Windows Weekly 876 Transcript

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

- Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot's here, richard Campbell's here. They're both home. For a brief moment, we're going to talk about Windows AI the future build is coming up, a lot of AI information, a little bit of Xbox news and some brown liquor. Next, on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is twit. This is windows weekly, with paul thurad and richard campbell. Episode 876, recorded wednesday, april 10th, 2024. Soldier on, it is time for Windows Weekly. Yes, the moment. You've all been waiting for the chance to throw old fruit and vegetables at Paul Theriot, theriotcom, richard Campbell oh, you've been in my comments section, Richard Campbell from Run as Radio.

0:01:01 - Richard Campbell
Hello, I was thinking Paul's generally the tosser, not the tossee, that's true, but I think, these things get tossed in both directions once you start tossing.

0:01:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, all better, it's welcome to the.

0:01:13 - Richard Campbell
I'm often called a tosser. That's one of the terms.

0:01:15 - Paul Thurrott
Actually you're a tosser I don't know.

0:01:17 - Leo Laporte
I really, if I really want to know that's a britishism, but I don't really know, I don't know what it. Yeah, it's not complimentary, I think.

0:01:23 - Richard Campbell
So I think you're right, that's not a nice thing to say hey torsa.

0:01:29 - Leo Laporte
So what's the? What's the haps with the? Uh? You know what? I'm seeing a lot of positive press about uh, about this npu thing and qual comes next. And uh, the verge said yesterday microsoft wants to beat Apple.

0:01:46 - Paul Thurrott
Who cares what Microsoft or the Verge says what I say?

0:01:49 - Leo Laporte
is what does Paul?

0:01:50 - Paul Thurrott
Peratt say. What does Paul Peratt say? No, I mean, oh, microsoft said something, marketing, marketing, marketing about Windows. That's interesting. No, yeah, you know, what's more interesting is someone who looks at it themselves and says, actually this thing's pretty damn good, is it? Is it? Are you excited it?

0:02:05 - Leo Laporte
really is.

0:02:06 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, so you took this thing out for a spin.

0:02:08 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I took it in for a spin. I couldn't take it anywhere, but it was a. Yeah, qualcomm has started inviting the press to kind of see for themselves, like what these things like ahead of the release of actual hardware. So it's Qualcomm, you know you don't get to hear about, like, which companies are doing what and when and that kind of stuff, so those announcements will come, but, um, they have their own reference hardware and, um, yeah, some interesting stuff came out of that. I mean, I just qualified by saying you know there's always that little kind of gotcha that may or may not happen, we'll see. But um, you know, it's one thing to be in a room with a bunch of these computers and be able to play with them and do whatever you want to do. But I mean, obviously you have to get an actual hardware from a computer from Dell or Lenovo or HP or whatever, and see what those are like in the real world. But what I saw that day was nothing but impressive, like really impressive.

0:03:02 - Richard Campbell
And so it seems to be feel overbuilt, like they're really building a crazy high-end machine or or you never know with reference hardware yep oh, so this is not from this is not like the latest dell.

0:03:14 - Leo Laporte
This is a qualcomm build yeah, these were qualcomm computers.

0:03:18 - Paul Thurrott
They, depending on the machine, it had 16, 32 or 64 gigs of ram. Uh, lp, ddr5x. Right, so it's fast. You know good ssds, um, they were just 1080p screens. Nothing special there, um, but yeah, running. You know the, the x elite processor which has the integrated cpu, gpu and mpu, um, and then you gotta call it an m1 competitor, right?

0:03:45 - Richard Campbell
I mean, that's what you're describing, that's what they're aiming at, isn't it?

0:03:48 - Paul Thurrott
it's an m3 competitor actually, right? I mean it's it's. You know these things are not neck to neck, but in every category I I think the way it works out is that, um, single core, I think the m3 is a little ahead, and multi-core, I think the M3 is a little ahead, and multi-core, the Qualcomm is ahead. You know that kind of thing. But, like I said, you know this is going to come down to actual real-world software running on real-world PCs and also, you know what's the battery life like? Right, you know we don't know that.

But the thing that's in the interesting framing bit for me is I've been using this MacBook Air lately and it is uh, super thin, very light for the size of the screen. It has no fans, makes no noise, it never heats up, it never gets overloaded, it never glitches or acts weird. It does anything strange and, um, you know sitting in that room with these computers and playing you know playing some games and running some AI stuff and, um, this is a good, actually, this is a pretty funny video. You might, that might be worth playing. Um, and playing some games and running some AI stuff. Actually, this is a pretty funny video that might be worth playing.

But there were some good demos and one of them was well, a lot of them speak to this question we've had, which is okay. But what are the apps? How are we going to use this thing in the real world? How do we sell this on people? What's the elevator pitch or whatever? You know um. One of the the better demos um well, that's not really one of the demos um was audacity is using the mpu to do a real-time song creation based on a text prompt, right um that sounds, stable diffusion.

Obviously there was uh video editing with da vinci resolve, which is using the mpu across a variety of workloads. You know that type of stuff. Um the, these, the games you're seeing here in this video, are emulated. These are x64 games, they're desktop apps, they're from epic, not from the, the Microsoft store.

0:05:44 - Richard Campbell
Wow, so this is a worst case scenario.

0:05:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean and this is see before I saw this what I would have said to you, like, what are these chips targeting? I would have said mainstream ultra book.

0:05:57 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you know and I said, my reaction is seeing games being played. It's like why are we looking at games?

0:06:06 - Paul Thurrott
Because that stretches the limits of. Yeah, you know what's possible, right? So um, the the other. The other video, leo is, is actually kind of humorous, only because I make a joke at the end of it. That was just perfectly timed, but it's. The other one is like a uh is the music creation demo, uh, video. It's only, it's probably just 12 or 15 seconds long, but if I don't know if Is it in the same article. It's in the article.

0:06:28 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, if you scroll down you'll see it in the middle of the article, Still scrolling. I just want to see what do you pin the NPU with. I love your screenshot there where the NPU is running 50%. That's what you want. Tell me you're using it. We've got five minutes. Yeah, exactly that's what you want. Right, Tell me you're using it.

0:06:44 - Paul Thurrott
Nine seconds here, we got five minutes of here we go, five seconds. It created every Nickelback song. I'm unduly proud of that one, but anyway, um, yeah it. Um. Look we, I would say. Since last october when they announced this uh chipset, there has been a lot of rumors and leaked benchmark stuff and you know it's all been very positive and nothing I saw did anything but verify that kind of stuff right there like this is what?

0:07:22 - Leo Laporte
yeah, this is what qualcomm promised last year at their event. And, of course, my reaction was the sensible one we've yeah, you've lied to us before you know, let's wait and see.

0:07:31 - Paul Thurrott
But now we've waited and we're seeing the only yeah, it's like you've been punched in the face repeatedly and the guy standing it was fist like this. He's like no, this time I'm not gonna punch you and you're like I. I wish I could get in this red though I.

0:07:42 - Leo Laporte
I tell you what. I forget the performance and all that. I just want the red color of that. That's beautiful. That's AMD's color, though Somebody better tell Qualcomm.

0:07:51 - Paul Thurrott
So one interesting thing that I noticed there and others noticed too. I shouldn't pretend this was like an original thought or anything, but Qualcomm wouldn't talk about this too too much. But there are different versions of this chip in those computers. I um, some people were reporting it as two. I think I saw three different versions and they have different um kind of model numbers and different. They have the same core. The mpu is the same always, um, sometimes they're. It's not clear like what, what the differences were with that, but there is some sort of hierarchy or tiering of the of the chipset. Uh. So you know the only thing they said to they like. They said basically, like we're not going to talk about this, but, uh, the one thing we can promise you is that, unlike certain companies, we're not going to over skew it. You know, like, in other words, we're not going to have a million processor versions like, say, intel does. So we'll see what that means, but I thought that was kind of interesting.

0:08:50 - Leo Laporte
So they're all Orion Core, right. That's the code name O-R-Y-O-N, but they're different.

0:08:57 - Richard Campbell
There's different.

0:08:58 - Leo Laporte
There are multiple skews.

0:08:59 - Richard Campbell
This is running four gigahertz which

0:09:01 - Leo Laporte
is really interesting.

0:09:02 - Paul Thurrott
That's really high the one was higher than that. Yeah, which is really interesting. That's a really high one. It was higher than that, actually. And then there was a three-point something.

But you know, the other thing is and again, I'm not a hardware guy, I have to keep qualifying these things Companies can handle this multi-core performant core, efficient core thing differently, right? So Intel, as they move into this kind of hybrid architecture with the core core ultra chipsets in particular, have three types of cores, right, there's performant cores, efficient cores and high efficient core ultra, whatever the term is. And the idea is you can turn these things on or off as needed, and ideally what you have is a computer sitting there doing nothing and all the cores are off. But maybe one or two of the high efficiency cores are just sitting there doing background processes or something like that, and it's efficient. Right, apple has two.

Is that true? I think Apple has two kinds of cores, right? Yeah, and AMD, the one-off kind of chips that they did before they started moving everything over to this hybrid architecture. The way their cores worked, for this was like in the hp dragonfly row, I think is the name of it um, whatever number of cores it had, they could turn them on and off arbitrarily, but also, uh, vary the amount of power they receive. Uh, so that's another way to kind of handle performance, efficiency etc, um cetera. So these Qualcomm chipsets, or this Qualcomm chipset, has only one type of core.

0:10:33 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, multiple cores. You're really talking about how Intel compensates for the fact that their pipelines are too complicated. Yeah, and they're just afraid to get away from that. So they've gone this multiple different strategies to try it's, it's right power consumption, where we just were simpler in the first place. You know what? If there was one kind of core that was power efficient and performant, you?

0:10:54 - Paul Thurrott
know what a concept. Why can't the one core do it all? Yeah, so that's why I think the amd approach is kind of interesting, because it's mimicking how at least our qualcomm does things. So you know in the arm space.

0:11:04 - Richard Campbell
I mean I would argue that's a byproduct of arm more than it's a byproduct of what qualcomm did with it.

0:11:09 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, yeah, okay, um yeah, I don't know, like I said, not really a hard and I don't would you like a 20 minute on heart on cpu architecture, like we can do that.

0:11:18 - Richard Campbell
I don't think you want it, just I don't.

0:11:20 - Paul Thurrott
I'm just I, I'm just. I just I bring it up only because I found it interesting and I don't want anyone to think I'm presenting myself as some kind of an expert Like this system is better, because it's not that, it's just different. It's interesting to me that it's different, yeah.

0:11:34 - Richard Campbell
And we'll see. There's a keynote I do where I talk about the hardware problems in relation to Moore's Law and I show the logic diagram of a modern Intel CPU beside the logic diagram of a modern ARM chip. I think it's like the A8 or something like that, and it's just because they've continuously built on it and built on it and built on it. There's just so many different little subsystems all through the CPU that they're afraid to every time they try to move away from it. They've been hammered by it right, like their customers have always been angry with them for it.

0:12:09 - Paul Thurrott
Well, they are the hardware version of Microsoft. They can't get away from the backwards compat thing, you know.

0:12:14 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, they have the innovator's dilemma by times a thousand right.

0:12:18 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I know that when Apple was designing the M-series chips, one of the modifications they made, what and it was kind of in deference to the uh legacy code base, right then on the mac, just like on windows, it was intel based right at that time um, they did something to allow for a quick conversion of those different architectures specifically for emulated code right, which went a long way apparently to making those things more efficient, to that kind of thing and is one of those things that just helped the Mac be very successful in that transition. Right, you know, whereas you know, I don't know how they again not a hardware guy, but I look back at something like Windows RT, which was our initial attempt in the Windows space to go to ARM, and you know we got it to compile and everything you know, but it could not emulate like emulating the advantage that Apple has is the walled garden.

0:13:12 - Richard Campbell
It's their hardware, it's their OS, it's their core apps. They're used to beating their developers to death anyway. So you know they don't. It's like hey, you changed ship set, you need to fix your apps or you don't get to ship Like.

0:13:28 - Paul Thurrott
that's how it is. There is a it's not worth debating but the different approaches of Microsoft and Apple when it comes to backward compatibility, the more aggressive way that Apple obsoletes technology and moves forward right, has its advantages. It has its disadvantages. I mean, I think you know in the Windows space one of the reasons why. Or in the PC space, you know one of the reasons why Windows is such a big deal for enterprises, I think, and they want that stability and they want that they want to know that you don't have to think about it, everything's going to work always.

0:13:57 - Richard Campbell
You know, they know they want a 10-year machine that doesn work for 10 years. Yep and microsoft is.

0:14:03 - Paul Thurrott
You know, they deliver that and I I always felt like maybe there was a happy medium that could be found, but I well, I don't know what's the argument for these qualcomm machines?

0:14:12 - Richard Campbell
it's not necessarily windows, so much as it's less expensive mac-like computers. Apple never tries to go for the low margin devices. That's not their business right. They're the mark, they're the luxury product and they price accordingly I, I don't, I want to be careful, I I'm not.

0:14:29 - Paul Thurrott
I don't mean to, I'm not throwing a like a, a pc company, out under a bus or anything. I don't mean it like this, but it is just a weird coincidence that the other night I told the story to brad. This morning, but I was, I was. I got a new computer to review and I'm setting it up, or we're watching tv, my wife and I, in the dark there and I'm just doing all the initial setup stuff right, and so it has to install updates. It has to install app updates, it reboots and it installs a firmware update and as it's doing that, the machine it's.

This is the sound that went on for 15 minutes you know, the that sounds like the fan noise out of the thing two seconds in my wife looks. She's like what are you doing? And I'm like I, I don't know. It's updating the firmware. I so you know this is a uh as modern of a pc as you can get. It has a core ultra, whatever 7, 155 h, whatever it is processor.

And I'm looking over at this MacBook Air which has no fans right and is super efficient and gets literally 24 hours, well, literally probably 18 hours of battery life or whatever it is, but and I'm thinking to myself this we can't get to that quick enough in the Windows space, like it's so important, and this is the thing you know.

0:15:42 - Richard Campbell
And you've got to know that there's a safety mechanism, that machine that when it's changing the firmware that would normally vary the fan speed, default fans to max until the firmware is back. Oh, that's good yeah right that, otherwise you could damage the machine but well, I'm glad the machine's safe um I just uh, but it ruins better, you know? Um, yeah, it ruined your viewing of friends, but what are you gonna?

0:16:05 - Leo Laporte
Don't update firmware while you're watching.

0:16:07 - Paul Thurrott
TV.

0:16:10 - Richard Campbell
I was going to say everybody loves Raymond.

0:16:12 - Leo Laporte
Does this matter for desktops? Are we still going to want to use Intel on the desktop and just Qualcomm Right? So the two things that are going on.

0:16:20 - Paul Thurrott
So it's funny because Richard asked a question that I think is related to this up front, which was like what's the market these things target? Like I said in the beginning, before last week I would have assumed it's solely ultra-thin, ultra-light, portable laptops, business class laptops, right, and there's no doubt that's a big part of the push. This is the kind of you know, the MacBook Air mainstream part of the market. Right, it's where most PCs are sold, but it seems like it's better than that, so it could be.

0:16:49 - Richard Campbell
I think it is too.

0:16:51 - Paul Thurrott
It has kind of a tiered experience maybe. So I'm not saying it's a gaming PC, but it's maybe more than you know. It's more than just that center part of the market. So that's interesting.

0:17:01 - Richard Campbell
I think that the race right now is who establishes the NPU standard? Yeah, this is the race, and you have to do it with hardware. You have to Yep.

0:17:11 - Paul Thurrott
We're going to talk about this a little bit. I want to get to the Intel stuff in a second and the thing is like Apple should win this, except they missed the AI ride.

0:17:18 - Richard Campbell
So let's see what happens.

0:17:19 - Paul Thurrott
We're two months, what is it? Three months away from wwc. I'm really curious to see what they come out of the gate with, because they are also going to follow google and microsoft, yeah, with their respective developer show. So this is the next. This is why I had this up front. The next few months are in just an inflection point almost in the industry.

0:17:36 - Richard Campbell
It's very, very interesting. This is when the mpu standard gets declared. What are we going to build against? Yep?

0:17:41 - Paul Thurrott
but with regards to desktop computers or, you know, workstation class computers or gaming computers, that kind of thing, I think that there are two things going on. One is that ARM is scaling up, obviously, and we'll see how the companies that actually provide ARM chipsets adapt or don't adapt to the needs of that market, like dedicated, you know, like bigger, beefier GPUs in particular, whether it happens or not, or on the Intel x86, whatever side, we'll see hybrid designs, that kind of mimic, the arm architecture, or maybe one day adopted, right, or maybe it's the, it's that car truck thing that Steve jobs talked about. I mean, at some point that part of the market becomes a smaller and smaller, still important, but kind of subset of the market for those, and smaller, still important, but uh, kind of subset of the market for those. I'm going to call them vertical use cases, right, uh, gamers, uh, workstations, etc. Etc. Yeah, I don't, I don't know.

0:18:35 - Richard Campbell
I mean, we'll see, we'll see I would also argue here that this is weird. If microsoft wins this, it's almost unprecedented. I mean, microsoft is used to building the api that makes all the stacks work together. Right, the normal pattern for this should have been apple wins it or google wins it, the other is emulated, and then microsoft comes in third with a, with a, with an api that allows all of them to work together. If microsoft comes in first here and somebody else has to make you know, think odbc. Right, microsoft did not have a winning database and so they created an odb. They let, they abstracted the connection. Who cares what the database is? Yeah, precisely, and here's the issue, paul. Yeah, it's not just that microsoft can do that, it's that the rest of them largely can't like that whole approach to iterating on a standardized interface for developers. Right, I mean, I mean, google can, they'll just drop it three times along the way until nobody's willing to use it and Apple wants 30%.

