Windows Weekly 898 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.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Windows Weekly. I'm Micah Sargent subbing in for Leo Laporte this week and we kick off things with Paul Therat talking about his time at IFA. We also have a conversation about Intel's current run of processors, where Qualcomm comes in to play, state of the chips being used in PCs and what we might expect in the future for the Copilot Plus PC lineup. After that, it is our typical conversation about Windows updates and a little opportunity to talk about Windows Recall, a touch of information about Apple's event and what we can expect from the iPhones and, of course, as you might expect, we get around to Xbox Corner and your tips and picks of the week. All of that, plus so much more, coming up on Windows Weekly.

0:00:58 - Richard Campbell
Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Twit. Trust, this is Twit.

0:01:10 - Mikah Sargent
This is Windows Weekly, with Paul Therot, richard Campbell and me, micah Sargent, episode 898, recorded Wednesday, september 11th 2024. It's notable when it works. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we talk to two of the foremost Windows watchers in the world. I am your host this week, micah Sargent, subbing in for Leo Laporte, who is on vacation somewhere on a ship or something. Who knows, maybe he's on a horse, but I am not on a horse. I am in the saddle Joining us this week as what's happening.

0:01:51 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know what's happening All of the puns.

0:01:54 - Mikah Sargent
Asking. What's happening is Paul Theriot. Paul, where are you coming from this week?

0:01:59 - Paul Thurrott
I'm at home in wherever this is McCongee, lower McCongee. It's hard to say Somewhere in Pennsylvania. Mukunji-ish. I'm Mukunji adjacent.

0:02:09 - Mikah Sargent
And joining us, not from a bathroom, not from a kitchen, but indeed from a living room space. It is Richard.

0:02:16 - Richard Campbell
Campbell. Hi Richard, I'm in Vegas, I'm at the MGM Grand, we're doing our Dev Intersection and Next Gen AI conference, and one of the perks of being an organizer is you get a nice suite.

0:02:28 - Mikah Sargent
So I'm in a nice suite. That's sweet, and it certainly looks that way. As you know, with this show, this is the time where we talk all things Microsoft, all things Windows and, as I always say, the tech adjacent stuff that's going on. So, without further ado, let's kick things off with IFA. That's how it's pronounced. These days.

0:02:49 - Paul Thurrott
Right, you know, I have no idea. I've said it at least three, four different ways.

0:02:53 - Mikah Sargent
IFA, IFA, whatever it is.

0:02:55 - Paul Thurrott
My favorite part about the name is that it's German for Consumer Electronics Show.

0:02:59 - Mikah Sargent
So that makes sense, that's good to know.

0:03:02 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, so I went to IFA for the first time, um, mostly just to go to berlin. Honestly, I didn't step foot inside that show, even for one second.

0:03:11 - Richard Campbell
You said you were the last week that you were you know, here's what it took.

0:03:14 - Paul Thurrott
I looked at the map and I was like nope, because you know I it's it's way out there and yeah, it's just not worth it. Um, and you know, for whatever it's worth and global warming something, something, something I don't know, it was 90 degrees most days that week and Germany does not have air conditioning outside of hotel rooms. So all the events I did go to, because I did, I went. I did go to a bunch of stuff that were outside of the vendors.

Yeah, it was brutally hot everywhere. Yeah, so yeah, I'm not, not, yeah, not doing that. There's no reason to, though, right? So yeah, I got to see some pc maker stuff. I got to see some intel stuff, some call com stuff. Um, I didn't really see any amd stuff, but I had lunch with them so that was good, that was low level hardware, like you're not.

0:04:03 - Richard Campbell
you're talking about the parts that go into the, rather than the parts, the parts of parts.

0:04:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so this I sort of blurted this out at one point, probably on the show, and I kept saying it last week and I was talking to Ryan Schout, for example, who's like a hardware expert and he worked at Intel briefly and now he's back doing the kind of analyst thing, but he agreed with me on this. You know, not that this is the biggest year for the PC in the sense of sales or whatever, but rather just the sheer amount of news and rapid advancement in the PC space. It's just, it's really interesting. You know, between Qualcomm, you know, finally coming out with a windows and ARM chipset that works and works really well. It's impressive, yeah, yeah. And then Intel and AMD showing up to try to match the advances that we see on the ARM side.

0:04:57 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, a little pressure on them is good right.

0:04:59 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it is good.

0:05:00 - Richard Campbell
It's been coming for a couple of years, but it seems to have come together this year.

0:05:04 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's right. Right, and you know Intel. We'll talk a lot about Intel, unfortunately, because you know it's been another week, so there's another week. You know, another set of bad news from Intel. But they hit it out of the park with this Lunar Lake, which is part of a kind of a family of chips that will soon include something called Arrow Lake, and this is not the clean divide that I thought it was. I used to think of these as the mobile chips and then the desktop chips, because that's typically how Intel has done things, but they mixed up the schedule last year, as you may recall, the mobile shipping world right, that's right, yeah. And then this year, so, with Lunar Lake. Lunar Lake is the, the efficient, most efficient version of this kind of generation of chips, and so when Arrow Lake comes out, you're going to see, in addition to desktop chips, higher end mobile chips that are, you know, the high performance version.

0:06:01 - Richard Campbell
So you see, lunar Lake is like the talk. They've moved to the new format. Now they're optimizing it.

0:06:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean I don't mean to be cynical here, but I've made a point of this that intel ignored so many uh warnings from microsoft mostly, but pc makers to some degree, but mostly microsoft about this mobile wave and and efficiency and thin and light and no fans and yada, yada, yada. That it is. I don't know if it's ironic, but they've woken up and they went with this. They made one specifically for that and they went with it first, and that is really neat to me. I think that's great, so good for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the lunar lake stuff, for whatever it's worth, is uh, architecturally in a way isn't is somewhat like arm in that the ram is on, die can't be upgraded, you know, can't you? You buy it with what it has and that's what it is. Yeah, yeah, and you know I don't really think about this too much with apple today, but when the Apple Silicon first launched what probably, I guess, four years ago, one of the weirdnesses with it was that they couldn't scale too high in terms of Ram and there were some other limitations, obviously, but they've since gotten past that.

0:07:20 - Richard Campbell
But these They've stayed on die. They've just improved their process so they can put more Ram in.

0:07:25 - Paul Thurrott
That's right. Yeah, so the, the, the lunar like stuff is limited to it's a weird thing to say, but limited to 32 gigs of RAM. You can't go to 64. Um, that seems just a little low, but it's a. These are you know what I would you know they don't call them this anymore, but kind of a ultra book class machines. Yeah.

0:07:42 - Richard Campbell
So they're not workstations, you know, you don't want them.

0:07:44 - Paul Thurrott
No, no, no, no, and those are coming Right and so they always have like, uh, they they keep changing Right. We went through I I'm not gonna remember this exactly, but I want to say 12th and 13th gen was. They had the P series, the 28 watt part that was for very efficient, I'm not actually sure, but there will be H series and then two others I don't remember the exact numbers. P is gone but they're going to be different version. Actually, u series, u and H and then I believe one other are coming with Arrow Lake, so Freaking letters at random. Yeah Well, I don't think they're random, I just don't remember. Actually, I'm not sure I even saw ever what V stood for. So maybe someone in the chat, I don't know. Yeah, so I just wanted to kind of follow up on something I said last week because I talked about, I had talked to and had since talked to more people who work at PC makers, work for the hardware companies, the silicon makers, microsoft, and trying to get an idea because they've been, you know, they've been using this stuff and what does it look like? Lenovo is kind of an interesting company because they have at least I think it's two or three models that are going to be available in all three versions of the chips. So, off the record, mostly Ryan Shroud I'll just name him because I'm not going to say anything proprietary that he told me or anything like that. But I trust him a lot and he reversed one of my understandings about where these chips were going to land.

The Intel introduction of Lunalink is very interesting and I recommend anyone watching the show should actually go watch it. It was a very confident presentation. They crapped on Qualcomm so hard. It was humorous. I made a video about it. It was like the number of times they said Qualcomm or Snapdragon or ARM or whatever. It was really funny.

And they can accurately claim to have the fastest CPU cores, the fastest GPU. This is actually an area we call from falls kind of short the best performance per watt, not the best efficiency, necessarily. And they claim the best AI performance. That's kind of ludicrous. They're all neck and neck and that stuff doesn't matter. But the reason they claim the best AI performance, that's kind of ludicrous. They're all neck and neck, that stuff doesn't matter. But the reason they claim that is because Intel's the one company doing something called total tops, and this is the thing that you, richard, kind of, are concerned with, which is you have a really powerful GPU that has a tops rating. Why can't I use that for AI, accelerated tasks? And what Intel is saying is you should, if you have it. And so they combine the tops rating for the cpu, gpu and mpu and say, well, this is what we can do.

Um, the one asterisk they have is that they claim to have the most efficient x86 processor, which you would know, to which I would say low bar and fair enough, um, and so they they're. They're not matching qualcomm there, in the same way that qualcomm isn't matching apple, right, I mean, whatever these are, these are kind of the tiers, but metrics that make them look good. Yeah, well, they, they highlight the ones that make them look good, for sure, you know. Um, yeah, in that case, they kind of uh, yeah, they qualify it, I guess. Um, but what? According to ryan and again, I'm I just really trust the guy, he knows what he's talking about he believes that Lunar Lake is actually ahead of AMD overall and also on efficiency. So, based on his own experience with these things, so that's kind of interesting. But they're all this is my phrase I always use now, for whatever reason is. They're all in the ballpark, right. So all of a sudden we're in a good place.

The only question is, it's what? September, beginning of September, still, we need a couple of months. These things are going to come to market. October will happen. We'll certainly have an Arrow Lake announcement at some point and then Arrow Lake chip shipping, I'm sure by the end of the year, and then people will review them, these devices, the actual PCs, and we'll see, right, because we've seen some reliability issues with Intel chips in particular. This is the type of stuff that actually happens all the time behind the scenes, that we don't really learn about. Pc makers work with the silicon makers to get the fixes in, deliver them to consumers or users, sometimes through Windows updates, sometimes through their own software updaters. So we'll see. I mean that's the one little asterisk cause. We just, you know, theoretically, are based on tests, you know, internally, and so forth, it looks like we're in a good place. So I think that's very interesting, right, and and very good news and then we'll see.

0:12:18 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, the question always is is arm going to survive this Like? I'm waiting for the next generation of snapdragon chips so they can make some improvements and start to differentiate more? They were just trying to get to the goal line this time around.

0:12:30 - Paul Thurrott
This is the asterisk with qual qual common arm right, um, so I, I look, I think, um, they've done a great job. Uh, qualcomm has, and they've done, I think, as good as they can do. But yeah, it's fair to say, especially for more um, uh, you know expert users or uh power users. You know you're going to have these esoteric uh applications or devices and we'll you know you might have a different experience, and games are a problem.

0:13:01 - Richard Campbell
I, I'm with you, but also we. This was still very much an ultra for a ultra book form factor.

0:13:12 - Paul Thurrott
I would point out the long battery life and the everyday. My openness is right where I expect it thing I would not normally. Oh no, I, I, I have a story on that. Um, uh, me too. So me too, obviously I talk about. My wife knows this. My, my wife believes that I have Tourette's. I yell at my computer so much. But she has pointed out to me like you look like a child on Christmas morning when you open this laptop, like you know, like it works.

And um you gotta understand how many times things don't work for me Like it's it's. It's notable when something works this well, and that is a fact. The only reason I highlight the game thing is because Qualcomm did Right. I would not expect these devices to run games, not just because they're Ultrabook class hardware, but because they have to emulate those things. It's hard enough to emulate an x86 productivity app. I would never expect it to be able to emulate a decent game and have it work right. Yeah, the fact that it works at all, it's kind of a miracle. It's a miracle, but it were it, but it's the.

0:14:13 - Richard Campbell
The experience is pretty terrible most of the time so well you got to wonder what's the threshold that makes, uh, an electronic arts or a blizzard say, we're going to do an arm build yeah, we're not, we're not there. Well, I wonder because, generally speaking, these guys are working at fairly low level. Like it is not that hard to do another compile and as long as you're doing pure internet-based distribution, what do you care if you have more versions?

0:14:40 - Paul Thurrott
so I feel like there's an architectural thing that has to happen here on microsoft's behalf, because one of the weird little qualifiers on the Windows and ARM stuff with Snapdragon X is that when you run the Xbox app, nothing happens. There's nothing there. If you don't have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which gives you the game streaming capabilities through Xbox Cloud Gaming, you can't do anything with this app. It doesn't run any games like through Xbox. So even Microsoft's native inbox app with Windows 11 is useless on these computers. They don't even pretend otherwise. I don't even know why it's in the box. Honestly, it's a little strange.

So I, I, microsoft, plus these companies, microsoft I don't know if you heard they bought a big game maker, uh, last year. It's kind of big. Yeah, it was kind of on the buried on the back page, but they, um, you know they now have a lot of games and so maybe, maybe this is something they can um play, or well, this is something we'll have to play a role in. Right, this is going to have to come from Microsoft, so we'll see. Maybe things look different in a year. It can only get better.

0:15:47 - Richard Campbell
But therein lies the question is, now that you're getting the response, how many buyers now back away from the ARM chips? It's like, hey, let's do it now?

0:15:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so that's always been in the back of my mind. This is a fairly obvious concern. If Intel which they have really good engineers and AMD show up and they make chips that are efficient, If they make, uh, if PC makers make laptops that actually open and I'm sorry that, actually turn on instantly every single time you open the laptop lid, then what's the point of our right? I mean, what's the point? And I'll just, I just I'll just point back to the original thing that Terry Meyerson said to me in 2017 that I, you know, publicize and talked about, which was he didn't care who won from a chipset perspective. He just wanted Intel to do better, and the way he said it was I want to get all those effing Intel stickers off the laptops was the way you know, in his kind of patented, blunt style Um, but fair enough, Um, so now we have Qualcomm stickers all of the laptops.

It's great, Uh, but yeah, that, and that's been kind of my perspective as well I just want it to work right. When things work, it's wonderful, Um, and so, like I said, I, it looks like they're kind of there. I don't know where we're going to land on Instadown and Power Manager. We'll find out.

0:17:06 - Richard Campbell
The arm advantage is that they don't have all of the driver baggage that the x86 stack has.

