Windows Weekly 885 transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat is here Well, actually he's in Mexico City. Richard Campbell's here Well, actually he's in Oslo, norway, but we will meet in the middle to talk about Windows. Copilot plus. Pc day is just around the corner. Microsoft pauses the rollout of 24H2. Could this be to update recall Patch Tuesday for Windows 11, and Paul and Richard's thoughts about Apple's AI performance at its WWDC keynote on Monday. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorada and Richard Campbell, episode 885, recorded Wednesday, june 12th 2024. Open the Kokomo. It's time for Windows Weekly. You, dozers and winners, you. Maybe it makes more sense if I say you, winners and dozers, yous Get it. Never mind. That's Paul Theriot on your left. He is the star of Theriotcom and he is in Mexico City with a new beautiful little painting behind you. It's great art.

01:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's art, but what does it do?

01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go it reflects the beauty of it reflects yeah it reflects, reflects period, richard. Richard campbell's, on your right there. He's in oslo, norway, hello, and his art is a hound dog I will.

01:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I kept it just out of frame, but I will return it to the frame now for you People are going to ask what is that? Now they will know what is that? Because it is casting a very strange shadow Strange little shadow.

01:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If this is a horror movie, that shadow will get a little closer to him as the podcast progresses.

01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does look like a Five Nights with Freddy character.

02:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's really something I don't know. Apparently, there are other animals in other rooms. Oh, they made it. They made a mixture of them.

02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, there's there's a hotel in providence, rhode island called the graduate that I stayed at. My daughter and I stayed there. We had separate rooms and she said I can't stay in my room. There's a terrifying plaster frog lamp. And I said, hey, good news, there's one in my room too. Yeah, I was going to say In all the rooms.

02:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What do?

02:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you think is in my room. Yeah, all the rooms, all the rooms. Hey, I did a gig for a company in Canada once and they just put me in Delta hotels and all of them are decorated identically. The decorated identically. The only way I could tell which one of the deltas I was in was to read the letterhead. Oh, that's so weird.

02:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why not? You know it's cheaper by the dozen.

02:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and happy Groundhog Day to me.

02:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Deja vu, much so. Speaking of days, the 18th is as Paul has coined it, perhaps unfelicitously. Yeah, we probably need a new term C-Day For Copilot.

03:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Plus, it's like D-Day, but for other PCs.

03:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the 18th right.

03:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it the 18th. Now I don't know.

03:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
18th right, I could be wrong. I could be wrong too, I could be wrong. I just say things. 18th right, I could be wrong. I could be wrong too, I could be wrong. I just say things who cares? So let's start with recall. I got to tell you, paul, and you can confirm or deny, but last week where you were saying, hey, wait, hold on recall, it's not even out yet, just hold your horses. And then, shortly thereafter, microsoft said yeah, okay, we're going to make it opt in and we're going to make it more secure.

03:51
I, I felt like paul must have known that no, I did not. You did not have early advanced no look I? I'm just reading the room.

03:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean, we look I nobody has more complaints about Microsoft than I do, right, I mean. But the one thing I will say about them that I guess is semi-positive is they do respond to this kind of feedback, you know, and look, this AI stuff is super important to them, they want to get it out in the world, et cetera, et cetera. But you know, you get pushback from a certain customer segment, which is their commercial customers, and, yeah, you're going to make some changes. So, no, I didn't know about this, but I knew, I knew. I mean, I knew they would respond. Right, the thing is the clock is ticking and this creates kind of an interesting conundrum, timing wise, because of the rollout of these copilot plus PCs on which you will get this feature right. So I will say their response.

04:47
You know, response came late on a Friday, right, typical, I guess I could have predicted that one, honestly, maybe I should have. The only substantive change, honestly, was that opt-in bit, because they told me it was opt-in at that event and the way they've been describing it since is optional, you know. So, optional, I mean it's different because it's going to be well. It would have been enabled by default and then you could optionally turn it off.

05:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That would be opt-out rather than opt-in.

05:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, both of those things are optional too, so they describe it as optional. Well, this is a dark pattern. I mean, in a way, the sort of negative option billing.

05:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the dark pattern.

05:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the dark pattern was the wording of the screen and the out-of-box experience. That didn't say yes or no. It said this is what's happening. If you don't like it, click details.

05:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you want to turn this?

05:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
on yourself, or do you want us to turn it on for you, asterix? We are turning it on for you, yes. So yeah, I mean, that's important and, honestly, that's not unprecedented. But we live in a world where Microsoft is auto-enabling things like OneDrive folder backup, even after you've explicitly said no multiple times, right? So last week we talked about dark patterns, or two weeks ago whatever that was, and I had written an article about this. And the use of language to make it look like, if you allow us to track you more, you'll have a better web experience, when in fact, if you allow us to track you more, we have more information to sell to advertisers, is the real reason we're doing that.

06:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe those advertisers will, tomorrow, you with ads of things you've already bought.

06:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so look, I uh, I very much disagreed, and still disagree, with all those people who bemoaned about this ahead of time, because that did not represent the shipping code, but um, specifically on copilot plus PCs. But you know what this is like sometimes you do the right thing and have a bad outcome, and sometimes you do the wrong thing and you have a good outcome.

06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think what Microsoft did is adequate?

06:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's no way to know. See, here's the thing. We still haven't seen it. We don't really know. Yeah right, we'll talk a little bit later about some of the Apple stuff, for example. So in both these companies cases, you make these claims, you're doing this thing and it will get out in the real world and things will happen. You know, um, we used to experience this back in the day and all of a sudden there were problems. No one saw it during the beta, or anticipated or whatever. So I can't, no one can claim it's going to be fine and you know it's, we'll see. But this is too important for Microsoft not to get right. And I, you know, I hope I mean, I don don't know I hope they move quickly to fix whatever problems may come up. But, um, I, the big thing to me, like I said, is just making it often.

07:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's how this should have always been certainly the way the it person looks at it is tell me it's off by default or that I can make it off by default yeah, so the I by the the it story here is actually really interesting.

08:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It can allow recall on a PC that they manage. They cannot automatically just turn it on. They can just say you can't have it. But it's up to the user. If it is allowed by it to use it, it cannot control it after that. It's this, yeah, even though that's you know, it's cannot control it after that. It's this yeah, even though that's you know, it's the business's pc and it's you know. We can talk about all the legality and whatnot, but um, it's, it's interesting I and look like I said it demands windows.

08:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello is an interest. I mean, that is an interesting barrier, a lot not just Windows Low right, but ESS.

08:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yep.

08:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so we'll see.

08:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see. Yeah, you know, one of the promises of recall was that you would sign into a PC where someone was using recall with a different account and it could be an administrator account. And you know, if you've ever done this on your own PCs, you know you can browse the file system, go into that person's account. It will give you a little warning, like you don't have the rights to access this, and you say click whatever, give it to me. And then it spends a little while and you get in. And one of the promises with recall was that that wouldn't work with the recall database. That this thing was private to that user was like basically, um, per user encryption, right, and one of the things they changed although again this matches what they said originally was uh, user accounts on these pcs will be encrypted per user. So you can't do what I just described with recall, right, you can't, as an admin, get into that part of the disk. Um, yeah, I mean, that's what you said you were doing, so great, you know, I think a lot of what they announced on friday was like but you already said you were doing that, like I, I, you know this was what you said you were doing so it's kind of hard to say how much actually changed. But but the again the big one, opt-in is. That's such a huge victory and it's when we it's the type of victory we haven't gotten in windows.

10:06
I can't even think of another example. I mean much at all. Yeah, it's been. It's been definitely sloping in the opposite direction. You know there's been more and more, and in fact there's I don't know if this is in the notes, but the 24 H two does more of this as well. For individuals, they're requiring more and more Microsoft account to do anything. You know they really want to push you in this, down this path. And that's true of recall, and not just an NSA account, an intra account. I'm not sure about the intercom bit, but I mean you know, for example, some of the Copilot plus PC features you get, you know, free co-create and paint forever. You know unlimited number of images, but you have to sign in with a microsoft account.

10:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know um well, try using a new windows 11 pc without a microsoft account, like yeah, I mean, I, I would.

10:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The reason I signed in with a microsoft account personally, well, there's a bunch of reasons. Honestly, it does the auto encryption stuff and whatever. But there are, in fact, microsoft products and services that I use, that you have to sign into, use like OneDrive, right, or you want to. You could say, look, I'm going to use a local account, I know what I'm doing, like I'm going to secure it properly, but I want to use, you know, whatever it might be, an Outlook app or Microsoft office or OneDrive, like I, I said at the microsoft store, uh, you could sign into those apps just those apps with your microsoft account. And to me it's like, well, I mean, if you're going to do that, just sign in, to sign in once. Like, why would you like, why go through that, you know? Um, so anyway, I, I uh, look, no matter where you took a stance on the recall debate, this is nothing but good news. There are additional protections that are enabling. This is the type of stuff I feel like they would have enabled over time. They were really, you know, they, you know reasonably, but not surprisingly really tried to push this notion Like, look, this thing's a preview, it's not going out to that many people. We were going to use this time to gather the feedback and make improvements to the product. There will come a day in the future where recall is rolled out to many, many more computers and by that point we expect it to be where it needs to be or whatever, right? So I don't know.

12:20
You know, I guess, like everyone can just kind of you know I did it. You know, whatever guess, like everyone can just kind of you know I did it. You know, whatever stance you took, you can feel good about it, it's fine, it's all good. So there you go. But here's the dark side of the downside. You know we're careening toward this thing, which I get, I agree. C day not a great name, co-pilot. Plus PC day a little lengthy, but these things are coming. And plus PC day a little lengthy, but these things are coming. And you got to know they're in boxes at some point in the distribution chain, somewhere, right? And now Microsoft has just said actually, we're going to change this major feature, a feature that impacts the out of box experience that you see when you press the power button for the first time. How the heck are they going to handle that Right. So in the release preview channel, which is part of the Windows Insider program, they have paused the rolling out of the I'm going to call it final for lack of a better term release of the release preview, sorry, of 24H2. Right, if you're on stable, which you can be right.

13:24
I had that tip a week or two ago where you can take the latest iso you're now being. You don't have to sign into the insider program, you just upgrade to that version of windows. You're unstable or the general availability channel. So every other tuesday, patch tuesday and also week d for the preview updates you get whatever the stable update is for that uh week. Uh, this has happened twice since then. Uh, once in um, it's just general patch tuesday and then once on the week d, uh brought it up to the latest build, but patch tuesday was yesterday and if you pay attention to this kind of thing you might have noticed. Uh, there were 23 h2 and 22 h2 updates, but nothing for 24 H two, and it has to be. It's tied to this right, obviously. Um, my, uh, I'm going to call this as an educated guess. Um, is that next Tuesday? Um, we will. If you're on 24 H two on a non co-pilot plus PC. You're actually going to get a new build of you know an update. You'll get that patch Tuesday update.

14:22
I think this has been delayed because they're making these changes to update and that anyone who buys a copilot, like the first wave, the first shipment of copilot plus PCs, perhaps, unless they have some way to update them in the box, like Apple does now, I guess, with iPhones If you've ever done this and I do this all the time, so I've seen this a million times you go through a couple of screens you know keyboard language, yes and then it says looking for updates and you're going to get a big update. You know, because what they don't want you to see is that screen where it's not opt in, and they certainly don't want you to get to the desktop and see the way it was going to be originally. What they want you to see is this updated experience, right when it's opt in, and then is this updated experience right where it's opt-in, and then when you do opt-in, you get to the uh, the proper experience you know, when you reach the desktop. So that's going to be an interesting thing I'm looking forward to.

15:13
Uh you know hearing what that looks like and also seeing what it looks like right and no and a lot of this.

15:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean certainly it's all the copilot plus pc stuff. Initially, yeah I mean it's interesting that 24h2 got delayed, possibly for things that were only going to be for copilot plus pc. So that means it's going to be dark on other win 11 machines that are also running 24h2?

15:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think so. I, and without you know again, all I, all I can say right now for sure is that what we saw yesterday was that anyone who did do as I described did not get a Patch Tuesday update right. It's not completely unprecedented, but it happens right. Last week, for example, or two weeks ago I guess, the Week D preview update went out a day late, right, not a big deal, right, but it went out a day late. This one is a big deal.

16:06
So, as to your why, I'm going to guess that, look, they have a build machine, of whatever kind. It builds all the different versions. They're building it for all of the architectures at one time. And why ship this thing now? They're probably still working on it, right, right, I mean, maybe it just wasn't ready, so there's no reason to ship what they were going to ship. Plus, who knows, there's probably code in there that I'm sure people like rafael um could look at that thing and say, see, oh, here's the. You know, even though it's not enabled for our pcs, like you know, that stuff might still be in there to some degree and they can say, oh yeah, look, they were going to do this, but now they're changing it. Right, they changed their mind. I really think this is. It's kind of embarrassing for them.

16:51
I think you know that's my take is like they, they want to ensure that you know they're doing the right thing, which is great. It's short time schedule, it's not like this is six months in advance, so these things are probably shipping around the world, right, so they're. They're in this position now. Where they have to, they have you know, they have the system in place. They can. They can update the pc before you do much of anything, right before you can sign in. So right, they're going to do that. So you know, uh, people are going to buy this thing, thinking, okay, I got this fast new computer, it's going to be awesome. It's like, why is it taking so long? You know, because it's downloading some huge update, right, um?

17:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
like that's what I figured, that we'd have a separate channel for this update. I mean it's on unique hardware. Even this is windows on arm for crying out yeah, I think it's just because it went out.

17:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I I think that's the issue. You know, they delivered the build to pc makers who put the image on their systems, put them into the channel and they're like I'm just kidding, you know. I mean, look, day zero updates are not unique, you know, frankly, very common, but this is a big one, right?

17:52
any game you've bought in the past five years had a game, oh my god, yes and also, you know, think about it this way, like if you were concerned, you should have been about this bit of it, that co-pilot would be enabled for someone, kind of behind their back or without their knowledge, and then they ship an update. You know, I mean they'd have to write extra code to accommodate that. It's like, why don't we just ship the regular code and not worry about it? So, in other words, we don't want to mis-enable it if you will on some number of pcs, then have to write code to fix that.

18:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'd rather just ship the right thing one time everybody would doesn't always work that way, and it's not as urgent, right, because the updates are pretty painless for everybody.

18:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, this is the, the silver lining of, uh, what they used to call windows as a service, which is such a ludicrous idea on the face of it. We're going to take this legacy software stack that has literally decades of code of different types and different ages and so forth.

18:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So many different shades of cruft you've ever seen.

18:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and we're going to treat it like it's an online service.

18:54
We're going to update it all the time You're like this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life. And they made plenty of mistakes, lots of problems, kindles or blue screening windows and all kinds of stuff. But here we are. You know, the terry myerson announced this nine years ago and look, I'm not saying it's perfect, but honestly, you ever updated mac? I mean, come on, like they actually do a really good job, it's, it's it, they did get it there. I mean, they kind of jammed it down our throats, but they have so many avenues for updating windows now. Yeah, I mean, we're there. So, yes, it's, we have that. We have that. They can do what I just described and it will be okay. And then recall will still break everything and you know we can complain about that. Next week it's going to be fun. So look at it as an opportunity, not a problem.

19:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

19:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

19:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I mean I've got to think they're still panicked about whether or not an ARM device can succeed because it hasn't so far. You know, they sound like they haven't tried before.

19:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, so we're going to. Well, let's talk about that now. So one of the things that's kind of interesting about the sole windows and ARM thing is that it's never worked. Like you said, Microsoft has made various platform improvements over the years. They've gone from 32 to 64 to just 64.

20:11
The emulation is never good enough, right. But I would say, up up until right now, the central problem is the hardware just wasn't fast enough, the performance wasn't there, right, and part of that is native and part of its emulation, whatever. So, you know, microsoft has indicated in a way they never did before. By the way, I mean, qualcomm used to always say, hey, this thing will run just as fast as an I five. You know an I five from, like, you know, 10 years ago, but Microsoft really never talked about that. But now they're like yeah, no, this thing is. You know they're, they've been. You've never seen anyone hedge their comments. You know it's always been like no this is it.

20:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like they're afraid to even mention it.

20:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, this time it's like no, we did it or they did it or someone did it. Whatever it was, it's been done. But we've had rumors over these past several years that maybe Qualcomm has an exclusivity window with Windows and ARM, that this exclusivity window is going to end. I think at one point we thought it was the end of last year. Now we don't think it might be the end of this year. There are new reports that suggest it could be sometime early next year. But Reuters has published two reports recently that kind of confirm some of the rumors. We've heard that AMD and NVIDIA and now MediaTek are all going to release chipsets for PCs based on ARM as soon as this window closes.

21:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is so funny because I read the story and I thought, oh, I guess they did confirm that Qualcomm had an exclusivity.

21:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean Microsoft and Qualcomm have never confirmed this right.

21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one's ever confirmed it, but they acted as if oh yeah, everybody knows that.

21:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The one thing. I mean. I talked to Terry Morrison about this a million years ago and there are many comments he said about this that kind of stuck with me. One of them was about getting those effing Intel stickers off of laptops. He also said that he didn't care who won. His point with this was to go to Intel and to doing the right thing and there's a nice story there, because they never did. But they are now, I think, with the Lunar Lake processor family for the first time, they've finally gone down this route where they're making a significant architectural change that could, we'll say, rival Qualcomm.

22:25
But Qualcomm also. One of the things he said was you know, when you look out at the arm world of the day, and today too, outside of Apple, I mean, who else is there? I mean Qualcomm is the only company big enough that ships enough chips that they could stand up to Intel. Right, and I think that explained it. And and I I don't know this right there's. You get these kinds of vibes and you see rumors and things, but I feel like this Nuvia purchase for Qualcomm and this push to make Snapdragon X really makes sense required a deep investment on the part of Qualcomm and Microsoft, because I don't know that these things are going to ship in a volume big enough to justify Qualcomm's investment alone. Right, that whatever billions they spent, like they're going to have other companies offering other chipsets alongside them pretty soon. And I feel like the last year or two has involved these two companies kind of I almost said collude, that's not fair Partnering to make sure this happens and by happens I mean like happens correctly, like this is like what we've been waiting for.

