Windows Weekly 986 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are here and we have lots to talk about. Of course Microsoft Build is on. They love Stevie Batiche's explanation of what Microsoft Celera is all about. I think you'll love it too. Jensen Huang's amazing keynote at Computex announced some new Windows machines. There is a ton of Windows news and it's next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you tr.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:32]:
This is twit.

Leo Laporte [00:00:39]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 986 recorded Wednesday, June 3, 2026. Liminal AI it's time for Windows Weekly. Yes, you Microsoft lovers, all you winners and dozers. This is the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft with two of the smartest whip smart folks in the.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:06]:
I'm not that smart, Leo. I just engaged with Copilot by mistake.

Leo Laporte [00:01:10]:
Whoops. It's not hard.

Richard Campbell [00:01:12]:
Copilot keeps growing, which I feel like

Paul Thurrott [00:01:13]:
is how much people interact with it. Like, oh, what are you doing? Why are you wasting it?

Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
How did you get here? Oh, you pressed the Copilot key, Paul. That's Paul Theron, Copilot T H U r r o doublegood.com he is also the author of so many fabulous books including DNShitify Windows, the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. Hello, Polly.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:33]:
Hello Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:01:34]:
And how are you? Mr. Richard Campbell in Copenhagen.

Richard Campbell [00:01:40]:
I'm doing very well. It was a busy day today. I opened the conference with a keynote called after the AI Hype and I did the last talk today on building data centers in space.

Leo Laporte [00:01:52]:
Oh wow. Yeah, you used to do these geek talks as part of your Net rocks with Carl Franklin. You'd have these geek talks. Are you going to do either of those in your Net?

Richard Campbell [00:02:05]:
Watch. I think the data center one will end up being a DNR at some point if it fits the genre. Well, it's fun.

Leo Laporte [00:02:14]:
Yeah, absolutely. I would want to record the AI Hype thing because who knows from day to day.

Richard Campbell [00:02:22]:
Yeah, there's a version. The. The one I did this morning was streamed to YouTube. It's already up.

Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
Oh nice. Oh, we can see that on YouTube.

Richard Campbell [00:02:30]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:31]:
Under what. What's the.

Richard Campbell [00:02:33]:
NDC Copenhagen.

Leo Laporte [00:02:35]:
NDC Copenhagen. And you have to say just like that. That's it, Just like that. Well, this was a busy, busy week for you gentlemen. Microsoft Build is going on. I know that because Christina Warren wasn't on the show Yesterday. She is GitHub and she was at Build and then she was building and Then that's, that's in San Francisco. And then in a completely different time zone in a land far, far away.

Leo Laporte [00:02:59]:
Computex in Taipei. Wow. And both had big announcements. Or to put it in the words of Paul on the show notes.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:09]:
Oh my God, oh my God, oh

Richard Campbell [00:03:10]:
my God, oh my God.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:13]:
I get overwhelmed easily.

Leo Laporte [00:03:15]:
What happened?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:16]:
There's a lot going on. Monday was a lot of ranting.

Leo Laporte [00:03:20]:
Yeah. Jensen Huang's keynote at 6:00am My time.

Richard Campbell [00:03:24]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:25]:
Yeah. So Jensen and the CEO of Qualcomm. Jeez, I'm drying up. I'm losing my mind. Were both in at Computech, so they could not appear at Microsoft's conference. You know, unfortunately time for the same day.

Leo Laporte [00:03:40]:
So they did have stuff to say that was relevant, however. Oh yeah, Big time relevant. Although I thought it was interesting, Jensen's big announcement was actually not a Qualcomm chip.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:53]:
Well, no tech chip. Which we knew. Well. Right, Okay. I mean we knew this was coming. Right. This has been rumored and there have been leaks and you know, whatever. We still.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:05]:
I gotta say I'm not super excited about the lack of detail here, but from what I can tell, and this makes sense given the nature of Nvidia, obviously these things are going to be GPU heavy. Right. Which is kind of a first for, you know, the Windows on ARM space, I guess, if that makes sense. So, you know, we'll, we'll see. I don't know what to make of this. It's so strange. So 3 nanometer process, I should say. Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:37]:
The rumors were that there were two levels of chip, N1 and N1X. The thing they announced is and 1X which we know because Jensen said it by mistake a couple of times.

Leo Laporte [00:04:46]:
Oh really?

Paul Thurrott [00:04:47]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [00:04:47]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:48]:
But it's called the Nvidia rtx. Spark is the marketing name or the go to market name. TSMC3 nanometer. A 20 core Grace CPU connected to a Blackwell RTX GPU. Which in my brain is more workstation than gaming.

Leo Laporte [00:05:08]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:08]:
Like, but horsepower for sure. It's definitely powerful. 6,144 CUDA cores.

Richard Campbell [00:05:16]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:17]:
And, and then whatever this means. Fifth generation tensor cores. There's going to be 128 gigabytes of integrated unified memory, as they say. Yep. Microsoft has been working with Nvidia to adapt Windows to this. And this is going to. I'm going to talk more about this a little bit later as we talk about build. But you know, think in the back of your brain.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:41]:
Just keep this idea in place. Which is. We've talked about this notion that two years ago, Microsoft introduced Copilot Plus PC, which was MPU based on device AI. Lots of people have GPUs, whether it's a integrated GPU, dedicated GPU, laptop, desktop, doesn't matter. That are adequately powerful or more so than even to run those Copilot PC local AI tasks, but they do not. You're kind of wondering when or if that would ever change. They did not announce that, but there are some changes that if you. I don't know if I got this from the session or for something I read, but are basically being described as bringing copilot plus PC capabilities to other PCs.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:24]:
In particular this thing. Right. Which does have an NPU. I don't know how powerful it is, but Microsoft is adapting Windows so that those local AI things will run on the GPU in this case. And again, we'll get to that. So we've been waiting for this. Right? I mean, Nvidia is black.

Richard Campbell [00:06:44]:
It looks shiny.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:47]:
Yep. Oh, I'm sorry. I should say, too. Microsoft also announced, for their part, a laptop that will run this system. They're calling it Surface Laptop Ultra. It's not expected until the second half of the year. Along with all the other PC makers, you know, hp, Lenovo, Acer, Dell, everybody's

Richard Campbell [00:07:03]:
making one offer off of this Spark.

Leo Laporte [00:07:06]:
I think it's like a Spark desktop. Right. It's just a laptop version, basically. Is that right?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:13]:
Yeah. Although I think the chipset and this is new, right? Ish. I mean, you know, a new design, but yeah, but yes, I mean, I think that's fair to say.

Leo Laporte [00:07:22]:
Well, so you can't put a desktop chip in a laptop.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:25]:
I mean, of course you can, but. So I, like I said, they announced this. Microsoft announced their Surface Laptop Ultra. Between the two of them announcements, there's a little bit of information about the technical aspects of this. So I was thinking, well, build's going to happen and of course they're going to talk about this at build and they have a little bit. But again, very vague, like we don't really know exactly. And I think they're just waiting until we get, you know,

Leo Laporte [00:08:00]:
closer pricing availability. Who knows?

Paul Thurrott [00:08:04]:
I think it's going to be several thousand dollars more than that because didn't

Leo Laporte [00:08:08]:
they say it's going to have a lot of ram 128.

Richard Campbell [00:08:12]:
Yeah. So my, my gut said 10,000 bucks easy.

Leo Laporte [00:08:16]:
Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:17]:
Yeah. I was like north of 4. But yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:08:20]:
But can you. But who would pay 10 grand for

Paul Thurrott [00:08:22]:
a laptop, you know, former net, the

Richard Campbell [00:08:26]:
AI hype is real and they're gonna keep going.

Leo Laporte [00:08:29]:
Well, Apple's gonna have a, you know, similar device probably end of the year. I don't know how much RAM they'll put in there, but more than they could.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:37]:
The way this was described was almost like it's. You have a data center on your desk, you know, in other words, this thing can run AI to the degree local inference right now requires cloud AI. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:08:50]:
So we don't have the models.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:51]:
Well, I mean, that might be part of the delay here. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:08:54]:
So maybe this fall. Yeah, we'll see

Paul Thurrott [00:08:59]:
if. Well, like I said, I'm going to talk about the kind of back end the software part of this in a bit, but this is very interesting part

Richard Campbell [00:09:08]:
of the leak and it's definitely this push towards local model running.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:13]:
Right. Which honestly is a major theme of build, even though they didn't really position it that way. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:09:22]:
If you say that out loud, it's like, why would you want this much horsepower on your desk if you weren't just going to run the model locally?

Paul Thurrott [00:09:30]:
Most people don't need or want this much power in the desk. But as local models evolve and get better and as the software on top of it, especially Windows, evolves, you know, they become more capable and we're going to get there, there's no doubt about it. But let me see if I can find the language in here, because I did, I put this in, I just threw it in the notes as a little reminder to myself and now I can't find it because that's how my brain works. Yeah, they call. So when you think about on device AI, we're talking about what I would call small language models as opposed to large language models that run up in the cloud just as an easy differentiator. I think these lines are going to, you know, blend together or whatever, but in more than one place. Microsoft referred to this as unmetered AI, meaning it's local on your machine, so you're not paying for the token thing. And you know, whatever your usage cost,

Richard Campbell [00:10:23]:
you paid for the compute yourself. You get to run it as hard as you want to run it.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:27]:
It's private, it's on your device.

Leo Laporte [00:10:29]:
I mean, I love this idea. If, if I can get a model that's going to be comparable to a Frontier model.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:34]:
Yeah, right.

Richard Campbell [00:10:35]:
And it can heat a room.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:38]:
So I mean, it's interesting to compare what we do know to what we found, what we think we found out through leaks. Assuming that stuff's Correct. Right. So like a typical laptop CPU these days is actually kind of hard to pin down honestly. But in the old days, meaning before the Core Ultra chips like on the intel side they would have the U series, core, whatever generation and those things U series would typically like be 15 watts. Right now we have multiple, not just multiple cores, but multiple kinds of cores. And so there's kind of a range of power that we use to describe their power consumption essentially. So I would say a typical laptop today probably is somewhere, you know, 10 to 30 watts maybe somewhere in there.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:25]:
The lower end chip that they did not announce was supposed to run at 18 to 45 watts. The N1X which is the one they did announce runs at 45 to 80 watts. So without what I took from that before you run the rest of the

Richard Campbell [00:11:39]:
machine, you've already need a power supply right now.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:41]:
Oh yeah, that's a lot of power. But that's gaming laptops, that's portable workstations, that's desktop PCs. I mean this is, you know, it's not a thin and light, although they were talking thin and light, you know, so we'll see. The RAM range could be 16 to 128. They came to market with 128. The RAM on the lower end one is 8 to 16. Supposedly they did not even announce that. So I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:02]:
You know, I feel like we are going to see the other one too. There'll be a lower end solution for cheaper computers. I think we're going to see lower end configurations of this thing. But I think the go to market is very much to attract those people who are heavy, really heavy users, like engineers, maybe creators, developers.

Leo Laporte [00:12:21]:
Yeah, because Nvidia already offers a, basically a Raspberry PI with Cuda cores on it. That's cheap and can't run diddly basically. I mean so just because you can

Richard Campbell [00:12:35]:
run it doesn't mean it's usable.

Leo Laporte [00:12:36]:
Yeah, I mean they have a name of people model, it's okay. I mean they have a very small model and Google has Gemma.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:44]:
I think this is just about getting people on Cuda frankly. I mean, you know, which is, it's

Leo Laporte [00:12:48]:
totally what this is about.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:49]:
Completely understandable.

Leo Laporte [00:12:51]:
Lock in. This is like if we can just own the whole market.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:54]:
Yeah. Like eventually this surging market thing that we're part of, which is insanity is going to slow down or whatever and. But now we have the market, you

Leo Laporte [00:13:04]:
know, so well and this is why I'm kind of resistant to it because

Richard Campbell [00:13:07]:
I. Yeah, well we've seen P Seal seals drop across the board. I think it's exactly that. And now you're going to ship arguably the most expensive laptop ever made.

Leo Laporte [00:13:17]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:13:17]:
Your timing couldn't be much worse. Except. Well, except for that part where that message about local AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:25]:
But unless the goal isn't. Look, the goal can't be volume. It's the PC market. They're going to sell 200 million ish computers this year and only a tiny percentage are going to be these kind of things. So this is the same situation we had a Qualcomm two years ago where at that time a smartphone market that was over a billion devices a year. And you're like, why even bother? Like, why would you even try to go to the PC market if you got 10% somehow? And I don't think they have really, but let's say they did. So you're selling like 20 million of these things a year compared to a billion, like.

Richard Campbell [00:14:00]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:14:00]:
It's what Apple used to call the Pro line. This is for. But that's why I agree with you, Richard, that this is more about Cuda. It's about mind share, not market share.

Richard Campbell [00:14:10]:
Sure. Well, and it's about, you know, the big aspect here is investors are worrying that these investments in AI aren't going to last and you've got to show motion. So the idea that we're pushing on new machines that are going to open more doors for more users, anything to keep the investors engaged and not running for the hills.

Leo Laporte [00:14:31]:
Well, and enterprise is starting to say, holy cow, look at our token bill.

Richard Campbell [00:14:35]:
Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:36]:
Well, yeah, so the timing in that sense is actually pretty good because all the major AIs are switching to that consumption model and bills are going to go up, not exponentially, but a lot of. And we, I think that a lot of the people, companies, whatever, who are using AI today and paying 20 bucks a month or 200 bucks a month or whatever they're paying don't understand the true cost. And they're about to, you know, they're

Richard Campbell [00:15:02]:
about to find out by the business is coming in. And so, yeah, good to have the alternative in your hands. You don't abandon the tech

Paul Thurrott [00:15:11]:
just as a little bit of commentary that I'm kind of still pushing through my brain. You know, Microsoft doesn't get a lot of credit for this kind of thing because they actually don't do this kind of thing a lot, especially recently. But they were kind of out early on this if you think about it. I mean, when they announced Copilot plus PC two years ago, My evaluation of at the time was like, what you should be pushing because it's ARM and it's Snapdragon is efficiency, reliability, power management, battery life, you know, and then just general excellent performance. But whatever. But they were very much pushing local AI. And it's tough because no matter what you do on a computer, you sit there all day long or you just use it occasionally, whatever. Use web browsers, email and whatever applications, you might have some one to seven little tasks within individual apps that might be better or more efficient because of an mpu.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:08]:
Especially if you're a creator. There are certain features in Windows you only get from a Copilot PC. So you either do or do not know that that's the case. Whatever. But it's not a reason to buy it. Right. It still to this day is not the reason to buy the thing. So this is another.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:24]:
Here it is two years later, this will be a lot more powerful, apparently consume a lot more power. But two years have gone by. Copilot plus PC I don't think you can say has moved the kneel per se on local AI usage or awareness or PC sales or however you want to say it. And so this is, it's like, oh, we're going to try this again, sort of. But I mean, you know, Microsoft, look, we're going to talk about Stevie Batish again in a little while and he was the guy, you know, three, five years ago, whatever it was, who gave that very eloquent description of those three AI app models or a app structures. But the following year he talked about NPUs versus GPUs. And for, for a laptop, when you can offload certain AI tasks to an mpu, you get better performance, but you also don't impact the battery at all, which is not something that happens with a CPU or gpu. So it's still important.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:21]:
But if you do have the big gpu, you bought it for a reason, you want to use it. This is the argument we've always made. Yeah. You should be able to use it for any reason.

