Windows Weekly 888 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here, richard Campbell's here and, yes, paul's first reviews of the CoPilot Plus PCs are here. We'll talk about Windows 11 and a belated Week D preview update. We also talk about a new way to use Office Online not Microsoft Office, Proton Office and a $10 deal on one of the number one books for Office 365. It's all ahead on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 888, recorded Wednesday, july 3rd 2024. Find the blue penguin. It's time for Windows Weekly episode 888.

01:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the luckiest of all episodes, featuring Paul Theriot who ate lunch.

01:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, really pushing that, you have a little bit of a stutter going on there. Hey, hey, hey, he's at theriotcom and leanpubcom. And then on his left is there Mr Richard Campbell wearing his lumberjack shirt. Hey, canada.

01:27 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Day Got to go with the rest oh it is Canada Day, isn't it?

01:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it was on Monday it was the first he doesn't have pants on either Is.

01:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Canada.

01:35 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Day.

01:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
July 1st July 1st, yeah, Okay. It seems like Canadians just say, okay, well, we're going to copy your holidays, but we're going to do them better and earlier.

01:44 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Well, yeah, To be clear, you guys had a revolution. We just filled in the form right. It's not the same thing.

01:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know it's like the difference between Apple Silicon and Windows and ARM there you go.

01:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then the founding fathers said wait a minute, we could have filled in a form we could have filled in a form.

02:01 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, right, could have filled in a form. Well, the old name was Confederation Day, which was. It was the day that all of the provinces signed on to say, ok, we'll, we'll be a country now.

02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's neat.

02:12 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
And that was partly. You know, one of the rules for British Columbia being on board was that the railway went through. So they completed the railway in 1866. And so in 1867, they signed on.

02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we would have had to wait 100 years, but otherwise we could have avoided hardship Doing railways in 1776 would have been tricky.

02:30 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it seems unlikely.

02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just saying. You know, we fought a revolution, but if we'd waited 100 years, we could have filled out a form, could have filled in a form, yeah.

02:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Man, I would have given anything to have given a crap about the royal family. You know that would have been great.

02:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's, by the way, where all the loyalists in America went to Canada so they could wear red flannel shirts. This is a show not about history. This is a show about security, windows security.

02:59 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's all insider ball today. We're all insecure in our own ways.

03:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just mentioned that our advertisers like the security shows, and so I just want to emphasize that security-minded people listen to Windows Weekly, like CISOs. What are the other security professionals?

03:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, all of them now, all of them you have to care about security now.

03:21 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Well, we stay on the show all the time. It's like we're all in the security business here, because we all go down when the black hats win.

03:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, alright, this is 888. So this should be a happy celebratory show.

03:36 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
We're all home, right Home is good.

03:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Home is good. Canada is independent once again. No, I'm sorry, still a Commonwealth country. Do you have the king on your money yet? Canada is independent once again. No, I'm sorry, still a Commonwealth country. Still have a. Do you get the king on your money yet?

03:48 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yep, no, they're starting to print them. Yeah, they're coming Okay.

03:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Takes a couple of years On the Toonies and the Loonies.

03:55 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Those take the longest, because the coins last. The paper will show up first.

04:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's going a pain. Uh, you know, maybe you could just, kind, of like william, do charles and william and charles together, it's king.

04:11 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
You know we're looking for king chuck right, I want king chuck I just hope that the money doesn't look like his red official portrait. That thing that was a heck of a thing, wasn't it? Did he not know going?

04:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in.

04:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was an homage.

04:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he's modern, he's a modernist, you know.

04:31 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
And what's better than a monarch soaked in blood?

04:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's like a man claiming he's like a feminist. You know, I mean, maybe I'm not saying it can't happen.

04:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But don't have your portrait painted that way. Is that what you're saying? It's really quite something. So the top of the page on the show notes says something interesting to me Mission accomplished. What was the mission and how has it been accomplished?

04:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you mentioned history, so everyone knows that in 2003, george Bush stood on the deck of a carrier in the Persian Gulf and declared that combat operations were over in Iraq, and then they went on for another eight years. So in that sense, we have reached a similar milestone with Windows 11 R&R, which has been this kind of a dream, a broken promise, something that never lived up to its expectations, and through years of work, both on the hardware and software sides, from Microsoft and Qualcomm, it's very clear that they've actually done it. This is the one huh. Yeah, it took a long time A couple of false starts.

05:45 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's a couple of false starts, right. A couple of fall starts, right.

05:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah oh, a couple, yeah, a couple, I mean. I mean, depending how you look at it. Honestly, there were several because obviously, windows rt was its own thing and that was one. You know, I keep referencing that steven sanofsky book, but one of the great stories in there is, you know that what could have been? And they understood Microsoft, his team that you know, for this thing to make sense, it needed to be its own thing, you know, not just windows, but on a different platform, and they got no buy-in whatsoever from anybody, including, crucially, the office team. So they had to ship with the desktop environment and they shipped this thing that looked like windows and couldn't run windows apps, including, crucially, the Office team. So they had to ship with the desktop environment and they shipped this thing that looked like Windows and couldn't run Windows apps, you know. So it was kind of a problem, you know, revived under Terry Myerson for Windows 10 in 2017. The first generations of chips from Qualcomm were basically smartphone chips.

06:43 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
That did not work great.

06:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, if what you were looking for was 20 hours of battery life and the inability to do anything, great solution. Those things nailed that one. And then since then, you know we were talking about a couple of missteps or whatever, a couple of humps or whatever. But you know this is where the several comes in, because there were a bunch of little milestones that have occurred on the path to today. That includes such things as switching from 32 bit only emulation to 64 bit, and then 64 bit only right X 64.

07:15
And of course, the well, not of course the ability to kind of mix and match arm and X 64 code and you're in a single app. So you know, microsoft did with their developer platform and massive improvements to the emulator, and then the Nuvia-based hardware advances that we see today with Snapdragon X. So, and actually you know what we should also highlight. This is very important because Windows RT zero support from third parties like zero right Inability to well, that's not totally. I guess one could have created, I guess desktop apps that would have run an arm, I think, but no one did and you know it was always so small.

07:55 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
In the NET world we were able to just cross compile, so there was nothing to it. But that was the issue, right? Yeah, it was never the issue.

08:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm glad you brought that up because I forgot about this last week. At some point during last week's show I said, hey, I have a question to ask you later, and then I forgot about it. And then yesterday I was working in Visual Studio on a Snapdragon X based computer and I was like, oh, I've got to answer that question and I think I figured it out. But there are interesting discussions to be had around NET and how it handles those things, interesting discussions to be had around NET and how it handles those things. But anywho, there's kind of a perfect storm of factors or things that have occurred to make Windows 11 on ARM viable and even desirable. And the one that I kind of point to is three years ago we had something called a Snapdragon 8CX Gen 2 chipset.

08:50
Not great, right? Not a very minor improvement over Gen 1, a very minor improvement over whatever chips had come before that. Not a lot of buy-in from third parties. You know there wasn't a lot going on there and that kind of sits in the middle between then and now. So x64 was just happening. X64 eventually became a windows 11 only feature remember that was going to originally be in windows 10 on arm and they're like look, we're doing windows 11, that's where that's going to be. Um, you know, there were these changes like the uh, like I said, the ability to mix and match code and so forth that I have one of those laptops, not right in this room but here at home, and I've been using it a little bit since I got home and, my God, is it terrible, like it's just terrible and it's a beautiful piece of hardware. These things were very expensive All of them were. I mean, they were typically about $2,000, whereas the new ones now they're more closer to $1,000.

09:43 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
And you're getting all these pieces together right. It's like. It's not only beautiful, it's reasonably priced.

09:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and so the discussion we had three years ago was they're improving the platform, hardware and software at the time. Compatibility is getting better, Performance a little bit better, but better. You know, not great but better. But what we're seeing is that 20 hours of battery life I talked about in 2017, 2018, whatever year that was has gone down to a reported 15 hours of battery life, but a more realistic, real-world 10 hours of battery life.

10:17 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, which is legit, it's a full workday.

10:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I mean, look, it's not just a PC, it's emulating a PC, right, right. Yep, I mean, look, it's not just a PC, it's emulating a PC, right, I mean, what it's accomplishing is actually rather incredible. Yes.

10:29 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
And I've been watching the performance. I've seen a few folks now that have found the same app native and emulated yes, and you can actually see the difference. And the emulated version is about half the performance of the native version.

10:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but acceptable performance, yeah, we need to talk about that a little bit because, yeah, I mean, but yes, the answer is yes, but the question three years ago, the question I posed, was sort of okay, we're getting this thing there, great. But here's the problem. What if it gets there and then the battery life is like six hours, right? So what have we accomplished? We have this thing that's not quite as compatible as the native platform. It's never going to have the native performance. We're never going to have our. We've certainly not in the short term. We'll have, like you know, dedicated GPUs, et cetera, Like what. Like this is a lot of work to get to a world where battery life halved and then halved again. And now we're just where Intel is right. I mean, maybe it will still be a little more reliable, maybe it will be a little more consistent from kind of a performance efficiency standpoint, whatever. So I'm actually really happy. Sorry, can we come at this?

11:39 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
from a programmer's point of view. Yeah, it's a heck of a lot easier to write for ARM. Interesting Like at the low level.

11:46
Yeah, there's no segmented memory addressing like this. Right, all of these things that have built up over the years of protecting x86's architecture, as much as we've tried to extract them away and so forth. Like they represent debugging problems, they represent memory problems, they represent security issues, like the fact is, especially especially now with arm64 becoming like don't think about anything else, just think about ARM64. Now, right, it is much easier to build quality code from the kernel up. Yeah, it's cleaner. Yeah, it's just less code, there's fewer cycles being run.

12:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not that thing that you know.

12:24 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Maybe the windows team wanted for rt back in the day yeah, I've always felt like rt was a weapon to to bludgeon intel with yeah, it was kind of needed.

12:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't make, don't make me release a snapdragon? Well yeah, it was an apple nv. We want an ipad. What the hell? We had tablet first. What's Do you?

12:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
think they had to do that in order to get here, like was it an intermediate step that was required or just was it a waste of time.

12:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Honestly, there's an alternate universe where Microsoft took one more year to release 8 and RT and they got buy-in by their big tech partners. Yep, RT did not have the desktop and Microsoft leadership went down to the office team and said you're freaking, building an office for this now.

13:12 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
And then they were on stage with Columbia and all those other guys. They had everybody bought in. There was a world of the business tablet.

13:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a different world. I think for that platform to have succeeded, it also would have required melding with the Windows Phone team. They already had a platform. Yeah, they were already, yes, shifting it to.

13:31 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Windows Phone and they needed buy-in by the developers. They needed a path for the enterprise developers that were already using the Microsoft Stack, which they didn't do.

13:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a lot of people you know it's very easy, we all have our kind of knee-jerk reactions to things and a lot of people. You know it's very easy, we all have our kind of knee-jerk reactions to things and, uh, a lot of people like to simplify problems down to if they had just, you know, and and if they had just done maybe five things it's not one thing the world could have been a different place, but they didn't right. So, for whatever reason, you know, three years seems like a good time frame for new version of windows, whatever it was like. Who there's? There's all kinds of factors that went into it.

14:04 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Let's just speak to you know, every time Intel tried to make a better chipset, they got absolutely punished for it.

14:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, I would also say every single time that Microsoft did anything with ARM, intel poked up like an evil little like a mole or something out of the ground and said hey, remember us, we're your biggest hardware partner. We're going to be part of this too. So when Microsoft talked about the original ARM port with Windows RT, what became RT? They referred to it as Windows running on SoCs, and Intel had an SoC too.

14:39
technically it was called Atom, and I don't know if you guys remember Atom, but it was really bad, right, but they had to include them.

14:47 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
You know, this is how they felt like that was the response to Sanofsky and RT was OK, we'll make you this.

14:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was that the netbook? What's that? Was that the netbook?

15:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that was later. Well, yeah, it was actually in part.

15:02
Yeah, but it was also these little tablet things you know like we're going to make Windows 8 tablets that run on Atom, and they were terrible. When Microsoft hooked up with Qualcomm for Windows 10 on ARM, intel again came up out of the ground and said excuse me, what about us? Your biggest partner. And so they had something called Always Connected PC, which was really about Qualcomm and Snapdragon, but it was also about Intel. We have Always Connected PCs, too. We just also ours should be called Always Unreliable PCs. But whatever we have, we meet that spec Like we'll do that too. You know, when this generation happened, microsoft partnered with them on AI PC and then was like you know what it's been like 20 years. Screw these guys. We're going in our own direction. We're going to do Copilot Plus PC. And Intel was like what about us? They actually kicked them off campus, right? I told the story. Yeah, they wanted to be part of that announcement. Microsoft said no, give us the badges.

15:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're leaving. We're not doing this. You this, by the way, I think more people should know this story.

16:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I probably shouldn't have told this story, but it's just too juicy not to talk about.

16:08 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's telling it also means they mishandled it. How do you get to the point of issuing them badges if you're going down this path Like come on Well listen.

16:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Part of the story is all the PC makers that showed up for this event were told that they were going to make a bigger part of it and they were expecting to be on stage, etc. It was kind of a last minute thing where they were like you know what, let's just film some stuff with your CEOs. We're not going to put you on stage, but you can have your little product showcase afterwards. And then you go in that room and it was 60% Surface and 40% all the other PC makers jammed into the small space. It was really badly done. But I think Microsoft was in their own kind of passive, aggressive way because they are from the Seattle area said look, we're going to stand up to these guys. We can't, we're not doing this, we're not compromising. I don't agree with it 100%. It could have been handled a lot better. But this was like look, this is a Qualcomm event, guys, and you know, for us it's a surface event, but even Qualcomm was angry.

17:06 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yes, because again can't get anything right, they're unbelievable.

17:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I told you the story. You can look at the video, I think. I think the fact that you offended everyone equally is a way.

17:10 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Is there's a certain fairness to it? I guess, yeah, no, you can't feel hard done by. They're mad too.

17:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, look I I, as with uh socs, as with uh always connected pcs, there will be co-pilot plus PCs. We think Actually, you know, no one's really confirmed that 100% the language so far has been AMD and Intel and their partners, which are many, will ship co-pilot plus PC class PCs. No one has said when, right no, and I have my theories that are based on just educated guesses.

17:42 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Well, in the meantime, you know, here I am with a workstation, with an NRTX-49. I think it's 1,300 tops, but I haven't got a pilot plus PC.

17:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and unfortunately, I know this kind of thing leads to conspiracy theory, which is understandable. I thought you know I bring this up a bunch, but I think Stevie Batiste did a good job of explaining it in a way that is not offensive but rather just like a dawning realization that if we can get to NPUs that deliver a certain level of performance, we can do certain things more efficiently and they make sense and NPU emulators via GPU are good enough.

18:17 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I would use Hanselman's quote we are not organized enough to be as evil as you think. We are there, you go All right?

18:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I, I think it happens in time, but for right now they're trying to give this little window to Qualcomm, because you know, there was an ugly little moment where Microsoft and Qualcomm were kind of bearing down on a schedule that was about to end and Microsoft said if you don't meet the terms of the requirements we set up for you, you're out. You know, and they bought Nuvia and, I think, microsoft. No one talks about this and this is not a fact. It's just. I'm pretty sure Microsoft pumped a lot of money into this. I think they kept it going and it worked.

