Windows Weekly 883 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This week on Windows Weekly, paul Theriot and Richard Campbell take a look at Windows 24H2. Paul says you know, actually that's the new Windows 12. Okay, he'll explain. We'll also talk about AI, that big big Bing outage. What happened there? And finally, another game comes to Game Pass from Activision. It's all coming up. Next, on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 883, recorded Wednesday May 29th 2024. It's so convoluted, it's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners and dozers. Glad you're here, because Paul and Richard are here and it'd be a shame not to have an audience for this fine thing that's about to happen.

01:02
Paul Thorat is at his home in lower mcungie pa hello, what of it?

01:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what of it?

01:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, right hey, hey, what of it? Richard campbell is a nice canadian up there in mad park, british park, columbia yeah, sun's just starting to break out from a rainy morning, oh isn't that nice. I'll show you if you like.

01:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's see, we have a similar experience, except ours was construction trucks at 7 o'clock in the morning. It's almost like that.

01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, norman, the loons, the loons. Do you have loons up there? Oh yes, they sound crazy, don't they?

01:42 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's the sea lions hanging around right now. The obnoxious part, yeah.

01:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They come down to San Francisco to infest us after they're done with you. Yeah, so the reply of the week we begin with on Windows Weekly Paul Thorat has stuck it in here is this on the uh site, formerly known as twitter what is this? It is yeah, and is this a reply to you?

02:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this was just, uh, well, I rip on. You know headlines that are bad.

02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a really bad one and then the quote is microsoft claims windows 11 is better than 10 for celebrity gossip, weather and stocks, and of course, paul, in his usual way, says it's this laser focus on quality that keeps me on this platform.

02:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, Now you've got a lot of views 40,000, 767 likes.

02:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then somebody you've blurred his name.

02:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I'm not trying to make fun of him. He misspelled this word, but it's beautiful, it's so convolated and I'm like that's it. That's a good word, convoluted I like it.

02:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's convoluted.

02:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I yeah I yes, it's rare we get a title for the show right at the beginning.

02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I think convoluted, convoluted, it's so convoluted, it's pretty good. You're gonna have to work hard. We all know what it means. Yeah, exactly, convolut, convoluted, that's good, all right. Yeah, I was remarking because, as we know, there might be a big breaking news story in the next day or so. And I was remarking that I clicked it said in big letters, the widget bar on my Windows 11 said breaking news. I thought, oh, and I clicked it this is it, baby. And it says says finally, video of somebody's arrest at the pga tournament last year or something breaking, really, really. And then there's a picture of a weasel in my uh, in my search lozenge my top headline.

03:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is the only major actor still alive from gilligan's island. Who is the only major actor is still alive from gilligan's island? Who is the?

03:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
only major actor still alive. I am not clicking on that, I'm sorry is it. But it's not bob denver, it's not, it must be. It's not tina louise, it's not the skipper who could it be marianne still around. Marianne must be marianne or the professor. Maybe it's the professor don't look, don't click. Minor actors were don't click, professor and marianne, I'd rather be ignorant on this topic. Yeah, you don't need to know. No one needs to know. That's the worst link bait I've ever seen what am I gonna do?

04:14
I'm gonna replace the childhood memory with that information and I actually, you know, temporary- anyway, that happened many years ago when I interviewed the skipper, alan Hale Jr, whose father was the great Alan Hale Sr, and you know he was a skipper. But he told me, yeah, we didn't get much money. You know, in those days, tv, even though they re-ran that show forever, he said, may have a few hundred bucks. So he was selling Valvoline oil treatments or something. He was like that's why he was on the show, that's why he was touring to sell oil treatments and I thought, oh, this is sad. This is my childhood ruined, ruined. All right, enough of that. We're here to talk about one thing, and one thing only.

04:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
On that note, I do have some valvoline oil I'd like to sell. Do you mind if I do a little 30 second?

05:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
spot. Tina louise is still with us. That's the uh, just the ginger. So you didn't ginger, so you didn't have to click. There you go there's. Isn't that a twitter site? Or probably x? Now it doesn't say twitter anymore. Is that an x? Uh account was saved you a. Saved you a click where they would.

05:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me tell you the the worst group I've ever joined in my life is. It's called dead of mites gone, but not forgotten. It's on facebook. Anytime anyone posts there is when someone dies.

05:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is horrific they missed a real opportunity. Could have said not dead of mites or night of the living dead they are dead, you know like I.

05:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just don't, it's just sad anyway, wow, okay, I don't like stuff like this okay, moving on windows 11 memories well, so you know, in the wake of last week, last week was a big week, right?

06:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
microsoft land and for me in particular.

06:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know I've been looking forward to this arm stuff for a long time. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff going on there, so obviously I've spent the several days I've been home since Seattle obsessing over that trip and the events of that trip, and the first thing I did was come through my threat to make a video of each time Microsoft referenced the MacBook Air or Apple during last week's co-pilot event. Wasn't as many as I thought, honestly, but it's worth watching. I think it's only I don't know 40-something seconds long or whatever.

06:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should we watch now? Let's do it.

06:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's all watch it together, let's watch 58% faster than the most advanced MacBook Air with the M3 processor, 20% more than the latest MacBook Air 15-inch. It's outperformed the MacBook Air 15-inch by up to 23% on peak performance, up to 58% on sustained multi-threaded 3-foot performance. Prism is as efficient as Rosetta 2.

07:05 - Richard campbell (Host)
You can do all those things faster than on a MacBook Air. And across twice as many screens.

07:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Latest MacBook Air. Far longer than MacBook Air. Seven Is the MacBook Air with M3. Almost two times as fast as the MacBook Air. Over here. Nine $200 in savings versus the equivalent MacBook Wow.

07:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's as if they're a little jealous of the MacBook Air or something. Yeah, blame them.

07:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There was a pretty good story in Mac world about why this was so misguided and I agree with most of it honestly. I mean, all benchmarks are sus right about why this was so misguided and I I agree with most of it honestly.

07:45 - Richard campbell (Host)
Um, I mean, all benchmarks are sus right.

07:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's, it's just it's weird.

07:51 - Richard campbell (Host)
It's a weird thing for them to be doing, but anyway, but this was the guy who really right, it's really was the guy who defined the idea of you'd never say your competitors, product or name, never say your competitor's product or name?

08:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but we look. When the second-gen MacBook Air came out, intel created this ultrabook spec. Asus was the first out of the gate with I can't remember the name of the laptop. It was very much a MacBook.

08:15 - Richard campbell (Host)
Air clone. I think I cut myself on the edges of it. What's that? I think I cut myself on the edges of it. It was a UX, something like.

08:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
UX50 or UX30 or whatever.

08:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's called the Swift right.

08:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, this is way before that. This is Asus, not Asus, Not Asus. But you know, obviously we have beautiful laptops and a PC space.

08:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But didn't Intel create the Ultrabook before Apple did the MacBook Air, or no, it was Air and then Ultrabook.

08:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The notion that Intel could do anything thin and light is ludicrous. For starters, the notion that Intel could have invented anything new or unique in the last 20 years is also ludicrous. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say no, no, that's my educated guess there.

09:04
Anyway, we do have have great, we obviously have great pcs, but, um, you know, the hope here is, with arm that will, um, we'll get some of those attributes that are so desirable in the macbook air, like fans, but anyway, um, so, uh, the other thing I wrote, the other thing I this isn't really worth going down the list per se, but I I was really struck, sitting in the audience at that event, by how many references there were to the past, and I mean like many, many references, uh, explicit and implicit. Um, if you think about something like, um, that recall feature is is like this is, oh, this is timeline, like you're you're doing timeline again, like there was stuff like that. But I was going to write an article about all of the references to the past. I only got through the first seven minutes and I was like you know what this is? Enough, satchin nadela referenced the past explicitly seven times in seven minutes, like seven discrete events from the past, um, which I thought you know is it's always kind of interesting for just from a perspective point of view or whatever. Um, and some of the references were to things that weren't necessarily positive, events like Windows 8 and that whole, you know, from the silicon to the I always forget the phrase because I'm trying to block that part of my life out but there was just a bunch of that stuff. So I thought that was kind of interesting.

10:22
The other thing is I mentioned last week that sitting there in the audience and you submitted.

10:26
He said you can now pre-order and I was like boop, wwwsurfacecom pre-order.

10:32
You know, um immediately had buyers regret, not because I don't want this device, but because I wasn't sure if I got the right one, and I eventually went back and canceled it and got a kind of a beefier version.

10:45
And the rationale there is just that on the one hand, I wanted something that compared head to head as close as possible to the MacBook air that I have. That's actually not possible because of the way that Microsoft um limits the ways you can configure these devices. So, for example, I have 24 gigabytes of Ram is a weird amount, but you know, like a 16 gigabyte, 512 gigabyte storage option, it's not there, it does not exist. You can't get that in a Surface laptop 15, anyway. You also can't get two of the colors. If you want to get more than 16 gigs of RAM, you can only get one of the colors, I mean, it's this whole kind of weird limiting thing. But if you had told me I think back to this, maybe back in february that I was about to spend over four thousand dollars on laptops in the next month or two, I just right.

11:30 - Richard campbell (Host)
Why would I ever do such a?

11:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
thing, but between the macbook air and the new surface laptop which I got. I did not intend in any way, shape or form for this to be like the best configuration, but that's what it is. It's like 32 gigs of RAM and terabyte of storage.

11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's expensive, it's not what I want, folks, if you're just thinking, oh, he must be one of those rich guys. He drives a 92 Toyota Corolla.

11:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't get any ideas here. Actually, it's in some ways worse than that, because it's an 11-year-old BMW where the middle rearview mirror has come off from the glass and is dangling there like a kid's.

12:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, BMW never expected you to own it that long. That's really the.

12:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, the reason it's not fixed is because they want to charge us $1,800 to glue that thing back onto the glass. That's BMW for you, and, yeah, we're going to gorilla glue it Anyway. Yeah, not a new or expensive vehicle, benny.

12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you spend all of your hard-earned money on silly things like what did you buy? You bought a Pro Surface laptop.

12:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Surface laptop, yeah, 15-inch Surface laptop Nice, I think you're going to like it, because I don't have enough laptops yeah, I think laptop, yeah, 15 inch service laptop nice, I think you're going to like it. Laptops yeah, you know, I think I am too. You know, I never have a time. I mean, I'll have other devices in for review. I know I'm going to get some hp and lenovo devices, for example. So, um, there'll be something I can compare it to beside the macbook air, obviously, but we'll see. We shall see lots of weirdness there with the configuration stuff microsoft does not really have a full slate.

13:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm so tempted because I really want to. I think I'm going to get that del the dev box, though yeah, I pre-ordered one of those that seems like.

13:14 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, I did too oh, you got that too okay yeah I mean, I don't have any, I put my name on the list I I've not gotten you didn't actually pre-order it, you just gave me your email address. You think it'll be in short supply? I don't think. I think they've got no indication of when they're actually going to ship it.

13:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, this is a major improvement over the thing they shipped last year and I think it's going to be fantastic frankly, I'm not kidding.

13:41 - Richard campbell (Host)
I'm probably going to turn it into a home assistant server almost immediately. It'll be able to run its own large language model for the house. Then I'll get another one.

13:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm thinking. I need a computer that I don't want to use to dedicate to the home studio, for, you know, so I can put Zoom on it and if you use it you have a risk of crapping it up. So that will be like the, you know, the home studio computer yeah that seems like a good use for it. Can you put linux on any of these things, or do we know yet?

14:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, well, okay, so I know that's a terrible question. No, no, the answer is yes. So there was. Uh, they announced something recently. They've been appearing at Linux events. They're making sure that all of the Linux distros have what they need to be able to get up on this thing. Good on you. Yes, good on you. Apparently, they've been doing that the whole time with Snapdragon.

14:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wasn't really aware of this, but yes, the answer is yes, Well, remember, they have to run on Android and that's basically Linux.

14:45 - Richard campbell (Host)
And certainly HA runs on Linux, so that's my intent.

14:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Drivers. It'd be a good home assistant device, wouldn't it?

14:53 - Richard campbell (Host)
Low energy. You can leave it on all the time. Normal dedicated HA machines are two $300 Odroids. Right, right, they're much smaller. This is a crazy torquey box for that job. Yeah, it's a beast. You know, the hip thing now is to use an llm with ha, and typically you do that through the open ai apis. But why would you want to run it locally?

15:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, call it jarvis. Say jarvis, open the windows, not the garage door, the window, the curtains. Jarvis, you know that kind of thing It'll be fun, is it raining? That's the old one. Hey, siri, is it raining? Who was that? Zooey Deschanel who had to? It actually had to ask.

15:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Siri Standing in a window where you can see it pouring outside. Yeah, Is it raining? Yeah, yeah, but still it's raining.

