Windows Weekly 887 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 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on Windows Weekly. I, micah Sargent, am subbing in for Leo Laporte this week and we kick things off talking about Windows 11. Yes, there are some new updates, including what you can expect from Patch Tuesday, but also hope Paul talks about PhoneLink and how the experience is not so great. Afterward it's time to talk about the Co-Pilot Plus PC. Paul was able to try it out and has a lot of thoughts on the experience, including using it. We have a moment where we see Paul in a sort of take-on-me aha-style animation. It's really interesting, but, more importantly, there's a lot to get through when it comes to what's new with these Copilot Plus PCs and what you can expect in terms of the versions of Windows that will be running on them. Afterwards. It's Microsoft's favorite topic antitrust and how Slack made a complaint regarding Teams, and it results in a little bit of a rant, I think, from everyone on the panel about what makes sense in antitrust and what does not. Xbox Corner and the tips and picks of the week follow All of that coming up on Windows Weekly.

01:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit.

01:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This is Windows Weekly, with Paul Theriot, richard Campbell and, this week, me, micah Sargent, episode 887, recorded Wednesday, june 26th 2024. You're drinking wood? It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we talk to two of the foremost Windows watchers in the world. I am your subbed-in co-changing continent by the one and only Paul Therot.

02:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello Paul, hello Lear.

02:15 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Micah, you are coming to us from a very colorful location in Mexico City. Yeah, mm-hmm, yes, location, uh, in mexico city.

02:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yes, is it. What's what? As your uh ac fixed the birds gone, so we don't actually have ac or heat here, but we have a water heater that never works properly. Um, although it's been fine on this trip, actually the birds are gone. They grew up, they flew away. In fact, I left the ladder out there so I could go push the nest out of the hole. We're going to have to plug it with something, but, yeah, we've had a tweet, tweet, tweet, kind of trip on this one.

02:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, I am glad that they have figured out what they need to do to fly off into the sunset Joining us from Kansas City, Missouri, back near my hometown this week. It's Richard Campbell. Hello, Richard.

03:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hi, micah, good to see you here. Good to see you too. This is leg six of a 27-day six-leg run.

03:15 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, my word, you are always on the go.

03:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is it. I'm staying home for the rest of summer July and August I'll be at home, nice. I don't know how you're doing rest of summer, july and august I'll be. I'll be at home, nice, three or four days away from going home. Oh no, I and I was asked if I would go to st louis after this. I'm like, listen, I'll be at 27 days and I'll probably hate everybody and everything. No, I'm gonna let that one go, I'm gonna go home. Right, that's wise, that's wise.

03:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Uh well, folks, you know what this show is all about. It's about Windows and Microsoft and everything therein. So without further ado oh and by the way, folks, leo just took the morning off. He'll be back later in the day and back next week, but I am pleased to be here in his place. So let's talk about Windows 11. Although I know everyone's's going, when are we going to talk about those new pcs? We'll get to it all.

04:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, calm down people later yeah, I don't know why I laid it out like this. I just just to make people I like it it makes people have to.

04:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, they got to wait around for the good stuff today delayed gratification.

04:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's important well, yeah, anyway, um, yeah, I mean, actually, technically, last week was a big week because of co-pilot plus pc, but in its own way, this is a big week as well, because on tuesday we had our week d preview update, right, which is what happens in between the patch tuesday updates. So patch t occurs on week B, the second Tuesday of every month. The preview update occurs in week D, the second, sorry, fourth Tuesday in every month, right? So that's what that was yesterday.

04:57
As we record this, the second month in a row, microsoft did not deliver a preview update for Windows 11 version 24H2, which is the version that went out in those co-pilot plus PCs we're never going to talk about, but it did release basically no, not basically literally identical updates for Windows 11 versions 22 and 23H2, right, and this ties into what we were talking about, I assume, last week, which is that Microsoft, for strategic reasons or not, has decided that each supported version of Windows 11 will have the same feature set, and this update is the preview version of adding the 24H2 features to 22H2 and 23H2.

05:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And if you follow that, I make us all wonder why? Why?

05:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
why why?

05:47
yeah, well I make different versions at all yeah, I am um that's the thing of the show yeah, I've stressed over this for a couple years with windows 11, because they keep changing the way they update the operating system, right. So now I'm just like, yeah, whatever I I got to this point with windows 8. I remember at some point I was like you know what this is nuts. But let's just ride the sled, you know, let's see what they fare at paul, my favorite paul yeah, well, it's uh, yeah, like, um, uh, everyone succumbs to torture eventually, richard.

06:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's what happened here so this is the stockholm syndrome episode yeah, well, yeah, I'm not.

06:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I can't say that. I'm, you know, feeling friendly toward these people. I'm just saying You're not fighting for them yet, you just give it. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not supporting it, I'm just saying it. I'm reporting, not supporting, if that makes sense. So let's see.

06:42
So, yeah, so of course, the asterisk to this and there is an asterisk in the note which I do not explain right Microsoft is going to test new features for 24H2 that it will deliver in time for its roughly September, october final release, so to speak, and then in October 22H2 also goes out of support. So you know, there's this temporary window where we have three versions of Windows that do not today, unless you install the preview update, but will in two weeks actually line up Asterix and less Microsoft between now and then add something to 24H2, because you know that's the fun of what we're doing Might happen. Yep, with 24H2 shipping in its initial release a week ago, tuesday, with the CoPilot plus PCs, which again we are not going to discuss, there is a set of new features you get there, not including the AI features that are unique to Copilot Plus PCs. And.

07:58
I'm going to talk a little bit more later about this mishmash of Windows. Is it mishmash, I guess, of Windows 11 versions and product additions and optional features or features that require special hardware and Copilot plus PCs, and how it all kind of lines up? You'll be delighted to know it doesn't, and then we'll see. And then, longer term, we have these theories that Microsoft will eventually eventually bring those co-pilot plus pc features to um, to other pcs, right as they gain powerful mps and so forth.

08:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we're in a moment in time, basically, and I know and an odd one, but it will pass, will it? It will, um, there'll be a new change right, there'll be.

08:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, it's like I yeah, I was. Yeah, it's like I almost died of like high altitude pulmonary edema. I came off the mountain I was cured. The guy says well, I do have some bad news. I was like what? He goes you have pneumonia. I'm like, come on, man, and that's sort of what. Like that's what Windows is like. It's like pneumonia, just like the money um just leaves you gasping for air. Yeah, yeah, um. And then in the insider program, we haven't seen anything yet today, although actually it's possible. It's happening as we speak, because that often happens.

09:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But um, there were some interesting show, and as soon as you say nothing's happening, they press the play.

09:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah of course. Yeah, it's like, have they started recording? Okay, good ship the updates, um. So it's possible there's new stuff occurring as we speak, but I'll get the weird one out of the way. So, just historically, microsoft paused the delivery of a release preview build that was tied to the initial version of 24H2, which was tied to that recall drama, tied to that recall drama, um, and then, since then, uh, they've actually released a new release preview build which matches the preview update they delivered in stable yesterday.

09:51
Again, if anyone's following this, congratulations. I'm having a hard time with it myself. I know, uh, there's some uh, canary stuff that's not particularly exciting. Uh, drag and drop address, file bar, address bar in the file explorer, which we've seen elsewhere as well. Nothing big there. The big one is happening in beta and, uh, it's hard like, just as I know or suspect that microsoft is releasing windows insider builds as we speak.

10:15
I have this burning suspicion that I spent two and a half weeks rewriting a 57 page chapter in my book about phone link, that app in windows 11, and the next day those guys announced a major update to phone link, uh, so, yeah, that's they're testing in the in the beta. It is a weird little sidebar that's gonna latch on to the start menu, much in the way like a lamprey eel, like latches onto a shark or whatever, eating the scraps that fall out of its mouth. Remora, yeah, remora, sorry. So I have a link in the notes. I don't know if you can show this, maybe not. It might disturb some people, but I took a. Yeah, this is how I viewed that, oh yeah.

11:00
It's like yikes, yikes. Some people are like, oh, look at that, that's really nice. You know, I know these things are subjective. I was like, guys, could you stop freaking around with this thing? So yeah, I guess we're just building off of it like Legos or something. So this is in the beta channel, meaning it's probably a feature that will come. I was going to say it's a 24-inch too, but it's a 24-inch too, but it's just gonna come to supported windows versions sometime this summer, I would imagine, just based on the way things go. So yeah, that's most of it. Most windows 11, I think, the non-copilot plus pc stuff. Anyway, what there's more? Wow, that was fast. Yeah, I know a lot of this is not super interesting. I mean, you know they put these builds out almost every week and there's usually not a lot of interest, right, yeah?

11:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Kevin, should we take a break? Yeah, all right, we'll take a quick break before we come back A completely different vibe this week.

12:01
I just see, yeah, sure we could take a break this week. I guess, yeah, sure we could take a break. I'm actually pretty pumped to talk about our sponsor this week before we come back and talk about Copilot Plus PCs. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by 1Password. Yes, in a perfect world, end users would only work on managed devices with IT approved apps. But you know and we know we don't live in that perfect world. Every day, employees use personal devices and unapproved apps. But you know and we know we don't live in that perfect world. Every day, employees use personal devices and unapproved apps that aren't protected by MDM, iam or any other security tool. There's a giant gap between the security tools we have and the way we actually work. 1password calls it the access trustap and they've also created the first ever solution to fill it. 1password Extended Access Management secures every sign-in for every app on every device. It includes the password manager you know and love and the device trust solution you've probably heard of on this podcast back when it was called Collide. 1password Extended Access Management cares about user experience and privacy, which means it can go places other tools can't like, to those personal devices we were talking about and contractor devices. It ensures that every device is known and healthy and every login is protected. So stop trying to ban BYOD or Shadow IT, because it's just not going to work. Instead, start protecting them with. 1password Extended Access Management. Check it out at.

13:30
1passwordcom slash Windows Weekly. That's the number one. 1password P-A-S-S-W-O-R-Dcom slash Windows Weekly. Check it out out. And our thanks to one password for sponsoring this week's episode of windows weekly. All righty, we are back from the break and that means it's time to talk about what's next. What's?

13:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
next? What's next? Well, after a one wait, I finally got a Copilot Plus PC to review.

14:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's changed your life right Like everything's different now.

14:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll tell you something. The last two mornings I experienced what I will describe as a miracle. You know, some people see Jesus in toast or they witness something amazing out in the world and they're convinced of a higher calling or whatever. What I saw was a Windows laptop that I opened the lid and it actually just turned on and I got to tell you in my world. That's a miracle, because I've been discussing how Windows in general, I mean for years, has been sort of a roulette wheel of reliability and predictability. But that is particularly true in my experience with this current generation of Meteor Lake based laptops, right, these Intel core ultra based machines. Lots of weird problems, and I don't think I have this in the notes, but I did review one of those laptops on this trip and I was, I was using it pretty much full time, I mean for everything, for the show, for whatever, and um, every morning it was like a little little fun little game. You know, we're gonna see what happens. Um, what happens?

15:15
I will this time yeah no, I just so people understand what that means. You know, historically this has kind of always been the case. I just feel that this might be the buggiest, weirdest chip version that Intel has released in Silver Lake and it's up to the PC makers to fix these problems for better or worse. Like that's how it works. And that was the thing that Microsoft discovered during the episode I referred to as Surface Gate, where they had shipped Surface Pro 4 in the first Surface book and we're having massive, massive problems, including the hot bagging stuff, and Microsoft wanted Intel to fix the problems. Intel said that's not how it works.

15:55
Microsoft lashed out by arbitrarily obsoleting certain Intel chipsets from supporting Windows 10. It kind of went back and forth. They never really kind of got on top of it. But what I had heard from I guess it was two other PC makers was how this works and that's how I just described it. It's PC makers fix this stuff. So the one thing I did see about a week ago was and I kept checking, you know, I kept checking Windows Update for optional updates. I kept checking, in this case, the HP Support Assistant app for updates and one day I got eight firmware and driver updates and it started working pretty good, so it took them that much time to get on top of that. And then, of course, meteor Lake is orphaned anyway, so who cares? But we'll talk about that later.

16:43
So copilot plus PCs obviously are based on the Snapdragon X processors, which include integrated uh processor graphics and MPUs. There were four of them, I think, three X elites and one X plus, or there are four X elites, I don't remember. But, um, I'm expecting and hoping over time to access several of these devices, but the first one that arrived is a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X14. I will say, richard, speaking to your theories about binning, which are so close to being reality, I think we could just call it a fact. It is notable, I think, that most of the Co-Pilot Plus PCs we've seen to date are the lowest end version of the Elite X processor, right, the one that maybe is the most reliable to make right, yeah the most of.

17:33
Yeah, which is not a big deal I mean, honestly, I think these things are pretty great across the board is 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage, which is literally well, not literally, but it's pretty much the minimum you would want for a co-pilot plus PC. Because of the RAM and storage implications of local AI, I would configure this with more RAM, for sure, and maybe more storage too. I did buy a Surface Laptop 15, which is sitting in a box in my house, in my condo or whatever it is in Pennsylvania. So you know I'm not counting the minutes or anything, but in the meantime I have this Lenovo and, yeah, it's pretty great. So what I've been doing is going down kind of a checklist of things and writing it up as I go, because I'm trying to catch up with the rest of the world on this stuff. I will say, um, this particular PC is is wonderful. I mean it.

18:33
I review a lot of I probably review eight to 12 laptops a year and there's an OLED display which is beautiful. But there's also just a kind of feeling of uh, like quickness to it, like out of the box, like it feels very fast and it's kind of a neat thing. It's not completely silent, because it does have some fans, but it's basically silent. I mean, even playing games which I'll get to, you know you turn the game shuts off and you throw your ear up against the and it's I have heard nothing. I mean it's been very, very quiet.