18:56 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yes, that's the miracle. This is a good machine.

18:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No two ways about it. Yep, yep and that's. Yeah, that's the thing. And look, we've already talked about all the kind of weirdness around it. They have this big event. They pivot on AI. They call them co-pilot plus PCs Terrible name. What we really have is the realization of that always connected PC vision minus the 5G requirement, right, yeah, but that thing that is efficient and provides performance. You know, qualcomm, several years ago, promised we're going to have, remember, core i5 level performance and an arm chip didn't say which generation core i5, which I think was the asterisk um, you can, everyone can look at the benchmarks themselves.

19:37
I don't like benchmarks, I like real world usage. But I can tell you, whichever you choose to look at these, these things are in fact competitive from a performance perspective. They over-excel in certain areas, which is kind of crazy.

19:51 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I think you've actually finally given Tim Cook pause, which it's been a while. Cook's been running away with the story for a few years now and all of a sudden here we are. Yeah, no, made a great machine, made still a stunning machine. We're all the beneficiaries. You're not going to be sad about the MacBook Air M3.

20:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's an interesting point. So Apple moving to the Mac happened relatively recently, I think it was 2020. This was three years after Windows 10 on ARM started and it gave us a guidepost to kind of look at like this is how good it could be. I hope. I brought this up last week, but it bears repeating regardless. There's a big difference, it's a fundamental difference, between what Apple and Microsoft have done with their respective platforms. Apple did a platform transition, which is difficult I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying it's not but Microsoft did something actually far more difficult. It's actually more impressive that it succeeded, which is they're doing both. You know they're not getting rid of x86. These things are going forward in time together.

21:01 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
They're also not controlling all the hardware, like Apple gets to do this. Hey, we don't want to make it a hardware. They're also not controlling all the hardware, like Apple gets to do this. Hey, we are making the hardware. We're making it like this is suck it Right, but where you persuaded all these people to play ball. It's extraordinary.

21:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just told this story again, but in the late nineties I was in San Francisco. I worked for this little startup out in San Francisco and I was at a buddy's friend's house. A bunch of people are over in these two goons are talking about how great Apple is and I'm like, what are you babbling about? And they're like, oh, apple's got way better engineers than Microsoft. I'm like, okay. I'm like, please explain. And they're like well, you know, macs are more reliable, blah, blah, blah. Whatever.

21:34
This is when the company was about to go out of business is not particularly interesting. The fact that there are literally millions of combinations of hardware components and PCs. This thing boots up all around the world every single day. Millions and millions of people get work done on it. That's a miracle. The company that made that has better engineers. I'm sorry Now, I'm not. I am not claiming that Microsoft and or Apple has better engineers than the other. That's not the point. They have both done something that I think is technically impressive.

22:15
Microsoft doesn't control the entire ecosystem. They cannot dictate that we all just switch to ARM. They can't, literally. Intel is their biggest partner. They cannot do that. They don't have that part. Intel is their biggest partner. They cannot do that. They don't have that part. They've been begging. They've been begging, begging, begging, begging Intel for decades to jump on this mobility efficiency thing. And Intel's like more cars, more performance, more watts, whatever. More, more, more. That's been their approach. More is always more and look, maybe this has started a fire under them. Finally, we saw a radical switch with with meteor lake, which I don't think has been successful. We are seeing an even more radical shift with lunar lake, which is coming this fall, and um so I mean again, this is, this is what actually having competitive threats matter.

23:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right. This is why competition is good, yeah, that's exactly right it makes everybody better.

23:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I talked myself into this. I think it was last week. I was talking, you know people in the United States, especially in the tech world. I was kind of whining and moaning about the EU and the DMA and, oh, they hate American companies. It's like no, they hate American companies. It's like no, they hate dominant companies. Like they hate dominant companies that don't follow rules.

23:29
And so I look at the DMA as almost a new, a new take on antitrust. Right, because they have the traditional take, they have their own version of the Sherman Antitrust Act, but they also have this new thing and it's it's a better thing. It's a better, more modern kind of take on what it means to be dominant. And anyway, one of the definitions of a monopoly, one of the ways a monopoly differentiates themselves from normal companies, is they can behave in ways that are as if they were no competitors. Right, in other words, competitors enter the market, they make changes and the dominant company, even though they only have like 50 percent market share, whatever the number is because we're also focused on something stupid like that they don't have to do anything because they don't care, it doesn't matter, and those are the companies. That's a new kind of way of looking at anti-trust, I think, and that's the way Intel has behaved, you know, for the past 20 years, although I think you could make a really good case that that Intel in fact had a monopoly of sourcer.

24:22 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, which they did without a doubt, and they chose to only try and innovate in little corners. Yeah, they never put their best and their brightest on building a new thing because they couldn't afford to. I read a book a while ago called the Poison Squad, which is really the invention of the FDA. That's what it's about, and one of the great storylines in that is about milk and the fact that in the late 1800s they preserved milk by putting formaldehyde in it, because it would spoil. Oh my.

24:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God.

24:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Was there not like enough cocaine for that to work? Oh my.

24:54 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
God and humans drinking milk with formaldehyde? Adults drinking formaldehyde in milk was not that big a deal. But if you did enough to eat a kid, it'll kill a kid.

25:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know, children die, die is this where the term well preserved came from nice?

25:07 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
yeah, but, the regulation did not allow formaldehyde in milk. Actually drove refrigeration, oh yeah you know that was a cusp technology so here's these folks.

25:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you're trying to sell safe milk. I didn't. I didn't mean to get off on a worried antitrust segue, but I will say one of the things that many people have trouble understanding is the bad impact of a dominant company, because they don't see it. They don't understand it. So, like I don't understand, like I have all the apps I want on my iPhone, what's the difference? And it's like you don't know the innovation, that's not occurring because this company will not allow it.

25:45
You know, you don't know the lower prices you would have if there were alternate app stores, you don't know. You know how good things could be if they didn't lock down their system for their benefit not for your benefit, right, even though in some ways it might benefit you, right. I mean, it's a hard thing for people to kind of understand. But Intel in our industry, in our part of the world, is that company. It's a sobering thing to go back and watch. When Apple made their first platform transition well, I guess technically the second in a way right From the PowerPC to Intel x86, x64, they started talking about performance per watt, which I think most of us would associate with the A-series or the M-series chips. It actually goes back to that, the very first talks that Steve Jobs gave about Intel. That's what he was talking about. That's where Intel at the time beat Motorola and IBM with PowerPC, right. So look, it's taken a long time, but the notion that Intel was ever more efficient than anything is hilarious to me.

26:45 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
But I guess it was. When you talk about who's got the best engineers, you know there's great engineers at Intel, oh my God. Yes, but often they are not allowed to work on an innovative product because we have a cash cow here. So you will work on the cash cow.

26:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and look that happens in Microsoft too, and only when they're threatened are they going to you. When they're threatened, are they going to you. Run into a wall where it's like, look, we got this incredible thing. It's like, oh, does this hurt x86? Yeah, totally.

27:08 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we're not doing that. Watch Microsoft and Windows right up until like 2013,. Right?

27:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I tell this story a lot, but you know, part of the Terry Myerson thing was like he didn't care, he wasn't trying to make Arm win, he didn't have to have Qualcomm beat Intel If all that happened was that this inspired Intel and I guess AMD too, right To a less degree to change their ways and work on this efficiency stuff.

27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't matter what the details are. They made Atom.

27:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But they made Atom exactly. It's just a laughingstock.

27:40 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's just ludicrous. It's enough to sabotage the argument which was sufficient. You're right, it's enough to sabotage the argument which was sufficient.

27:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, right we had a really good conversation on Twit with Ryan Shroud who, as you know, knows more about this than anybody yeah. He was the host of this Week in Computer Hardware on our network and editor-in-chief of PC Perspective. Then went to Intel and worked for the company Yep. Went on the inside On the inside for several years he creeped out a back door. Now he has his own company, which is kind of a benchmarking company, which is really cool. That's right and it's really good he works with.

28:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Patrick Moorhead and those guys. Yeah, he was, of course. So he was the guy. Sorry, I ran into him at. I'm going to be speaking to him again soon. I can't wait to talk to him again.

28:28
I ran into him at Build and he was the guy who had written the white paper that I talked about about the Surface laptop. There's some fascinating things in there and there's also some backstory about the things that he found out that Microsoft didn't really want to talk about too much. You know, yeah, which is kind of interesting, yeah, but but the the big story was that the claims were real, you know, and that he reassured me because I was freaking out about the fan. I I felt really stupid coming out of that product showcase, not even thinking I might. I was so convinced I in my I'd already concluded that obviously these chips would be like kept talking about macbook air. I mean, they're going to be fanless, silent, whatever. None of them are, you know, and it was like yikes, but actually they're silent almost all the time. I mean, you could, when you crank up a like a video encoding test or something like that, yeah, you're going to hear some fans.

29:25 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
My RTX is silent right up until.

29:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but they're not the jet engine thing that I get out of meteor like devices. It's more of like kind of a low whoosh sound than it is like a like white noise crazy sound. Yeah, so that you know that's look. It's never going to be perfect. This is the thing we have to kind of come to. It's never going to be perfect.

29:48 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
We don't have a single company with a vision that can do the end-to-end I would argue that that this stack is in a better place to make a perfect machine for your requirements than affleys, because sooner or later an Asus is going to go. You know what, if we take the lower end chip, or, and we do something fun with cooling and we go solid state on this. Here you go. No fan, yep, I think it's going to happen.

30:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are stories about Qualcomm supposedly working on other versions of the chip. Some seem to think it's headed in that direction. I think there's a better direction to go up as well, where they do more performance. There's also stories about these other companies, like NVIDIA, that they get in the market and what they do with graphics. I think it's going to be very important and maybe there'll be innovations for not just for games, but for, you know, engineering, scientific work, workstation, developer, whatever. That will be something well, that might force Apple's hand. They might have to do something similar as well. They've been, they've been kind of resisting that.

30:52 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Coincidentally, carl pinged me the other day while I was in transit and he goes listen, I got to move this raid machine into my office and the and the power supply fans make me crazy. What do I do? Yep, and I looked over the specs of the thing and it's like it's a 500 watt machine. Well, here, buy this 800 watt power supply with 140 millimeter fan.

31:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's so overpowered they have those whisper, quiet it's never.

31:12 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's a quiet fan anyway, but it'll never power up because you're never going to load it enough to mean decooling right did I ever uh tell the story of how brian levinson solved this problem 20 years ago.

31:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, in his queen anne home in the seattle area he uh had an office and he built a the wall like two feet out from the wall and put some holes in it and put the pcs behind the wall. Yeah, and the cables came out and he had a keyboard and the screen and the mouse and he just put a wall. Yeah, but he was like I'm not going to deal with this.

31:43 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Carl had that in his old office he had a server closet with all the workstations and it just ran cables for the rest. Two or three desktop computers, then I went down the water cooling path because that makes things simpler. Look, there's a puddle of water under my PC.

31:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What could be wrong? Is it green water or clear water?

31:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's clear water, we're just doing it, and then, hey, I want to get your reviews, because you have now a number of these co-pilot plus PCs, including the one I've been eyeballing, the Lenovo Yoga Slim, and then you've got the HP and, of course, microsoft's. Can we get your? I mean, you know, for everybody the reviews, you go to therotcom, but your thumbnail reviews of those in just a moment, how about that? That's called a tease in the business. Stay tuned, kids. It's a good thing coming up. But first a word from our sponsor, the amazing Thinkst Canary. Thinkst Canaries are the coolest thing ever.

32:39
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33:19
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34:10
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34:35
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35:59
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36:13
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37:03
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37:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so two weeks ago, yesterday, the first co-pilot plus PC shipped publicly, right, we did not get them as reviewers early, like we were supposed to, because of all the recall stuff. Um, depending on the PC maker, you might've gotten something that day or maybe the next day. I was in Mexico and, uh, that would be a problem. But, uh, I, so I had pre-ordered a, uh, surface laptop. Um, that did arrive that day, but in Pennsylvania, so that didn't help. And then I knew that Lenovo and HP were going to send me something, right. So, unfortunately, after a couple of days went by, I didn't.

38:18
You know, this is something I don't usually think much about, you know. In fact, oftentimes with PC makers and me, they send me too much stuff, right? So I don't really care if I get stuff or not, or you know they'll, they'll write me and I'll ignore it for a little while. Then they'll ping me again and I'll be like, look, I have a lot of stuff going on right now. I don't know if I can do this, but this one I actually, you know, I cared like hey, uh, you said you were shipping stuff, like what's going on, and in both cases I got it's. This is weird, cause I actually had friends at both these companies um, really clueless kind of responses back Like uh, you know I'm traveling right now, I'll get back to you, or like, you know, let me see what's going on. I have no idea. And it's like guys, what the hell, like this is actually important, you know? So anyway, I don't want to go through that too too much.

39:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why would they be reluctant? I mean, why would they do it differently than they always do it? I don't know. I don't know.

39:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You would think you know. Lenovo has shipped three PCs to Mexico, no problem at all. Hp I talked to them ahead of time and they said they were willing to give it a shot. Got the address information, it was all set, no problem.

39:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then they just never did, I'm just baffled it was crazy, it was very strange.

39:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, one week later I did get the Lenovo, and then, you know, we flew home last Saturday, so the Surface was there waiting. And then, just today, I got an HP, and the HP was an elite book, the ultra, the business, I'll tell you why the Lenovo interests me.

39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The price yeah.

39:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, holy cow. Not just the price, but also the upgrade costs for things like RAM and storage are incredibly reasonable.

39:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm used to Apple, you know, but you double the RAM for 67 bucks or something.

40:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's unbelievable. I know that's how much that stuff should cost. Well, it's the actual cost, right? Yeah, if you go to Lenovo and buy one of these things, it would be silly not to upgrade both to the maximum.

40:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Terabyte and 32 gigs right.

40:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte, if you paid for both, is like $100 or maybe $110.

40:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I couldn't believe it. That's like extra it $10. I couldn't believe it. That's like extra. It's like why wouldn't you do it? It's incredible they're doing some sort of loss leader thing right. They're trying to really get this market.

40:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that's just how much it costs. I think Apple is raking people over the coals we know that and Microsoft is like oh, we'll just do what Apple does and we can't do it at scale. So we have very limited configuration options. You know there's some problems there as well. Anyway, yeah, I can't speak to the HP one. I'm not sure how they do it, but HP always has sales. Actually, lenovo does too. You know, we'll see. It's a really nice machine.

40:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just feel like they really want this Copilot Plus PC, or maybe, to succeed. Or maybe is the Qualcomm part a lot less. Is that what they're saving? Or maybe is the Qualcomm part a lot less. Is that what they're saving? No, or is Microsoft giving them a great deal on Windows? Why is it? Oh?

41:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think, I don't think they can do that anymore. Look at this thing.

41:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's $1,300, right $1,300.

41:17 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's nothing, yeah it might even be less.

41:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it's, yeah, $1,800 in Canada. It's a bargain. Yeah, it's an OLED display which is unique among these three computers. I really want this 14-inch I think it's 14.5-inch. Actually Three USB, 4 ports and they are 40 gigabytes I confirmed that today. Gigabits per second, rather, so they're the full speed. They work with Thunderbolt Docks. You know Thunderbolt 4 Docks, no problem, it's the Lenovo and the HP. Both have the lower end elite processor, which means it doesn't have that. What's it called like dual core boost or whatever Boost? Yeah, it doesn't have that. The Surface laptop I bought though this is not true of all of them actually has one step up and this does have a mind.

