Windows Weekly 1004 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.
 

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott's here. Richard Campbell has the day off, but there is so much to talk about. The Surface event was minutes ago. Paul has all the details, including the new RTX Spark laptops for home AI builders. He's got the new Google Book and the new Wildcat processor. I'll give you a hint, one of those 3 things is excellent. Windows Weekly coming up next.

Leo Laporte [00:00:25]:
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott, episode 1004, recorded Wednesday, October 7th, 2026. Fat washed. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners and all you dozers. We are gathered together today to celebrate the marriage Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:00:59]:
Of NVIDIA and Microsoft. Hello, Paul Theriot, theriot.com, leanpub.com. No Richard Campbell today. He is, what is he doing this time?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:10]:
He's having like a, just a kind of a medical thing. Not a bad thing.

Leo Laporte [00:01:13]:
Oh, he's having a colonoscopy. I now remember. Wise man. We probably don't wanna share that on the livestream.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:21]:
He told me maybe I'll be able to see some video later. So, you know, I'll let you know.

Leo Laporte [00:01:25]:
That's exciting. I've never had one of them. I've had the sigmoidoscopy where they, they don't penetrate nearly as deeply. And that one you don't go to sleep for. In fact, they turn you on your side so you can watch the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:38]:
Yeah, don't want to see that particular channel.

Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:42]:
But you know, it's a series.

Leo Laporte [00:01:43]:
I think it's on Tubi now. But anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:45]:
Yeah, it's a series.

Leo Laporte [00:01:47]:
It's a series. Yeah, I don't look forward to that. You know, Lisa says, Art, she looks at me and says, This is kind of a mean thing. She says, aren't you due for a colonoscopy? And I say, no.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:00]:
I feel like you need something jammed up your butt.

Leo Laporte [00:02:02]:
No, I don't know what you're talking about. I guess I should ask my physician or I could ask ChatGPT.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:08]:
Well, I mean, it seems like the type of thing they would bring up.

Leo Laporte [00:02:10]:
You would think.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:11]:
I've been lucky the last 2 times. You can do like a mail-in thing.

Leo Laporte [00:02:16]:
No, I do that every year. And I think maybe that's why I don't have to do the—

Paul Thurrott [00:02:21]:
I mean, it's not, you know, it doesn't last forever.

Leo Laporte [00:02:26]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:26]:
But yeah, get you over the hump there, so to speak.

Leo Laporte [00:02:29]:
Oh God. Oh Lord. We're gonna start talking about something more interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:34]:
Look, it was only a matter of time before we got to butt stuff. The point is, you know, we're men of a certain age.

Leo Laporte [00:02:42]:
And that's what happens. Yeah. You have to care for all those little things. Anyway, I'm glad. I'm actually very glad Richard's doing it. I hope he doesn't mind that we shared that in public, but I think he mentioned it last week.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:54]:
I felt like he mentioned it publicly.

Leo Laporte [00:02:56]:
He did it.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:57]:
I hope he did. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:02:59]:
Anyway, he'll be back next week. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:01]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:03:02]:
Sitting carefully. Meanwhile, Paul's been very busy because right up to the beginning of the show this week, Microsoft had its Surface event. And you know what? In hindsight, I probably should— I didn't know we could stream it. We should have streamed it. What did they talk about?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:17]:
Nothing in particular.

Leo Laporte [00:03:20]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:21]:
No. So, well, This was somewhat confusing as an event because it wasn't clear what it was tied to, right? Microsoft and NVIDIA separately and then together announced the RTX Spark platform for Windows 11 on ARM and these kind of new super powerful kind of CUDA GPU.

Leo Laporte [00:03:42]:
I own 2 of the standalone DGX Sparks that they had made previously. And in order to make this laptop, Much to the dismay of local AI aficionados, they discontinued the DGX Sparks and they now make the RTX Sparks. If you get the 128 gig version, that's identical with one exception. It doesn't have the high-speed ConnectX-7 network.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:08]:
Oh, that's interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:04:09]:
So you can't tie the laptops together in the way that I— I have 2 Sparks tied together, which gives them— they're like—

Paul Thurrott [00:04:16]:
Right. And there's going to be more of that kind of thing. And not just with NVIDIA, there's going to— the new AMD Luna— not Luna, Halo platform is going to do this as well. You'll be able to, you know, they're not like SFF, like, you know, small form factor NUC type. The next one up, I think it's like 16L or 1.6L.

Leo Laporte [00:04:35]:
Yeah, I have a— it's a— was it a mini ITX? I have a—

Paul Thurrott [00:04:39]:
the— yeah, it's weird.

Leo Laporte [00:04:40]:
It's like Halo in a desk framework desktop. And so there's the— now that's the $395. Now there's gonna be the $495. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:46]:
But yeah, if you have a fast enough network connection, it's good because the—

Leo Laporte [00:04:50]:
some of the— it works with these new MOE, mixture of expert models, because they only load a little bit into at a time.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:56]:
It's good because these systems are inherently non-upgradable or expandable, right? Yeah, probably storage you could, I guess. But, um, but this lets you chain 2, 3, whatever number of these things together and like Honestly, like that, you know, that can solve some problems. So that's pretty cool.

Leo Laporte [00:05:13]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:13]:
They didn't really talk about that per se, but so I guess let's see here. There are multiple, yeah, I'm not sure how many. I want to say a number, like there are 3 elements to, there are 3 to 5 to 7, I don't know, elements to this announcement today. But one is just an expansion on the notion of how Microsoft is going to bring agents, AI agents, and agentic AI to Windows 11. which it initially talked about a year ago. Remember the semi-controversy over Pawan Davaluri having the audacity to explain how he was going to talk about something at Ignite and everyone lost their minds, and then what he announced was perfectly reasonable. So there's that. There were some other announcements from Build, which was this past June, related to this that are now coming to fruition, like the Microsoft Execution Containers.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:08]:
Which is one of the several methods they have to contain and secure AI agents and make sure they're not breaking out of their guardrails or whatever. There's the enterprise management stuff, which we don't care about. We're not going to talk about that too much. But they introduced today this notion of something called hybrid intelligence. And I keep waiting for this thing. I've been talking about orchestration for 2 and a half years. I really latched onto this term. From the earliest days of our current AI era where we were picking models from a dropdown like apes, I kind of said, look, this is a stupid thing to have a normal human being do.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:49]:
It's AI, it's super intelligent, it should be able to do this for us. So obviously they're moving to that kind of a model. But with hybrid intelligence, as Microsoft calls it, this is local AI. preferably local AI when possible, local AI when you're offline, it will just work kind of AI, and then the cloud when required, but also with constraints you can put on it. You can say things like, I have this AI subscription, I don't want to spend too much money, whatever it is, you can kind of do that kind of stuff. And you're like, okay, I mean, this makes sense, right? Whatever. There are these new generation local AI models that are occurring. NVIDIA has one called Nemetron they were talking about, which is coming to RTX Spark.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:33]:
DeepSeek V4 Flash, which runs in 60 gigabytes of RAM, I think is already available. There's the Windows ML, which is kind of like the runtime that scales across all the different processor types you have in these SoCs, blah, blah, blah. You know, llama.cpp is coming to Windows ML, which is gonna bring more, you know, open source.

Leo Laporte [00:07:53]:
You can run it in— Windows before? No.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:56]:
Well, I think it's going to be— it's in— no, sorry. I mean, program— like, so Windows, it'll be built in. It's built in as a— it's a— it's, I guess I would call it just a service that's available through, uh, this programming interface. Um, but they also talked about, um, some things that are coming to Windows 11 as what I would call kind of end-user features, right? So, um, When they showed off what they were thinking about last year for AI agents in Windows 11, remember AI agents running in Windows would be like apps. So they would have a taskbar icon. They would pop up a notification when they needed to alert you about something or needed your feedback or whatever it might be. You could interact with them however you would interact with them, whatever. They didn't actually show any of that stuff off.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:44]:
And it's possible the emphasis here has shifted a little bit. I guess when you think about Windows as a, kind of a user interface or whatever, you know, you're sitting in front of it, like how, what are the ways in which you might interact with AI? And obviously there's a standalone Copilot app. They just updated that pretty significantly. But they see search now as kind of the obvious place to start because in Pawan Davaluri's words, he sort of said, or he literally said, search is where intent begins. You know, in other words, you're going there because you need something.

Leo Laporte [00:09:19]:
Does anybody search anymore? Do you?

Paul Thurrott [00:09:21]:
I don't go to, So I don't use Windows Search ever because it's so horrible. But to be fair to him and to Windows and to Microsoft, it has been improved dramatically this year, right? Part of the pain points thing was making this thing work better. And you can look at that now and say, yeah, they're doing this because they want, you know, this is where they're going to have their first front-facing kind of AI UI, I guess, if that makes any sense. You may recall when Copilot first shipped, when it was like that sidebar thing and that was it. And, you know, before they moved the icon 18 different times. One of the things that kind of differentiated Copilot in Windows 11 from Copilot on the web was that it could take actions against settings in Windows. You could tell it like, I want the screen to be dark, I want, you know, I want my mouse cursor to be bigger or whatever. That stuff never worked great.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:12]:
They later kind of moved that into Settings directly. So you can kind of just type search, you know, in the search box in Settings and find those things. And if you have a Copilot+PC at least, and I think in some cases a normal PC, you'll actually get actionable clickable things in the search results. You don't have to go into the interface. But they're actually putting this— I don't think they're taking it away from settings, but they're putting this into search as well. And so you'll get kind of, you know, in other words, you would search for there. It's a logical place for you to say something like, well, how do I put dark mode on or whatever? And so they're going to do that right in search, which is kind of cool. If Copilot is required or can be used for anything that you're asking, it will pop up inline.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:54]:
You can bring it up into the full Copilot app if you want, blah, blah, blah. But they're also expanding on those integration features. So it's not just like Windows Settings. And they only gave one good example that I saw, which was that you'll be able to send a text message from this thing. So you could just pop up search and say, I need to send a text message to Stephanie or whatever. And it will do that through, in this case, Phone Link. And like, so this is another Windows feature that it's kind of using for that kind of thing. Like, okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:23]:
Microsoft a week ago or sometime in the past 2 weeks, whatever, announced the new Copilot app for Windows, which they're super proud of. Like this thing, they talk about this endlessly. I have no idea why this is so fascinating to them, but they're—

Leo Laporte [00:11:37]:
I had Lumaresca on Sunday on Twitter. And of course he works, he's kind of Mr. Copilot. He's an AI engineer at Copilot. And I said, explain this to me.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:46]:
Well, tell me if he mentioned this part of it, 'cause they always say this. They're like, It has 3 interfaces, Home, Code, and Autopilot. And you're like, yeah, I—

Leo Laporte [00:11:54]:
Like it always has.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:55]:
Every AI agent, every AI chatbot has this. It's like, what are you talking about?

Leo Laporte [00:11:59]:
I'm not sure what's different.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:01]:
They're super proud of this. So, well, what's different is some of this stuff was not available previously in Copilot.

Leo Laporte [00:12:06]:
Oh, okay. So there is new, there are new features.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:09]:
Yeah. And look, I'm not sure how to, you know, what the chicken egg or who to blame or who to credit here is. But, you know, Microsoft until 2 seconds ago had separate consumer and business Copilot apps, right? Like they did previously for Teams.

Leo Laporte [00:12:25]:
That's confusing.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:26]:
Yeah, that's confusing and it's inefficient. But then again, you know, there are special requirements in the enterprise and businesses where you have managed environments where this thing has to take into account all the policies you might have about data protection, et cetera, et cetera. So—

Leo Laporte [00:12:37]:
And I think probably OpenAI and Anthropic do the same thing. They have the, you know, the desktop Copilot chat.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:45]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:12:46]:
I mean, I'm saying—

Paul Thurrott [00:12:47]:
I'm sure.

Leo Laporte [00:12:49]:
And they have enterprise chat. I'm not sure.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:51]:
Yeah, they do. I mean, I don't know. Look, Microsoft's been doing this for 30 years. They're good at it. It's not a world I care about, but they— no, I mean, I literally couldn't care less personally, but I mean, but they do have this deep relationship with the enterprise.

Leo Laporte [00:13:06]:
Yeah, that's their business. In fact, this is—

Paul Thurrott [00:13:08]:
And they're good at this. So this is going to be— I'm not saying this is going to work for sure.

Leo Laporte [00:13:11]:
And they have trust, and this is really important. Business doesn't know and trust these other guys as much. And so that's where Microsoft really has an advantage.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:19]:
Right, right. So one of the things they didn't say a week or 10 days ago, whenever it was when they announced the pre— this new Copilot app for Windows 11, is that it was actually built for what Microsoft is now calling, um, hybrid intelligence. So we didn't— he didn't— they didn't talk about this last week or whenever this was because, you know, this is like a new thing they're talking about now. But the idea here is that this thing can work against local AI only if that's what you want. If you're offline, it will work against local AI only. It will orchestrate across multiple models locally and in the cloud. You know, it's a, it's part of this vision, vision, part of this strategy. I hate to give like these words to things that aren't really that big of a deal, but whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:07]:
They, they have this capability. So. Okay, that's cool. You know, local models are going to be the preference going forward, which is really interesting. That includes things like Autopilot, which is your personal agent. You can just ground this thing against your local data on the PC and it will only work locally. It will never interact with the cloud if that's what you want. You know, everything can happen against local models.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:31]:
Now, of course, for that to work, you have to have local models and you also have to have a PC that can run those kind of things either at all or efficiently to some degree. And what that means is you either have a, I don't know, like a gaming-type PC with lots of dedicated graphics, you know, NVIDIA preferably. You might have a Copilot+ PC that has a good NPU. And now you might have this new class of RTX Spark computers, which they're calling— they don't really have a good— they don't have a brand for this, but it's the builder tier. I would call it the maker tier. Maybe they use the term maker a lot. So what that means is these are ultra-powerful supercomputers that have these CUDA, whatever the—

Leo Laporte [00:15:15]:
Yeah, I mean, having a Spark, I know exactly what they are. The only big difference is this is running Linux versus Windows, but you could run a very competent QWEN model in there. I really wonder though, they're going to get pretty hot.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:33]:
Yeah. I mean, well, so I mean, they're all going to have to have Some kind of advanced thermals. They talk about that. Ideally not just fans, but yes, I mean, it will probably be water cooling in some cases, whatever, a liquid cooling.

Leo Laporte [00:15:43]:
They didn't do that with the DGX Sparks, and they get hot.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:47]:
They get hot.

Leo Laporte [00:15:47]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:49]:
So the one thing I, I had seen, and I don't, I don't believe this was like a, like an NDA thing, but talking to multiple PC makers ahead of this event, and I, you know, knowing some of what was coming, The one thing I saw very consistently, and Microsoft kind of talked around this a little bit, but when you look at an NVIDIA RTX Spark-based PC, whether it's a laptop or one of those small form factor things, there are basically just 2 tiers, right? Because these things have unified RAM. And one tier is 32 gigs, which they're targeting at creators. And so these are the people who maybe are editing video or advanced photo stuff or whatever it might be, but they're They're creators, right? And so you have a laptop, it's portable, you can bring it with you. They're fairly big machines for the most part. I don't know if there were any— well, the things I saw were like 16 inches, but I'm sure there'll be 14-inch versions as well. But 32 gig is the entry level. And so Microsoft finally announced the starting price of these things, at least their computers, and not as bad as expected, right? $2,600 essentially. And up.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:55]:
And I think $2,600 will be the— I haven't seen it live on their site yet, but I assume that's the 32GB configuration. The second configuration is the one they keep talking about because they always say up to 128GB RAM. And the 128GB of RAM configurations are aimed at what I would call like AI nerds or, you know, like data scientists or, you know, engineers or developers or whatever it is who actually need that. You know, they This is where you can put these gigantic, what used to be frontier models 3, 6 months ago onto a local machine and have it actually run in memory. So these are the, this is, so these are the 2 kind of basic tiers. So it's like devs, developers, creators, makers of all kinds, whatever this is. I would say, you know, data scientists, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:17:43]:
Or like people like nerds like me on a—

Paul Thurrott [00:17:46]:
Yeah, right, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:17:48]:
A little man inside my computer to answer my questions.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:51]:
So in addition to this laptop thing, Microsoft also announced a Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at Build. This is the thing that comes with that Project Zenith preconfiguration, which to me is just like a major waste of time, but whatever. And these are gonna be $6,000 and up. So that kind of puts it into that NVIDIA, whatever the current RTX Spark price range, I guess. ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI are all coming out with laptops. In all cases, these things can be pre-ordered now or soon, like today sometime as we record this, and they will ship on next Friday, which is October 16th, I believe. But let me make sure about that. If I could just get to this little thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:36]:
Yes. So Friday, October 16th. So these things, they're all coming, right? So this is all, this is happening. And then in the future, and this is later this year, not next year, I don't know if it's Microsoft, I know it was attached to a Dell display, but perhaps this was a Dell machine, but I assume there'll be multiple versions. There's something called a DGX Station for Windows. And so this is one of those giant tower computers.