19:02
The only time it really spun up was when I was going through a bunch of app install and app update stuff all at the same time, and it wasn't loud, I mean, it was just a very low, non-aggravating hum is how I would call it. That's okay. It's okay. It also vents out the back and even though this one vents in from the bottom, I've used it on like a bed which is kind of a torture chamber for that kind of laptop. But same thing no noise, no heat. Well, a little bit of heat, but no noise and no worries. It's worked fine, anyway. So the stuff I've tested so far is you ordered the Surface version of this too.

19:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just hasn't come yet. No, it's in.

19:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Pennsylvania. Oh right, that's the, that's the one that's in Pennsylvania. Yeah, that's what's up. No, that one came a week ago, tuesday. Uh, that would have been nice to have had that one. Um, but yeah, no, not yet. Um, this Very, very nice.

20:02
So I've tested apps, hardware I have a limited set of hardware here, obviously in Mexico, but I have some. I've tested gaming. I've tested the inbox AI capabilities and I would say, you know, across the board, most of it's pretty great, except for the AI stuff. We'll get to that. Well, it's kind of mixed. Maybe the best experiences so far have been apps and hardware.

20:22
As far as compatibility goes, I was keeping track of what's native on ARM, what's being emulated, et cetera. I only found one app that did not work at all, which was Google Drive, which makes sense because it's a system integration, low-level file system integration. That type of app has to be native. But everything else has worked great and I don't remember the exact numbers, but I want to say of the initial, you know whatever 16 apps I think it was eight native on ARM out of the box, one or two with a little bit of work, which is something I'm going to get to. The rest were 64 emulated, like looking at what's running on this computer. Now I think Zoom, if I remember correctly, is native Notion is not, but it's basically a web app. It doesn't matter. Discord is not, microsoft Edge is obviously comes in the box. So I do things like Git, which is not native on the command line, visual Studio, which is native, visual Studio Code, which is native off of Git as well. I have screenshot utilities that work fine. Um, I've had no, I've just no major Well, my, my file, uh, cloud storage solution is a major issue actually, but of course I also pay for one drive through Microsoft 365. So, um, you know, I, I can, I can make that work, it's okay. Um, your mileage will vary, and again, we're going to get to that work. It's okay, your mileage will vary, and again, we're going to get to that stuff.

21:47
Hardware compatibility really surprised me. This one, 100%. Everything I have works fine. Bluetooth, usb, whatever, it's technically USB 4. They're not certified for Thunderbolt. I have an HP Thunderbolt 4 dock 100% compatibility, works great, every port. Just plugged it in and it worked. Yeah, immediately, Two USB-C docks.

22:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Say again when I think about the stuff that breaks on plugging a foreign dock in, it's like you don't get the video through.

22:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No video is no problem. The only issue I've had and I was having issues with the webcam I'm using here is a Dell 4k webcam. Those can be crumbly, yeah. On the previous on the Intel laptop, I had to every time I connected on a podcast the camera would fail. Literally said camera failed Right and plug it from the dock. Plug it back in again. Plug it back in and it worked. On this computer it just won't see it when it's plugged into the dock. On this computer it just won't see it when it's plugged into the dock. So it's a USB-A connector on the computer end. This computer has USB-C, so I travel with dongles of various kinds. I just grabbed a dongle. It's working fine, in fact, now that it's connected directly to the computer, which is not what I want. But it works perfectly and every time and immediately, which is really kind of neat, and that's not the experience I've had before. So, and every time and immediately, which is really kind of neat, and that's not the experience I've had before. So it might be the dock.

23:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe something's wrong with the dock?

23:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know.

23:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's so many weird software things in there driver things. I'm always stunned when somebody else's dock works on my device.

23:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it might be an overloaded USB channel. It could be, you know, I don't know, I really don't know. I've tried plugging the dock in a different. Yeah, it doesn't matter.

23:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These are all these non-standard standards, right Like just.

23:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so it works. Yeah, so this thing in my ear is like a Bose, quiet comfort earbud. No problem there. Phones all connected, obviously. Usb storage of every kind. I have a bit locker encrypted SSDs, no problem, little USB key or memory sticks, whatever, no problem, obviously. Like I mean you know the microphone, I mean everything, like everything works fine. So that's been great, which is good because there are no drivers. So if it doesn't work. It's not going to work.

23:58
Yeah, the gaming thing was interesting. So it's weird to me that Qualcomm and Microsoft both kind of promoted this aspect of these machines. These are Ultrabook competitors, and by Ultrabook I mean like an Intel U-series chip, really thin and light, low wattage.

24:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Long battery life.

24:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, like not a gaming machine, right? Yeah, it's a long battery life yeah, like not a gaming machine, right? Yeah, so on AMD, more so than Intel, but I test more Intel-based laptops. Integrated graphics are getting really interesting and obviously on ARM that's been true for a long, long time. So we see that on phones, but we see it on the Mac and we see it here. Actually, with this system, like with these Copilot Plus PCs with Snapdragon X, right, the integrated GPU is, you know, they're getting there.

24:50
So when I tested the first Meteor Lake PC last December, which was an HP Spectre x360, one of the things I tested was whether that new, incredibly better integrated graphics they have in that system H series or higher could it play games? Yeah, sort of. And the situation on this PC is in a similar place, but it's emulating games, right, it has auto SR, automatic super resolution technology to upscale, so you run the game at a lower res. It looks like it's high res. You're running it at a lower res. That improves the frame rate, and so you get the equivalent of like 1080p, 30 frames per second.

25:37
I actually get better than 30 frames per second on a bunch of games, but, um, but my god, it's's not. You don't just, you can't just run a game. It's not that simple, at least not yet In my experience. I've had to run it and then it runs, it looks full screen, but it's up on the corner and then you crash it and you run it again and then you reboot and then you know like it works eventually and what. I eventually figured out was yeah, you really have to.

26:02
You have to really kind of screw with it. There's a couple of new settings spread throughout the settings app in Windows, and one of them is, if you go into the display section and go down to graphics, which I don't think many people ever go to I would I don't. There's nothing really there. There's the automatic super resolution options and you can enable or disable this stuff on a game by game-game basis, and so one of the games I tried was Doom 2016. And it was running pretty good. It was running at first. It was like 20 to 30 frames per second, looked pretty good. It was like 1280 by 720 maybe, and then I enabled it AutoSR for that game explicitly, because it didn't automatically do it, which it does for some games. And that made auto SR for that game explicitly because it didn't automatically do it, which it does for some games Right, and that made all the difference in the world. I played that thing for about two hours. Yes, it was like 40 frames per second really consistently at no glitches, no, nothing. It was great and it looked good too. It looked awesome. Yeah, it looks. It looks beautiful.

26:57
Um, I also tried the familiar with it Third-person shooter, rather, yeah, that's pretty good, but yeah, it's. You know, like if you have a Mac and you look at what games are available, you'll see a very short list, you know, and a couple of them are pretty good, but it is not a big list. So it's better than that. But there are some weird isms to this, including, for example, you run the Xbox app and there are no Xbox game pass games in there. You cannot play any game pass games. I know that launching with that is seems like the weirdest and most impossible thing, but it's true, it's so. So like why?

27:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
why I forget?

27:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know Right thing, but it's true, it's so soluble, like why, why? I just forget, I know right. So yeah, no, it's weird. So the interface is like you all you get is game, uh, xbox cloud gaming. If assuming you have an xbox game pass ultimate subscription right, which I do, um cod gaming doesn't work well at all, so it doesn't matter so that was a way to start it.

28:03
Yep, doesn't matter how fast, well, maybe it doesn't work well at all, so it doesn't matter. So that was a way to start it. Yep, it doesn't matter how fast.

28:06
Well, maybe it does matter how fast your connection is. I have a gigabit here, though, and I have good upload speeds. It does not work well here. No, it's a late spot. Yeah, so you can download the games through Steam or Epic Games Store or whatever. It's going to be hit or miss. There's a website, a link to an article that's tracking um the performance and visual quality of different games. They have some games they recommend. You know they show off games like, uh, balder's gate and, um, well, control. You know there's a couple of them, so it'd be great, but um, these two is everywhere.

28:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I feels like it's you know what it?

28:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's the new um. It's that there's a tomb raider game that just runs great everywhere, or, like those asphalt games, always run great anywhere. For some reason, like um, yeah, control, I think, is the new, is the new tomb raider. It's like, for some reason, that thing just works great, you know, and it does, it works, it. Does you know it? It's it's fine, but, man, it's just a lot of work to go through for somebody. Does you know it's it's fine, but man, it's just a lot of work to go through for somebody. And let's see what else we got here. Sorry, I feel like I'm giving a speech, so, um, and then there's the inbox, ai, stuff. So, as everybody knows, um, microsoft was going to launch this thing with that recall feature, which I think a lot of people would have found really useful useful, excuse me, um. And then that fell apart and now what we have left is fell apart meaning blew up yeah, yeah, they ripped it right out and now we have a bunch of other stuff.

29:31
So auto sr like I said, games is great, but then with one exception, the rest of these features are just like not quite there. So in paint we talked about this last time this is additional feature code creator. You can draw in the app or you can actually use a text prompt and it will create an image for you. And you know, pretty terrible, frankly, low quality, low resolution too, which is weird, unless you start with a high quality image. If you don't, if you just have it generate one from scratch, it's like 512 by 512. I don't know how anyone could use that. There's an image creator. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm actually mixing those up. The image creator in photos is the one that does the low res stuff. It's bizarre. It's so low res I don't even understand what the point of it is.

30:18
If you think about co-pilot in the web or however, you access it Right and designer that image creation capability, it's really nice, like you can do really complicated prompts and it's does a great job. I pay for co-pilot. I get these amazing 16 by nine images that I use a lot in the web, right? So I. I used a prompt I had used the other day in image creator in paint, which was about a rotten apple in a market full of fruit and blah, blah, blah, with light shining on it, and in paint sorry, in photos. This version of this capability runs against the MPU, against small language models installed on the device. It doesn't go to the cloud, wow, and it is not good. It is not even close.

31:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It has never once created what I asked so when I yeah, create like, in other words just you switch, it doesn't matter.

31:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've never gotten it to work. And it doesn't matter because, honestly, these are not 16 by 9 images, they're only 512 by 512 pixels, which is garbage. I wrote this is the prompt. I used A small rotten apple with a bite taken out of it, on the edge of a vast market of fresh fruit and vegetables of all kinds, with a light shining on it from above, and what I got was pictures of apples, most of which were not rotten no market no other stuff. Sometimes no light, like just garbage, like absolute garbage.

31:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that one's useless If you're fed to a to a mid-journey or dolly, you get good results.

31:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can see it, it's on my. I have a. I have a link to it in the article. But I I wrote an article about apple this week and you can see it on the article. It's beautiful, it's exactly what I asked for, right? You know? Beautiful, high quality, high resolution, 16 by 9, whatever. Um, paint. No, I keep confusing this because it's kind of weird. Sorry, but the photos app today in windows 11 anyone who has this now can use a background blur, remove and replace feature, which is really nice, works really well. Um, they've added something to it called restyle image.

32:19
So you take, if you have a copilot plus pc, this one's really interesting. You put a photo, you're editing a photo. So I used a photo of my wife as the example in the article. But it has style presets like impressionist, anime, you know, et cetera, renaissance, whatever. So I applied this to a picture of my wife and it it applied this to everything, but my wife, right, and I was like, well, yeah, I mean okay, but what I really? So it's sort of like image, it's like background replace, right, but I'm like that's not what I want. I actually wanted my wife, as part of this photo to be restyled as well. And it turns out there's a little note in there that says we can't do this with human faces, right, and then I guess we can understand why. Right, they don't want people to distort people and then publish pictures of people look terrible or whatever it is, so they're not allowing you to do that with people's faces, like fair enough. So I tried this on other photos, like some fried eggs on a plate or a beautiful sunset, and I got to tell you this feature Awesome. It's not why you would spend 1500 bucks on a new PC, but it does all run locally and it's awesome. And they also have a. A lot of these features have a creativity slider, and the way that that works is it uh, applies more creativity I guess the only way to say it to the image, based on how high, how it's dialed up and it's it's, it's excellent. Like this is actually really nice. This is the type of thing I actually would have enjoyed showing more images of. I just didn't want to take up, you know, a huge amount of space in an article, but I tried this against a bunch of different images and this works really nice. Like this is good. I. I do wish it worked with people. I think that'd be kind of fun, but this is possibly the best feature unique AI feature in these computers.

34:09
I would say Live captions is one of the best features in Windows 11, as I've said many times. But in Copilot Plus PCs they've added real-time language translation, which sounds awesome. The only problem is it's only into English. So if your English is not your native language and you're trying to do translations, you're kind of out of luck. But it works against 40 different languages. I don't know any languages really. I speak a little bit of Spanish, so I did test it with a Spanish language.

34:37
A YouTube video to. Yeah, it seemed good, but I'm not really the authoritative source there. Honestly, this will absolutely support two-way translation across all supported languages at some point. Right, I mean, we know that. Yeah, obviously, yeah, this one might emerge as one of the best features over time, but right now it's just kind of limited to translating into English, and then I don't think I can do it from here. I guess I can't.