42:03 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It does have a dual curve why do you think these lower end chips are selling are so common, like I wonder?

42:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they I think it's what you said up front. I think it's a binning issue.

42:12 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I think they're just more of them yeah, and I wonder if they they also said if you want the premium, you pay a premium price, you allocate three years or something like that, like they make it hard the only thing rarer than the highest end snap dragon x elite chip is this x plus right, right and um.

42:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't see too many of those out in the world. Microsoft has offers it in the surface pro and I think in the 13 inch laptop in the base configurations. But even then you kind of look at I like why wouldn't you just go up? You know why not? Yeah, they do all have the 45 tops um mpu and then off the top of my head I don't remember exactly, but there's, it also means that they're scrapping any of the die sets that don't have an mpu working correctly, like it's just a fail at that point

43:02 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I think so where they're carving out some processors, they're carving out some other, they're carving out some other functions, or they're lowering the processor rate because it's not reliable. At the higher one, I think they have yield problems. I do too. I do too. But you could turn that into a very profitable thing, because everybody wants the highest-end chip, so you just make that a premium.

43:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a term for this, I'm sure, but it's. You see it out of the paper for a car. You go to the lot and you walk out with one that's like twice as expensive because they did the upsell on you. You paid for the underbody treatment, all this it's very common human thing yeah, nice, mine's anodized, like they're all anodized, um, but yeah, they're it's.

43:42
This is right. It's in my way. There's nothing wrong with it. I'm not. This is not a complaint. I, I don't look, I don't, really. I don't do benchmarks. I can't tell you that one of them is X percent faster, slower, whatever. But I did do some encoding stuff. I'm going to do more of that because I was just all working off software encoding for that one, but it's, I don't notice any real world difference between them. Really, you know, between the two, the the surface I have has more Ram and storage as well, and I think that helps to some degree, of course, um, but I, I would be happy with any of these. They're all great. So I don't know what to tell you there.

44:21 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
What's that? The question is when is it your daily driver?

44:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it already is, oh yeah which one, the lenovo or the hp or the other service, the service yeah and it's not because of anything internally or whatever.

44:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In fact, it's missing some things like uh, present detection, presence detection, which the other two have, which I think is very valuable especially is that part of hello? It's sort of it's kind of uh, on the side of hello. The idea is that you, as you approach your computer, it senses you coming and it lights up the screen. Oh, because the screen is lit up when you get close enough windows. Hello facial kicks in immediately right and by the time you sit down, it's already sitting there waiting for you is that only?

45:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
choose like that I was gonna say, I think that this, this HP I have, which is a core, does it as well. That's not only Copilot Plus.

45:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. No, this is not a Copilot. No, that's not unique to Copilot Plus. Also, hp and actually Lenovo tend to do their own version of it. It's not the feature built into Windows for whatever reason, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with it. It's fine, but I prefer to use a fingerprint reader for Windows Hello.

45:30 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
None of the computers I have support that. It's pretty much an absolute thing now, Paul. I know it's weird. I live on a phone.

45:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say the Face ID is so fast and easy.

45:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's great and you might. You'll notice presence detection because you can do something like you're using a laptop and maybe someone's over here talking to you and you kind of look and you'll see you'll. You'll kind of see the screen dim. You know, even looking away we'll do it.

45:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it happens to me all the time on this HP.

45:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so that's built in, and then I'll come and sit down and it goes, oh hello, and it comes back.

46:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great.

46:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so if you look at the MyHP app you'll see where that's configured and it's in there. But if I'm going to use the camera I kind of want to have presence detection and the Surface doesn't actually have that. But the reason I prefer it is just the display. It's just bigger. I just really like bigger displays. Is it 3.2? Are they still doing 3.2?

46:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's a 15-inch 3.2 display.

46:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a 15-inch 3.2 display. It's kind of cool. I like that. It's not OLED, it's nothing special. It's a little reflective, honestly, but I just like the size of it, so size matters. But as far as the other two are very similar, they both have three USB 4 ports. The Lenovo does not have a headphone jack, what that's weird. It is weird.

46:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this caused a problem for me last week. It's a thing to leave out.

46:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know. So I used it for the show last week and I tested it ahead of time, obviously, and I'm looking for the thing and I'm like really, and it just doesn't have one. So I ended up using a single earbud for that show and that's not something I'd want to do every week. I guess I would probably figure out like a USB-C converter for my headphones or something, but the other two have the headphone jack. Other than that, I mean honestly, they're very similar.

47:21
It's weird, like you know, if you buy a Chromebook, they always have the same keyboard. It's weird, like you know, if you buy a Chromebook, they always have the same keyboard. It's not quite like that, but actually you know, everyone knows about the copilot key, but what is common to all three of these computers is there's a snipping key which. So even if you disable the feature in settings that ties print screen to snipping tool, these all have a key that you can launch the snipping tool, right, and you can do it in combinations with other keys to do like windows or areas or whatever, and that's kind of interesting. No one's really talked about that too much.

48:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No track point.

48:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah.

48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, lenovo track point.

48:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, no, no, but even on um, yeah, they walked, they've walked well.

48:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
End of an era I never used well uh, sorry, sorry, sorry.

48:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is a lenovo thinkpad that probably does have that track point. Right, I don't have that machine. Um, they never really did that on idea pad. And, uh, hp used to have something similar on some elite books and some of their Z books, but those are gone now they don't do that anymore. It's all you know precision touchpad stuff. Anyway, last week on the show I highlighted some of the stuff I had done to that point. This just came in really hot, you know. So I talked about app compatibility, which was fantastic. The only thing I found was Google Drive. That would not work at all. Hardware compatibility based on the devices I had in Mexico, which is actually a pretty good collection. Gaming, which is a real mixed bag, but it's kind of interesting what it works. It's pretty good actually.

48:55
And then the inbox AI experiences, which we can just ignore for the most part even though some of them are you know, some of them are not bad and I and I recorded an episode of Hands-On Windows about that that I think will probably go live next Thursday, a week from Thursday. Since then, I've done a lot more app and game compatibility testing. I've done some early video encoding performance tests. I've written twice about battery life this is something I'm trying to figure out and I've done some more hardware compatibility stuff. I've seen excellent results across the board.

49:26
I would say Google Drive was the only thing that absolutely did not work. I got Doom 2016 to work fine and then it didn't. I got to a certain point in the game where it stopped loading. It would just crash. I played it on an Intel machine, no problem at all. I got further into the game. I thought I'll get to some point. I'll try it again, it'll be okay. I've never gotten that to work again. I have no idea why.

49:51
And that's on two of the computers. Um, and then I have uh, what is? Oh, one hardware device that doesn't work, which is the focus right usb connector I use with this microphone. So I was going to use one of these computers for the show today and I ran into a couple of problems. One I left my USB hub at home in Mexico, uh, and then two. Why don't you have two? Uh, my wife has the other one. She's upstairs with it. Why don't you have three?

50:18
I will now that's going to happen, but but actually it kind of doesn't matter in a way, because the focus right does not work and I would have to either find a new USB interface that I know works with Windows 11, which I think is going to be challenging short term, or I could use the microphone that my wife is using and that I use in Mexico, which is that ATR condenser USB mic. And yeah, I don't know. You know, I have a desktop thing here Now. At some point I want to get that, um, the dev kit that we've been talking about, yeah, and if and when that becomes available and I get that, I think I'm gonna have a decision to make at that point, but I'm gonna.

50:55 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I'll hold up until then well, and and I just was seeing the announcements now that they are testing a version linux for it. Yes, yeah.

51:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Qualcomm's been very upfront about that. Yeah, They've always supported Linux on the Qualcomm stuff.

51:10 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
So yeah, that's going to happen. They're just going to finish up with low-level drivers. Once that stuff's in place, that to me again. I think that's going to become my excessive home assistance host. Yeah, so.

51:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When will Linux be compatible with the Microsoft Pluton processor?

51:26 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's like Microsoft distributes three versions of Linux in their store.

51:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
To say, it's hard to say, um, so it is. I've only looked. It's what's Wednesday. I've had one of these computers for eight days. So I've had the other one for four days, five days maybe, whatever that is. I don't have enough real world battery life, but what I did see across the first two computers that was very consistent was surprisingly terrible battery life on day one, like surprisingly terrible, and then it got better and then it got good and I mentioned up front so what happened. Well, here's the thing. So I review a lot of laptops every year.

52:07
The one thing I don't do is like micromanage battery life, like right up front. I don't really think about it that much. Battery life is usually something like a weekend. I kind of notice it right. I have an idea in my head, just based on using the thing, that it's going to land somewhere. So then I start looking at it. But going into this, I very much wanted to focus on battery life. So I think this might be something that just happens all the time and you bulk, install stuff, you're, you're heavily using it in a certain way, the fans rolling, the battery life is not great right up front, but then you calm down and you start using it normally and I think it kind of you know plateaus or reverse plateaus, or whatever.

52:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always get terrible battery life on the first few days.

52:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think it's just use it differently.

52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

52:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has to prime the pump You're installing stuff.

52:58
It's indexing. Yeah, I just, despite the fact that I've been doing this for 20 years, I just never really thought about it. And now, like this time, I'm like, oh my God, I have to focus on this and I think that might be all it is. But at first I got really nervous, like that first one yoga slim, like two days in. I was like, oh man, they're talking like 15, 20 hours of battery life. I'm seeing like three and a half, four and a half at most. I'm like I don't at this now. I think last night was nine hours and 50 minutes it's, and we're early still. So I think they're going to be in that 10 hour range and this falls into the.

53:39
It sounds like rationalization but, realistically speaking, because they just can't have the same control over the ecosystem that Apple does over there, it's just not going to be as good. But it needs to be in the ballpark. Like when you talk about like all day battery life, like what does that actually mean? Like 24 hours of battery life, what does that mean? I'm working for some X number of hours and needs to last that whole time. Like it absolutely meets that need. You know, the MacBook Air I had, real world was about 15 hours of battery life. So that's the difference that I saw, or I'm seeing so far. Like it's not, I'm not done, but that's where I'm at about right now. I think that's terrific. Like I think it's fine. You know the better thing though well, I don't know better. But as important, the thing we don't really think about that much until things go wrong is what happens when you leave it alone overnight. What happens when you open it up in the morning, what happens that makes you actually turn the thing fully off before you take it to the airport, which is something. When I went to Mexico on this past trip, I took the MacBook Air and I just closed the lid and I put it in the bag. I didn't think about it. Next day I got up, maybe 1%, down, probably 0%. Honestly, I didn't think about it.

54:52
I am seeing very consistently with these computers two of them, you know, and again just eight days. So it's not scientific, but they come on immediately. You can look at the battery life usage. You can see what it's doing. Look at the battery life usage. You can see what it's doing. I'm seeing between one and 3% battery loss over eight hours overnight, depending, you know, uh, different conditions, whatever. It's very consistent. Um and again, I'm hitting about we're. We're up to about 10 hours of battery life on both of them, I would say right now. So to me, I keep pointing it out to my wife. She must be so bored of me by now. I don't even know why we're still together. I, I keep pointing it out to my wife. She must be so bored of me by now. I don't know, I don't even know why we're still together. I, I uh, in the morning I'll be like honey, honey, guess what just happened. She's like what's, what's going on?

55:34
I'm like no-transcript conclude yet I it's too soon, you know, I, I but it's looking really good. Um, so I have this. One app does not work. That's important to me, frankly. I have one hardware device that, yep, it is important to me. I could work around both in fact, I have already worked around both, arguably and I have that one game that was working and now does not work. I can't explain that one. It's kind of weird. I got a beta graphics driver from Qualcomm over the weekend. I wonder if the Doom problem might be tied to that. It was supposed to make the game compatible before. It wasn't explicitly compatible with AutoSR, etc. Etc. But it's okay, it's not. Like you know, doom 2016 is not mission critical. No, it's. Look, people listening to the show are probably more technical. They're going to have those weird devices. They're going to have off-brand printers or 3d printers or some some weird thing. They're going to use weird software that you know, whatever most software will.

57:17 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
This has been. The essence of all of this is that everything works except the one thing you need yeah, I I write, I mean because I got this late.

57:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have been looking at reviews and write-ups that other people made. I usually don't do that, right, I usually like to keep myself kind of clean from that stuff. There was a it's an Android site, I don't remember which one, it doesn't matter. This guy was like oh, the compatibility is garbage. Almost none of the apps I use are native on ARM. And then he listed them and I was like I don't know any of these apps, what are you talking about? It was like the weirdest collection of apps. I was like Jesus, dude. So I don't remember the numbers and actually it's been updated since I wrote about it. But if I ran 20 apps regularly which I don't right, nobody does, but I mean let's say there were 20. I think that 12 or 13 of them are native on ARM and the others all work normally in emulation. And to your point, richard, earlier, yeah, there's probably some performance difference, but the overall performance is so good that they it's efficient, they're just normal. You don't notice it.

58:24 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
But you'll notice when not like you're typing and it's catching up, you know. But you'll notice when they do make a native version that it's snappier.

58:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that could be. Yeah, and that would be nice. You know, we'll see. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive.

58:45 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
And you know realistically these devices now and all right, let's do this. And plus it was relatively low bars to entry, like it's not that hard to cross.

58:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One of the weird things is, honestly, it's, it's it's usually not always, but usually pretty seamless. You don't have to think about it. But you, you have one of these computers and you know what you're doing. So you want to make sure you're running arm versions of things, so you're kind of micromanaging it, which is what I've been doing, and you google and you look and you find out whatever. I would say this is not exact, but 85 percent of the time you just do the normal download and you get the arm version. If it's there like you, just get it right. There are exceptions, for sure.

59:22
Um, the question I wanted to ask you last week because I had a? Um, the question I wanted to ask you last week because I had, a couple weeks ago, I had taken my wpf version of that dot netpad. Yep, dot netpad, yeah, app that I had written several years ago and I updated it using dot net nine preview and, um, it's got the windows 11. Look and feel it's really neat, right? So sometime, whenever dot net well, november, when NET 9 ships, I can do like a new version of my app. It would be fun, right? So I installed Visual Studio on the Yoga, which is an ARM-based computer.

59:58 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I looked it up. This is a different commit, now that you're actually running Studio in ARM as well as being able to compile to ARM.

01:00:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and it turns out. I had to look this up about three years ago. Whenever they did this, there was an announcement there's a single downloader. They don't have a special downloader for ARM. They just give you the right version and you can look it up. You can see it's running. It is, it's ARM-based right.

01:00:20
So the question I was going to ask you last week and now I have the answer, I guess is I wanted to do what I did before, but replicated on the arm based computer. So I've got I install, like the dot net nine, preview three, I think, is where we're at binaries. Um, I've got visual studio, I've got the workloads going, I've got it, I've got all the code I need. But I can't get dot net nine in the drop down right, uh, for for the target right, and I'm like this is kind of an interesting problem. The app is uh, will compile to any binary, but it is running on arm, so it's. You know, do I need the, the dot, the arm version of dot net nine? Do I need the x64? Do I need both? You know, I I don't know. I couldn't get it to work.