0:19:32 - Paul Thurrott
There's something happening and it's not a thing. It's a bunch of things, but a lot of it has to do with AI and MPUs and all this stuff. We've talked about these automatic upscalers that are coming, that already here from various video card makers and are coming to Windows. You know this notion that you can. I think to date the argument was look, you have to have the beefiest possible hardware to run this thing at the best possible quality and resolution and frame rate, and that's, you can't beat the physics of it. But you can sort of beat the physics of it by emulating it to the point where for most people it doesn't matter and you enable higher quality seeming games, if you will, to be run on lesser quality hardware for lack of a better term 8K TVs aren't taking off for a reason.

0:20:21 - Richard Campbell
Most people can't see the difference. So imagine if everything is upscaled to at least HD, you know, and that's going to be good enough. Yep, and this is the real destination of augmented reality. What if we just made your world shiny?

0:20:34 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I mean, the applications here are incredible. I mean, if you keep it to a very kind of nichey kind of thing, you go back, you're like I want to look at like an old video from like an Apple keynote from the 1990s or an old Microsoft event and it's this 320 by 240, 15 frames a second piece of garbage. And what if things like that could be upscaled and that stuff's not really historically that important, but then you can apply it to things that are important and more meaningful, or to TV shows that were not filmed in HD during that horrible era between film and HD where everything was made on videotape and it was low quality. Yeah, there's a whole and that's just video, right I mean, but there's a whole world of content out there that can benefit from this stuff and things get a new lease on life. You know I talk about playing old video games all the time, like the original Halo.

0:21:27 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, the question is is that game still good if it's in high def?

0:21:32 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, I can tell you that Half-Life is the first one is absolutely I mean not all, you know, not all of them, for sure All right. So again, we could spend the two hours just on this topic. For sure it's so much going on, but generally speaking, I just want to say the next three months, a lot of stuff going on. Yeah, pcs will start appearing by mid year. We've got the back to school and the holiday shopping season's coming. We've got computer shows, computex and IFA in the fall, where you know, new computers will be announced. Microsoft is supposed to be announcing something at Build or before Build with regards to Qualcomm-based Surface computers.

0:22:13 - Richard Campbell
Intel last night I don't know how we not buy one of these. I mean really One of what? How do we not buy one of these new X-based, x-elite machines?

0:22:24 - Paul Thurrott
I don't see a version of this year where I don't yeah.

0:22:27 - Richard Campbell
I just, I just got a new machine and I'm going to need it.

0:22:30 - Paul Thurrott
Oh no, oh, I, well, I, you know what. I think you're in a good place because, for the types of things you do and the type of machine you use as a surface book followup, I think you had a Surface Book 2 before. Right, it's right there. I think you're fine. The question is going to be so this is what came up last night on the Intel thing. So everyone well, not everyone, hopefully some people know that we right now are measuring AI performance, ai accelerated performance, using a measure called TOPS, which everyone pretty much agrees is horrible and needs to disappear as quickly as possible. But for now, this is what we have. It's what is it? Trillions of instructions or operations per second? Right, that's what it measures. The Qualcomm X Elite has incredible TOPS performance.

Right, the Intel Core Ultra Meteor lake that came out that they announced and released the first uh pcs for in last december does not okay. Like it's uh, it is a uh. What is the difference? The uh, the snapdragon x elite is 45 tops, just with the mpu, the, the MPU and the Intel is 15. Or, no, sorry, it's 11. It's like it's nothing.

So Intel had an event last night, so of course, qualcomm's going to be jumping all over these guys and right now the current generation AMD chipsets are also 15, 16. You know they're not very high, so right now it's not even out. So it's not even fair to say right now, right now not very high, so right now it's not even out. So it's not even fair to say right now, right now there's nothing. But soon we'll have these x elite chips, 45 tops, right.

Um, intel had an event last night and that yesterday, and they talked about a bunch of different things ai related across chipsets, the cloud, the data center, etc. Etc. But they did like a 10 second well, it's probably two minute thing about the, the client, uh, you know, pc side, and they talked briefly about the next generation coming out, that later this year, and then they mentioned the one coming after that, but that the version of the this we'll call it the second gen core ultra chipset, the arrow lake chipset, will deliver. What's the number I gotta? I want to make sure I get the number right. It will be 45. It will match what Qualcomm is doing today, although by that point they could be heading toward Gen 2.

0:24:56 - Richard Campbell
AKA, we're committing to being behind.

0:24:59 - Paul Thurrott
Well, that's the thing. The way they marketed it I found kind of disingenuous. They were acting like they were leading and these guys are behind and we'll see. You know that kind of thing. But they also added, like this interesting nuance which I actually think makes some sense, which is that when you think about, like AI accelerated performance, it's not just the MPU. In fact, most AI workloads today are accelerated by the GPU, right, right?

So, as it turns out, you could measure the TOPS performance of a CPU and a GPU and you could also add those together on an SOC and say, hey, the overall TOPS performance of this chip is some number. So what they're saying is that… or this system rather than the chip, that this entire system has a TOPS performance. This is our lake of 100 TOPS, tops and that's across all those things. So when you look at cpu and gpu, you take away the 45, there's 55 left, most of that probably coming from the gpu, I would imagine, but I don't, they didn't say so, I don't really know. Um and the qualcomm chipset that's coming out, you know, next month or whatever uh has a total TOPS rating or performance number, or however. We say that of 75, right, amd, like I said is 15, 16 on the MPU. They are also promising a 3X boom or boost by the end of the year with the next generation of MPU and the next generation chipset. You know we'll see.

0:26:23 - Richard Campbell
So everyone's playing this kind of game right now, and I'll you tops reminds me of tpcc from the database era, which everybody agreed was a terrible specification and nobody could agree on changing it, so it just stayed.

0:26:36 - Paul Thurrott
I I feel like it's gonna go the way of like the megahertz thing. You know like remember the megahertz myth? Um, there's a lot that goes into what makes a computer, something that's complex, perform well or not, and it's going to differ. You know, it's like here's a benchmark number, neat, and then you use it in real life and you're like, yeah, but it pauses every time I go to save a document in Word. So it doesn't matter what that score is if it doesn't work well.

0:27:00 - Richard Campbell
You're talking about hyper-threading? Aren't you? So Intel compensating for old style architecture? Yeah.

0:27:09 - Paul Thurrott
Well, look, intel is Intel. I mean they have a presence, they're there. I mean they're a force to be reckoned with. And you know, software makers are going to want to address that market. They've already sold Actually they provided some kind of a number About 5 million PCs with these chipsets so far, 40 million by the end of the year expected, if not more. And then they had already said by the end of next year they expect to see 100 million core ultra-based PCs in the market, right? So you know, they're shipping at a volume that Qualcomm has never achieved in the PC space, right? They're shipping at a volume that Qualcomm has never achieved in the PC space, right?

0:27:46 - Richard Campbell
I'll bet you AMD. Once these NPU architectures are settled out and this is how you call it, and so forth, I would expect AMD to come up with a driver modification that allows their video cards to run very well as NPUs. And I would say AMD rather than NVIDIA, because NVIDIA is already leading why?

0:28:05 - Paul Thurrott
innovate, just keep running. One of the things that came out at this Qualcomm event was that, in talking with not me, but in them, talking with the various software makers right, the Adobe's of the world, the DaVinci guys, the Audacity guys, etc. They look at the workloads that their products undertake and they find that some things work better on the MPU and some things don't, and so they optimize different parts of them for different things, and so there are going to be these combinations of hardware components and then particular software apps, but also used for particular things that, for some reason, are going to work really, really good.

0:28:44 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you're on it. There's going to be a synergistic moment where this particular software, with this set of chips Yep, and that's, you know, the tops number look silly.

0:28:53 - Paul Thurrott
We're going to get advice from people like me, sadly, but the advice is going to be tip If you use Adobe Photoshop.

This is what you want these sets of parts, with this set of drivers, magic yep, and and this reminds me again of apple back in the day, when you know the g3 was kind of a thing and they would put the two computers, remember, next to each other and they'd be like, look, the g3 is done with this automated photo photoshop task and, uh, the intel penny and whatever it was at the time is not. It's like, yeah, but you know it's not that the, the Pentium, whatever it was at the time, is not. It's like, yeah, but you know it's not that the Pentium was like slower, really, it's just that Adobe optimized it for that particular chipset.

0:29:32 - Richard Campbell
If the PC, if desktop PCs were more popular, I would be more comfortable with this happening. I'm just suspecting that the laptop it matters the most and those because of the Ultrabook book movement means mix and match is not going to is going to happen at the factory, not at the customer oh yeah, I mean got well.

0:29:51 - Paul Thurrott
I mean right, are we eventually going to have, um, like the user ability to tweak? Uh, what do you call that when you overclock, like overclocking? Uh, yeah, and we're talking mpu. Yeah, probably not right away I suspect never.

0:30:04 - Richard Campbell
I you know, yeah, no, I feel the same way. Well, just because the vendors always hate it. Overclocking it creates a ton of problems and because these things are devices.

0:30:12 - Paul Thurrott
You get a chance to start over you don't allow it to happen.

0:30:14 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, but I do think the high integration of chips to get a lot of these benefits means it's going to be tough for us to innovate here as the end user path for us to innovate here. So at the as the end user.

0:30:29 - Paul Thurrott
So, um, I'm still curious how we're going to sell this to normal people, right? Because the normal path for a pc upgrade these days is you've been using this thing for several years, you finally figure out you got to get something new. It's just slowed down, it's terrible whatever it is now. Now you have choices, right. I think people legit would might go and look at a mac, they might look at a chromebook, even, depending on their needs. If you're really technically, you might even look at linux, right. So you've got that problem when you're microsoft or windows.

But if you know, whatever mainstream people don't really think about it, care too much. Type of people that buy a car without knowing anything about the brands and just want a vehicle. They don't really care, care too much. Type of people that buy a car without knowing anything about the brands and just want a vehicle. They don't really care. Go to best buy, be like whatever's the best thing. Who cares? Even in that scenario, if you wait, whatever that number of years is five, seven years, whatever that pc is going to be a nice upgrade, you know it's always going to be a good upgrade.

0:31:17 - Richard Campbell
So, and uh, rob bot was asking about, can we get laptops like that are modular, like desktops, like that's the framework laptop like framework has a chance here to grab this x elite and to modularize it.

0:31:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that would be interest, I would yeah so all right, so I I'm there.

0:31:35 - Paul Thurrott
Like I said, we could spend the whole two hours in a side. I'd say quickly to this that the one thing that has happened. Well, framework, uh, not because of framework, necessarily, but framework being sort of the of the tip of the spear in this movement, there's this right to repair thing that's happened that has impacted the phone market a little bit and the PC market quite a bit. Pcs today, modern PCs, modern laptops, are far more repairable, user repairable, than they've been since, I don't know, late 1990s or early 2000s.

0:32:03 - Richard Campbell
Before the iPad, you can unscrew them Really.

0:32:06 - Paul Thurrott
You can take out the battery, you can take out the you know the RAM in some case. Sometimes RAM is soldered on.

0:32:12 - Leo Laporte
Is that true of Lenovo, too, because the ThinkPad's getting more and more glued together?

0:32:19 - Richard Campbell
I'm so happy to hear that. Oh, no, no, no, these are no. They have to.

0:32:22 - Paul Thurrott
Awesome. So this is awesome. Yeah, so one of the one is that, as a like reviewer of laptops, one of the big things I've noticed in the messaging over the last several years changing is a real emphasis on sustainability, which includes, you know, recyclable, recycled, recycled parts and recyclable components, right, but also this stuff Right, but also this stuff right that you could open up almost any laptop today new ones and replace the SSD, which is an M2 slot, replace the wireless card, which is an M2 slot, replace the battery easily without killing yourself or breaking the computer Not the CPU, obviously, and sometimes not the RAM. Sometimes you'll have RAM that's just on the motherboard, but there's an expansion slot. Sometimes it's all expansion slots. It depends on the motherboard, but there's an expansion slot. Sometimes it's all expansion slots.

0:33:07 - Richard Campbell
It depends on the model. This is the Ultrabook. Mantra was to minimize size, so everything was soldered on.

0:33:12 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, yep, but I think this right-to-repair movement has had its effect, and so we may not get to the framework everywhere, but we're definitely closer to it.

0:33:22 - Richard Campbell
One would argue. The real thing is to make smaller connectors right. Yes, and actually so. Connectors used to be big and bulky.

0:33:28 - Paul Thurrott
Again. I'm not trying to fly off on this completely, but that's happening too. So there's a next generation standard for RAM. If you think about an SO DIMM slot, whatever that size is on a laptop, is basically half an M2, I think, and there are smaller M2s as well, but they're getting just like SIM cards right. They're turning into these little nothings, right, and so that will help a lot and will alleviate some of the concern. Listen, as great as computers are today, and phones too, one of the things I really miss is the ability to pop off the battery and pop on a new one, right?

0:34:01 - Richard Campbell
Well, the biggest one is replaceable.

0:34:03 - Paul Thurrott
You know, you travel a lot.

0:34:10 - Richard Campbell
It's like like I just want that extra battery. You know um that. Stuff's killer so, and batteries wear out when phones still function.

0:34:13 - Paul Thurrott
So exactly just swap the battery, exactly, exactly. So we've made it easier for the company and for third-party repair shops to repair these things, and now we're moving to a model where the user themselves, if they want to, oftentimes can do it themselves and you did the whole piece on surface, making parts available like that's part of it.

0:34:29 - Leo Laporte
Right, that's right I have to say, though the framework, I mean you do it with a screwdriver and you can actually replace the motherboard. You can go from intel to amd, which is pretty amazing. If they made that with a qualcomm x elite. Oh, I know, man, I would buy it so fast, mostly because I could put Linux on it.

0:34:48 - Paul Thurrott
That is the important part.

0:34:49 - Leo Laporte
I feel like you're broken inside.

0:34:50 - Richard Campbell
I am. I am no.

0:34:51 - Paul Thurrott
That's fine, it's just a good recallable gag. This is the benefit of the PC ecosystem.

0:35:00 - Leo Laporte
You can do what you want. The difference is, I'm serious.

0:35:03 - Paul Thurrott
No, I know it's fine. There's nothing wrong with that.

0:35:08 - Leo Laporte
It actually remains to be seen whether Linux on ARM will be as good as Windows on.

0:35:14 - Paul Thurrott
ARM. You know what I think it's going to be so far. It's pretty good You're already talking about a system that, by nature, is more lightweight than Windows to begin with.

0:35:23 - Leo Laporte
My God, if anything this could be, and it's always had ARM support.

0:35:27 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, it's not a new thing for for linux so anyway, I mentioned earlier this kind of lack of an elevator pitch, and this is the problem. You know, someone walks into a best buy, let's say and they're okay, I want a new computer. That one looks pretty, bring it home, who cares? Um, it's very simple battery life and no fan noise.

0:35:45 - Leo Laporte
That's, I think that's the thing.

0:35:46 - Paul Thurrott
I think the thing that right, if the thing we've always wanted in the pc space is something we can legitimately hold up against the macbook air and say it's this, but with windows, that kind of thing, right, um, and so I think we're going to get that, um, and that's fun. But I, I, I, I feel like we touched on this in the past this notion that there is no such thing really as a killer app for AI for PCs, but rather a thousand little killer apps that are very vertical, that are individualistic, like something that might matter to me, or some set of three or five workloads, whatever they are, may be different for you wife, maybe different for grandma walking into best buy, whatever it is right. So I don't think we're going to get the the mainstream. Uh, push of you know pc, exciting new pcs, other than the fact that mate may be a macbook air type thing, super thin, super light, super quiet, maybe, maybe 18 hours of battery life. We'll see that, I can't promise.

0:36:45 - Leo Laporte
But would these also be? I mean, apple also offers m3 maxes on laptops, and that's what I have, and that's a power.

0:36:53 - Paul Thurrott
They serve the. They serve the range.

0:36:54 - Leo Laporte
It's the range so so qualcomm elite x could do that as well yeah, and that's sort of what I I think I was.

0:37:01 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, look at the being hinted at by. You know, by seeing these things I think they are, they're going to have a tiered I don't want to call it a family. I don't know how they're going to market it, but you know, for example, I don't remember the dates exactly, but Qualcomm announced these chipsets in very late October and then, I don't know, four days later, apple announced the M3. It's like, really, you know, and of course, qualcomm had just compared everything they had to the M2, right, so now there's an M3. And the inference there is well, you're already a generation behind again. But part of the reason for this little thing I went to was like, actually, we've tested against the M3 and we beat them in most areas, so we're looking pretty good.

That doesn't include m3 pro or max, right, those are at a different level and they target a different part of the market, right, that's a, like, a portable workstation, whatever you want to call it, but, um, you know, maybe they get there, I don't know, we'll see, but anyway, but the software is the big thing, so we um, I hate this part of my job. I hate that I have to do this so much. But for years and years and years, when we don't get the answers we expect on some milestone or some date, we always say, well, microsoft has Ignite coming up, I guess we'll see what they do then. Or Microsoft has Bill coming up, I guess we'll see. And so we always have to do this because we really you know, they're not super transparent about when things are going to happen. But they just released the Build session list, right? So Build is coming in May.

0:38:26 - Leo Laporte
Can we hold off and talk about Build in a moment Would?

0:38:30 - Paul Thurrott
you mind? I mean, it just ties into this.

0:38:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I understand, but it's If we can. We'll do a little ad. And then I do want to hear this what is Microsoft going to do at Build? It's going to be interesting. Are you guys going to be? You're both at Build, right?

0:38:44 - Paul Thurrott
Well, yeah, this is the thing. So I contacted Microsoft today. I'm like are you going to send out press invitations, what's going on? And so they're going to get back to me. So I, you know, I'd like to be there.

0:38:56 - Leo Laporte
I'm thinking about just going, even if I don't get in just because I think I need to be there Sounds like it's going to be interesting. Anyway, hold on, I think this is a big one. Hold that thought because it is going to be interesting and we're going to talk about it. But first, I think, a word from our I said first, there we go. A word from our sponsor, cachefly.