0:17:15 - Paul Thurrott
I like that. You kind of. I don't want to call that making lemonade, it's not fair. You put that in a very positive way and I think it's correct. One of the things that we not we, you and I, but us windows, you know the windows community or just Microsoft and windows, I don't think does a good enough job with, is getting rid of legacy technologies that kind of sit there like um, you know some vestigial, you know limb that no one uses anymore but there's still. It's still there. It could be a security concern. It could be causing issues. Whatever, it's still there. It could be a security concern. It could be causing issues whatever it's doing. You know, apple, I think is a little too aggressive. Microsoft think it's a little not aggressive enough.

0:17:50 - Richard Campbell
I think it's a very tough line to build and everybody's had that experience where this machine's behaving properly, like the screens turn off after 20 minutes, like that sort of thing, and then one day it doesn't, yeah, then you install the app.

0:18:00 - Paul Thurrott
You actually need nothing works anymore, or whatever.

0:18:02 - Richard Campbell
Um, yeah, or just one day randomly like it works, or you reboot it and it comes back like it's just, or the service pack comes through.

0:18:08 - Paul Thurrott
Something happens yeah, so it's a you, you've said it, that you kind of what you were saying. I is true, and I I feel strongly about this that windows and arm because it is in some ways a subset, especially of the low level stuff that might be in windows that's just legacy, cru cruft, yep, um, it's not a full, you know it's not a full remaking. It's our re-imagine, not re, you know, from scratch. But it is less and that sounds like it sounds bad, depending on how you phrase it. But honestly, I think it's a good thing because we're getting rid of stuff that most people don't use. It could be a problem and it could contribute to reliability issues. There could be that one weird driver that's in your system you can see it in death manager and you don't know why, but when you open the lid it doesn't come right on and that's why it's really hard to find that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:18:56 - Richard Campbell
So they pull that stuff. They generate a 1% increase in tech support tickets for those those few and it's and that's real measurable costs and people just noticing that power management doesn't work properly anymore rarely generates as much cost. Yeah, yeah.

0:19:14 - Paul Thurrott
So but yes, like I said, watch. If you haven't watched the Intel presentation, and I suspect the same thoughts will go through everyone's brain as went through mine, which was a nice job crafting on Qualcomm, hilarious, but also in the confidence which was there and was great. But yeah, if they actually did what they say they did and it's starting to look like they did, yeah, I mean that gives. That makes it hard for ARM. I think there's enough resistance, especially when you consider that Windows is two-thirds at least. Commercial PC sales, commercial PC usage. Those guys don't want anything new and different, they want known, they want stuff that works, reliable reliable, reliable right.

It's a tough.

0:20:01 - Richard Campbell
Most PC makers make a line for those people right that are a generation behind for a reason Yep.

0:20:07 - Paul Thurrott
And when you look at Qualcomm, you know they had they came out with what they came out with, which was great. They had, whatever it was, four or five SKUs. Most of them were X elite, and then they had the one X plus. Now they have two more X plus SKUs. They're both eight core.

They both have yeah, yeah, right, and the gpus are less powerful. Oddly, the gpus are slightly different in both of those, so they're actually now, I believe, uh, three different levels of gpu across all the entire family. Um, mpus are 100% the same, right, I you know what? No one, they would never admit to that, and I. But here's the thing they said this very early on, in fact, before we knew what the chip versions were going to be.

I went out there I think it was March or April at New York, and it met with these guys and they didn't want to talk about it at the time. But the one thing they said was look, the PC makers came to us and they said we need to have tiers of these things because we have products that we sell for different prices and you know, we need cheap ones for the cheap ones and we need, you know, expensive ones for the good ones. Whatever, and um, we could see, looking at the computers, they let us get our hands on that. I think at the time that we might've seen three different versions of chips, at least something like that.

0:21:24 - Richard Campbell
I think it was originally three, yeah, and now there are five and now there are seven or whatever the number is, and it was very much speed stuff which speaks to bending right Like they just measured it. It was unreliable. You step it down? Okay, it's reliable. That's that chip.

0:21:35 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, that could be what they're doing. It's interesting to me that when AMD in August and now Intel in September launch their next-gen chips that have these powerful MPUs, that Intel had to completely halt the development of what they were doing, to change everything and do what they just did, which cost them a lot of money, which contributed to their current financial issues. That Qualcomm in the same week was like hey, look, we have lower end chips, which is not normally a very exciting announcement. If you follow the smartphone space, you might see throughout the Apple doesn't come out midstream and say it's not September, so let's pretend it's May or something. And Apple's like hey, we just released a new version of the A18 or whatever we're on, it's the A18 Mini. It's like we took an A18 and we stripped a bunch of stuff out of it and we're going to put it in a really crappy iPhone, like they never do that.

But Qualcomm serves a market of partners who sell phones at different price points and they will routinely throughout the year they have their eight whatever series for the flagships that we all probably use, but then they also have seven, six, whatever series, and so you know, over the summer they released I don't know what it was, a six series, something for phones, like, okay, I don't even follow this stuff, I couldn't care less. But there, you know, we, if you think about Intel, we have, uh, back in the day, we don't use these numbers anymore, but at core, I three, I five, I seven, eventually. We had, by the way, with ultra, but, um, you know, qualcomm has their way, uh, amd has their way. Whatever you you make, you have different price points. And so, yeah, it felt weird. And this is also about one month before they have their annual event, snapdragon summit, where they will announce I assume I know they're going to announce new chips for phones, but V2 of this, I would think right.

0:23:29 - Richard Campbell
This would be the time. Yeah, it's about the right time. This is about this time last year that they were talking about X and we'd have hardware in the spring.

0:23:37 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah.

0:23:38 - Richard Campbell
And we had so happened.

0:23:41 - Paul Thurrott
I guess we'll see.

0:23:42 - Richard Campbell
I just don't know where the sales numbers are. Are they happy? Did it move?

0:23:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, right, you've got all these vendors to make all these machines on these chipsets. I never understood the appeal of this to Qualcomm. To be honest, right, they serve a market that has billions of sales. The PC market is $200 million to $300 million at best. They're going to have a tiny percentage of that and it's super low margin, exactly so I don't see this as the volume growth for the company.

0:24:13 - Richard Campbell
I don't. There's more margin in the PC chips than there is in the mobile chips. The mobile chips are all about volume.

0:24:18 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, Well, I mean okay, that's good, but it's, you know, I don't know where the line is for lots of something that costs a little versus a few of something that costs a lot. I guess there must be.

0:24:29 - Richard Campbell
Look at their emphasis on the premium version of the axe, like that's the one that's going to make the money. And I'm still very much in the camp that they're continuing to work on die yield and that's why they're carving off these different old SKUs.

0:24:46 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I'd like things to be simple. You know, I watched the. We'll talk a little bit.

0:24:49 - Richard Campbell
And again it's like when you have PC makers coming back saying it's still too expensive, right, it's like, oh good, I'll send the guys back to fetch another 10% off that die and make you a cheaper chip.

0:25:06 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know that. I've ever seen anything about what pc makers pay for, say you know, a qualcomm chip or whatever right. So yeah, I do know, just going to the event, that every new qualcomm based pc that the three major pc makers announced, and probably the next two as well, were all this new chip. There were no new snapdragon x elite computers announced Right IFA that I can recall or saw.

0:25:27 - Richard Campbell
So, and that might be that they're not selling Right, that there's not enough out, they're not getting enough out there, that they're trying to find what's the price point that makes people go. Well, I don't care about these other issues, that's a great price for a long life machine no-transcript.

0:26:09 - Paul Thurrott
The Snapdragon stuff I wrote something about. What about Chromebook right, chromebook Plus, and wouldn't this platform benefit Chrome OS more because you can run Android apps? It's the same underlying architecture, right, and summer kind of went by by nothing, nothing, nothing. The one thing I haven't seen anywhere and really talk about this. But again, I'll recommend go watch the Intel presentation.

The first segment was about Google and you may recall I've been talking a lot lately about how Intel spreads money and to get people, companies, to support their chips but also to not support other chips, and they specifically talked about how the Core Ultra, series 2, the Lunar Lake chips will be used in wait for it, chromebooks, chromebook Pluses they might have snatched that away from Qualcomm.

So again, I recommend watching that and watching it with that in mind, because they bring out a guy from google right in the beginning and you're like wait, what am I watching? Isn't this an intel event? Um, kind of interesting. So, yeah, there you go, all right, uh, let's see if we can get through the rest of this. I'm sorry I kind of beaten this one to death here, but, um, intel, a lot of problems like we've been talking about every week. We know that sometime late this month, pat Gelsinger and his executive staff is going to meet with the board of directors at Intel and talk about a way forward. There's been a lot of opinion that maybe what these guys need to do is sell the foundry right.

0:27:45 - Richard Campbell
Which would.

0:27:51 - Paul Thurrott
It sounds crazy, yeah, but it may be the only way they can survive.

0:27:55 - Richard Campbell
But there's another way. What business are they in if they're not making chips? Yeah?

0:27:58 - Paul Thurrott
They're in the business of designing chips, right that?

0:28:01 - Richard Campbell
hasn't been the best feature, has it.

0:28:04 - Paul Thurrott
Well, we knew already that the Arrow Lake chips that are coming soon were going to be manufactured in Taiwan, not by Intel, right by TSMC. And now we know that the current. We knew some of the Lunar Lake chips were going to be manufactured there, and now all of them are Wow. Lunar lake chips were going to be manufactured there, and now all of them are wow. So the other opportunity here is uh I think I don't remember if it was reuters or bloomberg reported that qualcomm has been trying for months to buy intel's chip design business, meaning the guys who make the x86 chips. Now there's a lot of legal stuff there because there's patents and cross-licensing, especially with AMD.

0:28:47 - Richard Campbell
There's a lot that goes on there. There's going to be some ITAR, there's going to be some national secret stuff. It's not a trivial thing, yeah, but what you're really talking about, paul, is the dismantling of Intel, intel is a big company.

Yeah, one way, that's right, break it up and sell it off to other entities. Yeah, break it up and sell it off to other entities. Yeah, the tmsc's pick up some of the fabs and and if the design business goes to qualcomm then it's like, hey, you need me to make an x80 chip, the 86 chip, fine, so in this world.

0:29:15 - Paul Thurrott
If this were to happen, intel would be the us based alternative to tsmc. Um, this assumes they get their act together and can manufacture, you know, high density chips at volume at three nanometer or less or whatever. Um, there have been reports that they can not do that, but you know, we'll see how that goes. And um, I, yeah, I don't. I'm not a hardware guy, I have to keep saying that, but I think I still I in my brain. I still live in the 90s because I was younger and thinner. And in the 90s when you thought about a company like Intel and there weren't actually many other companies like Intel, I mean obviously AMD was around and then we had IBM and Motorola making PowerPC chips and so forth. I think by and large those companies were always the company that designed the chip was the same company that made the chip. Like literally, when you say Intel made a whatever X86 chip, yeah, it means they designed it and then they went to their own factory and they manufactured it and they shipped it.

0:30:14 - Richard Campbell
Intel started it when they were inventing the process at the same time, right, yeah, their original business was RAM. The CPU came later. Right, it was always hand in hand. The question is, is it archaic?

0:30:27 - Paul Thurrott
yeah, it is the question, because that's actually not the way the arm world works, especially not at all. It's, it's really not the way the world works outside of intel. I mean, as far as, like, volume chip production, I mean it's pretty much you've got like, yeah, we talk about this, like nvidia, you know, billions and billions in revenue, or not. Well, yeah, billions and billions of revenues, whatever. And I, you know, some guy on twitter is like this is a reminder. Uh, they don't make anything. They design things and then other people build them and it's, it's. It is a sobering reality. You know, um, that that's the business. Um, so intel could be a company that just designs x86 chips and then someone else manufactures them. That's not what anyone wants.

Yeah, except Qualcomm could buy the design group and there is no Intel effectively Not as we know it it's, you know, hp and HPE split and became. This is not exactly right, but server and client computing, right Sort of Intel could split into, you know whatever you want to call those things Intel Foundry and Intel Design, whatever. I guess we'd just call it Qualcomm, and there would be two different businesses, right? So yeah, the way I think of Intel. Still, that 1990s version of Intel, yes, would be split in half into two different things. I'm not saying it's going to happen, nobody knows that for sure right now, but it's I.

0:31:45 - Richard Campbell
We should leave that on the table as a possibility because, depending on how things go, but either, when you talk about a company that's big, they eventually end up filing for a bankruptcy protection and the receiver chooses to break them up Right, like that's the only thing that happens to a company. This big Nothing's. There's too many assets? Well, there's.

0:32:03 - Paul Thurrott
There's the you know, we had that notion of too big to fail when it came to banks um intel is a national security concern. They may be too important to national security to fail, which is not a fun little phrase, but I there may be some form of government, uh, you know, like they did with chrysler or whatever, um where do you bail them out?

0:32:22 - Richard Campbell
or do you put them, break the pieces up and put them under better punishment? I mean, the U S government has already made moves to put foundries back inside their borders. Yep, doesn't really matter what the owner is. We may end up with just issue is significant.

0:32:36 - Paul Thurrott
So T S M C will be the the one making chips in the United States, and not Intel. I don't know.

0:32:41 - Mikah Sargent
We'll see.

0:32:41 - Paul Thurrott
Like there's lots of outcomes. Intel may emerge whole on the other end. That's one outcome.

0:32:45 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I mean this is a leadership change. There's a bunch of ways to go at this problem.

0:32:51 - Paul Thurrott
I feel bad about that because I think he did the right thing. And if he were Pat Kelsinger, if somehow this results in him leaving the company, the ideal outcome for Intel is that they are what he wants them to be, which is a designer and manufacturer of chips, and not just for them, but manufacturing chips for other companies like TSMC does right.

0:33:13 - Richard Campbell
But that's also a challenging conflict, right Yep.

0:33:23 - Paul Thurrott
Then you really need to separate the entities, and everybody's a customer, including Intel. Well, I mean, it's too early to say, but the early money is probably on. That is maybe where we're heading. The question is going to be where the pieces land, I guess, but maybe it does make the most sense.

0:33:35 - Richard Campbell
I look well and we don't really know how. I mean, we don't really know how serious the finances actually are. Right, they, they've done this, playing around the bank stuff like who's going to finance them. They've got a lot of money from government. They do layoffs, but they're positional layoffs. We can't pay our bills, yeah.