01:01:10
So I meant to ask you about this last week and I forgot and then flash forward a week and maybe over the week or yesterday or whatever it was. I installed it again. Now, on the Surface right, I'm going through exactly the same thing. Yep, seeing exactly the same problem. I've got NET 9. In this case, I installed both like an idiot and it's not there. And then it dawned on me what my problem was. I'm an idiot, is my problem. I wasn't installing the preview version of Visual Studio, I was installing the stable version, and the stable version does not support NET 9 in preview. You have to install a preview version, so as soon as.

01:01:44
I did that it just worked. It should have all worked with eight as well well, the eight doesn't support the, the windows 11 style, the, the fluent stuff that you have to have. It's, it's, it's coming in dot net nine, so I just you know you, you want it and you want to dab.

01:02:03 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
We just put that show in the can for it on at rocks about the win 11 styling.

01:02:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh good, I can't wait to listen to it, Cause this is a. This it's speaking of coming in hot like this. Capability with WPF is very raw.

01:02:16 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah Well, and part of that is simply a message that says, hey, we put more people on WPF with giving away some of the story of that show. But part of that was this recognition that WPF is loved by the community. It's been a bunch of good episodes, yep, and it's never gone away. Well, and now Microsoft's recognized. Hey, you know we should run in front of this parade, and so it's kind of— Well, they have—look they have these modernization stories.

01:02:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The reality is—and when I say this is always an asterisk I don't mean literally no one, but no one is going to make a new Windows-only app. So the fact that you can do modern Windows 11 styling in the Windows app SDK is fascinating, but no one's starting from zero lines of code to do that. But there are thousands and many thousands of WPF-based applications on the world Many millions, yeah. And those guys, a lot of them, yeah, they want to make that thing look normal, yeah, modern, on Windows 11. So what they're doing actually makes sense.

01:03:15 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Took a while to get there but Well, and also that the community was struggling to update to keep up with the demand too.

01:03:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, it was a lot of community based stuff.

01:03:24 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and you know these guys are volunteers, like they're only going to do so much, to have real jobs too.

01:03:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't remember the name of this anymore, but they used to be like a toolkit that Microsoft provided for WPF that at the time would modernize it. I swear to God, this is for Windows 7, I think, to get you know at the time, modern style, I think it was for yeah. I think it was for yeah. So you have, like the OK Cancel dialogs, there's something called a task window where you can have multiple types of buttons and all this stuff. So I need that for this app and I had to write my own because that does not exist anymore, like they put it out and then they took it away.

01:03:59 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, today there are GitHub repositories like WPF, modern WPF and WPF UI, but now, with what happened to Build, they're saying, okay, well, we're starting to put this into the official path.

01:04:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's what's happening. Yeah, so I mean Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code. That stuff is native on ARM Yep, Affinity, Photo 2, Adobe Photoshop native on ARM. You know, a lot of the stuff I use is kind of like a web app, like Notion.

01:04:28
So Notion is not native on ARM, but it doesn't matter because this is a web app, so the way that that runs in Windows is great. Regardless, it's fine, so it's been very good, I guess maybe is the best way to say it. So, yeah, overwhelmingly positive. I guess I'm kind of reversing my stance on this in a way, because I always come at this from the point of view like a technical person knows what they're doing, they can handle the problems, and a mainstream person would be the one who would be screwed up by the little incompatibilities. But honestly, it just kind of works with everything normal.

01:05:05
So a person like my wife was smart but not technical. Yeah, everything she uses would work fine, literally. I know it all does. Like I know if you didn't she'd ping you for and you could tweak it, of course, but I don't think she'll. I don't think in her case she'd ever run into anything that didn't work, whereas technical people it's kind of a unique. I talk about this sometimes. It's weird how um bitchy we can be about like oh, I can't use it.

01:05:26
It doesn't work for this one thing. It's like, dude, you're technical, what do you like? Work around, you got this, you can do it, it's going to be all right. Yeah, like it's kind of weird. So, yeah, if you look, if you want, if you play video games yeah, you don't want this thing obviously. But I don't know, like, thin light, really efficient, good battery life, quiet, reliable and consistent, which is that thing we don't get in windows. A lot still has the crap, you know it. It still turns on folder backup and one drive which I've been complaining about since october.

01:06:03
Um, by the way, one thing um, uh, the surface lap, nope, the hp elite book, because it's a business class computer, came with windows 11 pro and one of the things microsoft did in 24h2 was cut off. A lot of the workarounds to not have to sign in with a microsoft account, etc. Etc. But I signed into that thing with a local account on the first try, no problem at all. So, um, things still work. Not all of them, I mean, they did cut off a bunch of them, but there's, if you, if that matters to you and you know it shouldn't, but I know it does uh, that's still possible. That's how I signed into it. I still haven't put a Microsoft account on it, um, so that works, you know, but you have to have probe If you're running home. Sorry, they are being mean about that.

01:06:55 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
They decided they need to weed it outside my window, like right now.

01:07:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My advice would be don't work around it, because you could sign in with a Microsoft account the first try. That will give you the full disk encryption, which is what you want, and then create a local account and just use that. You know, yeah, like. Encrypt the disk, then use your local account, because you know better than everybody. Whatever your excuse is, you know they'll be fine. So anyway, I keep waiting for that little. You know that moment where it's like yep, this screws up everything, yep.

01:07:31 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
And yeah, you're looking for the no-go, right? And then, yeah, I'm still worried, certain customers, certain apps, right, of course, of course.

01:07:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There will always be.

01:07:40 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
The hated? Yeah, what would be the one? Do you want to break it? Run AutoCAD.

01:07:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, there you go. That one I don't know about.

01:07:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It turns out, fortnite breaks it, but that's because of the anti-cheat technology.

01:07:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but that's coming. We're less than a month away from that.

01:07:55 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Just working that's going to work, but AutoCAD is your perfect scenario because it's like Windows XP it's wildly popular, mandated by a bunch of organizations and chronically old school and yeah, there are.

01:08:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Literally. If AutoCAD they used to give you a dongle, remember that you couldn't use without, and they've always been horrible yeah.

01:08:17 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
But they're not optional Right. So it's just simply it's a no go.

01:08:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everyone has these things I've turned into like open mic night, like half the emails like get are like hey, could you try this random app that no one ever uses, like one of them was like a Windows Live photo gallery, and I'm like you mean nothing that hasn't been supported for 10 years. Yeah, I'm not testing that. What are you talking about? Like what you have to use that I mean it's just kind of weird. But everyone, but that's that's everyone, everyone, I mean I mean everyone who reads my site. For sure, I mean they all have like really specific, this has to work and I guess, to be fair, I do too, I guess, but but it's like Google Drive doesn't work. I'm like, eh, I can you know Well, and the other question is is it just your preferred pieces?

01:08:58 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
People have a weird editor they love using and it's going to be grumpy, but it's like it's not, like there isn't other editors, as opposed to an AutoCAD where it's like listen, this is mandated by my organization and if it doesn't run, I cannot do my job.

01:09:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I said this up front. But look, this required a bunch of hardware and software work, right? So over several years to get to this point. But as big of a deal is just getting third-party developers on board and getting this giant matrix of apps that everybody uses, right? I don't know what the numbers are. I wish they'd. I'm surprised they don't say this. It's like there are probably tens of or hundreds of thousands of apps for Windows. It's probably a tiny percentage that works natively and then a small percentage that works well on emulation, but it also represents like 85%, 90% of what everyone uses. It's all long tail. Yeah, it's yes.

01:09:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And what's impressive is that the emulation works so well that you don't really notice that you're not using a native app. I mean, that's really good.

01:10:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've seen articles that complain about the emulation. I'm like are you using one of these computers Because it works great? I review laptops. I have never run an app and been like huh, that's a little slow, like not once that was the secret sauce to Apple moving to Silicon.

01:10:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, that was the secret sauce to Apple moving to Intel. Back in the day, rosetta and now Rosetta 2. Good emulation solves a lot of problems.

01:10:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The secret sauce, though, for Microsoft, is so much more important because it has to exist and coexist forever, right Like Rosetta or Rosetta 2.

01:10:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not transitional, is a stepping stone.

01:10:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it has to work to get you onto the hardware. But you know those developers are going to update those apps, not necessarily you onto the hardware. But you know those developers are going to update those apps On Windows. We're like, eh, I don't know why bother, it works fine. Yeah, so it's important, you know, and it works great.

01:10:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, just briefly want to mention that we are experimenting with streaming on more platforms today. This will be, in the long run, the plan using Restream. So I want to say hello to people on YouTube, on Twitch, on X believe it or not. See those X's there. Those people are on X, those X's, those X's. Hello, hello.

01:11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As in X Twitter as informally known as Twitter.

01:11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I believe we're also on Kik and some other platforms. So thank you to all of you. I do see the chat all of you but we don't have a way, as we did, if we're using Restream natively to put it onto the screen. I wish we did. We're working on that and we aren't yet ready to do this all the time, but I think within the next couple of months we're going to do this all the time.

01:11:47 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's experimenting. That's cool.

01:11:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and it's good. I think it's great, and we just love having people be able to watch however they want to watch. So thank you to all of you. Let's break, shall we, and then go on with more. You think so? Are you with me? You think so? Are you with me? I think so. Okay, we should talk about Windows. Oh, windows, that what a thought. Well, we'll get to that in a moment, but first I want to thank a very important sponsor.

01:12:20
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01:14:37
We do something that Cache At first we were, I think, the only people doing it, but CacheFly now offers this. You can shield your site content in their cloud, which means you get a 100 cache hit ratio. A cache miss is why you get buffering and oh, hold on a second, I'm going to go out and get that content. This offloads your primary source. This has been a boon for us, and with CacheFly's elite managed packages you do get vip treatment. Your dedicated account manager will help you, be there from day one, ensuring a smooth transition, reliable 24-7 support. We love it, we love CacheFly and we're very grateful. Learn how you can get your first month free at cachefly.com/twit. You've heard me say it for 20 years almost now. Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by cachefly at c-a-c-h-e, f-l-y dot com. Slash twit. Thank you, CacheFly. We really appreciate everything you do. Paul thurot, richard campbell, uh, and what are we talking about? Um, windows, windows, windows a little thing called windows.

01:15:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What a thing. Nobody uses that. It's not a thing. Um, so last week I talked about the week d preview update, which will become the patch tuesday update next. Well, actually now this month, right next week, and I noted that there was no version for 24H2. They released a really big update for 22 and 23H2 that brought forward I think all, if not all, most, of the 24H2 unique features to those versions, and thus July is going to be a big deal for those systems.

01:16:23
Friday they did release their week D update for 24H2. And this is bug fixes, right. And so when patched, unless something changes, which it could, you know, microsoft patch Tuesday next week will be a minor affair for 24H2, but 22H2 and 23H2 will be brought up to the 24H2 feature set based functionality, right. So this kind of mirrors what I was saying earlier, that the plan is for these things to all have the same features, right, you know when they can. The truth is we're going to see different things happening at different times, but yeah, for a little while we have this window. It's kind of fun.

01:17:02 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's still crazy to have three versions of the same features. But okay, I'd agree more.

01:17:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, we live in a I mean listen compared to some of the craziness with the updates. You know we've talked about features that were just released into stable with no testing at all Recall jerks. You know this stuff happens right. So you know, to me this is just like yeah, okay.

01:17:27 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
You're getting used to it. Now is what's happening, so we'll call it Stockholm syndrome. Yeah.

01:17:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Except it's like physical pain, it's like eventually you get punched in the face so much you just don't feel it anymore.

01:17:40 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
No, your face is shaped like that yeah, face shaped face yeah.

01:17:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's the dent in your? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, face shape, face. Yeah, what's the dent in your yeah, so we haven't heard much about or from the Windows Insider program over the course of 24H2, kind of being stutter, stepped, released with the Copilot Plus PCs, but I think it was last Friday. Suddenly it rumbled back to life or, as I wrote, it, stumbled back to life.

01:18:08
Canary dev and beta channels all got a release, nothing monumental, I think. The Canary one basically just fixes the other two, a couple of small features. I don't know if they're in here, I'm just looking to be sure. But yeah, nothing super interesting. I one thing um, windows backup and Windows 11 is kind of a curious tool. Is it's really just the front end to functionality that has been in Windows for a while? Um, you could actually go into it and say make a backup and maybe feel good about that or something I don't know. Uh, there's no reason to do it, it just happens Like there's nothing. Yet you don't really have to do it, it's just a button to give you something to do, I think. But I did theorize when this first happened. I think it arrived in 23H2 or, you know, just before 23H2, because the way they did stuff last fall, but that maybe this turns into Windows Backup, could turn into something like actually useful. This new modern Windows Backup and actually the Dev Channel I think it is, yeah, is actually going to back up.

01:19:11 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
What does useful mean for you?

01:19:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, more than just some basics, like it's a curious kind of subset of things that it saves. It's not really I don't know backup is kind of a strong term. It's mostly sync stuff really, and honestly, some of it's just stuff that happens regardless, like the folder backup stuff in OneDrive or whatever. But they added support, or they're adding support, for sound settings. So this means things like the sound scheme that you choose, which becomes part of a theme, as we call it in Windows 11. A theme is a new construct, construct, a modern kind of interface. Sound scheme is right back to control panel days, that little dialogue. You know it's insane, um, but they are adding to it. So you know I don't want to get too excited. It's not super important. But, um, and that's about you know nothing, nothing super, you know I have. I have a writing machine.

01:20:04 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
That's about you know nothing, nothing super you know I have. I have a writing machine that's configured so that there are no pop-ups, no noises like nothing. Love it. And every single time you update a piece of software, all that shit gets turned back on again. Yeah, so Every time, yeah. You literally have to go in every Tuesday, every Wednesday morning you have to sit down and turn off all the notifications.

01:20:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like they all got reset okay. So I don't talk about that much on this, this, that much on the show, because I haven't really found anything that just kind of works. But there are various utilities that give you various levels of control over various amounts of options. Yes, right, and some of them are actually pretty good. Some of them are kind of minor, but the advice with all of them is, every month when you do that Peter, cumulative update patch Tuesday you get to run the thing again, you know.

01:20:59
So actually, the goal is to and there's some of them do this, not all of them, but some of them actually let you export the configuration you chose. So what you can do is import it and it will go. You do this, not all of them, but some of them actually let you export the configuration you chose. So what you can do is import it and it will go. You know, instead of manually remembering, you can kind of go back and get your your preference. It's stupid. It's a stupid thing to have to do. I mean it would be better if you could just have a script that ran on.

01:21:20 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It would be better if the software didn't suck.

01:21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's another way to say it. Yeah, I mean 100%, obviously, I mean obviously Right, but we live in a world where, yeah, where, the software sucks.

01:21:36 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, or what the software wants is more important than what you want.

01:21:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like software used to be ambivalently and bad, but now it's like maliciously bad. It's openly coming for me.

01:21:49 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
You need, you need toast and you need more toast. You know what you really need? Yeah, more toast.

01:21:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, imagine if Amazon behaved like Windows 11, where it was like hey, usually buy coffee every three weeks, do you want to buy some coffee? Nope, they're like you know, we have a coffee subscription, we could just get you one. We'll get you with the exact amount of coffee you need. No, I'm good. And then one day coffee arrives and you're like ah, you know, like that's what Windows 11 does, and you know it's not great, but it's still better than the Mac. There I said it. Okay, so a bunch of stuff that kind of falls into two buckets, but I'm going to make it one bucket, and that bucket is AI and Microsoft 365. Okay, I will start with the Microsoft.