Leo Laporte [00:19:01]:
Oh yeah, those are $100 grand and up.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:03]:
Yeah, it's like a trillion parameter models could run locally. It's just insane.

Leo Laporte [00:19:07]:
And those you need special, that's for enterprise. I mean, if you put that in your house, you'd need You need to put in a special 20-amp circuit.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:14]:
I mean, I used to have rack-mounted storage servers in my house, so I get it. But yeah, it's like putting in a dryer install or something. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:19:21]:
Yeah. It's kind of crazy. Big NEMA plug.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:19:25]:
And it's hot. Again, even more heat. I mean, those are space heaters. It's like having 4 1,500-watt hair dryers running all day.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:33]:
Right, right. But you're not spending tokens on the cloud.

Leo Laporte [00:19:36]:
But you're not spending tokens. Well, I understand who it's for. It's not for me or you. It's for a business. that wants to have 8 to 15 users using AI locally without exfiltrating their business proprietary business data. And so they put that in the wire closet with their other servers. And $100,000 to them is— I mean, they bought— this is the same companies that used to buy IBM 370s. It's the same thing.

Leo Laporte [00:20:01]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:02]:
Okay. I think— no, I think you're right. I mean, and look, I This doesn't resonate with me or mean anything to me as a person, but I mean, Microsoft does have that relationship and trust with enterprises. I think this matters. I mean, when you talk about not exfiltrating data and making sure this stuff happens, I mean, this is, you know, this should be what they get right. So we'll see, we'll see, you know, like, but this is a big part of the plan for sure. Just a couple of small data points. I don't know, there's gonna be all kinds of stuff happening.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:33]:
So Muse is coming to Windows as a native app. It's going to integrate with that MCX, the agent container platform that Microsoft has. This is so stupid, but there's a Get Started app in Windows which runs when you first— why is my computer not working? I swear to God, I can't. I think my keyboard might be dying. But anyway, it runs when you do it.

Leo Laporte [00:21:01]:
By the way, I know why it's dying. I heard you pounding on it before the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:05]:
It got everything it deserved, Leo. So this app is just like a, you know, on a Copilot+ PC, you'll learn about things like Click to Do and blah, blah, blah. And it does some stuff. It's nothing. But for people who have one of these computers, it's going to let you instantly set up for all the agentic AI stuff you want, including like a simplified OpenCLaw setup, which right now is a horrible process on Windows, et cetera. So there's that. This is kind of just out of nowhere. Call of Duty is coming to RTX Spark in 2027.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:37]:
And that's interesting because we talked about this a little bit when I was at IFA that I saw games running on these computers and this is a Windows 11 on ARM computer. These things are native x86, obviously all game, basically all games are. And I think it was Doom, whatever the latest Doom, Doom: The Dark Ages was running at, It was 100 to 120 frames a second or something crazy, but, uh, it looked highest, you know, highest graphic setting, highest resolution, you know, awesome frame rates. And they were just like, yeah, you know, we didn't do anything to make this work. It's just super powerful. So, um, games like Call of Duty require a little bit of additional work. It's not gonna— I don't see this being a native port. I just see them doing the work to get it to actually run on the thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:19]:
Like, you can't run any Call of Duty game today on a Windows 11 on ARM machine. So that's kind of it. Interesting. That's something I didn't think about.

Leo Laporte [00:22:28]:
Would a gamer be interested in one of these laptops?

Paul Thurrott [00:22:31]:
Yeah, in a year or two, or within a year maybe. I mean, right away, what we're gonna see in the beginning is like what actually runs, right? So once we get these things, and I will have at least one of these within the next few days. I gotta talk about that actually in a moment. We'll see, right? I mean, Windows on ARM is a very haphazard experience for gaming, and some stuff actually works fine, you know. Um, sometimes it's weird. Like, I know with the Doom series, like the modern Doom games, um, Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, if I'm doing this right off the top of my head, work fine on Windows 11 on ARM, you know, Snapdragon XX2. Uh, and the new one does not run at all, and I have no idea why. Like, they're clearly the same basic engine.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:15]:
Like, it's weird, but— That's the experience. The Nvidia stuff, look, their roots are in gaming, PC gaming, graphics, et cetera. I mean, they have this relationship with that community. So I've always kind of wondered about this. I think they're gonna— and you can see it just by the Call of Duty thing. Yeah, no, we're gonna support this thing. Not that these computers will become a volume platform anytime soon, but these are the power users, right? And so having one— one of the wonderful things about Windows PCs, still Windows laptops today, is that Buy a new computer, games run awesome on these things, even basic laptops. So there's no reason this can't happen.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:57]:
I think it will happen. Interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:24:01]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:01]:
I mean, we'll see. One of the big advantages of Windows 11 on ARM compared to any x86 platform is that when you're on battery power, you don't lose much in the way of performance. So Intel machines, it varies by chipset. So exact numbers don't really matter, but I know probably Lunar Lake, it was like a 50 to 60% drop in performance on battery. It was horrible. It's better with Panther Lake. AMD was better than Intel, but still bad, right? And then Snapdragon XX2, it was like single-digit drop. It was so small you wouldn't even notice it.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:37]:
And Microsoft is claiming that on this RTX Spark platform, the performance is 99% on battery compared to on power. So it's like you're not going to notice that difference, I guess.

Leo Laporte [00:24:48]:
Which means battery life will be pretty great.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:51]:
Yeah, well, I will— yeah, we'll see that. We'll see, right? That's one of those things. Um, let's see. So Surface Laptop Ultra in particular, it, it has all USB ports, but they have the charger is a USB on the end, but it has like magnets on the side and it clasps onto the what must be magnets in the laptop. So it actually gives you kind of the advantages of what Microsoft calls Surface Connect, I believe, or Surface Connector. And, you know, Apple has MagSafe. So it's, it's like that but without the proprietary connector, although obviously there are magnets there. But that also means you could plug any USB-C cable into the thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:27]:
So it's kind of okay, like, that's cool. Um, see if I'm missing anything else in here. There's a lot of stuff. Sorry, I just took a bunch of notes and I tried to turn it into—

Leo Laporte [00:25:36]:
How long was the event?

Paul Thurrott [00:25:38]:
It was almost an hour. Yeah, it was close to an hour.

Leo Laporte [00:25:41]:
I mean, I wish we'd covered it. I didn't realize they were going to announce so many things.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:45]:
I wasn't sure. Right. Well, that was the thing. So the knee-jerk reaction I had to this event when they first announced it, because they have this graphic and it says 10.7.

Leo Laporte [00:25:56]:
10 what?

Paul Thurrott [00:25:57]:
Well, 10 meaning October 7th.

Leo Laporte [00:26:01]:
Oh, okay. Not Windows 10.7.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:03]:
But that's the first thing I saw.

Leo Laporte [00:26:05]:
Me too.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:05]:
So you just reminded us. of the 2 versions of Windows everyone wishes they were still using. Smart.

Leo Laporte [00:26:11]:
10 and 7, yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:13]:
Yeah, 10 and 7, nice. So like, this is whatever, this is random, but it's just got— that's the way my brain works. I saw that immediately and I was like, oh, that's not good. Um, but yeah, so, um, honestly, well, I, I was hoping that we would learn about the availability and pricing of RTX Spark-based PCs, and we did. And so we have to still go in, like if I go to maybe, oh, from the wrong window here. If I go to surface.com, no, it's not. They're still on a, something went wrong is what I'm told on surface.com, which is everything you need to know about Microsoft. But sometime today we'll have all the pricing.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:52]:
We'll see how these things, I'm really curious to see where the 128 configs, how that plays out.

Leo Laporte [00:27:00]:
So, Um, I'm curious to see who buys the 32 gigs because that's—

Paul Thurrott [00:27:05]:
yeah, and they're gonna be—

Leo Laporte [00:27:06]:
that's for— well, it's gamers, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:10]:
Yeah, I mean, well, no, well, and people like you who want to do the most. You could run a small model, models, imagine.

Leo Laporte [00:27:16]:
Yeah, 32 gigs is— I mean, I'm running, uh, Quen on a 24-gig 3090, but— well, yeah, I guess so. I guess, yeah, there's a, there's a market.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:27]:
Okay, so someone has, uh, Jarno in the, uh, Discord tells me that the 128 config starts at $5,899. So yes, so $2,599 for 32 gig.

Leo Laporte [00:27:38]:
Um, that's who that's for. Somebody doesn't want to spend $4,000 or $5,000.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:43]:
Well, you know, I mean, or just doesn't need it, you know, whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:27:46]:
I mean, you know, it's hard to know what you need until you really start doing some AI stuff. That's the problem. Like, I'm glad I bought 2 Sparks when they were still relatively inexpensive because— but I didn't know, but I just kind of guessed. But if you're at 256 gigs, okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:02]:
But I— to me, you're in the Adobe Creative Cloud, whatever it's called, Creative Cloud thing, and you're, you're using Spark maybe, and you've got Photoshop and Premiere and whatever else, like 32 gigs is probably going to be— that's gonna be good for most of those guys, right? I think the 128 config is more like straight up, you know, like stuff you're working on, like the AI agents and a bunch of them running in tandem and doing whatever and making it make sense on the client, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:28:29]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:30]:
Um, I will say I, I found it really interesting they did not walk away from the Copilot Plus PC thing, nor did they even suggest it was going away. I, I feel— and I— this was the thing, I— this, you know, there was this story that came out a couple weeks ago, oh, it's going away, they didn't mention it with this. And I'm like, yeah, I don't I'm not sure about that. Uh, so, um, I don't know. I mean, I— these RTX Spark laptops are Copilot Plus PCs, but they're more. I mean, obviously, but they get all that stuff. So I don't know. I, I still have not personally seen any direct evidence of this, um, going away.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:05]:
But, uh, yeah, but a lot of stuff. So yeah, so look, there's like— there's the Windows 11 stuff. There's some kind of features, whatever. Um, there's hardware. We know, we already know all the PC makers doing this for the first round, including Microsoft. 2 tiers, like I said, 32, 128. I mean, it— maybe you could configure a version with other memory configurations. It's just that 32, 128 are the 2 I've seen with 3 different companies.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:33]:
So I don't know, I guess we'll see. Um, mostly laptops, but there'll be some of those smaller desktop form factor type things. Um, lots of partners partnering here across the board. So there's the Kind of the AI community, the Ollama CPP and the DeepSeek and Perplexity and all this stuff. So there's all that stuff. There's obviously the NVIDIA partnership on the hardware. Yeah, it was kind of all over the map. So it's weird because it's like an Apple event.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:06]:
When you know Apple's going to announce a new dot, dot, dot, fill in the blank, like last time, like the iPhone Duo, you're like, all right, I want to see the iPhone Duo. And they make you wait for it. And this one, it's like they're talking about blah, blah, blah, AI, local, and you're like, Jesus, guys, can you just put a dollar sign on the screen? I just want to know how much this damn thing costs. But it eventually came. So I don't know, I was sitting there, I had the video on, I'm taking notes, I'm thinking, all right, I can write most of this. So I'm sitting there and it's like there wasn't much to write until right at the end of the thing. And I'm like, all right, I got to get moving. I have a podcast here.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:39]:
I always sort of understood that I would be getting some RTX Spark something, something. So the first of those laptops should arrive as soon as Friday, which is bad timing for me because originally we were flying to Mexico on Friday. And this instituted one of the stranger conversations I've ever had with my wife, which was, you want to delay a trip to Mexico because of a laptop? She's like, don't you—

Leo Laporte [00:31:07]:
She doesn't know you by now.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:09]:
Don't you read? I review like 25 of these a year. She's like, I don't understand.

Leo Laporte [00:31:14]:
This is a really good one.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:17]:
I'm like, yeah, but it's really expensive.

Leo Laporte [00:31:18]:
No. So which— so they're gonna send you one, the 128?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:22]:
I don't know. I actually— so I bet they do. Choice. I could, I could pick either one. And I said, honestly, well, I don't care which one I get. Um, I— well, I don't need the— I don't need the 128. I'm never going to be able to take advantage of that.

Leo Laporte [00:31:35]:
So you're not keeping it, right? I mean, you send it back.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:37]:
I understand. I'm just saying, like, I don't, I mean, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:31:40]:
Get the 128 and I'll walk you through setting it up.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:43]:
So I will, I'll get what I get. And that maybe that is what I get.

Leo Laporte [00:31:46]:
I don't know. Okay. They'll send you the good one because they want the best review. They don't want you saying, well, it's a little lightweight on the RAM.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:52]:
Okay. But they did, they gave me the option. I'm just, you know, so maybe they'll, I don't know. I'm probably the only one who's like, yeah, 32 is fine.

Leo Laporte [00:31:58]:
I don't care.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:59]:
I don't care about myself. Um, no, but I mean, I'm, but my, the way I use computers is much more closely aligned right now with that kind of creator thing.

Leo Laporte [00:32:07]:
I understand. But I, I, I I would be glad to help you put a nice QN 3.8 Flash Next on there running at very high speed and just say, just try it, Paul. Just see how you like it.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:21]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:32:21]:
And then soon you'll be one of us.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:25]:
Okay. Well, I look forward to sleeping in the warm liquid of the matrix and, you know, figuring out—

Leo Laporte [00:32:30]:
It's very comfy in here. Come on, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:34]:
So yeah, no, we're going to be here for 2 more weeks now because it turns out that—

Leo Laporte [00:32:37]:
Really?

Paul Thurrott [00:32:38]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:32:38]:
Because— and you did it and Stephanie said, okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:41]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:32:43]:
Can I go to Mexico in your place?

Paul Thurrott [00:32:45]:
Sure. I mean, there's no one, no one's there now. It's, it's open.

Leo Laporte [00:32:48]:
So, uh, nobody's sending me a 128 gig.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:50]:
Honestly, this was, this was better for me anyway. I was kind of stressed about how quick this was coming up. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:32:55]:
Thanksgiving too, right? I mean, you should just—

Paul Thurrott [00:32:56]:
well, we're good. We'll be back for that. Like we were always going to come back right before Thanksgiving. So we're still going to be there over a month. Like it's not, it's not just like, don't, don't cry for me, Argentina. It's fine. Like I, you know, that's, that's at least 30 tacos. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:10]:
But I mean, this is good. I just had stuff I wanted to get done before we left and it was a crunch. And now I'm like, you know what? Now I get some breathing room.

Leo Laporte [00:33:18]:
Good. You don't feel crunched. I think that's important.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:20]:
Yeah. No, I just said it last night. Unfortunately, the nature of my relationship is that Stephanie had to spend more than half of her morning working on this because it was complicated and expensive depending on how we did it and blah, blah, blah. There was all these different permutations. And then She got the work done and I was like, listen, I'm sorry that you had to go through that, but for whatever it's worth, I'm so much less stressed.

Leo Laporte [00:33:41]:
Get the 128 and you could have your agent do that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:45]:
Yeah, well, right now she is my agent, but—

Leo Laporte [00:33:47]:
I know, that's what I'm saying. Anyway, you don't want to replace it. You just want it to do the dirty work that you don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:55]:
I understand. Yeah, but we'll get there. By the way, look, it's going to happen.

Leo Laporte [00:33:59]:
I'm not trying this with like, I'm not going to tell Lisa in 2 weeks, oh, Lisa, can we hold off the trip to Bali? Because I'd like to be here when the Mac Studio 512 gig comes out. I don't think that's, I don't think that's an option.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:12]:
To me, this is a bit different than that because like I said, I review lots of laptops. They, they ship laptops to Mexico. It's fine.

Leo Laporte [00:34:19]:
And, and Apple's never going to send me one, so it doesn't really matter.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:22]:
But this is just, there's a limited availability of these things. Not that many people are getting them.

Leo Laporte [00:34:26]:
No, you want to, I'm thrilled. And seriously, please.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:29]:
I was like, look, I got to— this is just important.

Leo Laporte [00:34:32]:
I have to. Let me know what you get and I can help you. And just as a place just to try it, install a nice local model and just see how you feel about it. That's all.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:43]:
Just what do we have to do to get you into this local model today?

Leo Laporte [00:34:48]:
Bring your wife, your pink slip, and your checkbook. Come on down to local models. I'm going to set you up.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:54]:
I understand how this will work. I'm not completely out to lunch about this, but anyway. No, we'll see.

Leo Laporte [00:35:01]:
But I'm offering. You don't have to take me up. I'm just offering. I'm here. I am leaving. I will only be here next week, and then after that, I'm gone for 3 weeks.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:10]:
So 3 weeks.

Leo Laporte [00:35:11]:
When is the laptop coming? Do you know?

Paul Thurrott [00:35:13]:
Friday, maybe Saturday.