35:04
Let me try. Let me just put up a where's this thing? Windows Studio FX. So Windows Studio FX is a feature. Oh, I can't do it across that camera. That's why Is a feature that Microsoft has supported in NPU based PCs for a while, like, I think, since Surface Pro 9 maybe, which was Qualcomm-based. It's kind of carried along. There are kind of a core set of these features that work with just about any computer with an NPU, but there are some features that only work if you have a really powerful NPU right, and so I got to try those for the first time, like creative filters, for example, and this is where you can apply filters that make you look like a painting, but you, you know you're moving and talking and gesturing and the whole thing it looks like an anime oh, you're actually moving the whole time.

35:52
Oh, that's yeah, like I. I yeah, if I could figure out, let me um. I bet I can't make this work here, but I'll try, because what the heck?

35:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
oh no, turn this on the zoom Zoom stream. I love it. Yes, let me see.

36:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm powered up anyway, it's a start. So this is the laptop display, obviously right, so let me see if I can make this work. Probably not, but what the heck?

36:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Turn this thing on Live.

36:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Turn on. Yep, we love a live video. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, okay, you're getting a lot of it. So, yeah, you're looking artistic. Yeah, let's see, the best one is this one. Yeah, this is kind of the cool one. And then and you can combine them right, so I could do like background blur, portrait lighting Wow, eye contact, which is really screwed up when it works.

36:39 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Automatic framing, I guess, if I assume it's going to, maybe eventually it's got such a wide view, it doesn't really need to.

36:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you can. So you know I'm not going to turn these on during a work, call you know kind of thing, but they're actually pretty cool Like it's. I'm not saying they're useless.

36:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, that it's you can. It's doing that live. That's cool.

37:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think so. It's interesting Live camera switching. See, that's working fine because this laptop's great.

37:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Regular Leo, yeah, and I think that's most of it, so, yeah, so when I think about you know, it's weird that Microsoft was selling these computers and this platform on the AI stuff, because most of it's like eh, when in fact you bet everything on recall, like this was going to be the feature that would make you need to buy the machine.

37:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So my wife and I some years ago we travel all the time, and we were probably in France, I would imagine at the time, but many years ago kind of came up with this phrase where we just kind of admitted to ourselves that 70% of travel is eating. Right, that the reason we're here is to go eat the food that's here Cause we can't get that in the United States or where we live or whatever. Right, and that's true, you could go around the United States, whatever. And I feel like 70% of the selling this thing was a recall. You know, like I think they were betting so much on it and I, like we've talked about this early. Yeah, I don't know how they didn't see this coming. Yeah, a lot of people made a big deal about these supposed security issues. But to me, the big issue with recall was that it's such a major feature, it's such a it's a good idea. It needs to be tested.

38:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know if you want it well yeah, yeah, you can't just look.

38:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft will move the icon in the taskbar for copilot a couple times over six months, whatever. I don't like it, but whatever they didn't test it that much, it's fine. But like you have to test a feature like this, right it's. So it's a big feature.

38:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is not a little thing, you know microsoft used to, when they rolled something out like that introduce you to someone who's been using it for four months as part of the sdr or beta or something, so they could actually see look, here's what it did for me.

38:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, all that like well, okay, yeah, real life you're referring to. Well, microsoft as a company is completely different right today than it was 10, 20 or whatever. In the, in the windows organization, which used to be the center of the company, which used to be the focus of the company, right, there were these formal processes for testing and and the corporate space. They had rdp customers right, who would deploy versions of windows early for this specific purpose. You know, today everything is kind of homegrown, and even the Windows Insider Program, which started out as an engineering effort, it's not really an engineering effort anymore, you know, it's kind of a marketing thing and I don't think there's a lot of enthusiasm or engagement there. I think Microsoft screwing around it as much as they have has not helped. There's all kinds of stuff going on, but it is patently ludicrous to say all right, you're right, we should attest to this, so we're going to test this in the Windows Insider Program. How are you going to do that? Well, those people have to have Copilot plus PCs, I see. So there are 17 of them in the world and three of them are in the insider program and somewhere in the notes. I think I must have this in here somewhere.

40:10
There's a weird issue in this moment of time with these yeah, I have it later but with getting ISOs to reinstall Windows. You know, one of the problems with the Windows insider program is you can't just roll back to stable. Yeah, right, you know one of the problems with the Windows Insider Program is you can't just roll back to stable. Yeah, you have to go Now. Yeah. So I would just say most people who are in the Insider Program should understand that and should be technical enough to be able to handle that.

40:32
It's not a problem. You can go to whatever it is downloadmicrosoftcom, slash Windows or whatever and download the ISO, and you can't do that with a copilot plus PC. They don't offer ARM versions of these ISOs, nor do they offer the 40 plus SLMs that are pre-installed in these devices. What's that install going to look like? Right, if they put it into an ISO? You know Windows 11 ISO is probably five gigabytes-ish today. What's it going to be 11 gigabytes? Yeah, nobody knows, because they haven't done it, so we'll touch on that a little bit later. But it's this notion that recall is going to be okay now because of the insider program is silly.

41:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I guess it depends on the copilot plus PC thing, which I don't know, that it's a real dependency. Again, why can't my RTX 4060 do this? Yeah, well, because they're trying to sell their computers, richard the whole thing, because this, I think, would have been a better product in the enterprise.

41:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, where I could have tested especially if it mandated internally, and um, uh, managed it, um, right. In other words, you could have a version of recall that only runs when you install or when you um sign up with an enter id, right, yep, there's a. There's just a. Users are going to have to understand, like, look, this is a corporate computer, they own the data. Yeah, don't put your personal credit card in there, don't browse porn sites, don't do all the stupid stuff you might do, um, because it's all being recorded right and also you know the same way that I went back when I was responsible for exchange servers, like we monitor for harassment so that you're protected.

42:08
Too Right that somebody can claim harassment against you and we can check your email and know that they don't exist the stance on recall from their perspective and I'm not talking about the drama, I mean forget that happened, but it reminds me of when Windows Phone 7 first came out. You would have assumed that this phone would have been the best corporate phone ever made, but no, they were shooting for consumers at first. Right, that changed over time and so, with recall, the story was businesses. It can restrict the use of the feature. They can say no, it could be on or off. But if they allow it, they can't control it, see it, access it, do anything with it. That's the users. So you've created a weird little enclave on a corporate laptop that's for the user and is theirs privately. That's not how it works. I'm sorry, that's just not. That is not how that works.

43:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that's what I was thinking. I was thinking this is ammunition to protect employees from accusations and appropriate behavior.

43:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, I mean what you've given them as a way to record and keep private there on that. You know their bad behavior it's. It's a you know no mass.

43:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I mean, here's the crazy part Make it work on the. If you made it work with rtx's at first, you don't think corp's not going to buy a ton of copilot plus pcs. When they see how useful that is, they want everyone to have one. So I'm gonna.

43:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not defending microsoft, but I'm going to give you the the answer that I think they would give, which is this we've been working with qualcomm for seven years to get this platform to a place where it actually makes sense it is. We've invested they have to billions of dollars, uh, millions of man hours probably, whatever it is and we finally have this thing that works great as a laptop thin and light, laptop, right, there's no such thing as a dedicated graphics, it's all integrated. It's never going to be that powerful, honking workstation, gaming, pc, whatever. It's just not. So we have one of the things that's great on these things.

44:12
It is great, you know, because it doesn't impact battery life that thing I was doing with the studio effects. You could run that thing for the two hours. It would look stupid, but it would not impact battery life that much. Like low, low, low single digit battery life hit. That's the point. The MPU is really good at this stuff. They also have this cloud thing going on where every time you make a stupid picture of an Apple with a bite out of it, like I do every day, it's costing them like three cents and what they want to do is put that stuff on your computer and that's where the MPU and the SLMs kind of kick in. So, yes, you're 100% right, and everyone with a NVIDIA whatever or an RTX whatever or a Radeon whatever understandably I'm upset about this, but it's kind of a perfect storm of what type of device makes sense with these processors. They're doing AI now in the cloud. It's expensive, they want to cut those costs and I mean it can be a win-win, but it's just not going to impact all users, I mean.

45:10
And by the way, I'll also say you went this far down the marathon and you tripped over the finish line like really, yeah, we've been pushing this notion of always connected PCs ever since they announced Windows 10 on ARM, always connected PCs being the. They announced windows 10 on arm, always connected PCs being the 20 something hours of battery life, compatibility with existing 32, eventually 64 bit, uh, intel type apps, um, instant on, you know, with the laptop lid and all that stuff, um, and 5g connectivity, right, right, and then all of us, and then you know 90% of the way to where we are now. They're like, eh, not going to do that anymore. And, by the way, the 5g connectivity, right, right, and then all this, and then you know 90 of the way to where we are now. They're like not going to do that anymore. And, by the way, the 5g, forget about it. Uh, it's not happening. I mean, it is happening but it's not going to be a requirement because it's expensive. Those chips are expensive, yep, and uh, we want to keep prices down because one of the things they heard from the previous gen arm stuff was too expensive, right, a lot of things like two grand, these things started at one grand and in that space, the thousand to $1,500. Ultra light, good, better, yeah, this is good, like, these are good systems. So it's a starting point. I mean, I think it's all going to evolve over time, but yeah, so here's the thing. You know, you guys, everyone knows I want this thing to work so bad.

46:25
I have been using a MacBook Air for the past few months and it's unassailable from a reliability, uptime, performance perspective. It's a magic combination of impossibly big screen, impossibly thin form factor. I could leave it and have sitting on a shelf for six days. I open it, it comes right up. The battery is exactly where I left it. It's insane. You know we want that, but we're Windows users, so we're also pragmatic and realistic and we know we're not going to quite get that, but we want to get as close as we can to it. And you know it's getting there. It's close. I've only had it for a couple of days.

47:01
So this is not like a final ruling or anything, but the problem I see is that the central problem with Windows 11 on ARM or Windows on ARM is always that little last mile bit, the uncertainty every time you do something. So, for example, if I go to Mozillacom slash Firefox and I download Firefox I know there's a native version on ARM and it downloads and it says Firefoxexe or whatever? Is that a native arm? I don't know. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't right. I could I installed or I didn't install because I looked it up. But Affinity Photo 2, I know that thing is native on ARM. I go to the Microsoft store, which would be the best place for this kind of thing. It's the x64 version. I'm not getting the arm version. I had to look it up and there's a special URL on their website. It's not the normal link. You get the native arm version right.

47:50
So there's these little things. Or you have some kind of an esoteric printer or scanner or any 3d printer or whatever it might be. You might have some compatibility issues. Right, for me it was only one thing. It was Google Drive, right, and you know some guy. You know some guys like just use Dropbox and I'm like I am paying for Google Workspace. I, you like I'm not going to solve this. Like I spent a thousand bucks on a laptop so I can spend another 200 bucks a year to get Dropbox. What are you talking about? Like have to kind of think about this stuff.

48:27
Yeah, so if you were to go to a Best Buy today and buy, like, an HP Spectre or a Lenovo Yoga, whatever, you don't think about this stuff, right, you don't think about it. You just buy the most beautiful, best value, whatever it is, whatever you care about, you bring it home, you install all your stuff. It all works.

48:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't think about it, and it seems like amazon's gone out of their way to not talk about the fact that this is an arm chipset, right? That's almost too far out of the way, that's right, I really. I feel they are going to deceive some people. They're not going to realize it's a different chipset and there's these new problems that you're just not familiar.

48:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So look, if you, uh, as a normal human being, well, like I, walk into a best buy and you buy an arm based Lenovo Yoga Slim, right, you buy this computer, you bring it home and you start installing software and it all works right. And it all works well, like I'm running I don't remember the numbers anymore, but most of the stuff I'm running right now is, in fact, x64 emulated. It's fine. Like I'm not stuttering and slowing down, you're not noticing anything weird, it's fine, and I don't notice anything weird. Like I run things like Notion.

49:28
Well, photoshop's native actually, but I think Slack might be negative is native, but in beta, you know, zoom, I can't remember, but that's the point, it shouldn't matter, I shouldn't have to know that. Like, it should just be fine If it is. Who cares? That's like saying, you know, back a couple years ago, I, some of the apps you're running a 32-bit, who cares? You know, I, it just works. Who cares? Even though my system might be 64-bit, right, dave cutler's windows on windows magic, exactly. So the the problem's not that because, honestly, the emulator stuff, at least from what I've seen so far, very, very good, um, the problem is those things that don't work. And then what do you do, then and it doesn't seem like there's workarounds or anything.

50:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're just like nope there are no workarounds.

50:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No like, if it's a, if it's a file system integration piece, nothing that you can do there. If it's a driver, absolutely nothing you can do. There's no way to make an x86 driver work on. This will not work, not going to happen.

50:25
So so what they've done microsoft and qualcomm between them is they started out at literally step zero. It was horrible. They did a device that was, uh, I had 25 hours of real world battery life, couldn't do a freaking thing with it, it was useless. It ran as slow as you could possibly imagine, right, completely worth nothing but incredible uptime. Yeah, and now I don't know what the battery life was. The thing I'm seeing out in the world, real world is probably, depending on the device, somewhere between 8 and 15 hours of real world battery life, which is, you know, good like all day, whatever. Yeah, performance is very, very good, right, compatibility very, very good. There's been a lot of work, but little, but still, the little. You know, it's the little gotchas and I, I, unfortunately that's the the thing that may, depending on your situation, undermine it for you, especially if you're not a technical person.

51:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think technical are still really talking about a first gen device. Like a conservative organization is not going to buy this machine. They're going to wait for the second gen, at least.

51:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, look, if you're a Microsoft guy and you literally run Microsoft 365 with OneDrive and Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint and Microsoft Edge, I'd love you all of those things. 100% ARM64 native. It works great. Life is good. It also works great on a.

51:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Mac.

51:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Richard, come on, man, but yes, you're right. Um, that's true. Um, the other thing to keep in mind and I I don't mean to be that guy and I in in one of these cases, I actually don't trust this company in the slightest. But I will point out that, uh, intel and amd are both gunning for qualcomm, in the sense that they are releasing um new hybrid designs with integrated MPUs and GPUs that are fantastic compared to the current gen stuff. I don't think Meteor Lake is any good at all, but Lunar Lake looks unbelievable. I mean, we'll see. It's Intel. They could still, you know, face-rake that one Everything looks unbelievable until you ship it.

52:21
Yeah, yeah, okay, fair until you ship it. Yeah, yeah, okay, fair enough, yeah, so you know, copilot plus PC. We have this little exclusivity window. We don't know how long it's going to, last Cause no one said. But right now it's all Snapdragon stuff. I don't know, I guess, if you're the.

52:39
The other issue with the app compat stuff is you know, if you're an Apple and Apple switches to Apple Silicon and you buy, like the first gen MacBook Air, you know, the first couple of weeks, first couple of months, whatever it is, you're going to be doing a lot of emulation, right? You're going to be running Intel based Mac apps in Rosetta 2 and you know, whatever that experience is, it's probably pretty good, but not great. But over time and probably not a lot of time, because Apple developers seem to be pretty great at this Everything switches over to native ARM, like Apple Silicon. Right Today, I don't think any Mac user even thinks about running Intel apps.

53:13
You don't have to worry about this, right, right, yeah, in the Mac world I mean in the Apple world, no, I mean in a different world In the Windows world we have this deep legacy of Intel x86 dating back literally to the very beginning of Microsoft creating operating systems and the first PC, and we're never going to get rid of those apps. So it's absolutely key that if ARM is going to fly, it has to emulate those apps really really well meaning, reliably and with good performance. Those apps really really well meaning, reliably and with good performance. And I mean, you know, this is very good, it is very good, but we're never going to see every single app that every single one of us uses transition to ARM which is not.

53:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's just not our world and you're describing the 10x battle again right Like this. We want a safer computer, except that we need an app that won't comply, so we can't use a safer computer I mean.

54:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, there's. I'm not, I don't want to, I'm not going to go too far down this rabbit hole. But there is a whole discussion to be had about a couple of efforts microsoft has made to either remove or shield us from the complexities of this x86 windows architecture. Right, windows rt was one of them. They didn't go far enough. Windows, uh, 10x, like you said, is one of them, and the idea there was like look, look, these, you know 132 apps are dangerous. Right, I mean, they're powerful but they're dangerous. What if we could put them in, like sandbox them in a way where, you know again, ideally it's seamless. Users don't know what's happening, it just works, everything's fine. But you don't worry ever about downloading a malicious anything, because this thing sandbox, it can't hurt anything other than what's ever in its little container. And Windows 10 X, that container system, had performance and compatibility issues, you know, like everything else. So it didn't, it didn't fly.

55:06
There's stuff, by the way, in Windows today that kind of harkens to that and is a little bit like a, like a thin, kind of shadowy version of it, if you will. But you know, windows and ARM is just, it's Windows, right, it's just Windows. You know it's the same, it's the it's. It's not fair to say it's been recompiled for arm ship it. It's not that simple but, um, like any other os platform, hardware platform, port of windows, nt a lot of work. You know kernel level, driver level, whatever it might be, compatibility, performance. You know all the stuff we talked about, but it's this is the best performance. You know all the stuff we talked about, but it's this is the best they've ever done with that sort of thing. And I mean like broadly right, because even back in the day, power PC version of windows and T, certain things that did not work on that platform, right, I mean as far as like just raw performance and compatibility. I think I could. I could stick this laptop in front of my wife and she wouldn't even notice.

56:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, she wouldn't notice as long as I could stick this laptop in front of my wife and she wouldn't even notice. You know, she wouldn't notice anything as long as the apps she needed to use were on the list.

56:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I think they all are in her case, right, yeah, I mean, look, even in Windows, intel Windows. She'll come to me sometimes and be like, how come this doesn't work. I'm like, what do you think I wrote a book about?

56:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh right, yeah, yeah, uh so um no tech, no tech support. Excuses for you, yeah.

56:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, I it's. I don't want to qualify it, but I almost I have to. It's still not this little gotchas. You know you have to be educated.

56:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just wonder if you're going to be more comfortable over time, like another month from now.

56:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm actually for me, I am comfortable. I'm thinking more now. I'm just thinking more broadly for other people because I've gotten so much feedback from people or I've even seen I saw one review. It was like a guy from an Android website where he listed the apps and he's like, oh, none of these are native on ARM. And I'm like I've never even heard of these apps. What are you using? Like most people are going to use Word and Excel and Chrome. Uh, you know, like normal apps and those are all native on arm and they all work great. I have esoteric apps that I use, like weird apps. Like I use IA writer, for example, which is obviously never going to be ported to arm, but it runs great. Who cares?

57:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like it's fine, yeah, um you never mentioned the flip champ, because that seemed like one that would really take advantage of the web app.

57:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the container it's a web app. So it's a native ARM64 container of a web app, right, so it's, yeah, all the inbox. I've never seen an inbox app that is not. I'm sure there might be something somewhere, but I have not seen one. And you can go into task manager. There's a like a details view and you can see all the EXEs that are running at the time. And actually this might be fun to do. Maybe I could do this, you can sort of. You know, let me look. So there's something like I use the browser brave, right, so brave is a native arm 64 app, thank you Google. But there's something called brave crash handler. That's an X 86 app, that's a 32 bit app. Okay, right.

58:02
So Greenshot Notion, discord, grammarly, lenovo, vantage, interesting are all x64 apps. That's what's running right now. I mean, this is not a full view, but Microsoft Office, edge, the Adobe stuff always runs in the background because they're a giant virus. But the Photoshop stuff, all that's native ARM64, all the system, this is all system, it's a system stuff, it's all arm 64. Explorerexe, right, all this stuff is arm 64. Microsoft edge, like I said, the wedge of view and then.

58:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So one of the arguments now is this is the worst it's ever going to be. The list is only going to get better for this.

58:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I don't know if I can get a count, but I mean, looking at this and this just happens to be what's running right now. I mean, honestly, I would normally be running more stuff. I've kind of, you know, I turned off like Affinity Photo while I'm doing the podcast, because why? You know, why, wouldn't I? But this is, I would say it's almost three quarters of it is native. These are just processes, right? I mean, it's not apps. But the vast majority of what's running on this computer right now is, in fact, arm64 native, right?

59:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a very good place the first couple of weeks of it being available, which means a lot of people have done a lot of work.

59:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and better still, like I said, the x64 emulation stuff, awesome. Good. I've had in like the U series meter, like stuff is so garbage, like file copies actually take longer, like it's that terrible and I had more. I didn't bring it here because it was so bad, but I have a laptop at home waiting that was so horrible from a performance perspective, like this thing blows that out of the water and this thing is emulating stuff, you know like the other ones is running.

59:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The chipset would run emulation faster than native chipset. And I guess we're here, yep yep, yeah, so it's the best.

59:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, this is the best shape windows on arm has ever been in, by far. It's not even close. Okay, I wish I could end the sentence right there. You know there's always that, that, that, but second half of the sentence, uh, and for it but a little asterisk, you know, look, but again, I, I wouldn't foist it on a normal, mainstream, non-technical person, but anyone watching this or listening or whatever, I, yeah, you can. If you can't handle this, get off of my podcast. No, I mean, it should be fine for anyone who cares about this stuff.

01:00:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's very, very good. Got a text treat to them. Okay, I appreciate that. Do you want to talk about the iFix thing? Cause I read this separately and was surprised and impressed.

01:00:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't know if people remember when Surface Laptop first came out. It was most notable. Well, most notable because it was a MacBook Air but with a Microsoft logo on it, but was second most notable because it had an Alcantara cover on the wrist rest which was a Cheeto magnet If you've ever seen pictures of people grinding Cheetos into the not good. So you know Microsoft was like look, we're making a laptop, we have to differentiate it somehow. We can't just have one port. That can't be the only difference. Let's put some carpet on it for some reason. And to get to the battery, to repair that computer, you had to, with a razor blade, cut that Alcantara off of the top of the computer. It was the most unrepairable at the time device that I think iFixit had ever seen, or that Jerry Riggs everything, whatever it was around at the time. I don't remember. But someone was like this is literally the most unrepairable device ever, horrible.

01:01:40
So with the you know Microsoft has. Well, there's two sizes. First of all, there's a right to repair thing happening which is having great positive impacts across the industry. Right, apple today was talking this stuff up as if they were doing it out of the goodness of their heart, but they have to right. So all right. So these companies have to do this stuff, but they're also and this is true of Apple as well, but I think Microsoft most notably they're doing it right, you know. So not only are the new Surface devices the most repairable that Microsoft has ever made they got scores of eight out of 10 each right, as opposed to zero out of 10 for the first one. They're also well done on the inside, like they have these codes for each of the parts, and it points to something.

01:02:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You scan it and you go find, yeah, it's unbelievable, that's really smart, it's beautiful, like it's really well done.

01:02:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Microsoft is kind of making lemonade here in a sense, but I don't want to undercut how awesome what they've actually done. You know, forced to do, yes, but the end result for people who a want to upgrade components right, which even on these arm devices is possible to some degree just not RAM, you know or be literally have to get this thing repaired, repaired and maybe they're going to bring it to a professional. It wasn't really possible to repair those devices. They would just replace it with a refurbished unit, like that's how that would work. This is a, this is a sea change and it's wonderful. So if you're an Apple guy, by the way, apple's doing, you know similarly, and they had a big, they had a big announcement today about that. But yeah, I mean, big tech is great because they push and they fight and they scratch and they cry and then they promote it like it was their idea.

01:03:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I know it's ridiculous, it's funny. Yeah, they're like I'm not going to do that, and then suddenly they do it.

01:03:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it's like, look, look, what the wonderful, amazing thing we did. Hey, we just invented this idea. It's called right to repair, you're gonna love it. It's like, yeah, okay, well, is there an apple trademark on that? What's going on? Um, yeah, no, that stuff's awesome. Um, and then you know, semi-related to that, uh, if you, you know, if you care about the surface stuff, especially surface pro, you might have noticed there's a surface Flex keyboard cover they announced for the Surface Pro 11, you know, the ARM version, and it looks just like the normal Surface Pro keyboard with the well up there for the flat Surface Pen, but it has a battery built into it and you can pull it off of the tablet and use it as a Bluetooth keyboard, right With its own battery, right.

01:04:18
And so the way they solved this back in the day, there were a couple of ways. Microsoft at one time shipped I think it was for the first two gens like a type cover that had a battery built in which actually you couldn't disconnect it from the computer but it would augment the battery life of the computer. So it was like a pound heavier, whatever. And then they had like a barrel battery that you could attach to a surface uh type cover and then that would that added bluetooth and a battery so you could pull it off of the computer. But it was like a like a big barrel. So now it's just kind of thin and built in and it gives it gives a little bit of rigidity to the keyboard. So if you are worried about that, bump, bumpity, bump, whatever.

01:04:59
And then this past week they delivered firmware updates to Surface Pro. I think it was 8, 9, and 11. That doesn't sound right 10, sorry, 10, not 11. 10 being the one they released in March the AI PC, the Intel Meteor Lake version. What's missing from that list if you are a Surface guy you might have noticed is the Surface Pro X. We'll call it. This is one of the, I guess the previous generation. No, is that true?

01:05:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it was the previous generation of. It Was the previous gen Qualcomm based?

01:05:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think. Yeah, I wasn't sure if Surface Pro 9 came after I can't remember anymore, but it doesn't matter. Anyway, the Surface Pro X, for lack of a better name. I don't think we called it that at the time not supported. No one knows why, but maybe someday, I don't know.

01:05:51
Yeah, so I mentioned this ISO issue right, where we don't get a normal way to download Windows 11 on ARM ISOs for Microsoft, right. There are sites like UUP dump that you can get unofficial ISOs, but what you're not going to get at least not yet, although maybe someday are those like some kind of a download with all the SLMs on it, which would be kind of nice. I mean maybe the auto download or something. I have no idea. I might try this on my Surface laptop because I'll be able to get it back. But I'm kind of curious. You know, if you did like a base install of Windows 11 on ARM on a Copilot Plus PC and then tried to run one of those AI features I just mentioned without any SLMs on the disk, how would that work or would it work? I don't know, I guess we're going to find out. How would that work, or would it work? I don't know.

01:06:36
I guess we're going to find out Microsoft I'm not sure about this 100%, but it is either the only or one of the only PC makers shipping Copilot Plus PCs that has delivered recovery images, right, and so it's not quite an ISO but it's a way to blow it back to factory. You know first day condition, right, basically, what you would do with Reset or whatever, and I assume but I don't know first day condition, right, basically, what you would do with reset or whatever, and I assume, but I don't know. But I assume that includes those SLMs or whatever. So when I get home and I can finally test Surface Laptop, I will try to find out. But like I said, if you someday next week, tomorrow, whenever Microsoft's going to, maybe today right now during the show, microsoft will say, hey, we're testing, you know, recall on the Insider program. You're like, hey, I want to try this feature and you enroll, and you know you got to be careful because if you can't get your computer back, yikes, you might be stuck. You know, just be careful with that stuff.

01:07:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There'll be a solution. It just means you might have some time before you have a solution.