01:22:32 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's not an easy combination, right, but okay.

01:22:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's an uneasy Alliance. So here we go Yep, the EU is back, and better than ever, baby.

01:22:43
Off the top of my head, I think back in it was February or March. Yes, off the top of my head, I think back in it was february or march. Yes, the european union and then the uk cma, and then the ftc slash doj, I don't remember which all announced they were going to investigate this mysterious microsoft open ai partnership and the. The goal of that investigation in each case was to just figure out were they trying to bypass an antitrust uh investigation? Right that, because obviously we never let them buy them, nope, but here they own 49 do they buy them in?

01:23:16
you know, but not in name in other words, do they control this company really? You know? Um, so the european union god bless them decided after a couple months they were like you know, I don't, although you would think it was Ken Starr Nice, they were like you know we didn't find. We found that Microsoft didn't acquire any control on a lasting basis. We concluded that their partnership is not illegal under the terms of the, well, under their version of the Sherman Antitrust Act, whose name I cannot remember, it doesn't matter, I guess. So investigation over right?

01:23:55 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
No, no, no Well because there's an essential problem there, paul, which is last year, when Sam Allman got fired. It'd be abundantly clear that Sacha had a say Yep, yep. Well, I mean you might, and Sam Allman got fired, it'd be abundantly clear that Satya had a say Yep, Yep.

01:24:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, you might have said let me see if this is the message.

01:24:10 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
So when I started calling him Dark Satya. I really liked it. Angry Satya is awesome.

01:24:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, angry Satya is going to be around, because I didn't put this in the notes, but today I think it was Bloomberg reported that Apple is also going to get a Microsoft-like representation on the OpenAI board. Now, I don't recall Apple investing $13 billion in OpenAI. Let me just think Nope, but they're getting the same representation that Microsoft has.

01:24:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple's giving something to OpenAI for the.

01:24:44 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, there's a deal there and it's an observer seat, I presume.

01:24:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but that's what Microsoft has, oh, okay.

01:24:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who has a Shiller? Is it Phil Shiller got it.

01:24:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Phil Shiller. Yeah, he put the shill in Shiller.

01:24:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was their chief marketing officer. Now is a kind of.

01:25:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's such a piece of human garbage that guy. But are they actually calling it a board? He's the courage guy. Yeah, a board. He's an observer and he is what microsoft is. He's all right. So microsoft and apple are both going to have this. So this is a report.

01:25:14 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
This is not something opening and understand, like if this was a serious blunder by satcha that back when they put, say, the two billion in the second round, they didn't have an observer seat, then they should not have been blindsided by Altman's firing. That's unbelievable. That'll be a Harvard Business School case study one day. It's unbelievable.

01:25:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Explain to me who was a business nitwit. What is the role of an observer on the board? I've been on boards, I understand you.

01:25:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, I'll put it into language that everyone listening to this will understand, because you have all read or seen the movies of the Lord of the Rings, which is your role, is a grime of worm tongue sitting next to the king whispering into his ear.

01:25:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I understand, you're not bored. The?

01:25:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
vote is decided to vote on. They look over. The Microsoft guy is like you should not go forward with that proposal we voted. It was not Microsoft. They had nothing to do with it.

01:26:08 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and the reality is, what does the observer do? The observer decides if he has to call Satya or not, or, in this case, she decides to call Satya.

01:26:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, there are two things happening with the observer role in Microsoft's case. One is the Sam Altman firing. They want to make sure that doesn't happen again. In other words, if that stuff starts happening, you're not going to believe this. Get down here. You know that kind of thing. So that's one. But the other one is, you know, from OpenAI side, obviously they don't want to really wish control of the business and despite the fact that Microsoft has given them more money than God they're, you know, they're working very hard to make sure that, you know, they don't become a microsoft fiefdom or whatever.

01:26:44 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
so and, to be clear, all of that money largely has gone back to microsoft in azure consumption, yeah, which is kind of brilliant really when you think about it.

01:26:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, it just looks yeah, oh no.

01:26:57 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
But now we get back to the point which is like marguerite should be investigating this. I don't. I'm not saying it isn't on the up and up, but but it is filled with moral hazard.

01:27:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's why they're doing this to show that they are not a Microsoft thief.

01:27:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the letter of the partnership agreement is that Microsoft did not, in any way, shape or form, acquire OpenAI. They don't have voting control. They can't control the decisions. That's not illegal. However, one of the things the EU is, and should be concerned with is this concept of the rich getting richer, right, that there are a handful of big tech firms that dominate the industry and they are absolutely going to dominate AI. You know, and it's like so I mean, I think, the thing that will. Ultimately, I feel that the European commission will find that Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI is not problematic, and the reason will be Apple and, to a lesser degree, microsoft has partnered with every other AI company they can imagine, so that's not just for.

01:28:01 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I suspect that's why Apple has this seat, because the OpenAI board desperately wanted somebody else to be there. So, yes, this is. This is such a great hedging bet, you know, and if microsoft's smart, they're happy too yeah, you know what, though?

01:28:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think a lot of rank and file at micro. You know, a lot of these people I'm sure you will hear this if you haven't already are like what is going on over here? Like what is like why did we like what? Did we put all our eggs in this basket? Now that's changing. I mean, that's part of the Suleiman hire.

01:28:32 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they're diversifying as quickly as possible, also because optically it looks better.

01:28:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I would also say this just because you're both observers.

01:28:40 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
But, as Orwell said, some pigs are more equal.

01:28:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey look, before World War II broke broke out, I mean, uh, hitler and stalin made a little deal, you know. I think uh, uh, sam altman appearing at bill was like I am a human, I most people stand this way, it's completely normal. You know, was that moment it was like, yeah, these guys are not going to be together, you know and if, uh, they're at odds right, yes, they are.

01:29:07
That's right, that's exactly right. Microsoft wants the liebenstrom, or whatever they called it, and, uh, you know, open a. I just want to give it up we just found somebody, that's all we're asking. It's a simple ai liebenstrom, which I think is pretty much what the guys in Castle, wolf and Science 3D used to yell.

01:29:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, mein Leben. All they ever said oh yeah, mein Leben. They said, that didn't they Was that when they got shot though right, yeah, yeah, I just remember, because I played it on like an Apple II, which had no sound, oh jeez.

01:29:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, I'm talking about the 3D version. This is the in-software version. It was all inside. It might sound like somebody's sneezing in the closet, Right? No, no, this was. They had better sound by. This is the early 90s, the real game. Well, you know the one that started it all, really right, Anyhow, yeah. So look, the EC's got their finger in many anti-competitive baskets or pies or whatever right now. So I think this is one of the likes. Yes, we do. Yeah, they're going to run out of fingers. God stop. I know, I know, I'm sorry, I'm calling.

01:30:25 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
HR.

01:30:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Show us, yeah, show us, yeah. And then you know, every month, microsoft highlights all of the features they've added to Copilot in Microsoft 365. And there were a bunch of them in June, but they also discussed some ones that are coming this month. Now it was next month at the time, which is nothing surprising, right? Like one of the you know, I think we should accept the fact that AI collectively is just a set of features that will enhance things, right, and that a lot of the new features we're getting in this case Microsoft 365, are AI features. But they're features, right, they're just, and that one of the benefits to that type of thing.

01:31:04
If you think about you know you're writing something and you have to look something up. I, you think about you know you're writing something and you have to look something up, so you'd go switch the browser and google it. You're like okay, and then you go back and you're right, like it's. It's neat when you can do things and have the tool right there so ai can help you, uh, enhance your writing or write new things for you or create images for you, whatever it is. So, for example, if you integrate microsoft designer into word and powerpoint, because, because those are apps where you might need to insert an image. You could go to the web and do that. But if you can do it right in the app, maybe it feels more natural or it's, you know, it's. You don't lose your context, your thread, yeah, yeah.

01:31:40 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
So a lot of it is. When I'm building a deck, I tend to leave a note for myself, get an image, that and then go on to the next slide, next slide, and then I go do image searching, yeah.

01:31:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyone who has built something or taken something apart and then had to rebuild it, right, whatever it is, like computers like this or whatever, you have all these little bits and you organize them however way that makes sense to you. Hopefully you take photos of it, because sometimes, like a kid walks by and kicks it all over the floor and then you have, like this, you know, confetti, mess of whatever. You have no idea what, anything. Yeah, so you want to stay, you want to see them. Um, so there's nothing super important or, you know, obvious. But you know, again, a lot of this is is based around this notion that you're going to have ai-based functionality in these apps and you're going to stay in the app and you're going to see more and more of that. I think this is, you know, very standard. I think this is the way ai works, right? Um, you know copilot. And one note for some reason this was separate from the other stuff. I don't know why, but can recognize handwritten text says paul, from 2002 because, didn't it do that like?

01:32:41 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
a million years ago, this was the original feature in one note. Yeah, I, I, this is like the. This was the original feature in OneNote. Yeah, this was the tablet PC, the motion computing tablet. Right, I had this machine.

01:32:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't understand.

01:32:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to guess it's because they're going to take this cross-platform or something I don't know.

01:33:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know.

01:33:01 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I thought we were going all in on loop. I thought OneNote is on its way out.

01:33:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh God, don't get me started with loop. It's just loopy, it's never happening. I know I'm I'm in the I'm so disappointed I was uh, I know I want it to happen so bad and it's just uh, well, they just the right.

01:33:19 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Pm has to come along and get that ship straightened out, but loop is just sort of wandering around right.

01:33:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so it is interesting to me that, um, microsoft teams, which is just a new way around right now. It is interesting to me that Microsoft Teams, which is just a new way of doing something we've been doing for a while, like collaboration right, has really taken off. Yep, loop, typical Microsoft solution. We don't make a simple app. It's a platform. We have components. It plugs into everything. It's, you know, like a cancer. It's in everything. And yeah, not so much.

01:33:48 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I don and everything and uh, yeah, not so much, I don't know, but you know the difference. I would say jeff teep, yeah, right, interesting, okay, I mean it comes down. I'm like I was saying that, I wasn't saying that flippantly, like you need the right pm. It's like jeff keeper helps convince sharepoint. Went away for a while, came back, took on teams as a rapper over top of sharepoint and the way to collaborate and look at it like it's a force of will thing, the whole company this is.

01:34:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This has gotten messy because of antitrust and because their first attempts at this actually did not do so well. But there's also, I think, this idea that with teams, there's a monetization play here above and beyond the thing you're already paying for, whereas loop feels like something that just kind of happens.

01:34:28 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
So I'm already paying for microsoft 365, like I just addressing a challenging problem, right, like, yeah, the claim to fame for loop was I've got a 57 year old sales guy who's been in the company for 30 years and by golly he's only going to look at an excel spreadsheet with the current inventory and products. And the fact that I can embed that as a loop component and update it real time so that every time he opens it the data is current without changing his workflow at all, because he can't even spell teams, you know he's good.

01:35:00
I'm sure this was completely coincidental, but as a 57 year old man, who's been in this industry for 30 years deeply, deeply insulted just picking random numbers, uh no, but you're right, of course no, no, that's loop's claim to fame the fact that it's a not that good. It's a you know weirdly wobbly notion. Copy when you use it that way.

01:35:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the problem. People see it as that, and it's so much more than that.

01:35:28 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's you want to make? You want to make yourself uncomfortable with loop? Watch what happens when you update chrome. Chrome gets an update and loop restarts. Jesus man, it's just like, by the way, we don't own our own code, oh boy okay well, I mean, what is that all about?

01:35:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I don't know. It's electron, but it's in the Chromium rendering engine.

01:35:48 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it must be the Chromium.

01:35:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The thing that you described is the basic playbook, with Teams as well, and it's what Windows is doing with ARM, like we're not moving to a new thing. I mean, we are, but we're going to keep doing your old thing too. And to make sure that that works for you, we're going to update your old thing so that it works with this new thing, right. So you see Loop or Teams inside of Outlook or whatever. You have this bi-directional experience where users don't have to worry about where the thing they're collaborating on is. In fact, we want you not to ever think about it, because we're going to manage that on the back end. We're not going to round robin doc files in email, right, it's a more sophisticated system, so it's just. But again, it just. I feel like it just hasn't yeah, taken off.

01:36:37
I don't quite get it and wait.

01:36:39 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Handwriting recognition is the original neural net demo. Right like this was the product they built for the post office 20 something years ago to recognize addresses, which saved billions. Like, yeah it was, it was the neural net win in the 80s it's the only reason santa claus could keep his business going.

01:36:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's it. That's why.

01:36:59 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
That's why he's in canada, because the postal code isO yes, I love it.

01:37:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, the Zip Code is one.

01:37:09 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
They respond to every letter. Yeah, I love it, that's good.

01:37:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They truly do Well, but you need the US to track them on like satellites, that's.

01:37:19 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
NORAD and, by the way, it's the North American radar observatory.

01:37:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh wow, hey, Canada screw you Okay, so no, I'm just kidding.

01:37:29 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Or that big old buffer zone so you can get your airplanes in the air. That's right.

01:37:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, handwriting recognition is one thing, but the big innovation in the tablet PC in 2002 was it? It wasn't, it was, but we weren't going to take handwriting and translate it into text, we were just going to leave it as it was and the system would still understand it right. It was handwriting as a first class data type. It's a very typical Microsoft solution to a problem Like we need to cross a small river, let's build a battleship, you know, kind of a thing. But they created a really powerful platform, so I guess that was 100% Bill right.

01:38:10 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
That's one of the last things Bill did. Yeah, that was, he was right. I mean, you still have to overpower it to do that.

01:38:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You still have to understand it. It did it, that's right, but it doesn't have to turn it into a text object.

01:38:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, he's brought it forward 20-something years, something years, and Apple does a demo where someone writes in horrible handwriting on an iPad and the iPad fixes the writing so it's a little cleaner. That's going to be. That's like a kick between the legs, right, jeez, that's I mean that's.

01:38:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really cool. You know you could tidy up your. It's like a, your third grade.

01:38:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm not saying your handwriting is bad, I Handwriting's bad I don't know, it's shocking. Would it be good enough for an Apple presentation? Probably not. So where are you going?

01:38:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to fix it. We're going to make a font that is your handwriting.

01:38:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Only Imagine if you weren't left-handed, like you weren't handicapped in that way. Oh.

01:38:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm a lefty and you could just write like a human being. I know, I know your wife is, I know my wife is.

01:39:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I naturally go right into this form of bullying because it's fun and it's not mean-spirited. You know the.

01:39:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Latin for lefty is sinister. You know that, don't you? Yes, jerry Pornel, late, great sci-fi author and cantankerous son of a gun, always used to sing the praises of Microsoft's handwriting recognition because, he says, they used my handwriting for it. They trained it on my handwriting.

01:39:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I said, you're the only one that can understand that Jerry used to carry around a first-gen Compaq Transmeta-based later HP tablet. I remember that Transmeta this thing could barely get out of its way. You'd have to boot it up before you left for the office so it would be ready to go by the time you got there. Oh he loved it.

01:39:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He wrote about it in Byte Magazine and Chaos Manor.

01:39:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He was the only person who ever used it. I don't know how he did it, it was terrible.

01:39:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I loved it. I missed Jerry a lot. He was quite the character.