23:31
So I think it's on both of them to make sure this works, but that it's going to be really interesting to see what, say, nvidia does, in particular, because there's some pretty good game emulation stuff happening on Snapdragon X like really good actually for what it is.

23:50
But you know what we miss in the ARM world, including on Apple, really is this kind of notion of like a dedicated GPU and I'm not saying we're going to see add in slots or anything, but you know NVIDIA graphics, even if it's integrated on an SoC and an ARM system, is very interesting because not just for games, but you know a lot of our AI workloads today, target GPUs and they'll make sure that this thing hits that. You know that specification as well, so there could be some good competition. It's horrible, you know, this hasn't even happened and we're already looking at kind of the next thing, which is, so you know, typical and terrible. But, um, I think, uh, I know a lot of people still doubt arm and I know a lot of people, you know, think, well, maybe at best this will be like the third option, it will be like a mini amd or something I don't.

24:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I still think this could be it's architecturally simpler, like there's a lot of advantages to going to arm. Yep, it's just the native install base. It's like how much stuff is actually built right.

24:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You have to accommodate. Yeah, this is why rt failed. You know, the arm chips of that day weren't powerful enough to emulate x64 or x86 code, it didn't have the backup solution.

24:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was no fault, not a time when it was easy to convince developers to do anything in the microsoft space.

25:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So the two big things that have changed is that the emulation is much, much better. So you get, if you have to run an X 64 app, I'll call it 64 bit X 86 app You're going to get decent performance. Most people, most apps, probably won't notice. And then just the general performance slash I'm going to call it native app compatibility stuff. Microsoft put out all the tools for that. There are kind of hybrid apps that have our X64 and have it's like EM, arm64, whatever that's called ARM components. So the important bits are running natively on ARM. And then there's a great slide that I think Qualcomm showed where it's like. Here's the ecosystem, and if there were 75 apps on that slide, like 70 or maybe 68 of them were native on ARM or would be by launch. I mean it's gotten a lot better.

25:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
a lot better. I think they've got a better relationship with the devs. I think the emulators are way better. I think the migratory stack is better. It's easier to move software to it and they've definitely seen we've gotten more attention that folks are interested in getting their app across.

26:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a snowball effect too, right? You know, when Google came out and announced Chrome Native on ARM, you know, again you get the disbeliever types, you know, and it's like, oh, does this really mean anything? I honestly, yeah, I think it means a lot because I think that says something to the world, to other developers, like, okay, maybe we need to. You know, there's a lot of big companies that are looking at this and saying, you know, I think this is going to work Like this is going to be a thing.

26:37
Yeah, it's worth putting energy into. Yeah, I mean I won't be able to do this anytime soon. But some company company, some pc company, offered me a laptop to review and I almost knee jerk kind of responded with like, yeah, if it's not based on arm, I'm not donut which is, which is stupid, which I don't know which is stupid? It's just stupid. Like I didn't, I did not respond.

26:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, the imp of the perverse invaded you exactly. I'm getting. I'm getting ahead of myself you know it's tempting yeah, right, and there's always the possibility.

27:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
those PCs will arrive whenever they arrive, and you know, maybe they're not as good as I think they're going to be.

27:10
That's happened before right, I've never been disappointed by technology, leo. What do you think? I've never been wrong about anything. No, you have to leave that possibility open. But I do think the nice thing that's happening here of you know who wins and it it's not super important that anyone wins, really, but um, that terry myerson belatedly will get what he wanted, which was that intel and amd2 are, uh, changing the architecture of the chips to better accommodate this world of super mobility a lot big uptime, a high efficiency. You know the performance per watt thing, and um, this is why competition won't.

27:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why it's good. Exactly this is why choice is good and if if there's one thing that windows world offers, it's choice.

27:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, but you know I said this on first ring daily this morning, so apologies if you're one of the three people. This is that podcast. Uh, but the uh. But I said this on First Ring Daily this morning, so apologies if you're one of the three people listening to that podcast. But this is an important point because we live in a big tech era. These companies are all abusing monopolies of various kinds. Monopoly is when they're just. They can behave as a business in a fashion that precludes there being competition. Like you, pretend there is no competition even though there's competition out there. No matter what they do, it doesn't impact what you do, and that's the way Intel has behaved, frankly, over the past 20 years. Right now, does Intel have a monopoly in the PC space? I mean yeah don't they?

28:42
I mean right, there was a time. Yeah, I mean even space. I mean yeah, don't they? I mean right, there was a time. Yeah, I mean even today they have a dominant position. I, we can all agree they're struggling to a certain degree, but they're still. I mean the majority of x86.

28:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever chips that go out or pcs that go in the world, are still based on their chip size, right, you know how you know how I'll know when, uh, it's really happened is when people come up to me, as they used to do, and say should I get an intel or qualcomm? Yeah, pc right. Uh, they used to say intel or amd. Briefly, there was a brief period when the you know team red was had some parody. They don't do that anymore. Um, and no one has said to me should I get a qualcomm or intel?

29:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
pc, no, no. Well, of course, you would never say yes to that today, right? I mean the? The existing computers are horrible. Um, in the end, right, they, they will betray you. You may have that 15 minutes where you're like this isn't too, oh damn you know, like it kind of it, kind of it kind of hits you like that.

29:36
But, um, I look, all I want um of this world is is not what Microsoft wants. You know, when you think about AI PCs and co-pilot PCs, what we're really talking about here are PCs that have MPUs that run AI locally, and I'm not saying I don't care about that. I don't mean it that strongly. But what I really want is what I got on the Mac side with the MacBook Air, which is this thing that's really thin and light and silent, super fast. It's all day battery life, really not pretend, all day not. I can run a video and matter what I do like actual yes and um, look, I'm gonna. I'm a windows user, I'm used to compromise. I will uh accept three of the four of those things, or whatever number it is. Um, we'll see. That would still be successful.

30:23
To me, the fact that we are in this ai era that's unfolding and these things will have mpus, uh is interesting and good. But you know, remember, before this generation these things were called always connected pcs, right, and the pcs were about to buy. I don't think any of them have a 5g chipset. That used to be a primary component of it. Today we're talking about ai and copilot plus. Right, it's not. It's not really about always on, always connected, kind of stuff, although I still, I mean that's still useful. But I just want you know I brought the mac here. I don't use it that much. I have a review laptop with me, not an arm when I will tell you that. But right, I, um, I open the lid. It doesn't matter if it's been like a day or two days or a week, it comes on instantly every time the battery life hasn't really moved at all. And I can tell you, when I open a windows laptop and I have whatever number I have four or five of them here uh, it's like spinning a roulette wheel.

31:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have no idea what I'm gonna get yeah, and I've definitely noticed my, my studio two on the road. If Every couple of days you definitely have to restart it, it's cranky.

31:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This new computer behaves not all the time, because, again, it's random. Computers are just stupid and unreliable. But a brand-new computer. I'll open it and I wait. Nothing happens. And I hit the button to turn it powered on and it waits. A little thing comes on and you're like is this just booting up for the first time ever? What is happening? Like, what is this?

31:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
thing doing.

31:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like. This is a brand new, modern device, latest chipset from whomever not Qualcomm. Why is it like this, right? Which is what leads me to almost respond to a PC maker with I'm not reviewing this, unless it's based on Qualcomm. Wow, I want that experience, right.

32:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't know if you're going to get that yet, right that's exactly right, because it could be Windows.

32:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It might not be the hardware. I know it's Windows. That's exactly right. Yep, exactly right. So we shall see. I don't know Qualcomm. Look, qualcomm does have a rich history with a lot of things and a lot of them with their chips, you know efficiency and performance and power management and you know the instant on stuff, and also connectivity and blah, blah, blah, whatever.

32:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But so I do feel like just being on Qualcomm is in fact going to help to some degree, and the question's going to be do you think we'll look back at Monday June 18th and we'll be looking back at, or Tuesday June 18th, and we'll be looking back at? It by the way next week and say, hey, this is the day everything changed.

32:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the iPhone moment.

32:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

32:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean that's one of the possible outcomes.

32:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're putting that further out, because the the day the iphone shipped didn't what didn't know. That's a good point sometime later.

33:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it took a while yeah yeah, but you know what, uh, the iphone accomplished even on day one that thing that I want for qualcomm and what terry myerson wanted for qualcomm, which is, you see it as a competitor or you see it as a person who's using whatever stupid flip phone you had at the time and you were like you know what, I want, that thing I may not want it on apple, I may want it on my own thing, and eventually it comes to android, you know whatever.

33:29
But then eventually it's just android. But, um, you know, in the end that model did win, right? Yeah, it's possible that, uh, the snapdragon x computers will be like the first ibm pc, where at the time it seems great, but then over time you realize this is in fact like an 8-slash-16-bit system with horrible memory, segmented memory limitations, and it does take a few generations to get it to where it needed to be. But even in the beginning you could see this was going to be the platform, right, even though the first one. We might look back and say, eh, you know that one wasn't that good.

34:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, and you and you bring up a great question, which is when is the next rev of chips? Yep, so are they going to be tick tock? Are we going to see him in a year, year and a half?

34:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so arm holding Right. A couple of things about this company. One, let's not forget they have a lawsuit against Qualcomm for their new acquisition Right, and the short version of that story is that Qualcomm acquired Nuvia Arm, went to them and said well, nuvia has their license agreement, you have yours, you're using their chips, you're going to pay both. And Qualcomm was like, yeah, no, we're not. And now they're in court and we'll see what happens. Both of them have pretty good stances on why they made their decisions and I sort of see both sides of it. I think Qualcomm's argument bases on look, we have all kinds of patents and they cover this stuff. So we're in the clear, you know and we'll see.

34:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll see. Well, and self-immolation by mutual patent lawsuit is a good way to earn money.

34:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The only thing better than two giant tech companies who hate each other fighting is two giant tech companies who are partners fighting each other, right yeah?

35:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so like it's the only thing that's better.

35:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like it's like watching uh, war of the roses. Like your marriage is dissolving, yeah first fight with patent cubes arm uh would be screwed without qualcomm, and the reverse is also true, right yep so it's beautiful, it's perfect.

35:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the moments where you both could be making a lot of money. You really want to start Mac each other around. Is that a good?

35:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
idea, exactly right. I mean, I feel like if Qualcomm threw him a 20% something, something they'd probably be fine. Who knows, we'll see what happens there. But but ARM has also said on record many times now there will be more ARM computers from other companies, companies in the future. And they also said something that was very clearly a dig at Qualcomm, because it was part of an article, I think, and it might have been Reuters actually, but it was part of an article somewhere where they were talking about this lawsuit and you know whoever the interviewer was, asked them blah, blah, blah, whatever. And the guy said listen, this first generation is fine, but the second gen is going to blow this out of the water. And they were very clearly referring to not the second gen Snapdragon X, but rather the NVIDIA, the competitor's ARM chipsets, and it was like okay, it's like. So it was just like a little like you know.

36:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it makes you wonder if they aren't already quietly in beta. They're literally, oh, they got to be right, whatever constraint there may be, to say, okay, let's announce it, let's go yep, like if there's an exclusivity of some kind. The day it ends they're, they're ready to ship hardware we don't know what.

36:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The end date is right, sometime next year, according to reuters, right?

36:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
we don't know the way they worded it, it was either the end of 2024, sometime early in 2025, but the, the, the way they said it was that the, the chips or PCs based on the chips, would be in market by the end of next year. Interesting, yeah, yeah.

36:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I just want to say I have a PC. I'm very happy with it. This portion of Windows Weekly is brought to you by HP and Intel and my new HP Elitebook 1040G11. I love this baby. It is beautiful here. Let me disconnect it so you can see it in all its glory. I particularly like the OLED screen. I've mentioned that before. But it's light, it's thin, incredible battery life. It's HP's first commercial AI PC with an Intel Core Ultra processor. I don't mean to hide you, paul.

37:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would like to see the computer too. Take a look at it, Paul. Look up.

37:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Come on.

37:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Look close, look close, look at the back of it. You're behind the stage, buddy.

37:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Designed with AI acceleration. Yes, it has the co-pilot key to empower your workforce, deliver exceptional performance, battery life and world-class security. It's everything you want your employees to have and, and I gotta tell you, it's everything your employees want to have too. With the hp elite book 1040 g11, you're going to get smart sense. I got it running right here. There there's the SmartSense icon. What is this doing? As I'm using the PC, it's monitoring it. It's keeping an eye on the load. It's keeping an eye on the vitals, making automatic adjustments to energy hogging resources. It's how you get exceptional battery life According to HP, up to 29 hours of battery life. Now, I haven't tested that, but I have to say I don't plug it in very often. I often run it on battery for hours at a time, but that's because SmartSense is monitoring and balancing the battery, the fan, the processor, everything that runs. When you need performance, you get performance. When you're just kind of sitting there thinking, it goes into idle. It's really remarkable and it allows your focus to remain on your work, bringing your biggest ideas to life.

38:51
The sound on this fantastic. They acquired, as you know, poly Studio some time ago. They now have Poly AI-driven audio Plus Windows Studio effects built right in, which is a fantastic way to make your Zoom zip. Automatic face framing. It does eye contact, which is really cool. You're always looking at the screen when you're on a Zoom call, but with the eye contact you're always looking at your people, at your peeps. It's got a really nice, really.

39:22
I did try this out. Adaptive dynamic voice leveling you get incredible optimal vocal clarity with background noise reduction and more. So it knows what the ambient sound is, it knows what the environment is and it optimizes for your voice. Does a great job of that. And, of course, as I said, copilot is built in. Let me just push the button bing the AI assistant that automates your workflow by suggesting personalized optimizations and streaming for efficiency, or, in my case, funny pictures of Paul and Richard Using. Learn it. Now.

39:55
This is you know, I mean, yeah, you know what. This is why employees love it. It's a very friendly, easy to use, lightweight, good looking PC. It doesn't look like your work computer, but I gotta tell you, with that HP Wolf Security for Business built in, this is the kind of computer your boss also wants to buy, helps you manage your time effectively, set priorities, be more productive. Windows 11 Pro on this baby the latest Intel Core Ultra 5 or 7 processors, as I mentioned. The 14-inch OLED display sings. It's beautiful. You get a 5-megapixel camera, the HP Wolf Security for Business and a whole heck of a lot more at a really great price.

40:41
This newest laptop will adapt to your employees' personal needs and behaviors so they can regain meaningful time and focus on meaningful work. So there, go to hpcom. This is making my life more meaningful. Go to hpcom. Search for this thing, this baby. Oh, it's so pretty, isn't it? The HP EliteBook 1040 G11. To learn more today, we also have a link in the show notes, so you can just go right there. Hpcom, it's the HP EliteBook 1040 G11. And no, you can't have this, paul, it's mine.

41:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do have something very much like it you told me that yeah, the Firefly. Yeah, the Firefly, which is kind of their pseudo workstation version, but it has the best keyboard I've ever used in my life I think we're in agreement.

41:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hp, which for a while I had a hard time recommending because they, they just. But in the last, I don't know, maybe it's when they split your commercial pc like elite book and firefly.

41:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just love my elite books and this is not the first I've had.

41:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've really knocking it out of the park again and again, and again. So so I highly recommend this the HP EliteBook 1040G11. It goes to 11. All right, what's next? We got to talk.

41:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Actually, before we move on just real quick, because there were two just kind of software-related ARM things that may be of interest. I don't remember the exact timing on this, but earlier this year Microsoft started talking about super resolution coming to Windows 11. And this is that video game upscaling technology, although honestly, this should be used for anything video related, right Videos, etc. Since then they've announced something called auto SR and there's been some confusion over that. So they they published a blog post kind of explaining this. But you know, part of the kind of package of technologies that makes game emulation work on Snapdragon is this notion of we're going to run the game at a lower resolution to give you higher frame rates, but we're also going to bump up the quality using AI right Running off the MPU, and that technology that's auto SR.

42:53
So the super resolution feature that's coming to everyone in Windows is called direct SR right, in keeping with their direct X family of technologies. It's a way to eliminate the need, although we'll see how this goes but the proprietary super resolution solutions we see in the world today, from NVIDIA and AMD especially, but also apparently from Intel, by providing and this is again we talk about this a lot, windows kind of brings in these things that are separate out in the world and look, we're just going to make this a common thing and it can write to those apis under the covers whatever the user doesn't have to worry about it, like you don't have to install extra stuff, you know whatever. So direct sr is opt-in from a developer standpoint. So in other words, you're a game maker, you have to choose to do this and so the game maker is involved, it's not just the buy the consumer.

43:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's exactly right, dang, use it.

43:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's not, yeah it's not happening without their yep. Um, auto sr is automatic and does not involve the game maker. So yeah, that is interesting. Um, like a lot of things with these co-pilot plus pcs, it's uh, very limited in the beginning. Um, there are only 11 game titles at launch that will explicitly be upscaled, if you will, with AutoSR. One of them, incidentally, is called Control, and that's one of the three games they showed off to me in the press right a month or two ago. But Resident Evil 2, the remake, resident Evil 3, the remake, borderlands 3 is one.

44:23
But there's actually a website called Windows on Arm Ready's. There's actually a website, uh, called windows on arm ready software. It's not a microsoft site, but they they work with these guys and link to it, so it's works. On woacom, um, presumably they'll have apps later, but right now they just have games. So if you go to that site slash games you'll see their, their list of games, and there's hundreds and hundreds of them.