Leo Laporte [00:35:14]:
I'm so jealous.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:18]:
Okay, well, look, There's all kinds of stuff happening in the world where I'm like, well, we'll talk, for example, like Google Books, right? We'll talk about that in a bit. But I knew I'd get one or more of these. I'd probably get a handful of them at some point from various PC makers. But I also know I'm going to Mac. I thought I was going Friday, right? So I'm like, well, I haven't gotten any offers. Google told me they would send me one, right? But I've Never heard back from that. So I'm like, I'll be in Mexico and they'll say, hey, good news, it's available, we're shipping it. And it's like, great, I'm not home and I won't be home until the end of November.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:55]:
Um, so I ended up, you know, just buying one for myself, um, just to make sure I had one before we went to Mexico, right? Which now seems a little premature, but, um, but whatever. That was, you know, that was Monday and things changed on Wednesday or Tuesday, I guess. I don't know. We'll get to that in a moment. So, yeah, I don't know. One thing they didn't talk about, by the way, was this thing that had come up kind of between the announcements. I don't even remember how it came up, but one of the things that's unique to this RTX Spark platform is that you'll be able to assign RAM to AI agents, to AI apps, to whatever it is. Like I compared it to using a Mac in the early 1990s so you could do that.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:40]:
And I don't quite understand that, but it's kind of something different.

Leo Laporte [00:36:44]:
You can reserve how much RAM goes to the GPU and how much goes to apps.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:50]:
Yeah. So that's a different thing for Windows. I mean, that's unique. I'm kind of curious about that.

Leo Laporte [00:36:57]:
Yeah, you can do it on a Mac. In fact, I just did it on my Mac Mini because I don't— it's headless. I don't need anything else to run on it. So I just said, hey, give it—

Paul Thurrott [00:37:08]:
So you just give it basically all the RAM.

Leo Laporte [00:37:09]:
Yeah, take all. It's only a 64-gig Mac Mini. So I said, take Take as much as you— I think there's still 9 gigs of system memory left, but the rest is GPU. Okay. And that way you can get a bigger model in there and stuff. Again, I'm your little AI buddy ready to help at any point.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:26]:
I appreciate it. I'll let you know what it is.

Leo Laporte [00:37:30]:
Yeah, you don't, you don't have to. It's, it's fine, Paul. You got a Google Book. What more, what more would you want in life?

Paul Thurrott [00:37:36]:
Well, it turns out having used one, a lot more. Um, but we'll get to that.

Leo Laporte [00:37:39]:
Yes. Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:40]:
Because there's some big problems.

Leo Laporte [00:37:41]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:43]:
Yes. But anyway, we'll get to that. So this just happened. I'm still fog of war-ing it a little bit, but I think that's most of what just happened.

Leo Laporte [00:37:52]:
Most of what just happened, ladies and gentlemen.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:54]:
I'm leaving open the possibility I may have missed something there. There could be more. But I believe that's most of it. I still have to go and look at all of the PC makers and see what the prices look like and see the configurations. You know, maybe there are different configs I'm not aware of. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:38:10]:
Well, this would be a good time to take a break so that you can consider if that's your final answer.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:15]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:38:15]:
We'll play some dramatic music, and if you wish to make a lifeline call, you can.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:21]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [00:38:22]:
And then we'll continue on with the Winters— Winters— the Winters Insider Program. You are watching Winters Weekly with Paul Theroux. Richard Campbell is out. Getting stuff worked on, but he'll be back next week. And, you know, I kind of, I hate to say it, Paul, how many shows have we done together, just you and me? You know, more than, I mean, 500 or something.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:47]:
At least 500. Yeah, I don't—

Leo Laporte [00:38:48]:
And I kind of like it, just you and me, buddy, hanging out. You know, I kind of enjoy it.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:54]:
It's not horrible.

Leo Laporte [00:38:55]:
No, it's like the good old days. This is how the show used to be, folks, back in the days when AI was just a little twinkle in my eye. We will have more of Windows Weekly in just a little bit. Paul Theriot, theriot.com. What is it? Does— there's no climate change in Mexico City, right? It's pretty much the same all year round. You don't have seasons really, or do you?

Paul Thurrott [00:39:19]:
No, not like we have here. I mean, they have a rainy season and a dry season, but the temperatures are pretty—

Leo Laporte [00:39:25]:
Yeah, we just learned that Our trip to Southeast Asia is coinciding with a pretty big typhoon season.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:35]:
Awesome.

Leo Laporte [00:39:35]:
So that's going to be fun.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:37]:
Yeah, it'll be fine.

Leo Laporte [00:39:38]:
I'm bringing my poncho.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:39]:
What could go wrong?

Leo Laporte [00:39:41]:
And my hip waders. All right, let's talk about the Windows Insider Program.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:47]:
Oh, just real quick before we do, I just—

Leo Laporte [00:39:50]:
because I find something.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:51]:
I just looked at this. I— so I'm wrong about the memory config. You can configure even a Surface laptop with a ton of different memory That makes sense because that's the most expensive component at this point, right?

Leo Laporte [00:40:04]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:05]:
So there's basically the difference between— there's 2 CPUs. So there's an 18-core CPU and a 20-core CPU. The 18-core CPU comes with a 5,120-core GPU and the 20-core CPU comes with a 6,144-core GPU. So the base price of $2,599 is in fact for 24 gigabytes of RAM, which is garbage. And then you can go 32, 48, 64. Well, no, you can't. You can go 32. You have to move up to the higher-end processor to go from 32 up to 128.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:39]:
And in that case, the 32-gig config is like $3,700. And then the 128 config, which is $5,900, by the way, already sold out. So.

Leo Laporte [00:40:50]:
Really? Yeah, but they had 4 of them, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:40:53]:
Yeah, I mean, they had— yeah, they have 64, 48, and 32 gig configurations as well. So you could get in, like I said, as cheap as $3,700. But okay, I don't know, things are expensive. But honest— but again, not, not as bad as I think a lot of people thought. This was one of the things I had, you know, no one would tell me pricing exactly, but I, I got indications that they wouldn't be that bad. The first one I'm reviewing, by the way, people are asking about this. It's an HP Omnibook Ultra 16.

Leo Laporte [00:41:27]:
16-inch screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:28]:
Yeah. And HP is also going to sell an Omnibook x14, which is a 14-inch screen with different RTX Spark configurations as well. And then eventually they'll have one of those boxes like the I can't— what is it called? Does anyone know? Like, is it 16L, 1.6L? I don't know. I think it's probably 1.6L, I guess. Whatever the liter, I think is the— probably what that means.

Leo Laporte [00:41:53]:
It's so funny they measure the volume in liters, but I guess that's how you would do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:57]:
I think that's what it is. And it probably— it's probably designed to fit in a rack or something. But, um, but anyway, uh, these look like cool computers either way. So, you know, we'll see. And HP's for whatever— well, HPs have a hard— the HP has a— I haven't gone and looked at that yet, but their starting price is actually higher than Surface's, but they might start with a higher-end configuration too. So I don't, you know, they may only, they may offer different configs. I don't know. In fact, I know they do because they, yeah, 32 is the lowest end.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:23]:
So that might explain that. Okay. Um, and then on to more boring things. Uh, yeah, we had, uh, 4 Insider builds last Friday. Um, the only, this is across, let's see if I can get this right. Um, Experimental Beta, Experimental 26H1, and what's the other one? There's one other one I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Um, is it an experiment? I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:48]:
I don't know. Um, there's only one major change in here. So Microsoft has, uh, created this Cloud Rebuild feature, something the Macs had for, I don't know, 15 years, at least 10 years. Um, but, uh, kind of a neat way to, uh, quick— well, as quickly as your internet connection, but also efficiently kind of rebuild Windows, you know, using cloud files, um, which is pretty good. At some point they added, um, remove and remove and sanitize options. Sanitize being like the, you know, the write zeros to all the sectors on the disk multiple times to really erase it, you know, that kind of thing. And they're making some improvements to that, but not nothing, nothing dramatic, I guess, across those things. And then I didn't have to— there's at least 2 things in the notes today I just did not have time for.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:37]:
Like, this is just— Wednesday is as tough as it is, but with this Microsoft event, it made it even tougher. Some time ago, this might be a year, year and a half, 2 years, I don't remember, but I looked into what it means to remote desktop from one Windows 11 laptop to another. This is surprisingly complicated. If you If you sign in with a local account, actually it kind of works the way it did before. You'll be able to make that work. But if you don't, like most people, if you use a Microsoft account, really, really hard. They never updated the authentication bits to account for Microsoft accounts. So you can— it will prompt you, you type in your email address, it'll prompt you for the password, you can type it in, it's not gonna work.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:19]:
So I wrote about different ways you could work around that. But now Microsoft has added a feature to its Windows app, terrible name, but the Windows app for Windows, hilarious, Remote PC connection feature as of today that is a replacement for Remote Desktop. This thing that debuted, if it wasn't, it probably was not Windows XP, but I think Windows XP was the version where they debuted this. Maybe I'm thinking of file sharing actually. No, that's not true. Never mind. Well, no, I think it, yeah, I think there's a simpler, I think they had simple and complex interfaces essentially. I'm sure Remote Desktop dates back to the '90s, you know.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:57]:
Uh, I don't remember. I don't actually remember anymore. But anyway, this is the modern replacement for it. So Microsoft has, like I said, a Windows app, stupid name, but it will allow you to remote desktop to other Windows computers. So I haven't tried it yet. I just saw the announcement. I'm kind of curious about this. We'll see if this actually solves the problem.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:16]:
If it does, we'll do an episode about this on Hands on Windows. So we'll see. And then in the hardware front, in addition to the RTX stuff, RTX Spark stuff we just talked about. One of the other things that's happening on the far end of the spectrum this year is this move to improve the resource usage in Windows. Supposedly 26H2 roughly frees up like 2 gigs of RAM on a clean install compared to predecessors. I'm not sure about that, but okay. But they're also, or rather silicon makers like Intel, And Qualcomm are making lower-end chipsets they can sell to PC makers for less that will often be tied to just 8 gigs of RAM, which is terrible, but okay, whatever. Sometime over the summer, Lenovo offered me a selection of like, it was a crazy number of computers I could choose from.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:09]:
I picked 2, but one of the ones I picked was one running Wildcat Lake.

Leo Laporte [00:46:14]:
I'm so jealous of your life.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:15]:
I wanted to see— no, don't be. This is a horrible responsibility. It's a lot of work. Yeah, I bet it is actually. It's not really that great, but I wanted to see what this looked like, right?

Leo Laporte [00:46:25]:
It looks good from the outside, Paul. That's all I'm saying.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:27]:
I know a lot of things do. That's the fence and the green grass and whatnot. But this thing, this computer's terrible. Like I, and in fact, I did an episode.

Leo Laporte [00:46:37]:
Oh, really?

Paul Thurrott [00:46:37]:
I don't know if it's out yet, but I did an episode about it on Hands On Windows. And it's the only Wildcat Lake computer I've tried. So maybe others will be bad. I'm not really sure. Honestly, Lenovo usually does a great job with this. I had some high hopes for this because Wildcat Lake is based on Panther Lake, and Panther Lake can be freaking impressive, like really good. And this was not the case.

Leo Laporte [00:46:58]:
Huh.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:59]:
And it's the type of thing where, like, you know, you open a browser with multiple tabs, you open a couple of apps, and then you right-click on something and you wait like 2 seconds before the, the thing pops up. Like, and, and this thing has 16 gigs of RAM. It's not even an 8-gig system. Like, I can't even imagine how constrained this would be in 8 gigs. Like, I I strongly, strongly recommend no one ever buys an 8GB Windows laptop these days, but this is what they're doing. And then somewhere down the road, we're going to get the Snapdragon C stuff, right? I still have some hope that that might be a little bit better, but again, I still feel very strongly like 16GB is the viable minimum on Windows, but I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. It's just terrible.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:40]:
So HP announced a bunch of them. Good for them. So I don't know. I don't know what to tell you.

Leo Laporte [00:47:45]:
Well, actually— What is the problem with it?

Paul Thurrott [00:47:47]:
It's slow and terrible.

Leo Laporte [00:47:49]:
But what was the market? Is it the 8 gigs that's the problem or?

Paul Thurrott [00:47:53]:
Well, the computer I have has 16 gigs, so no. I can only imagine with 8 gigs it'd be even worse. But I also have basically the fastest version of the chip, which is terrible.

Leo Laporte [00:48:02]:
Who did they design this for? What is the—

Paul Thurrott [00:48:04]:
So I will, look, the one thing I will admit is there is this market for people who don't use a computer all day, every day like I do. That this is a secondary device. Every once in a while they need to just have that bigger screen and the keyboard. And yeah, for that purpose it'll be fine.

Leo Laporte [00:48:20]:
It's for my 85-year-old father-in-law who did just buy an HP, not a laptop, but—

Paul Thurrott [00:48:26]:
Maybe, but even then, again, even just any normal person, 16 gigs, just do not ever buy an 8 gig computer in 2026. Terrible.

Leo Laporte [00:48:34]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:36]:
So, oh, of course.

Leo Laporte [00:48:38]:
So it's the lack of cores. I mean, it's the size of the— What is wrong with Wildcat?

Paul Thurrott [00:48:43]:
There's all kinds of things. So one of the neat things about Panther Lake, so there's a bunch of things that goes into this, right? So I talked about there's chip architectures that have changed over time. Intel has moved pretty quickly for them because they had to catch up to move into a world of hybrid cores, right? One of the big differences between a standard AMD-based computer and one based on Intel is that AMD for a long time has had cores that can go up and down in power consumption and in performance. And so they can be like, that core can be idle or nearly idle most of the time, and it will pop up in performance as needs be, right? With Intel, what they do is they have multiple types of cores. And if you need the— if the system's basically idle or just not doing much at all, the more powerful and thus power-consuming cores will just turn off until they're needed. So it's kind of like 2 ways of doing the same thing. It's just a different way to do it. But these are things they've been developing over time.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:46]:
Intel, like a Panther Lake, will have performant cores, they'll have efficient cores, and they'll have, I think it's low-power efficient cores as well. So it's a big change from back when we had 11th, 12th, 13th gen Intel core chips. They've been really rapidly evolving. And A lot of this is just kind of about learning what some of the advantages of the ARM platform is without actually using ARM. So it's like, well, what makes these things so efficient? And how do these things work so well? And they're trying, Intel and AMD are both trying different ways to kind of make that work with x86. So it's a way. But you have this Panther Lake thing. One of the big advances in this generation of Intel chips, although the previous 2 were big here as well, is the Integrated graphics, right? And they have different levels of this.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:31]:
They go from garbage to awesome. And the awesome these days is Intel Arc B-series graphics, like you get on the higher-end Panther Lake chips, which is like having a dedicated graphics chip in a laptop. They're unbelievable. You could really play AAA games like the new Call of Duty, high frame rates, good graphics quality. It's awesome. It's amazing. If you think about like, okay, so we have to make one of these, but it's less expensive. They're going to cut cores.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:01]:
It's going to be made on probably a— I don't know this off the top of my head, but I'm sure it's not made on the same kind of efficient process manufacturing technology. It's probably like an older one, higher nanometer value, whatever it is. And it's going to have garbage graphics, right? So these things have— it's like less powerful CPU, way less powerful GPU. It's Celeron.

Leo Laporte [00:51:21]:
Or is it Atom?

Paul Thurrott [00:51:22]:
It's Atom. Well, they don't call it that, but yeah, I mean, back in the day, we used to call them Celeron, Atom, Pentium. We used to remember for a while. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:51:30]:
But I mean, that's the market segment it's aimed at is the low-end, low-cost.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:35]:
Yeah. These things don't even qualify as Copilot Plus PCs. Like the MPU is, I think it's, I don't remember, 13 or 17 TOPS. Like it's not even 40 TOPS. So look, there's all different ways to save money, but We'll see. I don't know. So we'll see if Qualcomm can be more viable in this range.

Leo Laporte [00:51:56]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:56]:
It's hard to say. Although, in fact, I was just working— it's sitting right next to me. One of the best laptops I ever bought, I bought this last summer, was the cheapest, lowest-end first-gen Snapdragon X processor. So remember when this thing came out, it was like Snapdragon X Elite, and then they announced Plus. And then much later, a year later almost, I think they announced just Snapdragon X. It's like the lowest-end one. It's like the fewest cores, the slowest graphics cores. It's, it's the worst of the worst and it's awesome.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:25]:
Like it's actually awesome. So it's possible that Snapdragon C, which is their new low-end chip for this new gen, will be somewhere in that category. If it is, like this could be pretty good. But again, I would never tie that to 8 gigs of RAM. Always get 16. I don't, I don't quite understand.

Leo Laporte [00:52:38]:
Yeah, always get 16. At least.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:41]:
Yep. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:52:42]:
Although it sounds like don't get this processor no matter how much RAM you get.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:46]:
I've only like, it's the one laptop. Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:52:48]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:49]:
Too soon.

