what happened with air quotes around it.
02:01:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but actually there's two things going on there. Now I'm going down getting into plot stuff right, like because the brotherhood of steel is there too and there's a whole subplot.
02:01:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Be careful not to give away the whole thing, but I, I, yeah, I, I don't yeah, and I think they do a good job with this. Basically, three main and intersecting storylines where these characters kind of, you know, intersect and I, I and have their own backgrounds and everything. I think it's great. My wife tolerates it, mostly because it's just super violent. It's not her type of show, but I think she recognizes just the quality of it. It's good, it's well made and the actors are all great and the story's great.
02:01:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love her. She's adorable, the lead, it's funny because that's why my wife likes it is because it's so violent. Lisa loves the violence. Oh, wow, she's like oh, this is great. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to have to do like a horror movie marathon. Oh, she was teaching our, she was showing our son Saw, when he was like six.
02:02:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean she loves that stuff. One of my top three parenting moments was watching the Shining with my daughter for the first time, and she might have been eight to 10, whatever your, you know, whatever age, and we're watching it together, it's just us.
02:02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a terrifying film.
02:02:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, it's one of the best movies ever made. And there's a scene where the kid, little kid, goes in that room and it says Red Rum, written in probably the lip sync or whatever, or just maybe in the finger or whatever. And she says we're just sitting there. And she goes what does that mean? And I'm like we'll find out. She goes, we're going to find out. Right, and I paused it and I was like you don't know what that means. You're experiencing this for the first time.
02:02:56
Like if I could selectively wipe my memory and watch like Star Wars again for the first time, I would do that every weekend and I was like I'm going to get to see this, like you're going to understand.
02:03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that nice. It's a wonderful feeling. Here comes Lisa. He didn't watch Saw. He was watching Halloween.
02:03:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, he always wants to watch Saw right, Did he finally let?
02:03:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
him watch, saw when he was older, when he was older, when he was older. Yeah Well, correction. I apologize, I did not mean to cast aspersions. Redrum, redrum.
02:03:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Awesome, I would say I probably hate horror movies. You've got to watch the Exorcist and you have to watch the Shining and actually the original Halloween. I would throw that in there too, first Exorcist, yeah, first Exorcist.
02:03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And what was the one with Damien? Oh, the Omen, the original 1976.
02:03:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
First Omen.
02:03:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Gregory Peck yeah, classic Great one, Actually the first two Second one's great too.
02:03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm getting chills just thinking about it. All right, guess what. We're here. The back of the book is coming up next. But first can I put in? Can I beg? Can I beg for a little bit? I'd love to have you as a member of Club Twit. I don't, you know, we you guys weren't here, but Sunday we had the open studio and we had a bunch of people come by. We all went to Lagunillas afterwards and it really brought home to me something I've known always, but it just really brought home to me how cool our Club Twit members are Smart, accomplished. It's a wonderful hang and it's one of the great reasons to join Club Twit.
02:04:35
Of course you get ad-free versions of all the shows and you get the additional stuff, like Stacy's Book Club coming up tomorrow. You still have time to read the Babaverse. It won't take you long. We Are Legion, the first volume of the Babaverse, which is a great book. We're going to talk about that tomorrow on Stacy's Book Club and then pick another one. We give you video versions of Paul's Hands on Windows. Everybody can listen to Hands on Windows. You want to see the pictures.
02:04:57
Join the club, things like that, because we're trying to give you some bonuses, but more and more I realize the Discord and the smart people in there really is worth the price of admission If you've got a question, if you want to talk about a topic that geeks are into and it doesn't have to be our shows everything from coding to anime, to travel hard, liquor, spirits, beer they're in there and they're wonderful, smart, great people. So if you're looking for a community to join, really the Twit community is the best and you can really get into it by joining the club. Now, the main reason the club exists, that $7 a month makes a big difference in our ability to continue to produce shows and to produce new shows for you. We really want to do that. I think the times they are a changing and as things get more and more interesting in the tech sphere, I think you need I know I do a place to go to listen, to learn about this stuff, to hear journalists who know their stuff talk about it without fear of favor.