44:45
Some of them are automatic with auto SR, some of them just work perfectly and you as the user can say I'm going to do this thing and it's going to work fine, right, you kind of opt into auto SR, I guess. If that makes sense. I'm sure I haven't gone through the whole list, but I'll click on a random page and see if I can find one. Yeah, on a random page and see if I can find one. Yeah, like, some of them are perfect, some of them are like playable right, which is playable as a much lower bar, yeah, but if you click through this list, you'll see like there's there's a lot of you know, this is a lot, a lot of games. So I think eventually, or maybe even right away, it's probably going to be a pretty good solution and it's, it's uh, it's the type of thing why can't we do this everywhere?

45:27
and yeah and I I think this is a big part of the I'm going to call it the co-pilot plus pc story, which is they're limiting this in the beginning. You know better or worse, whatever they are, I feel like over time they're not going to. You know that this is um, this stuff becomes part of windows. You know?

45:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, we'll see you know, I mean always with this scaling stuff. Does it do damage to the game? Can you say don't do that?

45:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
there are um little graphical things and the microsoft post about this talks about that. You know you'll see little things here and there, maybe um where it's not as good and that's why it's not kind of certified or whatever um, but you know my large I mean uh, I'll talk about this at the end of the show, but I've been playing some games on pc here in mexico and right, you know, when you're using a laptop, um, you know you have to put up with some things like lower resolutions, and you know, yeah, yeah, you don't have as much horsepower, but at least you're now in the master race, like that's something I, you know, I, I still have a, I'm a mixed race.

46:31
Uh, for some way I would say that, but um, it's, I think it's acceptable. In other words, um, already with even with the meteor lake generation of pcs, which, honestly, that chips that they're dropping it like a bad habit. If you look at lunar Lunar Lake, compared to Meteor Lake, it's like Meteor Lake didn't even happen. You know, yeah, they look like they're just scrambling, it just looks stupid, but yeah, but the one big advance in Meteor Lake, well, that's not fair, but the biggest, maybe the biggest advance might be the integrated graphics. Right, every five to seven years, intel will improve their integrated graphics. They the first time was for Vista, remember, um, and they did that with meteor Lake and it was a. It was a major double digit improvement in performance.

47:13
And there are certain games you can play, even on like a. I think it's called Intel Iris XE graphics with a media like processor, if you have enough Ram. You know it's not like a, it's not like a, it's not like a real gpu, if that makes sense, but it's, you can play some. You know it's pretty good. Yeah, um, pretty bueno, as we say. So, uh, I the the snapdragon stuff with auto sr, I guess. Right, I think it's actually a step up from that, and apparently lunar lake is another gigantic improvement and I think this makes it more viable to play games on more systems than was the case, like a year ago. You know which is?

47:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, if you care about games as I, I think this is important, it's good, so yeah, and all the stuff is good yeah it'll be, let's just talk to me about what's happened with windows 11 here, because I didn't get patched and I'm okay with that well, what do you run?

48:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
what do you mean? What are you running? Like, what do you get? Didn't get patched on on what, like? What do you? What's your system? I think I just got 23 h2. Oh, you should have, yeah, you should have gotten a fix. Um, yeah, like last two weeks ago, on two or that, the preview update went out late. They, they did announce, you know, a patch. Tuesday update for 23 h2 and 22 h2.

48:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, the two supported versions of windows 11 no, you're right, I did get the cumulative update yesterday, okay yeah, it's not.

48:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not. There's not a lot you would have no I didn't even notice.

48:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It noticed, you know. Yeah, I guess I left the machine on overnight last night, so sitting in the in the hotel, this is part of that rule really.

48:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sometimes you wake up and it's like you run your browser you have to sign in whatever and you run the browser and it's like, uh, you know edge or chrome or whatever you're using, it's like didn't shut down properly, like really, yeah, interesting and now those hundred tabs you had open, that was yeah, oh yeah, they're gone yeah, yeah.

49:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What happened on the internet is staying on the internet yeah and yeah, yeah, and then in the browser history nope yeah, usually that works pretty good right, but yeah, that happens um a lot most of what it was 24 h2 that got frozen and it's probably due to this recall, the recall thing, yeah that's my guess and we talked about that I.

49:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just they could have obviously shipped something for x64 systems. Right, they could have, but I think without knowing how literally how Windows is built today from their perspective.

49:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like this is a feature flag that they just delivered to certain hardware, but it's on everything, so what Just leave?

49:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it and also who cares? I mean well, from Microsoft's perspective. In other words, microsoft documented in a Windows Insider blog post that you could, as a normal person, not insider download the ISO, install it and be unstable. And they literally said explicitly you will be updated on the stable path. So every time there's an update for 23H2, you're going to get it. And I took them at their word. So it has happened twice. But yes, with this patch Tuesday it didn't. And look, this is one of those. Looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, quacks like a duck, kind of things. I can't be 100% sure, but based on all the available evidence, I have to think it's. Recall related the timing it's going to be an interesting day when the Copilot Plus PC ships, and that's even, that's true, even if you don't care about them, because if you're on 20, I wonder if it would just be a separate build.

50:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it's already arm Like I'm not sure how they're delivering that and it's specific. A lot of things that are here that we're talking about is so specific to the hardware it's kind of so confusing.

50:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's kind of a base 24H2 that exists as it is today. There are the co-pilot plus capabilities that are built on top of it, which I don't know how it's packaged. I mean, is it just really Windows 11? And, yeah, like you said, a feature flag kind of thing, probably right On those PCs there's going to be 40 something models right that are built in right. Um, so you know, how does that differ from an x64 pc today on 24 h2? It's kind of hard to say. How will it differ in the future? Also hard to say. Microsoft has said look, there's going to be two kind of major milestones for this release, um, one of them is happening right now or until next week, whatever. Um, probably, almost certainly this is not the right term. But yesterday, barring the recall problem, almost certainly would have been the so-called final release of the qualified first version of 24h2, the version that will ship in copilot plus pcs, right, um, but you could get as a regular pc user, letting you get it days before they're supposed to be released.

51:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I know, it's sliding under a wire yep, it's insane and maybe unprecedented. I maybe right um, but then again um in the history of windows like first generation machine and you're going to open it up and it is just going to suck down your internet for a while we're going to find out how bad the fan noise is then, aren't we?

52:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so it's going to be a good test, or it's just going to burst into flames. You know it really knows, don't put it on a couch that's my advice.

52:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, they call it a laptop, but don't put it on. Don't put it on your life, unless you're freezing. Um well, we'll see. I mean, you know you want to be sterilized, I don't know. It floats for you, yeah.

52:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the thing is, you know, I mean 24H2 testing continues, right. A bunch of the stuff that will ship, even on copilot, plus PCs, including recall, will be in preview right For much of this year, and then October we'll call, it will come and we will know more by then. I have a feeling this summer we're going to learn more about other features, not major stuff like recall but little things that will occur for everybody in 24 h2 perhaps, and um, ignite time frame.

52:55
Yeah, and, and I, I I don't think this is in the notes, but I did write a thing, I think. Did I publish it yet? Yeah, I wrote a thing today about, um, some of the weirdnesses about this whole bifurcation of the two sides of this. Right, so right, if you, if you open microsoft paint right now, you will see a feature called image creator. An image creator doesn't use an mpu, it doesn't hit your hardware in any meaningful way, but it does hit that back end of copilot and Designer, right, the Microsoft Designer product, and it allows you to, you know, do what you would think it does. It creates images, right? So it's like you can do it from within Paint. If you are running this Paint application, you know, in the near future on a Copilot plus PC, you'll see another icon next to it called Co-Creator. And you might think, wait, these are the two of the same things. But co-creator is like image creator in that you're using prompts or, in this case also you can finger paint on the screen, right?

53:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
or use your mouse. Obviously do a rough in and then have a tool.

53:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and if you're familiar with co-pilot like if you really use co-pilot, um and I think most people don't but, uh, you know that there's a prompt and you ask questions and it does things or you say something. You know, create this thing for me and it does it. And there's a conversational aspect to it, right. But there's also this feature called notepad, and notepad is a way to have more complex and longer prompts and you edit it in real time. You interact with a co-pilot and over time you it doesn't publish like results you kind of work on it together over time until you have the thing that you want. In other words, like with the copilot, you would typically say make me a picture, it looks like this. You're like no, that's not it. Okay, make me a picture, it looks like this, but here are a few more details. No, that's not it what you want. And then you can save that prompt. It's saved into your history, it's part of your account and all that kind of stuff, and maybe it's some kind of an automation or whatever.

54:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because, you know, there's been Jupyter notebooks which are famous for being able to execute and code in place and keep everything, yeah right.

55:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the copilot version of that. Maybe that's a good comparison. Yeah, play most of execution. It's the co-pilot version of that. Maybe that's a good. That's a good comparison. Yeah, um, co-creator is a little bit like that, like it's uh, it's iterative, you don't. You know, with um image creator you say, make me this picture, and then it goes and wait and wait and they're like okay, no, that's not it co-creator, you can keep editing it and you have sliders where you can kind of say you know, make this more realistic or less realistic or use this style.

55:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's kind of an ongoing. You just push the slider up.

55:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, this is a goth, so their eyes are completely blacked out. I would like yes, I would like it to be an emoji, a goth emoji of a Anyway.

55:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We can stop the goth emoji. I think that's there.

55:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
For people like me, this is a new, special kind of hell, because it's already bad enough in Windows 11. I have to qualify everything. It's like when you click this button, flowchart starts. You may see this, you may see this, oh, you may see this. And now it's going to be like you run Paint and you may see some buttons, you may not.

55:58
It's kind of weird, but Paint also, or rather Co-Creator, has, like I think I said this earlier you have to sign into a Microsoft account. Rather co-creator has, like I think I said this earlier um, you have to sign into a microsoft account. People might have wondered why sometime in the past six months, uh, microsoft added a sign in to paint. I don't know if you notice this. You run the paint it's a little profile picture up in the corner and the reason is some people might sign in with a different kind of account, including an inter-id account, by the way, and this feature that I just described requires a microsoft account. So they're going to force you to sign in in the app if you didn't sign in in windows. Right, that's one of the now for signing over your soul to microsoft.

56:32
Um, you'll get endless advertising for the rest of your life for free, so that's nice um no, I don't know, I don't want um, no, but what you're getting is the ability to run, because this thing is, some of it runs on the MPU but of course some of it has to go to the cloud. The MPU doesn't know what a turtle looks like necessarily. Actually, maybe it does, but it doesn't have all the information right. It's a lot like what Apple announced, where we'll do as much as we can on the MPU, but sometimes we're going to have to the cloud. So it's really kind of a hybrid thing. And this speaks to that question.

57:02
You know, we had, I don't know, six months ago, whenever it was where microsoft has this list of whatever it is eight or ten features in windows 11 that use ai text recognition in the snipping tool. This feature is the image creation feature, whatever, and with one exception all of it. None of it uses an mp or gp or anything like that. It doesn't use anything. There's no ai acceleration at all, right, um, but they're, they're shifting that right. This, I think, part of the promise of a hardware accelerated copilot PC let's call it AI PC is that, um, there's an upsell opportunity there for the industry.

57:37
They have features that they can promote, which, by the way, leads me to a dark path, which I'll get to in a second. Well, I mean, think about it, but we'll think about it in a second. Don't think about it now. Okay, don't think about it yet. Don't overthink it. I'll do the overthinking here. No, just that we have these different versions of Windows 11, and now it's getting even more confusing. So the dark path I went down was in writing about this, I sort of realized Microsoft today promotes their path of doing things in so many different ways Banners, notifications, full screen things. When you resign into windows, you know it installs an update inside of apps, inside of the settings app. You know there's all kinds of different ways for this company to reach out to you to try to convince you to do what it wants you to do.

58:27
Well, I don't know. I don't, off the top of my head, remember the full list, but there's a bunch of stuff coming in Copilot, plus PCs like Recall, like Co-Creator and a bunch of others. Now, how are they going to tell Windows 11 users they might want to upgrade to a new PC? I'm sorry, I put this idea in your head, but think about it. What have they been doing so far? Hey, windows 10 support's ending next October. Buddy Might want to start thinking about upgrading. I mean, they've already been using Windows as a billboard. Are they going to do?

58:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that for.

58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Copilot Plus PC.

58:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why wouldn't they? Hey buddy, it's time for a new PC you look like you're ready to upgrade a PC to a new PC. It's going to be like a little clippy guy. Can I help you with?

59:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that yeah yeah, I'm just saying I don't you know what would make this whole process so much easier. Windows 12. Yes, Buy a new machine.

59:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true, but you don't think Copilot Plus PC is enough of a proposal proposition to get you to buy a new PC.

59:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I agree with Richard in the sense that that would make it simpler. In other words, if these PCs were running Windows 12, you could say oh, look, there's the break. Windows 11 has some form of value.

59:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You need new hardware. They tried it with 11 and then backed off. Why do you?

59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
think they didn't do this. You're right.

59:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It does make sense. Mark it confused because then you have three supported versions of Windows in the market. But you know what the truth is. We have Windows 10, 22h2, which is on some infinite path. We have 22 and 23H2, which right now are exactly the same thing with a different version. I don't believe there's any difference. They get the same cumulative updates and very soon we will have 24 h2 as well. So we already have four supported versions of windows, if, if and well then copilot plus, which, by the way, is going to have its own set of upgrade paths, because not just through windows update, but through the app store, through the microsoft store, rather um, and through all their other paths for updating, right, um, you, you know what's the difference? Like who cares? So I don't know. The theory has always been that this would be confusing to customers. Obviously, they were going to call this thing Windows 12. Because we're not confused now.

01:00:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you did it at kind of simultaneous, I must have equated it.

01:00:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know the game like they put the blindfold on you, spin you a circle and then they have you go off and do something. Except in this case when you're done spinning, they just punch you in the face. And just because you're not confused enough already. What's the difference? How would that be any more confusing than what I just described with Co-Pilot Plus? If anything, it's less confusing because we at least understand Windows versions.

01:01:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, exactly, and the vendors like it. You know, it's new logos there's so many advantages to doing it this way, right.

01:01:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You are phasing out Windows 10, so it's not like.

01:01:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're not that far away.

01:01:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is actually what cements that the october dates, so I don't have to really think about this.

01:01:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have a hard time with math so I won't think about it. But with windows 10 at least, they froze the version number. So there's only one version of windows 10. Right, there are. There will be any second now three supported versions of windows 11. Right, right, and based on support timelines, I mean maybe this is the mult, the maximum, like four versions. But once you introduce a windows 12, it's going to be on the same updating system as windows 11, so you'll have multiple annual versions of it.

01:01:56
And we could reach a point three years down the road let's call it where all of a sudden we have like six or seven supported versions of Windows. And this is the nightmare mistake they made with Windows 10, where every year, actually twice a year, they were releasing a new version with their own support lines and it got to be really messy. It was the opposite of what they wanted. Remember they said we want to get as many people as possible on this one version of Windows and then they made a new version of that every six months, creating you know massive numbers of versions that frustrated everybody.

01:02:26
Yeah, that was the exact opposite of what they were trying to do, which is, you know, perfect Microsoft, yeah. So look, I'm not. I'm not explaining it or excusing it, I'm just guessing, like that's why. But yeah, I agree, windows 12 might have made more sense.

01:02:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you see them struggling and this is a solution to that struggle. Well, okay, do the thing that people expect.

01:02:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
See, now I'm thinking through this. So imagine they call this thing Windows 12, but you're AMD or Intel, or you're Dell or Lenovo or HP and you're like look, Intel has these really crappy chips that we have to put in our PCs now, Thanks. And what you're telling me is that after you announce Windows 12, we're going to keep selling Windows 11 on some of our computers.

01:03:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why they did it Right, because they don't want to say, this brand new PC that you're about to buy won't run, yeah, can't run the newest thing.

01:03:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Exactly, that's exactly why they didn't do it. That might be why, right, right, because that's so here's the logical hold point.

01:03:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Then till the exclusivity ends and the new vendors come on board and then you can make a break.

01:03:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I, this is going to require a bunch of things, but you know, intel, I, I I have. These are all theories. I want to be super clear when I'm not stating or speculating 100, I am speculating, but I, intel, you know, just talking about these two companies, intel and microsoft, they have their own priorities, right, they're, they're partners, but they also have their own. Go to market whatever I have to. I mean, look, you have to agree. There were, there were conversations between Intel and Microsoft where they're like Intel's like all right, this is what we're putting out this year. And Microsoft was like can you? It's much better. I know you've got it coming. And intel's like nope, we're doing this thing and we're going to call them ai pcs and like I wish you wouldn't do that, because we're going to do all this ai stuff and that's not going to work. And I, that's how I imagine that went down.

01:04:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and then they had to invent a new name just to discourage what yeah, so right territory we're trying to grab intel last fall uh, screw the schedule around released, uh, mobile chips first of this new thing.

01:04:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we're like, okay, I guess we're moving on to Intel Ultra. And then CS came and they announced what was it? 13th or 14th, I guess, yeah, intel Core, not Ultra. And you're like guys, come on, come on, come on, like, at some point Intel and AMD and well, and Qualcomm's already there will just have what we would now call co-pilot plus capable PCs. You know, they will be able to run this thing that should have been called Windows 12. If the whole industry had just kind of waited a little while, we could have done it. But I think it was just different strategies from different companies were like, yeah, I don't care what you're doing, I've got my own thing. And look Intel, I don't care what you're doing, I've got my own thing. And look Intel, I mean they're going to sell what did they say? 40 to 60 million of these things. Like are they immediately orphaned? I mean, that's not fair. Those are good PCs still, right, I mean they're viable.

01:05:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Whatever they're, all of the concept it's not, like it bursts into flames.

01:05:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they're already doing this with the copilot plus PC. As I just told you, All your old machines don't get this. Do you think that that's such a great feature that people won't buy a PC if it's not copilot plus? Or is it more likely that some people will go the other direction?