Leo Laporte [00:52:49]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:50]:
There will be more to come and I'll give it a chance. I'm not, you know, I'm not going to walk away from it exactly, but not, not good. Uh, not the one I tried was not good. Um, and you know, that doesn't happen a lot, right? Like if you think about it, like, uh, PC makers don't usually send me crap. They usually send me something pretty good, as they would. They want to sell computers, right? But, um, yeah, this one, I don't know. There's something—

Leo Laporte [00:53:13]:
It's the market. It's got to be for the market. Is market— is it netbook crap?

Paul Thurrott [00:53:18]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:53:18]:
I mean, is it that level?

Paul Thurrott [00:53:19]:
Yeah, it is.

Leo Laporte [00:53:20]:
Oh God. The thing is— This is self-defeating, I think.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:24]:
So 2 things that have changed since that era. First of all, the screens are bigger. Remember, netbooks had to be like a 10.1-inch screen or smaller, I think, or some small number. But also just the timeframe. I mean, we were just in the beginning of kind of the modern smartphone era and smartphones weren't particularly powerful. I mean, they were awesome in their own way, but today we— you can buy smartphones today that are more powerful than computers. They're really impressive.

Leo Laporte [00:53:51]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:51]:
So this is— these things, bigger screens, full-size keyboard obviously, and the trackpad or whatever. This is not— you don't give this to a student. Those people need more RAM than you do. Um, you might give it to an older person. You might give it to someone who's just primarily on their phone all day, and like I said, every once in a while they have this need, whatever, they just need to type something on a bigger thing. And, uh, it— and it will be okay for that. It's fine. You know, we've always had crappy low-end.

Leo Laporte [00:54:19]:
Do you think these are binned? Like they're better parts that just didn't pass the test, and so they're selling them off as Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:27]:
No, because this was a new design.

Leo Laporte [00:54:29]:
They designed it this way.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:30]:
Wow. I think within the product family, like we see in other chipsets, we know this is Qualcomm, that binning occurs, and that's how you get the scale of processor models. So the binned ones are the ones where, yeah, for some reason, 2— well, they probably don't even have this many, but let's just pretend like 2 of the GPU cores aren't really working on this one. So we're going to call this one, you know, Intel Core 350 or whatever the brand is. And, uh, because, you know, we'll just turn those off, don't worry about it, that kind of thing. And I'm sure there's some of that that occurs within the product family, but these aren't binned Panther Lake chips. These are—

Leo Laporte [00:55:05]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:06]:
Newly designed chips based on Panther Lake, based on that architecture, if that makes sense. Um, but they're garbage. Uh, so, and Panther Lake, look, I've been very critical of Intel, and, and I, I, it was, it started as a suspicion and then grew into a Just an overt distaste because their chips are incredibly buggy. But I have to say, Panther Lake, I've already seen several excellent Panther Lake computers, including what I talked about last week, I think. This thing got crazy good battery life, got battery life like you see on an ARM computer. They're doing something right. And that combination of Lenovo and Intel often is very, very good. In this case, not so much.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:52]:
I mentioned that I bought a Google Book. I was in Boston over the weekend to see my mother and—

Leo Laporte [00:55:57]:
Couldn't resist, huh? Just had to buy it.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:00]:
Well, so what I ended up doing was I wanted to come home Sunday. And when I originally, I was going to just go pick it up locally because I came out Sunday, but then they were like, you can't do that, but we can ship it to you or you can come Monday. I'm like, yeah, I'm not going Monday. But then I'm like, wait, I could go Monday here. So then I just pre-ordered it from the Best Buy that's local to here, and I did pick it up Monday. So I went into a store like it was the exact same night. Are you going to return it? Well, that's the thing. So I've been going back and forth on this.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:29]:
My goal was not to return it. I was going to— this is the modern replacement for Chromebooks, et cetera.

Leo Laporte [00:56:35]:
This is the new Android version of the OS, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:56:38]:
Yeah. Yep. And look, I've used so many Chromebooks, obviously Android tablets and whatever devices of all kinds, and you kind of follow the progress of what they're doing here. It's very interesting. It's, it's a smart idea. You know, there's so many more, um, app makers and then kind of like hardware peripheral makers and device driver writers that target Android than Chrome OS. So by swapping out the, you know, the fundamentals, the foundation of the platform for Android, you're going to get a lot more support like immediately. So that always made sense to me.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:08]:
The trick for me was that you continue the things that are right about ChromeOS, like you have the desktop version of the web browser, et cetera. And as time went by and there were little reveals here and there, remember we've learned a little bit about this last September, a year ago September at the Qualcomm Summit. Rick Osterloff from Google showed up, talked about it a little bit. They talked a little bit, I think around Google I/O timeframe, they previewed it a little bit. They had their event, right? And so the first generation, I think there's 5 different models, some based on Snapdragon X, first gen, some based on Intel. I bought the one I like the most just looking at it, which is the Lenovo because it's 15 inches. It's also the only one of the first gen that has facial recognition. The other ones all have only fingerprint recognition.

Leo Laporte [00:57:57]:
Yeah, I have the earlier one based on the MediaTek processor. That was the Yeah. Of Google Books until—

Paul Thurrott [00:58:04]:
And that will be one that will become a Google Book, right?

Leo Laporte [00:58:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:08]:
Just like there were Chromebooks that became Chromebook Plus. I have an HP Dragonfly Chromebook that came out before there was a Chromebook Plus, but made 16 gigs of RAM, whatever the stats were, and it's now a Chromebook Plus device, right? So that device will become a Google Book. There's no doubt about it. And MediaTek will be one of the silicon makers that will be making, or that will be used by device makers to make Google Books in the future as well. So they're going to be in there. There's been some early stories. I kind of wonder about this, like, that if you have an x86 version of this thing, which would be an Intel Core Ultra Series 3, whatever processor, It's probably not going to run complex Android apps well because they have to be emulated essentially, right? These things, it's ARM. Android is essentially ARM.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:03]:
I know this is an x86.

Leo Laporte [00:59:05]:
Interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:06]:
I haven't run into that problem, but I have run into a lot of problems. So I was actually very excited about this and I just started seeing things where I was like, I don't This can't be right. I must be missing something. So at some point I brought out the HP Dragonfly Chromebook and I put them side by side. I have a lot of experience. When I use a Chromebook, I'll install the Linux subsystem. There's a couple of Linux desktop apps that I want to run like Typora, which is a Markdown editor. I can get that working on Chromebooks.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:43]:
That works fine. Obviously you can run Android apps on Chromebooks as well. Apparently that's through an emulator. I guess that's more native now, but not if you have x86, but whatever. And what was the other thing? I don't remember. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But I was like, look, they have years. When did Chromebooks come out originally? Like 15 years ago or something? It's been a while, right? They have a lot of experience with this.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:10]:
Like this will be that, but better. And there are things in there that are better. By the way, some of the stuff, one of the things I haven't written about, and that will be soon, probably tomorrow, is they have a couple of app creation solutions in the system that are really interesting, right? So one of them is just like make your own widget, like create your own widget. So you kind of right-click or hard press on the desktop, browse widgets. And then one of the options at the top is like create a widget. And they have all these templates so you can just describe what you want. It'll just make you a little special widget, right? I've done that a couple of times. That's obviously aimed at normal people.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:45]:
It seems to work pretty good. I've got a couple of those on my desktop. It's kind of nice. But the other one is Antigravity, right? So that's been around a little while, but Antigravity is Google's originally web-based IDE for agentic AI app creation.

Leo Laporte [01:00:59]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:59]:
So I tried a couple of Android Markdown apps and I was like, screw this. I'll just do what I've done before. Because you get like a year of Google AI Pro, whatever. So I'm like, yeah, just make me a Markdown app. I want it to work like Typora or like—

Leo Laporte [01:01:13]:
Wow, that's great. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:14]:
And it ran for 25 minutes maybe. I had to okay some things, of course, you know, and as you go, you can kind of say, look, don't ask me about the skin, just do it. It's awesome. Like it made an awesome app. I did some of this over the summer, you know, after Google I/O. As well. And, uh, because it, uh, I don't— I assume it was Antigravity, I don't remember. But you could make— originally it was like web apps only, then it could do Android apps.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:42]:
So I did some of those. This one is a web app, um, but it's— you— it's an APX, you install it locally. It's, it's pretty freaking great, actually. I gotta figure out a way to get it out in the world. But it's, um, it— but anyone could do this. That's what's cool about it, right? So that stuff, like, that's cool. Like, to me, like, that's cool.

Leo Laporte [01:01:58]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:59]:
Um, The problem is that there are just basic fundamental regressions, meaning features that were in, and are still in Chrome OS, that are missing here that are just absolutely needed. And I just, to drive the point home, I just kept it to the Files app, right? So the Files app is their file explorer type application, obviously. The 2 apps, the Chrome OS version, the one that's on Google Book, They look very similar, but the one on Google Book is missing all kinds of features, some of which are just painfully obvious. So for example, one of the things I do, I'll bring up a new Windows laptop, I bring up File Explorer, and I sync with what I'm using, Google Drive mostly these days, but whatever it is, I could be using OneDrive, whatever service, and I pin the handful of folders I access all the time to the sidebar there, right? the navigation bar in File Explorer. But in the Files app, it's called Sidebar. And in ChromeOS, you can right-click any folder and add to Sidebar. And that feature does not exist in Google Books, and you cannot modify the Sidebar. And I'm like, what?

Leo Laporte [01:03:11]:
Oh.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:12]:
Like, what is— like, that's insane, right? So that's a really simple one, right? Google Drive in ChromeOS, you can sync files locally. You can arbitrarily— you could have— you could sync all of it, If you're not using too much storage, you have enough space on the laptop. If you don't have that, most people probably don't, just like in Windows, just like in OneDrive, just like in Google Drive in Windows or Mac or whatever, you can right-click a file, you can right-click a folder, choose Available Offline, and that thing will just sync and it just works. Not available in Google Book. What? Are you kidding me?

Leo Laporte [01:03:42]:
Hmm.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:43]:
And I was like, well, hold on a second. So one of the things I start to see as I use this thing more is like, one of the problems here is like this, it's Android, right? So if you think about how Android works, like there's a Files app in Android and Samsung has its own Files app. It's possible maybe this thing will have some features, I don't know, whatever. Like would you go into the Files app on Android and sync folders from Google Drive locally? Probably not. You would probably do that in the Google Drive app, right? I don't actually ever do this on a phone, but I—

Leo Laporte [01:04:11]:
You probably don't want to do it on a Chromebook. I mean, the whole idea is not using local storage at all, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:04:17]:
Yeah, but it comes with 512 gigabytes of storage.

Leo Laporte [01:04:19]:
Like, I mean, it does. That's, that's a change. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:22]:
You can, yeah, you can do this on Chrome OS if you want.

Leo Laporte [01:04:24]:
I guess if you're getting on a flight. Yeah. Or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:26]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Anyway, it's not there. You can't do it. I'm like, okay. So one of the other things you can do on a Chromebook or Chrome OS within the Files app is connect to network storage, like network shares. And I think there's a plugin interface for this.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:42]:
I think you actually have to add this feature. So it's like an SMB. file share service that you add, right? You can do this for OneDrive, same thing. You can't do, um, like an offline sync with it, but you can act— you can access— if you're online, you can access your OneDrive storage live through this interface. Like, it's nice. Doesn't exist. So there is no way that I found on this laptop, barring a third-party app, because you could probably download Android apps— I've tried a few actually— um, and get to your network-attached storage or whatever it is. Like, it could be a laptop, uh, a NAS, whatever it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:14]:
Not possible. It's like, are you kidding me? And the other, this one is freaking bizarre, but I have this, I just plugged it. I didn't plug it in to test it. I just plugged it in to copy a file over, but I have a 4 terabyte drive. I specifically formatted with exFAT because it works everywhere, meaning read/write across Linux, Mac, and Windows, right? Meaning, and iPad too, right? It works on my iPad, no problem. And, um, it works on my Chromebook too, but it does not work with this laptop. When you plug it in, you're for— you're prompted with something that says something wrong with it. Um, would you, you know, click here to fix it? When you click here to fix it, it says format it.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:55]:
I'm like, I'm not gonna format.

Leo Laporte [01:05:56]:
That's not what you want.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:58]:
I'm using like 3 of the 4 terabytes of storage. So I had to go back and forth to figure out what was going on here. I tried different little USB keys. Most of the ones I have are either Like a Linux install disk that has a couple of partitions, or more likely an NTFS-formatted whatever. And everything I plugged into this thing said— until later, I'll get to this— but said the same thing. It's like, something's wrong with this, fix it. You select fix it and just erase it. Just want to reformat it.

Leo Laporte [01:06:25]:
That's not right.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:26]:
So the next day I went back and looked at this and I was like, all right, I'm going to find a USB drive of some kind that has nothing important on it. And I'm going to let it do its thing. I'm just curious. Like it doesn't prompt you. So when you format a disk with the system, It doesn't tell you or give you the option to choose what format to use, and I just let it do it, and I plugged it into Windows. It's FAT32, and I'm like, okay, well, I mean, that's fine. FAT32 is fine. It's not quite as efficient on disk as exFAT, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:56]:
Like, that's interesting. So then I took that disk that I had formatted with the Chrome— the Google Book, put it in a Windows laptop. Like I said, it worked fine there. I formatted it again from there, just NTFS, plugged it in. It's like, nope, you have to fix it. I'm like, okay. And I kind of went back and forth in this. And basically it's only compatible with FAT32.

Leo Laporte [01:07:14]:
That's weird. But you know what? This is early days. Maybe they haven't put the drivers in and they're gone.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:19]:
See, you say it's early days, but this is my point. They've had this in Chromebook forever. Yeah. So external drive support, network support. Sync Google Drive locally for offline use, and the ability just to customize the sidebar. Are you kidding me? Like, that is the— like, I'm sorry, like, before you get to like apps and does it do this, this, or the other thing, I'm like, no, I can't even use this thing. I can't, I can't guarantee, and I'm not— I wouldn't say this is too stupid— I'm not going to be online 100% of the time. Well, I guess actually I am, right? Because I don't have a choice.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:57]:
But I mean, I can't, I was thinking this was going to be like a viable replacement for like a laptop, like a Windows laptop or a Mac. But the truth is, even, um, even an iPad with a Magic Keyboard is more compatible with everything I just said. Everything I just said you can do right now. Everything. It all works on an iPad. It does not work on this thing. And I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Like, one of the fundamental advantages of this system Should have been that it's designed for laptops.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:30]:
Like the— with the iPad, there is a compromise there, right? This is a touch-first device, it's a tablet. They did add a bunch of stuff in iPadOS 26 and then, you know, improved it a little bit in 27 that makes this thing work pretty well as a productivity laptop-type device when you have that keyboard thing attached to it. But there's still a lot of touch interfaces in there. You can click them with the mouse and they don't always work the right way, and it's kind of weird, and you're like, okay. So you're like, this thing that was designed to be a laptop, you know they're going to get this right. They've been doing Chromebook forever. No, they completely screwed it up. And I am blown away by how immature this feels.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:05]:
If this had been what Chrome OS was like when they first released this, that, and it, by the way, it probably was. I just don't remember. That would've been okay. That would've been the first shot. We're just starting out here. We're trying to figure it out. But they had so much to work off of here. Like, they— this should have been a superset of Chromebook Chrome OS, right? It's not.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:26]:
I mean, I mean, they do have some things that are not in Chrome OS, um, you know, like Magic Pointer, and they have that Rambler thing built into every text box, which is great. But, you know, they could do that on Chrome OS too. Like, this is— these are not— these don't require platform-level anything. Like, this is something they could have just done. Like, I don't— I don't know, it's disappointing. I was surprised by how bad it was. So I'm gonna— I guess I'll hold on to it. I don't think I'm just gonna bring it back.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:52]:
Obviously it will—

Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
They're gonna update it, right? They'll have to. Yeah, they'll have to put in, of course, features.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:59]:
Oh, they're gonna have to, that I can guarantee. So, um, I just— I don't know, this, this— it just blows my mind. Like, these are little— these are small things. It— well, These are fundamental things. They're small, but when they're missing, you miss them.