15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's a gaffer, a grip with a hose.

15:41 - Richard campbell (Host)
Actually You're in a yeah okay, that's one of my favorite dog memories is my dog looking out the back door seeing it raining. So they went and checked the front door to see if it was raining. And then he was really annoyed.

15:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not as dumb as it sounds. I was outside of a restaurant in Boston looking through the open windows to a TV that was showing the Red Sox game and it was pouring. I could see it was pouring and I was like man, it's really raining in that game and I said wait a minute. That looks like they're playing at home. And just that moment it was like. It hadn't been raining where I was in Boston, but it was where the game was. It happened simultaneously with me realizing they were home, hey.

16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right. Well, let's do a little. I know you just bought a laptop, paul, but I kind of want to talk about this laptop and maybe change your mind. My friend, this portion of Windows Weekly brought to you by these great laptops from HP and Intel and I'm such a fan of this it's plugged in right now, so that's how we got the audio out and all of that. But this is what I'm using for the show now and I'm blown away. It's the new HP EliteBook 1040G11. Hp's first commercial AI PC. It has an Intel Core Ultra processor, which is the first Intel chip to have that AI at least commercial chip to have that AI acceleration. You know what's great? The battery life is so good on this I don't even need to plug in the battery. And light light is a feather. Ai acceleration it's great for biz, empower your workforce and deliver exceptional performance, life and world-class security.

17:30
With the hp elite book 1040 g11 you get uh smart sense. This is that hp uh proprietary technology which monitors the pc as you're using it. It makes automatic adjustments to the energy hogging resources, giving you, they say, up to 29 hours battery life. I haven't verified that, but I have to say I've gone days without plugging it in. It's pretty remarkable. It balances the fan, the battery, the processor, everything. When you need it, you've got the power. When you don't, it sips away at power so you can last longer. Let's your uh you focus on, on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Let hp handle the juice also.

18:12
Man, the audio on this well, you heard I was just playing that that audio out of this for the your video, paul, this is the poly uh studio audio. They, they acquire hp acquired. It's got poly ai driven audio camera's. Got windows studio effects, which I really like. When I'm on a Zoomer call or a Teams call, I have automatic face framing, you know, so as I move, it frames my face. I could be looking down at the keyboard or the screen, but it looks like because it's got automatic AI eye contact. It's really remarkable.

18:42
Adaptive dynamic voice leveling for optimal voice clarity that's based on your environment. They do background noise reduction and more. And, of course, copilot's built in. It's got that Copilot key. It's the AI assistant that automates your workflow by suggesting personalized optimizations and streaming for efficiency, use learning, deadlines and personal productivity patterns to help you set priorities, manage your time effectively. It's like having a little buddy right there in the computer, of course, windows 11 Pro on this. The latest Intel it says it right there. It's Intel V Pro, the latest Intel Core Ultra 5 or 7. I didn't even mention this screen. This is a 14-inch OLED display. I'm never buying an LCD panel again. Oled is just so gorgeous. I just love it.

19:29
A 5-megapixel camera, hp Wolf Security for business, built in so much more. This is the newest laptop from HP, their AI laptop, the EliteBook 1040G11. It's perfect for business. It'll adapt to your workers' personal needs and behaviors so they can regain meaningful time and focus on meaningful work. Hpcom, that's the place to go to find out more. Just search for the HP EliteBook 1040 G11 and you can find out. See all the specs for yourself. There's also a link in the show notes If you want to click that. Hpcom search for the HP elite book 1040 G 11.

20:08
All right, little little buddy, I'm going to tether you back up again so we can use you for the show. But uh, this is, this is. This is great. I've got the ethernet there plugged in. I have an adapter. Oh, that I should mention that. You know, as long as we're comparing to MacBook Airs, look at that. Type A USB port, type C USB port. That's on one side. On the other side, a full HDMI port and two more Type Cs plus a headphone microphone jack. It's got a Courage port. I love it. Thank you, hp, for not abandoning me. I'll plug that right in. Look at that. Hdmi goes right in there. There's the power to use type c power. It's great. All right back to the show. Sorry to interrupt, gents. Um, let's talk about windows insider. We got a release preview yeah.

21:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so this one is well confusing. I don't know what's confusing these days. So last week a 24H2 build came to the release preview channel. They were previously testing this in Canary on dev, and then just dev, and it skipped right over beta because you know, we're just rolling the dice now and it landed in release preview. So typically, what this would mean is that it would hit stable soon, right, and so if you look at the calendar, you can figure out for yourself that, um, we are already actually. Are we already? We are one, two, three. Yesterday yes, yesterday was the week d of the schedule.

21:40
We did not get this as a preview there, so it's possible it would be June, maybe patch Tuesday, which is the 11th in preview, or maybe the weekday in June or whatever. This is the thing that's going to have that staggered release. Right, you can get it early in the year because it's going to be the version of Windows that comes out on those Copilot Plus PCs, but then it's going to have a bigger release in the fall for everybody. So we'll see Everything's so different now. It's going to have a bigger release in the fall for everybody, so we'll see Everything's so different now. It's impossible to predict Because it was so possible before. Yeah, I mean, it's just I don't know. Yeah, it's impossible to know what's happening.

22:19 - Richard campbell (Host)
I noticed you just stopped talking about Windows 12.

22:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, because 24-H2 is Windows 12, right, like they've decided that that branding was just too con. Oh, that's interesting.

22:30 - Richard campbell (Host)
I'm gonna wait until apple releases a mac os 12 then we didn't want to convolate the windows releases I didn't realize that I've been.

22:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I too, like richard, have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it did, but they renamed it as the way down, so I didn't know.

22:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is half speculation, half. You know a name source told us type stuff. But yeah, internally there was this debate because they wanted to kind of move on. But actually it's just too complicated to have too many versions of Windows out in the world.

22:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I remember the days when Windows 10 was the last version of Windows. Remember that and the days when. Windows 10 was the last version of.

23:05 - Richard campbell (Host)
Windows Remember that, and they kept making new versions of Windows 10, and everybody was suffering Everybody's so absolute. I'm talking about in the IT world. They all want to skip a Windows 11, right? That's what they've been doing since XP.

23:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You skip a version. Microsoft has been trying to break its commercial customers of these habits, since it's had commercial customers, and its success rate is about I don't know zero.

23:31 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah.

23:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has never worked.

23:34 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, there's always this idea that Microsoft is really good at figuring out which way the crowd is going and run in front of them. So you know, there's the whole thing of the crowd's got to get the act together and go in a direction that makes them want to run in front of them.

23:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, look, for me this is a monumental release because Microsoft has now I got to think about this September. So let's do the math on this, september to the end is three, we're going to call it nine months has changed the location of the copilot icon three times right and um. So when this is fully deployed it will just be a, an app icon like other pinned apps in the taskbar. It's not going to be over on the far right anymore. So, um, it's hard not to see that one as a personal dig, because I spent so much time and effort fixing all those screenshots. But, um, you know that's okay, you know you got to keep Paul busy. So, uh, maybe he won't. You were bored, we can tell. Yeah, um, the weird is I mean, the weird part about this for me is I don't know when to even worry about that because, like I said, it's not really clear when this comes out for everybody. You know, um, one of the other things that will happen when that happens, co-pilot in windows will never, or no longer rather, be a like a pain on the side of the screen. It's going to be just a standard app window. So if you saw that co-pilot plus pc event last week. You would have seen that recall experience was really an app.

24:59
I asked the guy who made it I just wanted you know to be clear, this is an app, right? I mean it was a little tray icon as well, but you know, you run the thing, it's like an app icon in the tray or in the taskbar and he said, yeah, no, it's just a, it's a standalone app. So, um, there's some good, bad and different stuff uh, tied to that. But, um, you know, for people that want to not have things in their system and so forth, I think this that will make that easier. Um, so, whatever, that's fine.

25:24
Um, looking through the other improvements or I'll call them changes, I mean none of them are a big big deal. It's kind of one of those where microsoft giveth, microsoft taketh away situation. So if you're familiar with the quick settings interface, for example, you know that today in windows 11, you can customize the little cards or tiles that are there. Um, and now they're going to let you scroll through all of the available cards or tiles, whatever they're called, and you can't configure it in any way, like you actually can't get rid of any of them, like you have to accept all of them and you can't change their order and it's like okay, so you know.

25:56 - Richard campbell (Host)
Typical windows 11 experience, I guess, is what I'd call that I trying to think they know better than you, as opposed to Apple, who knows they know better than you.

26:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, apple probably does know better than me. I don't think anyone at Microsoft doing this stuff even has thought of this stuff. I don't even think it's a notion of superiority. I think it's just a certain cluelessness that you take things away and people notice. But we'll see how that goes. They do have a rich history of coming back a year or two later and adding back the stuff they ruined, including, by the way, that File Explorer drag and drop feature right, which is coming back.

26:30
So you know, typical, you'll be able to zip files to 7-zip and tar formats, which is kind of cool. So just WinZip or sorry, just zip. And we might have talked about this. We talked about this last week. I feel like we might have the Git integration, all that stuff. So not too much today. You can install this today, but it is right now. It's one of those things. It's a rolling release, so there's definitely not much to look at. If you are in the beta channel, there's even less to look at. They also had a build last week. No new features. This build is a 23H2 build that arrived after the release preview got 24H2, because again, nothing matters anymore and we live in a universe where rocks are flying in space and it rains frogs. I mean. Nothing makes any sense. Don't even try to make sense of it.

27:25 - Richard campbell (Host)
There is nothing. The really great part is they're not putting out documents saying this is how this is going to work, going forward, they're just.

27:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think they, I listen we you just in the time you've been on the show. You know that I've been obsessing over this and I talk about it a lot and I try to make sense of it and, um, they just don't care. There's no one's there there is nobody's concerned. There's no light at the end of the tunnel, where they're like all right. We tried all the different permutations. We got a strategy.

27:50 - Richard campbell (Host)
We're going forward with it. This is the great thing about being an insider is that they're perfectly willing you to show you the randomness that goes on inside the yeah, yeah, if you like chaos, it's not a bad place to be.

28:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're one of us now you're an insider.

28:03 - Richard campbell (Host)
Well, welcome to the one of us. Now You're an insider. Welcome to the chaos. One of us.

28:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We all have a different experience. It's so weird to me Maybe it's because I came into this with kind of a computer science point of view and what they're doing is not computer science and then this just happened after we started the show, in fact, or as we started the show. But Microsoft is putting a new sticky notes experience into Windows. They're testing it inside a program. I know it's coming through the OneNote app. You work in OneNote.

28:31 - Richard campbell (Host)
I thought we were all supposed to go to Loop.

28:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't hear much about Loop. Again, if you're looking for sense, you've come to the wrong place. I'm not sure how many times I can say the same thing. Whatever happened, thing I. Whatever happened, the loop still out there. So, all right, maybe, actually, richard, you probably use one note to use one.

28:49
I use one a lot and I've been trying to move, so then you you would remember that one note at one time or maybe still today, because I don't use it anymore had this little thing that would run in the tray. That was like a little mini one note experience outside of one note, yes, and that would be sure I never use that one. Okay, it's like quick notes or something like that, whatever it was called yeah, it was Sticky Notes.

29:05
Yeah, absolutely Okay. I think this is sort of an upgraded experience. For that, the reason it's considered sort of something related to Windows because it will be in Windows 10 and 11, is that there's going to be a system-wide keyboard shortcut that will launch this new Sticky Notes experience, which is not quite like the old one, where you had little individual notes, but a little bit it's a. You know, it's nicer looking, I guess it's. It's less like a traditional sticky note, but I don't get it and I don't care, cause I'm not going to use one note and these guys can you know, I'm just amazed at putting energy into one note.

29:38 - Richard campbell (Host)
It just seemed like the neglected stepsister for forever. Stepsister for forever, yep, right. So the fact that anything's showing up in one note, it's like what did you draw the short?

29:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
straw like how did this happen, right? So, right, right, welcome summer interns. Yeah, we're gonna go through a catalog of microsoft brands from the past that you might have thought were dead, but you're gonna be working on like the guy picked last for dodgeball.

30:00 - Richard campbell (Host)
You're working on one note so there's that, okay.

30:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's all we have, I think, for the insider, and then just two related things. Um, the microsoft edge team put out an interesting post I think it was yesterday, okay, they talked about. They talked about this like it was performance and I guess performance I. I hear microsoft edge boom, wow. Well, my power just dipped, but my there you go. You should get that stuff in mexico we do have a enormous set of trucks like a block from here working on if you had a backhoe fade microsoft surface laptop with snapdragon elite pro x.

30:40
yeah, I wouldn't be online because they don't have 5g support, so it wouldn't have helped. Yeah, I just would have had really good uptime, right.