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cachefly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. It allows you to shield your site content in their cloud, which is incredible. It means you're going to get 100% cache hit ratio. We do that. We've been doing that for a long time One of the earlier I guess we were in a beta program, but it's been fantastic. They call it SOS. Oh, and I forgot to mention their incredible service and support. With their elite managed packages. You get the VIP treatment. You get a dedicated account manager there from day one to help you make the transition and reliable 24-7 support whenever you need it. Learn how you can get your first month free at cacheflycom slash twit. That's and you've heard me say it many times for 15 years c-a-c-h-e-f-l-ycom, cacheflycom slash twit. Thank you, cachefly, for your support of Windows Weekly. We appreciate it. Paul Thurott, richard Campbell. Now let's talk about Build, the big developers conference and probably the first place we'll see Microsoft's you know explanation of all of this right.

0:42:21 - Paul Thurrott
Well, they're not really rumors, they pretty much confirmed. You know there's going to be some hybrid AI occurring in Copilot in Windows where there'll be something happening locally, something happening in the cloud. They'll probably talk about that. Obviously, it's interesting just to see who's in the keynote, right. So Satya Nadella, kevin Scott, cto Rajesh Shah. He's basically in charge of Microsoft 365, which Windows is included in, and then Mustafa Suleiman, the guy who runs the new Microsoft AI. Yeah, the new guy.

0:42:52 - Leo Laporte
What about the long-haired hippie guy?

0:42:57 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you mean. Well, which one you mean?

0:42:59 - Leo Laporte
The good one, not the bad one.

0:43:00 - Paul Thurrott
Stevie Batiste, not the bad one. What?

0:43:03 - Leo Laporte
was his name Stevie Batiste.

0:43:04 - Paul Thurrott
Stevie Batiste? Yes, yeah, so he's not mentioned, but that doesn't mean he's not going to come out. We'll see what happens. Well, you know what? That's an interesting question, right there. Right, part of this new AI organization opens a can of worm of questions about other people. Right, what's going on? But Microsoft has. Anyway, like I said earlier, let's see what happens to Build, let's see what happens to Build. Let's see what happens to Build, and then Build comes and it's like about the cloud, and you know there's nothing, right. But they put out the session list and actually, pretty explicitly, there's some interesting stuff in there. They're going to talk about this next generation of windows on arm right, which they're basically treating as a new thing, and then there's this kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum this is the literal temporary name of a not to be recorded a session called designing for a brand new windows ai feature, whatever that might be called um.

0:44:02 - Richard Campbell
So that's kind of interesting you also have to wonder what sessions are they not listing? Because they're part of announcements? Yes, but the fact that they're listing some of these just says there's a lot going on.

0:44:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, there are a curious number, by which I mean more than zero sessions about Win32 app development, and then, with this disconnected set of technologies, winui and WPF, which is Windows Presentation Foundation. Windows Presentation Foundation dates back to Longhorn and 2006. Long time ago. It's stuck around. People still use it, of course. Yeah, it's experiencing a bit of a renaissance, although my understanding was that WPF and Windows Forms were both mostly community-driven these days, is that not the case?

0:44:46 - Richard Campbell
I thought it was no. No, there are supported editions that moved across to NET Core, so they made that jump. Wpf is integrated in MAUI, so you can build a MAUI and it will render it up in PDF as well. So, yeah, I mean, there was that XAML reckoning right to try and put all this stuff together. That is ultimately what MAU is about.

0:45:09 - Paul Thurrott
We talked about Microsoft's embrace of backward compatibility earlier. It applies very much to the developer space and there's always been this kind of notion that if you there are definitely exceptions but you adopt Microsoft technologies on the developer side side and they'll take you along with them. They drop things you know. Silverlight dropped off.

0:45:29 - Richard Campbell
But you know, silverlight is still considered a complete catastrophe for some folks, right, and I would argue it's the exception, right, but the answer I 100 percent 100%.

But when you talk about something like WinRT, which is not NET based, but you can at least make this argument that well, you see, sharp, use XAML, it's NET-like. Your skills move forward as a NET developer. There was nothing you do for WinRT. You ran the version, you ran the 2012 version and it compiled to ARM. It was just it would jet to arm. Now that was it, right, right, and it went away after 2013. Yeah, yeah but.

0:46:11 - Paul Thurrott
But again, there is some path forward in the sense that languages, uh, you know the, the framework, names and namespaces may change, but it will at least be familiar and that kind of thing. So wpf is this? I'll just call it a cockroach, but it's this thing that has kind of persisted across this continuum as things have kind of come and gone. It's come out on the other end and it's still there.

0:46:36 - Richard Campbell
It's come to mean different things along the way. I mean, yeah, yeah, you call it the cockroach, but at the it's like you mean the tool that Visual Studios built on that one.

0:46:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, no, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that anything other than lovingly, I, of all the Microsoft frameworks over the years, for lack of a better term and for all the problems with SAML and not really ever being able to come up with a true visual editor for that visual basic style thing. Right, I still love WPF, right. I mean it's like I still think they should have moved forward with something based on that and not gone to win RT.

0:47:13 - Richard Campbell
But you know it's not like it's going away, because it's now integrated into Maui, right Like XAML is never going away?

0:47:20 - Paul Thurrott
No, that's what's fascinating, that's what I mean. They're talking about it at Build. That going on? No, that's what's fascinating, that's what I mean. They're talking about it at Build. That's crazy. It's 2024. You understand, this is 20 years later, like they were talking about this at Build 2003, when it was called Avalon. Right, I mean, this is crazy.

0:47:34 - Richard Campbell
The original Avalon vision was never manifest. It got kicked out to become WPF while they tried to fix the crisis of delivering a new os, and then it tried to be reintegrated back in in eight and that went well. You know it's never really manifest as it should have, yeah, and so you know it doesn't surprise me they're still ringing around with it. There's some good people working on it. It is quite a capable technology.

0:47:59 - Paul Thurrott
It just has had an incredibly rough ride yeah, yeah, but it's like I said, cockroach kicking around. I love it, it looks good going you know it's beautiful.

So we get all this stuff happening. Right, we get Windows 11. We talked about this last week 24H2, staggered release right, they just released. Well, we'll talk about Moment 5 in a second. But this next thing will occupy probably the rest of the year. We'll occupy probably the rest of the year. That will probably be most of the. As far as the system part of Windows We've got Build, where we're going to learn about their plans for hardware, accelerated AI, co-pilot, new and updated AI experiences in Windows, et cetera. I'm sure they're going to cart out there. I don't know anything about it, by the way. I'm not saying anything, but I'm guessing.

0:48:45 - Richard Campbell
But I'm educated guessing that they will bring out some third parties. Right, I would want to have Dell on the table. Lenovo, like, show us your Well that's.

0:48:53 - Paul Thurrott
That's yes. Microsoft really wants to go all out.

0:48:57 - Richard Campbell
Every attendee will be walking out with a piece of hardware. That would be amazing Allo and. Rt right.

0:49:04 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I guess I didn't put it in my article, but Qualcomm had an amazing slide of all the software makers that were natively compiling and releasing on ARM and targeting the MPU and it's pretty broad and wide and, as stupid as it sounds, it's just an app.

0:49:26 - Richard Campbell
I don't think you could you know you're saying the big pieces here, which is maybe AI is the thing that makes ARM on Windows come true. Yeah, Because it's only so compelling. But now that you have to do this other thing too, now it's more functional.

0:49:37 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, the combination, it's the perfect storm of timing and capability. And it's yep, it was not, was not yeah, back when they ever.

0:49:47 - Richard Campbell
now it's 2016 or 17, whatever year that was, um, we weren't there, you know, and look, maybe someday freaking out the idea that microsoft might actually be in the best place to put all these ingredients together. First, the right software with the right hardware.

0:49:59 - Paul Thurrott
It's like we just experienced a uh, a solar eclipse, but this is more like when the planets align right and and you get some number of them, and it's very unusual for these things to all, because they're not all in the same plane for one thing. So this alignment of things is shocking.

0:50:18 - Richard Campbell
We're anticipating it. There's plenty of ways for it to still go wrong, but we are.

0:50:21 - Paul Thurrott
Let me just throw out the elephant in the room. The thing I've been bitching and moaning about for the past three years, which is Windows 11, right that here they are ignoring and overtly and certifying Windows by forcing edge on you at every step of the way. Or you choose edge and it still complains to you because you changed the default search engine or had the temerity to modify your new tab page or something.

Right, You're not enough for us. Yeah, OneDrive and all the terrible behaviors there, there are still problems and you know that doesn't go away. That is the asterisk, the little thing, the bug in the bottom of the drink. That has me worried a little bit. But you know, we'll see. We'll see how it goes.

0:51:04 - Richard Campbell
But there's a lot of stuff I would love Build to be, this thing where they say Windows is going to get great again Because this is what we said from the outside about this.

0:51:12 - Leo Laporte
That implies that it somehow wasn't great.

0:51:14 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't know if you've been paying attention to the show for the past two or three years, leo, but I've had a crisis of confidence here.

0:51:22 - Richard Campbell
We talked about this when the AI thing first came along with the first chat, gbts and so forth. Windows is the logical hub for this interface. It's just we don't believe the Windows team can pull it off. Maybe this new group is it and they're going to roll up, they're going to come rolling in.

0:51:39 - Paul Thurrott
I can't wait to learn more. You can only be cautiously optimistic, but I am optimistic, I feel. I feel I feel like things are lining up pretty well. So we'll see. You know, we'll see.

0:51:51 - Richard Campbell
And, in a serendipitous way, there is no grand plan. As Scott Hanselman said so brilliantly, we are not organized enough to be as evil as you want us to. That's right.

0:52:11 - Paul Thurrott
That was always the big.

Well, that was the big look. The big counter argument during the Microsoft antitrust stuff was like I don't think you understand how little the groups at Microsoft talk to each other or how little they like each other. Yeah, you know, like one of the like this notion, like Microsoft used to talk about this apocryphal, you know Chinese wall between the two parts of the company. And internally they were like we don't need a, there's already a wall. We hate each other. They don't, we don't you like we don't need a, there's already a wall.

0:52:27 - Richard Campbell
We hate each other. They don't, we don't, you know. We don't talk to them.

0:52:29 - Leo Laporte
You mean that wall over there. You want to talk about this wall. We're in different buildings. Is it like a conscious desire to make sure that everybody kind of is competitive with one another, or is that cultural?

0:52:38 - Richard Campbell
No, no, it's a cultural thing. So it really came up In the Gatesy Like 8C and Balmer era.

0:52:42 - Paul Thurrott
It was certainly but also just the culture of different parts of the company, like the parts and then parts of the company that were making OSs, nt and Windows, right, and then the part that was parts that were making apps, mostly Office, but then the other stuff, completely different cultures, completely different ways of shipping products, completely different abilities to make or not make schedules, you know, to realistically determine how long something is going to take, and then you know they were just different. And, um, I, you know this, this and, by the way, there were, there were riffs that you can point to from the outside, that you could see, um, that we used to talk about.

Remember, you know, windows wasn't done until Lotus doesn't run or whatever the phrase was Um, windows was also not run until Office came up with a UI that Windows could then take and give it to everyone else, right, yeah, but there's also the reverse is true, which is like what happens when Office doesn't adopt technologies that are Windows it basically just kills them dead in the water.

0:53:42 - Richard Campbell
And now you're talking about WPF. Wpf would be the center of UX implementation, if office had implemented, if they were like Nope, not doing it. But you know, the difference was that, you know, gates was the one that told them you're going to use MDF, you're going to use LADB, like he had the power to do that. It was a different era, yeah.

0:54:03 - Paul Thurrott
He had the power to do that it was a different era.

0:54:04 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, he had moved on. Bomber didn't have that strength, he couldn't make those hard technical decisions.

0:54:09 - Paul Thurrott
We mentioned Windows RT. There was a 10-second period of time where they came out and said they were going to do this. The primary version of Office going forward was going to be this mobile version of Office that ran across phone, desktop and maybe on the Xbox if you wanted it to. And the only thing that ever came out of that was that one drive for Windows 10 product which was very good, by the way and they, you know you would have continuum. You could you know, if you ran it on your phone, it looked like a phone app, but if you connected the phone to a screen, it looked like a Windows app. It was really, you know, it was a good idea.

But then the office guys actually got a good look at like what they would have to do and they were like, yeah, we're not doing this. And then, even with uh, even with one note, they eventually scaled back and said no, we're going back. We are literally dusting off the 2016 code base, putting this back app back in the product, bringing it up to speed with everything we did for what we now call one note for windows 10. And then we rid of that old thing that was going to be the future and in doing that, uh, for very, you know, pragmatic reasons, right, obviously it's a huge code, base, legacy code. I mean, you know it was impossible to replicate this in some other uh framework or whatever. Um, they also that played a big role in killing win rt, right, that was when off office said yes, tried it and then said no. In some ways, that's even worse than just saying no, because a lot of people are like, okay, here we go, office is doing it. It must be real. It's like, oh, no, just kidding, you know yeah.

0:55:31 - Richard Campbell
But anyway, the disaster was Win 8. And they had already built Office for iOS and Android. And we're forced to hold it on the shelf because Windows 8 was going to dominate everything and is going to dominate everything. And then it became apparent that it wasn't and they released it and and you got the new. You know, I would argue, there's several different things. One was microsoft didn't have a horse in the game for the for, for the universal windows platform.

0:55:56 - Paul Thurrott
And then uh, and and office well, they didn't have a universal windows. I mean right, windows 8 shipped into world that had windows phone. That was different co-based, different app store, different guys.

0:56:07 - Richard Campbell
That was all going to be fixed. Well, it was fixed, but it was too late. It didn't matter. It didn't matter at that point, but the fact that Office then became focused on competing with Google Docs and the Google workspace changed. It cared a lot less about Windows at that point.

0:56:28 - Paul Thurrott
This is so unrelated but yet very related. I was looking up, uh, open document, open office document formats and trying to go back and remember when this happened and how it happened, what the deal was, you know, and what you know. Uh, as part of a story about antitrust and monopoly, because everyone knows about, you know, microsoft. They got in trouble with monopoly, antitrust etc. Um, the story that doesn't really get told. A lot is like office was, if anything, even more dominant the windows, and it never got in trouble. Why is that? Because they didn't. Well, no, but they were never brought to antitrust court and forced to change, you know, so they also responded well right, that's what's what I mean, and that's what right, and that's one of the things I wanted to look up.

One of the reasons was this notion that Microsoft was going to keep customers hostage by these proprietary Office document formats. We forget what a big stink this was, you know, 20 years ago, whatever. And they created the formats we have today essentially right and essentially right. And then there's something out in the world called odf, the open document format. That's different and arguably in some ways more efficient but slower, and there's all kinds of whatever. There's a big debate there. But I read this um article from I don't know, 2003, 2004, somewhere in there, and then that sent me down like a rabbit hole of remembering things I had forgotten about, which was basically, uh, examples of how Office dodged that bullet by just being pragmatic and making the right decisions, something we didn't see on the Windows side of the house, something we don't see today with Apple.

0:57:55 - Richard Campbell
The original conflict with Office was when, as a PC seller, you could only sell Windows if you paid a license for every single copy of windows. And if you were selling copy of windows with office, it was a lower price than if you sold it only with windows. And that was the first fdc set. That said you know you can't do this. And microsoft correctly said okay, we won't do that. As you know, the the series of blunders that leads to 2000,. To the 1999 decree, by the way, monopoly declaration. It was a series of blunders.

There was many off roads that they refused to take.

0:58:35 - Paul Thurrott
That licensing policy is the reason that IBM doesn't make computers today. Right, but they missed the Windows 95 launch window.

0:58:43 - Richard Campbell
But they also had a consent decree in 1977 because they were dominant in the computing industry at the time. You know like one leads to the other. In the end, all of this is the us government's fault. Yes, I always say, I would say that I would have said bill gates's fault, but okay, that's fine, you know.

You know this starts with the us government selecting cobalt and as360 as the platform for the irs and all the other government offices means the rest of the industry also likes it, and now ibm dominates the and then became snow white and seven dwarves, right boroughs and seo and so forth, and so they end up being declared a monopolistic company and end up with a consent decree, much like microsoft, and that requires them to outsource non-critical things, which is why they outsource the operating system. That kicks off Microsoft's path to becoming a monopoly.

It's all the US government's fault.

0:59:35 - Paul Thurrott
It's the most complicated board of dominoes ever created.

0:59:42 - Richard Campbell
Look we've learned anything in the past five minutes?

0:59:47 - Paul Thurrott
There have been some ups and downs in our industry and this year is looking it's like.

0:59:52 - Richard Campbell
you know we've had some down years recently.

0:59:54 - Paul Thurrott
It's looking pretty good. Months are going to be crucial for the future windows and, um, I like what I've seen. Personally, I like most of what I'm seeing out in the world, right, just news and whatever and rumors and things. Uh, the stuff. Microsoft, just today, like I said, came out with the build session list very interesting. Um, richard is correct, it's also very incomplete, but still the if this is what they're telling us about, like, this is going to be some good stuff. So there'll be a Scott Hanselman Mark Rezinovich session where they build co-pilots together in a completely unscripted, impromptu performance, which will be you met either of those people, which will be entertaining and probably education.

1:00:43 - Richard Campbell
you know it used to be the snow Rezinovich show, now it's the. That's right. I miss those days, yeah, yeah, uh. So all of my workstations were rebooted this morning.

1:00:53 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, so was my PC Interesting. You say that yeah, all coincidence. I think not. I think not.

1:00:59 - Leo Laporte
No, not so much.

1:00:59 - Richard Campbell
So I'm still clinging to 10 on two of them. I want you to know that.

1:01:05 - Paul Thurrott
I look at Windows 10 every day. Now I don't use it all day, every day, but I open it up, I check for updates, I do a few little things and I move on. But I'm looking at that again and it's, you know, I wouldn't call it nostalgic, but there are things to like there. For sure, Tuesday was patch Tuesday. If you're only half paying attention to the show which, by the way, I'm with you, I completely I'm only paying half attention, I get it. There's a lot of there's a lot of confusion.