Leo Laporte [01:10:15]:
I wonder if Google's signaling though, this isn't meant for people who will do things like that.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:23]:
See, I don't— that doesn't make sense to me just because of what Chrome OS already is. To me, the point of— we have this thing called Chrome OS architecturally, however you want to say it. It's good. Like, it's— there's some good stuff going on here. It may or may not be popular, that's beside the point. Um, but you could do Linux apps including— oh, I'm sorry, by the way, Windows graphical or Linux graphical apps also do not work. There's a Linux command line built in. You can run Linux command line stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:54]:
You can install graphical apps if you want. I did. They don't run. I'm like, I— and I looked it up and they're like, yeah. And the way Google's like, yeah, some Some work, some don't. I'm like, well, I've never seen one that works, but okay, that's stupid. That works fine on ChromeOS. Um, you know, if you're— if you buy an ARM-based Googlebook, it will run Android apps natively.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:13]:
There is some advantage to that. Um, there is this kind of push and pull between like what you expect as a desktop PC user versus like a mobile app, right? And there is that weird dichotomy, or whatever the term is, on ChromeOS where You often have 2 choices of apps. You might have like a web app version of something and then a mobile app, and you could have both installed side by side. I've already done this on this thing. I hate that. They try to do a little, uh, curation, I guess, where if you go to the store and you, you know, you might get one or the other, you don't actually see both. But, um, like the Gmail app that's built in, the Google Calendar app that's built in, and I'm sure a dozen of other apps are the web app. And if you're like, well, okay, that's cute, but I want the Android app version, you can't get it.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:00]:
It doesn't show up in the store that appears on this device. And it's like, okay, but I mean, there might be whatever reason I might want to run that app, whatever it is. Maybe those aren't the best examples. But when I wanted to use Slack, and Slack has a good web app, and you would think that would be what this is. No, it's the mobile app in that case. And that app is a piece of crap. It's garbage. Like, it's just, you know, it's a— it's an Android phone app that you can stretch out and it looks like a stretched out Android phone app.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:27]:
Like, it's terrible. So look, uh, Chrome OS is gonna be around for, uh, till what is it, 2031 or something? So we have whatever that is, 5 years. They'll fix it. I mean, there's no doubt, but I just don't— you know, Apple gets all this crap for taking so long to make iPad a good laptop, like for people who want to write and do productivity stuff, right? But the thing is, like, I didn't— maybe I should just do that. Like, if I went through that list of things, if I could find it, um, before they even fixed all the stuff they fixed in iPadOS 26, you could customize the Files app on the iPad, you could sync Google Drive files offline, you could access a network, and you could use a portable drive, including one formatted with exFAT. And none of those things work on this thing. And I'm sorry, but that's just completely unacceptable. Like, these are not— there are complex workflows.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:24]:
Like, if you want to do something like sync a GitHub repository to an iPad and then keep it up to date, meaning you're pushing and pulling and make sure it's always up to date, not as seamless, right, as on Windows. Even the Mac is not actually as seamless because of the whatever security model they have there, but you can do it. I've done it. Look, it has Linux, I'm sure. Well, it has Linux, but remember, you know this I think from using these things, the Linux environment in Chrome OS and presumably on Googlebook is sandboxed, right?

Leo Laporte [01:14:01]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:02]:
And that creates a problem for getting between this sandbox environment and the native desktop or whatever, the native OS, right? And what that means is I can't run Typora on a Chromebook, which is a graphical Linux app, and do file open and browse the local file system, or browse Google Drive, which is part of the local file system. I can only browse the Linux file system. And they have a folder you can copy back and forth, and that's cute. It's a nice little thing for the crayon and— You know, water pail set, but I, but I need that to work every, like, I don't, you know, anything you do.

Leo Laporte [01:14:44]:
Yeah, it's why I don't actually use a Chromebook for Linux anymore.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:47]:
I mean, it's just too separated. It's just a—

Leo Laporte [01:14:50]:
Yeah. Yeah. And you can't choose the terminal and there's just, it's, yeah, I'd rather just use either a Linux.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:56]:
So I guess you could put Linux on a Chromebook or a Googlebook.

Leo Laporte [01:14:59]:
I don't know. Have you tried?

Paul Thurrott [01:15:01]:
No. So right now, no, but, um, they are going to open the bootloader and this will be possible. Presumably you can put Windows. This will be a great Windows laptop someday, maybe. I don't know. But it's a beautiful machine. Like the machine itself is gorgeous. It's gorgeous.

Leo Laporte [01:15:15]:
Good looking.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:16]:
Yeah, it really does have a nice kind of silky premium feel to it. Like the material is very nice, you know? I'm just shocked. Like these are just basics, you know? If I have to struggle a bit, like the GitHub thing I was talking about, the repository thing, I've gotten that to work. I got that working on a car, in the backseat of a car. In upstate New York, driving around with our friends, and I almost like, you know, cheered out loud. Like, on an iPad, I got that to work. And I haven't tried yet on this thing. I know it's going to be a struggle because everything is.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:46]:
But like, you know, you can do these kind of complex workflows on an iPad. And it's like, you know, that's— that to me is the future. Like, that's— you can see the future there. I look at this thing and I'm like, this should look like the future. And it just looks like the past. I don't— I don't get it.

Leo Laporte [01:16:02]:
You know, it is puzzling because there is a market for these, at least for Chromebooks with developers, but this sounds like this is not a good— they're aiming at a much more, a much less sophisticated audience.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:13]:
They aren't though. There's a bunch of like Antigravity's part of this.

Leo Laporte [01:16:16]:
Yeah, that's weird.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:17]:
You know, the Linux thing is part of this.

Leo Laporte [01:16:18]:
It's Google's problem all along. They are very schizophrenic. You just don't— they, they can't figure out what they are.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:24]:
Let me say that in a slightly less polite way. Look, Google does a lot of things right, but my God, the number of times Google half-asses something is— no, I'm serious— is astonishing. And I'm getting fricking tired of it. It's just— if you're somehow being outdone by the most closed mobile platform on earth, you're not doing something right. And by the way, stop using the term open all the time, Google. Stop.

Leo Laporte [01:16:49]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:49]:
Because this thing is just sitting here doing nothing.

Leo Laporte [01:16:52]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:52]:
And I'm— and it's, I, I'm— it's shocking. It makes no sense. And by the way, I, as I've been discovering, I've just got the thing on— what'd I say, Monday? It's only been a couple of days. So past couple of days, I'm, I'm looking out in the world. It's— I'm like, some other people are— other people are using these things. Other people will have run into these problems. Surely someone is out there complaining about something. But all I see is like Well, it might not work on Samsung phones right away, you know, for the phone integration stuff, which is pretty good, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:24]:
Um, you know, the complex ARM apps, you know, on Android might not work well on x86 or whatever. Yep. Okay. But what about the— okay, that stuff I get. But what, what about the basics? You know, I can't browse the network from the Files app. What is this thing? That's not a laptop. I don't browse, I don't browse the network from my phone. I got it.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:44]:
I know. Not a phone.

Leo Laporte [01:17:47]:
It's not a phone.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:47]:
It's a laptop. You have been talking about bringing Android to laptops for 2 years and you brought it here and what did you do? You just stretched out the phone UI? Is that what you did? Because this is, it's astonishing it took this long to deliver this little. It's really bad. So anyway, you heard it here first. Google hater Paul Throdde, you know, the Windows guy. I spent $1,200 of my own money to, you know, I wanted this to work.

Leo Laporte [01:18:12]:
$1,200?

Paul Thurrott [01:18:13]:
$1,100, yeah, $1,100-something, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:18:16]:
The Lenovo was only like $800. Wow. Wow.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:20]:
Yeah, some of them are less expensive, but this is the bigger screen. You know, I wanted, it's the one I wanted.

Leo Laporte [01:18:23]:
It's a nice laptop.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:24]:
I wanted to get a nice one. I'm like, I might write a book about this.

Leo Laporte [01:18:26]:
Wait till they unlock the bootloader, put Linux on it, you'll be happy.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:30]:
Yep. Yeah. A pure Linux install would be better.

Leo Laporte [01:18:34]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:35]:
I mean, other than the Google Drive sync thing, that, and you know—

Leo Laporte [01:18:39]:
Well, that, see, that was to me what the whole point of a Google book was.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:43]:
You get that automatically.

Leo Laporte [01:18:44]:
Yeah, is everything's in the cloud. And you know, my daughter uses them and she doesn't, I don't have to say, oh, have you been backing up? I don't have to think about that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:52]:
No, it's just there.

Leo Laporte [01:18:53]:
It's just there. And when it breaks or whatever, we get another one. She logs in, it's all there again.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:57]:
Right. If you're a Microsoft guy or whatever, maybe if you're using OneDrive for some reason, God love you, So you get that in Windows automatically. If you switch to a Mac, you can get a OneDrive app for the Mac that works fine. If you switch to Linux, you cannot. It's just not there. You can do third-party stuff, right? But there's ways to do it. There's ways to do it, but it's not that native, you know, normal experience. If you're a Linux user, you're geeky.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:19]:
Fair enough. Fair enough. But a Chromebook, you know, you look at that and it's a weird middle ground between can and cannot. It's like, well, OneDrive's not happening. Well, it does have the If you're online, you can browse it live. You can't sync it. But it's Google, so they have Google Drive. And it does do that local file sync thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:34]:
And you're like, okay, well, I could just use Google Drive. It's great. Google Drive works great. Except if you have a Google Book. Which is weird. You can access it from the Files app, but it's live, a live view only. And there is a dedicated Google Drive app, which I'm 100% sure, by the way, is another web app.

Leo Laporte [01:19:51]:
I gotta move you along because we are way behind on commercials.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:53]:
I know. I'm so sorry. Yeah, sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:19:55]:
Let's pause and then, uh, I will— we will continue. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot, who is just a little salty, uh, about a couple of things. Wildcat.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:06]:
Another thing, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:20:10]:
So excited, Paul, about the brand new extra flat Xbox. This is going to be—

Paul Thurrott [01:20:15]:
Yeah, it's like a smart scale. It's nice. This is like a heat warmer or foot warmer.

Leo Laporte [01:20:20]:
This— I don't know if I would buy this. I'd be a little It's a dev box for the RTX Spark. Price is right, 128 gigs for only $6,000. I paid $4,600 for mine, but—

Paul Thurrott [01:20:31]:
Styling by 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Leo Laporte [01:20:33]:
It looks like— it looks like a doorway mat, doorway mat.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:39]:
It almost looks like a, um, like a solar panel or something.

Leo Laporte [01:20:41]:
Yeah, it's so flat. Now this is the key though on this, is these RTXs, I don't see it, I don't think they have that high-speed Ethernet connectivity, and that's—

Paul Thurrott [01:20:51]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:20:52]:
That's what you really want if you're gonna daisy chain more than one. This is like a one box, that's it. It's pretty— I mean, I would otherwise, I might consider it adding it to my, um, little Spark cluster, but if it doesn't—

Paul Thurrott [01:21:05]:
Spark cluster.

Leo Laporte [01:21:06]:
My little cluster of sparkies. 128 gigs of RAM. Yeah, this is basically the same thing as the DJX Spark, but it's you know, the GB10 processor. It's a smaller SSD instead of the 4 terabytes I got, it's 2 terabytes, but that's fine. $6,000.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:25]:
Yep, it's expensive.

Leo Laporte [01:21:27]:
Yeah. All right, let's— I'm sorry, I just— when I just saw this and I thought, wow, that's—

Paul Thurrott [01:21:31]:
Yeah, it's cool looking.

Leo Laporte [01:21:32]:
Kind of wild.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:32]:
It's different looking, I'll give it that. Yeah, I kind of like the traditional— whatever that small form factor thing is, like if you look at the HP one or, um, uh, Lenovo has one that's on the AMD Halo platform. Those are cool looking to me. And those you can— well, I don't know the— well, maybe not the RTX Spark one, but the AMD one I know you can stack and connect a bunch of them.

Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
Well, that's the key. You probably will want to do that.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:59]:
Despite the fact that we're 2 hours into the show, we're still in the Windows segment, but I've been working on this—

Leo Laporte [01:22:06]:
This is Windows Weekly, Paul. Never apologize for that.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:08]:
Yeah, that's a good point.

Leo Laporte [01:22:09]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:10]:
Okay, so more bang for your buck. So I was just— I've been reading a lot of kind of industry history books and things, rereading in most cases. And I have this Tech Nostalgia series that I'm kind of expanding on this for the past month or so. And I saw this thing, it was— this is probably a couple weeks ago now when I first saw this, but I'm always looking for kind of themes, you know, like, When I was writing what became Windows Everywhere, I realized one of the themes was, you know, the way Windows might have progressed over the years was in part sometimes like forces within Microsoft are like, we want to advance the platform. And then there were forces outside of Microsoft in the industry that forced changes on Windows, right? Like, you look, Windows 8 is obviously like a reaction to the mobile wave that occurred, and, you know, maybe not the greatest reaction, but that was them kind of responding or whatever. And then This thing I saw, it kind of reminded me that it is an interesting fact of history that obviously Windows has had various competitors over the years. Microsoft has usually done a pretty good job of fighting those down or fighting them back, whatever. And this goes back to the early days of the industry, right? Like Windows was inspired in part, yes, by the Mac, but also by like VisiOn, right? From VisiCorp, the guys that made, or the guys that published VisiCalc.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:29]:
had created a windowing GUI environment for DOS before anyone else. And Microsoft, well, Gates saw this and was like, we should combine our companies. And they said, did it fall apart? And he's like, then we will put you out of business, because that's Gates. And that stuff's very interesting. There's a lot of what-ifs and whatnot. But one of the biggest what-ifs honestly, or could have beens, or weird Just facts of history is how many times Microsoft has tried to kill Windows, right? And this is something I think a lot of people don't appreciate, how many times this has happened. I mean, as early as Windows just came out, they were planning to kill it for OS/2. I mean, that was their plan.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:11]:
Microsoft was doing this. I mean, in tandem with IBM, obviously, but Microsoft, Bill Gates went to Apple CEO John Sculley in the late '80s and said, You should license macOS to PC makers. We can get this thing out there. We love the macOS, but let's make apps for it. They were willing to kill Windows for that. So this has been going on for a long time. Microsoft successfully killed Windows one time, by the way, right? That's what NT is, right? NT was a portable operating system that originally was designed on RISC hardware. That eventually became Windows, right? It actually did kill Windows.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:52]:
Windows on ARM that we have today is the latest version of that and is in many ways the culmination of that original plan to create a portable RISC OS. There it is. I mean, we're doing it today. It's kind of interesting, right? But people don't maybe understand all the examples of this. And there were There were 2 that were fairly recent that I— well, actually, there were several that are kind of recent. So, you know, Windows RT, right? That was the original, um, we're not going to run Windows apps thing. Didn't work. Uh, Windows 10X was going to put Win32, uh, the entire— all Win32 apps in a container, uh, basically have a mobile OS that ran those things isolated.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:33]:
That didn't work. Um, there was something called Edge OS, right? They were going to do like a Chrome OS thing, but with Edge. You can kind of see how that would make sense, but also not make any sense whatsoever. And that never happened. But since we've had Copilot, Satya Nadella has been talking about Copilot as an OS, Copilot as the Start button, you know? And when they launched this Copilot super app a week or two ago, they were talking about this is your new OS for work. And it turns out Microsoft has an internal project to potentially replace Windows called Project Aeon. Which is based on Edge OS but has Copilot integrated into it. And of course today they have a solution to the Win32 problem, the thing they tried to solve with containers several years ago with Windows 10X, but now they could just run them from the cloud.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:24]:
They have Windows 365. And so I don't know that this thing is today is now actively being pursued, but there's a good video of this online and it's an internal Microsoft video where they're demonstrating how this thing would work. And it looks almost like what you would think it looks like or whatever. You can see it was made of— this is not super recent, meaning like 2 minutes ago, but a year or 2 ago. And you can see how some of this occurred in the new Copilot app we have now. But it's fascinating. If you think about Windows is now over what, 40? Yeah, it's over 40 years old. And Microsoft has tried to kill Windows.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:03]:
Internally many, many times. And this thing is the— like Bill Gates once called it, the most versatile software ever created. I would just call it the cockroach of the software world in many ways, or one of them anyway. Um, it's just kind of lasted. So it's, it's just, it's just interesting to me that, um, we're still talking about this. So, you know, we'll see if anything ever comes of it, but I look forward to changing this podcast to the Aeon Weekly Podcast at some point.

Leo Laporte [01:27:30]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:31]:
I'm gonna race through some of this because most of it doesn't matter, but just a couple of quick AI-related things. Microsoft AI released some new voice and transcription models last week, and these are tailored toward developers that wanna create like voice chat agent type things, which is kind of interesting. And it's supposed— and at least one of them is the, not just their strongest model of this type, but is the best in the world for this kind of thing. That stuff's progressing. Google has been delaying Gemini 4 all year long, and I think they originally intended to release this whole family of models well before now, but it's falling behind in various ways, one of which I think, by the way, is coding. But they just released the first of the Gemini 4 models called Argon, which is a frontier model.

Leo Laporte [01:28:20]:
Well, they released it to cybersecurity experts. I keep looking to see if I've got it yet, and I did see somebody on Twitter said they had it, but I, I don't know if that was—

Paul Thurrott [01:28:30]:
Yeah, I've never seen it. It's like if an AI model falls in the wood and no one uses it, does it exist? Yeah, it's got that feel to it.