30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The battery would go, go, go, yeah, yeah.

30:52 - Richard campbell (Host)
That was incredible. Lots of time to not be connected to the internet with it.

30:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, anyway. So when I hear Microsoft Edge and performance, I always think back to the early days of Microsoft Edge, when they would do those side-by-side tests, remember with Chrome, and sometimes yeah, yeah, the good old HTML5 drag race days, those are fun days. That got really silent when they switched to Chromium for some reason. It was weird, I stopped talking about that.

31:17 - Richard campbell (Host)
The numbers seemed awfully close most of the time.

31:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So performance to different people means different things, but there's this perception of performance and, of course, when you run a big app like Edge, whichwriting each of these components one at a time to make them more efficient. So they did this first with the um, the browser essentials interface, which is a um, something that was added to edge sometime in the past year. It's just a little. It's basically a little dashboard. It gives you some information, overhead information, um about the browser and how it's doing, and it includes that built-in VPN feature, for example, is in there, and they saw massive performance advantages to this and so now they're moving on to other parts of the UI. So they've done the favorites interface over again. That's 40% faster now than it was before and they're going to move on to basically each component in turn and by the end of the year.

32:27
This thing should be less of a pig. So it's kind of like the teamsification, I guess, of edge in a sense, that they have this big pig of an app and they're trying to de-bloat it and in this case, because the you know it's, it's not that hard. It's kind of like windows 7. It's like this interface was built with javascript. I mean, man, it's, if only, like Windows 7. It's like this interface was built with JavaScript. I mean, man, if only there was a quicker way to do this, you know, instead of doing client-side rendering. So it's still web technologies, but of course the underlying web platform has improved a lot over the past several years. So they've figured out a system, they're implementing it and at some point they're going to open source or at least release this, so other developers can add these uh kind of responsive capabilities to their web apps and to their products as well, and they, you know, maybe it will feed upstream or downstream, I guess, into the chromium browser as well.

33:18 - Richard campbell (Host)
So we'll see, yeah, it's a good question. That's again the other team you're like, I'm excited to see you guys are up to stuff right, like yeah, right, and not just adapting the new web features, cluttering it with crap.

33:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly the modularization I'd like to see is a little dashboard where you can just turn off all the features you don't want.

33:35 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, and where's the plug? My digital effluent flow?

33:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, could. I just you know, kill the sidebar and, you know, get back 50 of the ram I'm using right now, something like that. So, uh, I don't think we're going to see that, but yeah, you never know where this.

33:50 - Richard campbell (Host)
By the way, loop is pretty tied to edge too, like if I update.

33:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If I do an update to edge, loop closes and restarts as well, he has a new app, right it's it's got to be web-based, right? It's probably using web view too.

34:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, yeah, probably yeah doesn't that slow it down, isn't that a? Is that I mean?

34:09 - Richard campbell (Host)
no, no, it's plenty. It's snappy and fast. It's just consuming a lot of memory. Yeah, there you go, okay that's the real reason.

34:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They raised the minimum for the co-pilot plus pcs. It had nothing to do with ai or SLMs. It's all about loop.

34:24 - Richard campbell (Host)
It's all about your affluent pipelines.

34:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, and then this is only semi-related, I guess, but to kind of wrap up for about three seconds my overview of earnings. The world's biggest yeah, pc maker, lenovo, announced their latest quarterly and annual earnings and year over year they're doing great for the quarter. Year over year for the fiscal year not so great, but that makes sense because the PC industry is recovering. According to them, they expect to see pre-COVID level sales this year, this calendar year, and then they expect the AI PC segment will expand past the premium part of the market and move into the mainstream over the next few years. So they're hoping at least they're saying this will drive a new refresh cycle for the PC market. But we'll see. I mean those numbers keep.

35:21 - Richard campbell (Host)
Well, as long as it's got a copilot key, you know it's going to sell, that's right.

35:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, during times I'm not going to get this 100% right, but it said my PC has an AI key on it. Now, what I'm like I don't know why don't you press it and see what happens? Like you know, what do you think is going to happen? You think, like, stars are going to explode or something takes over the world. Is that it? Yeah, yeah, like, hey, you own Tesla now you know. It's just, it's a key. Relax, yeah, it's okay. Uh, and that's it. There you go. I'm hoping I don't have to deal with, uh, any more earnings reports for a couple weeks. That'd be good.

35:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really hate those, don't you?

35:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just hate that it's just some of them are brutal. Yeah, maybe for the next round I'll start using AI to do number analysis, but the thing is I've got to check it. This is going to make it longer.

36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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39:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
AI Never heard of it. I thought you were going to say Bing, Bing, yeah geez.

39:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was like you know actually, actually, what happened last week? Because they were out for 24 hours, weren't they?

39:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think the hamster tripped Nice. That's a big deal Caught up in the wheel.

39:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't Azure in its entirety, it was just a few things.

39:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So when you say something like Bing is down or there was a Bing outage, you can just cue the jokes up, right. People are like I'm surprised anyone even noticed that kind of thing. Both guys were really upset. Yeah, right, the thing is, um, unfortunately, uh, this backs a lot of other services, including things that are important like copilot, right, um, duck, duck go.

39:56
Uh, other third party services use this. So actually it was a pretty big deal and nothing was down for over 24 hours, like it. You know, and you could notice it, if you ran copilot in windows, that thing would not work. Like it came up, the pain came up, it didn't do anything and eventually you got a little, uh, you know, something happened error message, whatever, um, so, yeah, uh, they have not, to my knowledge, described what happened. Um, I'm sure it was a human error type deal. Maybe they're letting uh, ai do the configuration now or something, I don't know. They could blame it on all kinds of things, but I haven't heard um. I also, you know, I don't know if you guys run into this um, I would imagine your audiences are a similar technical bent and that there's some percentage of them who are just like the ai nevers, you know, bent for sure. But I don't separate, I am. I still deal with this like I. I will never use ai yeah.

40:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I don't think anybody says never, but I think a lot of people say, oh, my guys do.

40:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's kind of and I'm like a partner already using ai, it's overhyped bad news for you. Yeah, you are, yeah, yeah, um so, but this reminds me of you know, every time there was like a gmail outage or an exchange online outage, or whatever it's like. See, this is why I always put everything on premises yeah, remember that on the cloud every time.

41:14
You know, like, like, as if this random occurrence like justifies the horrible decision you made. And you know, without acknowledging the fact that this doesn't actually happen that much. You, you know, whereas I'm sure the guy Bob working in your server closet is doing a much better job than Microsoft. But you know, whatever you know, whatever your poison. It's up to you anyway. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know any anything more about this topic. I just uh, I'm fascinated that it was down for so long. I think that to me that's the big thing.

41:46 - Richard campbell (Host)
So yeah, it's surprising it took that long to recover. Like just revert boys Like how hard can this be? What's going on?

41:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, this is why we have snapshots Like I. Yeah, unfortunately with, like, distributed cloud infrastructure, I guess I could imagine a cascading series of you know problems that spreads and then you know, rolling that all back is a little more complicated than what I'm imagining, but I'd like to know more about this and also, you know, from Microsoft's perspective, the fact that this shut down so much you might want to, you just angered a whole bunch of customers.

42:23 - Richard campbell (Host)
now I mean, on one hand, is that's kind of useful to let people know, hey, we're important on the other hand, it's like that's not the way you want to collect a lot of money.

42:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly. Um, I don't know what to make of this. Uh, there is a co-pilot, or a version of co-pilot, available now in telegram and it's microsoft supported yeah, microsoft made it.

42:53
Um, I don't, I don't know what to think of this um, so it's, it's free, it doesn't, you know? It doesn't require a subscription. Um, there will be a limited number of interactions you can have per day, right, they're limiting the free accounts in some ways, which makes sense. They do that basically on the web, although not quite as limited as this. And we're getting into kind of a weird kind of matrix of capabilities issue, I think, with Copilot, where we have a free Copilot tier. Of course, we have multiple paid copilot tiers, each with some overlapping but also some unique functionality.

43:29
That stuff is being made available across those. I'll call them three, but there's really more than three offerings. Uh, in other places, you know, like windows, where, for example, one of the weird inconsistencies is that you get access to the um, like the image creation stuff, explicitly, although you could just do it from a normal prompt, but you don't get access to the custom gpts for some reason, like it will probably happen, but we don't know when you know. So, um, in many ways it's become what microsoft 365 is right, like we're going to add a feature to word and take a guess which version or versions it's available when or if it will ever come.

44:04
Yeah, it's just one of those things. I saw an article the other day actually maybe today that was talking about a couple of features in Microsoft Word you might not know about, and one of them was this transcription feature which my wife has been using for several years. It was only available in the web version of Word within the past six to seven months, or something like that. That is so weird. Yeah, version of word until within the past six to seven months, or something weird. Yeah, it's very strange. So this is a problem. It's always been a problem in the microsoft space. Microsoft 365 especially and it was, it's a. You know, teams has the same problem a little bit. Um, and copilots, absolutely, absolutely. All right, it already has this problem. So, um, yeah, implementation of copilot in different places is going to have some different little mix of features. Right, it's gonna be hard to keep track of this stuff, so I'm not sure what to say.

44:51 - Richard campbell (Host)
Well, I'm not sure why this would even be there but and this is sort of a classic problem too, because your customers get really angry when one for you know, one in place of the product has doesn't have the same features as the other. Like you see, this it's one of the reasons to not do native mobile apps, because it's very hard to synchronize release of Apple and iOS or iOS and Android. And it really makes customers angry when you do that.

45:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the one place in my life where this has hit me the worst is the smart display in my kitchen. No-transcript, primarily to just show a photo slide show the stuff and it's kind of fun because a new event will occur.

45:31
We go on a trip, whatever. We get home and you're already seeing pictures in that thing. It's nice. Yeah, I tried a pixel tablet recently. It works as a smart display. When it's on that dock thing, it's got a bigger screen. I thought I'll just stick this in the kitchen. This will be better, and it is. It's nicer looking, it's got a better. You know, quality experience, whatever. But one of the things I do all the time in the smart display is some picture will come up of something I don't like, or maybe it's just out of focus or terrible, and I will say Google, don't show this picture. And then you go through like a convoluted what's that word? Again, A convoluted experience where it goes okay, you want me not to have. Is that correct? It's like just do it. Are you really sure? The version on Google or the Pixel tab is even worse because it says I'm sorry, feature isn't available here.

46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yet it's like oh, come on, come on at least it doesn't walk away looking back over its shoulder. Every that's true. If it could it would lay.

46:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know you want me, you know you do that. Sad dog I look like. Oh, come on, I might just you'll have fun on the farm you love this feature deep down, you know you love it yeah.

46:42
Speaking of Google, yes, after testing their AI summary feature in Google Search, they've basically gone live with this. I'm sure everyone has seen this. I'm sure most of you hate it, right that the goal of this to me should be like answer the freaking question, and what it does instead is fill up a bunch of space above the fold and then you scroll down so you can answer the freaking question, and what it does instead is fill up a bunch of space above the fold and then you scroll down so you can answer the question. So I guess it achieves some goal, but lots of people don't like it, and I would count myself among those and you're not still seeing it.

47:13
Are you the ai?

47:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
overview. I think they turned that off.

47:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah oh, did they?

47:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, maybe, maybe because if they did, it was because of all, oh, because it was telling you to drink your own heat rocks and put glue in your pizza, so yeah, yes, right, exactly.

47:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, there were. Yeah, I guess they did. So there were ways to get around this with a little command line, but that doesn't help you when you're using a phone or whatever. So, yeah, maybe what we need is not for this just to work, but also for it to have that option.

47:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just to work but also for it to have that option. I'm sure they'll bring it back.

47:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I'm sure they'll bring it back. Oh, it's fixed. This will be Google search, yeah, but right now it's yeah, it was amazing how many people hated this thing. Yeah, really bad.

47:57 - Richard campbell (Host)
Google has done so much damage to their brand over the last few weeks, but we keep going back, do we?

48:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like they're in a funhouse mirror, where there's a rake on the ground in every direction and they just keep walking into it repeatedly. It's kind of strange. I stopped using.

48:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gmail. I stopped using Google Search. I pay for Caggy. I stopped using Google Calendar and Google Address Book. I use FastMail. They lost me Because Google, because Google. They lost me Because.

48:22 - Richard campbell (Host)
Google, because Google they're horrible. But wait, there's Rake 2.0.

48:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know Plenty of time to do it again. Yeah, right. I mean you can't not use Google, I suppose. But boy, I mean I do pay for YouTube Premium.

48:37 - Richard campbell (Host)
There's certain things you've got to do. Youtube is unusable.

48:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, the way I would put this is this hasn't caused me to stop using Google services, right, like? I still rely heavily on search, obviously, but Google Drive photos.

48:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's so much better search than Google out there.

48:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, but I'm just saying for me it hasn't triggered that, but it is odd that they are making all the same AI steps, that Microsoft is basically right Across their similar offerings, right Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, et cetera, et cetera.

49:05 - Richard campbell (Host)
As they need to.

49:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I just don't. I'm like, hey, this is not attractive to me.

49:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A week from tomorrow, Apple's going to do the same thing. Watch and see.

49:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, we'll talk about that in a second actually, because I'm kind of curious how they're going to handle that. But, um, but anyway. So the one move they did make recently that I thought was a good one and I wish you know I, I uh, would have attended this briefing in person if I hadn't gone to Seattle, but I I watched it virtually from the press, from at build, but the the they were talking about, uh, they were making fun of Microsoft and the copilot plus PCs, because it was basically like AI is only for rich people, you know, which I thought was pretty good. So they're um, uh, they're bringing um their Gemini models to Chromebook plus devices, right, um, they've lowered the base price of a Chromebook plus to $349, right, Depending on the model. Um, they're giving new buyers of new devices months of a google one ai premium for free, and this is normally 20 bucks a month. It's two gigs of google drive storage, but it's also access to whatever the most capable gemini model is of the day I think it's still 1.5 pro today and then all the gemini stuff across docs, gmail, etc. Like the microsoft 365 copilot type stuff.

50:22
Um, so I think there's a good message to be had there and it's kind of in keeping with the value proposition of Chromebook, right. So I mean, that's to me like that stuff's good, but we'll see. And then, like Leo said, so, wwdc is coming up in about two weeks, I think. A week from tomorrow, is that right? No, it's two weeks, it's the 10th, sorry, I think A week from tomorrow, is that right?

50:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it was a week from tomorrow. Two weeks from tomorrow, it's the 10th, sorry, two weeks from tomorrow, yeah, yeah.

50:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, so every few days we seem to get a report, now from Mark Gurman, who you know that's pretty good with this stuff.

50:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry. Two weeks from Monday. A week from Monday, okay, whenever it is making up numbers, yeah, I just. You know what, I'm sorry it's in july.

51:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know why. Let me ask gpt. So well, it doesn't matter, it's.

51:08
This is a microsoft show continue on the point is yes, the point is only that their thing is going to be kind of private by design, which I I'm really curious to see how they swing for that one. Um, because they're going to do all the stuff you would expect, right, there'll be AI stuff in Siri and photos, and you know I like you, you know messages, right, all that, all that stuff. Like we, we know this, but I'm just curious how you know how the what happens on your iPhone, you know what's generated on your iPhone, stays in your iPhone, kind of thing.

51:38
I don't know how they're going to handle that.

51:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm really curious about it it does seem like they're going to have a fork in the road where they will do it on your device iphone or laptop or whatever a pipad if they can, and the operating system will decide if it can't, and then we'll send it up to a black box in the cloud running an m2 chip.

52:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, and that's the private bit right, is that on apple, that black box?

52:05
but yeah, yeah so it's still hybrid, it's hybrid yeah, like everyone else is talking about microsoft talk series always done that a little bit right but it's also that orchestrated thing I was talking about, right, this, uh, this missing piece, not well, it may not be missing, but just the a sophisticated something, something that will say you know, this is what we can do on device and this is what we can do in the cloud. And in Apple's case, when they do it on the cloud, it's not going to just publish it with a print line to googlecom or whatever. So we'll see. We'll see how they do it. I'm very curious.

52:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, lots of announcements A week from Monday. Let's get that straight. They'll have that straight. I don't have a lot to say, and you?

52:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
know, I bet it sounds a lot like what google said, what microsoft's doing well, but yes and no right, I mean again because it's apple, apple is they do things in a very unique way I'm I'm very curious about I think, though, that they are going to do, uh, the thing that microsoft has done with co-pilot, which is add it to their office suite and their notes well, and again, right need to right.

53:02 - Richard campbell (Host)
These are not optional things, you've got to do them.

53:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, everybody wants it yeah, this is just all become table stakes now table stakes.

53:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's exactly. Yep, this is my. This is what I observed last year sometime. You know it's like so. If everything is ai, then nothing is a like. This is just we've just reached. If you have a messaging app, you have to have this. If you have a messaging app, you have to have this. If you have a photos app, it has to have this. If you have a word processor, it has to have this. We're going to hit this interesting spot where these companies' abilities to charge for this stuff is going to be a little difficult. Apple is doing great because they can subsidize it with the phone, right?

53:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's not something Microsoft can do. They still do sell Apple One, just like Google does.

53:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, Sure. I mean it's going to be a parody, I think, and maybe there'll be a version of that. That makes this better, or whatever. We'll see.

53:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I, said I'm curious. German says they've done a deal with OpenAI, so there will be a chatbot. Maybe it'll be Siri. Yeah, that'll be interesting.

54:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think now that the iPhone is hitting middle age, it makes sense the wife would go for a younger model.

54:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the iPhone's midlife crisis.

54:13 - Richard campbell (Host)
There you go. I know it's hard to be interesting as a phone these days. They're all kind of the same. They are the same.

54:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's true, but what Apple's done is interesting, which is the phone doesn't change, but the ecosystem play gets more and more, and so you need a phone so that you can use the watch, so that you can use the iPads, so that you can use the laptops, and that's actually a smart move, because a phone can't really get much better. So how would we keep people buying it? We lock them in and this is going to be.

54:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We were just talking about a potential refresh cycle for the PC. We'll see. But for the phone, this is in some ways a better opportunity, because most phones I mean some Android phones actually have a lot of RAM, but most phones just don't have the specifications for this, not just the MPU, but just the amount of RAM. Like iPhones to date have shipped with relatively small amounts of ram compared to like an android phone, and that's going to change, like this year. It's going to be very interesting. Uh, I wonder if they'll even talk it up right?

55:10 - Richard campbell (Host)
um, because they're going to have to run more and more on the device yeah, well, and it's interesting to see if they really do need to do that, because last time I looked, the business actually was selling. Cloud the business. What business these big players make their living selling?

55:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
cloud.

55:25 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, not apple right cloud not apple, but the apple being the exception. Right then why would they um?

55:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
look, if you uh, this is not necessarily worth doing, but if you go back and look over the enormous doj um filing against apple for antitrust violations, what the charges all boil down to, at a very high level, was a company taking action to prevent a potential competitor that could erode its hardware advantage, right? So, for example, the most obvious one for us here at Microsoft space is we don't want the Xbox streaming service on the iPhone, because the iPhone is high end hardware. The people they extra for it because they could play great looking games, and you're making that advantage go away because now those games stream and they look great. You know they're. You could do them on a low-end device, right, that was the real reason. They blocked that um, and so you have to kind of look at it through that lens, I mean.

56:15
And so how does apple rectify that? Um, they're, I mean, they're magic. They're going to get companies to pay them. Yeah, you know, just right, I mean it's, they're in, they're magic. They're going to get companies to pay them. Yeah, you know, just right, I mean, they're in a really unique position here. They just don't have the same normal competitive concerns.

56:31 - Richard campbell (Host)
But again, what if the companies wouldn't pay them Because it's? Going to cost them a fortune to operate it.

56:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet OpenAI and Google are tripping over each other to one-up the deals.

56:41 - Richard campbell (Host)
I don't disagree, but it wouldn't be the first time that Apple wrecked a company or two to benefit them.

56:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are you suggesting that this rainbow-colored unicorn in any way?

56:56 - Richard campbell (Host)
Ask the music industry how it feels about the 99. Cent song you know.

57:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the good news is, the companies that it would wreck are horrible companies.

57:08 - Richard campbell (Host)
So who cares? There you go. So as long as we hate them, this is fine, that's right, uh, it's a good.

57:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the great leveler, yeah, um, yeah, give them a chance to get their own stuff going and then they can just get rid of the partners and we'll see.

57:20 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, okay, that seems to be the mantra, you know. They always criticize, criticize Microsoft for that shtick. They sort of embrace and extend and extinguish thing.

57:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But Apple, you know, are the masters of it has honed that to a yes, to a fine tip, a shiny, sharp spike. Yeah, yeah, they're brutal. This came out less than I would have liked last week at a build, but um, browsers are getting SLMs. They're going to work locally with MPUs. Uh, the web platform is being updated to allow web apps to be more sophisticated and use those local capabilities as well. And um, google, you know, know, again, that was another one. They more information in the briefing than there was in the public bit, which I thought was a little weird. Microsoft also did not rise to this occasion. I thought there was going to be more information there, although they talked it up a little bit in the context of windows at least.

58:16
Um, but I would say that the browser maker that's been the most um aggressive the space is Opera, and just since we last talked, they've had two major AI-related announcements. These were the guys that they came up with one of the first in-browser AI assistants called Aria. Back in February they announced that these features were coming in so fast that they started an AI feature drop program so that you could get the developer channel version of Opera and preview these features before they hit stable if you wanted to, and provide feedback and so forth. So they've released a bunch of that over the past couple months and now the first major advance that came through there is heading to stable, and I've jumped to the wrong one. I'll just do the second one first, because I'm thinking of what just happened today.

59:01
They announced that in mid-June they are going to bring a selection of SLMs, like local language models that will work off of MPUs, to the desktop versions of the browser Windows, mac and Linux. They claim to be the first major browser to do this, which is curious because it's not there yet today. But when this went in preview back and I think February, it was 150 AI language models you could choose from. They will have over 2,000 of them available in the stable version from over 60 families of AI models. They did not specify any, so I don't know exactly what those are going to be. Some of my readers misunderstood this to mean that the browser was going to be loaded down with 2 000 slms. That's not the case. You it was the user choose which ones you want to use although, why not, let's get them all yeah, that's.

59:50
Yeah. You thought, uh, you thought edge was taking up a lot of ram gotta get them all yeah yeah.

59:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I thought that you sound like bitcoin miners exactly yeah 2 000 slms, that's they also are choose I know I, so I think what will happen?

01:00:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I, I would imagine that the way this see this is the thing I talked to richard about this. I was curious before the show last week like how would this happen? We know in google chrome that google will provide uh gemini, uh nano on device and they'll start installing it when you start using that Help Me Write feature. That's in Chrome, right, so that's straightforward and we would expect Microsoft will use a version of Fi and I made the argument that they should rebrand it to Copilot something, copilot Nano or something right, and that would be one of the things. But during that event for Windows, they were talking about how these Cop-pilot plus pcs would actually ship with over 40 slms on disk, like it's crazy now they can send it to your house like on a shiny cd, like all the gold master, if you will.

01:00:52
Yeah so here's the thing um, I, that's okay. Uh, because the user's not choosing that right. In other words, applications and services that run on the system, you know, will use whatever SLM they want to use, like that's there for developers. It's not really. You know. The users are like oh, yes, yes, no, you know it's not like a feature thing, but in Opera it is because you have this chat interface so you can kind of go in and say look, I really want to use the, you know whatever, slavo or the I can't think of models, all of a sudden it's just Gemini, whatever it is yeah.

01:01:29
Yeah, whatever it might be Like, I want to use it for image creation and these are good for that, or I want to use it for this. These are good for that, so we'll see how that evolves, but no, yeah, I mean it's worthless.

01:01:46 - Richard campbell (Host)
right past past what six?

01:01:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you're just in the paradox choice anyway exactly nobody had to qualify to choose yeah, this is the italian dress well, but they can say and they do uh, this one's good for code generation, this one's good for chatting, this one's good for yeah, you know, they'll probably have little, shouldn't it be good for chatting.

01:02:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This one's good for reading.

01:02:04 - Richard campbell (Host)
Shouldn't it be good for everything? No, they're tuned.

01:02:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In other words, that's the selection you might actually ultimately like. Maybe the UI will be such that you'll say what do you want to do today?

01:02:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or it could even be automatic, where it just says oh yeah, you need this Okay there you go.

01:02:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The thing is they have to be installed. So some of these things it's not going to ship with 2000,. Right, like you actually have to install these things. So we'll see how that goes. Separately, they are partnering with Google to bring Gemini AI models to Opera as well, so they'll be among those models, and they are also using Gemini for image understanding and generative capabilities, which is kind of interesting. So ARIA previously had image generation capabilities, but now they're going to be using Gemini and basically the understanding bit is going in the opposite direction.

01:02:56
It's where you come in with an image and you say I want to know more about what this thing is, and that's like the type of thing they're using in circle to search or like back in the day. This is like reverse image search, I guess. Right, except it's using AI and it will, you know, tell you, tell me something about what. What kind of sneakers is the person in this photo wearing? You know that kind of thing, right? So it makes sense. Yeah, makes sense, yeah, except that they're using Google, and so you know, that's fine.