01:07:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, I had a. Because of all the ways that Microsoft screwed around with the Insider program, I have at home a. I want to say it's a Snapdragon 8X Gen 2, maybe based Windows and ARM PC, like you know, previous Gen, and the way the Insider program worked for many, many years was that you were testing some version of Windows and when that version shipped, you could check a box and say I want to go back to stable. When that version shipped, you could check a box and say I want to go back to stable when that version ships. Well, the problem was for a while there none of the channels were mapping to a version of windows, so you could never get out of the insider program, right? So I had to on that computer.

01:08:09
I eventually did get out and it was. I think it was either, I think it was because they opened a window, briefly remember to get out of the insider program certain channels, and I think that was. I think that's how I did it, but I was just paving the machine. Yeah, which, whatever it's better than you know, better than nothing, but you know it'd be better than everything and ISO. So you know, someday, um, I think we're going to get there. So we'll see. We'll see how Microsoft handles that Um, but right now the only one.

01:08:43 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I know of maybe someone could tell me otherwise is the Surface devices. Are the only copilot PCs that I know of that have recovery images so far? Okay, forgive me if this has been mentioned on the show where you first talked about recall getting pushed back. Did they provide a date on when that's supposed to come? Did they provide a date on when that's supposed to come and if not, do you want to speculate on when you think it will launch?

01:09:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They didn't, but at least not a specific date. But they're going to test it in the insider program this year and then they said they would bring it to stable for lack of a better term and preview later this year. I take that to mean that between now and September, Octoberober, they're going to put it in the insider program and when the final version of 24 h2 for lack of a better term ships.

01:09:27
Yep, they'll ship it then and it will be in preview. It's still going to be in preview because that gives a little out. You know when people are like hey, we found this security problem, like yeah, it's a, it's a preview, why did you use it?

01:09:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's true.

01:09:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so yeah, that's my guess, but they didn't know, they've not said explicitly Right?

01:09:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, something that's kind of bugged me about the whole thing is I would maybe this is off base and you can explain why I thought it was arguably an unfair reaction from the public. This is why this is why, very specifically, why it was not yet out and it was something that was going to be coming later and to say, there's a crucial piece to this sentence and it requires very specific hardware components that nobody has.

01:10:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:10:23
So, which this moots the entire when you, you know, one of the big conversations we have in the security space is it's like the Steve Martin joke, like how to make a million dollars in real estate, First get two million dollars. So in security, it's like first get physical admin access to the computer. Step two you're like hold on a second. What are you talking about? Like what do you? What do you mean? Get physical admin access? Like if that's the first step, like we're doomed anyway. Right, yeah, I mean like that's every you know. So, yeah, the problem with the, uh, the security, there's a couple of problems actually. You know a lot of people. It's. You know, people feel very strongly about this and they feel very strongly about it in a way that contradicts the way that I feel about it. But one of the things I heard was like, well, this is how security works. You know, they pointed out security problems and then Microsoft made a change. You know it was a change for the good, it was good, they did this. I'm like, yeah, except that's not how security works. Microsoft has channels by which you inform them of security vulnerabilities and then they fix them, and then it goes public after it's fixed. See, the thing is this just happened Patch Tuesday, two weeks ago. Microsoft said nothing about it at the time, but there was a major Wi-Fi security vulnerability fix built into that. The security researchers have found it, contacted Microsoft through the proper channels. They identified the problem, said yep, it's in every single version of Windows ever made, fixed it, put it out in the world, waited until it was auto-installed on computers everywhere, and then came out and said hey, by the way, we fixed this problem. We didn't mention it that Tuesday, but that's what happened. We want to thank the people who did the right thing, which I thought, and they named them. They named them by name because those guys did the right thing. So, with recall to me, we've heard this phrase you do the wrong thing for the right reason or you do the right thing for the wrong reason. This was just the wrong thing for self promotional reasons. And they they created a scare that didn't need to happen. And the thing that here's that imagine recall just went out the way it went out. Imagine it did have all of the vulnerabilities they claimed it had. Like. Imagine everything they said was true. It was in preview on a set of PCs that are going to be used by single digit thousands of people. And the worst case scenario is it's in preview. We will fix it before it is not in preview. Now, to me, the central mistake that Microsoft made was just not testing it before they put it out. Yeah, should have tested it.

01:12:59
So you look at people like they try to pry apart this Microsoft announcement and say, well, look, they said this, they made this concession to these guys. And I'm like, did they? You know, there are things like um, one of the claims that Microsoft made was that, as an admin on a PC, if there's another user using Copilot, that you would not be able to access that set of snapshots. The security guys were like, oh, but we can access them. It's in plain text Like, yeah, you don't have a Copilot plus PC. Like, it's not that you don't have the same security controls.

01:13:31
So Microsoft comes out a couple of weeks later like we're going to add per user they didn't write it that way yeah, well, we're going to have per user encryption. Right, that's a feature of Windows that already exists. This is not new. When Microsoft says vaguely that the way we're going to do this is no admin can access these files. What they mean is we're going to implement per user encryption. That's how that works. That's how we prevent it. Right, the thing they added was there's a feature we're going to talk about called windows Hello enhanced sign in security. Ooh, that's and it? Yeah, um, they this is the thing they said we're going to require, every time you, as a user, accesses your snapshots, for you to authenticate over windows Hello ESS. So people like, see, they weren't going to do ESS. So people are like, see, they weren't going to do that before. And I'm like, see, here's the thing, that's how Windows Hello ESS works. So I'm not actually 100% sure that that's even new.

01:14:29
I feel like they said a lot of stuff. It looked like they were answering complaints, but it was all stuff they were going to do anyway. And then they said, oh, we're going to test it, Like stuff they were going to do anyway. And then they said, oh, we're going to test it, like okay, and I think that's the only change they made. But even that isn't much of a change, because they're testing it with the insider program and that's like not testing it. So I don't know what the it's not clear what they actually changed. Look, it's doesn't matter where you're following. This. You could disagree with me completely. I know some people do. It's okay. The net result is the same we're all going to get what we wanted. Well, we're not getting recalls never coming to Windows 11. If that's what you wanted, you guys are out there. I know that too.

01:15:08
But Windows, actually, I should say I forgot. I forgot one of the big changes. One of the big changes they did made was on the day of the launch. They referred to it as an opt-in feature, but it was actually an opt-out feature, and what that means is that when you set up your new computer, it was a screen that should have said well, you have this awesome feature, it does this, do you want it? Yes or no? And that was not there. There was a screen that says we have this awesome feature and it's enabled, and if you want to disable it, right, that's horrible. Yeah, and so that change was made. So that's a good change.

01:15:42
But anyway, like I said, it doesn't matter who agrees, disagrees, whatever. I know there's all kinds of opinions on this stuff. The important thing is now they are doing the right thing right. And the one thing I did say before they delayed it was look, this thing will come out in the world and then we'll know it's microsoft, right, is this going to be flawless, super secure and private software? No, it's microsoft. Like we can't trust those guys. But you know, but we have to look at it on the real computer. Um, which brings me to that windows hello ess thing, because this is actually very important, and I was surprised to discover that that Meteor Lake laptop that I was referring to earlier has this feature enabled.

01:16:27
And this is the trick Windows Hello ESS uses something called virtualization-based security, which uses the hypervisor in modern CPUs that we all pretty much run, which uses the hypervisor in modern CPUs that we all pretty much run, and a laundry list of incredible secure components that I'll kind of get to. I can't claim to understand all of it. You can't, as a person or a company, enable this feature on computers. It has to ship from the factory. Every single component has to be secured and certified, secured and checked by Microsoft, and has to have a special code to ensure that it has never been changed. There's a whole set of security controls in this that boggle the mind. If it doesn't come from the factory like that, you cannot use it If you, as a user, attach an external camera or fingerprint reader, it turns off. You can't have both. It will not allow insecure Windows Hello components to be attached to the system later. You can't, you just can't do it. And it's an incredible list of things.

01:17:33
And I'm going to paraphrase a bunch of this because, seriously, geez, that's crazy. But modern 64-bit microprocessors with support for hardware-based hypervisor virtualization capabilities, with support for hyper virtualization extensions and SLA, second level address translation, secure boot enabled Trusted platform module 2.0 or Pluton Firmware for the Windows security mitigation table specification, specification that supports public. It goes on and on. It's crazy. Every single IO device has to be protected by some form of a physical memory management unit. That again has to be secured at the factory and sealed and can never be touched. If anything in there is violated, this thing stops working. It will not do its thing. It's over. It is you could. I don't know how many dma capable io devices are in a typical pc, but if it's 27 and you had, 26 of them met this spec and one did not.

01:18:27
This is not a windows hello ess compatible system. That's how. It's super stringent and it is um. This is only one of the things that is unique to co-pilot compared to normal off-the-shelf Best Buy PCs, and the reason is this will be what Windows Hello is in the future. There's no doubt about it, but it's not what it is now. This is a level above. It's additional biometric security because it's known to be secure from when it's off to when it's booting to when it's running, like it's secure the whole time. There's no. It resists attack attacks offline, online, it doesn't matter.

01:19:07
And um, it's 100 passwordless, like one of the options you don't get, like in windows 11 today. You can check a box, you can sign out, sign in with your microsoft account and you, instead of using windows Hello, pin or Biometric, you could use a password. You cannot do that on these computers. It will not let you use a password. Passwords are the most easily guessed or whatever insecure part of the security chain. They're not going to let you use one. You can't.

01:19:33
So there's all this stuff and this all plays into that whole. Yeah, yeah, but I found this thing and it wasn't. You know, it was in plain text. It's like no, no, it wasn't, it was in plain text on the computer you hacked into. Like it's not. It's not the same thing.

01:19:48
Um, in windows hello, there is a. There are settings for, like, how often you have to authenticate again. In windows, hello ass, there is no option. You authenticate every single time you do anything. That's the rule. So, and that's why they all have cameras, by the way, and not fingerprint readers, even though some have fingerprint readers too, because they want this thing to be seamless. So when you access a your recall, uh, snapshot database in the future, it's going to go oh it's you, it's going to make boop boop, oh it's you, it's going to make sure every single time Can't change it. That's the way it's set up. So you know, look, did those guys make a point? Not that I can see, but you know again, opinions vary and Windows Hello ESS is a great example. It's incredible.

01:20:39
The requirements for this are off the charts. It's. Remember, richard, remember this there was a really secure version of Windows Server that was called something like not Data Protection, server Data, it was just Data Center. And you know they lower yeah, and Data Center. In the beginning you could not just put it in your environment you had. That was one of the early versions of. I don't think Microsoft did it back then. But they had partners they worked with where their environments were known to be physically and otherwise secure, and that was where that data center server had to be. They wouldn't let you put it in your environment because we can't certify that your environment is safe. Right, right, and this is kind of like a I don't know if it's a logical successor or whatever, but it's a kind of like a client, a future client security solution of kind of a similar type. It's very interesting. You should look this stuff up. There's a bunch of documentation for windows, hello, ess and virtualization based security and blah, blah, blah. Whatever the whole thing it's it's that. Look at the requirements. You gotta, you're not.

01:21:45
You thought having a tpm 2.0 was a problem. Windows 11 I gota news flash for you. It was like. You know, that's like, like. It's like putting a plastic fence around a child. It's nothing like it's. You know this is a. This is really's nothing like it's. You know this is a, this is really, it's serious and that's you know. That's one of the problems I had with that recall stuff. The other one was just the self-promotional aspect. It was suddenly. It was like these juicy quotes in BBC and CNN and it's like guys, there are 1.5 billion windows users in the world. You're talking about a feature that's in preview. That affects zero of them, right? You know? Like, what do we? What do we make? This is what we're making a big deal on. I mean, you know, there are real problems, right?

01:22:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
anyway, this is my bigger one for you.

01:22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yep, so that impact more people.

01:22:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
yeah, um, it looks like you have a little section there at the end, um, of the co-pilot plus portion. Yeah, uh, well, it's a call to questions. Is that something you still want to do?

01:22:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So the reason I have this is you know one of as I uh I said this earlier on I was talking about you know the uh, the patch Tuesday or the, I guess, the week D updates and how confusing it is 22, 23, h4, 24, h4, you know all that stuff and it's like what's going on here and how do these things all meet and match? And it's very clear to me when I get feedback from readers in particular, I can't even imagine what this sounds like to someone listening to this thing. Their head must be spinning, but people don't understand what co-pilot plus PC is in the scheme of things. So I wrote this really long article that I'm going to try to condense down to a couple of minutes, hopefully or less, just to kind of put things in perspective, like where we are with Windows and what all this stuff means.

01:23:29
So we have Windows 11 as the current mainstream supported version of Windows. I know there's a Windows 10, but basically Windows 10 almost works exactly the same way. We have home and pro SKUs for consumers right, I know there are other SKUs for other customer types. Let's just stick to the basics here. You know Microsoft creates these lists of features for both. Pro is mostly a super set of home. You get a couple of additional features in pro, right? It's been like that for a long time. It's been like that since NT. You know the original NT was workstation and server. The original XP, which was the first version to bring NT mainstream, was Home and Pro, just like we have today. We went off the charts in between then and now, but let's not worry about that today. Home and Pro.

01:24:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Ultimate editions.

01:24:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, still waiting for those extras. What's going on there? So with Windows 11, one of the big changes is that the OS is only 64-bit right. Windows 10 was 32 and 64-bit and that supported upgrades from older versions of Windows that were 32-bit right, but now we don't do that, so it's 64-bit.

01:24:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It can run 32-bit. A 32-bit OS would only run 4 gigs of RAM and nobody wants to do that anymore, so it's all run in 64-bits.