0:33:57 - Paul Thurrott
It's probably not coincidental that Pat Gelsinger pulled Intel's findery business out and reports those finance separately from the rest of Intel, as if it were a separate business, right? The goal being to show that this thing can exist as a standalone entity, right? Assuming losing $7 billion a quarter, somehow a standalone business? But yes, for right now, look they're, they're invested. This is the investment phase. They're trying to get this thing up and running. Look, I want them to succeed. This is the one thing I know. In any technology, any company, whatever it is, there are the fanboy types. There are the people who just hate these companies for whatever reason. They just want them to die and go away. You don't want that if you're an American, especially because that could take down the whole stock market with it. You want to be careful there. So we'll see, but I want them to succeed. Again back to Terry Myerson's point. Yep, We've finally reached the point. It took longer than I wanted, but they've gotten their religion. They get it. Lunar Lake proves they can do it.

0:35:04 - Richard Campbell
I think I realize the real point, which is they happen to be making some pretty good chips at the moment, I know.

0:35:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, yep, and I often talk about this, and I think this doesn't just apply to technology, but something like a phone. You're like I need a new phone and it's a decision. It sounds like a black or white or a zero one, whatever left right decision, an iphone or an android phone or something it's. It's a little more complicated than that right, right and within wherever side you choose, you what, what matters most to you, the screen size, the camera quality, that you can go on and on and on, and so it's like this matrix of choices you make, and some of them are weighted higher and some are lower, and, um, I, I look at it like it's positive, depending on your needs. You might look at lunar lake compared to rise in, uh, the new rise and stuff, or to the Qualcomm stuff, and, and because of how you weigh things, intel's the obvious choice, right, yeah, someone else may care, maybe for someone else, it's, you know, efficiency is 50% and the others, you know, are 10, and maybe Qualcomm comes out ahead it it, it just depends. So I, I think they're looking great, uh, with lunar lake. The rest of the company, uh, you know, we'll see. Um, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that's right, I think that's most of that stuff. Um, I just added this aside because I saw this at the show. I've now gotten emails from three or four people who've all seen the same thing, which is amd launched their um, uh, what's it called? Resin zen 5 series sorry, uh. Chips in august are two milestones and pcs are starting to appear ifa, ifa, whatever was, um, the intel stuff. Now we're going to start seeing that soon those computers are all running Windows 11, 24h2. Okay, interesting, this is a thing we're going to talk about this a little bit.

But Microsoft to some degree pretends this thing is not out yet and does not exist. So I've had people open the box and they're like, hey look, this is a screenshot, it's running 24H2. I'm like, yeah, I know, and they're like, but it's not a Copilot Plus E. I'm like, well, it sort of is. And the reason it sort of is and the reason I think they're doing it this way not that it makes sense, but I'm just trying to rationalize it is that it's not just 24-H2, right, it has those on-disk language models. Right, that you need to get the Copilot Plus PC stuff.

It's not maybe a big deal if you live in Western Europe, canada, the United States or whatever, where you you have a high-speed internet connection and you could download tens of giga. I downloaded 150 gigs of games from Steam today on a laptop. I mean, I don't think anything of that, but for a lot of people doing that kind of thing is prohibitively expensive or impossible. So they want to have that stuff on the disk, and I think that's part of it, stuff on the desk, and I think that's part of it. And so, even though you may not have those things turned on, the actual features in the UI you will in. Whatever they said, october November. I think that might explain this.

0:37:55 - Richard Campbell
But my observation is that November was the six month point, I think a contract expires and this problem goes away.

0:38:02 - Paul Thurrott
Right, but on the backend, I think whatrosoft wants to do is ship a software image to pc makers, whether they're running on amd, intel or qualcomm. Right, that has that stuff right one, only one update state.

What a concept well, yeah, what I have. What do they call this? It's an enablement package, right? So you probably have the bits on your computer to run enabled. They're just not enabled, right, and and I'm sure there are people out there who know what flips to switch and you could probably make it happen right now. But I've heard from multiple people and I saw it at the show. Every single time I kept looking. People are like oh, what are you doing? And I'm like Windows R Winver interesting, they were always 24H2. And so that's a thing. So that's a thing. Microsoft's kind of weird silence on 24H2 has been weird for me all year.

0:38:51 - Richard Campbell
Well, the last four months or whatever it's been, this whole situation and the fact that 23H2 is essentially the same thing right, like 22H2 we don't have to talk about anymore, like we are in such a weird state for these OS updates Yep.

0:39:03 - Paul Thurrott
And the only thing that's not weird about it is that it's always weird. So you know like I mean I'm kind of getting used to the roller coaster. You know it's I think it's called After the Sunsetters. There's a Chris Braston movie where him and his wife are jewel thieves and they retire and they go down to the Bahamas, I think, or Bermuda, I guess, and there's a montage where they're always having lobster every night and drinking champagne and it's like the greatest thing in the world. And then over time, this thing that was awesome, when you just do it occasionally becomes like just, he's like, he's like he looked he can't even eat it anymore, and I and I think that you know what I mean and I think that's kind of where I'm at with the updates it so much I don't even feel it anymore. I'm just, I'm just like, I'm just soulless. Now it's like whatever you're past. So, yeah, every month comes it's a little something, a little different. I'm like yep, this is the horror house I live in.

0:39:54 - Mikah Sargent
This is what happens, yep there you go all right, I fit in the can yeah, speaking of uh updates, we will be talking about those momentarily, but I do want to take a quick break here so I can tell you about our first sponsor of this episode of Windows Weekly.

It's Veeam. Without your data, your customer's trust turns to digital dust. Do you like that rhyme? That's why Veeam's data protection and ransomware recovery ensures that you can secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it, no matter what happens. Veeam is the number one global market leader in data resilience. Veeam is trusted by more than 77% of the Fortune 500 to keep their businesses running when digital disruptions like ransomware strike. That's because Veeam lets you back up and recover your data instantly across your entire cloud ecosystem, proactively detect malicious activity, remove the guesswork by automating your recovery plans and policies, and get real-time support from ransomware recovery experts. Yeah, when ransomware strikes, veeam is what you want. Data is the lifeblood of your business, so get data resilient with Veeam. Go to Veeam V-E-E-A-M dot com to learn more. That's Veeam dot com to learn more. And we thank Veeam for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. Now we must traipse into the world of updates, which is Paul's favorite. Oh, paul, you're muted.

0:41:38 - Paul Thurrott
I did that. That was a funny joke. No one got to hear.

I said not, sashay, See very good it would have been funnier a few seconds ago, yes, so, uh, moving on to literally windows this time, I guess, um, yesterday, geez, feels like a month. I'm still way off schedule because of my travel. I'm sorry, yeah, um, which is anyway. Uh, you know I get up at 430 in the morning and whatever pass out on the couch at like eight o'clock at night. So, patch Tuesday came 22, 23, 24 H2 all got updates. The 22, 23 updates were the same, the same update, 24 H2 is different. But commonality, right, the only big I don't want to call it big, but the only obvious change you might see, depending on the type of phone you use, or if you use phone share or a phone link at all, is they've added Android, android devices, or will be depends when you're going to get it Part of the fascination of this to Windows share, right, so when you go select a file share, this will be one of the options, right, and this is part of their.

You know, like Richard said, they're aligning all of these versions uh together. The way that they document this is fascinating to me. So, if you know the KB number for something, uh, they use a KB, a knowledge base number, to identify these cumulative updates. You can look it up on Microsoft support. And Laurent, the guy who writes the news at throtcom Microsoft publicizes the 22, 23h2 stuff but does not publicize 24H2. So every two weeks on Tuesday he texts me and says hey, could you tell me what the KB is for today's 24H2 article? Because he doesn't have 24H2, right? So because I have a 20, I have well many 24H2 PCs.

I can just check for updates, see what it says in Windows Update, type in the KB number and you can go find it right. So, if you, I have a link for this, I think, in the notes. But if you go to the Microsoft support website, you will see the Windows 11 version 23H2 update history right, which includes documentation for every update they've ever shipped, including the preview updates that come in the in-betweens. They've done the same thing for 22H2, for 21H2, for every version of Windows 10, and they have never at once done it for 24H2. But if you know the KB number, you can go look it up and it will come up. They just don't have a UI for it. This is what I'm talking about. They pretend that this thing doesn't exist. I don't get it. I don't know why they do this Now. I assume that's going to change in October. Maybe they just don't want to draw attention to it. Maybe they feel like if it was there, customers would look and say, hey, I'm not on the latest version, how come I can't go get this thing?

0:44:30 - Richard Campbell
But there is no 24H2 in the non-insider release path.

0:44:35 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know. No, it's in stable. Oh, it is in stable, yeah, it's been in stable ever since the Copilot Plus PCs launched, so June, yeah, and you launched, so june, yeah, and you can, as even if you're on x64 today, you can go get it. I mean, you do have to install, you know you have to work around it because it's not on that iso download page, but you do install a bait like a insider build. You don't feel like?

0:44:59 - Richard Campbell
rolling the inside with a snapdragon deal. It's just. Yeah, it's a weirdness, right? Yeah, I mean, I really want to. I think any in december. A lot of this goes away.

0:45:09 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we're right on the cusp of it, as we were just kind of discussing. It's been an entertaining year for sure for this kind of stuff.

0:45:22 - Richard Campbell
They've been trying to make a thing come true with Windows on ARM without focusing on Windows on ARM. Right, with Windows on ARM without focusing on Windows on ARM.

0:45:29 - Paul Thurrott
Right, so anyway, there's not a lot to say with these updates, other than that they're here, and next month, 22h2 and also 21H2 Enterprise Education IoT, I think, is one of them, or whatever it's called will receive their final updates, and I think do I have this in here. I don't see it.

I might have not put this in somehow, but, um, when this happens, they will, they, microsoft, will be doing exactly what they always do. So I I sort of said this would be happening already, but they've officially confirmed it. They will force upgrade non-managed PCs to not 24H2, right, but to the last, the oldest supported version, which in this case will be 23H2. Yeah, yep, so starting, you'll get an update in October, normal, you know, a quality update. I guess we're calling it security update.

And then after that, the next month is going to come and if your computer is supported, you know, is compatible, you're not managed by a corporation, because if you are the slightly different rules over there, they're allowed to manage that themselves. I mean, you'll be non-supported, which you know actually violates their licensing agreement with Microsoft. They actually do have to do this work, but that's on them, um, you will actually be forced. Upgraded is not how much. They're not the official Microsoft term, it's more to do with like flowers and unicorns and stuff. They make it sound fun, but, um, they are going to upgrade you, so that's happening, yeah, yeah. So after you know, one month from yesterday, roughly, not really, but the second Tuesday in October, whenever that is. After that, the next thing that happens, it's going to be all 23 and 24H2.

Yeah, 22H2 goes out of support. Yeah, most people know that Parallels Desktop has had the only kind of supported way to run Windows 11 on ARM on a Mac using. You know, apple has some technology in there and Parallels obviously has their rich history of that, and now they're partnering with Microsoft. It's sort of an officially supported thing. The new version of Parallels Desktop is out.

If you do have a Mac and you need to run Windows apps for some reason, this is not the only way and there are actually freeways now that are pretty good, but this is arguably the best way I like. They have a mode I think it's called coherence or, yeah, I think it's called coherence where you can not have a Windows desktop in a window but just run Windows apps arbitrarily out and floating Windows next to other apps. Did you still click an app? Yeah, so Parallels Desktop either just shipped or is about to ship and it is offering some enormous performance gain when you run 24H2. And they literally cited that it was thanks to Microsoft, because Microsoft has a new Prism emulator in Windows 11 on ARM and they're seeing massive gains on the Mac, which leads me to wonder if we're going to go back to that time where the Mac was the fastest way to run Windows. I don't think that's going to happen. I think Snapdragon is good enough, but I already thought it felt pretty damn native. It's kind of amazing.

So, um, that apparently is only going to get better. And then, uh, we, we know that. I don't know why they publicize this, but, um, microsoft photos the photos app that's in windows 10 and 11, right, uh, microsoft has spent a bunch of time this year updating it on windows 11. And part of the update is to port the, just like they did in File Explorer. It's like the top and the side parts that are all being updated to something called the Windows App SDK, which is sort of the desktop version of what used to be UWP and Metro before that, and it's WinUI 3 for the, you know. So you get the most modern looking UI and they talk about this for some reason. I don't think most people really care, like what they use, but whatever, they talk about it. Apparently now they are doing the same for Windows 10 as well. So remember no more updates they were promised. It's a lie.

0:49:42 - Richard Campbell
It's a lie, yeah Well, and there's no reason it won't run on 10.

0:49:49 - Paul Thurrott
Like lie, yeah well, there's no reason we'll run on 10, like it's just like. Yeah, it's the same app, I know, right, I would argue it's more work to stop it from showing. Yeah, yeah, I feel the same way. Yep, yeah, um, and then I'm just throwing this in as kind of a fun little side note. But, uh, the latest version of chrome s, chrome osr, came out, uh, this past week, and they have a little feature that will sound familiar to you, called snap groupss. Oh no, yeah, just like macOS Sequoia, which is coming out end of the month, I guess, has a similar. You know they had kind of a proto-Snap type feature. Now it's. You know these things line up and look very similar to what we have in Windows, right?

0:50:25 - Richard Campbell
So the next time someone tells you that it's a good idea, right?

0:50:28 - Paul Thurrott
That's what I mean in Windows, right. So the next time someone tells you that it's a good idea, right? That's what I mean, and this has been true forever. This was true in the 90s. I keep referencing it for some reason. I guess I had a stroke and I'm stuck there. It's true today. It's been true all along. You know Apple copies Microsoft, Microsoft copies Apple. You know this kind of goes. This is Good ideas show up.

They show up everywhere, yep, yeah. The one I really remember was Apple came out with a fast user switching feature for logging in on the Mac, which I thought was fascinating, because Windows had one too. It was called fast user switching, like you couldn't even change the name, I mean it's like I mean, come on, guys, but that's fine. All's fair in love and war and in competition, so that's good. I'll spare. In love and war and in competition, so that's good. Plus, it makes it easier when you move back and forth between the platforms.

0:51:13 - Mikah Sargent
I love. I didn't realize that they had the same name. That's pretty.

0:51:15 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I thought that that was the thing I liked about it the most. You know, like I don't care that you copied it, but like seriously come up with something new.

0:51:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, um speaking of of uh that. I know that last week you all talked about um recall and the uninstall, but not uninstall how that was going to change um. I just wanted to know where do you both stand in terms of recall as a feature? I know you're both probably especially you, paul, who writes about this regularly going to need to use it so that you can tell people about how it works and what it does, but I just wanted to hear your takes on whether you feel like it could be a useful thing for you and whether you genuinely see value in this feature that Microsoft seems to be saying it's going to be there, you can't get rid of it, and it's this big new thing we worked on. So too bad.

0:52:14 - Paul Thurrott
Let me let Richard should go first, Cause I've I've weighed in on this at great length many times. I'm curious where you stand.