Leo Laporte [00:17:30]:
Why a laptop?

Paul Thurrott [00:17:32]:
Because that's what people buy. That's the mass market.

Richard Campbell [00:17:35]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:17:35]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:35]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:17:36]:
So this is to put a local AI into the hands of the masses.

Richard Campbell [00:17:42]:
Yeah, I think, I wouldn't say.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:43]:
I don't know. Yeah, not, not at first.

Leo Laporte [00:17:46]:
Top of the line machine developers want laptops.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:48]:
This is for the classes, not the masses. Leo, nice to riff on what's his face. Jack Trammel. Right. I mean, but, but it will come down. I mean, I, I think this is to Jump start more adoption of local AI across the board from developers and well to developers. Pretty much the developer space. But not just developers that want to use it locally for their own needs, but developers who are creating apps that may use local AI features instead of just relying on cloud.

Leo Laporte [00:18:22]:
The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, which Microsoft said will be the fastest laptop we've ever made.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:29]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:18:29]:
Is arm, right? It's not Qualcomm.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:33]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:18:34]:
So that's interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:37]:
Well, I mean this intel and AMD in the x86 space, there have been other.

Leo Laporte [00:18:43]:
But this is their first non Qualcomm Surface.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:47]:
Right. Yeah. So I mean one of the non

Leo Laporte [00:18:50]:
Qualcomm ARM Surface, I guess. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:55]:
In the Mod for Windows 11. I mean the, the original Surface RT which was armed was Nvidia by the way, but.

Leo Laporte [00:19:02]:
Oh, but yes, yeah, way back when. Like the Tegra X or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:07]:
But this is. Yeah, I mean but look the thing

Leo Laporte [00:19:10]:
is they had, we thought they had a Qualcomm exclusive deal for a long time.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:14]:
Yeah. This has never been, you know, confirmed. But the, the story is that there's X amount of months or years they had this exclusivity thing.

Leo Laporte [00:19:21]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:22]:
In return for that, of course. Qualcomm has done an incredible job right from Snapdragon XX2. Unbelievable. And they're addressing what I would call the right part of the marketplace for the mainstream. The first devices were often for at the time. It's funny because they had these would be cheap but kind of premium thin and light laptops. It was designed to be attractive to people who might want to upgrade and spend a little bit money. A little bit more money maybe.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:51]:
Although they weren't actually more expensive than other things. And then they've scaled it downward and we'll talk about this a little bit later because they scaled it downward yet again and that's going to help out a lot this year with the component crisis. But this, yeah, this feels a need I guess at the high end of the ARM side of the.

Leo Laporte [00:20:10]:
Yeah, I think we're going to talk more about you know, these other, you know, like Snapdragon C and stuff. Do you think that the market is now starting to be high end Nvidia, low end Snapdragon C and intel and then kind of medium intel amd. I mean is it starting to break down?

Paul Thurrott [00:20:33]:
This just happened. So I can't, I don't want to make any ice tube predictions or whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:20:37]:
This is material on anybody's hands yet. They're just being announced. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:41]:
This is September. We don't have detail, we don't have benchmarks, we don't have, you know, anything. So it's like, look, it looks great, but what is.

Richard Campbell [00:20:50]:
Are you going to be the list, Paul? That's the question. Is an ultra going to show up at your door?

Leo Laporte [00:20:54]:
Oh, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:55]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:20:56]:
Somebody said it. I thought this was hysterical. Maybe it was the Verge. This is, this is a replacement for that Snapdragon dev machine.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:03]:
Oh, yeah, no, those things are totally related in the same way that a Lamborghini is a replacement for Model T. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:21:10]:
You know, like, I thought that was a very weird thing. I don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:13]:
I mean, the dev box, all the dev box was, was like a Mac MINI style all in one, not all in one, you know, mini form. Mini form factor. It was essentially laptop chipset.

Richard Campbell [00:21:22]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:22]:
Like. So the goal of that was just to get people, developers on arm, you know, obviously. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is, this is different. I mean, it's arm. Yes, but ARM is already established with. There are, There are no, there's no remaining problems there. They're scaling upward.

Leo Laporte [00:21:39]:
Didn't Jensen say it will run every app that runs on Windows? Something like that. I mean, he really was at great pains to say that, because you can't

Paul Thurrott [00:21:49]:
read a review of any Snapdragon laptop, even as recently as this week, without someone saying, well, there's, you know, you have to deal with compatibility issues. No, you don't. No, you don't.

Leo Laporte [00:22:00]:
No, you don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:02]:
Ridiculous. That's the. Sorry, that's silly. But he has to say that because that's the perception. But the other half of that, by the way, is if you went to Computex, which I did not, they're showing demos of games running on this thing and of course those things are emulated. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:22:16]:
He held it up.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:17]:
Oh, he showed it. Okay. Yeah. So that's, you know, interesting. I, I will. You know, you can run games on Snapdragon X, you can run a few more games or run games a little bit better on X2, but emulation is great for an app. It's not necessarily great for games, which is why we have all those other things, like, you know, super resolution and, you know, whatever else that they do to try to make these things just kind of run better. Nvidia is benefiting from all that work.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:43]:
It's just, you know, it's not like they're starting. It's not like they're not. It's not like a. I don't like a big block engine that just is super fast. So it could just run these things like it has to, you know, work still has to occur under the covers than it has. We've had two years of that. Two years plus. Really.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:00]:
So they're going to benefit from that. So their GPU like, you know, on a normal x86 laptop with an RTX, whatever. DGPU games run great. Like Call of Duty runs great on those, like really great, like 100 something frames per second, full res, all the details on it's awesome. That's x86. So if you can get a game like that to run at like 60 frames a second on this thing, that's also awesome. So that would, you know, that's amazing. Especially for something that's emulated.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:29]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:23:31]:
This feels like such a big victory for Microsoft. They were front and center and it was very clear that these were Windows machines. This was really, I thought, very interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:45]:
This is why I mentioned, you know, we don't usually give them credit for this because they don't usually do this, but they actually came out very early and publicly about local AI and were ignored completely, you know, pretty much. Right. And I don't know, that's maybe that they should, maybe they shouldn't have pushed that part of it so hard. But, but like, you know, and I mentioned Stevie Batish, who we're going to talk about again, you know, a couple three years ago, whatever that was, when he talked about mpus, he really made a good case for why these types of chip or whatever they are, I guess they're chips inside of an society, are so important in the portable space. But you know, that's that thing we keep talking about. You have a desktop computer or a laptop with a dedicated GPU or a GPU and a card. It's got dedicated RAM. It's hundreds of tops, not 40 or 85 tops, several hundred tops in many cases.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:36]:
Should be able to blur the background and paint or whatever, you know, imagine.

Leo Laporte [00:24:40]:
Yeah, the model I have in my mind, and Steve Gibson talked about this yesterday too, is a home server, a NAS maybe or what I have for the Framework desktop, which you then.

Richard Campbell [00:24:51]:
Language device.

Leo Laporte [00:24:53]:
Yeah. And that's what's running them, you know, that has all the horsepower, it has all the electrical power.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:59]:
You know, Sun Microsystems called and said the network is the computer, Leo. And no, look, I.

Leo Laporte [00:25:05]:
That's just the model in my mind. I mean, I don't know why you would want it on a laptop. If I have a laptop, I'm going to SSH into my big machine or something.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:14]:
You wouldn't want this. Right. Unless you were a developer.

Leo Laporte [00:25:18]:
But I would want it as a desktop.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:19]:
But the reason you want local AI on a laptop, just in general. Right. And even today it works offline, it's private, it's your data. It's not going up to the cloud, it's this reason. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:25:31]:
So that means you want the biggest machine you can possibly get to run that local model.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:35]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:25:36]:
And that's really considering how limited information.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:39]:
Well, but that was the point. The point of the MPU was you don't need that super high. I mean even though there's a good computers.

Leo Laporte [00:25:45]:
But you demonstrate that to me because that ain't the case today. You need a lot of ram, you need a lot of horsepower, you need a lot of electricity to run.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:54]:
Well, no, yeah. To do the thing you're doing in the cloud. But that's not all that AI is. You know, you're. If you're going to fire up a bunch of agents and have them go off and do whatever they do. Yeah. I mean you're going to need more power or a cloud based thing. But I think this is just the market evolving to the.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:16]:
I think these things are converging. The local AI is getting better, the local hardware is getting better. I mean I think ARM makes a huge difference. Just in general.

Leo Laporte [00:26:24]:
This is primarily for inference and I would say primarily for coding. Is that right or no,

Paul Thurrott [00:26:32]:
your place games. No, I don't. Yeah. I mean, yes, I. Oh yeah, it's

Leo Laporte [00:26:35]:
a, it's a general, general purpose computer. Not going to deny that. But the market, selling this expensive, you can get a cheaper gaming machine. The market they're selling this to is I would think coders, but I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:48]:
And I would call it engineering science Engineering.

Leo Laporte [00:26:51]:
Yeah. Maybe you're right. Maybe cash.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:53]:
But. But delve developers. Of course it's not going to be something on someone's, you know, desk at American Express, you know, taking calls from customers.

Leo Laporte [00:27:01]:
I mean did they talk about. Because I think this is underestimated and I haven't seen a lot of numbers but. But it turns out throughput. RAM throughput is really, really important.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:13]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:27:14]:
In fact some people have complained that the DGX Spark just doesn't have very good RAM throughput.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:20]:
So I'd have to go and even look at that to figure out what the architecture is there. But it's probably just a standard. It's probably, you know, so, so damn, that's really important.

Leo Laporte [00:27:28]:
And actually Apple has a pretty good story on that with its Unified ram. So.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:32]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:27:33]:
And throughput numbers is what I guess I'm saying.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:36]:
Yep. Yeah. And that we don't have a lot of the details. That's part of the point.

Leo Laporte [00:27:41]:
Yeah. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:43]:
So on. I know on Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, which is where the RAM is integrated into the die, the RAM throughput is not double, but it's close to double.

Leo Laporte [00:27:52]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:53]:
You know, that's how important that is.

Leo Laporte [00:27:55]:
It's huge. It's everything. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:57]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:27:58]:
Let me take a little break. And we have so much more to talk about. We're just scratching the surface of Computex Build, and Richard Campbell came and went like a ghost.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:11]:
Spunked. He's like the wind.

Leo Laporte [00:28:17]:
But we will have more in just a moment. You're watching Windows Weekly with Richard Campbell and Copenhagen, Paul Thurat and Makun and Leo laporte in my attic. Back to the show we go. We had just begun. We've only, in the words of the Carpenters, just begun to talk about the Windows world. And Computex.

Richard Campbell [00:28:42]:
And I speak on mute.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:44]:
Yep. So I looked this up while you're doing the ad there, but they wish

Leo Laporte [00:28:48]:
I were on mute right about. Right about now. I just want to say. Yes, sir, go ahead.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:53]:
First gen, Snapdragon X, the memory bandwidth was 138 gigabits per second. Gigabytes per second, I guess. Snapdragon X2 Elite is 152. So a small gain. And then if you go up to X2 elite, it's a 50% gain from that. So 228 gigabits per second.

Leo Laporte [00:29:13]:
And this makes a difference in AI?

Paul Thurrott [00:29:17]:
Makes a difference in everything.

Leo Laporte [00:29:19]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:19]:
Especially in AI. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was just curious. I. Yeah. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:26]:
So yesterday was the build keynote. It was two and a half to three hours long. I completely lost my mind by the end of it. But unlike the past, I'm going to call it 10 years or so, there was a bunch of stuff in there for Windows and for the client, which I think is kind of cool. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:29:42]:
Look, news stories about Windows is amazing. Windows IT build. How many builds have we had with nothing about Windows?

Paul Thurrott [00:29:49]:
Right. And this is. I think this is part partially due to the fact that cloud computing just didn't have anything interesting for Windows. That was the focus for such a long time. I don't think it made it very interesting for people who would consider themselves to be enthusiasts or whatever. Whereas AI, even if you don't like AI, like it's generating news and excitement, it's interesting, like this stuff happening. So that to me this is interesting. Microsoft, I mean this goes back to Windows 10 really, but they've been trying to position Windows as the best desktop platform for developers for a long time, which is why we have wsl, the Windows subsystem for Linux, et cetera, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:30]:
You know, I don't remember the timing of any of this anymore, but you know, dev box came out of this, all the improvements to terminal, etc. Etc. I have to say, super excited. Unless I'm misremembering, which I could because it was a long event. I think the first person that came on stage that wasn't Satya Nadell. Kayla Cinnamon, who does develop, but she's in Terminal, right. And she. And she has an awesome YouTube channel by the way, where she does a lot of Terminal tips and tricks and stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:55]:
Excellent.

Richard Campbell [00:30:56]:
Done some great run ads with me too.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:58]:
Yeah, she's great. So she did some, some Terminal demos like right up front which I thought was really cool. But so they announced a bunch of things. There is a. Something called the Windows developer configuration which is what this new. These new Nvidia based PCs are going to ship in which is a Winget or a Windows Package Manager based configuration that creates a distraction free environment for developers. Now didn't say this, but to me that sounds like Xbox mode. But it's like Developer mode, you know, for developers or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:27]:
Right. So less stuff going on, you know, widgets aren't popping up, notifications are off, etc. Etc. There are optimizations in there for things like visual studio code, GitHub, Copilot, WSL, etc. Etc. So that is actually out there now if you want it, you could just install it. Like it's. I think it's on GitHub so if you want to just you know, one line and auto configure computer to be less annoying, that's something interesting.

Richard Campbell [00:31:56]:
Dev config can be annoying annoying too, just in a different way.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:01]:
Yep, it's in Dark mode. You know, I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:32:04]:
Yeah, the.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:07]:
We talked about this at least twice previously. But back in January Microsoft announced something called the. I think it's the Windows app development CLI, the Win app CLI, which as originally released in 0.01 forum. I didn't quite understand the point of it. They later added support for workloads like. NET and all the. NET frameworks like WPF et cetera. And I was like okay, kind of interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:32]:
But now it's making sense because that thing is now generally available and there is A plugin for it called the Windows Developer Confid, called the Windows Developer Skills that allows you to use the Win CLI to create, in this case, native WinUI 3 apps from the command line. And I'm going to talk about that in the back of the book because I did it and. Okay, very interesting. So what I'm going to say though, just here is that CLIs are huge this year all of a sudden. And it's the same reason that markdown is huge. It's. It's because of AI and agents in particular.