01:40:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I got him into a press room. He didn't have his ID because he's Jerry Parnell. Everyone knows him. A young woman would not let him in. And I'm working at my computer and what I hear off the side is honey, I've been coming to this show since before you was born and I was like he's okay, please let him in, please let him in, he's good, don't do this to him, don't do this to us. You know, yeah, he was something else. I loved him anyway. Uh, tablet pc, blah, blah. Oh, yes, okay. So I don't know what it means to have handwriting recognition in one note.

01:40:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's hilarious, but it's happening I thought it did honestly for years I know it does, it always has, so what's?

01:40:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
really going on here. So I think that my guess and this is completely uneducated is just that it's probably related to more of a cross-platform thing, where this will just work the same everywhere and it's using AI on the back end and they'll do locally.

01:40:59 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I think you're totally right. I think they've been maintaining a very old handwriting parsing engine. A very old handwriting parsing engine and I would lay odds grabbed a couple of university students and said, hey, why don't you apply a new model to this and see where you get it? This is called Microsoft.

01:41:13
Fee, and if you would put that there you know, maybe this you know, the other side of this is probably less computationally intensive? Yep, oh, definitely, like I remember the metrics around DeepMind's alpha intensive? Yep, oh, definitely, like I remember the, the metrics around deep minds alpha applied to uh, chess versus starfish, which was the best chess player in the world, and it was like a tenth of computational resources someone asked me, um, if the pc not having good battery life over the first couple days was related to it indexing the disk, and I'm like, are you a time traveler?

01:41:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like maybe. I'm like, maybe, right, but the the way the fact that we use indexing to basically handle a database of data, uh is very. It's kind of it's old school, right, like AI works against some kind of an inference. It's a. It's not uh, this document was properly created with the right metadata and that's why we can find it so quickly. It's like I want to find a blue penguin and you're like 70 days ago you were looking at a blue penguin. It was on a porn site. It's a little weird, but here it is. You know, like you can do that kind of thing, and I think, yeah, I think that maybe, maybe they're, I think you're right, maybe they're modernizing uh, this Well to use AI, right.

01:42:27 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah Well, and plus didn't they also get a mandate from Lord Sacha that they had to do something. So this is a something, yeah there you go, yep Right. Why do we still?

01:42:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
have OneNote. Oh, they're doing AI, okay, right. That's good, well, just remember when the Internet Tidal wave came out and every product team had to have internet in it, and to this day you can do a select statement in sql server to html. Yes, yes which, because you had to do something, I really had to do something. You really shouldn't use it. It's using tables. Well, I think at the time they also thought this was going to be in the file system, right, and so knowing html was going to be important.

01:43:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um but yeah, I like, uh, the comment from greg melton in our um youtube, one of our youtube viewers today. Hello youtubers. Greg says personally I like the text-to-speech voices that were used in windows 2000, especially microsoft sam, where he couldn't say certain words correctly. Those were the days of sappy. Back in the 1990s we got an old timer in there.

01:43:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Some of the voice stuff in Windows 11 today is crazy because obviously there's built-in voices, but you can select even better voices and they're disarmingly good. They're really good.

01:43:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're really good. You think we'll look back on 20 years from now and say remember, when it sounded like Scarlett Johansson? Who's Scarlett Johansson Exactly?

01:43:48 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I think that will be what they say actually but, and from a from a somebody who's serious about audio, like scarlett johansson's voice has a lot of fry in it, like oh yeah, that good but it's natural.

01:43:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it doesn't sound like a machine, does it? I mean, no, it does right, that's the point. And in fact, some of the open ai voices still have vocal fry and and you remember when, in order to cover the fact that the machine was thinking, would add you know like instead of working.

01:44:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are you everything okay over there?

01:44:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Working.

01:44:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Working. Something's happening. I think I'm having a stroke. No, here's the answer. Okay, so blah, blah, blah. Okay, yeah, something's happening. I think I'm having a stroke. No, here's the answer. Um, okay, so, okay, yeah. So last year there was a rumor, rumor, rumor, speaking of can't speak properly, nice, uh that google was adding some local ai stuff to the pixel under the name pixie.

01:44:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That appears to now be called google ai because apple intelligence probably it's too bad they didn't do google intelligence, because that would have been perfect.

01:44:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A little too on point. Perhaps they're going to roll in stuff they already have today, like Circle to Search and Gemini, which is mostly probably not on device, although maybe that switches over time to more and more on device. They're going to have a feature called Add Me, which is you're taking, which they have not described, but my they have Best Take. Sorry that was me.

01:45:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had Maria. It wasn't just me. I apologize.

01:45:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice, that's a solid Dennis Miller joke.

01:45:25
Best Take is you know, you take a photo of a group and it actually takes a bunch of photos real quick, and then it grabs the version of each person where their eyes are open and they're smiling and does a nice thing. I'm guessing that add me is going to add the person taking the photo to the group, right, that you take a selfie and then it adds you into the group. That's my guess. Something called studio, which used to be called Creative Assistant, which is about adding images and I would imagine creating sorry images and probably other content using generative AI on device. And then Pixel Screenshots, which is kind of like a mini version of Microsoft Recall, where you take screenshots and it saves information about each image as you do it, which will make searches basically an index, right, We'll make it easier to search against those later on. I'm not sure why it's only screenshots. It seems like eventually you'd want to, I don't know a feature that may be recorded everything you did on the device and then save it to a private on-device enclave?

01:46:20
I don't know. I'm just throwing it out there Just an idea. I think I mentioned last week that Opera is going to allow you to use whatever they call them. Llms. They're really LLMs and SLMs, right Remember the rule.

01:46:38 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
If it's called artificial intelligence, it's because it doesn't work. As soon as it does work, it gets a new name. It becomes image recognition or handwriting recognition, predictive analytics or a large language model. Let's call them models.

01:46:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go. So Brave is also going to use what they call the bring your own model model in their browser. It's available now to test in the Canary Channel.

01:47:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, what I've been using lately is the new Anthropic Cloud Sonnet, which is in some respects really impressive when you say that.

01:47:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what do you use it in, Like what's the use case there?

01:47:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, ok, you remember, and we've talked about my custom GPT that I did for Lisp coding Yep. Okay, you remember, and we've talked about my custom GPT that I did for Lisp coding Yep, and that was back in the day two months ago, where you had to give it a bunch of documents.

01:47:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm so young then.

01:47:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh man, that was so long ago. Now this is my new test for all these new AIs and they all can code quite competently Sonnet. I've asked it questions, I try to challenge it with the kind of stuff that people might use, and it's surprisingly good. It's not good, it doesn't do everything, but it's surprisingly good at a lot of things.

01:47:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was trying to. I talk about this from time to time. Sometimes I stupidly forget that my wife is my wife and she doesn't care. And I was describing to her.

01:47:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My advice just from personal experience never forget that your wife is your wife. That's a trouble.

01:48:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean in the sense that she's like normal and doesn't. Oh, she's a normie. You forget she's a normie, Occupy my mind she doesn't care about. But, like I was describing to her to this minute, I believe the best use of AI so far is actually for coding right. That Copilot for GitHub or whatever, is still among the best right, oh yeah, still most mature?

01:48:26
Yeah, because you can take a block of code and say optimize this or it's the whole leave in context thing, like everyone goes to Stack Overflow and they go through all the things and they forget what they're doing. But you can do it right there. You can optimize on the fly. It can find mistakes, it can help you know code to a certain standard if you're in a business Like it's just, it's excellent. You know, I just think that stuff is really great, so it's a good use for it, I think.

01:48:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, that's the thing about AI. It really is very dependent on the sphere that you're using it and how you use it and what you're using it for, but it can be pretty amazing. You know, yep, the music, composition, stuff is amazing. So when Brave says, bring your own model or BYOM, are they? Can I use cloths on it? Can I use? I mean, or is there a drop-down list or something?

01:49:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How does that work? Yeah, literally, there's a bunch you can install and load and whatever. So they have a it's in Nightly now. But the idea here is they have Leo and Opera has Area and in both cases you can augment the in-browser AI assistant with these models. They could be on device, they could be in the cloud, they could be some combination of both and you know it's up to you. So it's a little ponderous. I think this is a bit much task of a normal person, frankly. But that's not who this is targeting, right? This is, in this case, in brave's case. It's obviously about privacy and and they have that whole promise. You know around that. But the types of people who would use brave are, by definition, probably pretty technical and would want some say over this kind of a thing, right? So I so I think it makes sense for the audience. It's you know they recommend like for local models. They have Lama, lama 3, mistral 7B, microsoft V3 Mini, which I would say is fine, but I don't know what the right one is.

01:50:14 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
The usual suspects. In other words yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting to point out that the OpenAI API is now being implemented by a bunch of other stacks, so it's like you can use the OpenAI interface and it'll just say oh, I'll point it over here and it'll just work.

01:50:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So okay, so interesting, you mentioned this. So two things that occurred to me as we were going through this. One is that Copilot plus PCs have some local AI capabilities, so there's image creation capabilities that, instead of running against Copilot in the cloud, run against. We don't know what the models are, but they run against some model or models on device. So I've done a bunch of these now where I have a very not complex, but a detailed prompt and in Copilot up in the cloud it's beautiful, like 16 by 9 image, and then in the on-device version I get like a picture of an apple, like by itself, and it's like, uh, it's not really what I asked for, you know.

01:51:07
So there's those kinds of limitations, yeah, um, but also, if you've ever like, uh, I wanted this is a few weeks ago I wanted to create a picture of Tim Cook wearing like a cook hat and with grill equipment in front of a grill, and none of the big AIs would do it, because this is a person and we're not doing that, right, yeah, so then you go out to the actual Google web and you find, like you know, face, replace whatever. Every single one that I used, every single one one a gave me an image b gave me exactly the same image. They're all clearly using the same model underlying engine. Interesting, it's crazy. They were all like the face was the same face. Yeah, the not quite tim cook face. Nice, the one white guy in their library of faces that looks a little bit like him, I guess.

01:51:59 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I don't know, it was really strange I'm working with a bunch of conference organizers and everybody's using chat gpt to write abstracts now, yes, which is funny when you're when you got three or four, but when you have two thousand, are you?

01:52:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
serious, is anybody doing their homework?

01:52:13 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
come on, yeah well, so you're like a thousand they start with in a world, yeah, stop stop.

01:52:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we shall delve into this subject. In a world, in a world where machines write your code.

01:52:29 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and every title has a colon in it. You want to stand out. Just take those elements out.

01:52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's an interesting point.

01:52:38 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, there's certain that's crazy traits yeah, it's just like you used gpt to write this for you and I can tell, and it's like you know, how can you tell?

01:52:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's like I have a thousand, just like it come on, people are so lazy um, uh, one more thing, and then we're gonna do the xbox so google translate, which is already pretty awesome, uh, added support for 110 new languages in one day, the biggest ever, obviously because of advances in its Palm II language model, which was trained on multilingual text, right. And so some of these are like how did you not have this Cantonese Javi?

01:53:16 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
The power of the organization.

01:53:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Some of them, I think are Klingon or something from Star Wars, I don't know, but a bunch of new languages. Um, actually, it says about a quarter of them came from africa, right, which would have been obviously underserved by this kind of thing. So I mean, that's, this is.

01:53:29 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
This is the type of thing that makes this this is the internet bringing, bringing the internet closer together forever.

01:53:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah it's good. It's not always good, it's not all good, but that's good.

01:53:38 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
They were good things yeah once again.

01:53:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we are thrilled to have all of our brand new viewers and listeners on the various platforms. I just talked to anthony nielsen. He says we can do this from now on. Uh, I also um talked to anthony nielsen who said we're getting a good response. We're on xcom about the same number of viewers a little over 300 on xcom and on YouTube but you might want to tell your grandpa because we got zero viewers on Facebook.

01:54:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, but you know what? That's been my experience too. Facebook is like zero engagement.

01:54:17 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, which I?

01:54:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
think is the real reason they made threads.

01:54:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean. One of the reasons we've got viewers on Twitter is because we're on the front page YouTube. Of course, we've been streaming on YouTube for some time. Keep calling it Twitter.

01:54:33 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
We're not going to be the front page anymore.

01:54:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did I say Twitter? You know, the only reason we're doing it now is because it's not Twitter, it's X. I was always really concerned about the fact that Twitter and twit sounds so similar.

01:54:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you've been acquired, have you?

01:54:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I'm now living on Elon bucks. It's so exciting All the Teslas I can drive.

01:54:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I have not been acquired. I buy enough.

01:54:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Teslas, I can go to the moon. We always said we are not Twitter, we predate Twitter, twitter copied us and blah, blah, blah.

01:55:07 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
We were Twits before they were.

01:55:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we were the first Twits. Anyway, now that they're X, I don't have nearly the concerns I did before. So I'm very happy to be there on their streams. You know what? It's good for us because it gives us a larger audience, a larger group of people who can see and interact with what we're doing. So, anyway, great to have you all aboard. I think Kik's in there too. We're using Restream, which is a service that kind of you know it's funny, a service that kind of we used. You know it's funny. We had a 28 000 box in the um, in the uh, in the uh, you know wire, closet over here in the network operations center and uh, the elemental. It was very expensive, I think it's a network operations nook nook. There is a center of the nook. Anyway, the elemental has a yearly license fee and we just decided to stop paying that. But now this is what's cool about the internet everything gets cheaper and cheaper. Now restream does it for pennies on the dollar and does a great job of it. So we're very happy.

01:56:12 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Thank you, restream and um that's in a great battle for being. You know, this is the battle of dot net rocks. Right, we're just trying to cut away the cruft of the fact that we had to roll all our own stuff back in the day.

01:56:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the only reason you know Twit looks like it does. I mean? The only reason I'm even in a studio is because we started this in 2005. And all I knew was TV and radio and I thought, well, we'll just build a little TV station, that's all we'll do. Somebody was asking me the other day about when we got started.

01:56:41 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
We're pretty sure we're now the oldest RSS2 feed in the world. Really, when did you get started? The day Weiner published it, wow, 2004. Yeah, yeah, so we think we were the third implementation. That's great, and both his and Curry's are gone, right.

01:56:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean there are older shows that are now podcasts, Well, and that's the thing. I mean, there were lots of things pre-RSS that were basically the same. I distinctly remember the first year I October 2004, started the Tech Guy podcast. So we were also in that very first.

01:57:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you didn't like calling him, remember, in the beginning you didn't want to call them podcasts either.

01:57:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wanted to call them netcasts because I was worried Apple was going to come, because they kind of made it like an Apple thing.

01:57:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, apple was notorious for that.

01:57:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then, too, they did. They went after some people who used pod. Yeah, they never went after podcasting in general. But I thought netcasting made more sense because you're basically broadcasting on the internet, right? Yep? Broadcasting made more sense because you're basically broadcasting on the Internet, right? Yep, that's netcasting Plus you're casting in the. Anyway, I tried, nobody bought it, so I gave up. We're now a podcast, like everybody else. Everybody knows.

01:57:49
You're a sellout like the rest of them, I am a sellout. Anyway, thanks to everybody who's watching, we really appreciate it. Now, here's the moment you've tuned in for.

01:58:09 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Ladies, and now here's the moment you've tuned in for ladies and gentlemen, I give you paul thurot and the xbox segment.

01:58:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will say I've been gaming a lot lately on the pc. Oh, welcome to the pc master race, friend I I think we need a new term for that but uh, it's um, you know it's it's. It's fine, like it's fine, yeah, it's better than fine. Well, this stuff has happened since I. It's fine, like it's fine, yeah, it is better than fine. A lot of stuff has happened since I dropped the keyboard back in 2005 and picked up a controller. You know.