You might have thought that Microsoft released something called Moment Five two months ago. You might have thought that they released it last month and now you might think they released it this month because they did. You know, these things happen in different ways now than they used to. We don't really have that hard RTM or GA date, that general availability date per se. You know, thanks to CFR, as he's controlled feature releases, some parts of feature bundles come out at different times on different PCs. It's the way of the world. You know, google actually does the same thing. By the way, I don't like it. I don't like the style of updating. But on Tuesday, yesterday, as we record this what they call moment five internally, which is a bundle of new features and one of the smaller moments from an impact perspective arrived in what I've been calling the stable channel. By the way, this thing actually has a name. It's called the General Availability Channel. Speaking of GA, I love these names, I know so, when you think about the Canary and Dev and Beta and Release Preview, general Availability, that's the stable channel. You, general availability, that's the stable channel, that's what we're on. As you know, individuals or businesses, consumers, whatever, um, I, I feel like this happens to me a lot because the nature of what I do, I'm writing books and things, and so I, I don't, I my computer rebooted like you said, like yours did, and of course I'm looking at it is. Is there anything new? And there isn't. And you know, even the stable release of this thing to the world has not triggered the opening up of new features that I can notice anyway. So we'll see.

The list of features that are in Moment 5 is not particularly interesting. There is one I'm looking forward to. There's two features related to the PC Link app. Is that the right term? Pc Link, no phone link. What do I call it? Pc Link, pc Link being a 1990s serial cable thing that you laptop, whatever Phone link. One is that if your phone is near your computer and you take a screenshot, you'll get a notification this has to be an android phone, sorry, iphone guys uh on your computer that it's linked to right and so that you can do something with it right on your computer. So if that's a thing for you like, that's kind of cool. But the one I'm really looking forward to is actually a feature that's available to pixel users today through pixel, not through the operating system where you can use your Android-based phone as a webcam with your Windows computer. That's cool. That's a great idea, because phones have terrific cameras a lot of them and more than one, really Yep, and it is, by the way, just as a goofy side note coincidence Apple obviously has this feature.

I think it's called continuity or something, and one of the continuity features is you can use your iPhone as the webcam for your Mac, and we just did a call last night with friends of ours in Mexico for someone's birthday. We have an Apple TV in our living room and I said here's an idea, we're going to do it on facetime, right? I'm like I will put the back, I'll put the laptop there, the macbook. I'll attach the phone to the back of it. They use that as the camera. We'll put air what do you call it? Airplay or whatever it is the screen. I'll extend the screen to the, to the tv. This is going to be awesome. It's gonna be this multimedia experience. You know, we ended up just doing it on a laptop, get everything else I just said.

But the thing that's interesting is for the variety of technical problems. But on the Mac at least, I thought the quality of the built-in webcam was better than my phone. I can't explain that. But that's not the case If you have a Pixel. But that's not the case If you have a Pixel or basically any modern, unless you have a crazy professional camera. Almost certainly that thing is going to be a better camera than your webcam. So kind of a cool feature. To my knowledge it's not available yet. It's coming. It will be here soon. I don't have it, so that's the one I'm looking forward to. That's cool.

1:05:43 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I've been using the OBS webcam since we moved here. I've never pulled out the big Canon XC10. Right, the new desk arrives this weekend, so I get to tear the whole room down and rebuild it. So it's like is it time? Yeah, you might as well Drag out the you know where. It's like wow, I love your background blur. It's like that's f stops, that's woke up.

1:06:07 - Paul Thurrott
that's a literal yeah, that's a camera lens. Yeah, that's how that lens works. Awesome. Yeah, I get more than once, uh, this, just the past few months, people, some set of people, a couple people said to me so you must have like a crazy slr something, something, no, no and that's the thing I like about this little ob's cam and this thing's so small I could lose it up my nose, yeah, and but it's pretty good you know, like the difference, the incremental difference between this and that big old xc10, like it's hard to justify then again, and I feel bad having that thing sit in my bag like right, it deserves better but you travel enough that it's important.

You know that's the right, you know it's fine. That's like a usb hub I travel with. I don't ever use it here, but I it's awesome when you have it.

1:06:52 - Richard Campbell
You know, yeah, I would argue, I should be traveling with this little, this little cam, rather than the than the flex cam, because it's even smaller. So I will figure it out. My portable rig continues to get crazier.

1:07:04 - Paul Thurrott
I always have been counting on and been disappointed by it not happening. The notion that the camera and a laptop will eventually be so good it won't matter. And, of course, laptop lids are actually very thin yeah, and they're thinner than phones, right. But this is another area where AI may play a role in making it good enough for most people, right. Ai may play a role in making it good enough for most people, right.

Where, through some combination of on the fly, oversampling or whatever like over, you know, making it appear to be better quality, right it may be okay. I know, I think you could do it. Yeah, it's going to save the world and then it's going to destroy it because Terminator.

1:07:46 - Richard Campbell
I like the idea. You know nobody wants to use the physical enhancement features that thing could do. But if you got to upscale anyway, why don't we just touch up? Yeah?

1:07:53 - Paul Thurrott
I know, yeah, you don't want to look 29 again.

1:07:55 - Richard Campbell
Really, I mean, come on look how good um, I'll just do it I don't.

1:08:01 - Paul Thurrott
I I think you do this too because you're on camera a lot. I I spend a lot of time screwing around with these settings and I try third-party apps and I do different things, you know, and I almost always just go back to like, yeah, whatever, like it's the defaults are usually right. Yeah, usually, yep, yeah, well, I got defaults for a reason we've.

1:08:18 - Richard Campbell
We've got the, the kevin, the crew in our on us. So it's like you know, I care more about color temperature in the past year, I know the previous 50 something I told so leo's, leo's back.

1:08:30 - Paul Thurrott
I want to tell this story in leo's presence because he'll he'll appreciate this. I I'll tell the shorter version of it. But when I was in mexico one of the problems with mexico because it's a big echoey room and we wanted to, uh, you know, paint and we're going to put things on the wall and hopefully this is the stuff that gets it over the top, whatever. But I, for the two years we've been there, I haven't really had this whole kind of nice microphone set up and but what we do have is these little, uh, La Vieira, you know, wireless mic things which I have tested in every configuration imaginable and sound wonderful. They sound wonderful and I and I know leo hates wireless, he hates you know it's not just the wireless it's their omnidirectional yep, there's all kinds of stuff.

And I thought to myself you know what I'm gonna, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna try it one time. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna just try it and see. I'm gonna see if he thinks it's okay, I'm just gonna actually try it. And so I, that day richard was late or wasn't, couldn't make it, I don't remember exactly, you weren't here for the start of the show. So leo shows up and he says hey, how you doing and everything. I'm like good, I, I said I'm fine, but I've got some bad news. And this he goes oh, is it that you're on the wrong mic, like that? And I'm like, oh, so that was the end of that. So you know that stuff matters. You know it matters. Right, you got to. You know you got to.

1:09:50 - Leo Laporte
Only in podcasting.

1:09:52 - Paul Thurrott
It's classic. It was so instantaneous, Like it was perfect.

1:09:57 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure, Richard, you did the same with your shows.

1:10:00 - Richard Campbell
Oh yeah, no. I'm very the number of times the number of times I've got. I see a guest who's got a you know a Yeti or something in front of him and he's talking. I'm like, dude, you haven't selected the right microphone. It's like, how do you know? Oh, I know, Yep, it's like you can't hear it.

1:10:14 - Paul Thurrott
So it's like since the pandemic you could watch CNN or whatever NBC, whatever news thing you watch, and there'll be some guy wearing a shirt and a tie and he's probably got his underwear on, you know but no pants, but you only see the top half of his body. He's at home in front of a something, something you know. Maybe his kid or dog disturbed it, maybe not, but they'll often have like they're just wearing like AirPods and you know like people will sometimes use what, what looks like the most ridiculous equipment. It's like that actually sounds pretty good. Yeah, you know, for some reason it's kind of hard to explain, but I don't know, I can tell, I can tell.

1:10:48 - Leo Laporte
TV audio is so bad. I do not doubt your powers. Yeah, I hate TV audio.

1:10:54 - Paul Thurrott
Leo's expertise in this area is without question.

1:10:56 - Leo Laporte
When I see people wearing AirPods, I go oh no, no, please Don't do it.

1:11:02 - Richard Campbell
But this is the latest state-of-the-art technology from Apple. It's got to be good, I don't know. I love an MSNBC interview where the guest is remote and they've also got their TV on so you get the echo. I just know that engineer is losing his mind.

1:11:20 - Leo Laporte
Can I get into his earpiece? Please Notice all three of us, though using bob hiles, beautiful the little bob hiles, beautiful my.

1:11:28 - Richard Campbell
I wish there was a.

1:11:30 - Paul Thurrott
This was sent to me by a very nice man yeah, and it sounds good, I noticed um, it sounds kind of a bronze gold color and mine's kind of more plain I have a special, uh special edition.

1:11:43 - Richard Campbell
Bob and I were good friends well, and I told you the story that when you sent this to me the first time I was, I was gonna record with carl. He's like what's that microphone? And immediately ordered one, yeah good yeah and then we had to reshoot all the ads.

1:11:58 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, no, because it sounded so good my version of this is that, again since the pandemic, you do a lot of things online that used to be in person and that includes, like doctor visits and stuff like this. I've had three different doctors, like a sleep doctor, an eye doc not an eye doctor, I'm sorry a uh, just the general doctor, and I don't know what the other one was, but the and they're all like. They're like are you? You on the radio? Or something like what is this? What's this?

setup yeah you know I'm like. No, I just, I just work from home you know there is a look.

1:12:32 - Leo Laporte
Anytime I see on msnbc there is a look and I know immediately podcaster because they have this thing. They have a big microphone in their face. They have.

1:12:40 - Paul Thurrott
They have a broad hands, yeah, pod face, they have a broadcast Podcaster, or if they have all the colored lights in the back. You're like YouTuber Twitcher you can always tell.

1:12:51 - Richard Campbell
It's a species, all right we talked about the beta channel.

1:12:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, General availability oh no. So we've been waiting for the PC market to rebound? You should read this side. You see a report. It's hilarious. They acted like there's been a turnaround of like historic proportions. Pc sales grew 1.5% year over year. Oh boy, To a year that was so bad comparably, that everyone experienced massive double digit year over year drops, including Apple. So I'm like I don't know what you're comparing.

1:13:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but it's up. I mean the big thing, is it the direction? Right, it's going. Have you ever looked at what?

1:13:26 - Paul Thurrott
1.5 looks like on a graph. It's basically, if you, if you're, if your heart stopped and then the doctor said, hold on, it's up 1.5, I don't you'd be dead you know it's still dead pc market you're 1.5 less less dead. I would call that flat. But you know, whatever it's okay, it's not negative, it's not down 7% or 16% or 30%, whatever it was a while ago.

1:13:52 - Richard Campbell
Psychologists say 2% is the threshold of notice. So 1.5% not a threshold of notice.

1:13:58 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I didn't know that figure, but to me 1. Anything is flat, but that's okay you know what I get? It it's fine. Uh, lenovo still number one, hp still number two, dell still number three and apple still number four so yeah, nothing's changed.

Nothing has changed. Uh, so that's that. Um, there, this one, I I don't. This is one of those fog of war things. I I'm I'm not happy with the. You know, microsoft is not super transparent with this kind of stuff, but they're starting to block access to registry keys which are tied to features in windows that are probably seen, are going to, are probably going to disappear in 24 h2 which today are used by companies like not by Stardock, interestingly but companies that make third-party utilities to change the taskbar or the start menu or file explorer back to the old versions, because that code is still in Windows and they haven't done the deprecation job I think they need to, which is come out publicly and say here's the timeline if you're using this stuff, stop.

1:15:06 - Richard Campbell
You know um, I wonder if they're communicating with them privately, because that seems to be more of their style these days too. Is that they literally? I mean?

1:15:13 - Paul Thurrott
well, I, based on the reaction of these companies to this stuff. Yes, no? The answer is no, because the people who are reporting this are the ones who make these apps right. There was a guy from coming.

He's like I, I've never seen anything quite like this. Now the good news is uh, for now, you can. You can work around the blocks. It's a meaning. So the, the makers of these apps can, can get around this and make it work. And then there, of course, there's always the apologists. You always get the uh, the guys who are like oh, everything, microsoft is great. I don't see what the problem is. You know like who are defending this, because maybe this behavior could be used to. You don't want, like a third party app changing your default browser, do you? I'm like I'm running Windows 11. Who cares what my default browser is? Windows 11 doesn't care what my browser is. It doesn't respect that choice. But whatever the purpose or whatever this is happening, the problem is going to be when 24h2 arrives and if, as expected, this code has been removed, we're going to have a whole family of stuff is going to break.

1:16:12 - Richard Campbell
Every part of utilities are going to stop working, yeah, and, and customers who are going to go?

1:16:16 - Paul Thurrott
oh, so don't install 24h2 yep, so we'll see how that works out. I'm not. I am not advocating for microsoft to leave legacy code in windows, necessarily. I don't mean it like that. But then again, uh, you know, the dot net framework, four point, whatever is still in there, 4.8 will be there that has existed forever.

The vb runtime from 1999 is, yeah, I mean forever yeah, what one of the one of the many antitrust arguments against apple is. It's kind of selective distribution of apis to third parties and how it gives itself some of its own. You know, apis only for itself, right, that kind of thing. And because it has this stranglehold on the market, um, it can do this. You know it can engage that kind of behavior and and in some ways this feels reminiscent of that yeah, didn't microsoft invent that?

1:17:05 - Leo Laporte
I mean, yeah, they did. Seriously, there was a whole, yeah, windows secrets, books.

1:17:09 - Paul Thurrott
Well, so, uh, yeah, there's two sides to it. There's the there were. There were always rumors that my, that microsoft had back doors in windows. Right for the government, that was the big one. Right, the cia or the nsa could get into the back door in windows. Right For the government, that was the big one, right, the CIA or the NSA could get into the back door and windows, you know. And also that there were secret APIs.

You know, microsoft has always disputed this, always, and and there's been no. You know, look, the Microsoft windows co-base is available to governments to software part If want to. You know, you people have been able to see for themselves like this isn't necessarily true, but this is the stuff from the consent decree in 2001. I think that, yeah, a lot of this stuff. Honestly, it's tied to what we're talking earlier about microsoft as a company being big and complex and how these things they're not in some in concert army marching together to the same song. I mean, a lot of this stuff is vestigial, just leftover. You know, it just happens to be there. As a developer on the outside you'd be like, oh look, I found this awesome API that does something really fun and I can make this app. It's really cool. And then that API disappears in some next version of Windows. And then you complain, I guess. But they didn't document it and we can. You know we're naturally inclined to believe, um, you know conspiracy theory, so I don't know.

1:18:31 - Leo Laporte
So there are undocumented APIs right there there are. Apis. You don't publish Yep.

1:18:37 - Paul Thurrott
Well, that's you know I mean that's just like there are, just like there are VMs out there that weren't properly locked down. The Chinese got in. It's nobody's fault, Leo, it's just it just happens. It's just. It just happens. It's mistakes. Democracy is messy. I don't know what.

1:18:51 - Richard Campbell
I'm looking at.

1:18:53 - Paul Thurrott
You know it's, I don't know. It's not necessarily malicious, I guess, is all I'm saying. It might just be stupid.

1:19:00 - Leo Laporte
Or intentional, but it's not illegal to have an undocumented API.

1:19:04 - Richard Campbell
It could be both, I don't know.

1:19:05 - Leo Laporte
I mean, we have API calls on our back end that are not public.

1:19:12 - Paul Thurrott
We don't want other people using Yep More often than not, though honestly I think a lot of these undocs. So, for example, the Windows taskbar and start menu used to be a thing and it was evolved in over time and then windows 11 happened and those things were actually rewritten from scratch. But because different code in the operating system accesses code in those code bases, in many ways the code's still there, right, so third-party apps that take advantage of it can also use it. Um, but at some point, you know, microsoft is working behind the scenes to get rid of those connections and they want to get rid of that code base because it's not really. It's being maintained, sort of, but it's not secure, it's not actively they never advertised it so maybe they don't feel like no, I know, I I'm not.

I'm not taking anyone's side, I'm just saying that, well, I'm. Well, the side I'm taking is there's a responsible way you can handle this, which is to say look, this is what we're doing, here's the time frame. It's kind of like the new outlook thing. Everyone hates the new outlook. I completely get it. But the one thing I will say to this is they've been very clear about them not getting rid of the thing you love until this new thing that you hate does everything the old thing did, and it's going to be 2029 at the earliest. So at least there's clarity to this. Right. You may not agree with the decision, but at least they have a time frame and it's probably going to go well past that. This kind of stuff silence, right. They've never really talked about it.

1:20:36 - Leo Laporte
What does Brad say? I feel like they should just start that, because for him they don't use it.

1:20:42 - Paul Thurrott
He loves this. He wants this to happen as quickly as possible. Every one of his competitors is going to drop off the face of the earth when this happens.

1:20:48 - Leo Laporte
They're smart, stardock's smart. They don't play tricks, right Right.

1:20:54 - Paul Thurrott
Intentionally Well, they might play tricks, but they don't. I don't know what they do. I'm I mean, come on, no, I tricks. No, I mean, they're just not using those APIs. So that was a good decision on their part. It required a little bit more work, right, they have to recreate these things, you know themselves, but that was the right thing to do.

1:21:10 - Leo Laporte
They must have sensed that this is not, these are not public APIs, these are not documents.

1:21:15 - Paul Thurrott
Realistically speaking, you can see what's going to happen. I don't know any. I don't know windows at this deep of a level, but I think with each new build, to each you know beta channel, whatever you can see as things change and you can see over time they've been removing their dependencies, uh, in-house, and at some point they're like we don't need the old taskbar code anymore, so they're going to get rid of it.

1:21:36 - Richard Campbell
It's just taking up space and is potentially a security vulnerability so the concept of Windows actually getting smaller over time, wow, what a thought.

1:21:45 - Paul Thurrott
No, but then they threw Copilot in too, so they make up for it. You know, they'll pad it with other crap.

1:21:53 - Richard Campbell
It's okay, I like Copilot.