02:06:03
We are not, you know, we're not, uh, you know we're not twitchers, we're not tubers. We, we, uh, we. We have, you know, no investments in these companies. We cover the companies with absolute objectivity and I think that that's even more important now than ever. If you want to support us, if you want to join this great, vibrant community, seven bucks a month, go to twittv slash club twit, and that's all I'm going to say about it. I don't want to harangue you, but it helps us an awful lot. We really need your help and I think it's a great benefit. All right, let's continue on with the back of the book, as I like to call it, and Paul Thorat's tips and picks.
02:06:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul, Someone just sent me a cartoon that it's like two panels and it's like. My daughter says you work at Microsoft. He's like, yes, I do. What do you work on the New Outlook? He says you have exactly 10 seconds to get the F out of my house. That's good. Anyway, sorry, we're gone.
02:07:03
So my tip and app pick of the week are both related to the certification stuff that I kind of obsess over these days because I can't stand it, and it's getting worse. And of course, we've all heard the joke that most people only run Microsoft Edge once and that's so they can install Google Chrome or whatever browser they prefer. And that's, by the way, it's not a joke. That sadly is true, but you can avoid even that. I made a short video. It's going to be like a minute or something. You can install any browser and never run Edge even once.
02:07:33
Ooh, unless you're a person who can like Nice, and you do, and let's do it with the WinGet right. Oh, let's do it with the Winget right, Of course, yeah.
02:07:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Winget search name of browser. We'll give you the exact code you need and then Winget install name of ID. Is Winget installed on all versions of Windows?
02:07:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's installed by default in Windows 11. Windows 10, I think you might have to install it separately.
02:07:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it's a command line. Is that going to scare people?
02:07:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is the simplest thing in the world. That's the point. Is that going to scare people? It is the simplest thing in the world. That's the point, it's so. Even I say things like this. I didn't mean. Even my wife, even a non-technical person because my wife is probably smarter than I am who doesn't care about this stuff, could handle this easily. It's simple. You don't have to.
02:08:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's a command line, so you could go to the terminal and type winget.
02:08:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But if you want to use it, actually what you do is run terminal. Oh yeah, you, you don't want to just type winget, no, no. No because you want the terminal, okay, no, because you might be running a couple of commands so you might want to just look.
02:08:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So just run terminal, okay so I'm going to open a command type in uh winget search. You know firefox and then it's going to give you all the options. Do you agree? Yes, I agree yeah, and, of course, when you hit yes, it runs Edge, so it gives you a list.
02:08:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No it didn't, no, but it gives you a list and then the top one, the one that's like an ID, that's a weird ID code that will install that one from the store. So you can copy and paste it with the you know, select it with the you know, select it with the mouse, and then just type WinGet, install and whatever that code is.
02:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and you have to use this code. Huh, that's what the command is going to do.
02:09:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why you search, Because you know, if it's a web app, typically it will be something like Firefox, Firefox, right, Right, Google Chrome, Brave, Brave are the ones I can think of. I don't remember all the you know. I don't remember every browser's like you know code, but it's different for each. Yeah, it's googlechrome.
02:09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, super easy. And there it is. Look at that. Oh, I already have it. Yeah, you already have it. You're good to go? I'm good to go, yeah, yeah, actually it's not surprising because that's the window right behind the WinGet prompt. So if you yeah, you're right here. Right, you can see it. Yeah, winget runs everything right.
02:09:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wrote a script that bulk installs all the apps I want to use and what's nice one of the other nice things about it is I can bring it to a computer where I just kind of manually install stuff, run it and it just skips over the ones that are already installed. That's nice. It just installs the other stuff. It's nice. It's really nice. Winget is well. I mean, people have been using package managers for years. They're like you're cute, paul Microsoft finally got a package manager. 25 years later I get it. But it's magic and it's wonderful.
02:10:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the best way, absolutely. This is what I'm going to, using package managers. You know that's yeah, apt or whatever or Chocolatey. Yeah, yeah, yeah, homebrew on the back is a good one, right, right, great, I'm installing Vivaldi. It's done. Look at that. There it is Welcome. Now. Here's a thousand things you can do.
02:10:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We have 41 minutes before the show ends, so we can't really sit here while you figure this. Block it.
02:10:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Block it, baby. There is a lot. No, there's a lot going on, it's true, but you know what I'm kind of digging this browser.