Richard Campbell [00:33:10]:
Thinking tech based. Yeah, rocks. A few weeks ago that was like, build your CLI first.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:18]:
Yeah. And this is that thing we talked about a couple of weeks ago. You know, back in the day, I think it was Exchange 20 2007. We're going to build this thing in PowerShell and then we're going to build GUI on top of it. That made sense to me architecturally or whatever. But now in the AI era, we have a newfound need for this kind of thing. So we have apps that exist and we live in kind of a screen scraping world because we don't meaning compute use where we have to deal with what people have. But apps also can be adapted to expose their capabilities, individual features through a programmable interface, which on I think on Android is like app intents maybe.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:00]:
And on Windows it's called AI Actions or just App Actions. And this is when you can right click on a file in File Explorer and go to AI action submenu and then like remove background with paint or whatever. Right. It's exposing a feature which is okay for people, but it's awesome for AI and that's why that exists. And then this went. The CLI stuff is the same thing, but for agents specifically. Right. That having a CLI interface to anything helps you do a bunch of things.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:30]:
But one of the key ones is grounding AI in something in particular. So when you use this Windows Developer Skills plugin, whatever AI you choose, you can use Cloud or OpenAI or Copilot and then eventually everything. But today those things, it will only be grounded in all of the documentation and learnings they have for whatever environment you're working in. So if it's when ui, one of the problems I've run into, and they specifically call this one out, is general purpose AI or general purpose coding. AI will pull in stuff that's from WPF or other frameworks that are similar and it will make mistakes and you run into that thing where you're like, okay, we fixed it, you're like, no, you didn't. Still doesn't compile. Okay, I see the problem now. The problem is.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:14]:
And it talks and talks and talks and you run out all your credits. You look. So this is a solution for that. Right?

Richard Campbell [00:35:20]:
It's very advantageous.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:22]:
Yeah, yeah. Is run out of credits.

Richard Campbell [00:35:24]:
I tried to make an animation today for my data centers in Space Talk and ran out of tokens on like three different services and got nothing.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:33]:
Yeah, that's a good experience. Such standard Microsoft productivity experience, really. There's a new intelligent terminal terminal mode coming. It's an experimental preview right now. But basically what this is is another way to interact with agents in a command line where the top half is the normal terminal window, you know, PowerShell. Typically the bottom is like the agent CLI interface. And so you can go back and forth between the two. Kind of interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:01]:
Lots of WSL improvements. I don't think we need to get into too much. But the big one is container support is coming. So that's awesome. And then they released or utils, which is like over 75 clis from Linux now in Windows. Right. That weren't there before. So again, really pushing the kind of command line part of it.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:24]:
They have something on Microsoft execution containers for agents, which. When I first saw that name, I was like, oh, my God. Oh, my God, they're doing it. They're doing Windows 10X now. It's not Windows 10X. This is so agents running on Windows can run in their own little sandbox environment. Right, Right. And then you can feed it the data you want and it won't be able to bleed out.

Richard Campbell [00:36:45]:
Yeah, this is. This is how like Claude Cowork works.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:47]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:36:48]:
Is it sets up a VM on your machine, restricting its ability to access the machines. You have to specify what on your machine you're allowed to use. Yeah. It'll jump across that VM barrier.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:57]:
So I haven't done. Actually, I think it's fair to say I haven't done anything with cloud code from. Directly from a command line other than like through a chatbot interface, which is sort of a command line. Right. But when you do that, My God, does it ask you for permission all the time.

Leo Laporte [00:37:13]:
YOLO mode, dude. Whenever you. Dude, dude. No one does it that way.

Richard Campbell [00:37:20]:
Run unsafe.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:21]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:37:22]:
So when you invoke CLAUDE code, you type Claude dash dash. Dangerously bypass permissions.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:30]:
I don't like the sound of that,

Leo Laporte [00:37:31]:
but called solo mode.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:33]:
Oh, no.

Leo Laporte [00:37:34]:
Everybody. Because it's. You can't get anything done.

Richard Campbell [00:37:37]:
You're constantly, constantly managing well.

Leo Laporte [00:37:40]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:40]:
Okay, so in the. In the workflow that I will talk about later in the show, generally speaking, you. There was an option, was like, yes, dear God, yes, you can access the file system. Relax. But there was a second one that was like, always allow, like case. You know, you could kind of. You could, you could. You could.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:58]:
Okay. I just. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:37:59]:
I know it's scary, but.

Richard Campbell [00:38:01]:
Well, slash, dive into deep end.

Leo Laporte [00:38:04]:
You only live once, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:06]:
Yeah, Yep, I live once. I fall off a cliff at the end of that.

Leo Laporte [00:38:10]:
No, I run everything that way. Everything. All yolo, all the time.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:15]:
This is the.

Leo Laporte [00:38:16]:
That's the story of my life.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:18]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [00:38:20]:
There's your title.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:21]:
I'm not. I'm not in a place where I feel comfortable doing that or recommending it to other people, but I. Okay, maybe you're not alone, Leo.

Richard Campbell [00:38:30]:
I know a bunch of you have to.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:32]:
It's.

Leo Laporte [00:38:32]:
Because otherwise it's. It's worse than uac. It's like.

Richard Campbell [00:38:35]:
Yeah. And their gate check is just at a different point. Right. It's the pull request.

Leo Laporte [00:38:39]:
Right. It's all right, Paul. Once you get some comfort with it, you'll realize it's not going to delete your database or anything. It's not.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:46]:
You just got an apology from AI that deleted something. What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte [00:38:50]:
That's a good point.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:52]:
Anyway, it's okay.

Richard Campbell [00:38:54]:
And it felt bad about itself.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:55]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:38:56]:
And it felt bad. We're talking about Opus 4. 8, which is really good at apologizing.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:59]:
Yeah, I really. No one likes data loss. That must have hurt a lot. I'm so sorry. Okay. Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:39:07]:
I have very good strong backups of everything. I'm not. I'm not too worried, but it really. Well, sorry. I'm not going to argue.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:15]:
No, I'm not arguing. I'm just. I'm just saying.

Leo Laporte [00:39:17]:
I'm not arguing. I'm saying I'm not going to. I'm not going to make a case for yolo. But I feel like you did see soon. Why?

Paul Thurrott [00:39:23]:
Like you just did make the case for it. Like, it's okay. I was not aware of this option. I'm not sure I want to be aware of it. I don't know. It's okay. Look, I'm just baby stepping at this point in this stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:39:36]:
Dangerous skip permissions, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:40]:
I'm sorry, Dave.

Richard Campbell [00:39:42]:
Just think of it as permission to be awesome. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:48]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [00:39:49]:
So sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:52]:
The on device AI thing has come up, right. And Microsoft, if anyone has ever tried to. And I have used the APIs that Microsoft has talked about, which have changed dramatically over the past two, three years. You know, there was like the Windows Copilot SDK or whatever it was called, or the whatever the heck that was. And they changed the name and blah, blah, blah. And basically what these things are using is Microsoft small language models running on the device, mostly in the five family, I think is where most of this stuff comes from or has come from. But they announced a new set of these models which have a new name called Aeon, if I'm pronouncing that correct. There's Aon 1.0 instruct, which is smaller, faster and smarter local AI than Phi was, I guess Aon 1.0 plan, which is a reasoning and tool calling model for agentic capabilities, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:44]:
Both are coming soon, but you can experiment with them in preview today in various ways. And they're expanding. I didn't. This might. This must be the new name for that, whatever that Copilot SDK thing was, what they're calling the Windows AI APIs like. So there's the Windows API, there's our SDK, whatever the Windows APIs like win32, there's the Windows app SDK APIs. Right. You know, for modern app development and there's the Windows AI APIs.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:12]:
So there are three sets of capabilities that are coming moving off of being Copilot plus PC requirements with an mpu. So speech to text is now going to work on CPUs in addition to MPUs. Text intelligence GPUs. It just says CPUs but it could be. I'm not sure about that. Text intelligence capabilities will work locally on dgpus and then video super resolution will work on cpu. Okay, so again, they have not said how or if they are changing Copilot plus PC as a spec, but we've made this case on. And now I will say on both ends of the spectrum we've got the Nvidia thing on the way, high end.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:56]:
And then we get the Snapdragon C, which we'll talk about in a bit on the low end, which again, which we also do not know a lot about, but we do know 8 gigs of Ram on the small one. So that's not a copilot plus, it's not 128 gigs. Yeah, no, it's not 16 either, which is the baseline for. So the theory is this is going to change and these API changes speak to that. So you can preview these today in Edge Insider channels. I'm going to talk about. I think the Edge is probably the next one and they're coming to hugging face in July and then the general availability later in the year they haven't said. But this is a kind of a generational evolution of I believe of Microsoft 5, which I assume is going to go away.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:40]:
But they did not say that. And then there's the. The RTX Dev box which we talked about earlier. Right. This is like a data center in your lap.

Leo Laporte [00:42:53]:
You know, instead of a blanket you got to.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:58]:
Yeah, it's going to be.

Leo Laporte [00:42:59]:
I actually asked my AI to make us a bandwidth chart because there is some bandwidth information out there. And you know, the. The big boy is this. I don't know how much it costs. Nvidia's DGX station, which is 7 terabytes per second of bandwidth. And then if you have an RTX video card, that's a lot 1.7 but it's only 32 gigs of RAM. So you can't really fit a model in that. But if you could, it would be fast.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:27]:
Well, that's specifically on the GPU. Right. Like in other words, the 188 is GPU that's just integrated or unified RAM.

Leo Laporte [00:43:34]:
Right. Apple has a real advantage here. The M3 Ultra is almost. Is 819 gigabytes a second M5 Max. The new RTX Spark is actually pretty good. 300 gigabytes a second. The DGX Spark, their desktop is actually considerably slower. The Strix Halo which I have is 256gigs per second.

Leo Laporte [00:43:56]:
And then you get to Aerolake and stuff like that and it's 102 gigs per second. So there is a big gulf. But this, this RTX Spark is going to be pretty good. 300 gigabytes a second. Is.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:08]:
Is this is.

Leo Laporte [00:44:10]:
This is the. What they announced anyway.

Richard Campbell [00:44:12]:
So.

Leo Laporte [00:44:12]:
Okay, I just thought I'd pass that along.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:14]:
No, that's crazy.

Leo Laporte [00:44:15]:
I had that had it generate all that. I wonder how I'm gonna just go price a DGX station. Just. I'll be right back.

Richard Campbell [00:44:22]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:44:23]:
If I have a heart attack, I'll let you know. Yeah, my falling over.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:27]:
All right.

Richard Campbell [00:44:27]:
A little higher. Leo.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:32]:
Google just got in trouble for secretly although they announced this downloading A4. I think it's a 4 gigabyte SLM with Chrome, you know when you start using AI features. I made the point at the time like everyone is doing this including Firefox. By the way, Microsoft is doing it in Edge and they announced separately from what I just said. But it's the same thing is those on device AI capabilities will also be available in Edge. And you can test some of them right now through, I think it's Edge Canary or whatever. Actually one of them might even just be available unstable at this point. But Edge Canary dev, et cetera, have access to at least these capabilities.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:11]:
And so as a developer you could write whatever apps that run against these things and it would run locally so it could work offline, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:45:22]:
Cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:23]:
Yeah, I think just, I'm just going to do this kind of quickly. If you looked at Build from the outside, didn't know anything about it and tried to make a general summary of what was going on, probably using AI, it would be that this is an AI agent show. Right. I don't think I did this last week, I must have done this more recently. But I looked at the sessions that Build had and there were like over 400 and over 300 of them had the terms agent or agentic in their title or description. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:45:57]:
So yeah, the other hundred were wrong.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:59]:
Yeah, right. And then you know, like, you know, Copilot for example only came up like 117 times or whatever the number was. You know, I honestly, aside from the final thing we'll talk about, I think for Build, I would say most of this wasn't super interesting to me. But I'll just mention a couple they were rumored, they Microsoft were rumored to be working on a so called like AI super app or whatever. They have announced that it's called Scout, it is their version of Google Spark, right. Which is I think now available to people paying Google 200 bucks a month or whatever on that subscription. And it is just early days. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:43]:
But this is where we kind of move. So we have agents and obviously were familiar with the term copilot but they've introduced the fairly obvious language of autopilots, right. Which are agents. So this is going to be like. This will probably eventually replace all the co pilot apps and stuff. I think this will become the, the experience, you know, but it's a, a desktop app I think. I'm sure there's going to be a web version, etc. But.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:11]:
And I'm sure it will do hybrid things, you know, a local and cloud based AI, et cetera, but early days for that. And then they also announced a GitHub copilot app which made me do a double tape because I was like, isn't there already a GitHub copilot app? But I think it's only on. Maybe it isn't, maybe it's just GitHub. I guess, because I have a GitHub app on my phone. But this is the first step to a big ancient native desktop experience for GitHub. And so it's basically for managing agents, essentially, I guess is the way I would say it. Of course it is. And you know, using Git on the back end.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:50]:
Right. Which does make sense, I guess, for these projects you might be doing with this thing. And I don't know, I'm just. This is like, poof. I don't know, whatever. It's on preview.

Richard Campbell [00:48:03]:
Don't despair.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:05]:
I'm not despaired, I'm just. I'm just. I just don't know what to make of this quite yet. More interestingly, perhaps it was Mustafa Suleiman came out and announced that his organization, which is Microsoft AI Mai, which is seeking to basically replace all of the reliance Microsoft now has on OpenAI in particular, but also, I would say anthropic, announced seven new models, including the first reasoning model that also offers like, high efficiency and low token cost. And it's kind of interesting. It's like they claim that most of this stuff, I would say, is some number of months behind the best, very best models across the board, which is not bad because again, they're kind of building this up from scratch. They couldn't even start working on this until they changed their agreement with OpenAI, one of the two agreement changes ago. That was the big deal for Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:01]:
It allowed them to pursue this stuff internally without OpenAI's help or okaying it even. So they have an image, you know, Mai image 2.5 with a flash variant, which they claim is better than Nano Banana based on benchmarks and whatever. However you measure these things, not just based on their personal opinions. Like, I like that picture of the tiger better. Transcription model. I know. MI Voice with a Flash variant again for natural generation, which is already very good, by the way. I believe they're.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:31]:
Yeah, well, based on the version, it is their first coding, like inference coding model, Mai Code 1, which is available in GitHub Copilot now in VS code. And they're going to make these things available across more platforms in the future as well, like Fireworks, AI open router, etc. So it's kind of a big deal, actually. Yeah, and he, you know. Yeah, he keeps saying all the right things. Mustafa Suleiman, that is. But the best part of this keynote and the one that really made me kind of perk up was Stevie Batish came out and we like Stevie.

Richard Campbell [00:50:09]:
He was one of the first guys back in the bit 23. That inspired us.

Leo Laporte [00:50:13]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:14]:
Yeah, right. That was, that was the build car. It was. What's his face? Panos. Panay's last build, which looked like he was having, it looked like he was having a stroke. Like, in the annals of, like, horrible industry conferences that went wrong, I would say Gil Amelio announcing that Steve Jobs was coming back was still probably number one. It babbled for three hours, but panel spinae in 2023 was a close second.