01:05:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know who wants to believe that. I skittered past that earlier, but that's one of the things I wrote about today, which is this notion that when I come to this kind of PC, what I'm looking for is that MacBook Air experience, which has nothing to do with AI. Right, it's all about reliability, efficiency, uptime, performance, everything, the whole thing. Right, that beautiful, magical package that shouldn't make sense. And somehow they do it, and it's because of that ARM chipset, essentially, and then some also probably some good decision making on apple's part. So I want that on the pc. And they're like great, we're going to do that sort of, but we're also going to, we're going to call these, we're going to do ai, like, okay, that's fun, but I, I don't really care about that, but that's what they're marketing.

01:06:17
So I guess it's up to everyone listening or whatever, to kind of go look at that list of co-pilot plus PC unique features, right, recall the co-creator, et cetera, and say is this enough to get me to spend a thousand bucks or maybe 1500 bucks on a new PC? Now, I don't know. To me, the selling point is the other stuff, right, like, the reason I would go to Qualcomm is not necessarily because of AI, although, yes, I mean that's neat, it's, it's, that's further in the list for me. For me, I mean it might be different for other people. But, like I said, go look at the list, go to the mic, go look up Microsoft copilot plus. Go to their website. They list all the features. There aren't that many, by the way, it's like seven or eight. Uh, and is that compelling to you?

01:07:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If it is, there's a buy now link, you can go, I mean and this is the dichotomy we're dealing with which is like I why aren't you selling the arm pc that you've been promising for a long time?

01:07:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
right, a lot of people have been hoping for for quite a while I think ai fell out of the you know sky and landed in their lap and they're like all right, guys, uh, we're doing everything.

01:07:19
I know and all we say yeah, yep, I mean, of course it's going to hit this. I mean, of course it doesn't. By the way, it doesn't hurt anything, I know. The truth is that this, the windows, studio effects or um, you know, recall whatever it is hitting the mpu and not impacting battery life. That's its own kind of magic and it doesn't hurt you if you don't need it it or use it. It doesn't hurt you if you do use it, right? So, unless you know, unless you believe, it recalls a security nightmare, I guess. But yeah, it's, that's a win-win, right. That, like eighth gen intel core processors, they were like we're doubling the cores, you know, and there was no uh downside to it, right, we didn't lose battery life, we, you know, it was like it was just a win-win, like, and these things are rare, they should be celebrated. It's great. My only question is whether those you know that was. We've been talking about this for a year now.

01:08:07
Yeah, at some point microsoft's going to open the kenoma, kenoma. Look, here's a list of features that this is going to require. In this case, run off the MPU and, like I said, it's up to all of us to decide if that means anything and I'm not saying it doesn't mean anything, but it doesn't mean as much to me personally as the other stuff doesn't mean as much to me personally as the other stuff.

01:08:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, and it's. The thing is like I, ultimately all the benefits of arm are greater than the co-pilot thing. It's just that they're they're, they're leaving their own hype exactly.

01:08:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they're, look, they're going to market with it. I mean, I, I like we, I have to sort of respect their prerogative to, you know, to have their own marketing and their own corporate strategy and, and you know, if it's a win-win for them and for us, like as customers, that's great. There's nothing wrong with that, right?

01:09:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but I don't know, I just I have a lot of questions.

01:09:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm feeling creeped out.

01:09:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know just about weird things here, Yep, Yep.

01:09:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, I mean there's also a broader issue here that you know Apple before I got to talk about this, I guess. But Apple, we'll talk about Apple stuff in a little while.

01:09:23
Yeah save it because I'm going to do a commercial. No, I'm not going to talk about that. But I just want to say, like I think most people would understand, that the Apple model is based around subsidizing other things with the hardware sales that they. They earn incredible returns or margins on hardware, and so when Apple says, look, our AI is going to be free, you're like, well, it's not really free. I mean, I paid a lot for this device.

01:09:43
Yeah, I think with co-pilot plus PC, microsoft's making that kind of a bet that it's not like these things are super expensive but they're going to get people to upgrade either sooner or maybe to a slightly better computer than they might have otherwise, if they're ready to upgrade, because there is an upgrade cycle that is a little bit overdue because of the post COVID. You know downturn there and you know there's an upsell opportunity here and in the sense that you know Microsoft earns a little bit more from a PC maker if a PC goes out the door with Pro instead of Home, there's no doubt they make a little bit more still when it goes out with Copilot right or Copilot Plus. So this is one of those, yeah, like a win-win. I mean win-win-win. I guess it's better for the PC maker, it's better for Microsoft, it's better for us as customers. If that's what we want, better for Microsoft, it's better for us as customers. If that's what we want and that pushes the industry, it's good for everybody.

01:10:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, it's fine it accelerates some of the things forward. Yeah, my only point is, we're actually doing the stuff right.

01:10:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I was glad to see.

01:10:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Splat come across that they're raking in arms.

01:10:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How hard was that, though, aren't they an?

01:10:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Electron app? Yeah, which means it should be all Electron apps. I don't know what they had to do.

01:10:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you know, to date one of the big questions with Microsoft and AI other than the obvious like why are they moving so fast? Is like, how are they going to make money on this right? And then they come out with things for Microsoft 365 or Copilot Plus where you're like, okay, they're going to charge us and it's like kind of expensive and you're like but if this stuff is built in to a PC, that's a little more expensive and you only pay for once and then use it for several years. I don't know if they change things over time, but for right now they're doing that Apple thing where they're like look, just buy the more expensive. They're not that much more expensive, but you buy this kind of computer, um, we make a little bit of money and I guess for now we're good with that. Is that going to make sense? Is that a business model that makes sense in the long term? Because that enough. Yeah, everyone has ai. I mean, I like, uh, I'm.

01:11:42
The bigger issue is going to be for companies like mid journey or whatever, where oh yeah, no, they're all being squeezed oh yeah, there's going to be in the same way that there was a dot com boom and then bust, right, there's going to be an AI boom and then bust, because a lot of these little companies or even some big companies, maybe, right that are offering AI for a fee are going to get squeezed up, because it's just going to be everywhere.

01:12:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right yeah, Like why would I pay for mid journey?

01:12:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Mid journey. Microsoft Paint is not as good as mid journey. I'll state that as a fact. But is it good enough for a lot of people? I mean, probably Is it free in Windows?

01:12:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:12:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean. So what do you do then? It's an I don't you know, we don't know how this is going to unfold, but we do have a lot of questions.

01:12:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess.

01:12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have questions.

01:12:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have many questions.

01:12:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm always the guy in the back of the room.

01:12:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like I have a question and everyone's like oh, come on, when are you going to open the Kokomo?

01:12:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because it's convoluted Leo.

01:12:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They are afraid of talking about ARM because it's failed before.

01:12:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, we've been through this before. We've seen this, yeah, but don't I mean, look, don't.

01:12:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's easy to be cynical before we've seen this. Yeah don't I mean, look, I don't. Uh, it's easy to be cynical.

01:12:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's always failed before. I mean, what's the definition of insanity? Well, you know it does.

01:12:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It does encourage a certain prudence and caution at this point, and if you've got something else to emphasize, you emphasize it because if it sticks around long enough the network effect takes over. Right, then you have to worry about it. Enough apps migrate and becomes that righteous circle because they wanted the copilot plus like. I think that's the belief. Copilot plus is what's going to get us to enough unit count that more devs will jump on board, making arm specific implementations yeah, and I and I, yes.

01:13:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But also if you just put it into windows, wouldn't that happen immediately, actually solve the problem in very ill.

01:13:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So many more seats. It's a tough thing, yeah, it's a tough thing.

01:13:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, we talked about the Stevie Batiste talk at Build 2024, 11 minutes of wonderfulness, yeah when he made the case for the MPU essentially right. And I think that's a hurdle for a lot of people because we all kind of understand that a GPU does what it does and it's great and it can take the load off the CPU. We all kind of get that and I think the MPU thing I think feels arbitrary to a lot of people. But from his perspective, what his argument is like no, you don't understand. This is exponentially better. It's not just better performance, exponentially better, it's not just better performance, it's also much but like almost stupid levels of efficiency compared to the standard cpu, gpu stuff. So I don't know, you know, we'll see. I don't know. There are definitely going to be software-based um ai solutions that are probably fine, right they're probably fine.

01:14:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know the answer. That's a great question I do know. Very much on my mind is getting that qualcomm dev machine and trying to run lm on it.

01:14:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly exactly so you pre-ordered it or you just got in the waiting list, put on the waiting list for an opportunity to pre-order.

01:14:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah with, I know what I'll do with it. I would put it into these.

01:14:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But also, you know it's going to be interesting to run like pick your SLM or whatever you want to call it. Let's run it off of a gaming PC with an NVIDIA GPU. Let's run it off of a standard Intel Core laptop with kind of a weak MPU.

01:15:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is a good enough factor or whatever that could take place where, when you're gonna and you're balancing it's going to be do I move a smaller model with slightly more limited stat, but it runs easily on this hardware, like I would argue.

01:15:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The smartphone might actually be the ultimate home for oh, of course, yes, and that's why you know the apple stuff again not to jump ahead. But you know google's doing this too. Google just put out a pixel feature drop that adds their uh gemini nano model to the 8 and 8a option, if you want it. Um, yeah, I this um technically in the phone space. We've been doing this for a while. They just really talk about it. You know you've had these really specific features like magic eraser on pixel or whatever, um, and now they're being very explicit about it, like look, we're running all these models, we got all this ram, we got an apu all this ai stuff now is carefully labeled because apparently it's good for business.

01:15:59
This, this upgrade scenario just talked about, is even bigger and will be, I think, even more real, if you will. Realer, uh, in the phone space, because apple's going to come out in the fall with iPhone whatever 16, with 12 gigabytes of RAM or whatever. The number is way more than they had before and and they had all those AI features they just showed off and it's like are their user base going to upgrade? Yeah, I bet they are. So that's going to be very interesting. Ai is going to be where you are.

01:16:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they're afraid to wait for the Pixel 9 because they're trying to get market share, so the sooner they can get devices in their hands.

01:16:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't mean to dump on this one app, but I did pay for it. It's making me mad. I pay for Infinity, what's called Infinity Photo 2. And there's one thing it doesn't do as well as Photoshop, elements, even, which is just kind of removing objects, is very easy in the Adobe world and I was frustrated with that just yesterday, trying to remove some, just some words from like a part of an image, and I was like you know what, if I put this on my pixel and I tapped it in the photos app, it would go away and then I could save it back and I didn't end up doing that. But it is frustrating that you shouldn't know like that. Yeah, it just works like instantly and not perfectly but very well on a phone and I and I have this whole rig set up here and it's like you know, because the thing I'm using doesn't do it.

01:17:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So well, my thought with that snapdragon dev kit is if I enjoy it that much, then I'll go buy one of the laptops. Yes, and you know they use them for the different purposes.

01:17:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm touched by that, but you know who knows.

01:17:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry it says on the page that june 18th, but uh, I just filled out the you know. No, you're on the waiting list. Like it's just a waiting list.

01:17:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah yeah, I did the same thing. It's there's. No, yeah, we've not heard from anyone who's been like, oh, you can order this now, but it's a good price for what this is kind of a mac any type thing?

01:17:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I'd argue that, yeah it's a good one I think this will be my home windows machine, probably I same.

01:17:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I if this. Well, I'm going the other route first, but the laptop works out. I will do exactly. I'll do exactly that. I'll put that on my desktop, yeah, yeah, and then I'll stop reviewing those stupid intel app.

01:18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm just kidding, but but except for the fine hp elite, yes yes, and also the Firefly.

01:18:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let's not forget them. Do you talk about?

01:18:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the Canary builds yet Before we go to that.

01:18:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so there's not much going on in Insider, unfortunately. So between last week and then today, we've gotten a dev and a beta build and two Canary builds now, and it's hard to even know what's what anymore.

01:18:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You seem very excited.

01:18:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can anymore, I think beta is on 23H2. So those are features that will right. Yeah, those are features that will come to stable, probably pretty soon. Dev is on 24H2. They've been pretty explicit about that and that's that coming 24H2, right, right. And then Canary, you know jazz hands? Nobody knows, so we're just making this up as we go along. At this point I don't know.

01:18:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why, would you think I know?

01:18:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
None of this is like dramatic. Snipping tool, automatic save for screen recordings Okay, cool. And, by the way, that is a weird thing. You know, when you take a screenshot with snipping tool, it saves obviously. Well, maybe not obviously, but it saves automatically when you take a screen recording. It does not you actually have to save it, it will prompt you. But I mean, it's kind of weird. Yeah, it's kind of weird. Um, narrator improvements, especially a voice access as well. Um, I, I I've joked about share because nobody knows it exists or uses it.

01:19:26
If they do, uh, they're, they are just going to see oh yeah, we're gonna to share is an option in start search, in dev, I think dev or beta meaning you search for a document and if you select it, you can go over to the right and select share. And I'm telling you if people don't use share in File Explorer today, I can tell you where they're not going to use it. It's in search results. But okay, that's cute. Phone Link is an app I've been using frustratingly for this past week for the book over three different phones and I am ready to murder If this thing had a neck, I would strangle it to death.

01:20:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You will be happy. Every so often I need it and I activate it, and it always deactivates itself, needing some kind of notification.

01:20:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate it so much.

01:20:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just be deactivated.

01:20:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple did announce something similar on the Mac with the iPhone, and you'll be happy. I said. Well, microsoft did it first with phone link.

01:20:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's three levels of functionality in phone link. Not to get off on a tangent, but what the hell you know? Iphone, which does next to nothing, lots of caveats, which is not Microsoft's fault. Android, which is pretty full featured, and then Samsung flagship. It's the right way, but not just Samsung. Interestingly, obviously, the Surface Duo gets into this, but there are certain Oppo, oneplus, I think, honor flagships. The distinction here is those phones have Link to Windows built in as an integrated experience when you buy the phone, whereas on other Android phones you actually download that app from the Google Play Store.

01:20:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, that is a big difference actually.

01:20:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:20:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because the hardest thing, is just getting this thing all the permissions.

01:21:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, listen, the hardest thing is documenting the 17 permissions you have to set in Android to get this thing to work correctly, only to have it not work correctly. You know regardless. Anyone who's using Windows right now can do this. If you use PhoneLink, I guess it would make the most sense. But if you go into the Settings app not the PhoneLink app, but the Settings app and go to Bluetooth and devices, you'll see a mobile devices interface and this used to be called Phone or then, I think, phonelink. Back in the past that's called managed devices. Now I think it's devices, because there are actually certain Samsung flagship devices that can be used with PhoneLink for some reason. And if you click Managed Devices and if you have devices in that list, you will see that you can enable or disable them.

01:21:46
I'm not 100% clear what disabling a phone does, except not make it available in the PhoneLink app, I guess. But what you cannot do is remove. So these are phones that are linked to your Microsoft account. What you can't do is unlink it. You can't. That used to be a feature. It's not a feature anymore. When they, when they updated the UI, they dropped the checkbox off. So it's no longer possible to disassociate or de-link a phone from your account. Now you might think I know a little bit about this. I'll go to accountmicrosoftcom. Let me ruin the surprise for you. I've already done it. Can't do it there either. And, yeah, there is currently no way to do this.

01:22:28
And this is a great example of the kind of lack of detail orientation that Microsoft, microsoft, has. You know, like where. You're like, hey, look how pretty this is. You're like, yeah, but what are those features? Like shut up, look how pretty it is. And you know, um, you know, we saw this. Windows 11 is the ultimate example of it, right, yeah, um, you know, file explorer is like that. We want to make it pretty. You're like I used to be able to drag and drop to the uh file, to the address. Shut up, but look, that's pretty, look how pretty it is.

01:22:52
It's pretty Shut up, yeah. So I wasted most of my afternoon yesterday trying to figure this one out, and what I eventually came to, after Googling it and so forth, is that lots of other people have seen this and it's gone. It's gone. It used to be there and now it's gone. It's broken, yeah. So maybe if you have a Windows 10 computer, you could do it from there.

01:23:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe it's all going to get better when Windows 12 comes out.

01:23:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The solution is install a Windows 10 VM, set it up, sign in with your Microsoft account, go to whatever this thing's called in Windows 10. I think it might still be called PhoneLink or Phone or something. Yeah, de-link it. There you go. How do you spend your day? Do you do stuff like that? I do. I'm an idiot.

01:23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody would do that. I've got my Pixel 8 connected and it seems to you know it's nice. It works okay, banners, badges, themes, so forth.

01:23:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do you have an option, leo, in there where you can like go like expand the navigation bar on the left.

01:23:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay.

01:23:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When you play audio from the phone, because there are playback controls, or maybe start something playing on your phone, I guess.

01:23:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me First expand the thing around Video or audio.

01:24:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just make the app full screen first, just so you can see the pain or whatever.

01:24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh the pain, it doesn't matter video or audio, it doesn't matter. So much pain, so much pain. Yeah, so much pain has so much pain, so much pain.

01:24:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let me uh like on your phone, just like play a song or something. It should appear you'll. You should see a now playing thing appear in the phone link. Okay, here we go slowly because it's microsoft.

01:24:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, now it's playing on my phone. It is playing on your phone. There it goes there it is right now, does it? Let you play audio from the pc is that what that option says right there says it says sync over mobile, sync over when I'm not connected. I'm going to turn that on connected audio.

01:24:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why did that even pop up? But can you make?

01:24:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that sound come out of your PC, or does it only go through the phone?

01:24:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I can make it. Yes, it will come out of my PC.

01:24:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look at that. That's a fairly new feature. That's really cool. Yeah, that's pretty good.

01:24:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's pretty good yeah.

01:24:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't used to do that.

01:24:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, look at that, but if you want to de-link that thing, you I'm sorry you can de-link it from your phone. I should say that the issue for me is I have a phone that I don't own anymore and it's in my list.

01:25:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I'm going to tell you for someone with OCD like me.

01:25:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That makes me crazy. There's nothing. You can see the. You know the device. It's better than nothing. I. I don't like, I can't remove it. It says remove oh, you can, yeah, you can, yeah you can because you still have the phone.