02:10:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's beautiful on mobile too. One of the tricks on mobile is you want to find a browser that has like a reading mode, kind of a deal right when you, where you hit an article, it just brings it up as text, and this browser actually does not have that. So that's kind of a weird little problem with it. But Opera does, brave does, although it's like an optional thing. You know, safari, I think, does.
02:11:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to make it human. Oh, that's human. Let's do beach.
02:11:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's human. Oh yeah, the browser company arc is in there. Yeah, yeah, they're all in there.
02:11:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Arc is in there. Oh my God, you don't need an invite anymore. Is that why? Or you would ask for your?
02:11:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
invite it's. I don't know if that's why, but you do not need an invite anymore, but it is in there. I mean honestly, anyone with the URL could have downloaded it at any time, as it turns out.
02:11:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, really, yeah, they weren't being super cute about it. Oh, wow, there's a lot of ARCs, okay, oh boy.
02:11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, look for it. It's probably what Browser companyar yeah.
02:11:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, see it partway down the list. There it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:11:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the ones that have named dot name are coming from the web, from the, you know the wind get repository or whatever. But again, I but like, like I said it's, it's it's kind of a joke tip in a way, because like, honestly, who cares? But you, if you're so offended by edge and God love you, you don't even have you don't even want to launch it.
02:12:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not once line for you not even have to launch it once, not on my computer. Hey, this is great.
02:12:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And if you're on windows 10, you can install wingit and I think so, like what I when I brought up windows 10 a few weeks ago. I'm pretty sure I had to download um wingit. I don't think it was included. Where's my arc?
02:12:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, I guess I have to. Didn't run it like it did, uh, vivaldi I love how quickly you move past vivaldi uh, configured it and I'm done.
02:12:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's really colorful. Hey, is there a?
02:12:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
deer in that woods. No, it's just a log. Oh fun, there's Arc, hello Arc.
02:13:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look at that. So my app pick is oddly well not oddly, it's related to it, but oddly these didn't happen together the Edge WinGet thing I did a week ago and then since then, ntdev, who previously created something called Tiny11, which is a customized version of the Windows 11 install ISO, created something else called Tiny11 Builder. So the problem with downloading an ISO from someone who's not Microsoft is you don't know. You don't know what's on there. So this tool is a PowerShell script that uses Microsoft's own deployment tool. So you have to download the script, which is nothing, and then two tiny little utilities that sit in the same folder. You run the script and then it says well, which one do you want to install? You know Home Pro, which language? Yada, yada, yada. And then it creates a custom ISO for you on the fly and because it's a PowerShell script, you can A look at it and make sure it's not doing anything stupid, but also, b you could potentially have not done this customizing, right. So the goal of Tiny11 is to make the Windows 11 install as small as possible and also to bypass some of those hardware restrictions during setup. I don't really have these concerns, like I have good computers, right, so I'm not worried about running windows 11 on a four gigabyte system or whatever it is, um, but uh, the way he accomplishes this goal is to remove a bunch of the stuff that comes with windows 11 and um.
02:14:30
It's also a really clean install in the sense that, like, the start menu has like two or three icons on it. There's no crapper. Obviously there's no edge or one drive, interestingly, um. So I tested it over the weekend. It doesn't actually solve the big problems I have and there are too many ways in for me anyway to make Edge kind of occur, you know, out of the blue. Because you can't install right, edge disappears, which is weird, because when I did Tiny11 back in December, there's no Edge. It's the same thing, it's the same type of install. There's no Edge. It's the same thing, it's the same type of install. There's no Edge. That thing's still going strong. I use it fairly regularly. It's all up to date. Edge has never occurred on that computer.
02:15:09
But the two times I clean installed with Tiny 11 Builder, I got Edge to pop its ugly head up somehow. Like if you run a like Clipchamp or Media Player and some other apps, use the WebView 2 runtime that is included with Microsoft Edge, and if you don't have Microsoft Edge installed, it will actually just auto install that component. That doesn't seem to be what makes the browser install, but one of the things that does, and I've tried to find an explicit list of what's included in this. But if you install the Microsoft Office suite from Microsoft 365, you're going to get Edge eventually, like it just happens, and Edge is required for Copilot and Copilot is in Office and I think that might be why that might be the trigger now, because they built Copilot into there, you know, and they use like a web extensibility model and blah blah.