0:52:21 - Richard Campbell
I mean nobody ever debated whether this thing was going to be valuable or not. The concern, the concern, was always the privacy risk. Right, right, that's the only issue. The idea that I mean we always struggle with finding the history in our browsers and so forth, so that part was never an issue. I think it's always a dumb position to say, oh, you have no choice, this thing's going to be there. A it's never actually true and B. Why scare people Like what are you doing? Like it and and be? Why scare people like what are you doing? Like that's, it's not even important. Just, people always want the option of shutting the thing off. Uh, yeah I.

0:52:54 - Mikah Sargent
I also think, we haven't seen the real product.

0:52:55 - Richard Campbell
Because we haven't seen the real product, we haven't seen the real product then look the enterprise admin guy in me who's had to go to court to talk about bad behavior of employees using the infrastructure that I was responsible for. I want this at the corporate level. This is protection for the organization and its employees so yeah, you're hitting on.

0:53:21 - Mikah Sargent
You're hitting on something, pilot it there where it's clearly a needed product where it could be controlled with policy.

0:53:28 - Paul Thurrott
And you know, yes, yeah, um, wow, I this is a huge topic, so let's just spend the next two hours on this. So when I, when I was in the audience watching them announce this thing, I had two immediate thoughts flashed through my brain. One was you know what time is lunch? Was, um, the way, the sort of Blasway way they presented it. It's so poor. And I thought to myself guys, oh, you got to address the privacy thing because people are going to overreact to this. And uh, I, I made a note to myself like I can't believe he just acted like this was completely normal. You know, google has this way of coming out on stage and they'll say something like people prize us because they know we're protecting their privacy. And everyone in the audience is like what is he talking about? Do you actually have no idea what we think of you? Like, that's crazy. And I think Microsoft suffers from the same problem. Like I knew there was going to be an instant distrust of it.

0:54:24 - Richard Campbell
And the funny part being Apple, the most trusted of the tech giants took the privacy questions so seriously when they were talking about nearly the same thing.

0:54:34 - Paul Thurrott
I, I, I was waiting for them to get through their thing and then say you know what, let's circle back, cause we really want to deep dive on this and why you can trust this because that story is solid. Uh, and they didn't. But the other reaction I had was you know what? This is a really good idea. And to that point I would just say I have asked, I do this all the time. I, my wife, is the initial canary guinea pig, whatever, where I say hey, I'm going to describe something to you and I just wanted, like tell me if you think this is useful to you. You know, and I described recall to her and she said oh my god, yeah, that's fantastic. And I and I said, okay, it's coming in some future version windows. And she said what can I? When can I get it?

you know, and I've had that kind of reaction with my sister, my brother-in-law, my friends, whatever.

0:55:19 - Richard Campbell
So I go through that process um I met the guy who pointed that normal mortal humans don't prioritize the security concern like it's not, that's right that's right in our I've had a friend show me that his iphone account has been compromised and he's sending using him to send junk mail and I'm like dude, you need to change your password. He's like oh no, I'm not doing that, this isn't hurting me in any way, I'm just going to let it go, oh boy.

0:55:44 - Mikah Sargent
It's so stressful you and me both. Man, it's a good example of yeah don't care.

0:55:52 - Paul Thurrott
My audience or whatever. They're technical, they're pedantic, they're ADHD, they're. You know they hyper focus on things that we live in and I'm one of them. I mean, I'm the same way. We live in this kind of little bubble and things that are important to us. You know, it's the Sam Kenison thing from back to school. He really cares about what We'll never know. You know like it's, you know it's a hyper focus, um. But then you get in the world and you talk to people and you realize, eh, you know, this is this normal. People don't have the same concern.

I met a guy at that show who claimed to have created recall. I mean, he might've just been one of the people on the team or something. But I said, listen, I have to ask you some questions. You're, you're not going to like this. And he goes oh God, here we go. Because he knew the types of questions that people are not going to trust him. I said no, no, this is not what you think it is. I don't think you're going far enough. I said, let me ask you two questions because I already think I already know the answers, because I know I can see you're taking a cautious approach here that no one's going to appreciate cautious approach here that no one's going to appreciate If I am saving these.

The problem with recall from my perspective, is that it's on a device. It's literally locked on a device. Now they're promoting that as the security aspect of it. But I use multiple devices. Some of them are not windows PCs, right? So what I need is a way to get to my history, no matter where it is. Like when you're in a browser, one of the things you can do is look for things that are in tabs on an iPad or a phone or something. When you're on your computer, like that's how Chrome works, it's how other browsers work, right? So I said so with that in mind.

I said let me ask you something, and I have a guess to the answer If, accepting that it's only on the computer for now, if I do a PC reset and come back, is that thing still sitting there? Because I know it's in a secure enclave all by itself, there's no reason it can't be there. And he says, no, we wipe it out, we have to. You know, for security, privacy reasons. I'm like all right. So I said that's bad. I said I want that thing there If I choose to save my data. That thing, the stupid. Oh, you know I can't trust you. You know Microsoft with a dollar sign.

So I said, all right, let me ask you another question. Surely you are working on OneDrive based if you're a consumer, whatever it is based if you're an enterprise, sync across devices, because this thing to me only makes sense when it's available in the cloud and it's everywhere. And then he, you know, he smiled, he said yep, he goes. So those two things you raised, we're absolutely looking at those. Obviously, it's in the roadmap, we're looking at that. But we know we have this big hurdle in the beginning to get over, which is we're going to do it on one device. It's going to be limited and people are still going to overreact.

0:58:29 - Richard Campbell
There's a strong case for leave it until people are screaming for it. Yeah, make the customer this is the apple way too right they'll do this all the time you know they'll well, and it's because it's a classic problem with smart tech people is you get too far ahead of the customer. You make things that just freak them out.

0:58:45 - Paul Thurrott
So make the thing that's valuable and make them ask for more yeah, microsoft has a way of over architecting things, like we talk about loops sometimes. That's a great example where and teams, I think falls into this too where, instead of coming to market with something that kind of meets a single need and does it well, they think, all right, let's step back. If we're going to do this well, we need this kind of thing. And then they build this gigantic infrastructure. It takes years and then they ship this thing where you're like why, why did I wait three and a half years for something that looks exactly like notion. What is this? Yeah, um, but the thing you don't see is how slow, yeah it's

like pieces dripping. You don't, yeah, so they didn't do it, that they didn't do this that way and I okay. So I think that's kind of interesting. Um, I've made this point so many times, but all of the security privacy concerns about recall are nonsense. They're completely made up, and the reason I can say that with certainty is because there is not a single human being who has used that thing on a co-pilot plus PC that has Windows, hello, ess and all of the incredible hardware requirements that have to be certified at the factory, and you can't add to it and change it in any way, or it doesn't work. You have no idea. Now, that doesn't mean it's secure. I don't, don't, don't get me wrong. I haven't used it either. I don't know that it's secure, but what I do know is that the thing you looked at is not the thing we're talking about, so your opinion does not matter. Yeah, um, the correct answer is nobody actually knows. Yep, nobody actually knows. Now, it's microsoft. I, I don't know if you know this. They ship buggy software sometimes, so there could be mistakes. But I know, I'm sorry, sit down, fan yourself, you'll be okay. So, to answer your question, micah, I am looking forward to using this. I specifically purchased a Copilot Plus PC with more RAM and storage than I need, specifically because I don't want to worry about this, than I need, specifically because I don't want to worry about this.

And from a technical perspective, it is fascinating to me that Microsoft spent a decade plus trying to solve this problem using databases and metadata and tagging, and couldn't do. It, failed repeatedly. We have a file system today that is not much different than wait for it that we had in the 1990s, because, god damn it, I can't stop saying that. And the point, the reason it failed was just think about something like a photo. For a photo search to work, it has to have metadata. That makes sense.

The location is a great one. But also you could go in and say, well, you'll say something like this is my father, this is my mother, this is my wife, this is the location. If you don't have locations sold, this is where it was taken, this is the date and the time, and that stuff is how you search for things and find it, and that technology improves over time, right? Google Photos will say, hey, is this person who we think it is? And you can say yes, no, and you know that gets better. But with AI you can actually kind of throw that stuff away a little bit and all the database junk from the past and you can say something like sometime in the past month I was looking at a blue sweater on maybe Amazon, maybe Kohl's, I don't remember Some website Boop up, it comes.

And that is both an incredible use of AI, a technology many people still don't believe is anything, but also solves a very real world problem, which is we have so much data in so many places it's siloed. This is like the Microsoft Graph and Jeffrey Snover and all the stuff that Microsoft did as sort of a next generation solution to solving that database problem, if you will. This kind of just rises above all that and says it doesn't matter, we have multimodal capabilities and we can do different things. And you know people like, oh, all this is doing is taking screenshots. You know it's like, yeah, it's like take, it's like screen scraping.

You know it's like yeah, it's a little more sophisticated than that and and I, I, I think people are not giving it it its due and I think when you put kind of invented privacy concerns or security concerns in front of the conversation, you can't see the forest for the trees, that there's something kind of really cool happening here. Yeah, I'm going to use it the second I can. I wish I could use it across devices. The fact that I have to wait months and months and months to get a really limited version of something that is going to be awesome in like two years is frustrating to me. It's the complete opposite problem. I'm surprised you still don't have it.

I know, like it's been a while Dude, I don't have Activision Blizzard games in Game Pass. Don't get me started the number of things I don't have that I should have.

1:03:16 - Richard Campbell
September. It's almost a year, almost a year.

1:03:19 - Paul Thurrott
I paid 15 bucks and now 20 bucks a month for the fricking service and I don't get me started. Anyway, that's, that's where I am. So it's probably not a lot. It's probably not maybe what some people would expect unless you've been reading my stuff, I guess. But I don't know. I see the benefit more than I see the concern, I guess.

1:03:43 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I think. For me, it boils down to the thing that you both keep hitting on, which is that no one outside of Microsoft has actually seen the final product, and even still within Microsoft, it seems like it's still changing and updating. So to make all of these judgment calls based on something that is not live, here's an idea Security expert.

1:04:04 - Paul Thurrott
Go to Microsoft I don't know if you know this, they have a process and tell them you've uncovered a problem and then they'll we'll thank you and if it's true, they'll fix it. And if it's not, they'll say actually, as it turns out, you didn't use this on the right kind of PC and that thing you're concerned about is not going to be a problem on the real PC. Sorry, I joked that we could talk for two hours about this. Yeah, Richard said something I want to circle back to, because this is an important point.

One of the other ways that this thing is limited in ways that I think are going to freak some people out and again, complete opposite of the usual freak out we've been talking about is actually with businesses. The way Microsoft has described this is that you as an individual can be on a managed PC and that company cannot manage this. It's the exact opposite of what that company is going to want, which is what he said, and it's true. Which is what he said, and it's true. You as an individual are going to be able to protect your privacy, what you do on your computer in your little private enclave and recall, and you're going to be able to access that, but if your IT pro, whatever guy, takes the computer home with them, they're not going to be able to do anything with it. It's yours. That is not what businesses want and what businesses want. I think what Richard was trying to say was that they want to auto enable this on corporate controlled and owned computers.

1:05:21 - Richard Campbell
Ship them to use and say look, just so you know.

1:05:22 - Paul Thurrott
We're going to record everything you do. So if you're visiting porn sites or if you're talking to people who are competitors to us, we're going to find out about it. Yeah, and I know a lot of people.

1:05:30 - Richard Campbell
You know. The issue and I brought it up before is like I have been through a harassment case where company devices were used to do the harassing. Yep, you are responsible.

1:05:41 - Paul Thurrott
It sounds dystopian. And, look, we've all been victimized to some degree, probably by IT At some point. We lived through the era where they were super gluing USB ports so we couldn't plug in our iPods and still data or something, when all we were really doing was charging it or whatever. But look to your point, there is a very real concern here and, look, we may not like it, but I think it's completely understandable. When this company corporate secrets on this thing, they're like. I mean, I feel strongly they have to tell you they're doing this. You should know that, right, you don't want to be behaving badly on a laptop and then find out six months later, like you know what they've been watching, but knowing that you'll probably behave yourself, hopefully, or whatever. But they're protecting themselves, right? This isn't about spying on people, it's not about violating your privacy. It's about protecting the company and I feel like for the corporate environments, they need that as well. We already have in MDM solutions this notion of selective wipe and we have private data and company data and they can just separate.

1:06:51 - Richard Campbell
Mechanism built into exchange. Yep Right. I already have keyword filtering, for I think that's harassment terms. I think this is the mail automatically yeah, so I think in the future.

1:07:01 - Paul Thurrott
Well, so again, recall. Everyone's freaking out about how like microsoft's tendrils are in here. Somehow it's the exact opposite. If anything, it's too limited. A future version of recall will be have a personal and work version. You'll be able to. The company will be able to do it. Say, look, when Bob uses Microsoft Edge, he can do whatever he wants. It's in his thing and he can look up little recall things and do his personal stuff. But when he's using the browser, we control. We see that and we control that right, and you can split it however you want between apps and services, whatever, so that will happen. But however you want between apps and services, whatever, so that will happen. But again, they didn't architect that giant thing to begin with. They did it from the opposite angle. So the thing that they're coming out with is actually very limited. Um, and instead of being celebrated for the restraint right, microsoft is being overly criticized for being like. You know, and to me that the criticism is just how clueless they were in announcing it Like well, you trust us.

1:07:57 - Richard Campbell
It's like, guys, you are not trusted to work harder on trust.

1:08:01 - Paul Thurrott
That was a. That was a weird moment for me because I was just like oh, I actually think this is going to be interesting, but you're going to get raked, and I didn't even. It was exponentially worse than I imagined.

1:08:14 - Mikah Sargent
Well, with that, we should take a quick break before we come back with more.

1:08:18 - Paul Thurrott
Hey, you asked man. No, I'm glad you did. This is on you, I loved it.

1:08:22 - Richard Campbell
I was curious where you both stood on it.

1:08:24 - Mikah Sargent
And so, yeah, it was good to hear, because I know you both have talked about it a lot and it's just kind of nice to hear.

1:08:32 - Paul Thurrott
Although, it expands. I think sometimes people can surprise you, like with Richard.

1:08:35 - Mikah Sargent
I'm like well, you know.

1:08:37 - Paul Thurrott
I think Rich, I mean, I know he gets it, but it's like you know, you never know Richard might be like no, this is a privacy nightmare. And because he's Richard, I'd be like all right now I want to hear this because I know he knows what he's talking about, but I also know better than when I don't know.