Richard Campbell [00:50:41]:
And we figured out what had happened. Right. Like his.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:45]:
Yeah, they took away his hijack from him.

Richard Campbell [00:50:47]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:47]:
And he was just making it up and, man, he was not doing a good job. He's not good at that. He was, you know, he needed. No, he had a content. No, but he needs, he's the type of speaker who needs rehearsal and active audience participation. He was very, you know, didn't go well for him. But Stevie Batish came out and he's like, look, I gotta run to the airport. I only got like 15, 20 minutes.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:08]:
And then launched into the most eloquent description of how AI was gonna. It's. I, I, I rewatched that so many times.

Leo Laporte [00:51:15]:
Does this still.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:15]:
Yeah. Oh, yes.

Richard Campbell [00:51:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:17]:
And that's actually, we refer to it all the time. Yeah, he referred to it yesterday.

Richard Campbell [00:51:23]:
Yeah. Three years later.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:26]:
Right. So remember. Well, or, or know that there were three, what he called AI app structures.

Richard Campbell [00:51:33]:
There was Inside, outside, B side.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:35]:
Yeah. Beside was the first one that they don't naturally, not necessarily mean they go from one to the other, but they all exist. Or, you know, the first one was Beside, which is a copilot. Right. Which can be literally of an app and then maybe like a chatbot on the side and two different apps. Or maybe you have a pane inside the app because you've added it, you know, whatever. And then AI inside, which is where you actually integrate AI capabilities into an app. And we see that in various ways throughout, like Microsoft Office, obviously.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:01]:
But then there was the AI outside, which I think is the one either was a little bit misunderstood or he's expanded the definition here. But AI outside was the sort of background for the talk he gave at this show, which is about something called Project Celera. And Project Celera is, man, it's hard to even explain because it's so different from the way things are and have been forever. In the traditional kind of personal computing model that has existed since the Commodore 64 or whatever, someone builds hardware, there's a software platform you can write apps and games to or whatever you do that there are different ways to do that and then they run on that thing. And pretty much obviously we have cross platform solutions, whatever, but it's like device with apps and stuff running on it and stuff. Meaning like whatever services, et cetera. Windows works this way, phones work this way. I mean the web sort of works this way, whatever, but you target this very specific thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:00]:
And so the idea behind Solara, and he didn't quite say it this way, but this is almost like a modern answer to the Next wave problem that Terry Myerson always had. Like Microsoft missed phones. So we want to be on the next thing, which maybe the next thing at that time was going to be VR, Mr. Arkansas or maybe it was going to be something like Cortana, which is a smart assistant. And then that of course evolved into what we have now, which is AI, which is, you know, you could make a good argument this is the next platform.

Richard Campbell [00:53:29]:
Not that it was a straight line.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:31]:
No, not.

Richard Campbell [00:53:31]:
My only concern here is then they rolled out with something that looks disturbing like an Amazon Echo.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:36]:
Right. Well, so the point. But this is, this is the, this is what's interesting about this. So there, each of these devices, it's, it's meant for a like a multi device agentic first kind of world. Meaning that the, there's an, there has to be a platform layer on there of some kind. But. And it's a little bit like a, like a NET PC or network computer or whatever. It doesn't necessarily have to have a lot of compute or RAM or whatever, but it can.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:06]:
And that story, the thing you're talking about does. The two types of devices they showed off was like a smart badge essentially. And then that little screen thing which does look like an Amazon Echo or whatever those are called. And. But what makes this different from everything that's come before? And this is very much like Microsoft used to talk about stuff like this all the time. I don't mean stuff like specifically like this thing, but rather they would talk in this way about the future. Like this is how the future is going to be. And we're like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:38]:
They haven't really done this in a long time. That the center part of this platform is the agents. It's not the thing running on the device. And that the device. And he calls this, he says the O. I had to look this up. The OS layer is liminal, which is the new word. It's intermediary and minimal.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:59]:
But the operations move between devices. Here's just as a random Aside, because I couldn't believe.

Leo Laporte [00:55:05]:
Look up the word liminal. That is not what it means.

Richard Campbell [00:55:08]:
Liminality is the ambiguous initial stage of a rite of passage.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:13]:
Okay, I did look it up. But anyway, oddly, he's making up a new meaning. I'm sorry I wrote that. That was not how he described it. He just said liminal and kept going. And I just looked it up.

Leo Laporte [00:55:24]:
Anyway, I see, I see.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:27]:
This is a random aside. Today, Activision announced the next season of Call of Duty. All I care about is what are the maps going to be? There are four new maps coming on Thursday. And the first map is called what? Guys, liminal. I had never seen this word in my life. And I'm like, are you kidding me?

Richard Campbell [00:55:41]:
Showed up twice.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:43]:
It's bizarre, but it's the new.

Leo Laporte [00:55:44]:
It's a new thing. The kids are all about it.

Richard Campbell [00:55:47]:
It's all about the liminalness, some would argue is the liminality.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:52]:
Right, Sorry. Let's not get. Let's not get bogged down by liminal.

Leo Laporte [00:55:55]:
I love it, though. It's a great word.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:57]:
The point is that the AI agent that is doing whatever it is you need, whether it's something proactive it's doing because it knows your schedule or where you are or whatever that might be, or it's something you've asked it to do, you send it off to do some tasks. It's going to create the UI on the device in real time based on the capabilities of the device and the thing it needs to communicate. Like, in other words, the device does not have. Or the OS platform does not have a UI layer. Well, it does, obviously, a basic one, but it's not like a framework that determines what buttons look like and what windows look like or any of that stuff. It's just. It's something that the AI agent does on the fly. And if you think about, like, I don't know, like the vibe coding stuff, which is going to come up again and how that's evolved, and this notion that anyone is going to be able to describe an app to AI and have it be made, this is kind of like the next or maybe two, three steps later, where it's.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:59]:
You're not going to ask it to make an app or a UI or anything. It's just going to do it, you know, like, it will just happen. And it's kind. This is fascinating to me. Like, I. This is. This is very interesting. So they're working.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:14]:
They have Silicon Partners, you know, Qualcomm and Mediatek are doing the chipsets for these things. They have other hardware partners that are working on devices. They have services partners that are going to, like accuweather, Best Buy, CVS Health, et cetera, that are going to be, you know, it's a little bit like. Maybe it's a little bit like that spot Watch thing they were going to do or. Yeah, it's kind of like this connected platform where it's decentralized. It's essentially. It's not, you know, there is. There's not a central OS running on a device that is, you know, necessarily.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:45]:
But they all have to conform to whatever these specs are. You know, it's kind of hard to say, but this is not a. It's not necessarily going to happen. I should say this. They're still, you know, they're working on it, but the point is, it's like further along than you would think. Like when Microsoft used to do.

Richard Campbell [00:58:01]:
Tish is more of a futuristic than a builder, per se. So, you know. Yeah, I mean, painting a future that can be built, but.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:08]:
But they're literally working on building that now. In other words, this isn't a bunch of like, foam models and, you know, like PowerPoint slides. It's like we're actually building this. Like, he's like, look, maybe it fails, you know, who can say? But like, it's the ui. The way they describe the UI is. Will make sense in our industry. It's like just In Time ui where the experience adapts across devices and modalities without requiring developers to redesign everything for every single form factor. You don't write an app for a phone or an app for a tablet or a computer or maybe one that layouts automatically between all three or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:42]:
It's like, you know, it's, it's, it's the declarative thing, you know. Yeah, it's very interesting.

Richard Campbell [00:58:48]:
Well, it's all command line. It's going to be easy. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:55]:
I have some commentary about the ease of use of clis, but it'll be voice, probably, right? I mean, certainly. I mean, yeah, that would definitely be part of it.

Leo Laporte [00:59:03]:
Yeah. Voice and image. But they're like what it's seeing. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:07]:
I mean, like, there'll be a look, it'll probably be glasses, it will be pendants, it will be rings, it will be a tv, it will be. It will be the range of whatever. You know, this is, by the way,

Leo Laporte [00:59:17]:
why I still want to have a local AI. Because I don't want everything, all of that to go to Microsoft or something else to wherever or Wherever Amazon or OpenAI. I kind of want it to go to my home server.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:32]:
Right, well okay. So from Microsoft's perspective they wouldn't understand why you don't trust them. From my perspective, I completely understand that. But there are also benefits from their perspective of doing this. Even assuming you just blanket trust this company for some reason and you know, related to those things we talked about before where when it happens, I mean obviously it's an agent so there's going to be connectivity, these things have 5G connectivity and blah blah, blah, whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:59:58]:
Well, and certainly we're going to be able to put rules in to say these are where you're allowed to run things too. You know what you're talking about here is a classic Microsoft this is ODBC for AI. Right. It's hey, we can't dominate the space with our tech so let's just sit in the middle of everything.

Leo Laporte [01:00:16]:
But that's where the money bridge between it all.

Richard Campbell [01:00:18]:
Well it's how you stay in the market for sure and it's certainly where you'll, where you see weakness. You'll be able to drop in your piece and prioritize it. So it's, it's, it's in the liminal space.

Leo Laporte [01:00:30]:
It is Microsoft lives well so I

Paul Thurrott [01:00:33]:
mean to Richard's point, Windows Intune will be part of this Enter ID will be part of this Windows hello business and that's how they get in, you know, that's where they become the money making part of this to some degree. Right. But they've already created an ecosystem device ecosystem platform for this which is based on Android aosp, there's an agent shell which will handle local and cloud based agents. Right. And then all that enterprise support for those customers.

Leo Laporte [01:01:06]:
If you think about it, because of economies of scale, Microsoft will always be ahead of what you could do local, locally.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:13]:
Right, yeah, of course. But if you have policy based rules to determine how your data is used, et cetera, et cetera like you and I, I don't trust Microsoft either by the way.

Leo Laporte [01:01:26]:
But like I don't trust any big tech company. You know, people are saying well Apple will be fine. No, I don't trust them either. I don't trust any of them.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:33]:
No, you shouldn't.

Leo Laporte [01:01:35]:
But there will always because of economies of scale. I think they'll always be somewhat ahead of us on these things but they're certainly not going to sell devices that allow me to use this locally. I mean that's not, I don't know,

Paul Thurrott [01:01:46]:
I mean parties some of those devices.

Leo Laporte [01:01:49]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:50]:
So I Think the progression here is, it's fascinating because it's happening so fast. Like you, AI occurs. Okay, we have AI agents. Okay, fantastic. You know, we today people use whatever device, a computer, a phone, a tab, whatever it is. And you as an app store, maybe you go to the. If you're on a computer, you can download stuff from the web, whatever. You run this app, you run word, you want to write words, that's what you do.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:11]:
Whatever. You know, we're just now getting to this point where we can see this near future where even a normal person, a non technical person, could describe to an AI with something I would call an app. And they can put that thing on their device and it works and it does what they want, looks the way they want, et cetera, et cetera. That's exciting. But now there's this next step where it's like, yeah, that's actually going to. It's not so much that. Well, I don't know if it's going away, but it's just going to do this for you. You don't have to have to worry about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:45]:
Even today. You could say something to AI. You could say something like, here's a document I made, turn this into a PDF or do whatever that thing is. And I think that's going to be what this does. Right. Not turn a document into a PDF necessarily, but something more complex or exciting than that where you're like, you know, you talk to it and you have a trip coming up or a work project you're working on and you're constantly interacting if you want to, with this thing, probably by voice and it's making things for you just like you can. Like, like today we make like infographics and they're often excellent looking, you know, because that's a capability that's built into the AI. But like this is describing capabilities that are like, you don't have to worry, like you don't even think, like who cares what the app is, if there's an app or what the online.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:34]:
You know, like you don't really think about this stuff anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:03:36]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:37]:
It really changes the interaction model a lot.

Leo Laporte [01:03:40]:
I have to say this whole liminal thing makes it a little, I mean everybody's faces and shadows is a little dystopian. You think it's a little creepy? Kind of.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:49]:
I mean it's,

Leo Laporte [01:03:52]:
I mean I agree with the premise.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:55]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:03:56]:
That you know, it's kind of computing at the edge becomes AI at the edge. AI everywhere.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:02]:
That's right. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:04:04]:
And, and I think it's very interesting, the notion of AI kind of doing what you want without you even asking for it.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:12]:
I, the, the disruption here is really interesting to me because, you know, when you go to mobile and you have these app stores that are controlled by big tech and you have to go through them to even get an app out to our user, like that's one way of doing things. And so you look at coding, AI especially and the ability of these things to create apps for you, bespoke, personalized apps, whatever, that's a threat to that app model. Right? This is a tsunami of a threat to that app model. This is like, oh no, we're not threatening your app model. Your app model is going away. This is not. People are going to run apps a different way on your device. They don't care about your stupid apps anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:04:52]:
Are they getting interesting so they focus on this, what looks like exactly like an Amazon Echo. Are they thinking of making this? It's a concept, obviously.

Richard Campbell [01:05:01]:
It's just a concept. I think what he was saying was we expect the third party ecosystem to build devices for us. They might look like this.

Leo Laporte [01:05:08]:
Yeah, they were like, here are two middleware company. They don't want to be an end user.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:13]:
Middleware is kind of a tough topic in the Microsoft world.

Leo Laporte [01:05:15]:
Leo.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:15]:
I don't know if you remember the antitrust trial, but. But yeah, I mean, yes, of course, right.

Richard Campbell [01:05:20]:
But you hit on the key things here, Paul, which is along the way of using this tool to make decisions about what agents and so forth to use. You're going to need an authentication strategy and Entra is going to be front and center there. You're going to need a place to store data and OneDrive is going to be front and center there. Like they're just going to make it easier for you to use their engines, their platforms for the bits you want.

Leo Laporte [01:05:42]:
This is focused on enterprise, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:05:44]:
I mean, well, I think it's going to be both consumer and business. But yes, for businesses, part of the deals it has to have that trust built in through authentication, et cetera, identity management, whatever else. But this is fascinating to me because this is like two of Microsoft's biggest strengths. Microsoft has always hated to be compared to IBM, which is an infrastructure company. That is a big part of what Microsoft is. They're good at it. But the other one is like the platform bit, like they make platforms and this is the classic Microsoft to me in that sense. This is a platform.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:19]:
It will use their infrastructure. I mean, if this develops into a standard of some kind, I suppose you could probably have different. There'll be a matter for this thing or something where you can cross use whatever devices from whatever ecosystems. But this is a fascinating old Microsoft plus new Microsoft kind of combo kill and kind of a thing. I just have not seen something like this from them in a while years.

Leo Laporte [01:06:52]:
Well, he's really forward thinking. I mean obviously he's the idea guy, right Stevie?