01:03:25
Oh, and you thought, oh, I thought I was done with revenues. I forgot NVIDIA. I'm going to have to build a special like a quantum spreadsheet to handle the numbers, because it's amazing, their growth rates don't make any sense. So and also I would just say their, their margins are really high, like a a 15 billion dollar net income, which is a profit on revenues of 26 billion for a hardware maker. That's kind of nice, that's, that's. That's better than apple. Like that's crazy, like that's yeah, that's incredible hundred bidding for the gear.

01:03:58 - Richard campbell (Host)
Is that where we're at? What's that? Are they just bidding for the gears, just all? Auction now.

01:04:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is going to be like Azure growth.

01:04:09 - Richard campbell (Host)
It has to slow down at some point, but it hasn't happened yet. Are they actually making this much gear, or is this pre-orders? How are they?

01:04:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
doing this when one processor costs $30,000, you don't have to make that much.

01:04:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they specifically thanked Meta for buying 24,000 of its Hopper H100 GPUs so it could train Llama 3. Wow yeah, they are the.

01:04:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Levi's of this gold rush.

01:04:33 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, they do pretty well. Nice shovel, nice shovel you have there.

01:04:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would you like to pan for gold?

01:04:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It would be a shame if something happened to it. Yeah, no, this is just, and it's like hey, by the way, we're going to do it again next quarter, so we'll see you in three months. Yeah, unbelievable. This is fine, we're all fine.

01:04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, obviously they're also driving. Nasdaq up as the other indexes go down.

01:04:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they're doing the job that Apple used to do right. Doing the job that apple used to do right. There we can all when we were to leo's talking about retiring. Today, when he retires, if everything goes great, he can thank nvidia, or uh, you know, I wish I were in the nasdaq well, you must be doing some kind of a. I do uh.

01:05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's a it's a fund, it's a target retirement fund.

01:05:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, with vanguard yeah, the target is we buy nvidia stock and then we throw in a couple of other ones, just to make it look like we're diversified.

01:05:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The sad thing is, as you get closer to retirement age mine's for 2025, right as you get closer to that age they get more conservative. So they start moving the equities out, moving the bonds in.

01:05:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'm not going to get to participate in this. The way the market's going I mean, you know, compound interest works these are the gravy years. The gravy years Because all you can eat is gravy.

01:05:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Alpo years.

01:05:48 - Richard campbell (Host)
The teeth are done. These are the choices.

01:05:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because I can't tell the difference anymore.

01:05:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't taste. I might as well eat Alpo. It's just like mom used to make.

01:05:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Alpo's probably pretty expensive, honestly, but anyway, I don't know why. You know that, can you still?

01:06:02 - Richard campbell (Host)
get Alpo's is probably pretty expensive, honestly, but anyway, I don't know why. You know that. Can you still get Alpo? I don't even know.

01:06:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm glad to know I'm in the gravy years. Thank you, Paul, that's encouraging Well.

01:06:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I meant from a.

01:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what I'm talking about, don't listen to me, I'm in the biscuits and gravy. You know, when we take Lisa's folks out, my in-laws that's what they order is biscuits and gravy. They love it. Oh yeah, I'm sorry That'll kill you.

01:06:26 - Richard campbell (Host)
That's what I eat. If you want food that's kill you, man, I'll make you something that's really good.

01:06:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My first sausage, biscuits and gravy. I had that for breakfast every day because it was the cheapest thing on the menu. I loved it.

01:06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure I loved it. Let's take a little tiny timeout. You are watching and I am glad you're here Windows Weekly with the great Paul Thurott at thurottcom, his book's at leanpubcom and Richard Campbell, the host of Run as Radio on NET Rocks, at runasradiocom. On we go, paul. I always like to hear about the developer angle, because I pretend in my mind that I'm a developer.

01:07:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is actually very exciting to me. I'm a developer yes yeah, last week there were approximately 1100 developer announcements at build. It's a developer show. This makes developer show. Yeah, and it's, you know it's. You're going down the list. You're like yep ai and azure yep ai here, dot net ai, yep, got it, got it. And then they're like oh, by the way, we're bringing it back wpf. It's like what, what did you?

01:07:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just say got it.

01:07:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then they're like oh, by the way, we're bringing it back wpf. It's like what, what did you just say? Like I mean like what is it like? Wait, what does that? What does that mean?

01:07:27 - Richard campbell (Host)
you know, it never went anywhere what's well.

01:07:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Come on, no, but as a, but as a first class, growing concern, like, like we're going to improve this thing, monitor this. It's so what they're. I've since learned what they're doing and I am fascinated by this. So of years ago I wrote several versions of an app that I called NET Pad, right. I wrote a version in WinForms, in Visual Basic, and then a version in C Sharp, and I did that back-to-back to learn C Sharp. Right, because I knew Visual Basic from back in the day. That's how I learned C Sharp. And then I did a WPF version, which is my favorite version by far. It's the most feature complete. And then I did a UWP version and I kind of played around with doing a um, what we'll call a Windows app, sdk slash when UI version, um, but it's basically UWP and I just didn't interest me as much and I always wanted, you know, the thing I really liked was this the WPF version.

01:08:18
But when you run this app it, you know it looks like a. It's almost like a Windows 2000 app, it. But when you run this app it, you know it looks like a. It's almost like a Windows 2000 app. It has that traditional title bar, traditional menu bar, traditional status bar. It's not really modern looking right, and I have a couple of times over the years looked at like, how might I modernize this? You know, xaml Islands was a thing for a little while and it's not a thing and whatever.

01:08:37
So I armed with the videos of the couple of sessions that talked about WPF. I watched them. You know one I think, one on the plane, one later that there is no documentation for this in out in the world like on a webpage, but in one of the videos they actually have the code you need to add to a project to modernize it. So I freeze, framed it, typed it in I I. You have to download and install, uh, two things. You have to get the dot net nine preview four that was just released, right, separate download. You have to get the preview version of the next version of visual studio, 17.11, I think, yeah, 11. You have to install the right workloads. Of course you go up to github and grab your project. You change the target. So in my case the target was dot net 6. Change it to NET9 and then add that XAML code which references a new, as yet undocumented library, and it turns on and it is a beautiful, modern looking app.

01:09:35
Now I have work to do. I, because I worked around the limitations of the platform. It's there's a lot of things I have to fix in the text box and and some of the other options and so forth, but that's a fun thing. I'm going to do it because I worked around the limitations of the platform. It's uh, there's a lot of things I have to fix in the text box and, uh, and some of the other options and so forth, but that's a fun thing. I'm going to do it Cause I'm going to spend this year doing this, so this capability won't be live or unstable until November when dot net nine ships right, and which I would imagine is probably not necessarily, but probably when the will ship roughly no now you're thinking the wrong way around.

01:10:00 - Richard campbell (Host)
Net 9 will definitely ship in November at NET Conf.

01:10:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But then okay, so Visual Studio is on a faster schedule. I hope Well.

01:10:10 - Richard campbell (Host)
Visual Studio gets quarterly updates Quarterly. Okay, but there are no announced Visual Studio 2025 at this point.

01:10:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is 2022-1711 or whatever they're calling it.

01:10:22 - Richard campbell (Host)
And it's a great conversation about. Do we ever need a new major version number of Visual Studio? Right Like what's happening here with the?

01:10:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
content updates. Just ask Jerry Nixon to weigh in on that. Maybe he can tell us it's the last version. Yeah.

01:10:37 - Richard campbell (Host)
I'm with you, but at the same time it's like the main customer of Visual Studio. Big organizations and new versions are really problematic.

01:10:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it was a while when they were like bang, bang, bang and it was like guys, you got to stop doing this.

01:10:49 - Richard campbell (Host)
Well, not Studio. I mean Studio is you know 2015. Oh sure, 2019.

01:10:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was the all caps years. What was that 2012? Even Emacs updates every year.

01:10:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Emacs is up to version 29. That was every year. Emacs is up to version 29. It updates every year.

01:11:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, technically it updates Visual Studio, it's just that they do minor updates within the current version. Yeah, right, anyway. So I'm going to spend time on this. So the story which I was a little unclear on last week because, again, fog of war and there really wasn't a lot of information, you had to watch the sessions and then, of, of course, you can go to, like the windows dev center and, and they've changed the site so that there's not documentation for the new stuff.

01:11:28
But their deal is if you, um, you want to build a modern app, uh, you're probably bringing it forward from existing code, yep, and if that existing code is uwp, we have the windows app sdk. But if it's anything else, we have wpf and those two things, you know, I, they're, they're neck and neck and I that wpf used to be a little footnote on the bottom of the page next to w or win forums. You know like it's. It's like, yeah, we have it, it's cute, like kids work on it, you know. But, um, I, obviously there were a lot of companies that have been using this thing for 20 years and it works, and it works great, and it's uh, well and this, this was, you know, remember it was like right, it was cranked out of windows and windows eight Dot net, basically, right.

01:12:11
I mean this was not.

01:12:13 - Richard campbell (Host)
the darkest times ofnet were win eight, without a doubt. But when the app store was filled for of winning apps made with C, Sharp and XAML, it kind of made that silly. But you know, we've gone on from there. Wpf's always stuck around. It just seemed to be orphaned for quite a while and now you know what I saw in those announcements was this is love, Like we're here for you.

01:12:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You might remember this, but, kevin, it was Kevin Gallo era, so Windows 10 era. So at some point in the past I don't know seven years or so they I want to say open-sourced and welcomed kind of community involvement on WinForms and WP if I'm not mistaken, it might have been tied to that.

01:12:51
No, okay, well, there was a big community focus, regardless whatever the announcement was, and it's been sort of community-supp, they, they, they have all these uh kind of community contributions right in my app. I had to work around the lack of access to things like the modern file picker, the modern file open dialogues or the modern font dialogues, and you know the modern print experience. Like I had to write around that stuff. In some cases I called windows forms, like that's one of the things you can do, yeah, um, but what I really wanted to do was, you know, make it cohesive, normal modern app, and now I think it's oh, no, it's definitely going to be possible. It's really exciting. Also, it's incomplete, but there's a lot in it.

01:13:37
Um, if you're in the developer space, you probably know about the when ui gallery app that they have that shows you off all the different controls and window types and all the stuff you can do with WhenUI. They just released the first version of a WPF Gallery app. By the way, it's in the store and it's in preview, but it mirrors the WhenUI app because you know it's basically the same controls and stuff and in each case you get code so you can implement this stuff in wpf. You have to be in the. You know the preview and dot and nine, etc. Etc. It's not there yet and stable, but if you want to get looking at this with the idea of maybe switching this stuff on, I guess in november, I think, is when it's going to happen. Um, this, you know it's there. I mean it's starting to be there, like we still don't have the full API documentation yet, but it's exciting.

01:14:24 - Richard campbell (Host)
There seems to be a lot in motion there and really smart people working on the problem. Yeah, finally there's a subtext around all of this about MAUI right that MAUI is a big player.

01:14:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so look, fundamentally, microsoft's approach to creating apps on Windows hasn't changed that much in the last few years, which is like look, we're going to meet you where you are. Maui is their cross-platform mobile app platform.

01:14:51 - Richard campbell (Host)
And really the rationalization of Xamarin Forms.

01:14:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I think there was an expectation whether it was real or imagined, certainly there was on my part that it would sort of follow Flutter and make the desktop apps more sophisticated and maybe fill a hole there. And I don't know if they ran, we're never going to do that, just ran into problems. But I think eventually what they realized was like look, we get this huge body developers over here using wpf. What are we wasting our time on here? The goal is to create a modern, when ui beautiful app, right well, and wpPF can play inside of Maui.

01:15:22 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, but I think, like Flutter, maui is first and foremost for iOS and Android, and now it has a. Now they're trying to create a great desktop solution and it's a struggle bit off more than they can chew.

01:15:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And there was an indicate like Flutter just had some big event, or rather Google I always a big event in Flutter had some big announcements, and distinctly missing from any of that was really any talk about desktop. And, as is the case in the windows world, you know, I think a lot of the push here is toward web app and web assembly, and maybe this is the right way to go for this, instead of because this stuff can just render native controls and stuff like why are we doing yet another way to do the same thing? We should just do this one way. Yeah, but Microsoft, look, if you want to create new apps Maui, if it's a mobile app, react Native, if it's like a desktop type app, if it's a new app, right, there's a lot of stuff out there.

01:16:14
And then you know they're supporting Windows Forums to some degree, not quite WPF, but WPF has been like jettisoned right back up at the top. I love it, like I. It's like it hit the trampoline just right now. It's like back up, it's nice, it's really unexpected and it's a that's just a fun. God, what a, what a wonderful course correction.