02:16:04
I don't know, I'm still, but but again, like, this is an interesting tool, it's free, it's a custom version of the windows 11 uh, iso, and I think we're going to see some interesting customizations, not just from the original developer, but from third parties, because people are going to now look at this and say how can I maybe make this better or different? So it's an, it's something to know about, it's it's very interesting nice, yeah, good stuff.
02:16:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, all right, hi, I guess, hey, I guess it's time for you, mr richard campbell, in sw, where it's the middle of the night.
02:16:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's getting late. Yeah, no, two days about it Definitely getting late. This week's show 929. I did actually back at the MVP Summit in person with Sidney Smith, who's one of the PowerShell principals, and we were talking about the new version of PowerShell that was about to be released, which was 7.4. It's out now, is about to be released, which was 7.4. It's out now and both version 6 and 7 came out as more open source, cross-platform versions of PowerShell.
02:17:09
So a lot of folks stuck with 5.1. If you only were a Windows shop and that's what you use PowerShell for because in order to make it cross-platform, they took away a lot of features and so there's been a non-trivial amount of folks that stuck around with 5.1. In the meantime they've gone on and added a lot of new features. The big thing about 7.4 was two features that have been in development, sort of in beta, available for you to grab beta bits for in PowerShell 7, both PS ResourceKit and PS Readline. I finally got to their sort of 1.0 part.
02:17:43
So we were talking about that, but in some ways we kind of hijacked our own conversation. It was like you know, when are we going to get people off of 5.1? And Sidney was pretty insistent. It's like we're in feature parity now You're giving up nothing. In fact, you're gaining a whole bunch of stuff, Like so a couple of versions down the path. Now it's time to really start. If you're on 5.1, start looking at the latest version, Because it'll do everything you currently want it to do and many things you never hoped you could do. So it was a fun conversation. She's brilliant, as always, Deeply immersed in taking the product further. So a much more very secure version of PowerShell, Very capable and runs fine on a mac joints. It'll even do uh. You know security settings in uh in linux and um, and it's got all the parity features from the old version and uh in seven now.
02:18:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So well worth your time, nice, nice yeahShell 5.1 is like NET Framework 4.8.
02:18:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're exactly right, Cockroach.
02:18:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, just continuing on it's never going to go away it also, you know 5.1 comes with everything, so you don't have to go get the current versions, and a lot of folks are just not even familiar with going and fetching a new version of PowerShell.
02:18:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean they advertise it in Terminal. You know you go get the version on the web, right, because it's like Windows PowerShell and PowerShell or something like that. Yeah, different brands Better, better in every way. It's newer, so it's better.
02:19:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let's go now to the glens of the world. I think, yes, I've been holding off doing the DaVin.
02:19:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now to the glens of the world, I think. Yes, I've been holding off doing the Da Vin because I haven't opened any bottles and I'm going to get them home first. And we had a good time last week well, a couple weeks ago doing the Dalwini, and then we went to Four Roses. So I figured I'd dip back into that classics collection with the Glen Kinchy. Now, this is a Lowland whiskey and, just as a little bit of a reminder, this distillery is actually quite close to Edinburgh. Edinburgh and Glasgow are all the areas that we call the Lowlands. There are very few distilleries in there today. There used to be many more. They're down to maybe about six operating, although the rumor has it that the Rose Bank Distillery is going to open up again, which is exciting.
02:20:04
Um, lowlands, one of the original regions. There used to only be four whiskey regions. They sort of defined the lowlands was that area around edmure and glasgow, five dumfries, galloway, that kind of thing. Uh, in the past we talk about aukintoshan, which is also a lowland whiskey, and then eilly, down in the southwest and you know, island with very few trees, that's why they're so heavy on the peat. We've talked about beaumont and portisque and then east of eilly is campbeltown, which is the peninsula on the south part, a little more protected, so they have more options there, and again another place that used to have a lot of distilleries but it's down to like three, and then everything else was called Highlands, which they've now sort of divvied the Highlands up.