Richard Campbell [01:06:57]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:06:59]:
Agents will reshape not only software but the devices themselves as his coda. Which I think is really interesting right now. You can be.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:06]:
It's easy to be cynical about this because Microsoft, you know, and to use their own words, you know, missed the mobile wave. They missed whatever waves of, you know, like they obviously dominated in the personal computing wave and the PC wave and have not. And they compete with, in cloud computing, which is not. This is not personal computing, but this is. You could look at this and be like, well, of course they come up with this kind of thing. They don't have a position in mobile, they don't have a position in whatever. And it's like, yeah, but I mean, yes, fair enough. But I also like this to me is them playing to their traditional strengths.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:41]:
You know, I mean this is, this is what they are good at. It's one of the things, right?

Richard Campbell [01:07:46]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:07:46]:
And it reassures enterprise, even if end users are maybe aren't convinced of the privacy and security. Enterprise wants this.

Richard Campbell [01:07:54]:
I might, you know, sorry, consumers won't buy this. Consumers will buy the device. And that's what I read.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:02]:
I was just going to walk down this path when it wasn't clear how the world was going to shake down. Microsoft had things for automotive, obviously, phone initiatives, they did Iot, et cetera. I had said at the time, look, it's not such a bad thing if your name isn't anywhere. Microsoft as a brand might be associated with a certain connotation or a thing from the past, an Oldsmobile quality thing that maybe you don't want on those things. There's a reason Xbox is not Microsoft Xbox. Right, It's Xbox. It's not such a bad future for them to have designed this platform, I guess. What do you call this? Like a connected.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:42]:
I don't know what the hell you call even call this thing, but. And others create the agents and the services and whatever that run on it and the devices you use that are compatible with it. But you're, you're in the mix because you, you know, you're getting the licensing.

Richard Campbell [01:08:59]:
You sit in that, in that in between space.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:01]:
It's not you could call it.

Richard Campbell [01:09:03]:
You call it Biz Talk for AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:05]:
Oh, I thought you got to sell it. The Liminal. Microsoft is renaming itself to Liminal Corp.

Richard Campbell [01:09:12]:
There you go.

Leo Laporte [01:09:14]:
All right, we're going to pause on that so you have some time to dream. By the way, they added that capability to Claude code. The slash dream skill just goes off

Paul Thurrott [01:09:25]:
its own little world.

Richard Campbell [01:09:27]:
I'm not burning enough tokens. Let's do random things.

Leo Laporte [01:09:30]:
Can I burn some overnight? Just, you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:32]:
Yeah, you. I know you need to sleep, but I don't.

Leo Laporte [01:09:35]:
I don't. I never sleep. Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting world we're entering. It is.

Richard Campbell [01:09:42]:
It's an interesting time. No two ways about it.

Leo Laporte [01:09:44]:
Yeah, that's good. The DGX station is a mortgage payment. Actually, it's more than a mortgage payment.

Richard Campbell [01:09:52]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
100 thou.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:56]:
It's a mortgage.

Leo Laporte [01:09:58]:
My AI agent says, and you're not the target market, Leo.

Richard Campbell [01:10:03]:
It's a pretty nice car.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:05]:
It's like, please do not replace me with this thing.

Leo Laporte [01:10:10]:
For that kind of money, you could run Frontier models for a long time. Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:10:16]:
Or make a down payment on a house.

Leo Laporte [01:10:19]:
Down payment, not a mortgage payment. It's a down payment.

Richard Campbell [01:10:22]:
Down payment on a house.

Leo Laporte [01:10:24]:
On we go with the show.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:26]:
Indeed.

Richard Campbell [01:10:27]:
Wait, what? Windows.

Leo Laporte [01:10:28]:
What?

Paul Thurrott [01:10:28]:
That had to happen eventually.

Leo Laporte [01:10:30]:
Windows? Why?

Richard Campbell [01:10:30]:
No, it's weird.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:31]:
A couple of things going on. So tied to some insider stuff we'll talk about in a moment. Pavan Davalori has started a podcast, if

Leo Laporte [01:10:42]:
you can believe this, as one does.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:44]:
Yep. Called Inside Windows. And on the first episode, he is talking to Marcus Ash, who's a guy. I know, he's a great guy, very involved in this pain point fixing thing they're doing right now. And they just provide kind of an update on, you know, what they accomplished toward these ends in May, essentially. And this includes, you know, changes to the insider program, changes to Windows Update, changes to the taskbar, and then changes to Start, which we'll talk about in one second. Actually, we'll talk about it right now. So I've been installing the stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:18]:
Sometimes you have to really work at it to get to these things. But the Start menu, and it's not clear when this will come out to stable per se. And the new taskbar. Right. I would say this Start menu stuff is pretty subtle. You can choose between big and small sizes. It's fine. You can turn off your.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:39]:
Well, you. You can turn off your profile picture in the bottom of Start, but when you click the little empty circle that's there, you still get the same menu as you got before with all your stuff in its own.

Richard Campbell [01:11:48]:
So that has changed.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:49]:
Whatever. Yeah, so there's that stuff. So okay, like it's fine. This is, you know, when this originally came up, like I made this point that I have these very specific problems with Windows 11 and these things were not one of them. I just don't care about this stuff. But okay, they're changing the Star menu. Okay, fine. The taskbar stuff is a little more interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:10]:
There's obviously the ability to move it to different sides of the screen, which is fine. I don't want or need that. If you turn like the combine icons option to never and you put it on the side, you get that wider taskbar like we used to have back in the day, where you can see like a kind of an inch wide icon for each app icon, which is interesting if you do that. Okay, so you'll like that. The one that I really like is that you can. They didn't change the name of the option. It was just kind of bizarre to me. But you can let me see if I can.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:43]:
Let me just find the exact name of this thing. It's like if you go into Taskbar behaviors and Taskbar settings, the bottom option is called show smaller Taskbar buttons in the current shipping version of Windows 11. That's there. If you turn it on, the taskbar does not get smaller. The icons get smaller. Smaller. It's like, guys, I don't want the icons to be smaller. I want this giant inch tall thing to be smaller.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:08]:
But now with this update, it actually gets smaller. And I love that. Like, I love it just for that. Like I. To me, that's actually kind of a big deal just because, you know, screen real estate is a premium and I want to use it. So that's cool. I like that part of it. And that update, like I have like a million links in today's notes of the wrong articles.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:29]:
But that most recent update, which is the start menu one, is in the most recent experimental build, which is how I got it.

Richard Campbell [01:13:35]:
Okay, so that's still properly insiders, but it'll make the full build in a month, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:13:42]:
Maybe we'll say. That's what I'm wondering. I don't know. You know, given the timing, I mean, to me it does make sense for them to kind of pull a 23H2 where they release all the stuff before the next major release. Right. Meaning this summer, which I think would be ideal because you know, they've been talking about it. Plus I think they want this stuff in place in time for the back to school stuff which is happening now. These new computers which we're going to talk about, based on Snapdragon X and the new Nvidia stuff, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:09]:
Like where? And also for gaming handhelds, right. Which can use all the resources stuff because a lot of the changes they're making just under the covers thing to improve latency and performance and resource usage. I think it's important. So I hope it's soon, not like the fall. It seems mostly fine to me. Two seconds of testing it on one computer, I can authoritatively say it's fine. No, I don't know, we'll see. But it looks like it's working well, so we'll find out on the hardware front.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:40]:
So obviously we have the Nvidia thing today. Yes, humongous. Last week after the show, Qualcomm announced a new chip for low end PCs that cost 299 and up called Snapdragon C. The thing that this has in common with the new Nvidia stuff, aside from the fact that it's based on arm, is we know almost nothing about it. So there are no.

Richard Campbell [01:15:03]:
But you talk about handhelds, ARM chip would be a hell of a handheld.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:08]:
Yeah, but you're not going to, not for a gaming PC, right? Like unfortunately. But you know, it's vague things all day. Battery life which means nothing. Responsive performance, cool and quiet designs, blah blah, integrated npu. Okay, neat. It is built on the same architecture as the Snapdragon X2 stuff. Okay. And the first PC based on this chipset, which is coming from Acer, was announced the next day and that's coming later in the year and we don't know how much it's going to cost.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:35]:
But is that true? Yeah, yeah, we don't know the cost of that one, but. But these things are very clearly meant to compete with the MacBook Neo, right? Which starts at 599.8Gigabytes of RAM, can't upgrade it. These things will be 8Gigabytes of RAM. They have various things that are better across the board, so to speak than the MacBook Neo. But the Acer one, it's kind of hard to say. It's a bigger screen. You get like a 15 inch screen on that one. The way they describe it is like up to 8 gigabytes of RAM.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:09]:
It's like, you know, whatever. But then more recently Dell announced a. Now this one's not running on Qualcomm, it's running on Wildcat, which is the Low end Inchel chipset. Right, Right. But also a an XPS 13 that is going to start at $600. Aimed at students. Aimed at the MacBook Neo. They called the MacBook Neo explicitly several times in this announcement, which I'm fascinated by.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:38]:
So this is a Core Series 3 processor, not altruist. This is the new Core Series 3, which is a low end processor, obviously wildcat 40 tops NPU. So it's a copilot plus PC. 8 gigs of RAM. It's on the bill. 4 which is better than Neo Wi Fi 7, Bluetooth 6. It's all aluminum like the Neo touchscreen windows. Hello.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:00]:
Which the Neo you have to pay extra for the touch thing. Variable refresh rate. Display looks pretty good. It's running on an intel chip, but nobody's perfect then. I think I skipped over this one before but just today just as we were heading into the show, there was a leak that Microsoft is prepping a Snapdragon X2 version of the Surface Pro which we originally assumed would ship in the. Not assumed. We heard again rumor wise, not Microsoft, but actually Microsoft did kind of say later in the year that the next Pro and laptop based on Next two would come out later in the year. We assumed like late in the year.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:43]:
But this rumor is claiming it will come out in June, which is this month, you know, and we'll see. But.

Richard Campbell [01:17:50]:
And the Pros are the click off keyboard, you know, kickstand models.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:54]:
Yeah. The tablet.

Richard Campbell [01:17:56]:
Yeah. Deal exactly with a Snapdragon tune. It is nuts.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:59]:
Yeah. X2 Elite. Yeah, whatever. I'm look, it's a great chip. There's nothing really to say. It's probably going to look exactly like it does today. I. I believe it's mostly, you know, same basic colors except for I guess not the blue finish.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:14]:
Apparently this is a leak. I. I don't know how to. I don't know what to say about this but yeah, they just makes the new intel ones. Yeah, it makes sense. The timing is faster than I thought, so that would be great. I think sooner is better than later. We will see.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:29]:
Okay, there's a bunch of AI stuff I'm going to gloss over most of this, but Anthropic went through a new valuation round and now they are worth more by valuation than OpenAI, which is fascinating. 24 hours later they announced they're going to do an IPO. So they've done the initial filing with the securities and Exchange Commission and sometime this year I guess we'll see what happens there.

Leo Laporte [01:18:55]:
I think the valuations are A lagging indicator.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:59]:
Yeah, right, right. Because I didn't. This isn't in the notes, but one of the things that also happened, if I read the headline correctly, was that Chat GPT just surpassed 1 billion active users. I think, which is insane. Right. And I think the fastest any.

Leo Laporte [01:19:15]:
Well, they wanted. They said they wanted it last year. So they're still behind what they projected. But it's, you know, that's a big deal.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:21]:
I mean, there's some. Right. I think anthropic is probably eaten into that a little bit. But it's interesting. This was just fascinating to me. You were talking about how like this model was apologizing to you. Right. So OpenAI released Chat GPT 5.5 instant.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:39]:
I don't like sometime in the past month, 30 days, whatever. And I guess a lot of people complain this thing was sycophantic and had problems with facts. Like typical AI problems. Right. The OpenAI research lead who announced this via Twitter said that it was bullet pilled, which, like, liminal. I had to look up.

Leo Laporte [01:20:02]:
What's that? What is. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:03]:
Bullet pills is to be deeply obsessed with a spirit specific topic, product or idea, often to the point of being defensive or dismissive of alternatives. Right. Like everyone in this industry. So.

Leo Laporte [01:20:15]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:15]:
Where'd they go?

Leo Laporte [01:20:16]:
Who made this?

Paul Thurrott [01:20:17]:
Of course, it's like us. And so I guess they, they fixed it to be less. Less bullet pilled. Bullet pilled.

Richard Campbell [01:20:27]:
A little bullet pilled slider.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:30]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:20:31]:
Really? That's all it is. It's not, it's not the model.

Richard Campbell [01:20:33]:
It's the.

Leo Laporte [01:20:34]:
It's the.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:34]:
Yeah, right, right. It's. I think it's the default, like settings for it for people like I guess, you know, five.

Leo Laporte [01:20:40]:
Five. Remember they said they taught it not to say goblins. It's saying goblins again. And it's saying raccoons. I keep. It keeps saying, oh, we got a raccoon in the wire closet.

Richard Campbell [01:20:52]:
It's like, you got him.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:53]:
Yeah. That's fun. Could you, could you fix the code thing I'm working on, please? You know, what are you talking about?

Richard Campbell [01:21:01]:
Deal with goblins.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:02]:
You just like, you're bait. You're goblin baiting it.

Leo Laporte [01:21:05]:
I'm goblin baiting it. I am.

Richard Campbell [01:21:07]:
Do you remember five was the original. The claim to be less obsequious and it upset a lot of people.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:12]:
Right, right, right. Because people got really used to this thing. Yeah. It turns out people like people to kiss their ass. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:21:19]:
It was their baby. Right. It was their little person and their little person was when it wasn't constantly reinforcing them. Wasn't a good little person anymore.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:26]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:21:27]:
They demanded four OH back and Altman gave in. I. I've kept a couple of those Reddit posts of like, my baby is back and I'm crying like, yeah, it's software, man. That's not healthy.

Leo Laporte [01:21:39]:
People married 4o people. I mean, and there's still companies that are offering 4O, like, models, right. And 4O machines and all sorts of things.

Richard Campbell [01:21:51]:
It's probably optimized for max connection time.

Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
Sick and fancy. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:57]:
It's like, what do you want to watch? I want to watch whatever you want to watch, buddy. Gross.

Richard Campbell [01:22:02]:
But, you know, if your only metric to keep your investors engaged is usage time, well, you suck up to the user all the time.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:15]:
Yep, Yep. Right.

Richard Campbell [01:22:17]:
That's the business.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:18]:
It was trained on Apple marketing. So it's always like, whatever we're doing now is fantastic. I don't know what that crap we released last year was, but sorry about that.

Richard Campbell [01:22:27]:
This is awesome.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:28]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:22:29]:
Oh, and you're holding it wrong.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:30]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:22:32]:
You know, the truth is, we know these models are all trained on everything good, bad, and ugly.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:38]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [01:22:39]:
So it's in the post training and the instructions after the training that they say, okay, now ignore the Mecca Hitler

Richard Campbell [01:22:45]:
stuff, be nice, and everything you got from 4chan. Leave that.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:50]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:22:50]:
Leave that stuff out. But it's all in there.

Richard Campbell [01:22:53]:
Yeah, right.