01:24:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, now, 64-bit doesn't mean it can't run 32-bit apps or even older apps, but it does, right? So we have emulation, or yeah, I guess emulation, we'll call it emulation. It runs all the apps, so you don't have to worry about that stuff. Aside from the product versions, the product SKUs, product additions, whatever, obviously some features in Windows require specific hardware. So, even though Windows 11 Home may support Windows Low Facial Recognition, it's not an obvious example. If you don't have a camera that supports this, like from a hardware perspective, you don't get that feature right. That's pretty basic right, and that's true. It doesn't matter Home or Pro, right it's. You know, that's pretty basic right, and that's true. It doesn't matter home or pro, right? That's the same everywhere. That makes sense.

01:25:22
Windows 11 on ARM is just Windows 11, but running on the ARM platform, right, just like Windows on ARM. Windows 11, I'm sorry, just like Windows 11 for X64, the 64-bit version, home and pro editions, 64-bit only and, yes, can run 32-bit apps, right, but the native apps that run on Windows 11 on ARM are 64-bit ARM apps. It runs everything else in emulation. Some features require specific hardware. I mean, like you know, obvious. So the only material difference there are actually little tiny things here and there, but the only material difference between Windows 11 and Windows 11 on ARM is just the hardware type that it runs on right, hopefully to the user, you won't even notice that when you go to run a NET application, it just runs.

01:26:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the common language.

01:26:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I'm glad you brought that up. I have a NET question I'm going to pose you at the end of this because I actually ran into this. Copilot plus PC is just a specification, right? It's like when you have an Intel Evo computer today, or an Intel Ultrabook computer back in the day, or an always connected PC which no one ever bought, you would get like a sticker and it's like look, I have this special kind of computer. You would get like a sticker and it's like look, I have this special kind of computer. So it is just a specification and it has requirements, right to. To get that sticker, to get that acknowledgement, that specification, whatever, you have to have an mpu that can do 45 tops of ai accelerated performance, right, whatever that means, um, but you also have to have a minimum of 16 gigabytes of ram, 256, 256 gigabytes of SSD storage. It can't be hard drive or another form of storage, it has to be SSD.

01:27:03
And if you meet those requirements as a PC maker, you can market this thing as a co-pilot plus PC. You can today, base it on Windows 11, home or Pro, windows 11 on ARM, home or Pro, although there's this window right now where all the machines are just ARM, right. You get certain additional NPU-based AI-accelerated features that I talked about earlier in the show that are not available to anyone else running Windows 10, home or Pro or Windows I'm sorry, 11, home or Pro, or Windows 11 on ARM, home or Pro, right. They're just these additional sort of like media center used to be like that kind of thing back in the day tablet, pc edition, right but you could get a like today, for example, you could be like this, in fact, look, I don't even know, this Lenovo is probably home edition, I would think. Yep, windows 11 Home, Windows 11 on ARM Home. I think the Surface devices are as well, but HP is selling a corporate and a consumer laptop based on this chipset and I bet the corporate one is pro and the consumer one is home, right, all right. So I think co-pilot is one of the big confusions, because it's something right now. It's going to be something more as AMD and Intel step up with better chips. Pc makers release those chips. We don't know the schedule they never said but this fall or maybe early next year we'll be able to call PCs not based on Snapdragon Copilot plus PCs. So we'll see.

01:28:32
The other confusion is that thing I mentioned up front, we've got these three supported versions of Windows 11, 22, 23, and 24H2. All of the same features, or will soon. In October, 22h2 is going away and 24H2 will be like the new version going forward. They will all have the same features, if not immediately, then they will over time. But co-pilot plus PCs all run today on 24H2 on top of, you know, windows 11 or ARM Home or Pro, right? So I hope no one has questions because, dear God, but it's. You know, this is our complex world. I'll just compare this briefly to what it's like on the Mac. If you're running the Mac, you have Mac OS. All right, any questions? Anybody? Yep, that's what it's like. It's a little different, yeah. It's just a little bit.

01:29:31
I'm so sorry, guys. This is our world. What can I do?

01:29:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's still the first week. It's only going to get weirder.

01:29:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep world, what can I do? And it's still the first week. It's only gonna get weirder. Yep, it's, that's the duty of it. You know, spin the wheel, man. Next week's gonna be different. I wish I could love it. I mean, I just kind of tolerate it, frankly, but it's uh. Yeah, we have a. This is a crazy world that we live in all right up.

01:29:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Next, we're going to talk about one of the best, most favorite subjects of Microsoft antitrust. Yes, it's antitrust coming up on Windows Weekly. All righty, it's time to talk about Microsoft's favorite topic. Not something that makes any of their palms sweat, not even the slightest, paul and Richard. What's going on in the world of antitrust? Sure, yeah, we'll go with that. I was Brad.

01:30:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Smith, brad Smith being their chief legal counsel, right, and somebody said to me Brad, come on, man, you guys you had all these antitrust problems, like 20 years ago. What's happening? I would say, bob, it's like riding a bike, you know, it's like you just never really lose the skill. Um, so the thing that's interesting this case is actually very interesting and not maybe not for the obvious reasons. Um, brad smith, that guy I just referenced, was brought in to put an end to microsoft's antitrust problems in the early 2000s and I wish I could. Um, yeah, I think I'm getting this right, but his first meeting with the senior leadership team at Microsoft, he had a one slide PowerPoint deck with one word on it. It said settle, settle, yeah, settle. And they're like what are you talking about? What are you? You guys are just bitching and monolith, let's fix it. You know like, just do what they want, it's not going to hurt you. You know so belligerent. So, microsoft, you know they, you got a pretty good outcome, honestly, out of both of those big cases US and EU, the big. Well, no, I mean, there was other stuff. But you know, from a user's perspective, we got the default apps interface right. We could choose a different browser. So nothing serious. I mean, they could have ended this stuff so much sooner than they did.

01:31:45
But I would say that Brad Smith's tenure has been defined by his willingness to work with regulators and be a friendly party and do the right thing and try to meet them halfway. The best example of that is what happened with the Xbox acquisition of Activision Blizzard right, lots of pushback on that, as there should be. It's a humongous purchase and they bent over backwards, proactively partnering with companies we had never heard of to bring Xbox games to game streaming services in Europe and whatever. It took like a year and a half, I think, or 15 months or whatever it was, but they got it done and that's been Brad Smith's Microsoft, if you will, from kind of a legal regulatory perspective. So this thing, here's the thing there are a lot of regulators going after big tech today US, eu, obviously UK, all over the world. The big news, well, I mean, actually the DOJ did sue Apple in the United States, but in Europe, most of this stuff from the EU has been, with regards to the Digital Markets Act, that it has established what I think of as a more modern take on antitrust.

01:32:59
Frankly, that a lot of people, when they hear the word monopoly or monopolist, get off on some weird tangent. We're like they don't have 90 market share and it's like, yeah, that's not the definition. But you know, people have this idea that that's what monopoly is they? It throws up a block. So from the eu's perspective, they came up with this kind of legal definition of gatekeepers were like, look, we're talking about audience size in billions and revenue churn in whatever time frame and companies that meet those bars have to behave as monopolists do in the United States, which is by a different set of rules. Right, it's really just that simple. But I think you know we can argue about the details whatever.

01:33:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I think the idea behind the DNA Because the US is still hung up on the Sherman Act which is really about measuring harm to consumers, which now you get into the whole game of what Google did by selling people's information to advertisers, which nominally wasn't harm to consumers, so they're not allowed.

01:34:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we've known for I don't know a couple of years that the EU was looking into that upset about. You know, microsoft bundling teams into Office.

01:34:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm going to call it Office, right? I just want to make it simple. I think they have a complaint from Slack, right? Isn't that the driver for this? Yep, yeah, we're going to get to that this is a big.

01:34:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this is an important point. The EU typically doesn't investigate companies on their own. They're prodded by companies like Epic and Slack and Spotify who feel that they've been abused by some dominant party and they investigate. And I would say a lot of examples of you being like eh, you're kind of just, you know, complaining about nothing, right? But Microsoft has some DMA concerns. They do have a couple of gateway products like Windows.

01:34:49
Obviously, this Microsoft Office slash Teams bundling problem, which is very reminiscent of Windows bundling Right, it's not a DMA concern. Oddly enough, this is a traditional Sherman-style antitrust. But in the EU complaint, yep, this is just straight-up product bundling, right, it's the classic. It's literally like the oldest playbook in the book, oldest play in the playbook, I guess, aside from that. So that's different. So, in other words, we've got Apple kind of behaving belligerently, not really complying with the DMA. You can tell they don't like it pretending they're meeting the letter of the law. They're not. You know whatever. Microsoft's not doing the same thing. This is remember. Brad Smith is still running the communication channel here.

01:35:34
They have worked proactively with the EU to solve this. They have in fact made real world product changes in Europe. They have unbundled teams from office. I'm going to keep calling it office again just to make it simple to meet the needs of the EU regulators. They are charging less for office now and the EU after I think that was a year ago was like yeah, it's not enough, we're going to charge you with preliminary charges. You're violating our version of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Okay, so when you look at Monday, the EC, the European Commission, came out and said we are issuing a similar preliminary judgment against Apple. They are violating their requirements under the DMA. Here's how Bop, bop, bop, bop and in those four points that they made is the answer to the problem. If Apple just does the things they need to do, you will be fine, and Apple's like it doesn't want to do it. In Microsoft's case, they said they acknowledge we've been going back and forth with these guys for over a year.

01:36:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:36:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nope, we don't like it. And they don't say what Microsoft should do to fix the problem. It's the thing that's missing from the complaint, like yes, we get it, office is dominant. They made teams more popular. They accelerated the adoption of teams by making it free not really free, right, because it's part of office, but they they added it to office for no additional cost, which disadvantages slack. So here's the problem I had with this. Slack was started in 2013.

01:37:17
Slack issued this complaint while they were still in an independent company. Slack like Netscape, by the way, remember the IE Windows bundling thing from before was since bought by a much bigger tech company that has the financial resources to fight Microsoft kind of undercutting the complaint a little bit right. The other thing is two things about teams. This is important. Teams is a much more than Slack, meaning from a functional perspective, it's an actual platform with an apps platform in store, and it does way more than chat based collaboration. It's fair to say that when teams 1.0 shipped and whatever year that was, uh, that it was very much inspired by Slack, I think would be fair to say. But Teams is also the logical successor to a line of products and services that started in 2007, with Office Communicator and then Link, and then Skype for Business communicator, and then link, and then Skype for business, two of the three of which existed years before Slack was ever even a company, right? So, yes, I the thing I compare it to was like um, I played Call of Duty forever, like for a long, long time. Call of Duty is a game, and I mean like online multiplayer. They have alists or different types of games you can play. You could play like a one-on-one match against someone. You could do like death match, where it's you know, a free-for-all team death match where there's two teams can't kill people in your own team, you kill the other team. That kind of thing carry. You know the flag games and all the different game types.

01:38:53
And then there was a, a weird year where this thing called PUBG became a big thing, briefly Actually helped Xbox sales for one holiday season and this is what we call a battle royale game. And then Fortnite came and blew it off the doors. Like, fortnite was originally a different kind of game. It was kind of like a maker type game. It was a builder's game. Yeah, a builder game. There you go and they turned it into a PUBG clone. And then Fortnite today is still like one of the biggest things in the world, and so my argument at the time was always well, battle Royale is just a game type, it's not a game, it's one of the games that Call of Duty could put in that playlist. And so a couple of years later, call of Duty pretty dominant game in the first-person shooter space released something called Warzone, and they didn't do it exactly the way I thought they would, meaning they didn't integrate it into their playlist. They released it as a standalone game. You get it free when you buy a call of duty, right, and I think you could just get it free actually, but it's it's free, and that was their counter to Fortnite. So in the world today, fortnite is still, I think, number one one in this space and Warzone has some audience, whatever. They didn't destroy Fortnite, but it's this sort of thing Like we've had this gaming franchise that's been around for 25 years.

01:40:08
This new competitor came along and they offered this one thing that was a little different, and that thing was you get killed once and you're out. It's kind of stupid, like. As someone who loves these kind of games, I've never understood the appeal of this, but I guess we parachute in or glide in or whatever the thing is, and we land on this island and something constricts and you get shot once and you're dead. Call of Duty Activision looked at that and said we can do that, and they did. Do we sue Call of Duty for that? Is it proper for this company to meet competition, right? I mean, don't they have some right to compete, right? Maybe Monopolist gatekeepers, you know, again, they play by different rules, so that has to factor into it.

01:40:49
But you know, microsoft has had the ability to use a software program that comes with Office to make calls over the internet voice calls, video calls, have text chats. Microsoft, because it's Microsoft, a lot of the foundation for this stuff was not in that app. It was in, well, onedrive or SharePoint, right, basically SharePoint. And now they have this thing called Teams, which, by the way, the foundation of is what Richard Skype? Well, I was going to say the storage foundation is SharePoint, right, it's a front-end, it's still.

01:41:24
SharePoint. Yeah, the front-end stuff is Skype, back-end stuff is SharePoint. It is literally exactly the same thing as Office Communicator Link and Skype for Business. You know they're pushing a chat-based collaboration model for business. You know they're pushing a chat based collaboration model. Microsoft, which you know. Did Slack invent that or innovate with that? I don't know, maybe. But Microsoft is smart strategically because they know their customer base to say look, we're not going to force everyone down this path. We know there are a lot of 55 year old guys and businesses that are not going to be interested in this and so they allow people to work where they want to work through outlook In many cases.