01:25:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, if I didn't have the phone, you're all. You're all. You have to be connected in order to remove it.

01:25:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I see what you say there's three levels of connection here. There's the connection to the pc uh the phone link app on your computer. Yeah, there's a bluetooth uh pairing. That has to occur for any of this to work.

01:25:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Also pc specific and then there's a linking that occurs with your microsoft account, yeah, um, yeah, it's wi-fi too, right?

01:25:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sorry, but you, but you, you actually have to pair it with bluetooth to get all the features. Um, some features rely on bluetooth, okay I mean this.

01:25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is pretty cool right.

01:25:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it is pretty cool, but there's a lot of stuff that has to run on your PC and your phone for this to work.

01:25:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the problem, and all the permissions that you have to do.

01:26:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh my God, yes, yep, yep, and this thing has to run in the background. If you get this thing in your notification shade, that weird little icon, it's like your devices are connected. Good, why are you there? Please go away. Yeah, anyway, this is how I spend my time. That has nothing to do with Windows Insider. Yes, I don't even know why we got there. Oh, suggest a reply. So that's a new feature coming that will be coming in the future to phone link, where you're using the messages app through phone link on your computer, and it will suggest replies, right, um, so microsoft is kind of not using the feature on your phone. It's building on top of whatever's on your phone to do that. So that's fine, and that was one look I can get uh.

01:26:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can also get phishing, uh spam right on my computer. Yeah, $679.99 order that was given to us will be processed. Paypal customer. It's hybrid spam. We appreciate your faith in us. Uh-huh, okay, we forwarded your invoice.

01:27:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like hey girl, hey girl, I haven't talked to you in a while. Do you want to go to lunch? But I do know that I have to be here for work. Oh my God too, Give me your credit card number and I will make a reservation.

01:27:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hi, hey. Let me take a break here and tell us about a security sponsor that we now need to know about, right?

01:27:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you followed any of this, you're going to need this.

01:27:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody has got to learn about. Right now I'm talking about Collide, Actually, you know. Look, we live in a different world, right, and security is really paramount. But one of the things that I like about Collide is it's security that puts users first. Your users become part of your security team. Collide is for companies that use Okta for authentication, you know, make sure that user is who they say they are. But then it adds a very important piece to this it also authenticates the devices and make sure they're secure before that authenticated user can bring those devices into your network.

01:28:01
Maybe you've heard us talk about Collide, I'm sure, before. Maybe you just read that Collide was just acquired by 1Password Big news. Both companies are, you know, for forefront in creating solutions that put users first, and now collide is just doing that as part of one password more resources, more wood behind the arrows, as they say. So if you've got Okta and you've been meaning to check out collide, this would be the best possible time. And if you've been thinking, oh, I'd like collide, but how hard is it going to be to set up, you should know Collide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks, all the stuff you know. You want up front operating system up to date, browser up to date, phone link turned off or on or whatever. But you can also write your own custom checks for just about anything you can think of. Plus, you can use Collide and I love this on devices without MDM. That means your entire Linux fleet, all those BYOD phones and laptops that somehow sneak in your contractor devices. You can't make them install your MDM. So this is a great solution.

01:29:14
Now that Collide is part of 1Password, this great solution is only going to get better. So if you've been thinking about it, my strong advice go to the website collidecom slash www. Watch the demo, Learn how it works. I know you'll be impressed Again. K-o-l-i-d-e. Collidecom slash www. Very big fans of Collide and we thank them so much for supporting windows weekly. Now back to paul. I almost said paul and mary joe, but I can tell that's not joe, it's the beard, it's the beer, yeah oh, that's that's mean, not to me back to paul and richard.

01:29:50
Let's talk some more. Let's talk about did you watch the Apple event yesterday?

01:29:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I did, so I'm curious you must have covered it live, right?

01:29:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, of course yeah.

01:29:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So what was your takeaway from this? What did you think?

01:30:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The one-liner, the elevator pitch. Apple has Sherlocked AI. They took artificial intelligence and they made it Apple intelligence AI. They took artificial intelligence and they made it Apple intelligence. They had a very narrow road to hoe here, because one of the potential problems is it looked like Apple was just playing catch up. Apple had no perceptive.

01:30:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The story before this was like they're behind, they're behind.

01:30:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think Apple did a very good job of saying no, no, we're not behind. We've always had this. We were, in fact, among the first to put NPUs in our hardware. We've been giving you AI features all along. They noticed they didn't mention AI for the first hour and a half. They just showed you a lot of really cool features, and then they said, oh, and, by the way, this is all made possible by Apple intelligence.

01:30:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think that was very smart. We can compare this. I'm sorry, sorry.

01:30:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know it is chat GBT. Right, they did make the deal with OpenAI.

01:31:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but it's not the only AI. There's a variety of AI.

01:31:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They also said they've got their own stuff, but they're going to work with other third parties, including Gemini, in the future gemini in the future.

01:31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right here's, here's like a demo that blew me away. Um, they're showing. You know, one of the leaked things was yeah, now they're gonna put calculator on an ipad, and it's like oh yeah, which they made fun of.

01:31:20
So they start off and say see, we've taken calculating, we'll put it on the ipad. Notice, the buttons are bigger and I'm going. Oh, nice job. Then they said and when you open this secret door, all of a sudden it's basically a handwritten spreadsheet and they showed how you can change one number and automatically recalculates the number, all in your handwriting. It is mind boggling. They said when you take notes in notes in your handwriting, we'll clean it up. It cleans up. Yeah.

01:31:50
And then if you add something, if you generate some text, it'll generate it in your handwriting. That's all. Ai, it's not chat. Gpt, that's on device.

01:31:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Apple, it's on device this is the type of thing bill gates must be rolling in his grave and yeah, I know what I just said. Um, he's not dead, he's not dead yet I'm not dead.

01:32:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We know that.

01:32:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not quite dead but you know this was this kind of vision. You know for handwriting and you know digital ink is a first class. This is what the Newton was supposed to do right.

01:32:18
No, I know, but tablet PC was doing it. Yeah, tablet PC, right. Apple has what we might call kind of a slow plotting cadence. Apple is a company that they didn't do it this year, by the way, but they typically will announce a new version of iOS that has these special features and then they move on to iPadOS and it doesn't get any of those features. It gets them like next year, which is like what? So this year, all the home screen stuff, they're doing it everywhere Like oh, okay, nice, you're making a step forward here. But Okay, nice, you're making a step forward here.

01:32:52
But their approach to AI is, I think, a welcome departure from the kind of haphazard, chaotic it has to happen yesterday approach that Microsoft is doing. It feels more measured. Now, this version, yeah, and I look, yes, I mean I guess we could criticize look, the fall is going to come and it's just going to be in preview or beta or whatever. And it might be next year when, okay, yes, I mean I guess we could criticize the fall is going to come and it's just going to be in preview or beta or whatever, and it might be next year when, ok, ok, but you know, it feels more adult and mature or responsible. You know where.

01:33:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apple is like here's what we're doing, Right.

01:33:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So one of the things that they announced was very much like recall Right, except they went beyond recall Right. Sometimes this thing's going to go to the cloud and they're like here's why this is OK. You know, one of the articles I wrote last week after Windows Weekly but before Microsoft announced what they were doing with recall, was this thing where you know Microsoft has to come clean on what they're doing with recall, and a big part of it was you. I went back and watched that initial announcement. It's 108 minutes, I'm sorry, an hour and eight minutes long. The recall segment is seven minutes long, right, the segment where they talk about trust and privacy. If you blink you would miss it and nothing substantive is said.

01:34:19
So it's not, it's just he's like.

01:34:22
Responsible principles, blah, blah, blah, and you're like dude, come on. So Craig Federini gets up there and he's like all right, so what's going to happen? You know, and he lays it out, we don't out. I'm sure everyone knows the way they're doing it. You're like we don't know the details yet. And he also said something to the tune of like, just like on iPhone, independent security experts are going to be verified. I'm like well, I'm sorry, when did this happen on iPhone? I've never heard of this, but whatever, you know what, you know what. They spent much more time. Apple is a company that is certainly trusted more by its customers than Microsoft is. Microsoft spent no time on trust and Apple spent a lot of time on trust. It's like we're not going to assume you trust us. We're going to prove to you that you should trust us.

01:35:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, and I thought that was so smart, yeah, and, and I don't maybe I'm wrong. I don't really follow the Apple stuff like like some people, but I don't think anyone woke up to you know, like I, I think none of it.

01:35:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Zero, no right, except from elon musk, except for the insane person, yeah, and someone like. Unleash him from his cage almost immediately.

01:35:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's an insane if apple allows OpenAI's chat GPT on their phone, we will not allow Apple devices in the building. In fact, he literally said Faraday cage, faraday cage, we'll have to check your device at the door and we'll put it in a Faraday cage. We're so scared. He is insane.

01:35:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The crazy guys now subverted any possible complaint about this product.

01:35:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Exactly Because now you want to line up with this guy, yeah Go for it.

01:35:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, there was very little complaint. I mean, even people said, well, you know, I wish they didn't put chat GPT on it, and it does have a point. I mean, apple can't really vet chat GPT's privacy and security.

01:36:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But they say it's opt in. They say it's opt-in, though right they say it's opt-in.

01:36:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say if you ask a question and siri says you know chat gpt could answer this, there's a button that you press that says, okay, ask chat gpt.

01:36:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's often this was not in the video presentation, to my memory, but if you go and look at the apple newsroom you know print like the text announcement where they talk about uh, they, it's probably the one for apple intelligence. There's a quote from somebody, maybe tim cook, and it says it says look, the default is everything that goes to chat gcp is anonymous and temporary. They don't get to train it or use it.

01:36:46
They'll never learn anything about exactly no, I'm not how he said it, but the second half of the quote was I'm going to paraphrase to make it funnier if you're stupid enough to have an open ai account, yeah, we'll let you sign in and you and they'll steal all your information, like, but if you don't do that, you go through our gateway, yes, and I'm like, you know what? That's what, that's what people want to hear, and by the time this thing actually ships especially non-beta preview, whatever form you'll have choices. You'll have choices for the AIs, I bet. So look, obviously, as a Microsoft fan, I've had tough moments when it comes to Apple, let's say, and this one was just like a gut punch, because it's something Microsoft should have gotten right and didn't.

01:37:34
It's something Apple maybe didn't have to get right, other than they correctly read. The room saw what was happening out in the world, with people not trusting AI especially, and then they're going last right, you saw the Pioneer get the arrow in its back. I think they would have done this anyway, though this is kind of how they are.

01:37:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's always more polished when those kind of, these kinds of mess.

01:37:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I thought it was great, like, um, you know, and look, we can be cynical with apple. Oh, they're finally letting us move the icons around. Oh they're, they're going to do every the thing everyone else is doing. Right, that's the point. They are going to do it, but they're going to do it in their own special kind of apple way. Yeah, and the many billions of people in that ecosystem love them for that.

01:38:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I mean, maybe people I know apple people say apple's really slow to make you know, but slow can be a well, that's an advantage. So I'm just gonna say they're slow to get parody with android. Androids has all these features, but there is one area where you'd like them to be slow, and that is this ai revolution yeah, security and privacy yeah let's get that one right yeah yeah, the look uh cynically.

01:38:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it took him 17 years to let you, as a person, put an icon where you want it on a screen.

01:38:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I think we can all agree that's true they know better than you.

01:38:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It makes no sense. That's how steve jobs liked it shut up, but I but okay, I guess he's been gone long enough. We're okay with it now dead long enough. His ghost stopped haunting me, it's okay yes, right, his spirit is no longer circling cooperina, cooper tina, um whatever you know what I?

01:38:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I the walls don't start bleeding if I change that background.

01:39:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, exactly, it's okay, look, there's a really interesting comparison to be had between those three events. Right, google, microsoft and apple. Yeah, and for me, I mean, the thing we just talked about was, I think, the biggest and maybe most, and for me, I mean, the thing we just talked about was, I think, the biggest and maybe most important point. But the other one was the thing that Google did, where they were probably on stage for the same amount of time and it was like ba-ba-da do this. This is a 17-minute presentation. Here's the top 15 ways we're going to improve your life by adding AI to the Google apps and services you love. That's all they had to do.

01:39:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just it's definitely that. It's the dollar store effect of just everything on the wall hurled at you.

01:39:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is. It's the dollar store of operating. It's a dollar store of operating.

01:39:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like the nerd in the corner like excuse me, paul, but actually technically they're right, and it's like yeah, we know, stop talking. In a way it was-.

01:40:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It comes, apple, with a completely empty stage and a one Louis Vuitton bag and it goes here. It is Thanks, in a way.

01:40:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it was Google saying how smart they are and Apple saying here's what we want to do for you. That's a big difference.

01:40:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's also there's a message in there that I thought was very smart, where they differentiated. They call it world knowledge, which is the way everyone else is doing AI right, it's up in the cloud LLM, whatever and then the kind of personal intelligence, or however they phrased it, and it kind of echoes this recurring theme that Microsoft's tried to float, always unsuccessfully, where you, the user, as a human being, a person, is at the center of everything. Right, it's that same kind of people centric view. And, look, apple has a big benefit over the rest of the world because phones are the most personal device you could have. Everything that matters to you is in this thing.

01:40:54
And, yeah, they can do a lot of stuff on device that Microsoft cannot do, which is why they're trying to push everyone through covert means in some cases, to connect up OneDrive and to connect to Microsoft account and all your emails in there, and it's like we have these data silos Everyone does, where we don't have anything that touches on all of it. But now we do AI and it's like this gross monster and they're just saying, look, this stuff's all on your device. We build these apps, we have the data. We don't look at it, but we can run this stuff on device and you keep it. That's what happens when the what happens on your iphone stays in your iphone. It's, it's. It's an excellent message. Yeah, and I guess we could pick it apart. You know, if you want to be cynical a little bit, but I I just came away like, yep, there you go, that's how you market something beautiful.

01:41:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, I don't know how they could have done a better job with the circumstance they're in. Yes, it'd be nice if they had their own data centers, and we're't? No, they're building them though.

01:41:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're building them, though. That's the thing.

01:41:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Listen. The second they can get rid of open AI. They'll do it right. We know that about Apple. That's not cynical, that's just their strategy.

01:42:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I had no different than.

01:42:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft too, but you go to war with the army you have, if you will right, you know Microsoft has those data centers. Of course that's how they attack AI. Now they're really kind of backpedaling like, well, we got to get this down to the device because we're getting nailed here on how much these things cost.

01:42:19
You know where Apple, you know again, just circumstance, it's just the way it is. But they've been doing it, like Leo said, you know they've been doing on device. They used to call it machine learning. Right, They've adopted the language of the industry because that's what the world thinks this stuff is, which, you know, pragmatic. But they have a pretty rich history, I mean, of doing this kind of stuff on device. You know Google does too, and Qualcomm, I guess a little bit too, but Apple definitely. And they can point to things where they can say hey, remember this, yeah, that was machine learning or AI and we're going to do a lot more of that now, and I think that resonates, you know. Yeah, it's good.

01:42:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're building on trust, whereas Microsoft is fighting against a lack of trust.

01:43:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know what. So you ever watch a Google presentation where the guy comes out it doesn't matter who it is and he says you know, our customers love us because they trust us with all their data and blah blah, and you're like do you not hear what really happens out in the world? There's a little bit of that with Microsoft as well, where they're like I don't know what would possess a company like Microsoft to come out and be like we're going to record everything you do on your screen, what could go wrong? And assume that no one was going to question that right, like that should have been accompanied by an Apple-like explanation, because, honestly, there are protections in place and we've discussed those, like the things that are specific to a Coil Pilot Plus PC which is documented somewhere online. But I think this thing is going to sit there as a moment in time that anyone can go watch out in the world at any time.

01:43:51
That was the time to do it. They, they make the seven minute recall thing a 14 minute recall thing and just talk about why everything we're doing is, in fact, safe and privacy aware and beneficial to you. Yes, yep. Well, I think that people some people see the benefits, some people do the. You know, I refuse to even pay attention what microsoft is doing with ai. But, um, the cross-section of people who see the benefit of recall and blindly trust microsoft it's very is a venn diagram of one pixel. Yeah, uh, you know, in the middle, um, yeah, it doesn't make sense, I, I, it's. It feels clueless to me not to read the room when it's that obvious. You know, that's how I am, that's how I am.

01:44:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're counting. You seem to be implying that you can count on goodwill that you may not actually have.

01:44:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I didn't write this, Maybe it was ours Technic, I think, said you know the register. Whoever said something like you know something to that effect. Microsoft is counting on a level of trust they have not deserved they haven't earned it. Yeah, that's yeah and and trust is tough because even this is true people too, like you, may trust somebody, but the second they violate your trust. Yeah, it's hard to getting that back. Yeah, is sometimes impossible, and uh, with a you know why would anyone trust microsoft?

01:45:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I am say, though, in a rare moment of fairness, that really A rare moment of fairness.

01:45:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not fair to you, Leo. I know what you mean, but that's not what you mean.

01:45:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What we are really comparing is merely the marketing departments, because in both cases, this is really about positioning and marketing. Yeah, but come on, leo, this stuff drives stock price. No, no, it's the most-. It drives market cap. This is yes. They're the biggest company in the world again. Yeah.

01:45:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you've got to listen. It is irresponsible at a fiscal level to not do what I described. I mean, that's not just clueless, it is Fiduciarily irresponsible. I was looking for that term fiduciary irresponsible. I was looking for that term fiduciary. Yeah, it's a irresponsible from a fiduciary standpoint. Yeah, exactly, yep, right, all right, I think. Okay, I'm with you. Speaking of Microsoft can't get anything right weekly, so, um, I don't remember.