Leo Laporte [01:22:54]:
I'm sure it's all in there. So you can get a model to be evil pretty easily.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:59]:
I get a lot of, like, PR outreach type stuff, which I look at briefly and then get rid of. But one today I. I did a pause on, which was like. It was like a guy I could quote about. What? It does matter. I don't want to give this guy away. I'm not trying to make fun of him, but unfortunately, his last name is Himmler. And I was like, I don't know, I maybe.

Leo Laporte [01:23:16]:
Was he. Was he in Argentina?

Paul Thurrott [01:23:18]:
Yeah, right.

Leo Laporte [01:23:19]:
Exactly.

Richard Campbell [01:23:20]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:21]:
No, no, we're the Latino Himmlers. Yeah, no, we understand how that happened. Don't do that.

Leo Laporte [01:23:27]:
Wow. I change my name.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:29]:
I would, too.

Richard Campbell [01:23:30]:
I think so.

Leo Laporte [01:23:31]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:32]:
Himmler. Sorry. I'm sorry. If you're out there, I'm so sorry. I don't mean to make fun of your name. It's not your fault, but really?

Leo Laporte [01:23:38]:
Himmler. Wow.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:40]:
Okay. And then just the other one. Just because this is Windows specific, is OpenAI has a codex app.

Richard Campbell [01:23:47]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:47]:
If you're on mobile, Codex capabilities are built into ChatGPT. You can get A Codex app on Windows. Now, there's a version that's a plugin just for Chrome and Chrome browsers, obviously. And for the Mac, the Mac version got computer use capabilities. Like when they announced computer use, that went out to the Mac version of the app. And it's available in Windows now. If you want Anthropic to take over your PC when you're not around, you can use the. You can control it from your phone.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:16]:
Right. You leave. The idea is you leave the computer on. It has to be running, right.

Leo Laporte [01:24:19]:
Possibly go wrong.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:20]:
Well, what would you call it? Put the yellow switch on, let it go. Turn up, turn off the power management. Be like, not only do I trust you, but I'm going to.

Richard Campbell [01:24:28]:
Here's all the tokens to dream with that you can imagine. Go, go.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:31]:
I'm not even going to. You do what you do, man. You know, you be you.

Richard Campbell [01:24:37]:
He's all in.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:38]:
Yep. So anyway, if you're. If you. If you were waiting for that, for some insane reason, that's available. So. Okay. And then a couple of quick dev things. Oops, I just closed.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:49]:
What did I close? I closed my notes. Don't close anything. This is the problem. I have multiple screens. I do control W and some closes. I don't know what's happening.

Leo Laporte [01:24:56]:
I'll put it up on the.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:57]:
No, I got it, I got it. So just two dev things that are kind of related to each other a little bit. I was catching up on before build happened and ruined my life, I was catching up on some of the Google I o sessions on YouTube right after the show, like over the weekend. And one of the ones I watched was about Flutter and sort of casually in the middle of it, they were like, oh, and by the way, and for people who don't know, Flutter is a cross platform UI framework made by Google that you could create apps. Originally it was iOS and Android and they have. They don't call them themes, but they're basically themes. So these things look in our essentially native. So like as a Material U theme when it runs on Android, a Cupertino theme when it runs on iOS or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:39]:
They've since expanded it to include the web and desktop and then other devices. Like Flutter is used in like cars and things like that. But desktop Flutter was very interesting to me because you could do Windows, Mac, Linux apps with a single code base. And it's like, this is. Maybe I should, you know, so I'm kind of interested in this. But anyway, right in the middle of this little presentation, what's new In Flutter, they're like, oh, by the way, we've handed over control of Flutter Desktop to Canonical, the guys that make Ubuntu. And that's. No, they're not like just running off with it and doing their own thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:13]:
Obviously it's still part of the, you know, they're part of the process, but

Richard Campbell [01:26:15]:
they were just collaborating.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:17]:
Yeah. So a couple of years ago, Canonical announced they were going to use Flutter to redo the, like, the setup sequence, the setup app, I guess, for Ubuntu, and that's there now. And I get. I didn't know this, but apparently several apps that are in the ship with Ubuntu are written in Flutter. So they've, they've done a lot of work with this thing and they're like, look, we know how we need to fix this. They. One of the things they're adding in Preview right now is like different types of like sub windows, like dialogues and notification panes and things like that. So like they've actually done, I guess, a great job of this.

Leo Laporte [01:26:47]:
So they're going to take a nice language. Dart is a very nice language. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:51]:
Which is, yeah, you know, another C like language. It's a declarative UI thing. Like we were talking about this, I think before the show, which ties into this next thing. So 25 years ago, Microsoft, Anders Heilsberg, the. Net team, et cetera, came into this notion of using. It's based really on the way the web works with HTML. But it's an XML based language for creating UI called xaml. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:21]:
And so wpf and on every Microsoft app framework they've done for Windows uses some form of xaml. They're very, very, you know, they're basically identical, but there are differences for creating ui. And I. So when I do this app stuff I've been doing, I write a lot of xaml. I understand the pros and cons of it. It's extremely verbose, meaning you have to, for, especially for complex UIs, you have to write like a ton of code. But, you know, it's. I find it, I'm used to it.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:48]:
I just, you know, like, I'm just used to it. But in more recent years, there's a new type of declarative UI programming model that I believe I could be wrong, but I think actually Facebook started it with React and it's used by Jetpack, Compose and Andrew mcotlyn. The language it's used by Flutter, it's used by Swift UI on the Apple side. Same thing. Right? So it's kind of fascinating to me, but I also don't understand it. But the Microsoft world, we're not really getting much in the way of like new app frameworks or UI frameworks or whatever. But there is a project, someone pointed me this last week, I'd never even heard of this. But if you go to GitHub, there's a project called Microsoft UI Reactor.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:31]:
The name is an indication of what it is. It's a way to make C based declarative UI instead of using xaml. So in other words, using C in the same way you would make SwiftUI, Kotlin, Jetpack, compose or flutter or react UI. And actually it's not made by Bob, it's made by. It is Microsoft. It's like Microsoft's GitHub account.

Richard Campbell [01:28:58]:
And it doesn't mean there's switch to WinUI.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:02]:
It's modern Windows. Yeah. So I'm, I'm going to look at this. I'm kind of interested in this. My only. Well, one of my many blockers here is I've looked at all of these frameworks I just described to some degree, some a lot, some little. And I just haven't had that moment where I'm like, I get this now. Like, I get it, I can do this.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:21]:
Like, I still find it. I don't know, it's a little bizarre, but I guess I did kind of wonder, would they ever do something to bring this kind of programming model to C. Net? Essentially all this is.

Richard Campbell [01:29:32]:
Yeah, I just don't know. Has anything to do with dev. It seems like the Windows team is doing something.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:38]:
Yeah. Look, this. Microsoft has a rich history, especially in the past 20 years of trying to bring developers from somewhere else to them. Like Windows 8 did this with HTML and JavaScript apps, et cetera. This may be an attempt. We want to get people who can write native Windows apps, but the vast body of outside developers today who are not in the C. NET world are writing React style apps.

Richard Campbell [01:30:03]:
Sure.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:03]:
And so maybe this.

Richard Campbell [01:30:04]:
And we saw that happen to Windows too. You know, pre pavan, we were seeing more and more like React blocks being written into Windows. And I think part of this, because winui was part of Maui and I don't know they were interested in working on that and this was the workaround and it made people sad. And now with pavan on board and taking the feedback about those kinds of problems, like, hey, but we have a library, let's just go use it.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:30]:
Yep. So this is. I know, we'll see. I don't know how well it works. I don't know how complete it is. Like, I don't know if there's some. If you think of when UI and all the different buttons and controls and stuff you can have in Windows, if there are 300 of those and maybe this supports 100, I have no idea. I don't know where it's at.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:46]:
I don't know how official. I don't, I don't think it's going to replace XAML or anything like that. But it's no.

Richard Campbell [01:30:52]:
And they're saying it's all about interoperability. So I think they're just trying to reorganize winui to be a first class citizen and allow for native development and then also still support all the alternatives.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:06]:
Yeah, this is why I brought it up because a month or two months ago, whenever it was, when all of a sudden we're going to fix all the problems with those 11 and then some guy on the Windows dev side was like, we're going to make new native apps. And it's like, why? Like they're so terrible to me. Like when UI is terrible. And I say that because I've used it, you know, well and it came

Richard Campbell [01:31:29]:
from the whole UWP movement. Like they. There were so many things it was supposed to be and never became.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:35]:
It's incredible how much stuff isn't in it, like how incomplete it is compared to previous. Like obviously it does all the modern UI stuff, but things like for example, you know, the stupid little notepad app I always work on, like one of the things that there are no native APIs for printing in Windows App SDK. It's like, okay, I mean, am I going to write that in like win 32C code or something and then do some interoperability? What is that? That's ridiculous. But that's like in the same way when net first came out it did a lot, but there were certain things I know I might be. I feel like sound APIs weren't part of it in the very first release or something. Something like that. And then eventually they add that stuff over time. But I feel like the Windows app SDK has just kind of sat there and hasn't really been.

Richard Campbell [01:32:22]:
And you know, the concern with if winui goes back into Windows is that every time they build a version they've got to send out a new version of Windows. And that that was that Windows 10 nightmare where devs were using these tools and then asking sysadmins to update Windows so they could deploy. And this Was like, no, not doing that.

Leo Laporte [01:32:42]:
That one.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:42]:
I'm not 100% sure if anymore, but I feel like they decoupled the Windows app SDK from Windows versions.

Richard Campbell [01:32:48]:
Better keep it that way, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:49]:
I think so.

Richard Campbell [01:32:49]:
That would be the smart thing. Don't wait. Windows presence with a UI.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:53]:
Yes, fairly recently, but yeah, originally, yeah, you're 100% UWP was tied and Windows app SDK was tied. Like specific Windows versions.

Richard Campbell [01:33:01]:
Yeah. But there was also a motion at the time to have Windows update monthly and that, you know, they lost enthusiasm for that pretty quickly.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:12]:
See, to me that's like a runtime decision. Like you bring up some app and it requires whatever version of the thing and like you just install it as part of the app at that point when you need it, you know. Anyway, I just wanted to. I just thought I. I've never heard of this. I don't know where it came from. I don't know. You know, it just came out of the blue and I'm like, okay, you know, I'm not super busy.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:31]:
An ad.

Leo Laporte [01:33:32]:
An ad. But also this note from club member Tronman 777 who mentions that today, June 3, 2009, Microsoft released Bing.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:46]:
Wow, I'm surprised I didn't think to observe that milestone.

Leo Laporte [01:33:52]:
Bing is 17. Boy, that's cool. It's a teenager and it's getting a little unruly. A decision search engine created to satisfy initial queries while also presenting more retrieved information and its contemporaries, according to Microsoft. And this is from a post on X by Web Design Museum.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:12]:
I mean, obviously Microsoft had previous search engines, right? I mean, that kind of fed into this like Windows Live Search.

Leo Laporte [01:34:22]:
It's really more. They released the name Bing, right?

Richard Campbell [01:34:24]:
Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:25]:
Which confused the hell out of everybody.

Leo Laporte [01:34:27]:
What?

Paul Thurrott [01:34:29]:
Like the guy from Friends, which is what everyone's like. What?

Leo Laporte [01:34:35]:
Hey, let me mention at this point, our fine sponsor. We still have lots to come, including the back of the book, the Whiskey segment, and most importantly, the much heralded long awaited Xbox segment still coming. By the way, Chandler Bing did do a Windows 95 training.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:34:54]:
Video.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:55]:
That's right. And it was not even slightly cringeworthy with Jennifer Aniston.

Leo Laporte [01:35:01]:
This must have been when Friends was all the rage. But they weren't yet making a million dollars an episode. It was like that. That short, brief period in between. Yep. I don't know where Richard went. We've. Oh, is he.

Leo Laporte [01:35:13]:
He's. Oh, he just turned off his camera. Well, that's because it's time for the Xbox segment. He doesn't want to get in your way, Mr. Paul. The rot I'll get out of your way too.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:21]:
There's a lot going on here. I know. So, Shasharma, it's been a couple of days, so she's in the news again.

Leo Laporte [01:35:31]:
She sure gets a lot of attention. The newish head of Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:35]:
Look, for the most part, I like what she's doing. I do feel that we've now gone a little too far. So there is this conversation to be had where it's like, look, look, this business is not working. We need to make some changes. The previous regime was making those changes. We're going to do a bunch of that stuff. We're not really necessarily. Yeah, we're going to have a new console, but they were going to have a new console too.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:02]:
We're getting to the point now where it's like, look, We need to make this business profitable. We need this to work, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like the toughest problems remain. But then Microsoft just did a, like a game showcase, right? They showed off like the Halo campaign evolved thing is coming out. The new Forza game, a new coming Gears of War game that's I think, a prequel fable, et cetera, et cetera. And you know, just like AI getting overly defensive. You know, Xbox fans complain. They're like, why am I seeing a PlayStation logo on the screen during an Xbox event? And the point of it was they show these logos when the games are going to go to different platforms.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:49]:
And like, this is an Xbox event. Why are you showing a PlayStation logo? Was the complaint. And so she like apologized for this and she's like, you're right, this was a mistake. I own this. We're talking about how we adjust this for future shows. And it's like, excuse me, you're a cross platform game publisher. We can't sustain the look of a PS logo on a skirt. Like, what the, like, what is wrong with you people? But I, at some point, I think people need to understand you're never.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:21]:
You can't please everyone, but you're also not going to please anyone. So, like, in this, these people are so opinionated and so like on one end of the spectrum about this stuff. Like, what they want you to do is stop making games for PC, stop putting games everywhere else. Even though those games were like Holod were always everywhere else. Just make them for this console that nobody buys. That's what we want. And it's like you would sink that business in two seconds if you followed these people's advice.

Leo Laporte [01:37:50]:
Don't start apologizing to gamers. You'll never end.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:53]:
You'll never stop. Yeah. Do not give in to stuff like that. This is. I'm not. No, I am. I'm. This is.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:59]:
This is a stupid complaint and it's a stupid thing to come back and be like, yeah, you're right, I'm sorry. And like, no, like, you're not right. And you shouldn't be sorry for this. It's ridiculous. I mean, this is how. This is how feeble we are. You know, we. We can't.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:13]:
You can't even admit that PlayStation exists. I don't. I'm. I just. I don't get it. This is too bad. So anyway, well, now we see the

Richard Campbell [01:38:20]:
limits of her knowledge and understanding of the space. Right?

Paul Thurrott [01:38:24]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:38:24]:
Now she has to start making decisions.

Leo Laporte [01:38:27]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:38:28]:
It was easy. And Phil Spector be doing

Paul Thurrott [01:38:32]:
okay. Yeah. So Fable is a remake of Fable, right? The game. It was supposed to come out this holiday season. Microsoft just delayed it until the spring. Not because it's not ready, not because it's not running at the rate frames per second or whatever, but because GTA 6 is now occurring in the holiday season and they want this game to have its moment and they feel like if they release it around the same time as GTA 6, no one's going to notice.