Leo Laporte [01:28:38]:
All I can do is 3A Flash, which by the way is very good, but I'm really curious. They're saying Argon is going to be state of the art, so we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:46]:
Yeah, we'll see. I, look, I'm sure Google's going to be fine, but it is kind of weird. Like, they, they were riding pretty high there for a while, and it's like, man, they just can't get this thing out the door. I don't know why, but I think the problem might be they're, you know, this is the thing that Google did to Microsoft at one point. They're just smaller, faster competitors just iterating on their things, and it's like they, you know, keeping up can be hard. Um, I don't— I, I— it took me a while to understand the distinction here because Google Docs has supported Markdown to some degree for a while now, but now it supports it natively, meaning you could just start a new document, it could be a Markdown document, save as a Markdown document. If you're in Google Drive, you can preview these files and they render, you know, using HTML. They look like fully formatted documents, etc., etc.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:30]:
So if you're in the Google ecosystem and you like Markdown, this is something you might want to look at. I don't— Google Drive isn't my thing, but it's kind of nice to see. I think before you used to have to basically import/export, you know, or import, you know, convert and then save as that kind of thing. But now it just works natively. So. Everyone's doing it. Microsoft's doing the same thing. Just a small dev note, there's something called the C# Dev Kit.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:56]:
This is an extension for Visual Studio Code that brings in a bunch of stuff for C# programmers. You can— well, I'm not actually sure. I don't believe— I could be wrong. I don't think— I hate to say things I'm not sure of. It's primarily oriented to people that are using C# either on other platforms like on Mac or Linux or MAUI for cross-platform mobile development. I know it does work with that. I don't think— it's the thing I didn't want to say. I don't think you can do native Windows apps in this thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:27]:
But anyway, they re-architected it. They're going to align it with .NET now. So the previous version, the current version today is 3.3, but they're going to call it C# Dev Kit 11 to map to .NET 11, which is coming out next month. And it should come out around the same time, if not exactly. at the same time. So it's supposed to be dramatically faster, dramatically lower resource usage, et cetera, et cetera. And then a bunch of other stuff, like if you're familiar with like Flutter, and I think other environments have this too, it's like basically like a command line tool. You make sure you have all your prerequisites set up so you can do like flutter doctor and it will tell you what you have or don't have and fix it.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:06]:
They're introducing a C# doctor for that.

Leo Laporte [01:31:08]:
You should always have a doctor in the house, I think.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:10]:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that's Flutter Doctor.

Leo Laporte [01:31:15]:
That's kind of fun.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:16]:
I like that name.

Leo Laporte [01:31:17]:
Flutter Doctor.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:17]:
Well, it's like you're— and you're always missing something. You're like, you don't have the random SDK, you don't have like whatever it is.

Leo Laporte [01:31:23]:
Claude has a doctor. Everybody has a doctor now.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:25]:
Uh, I think so. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:31:27]:
Yeah, it's good. It's a kind of a good concept.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:29]:
Like, it's, it's basically— it's, it's almost like a prompt because you're basically saying, what, what am I missing?

Leo Laporte [01:31:34]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [01:31:34]:
What's wrong? I'm targeting like— I might have like runtime engines or, um, frameworks or SDKs or whatever it might be. And, um, This will just be like, yeah, no, you're all green. Everything's good.

Leo Laporte [01:31:44]:
Yeah. This is relatively new. I think the first time I saw it, there's a package manager for the Mac called Homebrew that had a doctor. And now more and more—

Paul Thurrott [01:31:53]:
Oh, Homebrew has a doctor? I didn't know that.

Leo Laporte [01:31:54]:
Yeah. Now more and more things have doctors. And I think it's a really good idea because there's so many dependencies these days and stuff. And yeah, in coding environments especially. But yeah, there's a Claude doctor. Hermes has a doctor. Yeah. I love that idea.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:10]:
No, it's smart. It's smart. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:32:12]:
We need a Windows Weekly doctor. Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:14]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:32:15]:
There's something missing from this show. I can't quite place it. I can't place the network from number one. Oh, I know. We need the Richard Campbell library. We left that one out. I hope he's—

Paul Thurrott [01:32:25]:
Yeah. If you drink every one of the whiskeys that he recommends, you're going to need a real doctor.

Leo Laporte [01:32:29]:
You will need a doctor. You got a whiskey. I love this. We're going to have a brown liquor later on in the show. Thank you.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:35]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:32:35]:
That'll be good.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:36]:
Yeah. I went on a quest last weekend to find something and I fell a little bit short, but the one I got was actually very good. Nice.

Leo Laporte [01:32:44]:
I'm very happy. We do not need a Doctor Who on this show, however. We've got our very own TARDIS. Let's pause briefly before you go on to the most popular segment of the week, the Xbox segment. I think we've covered everything though, right? I don't, I don't think we left it. You have a lot of stuff to talk about, so I don't— I think we got everything. All right, um, you're watching Windows Weekly. Yes, Richard will be back next week.

Leo Laporte [01:33:10]:
He is, uh, out for the day taking a, uh, sick leave day, which, you know, everybody gets. Everybody gets one of those. He's feeling fine, but his, his tuchus may not be. But we don't want to go into details. Uh, speaking of good, Now, I don't know if Anthony got the briefing. When we, when we start, when we start to talk about the Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:34]:
Yeah. Don't pull a John. That's all we're saying.

Leo Laporte [01:33:37]:
Play the theme. Do you have the theme, Anthony? He doesn't have the theme.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:42]:
He's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm pretty sure this is like a, um, like a job protection thing.

Leo Laporte [01:33:50]:
There it is. Oh, you did it. Found it. He's scrambling.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:53]:
There's a theme.

Leo Laporte [01:33:54]:
There's the background. Halo theme. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, if you play games, this is for you. The vaunted, the award-winning Xbox sound.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:07]:
Wow. I got nothing.

Leo Laporte [01:34:10]:
No. Um, so you better have something. So, you know, the whole point of this show is to separate the commercials, right? I mean, that's the whole, you know, right? That's your job here.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:18]:
Yeah, it's the buffer. All you got to do is like, you know, tread water for a little while, buddy, and then there'll be another commercial and you can move on. Uh, okay, so I can do that, I guess. Uh, yeah, so Asher Sharma led a, like, an in-house, um, kind of team meeting. There was a bunch of stuff that came out of this. Some people had leaked, like, a transcript of the, the conversations you had with the employees. Um, one of them said that, uh, Xbox was either— no, it's not profitable. Geez, I almost said profitable.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:45]:
Those 2 words, they can't say those in the same sentence.

Leo Laporte [01:34:47]:
Not profitable.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:48]:
Uh, is back on path to growth, I guess, is the way to say it, which is, you know, not a horrible Um, uh, problem when you've fallen so far. I guess, you know, finding growth again at the bottom of the barrel is maybe not that hard, but okay. But, uh, there was a report that she teased that Xbox has obtained exclusive streaming rights to GTA 6, uh, when it comes out in November.

Leo Laporte [01:35:12]:
Oh, interesting. That's gonna be a hot top ticket.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:16]:
Yeah, it's not happening, unfortunately. So since then Someone from, I believe from, who makes GTA? What's the company?

Leo Laporte [01:35:26]:
Rockstar.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:27]:
Rockstar tweeted, the excitement is great to see, but some misreporting here. They will launch, you know, GTA 6 is obviously coming to Xbox on November 19th, but the game will not be streaming exclusively, presumably to Xbox or to PC. There will be some streaming there, I guess. It's possible you'll be able to stream it over Game— sorry, Xbox Game Cloud Gaming. Sorry. But now we don't know. Yeah. So I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:56]:
It seemed like we were going to have a pretty exclusive thing there and now it's like, yeah, no, you're not. So we will see. Yeah. GTA 6 obviously has a big PS5 thing going on, right? This is a marketing thing now where it plays best on PS5. I'm sure people with PCs are scoffing at that concept, but I guess we'll see. Anyway, we still got a month and a half to go here for that, but that was one of the things that came out of there. Um, Microsoft clearly has an Xbox Elite Series 3 controller waiting in the wings. This thing has leaked multiple times now.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:28]:
Um, as we get closer and closer to the holidays, it's like, what do you— is it gonna happen or is it not gonna happen? I, I, we're almost— it's almost too late. Like, now it's like you got to get this thing out there. But, um, it's going to have Hall Effect and TMR sticks, it's going to have a little screen on it for some reason, which is kind of fun, different haptics, et cetera. I was joking that one of the problems with these things, and I'm super clumsy, but I think I only owned the first gen one. I don't remember. Maybe I don't remember if I owned gen 2, but if you drop one, a million pieces go flying in different directions because half the stuff comes off. And I was like, they should just make it all out of Legos. So you drop it, there's like 1,000 pieces on the ground.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:08]:
Now you can just spend half the afternoon putting it together again. Putting it together.

Leo Laporte [01:37:11]:
You kind of do. Um, where's the screen?

Paul Thurrott [01:37:14]:
It's on the top. It's weird. Like it's something you can—

Leo Laporte [01:37:17]:
Does it pop out?

Paul Thurrott [01:37:18]:
Yeah. Actually in that screenshot, let me see where you— yeah. It's where his finger is. See his, um, see where the finger— there's actually a screen right there.

Leo Laporte [01:37:24]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:25]:
It's a little strange. I don't, yeah, I don't quite get it.

Leo Laporte [01:37:28]:
What?

Paul Thurrott [01:37:29]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [01:37:29]:
So it's not, see, so you don't see it while you're playing.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:33]:
Oh, which is one of my other complaints about the Gogobook, by the way. People are fascinated by this thing. It has like a, like a light bar on the outside of it.

Leo Laporte [01:37:39]:
Yeah, I know. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:40]:
What could be more useless than a thing that's on the other side of the lid of the screen? What is that?

Leo Laporte [01:37:44]:
It's just advertising.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:46]:
I don't, I mean, like, it's like the, um, you know, the Google Pixels have like that highlight button or whatever. And it's like, it's okay. Like when you put a Pixel phone face down and if you have it configured correctly, it goes into like silent mode essentially. So you could see the light, it comes on at a color. You're like, oh, my wife's calling me or whatever. Um, like that's okay. But like a rainbow light on the back of a laptop lid? Like, is this for other people? Like, I don't—

Leo Laporte [01:38:13]:
Yeah. Look what I have, a rainbow light.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:15]:
That just seems goofy to me.

Leo Laporte [01:38:16]:
It's stupid.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:17]:
I don't like it. I don't like it. Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:38:23]:
Somehow we got back on the Google Book. Do you want to say anything about Wildcat at all?

Paul Thurrott [01:38:29]:
I mean— Oh, Wildcat Lake. Yeah, I hate that thing too. They should make a Google book with wildcat lady. Wildcat lady destroys everything. There's a product.

Leo Laporte [01:38:37]:
There's a product.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:38]:
We haven't had a chance to write this one up. It just came out today, but the first wave of games for October from Game Pass has been announced. And the big one in here is Battlefield 6 is actually in there. That's pretty cool. Let me just look at that, see what the availability is. Yeah, Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Yeah, so. Um, yeah, that's a good game.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:59]:
And then a bunch of other stuff that, you know, who cares? But, uh, but that's— yeah, that's a big one. So that's good. Um, Sony has, uh, someone here will know that I don't— yeah, what's it called? It's like PSSR. I think it's like their super resolution technology for PS5 Pro. I believe, um, they're bringing a version of this to normal PlayStations, like non-Pro PlayStations. So I This thing is— this is interesting. And I know AI use in gaming is particularly controversial for some reason, but using AI to up-res graphics, allowing you to run a game at a low resolution, but the perceived quality is of a higher resolution, thus giving you better frame rates, is just a win-win. Assuming it's not doing something gross with the graphics where it just changes the look and feel, obviously.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:48]:
But I mean, This, I don't like— I've used this on Windows. You know, we have Auto SR in games. They just brought it to Panther Lake. Um, it's awesome. Like, it's— this is mostly just a win. So this is kind of a cool thing. But, you know, for PS5 guys, those losers, um, and whatever they do, I don't know, whatever they spend their time doing. Um, so I mentioned, um, the Google Book thing where they have, uh, anti-gravity and then the create your widget thing built into this platform, which is pretty cool.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:17]:
And Google just announced a product called Playground, which allows you to create and play custom games. So it's kind of like the, like anti-gravity, but for games, right? It's the— it's a V1 release. I'm sure it's tied to whatever— I'm going to check this before I say this, but the— yeah, it's probably tied to whatever Google AI subscriptions, etc. It's, you know, a Gemini-based thing. It's an early— it's still experimental. I think it's US only for now. But if you go to playground.google, you can check this thing out. And yeah, you do need a Google AI subscription.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:51]:
But, you know, we're getting into it. We're getting into an interesting point in time here. I, I showed my wife the, the create the widget thing that's on the Google book because I was like, look, she's not a programmer, smart, but it's not her thing. But I was like, you could find a use for this. Like, I was like, this is like a normal person thing. I think this is kind of cool. And I told— I'd mentioned how I had used it to vibe code a Markdown editor, which I've done, you know, in the past in various different ways.

Leo Laporte [01:41:20]:
But thinking that— How many Markdown editors do you need?

Paul Thurrott [01:41:23]:
Well, yeah, well, because it's— these things are improving over time. It's not, it's not that I need like other Markdown editors.

Leo Laporte [01:41:29]:
No, it's just cool that you can, to be honest with you.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:31]:
It's amazing, right?

Leo Laporte [01:41:32]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:33]:
So you might be able to, on whatever device, be like, hey, I really like this game. I'd like a version of this. And then it will just kind of generate it for you. It's kind of crazy. I mean, I don't know. It's just our world is getting very, very interesting. So this creates— they're web-based games. They'll work on desktop and mobile, like phones, tablets, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:56]:
You can create multiplayer games. You can have leaderboards and achievements, and it does all this. We're going to see some interesting stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:42:04]:
Do you think this is kind of vibe coding or?

Paul Thurrott [01:42:07]:
It is vibe coding.

Leo Laporte [01:42:07]:
It's absolutely Okay, so they're letting Argon or whatever, Gemini do—

Paul Thurrott [01:42:12]:
It's Gemini, and I don't know what they're using. Unity, uh, as a runtime.

Leo Laporte [01:42:16]:
Oh, interesting. Um, so you know what you could do, and I think probably they are doing, is you could have a, uh, you could take Gemini and train it for Unity, and so it would be a Unity expert in effect.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:27]:
It's like you almost like put a, like a game demo on, just let it run for 2 hours, like, yeah, now make that, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:42:33]:
I mean— That's pretty cool actually. They've done this before. I mean, they've had Other tools like this.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:39]:
Yeah. The thing that's really cool about— so I meant like the Markdown editor maybe is a lame example, but, um, you know, there will be 3,000 Markdown editors that people create just by talking to a computer or whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:42:49]:
Yeah. Everybody will have their own is what'll happen.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:52]:
Yep. Yeah. But there are ways now to publish these things and this is part of this deal. So at Playground, you can publish this stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:42:57]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:58]:
And you'll be able to go and look at the, you know, 'cause you know, you could pay for apps, you could download apps, you can do whatever you want, but the fact, like, other— someone else might have taken the time and just done a really good job with this. And I feel like this is what's going to happen with games. It's like, I really like those side-scrollers from like the Amiga era, and I'd like something that's just like this game I used to play called Zool, or one of those early Psygnosis games like, um—

Leo Laporte [01:43:20]:
Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:21]:
Leander or, uh, Agony or whatever, you know, pick your favorite Amiga game. And but I want it on my, you know, whatever device I'm using now, right? I, I I feel like, I feel like that— no, I'm positive. Like, you could do that right now. There's no doubt about it.

Leo Laporte [01:43:35]:
There's a guy, we talk about this on MacBreak Weekly, who has— there was one called, uh, Strategy that was a beloved Mac game that's long gone, and he just vibe-coded it and then got together with the original devs and said, is it all right if I do this? He's just done another one. I heard about this.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:43:53]:
And it's so— I— you're right, I think you're gonna see this whole new era And actually, we were talking about this on Intelligent Machines, but somebody has vibe-coded clean room implementations of all the Adobe programs and made them open source. Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:07]:
Dear God. See, I need that.

Leo Laporte [01:44:09]:
It's called Playcraft. And I think that's really interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:13]:
Any form of game preservation is great, right?

Leo Laporte [01:44:16]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:16]:
I think. I mean, so, and there are different ways to do that. You have emulators, you can run like a, you might have like an Atari or an Amiga or whatever it is emulator and you run all those games. Sometimes little disk formats or little package zip files or whatever they are. You obviously have standalone hardware and that kind of stuff. You have computers that run apps and whatever. You go to the App Store, you can buy Doom on any platform that's ever existed, et cetera.

Leo Laporte [01:44:39]:
Tetris on anything.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:40]:
Yeah. Yeah, it's all there. But sometimes, and I'm trying to think of an example. So on the Amiga, Shadow of the Beast, the original Shadow of the Beast was a technological tour de force that you could do easily in a web browser today. But at the time, it was like the most incredible thing anyone's ever seen. But it was also like one of the hardest games ever created. And when you died, you just start over from scratch. And so like to get through this game, I used to have this giant sheet of graph paper that I had to— you had to do everything exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:06]:
And if you hit some point and didn't do one of the things, you're like, I'm just starting, I'm gonna die and just start over, because you weren't gonna get through it.