01:42:00
That's kind of the old school take on this for collaboration, right, we're going to pass around files and the backend will be a little more sophisticated. We're not just emailing them really, we're actually accessing files on the server. Whatever. I don't know. I don't know what to say to this. First, I don't know. I don't know what to say to this. First of all, the EU has never said what Microsoft could do to fix this problem. Is it to look at the price of Slack, which is arbitrary, and say we'll reduce the price of office by that amount we're going to let Slack determine the price of office, like that doesn't make any sense.

01:42:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft has had this product for many years more Like yeah, the other piece of this was that there was a moment where it looked like Microsoft was going to buy Slack and then it went south, or really they decided, no, we'll invest in what was in the Skype platform to become.

01:42:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Teams, and it was Gates, right, who was like guys, we have all this stuff in-house, why?

01:42:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
are we spending?

01:42:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
money on them.

01:42:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Well, plus, the relationship with Skype was important because it was they had bought Skype. They thought that's right. Why did we?

01:43:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
pay for this For seven billion something, I think Eight billion dollars.

01:43:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, which is about what they were talking about for Slack as well.

01:43:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. Look, big companies often buy other companies to either acquire their technology which I think in this case Microsoft didn't need or to remove a competitor, which you know, if you're big enough, is illegal for sure. But look, microsoft talked to Netscape about buying them too, you know, and eventually it was kind of the same thing. They didn't have the technology in-house but they knew they could license it from some other company which they did with Spyglass to get the same basic technology which was from Mosaic, and off they went.

01:43:46
And the thing about IE, which is the same as with Teams, is, yes, the first version was terrible, it got better and then it became better than that other thing that we're so worried about all of a sudden. It's not just that Microsoft is leveraging the dominance they have with Office. They actually made the better product, and that has to factor into this right, because if this was just about destroying a competitor, they would just do what that competitor did and call it a day. But they actually made something really good. Windows Teams, rather, was not always even slightly good, but today is in fact really good.

01:44:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Right, and that is the whole argument behind competition in the first place is that if there's competition, then you can make something better. So they made something better. So what's the problem?

01:44:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. Eu is like I do in the US.

01:44:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, that's true, that's true.

01:44:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I will. But US antitrust law. The problem is, once you are determined to have a monopoly, or thus a monopolist, whatever you have a different set of rules to play by, the things that are legal when you're a small company. Some of the things are no longer legal right, so product bundling is a good example. Some of the things are no longer legal right, so product bundling is a good example. Like you know, when Netscape and you know bundled email and web browsers together and charge for it like it doesn't matter, you're tiny. But when Microsoft, this dominant company in Windows and Office at the time, just puts the browser into Windows and makes it free and just gives it to everybody, I mean, you know, I, there are valid we're not talking about bundling it into office, even it's m365.

01:45:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just trying to make it simple, sorry I know it is. It's a subscription, yeah yeah, and I think that's part of the problem is like why aren't you mad about planner or forms or the other products that are inside and by the way, like what?

01:45:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what message are you saying? Like, microsoft has this technology called Loop. That has never really taken off, but it is incredible technical idea. If successful, we'll replace things like OneNote and Word and all kinds of other things. And it will be this it will be something that is integrated into everything. It will be a standalone app. It will be it's like the it's it's. It will be everything. It's amazing, everything. It will be a standalone app. It will be it's like the it's it's. It will be everything. It's amazing. Now it hasn't taken off, but I mean, you've just sent them like.

01:46:04
People are going to be like well, what about notion? Like, I mean, it looks a lot like notion. It does look a lot like notion. In fact, get to add do we just like at what point? Like, how do we know we're okay to do things right in this case? They've had this for years, longer than slack even existed. This should have been thrown out. I, in my opinion, but and and anyway I.

01:46:29
Monday came, the eu said look, apple, this is what you have to do. Clear cut, it's super clear cut. Tuesday came they're like Microsoft too sad. And it's like wait what? I? When I saw the story. I'm like I can't wait to see what Microsoft didn't do to meet their needs. Isn't this your favorite regulator lady? I love her, yeah, but in this case she's let me down, right. I mean, every people always do. That's the problem. So the um right, you, you, you have to be specific about the problem.

01:47:06
My understanding based on leaks, and you know, and when I say leaks and rumors, I don't mean like bob's web blog, I mean like uh, financial times bloomberg. You know microsoft has worked with the regulators and said all right, we're going to take the unprecedented step of stripping this thing out of there. We're going to lower the price of Office. You know, really, microsoft 365. If you don't use Teams, we're going to lower your price. We're going to earn less money. And they're like yeah, it's not enough.

01:47:35
So let's say the average price of a Slack per user per month. It's hard to calculate, but let's say it's 10 bucks and the average price for uh, or the average uh, the, the, the amount that Microsoft took off of office. You know, microsoft 365 was five, um, $5. The. I could think what the EU was saying is like no, you got to make it 10 bucks less.

01:47:54
It's like guys like, come on, you're just like how do you, how do you determine the value of an individual component of a? It's not even a suite, it's a, a set of products and services that runs on desktop, web, mobile, in the cloud. Like how on earth could you possibly assign a per user per month value that makes any sense and in any way makes Slack whole? Because, honestly, the only real answer here, if you really care about Slack for some reason, is Microsoft has to contort Office Microsoft 365, in such a way that everything is pluggable and you as an enterprise could add Slack to your environment with identical features to teams, and it would work just as well, even though two different companies make those products. And that is not reality.

01:48:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know why they're not complaining about the Google Docs set. You know that's got its collaboration tools too. Like I said, I woke up Tuesday.

01:48:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I saw this had happened. That's got its collaboration tools too. Like I said, I woke up Tuesday I saw this had happened. I'm like this is going to be fantastic, because I read this thing yesterday. They did it for Apple. It's beautiful, straightforward, logical, made sense. It was obviously true. Can't wait to see what they say, because I've been waiting for this for a year. Right, we never really knew for sure, we still don't. The thing they said it's got nothing. You read it for yourself. I'd give anything for somebody like oh, you missed a sentence. I I don't. There's nothing in there that says microsoft comma. Do this and you're okay, right, what do they? It's like uh, what do you want to go have for dinner? I don't know. What do you think like pizza? No, I don't want pizza. Well, what do you want? I don't keep. What do you think Like pizza? No, I don't want pizza. Well, what do?

01:49:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
you want. I don't know. Give me ideas. You hit on something I like, what is?

01:49:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that? What kind of person does that? Oh, I hate that. I do that all the time. Actually, that's a terrible thing to do to somebody. It's not Right. Yeah, I mean, look his office. Or Microsoft 360.

01:49:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think Brad Smith, brad's response to be amazing, right, like that's. What I'm waiting for now is what does Brad say back? It's going to be great.

01:50:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Part of it is you have given us zero guidance. Yeah, yeah. Because those conversations which were private are now going to be out in the public. Yeah, I can't wait to find out. Cannot wait Something? Yep, I thought it was going to be. I thought Tuesday was the day.

01:50:18
No it was not All right. Also, I hate Slack. I use Slack. I use Slack every single day now. Um, I don't use teams as much as I used to actually miss it, and their pricing model is um, I think it's based on like a 1670 spell from three witches or something.

01:50:40
It doesn't make any sense. I don't know. I don't know what this company is. I don't get it. I don't know. Somebody can I? Somebody messaged me on Slack and I got a bill. I don't know. I don't even know what. I don't know how this business may even make sense. I don't know. That'll be 45 cents. Yeah, what the hell? What's? What is this? No, no, it's not that I know they have. They have long-term commitments. It's like somebody messaged you. I mean I guess you're praying for them for the rest of the year. You're like what are you talking about? They don't work for me. I, yeah, oh, years. You know, yeah, here's a, here's a slack gift card that that business is a scam. But that's beside the point. I, whatever slack is, whatever it is. But honestly, I, like I said logically, if you look at this complaint, I don't. I just don't understand what you're asking us to do here so you're gonna nail your 95 theses to Salesforce Tower about.

01:51:37
Slack. Yes, I'm going to slide in the front door. Yeah exactly.

01:51:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I think it's time to turn the corner, because it's time for Xbox Corner. Yay, xbox, tell us what's going on in the world of gaming, because apparently it's not happening. On the new Covalent Plus PCs from Microsoft, well, part of it anyway, yeah.

01:52:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, don't run the Xbox app unless you like to cry. There's not too much Xbox specific. I think it might have been two weeks ago now, but like 10 days ago Microsoft had an Xbox game showcase which, I have to say, for the first time in 10 years or more, it was fantastic. A bunch of great games coming to the Xbox ecosystem right, not just the console Over the next six to eight months, whatever Makes sense. I mean, they own Activision, blizzard now. So, yeah, they have a better story than, say, they did a year ago. That's not surprising. But there are video game.

01:52:44
Even though E3 has kind of come and gone, there are actually video game shows, virtual and otherwise, that occur throughout the year. And the biggest my understanding I could be wrong, but I think the biggest in-person conference in Europe now is something called gamescom, and microsoft will be there in person this year, physically, I mean, not just virtually. Uh, they'll be the only video game console maker to be there, which is kind of interesting because we've seen all those guys scaling back from these events and they're promising the biggest. It's I love what they said the not the biggest games con presence ever, or the biggest games con announcements ever, the biggest booth ever. Just, I don't know if they mean like I got a big booth right, it's gonna be the titanic of booths, that's gonna be good, it's unsinkable. Um. So when is the conference? Yeah, it's in august in cologne. Uh, c August in Cologne, germany. Yeah, late August.

01:53:45
Which by the way is a colagne and cheese sandwich that's pushing right up against IFA, by the way, which is in the very first week of September, like September 2 or 3, somewhere right in there, and that's in Berlin. So a couple of big events happening in Germany at the end of the summer there. Pretty cool. That's about it. For Xbox specific I mentioned, I think I must have automatic super resolution AutoSR. Microsoft is starting to detail some of these features is a neat blog post they put up about how auto SR and prism the X 64 emulator, windows and arm now make gaming not just possible but actually pretty decent if you can get it going right. You know they're certifying games, microsoft and Qualcomm, so they're actually working with game publishers to help them in some ways, you know, make these games work better on arm where possible. Auto SR is kind of nice because it actually prism same thing. So these two technologies work automatically, which is kind of what you want. But the idea there again is that you have a lower resolution literally to the game, but visually to you it looks like it's 1080p and because it's lower resolution, it's running at a higher frame rate. So the net effect is quite good. Um, I actually set doom 2016 to run. Actually, I think it's 1080p, but it's like native resolution, but it's also using auto sr, so it's 4k. No, that's not how that works, um, but it gives you native resolution. But it's also using auto SR, so it's 4k. No, that's not how that works, um, but it gives you a better frame rates. It says it's good, um, and then, uh, if you're into steam deck I wish there was more going on in this space a little bit but, um, they're just having a sale right now on the LCD models, they as well, but the 64 gigabyte lcd model now starts at 297.

01:55:39
So, on three device, this is like console territory, right, and that's kind of. That's interesting. Uh, you would need more storage than that, frankly, but, um, I don't know if you saw what call of duty takes up now, but, uh, it's more than 64 gigs. I can tell you that, um, anyway, so they're having a sale. Also, this 512 gig model is, you know, like 75 bucks off. If you haven't taken that step and are interested, it's available. All right, I have never been more tired of the sound of my voice than I am today.

01:56:12 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I'm so sorry, everybody well, we are so sorry we're moving into the chips and picks of the week. So sorry, paul, but we will. We will take a moment because I do want to tell you all about club twit at twittv slash club twit. When you join the club for seven dollars a month, you gain access to some pretty awesome stuff. First and foremost, you gain access to some pretty awesome stuff. First and foremost, you gain access to every single one of our shows ad-free, because you, in effect, are supporting the show. So you will get your own special feeds to all of the shows and have access without any advertisements in between. On top of that, you will get the video versions of all of our Club Twit shows, so that includes naming just some of them Hands on Windows, hands on Mac, ios, today Untitled Linux Show. The video versions are available to you as members of Club Twit, while the audio alone is available to the public. You also get the twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes.

01:57:18
Before the show. After the show, special club to events get published there, and that means that when you sign up, you're immediately presented with a huge back catalog of great stuff to watch and listen to. And as if that weren't enough, you also get to join the club twit discord, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club members and also those of us here at twit, and we regularly are doing events there. I know that stacy's book club is coming up. I am doing a monthly hangout session where we all just bring different crafts. So we had some folks building Lego, we had some folks working on knitting, I was crocheting. It's just a fun time to kind of hang out together and work on whatever we're working on, maybe get an opportunity to show off what you've made. And I think we also had Joe Esposito who was there drawing stuff. So we had a great time.

01:58:09
Look forward to the episode in July. If that sounds good to you, I hope it does. Join us. Twittv slash club twit $7 a month. We'd love to see you in the club and we'd love it for you to have that warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that you're helping support what we do here at Twit. With that, I think it's time to head back into the show for the back of the book, as Leo calls it, with the tips and picks of the week.

01:58:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just add, because you mentioned hands-on windows, at least I'm recording some episodes tomorrow. I'm trying to figure out how to break this down still but at least one of them will do a little hands-on thing with the co-pilot plus PC so you can actually see that stuff. Cool, so that should be said. Awesome. I'm going to be quick here. Um, I have nothing but app picks, uh, so, uh, a lot of new browsers out. Um, there's a Mozilla Firefox thing happening where they're starting to put AI in the sidebar, but that's only in the nightly build, so we'll talk about that later. But, um, new, stable version of edge is going to add some AI features over time. Um, the only one that's available right now actually, are there any? I don't think. Oh, uh, if you use workspaces, uh, it will use AI to auto pre-populate workspaces with relevant sites specific to projects. But the other two features the theme generator that everyone's dying to see and the ability to have reading mode, create copilot-based summaries are rolling out gradually. So I've never seen either of those things, but they're coming. Vilvaldi 6.8 is out with a bunch of stuff, honestly, but major updates to their integrated mail application, which dramatically improved performance, among other things, mostly through prefetching, which seems a little cheap to me, but whatever, if you use that, that's fantastic.