1:08:51 - Richard Campbell
Right, it's like listen, I don't know. Isn't a product, yet it could be. Everything can be.

1:08:59 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I guess with Microsoft they get so many things wrong so often that we like let's not invent some future crime, let's just wait for it to happen.

1:09:06 - Richard Campbell
Then we can go nuts. I had enough problems with this stuff. They've actually done.

1:09:12 - Paul Thurrott
I have a stupid little cloud backup thing in my file explorer window right now that I would really like to get rid of and screw them for that. I'm mad about that. Now, you know, give me six months from now we can talk.

1:09:22 - Mikah Sargent
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This is weird, Paul we got you muted again.

1:12:16 - Paul Thurrott
Damn it. Okay, I'm still learning how technology works. So actually, micah, come back, I'm back, I'm back. I assume you noticed that Apple had some product launches. I could be wrong, but I think you might know a little bit about Apple.

I know a few things. Yeah, what was your impression of this event? In the context of? Everyone is now coming to market with these things they've been promising forever. With regards to AI, this is the first generation of iPhones that will be AI-powered. Ai powered, whatever Like what. What did you? What did you think of this? Um?

1:12:56 - Mikah Sargent
so here's the thing. Part of the issue, I guess, for me is the fact that I had watched, uh, Apple's WWDC, the worldwide developers conference, and so everything that they mentioned with AI, save for maybe a couple of features that they were talking about, are features that I already knew about that were going to be coming, but all in all, of course, what they're talking about is not shipping until the let's see. There were different phrases that they used. Some was months in the future. I think was one which seems out of character for Apple, right? Yeah, it's true.

1:13:34 - Paul Thurrott
It's actually. It's worse than it seemed at first glance too, because they were saying you know, these features will start arriving in October. October's not that far away. What they didn't say was in beta.

1:13:44 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, yes, and that is even rarer. You know Google had Gmail in beta for years and years and years, but I think there was maybe one other feature in modern Apple's past that started in beta.

1:13:58 - Paul Thurrott
I'll tell you the one I remember and this was I want to, I think. I know. I think I think it was 2016,. 2017. They announced the iPhone seven was the first one to have like the bigger size one with the extra camera lens. So they're going to do portrait mode and they announced portrait mode and portrait mode wasn't going to come until the 0.1 release. That arrived in december in beta and then it wasn't until the spring. They actually kind of just delivered it. It was like seven plus or pro, I don't remember what they called it.

If they did plus, uh, but it was the seven was. It was the phone and I. I bought this thing specifically to get this feature and, uh, I don't think I had it for like six months and it was garbage when I first came out yeah, now every now every phone does software bokeh and it's great and whatever.

But at the time you know you'd have, if you like, my hair right now is crazy for some reason. But you know they'd be like little dents and yes, uh, whatever, it was terrible, but that's the one. I remember that and that was, you know, quite some time ago.

1:14:50 - Richard Campbell
But but it speaks to how you know. Normally they have the product ready, then they announce it and they tell you when they're going to deliver it, and they hit the day Like they don't miss I think this speaks to the special case that is AI.

1:15:06 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I think that they're reacting.

1:15:08 - Mikah Sargent
I think reacting is a perfect way to do it.

1:15:10 - Paul Thurrott
They've been using the term machine language forever and it's funny, it actually made a little bit of a comeback in this talk, the presentation, but they switched over to machine learning. They switched. They're like OK, we're AI, ai PCs, we have one of those. It's called a Mac. They've sort of adopted the language that the broader industry is using, which is not something they necessarily like to do all the time.

They want to set their own terms, so yeah, like to do all the time right. They want to set their own terms, so yeah, so did you think it was a like as far as the products there's only, you know, the phones, the watches and then minor stuff, I mean, what was your take? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make that face and qualify it for you. I mean, what did you think? I mean, just like an apple guy like you, see these things well.

1:15:50 - Mikah Sargent
No, I was gonna say I don't. I don't think that that this was uniquely underwhelming, in the sense that this has been a huge, you know, brain shaking moment and, frankly, because a it's not there yet and because the kind of media creation aspect, which I think is the aspect that is going to interest most people, the the people who are going to be making stuff with those you know special they.

1:16:31 - Paul Thurrott
That's where they need the most help. Yes, they have to go to third parties.

1:16:34 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly that's where it's not ready yet, and so it's just another new slate of glass and metal that has a little bit of a better camera and a little bit of a better processor. Same as ever? Yeah, same as it ever was, even with the new button. Honestly, that new button is a little bit.

1:16:55 - Paul Thurrott
I'm a little bit, um, I'm a little nervous about it. It's uh really to me, that's the coolest.

1:16:57 - Mikah Sargent
That's the coolest thing that they did, because I definitely.

1:16:58 - Paul Thurrott
To me it's. It's all about the camera right to me, yeah, um, so you get the latest right is I'm fascinated that the anti-button company has now a battleship array of buttons all around this thing. Now it's crazy.

1:17:11 - Mikah Sargent
It looks like a, like a hedgehog or something yeah, remember the rumors about losing all the buttons and now it's got more buttons than it ever has had. I crazy. I'm equal parts excited but also, as I was saying, I just I worry that it's going to be a complicated thing where before, if someone held up their iPhone to take a photo of me, I'd pause for a second and be okay. Now it's like we're going back in time where you had to sit still so you didn't smile because otherwise your face would get tired, Like I just see them swiping and doing all this stuff. I'm like when are you taking the photo?

1:17:41 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't follow this stuff closely enough to speak intelligently to this, but from a high level I feel like the difference between the non-pro and pro phones is the smallest it's ever been, and it was odd to me how many features were everywhere. They usually do pro first and then we'll bring it next year. It's like that camera control thing. Normally that would be next year. That the Ram and the process. I know the process is slightly different, but the ability to run AI across all of the devices I think was uh, is you know smart? Um, I was it. It felt weird though, because it was like hi, I'm Tim Cook, it's all about AI. Here's some new phones Uh, we don't have any AI. Uh, here's the watch Uh, there's no AI. Uh, here's an approach for it Uh, it has some. Uh, do we say NC Cause there's no AI? And it was like it was really. It was it was about AI and it wasn't, and it felt weird. You know.

1:18:32 - Mikah Sargent
I think that, um, there was an opportunity for, because people, the people who tune into the iphone event are not the same people who take the time to watch wwdc, and so it was the first time that apple was talking about apple intelligence. To most folks that were okay, that's okay.

1:18:53 - Paul Thurrott
I never thought of that.

1:18:53 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, that's interesting so yeah, in that way it was kind of seeing it for the first time and seeing it in how it's going to work with the phones. However, yeah it's still, as you, as we're pointing out, all of this stuff is not going to be available on day dot, and that's that's perplexing.

1:19:11 - Paul Thurrott
it's interesting they did. They mentioned that thing that microsoft's been saying about co-pilot plus PCs and, like Google has said about the Pixel, where they talked about this stuff shipping on device, like the multiple on-device models, it didn't really explain how it was going to get there. You know like if a typical iOS update I don't know how big these things are a gigabyte or something, and then you go to get iOS 18, you're like why is this thing six gigabytes? You know like I mean, I don't know how they're going to deliver it, but at some point you're going to see it. You know, and I'm curious what that looks like.

1:19:42 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that is interesting. I hadn't considered that the model has to go in. They talked about it.

1:19:47 - Paul Thurrott
They literally, yeah, they said it. They don't do this during the presentation, but when you look at their newsroom materials and whatever else they give out you you kind of get a rough idea of okay, in beta in October we're going to get these 12 features and later in the year we're going to get you know these or whatever. And then next year we're going to get whatever you know, like the chat GPT thing which was almost thrown out as a one thing, or whatever they call it one more thing in WWC is at the tail end of this.

1:20:14 - Mikah Sargent
This is not coming until the spring or something like that, and not only did they they, they made it so that it wasn't just chat GPT, because we know they're working on deals with the others but that's the only one anyone cares about.

1:20:25 - Paul Thurrott
They're like yeah, but what am I getting?

1:20:26 - Mikah Sargent
this, you know they say other services like chat, gpt, it's like that's the one that people are.

1:20:31 - Paul Thurrott
I do like that the privacy messaging is good, and I think I will say just to you know, be fair to apple. Um, you know, as the world's most renowned apple apologist, um that uh, mary joe foley anyway yeah, exactly.

Well, she's more of an xbox guy but um, but that, that, uh, um, their kind of measured approach, which people see a slower behind, whatever. I get that. But it feels mature in some ways too, because I think there's been like a really chaotic spastic, you know, kind of AI, you know, and they're playing the adult in a way and yeah, I know they're behind, they really are behind, but the messaging is solidified.

1:21:14 - Mikah Sargent
I like it.

1:21:14 - Richard Campbell
I think they've done a good job of I respect it.

1:21:17 - Mikah Sargent
I was going to say the same in terms of and I think that that's why the the media stuff is taking longer, because there's a lot of cultural pushback when it comes to, uh, how these things are trained and what you're creating with it, and I think that Apple wants to see itself here because apple has been the adult consumer in the room like they don't put something in their product that isn't good and so when they were just doing this, it's like okay, well, we're about to see what good looks like, right, they come to market late, you know late, with air quotes around that word, um.

1:21:51 - Paul Thurrott
But they, what they've done, is evaluated this market, this product, and they've said, okay, can we make a difference here, can we do something better? And something like the iPod when it first shipped 2001,. Right, it's FireWire and Mac only. You're like, yeah, right, and then it went on to be the best-selling consumer electronics device of all time or whatever, right. And then the iPhone comes out and we forget the ipod because now that's a little asterisk in the corner, right, um, so they've made good bets. They've done they. They haven't. They don't always do it, but oftentimes they come to late, you know, come to market late, but with a better solution with the but yeah with a more so the subtext of everything you're saying here is this might be the exception, this might be.

1:22:32 - Richard Campbell
You're chasing don't to do, have said we're going to do this thing without thoroughly testing it, and now we're pushing it back because yikes, that's so much better than what I thought you were going to say there.

1:22:42 - Paul Thurrott
I thought you were going to say the subtext of what you're saying is that you are secretly an Apple fan boy and are now announcing your switch to the Mac. I would never say that I'm not that guy. No-transcript. I mean, anyone who uses an iPhone or an Android phone knows that it's not hard to switch the autofill provider, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean we can do this.

1:23:25 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know, based on the loud, horrible sounds I hear from my fiance when he's trying to log into something. Yeah, I think they might be trying to avoid that, like it's not our fault, yeah. Changing. No, I get what you're saying, though it does need to be put out there, but I don't know if Apple wants to be the company that's saying, hey, this is what's changing and it's it's let's, let's taint our otherwise fun and rainbow unicorn lollipop event with passwords are changing to pass keys these days.

1:23:57 - Paul Thurrott
Right, I've looked at it a little bit. I will look at it some more, but I feel very strongly that people should use a standalone third-party password manager. I 100% as a person who uses Apple stuff regularly.

Use a third-party because you can go between platforms and you cannot do that and it's not, it's not just that, there's also a level of functionality, like, if you look at, if you look at these solutions, there's a range of features that you get, and the ones that are built in tend to have way fewer of those things, and some of them are very important. Um, but yes, cross compatibility is important for sure. So I'll look at it and you know, and I think the danger here is that a lot of Apple guys and I would normally say goons, but you're here A lot of it.

No, a lot of Apple guys. I'm kidding you know it's the path of least resistance, right? So you see, like, oh, apple has it. I guess I'll just switch to that now and you might be losing out on some stuff. I don't mean to say that they're you know like it's the trash compactor in Star Wars and they're you know about to crush you, although I kind of am saying that, but yeah, there's a whole world of these things out there and some of them are really, really good. So there's kind of a high bar for this.

1:25:10 - Mikah Sargent
I choosing to use an easy password manager over just using the same password everywhere. I am happy that-. Oh, 100%.

1:25:19 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's simpler to do pseudo random passwords, but you know what, though, so we were talking about normal, like mainstream users, versus technical people, et cetera. Richard is a physical security key user, so he's at one end of the range. There are people who don't put passwords on devices because it's too much of a bother. I have heard from way too many people that doing a 2fa authenticator app thing on your phone is too much and too distracting and too complicated and too much time and, dear god, yeah, like I. I'm sorry, but that's nonsense.

1:25:52 - Richard Campbell
And over in the IT world. It's not optional. You can't get cyber insurance without it.

1:25:58 - Mikah Sargent
You can't run a Microsoft 365 account without it, Like I'm sorry, that's much of Apple's stuff also requires that you have 2FA. There are many services that require it.

1:26:08 - Paul Thurrott
Well, but you know what. So I like that, but Apple's 2FA requires another Apple device. Yeah, and my God, what are you talking about? No, I agree. So if I, if I'm on my windows PC and I'm on a trip and I sign into applecom to check on an error, it's like, and if I'm not, if I don't have my iPhone with me, like well, how do I? There's no other way. But I mean, that's nonstandard and not great and that's maybe you know. But to an Apple guy person, you know, their answer is it's okay, I always have my iPhone, I have my Apple Watch, I have my iPad, I don't care. And I'm like, okay, fine, that's fine, but I rent a movie on my Apple TV. It's like I'm like I don't have an Apple device here, Like I have to go find something to go, you know, type in a stupid code. I mean, it should just be an authenticator app, right? Yeah, I agree, I agree. So just, you know, it's just something to think about for the five of you out there who care about this. Okay.

1:27:10 - Mikah Sargent
So sorry.

1:27:18 - Paul Thurrott
Do we need to pause? I think you can go ahead and go going to microsoft. Yeah, this one's quick take a break. So they haven't opened this up to press yet. I said I don't know if richard, if you know, or can say if they plan to. I think they will. But uh, night is coming. That is an excellent question. Too early maybe? Uh, I'd like to get going early on that. If I'm going, um, I plan my trip to mexico so I'll be home in time to do you know to come to ignite.

1:27:30 - Richard Campbell
Ignite falls at the end of a trip across eastern europe for me and I haven't got to commit for podcasts, so I know nothing okay, so it's happened.

1:27:39 - Paul Thurrott
It's like the week before thanksgiving it's really late in the month, and it's in chicago. It's in chicago which you know, I know it's not ideal.

1:27:49 - Richard Campbell
Even orlando would be better and I say that, yeah, knowing how horrible you can't go to florida right now, but just not going to. Yeah, and on top of that, like they've opened reg but they haven't published an agenda. There's no content yeah.

1:28:05 - Paul Thurrott
So yeah, there you go. Well, if you, if you know you have to go for work or whatever you can, you can sign up now.