01:46:08
Yeah, um, last year Microsoft announced and then shipped, uh, something called Copilot, now called Copilot for Microsoft 365. Sometime late in the year they said we're going to have a version of this for individuals too, and that thing is called Copilot Plus. They announced it earlier this year. I actually subscribed, I paid for this and it's basically Microsoft Sorry, Copilot for Microsoft 365 for individuals. Right, whatever benefits that gives you. One of the things they promised at launch and then delivered later was the ability to build custom GPTs, which is one of those weird language things. But custom GPTs in the context of AI or Copilot basically means like custom chat box, right, chat box. It's a version of Copilot that is grounded only in a certain knowledge set. The idea is that in doing so, you will make it both more accurate and better performing. Right, because it's working against less data. Leo often uses the example of his my list the programming language list my list.

01:47:09
GPT.

01:47:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you.

01:47:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
List GPT right the beautiful example of a and Emacs, don't forget that either. Okay and Emacs A finite body of work where you should get great accuracy and excellent performance, and it's exactly what you want, right? Yeah, I can't believe.

01:47:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft's killing this Three months after announcing it. It's crazy. I don't get it.

01:47:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's two sides to custom. There's two sides to this, right. So Microsoft supplies custom GPTs in Copilot. I don't think they're limited to Copilot Plus, but one of them is designer, but you can also explicitly say like I want, like recipes and cooking, is one travel advice or travel help and, I think, like workouts and things like that. Right? So you can imagine a future where we probably have hundreds of these things. But the custom GPT thing that I'm talking about, which was limited to paying customers, whether it's Copilot for Microsoft 365 or Copilot Plus, was the ability for you, as a user, to create your own GPTs, which is what I did yeah with OpenAI.

01:48:18
I want to do that. I want to. I can't do what I want to do yet. Obviously this is coming or maybe it's available somewhere, but I want to point an AI at my website and say here's my buddy work Ah cool. Or at my One drive, uh, where I have that same information, and then chat with that. And because I I know I wrote about this topic, what did I say in the past and what, etc.

01:48:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know you can look at google's notebook lm, because that's yeah, and they're giving that away for free.

01:48:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, yep well, and yeah, I mean I do pay for google workspace too, so if it ever went paid, I'm sure I'd get it. Yeah, yeah, well, maybe not, because it's probably becoming part of.

01:48:54
Gemini, yeah, but it would no matter, but anyway, it never. The custom GPT capability in Copilot Plus never did what I wanted it to do, so I didn't do too much with it, but this thing was announced in March and they announced they were canceling it yesterday, I think, and they're killing it officially, I believe, in June or July, whatever the time frame is and huh, and they never really explained why. You know, other than one of those. You know we're constantly reevaluating how we deliver things to our customers. You know, taking your feedback, yeah and okay, but this is the twitchy part you were talking about.

01:49:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right, it's like yep, we make things, we you know, we talk about making things, we give names, we change their names again.

01:49:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Duplicating content or different. You know the same solutions in different places, and maybe we have too many things named Copilot. Probably not, maybe. Yeah, exactly. So this is the kind of slapdash nature of Microsoft tripping over itself to get AI out into the world and to establish itself as kind of a leader not to be a jerk about it, but a part of leadership is making good decisions and doing the right thing for your customers.

01:50:10
And right now, I mean six months ago, we might have made fun of Apple, but you look at their more measured approach to this stuff and you're like you know, maybe you could be a little more like that. I mean, I'm not saying you have to be exactly like that, but I don't know what this is about and I'd like to know why. Like, I'd like to know the real reason why. I don't think it's because no one's using it. There's got to be something else going on. Open AI, which is what this is based on. Or chat GPT, I should say, has a paid. I think it's called chat GPT plus or whatever. They have this capability. That's what this is based on. They have many more custom GPTs and I think they call it a SOAR. So this is an ecosystem.

01:50:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a thing, maybe they just want to do their own.

01:50:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, maybe they want it's microsoft they probably want.

01:50:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
maybe there's maybe another thing coming right behind it. They weren't ready to announce it yet, but they are dropping the other one, like, yeah, there is a conway's law effect here, the nature of microsoft's organization, the fact that satcha told all those teams here, here's the open AI APIs go. Every product needs one as a way to stimulate education inside the organization, to get everyone thinking and moving in the same direction. That kind of strategy never works. You now have to clean that mess up, right? That's what you're seeing, yep.

01:51:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love Ray Ozzie. I will defend him Not to the death, I'm not crazy, no, but I love him. But he made one big mistake. I'll defend Ray Ozzie up to the vague insult, up to this point. One of the criticisms of Ray Ozzie is that he kind of implemented the same solution over and over again, which is okay, whatever. My criticism of him is that he put multiple teams on the same project and said just fight it out and the best team will win.

01:51:52
And this was this cloud sync, cloud storage. You know very gates yeah, gates was famous. This is not um, this is not not in a modern era where we have, uh, version control and teams of programmers and we're not letting engineers design user interfaces anymore. Because, seriously, why did we ever let that happen? And you don't? This is not the jungle, we're not fighting, and you know that was just a mistake. I think it set them back a few years because eventually, you know, we have today we call it OneDrive and it works fine. But there were competing ideas there and some of them were pretty cool. Like LiveMesh was an app platform as well as being a sync engine.

01:52:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was really interesting, yeah no, and look, I mean I I was impressed that sachet took that risk, that the company actually responded the way they would have if bill had said it right and well, uh, but it did get it permeated throughout the whole company all at once this did occur at an era in which microsoft is laying off a lot of people.

01:52:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There was sort of a mafia back end to this where it's like I think we might want to take this one seriously. What do you think? He seemed serious. You walk into his office and there's a tarp on the floor and it's like what's going on in here? You said no to AI. We talked about that for a few over here. Please, are those piranhas, you know, that kind of thing like I?

01:53:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I don't know well, I mean, you know it's, he's pivoted the organization. It's been impressive, but it comes with a price.

01:53:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are things that happen look, uh, netscape did this, uh, almost 30 years ago now. Uh, we're talking about a goofy little app. That's fine. This is an entire ecosystem of software and solutions, or software and services.

01:53:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're trying to make it into an ecosystem. Right now, it's a whole bunch of individual efforts from different teams that they've been sorting through ever since. Yep, and some of it gets surfaced to the customer before it should have. Yep, yeah, a lot of it, maybe. Right, that's not a lot. You know how many co-pilots we've heard about? I know.

01:53:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I also know and again not naming names, but a friend of microsoft that this would have been not before building, before ignite was telling me that the night before the show where they were going to be up on stage and announce things, someone on the team finally said we have two things with different names that are exactly the same thing. We have to choose one and then we're going to go live with that. That's how far it got. Look, there's a risk-reward thing, obviously, but again, not to keep rehashing the same thing over and over again, but there's a reckless nature to it that I don't think is responsible.

01:54:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They call it leading. Don't think is responsible.

01:54:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They call it leading.

01:54:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's leading, like Mr Toad was leading in his wild ride. You know I mean.

01:54:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Follow me. You know, this is the nature of leading, is you're a bit panicked. You keep making sure you're in front. Yeah, you got to stay in front yeah.

01:54:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, if that's true, then these guys are spastically afraid. They're not?

01:54:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh no, you are nervous. These tech companies are good at chasing right. That's what they know how to do, and when they find themselves in the lead, they all get a little wacky to do yeah, they look behind them and they trip and they fall and they hit a rake.

01:55:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm leading.

01:55:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly no, you're not or you do. I mean you. Arguably, apple's been the most effective at leading, say, in the mobile space. Yep, and they get real cautious well and look.

01:55:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of the big criticisms of apple post iphone is they've never delivered that level of hit again. Right, it's been diminishing returns and that's not anybody's fault, but that's what happens. I mean it's same. You could make the same case with windows, right?

01:55:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
really maybe. It strikes me that the difference is apple kind of speaks with one voice, yes, and microsoft and google do not. I mean, apple would never have two products with the same the same thing they speak slowly exactly yes, thank you.

01:55:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, yeah, listen, I write this. I mentioned one example from the phone link part of the book and I run into this all the time. You know, is it a strength or a weakness that there are 27 different ways to do things in Windows sometimes? I mean, it's a little bit of both. Yes, because we all follow different paths and we think differently and maybe we get to things differently Both. But yes, because we all follow different paths and we think differently and maybe we get to things differently.

01:56:17
But I don't know Jerry Pernell or somebody had made the comment many years ago about Apple, like they either they don't do it or they nail it. You know, if they do do it, they're going to do it right. And I don't know, I, as I get, maybe I'm older or something and I just I, I sort of appreciate that thinking now. Maybe when I was younger I didn't care. You know it, I sort of appreciate that thinking now. Maybe when I was younger I didn't care. It was just kind of fun, like living on the edge a little bit or whatever. But yeah, I don't know. Okay, okay, what else we got?

01:56:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Adobe, adobe Little company you may have heard of, Although, by the way, there are another one you know when look when I can remove a background in Microsoft Paint.

01:56:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not saying I don't need Photoshop, but we're getting into a weird area here. Yeah, and Adobe, like well, I guess like Apple I'm not sure else to compare them to has been very explicit about how they're going to protect your data and indemnify you as a customer, that no one's going to be able to come to you because you use something. It's created something with their AI where they can say you violated our you know, copyright or whatever. Like you know, they've been very upfront about that. And then they came out with a little uh change to the terms of service. They kind of implied that they could look at your stuff and use it for man, talk about a cell phone, yeah, and so they, you know they, they corrected on that, but they, they, they basically added a couple of clauses to the terms of service that made it clear that they're not going to uh, um, review all of the content, but they may sometimes have to for various reasons.

01:57:46
Right, for legal content, you know, child abuse, whatever, um, and okay, fine, but the I think the important thing, and maybe the most important thing, especially for content creators, is Adobe does not and has not and will not uh, train their Firefly, uh generative AI, on your content, right, right, because you lose trust with this audience, you know? Um, that's a one way street, you gotta be careful there, so anyway. So anyway, not too much has changed there, other than big company makes stupid mistake, you know yeah.

01:58:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the intern right, the idea of I don't even know how you get there.

01:58:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, right, right, was it bring your daughter to school day or to work day? And she wrote the press releases. I like, yeah, I don't, yeah, who knows, I don't know, who knows, who knows how this thing's happening.

01:58:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's always amazing to me. Well, and it wasn't announced. It was just buried in the license group Somebody actually read the damn.

01:58:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Somebody actually read it Exactly. Hey, we just let you know we did this, we made a change. Most people are like, yeah, who cares?

01:58:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Someone looked and they were like whoa, whoa, whoa, unlimited license to your stuff, yep.

01:58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh God, I'm going to be forced to retire because AI is just going to make me AI. Paul, come and sit.

01:59:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Paul Buckley, it's easy. Being cynical is easy. Opera I've been talking about these guys a lot lately. They've been really pushing AI hard in the browser. They have a developer channel for their Opera 1 browser where they're testing AI features early and if you're using this, you can go to a site called devicetestai and run one of three tests against your computer where it downloads these massive models between two and seven gigabytes total to see where you are with AI capabilities from a hardware sense.

01:59:39
So the first time I did this, I mistakenly chose the middle of the two and I was told that my computer's not AI-ready. And I ran this on a Core Ultra computer. When I ran it against the base level I think it's AI-ready profile it said, yeah, your computer's AI-functional, which is like saying you have a third grader's understanding of english in the present sense. Or yeah, I was gonna say spanish, but um, yeah, I mean it's. Yeah, that's what I have, you know. So they don't actually like they don't measure tops, they measure it against workloads, basically. So you get scores and yeah, it's kind of interesting you know.

02:00:15
Now it's good to see new benchmarks coming for these technologies we definitely need a better way to describe, I guess, the performance for lack of a better term.

02:00:25
But the thing is it's not just performance, right? I? I feel like we need uh, I lost this, but in mic, Microsoft's million announcements at Build, one of the AI-related features of something Microsoft actually said this feature uses less than some watts of power when used. They actually spelled it out and I think it's the only time I've ever seen it because I lost it, but I think we need that kind of thing. It's like what's the efficiency of this thing too? You know, interesting Speaking of other browsers nobody uses DuckDuckGo, Still can't, doesn't have tab management, but for some reason they're also adding AI features to their browser.

02:01:08
I wish they would nail the basics, because DuckDuckGo I kind of vaguely trust and I'd be interested in that. But they're doing AI chat in the browser a little bit differently from everyone else. Starting with the name, the chatbot is called Duck Assist. I'll just pause for a moment for you to cringe a little bit. But it's going to let you choose between AI chatbots, essentially, so okay, and they're going to do the Apple thing where they're going to send information back and forth anonymized. So chat GPT, if you use them or if that's one of the choices it is one of the choices may use that data, I guess, for learning something, but they're not going to be able to associate with you, et cetera. So, okay, that's fine, Tab management guys, they're not going to be able to associate with you, et cetera.

02:01:58
So, um, okay, that's fine. Uh, tab management guys to saying, um, yeah, and I do. I just briefly not to, I don't have a huge like a editorial here, but I I feel like this is going to be more and more common. You know, um, there has been a knee jerk but deserved kind of response to big tech and AI. I guess we'll call it big AI. You know the Gemini's, open AIs, Microsoft's, maybe Amazon's of the world and that Apple type response where it's like, okay, we're going to use these tools but we're not going to let them benefit from it as much as possible.

02:02:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to limit our digital.

02:02:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They've already stolen everything they need. You know like it sounds like a pretty good place to make it stop, you know so well, because there's no point in drawing the line on social media.

02:02:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You already gave them everything, so now that there's a new thing, maybe we can try and draw the line yeah.

02:02:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I think we're going to see more and more of that stuff and then and I bet a lot of people cite apple as the inspiration for it. But uh, doctor, go, did this I? It might have been before apple, but it doesn't matter.

02:02:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, the both, both guys are using.

02:02:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I thought it was the right thing to do then notably, both guys don't have that giant ai data center in the cloud, you know. So it's like well, how do we approach that? Well, and they're all. They're also privacy first companies, right? So, um, watching how they handle ai, I think, can be instructive and and not a bad model to follow. I hope so. Yeah, and then this is going on, but there was a brief shiny moment last week where NVIDIA rocketed past Apple from a market cat perspective to become the second biggest company in the world, behind Microsoft. Apple, of course, has since had WWDC, so now they're number one again. But you know, look, apple, microsoft, they've been up in the stratosphere for a while. Nvidia has been on that steep, steep curve.

02:03:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you know, those kinds of steep ascents are followed by steep descents too.

02:03:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This company You're saying they're not going to hit there in this, like like, plentiful, probably not. Yeah, interesting, you're not going to hit there in this like like plateau there?

02:03:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Probably not. Yeah, interesting. You're not going to short them though either, richard? I mean no, no, I don't.

02:04:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They seem to be doing everything right.

02:04:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ai is kind of their market to lose and I called this a year ago, when I said they were firing on all cylinders, that they had cars, they had gaming, they had AI. They had really found very, very good markets for their hardware, for their designs.

02:04:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are people well, actually everyone listening to this probably knows more about hardware than I do, but one of the conversations we would have had recently around the 40 tops thing with co-pilot PCs was there's this group of users out here who have, like, massive GPUs on their gaming PCs or maybe their workstations, whatever, and 476 tops you know whatever the number is Right and they're looking at this. These goofy little laptops are like I don't understand why. You know, I can't just do this, and obviously it's not a laptop. Efficiency is not an issue. You know we have the Stevie Batista explanation, etc. Etc. I think the next generation GPUs that they just announced also use their own custom software to be like. You know what? I just want to blow the doors down. So, efficiency be damned, I'm going to run this stuff off the gpu. I bet that's going to be nvidia's approach, you know you know, watch my video card wind out exactly.

02:05:29
Yeah, you're going to hear it coming there. Exactly, it's going to be like a like an indy 500 race. You'll you to hear it coming. It's going to be like a like an Indy 500 race. You'll, you'll hear it coming. But but it will blow the doors up Right, and I think that's their point. They're looking good. This was like I said this is something they could have bad decision their way out of, but it looks like they've been doing everything right, so good for them.

02:05:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, although it's interesting that the way Apple got to be number one again is by saying AI a lot. It's a good way to get the market happy.

02:06:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Marketing helps, and they're good at marketing.

02:06:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they are the best.

02:06:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it was with the MacBook Air, or maybe it was just their recent earnings announcement. After years of talking about machine learning, they like look, the world has accepted AI as the term. We're going to start using this term. I mean, that's something a more obstinate Apple might have tried to dug their heels in. So that was smart of them, I think, right.

02:06:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, to be fair, they branded it Apple intelligence, which is genius.

02:06:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love that intelligence, which is genius. I love that. That's what ai stands for beautiful um and yeah and uh. I I think they had said something like I think it was earnings. It's like you know, our competitors are talking about ai pcs. We already have the best ai pc in the world with the macbook air or whatever. You know something like that. Like there you go.

02:06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just good marketing you know, after, uh, after tim said all about all the great shows apple TV Plus was going to create, that you weren't going to subscribe to.

02:06:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What a goofy way to start it.

02:07:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then he said the very next thing out of his mouth was you know, we've always been building AI into our systems, yeah.

02:07:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and then everyone was like I'm sorry, what happened? What?

02:07:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Severance who.

02:07:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, literally. Yeah, you're right, it went from Apple TV Plus programs. What is this the most?

02:07:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
blatant commercial it was. That was terrible. It was wild at a developer conference too yeah yeah, I mean it literally had nothing.

02:07:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We were up coding all night. You're gonna want to binge watch a show, am I right?

02:07:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, ted lasso, am I right? That was, yeah, that was a stupid one tim it used to be, they'd say how good their stores were doing. You know that was the thing. Now it's how well their Apple TV Plus streaming services which, by the way, would have been on point for a developer show.