01:16:34 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, years later. I mean, it is interesting to talk about working in XAML, like different cultures around Microsoft development that like or dislike these different stacks. Right, there's a whole group of folks who love Blazor because they want to avoid XAML.

01:16:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I forgot to mention Blazor. So Blazor, right, there's the whole ASPNET core plus Blazor.

01:16:57 - Richard campbell (Host)
There's two types of.

01:16:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Blazor. Blazor can be integrated into MAUI. There's a whole. That's the thing. It's like a there's a whole world out there.

01:17:05 - Richard campbell (Host)
So, however you approach things, yeah, there's a way for you, which is that's Microsoft, right Like? We give you lots of choice.

01:17:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I respect that to a degree. I arguably there are too many options, but there are options, yeah, and now WPF is one of them.

01:17:21 - Richard campbell (Host)
Again, I can't, you're kidding me, we're going to be dusting off like 20 year old books. And it never went away. It just didn't get a lot of love.

01:17:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, but now that it is getting love, I mean, I look, I think you would be crazy as a sort of mainstream developer creating an app to make an app that only runs on. But if you're going to do that, there are far crazier ways to do it than WPF. Wpf would be a great choice. That's a great choice Because that Windows app SDK, slash, winui 3 stuff is not garbage. It's not there. It's just really complicated. Yes, and some of the stuff like, for example, one of the things I looked at was like you create. Like if you look at the notepad app today, right, it looks nothing like notepad of old because it has this kind of modern top that has not really a title bar necessarily, but an area at the top that's like a title bar and has tabs and stuff. You can do that with the windows app sdk, but it's really hard and one of such a personality paul.

01:18:16 - Richard campbell (Host)
Thing and thing, paul. I can't even tell you like different devs want to go out of this different ways. Some people are delighted by XAML and some are repelled by it. Yeah.

01:18:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I basically they're talking. See, the one that I I don't quite understand still was that they were talking about no code effort. Remember that phrase from last night? Um, there's going to be a kind of a no code effort way to do this title bar experience thing in WPF and probably in the Windows app SDK. It's still overdue. I mean, if you ever look this stuff up, you could go down a real rabbit hole of the weird convoluted what's the word Convoluted code you have to write to get that to work.

01:18:54
Today it's not unnecessarily difficult, but it's going to get better. I love it. I love that this is happening.

01:19:02 - Richard campbell (Host)
I just I can't believe it's gonna. It's interesting to see where they're going to get to uh coming into to uhnet comp and the launch ofnet nine, because clearly there's motion in all of these things I love it, I love it, I love it so much I I this is.

01:19:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is energizing for me you're excited, that's fun yep, it's better than I thought, because I hear this and I'm like, oh, this is going to be an asterisk here. There's always an asterisk.

01:19:30 - Richard campbell (Host)
Don't fool yourself the asterisk is coming.

01:19:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't care.

01:19:37 - Richard campbell (Host)
I'm going to let you revel in your joy.

01:19:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As they say, we can talk offline if you want a sweet summer child you're like hey what are you doing this weekend?

01:19:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
because I'm gonna screw it up, okay, uh, the xbox space, a couple things. Um, after rumors and rumors and rumors, uh finally got the news we were expecting, because they've already said this. But they came out explicitly and said yep, uh, we are going to ship the next call of duty game, which is black ops 6. Uh, day and date on game pass. Right, so good, someone did some math there. I you know. This is generally speaking. We talk about a billion ish dollars every launch cycle for that thing. Man, how many game pass subscriptions would they have to sell for that to make sense? How do you keep them on game pass? How many months do they stay just to play that one? I'm sure there's a whole somebody's working this bad.

01:20:31
Brad broke my brain the other morning when he asked me this question. I could not answer. I still can't. So that's good, right, good. This is obviously one of the big marquee titles. They're doing a pretty good job with the PR this time, unlike, say, the last game, which started off as an add-on for the previous game and became a full title. But whatever, so great. So now, one year after the purchase, we will have had two games come to the game Boy oh boy. So look, we have time. There's what we got. Five months until then.

01:21:03
Ish, I'm sure we will hear more about other activision blizzard games coming to game pass. Before then I'm sure we will. Um, I can't talk about anything today because we don't have any uh yet, but maybe someday, I don't know. Um anyway, finally, um, atari, um, which is like the holding company that owns the atari name. Uh, but you know what doing the right thing with that stuff?

01:21:27
Right, they're going down the retro pc thing, buying a lot of retro uh written up retro game thing, buying a lot of retro um, uh, game companies and technologies and brands and so forth, and they just bought intellivision from intellivision llc, I think was the name of the company. This is the company that in recent years was trying to and brands and so forth, and they just bought Intellivision from Intellivision LLC. I think was the name of the company. This is the company that in recent years was trying to foist an Amoco console right which is sort of like the old Intellivision right, but poorly. I'm guessing they are going to rename the company, probably to Amoco, but what they've sold is the brand Intellivision, most of the games, not all of them, and I think it's probably licensing related.

01:22:06
They're licensing the games back to this new company, which will probably be called Amico, so they can continue making their new versions of the games, like we knew they were making new versions of, like night stock and some of the other games. That's cool and then we'll see. But the thing we don't know is like how they're. And then we'll see. But the thing we don't know is like how they're, what they're going to do with this. So we'll see. They own digital eclipse, which is the company that does those wonderful interactive game documentaries. Right, they did for Karateka. They just released like a new version, like an updated version of wizardry, like the original.

01:22:38 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, you should go.

01:22:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like a remasteraster, reimagined version of wizardry is out, so there's, there's a bunch of fun stuff happening there. Um, and the more and more I think about this and it's interesting that these are the two xbox stories um, I I would say going forward, I am much more likely to play older games again, remastered or not, that I am to play the next call of duty and interesting what's happened to you.

01:23:05 - Richard campbell (Host)
I have been god.

01:23:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You've gone totally nostalgia on me, I know I spent uh well I will say.

01:23:10
So there's um, what's that guy? I don't remember the names of things. Uh, I've been I'm reviewing a like a laptop with the highest end core ultra chip. You can get like a nine series, right? Yeah, it has nvidia dedicated graphics. It's uh, it's an incredible computer and it's like, well, how do I like, how do I put this thing to the test, right, and uh, one of the things I decided to do is play some games, so I put um doom, uh eternal on there with ray tracing, right as you do, nice that one's great microsoft flight sim a native resolution like 3200 by 2000.

01:23:44
That's awesome. I loaded up the Paris thing so I could like dive bomb Notre Dame and all that stuff. That was good.

01:23:50 - Richard campbell (Host)
But then there's a game that just. It's still fixed in that place, man.

01:23:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know Well, I did more damage to my plane than I did to the building, but I'm not trying to hit things, I just I'm not a good pilot. And then there's a game that just came out called, uh, sanua's sega hellblade 2. I believe the original game was called hellblade sanua's sega, which is like seriously, guys, but whatever, um, it's hard, yeah. So I've been playing that game, uh, for the past few days. I might actually just finish it like it's a really good game. Um, well, no, it's a good game. It's a third person kind of adventure action game. It's mostly adventure, less less action, but really light puzzle solving. It's basically just like an interactive story, but beautiful. Does it have a joystick?

01:24:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, look at that Nice, you know what it goes with my little teeny meeny Atari. Yeah, and so, by the way, if I'm not, mistaken.

01:24:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that comes from that Atari company.

01:24:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they're the ones who make that yeah, If I'm not mistaken, I think that comes from that Atari company.

01:24:45 - Richard campbell (Host)
I think they're the ones who make that. Yeah, oh, it's legit. Yeah, no kidding.

01:24:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's got an HDMI port on the back. Yeah, isn't that hysterical? That's not how it was in 1985.

01:24:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you want to attach it to a modern display, right? That's the point.

01:24:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The cartridge doesn't work. But yeah, you attach.

01:25:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Battlezone. So I wrote an article about Atari emulation last year sometime, so there's a bunch of stuff out there for this.

01:25:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is legit because it's got the legit ROMs and all that because it's from the holding company, but you could find it.

01:25:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Whatever's not on there, it's out there.

01:25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if actually somebody told me, because I was saying, oh, it would be neat if you could do Atari Basic. Somebody told me there is a Konami code to drop out of the no kidding, yeah, I can't remember if that's right or not, but yeah, that would be cool, wouldn't it? Then you could install ROMs. You know, if you found those old compute magazines type in a few games.

01:25:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That'd be fun. There's yeah with that chiclet keyboard. I love it. That would be well. No, I mean the you have to that the keyboard doesn't work right like you have to okay, so you plug a usb keyboard.

01:25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not. Yeah, this is just you'd be like you have my cat do it. I'm giving it away. I didn't. You know, I played with it a little bit, but you know it's funny. These games are nostalgic, but after you played asteroids for 15 minutes it's funny. These games are nostalgic, but after you played Asteroids for 15 minutes it's like yeah hardware is where I drew the line.

01:26:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't mind having it on a device. Actually, I'm going to use an iPad or something. It would be fine, but I'm not going to.

01:26:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well. Apple's really opened up the emulation world by allowing emulators on iOS.

01:26:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's going to change a lot. That's really good news, Yep.

01:26:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a little break and when we come back, the back of the book tip of the week app of the week run as radio on the Brown Liquor Pick of the Week. But before we do that I do want to put in a little plug, if you don't mind, for myself, for Twit, for the club, and it really is a plug for a great group of people, almost 12,000 strong, uh engaged technology buffs, uh the kind of people you'd want to hang out with and you can in the club twit discord. It is so much fun. But that's not the only benefit you get from club twit. You also get uh ad free versions for this show and all the shows. You get video for shows, shows like Paul's Hands on Windows we only put out the audio in public. Same with Hands on Macintosh, untitled Linux show, home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson. So you get a lot of benefits. But really the main reason we want you to join Club Twit, for us the main benefit is it helps us stay on the air. To be frank, more and more we're seeing this.

01:27:26
I have all sorts of theories about what's happening. To some degree it's Joe Rogan and Marques Brownlee just sucking the air out of the room. They're getting all the ad dollars. Youtube and Spotify the handful of Spotify's even struggling with podcasts. Times are tough. Public television, public radio the handful of Spotify is even struggling with podcasts. Times are tough. Public television, public radio all doing layoffs. A lot of media companies doing layoffs and a lot of podcasts going out of business.

01:27:51
If you want us to keep going and believe me, I want to keep going, I don't have to, but I want to and if you'd like to keep this show and all the shows we do on the air, it's really easy Seven bucks a month, that's all we ask. Go to twittv slash club. To it. There are lots of benefits, including joining this really interesting community. Tech enthusiasts they look just like that. Please, we'd love to have you in the club. Join the club.

01:28:26
Twittv slash club, twit. You know I hate to beg. I'm not that kind of person and I only am doing it because I want everybody to understand that our fate is in your hands at this point. I'm okay with whatever you decide to do. You know that's life. I always said we'll do twit as long as the advertising dollars are there and the audience is there. Both are dwindling. It's going to take a vote of confidence from you. $7 a month. Twittv, slash Club Twit. I don't mean to be so bleak. It sounds bleak, it's just, it's life's uh. It's uh the way things are. Let's get to the back of the books. We got tips and picks with mr pt paul thurot.

01:29:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What you got yeah, so I I talk a lot about the certification stuff, obviously, and windows is pretty much the focus, although there's there's so much more you know in the Microsoft space than Windows.

01:29:26
They do this everywhere. It's really kind of terrible, and there's this notion of like dark patterns, where you use deceptive language to make people make the wrong decision for them but make the right decision for you. There's a couple of those in the Edge initial setup, right when it says something like hey, help us, you know, make the mic, our Microsoft experiences more useful for you. If you go and look at the privacy statement that's associated with it, you've just told them that they can track you everywhere online, which is like what they really want, right, so that there's a good example of it. But I was looking at a new PC today and you know you would have seen this if you bought a pc and recently there's a an offer for three months of xbox game pass ultimate that you get inside. Well, it will pop up in the windows, but you'll also see it in the microsoft store app, for example so I was like you know I don't really click on this that much because I already pay for this.

01:30:16
I'm thinking this must be for new subscribers, but I clicked on it and actually if you already have this thing, it will just add to the subscription. It'll just put it up by three months. So I did that today. But to accept this offer you have to turn on, you have to let them turn on recurring billing, and I don't do that. That is a dark pattern that has bit me many times. Oh, it gets worse. So I said you know what I'm going to do. This. It's okay, I know how to turn this thing off. What they said was you have to go to the Microsoft account website and turn off recurring billing, but they didn't tell you how to do it Right, which you know now, to be fair to Microsoft. Later they did send an email that has a link that helps you get there, but I already knew where to go so I went and did it.