1:28:11 - Richard Campbell
That just happened yes, and I know folks that are registering immediately and what's funny is like on the influencer side of this, the mvps and things they're saying, go ahead and register and if we pick you to do one of these things, we'll refund you.

1:28:23 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, geez, okay that seems very uh organized, okay um that's amazing.

1:28:31 - Richard Campbell
I do know it's a new team right. There's been a big lots of changes inside of gold marketing for Microsoft, and so I think they are scrambling a bit.

1:28:39 - Mikah Sargent
Are they going to be like Team Pixel?

1:28:44 - Paul Thurrott
You know, those people exist in the Microsoft space, but it's a small crowd and they're kind of sad, so it's not really the same thing. That's good yeah.

1:28:54 - Mikah Sargent
I'll go away again. No, no, you're welcome to stay.

1:28:58 - Paul Thurrott
You're welcome to stay. I didn't mean to scare you away. How dare you opine on an enterprise topic, you Apple goon.

1:29:08 - Mikah Sargent
I kind of wonder, because there's been that shift in Apple a little bit not of the full, like you have to say good things, blah, blah, blah blah, but in the sense that there's been a lot more influencer attention being paid than we have seen in the past.

1:29:31 - Paul Thurrott
So I was curious with something like Ignite. I guess this is technically kind of on the consumer end too, but it was last. It might have been a year ago. Next week or something I was in New York for the Microsoft. They were like an AI event or something whatever. Satya Nadella was there, you know. So Microsoft had a hotel where we could book rooms at whatever special rate, which was not special at all, it was really expensive. So everyone just kind of booked their own thing.

1:30:02 - Mikah Sargent
And then this giant bus pulls up and like uh, I almost said I.

1:30:04 - Paul Thurrott
Carly. Carly gets out that blind woman's name. She has a name like I, carly, uh, blonde and oh, I Justine, I Justine.

Thank you. I, carly, I, justine, who cares? Um, you know, these women come bouncing out of the bus in their short shorts and stuff and I'm like, okay, what is this? This is a Microsoft event. What is happening? But Microsoft has been courting these people for a long time.

I think back to when the Zoom launched was one of the first examples of, and Zoom was what? 2006 or something, whatever year. They wanted to go away from their traditional kind of tech pubs and bloggers of the day, whatever, and they tried to get into the mainstream press and they talked to like People Magazine and Rolling Stone Magazine and places like that, and snubbed like people like me in the beginning. And of course, these guys were like, what are you doing? Something that looks like me in the beginning. And of course, these guys were like, uh, what are you doing? Something that looks like a Brown iPod? That, like. They were like what you know? No one was interested, you know, so they kind of blew it. But yeah, I mean, this is the way the world has gone. Um, people don't have the attention span to read an article and they but a Tik TOK video or YouTube short or something I guess is where it's at.

1:31:17 - Mikah Sargent
It makes. It makes a little more sense to me with something like the Zune, but an event where it was a consumer product.

1:31:24 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, an event where it's uh kind of more well, it was that one was half and half right, so it was windows 11. Um 11, um it ostensibly would be of interest to individuals, um can you imagine, though, trying to make windows 11 cool? No, I don't have to imagine it they're trying and it's the saddest thing I've ever seen.

1:31:46 - Mikah Sargent
It's awful, yeah I mean, even apple doesn't try to make mac os cool, it's. It's a. It's a pc operating system. How do you?

1:31:55 - Paul Thurrott
I think it's cool, but you know, good, I know, I'm just I.

I, you know, on what we used to call twitter. You know you follow all these microsoft accounts and now they're just like a blather of nonsense and it'll be like which one's your favorite, like what's your favorite color. It's like you know, um, you know, fall's coming. Uh, do you have a favorite pumpkin spice coffee? And and I'm like no, you're kidding me. I'm like I mean, I made that one up. I'm sorry, but, but it's not. No, no, but understand, it is no less stupid than what they are posting, right? I mean, in fact, it might be smarter.

1:32:26 - Mikah Sargent
Is it? Is it? Are they trying to say, like, theme your PC, or is it not? No, no, no, no.

1:32:31 - Paul Thurrott
It's, they're just trying to be social.

1:32:34 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's terrible.

1:32:34 - Paul Thurrott
So I'm always like is it? What is it like bring your child to work day or something over there? What's happening Like you know because you know what they've done is they farm this out to some, you know, college intern type. Who's you?

1:32:45 - Mikah Sargent
know? Oh, I thought you were going to say an influencer organization or. Just like, don't even give them that much credit. It's, it's not, it's nonsense, like it's just. This is the way our world is gone. You know? Yeah, yeah, I get I, but I don't know. It still doesn't make sense to me, in the sense that that's not who you're marketing to. Like, why are you marketing to the people who aren't buying these machines and who can't? They don't care about how windows works, because they have to use it at work, I'm not defending it at home.

1:33:17 - Paul Thurrott
No, no, I think I think I you could argue that if they can expand the market oh, you think it's about market expansion. Okay, maybe I don't know what it is, we're trying to reach the idiots. I don't, I don't, I don't know, I don't know. Like, what's the what's the goal? Like what, how do you win?

1:33:31 - Richard Campbell
like here, I don't, how do you know you've done a good job.

1:33:33 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean, and how do you do it without alienating the people who are actually technical and know the products and follow you for that reason.

1:33:42 - Mikah Sargent
And what?

1:33:42 - Paul Thurrott
are you doing with? Imagine if that was my Twitter feed.

1:33:47 - Mikah Sargent
That's how we'll know that you've been kidnapped or something, if your Twitter feed starts asking. I'm actually just test marketing.

1:33:52 - Paul Thurrott
No, seriously, imagine it because I'm thinking about it. No, it's just God. I don't understand the world anymore.

1:33:58 - Mikah Sargent
That'll be your cry for help If Paul starts talking about theming not even theming. I forgot. Oh, I just went out for a pumpkin spice latte today. What do you drink?

1:34:07 - Paul Thurrott
Something's wrong with Paul.

1:34:09 - Mikah Sargent
I'm making a TikTok you can't even say that with like. It sounded like an alien.

1:34:17 - Paul Thurrott
I do this for my kids all the time I'll say something Just like P interest. I remember that. I'll never forget that, Exactly Like I'll purposely mangle some social media things so my daughter can be like seriously, can you please leave You're embarrassing me.

Yeah, it's beautiful, it's the 21st century dad joke. Anyway, speaking of dad jokes, so if you thought the Outlook app, the new one is not enough of a conspiracy nightmare, oh man, yep, I'm assuming this has hit into your world a lot. Oh, yes, something called the Windows app. The headlines write themselves Windows app is just a new way to do remote desktop. Essentially right, yeah, but because microsoft has so many remote services now that can bring up a desktop like microsoft windows 365, uh, etc. Uh, deb, oh, not deb box, the? Uh, what's the dev thing called? Uh, it doesn't matter, whatever, there's a bunch of them microsoft, I would just call it box.

I'm sorry, it's deb box. Yeah, I'm sorry, I was confusing it with the thing in windows 11 and Azure virtual desktop, like just did.

1:35:18 - Richard Campbell
the list goes on, but yeah, go ahead to finish. I'll make fun of it.

1:35:22 - Paul Thurrott
I'm just look on the. On the surface we're going to have one client that works with all these things. Yeah, Yep, nice, it's going to look like it was designed by R Carly to bring that one back up.

1:35:34 - Richard Campbell
So I hope you like that kind of look and if you thought the new Outlook was not what you wanted, the feedback I've seen from this one is off the charts, when I think they were embedded, because they're all different protocols too and they all have different security risks as well. The argument is we need to consolidate to have one security profile. It's not a bad thing.

1:35:56 - Mikah Sargent
I'm a little confused here. Is this a way to access your own Windows PC? Actually, it's the one thing you can't do with this.

1:36:06 - Paul Thurrott
So it is to access some cloud version of Windows.

1:36:10 - Richard Campbell
You can also access machines through it, but you have to do some setup to do that.

1:36:13 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, so Windows has these vestigial remote desktop things built in right. So it's different for Home and Pro and it predates Microsoft account, which is how most individuals sign in now. So you have to jump through some hoops to get it to work. Now, if you're technical enough to actually need this, I think you're going to be okay. I wrote an article about it this year. I mean, mean, just because it's kind of an oddity now, uh, but yeah, so now we have this.

1:36:41 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's pretty like when you, I, it's beautiful, yeah, the it folks are losing their minds because, yep, I mean, we were basically pushed to stop using rdp, full stop, right, it's just too big of a security risk, don't do it. Only, actually, you know so we and we didn't, because all of the tools that they provided us, like admin center and things, weren't good enough to actually do everything we needed to do on our remote machines and I'm talking servers here primarily yeah, yeah, and so we continue to use rdp. So there's no, this is also partly the hey, the parade's going that way. We better run in front, right. So, uh, actually building better secure rdp clients is a good idea, and it's just an admission that this remote access thing ain't going away, so we better do it better now I believe this thing was announced at ignite last year.

1:37:30 - Paul Thurrott
That's how long it's been in development, or publicly anyway, in preview. Um, yeah, I don't know, it's not going well. My attitude is if you can't handle the command line, you don't deserve an application to begin with. So what are we talking about? But, um, I don't know. Yeah, I do think this is something they thought was going to go away.

1:37:50 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, although the integration is just not well. The other thing is it's not just the existing customer base doing existing things, it's that they keep bringing in new products that also need remote access.

1:38:01 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yep, I don't know, I don't know what to tell you.

1:38:07 - Richard Campbell
I mean, as long as they can get the front end of this to not be so god-awful, actually combining and centralizing and standardizing this is a good thing yeah, even something like windows 365 which has some integration with windows 11 on the client.

1:38:25 - Paul Thurrott
And then in the latest, I think in 23h2, they added this you can just have a sign-in from the lock and lock screen where you just bypass your computer and go right to windows 365. Nice, I mean like that, that stuff's nice. But yeah, I, it's been a good year of pushback from uh, from the corporate crowd, like the new outlook is just a nightmare. The uh, this thing is a nightmare.

1:38:47 - Richard Campbell
Well, people, which is the one number they can't argue with. Yep, just won't use it. Yep, there you go one number.

1:38:57 - Paul Thurrott
They can't argue with yep, just won't use it.

1:38:58 - Mikah Sargent
Yep, there you go I'm gonna switch this around. What is we do? What is um, what's bad about it?

1:39:03 - Paul Thurrott
because you're saying that it's ugly or something I'm no, I'm saying it looks like it was designed by a child. I guess that means ugly. It's, uh, it's, it's. You know, look, it's like a, it's a pretty app. It's not like it.

1:39:15 - Mikah Sargent
It doesn't look like a tool, it looks like you're going to use AI to remove the background or something, but isn't it just tap on it once to start your Windows machine?

1:39:23 - Paul Thurrott
You know how we used to do this. You would have a shortcut in your start menu or desktop that just launched the RDP session and you just go there.

1:39:30 - Richard Campbell
I don't know if you ever got to this place, but we also had a tool called the RDP Manager that would manage multiple identities of various RDP roles that you had, and I lived in that thing for a long time until I literally got rid of all of my servers.

1:39:45 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, Yep, yeah, I mentioned the way things are now in Windows 11. You sign up with a Microsoft account. This is something I used to. I had servers at home, you know, for decades, and as Windows evolved or changed and Microsoft account became the way that you do things like, that's those kind of legacy capabilities, as I'll call them, for individuals, kind of they're still in there, but they just don't. It's amusing to me that there are things in Windows that just don't work. Um, they can be made to work, Uh, but my, the documentation on this is light to non-existent. So I spent time. I'm like, look, I know how to do this and I'm not going to create a local account. So how can I make this work? And you kind of figure it out. But it's, it's, um, it's. You know, that's Windows.

It's this grab bag of technologies from different time periods, you know, and some of it sits there unchanged for years and years and years and I don't think anyone even notices. Stuff stop working. I mean it's weird. Anyway they're trying to bring this type of thing into the 21st century.

1:40:51 - Richard Campbell
I guess, or whatever. Keith in the chat was asking if I got an update on my delivery for my snapdragon device and it did check. It currently says uh, shipping on the 18th for delivery on the 20th of september oh that's, I thought I that's last week, when we look, yes, okay, yeah, I think it's all a lie, nothing is real until the box.

1:41:12 - Paul Thurrott
If you chat, you should refresh. We'll say november 1 and then refresh again. We'll say june 17th. Yep, you know, just to give you like random date generator.

1:41:20 - Richard Campbell
I don't know I've got it's like 23 h2 to me now yes, that's right.

1:41:25 - Mikah Sargent
All right, is it time for another break? Better, all right. Um, oh, we were just talking about, uh, password managers earlier, and although this isn't about a password manager per se, it is by a company that makes one. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by 1Password A question for you that I think I know the answer to Do your end users always work on company-owned devices and always work in IT-approved apps? Yeah, I didn't think so. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all of those unmanaged apps and devices? Well, 1password has an answer to this question. It's called Extended Access Management. 1password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device, because it solves the problems that traditional IAM and MDM can't touch.

I like this sort of metaphor here. Imagine that your company's security is like the quad of a college campus. There are nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company-owned devices, the IT-approved apps and the managed employee identities. And then there are these paths, the paths that people actually paths, the paths that people actually use, the shortcuts that are worn through the grass, that are the actual straightest line from point A to point B. These are actually called elephant trails. Those are unmanaged devices, shadow IT apps and non-employee identities like contractors. Most security tools only work on those happy brick paths. They don't take place on those elephant trails, but a lot of security problems take place on the shortcuts.

1password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all of these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It's security for the way we work today and it's now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra, and in beta for Google Workspace customers. So check it out at 1passwordcom slash Windows Weekly. That's 1-P-A-S-S-W-O-R-Dcom slash Windows Weekly, and we thank 1Password for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. All right back from the break and I believe it is time for Xbox.

1:43:52 - Richard Campbell
Corner. So much good news, there's gotta be good newsbox corner. So much good news, there's gotta be good news. There's so much good news. Who's me? Oh, he's muted again. He's three for three.

1:44:05 - Paul Thurrott
You gotta give him that, yeah I was gonna say it's consistent I literally said to myself you're gonna get it right this time well you did, if getting getting it right into the glass door, you know?

ah, damn it. All right, I have one more chance. I think so. Uh, two things happened yesterday that were not patched Tuesday. Um, one is that Sony announced the PS five pro essentially Nice and Microsoft announced the release of Xbox game pass standard, and neither one of these things were, uh, greeted with much enthusiasm. So I mean 700 bucks, man, that's the thing. So 700 bucks for a console, the games do look better. I the. This presentation, too, is worth watching, if only for its brevity. I think it was 11 minutes long. Um, I watched it live. You know, we were so excited to see this and I was like, you know, microsoft, apple, whatever google could learn from this. It was like there are three things you need to know. Bing, bing, bing, we're done. Yeah, it was like it was nice.