02:20:50
The Highlands encompasses huge area above the big cities in the Highlands and all the way up onto the coast. So that's 75% of distilleries these days. So the Spey side is recognized separately from the rest of the highlands because it's along the Spey River. It by itself is 60 distilleries in a relatively small area, and then I think it's only fair to carve the islands off on their own, which most people do these days. So that stretches from just north of Eylee, with Arran and Jura, mull, orkney, all the way up to Skye, which is in the northwest, which is where Talisker is, and all make a unique kind of whiskey themselves. You know the Ireland whiskeys tend to be a bit peatier, not as peaty as many Eyle's, saltier, and that makes the Highlands a bit more of a consistent version. Now, even though you're still talking a very big region when you talk about Highlands.
02:21:45
But we were talking about a lowland. We were talking about one of the few, the Glen Kinshi things to know about it. Well, it's owned by Diageo because it was once owned by United Distillers, since it was part of that collection. Although Diageo refers to Glen Kinshie as one of the four corners of Johnny Walker, and so Diageo is one of the largest owners of Scottish distilleries. They make one of the most popular Scotches in the world, johnny Walker a variety of versions which they use by blending many distilleries' whiskeys into it, most of which have no visible brand ones you've never heard of. The four corner distilleries of Johnny Walker are Glen Kinshie in the Lowlands, kao Ila in Islay, klyanish in the Highlands and Cardew in Speyside Interesting, and most people haven't heard of Cardew Klyanish too, too pretty rare. Karla has a good brand, fairly well known, but those are the four pillars.
02:22:48
The Glenclinchy distillery itself is fairly old. 1825 is the first mention of a distillery in that location, about 15 imperial miles east, southeast of Edinburgh. It was. It was called the milton distillery when it first opened, but within a decade or so it was renamed to glen kinshi in the perversion of names in that particular area. Uh went bankrupt a few years later in 1853, and then it was sold to a local farmer who made it into a sawmill and it stayed a sawmill for 30 years or so. 1881, a group of Edinburgh investors bought it and converted it back to a distillery, calling it Glen Kinchy once again, and it continued to function through there. It stayed in business through the Prohibition. It was one of the very few distilleries that was allowed to operate through World War II.
02:23:44
It, like most distilleries modernized in the late 60s 70s, stopped doing its own maltings, improved some of the technology. Today it's still a fairly simple distillery, mostly a 70s 80s technology distillery. It has one big nine-ton mash tun one of the biggest ones in the industry six washbacks and just one pair of stills. It puts out two and a half million liters of spirits a year, of which 90% of which goes into Johnny Walker blends. So the few bottles that you see on the shelves of Glen Kitchen you can get in the US represent a very small portion of their overall production.
02:24:23
For the most part it was not a well-known distillery until the United Distillers did their classic malts in the 1980s, and back then the classic malt they referred to for the lowlands was Glen Kinchy 10, which you really can't get anymore. I went searching on the rare whiskey sites for Glen Kinchy 10 from the 1980s and occasionally you can find a bottle for about 500 US which I would not pay. There's no reason to buy that. They do make distiller's editions once in a while, usually with some interesting finishing barrels, and they'll be about $150 or so.
02:24:59
But the standard product is a 12, and it is absolutely a classic lowland, which is to say it tends towards the lighter side, sort of grassy and fruity notes, not too big, not too harsh, not a real strong flavor. It's only coming in at about 46%, so it's not going to punch your eyes out. You know it's a nice gentle dram, one you can count on, like the Dalwini. It's just approachable and about $80. So not the cheapest bottle of whiskey out there, but not the most expensive either. And it's a little different. You know we generally drink. You're either into the peat and you're drinking your Islay, or you love the space with their big, rich sherry casks and so forth. This is neither of those. This is real simple whiskey, old style, but it's good you should try some.
02:25:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, do it right now. Maltscom, because it's Diageo.
02:25:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the Diageo site. We were there. We're called Dalwini as well. Yeah, yeah.
02:26:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, thank you, mr Richard Campbell, host of Run as Radio and NET Rocks at runasradiocom. Great to have you on, as always from Sweden. Safe travels home.
02:26:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we'll get to do a few weeks of shows at home, with the new desk including. I'm going to have it set up so I can do a standing desk. Nice, we'll try that on?
02:26:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are you going to stand for two hours, or whatever it is? Yeah, I think so. Two and a half.
02:26:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm a little nervous about that. Did you get a custom desk or something special?
