Hands-On Windows 209 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands On Windows, we're going to take a look at one of the first replies from the PC industry to the MacBook Neo. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands On Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott, and this week, um, We're going to take a walk on the mild side, if you will. You may have heard that we have a major component crisis that we're dealing with, not just in our industry, but all over the world. And, you know, when I— but looking at our world, we see things like smartphones that are way more expensive, computers that are way more expensive, components that are almost impossible to find, especially RAM and storage, graphics cards, that kind of thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:49]:
And to combat this, platform makers— Google, Microsoft, Apple— are all releasing lower-end versions of their products. And of course, PC makers as well, device makers. And also the platform makers are working on their platforms. So Apple with iOS, macOS, etc. Microsoft with Windows, Google with Android, Chromebook, etc., to make them work better with less— fewer resources, meaning less RAM, less powerful processors, less storage, that kind of thing. Um, and that's okay. That's fine for computers that are out in the world. In fact, if anything, we'll all benefit from that, but we're also seeing new computers that have lower-end specs and we're seeing actually new devices of all kinds of phones that are arriving with lower-end specs than they had a year or two ago.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:36]:
It's a very strange time. Um, but the first out of the gate, the first big one, at least in the computer space, was the MacBook Neo, right? And this is the A-series processor that Apple uses in the iPhone, 8 gigs of RAM. There's no fingerprint reader. There's no backlighting on the keyboard. You know, they're cutting costs, but it's under $1,000. In fact, it's probably closer to $700 or $800, whatever the starting price is. But, you know, we're starting to now to see the response to this device in the PC space. And this is taking different forms.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:08]:
Microsoft, like I said, is working to make Windows work better with lower resources. Silicon makers like Intel and Qualcomm in particular, and presumably AMD as well at some point, are releasing lower-end chipsets that will sell for less and be able to be used in lower-end computers. It costs less, right? Um, this, the Qualcomm entry is called Snapdragon C. I haven't had a chance to try this out, but given how good the Snapdragon X and X2 chips are, I'm guessing that might be pretty good. Um, Intel this past year has come out with a, for them, I mean, honestly, a fairly phenomenal chipset called Panther Lake, which is sold as the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 family of processors. And when you pair that with a high-end Intel Arc B-series graphics, it's not a card, it's really integrated graphics. It is a game machine. It's— they're actually rather astonishing.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:03]:
And so they've taken that chipset and they've stripped it down and they've created something internally called Wildcat Lake, which they're selling as the Intel Core Series 3, right? This is the series of chips, you know, in the pre- NPU days, we used to call things like the Intel Core 11th generation or 12th or 13th or 14th. I can't remember how high they went, but to me, these have the vibe of a, almost a Pentium or a, you know, a Celeron type chip, but they're actually based on Panther Lake and they are, um, you know, in that non-ultra kind of core space. So I am curious about this kind of thing and I finally got one in. I review a lot of laptops, uh, every year, but they tend to be the higher end ones, right? Because that's what PC makers send out. They want you to see the good stuff. But Lenovo was kind enough to send me a list of choices, and one of them was a Wildcat Lake-based laptop. So I was really excited to give that a shot. So I'm going to show this, this to you here.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:00]:
This is an IdeaPad. It's a little bit of a cheat because it does have 16 gigs of RAM, but you'll be able to configure this and other Wildcat Lake PCs with only 8 gigs of RAM. Probably be a pretty terrible experience, but It's there. You know, plastic build quality like you would expect. If you can see on the back, I'm not sure if you can see that, but I think you can. Lots of fingerprints there, and that's because it doesn't have any of the coatings and things that laptop makers would put on high-end computers to kind of prevent that from happening. Something I don't see ever really these days in anything but really high-end gaming PCs is a proprietary power adapter. This is the old barrel style.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:40]:
Very unusual, but the nice thing about it is it frees up the USB-C port for other things because there is only one of them. It does have HDMI, full-sized, and a couple of full-sized USB-A ports as well, and an SD card reader. But, you know, these are kind of— these, well, not kind of— these are low-end specs, right? The USB-C port, for example, is just 5 gigabits per second for data transfer, so Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4, which are very common these days, is 40. So that's, you know, much, much faster. Really high-end computers, we're starting to see Thunderbolt 5, and that's 80 gigabits per second for data transfer. So dramatically faster. But again, we're trying to meet a dollar price point here. All right.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:23]:
So what I have here on screen is a remote desktop view of that computer I just showed you. So it's sitting here on the desk next to me, but you can see it on the screen. It looks— it's Windows 11, right? So there's nothing really surprising. to how it looks. But, um, the thing to understand with this, other than, you know, the kind of cheapness of the build quality, which you would expect at this price point— and I should say this price point, you know, unfortunately has moved up. So I would say about a year ago, certainly 2 years ago, somewhere in the $500 to $800 range, you could get a pretty decent computer. Those computers now cost $800 to even up to $1,200, whereas I've always sort of described the sweet spot of, um, this world of, you know, for premium or just sub-premium laptops as being $1,000 to, you know, $1,200. That has moved up.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:12]:
So now it's $1,500, maybe even $1,800 for a really nice, um, you know, premium business class laptop like a ThinkPad X Carbon or whatever. But that's not what this is, right? So, um, this computer can be configured with, like I said, with 8 gigs of RAM. I believe that's going to be under $800. The version I have is probably closer to $1,000. Um, so what do you get for that amount of money these days? Um, not much. So if we go look at the system properties here, you can see the processor. This is the Wildcat or one of the Wildcat Lake processors. It's actually one of the higher-end versions.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:45]:
So it's Intel Core i7-350, um, 1.5 GHz clock speed. Hilarious. Uh, you know, we live in a world of like 5 GHz usually, uh, with high-end computers. Um, 16 gigs of RAM, like I said, um, you can get it with 8. And it probably tops out at 16, but if it doesn't, maybe 32. But the big thing to me here is the speed of the RAM. So it's, you can see it's 5,600 MTS. Um, to give you an idea, a modern premium laptop, you know, uh, Intel Core Ultra Series 3 or AMD Ryzen, whatever, or Snapdragon X2 is going to be 5,000, uh, 8,200 or 8,300 MTS or 9,200, somewhere in there, MTS, like, um, not quite double the speed, but almost, right? Um, it has, uh, kind of garbagey, uh, Intel integrated graphics, not the good stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:32]:
Intel actually makes really good integrated graphics now, but you're not going to see that here. And then it doesn't even say the speed of the drive at all, which is interesting, but, um, a 512 gigabyte SSD. I assume it's SSD. It's got to be SSD, but, um, but nothing special. Right. And right. I mean, that's, that's, that's how this is going to go down. Um, from a day-to-day usage perspective.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:54]:
Um, it's going to be slow. You know, you're not going to want to run a bunch of different things together. You're not going to want to run a single browser window with 20 tabs. It's just not really good for that kind of thing. But most of the experience is going to be familiar. Um, I always look at a couple of apps to kind of see where this lands on the Copilot plus PC spectrum, if you will. Um, this, the, the NPU in this particular laptop is not powerful enough to qualify this as a Copilot plus PC. However, it does have an NPU, so you do get certain features.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:28]:
So for example, uh, actually let me bring it up this way. Um, you will probably, uh, you will see like a Windows Studio Effects, uh, button in Quick Settings. Great. So that's good. It's not going to be the full suite of those features. I don't want to bring that up because I'm using the camera, but, um, you probably know there are several effects that are possible. It's probably just 2 or 3 of them in this particular case. Um, but Paint is actually a really good, uh, demonstration of what's available or not available.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:54]:
And this one's interesting to me because this is the shortest list of AI features I've seen in Paint. I assume it is the shortest list you could have. It's not horrible. It does have generative erase and remove background. Those are, those are going to be very commonly used. Image creator is terrible regardless of what kind of computer you have, but that's it. I mean, with a full-blown Copilot Plus PC, you'd probably have, you would have several, you know, 7, 8, whatever the number is options. So much.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:22]:
broader set of features. I was a little surprised though by Photos. So Photos being the other big one. And I just have these kind of humorous images. I've been taking screenshots of a Google app called Dream Beans, which is like a fever dream. But this is my wife and I, I guess, walking our dogs, as it says, but one of them is a cat because, you know, AI. But we can edit this to see what capabilities are there. And I have to say, It is missing a few, but it has, it has some AI editing features in here.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:55]:
So some of the stuff is very typical. The first couple of tabs here are just available everywhere, annotation, et cetera, but it does have generative erase. It does have the remove blur and replace background. Nice. And then these 2 are the big surprises. Now I've not downloaded the model yet, but it actually will do restyle image. And this is where you can Uh, restyle. This will be ridiculous for this particular graphic because it has a style, but if you wanted to make it look like, uh, anime or, you know, 1980s pixel art or whatever it might be, um, you can do that kind of thing with that.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:28]:
And then this one is super resolution, which actually I have to say I'm super surprised that's even here. So that this is one of the most useful and best features I think in Photos. So that isn't too, too bad. Um, but again, it's this is not going to be an awesome experience. Um, doesn't have keyboard backlighting in this case. I don't even think that's an option. Uh, some of the other Wildcat Lake laptops you're going to see soon— in fact, by the time you, um, see this episode, I'm sure you'll— Lenovo, HP, Dell, and others will have a bunch of laptops up. Some are very attractive, lots of colors and things like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:05]:
This one is fairly plain. It's got the blue color. It's mostly going to be colored by my fingerprints. That's The sad reality there, but, um, it's just going to be the day-to-day thing. So when I think about these sub-$1,000 computers now, and I'm— it bugs me, I have to— that $1,000 is the baseline, but it is sadly. Um, these are going to be better for secondary use, um, activities. In other words, you're mostly on your phone, but every once in a while you need a large screen. You want the keyboard and the trackpad and all that kind of stuff, and you have to get whatever the work is done.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:37]:
It's okay for that, right? This particular laptop, 15.6-inch display, it'd be fine for that. But Lenovo, in this case, or Intel or whatever, they're kind of marketing these level of computers as everyday computing, and they're not everyday computing, right? They're occasional computing. If you're going to use a computer every day like I do, and you probably do, unfortunately, the price tag is going up. And if If you have to buy a new laptop, I strongly recommend looking for something that's going to probably be in the $1,500 range and maybe even more. And hopefully you can get years of use out of that thing. But as far as this goes, it's fine for secondary use. Like I said, I'd have a hard time believing anyone who works on a computer every day could use this every single day and be okay with it. But if you are going to do that, do not sacrifice on the RAM because you cannot upgrade that later.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:28]:
And I don't care what Microsoft does to Windows. They're never going to fix this problem. So, um, do not get stuck with 8 gigs of RAM in Windows, I think is the primary point here. Um, I, my experience with this has been somewhat lackluster, but this is also 16 gigs of RAM. I can't even imagine what this would be like, um, with 8 gigs of RAM. It can play older games. Um, I actually got the latest Halo up and running poorly, but it ran. I'm kind of amazed by that.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:55]:
But you're not going to run modern AAA shooters, that kind of thing. It's— you're not going to play games. This is not a game machine, right? But if you just need to use, you know, web browser, a couple of tabs, Word, Excel occasionally, probably wouldn't do video editing on here, but some light photo editing is okay. That's fine. But yeah, the new baseline stinks. It's too bad. I feel bad about this. I wish this was a better story, but unfortunately We used to say, you know, you can't really buy a good computer for under $500.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:25]:
We're getting close to the part we're going to say that about $1,000, and I feel bad about that. But, um, yeah, don't get stuck with the base model if you have to buy one of these things. I guess that's the most important thing. So with that warning, uh, hopefully you found this useful. Um, sorry, it was all bad news mostly, but, uh, we will have a new episode of Hands-On Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about this podcast at twit.tv/how. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to Club Twit members.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:58]:
Thank you.