1:45:03 - Richard Campbell
Um, I don't know why they're doing the ak thing like well, ak is pointless.

1:45:08 - Paul Thurrott
But the big thing is, remember how we promised four years ago we're going to do like 60 frames at uh 4k all the time. Well, now we're, we're really going to do it, okay. So that's that's, to me, is the bigger deal. Um, and you know, I look, I think what they're doing is great. From a technical perspective, it looks good. I think these midstream refreshes are important. I think it's notable that microsoft does not have one. Yeah, uh, but yes, 700 bucks, by the way, for a console that does not have a disk drive, like an optical disk. Nobody wants a disk drive, paul. Also, they don't give you the stand. If you want to stand it upright, you have to buy it separately. Buy it separately. That's like buying a Mercedes and getting a. You have to buy the steering wheel or something. It's what Apple does with the wheels on the, like the wheels on the.

1:45:55 - Richard Campbell
You might as well make 800 bucks on everything like the. The person I know who's going to buy this in that moment has already ordered it.

1:46:02 - Paul Thurrott
I guarantee he doesn't care how much it costs and he but he'd want all of so you know, an xbox, I mean, I uh like a sony, like the real fan, like a big fan no, no, pro gamer, right like somebody who makes his living in games and and then he's just gonna have the latest and greatest always, okay right now it looks I. I don't like the physical box.

1:46:23 - Richard Campbell
I think it's ludicrous looking art piece, but yeah listen, I don't have any more plinths in my room, thanks, it doesn't look good with other stereo equipment type stuff.

1:46:33 - Paul Thurrott
It no is uh the wrong color. It is shaped like a, like a tulip or something. Yeah, it doesn't look good with other stereo equipment type stuff. No, it is the wrong color. It is shaped like a tulip or something. Yeah, it doesn't speak to performance and power and brawny, you know whatever? No, but okay, that's whatever.

1:46:44 - Richard Campbell
But the games, the graphics they showed off nice, which means they got the upscaler right, which is, yeah, that's a logical thing to do, right and it's. There's an interesting truism in gaming these days where I literally can't afford to spend the money it takes to make the game as good as it can be on what that hardware is capable of I think this ai based upscaling thing is going to be the biggest thing that's happened to gaming in forever gaming across the board.

Yep you know, it's all of the voiceover work, all of the digital interpretation, the fact that we could, we could machine learning, all of that stuff makes the game tremendously cheaper, more dynamic, like yep games are about to go through a revolution here.

1:47:26 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's neat and it's also great for the games you already know, right, the games from the past, where you can have some game that was maybe never brought along, never got that, 4k, remake something, something, and now we can make that thing look awesome. You can make it look nice yeah, I love that so that stuff's great so that, and they did a nice demo with that and I thought that was really well done, that's it's smart.

1:47:47 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, the funny thing here is if they, if this new approach to machine learning models for building games really takes off, they're going to need new hardware. They really are.

1:47:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, sorry, I was just appreciating the sticker of Micah as Twitch's official Apple goon. Yeah thanks a lot. Yeah, I take the. Yeah, I'm sorry, the love of the chat man. I want people to understand how much I love my god.

1:48:15 - Mikah Sargent
I'm sorry, not a goon let's just carry on, paul, please yes, if you're not muted uh, if you knew anything about computers, maybe you could have something to say about this.

1:48:31 - Paul Thurrott
So microsoft, uh, never announced xbox game pass this. So Microsoft never announced Xbox Game Pass standard by the way, never announced it, right. What they did do was add a support document to the supportxboxcom that described how the Game Pass subscription everyone loves and has is going away, right, and that thing was called Xbox Game Pass right. At the time they had three, four, I guess four. We used to have Xbox Live Gold. That became Xbox Live I'm sorry, game Pass Core. That had to evolve because they were running out of games to add to that games with gold promotion A couple of years.

Yeah, yeah. So honestly, that's not a bad little subscription. It gives you the multiplayer gaming thing, but the big thing is you get a curated kind of collection of 25 games that you can download and play as part of your you know your monthly fee. So that one's pretty good. And then, sideways to this thing is something called PC game pass, which is the obviously the PC version. That's hundreds of games. It's great, um, that one's great. That's a. That's a good one If you're a PC gamer. Um, and it's something you could do kind of side by side with whatever steam dog, uh, epic games, games you're buying, whatever it is Right. So it's, it's there, um, xbox game pass ultimate, which is the everything together, right, the whole enchilada. So you get the PC console, multiplayer rights, discounts on purchases, and you get the game streaming stuff.

At that time I think it was back in July they were raising the prices on everything as well. So this new offering is the thing that replaces Xbox Game Pass. The console it's the console offering. It's now called Game Pass Standard. It has the full console library. The console it's the console offering. It's now called game pass standard. It has the full console library. So it's hundreds of games, not 25 it, otherwise it's identical to core. What it loses in the big thing and this is the, the asterisk, the tough thing for people was uh, microsoft made a big deal this a couple years ago. Hey, we will give you every Microsoft Studio game in Game Pass, any version of Game Pass, except for Core. Actually, core didn't exist at the time, on day one, right. So when Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard and now we have Call of Duty, we're like nice, we're going to have Call of Duty on day one. So they canceled the thing that would have given you that. And now you have to pay 20 bucks a month to get Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

1:50:57 - Richard Campbell
And I think this is the great delay with all of these games is all right, you finally own some tier one games. Were you really going to walk away from a billion dollars?

1:51:07 - Paul Thurrott
The thing that bothers me. I feel like there's a story that we haven't heard yet, because obviously they looked at this business ahead of time. They ran the numbers. Someone said, look, this is how it's going to make sense. We have to sell X number of subscriptions and that will overcome the money we're losing from not selling that game on day one, the money we're losing from not selling that game on day one. Right, there's some calculus there. It could be off by whatever percent, but that was the idea.

And then I think they actually got the company and maybe they had a deeper insight into those numbers and we're like it's not going to work and, look, it's completely understandable. They just handle it poorly. Like I said, they never announced it, they just spat it out in a support document. So it's here um, you're, if you have xbox game pass, it's going away if it hasn't already based on whatever you paid forward for um. And then you have a choice to make, and one of your choices obviously would be walking away. But you can choose between these uh, what are the four, I guess, subscriptions they have now.

So it's not all bad, it's just that the thing we had before was so special and so awesome, and then they raised the prices on every one and they took away one of the key perks on the best one, and what we're left with is this new thing, and it feels slightly tainted because it used to be so great. But there we go. At least we have those two Activision games, so that's good. So maybe next year we'll get like two more. It's great, that's good. So maybe next year we'll get like two more. It's great. I'm not upset at all about that. So that's good. Netflix makes games, which you will know if you ever try to use Netflix on a mobile device because my God do they try to jam this stuff.

Oh, it's the worst. I am offended by this. I do not want games in my Netflix. You know I don't mind that they want to do it, but I want this to be another app. I, it makes me crazy. Yeah and um. I don't want that in my. I want to be able to say no to it, just like I want to go into Spotify and say I don't want to see podcast, ever. I don't use this for that stop or audio books or whatever. Like you know, I, I, this is a part of the this is an certification effect, right where they need to get.

1:53:14 - Richard Campbell
You have to keep growing to sell things, more things to the same people and you get into this trap I hate it.

1:53:20 - Paul Thurrott
Uh, this is like, um, you know, it's the reason why you see things like count chocula, candy bars, or you know what. I'm trying to make this stuff up now, like oreo cereal or something. It's like, guys, we we have, you already have, make one crap. Do we have to? Why do we have to have five crap? Yeah, it's just so.

Anyway, the uh, the news is they have, uh and this is from a third party uh, have crossed the 210 million download figure for mobile games and that sounds like a big number, but when it is, it is. But you also kind number, but when it is, it is. But you also kind of want to put it in perspective. This is very low single digits from sort of a market usage share perspective, and it's interesting that the best, the most popular game, however you want to say it by far, is like this legacy classic it's funny to call this which is Grand Theft. San andreas, right, is over twice as popular as the next, like the second most popular game or whatever. Uh, oh, no, that's not true. It's uh, half again as popular, but um, it's and yikes, I don't know. So it's 20 years old. Yep, asphalt extreme is.

This is a game you can get for free on every single thing that has a screen. You know is in the top 10. Right, I just I want this to go away. So bad, I just I hate it. So anyway, I just wanted to point this out because I hate Netflix. I guess I don't know, but you haven't given up the account.

1:54:51 - Mikah Sargent
No, because I feel like Netflix Because I like the shows.

1:54:54 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I do, but it's you know they. Netflix is the poster child for insurification, because they became like the new HBO. They were the place with all the best new shows and now we have too many of them and they have a lot of. I don't know. We should have a word for this. It's like really expensive content with popular actors. That is absolutely crap.

1:55:17 - Mikah Sargent
It's like Muzak, but it's video version of that. This is how bad it is.

1:55:23 - Paul Thurrott
I downloaded a couple of movies to my iPad for the flight to Germany, just in case, right, and I've watched one of them before. These things are so faceless, so pointless, I didn't recognize it. I downloaded it two o'clock in the morning on the plane. I start watching it and I'm like I think, have I seen this, you know? And I flipped through it. I'm like I watched this damn movie and I don't even remember it Because it's just pointless. Movies used to be events, star Wars or Jaws or whatever, and you wouldn't forget if you've seen Jaws, right, let me tell you. But these movies, like Ryan Reynolds has a ryan, ryan reynolds has like a handful of movies on netflix that are utter nonsense. The rock is in one of them.

1:56:17 - Richard Campbell
The woman who was, uh, wonder woman is in one of them and it's like, lowered the price of production enough now that they could. These things would normally never have been made these are they.

1:56:26 - Paul Thurrott
They spent 99 of the budget on the actor, and then it's this globebetrotting thing where it's a green screen and they never left British Columbia. It's unbelievable. So anyway, yeah, I have a mixed thing going on with or Netflix and I are having a disagreement.

1:56:43 - Mikah Sargent
I was going to say it doesn't sound mixed at all.

1:56:45 - Paul Thurrott
We're having a little talk about the future here. I don't know it went from awesome to what is happening here.

1:56:52 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I do hate that it keeps those games in the way whenever you're just going to watch something. Oh, man. Yeah, so they can raise those numbers, I guess, yeah, yeah.

1:57:00 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah. Your average income per user per month or whatever they're looking for, whatever their number is, I don't know yeah.

1:57:09 - Mikah Sargent
All right. Well, we'll take another quick break before we come back with, as Leo always calls it, the back of the book. I want to tell you about Cachefly. We're bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly, literally and figuratively. For more than 20 years, Cachefly has had a track record. They've held that track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivery serving more than 5,000 companies in more than 80 countries. At Twit, we've been using Cachefly for more than a decade now and have always loved the lag-free video loading, hyper-fast downloads and the friction-free site interactions.

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1:59:08 - Paul Thurrott
All right, I'm batting 25%. Woo, he did it, he's a 250.

1:59:15 - Richard Campbell
He's a 250.

1:59:19 - Paul Thurrott
That's nice to get over that. All right. So I don't have any app picks per se, although I guess, arguably, some of these are app picks. I guess what I have is a series of tips. So I stopped using bookmarks across browsers. I use too many different browsers and I don't really I collect all these bookmarks and you go through them like six months later and you're like delete delete.

1:59:40 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, they're just stupid.

1:59:43 - Paul Thurrott
So what I use instead is what's now called a new tab page, and there were a bunch of these things. I was using momentum for a while In fact I paid for it for at least a couple of years but now there are like really pretty kind of free ones really, and I've been using something called Bonjour lately for the past since late last year I guess which is Bonjour, the French word, but with two R's, which is good you know. But I just found out about a new one called Tabless, like Tab Bliss, so it's Tab L-I-S-S. It's gorgeous looking. In fact it's pretty enough. I'm kind of experimenting with it, so I might switch over to that.

2:00:25 - Richard Campbell
But something to look at like just kind of a nice, pretty photography. Take control of the look and feel and approach to browsing.

2:00:28 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, and these things tend to work across all the major browsers, etc. Etc. I think bonjour, I think it also works on safari, I think tabless does not, but I'm not 100 sure there, but I don't really care about safari works with brave and if you use safari you're broken inside.

Um, no, it works, they work with brave. I use it with brave. Um, the other thing is I maybe this is common knowledge, I don't know, know. So I think most people who are gamers PC gamers especially understand that Epic Games I think it's every two weeks will give away a couple of games and sometimes they're like awesome games, they're a great game. They gave away the I think it's called the Callisto Protocol, if I'm getting that name right a couple weeks ago, which is a AAA game from a year or two at most. It's awesome, like kind of horror, thriller, sci-fi game. So I've always paid attention to that, even though I haven't been playing games on the PC until fairly recently. It makes sense. Kevin says it's from the creator of Dead Space, which is a very similar type of game. So that makes sense. Also, a great game. It was the first one. So I think people know.

So I've been collecting these games. I will add them to my account. I've never played most of them, but I have 20, 50, whatever number of games in my Epic Game account. Okay, cool, I have an Amazon Prime account like every other normal human being in America, and if you have one, you have access to something called Amazon Prime Games, and I would like everyone who does have an Amazon Prime account and cares about PC games to go look at that page right now, because through the end of this month, they are giving away an incredible collection of games. And if you go to Prime Gaming, which is gamingamazoncom, click on the free games button and you will see what's available. Now, some of it's junk, for sure, but Shadow of the Tomb Raider, definitive Edition free. Lego, indiana Jones, the original adventures free. Borderlands 2, free. Baldur's Gate 2, free.

I'm trying to say it's hard because it's out of order for me, because I already grabbed a bunch of these. But there's more than what I've just said. Middle Earth, shadow of Mordor, mortar, game of the year edition free. What's interesting is, as you go through these games and acquire them, um, they're not tied to your prime account, so once you get them, you own them forever, right? Some of them are on Amazon, so I get this. They have a digital locker type experience. Um, some of them are on God, good old gamer, gogcom, and I think some of them are also on either Steam or I guess it's Steam, I think it's Steam. So, depending on the game, you might have to go to a third party website, sign in if you're not already signed in, but it will add it to your library on that service. It's free. So if you have Amazon Prime right, go get it. It's just go get it and look through the games Um, I grabbed all the ones that I know and you know figure I probably might want to play Um, and I grabbed a few.