Leo Laporte [01:45:13]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:13]:
And that's the way that game was. It was awesome, but it was horrible. And I'd love to be able to go over one of these things and be like, all right, look, I want this game. I want it to be exactly like this game, but when I die, I wanna start right where I was, and I wanna just have infinite lives or whatever it is, and I just wanna see the thing. I wanna play the whole game. I wanna see, there are parts of that game that I never got to, 'cause it was just that freaking hard, you know? And there were a bunch of games like this.

Leo Laporte [01:45:39]:
Anthony says the hot thing on YouTube right now is Skyrim in Minecraft. Or maybe Minecraft and Skyrim. So you— so it's, it's the game Skyrim, but— oh my God.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:51]:
That's amazing.

Leo Laporte [01:45:53]:
You're Steve.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:54]:
You're like, this is not the blocky 8-bit, uh, thing I'm used to.

Leo Laporte [01:45:57]:
Isn't that wild? Now apparently it's a mod, a Skyrim mod, but it's obviously vibe coded. That's, by the way, a very interesting thing is almost all these models can do Minecraft. They can all build Minecraft. It's like That's awesome. Trivially easy. So Minecraft and Skyrim, ladies and gentlemen.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:19]:
Speaking of Minecraft, I don't have this in the notes, but Mike Tomlin was the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers for, I don't know, 12, 15 years, whatever that was. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:46:26]:
Now he's a TV commentator.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:27]:
Yeah. Yeah. But do you know, so there was this great story about him. I don't know if it was in the New York Times or just Apple News or whatever. But so this guy spent over a decade building a city in Minecraft.

Leo Laporte [01:46:39]:
Mike Tomlin did?

Paul Thurrott [01:46:41]:
Yep. And this freaked out his kids for, like, the longest time. But he made a video. You can look this up on YouTube. There's a video of it. And he takes you on a tour of the city he created.

Leo Laporte [01:46:49]:
It's pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:50]:
It's actually— it's pretty amazing.

Leo Laporte [01:46:53]:
What?

Paul Thurrott [01:46:54]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [01:46:55]:
That's his little thing that he did.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:58]:
So all the guys, like, all these guys that used to play for him are like, sorry, we were, like, running suicides every morning, and this is what you were doing?

Leo Laporte [01:47:06]:
Yeah, I get home and I build in Minecraft.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:09]:
Yeah, nerd.

Leo Laporte [01:47:09]:
That is so— he is kind of nerdy, you know. I always think he sounds like, uh, Kermit the Frog when he talks. That is— that is—

Paul Thurrott [01:47:17]:
I know, it's crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:47:18]:
So we have, you know, the Twit people, uh, OMGcraft, we had a Minecraft show, built a beautiful Twit Minecraft, which I still have. Somebody's running it on a server somewhere. But look at this, look what Mike did. There's his son going, my dad, my dad is such a nerd. You know what? That's kind of sweet. Some people go home. I love it.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:38]:
This guy was like, he's the coach of an NFL team and forever and still embarrasses his children.

Leo Laporte [01:47:44]:
Who was it? Alex, uh, who is the, uh, big lineman who used to do needlepoint? Alex Karras was famous for needlepoint.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:52]:
Well, the guy who was Superman, uh, what's that guy's name?

Leo Laporte [01:47:54]:
Steve Reeves?

Paul Thurrott [01:47:56]:
No, the, uh, more recently, the, the, um, oh God, what's his name? Uh, Henry Cavill.

Leo Laporte [01:48:02]:
Oh, Henry. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:03]:
Tomlin is a huge video game guy and he builds like custom gaming rigs and stuff. And he makes videos about this all the time. Like he's like hugely into gaming and, uh, he's like one of the best looking, most muscular superhero looking guys that the earth has ever created. And he's like a nerd.

Leo Laporte [01:48:17]:
That's awesome.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:18]:
You know, like I love it.

Leo Laporte [01:48:19]:
You know what's interesting? It looks like Tomlin is building Minecraft in the Xbox. He's playing it in an Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:26]:
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte [01:48:27]:
Isn't that— you— I would not want to build in an Xbox. That's, that's hard.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:31]:
No, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:48:32]:
I don't know, but maybe he's just showing it off because isn't that an Xbox controller?

Paul Thurrott [01:48:36]:
Sure looks like one. Yeah, it looks like an Xbox controller.

Leo Laporte [01:48:39]:
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, or is it a PlayStation? No, it's—

Paul Thurrott [01:48:41]:
oh, wait a minute. That looks like it's a Sony, doesn't it?

Leo Laporte [01:48:44]:
Oh, it's Sony.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:45]:
Sony. It's Sony.

Leo Laporte [01:48:46]:
It's a Sony.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:47]:
No baloney. Pittsburgh Steelers. This guy can go screw himself. Look, the point is, it's fine. I don't care.

Leo Laporte [01:48:54]:
Um, they're working him into being a TV commentator. It's interesting because he, you know, it's tough at first. And so they're slowly working him up. They have, you know, Clarissa or somebody working with him to kind of get him comfortable.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:06]:
He'll probably be fine at it.

Leo Laporte [01:49:07]:
Oh, he'll be great because he knows it. I'd rather see somebody who knows their stuff and sounds like Kermit the Frog.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:13]:
You talk about the Tony Romo implosion. Tom Brady got off to a rough start, although I guess that's gotten a little better. I don't know. We'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:49:19]:
Well, people think it's easy. It is not easy doing what you do. People say, oh, I could do what Paul Theroux does. They used to say— that's why people love Bing Crosby. Everybody, every man thought he could sing like Bing.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:32]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:49:32]:
Every, every, every man thinks he could podcast like Paul. No. Well, it's a skill.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:38]:
I mean, you could. I— you just— you could try. I don't think he'd want to. I mean, you know, like, I mean, go ahead. I, you know, um, good luck with that.

Leo Laporte [01:49:50]:
That's funny. Apparently Warhammer World is based in Nottingham where Kev Brewer is. And he says, Henry Cavill is often there to have a play as well as co-producing a TV series based on the world of Warhammer.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:05]:
That's great. Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:50:06]:
Yeah, we're mainstream now. We're really mainstream, we nerds. It's not— it used to be—

Paul Thurrott [01:50:10]:
I would say we were ahead of the curve. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:50:13]:
It used to be, and when we were doing tech TV, we were the outcasts. We were the kids that in high school got stuffed in a locker.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:22]:
Yep. A lot of pantsing.

Leo Laporte [01:50:23]:
A lot of pantsing going on. And, uh, and now we're on top of the world. You wish you were us.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:29]:
Oh boy. Yeah, now we're destroying the world, unfortunately. We really came full circle on that one.

Leo Laporte [01:50:35]:
Yeah, now we're the bosses, and maybe you wish we weren't.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:39]:
All you gotta do is just watch The Simpsons episode about Mensa taking over, and you can understand why you don't necessarily want this.

Leo Laporte [01:50:45]:
Lisa was a Mensa member. All right, we're gonna pause because that You have just experienced, and now you know why the Xbox segment is so beloved, was our Xbox segment. Our Back of the Book is just around the corner with Mr. Paul Thurot. We have come now to the Back of the Book. That's where Paul Thurot puts his ears on and tells us his tip of the week. Paul?

Paul Thurrott [01:51:10]:
Well, before I do that, I should just mention, uh, during the show, Microsoft released 5 new Windows Insider builds. Wow. And on experimental and experimental 26H1 is the new Windows search experience they talked about today with inline actions. So you can do complete tasks like turn on dark mode, Bluetooth, adjust screen brightness, et cetera. So that's actually starting to occur. So that's cool. All right. So this one's kind of fun.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:39]:
If you go to desktop98.com, You will find a fully featured Windows 98 simulator, which is pretty awesome. It's free.

Leo Laporte [01:51:52]:
And it's HTML. That's the funny thing, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:51:55]:
Yeah. It's not an emulator. It's a simulator. It's written in HTML or whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:52:00]:
I think this is another Vibe-coded thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:03]:
Oh yeah, I'm sure it is. But there's a bunch of like the apps that came with Windows are built in. There's a bunch of third-party apps like Netscape Navigator, Winamp, et cetera, built in. A bunch of like the web browsers have like shortcuts.

Leo Laporte [01:52:14]:
You have to be 18 or older to use it. Well, thank you, Mississippi.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:19]:
Exactly. Jesus. But there's some games in there too.

Leo Laporte [01:52:22]:
It's like Doom. Wait, wait, if I log in— oh, it wouldn't be my Windows login. It would just be an account.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:27]:
Okay. Yeah, you can just ignore it. I think there's Quake. Get rid of it.

Leo Laporte [01:52:29]:
Can I play Monkey Island?

Paul Thurrott [01:52:30]:
Yes, you can. So it runs in an emulator. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:52:34]:
Oh my God.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:36]:
I know. I know. It's incredible.

Leo Laporte [01:52:37]:
There's Paint. There's, oh, wait a minute. 3D Pinball. Oh, I love this. This was such a great game.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:44]:
By the way, that game might be coming back to Windows.

Leo Laporte [01:52:47]:
Well, what's his name wrote it, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:52:50]:
Uh, I don't know. You're talking about Dave Plummer?

Leo Laporte [01:52:52]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:52]:
I think he— I don't actually think he, I don't think he did.

Leo Laporte [01:52:54]:
Oh, he didn't. Okay. He did write it.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:56]:
No, what he did, I think he helped update it for some version of Windows. I don't think he wrote it originally. I think I could get—

Leo Laporte [01:53:05]:
I love that sound that we're starting to play. Launch Ball.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:10]:
I believe this thing was in like Plus/98. I don't think it came in Windows originally. I don't know what the controls are, but this, this is very cool. It's probably just left and right shift.

Leo Laporte [01:53:19]:
Yeah, something simple. Doom. Duke Nukem. That's funny. Duke Nukem was one of my favorite. And you— can I go full screen? Oh, I've locked the, uh, the mouse into it. Let's go full screen.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:38]:
That's insane, right? I mean, this is—

Leo Laporte [01:53:40]:
This is in HTML!

Paul Thurrott [01:53:42]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [01:53:42]:
Or maybe, maybe WebASM or something. I mean, it's got—

Paul Thurrott [01:53:45]:
The games, I think, are— those are running through an emulator of some kind.

Leo Laporte [01:53:50]:
This is basically Doom, isn't it? That's pretty funny.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:53]:
Well, yeah, well, I mean, it's Doom with an attitude, I guess.

Leo Laporte [01:53:56]:
Yeah, Doom with a very big attitude. Oh, this was a great game though. It was an awesome game, yeah. What a fun game this was. Oh, this is the unregistered shareware version.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:06]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:54:06]:
So he wrote basically something that was a, uh, a runner, like a MAME emulator almost.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:12]:
And yeah, I, I think if you look at the screens quickly, there's some mention of what the emulator is in there. Um, but how it's not something, I don't think this guy wrote this. I think he just added it, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:54:21]:
Right. There's Winamp is in here.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:25]:
It really whips the llama's ass. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:54:28]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:29]:
And I think if you open Netscape and Internet Explorer, like it has a bunch of like GeoCities URLs.

Leo Laporte [01:54:35]:
Of course it does.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:35]:
Like that are like archived.

Leo Laporte [01:54:36]:
Microsoft's homepage from 1989.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:39]:
It's fantastic.

Leo Laporte [01:54:40]:
Oh, this is so cool.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:54:43]:
And you know what? It's snappy. It's running like really smoothly.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:46]:
Oh, that's funny you say that. That's what I wrote. I said, it accurately emulates the Windows 98 desktop experience we all remember, but with one difference, which is that it runs really fast. This is way— It is better too. Way faster than it ran.

Leo Laporte [01:54:59]:
Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:59]:
That's definitely better.

Leo Laporte [01:55:00]:
Desktop98.com.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:03]:
Yep. There's no downside to it running fast. It's just really smooth.

Leo Laporte [01:55:07]:
This is, um, nostalgia city, man.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:10]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:55:11]:
Look at that.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:13]:
No, no, it's, it's, it is rather incredible.

Leo Laporte [01:55:16]:
That is so fun. Wow. All right.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:19]:
I guess if you, uh, I haven't tried this, but if you run like AOL, like it will do the modem sound, you know, and then you connect to, you know, pretend connect to, uh, Yep. So excellent.

Leo Laporte [01:55:33]:
Ooh, it's 56K.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:36]:
Sure. Nothing but the best. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:55:39]:
If you hear the boing boing, you know, you're, you're, you're living large.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:45]:
Then if me, if you're me, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:55:47]:
Look at that.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:48]:
It's a flip phone and she hears the noise.

Leo Laporte [01:55:49]:
52,000 bits per second plays. Get off the phone. I'm online. Mom, I'm online.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:55]:
You embarrass me so much.

Leo Laporte [01:55:56]:
Oh, this is, somebody really put some effort into this.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:58]:
Yeah. No, I, that's, Yeah, this was not—

Leo Laporte [01:56:01]:
oh man, what a neat—

Paul Thurrott [01:56:03]:
this is not like a weekend project. Like, this is pretty serious.

Leo Laporte [01:56:05]:
Hey, let me say hi to my, my buddy DJ Kev. Hey.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:11]:
Hey buddy. Yeah, I'm calling from the past.

Leo Laporte [01:56:14]:
Oh, I have to sign up. Oh, too bad I can't ask him his age, sex, and location. But boy, those, those sounds will really, uh, bring it back.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:27]:
Wow. Triggering in a good way, depending on—

Leo Laporte [01:56:30]:
Let's shut it down.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:30]:
You look at it, pretty good though, right?

Leo Laporte [01:56:33]:
That is amazing.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:36]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:56:36]:
Wow. Good pick. What fun is that?

Paul Thurrott [01:56:40]:
I was, I was, yeah, I like, I, I was really happy when I found that.

Leo Laporte [01:56:43]:
Gotta be vibe coded. Maybe not though. You know, it's too bad that everything now, I think everything's vibe coded.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:48]:
Yeah, it probably is. That's okay.

Leo Laporte [01:56:50]:
That's great. Nothing wrong with it. It's working.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:54]:
It tastes like real chocolate. Who cares? So one of the games I left out of the Game Pass thing earlier is Gears of War: E-Day, which— so if you have a Game Pass subscription, that game came out, I guess, Tuesday, and it's available, you know, on Game Pass. It is fantastic. Like, I've been playing it. I have this 18-inch gaming laptop from Lenovo that's unbelievable, but I played through most of the first act, which is probably, I don't remember anymore, 5 or 6 levels. And it's the beginning of the game, obviously. So this is like the beginning of the attack on this planet by these aliens that have been underground forever waiting for their moment. And no one knows what's going on and whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:35]:
And the setup for this is, it's so fantastic and so well done. And the graphics are beautiful. The gameplay is fantastic. Gears of War was always great, Like from day one, and I probably played the first game especially, but the first 2 games at least several times each. But this is in many ways actually better, and I don't just mean like it looks better, etc. Like it kind of fixes some of the little problems I had with Gears over the years, which is it always had that kind of bottom-heavy, you're almost creep, you know, bent over the ground, like really close to the ground thing.

Leo Laporte [01:58:06]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:07]:
This is a little faster moving and you can move around more and stuff, and it's just It's just so well done. Like, it's— this is surprising. I, I haven't liked a single-player game this much in forever. And I, I tried this past year with a couple of games. There was a Star Wars game I played through a little bit of. And, um, God, what else did I do? Uh, I don't remember. But I've tried a couple of different, um, single-player games, you know, fairly recently. I'm having mostly played just multiplayer, right, for many years.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:35]:
But this is awesome. Like, it's awesome. I'm really shocked by how good this is. This is the, you know, when Microsoft makes like a new Halo game, like they did with Infinite several years ago now, or whatever it was, like this is what they're shooting for. And they just have never really gotten to, you know, somehow. And I don't know why this is different. I'm not sure why they were able to do this, but this game is just, it's just great. It's really, really great.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:00]:
It's definitely worth checking out.

Leo Laporte [01:59:04]:
Nice. Better than Call of Duty? There's a new one, isn't there?

Paul Thurrott [01:59:07]:
You're going to get— Let's not be silly.

Leo Laporte [01:59:10]:
That's okay. There's no—

Paul Thurrott [01:59:11]:
no, the new one, the new one's in Korea. Korea. That one's coming out sometime. Is it this month? I think it's late this month.

Leo Laporte [01:59:17]:
I've seen the ads for it, so it must be soon.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:19]:
Yeah. So I've been— I played the 2, you know, they had the 2 multiplayer— well, the 2 betas, not multiplayer, multiplayer and single player really. But, um, I did play those. Um, it's— that's going to be very, very good. Yeah, that's a good one. But this is, I don't know, single player. It's good. It's been a while.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:37]:
I'm really happy with it.