01:30:57
There is a set of de dark pattern, whatever screens that appear when you go to do this. So there's a link next to your subscription on the Microsoft website that says turn off recurring billing. I click it and the next screen comes up and says cancel Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. I'm like, I don't want to cancel Xbox Game. What are you talking about?

01:31:16
So now the fear here, of course, is that my subscription it was paid out to, I think, next April originally, um, because I bought a year of it from, you know, using a friend from Microsoft's code. This was a little bit cheaper, but, um, this would this put it out to August, right, for three more months. So, um, I was like, hmm, now am I going to lose anything if I do this? You know, but if you scroll down you'll see it. There's a button between a bunch of ads for all the other things you could pay them for. It says turn off recurring billing, billing. So I'm like, good. So I clicked it. And then the next screen comes up. It says goodbye for now. And you're like, but then, in tiny type, it says your subscription will end on August 5, 2025.

01:32:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
your subscription will end on august 5 2025 and you will not be charged.

01:32:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I did all I did was turn off recurring billing, but there were multiple instances of them trying to scare me, because what they want is for you to be like, be like whoa. Oh boy, I don't, I don't want to lose this. Yeah, and you know I'll, I'll do it later, but then you forget and you keep paying, and you know no very standard psychological manipulation straight up.

01:32:23
It's gross anyway when, in our um, our battle with, uh, you know, in certification, I mean, you're going to see this everywhere. It's not just microsoft, obviously, but I, you know, we focus on microsoft here. So this is like this, I thought was just a great example, because it's not necessarily windows, although I did get the offer in windows, um, but it's, you know, they're doing this everywhere. And this is, you know, it's not like it's not a new thing. This is more like big tech has figured this. You know, people have been doing this for years, right, um, you know, if you want to quit the wall street journal, it's easy to subscribe online, but if you want to quit, you're going to pick up the phone. Nobody wants to do that, nobody wants to talk a lot of it.

01:32:58
It's like would you just cancel the damn thing you know I got a good one here.

01:33:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Federal law requires that the credit bureaus Experian, equifax, transunion allow you to freeze and unfreeze your credit for free. Yes, what they don't, what federal law apparently doesn't require is that they actually make their system work. So I was able to do this at TransUnion and Equifax, but you're going to manage your freeze Good. Well, actually, it turns out I already have an account with Experian. I'm going to log into my Experian account right here and good, it's going to take me to the freeze. Oh, wait a minute. Welcome back, get your free credit report now. Oh, how exciting. You have to unfreeze your credit. There's no, it doesn't have, there's no box that I can. It's just you have to do this, by the way.

01:33:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I did it and then it failed. You must be like lisa come here, just tell me you're seeing what I'm seeing, right, like you doubt yourself, you're like am I missing something?

01:33:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there is no, closed box. There's nothing. I am going to submit my secure order now for my, my free credit.

01:34:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh gee, oh, we're sorry we've encountered an unrecoverable system error please note your order has been canceled.

01:34:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry about the inconvenience. This is the death loop I've been on for six months trying to get to experience. It has been deleted. There's no right, exactly. There's no way around this. They are federally required to allow you to freeze and unfreeze, but go ahead and try to do it on the website. So I call the number and they say you need to do this on the website.

01:34:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I finally said operator, operator Finally got through to a human and was able to do it when we moved back to Dedham in 1999, we signed up with RCN at the time because we got a landline Wow, Yep. Except we didn't. When they installed it, there was no landline, it was just over IP. So I called and I said what's going on with this? And they said well, you know, we do it over the internet now.

01:34:59
I'm like what happens when the internet goes down and I need to make a phone call and they said well, emergency calls will still work. I'm like, no, they won't. No, they won't, they will not.

01:35:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know these companies, and AT&T does it, verizon does it, because I've had many callers on the radio show tell me they will come in and they'll cut the copper. These new voip solutions you don't need this anymore. They're not supposed to.

01:35:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But as soon as they cut it, you can't get a landline. It's like oh, it's over.

01:35:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's right, you're a unicorn now yeah, yeah, never can get it, again, yep we.

01:35:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm gonna like when my parents uh pass away there, I think they're gonna leave it to me in their will.

01:35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how I'll get the landline yeah never get rid of your landline. That's the bottom line, you'll the bottom line.

01:35:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You'll never get it back.

01:35:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'll never get it back Ay, ay, ay, ay ay.

01:35:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What a world. And okay, so the app pick is Windows 11, version 24H2. I mentioned up top that it went into the release preview Windows 11 is an app.

01:35:59
Well, I'm stretching the bounds here. There you go. You can download an ISO. It's a file, it's stored like an app. So if you go to the Windows Insider program release, I'm sorry, if you go to the Windows Insider program preview Jesus, the Windows Insider preview, I'll get it right eventually. Downloads website sign in with your Microsoft account, which is required. You can just download the latest release preview build.

01:36:26
Assuming you're on an x86 system, getting the arm versions a little more convoluted for now. I'm hoping that changes. Um, you just download it, double click it to mount it as a drive run setup does the thing. It takes I don't know 20, 25 minutes and you're on 24 h2 and the neat thing about this is doing this does not enroll you in the Windows Insider program. So your PC is still unstable. In the same way that we had 22H2 and 23H2 kind of running together getting the same updates, we will now have 24H2 doing the same thing. So you will get updates normally through Windows Update each month as they occur. You'll be able to install preview updates if you want to do that. It's normal right Now as far as like. Are there any problems with this? Is this something you should do or whatever You're asking the wrong question. This is Windows Weekly. Obviously you should do this. What could go wrong? But I'm thinking you folks are technical enough to deal with this. It's not particularly problematic.

01:37:28 - Richard campbell (Host)
I think the one big thing that's come up has been, uh, some issues um getting to smb1 based nasa's, which actually shouldn't work anyway because that's not supported. Don't use smb1. Dead probably very angry with you.

01:37:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Bad, bad, bad yeah, but, uh, there are workarounds as it turns out, but anyway, uh, I haven't had any issues. I I immediately installed this on. I bet now it's on at least nine or 10 computers here and I've been using it everywhere. It's fine. There aren't a lot of changes yet. The biggest one to me you right click on the desktop or wherever you get that or the icon would be better actually and you get that pop-up menu. It has names on the little icons now and that's a little higher graphics, right, we talked about that last week.

01:38:07
That start, what do you call it? A quick search change where you can scroll through all the options? Is there? Um, copilot? Yeah, copilot is still the same. That that's not an app yet, but that will come. Um, it has the new version of teams, although that one's very early and is not working great and still to me seems like two separate apps with one icon. But whatever, um, they'll get it. There are some new features, but this will just get you on the train for the next version of windows ahead of time and it's not clear today as a normal person in stable if you would get it before october or if you have to do something special. But this is one way to do it and there's no doesn't seem to be, any downside as far as you know, enrolling in inside or something so you're saying I should do this.

01:38:42
I would do it right now, leo. Okay, I would do it right now.

01:38:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Deal, we'll be back.

01:38:48 - Richard campbell (Host)
Pause the show. He's working now.

01:38:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I see no downsides.

01:38:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What could possibly go wrong? Yep, richard Campbell, mr Runners Radio.

01:39:03 - Richard campbell (Host)
What's coming up. Last show of the month this is the one I did with christina wheeler, regular on the show talk she's one of my was a sharepoint person, now power apps person, although the bigger thing that happened was this. The last time she was on the show, she joined microsoft, so she was an mvp for forever, but now she's actually a blue badge, so, yeah, a senior technical specialist for business applications. But she's more or less still doing the same job, just from the inside instead of the outside, which is helping folks do the extensibility they want to do.

01:39:33
And that's what the show ended up being about almost entirely was how Power Apps not only just as you sort of forms over data apps to build in workflows for a bunch of things, but can extend a lot of the SaaS apps that you're using. So need a couple extra fields in CRM. Power Apps can do that for you Want to be able to migrate data between it's consolidated from multiple sources? Yeah, power Apps is great for that. So we just ran down this gamut of the different ways to approach these apps and, of course, power Apps has more than one way to build things. So it was also this okay, well, when would I use a Canvas app versus a model-driven app, and that led into conversation on the Dataverse and so forth. And, of course, because no conversation is complete with any Microsoft person, we had to talk about a co-pilot or two, and she actually dug into the co-pilot studio a fair bit, which I really enjoyed because it's a heck of a tool. So that's what I got for power apps and that's uh, christina let's do some.

01:40:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's do some brown.

01:40:28 - Richard campbell (Host)
I gotta figure out power I know so little about this all right, listen, I uh I pick whiskeys that I haven't talked about before and they're usually ones I've tried before. But you know, I don't, you don't necessarily know the whole story. And then as you start digging, I mean I've gotten re, I know they're really good sources now, for I've tried before, but you know, I don't, you don't necessarily know the whole story. And then as you start digging, I mean I've gotten re, I know they're really good sources now for whiskey information and things. That I sort of pull things together and sometimes stuff goes wildly off the rails, like just here we go, are you ready? Cause we're going to Aberdeenshire.

01:40:57
Okay, now, aberdeenshire is the land around the city of Aberdeen, on the east coast of Scotland, nominally part of the Highlands, but recognizing, the Highlands are sort of a catch-all for everything north of the lowlands, right, except they've carved out Speyside and so on and the islands are handled separately. Because really, you're talking about a very different terroir over on the east side of the Cairngorms versus the west side of the Cairngorms. Now, you're talking about a very different terroir over on the east side of the Cairngorms versus the west side of the Cairngorms. Now you look at the name of the whiskey, and how do you think you pronounce that?

01:41:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't attempt ever to know. Founders Reserve yeah, Founders Reserve.

01:41:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Good one Cask Strail Glen.

01:41:37 - Richard campbell (Host)
Daniel, the correct pronunciation is Glengarry Gary, obviously Okay good luck. Okay, it's like.

01:41:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Glen Wister. Yeah, it's like Wister.

01:41:51 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, the word Glen being Gaelic for valley, which we've seen that over and again with Glen Grant and so forth. But Geary is not actually Gaelic so much as it's Doric what? And that is an even older language. Now the word Doric is kind of weird because that's actually a Greek-origined word.

01:42:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's like Ionic. Yeah well, different column types.

01:42:14 - Richard campbell (Host)
Yeah, so there's the Doric, the Ionic, the Corinthian, and so on right.

01:42:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm impressed and that's very nicely done, mr Richard Campbell.

01:42:30 - Richard campbell (Host)
And derived from the dorian people, which are really kind of proto greeks. They fought the peloponnesians like. This is old school stuff and in fact that's what happened to the word doric in intellectual circles going from the greeks forward, where doric actually ended up meaning more like the column itself simpler, coarser, more reliable, more genuine. Yes, and so as you get an entomology of language going into the Renaissance and you have all this fragmented language of Anglo-Saxons and so forth across the european plains, the, the term doric came to remain the more sort of rough, genuine version of a language versus attic, which was considered the sort of smarter but corrupted versions of the language. What was the?

01:43:16
other one doric and attic attic, a-t-t-i-c. Attic, dorican, attic. So, uh, why the heck does this end up in northeast of Scotland like? This is the crazy part for me, because that part of Scotland, like the important part to remember about Aberdeen is it's further away from London than it is from Bergen right, or Dublin for that matter.

01:43:43
That Doric language isn't that Saxon-ish, it's more Scandinavian, and so the Giri is this mashup between Gaelic and an older Scandinavian language that was derived, but to help preserve it, they've adopted the name. So I'm not misusing the word Doric, like it's not applied scientifically per se, but that those Scots in that part of the world have said, hey, we have our own dialect, we like this dialect and we are going to protect it To the point where the late great Queen Elizabeth II spoke Doricoric. What he knew, the language, wow, I mean she also spoke english, obviously, but I would be be clear barmerle castle, which was the summer oh yeah residence for the royal family about an hour yeah, yeah, an hour west of aberdeen, up in the carringhorns so is it a kind of version of Gaelic?

01:44:42
So there's the Gaelic influences, but this is also the Scandinavian influences, which has to have more of the Doric origins. On the two of them, I would also say, because you look at the spelling, what is this? Well, they also use different symbology before the Latin alphabet was applied to them, and we've got to remember that, as much as the queen was a lovely person that everybody seemed to get along with, the relationship between the English and the Scots are fairly adversarial at times, and so one of the aspects of language up there is obfuscation, because it's a great way to sort the local from the foreigner. You know the English intent in Scotland most of the time was to extract more taxes and wealth, so you can't just go in there and burn the whole place down. Then there's no wealth, you have to subvert it, and so language became a tool to help route out the spies. Anyway, we were talking about whiskey, oh yeah.