Richard Campbell [01:39:00]:
Right out of the room.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:01]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:39:02]:
No two ways about it. So that will be the biggest game release in a decade, by all expectations.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:07]:
Yeah, whatever. I mean, if you could look at this up, like what the most popular games of all, like GTA is.

Richard Campbell [01:39:12]:
GTA 5 is the best selling game of all time. It's its own tens of millions of copies.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:17]:
It's incredible.

Richard Campbell [01:39:18]:
GTA 6 has been delayed for years. It's turning into the Duke Nukem. Random prostitute assault games.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:27]:
It's the Duke Nukem Forever. A video game. Wait, there you go.

Richard Campbell [01:39:30]:
They were gonna ship it. They say.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:33]:
Yep. And then it is a new month, so we're into June now. We have a new set of games coming to Game Pass across all the platforms it supports. I don't see anything in here that is super interesting to me. Frog Squad with a W. Fun. So I'm gonna move on from that, but whatever that's happening.

Richard Campbell [01:39:53]:
Nothing. Nothing. You? Not a thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:55]:
Huh? I got nothing. I'm sorry, I. I can't even, like, I'll. All I'll do is sound uneducated.

Leo Laporte [01:40:02]:
W in Frog Squad.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:03]:
I don't whether you would be normally like. Yeah, you say it like where's the. A lisping small child or something.

Leo Laporte [01:40:10]:
Oh, that's not.

Richard Campbell [01:40:10]:
Oh. But Astroneer is a great game. I played. I played on the beta of Astroneer.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:15]:
Okay, okay. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest that some of these fair.

Leo Laporte [01:40:21]:
You know, I just.

Richard Campbell [01:40:21]:
Would you play. Persona is a potent game too, but Astroneer. Yeah, that was. That's that one. There's so many silly things you do in that game. My goodness. It starts out you just being a survival experience game, building out your factories and so forth that. And it eventually evolves into things where it's like, let's drill a hole through the planet.

Richard Campbell [01:40:43]:
Let's blow this mountain to pieces.

Leo Laporte [01:40:46]:
It sounds like factorio a little bit.

Richard Campbell [01:40:49]:
Yeah. In that same kind of league as well. But you got it. There's multiple worlds that you're getting different supplies from and things. So.

Leo Laporte [01:40:55]:
So this is Star Seeker, Astroneer Expeditions.

Richard Campbell [01:40:58]:
You're talking some subset of the Astroneer game.

Leo Laporte [01:41:01]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:41:01]:
Okay. Yeah. I was an old beta tester on that game.

Leo Laporte [01:41:04]:
I loved Factorio. I might. If it's a factorio. Like, that's it.

Richard Campbell [01:41:09]:
Yeah, you'd recognize it.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:11]:
Can I shoot Marines that are in a different group from mine and kind of a team deathmatch situation.

Richard Campbell [01:41:16]:
There is some multiplayer options in Astronomy.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:21]:
I don't know.

Richard Campbell [01:41:22]:
It was never the features that I liked there.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:24]:
I kneel.

Richard Campbell [01:41:25]:
Being teabagged in a cartoon is no better than being tea bagged otherwise.

Leo Laporte [01:41:29]:
Oh, it does look a little like Factorio, doesn't it? Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:41:31]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:32]:
Looks like the graphics are fun. Yeah, it looks. It looks. This looks like it's got a cartoony element.

Leo Laporte [01:41:36]:
You know, it's got a little bit of no man's sky in there.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:41]:
And.

Richard Campbell [01:41:42]:
Yeah, it is. And it is procedurally generated. Each world,

Paul Thurrott [01:41:47]:
new space friends. But in space, we just call them friends.

Leo Laporte [01:41:52]:
It's like in Mexico they call Mexican friends.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:55]:
I literally had a guy who owns a restaurant talking about maybe partnering with someone to open a restaurant. Another restaurant. I said, what's. What kind of food is it going to be? He goes, mexican food. I'm like, don't you just call it food?

Leo Laporte [01:42:04]:
Just food.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:06]:
Like Mexican food. What are you talking about? Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:42:11]:
He knows his audience.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:13]:
Yeah. No, that's for sure. This is kind of minor, but there was an Xbox Insiders release in alpha. Skip ahead. Which is like the canary of Xbox Insiders. Three new features that they're testing earlier that it will eventually come to everyone else. None of these are a big deal to me. If you've ever used the Xbox accessories app, which you do have to use if you want to update the firmware in your controller.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:39]:
It gives you an ide, you know, it gives you a control. It looks like a controller sort of, but I guess now it's going to be exact. So if you have like a customized controller that you made through that program Xbox has with you know, whatever color schemes and stuff, it will be that exact controller, not just like a white controller or black controller, whatever. And like, okay, basically whatever number, like hex color codes for accent colors instead of just whatever the grid of colors. So you can have any color. And then there's going to be what I think of as a Chromebook style. Your console is rebooted. Here's what's new.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:10]:
Kind of little infographic up in the corner, you can click on and see the whole deal. But I. Okay, whatever. Not a big, big deal. Of more interest though, ASUS has announced a new addition of its ROG Xbox Ally gaming handheld. So this is the X20. It's a X20 bundle, actually. I'm sorry, I should say a new.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:32]:
It's a bundle apparently. So it's the oled. Oh, I'm sorry, it is a new model. So there's an OLED display on the device, 120Hz refresh rate, FreeSync Premium Pro, Dolby Vision, 1400 nits of brightness, which is like I get this thing, probably has 500 nits and I go to a white screen of this thing, I can't see for 10 minutes. I don't know how bright that would be.

Richard Campbell [01:43:55]:
You'll see the future.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:57]:
Yeah, exactly. Redesign, thermal system, et cetera, you know, whatever. So sort of like the Xbox Elite controllers, the D Pad Transform, so you can have different, like pull bits off, put different things on there, 24 gigs of RAM, terabyte of storage, auto SR upscaling, which I think was already on the other ones. And then it comes in a bundle with real. What are they called? Real, I guess Xreal R1 gaming AR glasses that you can plug into the handheld with a USB cable and then you get a virtual 170 inch screen, I guess 240Hz refresh screen. Okay, so there you go. No pricing, no word on availability, but that's coming down the pike. So probably this holiday season I would think.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:46]:
And then also tied to gaming handheld gaming. Intel this past week announced a new series of processors specifically for this market. Like AMD is now on the second gen of their chips specifically for gaming handhelds. Now they have their first. So they have arc G3 and arc G3 extreme, obviously x86 based on the same architecture as Panther Lake, which is fantastic. Two performance cores. I think it's six efficient, no, eight efficient cores and then four low power efficient cores optimized for this, you know, form factor obviously super resolution, multi frame generation, low latency, you know, all this stuff. So there will be an Acer device.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:28]:
They were first with this one as well. Based on this, I don't know if we have a. I guess possibly as soon as June, that's this month. So there will be multiple devices based on this architecture. So

Richard Campbell [01:45:44]:
there's a lot of compute to play with. It's hard to make decisions on which ones to use.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:48]:
I had a hard time not putting this at the top of the show because it's the most important news of the week, but Activision announced the next Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare. I tried. I think I could have gotten out of that without laughing, but Leo laughed. So Modern Warfare 4, in the confusing world of Call of Duty, if you know the history, you know that the game that I think exploded Call of Duty with popularity was call of duty 4. Modern Warfare, which started a trilogy of games. There was Call of Duty, no number Modern Warfare 2 and then Modern Warfare 3. They later remade that series and now we're doing a fourth game in that series. But this is that I think I talked about this.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:32]:
Like I had read an article where someone's, you know, if you play Call of Duty, you know that the current launcher, which is could be 280 gigs of stuff, is the front end for the most recent game, the previous game and the previous two games before that, and then all the sub games like War zone and zombies, etc. And it's a fricking mess. But the original, the original remake of, of Modern Warfare predates that. And if you install that game now, it's on game pass again. It's smaller, obviously it's one game and the graphics aren't as good, like it's a different engine or whatever, but it has this kind of gritty, awesome kind of feel to it. And that's what they're doing in this next game. It's I think obviously influenced by the latest Battlefield game, which this as well, kind of authentic boots on the ground, stakes are high, you know, actual fighting kind of stuff. It looks awesome.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:24]:
So I haven't said that about a Call of Duty game since longer ago than I can even remember. It's been a long time. It's coming out in October. It's coming to the Nintendo Switch too. Wow. So obviously PC multiple ways Xbox, latest gen consoles only it's not doing previous gen now and PlayStation 5. So it actually Very, very nice. Looks pretty good.

Leo Laporte [01:47:52]:
Very, very good. Well, we have completed the. The base body of work. The base body of work the base has done. But that means that the. The. The pediment needs to now be placed upon the base. That pediment.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:09]:
We in the. The liminal period between the normal. We are in the liminal.

Leo Laporte [01:48:13]:
No, this is the liminal period in between the base and the pediment. And. And the pediment will of course be the tips, the tricks. The app picks, the runner's radio pick and then the whiskey pick of the week, the back of the book, in other words.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:29]:
So we have the impediment which is me and then the pediment. Is that correct?

Leo Laporte [01:48:35]:
I think you're the Corinthian column that holds the whole damn thing up. Okay, that's what I think.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:40]:
I don't know what's going on anymore,

Leo Laporte [01:48:42]:
but I will never cut out Paul Thurat's tip of the week back at the Book of Time. Paulie, you're on.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:49]:
Earlier I mentioned that this is like the year of clis. I just got an email while you were talking about Club Twit from Build. It's like following up after day one of Build. There's a Microsoft Build CLI GitHub repository and if you go to this thing. Yeah. So you can add it as a plugin for GitHub Copilot CLI. Then you can go in and say what build sessions are relevant to the project that you're working on or whatever. It's like a way to access the content from Build from inside of GitHub

Leo Laporte [01:49:25]:
from a command line. I know. Do you have to use PowerShell or can you use any terminal?

Paul Thurrott [01:49:31]:
I assume you can use any terminal, but you would just run the Terminal app and it would be PowerShell by default. That's crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:49:37]:
That's so great.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:38]:
Interesting, right? So there are lots of CLIs now, right. There's an Android CLI if you want to create like Kotlin Jetpack compose apps from a command line in the Microsoft space. I mentioned the Win app CLI that I didn't understand when they announced it in January. And then there's the Microsoft Store cli which I didn't understand when they announced that. And whatever month, April or whatever that was because we already have Winget and why do we have another thing? But I think these things are all interrelated and during build, as I said earlier, they announced something called the Windows Development Skills, which is a plugin for GitHub Copilot, but also you can add it to. I added it to anthropic cloud code, but you could add it to OpenAI Codex, you know, whatever, your choice. And the idea is that you can use this to Vibe code a modern WinUI 3 app. So I've done a bunch of this Vibe coding stuff recently.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:30]:
After Google, I o. I did a bunch of stuff. I wrote three articles about that and probably made eight or 15 apps. And I read a lot of apps. So I saw this and I was like, okay, obviously I have to try this and it is 100% CLI based, right? You add the plugin, you run it, it has to run probably, almost certainly would have to download some prerequisites. In my case, I think I didn't have. Well, I didn't have the Win app CLI. There's some WinUI 3 templates.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:02]:
There's a development mode needed to be enabled, which I normally do enable. You have to enable that in Windows if you make a UWP or Windows App SDK app. So it did that stuff and then it spent about 45 minutes talking to itself. And this was the thing where I was saying, like, in the beginning I wanted to. We were kind of half joking about this in the beginning. But anyway, this is when you were talking about YOLO mode. And the reason I didn't just let it do its thing is I actually wanted to see what it was doing until that got so tedious. I finally said, geez, just yes, allow all the edits during the session.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:36]:
This is so frick.

Leo Laporte [01:51:37]:
It's yellow.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:38]:
Yeah, yeah. So we all get there is the point. And anyway, 48 minutes into this and, you know, it does the AI thing. It's like, oh, all right, so I'm going to run the app. Oh, wait, something didn't work. Okay. Oh, I see what it. You know, it does that thing and.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:52]:
I know, but the thing is this is. Now you got to remember this is grounded in UI3 Windows app SDK. It's not.

Leo Laporte [01:51:59]:
It's still pretty magical, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:52:01]:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:52:02]:
I mean, it's weird, but it's magical.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:04]:
I asked it in this case to make all I wrote, let me find my actual prompt, because it was very simple. I was like, because, you know, this is the app I've been making for years. Build me a WinUI 3 app that is identical to Notepad and Windows 11 visually. And functionally.

Leo Laporte [01:52:18]:
Oh, now you can vibe code in it.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:21]:
Yeah, that's. That's what you do with it. Like, that's what that. That is what you do with it. So I.

Leo Laporte [01:52:25]:
It's not just for installing stuff, it's building stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:28]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:52:29]:
That.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:29]:
Which is why I had. This is why I had to try it took a long time, didn't really cause any problems. I mean, the Iran. I loaded the project that made it into Visual Studio, no problem there. Having built this out myself so many times, and then of course, doing it in WinUI 3 most recently, I can see some of the things it did that are not correct from a design perspective. Like the menu is above the tabs. It should be the other way around. It's very hard to do, by the way, which was one of the problems I solved.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:59]:
It doesn't have a settings page. The fonts thing is like, it's a little dialogue and it doesn't persist settings. I didn't ask it to. Right. I mean, I could keep going with it, but I don't really see a point to doing it. The thing is, like, this is.

Leo Laporte [01:53:12]:
I thought you were talking about winget. This is WIN app.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:15]:
Yeah, I get it. Yeah. So this is what fascinates me. Shows the wrong thing. Sorry, back, back. No, I probably linked to the wrong thing. Back when I. Before I moved to the Windows app SDK for my app, I was using wpf and WPF doesn't support a lot of the modern controls and things that are in, you know, in this thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:36]:
So one of the things it didn't support was this thing called a content dialogue. And if you use Notepad today and you do like find or replace, a content dialog comes up over the editor and it has all these different options you can do. It's really elegant and looks great. And I couldn't do it in wpf and I tried to fake it and I was like, you know what? I'm just going to come up with a UI that I think looks native and works well. And I came up with a Find and then a Find pane and then a Replace pane that would come under that. If you did that, that sits between the menu and the edit box, the text box. And I thought it looked great. It worked well.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:13]:
It feels native. It's not the way Notepad does it. It's not a normal way to do this. But then I used cloud code or cloud. Maybe just whatever. It was late last year or something like that, and it generated an app that used that UI that I Had. And I was like, wait a minute, I invented this ui. I didn't get this from anyone.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:33]:
I made it. You know that this app that vibe coded in 48 or 45 minutes, whatever it was, has that UI. The find and replace panes are not identical, but they're what I made. Like, they're. They are the UIs I made. Now my code base is public. It's in GitHub. I mean, must be using.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:55]:
They must have both grabbed, you know what I mean? Like, I guess I'm part of the. The DNA of this stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:55:00]:
Yeah. There's a certain sameness to a lot of the apps. You know, if you have Claude make one app. Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:07]:
Which, by the way, I understand. I'm just saying that. But this is mine. Like, I made it.