02:07:42
Yeah, I mean the streaming service. There's no. Yeah, it's just weird. Yeah, let me tell you a little bit about our sponsor for this segment of the Windows Weekly Show, and then we'll get right back to the Xbox segment and the whiskey and all the things you're waiting for. Our show today, brought to you quite literally by CacheFly. For over 20 years, CacheFly has held a track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivery - serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. At TWiT.tv we've been using CacheFly for over a decade, and we love their lag-free video loading, hyper-fast downloads, and friction-free site interactions.

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02:11:12
Speaking of teams, we're back with our premier windows experts, richard Campbell and Paul Theriot. Let's talk Microsoft three, six, five.

02:11:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hmm, yeah, this is. This is very interesting to me. I lookcom, microsoft just announced that through the middle of the year they're going to start. Well, through the last half of the year, I guess, they're going to start killing a bunch of features in the name of security and they tied it to the secure future initiative. And as I kind of read through this list, I'm thinking, you know, I think we're going to see a lot of this kind of stuff over the next several months, as microsoft kind of turns its sarah and I, you know it's each product yeah, plus some of these things have been hanging around for forever like yeah, to finally finish which is kind of the microsoft way of doing things.

02:12:18
Like you know, technology lingers. You know they don't like to leave customers behind, but this is that moment. You know we went through this with well trustworthy computing, right? Remember server 2003. It's a server, not a surfboard, right? They started componentizing server and making the base install a lot leaner because you shouldn't be sitting there as a user on it doing stuff online or whatever it's you know, serving workloads of whatever kinds.

02:12:43
So I look at this is kind of the same stuff. There's some, there's some of this is interesting because I think some of this are uh features that people actually use, like g, gmail, support and lookcom. So this is to be clear is outlookcom the web site, slash server, slash, right, whatever? Um, if you, you can optionally sign in to your gmail account and it will appear as an icon in the left bar there and you can switch between gmail and outlookcom in the same ui. Today, um, they are retiring that as of june 30th. Um, their advice is to use the new outlook app for windows, which I think we've established. Everyone loves and wants to use. That's fine. Nobody's going to complain about that. See, you say we're brutal. I've never. This is like a man. Well, it's like that line in the airplane movie. They're all standing there with like a pipe and a noose and like they're all waiting to go to nuts on the woman, but like the next turn. Yeah, yeah, you know.

02:13:43
Cortana has been depreciated across the ecosystem. Of course, in 24 H two it's finally been removed from windows. In 23 H two it's there, but it's just the stub icon that doesn't do anything. A stub app, rather, they're getting rid of it across. Every service that still uses Cortana on the back end is going away. So, for example, if you use Outlook Mobile, there's a feature in there called Play my Emails and also Voice Search. Those are going to be deprecated by the end of June and then just removed as Cortana goes away.

02:14:13
Of course, I can't imagine why this was still around a light version of the website. In other words, you have an older browser that doesn't support modern web standards, like a web browser. What is this? Using a Nokia 900 series phone? I don't know, but anyway, getting rid of that in August.

02:14:33
And then the mail-in calendar apps in Windows 10 and 11. I know this is kind of a sore spot for some people, but obviously they're also replacing that with the new Outlook app and you know these are just out-of-date apps, I mean, they're not going to update them with all the latest security features et cetera. So those things. I don't think we have an exact date on that and I think it also depends on what customer base you're part of. But for consumers, by the end of this year those apps will be gone and you won't be able to get them. You can't go to the store and get them, they're literally just going to disappear, which I think. Maybe I'm on the minority, but I think that's for the best. And then support for something called basic authentication is being deprecated and will be killed in September.

02:15:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've been threatening this one for a decade, yeah.

02:15:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And actually, if you go and look across their other commercial products, they have, over time, gotten rid of this, deprecated, then removed it from things like Exchange Online or commercial Microsoft 365, azure, even and this is the problem with this, basic authentication is when you have a username and a password, but it's actually worse than that, because you and the service exchange those credentials multiple times, again and again and again. Obviously, that's very insecure. So I'd like to live in a world where Microsoft basically enforces 2FA or something like that.

02:15:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, this is maybe the first step toward that, trying to, but yeah, and I kept dumping this one out because a lot of people are going to break. There's also like legacy things.

02:16:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you have like this, like you may. If you're a Microsoft account guy, you've probably heard of like app passwords. You know like you sign into Microsoft. You've probably heard of like app passwords. You know like you sign into a microsoft hardware. Yeah, xbox 360 is like this. Um, it just doesn't understand the modern authentication method. So they're gonna get rid of that and I'll lookcom so good for them. I hope they stick to it.

02:16:25
We've been talking about it forever yeah, um, this one kind of came out of nowhere, but uh yeah, flurry and mueller, who I really like and trust, has created a new website dedicated to IP court battles, basically intellectual property court battles.

02:16:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not that they've been in vogue at all. This is very old school.

02:16:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's an interesting world. So there's a guy I'm not going to name these people because I don't really I don't like promoting these people but he owns a company and they bought a patent and then they sued the mobile industry for 13 years and won billions and billions of dollars, right? That guy and his partner in crime, who is a lawyer, who owns a law firm with the same name as his name but with LLP at the end of it, and that guy is representing the New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI. By the way, they led the legal battle against the voting fraud stuff with Fox News. It settled. Those two guys are partnering to take on Microsoft for violating one of their patents related to cloud computing that Microsoft is supposedly violating with Microsoft Azure Look at me being old Windows Azure, remember that. Sorry, we'll see what happens. They filed the lawsuit in Texas.

02:17:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you pay them off to go away, which seems unwise, or do you circle the wagons and let's go?

02:17:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It seems like this is going to be fast-tracked um and we'll see but I gotta imagine they go on the offensive.

02:18:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They try and breach all of their patents, like, yeah, you've got all the money in the world and you have a brad smith. Yep, like, get out the hammer and go smash the troll, end them. Make it really expensive. We're not only not going to pay you, we're going to take away your money. Yeah, exactly, right, right, right.

02:18:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I like that. Yeah, we'll see. I don't know.

02:18:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've not heard an official response no and I think, while you were assembling that, then Mr Smith shows up, puts his arm around his shoulder and is like listen, I'll cut you a little check. You sign all those patents to us and you get out of here.

02:18:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nice, we'll see what happens. Yeah, xbox Last week, I know, was a downer for people. This week is a little more interesting. On Sunday, microsoft had their annual Xbox game showcase. Hey day, microsoft had their annual Xbox game showcase. I don't know if you could figure out off the top of your head what happens when Microsoft buys Activision, blizzard and then has to show off new games, but suddenly they have a lot of new games and this might have been one of the better Xbox showcases, maybe the best of all time. Frankly, a lot of good stuff, activision stuff like Call of Duty, the next call of duty, obviously, but just games that have been in the microsoft kind of studio, xbox studio sphere for a long time.

02:19:20
State of decay. Fable uh, perfect dark remember, perfect xero was a launch title on, I think, the 360. Okay, it's a hard time remembering that far back. Anyway, um, there's a new gears of war game and it's not a continuation of the current storyline. It's actually going back to the origin story from before the original trilogy. So you've got younger versions of the characters from Dom and Marcus from the first game, etc. Stalker, assassin's Creed there's a lot of stuff coming, so that's great.

02:19:56
Um, a couple of weird things. Uh, so I love Phil Spencer. I want to be clear about that and I say that in kind of an unreserved way. However, um, in the same way with, uh, some other people, I, uh, you know the people I just like. This is one thing I he has this way of. He's a gamer. He's, uh, as partisan as he has to be to work for microsoft, but he just loves games, you know, and he wants games to be everywhere. This is real, it's not like a marketing thing. And he was interviewed in the wake of this uh game showcase and someone said, hey, uh, these companies are all doing these little gaming, uh, handheld things like why, why does an xbox have one? And then he does this thing, which he does, which I know he means non-maliciously, but he said, yeah, we should have a portable gaming console.

02:20:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh god, it's like dude, you run xbox alarm bell. What?

02:20:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
are you doing? You don't have one coming.

02:20:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You should talk to your boss yeah yeah, you can.

02:20:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can talk like a guy sometimes, but in your role as the guy in charge of that business, I mean, maybe don't say that you know.

02:21:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Can you actually follow it with? I never thought of that thing.

02:21:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you don't want to look that dumb, but you know. The other thing he admitted to, of course, was that Microsoft will be bringing more games to the playstation in the future and this is later in the notes, I think but one of those games is almost certainly the original version of halo, right? So that game has already been remastered as part of the master chief collection. Apparently it's going to be remastered yet again and as part of that work, supposedly it'll be coming to playstation 2. You know what? Yeah, of course, I mean, that makes sense to me. Okay, the other thing they did and God help us all they announced three new Xbox consoles, which, you know, in any normal world would be big news. Yeah, except what they announced was three look-alike Xbox Series X and S refreshes that are just color and or storage allotment changes. Nothing else is different. The one that has two terabytes of storage was, I guess, bedazzled or something. There's like green specs on it for some reason, um, so I guess that makes it different and two terabytes.

02:22:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It makes you glow yeah, so it's.

02:22:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What is it? So these things are, I guess they're coming out. So it's 2024. So we're only, we're not, we're not even like halfway through this console generation, assuming it follows a normal pattern, which it won't. We know. They're going to refresh, if only to lower cost, right?

02:22:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep.

02:22:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But two things Sony is coming out with a PlayStation 5 Pro this year, right, with a better GPU, et cetera. So that's a problem. These things don't match up against that at all. And there was a big leak last year, and the Xbox Series X refresh, in particular, was very impressive, and is not this thing that they just announced Now. At the time of the leak, phil Spencer said look, these were an idea we had at one time. These are not our plans. Plans change. Don't believe that this is what's going to happen. Spencer said look, these were our, an idea we had at one time. These are not our plans. Plans change. Don't believe that this is what's going to happen.

02:22:58
Um, the other thing that changed is that there was also as part of the leak is that microsoft was looking at using arm as the basis for their next generation console. Right, not a refresh right, but an actual next gen. So, following the refresh, um, if you look at their like, the current generation of consoles, which is xbox series x and s, playstation 5, is referred to as, like, the generation of gen 9 consoles. Um, previous gen obviously was eight, right? So xbox one, nintendo switch was part of that still around. Uh, playstation 4.

02:23:28
Um, there's something something weird going on here. Like I, I, xbox three 60 was a generation. Original Xbox was a generation. Yep, I kind of feel like Xbox one and series X and X are actually the same generation, because it's not that there aren't any games that so far don't run on one, but most games that run on Xbox today target all three of those consoles Right that run on xbox today.

02:23:58
Target all three of those consoles, right, and I, I mean, I get it, but at the time xbox one was considered kind of a disaster. It was kind of the we were hoping the nadir, if you will, of that line. But now xbox, I think the xbox series x has a much better consoles, but they are not selling well at all. So I'm wondering if there isn't some calculus going on here where we're going to cut this one off at the knees and move to whatever that next gen console is, whether it's arm based or not, a little sooner than maybe we would have otherwise, and that this refresh is almost a way of telegraphing. It's like that's what we got, this is what we got. We're doing this. You know so I don't know we could look forward this. You know so I don't know. We could look forward to, um, you know, this fall, this holiday season, and what we look at the games and see I bet most of them run on Xbox one. Still, you know.

02:24:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, that's what the you know may not be a lot of new consoles. So what's the current population? Yep. It's hard to code for.

02:24:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But Xbox One is. That's the thing. I don't. I'm not an Xbox developer. I'm not a developer really either, but I'm sure that the Xbox SDK whatever they call it makes it easy for a developer to target those three levels of performance and capabilities in a seamless way, right you?

02:25:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
really just build to the low one. You have some knobs to turn stuff up if you want and, by the way, they're essentially pcs under the hood, so you run this yes right, they're x86 based or whatever.

02:25:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, yeah, so that, but that will change. You know, with arm, if they go to our proposal right, so we'll see.

02:25:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um so kind of interesting. It actually pushes them over. But and this also speaks into maybe I'm still in some thunder here yeah, the role of llms and generative ai in gaming, that's right well, yeah, so uh, if you actually want to justify, a new generation of hardware that would do it.

02:25:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But so, in other words, like, let's say, this happens, it's a couple years later, so we've got some future call of duty game, whatever it is, it's going to run on xbox series x and s and whatever this new thing is, right, it's going to run on playstation 5 and playstation 5 pro and maybe they have a, a six. But whatever, those games are different games, right. Even though it's the same game title, the, the game they've created is probably a different game, like you know. I know there's shared code and all that stuff, but you know, it's two different platforms, right. But the thing you're describing is actually very interesting to me, because one of the things about on-device AI is you have this capability to create worlds on the fly, on-device, which is not something you're going to be able to do on a current-gen console, right, right, so there are going to be games when that happens. If that happens, well, it is going to happen, right, it's going to happen regardless of ARM, right?

02:26:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, at some point we're going to have on-device models, right. Right the argument it would be what if the storyline was generated text, so every version of storyline was a little bit different? You could write any, no more, no more. You know selection options for responses.

02:26:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can write back anything you want and it makes a a game that might otherwise have been non-replayable very interesting as a replayable title.

02:26:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe you know you. Once you know you have four options for each of these things, you rapidly just build a tree and make sure you go down the mall. But what if you could write whatever or say whatever? Yep, you know, right now we only talk to other players, but why wouldn't we talk to the game?

02:27:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, right, there'll be some random character in the background that wasn't fleshed out in any way, shape, shape or form, but because you walked up to him, you know, you're like yeah, I know the game's over here, I'll be right back and they'll generate a whole world for that guy that will be unique to that pass of the game.

02:27:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, and you know, you talk about replayability and gameability like that's all pretty compelling. You're always going to have the challenge of trying to get somebody back on the storyline because they didn't ask the right questions.

02:27:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know well, video games have a rich history of like railing people into certain. You know so.

02:27:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, you're going to play here.

02:27:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you played last to us. An open world game will essentially have primary and side quests.

02:27:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, this is just a an advanced version of that, I guess I would think that a bethesda is looking at this and going, wow, you know, I could just change the whole concept of dialogue. Yeah, the joke is tokenization.

02:28:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The dialogue will actually be smaller you're also going to have people who would never play video games or would never play that type of video game, who are going to wander off in an open world and just enjoy the scenery.

02:28:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, they talk to animals and look at trees and like they're going to have their own little experience, like I knew guys who, back in the ultima online days, just built their little houses out in the woods and that's where they live, right, and they go, they, they meet their friends online in a tavern to drink beers. That that's amazing. I once watched an entire performance of the Wizard of Oz in the game.

02:28:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So these are the people, and there were hundreds of people watching. The pandemic was not even a thing for these guys. The rest of us were forced to do this. The awkward Zoom meetup, or whatever we're like. Oh look, I'm drinking a beer too. It's fine. Yeah, there you go. Not really zoom meetup, you know, or whatever we're like oh look, I'm drinking a beer too, it's fine.

02:28:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there you go. Uh, you know not really well. And now you start thinking about this technology and, like I think about the resource allocation for voice. Yeah, and suddenly I'm like, huh, now I can, I can build a model for each of the different voices and I have this gigantic llm for all of this, and let's go I.

02:29:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of the things, uh, microsoft I felt has been a little indelicate about, frankly, has been kind of uh, bragging about this thing no one can prove which is like we got hardware coming down. It's going to be the most powerful thing in the world.

02:29:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, they've been saying that a lot lately and I wonder if that's not the type of thing they're talking about, you know no, and let's face it, they're uniquely situated to now build a console, you know, with a 200 tops processor in it, and they own the studios to make games, to drive those games. Hey, can't put it on the playstation, won't run, wow wow, that could be yeah, I maybe we got that.

02:29:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
we got the cart and horse backwards.

02:29:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe that's the plan You've got the studios Now make a console that just lives by itself. I mean, who just knows? You've now made these PCs that you're trying, you're hyping hard to do all those things. Why would you do it with a gaming console? Right?

02:30:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, food for thought. Where am I? I did all that so. And then just a couple of small kind of the monthly stuff. So, xbox june updates oh, nothing major. Some dynamic background stuff.

02:30:23
This is one of those things you hear and you're like there's no way, this is true, but apparently if you switch wi-fi networks on an xbox, it forgets the last one, so it's gonna manage that for you, like a computer did in 2001. Um, so that's good, uh. And then you know, some small stuff, nothing, nothing major there. Uh, we've gotten our what? 13th straight uh game pass drop with no activision blizzard games. I'm not upset about that, but everything's fine. Yeah, everything's good. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Uh, calisto protocols in there. That's supposed to be a great game, and I've not actually heard of these games, but I've heard they're very good. Octopath Traveler 1 and 2 are also part of it. Yeah, this is another selection of like I don't know. Brand new game Still Wakes the Deep is out on June 18th on day one on Game Pass, as well as PC and Xbox Series X and S.

02:31:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right.

02:31:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go. Still wakes the deep Dun dun dun. You know we play a little game here at Twit we like to call Club Twit. Let's see how big we can get. Right now Club Twit is at 11 978 paid users. We are 22 roughly from 12 000. I would like, before this show ends, to be able to celebrate our 12 000th member and here's how, jerry, I don't know what you think you're doing on this telethon, but you'll never walk alone.

02:31:57
If you know my baby, if you're a member of Club, you won't walk alone. You'll be in the esteemed company of brilliant tech enthusiasts from all over the world. You get to hang with them in our club to a discord. You get ad free versions of all of our shows. You also get special stuff that we don't put out in public. You get, for instance, the video of Paul's Hands on Windows show, the video of Michael Sargent's Hands on Macintosh, of the Untitled Linux show, of Scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks.

02:32:28
You can join our book club at the end of the month Stacy's Book Club. We're reading High Voltage. You should read it and join the club and talk about it, all of that. I know I've just described something that would probably be worth hundreds of dollars to you, but it's only $7 a month, less than a Super Soy, double Calf, decaf, petal, multi-sugared Latte. And not only that. Not only that, you get the warm and fuzzy feeling that you are helping keep this show and all the shows we do on the air. Frankly, as much as we love our advertisers, the ad revenue has declined, has plummeted steeply, did you see? It's not just podcasts, by the way, radio too iHeartRadio is now about to go out of business because of radio advertising's just disappeared. I think it's all going to marquez brownlee, but I'm not sure. But I think he's getting all the ad dollars now and we're not getting any of it. Mr beast, or mr beast?