I, I, you know a bunch of these. I've never I don't recognize. Some of them are more indie type games, so you can kind of click through and see what they are and be like, oh yeah, cool, I might try that. So, the games that are free right now I believe it could be different for different games, but I think they're all free through September 30th and I don't know if that means they do this every month and I just woke up and found this or something. But maybe this is unique to I don't know. I don't know, but if maybe someone else knows, but I just found out about this and I was like yikes, this is, uh, this is pretty good, so something to look at.

2:03:54 - Richard Campbell
It's awesome, yeah all right, I guess it's me. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this week's run as radio is with our friend, tony redmond. So and it actually goes back to a conversation we were having about Tony, I don't know a month or two ago. Of course I do a certain amount of lag with run as. So I pinged him because he had that new book coming out and when I looked at what he was doing he's like oh I see, the big thing that's happened here is that Microsoft, the M365 guys, have poured a ton of time into making sure there's PowerShell cmdlets for controlling everything in M365. And it's been a few years coming.

I know from talking to listeners of Runas that onboarding automating onboarding processes into M365 was pretty tough. You know you want those things to all be scriptable and there was a bunch of weird mechanisms. So often you had to pop out and do it a different way, that kind of thing. But largely it's been resolved now. So pretty much everything you need to do to control just about anything in M365 can now be done through a commandlet of one form or another. So PowerShell for M365 is so huge that when Redmond and his cohorts got done with it it ended up being too big for the main book, right? They're the folks that make that Office 365 for IT Pros book that is endlessly updated, like every month it gets updated, it's humongous too.

2:05:22 - Paul Thurrott
It makes my book like a pamphlet.

2:05:25 - Richard Campbell
Well, and you should pay for a subscription for it because the updates are worth their weight in gold, that whenever you reference that book it is current. But so they've literally done this automated 365 with powershell as a separate booklet. That's absolutely worth having because it's all of these things it's just so many different cmdlets and we ended up beyond just the the core typical things of onboarding and offboarding and stuff you would normally automate. There's also extensive automations around getting into the Microsoft Graph, so just getting access to this extraordinary pool of information about who worked on what and interactions and so forth that all exist within the graph. It's all PowerShell controllable now, so you could literally write expressions to pull out those kinds of relationships and get summaries from them.

2:06:15 - Paul Thurrott
I'm definitely gonna listen to this one. I, I love I'm speaking at one of tony's shows.

2:06:19 - Richard Campbell
Uh, awesome beginning of october, yeah that's great well yeah he's the, he's the man and he certainly put his heart and soul in this thing and it's like it's one of those products I've ever want to talk to who's in the space. It's like, oh no, I have it right here. Like you don't start work on something and as an administrator at m365 without checking right all right, and now it's time for the brown liquor pick of the week ah, micah, you've been away long enough, you know that stuff's oh, micah, whiskey conversation.

You, apple goon, you, yeah, I'll put forward a very important point the other day, which is, if I don't recognize, there's only two classes of whiskey. I seem to be talking about these days stuff you know and stuff it's like it's what? Yeah, because the micro distillery movement is becoming massive. Uh, although this one's a little bit weirder, and I do have it here one of the things that's been happening now that I've been doing this we know 100 plus episodes is that, uh, folks bring me whiskey and this is the great skua from inars, which is the only distillery on the Faroe Islands. Wow. So, yeah, weird. And how did she get it? She went to the Faroe Islands, not complicated, wow.

So if you've never been there and I'm pretty sure you haven't, this is a cluster of 18 islands north of Scotland, roughly right between Iceland and Norway. It is nominally part of the Kingdom of Denmark, although it's a self-governing territory. Much like Greenland is as well, maybe about 500 square miles, total population about 55,000. It's actually way milder there than you'd think, because it's right in the Gulf Stream. So, yeah, their summer highs are a whole like 55 degrees Fahrenheit or 12 degrees centigrade, but their winter low average is like five degrees centigrade, like 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Sure, they have the occasional winter storm It'll get down into like the negative 10, but not negative 40, right Like it's mild there and it's 62 degrees north latitude. It's not quite above the Arctic Circle, but far enough that there are days in midsummer where the sky never gets dark right Overnight it just goes to sort of semi-twilight and back up again, and they're in the wintertime, the opposite, where the sun just never really rises, kind of skims the horizon and disappears again. Remarkably, they've maintained their own language through all the twists and turns of the uh of the time. They still speak faroese, although it's really much, a very much a derivative of icelandic, because this is, you know, the population ended up living there were the vikings, right? Well, there is evidence of humans on those islands as far back as 400 AD and much of that evidence showed that they were eating barley, which is going to be relevant. The clear documentation of the Viking diaspora from the 900s includes these islands, along with iceland, greenland and the rest. Uh. So while they're part of the kingdom of denmark, in 1973, when the european economic group was forming the faroe islands, refused to enter, and they're actually not part of the eu either, although, uh, they are considered danish. So they have citizenship, even if their country is not in it. So you're a citizen of the EU but you're not in the EU. That's cool. They cut their own path. Of course, it's huge.

On fishing, somewhat the notorious thing that most people know about the Faroe Islands is that they do have a pilot whale hunt. Now, pilot whales are not an endangered species of whale. They're not hunting them for recreation, it's actually for food. I don't know that it's actually a necessary thing, but it is part of their culture and it's quite controversial. This is a fishing place and they do a lot of fishing, fish farming. That's where they make their living. They're isolated enough that their domesticated animals, like their sheep and ducks and geese and cows and so forth, are now considered their own species. So there is a farrow cow and there is a farrow goose and so forth.

So this is an odd, very secretive small place, and this whiskey is called the Great Skua, which is named for a bird that is endemic to the region, although it's all over the North Atlantic. The Great Skua is not a nice bird. It's big, for starters, about two foot long, four and a half foot wingspan. It don't approach them. They're aggressive to people. They're not actually dangerous in any way, but if you get close to their nest they will dive bomb at you. In the animal kingdom they're considered kleptoparasites, which is a great name. What I've seen this? When we did that Arctic expedition I watched great skuas do this. They go after other birds for food. So if another bird has grabbed a gannet, it's grabbed a fish, the skua will attack a gannet's grabbed a fish. The school will attack the gannet and the way they do it is actually will grab a wing and crash them into the ocean to take the food. To the point where I've seen gannets as the school dove on them. The gannet just drops the food because half the time it just kills the other bird in the process. They're just these big bullies of birds, uh and um, yeah, to the point where they'll even hunt other predator birds, like they are very aggressive birds, so upset the theme.

We're on the faroe islands. We're talking about a whiskey called great skua. Um, the company behind this actually starts in 1888. So, uh, his name was simon Vaggie, and Vaggie means from Vaggie, and he was trained in Denmark as a baker but got into brewing as well and formed a company called Flora Bjorn I'm doing my best Faroese here, baking beer Now.

At that time there were strict alcohol laws in the Faroe Islands and so the beer couldn't be stronger than about 2.5%. So they made this weak beer and you weren't allowed to make spirits at all. In fact, we talk about the prohibition in the US in the 20s and 30s. The equivalent prohibition existed in the Faroe Islands from 1907 to 1992. So spirits were just not a thing for the most part, but the family continued to operate the brewery and expended to other beverages. Today, when you go to the Faroe Islands, they have their own line of sodas that are made on the island. Today the fourth or fifth generation, einarwag, is the current operator, and he was around when the laws began to change.

In the late 80s they were allowed to raise their beer to a whole 4.5% alcohol and they then started to allow some importation of spirits. And of course the first spirit they brought in was Aquavit, which is primarily from Norway. Now Aquavit is essentially a gin. It's just that what we consider gin is a grain spirit flavored with juniper and other herbs. Aquavit is a grain spirit flavored with caraway and other herbs, and so by the 2012s, they finally, around 2012, they finally lifted the rule against manufacturing spirits and so immediately this company started making spirits. They started with Aquavit first and then actually opened their doors in 2016 with making whiskey.

They are located in a little town on one of the smaller islands called Kalkavisk. There is a road system across these islands, they have some bridges and so forth, although it's very common to move around there by helicopter because they're in the north sea where all of the oil rigs and so forth, there's just a huge industry for helicopters, and so there's like a half a dozen helicopter companies and and a dozen helicopter landing sites across these islands, so people move around that way primarily. But when they got into distilling this again only 10 years or so ago, they bought into the german holstein system, which is where very well priced for these small distilleries and their spirit stills only 1200 liters is tiny. This particular whiskey the great skua, they literally label it there there were 963 bottles made of this. It was bottled in july of this year and this is bottle 574 and it's about gone. In fact, I'll pour and this is bottle 574, and it's about gone. In fact I'll pour it into this glass right now. So they're using local barley.

Barley has been grown nominally on those islands for the better part of 2,000 years and they do their own maturation process. And then they have been buying Buffalo Trace and Woodford Reserve casks. So this has three years in bourbon and then a finishing year in Oloroso Sherry casks Very classic for a micro distiller doing small quantities like this. Again, these are only 500 milliliter bottles, so smaller than a conventional bottle. The nose is potent. This is cask strength 59.2. So smaller than a conventional bottle. The nose is potent. This is cast strength 59.2.

2:15:37 - Mikah Sargent
So like the great skua. I was going to say it needs to dive on you like the bird.

2:15:39 - Richard Campbell
It just grabs you by the wing and smashes you in the ocean, man, like there's no two ways about it. But man, it's nice in the mouth Like holy cow. It just fills your throat up and it's like hello, I'm big and sweet and rich. You can almost taste the salt, like you're deeply in the North Atlantic here. You know the ocean is amazing and it's absolutely present in this drink, like you're drinking the ocean almost, and it burns going down down. The second drink is always better than the first, which is why the bottle's empty.

No coloration, no chill filtration. That's literally all that came from the barrel. There were less than a thousand of these made. They're sold almost nowhere. If you can find one between 150 and 200 us it's really expensive for a small bottle of whiskey, but it's the only thing up in the faroe islands I understand there's now a couple another additional distillery starting up there. Because the aging characteristics of that land, with its very mild temperatures and consistency, it should make great whiskey.

We just haven't had time. This has been around less than 10 years, so give them a few more years. I think amazing things are going to start coming out of these places and then part of the conversation you haven't been in on, because you know you've been doing your normal job, micah is that we're seeing a change in the sales pipeline. They're not even attempting to retail these things. They're selling them through whiskey clubs and some direct sales and that's about it, because they're only going to make 20, 30,000 bottles in a year of anything.

There's three or four different whiskey additions. They still make their gin and aqua bean, apparently making a rum now. But they don't need to get big. They don't need to go big commercial. They can make a living in these smaller scales and it just gives us more choice, more interesting whiskeys, and this one I'm probably never going to get a chance to have it again unless I go up to the Faroe Islands, and then it won't be this. It won't be the Great Skew, it'll be one of the others, but that's the delight. Like what if you found a company making a product that every single one of them was a unicorn. I know, in that sense of it's only a few hundred bottles, so enjoy it now. You'll never see it again, and the next time you want one it'll be different.

2:18:02 - Mikah Sargent
Maybe good. Wow, that was actually. I found that truly delightful. As a person who doesn't drink, that was really an interesting story, and I thought you did a very good job in describing the taste of it as well. So, as you know, kevin does put together these moments as little like clips, I think is how it's done on YouTube no-transcript, only one.

2:18:42 - Richard Campbell
But uh, yeah, that's the collection there and uh, there's a. I mean we do one every week. They're not all up there yet, but there's lots of fun there and it's been. It's been. One of my favorite things of getting involved with Windows Weekly has been just making these, these silly stories, and it's become its own thing. People bring me whiskey all the time now.

2:19:02 - Mikah Sargent
I love that, and I'm sure you love that too.

2:19:06 - Richard Campbell
I like that. My mind has changed. You know, I thought I knew my way around whiskey before this but I see things very differently now.

2:19:20 - Mikah Sargent
Well, I hope that you see windows a little differently now, having watched this episode of windows weekly, be that positive or negative. Uh, we appreciate everybody for tuning in. I want to remind everybody that it is a great time to join the club twittv, slash club twit. When you join the club, you are helping support the work that we do here at twit. It's $7 a month and in doing so, you will gain access to every single one of our shows ad free, it's just the content. You also gain access to the twit plus bonus feed that has extra stuff we won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the special Club Twit events get published there Access to the members-only Discord server a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at Twit, and access to the video versions of our Club Twit shows, including the Untitled Linux show, hands-on Mac iOS Today, and many more.

So be sure to join the club twittv, slash club twit. Now is the time where I thank both of our awesome hosts for being here. Richard Campbell, if folks want to follow along with what you're doing, where do they go?

2:20:29 - Richard Campbell
And if there's anything you'd like to pitch. You know I'm on the social medias and not that hard to find and people find me there. But and Run, as of course is my weekly tour for administrators and dealing with that. Net Rocks is for NET developers and I'm at my conference. This is the dev intersection and next-gen AI show. We'll do one or two of these a year, plus, we also do shows for Fabric and Power Platform and M365.

2:20:56 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. And Paul Thurott of Thurottcom Anything special you want to share? Oh, just that he's muted. That's the only thing.

2:21:06 - Paul Thurrott
He really is muted. That's so great. It's not me.

2:21:09 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, we muted you.

2:21:10 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, oh, that's even funnier.

2:21:14 - Mikah Sargent
That wasn't Paul's fault, everybody.

2:21:16 - Paul Thurrott
Nope, I can't imagine why I was muted. But there you go. I guess someone else just controls the rates.

2:21:22 - Mikah Sargent
I didn't know that you could do that. Let me do that again. And Paul Thurot of Thurotcom, anything you'd like to pitch? No, maybe microphone control? No, I'm good, thank you All right, awesome, thank you. Thank you both. If you're looking for me online, you find me at Micah Sargent or head to chihuahuacoffee that's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-Acoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Windows Weekly. I will be back next week for another episode, and Leo Laporte will be back the following week, so stay tuned for that as well. I bid you all adieu until next time when we meet up again to talk about Windows.

2:22:05 - Paul Thurrott
That sounded an awful lot like the end of the Mr Rogers show, or whatever that was or maybe it was the Mickey Mouse show, I don't know.

2:22:17 - Mikah Sargent
Now's the time we say I'll be home next to all the family. Sorry, paul, I had to do it. Oh, it was kevin, you bastard. It was a funny moment.