1:21:57 - Paul Thurrott
Copilot's your friend. So actually I do. Oh, you know what? I didn't put this in the, did I? I don't think I have a big AI thing, I don't think I even put it in the AI, but I'll add it later. Okay, so I have a co-pilot thing I actually should talk about.

Not too much has happened on the Windows Insider front in the past week. The day of the show last week, it's going to happen any time now. There was a beta channel build update. Since then that was last week, not today Nothing major there. Copilot for windows that integrate with the command of the features and settings of the operating system, not the broader copilot stuff. Um, unfortunately that means they're inherently uninteresting. But uh, because to date those things have kind of sucked, so that's too bad. But whatever, um, there's gonna be some. They're trying different things. I, my problem is they're trying things in real time, like at least this is happening in the insider program. But yeah, because of the way things have gone over the past year or so, you we're going to see this as stable like any week now.

1:23:10 - Richard Campbell
Right, so you have a um I'm just glad they're trying things right like no.

1:23:15 - Paul Thurrott
That's what I mean I am glad they're trying things. I want them to follow the path. But I feel like ai especially, but windows 2, is on this accelerated path where it's like the old joke, oh it compiled, yeah, ship it. You know that kind of thing. So they're testing things like you've copied an image to the clipboard and then the icon for copilot changes to indicate that you can do something with that image in copilot, like create a similar image or tell me something about this image, or whatever the capabilities are. So it's fine. I think, yeah, you want to advance this feature. It's garbage right now. So it's fine.

But my worry is because, based on history, they will just, you know, june will come and we'll all have this feature and stable, because that's how they've been doing things. But we will see. We will see. The other change, which is not a new build but impacts, I think, basically all of the channels of the windows insider program, is a major update to the store app, the Microsoft store app, where they've I don't know how they've done it, but they've made some kind of major performance improvements where navigating between pages is 35% faster than it was before, somehow.

1:24:22 - Richard Campbell
So a rewrite, it sounds.

1:24:23 - Paul Thurrott
It sounds like yeah, this is a. So, if I can remember this correctly, I was talking to um rafael about this. There there's in no one normal would ever care about this, but no one normal is listening to the show, so I'll say it. Um, in in windows, there are all these different inbox apps and they're built with different technology, so we have this kind of archaeological scale of things. If you look at the movies and tv app, for example, is a great, is maybe not the only, but one of the remaining vestigial remainders from windows 8. Right, this is a, an old school ui. It's, it's, uh, it's probably an early version of uwP or whatever. It's never been updated, which makes me nervous about its future.

And then we have apps like. Last week Microsoft said I don't know why they even said this publicly, but they're updating the Photos app and they're bringing it from UWP to the Windows app SDK. Right, we have web apps like Clipchamp. We have still desktop apps. We have hybrid apps. File Explorer is a classic Win32 desktop app, but it has a WinUI 3 front end and a tailored internal version of WinApp SDK that enables the UIs. That was why we lost drag and drop support in the address bar in the last release and why we're going to get it back in the next release? Because they're retroactively fixing, uh, things that they break. So there's this kind of spectrum of app types just within windows. Forget about apps you install in windows, right, the apps that comes with windows and those shift over time. Um, the microsoft store app the one that was just updated is still a uwp app, right?

1:26:00 - Richard Campbell
right, I would have expected that this was a web app. It's interesting to see them moving stuff off of UWP.

1:26:05 - Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah they have to right. I mean they have to.

1:26:08 - Richard Campbell
I would like it if they're rebuilding it in MAUI like that would advance MAUI.

1:26:13 - Paul Thurrott
I'm waiting to see. It's not easy. I wish there was some command line you could run and it would give you the list of what was what. I'd love to see that, but I look at the absolute.

1:26:23 - Richard Campbell
One debugger would let you do that, but it's complicated right, I'm looking for something simpler, but when wpf was an orphan until visual studio implemented it for 2010 yes, like that's right. And the difference between wpf2 and wpf4 because numbers are hard um, which was the next version after 2. And it was the one that was caused by Visual Studio. It was just dramatically better because the studio team beat the snot out of it and they know where those guys live. Like they hunted them down and said you will fix this.

1:26:59 - Paul Thurrott
In its own small way. File Explorer has had this impact on native app development in windows because they wanted to do whatever it was they they had whatever code base, legacy code base, right. So like this is a probably a c++ app from a million years ago and when ui is happening at that time it was when ui2 and they wanted to make this thing look modern. It's an app, modern windows and, um, their microsoft solution for this type of thing at the time was something called to make this thing look modern. It's an app modernized, it's part of Windows and Microsoft's solution for this type of thing at the time was something called XAML Islands, which anyone who's ever used this will tell you it was garbage.

But internally at Microsoft, the File Explorer team used it and it was so bad they had to make their own version of it that only worked for File Explorer and was not something they could reproduce for anyone else. It was very specific to their needs. And now, of course, they've moved to the windows app SDK. They've actually had to do kind of the same thing. It's not a full rewrite or anything like that, but it's it's still not like vanilla windows app SDK and uh, I, I. This is the type of real world stress test that I think these APIs don't typically get yeah and it and they used to get all the time.

1:28:04 - Richard Campbell
And this is why most Microsofties are dog fooding all the time, like because they will talk to the other teams and press against them and know how to communicate with them and yeah, yeah, and it makes we all benefit from that when it's so to your point as well, it's funny.

1:28:18 - Paul Thurrott
They mentioned this. I so to your point. It's funny you mention this. I was just thinking this when I was having this conversation with Raphael about which apps were which and how were they made, et cetera. There are these smaller apps in Windows, things like Calculator, right. I'm like you know, this would be a good candidate for like a Maui app, right. But the thing is that the point of Maui ultimately is cross-platform.

1:28:41 - Richard Campbell
That's not important. Why bother? I mean, I would argue MAUI is strong on iOS and Android because that's where it comes from, and making more stuff in Windows would make the Windows implementation better.

1:28:51 - Paul Thurrott
But and MAUI is you know, I'm not saying this for Rich's sake, he knows better than I do but MAUI, to me is on a very kind of a slow boat rollout kind of a thing to me is on a very kind of a slow boat rollout kind of a thing, and and every release they'll be like here's what's new on desktop, here's what's new here and everything, and they've made concessions for the desktop that I think are good, but it doesn't feel it's not the type of thing that would happen. There'd be far more going on if that was the focus, right, I think what you're seeing is the customer feedback coming in, shifting the politics of how the layers work.

1:29:23 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, so you know that also it's an integration product, a lot of different teams touch it and that you have you sort of have a UN effect going on here. Well, I'll have to get together in a room and advocate, and it takes a while, yep.

1:29:39 - Paul Thurrott
When it was what was it called before XAML. I mean Xamarin Forms. Yes, the focus was was straight up mobile, right. So we had, you know, windows Phone and mobile.

1:29:50 - Richard Campbell
It was also Miguel de Acasa and he has that Gatesian gravity where he could just say I think we're going to do it this way and everybody did it that way. That's gone, no, no.

1:29:59 - Paul Thurrott
Right, you're right. I mean 100%. I love those guys, but yeah, they don't have that guy, they don't have an icon leading this. But there's a shift occurring in mobile, too, where Android is adapting to over years to bigger screens, like on Chromebooks and tablets. Apple did this years ago with iPad, but they're also adopting kind of desktop class UIs and so there are certain desktop features now that before it was Windows Phone, iphone, android and now you could actually do, you could make the case that there are Windows features, windows desktop features where it's Windows desktop, ipad, android, tablet and a Chromebook where these you know what we might think of as jump lists or accelerated keys or whatever they might be like these things. We're doing more with keyboards now with those devices, and so maybe we need shortcuts and stuff like that. I mean, there are definitely things that you know that MAUI has addressed, but I think there's definitely things that also you know still need to be addressed, sure, especially on the desktop.

1:30:59 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I'd love to see a Mio app come up and inbox in windows, right. I mean, the kicker on this too is if I don't know how much you pay attention to flutter, but you know flutter had ios and android nailed it. Now they're working hard to make a good windows implementation and I like it when there's a nice threat from the left like that that's actually what it needs I all get flutter, I feel at first I mean tim steve.

1:31:20 - Paul Thurrott
By the way, tim steve is that Apple? Now was he the guy who created Flutter.

1:31:26 - Richard Campbell
He was one of the drivers this is an ex-Microsoft guy an excellent leader of development does he go to?

1:31:32 - Leo Laporte
Apple to do a language he's in the developer part.

1:31:37 - Paul Thurrott
He's doing. What is he doing? I don't know if it's Xcode or something. Yeah, something, developers. If you look him up on Twitter he'll be part of WWDC. He was a good public face for Flutter. I think that Flutter may have helped Maui a little bit. I think they might have spread themselves a little too thin. They were like now we're going to do everything at the same time and it's like what are you doing? I mean, it's just I think they're targeting too many platforms at once.

1:32:10 - Richard Campbell
There is this N over N minus one problem. As the number of platforms increases incrementally, the complexity goes up logarithmically.

1:32:20 - Paul Thurrott
Well, but for a developer, the dream of that Java thing you know, write once, run everywhere, becomes even more important, right, it becomes even more desirable. So if they can nail it, if anyone can figure this out, whether it's a React native or Flutter or Maui or whatever it is like, this is the dream, right.

1:32:37 - Richard Campbell
If someone could just nail this, yeah, and the fact that there are so many solutions in this space just shows it's not well solved, right going back to.

1:32:46 - Leo Laporte
If it was. That was the point of java, right, yeah, exactly right.

1:32:49 - Richard Campbell
Once run everywhere, yep yep, right, right, once debug everywhere. I say that out loud. That's supposed to be the inside voice. I'm sorry, I don't, I don't, I don't make, I don't tease java people anymore. They have to live with oracle.

1:33:03 - Paul Thurrott
That's enough torment, they have to live with java that's enough torment I, mary jo, loves telling the story about the time we were in. Uh, we were in san francisco, I think it was for the windows 10 announcement event and there were no rooms because there was an oracle event occurring. And I went, we went into some hotel and I'm like what are all these frigging people doing here? I had to get a hotel in the middle of nowhere and she's like, oh, they're here for this Oracle event. I'm like Oracle. And she's like, yeah, they like Java developers. I'm like, are you serious? I stood up on a chair and I said attention, java developers. The whole room just like stopped, look at you. You are wasting.

1:33:36 - Richard Campbell
Oh, you're so bad. That is not right. Oh, that's so mean. I'm wasting my life all the way to the bank.

1:33:45 - Paul Thurrott
Thanks, very much. They are very well paid. Yeah, they're like the new COBOL developer or whatever Jeez.

1:33:54 - Richard Campbell
Louise, there's nothing better than being in a market that's slightly declining when the young and excitable have already left. Yeah, and you're like. So how much are you going to pay me to keep your stuff alive?

1:34:03 - Leo Laporte
Senior Java developer Starts at seven figures.

1:34:09 - Paul Thurrott
But you know what? Java's not something I think about a lot these days. Obviously who would? But every once in a while, sometime in the past year or so, I had to install the Java, probably for Android development or something. There's like a java sdk that oracle has, and then there's like a free version open gdk open gdk. I installed the, the oracle one, and I was like oh, no, no, this is this is.

This is what adobe acrobat acrobat used to be like in the 1990s. This is not okay. Like this is garbage, like it's hot garbage, and like it is, if anything, worse than it was that day in 2015 and then there's that that three billion devices run java graphic.

1:34:48 - Richard Campbell
That never seems to change the number or go away.

1:34:52 - Paul Thurrott
And the problem is the slide is cut off because the word at the end is badly and no one you know, you don't get the whole message.

1:35:01 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you got it, you got to let them.

1:35:04 - Paul Thurrott
It's like you know like when they used to crop movies for TVs, you'd get the square version.

1:35:10 - Leo Laporte
Slide has been adjusted to fit your preconceptions. Yeah, exactly.

1:35:13 - Paul Thurrott
Right, exactly, the marketing for this product has been adjusted to meet the worth of your screen, nice, I'm not going to go into this a lot because ultimately I failed, but I spent a lot of the last weekend and I mean like literally every waking hour working with Windows 11 Enterprise to find out whether this might, using this version of the product, might help solve the insertification problems with Windows 11. I am depressed to tell you that it does not, but it did cause me to kind of enumerate what those issues are and then also apply severity levels to each of them. So you know, we'll all have different so you've ranked your frustrations.

I appreciate, yeah, yeah it's like you know, I opened the door to the closet and I made the big monster stand in the back and I'm, you know, I kind of just arranged them a little bit and, um, I will say, just just whatever it's worth. For me, the major issues are what I think of as harassment, which is you change settings and it tries to get you to go back, or, uh, it just the worst one of all ignoring the choice that you made, where one drive silently, just you know. Do you want to enable folder backup? Nope, hey, uh, you should enable folder backup. No, thanks, you reboot. You know what? We're just throwing it out there. Do you want to enable fold backup? Nope, I'm good, and then it just does it. It's, it's just tired of you saying no and it just enables itself and I, that's indefensible, you know. So there's some stuff. It's like you know. People will claim uh, complain about the forced telemetry.

1:36:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know who cares I.

1:36:38 - Paul Thurrott
To me that's not a privacy issue. Um, it's. You know, we're trying to make Windows better. There may be some laziness involved to it on some vague level. I do agree, I should be able to turn it off if I feel that strongly about it, but personally I don't care about that kind of stuff, so I don't know. Anyway, we have some solutions to problems. You know, tiny 11 is one. There are workarounds, you knowounds. If you want to sign into Windows with a local account and not a Microsoft account, like Microsoft really wants you to do, you can work around most of that stuff. But there are some problems that are really bad.

Microsoft Edge is a particular form of cancer that I found very troubling, and it's amazing to me when people push back against this. But if you don't choose to use Microsoft Edge, they will force you to use microsoft edge. If you do choose to use microsoft edge, it will just keep bothering you with little pop-ups and says oh, do you want to put bing back as the? You know they'll never stop her, like bing will never stop harassing you. I have to move to france to fix this problem. So I, I, I would, I would like, I would like to see, I think the DMA being applied worldwide might be the solution, but I don't know the funny thing is, this is what drives you off of edge, is?

1:37:47 - Richard Campbell
it won't stop nagging you unless you run it exactly the way it wants you to run it.

1:37:52 - Paul Thurrott
This is not gratifying, like it maybe should be, but it is interesting to me that in recent weeks, days, even I've started to get emails from people like Paul I don't know if you've seen this, but um, or if anyone else has complained, but I just I turned off folder backup and one drive and I swear to God I know this sounds crazy it turned itself on and I'm like, oh, you're so cute.

I've been talking about this since September. Like people think I'm an insane person and maybe I am, but I separate issues. Separate and maybe I am, but I Separate issues Completely. Separate issues, right. Like guys, this is my point. I'm not glad you're seeing it Like. I don't want other people to suffer this way, but it's important to me that other people see it, because someone important is going to see it and complain and then maybe we'll get it fixed, because right now it's hot garbage and it makes me sad.

1:38:40 - Richard Campbell
Okay, Like I said, I'm going to try, not to focus too much on that, and we're about a year away from support from Win 10 ending, right or no. They push it down to October now. It used to be April, now it's October.

1:38:52 - Paul Thurrott
Sorry, that was my installation of Windows 10 was another attempt Like. Will this solve the problem? What if I just use Windows 10?

1:38:59 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it solves some of the problems. It doesn't solve all the problems. So we're 18 months out.

1:39:04 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, yeah, you could pay 61 bucks and make it a year and a half or two and a half years, I guess. There you go.

1:39:12 - Leo Laporte
Let's pause the pause that refreshes Windows Weekly with the fabulous Paws Thurott and Richard Campbell and all the windows and dozers who are in our discord chat and club to it members. We thank you so much for your support. If you're not yet a club to it member, please I beg of you before it's too late $7 a month. We'll get you all of the benefits ad, free versions, the discord chat, the special stuff we do just for our club members. Of course, paul Theriot's Hands on Windows is now public. I hope people know that and subscribe.

1:39:53 - Paul Thurrott
But it's audio only. I'm going to have to start tailoring it for audio somehow. It's such a visual show.

1:39:57 - Leo Laporte
Describe what you're doing maybe, but honestly, if you want the video, just subscribe to the club, then you'll get it. That's true for all of the shows. Now that we were, you know, keeping the whole show behind the paywall, hands on windows, I'm just gonna read the book now.

I think I'll just read the book out loud microsoft edge page five in the beginning in the internet explorer uh, anyway, we're glad to have you in the club if you already are, and if you're not, twittv slash club twit People I probably should mention you might have noticed we took away the year-long subscription. I asked Lisa to do that because every time somebody signed up for that it means in my heart I had to go another year. Oh jeez.

1:40:42 - Paul Thurrott
Wow, we've reached this point. I didn't, it's actually not me. I'm like I'm just going to stare at the sun during the eclipse. I don't care anymore, I'm more comfortable with month to month.

1:40:50 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to have to. You know, I don't want to disappoint anybody. We honestly don't know if we'll be here in a year I will, but the lights might not be on. So, uh, we just thought you know what? Let's go back to month to month. It's the same price anyway, and I apologize to people who only want that one credit card charge.

1:41:08 - Paul Thurrott
It also was causing us problems with chargebacks because for some reason, yeah, people, people would uh, a year goes by and you forget, and then you get this bill and you're like yeah, what's this?

1:41:17 - Leo Laporte
and it was spouses in many cases it was what's this? 84 and they a chargeback which costs us 50 bucks and dings our credit. Yeah, and we'd write to them and say, no, no, we'll refund you, you don't have to do a chargeback, and so you know that's another.

1:41:33 - Richard Campbell
They just didn't recognize it, so they didn't know who to talk to.

1:41:36 - Leo Laporte
So that's another reason.

1:41:37 - Paul Thurrott
month to month is probably oh, there's all I this is now that I'm sort of, now that I'm a business jerk, all the stupid stuff you have to deal with, like oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say it that way.

1:41:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry. Customer support.