02:33:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
or I just 600 mil a year, right.

02:33:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good Lord or Joe Rogan or whatever, but it ain't coming into my pocket. That's all I can say Now. Lisa and I are going without pay for the next few months because there isn't enough revenue to do that. But I can't not pay these guys. I can't not pay the light bill. I can't not pay the rent, so help us, help pay the light bill. I can't not pay the rent, so help us. Help us stay on the air. That's all I hate to beg. It kills me. But we're in the situation where I just I don't want you to be surprised if all of a sudden the lights go out. Twittv slash Club Twit. Help us get to 12,000 paid members. We only need 22 more. You could be one of them and I look forward, look forward to welcome you into our club to a discord, as I, as I just have for a number of new members, and then one guy who quit just just now. I'm going to finish windows weekly and then I'm quitting the club.

02:34:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know why. I don't know what happened. I think he was pulling your leg, at least at least he was going to finish windows weekly.

02:34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he's going to finish the show get his money's worth and then he's out of here. Please join us. We'd love to have you in the club. Twittv, slash club twit. All right, we continue on with Windows Weekly, starting with Paul Theriot's tip of the week.

02:34:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know how I just stumbled onto this and I feel like I've heard of it in the past. Maybe I heard about it when it came out. But when Nokia imploded, after they went to windows phone and Stephen, all up, he'll up, came and there was this feeling that this guy might've been a Trojan horse. And what's going on here? A group of Finnish journalists wrote a book called operation E-Lob, which is hilarious, and it, but in Finnish, right? So there is, and it, but in Finnish, right. So, okay, obviously, yeah, you can get the book on Amazon for the Kindle, et cetera, et cetera. But there's been sort of a crowdsourced effort to translate this book into different languages, including English, and you can download it for free. I think it's been done. It's not illegal or whatever, like it's, it's, it's okay, and so I'm going to, I'm going to read this, read this, you know. So I downloaded the pub version, put it into my kindle and I've been reading it for the past couple of days. This is, um, this is several years old now, right, I mean the, the nokia as that. You know, the original nokia as a company basically died when microsoft acquired most of its employees and technologies, right, and then, a year later, fired most of them. So it's fascinating. I'm only a partway through it.

02:36:03
I've always really liked Steven Elop. I know a lot of people there's some disagreement there, I guess, maybe, but he was a guy who could get on stage and just speak fluently about this product, no matter what the phone was, no matter what. He would just talk about it. He wasn't prompted, maybe, but he was a guy who could get on stage and just speak fluently about this product, no matter what the phone was, no matter what. He would just talk about it. He wasn't prompted, he would stand there and hold the thing and talk about it, and he's one of those guys I really, really, really liked.

02:36:23
One of my most disappointing moments at Microsoft I think it was the Windows Phone 8 launch in New York. But whatever, whichever it was, it was Andy Lee's, a previous guy, a guy who ran Windows Phone. At one point. You could just watch them and say he didn't even use this. He had no idea what he was talking about, like I don't know what he was even doing there, and ELOP was the exact opposite of that. So I'm dying to see how it ends Like. Don't ruin it for me, but I'm also interested in seeing what their conclusions are about the decision to go with Windows phone over, say, improving Symbian maybe, or going with Android, or choosing a non-Finnish person for the first time ever to run the company, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of mystery there, or intrigue or whatever. It's a very Finnish book, which I say knowing nothing about the Finns, but there's a lot of local stuff in it Is it dour and dark and depressing.

02:37:16
Yeah, it's right, right, exactly, but comfortable and happy, but shy, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean there's a lot of local stuff, you know, like local to Finland stuff, but it's, you know, sometimes you're like okay, whatever. But as far as the information about ELOP and Microsoft and how these things were sort of perceived outside of the company and outside of Finland, it's fascinating and also just some very interesting stuff about, oh, nokia was perceived in Silicon Valley especially, but also in the United States, because there was a big opportunity for them to be as dominant there as they were in the rest of the world and they just were kind of arrogant about it. You know, this is pre ELOP, obviously. I thought it was like, is it only only 20% of the way through? Ish. But yeah, I mean, I'm fascinated by this history.

02:38:09
So, you know, maybe there'll be some information in here. I can bleed into Windows everywhere at some point or whatever. So we'll see. Anyway, it's worth it. Look, I know a lot of people listening is probably still holding a candle for Windows Phone, so you're going to want to read it if you're one of those guys, for sure.

02:38:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Operation.

02:38:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
ELOP, yeah, and then APIC, one thing I decided explicitly to try to do on this trip. I very much did not do this on the last year or on most trips, but I want to start. I think I've gone off the deep end a little too far and not playing video games Like it worked a little too well. So I I do think this is a healthy nature to playing some video games, right. So put it in a box.

02:38:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Can you block out an hour and just do an hour?

02:38:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, games, right. So put it in a box. Can you block out an hour and just do an hour? Yeah, just like, maybe a little saner about it and maybe have it not be like death matching other human beings and screaming at the computer a lot, um. So of course I'm playing bagging. Please, yeah, don't say right, um. So I've been playing a couple of different games, but the one of the games I kind of returned to because it's it's a little bit like uh, this just came up recently.

02:39:11
You've seen the racing game game, like Asphalt, whatever those games. There's something interesting about those games in that they seem to run really well on, like anything Like you have just a regular laptop that runs fine, right, I don't care about racing games in the slightest, but the modern Doom games of which, by the way, they announced a third one at this Xbox showcase I just mentioned, which is Halo I'm not saying Halo Doom, what are they called? Doom? I can't remember, it doesn't matter.

02:39:39
Anyway, I never finished either of them, so I'm like I'm going to go back at least with the first one and see if I can get through it a little bit. There's a part in the game where you know how you get stuck and you'll try again and you can't get through it and I'm like you know, I just give up. So I did that for a little while and I said you know what, I'm just going to start from the beginning, even though I'm going to have to replay so much of this game. And then what I realized was I didn't really play much of it at all, paul did I, I, I didn't even get past the first section of the game. It runs well, even on like a core ultra laptop, like it's fine.

02:40:13
You know it's doing the dark ages yeah, that's the next one, right, so it's doing. What are they called? Oh, so, this is human, this is coming.

02:40:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the coming game. Yeah, this is the next one. What engine do they use? Unreal, do you know? I'm not really sure. I bet it's unreal. Yeah, everybody. That's the thing is. It used to be back in the day you go oh, the quake 3 is you know that's the best quality ever. Now it's all the same. So it's really about the game, not the engine. This game.

02:40:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I, I, I had a little bit of a stumbling block with the modern doom games because of course I, yeah, doom eternal. Thank you, kevin. Um, I I came well, it came up age, I was in my 20s but I played, you know, the original games obviously, all the uh, the side games yeah, quake and all that. You know these things don't look or feel anything like those games. No, if anything, it almost feels like you kind of it's. They feel like Serious Sam. You remember that game?

02:41:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love Serious Sam. Monster, monster, monster, kill, kill, kill, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm actually like you know. Look at this shield.

02:41:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's got its own little style to it's. It's not the same as the old doom, but I'm like you know this is okay. I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do my best to get through this there's no strategy, you're just slaughtering as much as possible. Yeah, richard mentioned, like you know, getting you back on the rail with an open world game. This is not an open world game no, you know, you're staying on the rail, it's uh

02:41:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you, you know you'll, you'll.

02:41:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are little puzzles and stuff, but it it's nothing.

02:41:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not Elden Ring either. It's not like I can never kill this guy, it's just like boom, boom, boom.

02:41:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I did have that problem before. So one of the problems with these games is, if you don't play them for a while, you also forget the combos you can do and the weapon loadout ads you can do. And so, playing it from the beginning, I was like oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I was missing.

02:41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So anyway, I'm going to try this. I'm looking for a good game. I really am, hmm, uh yeah, I mean. I announced that Valheim is coming to Apple, which made me very yeah, the.

02:42:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Assassin's Creed. I would look at indie games frankly, and that's something I'm going to be doing myself. I don't spend enough time on that. I've got to pay more attention to the indie games. I will. I will get there, and just real quick. Firefox 127 is out. One of the interesting things there is they pulled a page from the Edge playbook. You can check a box and it will start with Windows. Really, when you sign in, it's not tied. It's not tied to windows, it's tied to your user account. But um edge does this to make it faster, right, so so it's always running in the background yeah, and if you know it been, look that that's.

02:42:45
It's nothing wrong with that if that's what you use, right, I mean? You know you're going to go there, yeah who cares using it anyway, you want it running in the background, so thank you, sir.

02:42:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, paul's app pick and tip of the week. Now it's time for richard campbell and his run as radio plug of the week there you go.

02:43:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, episode 936 this week with susan hanley and we're talking about putting co-pilots into your intranet. So so Susan's been a regular on the show talking about the various aspects of intranets one way or the other. This is sort of the latest thing. She talked about co-pilot studio and Viva engage and all the normal problems came up, starting most of all like get your data estate in order. All of that old crap that's in your intranet.

02:43:32
That's going to confuse folks when the indexers come through and say the wrong thing we really got into, you know, focusing on hey, can you answer the question, how much vacation time do I have left? Or what do I got to do to use that vacation time? Those just narrow questions for HR and setting up models just to be able to do that much, so that folks you know there was a straight ROI on that for administrators saying if they don't have to call HR to get that answer, then that's other work that can get done. So the tooling set makes it very possible to get to that point. But it is still early days and most people's data are not in a good place. Like it's going to take the. The main effort is shaping up the data set enough to be able to make the co-pilot do what you wanted to do.

02:44:19
Yep, yep and it's same theme over and over again. Let us get some whiskey, oh, my goodness whiskey. Well, uh, last week I was in toronto, uh, doing some work with microsoft, canada, and today, uh, I actually arrived yesterday. I'm in oslo, but in between those two, I stopped in with my friend in the netherlands. He is a whiskey aficionado, and so he had a interesting bottle for me to take out for a spin that I enjoyed enough. I thought I gotta research this thing a bit, and had a fine discovery. Uh, the particular whiskey we're talking about is the ballon d'alic, the 2016, what they call the benelux edition, in that it was only sold in belgium, the netherlands and luxembourg it's the lowland edition.

02:45:08
Yes, the swampy side, uh. So ballon d'alic is an area, it's not, there's not really a town. It's on the Avon river, which is direct right near where it joins the space side, there in the space, and there is a Ballandock castle which has been there for oh, 500 something years. The John Grant was granted the lands that where Ballandock castle was also to be built in like 1498 and the castle was first standing in 1542. So the same Grant family, now known as the McPherson Grants, had been on that land for 24 generations. And in the early 1800s, further down, the Yvonne was the Delensau Distillery, although that is no longer a distillery. It's been shut down for a long time. Actually there is a nice hotel there and, uh, around that same time, the, the head of the family, baronet sir george mcpherson grant. He who, uh, owned that distillery back in the day, also was a co-founder of a distillery that's far more familiar, cragganmore, which just a short way down the Spey, a mile or two further down. So the Mufurksy of McGraths were one of the owners of Cragganmore. He also worked on some with some other distillers, like Robert Hay, who was the founder of Geddon Farkless, and with the what is known as the Speyside Distillery in Kisaube in the late 1800s. Now if Craig and Moore, if you followed their history and I believe I've talked about this on a past show was acquired by the Distillers Corporation Limited, our distiller's company limited back in 1965, and so the McGregor and Grant family exited distillery owning with the acquisition by DCL. So that's 1965.

02:46:58
Fast forward 50 or so years, another generation and near the. So we're straddling the Avon River here. The north side has the castle and the grounds and the south side had a few other things, including a fairly good golf course, and there was some old farm buildings that were, that had been there since the early 1800s, that Guy McPherson Grant decided to repurpose and one of the ideas was why don't we open a modern distillery but in the old building? So there was, there was a need to do a restoration on these buildings in the first place. They didn't want to lose them. Then they were, you know, pushing 200 years old and so they hired local craftsmen. But they were pushing 200 years old and so they hired local craftsmen. But they decided that what we'll do is we'll build a distillery out of it, and it took about three years to get it operational. It was inaugurated by then Prince Charles and Camilla, who are the local dukes of the area. Now what they decided, what the McPherson Grants decided to do, was go 100% whole school.

02:47:55
This place only uses barley from the farms in the area. They there's only three or four people that work in it. They only work one, one shift a day, five days a week. So no maximizing production with around the crock operations like nope, small group people, no software involved at all. It's all mechanical. And they've got Pinewood Oregon Pinewood washbacks. They're small, they're 5,000 liters each and they've got five of them and they ferment on the weekends since they don't work weekends. So over the course of the week as they get batches processed, they'll end up with, across the five washbacks, slightly longer fermentations from the first ones they put into the last ones they put in. So between 114 hours of fermentation down to 66 hours of fermentation and then combine them all to make their whiskey.

02:48:48
They only have a single wash still. It's only 5,000 liters. That's very small. And then the spirit still is 3,600 liters, which is incredibly small. And they use worm tube cooling the old school way. The spirit safe they have is actually from Krag Moore. It's used the Diageo people that ultimately bought DCL back in the 80s gave it to them as a gift. The old Krag Moore owners. Here's the Kragamore SpiritSafe for your still system. So they only put out 100,000 liters a year and they've only been in operation for a decade. So you're not going to find a lot of single malts from them yet. They're just not in that place right now. But they have a warehouse and it is full to the point where they have been placing. They've been putting together other warehouses in the regions around Glen Farkless because they've been making even in 100,000 liters a year. They're racking them up and letting them age.

02:49:46
Now I've not been to this distillery. It doesn't actually have a visitor center but they do do tours because so many few people work there Folks that write about doing a tour of that place. They were toured by the master distiller himself, so an incredible experience. They also offer a day-long tour, a hands-on tour, called the art of whiskey making. It's an eight to five and you basically work a day with them on their cycle making whiskey. That's genius. You wanted to get all. It's about 300 pounds. It's like going to a winery and like picking the grapes. Yeah, so you spend. It's for only two people, they only do it once in a while, and 300 pounds each, but you will have the experience of making whiskey from them.

02:50:30
They also have a thing called the estate club. You can be a member of the estate club. You can be a member of the state club. It's 600 pounds, but it's a one-time payment at this point that that membership lasts till 2029. So it's kind of like a wine club because it gives you priority on their custom bottlings.

02:50:51
So if you wanted to get into what are they making and I've also read that for folks who have really engaged with the estate club and done the tour and so forth they still have casts of Cragganmore from the 60s, so they drag out some old drams every so often if you're lucky to be around. So there's a bunch of different whiskeys that they make and many of them are quite experimental because they haven't been around long enough, and this Benelux edition is an example of this so aged in a bourbon cask and only bourbon. They don't talk about the year on it, so probably it was no more than eight years, but you know they talk about 2016, which is about right. You know that that was the distilling date. Now we're in 2024, so the math works out Only 234 bottles for the Benelux region, and so apparently a lot of the bottles went to the Netherlands, more than anywhere else, because the Dutch like their whiskey.

02:51:52
And if you can find one and there's still a few for sale, not very many it's about 120 euros, about 130 US dollars, but you would have one of the 235 bottles. So I tasted this one, which is just strictly a bourbon casking, and there was another that was also a sherry casking, and both a good drink and again, not any of your classic like super old school, the ultimate manifestation of single malt. Everything was made, you know, in sight of that distillery, but not those long-agings. They just haven't had the time to do that yet. But they've won some awards for the fact that they are making whiskey the old-fashioned way.

02:52:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Balando, balando, balando.

02:52:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well said, I think, maybe, probably, I don't know, it looks good, that's all that matters.

02:52:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks good, very nice.

02:52:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, just a fun. You know I'm going to have to get do that tour One of the times when I'm up there. It'll be tough to get it, but that sounds just. You know fun. You know I'm gonna have to get do that tour one of the times when I'm up there. It'll be tough to get to get it, but that sounds just, you know. You know I did. I did the mccallan tour and there's cat5 cable everywhere, like they're measuring everything digitized. You know great telemetry. You go into a place there where the buildings are built like it's from 1820 because they were built in 1820 and uh, yeah, probably barely electric lights in there. We'll see.

02:53:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, all right, we'll put a link to the Dram Time site so you can get a bottle of your very own Blaha and enjoy Valendalk, valendalk. And that's Richard Campbell, who is, if he's not, a scotsman of a true scotsman he's his own thing.

02:53:39
He's a campbell, of course. He's a true scotsman. Uh, you'll find him at run as radiocom, and dot net rocks is there to run as radiocom, and, of course, here with mr paulie thurot from thurotcom, and his books are at leanpubcom every Wednesday, 11 am. Pacific 2 pm. Eastern time, 1800 UTC, as they say in the lowlands. Uh, join us. Uh live on youtube. Youtubecom slash twit, slash live.

02:54:09
Uh, if you want to be notified, subscribe to the channel and smash the bell and you'll get a notification when we go live, which is basically at the beginning of every show. After the fact, on-demand versions are available at the website twittv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly, and you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client and that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. I'm proud to say that all of my begging resulted in another member, so we are now at 11,979 members. We didn't quite make my goal of a measly 22 new members, but every single one of you counts. So thank you, welcome to the club, and thanks to all of our club members for helping make this show possible. See you next time, time next Wednesday, and by then the copilot plus PC will be out and about, or, as they say, in Oslo, and I hope I do matriculate note into the world. I do hope that Polly will have a little review for us.

02:55:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I hope so too, but I I mean, we'll talk about that next week, uh-huh, we'll see, we'll see.

02:55:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not too late HP Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Thank you everybody for joining us. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekend. Bye-bye.