02:00:06
And then Opera announced today that they're going to move on from Opera 1 to Opera 1 R2. They're adding a ton of new features, um ai stuff, like you would expect, but also a bunch of multimedia stuff. Um, you can test that stuff over the next few months in their developer channel and then it will just roll into stable over time. But, uh, some of these things that stick out to me are like features you might have seen elsewhere, like a split view for tabs, um, you know, pop-out view for media, etc. But there's some neat stuff there. The big one, though, on the ai side, is that they have something called aria, which is their in browser. Um ai, and they are going to give the ability to give users the ability to choose which llms this thing connects to to get its answers for uh questions, and also for summarizing content, writing and creating new content, translating documents, et cetera. So you'll have, if you use Opera, you'll have a choice of that stuff. I don't think any of it's there today, but if you sign up for the or if you just download the developer version, you'll get that stuff over time.

02:01:06
And then we mentioned in certification here a lot, and I've talked a lot about Proton over the past several months. They have a nice suite of services now that are privacy focused and not big tech, if that matters to you, which I think it does to a lot of people. So Proton Drive is their OneDrive slash, google Drive solution. You know, encrypted and it's everywhere, et cetera. They added the ability to backup Android based photos to the service, I think at the end of last year or at some point, but this past week they also added that capability to the iPhone.

02:01:41
So if you've been holding off on looking at that, now is the time and I might be missing something. But I think their storage tiers for individuals only go up to 512 gigabyte, which seems really small. I maybe I'm missing. So maybe you pay, maybe you can pay for five, 12, like twice and get a terabyte. I'm not really sure how it works, but they do have a free tier. You can just, you know, try it out and see what it's like. But I this is something I keep meaning to look at. More is not just proton drive. They have a password manager, they have VPN software, they have mail and calendar and all kinds of stuff. So if you're getting tired of big tech and in certification, definitely pay attention to Proton, and I am going to put some tea in my mouth.

02:02:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Do that? Do that, because it's time for Richard Campbell to tell us about what's going on with Run as Radio.

02:02:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This week's Run as Radio end of June, I brought back one of my favorites, lynn Langit, who's been doing machine learning since before.

02:02:35
It was cool and I asked her to you know, talk to me about the impacts of the sort of craze and machine learning happening right now.

02:02:44
And and it ended up in this conversation about ignoring the hard parts, which is really the testing. You know she goes through such rigorous testing, building up good machine learning models, and one of the reasons is she works in healthcare. So today they're doing multimodal data analytics, so taking, you know, the text analysis or the text summary of the patient maybe there's audio clips from a doctor, some radiology images, that kind of thing and actually now the software being able to say what's up with this patient and you really need to be right, like right is good when it comes to health care. And so you know this is extensive model of how you go through building machine learning model and then testing it effectively, of how you go through building machine learning model and then testing it effectively and the iterations go into that to really get to something that folks can trust, folks that can literally bet their lives on. So I felt like it was as is usual for Lynn.

02:03:44 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
She's very grounding and like look, it's not impossible, it's hard and you just have to follow these steps and be thorough and you'll get good results. Nice, I like that you know, especially, as you said, in this medical aspect. Yeah, you can't be wrong.

02:04:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She's the lady you want. Like she worked on the genomics data for the for the during the COVID pandemic. Like she, the stories I've gotten from her over the years are just astonishing. Like she, the stories I've gotten from her over the years are just astonishing, and they've always been dealing with data accuracy and cleanliness and precision in lots of different forms, and machine learning is just part of that for her.

02:04:24 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All right, and as we always do, we round out this episode of Windows Weekly with the liquor pick of the week. It's a brown liquor. Tell us all about it, Richard.

02:04:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you're a little bit of a disadvantage, mike, because you haven't been in all these shows, but I've been touring around. Obviously I've been traveling so often. I grab weird whiskeys wherever I am. Last week it was actually a German single malt. It's very good, and who knew it existed? And I've seen a few folks have gone out and found it and had a taste of it. And you're right, this is a good single malt from Germany. But I'm actually going back a bit A few weeks ago.

02:05:01
Two weeks ago, when I was in the Netherlands, I was able to get a taste of a bottle of a Ballendalic 2016 Benelux edition. Only sold in Belgium, netherlands 2016 Benelux edition only sold in Belgium, netherlands, luxembourg. It was sort of a specialty whiskey, and so I talked about this distillery called the Ballen Dallach, which is in the space side, and it's the. I'm looking at it as a real 21st century distillery. It's brand new. It's only been around a decade or so. They only work one shift, five or six people working there, no automation, like they're really getting back to local grain, local water, local processes. They don't make a lot of it. It's hard to come by, but next door to Ballen Dalek is Cragganmore and I haven't talked about it before. They're one of the what we call the classic malts. When United Distillers in the eighties, this promotion that kind of changed the tone of whiskey around the world and it became much more hip. It started with this collection that called the classic malts and Craig and Moore is one of them. It was their space side representative. And as I've dug deeply into the history of Craig and I real I suddenly had this connection where just down the road in ballandallock you had this very ultra contemporary, you know, last decade distillery.

02:06:19
Crag and more was built in the 1800s. But the guy who led it uh, he was known as his name was john smith. They called the big. John smith was the definitive expert in making whiskey in the late 1800s and what he was doing was industrializing whiskey. So this was the fellow that helped lead this idea of getting away from the traditional whiskey approach was I have a large barley farm and I can't sell all my barley, so I turn some of it into booze and sell it.

02:06:49
And now, as industrialization was taking a hold in the United Kingdom, they were able to start building whiskey at much larger scales. And Cragganmore was his demo. So John had worked for McAllen, he'd worked for Glenlivet, he'd worked on Glenfarkless, he'd been at Daluane. This is the expert. And now he had an opportunity from scratch to do a new distillery when he was going to use industrial approaches. And that's why he picked that location, uh, near valendelic, because it was on the straths bay railway. And so you know he had this mind. His point was I now have trains that will bring me coal and barrels and I will send out whiskey at scale, by the way, that train lines no longer doesn't exist anymore. They turned it into a walking path called the space side way. So it's cool. But this is really what this is about, this whole idea of a professional, serious distillery.

02:07:48
He actually leased the land from george mc Grant, that's the Ballandalloch folks, and they started. So they built the facility in 1867. And by 1887, they had their first run, and so the very, the 300 casts of Craig and Moore then went by train for the first time ever to Aberdeen from Ballandalloch they called it the Whiskey Special to Aberdeen from Ballin-Dalek they called it the Whiskey Special, and so operated happily in the early 1900s. 1901 had a major refurbishment. Most of the buildings that you see today at Craig and Moore are from the Charles Doig refurbishment in 1901. Of course it was shut down during World War I. They got light. By the end of the war they were getting electric lights for the first time. And then in the early 20s, by the end of the war, they were getting electric lights for the first time.

02:08:36
And then in the early 20s, the family sold the entire thing off to a new entity called the Cragganmore Glenlivet Distillery which was owned equally by Peter Mackey, which was Whitehorse Distillers becoming the large industrial distillers, and George McPherson Grant, the guy who owns the land. So 50-50 share. But a few years later Whitehorse Distillers gets scooped up by an even larger group called the Distillers Company or DCL. And this is the path that leads to Diageo, of course, the Depression, world War II, lots of restrictions. They go over to steam in the 1960s and in 1965, dcl buys the rest of Cragganmore from the McPherson Grant family, which is when the McPherson Grants effectively got out of making whiskey, until they got in 10, 15 years ago with Ballen Delic. Then you know, 20 years later you get the United Distillers Classic Malts. That's what DCL becomes and you know, the rest is history. Craig and more, 12 was their definitive version. Uh, then, and then by the 90s that becomes the asio, the largest liquor company in the world, and I I'm at.

02:09:43
The more I learn about these companies, the less I hate them. Like you don't want to like big conglomerates, but they tend to preserve brands, techniques, styles, equipment. They've referred those stills from the early from the 1800s, which are unusual stills. They're flat top stills. They have had them remade three times in the past hundred years. They're identical to the ones that big John Smith put in in the 1860s.

02:10:13
How do you be angry with these people? They're making the product the way it was always made. They've improved their barley production, they centralized their bottling, but for the most part it's the same water, the same stills in the same location. So while they do produce a million and a half liters a year so a large scale operation they um, they use european large washbacks, which is what big john put in back then. Uh, so that's the big barrels that they do the fermentation in. And then they only have two uh wash stills and two spirit stills. They're relatively large although, like I said, unusual shape. They have the flat top instead of having a long carving lie arm into the swan neck. They do use a little bit of peat. They always did back then. Even I know peat was relatively hard to come by. It's easier now with the ascio. They don't do their own maltings, that's normal. All of those largely ended by the 1970s. They store about 360,000 casts across three Dunnage-style warehouses so the barrels are on their sides in racks, three high. Those buildings were built in were 100 years old and they age in bourbon sherry and pork caskings.

02:11:23
There are a bunch of special editions of Kragenmoor but the one you'll be able to find is the original. It's basically been the same since the classic malts in the 1980s. So for 40 years Kragenmoor 12 has been the same since they, since the the classic malts in the 1980s. So for 40 years cragenmore 12 has been the same. It's about 60 us, it's 40 avv. It is colored and it is chill filtered. So it is industrial whiskey, no toys about it and it is tasty. That is a proper space side whiskey. It was right for. United distillers say this is our representation of the space side. Why color it? Make it consistent. Different barrels release a different amount of color in the wood. The spirit goes in clear it's a solvent. Here's the joke, micah. Here's the joke about whiskey and all of these boozes. I was drinking rum last night. It's not. The alcohol is a solvent. You're drinking wood. That's what you like. You like the flavors of wood.

02:12:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The solvent is clear when I feel like it could be marketed better than that. Yes, you're drinking wood. What is wrong?

02:12:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
with you last night and I'm not saying this is a smart thing to do, but it's something I did I lined up an ounce of 15-year-old whiskey, a 12-year-old cognac and a 15-year-old rum, all barrel-aged, they were all about the same color and they really, really don't taste that different. I defy you to say this is the cognac versus the whiskey versus. This was a rum, because once they've had a decade in wood it tastes like wood and it's tasty Like it's very yummy. But it's just this illusion that the alcohol source matters all that much. It does a little, it's subtle, but in the end these are solvents and they pull phenols and compounds out of the wood that we enjoy. And yeah, one little kicker to the story that I actually said this in the Ballin, in Ballin Dalek, that when Ballin Dalek went into operation, diageo gave them the original 1869 spirit safe from Cragganmore that George McPherson Grant had originally helped finance 150 years before, and that's the one that Ballendal now uses.

02:13:46
And again, how do you hate a company, even though it's a giant conglomerate, that's bought everything up when they do these little things like very thoughtful? So, uh, I I was, I've been meaning to get to craig and more. Eventually it's one of the legit, you know, really great whiskeys and part of that great series. But uh, it was even more fun to dig into the history and realize how all these folks work together and the evolution of that. So side by side, you know, within a half a mile of each other, is the definitive 19th century industrialized distillery, just up the road from a 21st century ultra craft distillery.

02:14:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All righty folks. That is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. The show publishes every well, I should say it starts every week around about 11am Pacific. But you can find it at twittv slash ww. So you can go there to subscribe to the show and get it as soon as it's been edited together and mixed, mastered, minused and everything in between. But to tune in to watch the show live twittv actually youtubecom slash twit slash live when the show is live, or if you are a member of Club Twit, then you can tune in a little bit earlier to check it out. I will just briefly mention Club Twit one more time. Twittv slash club twit $7 a month to join the club and help support the stuff we do here. The show notes are also at twittv slash www, so you can find those there. And now it is time to ask Richard Campbell what do you have going on this week or anything else you'd like to plug?

02:15:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I'm here at KCDC, so I'm going to be at their conference later today. And a big thing for us and you'll see that on the RunAid site as well is we're in full swing for Dev Intersection in the NextGen AI Conference, our new version for the second week of September. Epic lineup of folks Scott Hanselman, scott Hunter, all the big troublemakers are coming out to the event and you should be there. It'll be at the MGM in Las Vegas the week of September 7th Scott Hanselman is very cool.

02:15:55 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I like that guy. He's a good guy, I'm one of my friends and, of course, paul Therot of therotcom. What do you have for us?

02:16:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're coming home over the weekend, so I'll be back in Pennsylvania next week.

02:16:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All right, therotcom to check out all the great stuff Paul does. Thank you both. If you are looking for me online, you can find me at Micah Sargent on many social media network or head to chihuahuacoffee that's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-Acoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. I will be back here in about 40 minutes to host twig. Leo's morning away has turned into a day away, so I will be back for a twig as well.

02:16:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I knew it. I knew it Before you. We escape here. Mike, I think we have to say congratulations, you've got big news.

02:16:43 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I, uh, I did just recently get engaged, so thank you.

02:16:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I didn't even see that.

02:16:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's awesome. Congratulations, thanks very much. Thank you, we're very excited and, yeah, thank you both for letting me join you today. Always a pleasure to hear what's going on in the world of Windows, and they will see you next week on Windows Weekly. I will not, but thank you for tuning in everybody and we'll see you soon. Bye-bye.