Leo Laporte [01:59:39]:
Nice. All right.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:40]:
Uh, and then Richard's not here, but I just, I, I might have mentioned this at some point. I feel like I must have mentioned it to him, but when we are in Mexico, we often end up in a place called, um, Taco Bar, which is fantastic.

Leo Laporte [01:59:55]:
You've mentioned it before, making me very jealous.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:58]:
Yeah, I've had 2 interesting— well, I've had more than 2, but I've had 2 of the more interesting experiences I've had there is when it's quiet and you're hanging out, the guys, we're just hanging out with it and they're always getting to me to try stuff. They're like, have you tried this? Have you tried this? They tried different things. There was a guy, he's not there anymore, but this guy was like, he keeps trying to give me smoky mezcal or something. And I'm like, dude, how many times do I got to tell you? He loves it. They love that stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:00:26]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:26]:
He's like, I don't like smoky drinks. He's like, well, you should like it. I'm like, I agree.

Leo Laporte [02:00:30]:
They say that. But I don't. They do.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:32]:
He's like, you should like it, but I don't. So let's just not.

Leo Laporte [02:00:35]:
They force it on you. I was in Oaxaca the whole week. They were forcing this stuff on us.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:40]:
Yep. It's unbelievable. But so—

Leo Laporte [02:00:43]:
It's the national drink, I think.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:45]:
The other crazy one—

Leo Laporte [02:00:46]:
It's not. It's mezcal.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:48]:
Yeah, it is now. Yeah. Um, the other one is— this is— I, I feel like I must have mentioned this when it happened, but, um, there is a— in Boston of all places— a distillery. Um, oh God, I'm losing my mind now. What's it called? Uh, Privateer, that makes rum. You know, like rum from Boston. That doesn't make any sense. Honestly, it actually does make sense.

Leo Laporte [02:01:09]:
They were on the triangle. That's exactly—

Paul Thurrott [02:01:11]:
Yeah, it's like molasses-based.

Leo Laporte [02:01:12]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:13]:
Um, it's really, really good. And they have one that's like—

Leo Laporte [02:01:15]:
it's—

Paul Thurrott [02:01:16]:
I think it's, it's like that That soap, you get it like Carhartt, it's like Naval Strength or something like that. It's got a name like that, but it's awesome. So we're sitting there, you got to imagine there's like 1,000 bottles.

Leo Laporte [02:01:28]:
So you're saying instead of tastes like real chocolate, tastes like real Carhartt?

Paul Thurrott [02:01:31]:
It tastes like real Carhartt soap. There's all these— it's like, you know the scene in E.T. where the E.T. is hiding in the stuffed animal pile and because he looks like one of the stuffed animals, no one sees him? This was like that except the alcohol version. So in the middle of this gigantic wall of alcohol, there's a bottle that has a distinctive 3-stripe pattern on it. And I'm looking at it and I'm like, uh, can I see that please? And he brings it over and it, it was, it was Privateer from Boston. I was like, okay, so there's no way you guys have this here, so why do you have this? And he's like, I have no idea. And I'm like, well, I know the owner, this guy Chris.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:06]:
So I was like, well, I assume some, some guy from Boston came here.

Leo Laporte [02:02:10]:
A Patriot brought it there.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:11]:
And brought it back then. And that's exactly— so when I saw Chris the next time, he's like, yeah, that's exactly what happened. I'm like, yep, I figured. So I drank all of it. And then, um, like, not in one sitting. I mean, like, and, and I had the guy— the guy at the bar was like drawing a line in the bottle, like, as I went down it. So I was like the only person that ever drank this because, like, no one knows what it is. And when I drank all of it, I had a friend from Boston coming to visit, so I asked him to bring a bottle of that.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:36]:
So we replenished it. And then I drank the rest of that too. Um, but anyway, the other one that I found there, which I'd never heard of, which is kind of weird because this is American, it's this Kentucky bourbon, is, um, there was a bottle of— it was called 1792. And it was one of those nights, it was like, like I described earlier, was dead and they're trying different things. And I was like, what is, what is that thing? And he's like, oh, you don't want that. And I was like, I, I want it.

Leo Laporte [02:03:00]:
I might. No, I want it.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:01]:
No, you don't want it.

Leo Laporte [02:03:02]:
No, you don't want that.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:03]:
I'm like, okay, you want the mezcal thing? I'm like, no, I don't. I want that. So at some point I finally said, look, what is it? And he said, well, you— he goes, it's a bourbon, but it's like, it's got some kind of a fat wash in it. And I was like, oh, that's exactly what I want. I love that kind of thing.

Leo Laporte [02:03:16]:
What's a fat wash?

Paul Thurrott [02:03:18]:
So, you know, sometimes you get like a whiskey or bourbon drink and they, they'll take some kind of fat, like it could be bacon, and they'll kind of rub it on the inside of the glass and then they pour the drink into it and you get kind of the some of the fat out of that as you drink it or whatever. But this was a bottle of bourbon where that had been kind of just added to it. So it was in the— it's like in the bottle. So you get that kind of— it's got a, like, a viscous kind of a viscosity, I guess, like a mouthfeel to it, but also like a little bit of a taste. It's really good. I just love that kind of fat taste. I don't know how to explain it. It's really good.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:55]:
And, uh, I drank the rest of that. But then they have regular 1792, which is like a small batch thing. And it's good. It's very good actually. So I've tried to find that locally and we don't have it here locally. We have a state liquor system. But when I was just up in Boston last week, I was talking to my friend. I'm like, listen, I got to go to— they have an awesome liquor store the size of Rhode Island.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:16]:
I'm like, I got to go over there and see if they have this thing.

Leo Laporte [02:04:18]:
That's for all the people who have to go to the state liquor store. They can go to the Boston liquor store.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:25]:
Yeah, one in Boston. Is that a state store too? No, we don't have state liquor stores in Boston.

Leo Laporte [02:04:29]:
I'm confused. Where do you live? Oh, you live in Pennsylvania.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:32]:
Oh, Pennsylvania.

Leo Laporte [02:04:32]:
We have state liquor stores.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:34]:
Pennsylvania. So, uh, New Hampshire has them.

Leo Laporte [02:04:36]:
Yeah. And so does Canada.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:37]:
They're always— they're right on the border, you know, of course. Um, so I went— it's, uh, what's it called? It's called, uh, Yankee— I think it's called Yankee Spirits. You'll see them around.

Leo Laporte [02:04:48]:
Yankee Liquor.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:48]:
Rhode Island. Yeah, you'll see them. This one's— this was a big one though. It's a really—

Leo Laporte [02:04:52]:
It's so funny how New England still has blue laws. It just cracks me up.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:56]:
It's like we're never, we're never going to grow up. It's just the way we are. But, um, they don't— they didn't have the fat wash one, but they had like the norm, like the small batch, right? Which is this thing. So like, you gotta, you gotta show me real quick. I don't normally care if I'm on camera, but, um, this bottle— hold on, should I click on that?

Leo Laporte [02:05:14]:
There we go. Oh my God, it's huge!

Paul Thurrott [02:05:16]:
The size of my head.

Leo Laporte [02:05:18]:
It's not fat washed, it's just fat.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:20]:
It's just, I picked this thing up and I was like, you know, like, I'm like, holy crap.

Leo Laporte [02:05:25]:
The webpage doesn't do it justice.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:29]:
Well, it's a 1, it's like not quite 2, it's like a 1.7, whatever the measure. It's like double the size of a normal bottle. But I was like, so I went there to get this, right? That's why I was there. So I put, I was like, holy, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. But the thing is, I noticed as I walked around looking at everything else they had, like Maker's Mark, very common, they had in this size. And the other one was Elijah Craig, which is also very good, by the way. And this was less expensive than both of them. And I was like, okay, I think my car was overweight from driving home with this thing, but it's very good.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:07]:
So if you ever see this around, whether you're in a bar, restaurant, or just a liquor store or whatever, It's not more expensive than the standard stuff. I know it's humongous. I can barely lift the thing, especially with my left arm.

Leo Laporte [02:06:18]:
I'm like— So again, what does the fat washing do? Does it make it taste a certain way or I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:23]:
Well, this isn't that. So by the way—

Leo Laporte [02:06:24]:
It's an unappealing description.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:26]:
No. Well, it depends on where you're at, I guess. This is not that one. This is the small batch standard one.

Leo Laporte [02:06:32]:
Oh, okay.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:33]:
Okay. They didn't have that. And I asked someone about it and they said, yeah, you know, it's funny. We did have that. And I actually haven't seen it in a while. And then after we got home, I looked it up and it's not on their website. So I wonder if it wasn't like a temporary thing they did, or maybe it's the only one who liked it. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:50]:
But this is just standard. It's bourbon. It's just bourbon. This is a really good version of a Kentucky bourbon whiskey.

Leo Laporte [02:06:56]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:56]:
Yeah, it's great.

Leo Laporte [02:06:58]:
And you get a lot of it for your dollar. I guess if you have to go to Boston to get it, it's worth stocking up. Ooh, he's going to do the Richard and taste it.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:07]:
The thing is, this is not the first time I've tasted this. Actually, you can probably see because I bought this thing on Saturday morning.

Leo Laporte [02:07:15]:
It's slipping away. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:17]:
In my defense, I drink a lot. No, in my defense, I—

Leo Laporte [02:07:20]:
This is, by the way, it says full proof. What is full proof? Is it cask strength? Full proof.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:26]:
This is a small— yeah. Well, that's interesting because I think they actually make one called cask strength. This is a small batch version, so it's probably single barrel. Well, it doesn't say that though, does it? So there's probably single barrel, and then there's probably just small number of barrels, and maybe that's—

Leo Laporte [02:07:41]:
Okay, so the one I'm looking at on the webpage isn't the one you're drinking.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:44]:
No, that's a cool looking bottle though, isn't it?

Leo Laporte [02:07:46]:
It is. It's in a little bed of gold.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:50]:
Yeah, I was gonna say it looks like it might be very expensive. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:07:53]:
Yeah, it's funny because isn't Don Julio 1492? I mean, maybe I'm wrong on that. Something about '90s.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:01]:
Yeah. I'm not sure what the distinction is of the year. This is something that Richard would've spent 3 weeks researching. I know.

Leo Laporte [02:08:05]:
You know, it all started in the Paleocene when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:10]:
We'll start at the beginning. First, there were dinosaurs. Right. All I can tell you is this is— so bourbon is always smoother than Scotch. I mean, obviously. Well, maybe not obviously, but it is.

Leo Laporte [02:08:23]:
Yeah. I like bourbon a lot.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:25]:
But this is an interesting— like this, there's really good bourbons, you know, of course, But this one kind of edges into Scotch territory in the sense, and I don't mean like in a peaty sense, like a non-peaty Scotch, but it has a little bit of a, like a rye kind of bite to it. And it's, to me, it's the perfect, um, just the perfect extra on top of what is normally a very smooth bourbon. Like it's just like, just a step into the direction of rye or Scotch. Like it's, it's really, really good. Strong recommend.

Leo Laporte [02:08:55]:
Very nice. Ladies and gentlemen, you got the whole thing. You got the kit and the caboodle. You got the, you got the Xbox segment, you got the very long screed about the Google Book and the—

Paul Thurrott [02:09:07]:
Oh, one more thing about Google Book, by the way. Glad you mentioned that.

Leo Laporte [02:09:12]:
This is, this is, this is full strength Paul Theroux. That's what this is.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:17]:
Like during the ad, another thing that really bothered me about Google Book.

Leo Laporte [02:09:20]:
Full proof, full proof. It's not foolproof. So apparently, according to, uh, Darren Oakey, who looked it up, uh, it's a whiskey that's bottled at the alcohol proof at which it first entered the bottle for aging, which would be somewhere between the diluted version and the barrel strength. Because barrel strength is going to be higher because of the angel's share. It's going to be a little stronger, I think.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:44]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:09:44]:
You know what we need?

Paul Thurrott [02:09:45]:
It's definitely strong. I, I, yeah, the reason is I went to a a party, I guess, a group of guys got together, whatever. But I made Manhattans with this for everybody, and 2 of 1, they were all like, these— this is really strong. And I was like, yeah, no, I'm an alcoholic. But I mean, no, but I, I think that— no, I think it's— this is just stronger than— like, if you put— if you would put the same amount of, um, just a standard bourbon— I'm trying to think of something.

Leo Laporte [02:10:11]:
They, uh, they have some mixed drinks on the website, including one that I'm desperate to try, the Butter pecan Old Fashioned.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:18]:
Butter pecan.

Leo Laporte [02:10:19]:
Butter pecan. Bourbon, butter pecan infused 1792 bourbon, Amaro, Demerara syrup, and 2 dashes of bitter. That's— that might turn a man like me to drinking. You have to drink.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:33]:
It's good.

Leo Laporte [02:10:36]:
I like it. I like it. Leo like it.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:38]:
I like it enough to drive it, whatever, for 6 hours in both— well, one direction, I guess.

Leo Laporte [02:10:43]:
But that's the only problem. You can't drink it till you get home.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:46]:
Yeah, no, I had it between my legs on the ride home, but, you know, nice and warm when you get home.

Leo Laporte [02:10:55]:
I do like the, the custom album art that Darren Oakey made for us because I don't know if you saw it. You were busy.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:02]:
Yeah, that's fantastic.

Leo Laporte [02:11:04]:
It is officially now Paul's whiskey segment. Well, and you've got the ghost.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:09]:
I will happily cede control back to the person who deserves it so much more than I do.

Leo Laporte [02:11:13]:
I think you earned some credit there.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:16]:
I like that he's like a Jedi ghost.

Leo Laporte [02:11:18]:
He's the ghost.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:19]:
Yes. Why didn't you tell me the truth about my father, Richard? From a certain point of view, I did tell you the truth.

Leo Laporte [02:11:25]:
Oh, I tell you. Ladies and gentlemen, we do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 18:00 UTC. You can watch us live if you're in the club, and I hope you are in the club. I'm so grateful to Our club members. We are, as we come to the close of the 3rd quarter of fiscal 2026, in a bit of a cash crunch. And if it weren't for the club, there would be no Windows Weekly. So sincerely, thank you. It's now almost half of our operating expenses.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:58]:
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have— I just feel the need to promote this. Kev Brewer said of the picture of Richard as the Jedi ghost that Richard was here in spirit, which is so funny. Oh, he is.

Leo Laporte [02:12:07]:
That's very good.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:09]:
See the wordplay there?

Leo Laporte [02:12:11]:
Yes, I get it. I get it. And it looks like Richard took all of— drank the entire glass of Macallan 18 that you poured for him. So he does well for a ghost. Club members do get to watch the show in the Discord. Otherwise, everybody's invited. See, this is the thing. The club members foot the bill so that we can offer everybody free ad-supported versions of the show.

Leo Laporte [02:12:35]:
On YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. See, or go to the website, twit.tv/ww. You can download them freely, audio and video. YouTube has a channel dedicated to Windows Weekly, but of course, best thing to do, it's a podcast, so subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:53]:
I heard that as YouTube has a channel devoted to Windows Weekly, which would be so fantastic.

Leo Laporte [02:12:58]:
Oh no, he's such a fan.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:59]:
God, it's about time.

Leo Laporte [02:13:00]:
Yep. The Edge, not so much, but Bono loves you.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:04]:
That guy's the one riff guy. He's fine.

Leo Laporte [02:13:07]:
It always cracks me up.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:11]:
I love you too.

Leo Laporte [02:13:12]:
Keith, I do too. But Keith Richards in his book spends a lot of time talking about how for every song he had to have a unique sound guitar riff. Like, for Satisfaction, he ping-ponged it back and forth between a tape player 4 or 5 times.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:26]:
Yeah. When did he stop doing that? Like 1972?

Leo Laporte [02:13:28]:
Well, now he's got other ways. What are you talking about? Every song, every song, he said, has to have a unique guitar sound. And, and meanwhile, U2, it's the same sound.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:39]:
Just like every song, it just does the same, you know?

Leo Laporte [02:13:43]:
Oh no.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:43]:
And it always sounds great. You're like, you know what, I don't care if it's the same, I can tell it's you. It's like AC/DC's like this. Yeah, I wonder what band this is.

Leo Laporte [02:13:50]:
That's really true. AC/DC, like, what are you talking about?

Paul Thurrott [02:13:53]:
It's the same. Yeah, but it's awesome.

Leo Laporte [02:13:55]:
Like, it's, it's just, you know, different.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:56]:
I really like it.

Leo Laporte [02:13:57]:
Different strums for different bums. Speaking of bums, Richard will be back next week.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:06]:
Wow, right under the bus. That's what you get for not being here.

Leo Laporte [02:14:13]:
We will be back here too, and I hope you will too join us next Wednesday for another exciting edition of Windows Weekly. Thank you, Paul. Have a great day.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:22]:
Thank you. Bye-bye.

Leo Laporte [02:14:31]:
Bye.