1:41:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, Customers, I don't mean it that way. It's weird things like someone will say hey, I don't mean to bother you, I'm going through my father's estate, I'm trying to rectify all these charges. Of course you're going to help those people out. You know you got to do the right thing, you got to refund it, you know whatever. But it's like, it's crazy, Like how much of that there is. You know it's constant. Oh, incidentally, month to month would probably make it easier.

1:42:08 - Leo Laporte
If you subscribe to the year, don't worry, we're not going to. You're going to get the year, but we're just not signing up any new year.

1:42:15 - Paul Thurrott
Long club members that yeah, uh, yeah, I didn't, it just seemed like I just didn't want to get to like december.

1:42:28 - Leo Laporte
No, I like it, there's nothing like people.

1:42:29 - Paul Thurrott
So I just thought right, you have this annual um cycle and and yep, and you forget yeah, people forget yeah uh people also die.

1:42:39 - Leo Laporte
Patrick says that, uh, we had a number of folks who passed away.

1:42:42 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, that's what I was just describing. Same thing. Yeah, our audience bases are on the way out, leo. There's no doubt about that, I feel it every day.

1:42:56 - Richard Campbell
Club Twit a great christening gift Stardom Young.

1:42:58 - Leo Laporte
Please, we beg of you, stardom Young, let's get to hardware, because there's some interesting stuff going on in the hardware world.

1:43:04 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I think probably last week or whatever. Recently we talked about Intel is getting a bunch of grants and loans from the US government through the Chips and Science Act and now TS7C, which is the world's biggest chip maker. They'd already on their own agreed to build two fabs in arizona. Uh, various levels of technology, various time frames. I think the first of those is going to come online maybe by the end of this year. Um, they, they just got an enormous uh or a potentially enormous we'll see how it actually pans out but a total of 11 billion dollars in uh loans and grants from the us government potentially, if the full amount is ever given and they're expanding their own investment in the United States. Tsmc is up to $65 billion, which is crazy. They're going to have three fabs, all in Arizona, which is great because Arizona's got plenty of water and no issues there at all, so it's good. It's like the dumbest place to build one of these things, but whatever but they got great tax incentives for being there, right?

1:44:05 - Richard Campbell
oh yes, they do.

1:44:06 - Paul Thurrott
Yes oh, mexico, arizona will declare war on on colorado to get this water if they have to. Yeah, there's there's no doubt about it. Um yeah, that whole phoenix is going to be all desert landscaping in about 15 seconds.

1:44:20 - Leo Laporte
I don't know stacy's book club just read a book about know, a sci-fi book about the near future. Where that exactly exact thing happened.

1:44:28 - Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, listen, it's going to. In the same way that, like is, as you age, you turn into a baby again, like Phoenix. The beginning of Phoenix was people who would bathe themselves or their clothes in water, put it on and then go to bed, cause that was the only way they could stay cold or cool. So hard Phoenix, oh, it's just so brutally hot.

1:44:47 - Leo Laporte
Read the water knife Paul Paulo got Bacchalupia. I'm very curious what you think.

1:44:51 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, I lived there for several years, I, I, I, without even knowing anything about sustainability or anything like that, or anything like that. You can only spend 10 minutes there and be like this place doesn't make any sense. In fact, there's a there's no, it's not on a river.

1:45:03 - Leo Laporte
There's no, I mean there is a river. There's a classic nonfiction book called Cadillac Desert that came out about 20 years ago I interviewed the author at the time, actually 30 years ago now in which he points out. Is that about Vegas or no? It's about is all of these land reclamation projects that we sponsored in the 30s and later, to build these great dams, to create livable agricultural areas in areas that are desert, and how this is really a very short-term idea. It's, the desert will be back, yeah you know yeah it's a good it was really using science to uh.

Yeah well, it was because we decided, really interestingly, you know, to make it our policy, agrarian policy that we were gonna, instead of planting arable land, we were going to reclaim desert land and make it arable but you just you'd have better luck. Uh, terraforming mars, frankly it's kind of like terraforming it really is. Yeah, it is a of like terraforming.

1:46:02 - Richard Campbell
It really is. It is a kind of terraforming except with the reusable atmospheric pressure and resources and less radiation and less perchlorates Like keep working on the Earth. It's a better place.

1:46:15 - Paul Thurrott
It takes us long to get there. That's all I'm saying. Anyway, that is what they're doing. Who cares? But uh, yeah, so we'll see. I obviously you want to get.

1:46:26 - Richard Campbell
Uh, it's a trained people manufacturing in front of this right Like it's just thousands of engineers, Very, very 6,000 direct high wage jobs.

1:46:35 - Paul Thurrott
Right, that's you know. They're going to need a. They're going to need water too, by the way. Um, I'm sure I'll be fine. I'm worried about the water. I don't know if I made that obvious. I was worried about the water when I lived there. It's not created or destroyed.

1:46:48 - Richard Campbell
It's just moved around. It's just expensive to get it from.

1:46:51 - Paul Thurrott
I think in Arizona it's actually destroyed. That's the problem, arizona's. You know someone, you know the dry heat jokes never get old. But my response to that was always like you know what else is a dry heat? A hairdryer, and I don't want to live in one of those either.

1:47:06 - Richard Campbell
You know it's.

1:47:07 - Paul Thurrott
Apparently you do. It's brutal. Yeah, okay, micron, samsung and possibly one other company are on the board to probably also receive money from the Chips and Science Act soon, so there'll probably be more of this stuff coming down the down the uh pike. All right, I threw this in the notes real quick. I just wrote this before the show, but I wanted to talk about this real quick. I thought this was kind of interesting.

I'm temporarily paying for the paid versions of copilot, pro, um, chat, gpt plus, right and gemini through google workspace and uh, and I've been you and there's a lot you could write about this or talk about, because these things are each good at things or better than the others at certain things, but it changes almost every week because these things evolve and it's kind of hard to explain. But we've talked about some of this, I think, on the show. But there's some really interesting as we sort of understand AI a little bit better. Right, as quickly as it's happening, it's taking a while, right, you learn things about it, you learn what it's good at. Right, and I think we've talked about this notion that generative AI is particularly good at summarizing content like that, or AI is, I guess you know here's a lengthy email. Or here's the transcript from a meeting. Or here's a really long book or article, or whatever you know. Here's a lengthy email. Or here's the transcript from a meeting. Or here's a really long book or article, or whatever you know. Here's five or 10 bullet points. It's good at that, right? We've come to understand that AI is better if you can ground the data, right?

Leo often uses the example of his Lisp LLM, where you know it's custom fed. This particular body of knowledge doesn't get polluted by outside things and it won't or hopefully won't uh, hallucinate or make mistakes, that kind of stuff. Um, one of the things I've noticed because I've been using ai in a very baby like way. Right, I think a lot of people make this mistake where they're like I've been using google search for 20 years or whatever it is, I I'm gonna ask it questions and it's like you know it doesn't work that way, right, like you can't. Like if there was an earthquake yesterday in Mexico city and there wasn't, thank God, but, um, there was one here last week, by the way, but anyway, um, you could say, hey, what happened yesterday in Mexico city and open AI would have no idea, right, pretty much, I mean, it's just not good at that type of thing, but you have to almost understand, like, what it's good for and what it isn't.

And I think, as Google especially kind of tailors their search service, it'd be interesting to see how they handle this, like I, in the same way that, like an MPU might fire off on a PC for certain tasks, like in search, they may have to do the same type of thing Like they'll. They'll look at a question and say, say you know what, this one might be better served by our traditional search engine or this one might be better for this. But, um, but the thing I found using these things, which is really interesting, because I I'll make these, uh, goofy images, right, I use my web articles and, uh, some of the the prompts I use are very vague and short and they that halo one remember with the religious imagery and, right, it was like the last supper, like you specified, religious, oh, no, no, I, I want it to look like rafael's painting of whatever I know.

There was nothing like that, but the thing that's interesting, so that happened, that was a lucky circumstance, right. But the thing I've noticed is that when you're actually trying to create content, it's way better to be way like you. You need to be more specific than you think you need. And this is. This is all I don't mean to say. It's like a, it is. It's kind of a key learning. I hate to say it like that, like I'm insightful or anything, but I mean it will change because AI is, you know, again, by next week this will be old news, but the more specific you can be, the better the the result will be.

And in the beginning, of course, it's hard that we're so used to being terse. We don't want to type yeah, you know, we go to what's the capital of massachusetts, right, you know, we just want the answer, you know. But for for creation, you want to be really specific. So I just came, I just invented this uh, bogus excuse to try to compare these things, and I remember back when we first started talking about the staff last year, I was like I use the example of a PowerPoint presentation. I don't like to give PowerPoint presentations. I only do this once a year. I'm not good at it. It'd be really neat if this thing could help me with that. I don't have to hire an expert. I don't have to research it by a book. I don't have to hire an expert. I don't have to research it by a book. I don't have to watch youtube videos.

What if this thing could just create powerpoint presentations for me? And so I tried it. So I, I came up with this is. You could be way more specific than this. This is a, like I said, a stupid example, but I, I ran this prompt against uh three technically four uh of these ais to see what they did right. So I need to create a presentation with a title slide, 10 content slides and a thank you slide with contact information at the end. Each of the 10 content slides should include a famous quote from a famous individual, plus a representative photo and or background image. The famous people are Steve Jobs, bill Gates, nelson Mandela, on and on. And then see what it does right. And I don't know, maybe I'm just a simpleton, but I am fascinated by this. And the thing is I didn't. I didn't go to the time and do need to go to the time to see if these quotes were even made by these individuals.

I think this is the problem today with this stuff, right, but this is, to me, was a really good example of how, today, if you have Copilot for Microsoft 365 or Copilot Pro, instead of doing this from a chat interface, you do it in the app, right, because then it will make it for you, right? Whereas if you go to ChatGPT, or if you go to Gemini or you go to Copilot, it will describe what these things should look like, but I wanted to actually make the thing.

1:52:42 - Richard Campbell
You know, yeah, no, it will describe what these things should look like, but I want it to actually make the thing you know. Yeah, no, one of the things I love with your prompt is you told him to make 10 content slides and then give him nine names. Did I screw that up? That's funny. Well, but you said should include. So it's almost like you set it up to now come up with one yourself.

1:52:57 - Paul Thurrott
You could add to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, that's funny, I didn't even notice that the, the, the co-pilot in PowerPoint was the best because it, you know, it created the part of the presentation which I think looks pretty good and it's pretty good.

The funny thing is, yeah, yeah, when you actually look at the slides, it doesn't. There are no quotes. It tells you things about the person which are useful and probably mostly true. Um, I would think of those as speaker notes, you know, in fact, the interesting thing is the first one I did, which was a Gemini, I think it just described like slide one this thing, right, subtitle, quote, image, and then you know it's, it describes the image. It doesn't give me the image, but it says you know, speaker notes this is Steve Jobs. Discuss Jobs's reputation as a visionary entrepreneur driven by relentless pursuit of innovative technology. Explain how the quote highlights the necessity to break new ground rather than merely imitate existing models. Right, nice, that's.

1:53:53 - Richard Campbell
That's that's pretty good, Really yeah that's pretty good.

1:54:00 - Paul Thurrott
You know like I was kind of impressed by this. Interestingly, at the end of this I realized, you know, gemini might be built into the Google docs apps. You know, in the same way that copilot is with Microsoft, right, and it is so say exactly the same. And uh, so I put, I pasted this into Google slides and it told me it was good, it could take. It said something like this could take as long as 40 seconds, which I thought was curiously specific. And then it errored out and it says for now we're showing limited results for people, try something else, try something else, but I need this.

1:54:36 - Richard Campbell
I think try something else means try something other than Gemini.

1:54:40 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah Well, but the interesting thing is gemini by itself, when it wasn't I. I think it has to do with the images. I think the problem was, it said, you want me to give you images of people, and you know, you know, so it didn't do it but but anyway.

1:54:56 - Richard Campbell
But interesting that the content filtering was asymmetrical. That only in the google docs version right.

1:55:01 - Paul Thurrott
Catch that versus yeah, like the textual version literally says where is it? Uh, you'll get a picture of portrait of steve jobs with an early apple product in the background. Yeah, thanks, I I wanted you to find that image. You know, it was the point. I'm lazy, I'm a high school student, right, I'm trying to get this done. Anyway, I thought this was kind of fascinating and I I well, it's such a good exercise.

1:55:23 - Richard Campbell
It's a kind of benchmark, right. It's a sort of qualitative benchmark, yeah, and it's a moving target.

1:55:29 - Paul Thurrott
The problem is, by the time someone listens to this, they might say, oh, that's kind of interesting, I'm going to go try this myself and they'll get completely different results. You know, different quality, whatever.

1:55:38 - Richard Campbell
But you know, I, like one would argue different people running this all on the same day are going to get different results. That's right. Well, the same person on the same day.

1:55:45 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's exactly right. That's true. I would like to think that they would be structured similarly, hopefully right. The exact content might be different. I don't know that we can trust any of the information about the people. Check it out, you'd have to check it all. And this is, of course, is you know? That's another, by the way, another key learning, I guess, of ai.

1:56:04 - Richard Campbell
You're gonna have to do some work you know this isn't gonna, but it's different kind of work too.

1:56:07 - Paul Thurrott
You know, fact checking is a lot less painful than trying to come up with facts right the one I should have done is and I, I thought of this as I wrote it and I actually added this textually to the article, but I had been working on this other stuff for a couple of days but every January, I do a look back at the previous year's PC sales and, uh, I use, I take the data from IDC and uh, gartner for the calendar year, so it usually comes out in January, right, and I, I wrote an article.

Obviously, pc market did whatever it did, but I also have this Excel spreadsheet that I created I don't know 10, 15 years ago, a long time ago, and I, I I find the last year's version cause I save it in the January folder for every year. So I go back to this year I would have gone back to 2023, found it, copied it to the desktop, renamed it, and then I have to update my chart. To update my chart, I have to enter the data, so we have the year and the number of pcs that were sold or whatever it is, and then there's a chart and every year I have to reteach myself how to update this chart, because I literally have no idea. This is the only time I ever use excel. You should make.

Actually that would have been so yeah, that would have been the way to do it because it was a year you can go. Look at my article. You can look this up. It's on thrivecom for at least 2015, through I don't I'll make upa year, I don't remember, but through, let's say, 2020. Maybe that chart had different color lines for every year and then one year I couldn't figure that out. Now it's all the same color. I guess I gave up.

1:57:35 - Richard Campbell
That's how bad I am at excel I would also argue that excel keeps moving your cheese too, right? I'd see. Like it's a different version time. Like you're basically relearning it anyway. Like if you leave yourself notes, you're just going to be angry because you're going to know the differences.

1:57:47 - Paul Thurrott
I feel like if I used Excel a lot, I would probably be okay, because you'd be rolling with the changes. I think so, but look, a, I'm not a, you don't want.

1:57:56 - Richard Campbell
But you are made for Copilot. This is a co-pilot scenario. That's what I'm saying.

1:58:00 - Paul Thurrott
But that's why it's such a great example, and even the PowerPoint thing is a good example. The idea here is that there are things we're good at and maybe we don't need AI for that. It's never occurred to me. Well, I just did it now, I guess technically. But I mean, I've never used AI in the writing of anything that I've published, like anything I've written, or an article or anything like that. But but I, I'd like to think I'm a good writer, whatever it is. But there are these things I'm not good at. And there are things like like the Excel is great. I only do it once a year. I, you know, I just don't. I don't even want to learn it, I don't want to know.

1:58:36 - Richard Campbell
Like someone right now is telling me how just don't care, like I, you know there's software busy being made so that you don't have to care, right? I mean, one would argue and now I'm going into the technical terms like what they're talking about in m365 with rag, with regenerate, with retrieval, augmented generation. Right is not only that you could get it to make your graph, but that you could say see these past 20 graphs, make me one like this.

1:58:57 - Paul Thurrott
That's right or you know, like, like, even I never. This is what I described to is also just step one, right, yeah, you are going to refine this prompt over time. You're going to have it, add detail. Maybe the results will show you that you oh I forgot to say do this too, and then you'll get to the point where it's like presentation based, and I mean a small P, like that PowerPoint, but I like the way this looks, but maybe more of a blue and green color scheme. Or you know something like not powerpoint, but you, I like the way this looks, but maybe more of a blue and green color scheme, or you know something like you. At some point you're going to be able to, and actually you could probably do it today. I'm just I, I only did the first step.

1:59:32 - Richard Campbell
I was just kind of curious, very interested with the co-pilot for powerpoint saying can you modernize this deck please?

1:59:36 - Paul Thurrott
yes, right, see what it does right, I have a PPT that was 4x3, turned it into a PPTX I assume it's called Of the 21st century and make it 16x9, right Higher resolution, upscale the graphics and the text and yeah.

1:59:53 - Richard Campbell
You know, these history talks I've done and I'm referencing conferences from like 2000,. And I managed to get the original logo, and it's 320 by 200, yes, and I sent it to a designer and said can you make me a 1080p version of this please?

2:00:09 - Paul Thurrott
wow so you know that today there are many services free, that you literally are there too. I did that a year ago, but yeah I own the only high resolution version of the.

2:00:22 - Leo Laporte
You know that's beautiful tech head 2000 graphic somebody saw it says that looks so nice, can I have it?

2:00:27 - Richard Campbell
I'm like no, I paid for this, this is mine I love it.

2:00:30 - Paul Thurrott
I love it, yeah, this and that's a great example. So you paid whatever, you paid, yep, and today, as part of you, you're still paying for it in a sense, but it, but, it's this thing that does so much more and, and there's no downtime you, if you needed that exact graphic today at 1920 by 1080 or whatever you know yeah you should, software will do it for you unbelievable.

Yeah, this is the world um, the rest of this ai stuff I. I intended to blow through this very quickly. I don't think any of this is particularly notable, except that we live in this era now and and where there's a whole news category.