01:58:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still can't get used to playing a game with a controller. Believe it or not, it just doesn't.

01:58:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I still. I go right back to it. I've actually been playing mostly with a controller on the PC as it turns out.

01:58:36 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you can, that's the other thing is.

01:58:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't have this in the notes, but there is a Steam summer sale happening right now through July 11th, and if you're a PC gamer, please check it out. My God, some of the prices are awesome, like I got Doom 2016 for $3.99. Wow, like normally $3. Wow, it's some good stuff. A little extra tip, I guess. But as for actual Xbox stuff, a little mixed bag.

01:59:07
Where are we? So Microsoft is partnering with Amazon to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to select Fire TV devices. The first will be the Fire TV Stick 4K and 4K Max, I guess. Whatever Meaning, you'll be able to use your controller over Bluetooth to that device and play games. Based on my experience with this on more devices than I can count, it will probably be pretty terrible, but I don't know.

01:59:32
I keep hearing from people sometimes who are like it works fine for me and I think if you play, I think a fast action game like Doom is not a good choice for this service, but maybe some of the slower games where latency is not that big of a deal, might be a better choice. So that's coming. When is that coming? Soon, I don't have an exact date. We have also had a new month, an exciting new month of Game Pass releases of Activision Blizzard titles. Just kidding, there aren't any. Wow, yeah, sometimes these are painfully bad, or maybe that's not fair. Painfully unfamiliar, maybe is the better word, and this might be the worst one I've ever seen for me personally, where I'm like, seriously, wow, cricket 24.

02:00:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, hallelujah.

02:00:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've been waiting. Magical delicacy. What sounds like porn to me, to chia, I know. Neon white case. I don't know what any of these games are nickelodeon, all-star, brawl 2, oh yeah, apparently the first one was such a hit exactly we've been a second one. I don't know I am. Are they scraping the? Bottom of the barrel I don't know I I they have hundreds of activision blister games they could put on this thing. Yeah, I know there's licensing and whatever and I'm sure there's stuff to sort out about billing and stuff.

02:00:55 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
but I would also say like if you're gonna to jump unfamiliar games, jump up during the summer when people are distracted. You wouldn't do this over winter, I feel like they did do this in the winter.

02:01:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, fair enough, this one's bad for me. It's really something. It makes me feel like I don't game at all. You have played nothing. Did I fall asleep for eight years? What is this? I don't know what any of this is.

02:01:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not exactly the cricket core segment. That is true.

02:01:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That is true, I also discovered in Mexico, having watched two football games, as they call it, that I'm also not a soccer guy. There's nothing more blisteringly boring than a 0-0 tie, and I saw two of them. Come on Listen, we've solved this in other sports. You make the field smaller, you make the net bigger, whatever it is. Yeah, you go until someone scores.

02:01:47 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Come on, think about it and shootouts are never the answer.

02:01:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Science also here's an idea. Could I know how much time is left in the game? Is that too much to ask?

02:01:55 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
clock never stops running it's crazy. Never stops running, if you like soccer football.

02:01:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Never stops running. If you like soccer, football, as you might call it, do not write me, I don't care. And then Forza Horizon 4, which I want to say came out in 2018, is going to be delisted. Why? At the end of the year? I know so why. It was originally released on the Xbox One. It was re-released on the Series X and S in 2020. The game maker at the time extended license agreements they had with their partners that are in the game through the end of 2024. And now that is going to run out, so this game is going to. I think you will be able to, If I understand this correctly. You'll still be able to play it, but you'll never be able to get it after that time. The latest version is Horizon 4. If you know the Forza games, you know there's really two series of games the Motorsport, which is the more realistic one, and Horizon 4, which is a little more kind of arcade-y or whatever More fun we might say.

02:03:03 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I want to drive a Veyron at 200 miles an hour on highways. It's goofy, but yeah, anyway, it's. This is unfortunately, I don't know it's so hard to justify delisting games In an industry that is notorious for sentimentalism and always interested in the old titles like why would you ever take a game off? The expensive part has already happened. You wrote it and shipped it.

02:03:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The complexity here is that Forza is a Microsoft brand, right? Right, those two games, kind of like Call of Duty has different studios working on the game. So the Motorsport games, the Horizon games, are made by different game studios. I guess Playground Games is the one that makes the Horizon games, or at least made that one, and they are in Britain. They are, I don't believe, oh no, they are. They're part of microsoft studios. So I don't know why. I don't know why. I guess someone just looked at the bill and was like you know, maybe based on usage, whatever, I, I don't know. This is, it's unusual. You don't see a lot of this.

02:04:13 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
So they haven't yeah, so this is about the licensing yeah, they don't want to maintain the licensing anymore, and so they're going to delist the game.

02:04:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, because they have to license those car brands. That's what it is. I get it.

02:04:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you would think by this point these companies would be like just use it, god, it's just free publicity, who cares? Well, yeah, but, maybe they're out of date. You know, maybe that's part of the problem. They update the brands and they're like we don't want the old one out there. We want, you know, yeah, we want you to put the new cars in. It's hard to say why can't they just have generic?

02:04:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
cars, you know. I want to thank the two people now who are on Facebook watching us live.

02:04:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Both of whom did it on a dare. I bet you can't figure it out.

02:04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I can figure it out. No, I can figure it out. I don't see chat on Facebook. I guess it doesn't have chat, it just has likes and stuff. So anyway, thank you, welcome you too, and that's special. All the kids are doing it. Special thanks to our Club Twit members who support the show and keep the show on the air and all of our shows on the air. Club Twit is the way two years ago, the way we decided. You know, advertising for podcasts is dwindling. We're seeing podcast networks and individual podcasts go away. As we were talking earlier, richard, you know we've been doing this since 2004. Kind of want to keep doing it.

02:05:42
20 years later, it's not cool anymore and I'm a lot older, but we still want to do it and that's where the club comes in. You help us, we help you. So the club is $7 a month. We keep it low, so we want to let everybody in. We would love, in fact, even to get one in 10 people who listen to the shows or watch the shows in the club. Right now it's fewer than one in 20. If we could get one in 10, we could add shows, we could expand, we could do more things like streaming into various platforms. All that costs money. The studio costs money. Even Paul and Richard cost money, believe it or not, when you become cheap and uh.

02:06:27
So your help really is important. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get your own special feeds, access to our discord, where the chat goes on day and night with a bunch of other really interesting, smart people the Club Twit members. You also get free stuff shows we don't put out in public video for shows we only do audio on, and so forth. All of that is just to give you some benefit, but the real benefit is the knowledge that you're helping us continue to do what we think we do better than anyone else, which is give you the tech news and information you need to stay ahead of the curve. So thank you in advance. If you're not yet a member, we'd love to have you. Twittv slash club twit. Now we are going to the back of the book. We call it the tips, the picks and the brown liquor. Now considering, we are now streaming into many, many platforms. If you are under 18 or 21, depending on your region please drink responsibly. Now. The tip of the week from Paul Frott.

02:07:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bring this up every so often, but our friends Paul Robichaux and Tony Redmond and that team of people have created an incredible book about Microsoft 365, which they still call Office 365 for IT pros. It's in its 11th edition. I was amused to discover that these editions are tied to the Microsoft fiscal year, which is genius and because it's always slow in the summer so you can kind of put this thing out and then they release. You know, regular monthly updates, so when you buy it you get, like the, you know the year of updates. Windows weekly listeners can get a $10 off. So I'll read this. I mean, hopefully it will be in the show notes, but it's a O three 65 it pros dot gumroadcom. Slash capital. I slash capital M three six five capital P capital S. So nope, that's not it I got the wrong one.

02:08:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's capital, zero, capital. O, three, six, five, I got the wrong one. Hold on we, yeah, no, no, we got to get the right one. Think it's capital zero capital.

02:08:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, three, six, five, I got the wrong one. Hold on we. Yeah, no, no, we got to get the right one. Hold on let me.

02:08:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry kev brewer's got it here I got that.

02:08:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, make sure it's the one with ten dollars off, though. Oh, I don't know about that. That's the thing. Yeah, I think I might have had the wrong. Uh, yep, I'm so sorry. Yeah, I pasted wrong into the notes. I will, um, I screwed it up again.

02:09:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry guys, I'm sorry. We're doing our best. We're not used to all these people watching us as we work.

02:09:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know a lot about computers. Let me put it in the chat when are we? Kev's got it, you got it.

02:09:14 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I think Kev's got it right. Kev got it right, yeah, yeah 0365.

02:09:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It must be somewhere.

02:09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, kev got it right, the one I was. Oh, I got it right.

02:09:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry, I copied the wrong one from the notes. I'm sorry I had it right in the notes. Yeah, it's a longer URL than what I said, but yes, so.

02:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's in the notes. Use notes. How about that? You know you are 57 years old, so I understand you know.

02:09:44 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah things get hard. Well, actually some things. That's the problem, isn't it? You were gonna? Yeah, you're going there. Okay, that's good, I'm calling hr again, anywho, anyway, hey look, the big thing about that book is it's continuously updated. The biggest problem you have when you're trying to manage office 365 is that everything you look up is out of date. It's a constantly moving target. I don't know that Tony and those guys realized what they were signing on for when they put this book together.

02:10:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know exactly the pain they feel because I do the Windows book. Their book is even bigger than mine. It's over 1,200 pages long. Wow, yeah, no pages long. Wow, yeah, no. This is. And Microsoft 365 is literally updated every month, which Windows is to some degree too, but Microsoft 365 is this giant thing. It's keeping track of this. It must be a nightmare. And actually, you know, tony, I talked to him a few months ago specifically about this and book sale models, et cetera, and he is the orchestrator, I think is the way to put it.

02:10:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's the one that puts us all together and a gorilla on the cover, which is nice.

02:10:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, there's a different animal every year.

02:10:50 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I think the team turns over too. Tony's one of the constants, I think.

02:10:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul Robichaux has been there for a while. These are a lot of guys that came up on Windows and TMAG right.

02:11:02 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
He was my original angry exchange administrator. He was everyone's original angry exchange administrator Back when he was at HP. Goodness Nice $10 off. If you're Windows, I've got to do a run-ass with him again. I need somebody shaking the fist at the cloud. It's not me. I love it yeah.

02:11:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, he's a good guy, yeah, he's great and uh, you know he picks the right, fights, um. And then, as far as uh software, there's a bunch of things I could have picked. But uh, proton, which is coming up more and more, bought a company called, or bought a product called, standard notes a few months ago. This is a a bizarre kind of paid product that's really expensive, but they have used some of the technology from that to build a docs solution on top of Proton Drive, which is their secure and encrypted privacy, blah, blah, blah. Cloud storage system, right. So this is a Google cloud I'm sorry, google Docs alternative markdown based, which is really cool.

02:11:58
If you there's a really low-end version of Proton Drive you can get for free so you can test this for yourself if you want to see it. If you don't see it today, it should come in the next couple of days. It's rolling out to everybody, free and paid, and obviously, like I said, there are paid tiers for those people who need actual storage, meaning more than a couple of gigabytes. So you can look into that.

02:12:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you want it paid, because that's why you're not using Google Docs. It's free, and because it's free you're you know the product.

02:12:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But Gemini, I mean, what's the problem?

02:12:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does Proton have AI? I bet it doesn't.

02:12:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet it doesn't.

02:12:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet it doesn't Well no wait, I'm sorry, do they?

02:12:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know, probably not. You know what, though? If you want AI in Proton Drive, just use something like Grammarly or LanguageTool. It builds right into the browser. I just feel like, if you're using Proton, anything you?

02:12:53
probably don't want AI in your kernel. Keep it out of my. This is the whole. Like I bought IA Writer, which is a markdown editor across the platform. Yeah, I bought it everywhere. They sell it. It's, you know, a little expensive, but I love it and, my God, they send out a newsletter. It has been an anti-AI screed Six months straight. That's all they talk about now. So you know, I guess there are different takes on. Ai depending on where you're coming from.

02:13:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't have any privacy, you and I, so we're not really the people who are worried about this.

02:13:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my God, I might as well just walk around naked. People are like what are you doing? I'm like, it's okay, I don't have any privacy.

02:13:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know we don't have any curtains, so it's the same. Yeah, I don't have any privacy. You know we don't have any curtains, so it's the same yeah exactly.

02:13:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why are you always washing the windows?

02:13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you doing, Mr Richard Campbell? Run as Radio man. Let's hear what's coming up on R as R.

02:13:52 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Published today, episode 939 with Boo Lamb. So this is actually one of the shows I recorded at Build, and Boo works for F5, the networking company, and one of the things they were announcing at Build was NGINX as a service on Azure. So what are we talking about? So NGINX is a reverse proxy and a bunch of other really cool things. And it's not that you haven't been able to run NGINX on Azure. You can. You just have to run it in a virtual machine, which means you need to do the care and feeing and pay for a virtual machine.

02:14:26
And we all know that platform pieces are better. And now it's not that, like Azure doesn't have a platform reverse proxy. That would be front door. But if you're a Linux guy and you're moving Linux workloads into Azure, the idea that you would switch out your proxy is not a good one. So you have to shepherd this VM, and so F5 found a niche there, and so now in the Azure marketplace you can select the F5 Nginx as a service platform piece and pay by the month. And now you've got Nginx without having to own the VM, without having to worry about the OS and all the updates and so forth. It's a continuously updated version, and then F5's got the background right.

02:15:05
Like Boo and I talked a bit about Big IP Once upon a time I did that work, you know I mean they were expensive bits of hardware when you're building your own racks and buy two for redundancy. But you know all that stuff's cloud now and they've moved to that space as well, and so the fact that this was there and just opens the door to easier infrastructure as code, you know, smoother deployments. One less thing your monitoring is automatically integrated. That was a very fun conversation and said okay, you know, this is all good for folks, so you want this and F5's done it, so you can go get it from them.

02:15:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Excellent. Now I unfortunately have lost the ability to show pictures from the internet, so this will all rely on your ability to describe.

02:15:53 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
This is not a hard one, because, well, the first question you have to ask is why the heck am.

02:15:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I talking about Jack daniels. What is your brown liquor pick of the week? Jd, you're kidding. So there's a few things going by the way jack daniels bad, there you go. I like it. No, that's the point. It's okay for cocktails. It's not bad at all, it's a.

02:16:14 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's a fine sip and bourbon there's nothing wrong with it and the more you know about it, the more you'll actually like it actually, okay, you know, just like any of these things. But why am I talking about Jack? Because that's not a normal drink for me. But in between doing the show in Berlin where I talked about a German single malt which was stunning the Elburn and then in Kansas City, when I pulled out, did I talk about Kansas City? Oh, the Craggymoor.

02:16:41
I was fishing in Montana. Oh, that's right, how did that go? Did you catch any? Oh, it's lots. Yeah, great, you know, listen, this is. You don't get to keep anything right, it's all barbless fly fishing, but I'm doing the laziest form of fly fishing possible. You, you're sitting in a drift boat. I don't have to get wet, I don't have to put on waders. Uh, I have a guide. It's either one or two of us. He rigs the line. He literally can you cast to that point because you put in the point. He asked you're gonna get a fish. That's nice, that's cool, and so it's like how many fish would you like? Like, uh, and we got. I got some good rainbows and a couple of whiteys and lots of cutties.