02:26:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I had the raised lower desk already, but I did also get a custom desk which is not being used for the video stack but just to fill the room fully nice. But I got it all installed the day before I had to leave for this trip. So it's not, it's only half built. I've got to finish off. I didn't get the video rig built yet, but it's something to do when I get home ain't no desk like a custom desk.
02:26:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They tell me um pa Thorat, do you have a custom desk? No, I have an Ikea desk. Oh, that's as far from custom.
02:27:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's about as far as yeah, exactly.
02:27:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The same desk as 100 million others.
02:27:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And here I am, in Sweden, I can go pick one up.
02:27:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, I probably had more trouble building it than most, but that's a personal problem.
02:27:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, last time I had to do ikea furniture, I hired my brother-in-law. I felt bad about it, but he seemed to enjoy it, so, okay, I have cried while trying to build ikea furniture.
02:27:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not my idea of fun.
02:27:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's for dang sure. Paul is at thurrottcom T-H-U-R-R-O-T-Tcom. Become a premium member for the best experience. I am, and it's worth it. You should also check out his books at leanpubcom. That includes Windows Everywhere a tour through the history of Windows by its programming languages. You can also, uh, get the am I. Is that correct characterization? That was my sense I was.
02:28:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I mean it's not, it's uh, it's more like it. I mean that's part of it, it's. It's sort of like a a history of windows as seen through the eyes of almost developers, or that people are writing apps for it, and there you go. The forces inside and outside of Microsoft that most normal people don't know about that kind of cause things to change over time.
02:28:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a very special book.
02:28:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's. I mean I wrote it so I have to say it's unique. I've been rereading Hearts of Ix I'm going to be updating it soon and I got to say I like it, you did a good job. My friend, you did a good job and that's a weird thing to say about your own.
02:28:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and I know because I'm a premium member and a lot of it was on the premium, as you were right. Yeah, yeah, that's right. You can also join Paul and Richard right here every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. That's when we record Windows Weekly, the stream live at YouTube, youtubecom, slash, twit, hit, smash the bell. I just like saying it. Smash the bell, and that way you'll get a notification when we go live All of our shows. I know you're cool when you say stuff like that Smash the bell, kids.
02:29:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's talking the language of the youth.
02:29:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We also are on YouTube as a dedicated channel. A great way to share clips, and we encourage you to do that. It's a great way to turn other people on to this greatest show within the astronomical units of the solar system.
02:29:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a disappointing qualifier. Okay, fair enough. Okay, in the universe, the greatest's a disappointing qualifier.
02:29:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, fair enough. Okay, in the universe, the greatest Microsoft show in the universe.
02:29:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is so much easier when you say that, there you go?
02:29:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why not? Who's going to challenge us? And if they do, hey, that's news. What else? Oh, you can subscribe on your favorite podcast player. That's another way to get it, and actually that's a great way. There's audio and there's video of every show. Don't forget Paul's Hands on Windows show, open to all. Now you can subscribe to the audio and, if you're a club member, get the video as well. It's a really good show. You did a whole thing on ClipChamp, which is fantastic. I'm going to be doing more soon, are you? What are you doing now? Do you remember? Because you were recording at the time, so you may not know. Kevin probably knows.
02:30:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't remember what I do anymore. I'm doing more tomorrow, but let me see what were the last ones I did. Copilot's Tips and Tricks. Copilot Windows 11 Fixes and Workarounds. Top 5 Windows 11 Inbox Apps See.
02:30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You and workarounds top five windows 11 inbox apps not not see. You should be subscribing to that. That's a great show. You should be subscribing to that. It's fantastic. Um, what else? Is there anything else to say except thank you for joining us, thank you to our club twit members who make this show possible. Um, don't forget tomorrow stacy's book club members. We'll see you there. 2 in the afternoon, pacific, 5pm Eastern. We're going to talk about Dennis E Taylor's incredible we Are Legion, the first book in the Boba Fett series. Very fun. And you know what? Even if you haven't started it yet, you can start right now and you would enjoy it.
02:31:16
You might even stay up all night it's a romp of a book it's kind of a nerdcore, in the same vein as the Martian meets Ready Player One kind of a thing. It's good, a lot of sciencing. I guess I want to talk more, but I shouldn't because we're done. Thanks, richard, safe travels. Thank you, paul. Stay where you are, you, everybody else, for being here. We'll see you next week on Windows Weekly.