Yeah, so uh. The new york times, which uh has a skin in this game, reported that uh open ai. Microsoft, google and meta have all stolen content at scale to train their ais, including a million hours of YouTube video in OpenAI's case, where they generated transcriptions for videos before that was a feature of the platform and then used the transcriptions to train their AI, which is a pretty good use of technology, honestly. Microsoft is opening a new AI hub in London. I wonder what that means. Microsoft is opening a new AI hub in London. What do that mean? Ironically, not at their former Camden Yards store location, which I thought was maybe one of the most beautiful stores on Earth. Briefly, there's an Apple store in that area that's likewise unbelievably gorgeous, but that was announced by Mustafa Suleiman, and I'm trying to get used to saying that guy's name because he is now one of the top.

Microsoft executives in the world. I wonder how he's going to do it a build keynote.

2:02:10 - Richard Campbell
It'll be exciting. I can't, I can't wait. Well, this is the first build keynote without Bob Bajon right, the leadership's changed, so it's going to be interesting.

2:02:23 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we'll see if Rajesh Shah can summon any excitement. With different leaders at different levels, you get these ideas that this guy wanted to be on stage, it's important to him and with Rajesh, you get the feeling like he is. They literally have to bring him out in a Hannibal Lecter cage. He doesn't want any part of it, but they're like no, you're getting out there, you got to do this and that's how it feels.

2:02:46 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, Well, and I'm wondering if they're going to announce new surface hardware. There's no pano, so who?

2:02:52 - Paul Thurrott
who? Yep? I think that that is the rumor that they are. There's supposed to be an event on day A0, as we call it for the press to see the stuff and then soon announce it at the keynote. This is just a rumor. But Google I just talked about this kind of mix of generative AI and traditional internet search, trying to figure this one out. Everyone must see this right. If you go to Google right now and you just type in a query of whatever kind history of something, something you'll actually get like a. It will generate something at the top of the search results now, which I think is kind of interesting, and sometimes it does it in place as you're looking at it. I didn't get it to do it here, but DuckDuckGo does this as well, but they're looking at whether they can or should charge for generative ai. In other words, the free bit is the traditional search and the thing you pay for is the generative ai, like the general youtube ish right, like we used to be youtube rev.

2:03:52 - Richard Campbell
I think they call it something else now. But that's right, you know, could you make a premium product and charge for it and not have as much ads and sponsorship could it make? It doesn't suck. I could pay for it, doesn't suck.

2:04:05 - Paul Thurrott
This is what I'm. This is why I looked at windows 11 enterprise. I will pay you. Yeah, turn off the crap.

2:04:10 - Richard Campbell
They turn off the crap, you know, yep because youtube youtube with the premium mode on is usable and youtube without the premium mode, I'm on on exactly.

2:04:20 - Paul Thurrott
Youtube might be the best example ever of why you pay for something you know to remove ads. Um, yep, I couldn't. I I think I said this recently like I, youtube would be. The YouTube premium would be the last service I gave up. If you, if you forced me to have that contest, yeah I, I would whittle it down and that would be the last one left. I would give up Microsoft 365. I would give you know I would. That would Netflix name anything. That would be the last one left. I would give up Microsoft 365. I would give you know I would. That would Netflix name anything. That'd be the last one because I could. I could use that. I mean, I could just watch that.

Spotify is a I'd love. I love that we've moved into a text prompt world, but Spotify now lets users create AI based playlists using text. Prompts like these are like the thing I just described for the copilot and all those other AIs, where you actually type in a description of the type of thing you're looking for, and I guess I haven't tried it with this one. I suppose being more specific here would be good too. I really like Van Halen, but I hate this particular album or this singer. So don't you dare give me anything like that right. You know that kind of thing maybe we'll see.

2:05:19 - Richard Campbell
Is that where?

2:05:20 - Paul Thurrott
you're going. Okay, that isn't where I was going, it's more of a the guy from extreme. What was his name? Uh, gary chiron. Yeah, skip the chiron album. The rest of it's fine rest of it's fine.

2:05:34 - Richard Campbell
Um, yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of make me a playlist that won't make me cry, right like.

2:05:38 - Paul Thurrott
There you go, yeah or make me a playlist that we'll do nothing but make me cry. Yeah, I want to wallow in my tears, yeah yeah, that's fine. I mean I, when you sign up for a music service, it does the most basic form of what is not really ai, but it says you know what, what bands do you like, and then they'll try to give you recommendations based on those things. Right, so there's an algorithm there or whatever that is, and well, it's mostly based on other people's plays.

2:06:01 - Richard Campbell
What did they skip when they yeah, yeah, there you go. Yep, yeah, there you go, yeah actually it's really funny.

2:06:07 - Paul Thurrott
So it's kind of fact-based or evidence-based whatever we've worked on.

2:06:10 - Richard Campbell
I've worked on a few recommendations engines over the years for products and things like that. And hey, a good recommendation engine and again I'm coming this from an e-commerce background it made its money. It was an average sale up 15 when the rent, when it was working well, and when it wasn't working that number went away and I had a sales got very angry. You know, like good recommendation engines were made money, like, just clearly I mean you know like I mean.

2:06:36 - Paul Thurrott
Music services today, aside from the subscription angle, are pretty much playlist based. Yeah, so the better these things can be. You know you want that. You want that moment of happy surprise. You're like nice, I like this song a lot. That was a good choice.

2:06:47 - Richard Campbell
You know you want to.

2:06:47 - Paul Thurrott
Never heard before and it was amazing yeah, right, exactly, there's nothing better, especially at my age. You know you find like new music now is almost next to impossible, yeah, but then you find new music that's actually good, like nice, you know, like that's very much appreciated, right? Yeah.

2:07:02 - Leo Laporte
So yeah do that You're like.

2:07:04 - Paul Thurrott
I want this kind of music, I want it to be whatever. Like, yeah, I like the idea. I don't like Spotify, but Brave, which has its they call it an AI assistance the in-browser thing, probably last November, brought it to desktop across all platforms. They brought it to iOS all platforms. They brought it to ios no, no, I'm sorry, android back in february, I think, and then recently they brought it to ios, meaning iphone and ipad, and uh, no one knows about this, but they also have a service called brave talk, which is a way to, by the way, have completely free video calls through the browser at hd quality with up to four people and never pay a cent and have no limits, or you can pay them $7.99, I think it is a month to have a premium version with hundreds of people and transcriptions, and it does all these other features.

They've added Leo to this. So if you pay for BraveTalk Premium which probably no one does it will give you additional features like summarizing the transcription and, you know, making the bullet points and a bunch of other stuff like that. So I, this is, you know it's. This is a I'm not saying this is something people should do per se, but it it's interesting to me. This is interesting Maybe as an example of how AI is going to permeate little, every little nook and cranny, if you will going to permeate little, every little nook and cranny, if you will, of our industry.

2:08:26 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's just software like you know.

2:08:27 - Paul Thurrott
You won't know exactly. Yep, it's like red eye removal. It used to be like a premium feature of photoshop and it. You couldn't find a photo app that doesn't offer that. Um, and then, uh, google has something that is basically their version of uh, what do you call it? Github co-pilot, which is used to be called StudioBot, and now, because everything has to be called Gemini over there they've got Copilot-itis they're calling this thing Gemini in Android. It's still in preview. It's in the current beta version of Android Studio, which will become the stable version sometime this summer, so it's almost out of preview.

2:09:04 - Richard Campbell
So what did they actually call it? It's no longer StudioBot, it's GeminiBot.

2:09:08 - Paul Thurrott
Gemini in Android. I'm sorry, I misnamed it here. It's Gemini in Android.

2:09:13 - Richard Campbell
Studio is the name. Oh great, so they've really picked up the Microsoft naming strategy. Yep, exactly so they add foundation at the end of that. Would that be better? Yep, exactly, should they add foundation to the?

2:09:22 - Paul Thurrott
end of that. Would that be better? R2. Yeah, r2, community Edition.

2:09:24 - Richard Campbell
Preview 7. Yeah, I don't know.

2:09:29 - Paul Thurrott
Whatever?

2:09:33 - Richard Campbell
It is so strange how this is going around right. I mean, you guys are in monopolistic trouble now and you can't name your products anymore.

2:09:40 - Paul Thurrott
Who are you Dominant tech giant that has trouble naming their products Interesting.

2:09:50 - Richard Campbell
And you think you're not the next Microsoft. Are you sure, are you really sure?

2:09:55 - Paul Thurrott
There's something there and then that's it for AI actually. So in the Xbox space, a couple of things. I meant to do this as a joke and I just forgot I was going to do a story every week where it's like yet another week of no news of Activision Blizzard games coming to Game Pass?

2:10:14 - Richard Campbell
That's the only question. Are all the Activision games out yet?

2:10:18 - Paul Thurrott
No, there's still only one. So that's neat. Just Diablo 4. It's just diablo 4.

2:10:24 - Richard Campbell
That's right, okay, I'm I gotta tell you I'm really excited for the fallout movie. I really am, yeah I hope it's a movie or tv series? I thought tv series, I don't know it doesn't mean anything anymore for the, for the production of the fallout, the fallout thing, I mean.

2:10:39 - Paul Thurrott
I really enjoyed the tv series now honestly right like um, yeah, I, I just I feel like these stories deserve that kind of space you take more time.

2:10:48 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, like the way that last I mean last of us couldn't be done in two hours it needed. Yeah, give it the time it deserves. I love it.

2:10:55 - Paul Thurrott
You know, unfortunately, a lot of the stories are really like six hours, but they drag it up to ten so you get a lot of superfluous but, it's okay, I'd rather have that than tough. You know, you could never do the lord of the rings. It's a two-hour movie, right. So they're doing three movies. Yeah, but what about the 20 20?

2:11:11 - Richard Campbell
episode art. We've seen a couple of commercials now, and even the boss is looking at me like is this gonna be any? Is this, what is this like?

2:11:18 - Paul Thurrott
this is a video game that I adored years ago and yeah, yeah, I'm gonna make a thing and she's like, and if it's successful, good, and I'm like no, but there are all these different versions of fallout that take place in different times and places.

2:11:29 - Richard Campbell
I mean there's, there's a franchise possibility and you know that 50s retro vibe thing is powerful.

2:11:37 - Paul Thurrott
you know yep, really you know what the problem with this thing is, though it's on Amazon Prime. That's a shame, which means there are going to be commercials unless you give them a little additional dig they got me.

I'm doing everything I can not to do this. I am actively resisting Amazon content and I just what did I just see? Oh, I forget, Because I literally, like I said, I'm actively avoiding it. But there was some set of movies that are on Amazon. I'm like damn it. It's like I don't want to pay for this, but anyway, they'll get me eventually.

You know you're going to, you're going to Well, in lieu of any Game Pass titles, this week we have an April update, or a set of april updates really, for xbox cross console and the xbox app on the pc. They went really big on the pc app. For some reason, all they've done is add the game hubs that have been in the console for I think several months now to the app. Um, which I don't know. Maybe I just don't care anymore, but this doesn't seem like a big deal to me. But, um, you know there's uh, they added discord integration last year.

If they killed mixer, you know, you thought I wasn't going to remember that name, um, and that's been updated where you can hear soundboard audio now from other people in the channel or call and you can turn that off if you don't like that. Um, remember they also added last year, uh, automatic or the option for updating screenshots and videos captures to OneDrive, which you know it should have been there from the beginning. People are apparently using that so much they're now adding notifications to let you know that your cost is getting low because you have too many stupid screenshots and video captures, which I could totally see.

2:13:20 - Richard Campbell
I mean, isn't that the point? Create devices so that you use OneDrive more.

2:13:24 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, click here to pay for another gigabyte, terabyte or whatever. Yeah, so that kind of stuff. Not a big. This is not a big month as far as the monthly system update goes, but that's happening, I don't know. Probably two weeks ago we talked about that big Microsoft AI reorg, yep, and then a week ago we talked about the guy was like nope, I'm out. You know, um, this past week there has been a this is a report from windows central. This is not something microsoft announced, but, um, there has been a reorg, apparently in the xbox group and one of the key players, uh, from project x cloud, which is xbox god gaming, uh is left because of the reorg, which we don't know any details of, because microsoft has not come out publicly and see what's going on there?

2:14:09 - Richard Campbell
bit by bit, I'm getting the feel of this idea that they're building a consumer group. Yep, yep, you know, with ai at its top and it seems there.

2:14:19 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah and it might be leading to a what we might call a non-traditional selection of people that there are these other guys who've been around for like wait, excuse me, like what's going on here, I should not be part of this. Um, we've all been passed over for a promotion at one point.

2:14:34 - Richard Campbell
I wonder if that's the sort of thing. It's like no, we want you to learn from these folks. It's like I don't want to learn and they're out. I don't want to learn.

2:14:39 - Paul Thurrott
What do you mean learn? I'm 57 years old.

2:14:42 - Richard Campbell
I found the way I want to do stuff and I'm not going to do it another way.

2:14:46 - Paul Thurrott
It's like okay find another team, yeah, so I feel like this departure, like that guy from the AI group, yeah, but what was he? He was in I don't know if he was in Bing, wherever he was and I feel like these are related in that sense, Like they're just people who are like, yeah, I don't like this, this is not working for me. So you know, you're going to step on some toes.

2:15:10 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and again I still get the sense that Satchit doesn't know what he wants to do in consumer. He just knows what was happening wasn't working and so he is bringing in other folks and it's a shake. But he I mean again you. You mean if satcha cracks consumer for microsoft, you would talk about trying to make your mark an impossible thing to make a mark on.

2:15:33 - Paul Thurrott
I don't see this company has anyone ever hit three grand slams in a single game? Because I I don't understand how that could work, but no well, you could make a really good case for microsoft, explicitly just ignoring consumer. Pretty much right.

2:15:48 - Richard Campbell
Except for.

2:15:50 - Paul Thurrott
Xbox whatever.

2:15:51 - Richard Campbell
Largely they have right. That's why I said explicit Technically they sort of have.

2:15:57 - Paul Thurrott
Right, I like that. They I've always liked the consumer offerings, that sort of emulate what they have for businesses, like this notion of OneDrive and Sync and the Microsoft 365 suite, and you know, I think I don't know I like it personally. I mean, I like using that stuff. But yeah, as far as like a pure play consumer, I mean, what are we talking about here? Like in Carta, mungo Park when was the last time you know what I mean? Like how far back do we have to go? Like Mungo Park, when was the last time you know what I mean? Like how far back do we have to go? Like I don't even.

2:16:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, they made that reverse flight simulator.

2:16:31 - Richard Campbell
There was a Microsoft phone.

2:16:32 - Paul Thurrott
It was an actual like a.

2:16:39 - Richard Campbell
You plugged it into the wall.

2:16:40 - Leo Laporte
What Like a phone Like a phone Telephone. Remember what? Yeah like a telephone. What plug, I think it might have been called Outlook something.

2:16:48 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they've tried. They used to do a lot of, you know, when Apple was really big on the digital media stuff on the Mac with making movies and DVDs eventually whatever they tried, all that stuff and the ergonomic keyboards and the mice They've had a lot of hits over the years but it's never really resonated. I mean no one's going to Oldsmobile, which doesn't exist anymore, for the hot new sports car. I mean I just don't, I don't know.

2:17:14 - Richard Campbell
It just doesn't seem like the right mix. But I know folks who love the split ergonomic keyboard so much that they bought a dozen of them and stashed them away.

2:17:21 - Paul Thurrott
I am one of those people. Oh, there you go. This is no longer the case. I brought my last one, my last extra one, to Mexico. I used to have three of them up in the closet. Yeah, as they break, yeah, so, and sometime this year they're coming back. Right, thanks, you've survived the drought. Well, that's not.

2:17:41 - Richard Campbell
I don't want.

2:17:41 - Paul Thurrott
I don't have any actual wood in here, but let me knock on something that looks like wood. It's probably particle board. Um, yeah, so far I've been okay, but yeah, but, but that I'm getting down. You know like you're getting down, this is it? He's not that way.

Oh, um, so this is another rumor slash report from a third party, also a window central, but makes sense. I mean, phil spencer's been talking about this very explicitly and this has always been a big part well, not always, but has now for a long time been a big part of the Xbox brand, which is this theme of game preservation. Right, the backward compatibility stuff, the ability to now stream this stuff over the cloud and not have to worry about the underlying hardware, is all part of an effort to make sure that your library means something. You know that when a new console, a new generation of software, whatever comes out, you you don't have to say goodbye to that stuff. You know, um, that's always worked better on the pc and of course xbox is kind of cross platform now. But, um, supposedly now they have a, a team that will kind of formalize and expand on that work that began with backwards compat and make sure that the libraries that people have of games, you know, move forward with people. As you know, as things change, I think that's cool.

2:18:59 - Leo Laporte
So that's cool, can't complain about that I just bought my Atari mini 400. I showed it on Ask the Tech Guys it's about this big 25 great games on it so cool very happy with it. But you know what? You play those games for about 5 minutes and you realize we've come a long way, baby.

2:19:22 - Paul Thurrott
This actually is a little this actually has. That was the Dark Horse. Technical winner of that generation, like the Commodore 64 was the biggest. That was the dark horse. Uh, technical winner of that generation like the commerce 64 was the biggest computer in the world. But the the guy I would say man, nolan bushnell. Well, no, I was thinking the guy made the chipset. Uh, the guy went on to do the amiga chipset, the 65 guy, the chipset on the. No, no, not sorry, his name is Jay, something Um yeah, okay, I know what you mean I God, it's awful, I can't think of that.

2:19:52 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, the, the Atari 800 and 400. Well, Paul, by the way.

2:19:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I stopped. You don't just stop learning. His stuff falls off the back, jay Miner. Jay Miner, that sounds right. Um he, the those 8-bit Atari computers were essentially multi-processor computers. And he took that architecture and built on it to make the Amiga later right. So ironically it became a commoner product.

2:20:18 - Leo Laporte
But technically in many ways not in all ways the sprites of the 64 were better but in many ways the music sound, a lot of the graphic stuff was superior, you know, superior on the atari I couldn't afford an apple too, so I got an atari uh as my first computer and I loved it and, yeah, I was very aware of the antic chip and the cti chip and all the stuff that minor designs.

right. It was very unusual. It had, um, it was made for games, so it had, uh, sprites in hardware and stuff like that. It was really quite cool. It's quite a neat piece of hardware. Yep, yep, all right, genius. It comes in many flavors. Let's take a little time out. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot, richard Campbell, more to come in, just a bit. The back of the book, in fact. Let's kick off the back of the book with paul's tip of the week yeah.