01:45:41
And more importantly, what glengarry actually means is the Valley of the Granaries, wow, so that area in the east grows barley nominally for thousands of years. There's evidence that there was barley in the UK 6000 BC. Wow, the Neolithic peoples already had grain. Now, the grain was originally from the Persian areas, but it had migrated pretty quickly. Productive crops don't take long to move and that's largely a latitude-based move into northern Europe and then across onto the islands. So this place has been growing grain for so long. There's no records. That place was named for its granaries then, and we know perfectly well that when you have too much grain you got to store it somehow before it goes bad, and turning it into alcohol is a pretty good strategy for that One I recommend.

01:46:39
The town that Glengarry is actually in is called Omildrum, which is from the Doric, not the Gaelic, but the Doric Mildroma, which means Hill of the Ridge, which is literally where it's located, on the hill above the valley. Wow, wow. So again, this is a part of the world old enough that largely their place names are the old language version for how to describe the location. Uh, now, as much as we're, I'm I'm painting a picture of this being away from all the other whiskey regions, even though it's in the highlands. It is less than an hour's drive to glenfiddich and dufton and so forth, with the space side, the kig alachi, where I would be our craig alaki. I'm always mispronouncing that name.

01:47:25
Now there's an argument that glengarry is actually the oldest distillery in scotland. The oldest paperwork they can find is its incorporation in 1797, but there's plenty of evidence to show they were making whiskey there way before that. I mean the fact that they've been growing grain there for a couple of thousand years. It's not like one day they said in 1797 we could make alcohol. Look, you could turn this into booze, and doubly so that.

01:47:52
John manson, the one who's on that original paperwork, is part of the manson family of that region that owned farms and merchant shops and tanneries like long scale, long-term family and multiple family members operated. Were involved in it for decades. It stays in the family for almost 100 years before harder times in the late 1800s. Uh that it gets sold to tg thompson, which also partnered with william sanderson. Uh, sanderson's a legend in whiskey making from the late 1800s. He wanted to get into the blended whiskey business so he poured enough money in to experiment with 100 different blendings and then had them tested with various people and found that the most popular one was that 69 and in fact that 69 is still still sold to this day, more than 100 years later.

01:48:48
Yeah, yeah, uh.

01:48:50
Unlike many distilleries of that era, this one survived prohibition. It did it by by selling at a discount rather than going bankrupt to booth distilleries in 33, ultimately passed, sold off to scottish malt distillers, which was part of the distillers company which eventually becomes the agio in in 39 and 37, although this is not owned by the agio. They ended up selling it off, shuts down during world war ii, like everybody else. Come, come back up slowly as grain availability grows after the war, uh, and then in the mids they had a crisis with their water source that actually shut the whole place down for two years, and in that time a different group grabbed it in 1970, a fellow by the name of Stanley Morrison of Morrison-Bomar. So in the 1950s Stanley Morrison and a couple of partners bought up a few distilleries. One of them was the Bomar Distillery, hence the name. And then in 1970, they also acquired Gungiri. In 84, they bought Akintoshan, and then there's other mergers after that. But one of the first things that Morrison worked on was fixing the water problem and hired some local professionals who found another spring not too far away in a farm over and made a deal and so they were up and running by 1972. They switched over to gas fired stills in 72 floor maltings, like it ended in 79, like most other places, and they were back in running well until the nineties, until 1994 when Suntory buys Morris and Beaumont all up, so that's Beaumont, aucantoshan and Glengarry now part of Suntory and there's a brief retooling then. So they shut down for a little while and then in 97, they reopen as a Suntory holding, making the Glengarry that I've got here this kind of whiskey. They make a few other additions.

01:50:38
Here's a few things I have toured this distillery not. Here's a few things. I have toured this distillery not since the latest set of renovations. I toured it in the 20-teens. Most of the buildings are original. You know one of the things you'll notice I've told these kinds of stories about distilleries now for a year and a half and every time one of the things I talk about is the major fire. Never have been Glengary never had a major fire. There are buildings from the 1700s still there, still in use. They've modernized a lot of the internals but one of the things you won't see are gigantic sweeping buildings because the place was built a couple hundred years ago and it just doesn't have. They didn't build that way so it still has all that original infrastructure. Have you been there? Yeah, but I haven't seen the latest edition and I'm going to talk about that just in a minute. So, uh, up until recently, this will be the coda. My other digressions beside me. Getting hung up on doric uh, they were running about a million years production.

01:51:39
They use a dry yeast process, no cream I know you're disappointed. They use louder mashes, which is a very modern technique, so they produce a cloudy wort that has more flavor. Stainless steel washbacks they got eight of them. They run on two wash stills and two spirit stills of about 20,000 liters, 11,000 liters respectively. Their lie arm design is unique Wide bottom stills with relatively short swan necks but long horizontal lie arms, part of their distinctive flavor. They primarily barrel in bourbon, finish in sherry and their dunnage rooms are dirt floor, low-walled, horizontal stacking. Three high, very old school. They make a 12, which is harder to find than their Founders Edition or Founders Reserve, which does not have a year on it, which means it's probably younger than that, or at least there's something younger in it. To stretch their production, because they do not make a lot, not the simplest thing to find. It comes in at 48%, about $55 US for a bottle. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you except that that's just a lovely dram.

01:52:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it?

01:52:50 - Richard campbell (Host)
really good. Oh, that's a pretty nice story. Yeah, fruity forward, no, peat, it's you know, old Highland and so forth. So this is a pretty good story. Here comes the crazy part In 21, Suntory shuts them down again, spends $7.5 million on the place, and in 22, they reopen and Suntory. Now look, I keep having this conflict. You don't want to like these big companies, the Diageos, the Suntories, the Pinot Royards, but they've also gone in and they they add things to places that have been, you know, like makers, mark, making no seller additions, so forth. All because these bigger companies get involved.

01:53:29
Well, santori has picked glenn geary to do a kind of modernization has been done before and part of it is going back to old techniques. So one of the things they've done is gone back to direct fired wash stills. Now, years ago, you know 40 years ago, most stills switched over to steam because it was safer. Right, the risk of explosion is lower, you don't want to mix alcohol with steam, with fire, but also that it's tough to control when you're directly firing a still it's a lot of heat If you're just pumping in steam. The old steam wash stills that Gungeary had, they only run it up to maybe 140 centigrade, which you know, 285 Fahrenheit. You know that's three bar pressurized steam, nothing too dramatic. But direct fire can get dramatically hotter, a thousand degrees, and the Maillard reaction, that sort of browning, toasting effect, doesn't even start until 150 Celsius, like 300 Fahrenheit. So you're kind of missing that out when you go to steam. So they want to go back to the. They've moved back to the old technique where they're actually using fire on the wash till specifically. Now, besides the safety aspect, the other problem of using direct fire is because it's so much hotter you have overheating problems. Often you can kick up foam into the, still to the point where it'll actually go across the lie arm and into the rectifier and really make a mess of things. So the difference now, of course, is while they're using the old technique, they have modern technology. So they now have a set of sensors that will carefully control the burners to not overheat the mash and to manage the foam for them.

01:55:08
But then here's the crazy one they're going back to floor maltings. Now, admittedly, this is part of the Morrison-Bomar group and Bomar is another distillery that does its own floor maltings. The reason they go to commercial maltings obviously is availability of grain and consistency of product, high yield like it's a very easy way to go. You make a lot of product. Going back to your own floor maltings actually ties into this idea of doing direct fire, because in the end your goal is to manipulate sugars in the new flavor and mostly standard maltings have a limited range of what they can do with their with the sugar manipulation. So do your own lower yield, but you have more control and so you can make a more unique product.

01:55:51
And the final part of the whole pitch that Suntory did here and spent their money on was lowering the carbon footprint of distilling. So not only are they managing their heat and resourcing locally so that they consume less resources to make the alcohol, they're also managing their heat better. So the excess heat that comes off the distillation process is used to preheat water, so they actually need to use less heating overall to run the system. And they're doing lots of water recapture to the point where they figure they can cut the water consumption for producing a liter of alcohol in half. So part of this is capturing old technique, which appeals to the whiskey aficionado a lot, and the other part of it is modernizing in a way that does is beneficial to an industry that's fairly heavily consumptive. The problem is that was 22 and it's 24. There's no product yet they've.

01:56:44
They've been laying up for two years oh, it's gonna be probably 10 years before we really get to try this. So they're going to continue to produce the original edition because that's what's in their barrels right, they've got some time on that. But all this cool new stuff we're talking about, we're probably not going to be able to taste it for a decade now I saw bevmo has the 12 year.

01:57:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that okay?

01:57:04 - Richard campbell (Host)
yeah, that's fine, yeah, yeah around around 50 dollars.

01:57:07
Yeah, 69.99 yeah, okay, yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. Of course, it's got a year dedication on it, so somewhat more expensive than the founders reserve right, I'd drink either. They make a set of vintages as well, which often sell out immediately. Not worth your effort, like he. It's a. It's a kind of a crazy thing, but it's almost. They take old barrels. They do a bottling. It'll be a run of a couple of thousand bottles. They're often gone in minutes from collectors. You know I'm having a tough time being angry with suntory, but I get pretty tired of collectors because putting bottles on shelves seems like a waste. You should, you should drink them right, that's what this is.

01:57:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I don't drink, but I love buying these for my brother-in-law uh, because he loved your klana kilty, because when he comes over he really appreciates it.

01:57:53 - Richard campbell (Host)
So I'm going to try to get some of this glengarry and then you run the youtube video so you can hear the story of exactly yeah and yeah, and I won't tease him by asking him how to pronounce it.

01:58:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, I love the stories behind these. That's what makes whiskey so interesting.

01:58:11 - Richard campbell (Host)
You know, I came in just to try and answer the questions about the whiskey, but then you fall in love with the madness of how these things happen, and so I want to share it with you guys.

01:58:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the story's great Glenn Gearyary. Go ahead and try to find that online g-l-e-n-g-a-r-i-o glenn wister and it's. They say, beam, suntory. So that's the official name because it's suntory beam. Depending on who you ask, it's jim beam and suntory. Wow, yeah, but as long as they don't, I think they understand that there's a lot of value in these old names and not to mess with them.

01:58:47 - Richard campbell (Host)
Well, and culturally that's always been. The thing is protect the name, right. Bring the name back around again, right.

01:58:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they're still doing that. Glengarry Highland Single Malt Scotch Whiskey Founders Reserve if you can find it. But I did see the bevmo has the 12 years, so probably not anymore. It's probably all gone right now. Very fun, thank you, richard campbell. My pleasure, richard runs run as radio at run as radiocom. That's where you also find dot net rocks. If you're a dot net, dot net aficionado, paul thurot is at thurotcom. Become a premium member. There's lots of great stuff in front of the paywall and behind the paywall, but it's nice to support Paul by becoming a premium member. I am. You can also buy his books. Leanpubcom. There's the field guide to Windows 11, now with Windows 10 inside and of course, his newest Windows Everywhere, which is kind of a history of Windows through its languages and dev tools. Paul, have a great week. You're going to stay in Macungie for a while.

01:59:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Summer. Maybe Next show I'll be in Mexico.

01:59:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, see I knew it, I knew it.

01:59:57 - Richard campbell (Host)
Next show I'll be in Toronto.

01:59:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh well, I'll get new lower thirds ready right now. There you go. You're going in Toronto? Oh well, I'll get new lower thirds ready right now. There you go. You're going in the hot season, though, paul. Shouldn't you go in the winter?

02:00:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, this is not. They don't have the same seasons we have. Yeah, you're in altitude. Oh, that's right, rainy season.

02:00:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right. Oh well, rainy's nice, yeah, yeah, rainy's good, nice. Well, have a safe trip and we'll talk to you in Mexico City next week and, richard, we'll talk to you in Toronto next week. Awesome, this is the show where you find out what's going on in the Windows world. It's Windows Weekly for all the winners in the world and the dozers as well. We do it every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live. We stream it live on YouTube, youtubecom, slash twit, slash live. If you hit smash the bell, as the kids say, you'll get an automatic notification when we go live, which is right at the beginning of each show. Don't you dare smash any bells, smash my bell.

02:00:58 - Richard campbell (Host)
yeah, smash your bell smash any bells.

02:00:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Smash my bell. Yeah, I'll smash your bell. You can also find a dedicated channel just for Windows Weekly on YouTube. We have audio and video at our website, twittv slash www. Probably the easiest thing to do is subscribe on your favorite podcast app. That way, you'll get it automatically the minute it's available, which will be shortly this afternoon, after Kevin King does his magic. Of course, if you're a club member, you get an ad-free version. That's nice, saves time, saves money. Well, it doesn't really save money $7 a month but we love our club members. Thank you, club members, for making this show possible. Twittv slash club twit Paul Richard. Have a great week, safe travels. Tv slash club twit Paul Richard. Have a great week, safe travels and we'll see you next time on windows.