02:17:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you have to throw them back, or can you?

02:17:21 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
eat them, take a picture with them if they're big and put them back. So I got a few photo keepers. I got a real nice 18-inch rainbow that danced on his tail. For me it was a good show. I gave him a big smooch and put him back Right on the lips. But one of the things we did during that week was we had a little memorial to an old fly fisherman who, unlike most people, uh, managed to die on the river nice. You know, most of us die in a hospital and he actually, in his 80s, had an accident and the river took him down and so and he liked jack, so we all drank jack, all number seven yeah, yeah, I'm like you know what.

02:18:00
There is nothing wrong with this drink no this is a good drink, the drink of rock stars everywhere.

02:18:07
Yeah, no, it's legit, and so let me tell you the story. So Jasper Newton, daniel, also known as Jack, born 1846. And, of course, he was a kid during the Civil War and a teenager by the end of the war, and did not get along with his stepfather. His parents were killed back then and he was taken in by a preacher and a moonshiner by the name of Dan Call. It's such a good story and maybe it's even true, like who really knows.

02:18:34
There's lots of there's been books written about this stuff and I'm not going to go that far. Then, another aspect of this is that the actual educator in all of this was a guy named Nathan Green, who was a slave, although by the time that he's working with Dan but, and he was so. He was owned by Dan Call, although was emancipated and to the end of the Civil War and so but didn't leave. They continue to work together and, in fact, uh, and green was the guy who did what's called the lincoln county process. So this is when we get into what's the difference between jack, which is a tennessee whiskey, and bourbon, which is most of these things right, and it's this charcoal filtration step oh see, I always thought jack was a bourbon.

02:19:22
It's tennessee whiskey, that's different technically does not qualify as a bourbon because of the filtration step and then and the filtration is done with maple charcoal and it is done at the new make process. So after you make the distillate then you run it through filtration and there's a few ways to go about it, but it's with charcoal and that technically disqualifies it. It's bourbon, which doesn't do that.

02:19:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is the?

02:19:47 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
effect of that flavor-wise. Well, what they say is it quote-unquote removes impurities, which in 1865 is a fine thing to say and today is very suspect. Um, because more likely is that the charcoal is adding flavors to the new make right there, other than taking them away. So, uh, call, being a preacher and a moonshiner, has a problem, as they actually, uh, you know, have been making for a while. He's got a lot of flack from his flock saying hey on, you work for God on Sunday, and then you make the devil's drink on Monday, like what's that about? And Daniel comes into an inheritance in 1875. And so they, actually he buys the business from call and becomes the lead on. This is the in Lynchburg, tennessee, where they've been ever since, although the location shifted around a bit. To his credit, daniel hires Nathan Green, the guy who coached him on the meth in the first place, as his distiller. So you know, right, the the same folks behind it the whole time. Uh, it's the. The name number seven comes from the fact that it was the seventh distillery in district four in Tennessee, so that's why they called it old no 7, although when the redistricting happened the numbers changed. They never changed the brand, because why would you? And so it's a little niche distillery for a long time until a guy named Lem Muttlow takes over in 1907, and Daniel dies in 1911, which is right in time for the beginning of prohibitions. Tennessee is one of the first states in the union to pass a statewide prohibition in 1910. And so now the company's got a problem. They make alcohol, so they start building out facilities in St Louis and Birmingham, so now in Missouri and Alabama, who also start passing prohibition, and then eventually by 1920, it's national, and so they're really in a state where they can't make their product. That lasts 13 years. Prohibition is repealed in 1933, but the state laws are still in effect. But in that intervening decade or so Motlow has made himself into a senator and he actually was one of the folks working towards repealing and fixes the state law as well. And so jd, even though they set up facilities in these other states, never really makes them anywhere other than in tennessee.

02:22:08
Uh, back and running by 1938, just in time to be shut down for world war ii. Uh, and then mott lowe passes on and goes to his family who runs it for about 10 years until Brown Foreman shows up and acquires him in 1956. Brown Foreman is a mini. It's not as big as Diageo or Suntory or anything, but they own a bunch of different things, including Woodford Reserve, which is a bourbon, and Glendronic, which is a Scottish whiskey Other than that and then becomes a much more, you know, professionally made brand.

02:22:42
For a long time in those days it was 90 proof, old, number seven, uh, 45 alcohol. But around the late 80s uh, you know, brown form and running it for 30 years or so they're paying additional taxes because they're above 40 in some of of their exports. They're already exporting worldwide. So they start lowering the alcohol level and they don't really tell anybody that they're doing it. They just do it over several years until they're down to 40%. There's a few folks that kick up a fuss about it but they kind of said like, listen, sales never are dropping. It just reduces the price of the booze if we make it at 40% rather than 45%.

02:23:20
And it is a very popular alcohol. Like it's hard to say what's the number one. Like sometimes it's Jim Beam, sometimes it's Jack. In 2023, they sold 14 million cases of Jack Daniels. So each case is 12, 750 ml or 24 ounce bottles, roughly nine liters. So 14 million cases, about 33 million gallons. There's just a lot of alcohol. It's the largest product in the Brown Foreman line and but part of what makes that hard number hard to understand is that the Jack Daniels makes many other products, a bunch of specialty versions of their whiskey. Gentleman jack is very nice, uh. Plus they do things like the lynchburg lemonade which has jack in it, and they don't make those. They break those numbers out clearly because you know corporate reporting ain't what it used to be. So not in the top five, for sure top one or two, most sold alcohols on this planet.

02:24:22
You can buy jack daniels by the barrel. If you care to do the tour, they will make you an offer. It's about ten thousand dollars to buy a barrel. Um, you'll get, you'll. Uh, you'll get. You have to roll it home. They're not going to ship it there. You're going to buy a new make barrel, so it's going to be a few years before it's ready and then they're going to bottle it for you with your own custom label. You'll get about 240 bottles on it, which makes it twice as expensive as just buying regular bottles, and they give you some decanters and things like that. It's beautiful. They keep the barrel. Obviously you don't take it home? Yeah, you can buy the barrel if you want.

02:24:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, by the way, they sell the barrels all the time you can visit this place, go to the tour, like you said. Yeah, I believe this has changed, but in 2003, when we did it, lynch that was a dry county.

02:25:08 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Still is a dry county. You can't taste.

02:25:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm like. You guys have to be the biggest taxpayer here. What's happening?

02:25:14 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
So they now have a store? Yes, they now have a store where they're allowed to sell commemorative products which include bottles of Jack Daniels. Yep, that's true.

02:25:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's how they got the exception.

02:25:28 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Just don't open them on prem. Yeah, take them, you can smell it.

02:25:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So here's what they're like.

02:25:34 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
It's one distillery, it has always been one distillery. It is a big distillery. Their mash bill is 80% corn, very, very high, 12% rye, 8% barley. They have one water source, the Cave Spring Hollow, which they not only own but for thousands of acres around it as well. They maintain their own yeast strain which is essentially the same one from the 1930s when they went back into business after Prohibition. They have their own microbiologist that maintains that strain. They ferment for four to six days, so they do a staged fermentation and some of them go longer, some of them go shorter.

02:26:09
They use the sour mash process which is normal for bourbon we talked about this before which is to say they take a certain percentage, typically 10 to 15 percent, maybe 20%, I've heard as high as 30 and put the old mash back in the still to help sour the mash, to create the flavors that are consistent. They have some of the largest custom-made stills on the planet. They use only column stills. There are six of them. They are 100 feet tall, they're just insanely incredibly massive. They're just insanely incredibly massive.

02:26:43
They do a two-stage distillation which goes up to 70, which is relatively low, which they then use the chill, the, the carbon uh, the charcoal filtration. They burn their own they. The way they actually make their charcoal is they use uh maple staves, two by like, two by twos. They soak them, make in 70% alcohol, set fire to it, control the burn and put it out when it's nicely charred and then stack it in these 10-foot tall tubs which all of the New Make goes through at 70%. They then cut it to 62.5, the standard number for American bourbon before barreling it in toasted American oak barrels. Aging ranges between four and eight years. Any given batch of number seven is 175 to 200 barrels.

02:27:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And if you missed last week's show, the theme was you are drinking wood.

02:27:34 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
You're drinking wood which is the name of the show last week, right, yeah, because that's what we got to is just this recognition of it didn't matter whether I made it out of grapes, it didn't matter whether I made it out of grain, it didn't matter whether I made it out of fruit. All the flavor. This is why moonshining is God's work. Yeah, yeah, so the whole. You know the charcoal filtration, taking impurities out, that's not a thing, right, really it's not. Let's talk about the major things that actually happen. Removing sulfurs is important. We consider it's only eight. The sulfurs come from barley. It's only 8% barley. That's not a much, that's not a big thing. I think you're preceding the new make with a bunch of the phenols that if you didn't do that, you wouldn't have as much flavor. There's lots of temperature games there.

02:28:25
Again, the scale of the operation in order to produce 14 million cases a year, they have 200 million barrels laid up at any given time across 90 buildings over a 3,000 acre area in Lynchburg. So this I mean a lot of ways. I could tell you, jack is a mom-and-pop operation. They've not really industrialized, they've just scaled up. They haven't really cut any corners. It's the same water source, it's the same mash belts, it's the same yeast, same woods, like everything's the same. It's just big, really, really big, and so they get to sell it for 20 because they work at that scale like that's, that's it. That's all there is to it, nothing more than that. This is as legit as any whiskey you're ever going to drink uh, not that I'm going to look for it and it's 20 dollars a bottle, especially like they paid you is.

02:29:18
You know, I've drank better whiskeys, uh, longer whiskeys, but boy, it's hard to be unhappy with the product they make in the way that it is it's.

02:29:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, but it's sweet enough that you could sip it. Yeah, like a lot of people who might find that's got to be the 80 corn, right?

02:29:35 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
yeah, corn is sweeter.

02:29:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it is very good for cocktails.

02:29:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jack and Coke is a classic cocktail.

02:29:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like a Manhattan or an old-fashioned.

02:29:48 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Typically, when you look at bourbons, they're not that high in corn. They're 55, 60, like 80 corn is a ton. It kind of makes it a simpler drink in that respect. Their offset is this additional time in the wood flavors means that it's picking up more of those wood phenols that sort of give it its character. Yeah, what you just got is a largely scaled family style way of making whiskey, although those stills are intimidating as heck. There's no pot stilling there. It's a beautiful facility it's worth visiting, but they don't need a pot still because they don't need to take sulfur soap. They just don't have enough barley for it to matter. So it's, yeah, 40%. This is an industrial-scale alcohol. No two ways about it. It is well-made, don't feel bad Put nice in it. Don't feel bad mixing with anything you want. It's rarely used as a well alcohol.

02:30:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has some really nice flavors too. Now they have honey and apple, I believe. I know, but that's how you get people into the fold.

02:30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's it. What is Gentleman Jack? It's double mellowed. What is Gentleman Jack? Is that a it's double mellowed.

02:31:00 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they do a two-stage aging process on it and the ABV is higher, okay, but yeah, it's just a more expensive way to make their same booze for the most part and again, I got nothing bad to say about it. Tim Huckabee, who organized that fishing trip, is a dear friend of mine and makes me do all of the all of the fly fishing. The only reason you fly fishing because of him, and he loves jack and I got a lot of flack for him for making fun of jack and then I and then I drank it because it was this particular occasion. I'm like you're right I'm wrong.

02:31:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's nothing wrong with this.

02:31:31 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I tell a story, nothing wrong with it, and, and to be sure be clear, I received some very unusual bottles of alcohol on this 26-day trip that I took, of course, and so we will be talking boutique-y weird scotches next week. Good, the Hills have bourbons.

02:31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One last question Is it worth getting a single barrel Jack or no? They do offer that.

02:31:54 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, it's worth a try, because now you're talking about, no two are going to be the same Right. I think the typical JD per day and a little number seven is 200 barrels. So they're taking all these different barrels and they're combining them to get to a consistent flavor. What's cool about a single cask is a single cask, is it's that cask? You don't know what you're going to get.

02:32:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's also barrel proof. Oh, it's not all barrel proof, but some is. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, so they do have a barrel proof single barrel, which means it's a lot more alcoholic.

02:32:26 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, well, because typically what's coming out of that? They go in at 62.5 and then you go four to eight years. You're going to have a big hit right up front, because Tennessee is warm, right. So as the barrel stabilizes at the high temperatures, you lose a bunch of alcohol right away, right, and then it's going to settle down over time, but it's going to come out of there in the mid-50s at least, and that's pretty potent Barrel cask strength is 125 to 140 proof, so it'll put hair on your chest.

02:32:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually it'll burn it off yeah.

02:32:58 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
There's no way it could be 140. Because that would mean it's going in at 70, which they don't even barrel at. They barrel at 62.95, right, really. If it lost no alcohol at all, then it would be at 125.

02:33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
proof, okay, I'm looking at their website, it says anywhere from 125 to 140 proof. I don't know how they're doing that.

02:33:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That seems unlikely.

02:33:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, you know episode 88 was very lucky.

02:33:27
Thank you, a very lucky episode Three eights. It's all good to be home, right? Yeah, Thank you so much. Richard Campbell is at Run as Radio. That's where his podcast is. Runasradiocom Also net rocks. It's been rocking for 20 years, yep 24. If this pod be rocking, keep listening. Paul Therot is at therotcom. Become a premium member. You get some great content. It's all great content, but I like to support what Paul's doing. You can also buy his books, books, windows Everywhere, the kind of history of Windows through its development languages and the field guide to Windows 11. Now with Windows 10 inside both at leanpubcom. We do Windows weekly Wednesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. And now you can watch us not only live on YouTube, at youtubecom slash twit, slash live, but now on Twitch X, facebook Kik. Did I leave anything out? I'm sure there's more and, of course, if you're a club member, in our Club Twit Discord, and thank you to our club members for making this possible. Have a wonderful Fourth of July, richard. Do you look over the 49th parallel just to see the fireworks?

02:34:44 - Richard  Campbell (Host)
I'm thinking I'm going to be driving down that way and hanging with some friends on the south side of the border. Fun Do both parties.

02:34:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fun. Paul, what are you doing for the? I guess they don't really do much in Mexico. For the Fourth of July I mean I'm home now, oh, that's right ago. For the 4th of July, I mean I'm home now, oh, that's right.

02:35:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're in the state where Pennsylvania over-celebrates the 4th of July. Yeah, sure, we usually go to a friend's house and look out over the valley. You can see the different townships.

02:35:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's really neat. I was in Philly for the Bicentennial. Oh boy, that must have been. That was quite a scene. I, that was quite a scene. Yeah, quite a scene. I thought this would be good. I should take the train and enjoy. I should go get stabbed, why not? No, I'm completely whole, no holes.

02:35:28
Thank you, paul, thank you Richard, thanks to all of our listeners and viewers, both those of you who listen live or those of you who listen after the fact. You can listen after the fact by going to twittv slash www. That's our website. All the 888 episodes are there. You can also watch our YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. We'll put the show up there. Great for sharing clips, if you want to do that. And, of course, you can subscribe. It is a netcast, so subscribe on your favorite netcast player, whatever that, whatever that is. No, you can listen to the podcasts on your favorite podcast player. If you subscribe, you'll get it automatically the minute it is available. Thank you paul, thank you richard, thank you everybody. We are going to cut the stream off briefly and we'll be back in about five minutes with this Week in Google. Take care, bye-bye.