2:21:15 - Paul Thurrott
So every spring microsoft store has a sale hardware and software and games. Um, if you're looking to buy a last gen surface device, this is not a bad time to look. You can save a lot of money on that stuff Surface Laptop 5, surface Pro 9, there are bundles, etc, etc. There's no real good sales on Xbox hardware but, honestly, the Xbox Series S has been priced in the right place for a long, long time. Microsoft does have a refurbished store.

A lot of people don't know. You can see that if you go to the store website. They offer Surface PCs and Xbox consoles refurbished on sale. I don't know what the quality is there, but other than that, I would say the big things to look at are Xbox wireless controllers $20 off. They're usually $65. And then the special editions. Also, a lot of those are on sale, including the wireless controller uh, elite wireless controller two and the elite wireless controller to core, which is the less expensive version. And then Xbox console and PC games are all there's some huge sales.

Definitely, if you are looking to get games on sale, uh, go through some of these lists the older games, newer games, whatever. Like looking to get games on sale, uh, go through some of these lists older games, newer games, whatever, like destiny 2, collections 15 bucks, 45 off, uh halo, the master chief collection is often on sale, but 10 if you don't have that. And if you don't have that, seriously, come on. Uh, lots of stuff in there, so just go. There's literally almost a thousand xbox games and about 450 pc games on sale. So a lot of stuff, yeah, and I love this aspirational trade in your mac, you know wait, wait.

Does it say that, yeah, trade in your mac? It says, trade in your back? Yeah, get get rid of that old thing and get a nice surface pro oh why not? Don't you want a real computer, don't you?

2:23:02 - Leo Laporte
want a real what's a computer?

2:23:03 - Paul Thurrott
if you're gonna trade in your back, trade it in at apple. Those guys give really good they really do, don do.

2:23:08 - Leo Laporte
Don't do it with Microsoft. Yeah, don't give it to Microsoft, they're going to trade it in for another man.

2:23:16 - Paul Thurrott
Trade in your Mac, that's funny, so I have two app picks. I can't claim that I use either one of these. I might be using one of them pretty extensively if it works out the way I want it to, so the interesting thing about both these, though, is that they're both acquisitions by companies that I really like and respect and will probably be using more of their stuff in the near future. The first one is Proton bought a company called, or the company, the very small company that makes something called Standard Notes. I spend approximately 72% of my waking hours investigating Markpad note taking apps and editors, and I have never heard of this thing, and it looks a lot like Notion. The problem is the free version is only plain text.

You can't even do like formatting, like bold and italics, like if you want to have rich text or markdown support, you actually have to pay for it and it's a subscription. I'm kind of hoping that they change that. But if you're looking for kind of a basic notion type solution that's free and not as good as the notion that is for, also for you I guess it's a thing. But because it's Proton, it's potentially interesting because Proton of course makes a bunch of awesome privacy-protecting apps, you know, mail Calendar, the password manager, et cetera. So I like that company a lot. We'll see. And then Beeper was acquired by Automatic, with two Ts at the end, and Automatic is the company behind WordPress and Akismet. Or to my mind they're the company behind PocketCast, which is the podcast app I use.

2:24:56 - Leo Laporte
And SimpleNote, which is actually a pretty good app. They also own Texts, which is an all-in-one pigeon-like messaging platform, so they're going to combine Texts and Beeper, yeah they're going to combine them, that's exactly right.

2:25:06 - Paul Thurrott
Texts and beeper yeah, yeah, they're going to combine them, that's exactly right. And this is a thing that right now works with about a dozen different messaging services, including SMS and RCS, which is good. This is the app that, by the way, we all know, went after iMessage, trying to bring it to Android. Apple forwarded them several times and is now being investigated for antitrust violations for that. So interesting. So they pointed that out and said hey, you know, we might be adding iMessage to the list. We're going to try, you know, but once Apple does support RCS later this year on the iPhone, the notion of having a messaging app that works with, you know, whatsapp, slack, whatever else you might have, I mean is very appealing. And just to rub salt in a wound that I think half of us feel, this was the original vision for Windows Phone, right, that they would have these hubs that would bring in all the services to a single place.

This idea of one contact all the different things go to and you could say message and it would say which service do you want to use? You know that kind of thing, love it. When that thing first shipped in october 2011, I think it was uh, messaging had bought into this, so we had skype, facebook messenger, sms and mms all in one app and it was wonderful. And then 15 seconds passed and facebook was like wait, what are we doing? And they, they walked away from it. So that ended that dream. But yeah, um, they're trying, beepers trying, and now automatics trying, and automatics a good company, um, a problem so I was a trillion user back in the day yeah, trillion, yeah, yeah, there you go trillion, trillion and pigeon.

Both did the same thing yeah, so the thing, but the thing about beeper and, yeah, and the other app I mentioned, they're both cross-platform, mobile and desktop. They're literally on everything, so you can get a native app. If I'm not mistaken, beeper has a native app, not just on Windows and Mac, but it's available for Chrome OS, it's available for Linux, it's available on, obviously, android and iOS and the iPad, and I think it's not just cross-service, which is awesome, but cross-platform, which makes the difference right. You'll have this wherever you are, which is ideal. Potentially, I've installed it everywhere. I'm going to try to make it work.

2:27:21 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, awesome. I love that, because the reality now is that every machine has half a dozen different messaging apps open for these various islands of community.

2:27:30 - Paul Thurrott
I have a folder called chat that has nine, ten, twelve apps in it.

2:27:36 - Richard Campbell
I have taken to making notes about people. It's like which of these am I likely to reach you on? That's right.

2:27:43 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, richard and I will talk on WhatsApp, raphael and I talk on Skype. For some reason, I guess we hate ourselves. You know, brad and I use the Google chat thing because we're on the Google workspace whatever nonsense that is. Let's see Messages Slack.

2:27:56 - Leo Laporte
Discord chat Meet. I don't know why I still have those Zoom FaceTime, telegram Signal, threema Wire, ringcentral. I mean yeah, it goes on.

2:28:09 - Paul Thurrott
Olds, which is the one that france says you have to use, like uh signal does uh whatsapp does messenger does chat.

2:28:15 - Leo Laporte
I try text chat slack, it's ugly and I don't like it. But yep uh, with some work, the premise is good I like I.

2:28:24 - Paul Thurrott
this is, uh, the the chat version of write once run everywhere. Right, it's the Java of chat.

2:28:33 - Leo Laporte
It's the Java of message. I'm sorry. I said that it's the.

2:28:34 - Paul Thurrott
Java of JIRA. Wait what? No what?

2:28:39 - Richard Campbell
Write once, reply everywhere.

2:28:42 - Paul Thurrott
My wife thinks that everything I talk about sounds like nonsense, because it does. But even to me it's starting to sound like nonsense because it does it all. But even even to me it's starting to sound like nonsense.

2:28:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah well, what's not nonsense?

2:28:52 - Richard Campbell
this week's run as radio richard campbell oh yes, great show um this is the show I did with sarah young and I'm afraid it's almost gotten a little long in the tooth. I had an opportunity to grab a lot of in-person interviews when I was at uh ndc in sydney, which was in February. So this is now two months old and it's about securing AI, which is such a moving target that as I was looking at the notes, I'm like, oh wait, but where's the content studio, content safety studio, because it didn't exist in February, but it does now. So Sarah is this firecracker security person. She's just a ton of fun to talk to. She's 100 miles an hour, knows backwards and forwards, and I'm dealing with sysadmins who've got this challenge where it's like this thing's coming to my company, like what do I need to know?

And so we just ran down. Start with the fundamentals how are you authenticating? What's the authorizations? What is the gradation of security? Like, what services can you access to? And then we get into more of the specifics around llm, some of the the frightening parts, and again you know that great line you must have your data estate in order. Such an easy thing to say for something that's impossible to do, like being perfectly secure, and that led to other microsoft products like like purview, which is really about looking at your data estate. Where is information? Is it tagged appropriately?

not a good name purview yeah, well, because you are looking you have a view over your purves.

2:30:24 - Paul Thurrott
No well, it's a it's it's, it's, it's, it's a perv view. What is what?

2:30:29 - Leo Laporte
are they? What are they going?

2:30:31 - Richard Campbell
for maybe they, but uh, you know a part. An important part of this is that when modern tagging is security tagging is used in the m365 space anyway, anything that you use that data in, like if you create a powerpoint deck, it will automatically have the same security clearance on it and so that security propagates outward from that and it helps protect information, and that's especially relevant with LLM. So we dug into all of this. But I will add to the show notes now, because I was doing the review, that there is now in Azure AI Studio a thing called Content Safety Studio, and Content Safety Studio specifically gets down into categories of content that may be appropriate in different contexts.

You know, often we don't want to see. You know, what's inappropriate in a business setting is not necessarily inappropriate in a home setting or different kinds of professional work. Doctors deal with cadavers on a regular basis. That's not something you want showing up at home, and so the idea that you have to gradiate content access is a complex problem for a lot of organizations, but there is tooling appearing for it, and Sarah talked around this a fair bit at the time, but clearly I think she knew these products were coming. She just wasn't allowed to talk about them yet, and so we got into them. We did certainly get into what they call the system message framework, which has specific security recommendations for LLMs. So well worth your listen. Like just a dense set of conversation, but yes, it's been a couple of months. The the fences are moving, and so there's been a couple of new products that have made this easier than they were back in february when we're talking nice.

2:32:22 - Leo Laporte
Now we have some lovely brown liquor. I still have a half a bottle of that stuff you brought last week. That was so good.

2:32:30 - Richard Campbell
Oh, the Conakilty, conakilty, yeah, conakilty from Ireland, yeah, and because you know, I don't know how we've done like over a hundred of these now and it's not like I'm running out of whiskey, but I do I now have to keep notes to keep track of which ones have I talked about which ones have a database. Hold on, yeah, take a break I'm doing in the loop.

2:32:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm gonna write the database in java and we'll be back. Okay, we'll be back in a couple of years. Uh, this is windows weekly. Paul thorat and richard campbell you've been waiting for it. You've been wanting it all day.

2:33:03 - Richard Campbell
Let's get a brown liquor in here, richard I, uh, it was time to go back to Scotland and to go to a traditional, so the Dalwini 15, it was one of those ones. When I picked it up off the shelf because I do like it and thought I must have already talked about this and I thumbed through my notes and went I've never talked about Dalwini 15. Oh, my goodness. So I grabbed a bottle because I'm home, I get to do that. The word Dalwini, a Gaelic word that means the meeting place that the village of Dalwini is in an intersection point geographically, on the southwestern part of the highlands. It's nominally actually still in the space side, although they generally refer to themselves as a highland whiskey, the distillery was built not that long ago. It's only in 1897. Remember we are talking about part of the world where a there's been humans for thousands and thousands of years uh, that that particular area was better known for smuggling things than making whiskey. The original distillery was built, uh, in 1897 by john grant that is, the same grant on Spey, the folks who built many other distilleries and it was named the Strathspey because that's the name of the waterway nearby. That name lasted a year because they ran out of money. Pretty quickly. Within a year. They picked the location because Delwini at that time had the railway already in it this is 1897, so that's impressive as well as various roads this is 1897, so that's impressive, as well as various roads. But by 1898, ap Blythe has bought it and renames it after the town Dalwini, and so it has the normal whiskey experience of the early 20th century, including dealing with the challenges of World War I with Prohibition. They had a big fire in 1934 that shuts it down for years and then, post-world War II, they generally start to modernize. You see more news from them in the 50s and 60s when they switch over to steam heat. They did their own maltings until the mid-60s. Then they, like everyone else, had to switch to third-party maltings and then British Rail shut down their siding. But by then the highway had come through and they were acquired by United Distillers in 1987. And United Distillers of course became Diageo and you'll notice that the website that I provided for this is maltscom, which is owned by Diageo and has all many of Diageo's brands in there, including Johnny Walker and so forth.

But back in 89, united Distillers, in a promotional move towards Scottish whiskey, did this promotion called the Six Classic Malts of Scotland, and so they picked, like great representations of each of the regions. Now, um, there are seven regions, uh, for that are recognized for whiskey, and that is lowland, highland, space side, sky isley, and then, uh, campbellton. They don't have, didn't have a distillery in Campbellton, so they just left it up. And in fact they actually used Highlands twice, because they listed both the Obon, which is the West Highlands, and they called Dalwini a Highland as well, although it's normally a Speyside. But they included Kragamore, also a Spey. And we've only done. I've talked about Obon before. It's the only one of the original of the six classics that I've talked about. But we'll do them all inevitably. But we can't just keep hammering away on Scottish whiskey all of the time. So by 1997, of course, diageo is formed out of that big merger with all the different companies, including United Distillers, so that's Dalwitty being a part of it.

The distillery itself is one of. It's not a huge, it's a mid-sized distillery. They push through a lot of whiskey, millions of gallons a year. They have wood washbacks. They do long. I love these guys. They do 60-hour fermentations during the week, but on the weekend it's 110 hours, so nobody needs to come in. That's the way to do it. They still run on only two stills. They have two large stills and they use wooden worm tub condensers coming out of them, which is old school. They actually took them out in the in the 80s and brought them back in the aughts. So, uh, they've stuck to the original techniques.

Delwini is also a blending whiskey, so Diageo owns Buchanans and Black and White. These are two original blends Before single malts were a thing, you could buy. Buchanans and Black and White. Black and White's been made since the distillery opened, even before in 1879. And you won't see this bottle in Scotlandotland at all. It's only sold abroad. But it has both a scottish and a west highland terrier the black and white sky terriers on the label, and you can actually get a bottle of that from bevmo in the 1.75 liter format that's 60 ounces for those who are counting for 45 bucks, uh, however, when you come to a product actually named for dalwini, this is it.

The dalwini 15 is the only product they sell. They have a couple of special editions, distillers editions, but otherwise this is what you're getting, like the obon, where you can only really get obon 14, although there's little bay and a couple of others. Really it's the one and I already have the bottle and it's afternoon so that's close enough for me so I get to have a taste now. It's nominally a space side, so you'd think it would be sherry cast, but no, they tend to stay strictly with the bourbon cast so it's pretty pretty light colored for a 15 year old. They're not doing any color in it. They also add a tiny bit of peat to it in their, in their maltings, and of course they order them that way they these days. So there's just a touch of smoke, but otherwise it's quite a fruity sort of fun, bright, uh, non-burny kind of product.

15 is a nice age, you know. You take a lot of the edge off of that and they don't mess around with the barrelings. It's pretty straightforward. This is 43 abv a touch low typically for a whiskey in this category, but that's fine. Um, about 95 us dollars for a bottle of this worth every penny. This is a proper single malt spay which typically come in the hundred dollar range for this age and it should be on your shelf. This is a proper single malt spay which typically come in the $100 range for this age and it should be on your shelf. This is a keeper. It's very drinkable. This is one of the whiskeys that people who are uncomfortable with whiskey will often feed them.

It's like I don't think I like whiskey. It's like, try this, it's not quite as cloying as, say, a Dalmore 12. It doesn't get the punch of an abalur abanonth, but it's got character to it. It tastes like something and it's got a little heat and they on the finish, but not too noisy on the mouth. So so it's a real nice balance and I'm always glad to have it around.

2:40:02 - Paul Thurrott
This uh bottle will be going into my decanter on the shelf as my evening sip um for the as long as that might I suddenly feel the need to visit you at home um?

2:40:16 - Leo Laporte
it can make a trip up the coast, you should is that weird?

2:40:20 - Richard Campbell
it's not a bit the boat, the boat house is getting a new deck. Man, you should come out. Oh nice, yeah, anyway, you know, uh, a lovely dram and uh, absolutely, you know. After going down the weirds and the bads and all those sorts of things, I just thought it was time for a classic and uh, and literally, definitionally, this is a classic dalwini, the 15 year old single malt, scotch Maltscom has it.

That is Diageo's site, yeah, and you know. But you're better off going to your local BevMo or your Total Wine or something like that. I've seen it there. You can find this, yeah. Yeah, I've seen it there. Yeah, and therein lies the problem, which is that there's so many whiskeys. You're staring and going what am I looking at here? So if there's anything I can do for you, it's like listen, it's as special as it seems. Some of them are not. This one is.

2:41:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, I know my mom's going to ask me to go in and get the handle Hiram Walker so maybe I'll bring her back a Dalwini just to surprise her.

2:41:25 - Richard Campbell
Get her the black and white because it's got Dalwini in it. Okay, alright, there you go. That's a 60. It's the big one With the big handle on it. They call it handles for a reason. It's got a handle on it, you've got to curl those things, man. They're heavy, it's the luggage of whiskey bottles.

2:41:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, mr Richard Campbell is at run as radiocom. That's wherenet rocks lives as well. Joins us every week for the show, as does Paul Thurott from Thurottcom T H U, double R, o, double good. And his books are at lean pubcom, including the windows everywhere book and the field guide to windows 11. Couple of really must haves. If you've got windows, you need those books.

We do windows weekly on a wednesday, 11 am, pacific, 2 pm eastern, 1800 utc. You can watch us live on youtube, as with all of our live shows, youtubecom slash twit. There's alsoa dedicated youtube channel for the windows weekly videos great way to share a clip if there's something you want to share. Maybe a whiskey lover in's something you want to share, maybe a whiskey lover in your life? You want to turn on to Dal Winnie. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. We like Pocket Cast, just like Paul, me too, yeah, but there are a lot of good ones and all of them have Windows Weekly. Once you subscribe, you should get it automatically the minute it's available. We thank our club members for making this possible Twittv slash club twit. We thank all of you for being here. Now, you winners and dozers. I think it's time to say goodbye to all our family. Thank you, paul, thank you richard, I was just.

2:43:00 - Paul Thurrott
That song went through my head, just as you said that so it's time to say goodbye to all the family.

2:43:09 - Leo Laporte
T-h-u-r-r-o-t. All right, take care everybody, we'll see you next week.