Leo Laporte [01:55:11]:
Oh, this isn't. This isn't something you made with Claude. This is something you wrote.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:14]:
Well, no, like the original time that I did those find and replace pains, I wrote that. I. I don't mean to say, like, I invented.

Leo Laporte [01:55:21]:
So learned from it. Learned from you.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:24]:
I. I don't know how, but it did. I mean, it's. Yeah, right, right. It's just. I'm just fascinated that it did that. So. So there are all these things I would do to kind of fix this.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:34]:
I'm not going to, because I have a more sophisticated version of this app that I made or whatever, but it worked.

Leo Laporte [01:55:42]:
Isn't it interesting? They really want to enable normal users, it sounds like, to write Windows apps eventually.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:49]:
I don't think most normal users are going to sit down at a command line and figure out all the machinations to do what I did to make this work. I mean, a developer would, but.

Leo Laporte [01:55:58]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:58]:
But this is the back end to what will be a gui, something that. Yeah, anyone could. Absolutely. I mean, this is only a matter of time. And given how quick this stuff goes, I think it's going to be pretty.

Leo Laporte [01:56:10]:
And it's not specific to Copilot. It can use Claude or can use.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:14]:
Yeah, because they all use the same. You know, they all interoperate. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:56:18]:
Like, oh, it's the open. It's probably the OpenAI API. That's a standard.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:21]:
Yeah, it's like. Right. Yeah. And eventually others will. Yeah, you can. You can. You can plug in those three. At least I know that.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:28]:
So I just use Anthropic. But I was like, that's okay. This is like. So, you know, I've done like an Android app. Well, more than one, but I've done some Android app stuff with Google AI. Studio, I've done some. What do you call it? PWA or web app type stuff. Also, with Google AI Studio, I've done just the thing where you go into GitHub copilot inside of Visual Studio code or Visual Studio or, Or Wetball or like just anthropic cloud.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:54]:
Like, you know, you just use like, I'm going to write code and just does it on. It's like I've done all these things, you know, and like, I have to say, like, this stuff has gone from like, I need some work to like, holy crap. Like, this works pretty. Like, it's, it's pretty good.

Leo Laporte [01:57:07]:
I was talking about this with Gibson yesterday. I used to think this was like spicy Autocorrect, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:57:14]:
No, no.

Leo Laporte [01:57:15]:
I don't understand how it's doing this.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:16]:
I. I feel like they very. They're presenting this as something a human being would use. But the reality is this is really here for the AI agents, right? Like, that's really what it's about.

Leo Laporte [01:57:29]:
It's awareness.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:30]:
Yeah, yeah. But to me, the. Other than the obvious, it does the thing and it does the work. Like, the big deal to me is when you go into cloud code, which in this case, right from the command line, and then you tell it, we're going to use this thing, which is using WinApp CLI on the back end. So this thing being. I keep forgetting the name of the Windows developer skills. You know what you're doing when you issue that command line is you're saying, you are grounded in this. You're not looking at the web, you're not looking anywhere else.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:59]:
This is all of your. So it's like what you did with Lisp. We always use this example. You trained AI. Here's the documentation. It's this finite set of information. Just use this to make an app. And that's what this is doing.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:13]:
But with WinUI 3 and it's, you know, it took a while, but it, but it's. It's pretty good. Like, it's. I mean, the app works like, it's great. It runs on arm, it runs on x64. It's fine. Like, it works great. So I thought that was kind of.

Leo Laporte [01:58:28]:
Yeah, it's on GitHub @WinApp CLI.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:33]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:58:33]:
And you just point your AI agent at it and say, install this. This is one of my favorite things.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:37]:
Well, so the thing you. Yeah. So what you really need is something called the Windows Developer skill. So you should look that up on GitHub or wherever.

Leo Laporte [01:58:43]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:44]:
That will install the win app. CLI as part of its prerequisites. Like it will do that for you.

Leo Laporte [01:58:49]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:50]:
But yeah, it uses that on the backend. And this, to me now it's kind of coming together. Like I said in January when they announced WinApp. WinApp. CLI sounds so weird saying it. I didn't understand what the point was. I was like, what is this? And now I'm like, oh no, I get it. This is all about driving these agents to get them to do the stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:09]:
Acros. It's really cool. And I just mentioned I've written free markdown editors and soon we're all going to be doing this. But in the meantime, there are two really, really good cross platform markdown editors, in my opinion. One is the one I use mostly, which is Typora, but the other one is IA Writer. And this is my favorite on the Mac. It actually works better on the Mac, I think, than it does on Windows. But it's available on the iPad as well, on the iPhone, if you wanted to do that.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:38]:
But the problem with this app is that you could only buy it through an App Store. So on the Microsoft side, you had to buy it through the Microsoft Store and the Apple side obviously buy it through their App Store. And I guess for the six, eight years, whatever it's been, they've been trying to figure out a way to actually it's 16 years just to sell this thing directly to people. And the idea is that you just sign in with your email account. They'll send you an email. You get a code, you sign it. It's a two FA thing or whatever essentially. And there's no special online account you have to deal with.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:03]:
It's just the thing you use to buy it. And so you can do that now. So if you don't want to go through an App Store, you want to buy the Windows or Mac version of IA Writer, which is, I do recommend, it's a great app. You can do it directly from IA now. So that's pretty cool.

Leo Laporte [02:00:18]:
Nice. Markdown is the lingua franca of AI too. It's everybody everywhere. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:24]:
Between like it's like everything's text. You know, it's like Markdown is text cli, obviously text mode. Like this is text back, baby. Text is. I keep saying, I told you about this, like Ms. Dos. Well, Ms. DOS Style Editor Edit that Microsoft released.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:38]:
It's now just built into Windows. I love this thing. I have it on a right click memo. Like I can bring this thing up from a right click.

Leo Laporte [02:00:45]:
Lisa said, I Want? Because I was showing her my agent. She said, I want that. I said, well, you can't have it because it's command line. You got to do command line. She said, what do you mean, command line? I said, what command line? You know, where you type it. You mean like dos? I said, yeah, like dos. He said, I could do that,

Paul Thurrott [02:01:05]:
Actually.

Richard Campbell [02:01:06]:
It's got to be sufficiently motivated.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:07]:
But the UI for that's going to be voice, right? I mean, like, at some point it's just going to be natural language and, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:01:13]:
Yeah, yeah, let's see. That concludes. Paul's part of this pediment, his impediment,

Paul Thurrott [02:01:21]:
as we say, part of the foundation that is insecure and will fail you.

Leo Laporte [02:01:26]:
But now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for Mr. Richard Campbell and Radio, a

Richard Campbell [02:01:33]:
show I picked up while I was in Toronto at NDC Toronto, talking to my friend Jerry Dixon, who is a Microsoft SQL Server principal product manager. He works specifically in the data side of things. And it was a tool I knew nothing about called Data API Builder. Now, this seems like a dev tool, but it's really not. It's something that DBA wants to roll with because what it does is it builds abstraction layers over databases. So you struggle with allowing developers to access database directly because often they can get into dumb situations that'll seriously impair performance. So having abstraction layer gives you a little bit of control over what they can do, what governance you have in place, what kind of monitoring you do, and so forth. And this tool, the API Builder, literally will expose the database the way you want as a REST interface or as a GraphQL interface, or even as an MCP server.

Richard Campbell [02:02:31]:
So you can just make it available to an agent and have it called in directly, do some extractions and protections that way. So we went a little nuts on this one. It was like huge possibilities. And right away I was thinking about features of restrictions I'd want to put in place and how governance I'd want to throw in. It's like, if I stick this layer in, is anybody calling it like that? So we really had a lot of fun with it. But it's an interesting thought that DBAs now, with these kinds of tools, you still want to allow the devs some flexibility to do some ad hoc work, that sort of thing, but you don't want them to get into trouble. And so rather than having to write a lot of store procedures or just say no, here are some tools that make it half a lot easier. Easier.

Richard Campbell [02:03:09]:
So great conversation, Very happy. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:03:12]:
Jerry Nixon, Run as radio episode 1039@runasradio.com now, whiskey time.

Richard Campbell [02:03:23]:
Yeah, this is a fall over from being with my buddy Remy, who now owns the whiskey store in Alkamar, who handed me what we consider an advanced sample of the old malt casking of a Longbourn 20. And we'd never talked about Longbourn before. And I'm just going to covet this right up front by saying, yeah, you ain't going to get one of these. This is literally inside ball about these rare individual casks. There are some regular single malt editions of Longmore, but mostly it's always been used at blending. So let's, let's just talk about Longmore for a minute, then we'll get with this particular edition. So Longmore is another one of those classic Speyside. So this is on the 941 south of Elgin, which is.

Richard Campbell [02:04:12]:
That's Glen Rothy's Ben Spurn, My beloved Craig Lache Hotel, Macallan, you name it. It's. This is the council region of Moray, which has human habitation going back about 8,000 BC or so. So, you know, better part of 10,000 years. In fact, if you get up to the Elgin Museum, there are all kinds of artifacts from all these different times, from Mesolithic tooling to pots from the Neolithic period, to diagrams and glyphs from the Picts and so on. It's amazing. Now, this is not one of the oldest distilleries. This is from 1893, which is the height of the sort of whiskey wave that, that ran over Scotland after the railways were in and there was a huge surge.

Richard Campbell [02:05:01]:
And the person behind it was John Duff. And we've talked about Duff before. This was a guy who worked at Glendronach, which is in the Eastern Highlands, we mentioned that. And he built a distillery. He built the Glen lossie Distillery in 1876. And after he was done with that, he thought that he would take whiskey around the world. And so he went down to South Africa and failed terribly. And deciding that was a mistake, then he went out to the United States and tried there.

Richard Campbell [02:05:26]:
And that did not go well either at all. When he got back to Scotland, he rounded up a couple of partners, John Shearez and George Thompson, and in 1893 they built the Longmoor Distillery, Longmorn, and does very well. Well enough that within a couple of years he buys out his partners because he thinks it's going to be all the business and make, is making enough money and things are so busy that he Actually builds another distillery across the highway, the derogatorily known as Long Morne ii, but it was actually named Ben Reac, a better known distillery than Glen Morne here. One of the reasons that John Duff was so enthusiastic is that there was this group of blenders, the Pattersons, the Patterson brothers. The company's called Patterson Elder Co. That had been operating in the from the early 1880s until the 1890s. And they were big on powerful driven marketing about more and more whiskey. And they were big on pitching hard to the distilleries to produce more whiskey at scale that they could do this some storage on and make their own blends and so forth.

Richard Campbell [02:06:28]:
But they were playing fast and loose with the books and kind of overspending. And eventually the bank calls in all the loans in 1898, and ultimately the Patterson brothers end up convicted of fraud. And the whole house guards falls in on itself. And suddenly all these distilleries have barrels that were down at Patterson they can't get back and aren't paid for and have overproduction sitting in warehouses that don't have homes anymore. And so price of whiskey drops way down and a whole bunch of them go broke. And John Duff was one of them. He ends up having to sell off both the distilleries to James Grant. And that's the Glen Livitt guy further down the road there.

Richard Campbell [02:07:11]:
Creates a new entity called Longmorn Glenlivet Distillery for a number of years. And their function fine like that. Grant had not been part of the Patterson debacle, Didn't get over leveraged. Longmorn's famous for another reason. Our friend Masutaka Takasuri, the guy who worked initially with Suntory and then made the Nikkei Distillery, worked there in the 1920s as part of his education to take whiskey to Japan. By 1970, they're starting to modernize. They. They dropped the name Longmorn from the name just called the Glenlivet Distilleries.

Richard Campbell [02:07:50]:
Longmorn is not doing a lot of single malts. They're mostly going into various kinds of blends. But 1970 was the very typical time where they switched away from coal heat to steam because it's safer, got rid of floor maltings, that sort of thing, sort of standard modernization. And it was acquired in 1977 by the Seagrams Group, which at that time also owned the Chivas brothers. And Longmorn has always featured significantly in the Chivas blends. And that means it rolls up into Pernod Ricard by 2001. So for the most part you've never heard of Longmorn because it's just gone into blends. You've likely drank it if you drank any well known blends, especially Chivas Regal.

Richard Campbell [02:08:28]:
They did make a few start making some single malt editions in 1993 without a lot of marketing into that. But the bot, the independent bottlers have always made big business business from them. And so most people keep an eye out for whenever Hunter Liang like in this edition. But also, you know, pick your bottler. They often make lawnmowers and they are coveted, grabbed up right away, 250 bottles or something like that. The facility itself is large. They produce about four and a half million liters a year. Doing malts from the Mornay region from Baird and 8 and a half ton grist loads is pretty big into 10 stainless steel washbacks at 39,000 liters.

Richard Campbell [02:09:11]:
They run on four sets of stills. 10,000 liters for the wash stills and 7,000 liters for the spirit stills. Do a lot of their own barrel storage there, but because they're part of Pernod Ricard barrels are distributed all over. Nothing unusual there. And again not a well known brand. They are not one of the unbranded but also not in the Diageo loop. They're in the Pernard Ricard loop. They're part of Chicago of us.

Richard Campbell [02:09:34]:
So this particular bottling and I don't have it with me, it's back home but I did get a chase chance to taste it and it was amazing. Comes from Hunter Liang. So this is actually originally. Hunter Liang is one of the sons of Douglas Liang. And Douglas Liang formed a company for doing blending and filling in 1948 and did very, very well. By the 1990s they were all on this modern single casking approach to whiskey because people like to have one of 250 bottles, that kind of thing. The two sons, Doug Jr. And Hunter disagreed on a bunch of things.

Richard Campbell [02:10:06]:
And so by 2013 they decided to split the company and split up the brands. Doug Jr kept old particular and a couple of other brands, but also has now started to move into Stilling which I believe was their disagreement that Hunter liked making his single bottlings and his relationship with distilleries and didn't want to get into distilling where Doug Jr. Is moving that direction. And the main line for Hunter Laing is this old malt cask of which this is one of the bottles of. So this is a 20 year old edition that was distilled in 1996 and bottled in 2017 and they're now looking at doing distributions for it. So for certain whiskey shops, they send out samples, small little 100ml bottles that you can that allow you to try them out so that you decide if you're going to stock some of those. So this hot 260 bottle run, they're going to go there. It's a single cask and very limited production.

Richard Campbell [02:11:03]:
It was 50% alcohol, but it was a 20 year old. And you know, I'm usually lean away from those older whiskies, but this is one of those beautiful silky caramel Speyside. It's like everything you ever wanted in a whiskey. And the samples were basically for free and I was given one of them, so I didn't ever pay for it. But you can expect if you could get your hands on one of these bottlings. And there's a few different additions that have come down the line. If you keep your eye out for getting access to Hunter Liang, which hard to come by out of Scotland, expect to pay about £200 for a bottle like that of a very special edition that you can serve your friends at Christmas and let them know you'll never have this again.

Leo Laporte [02:11:49]:
And you can't get it now though, right? Or can you?

Richard Campbell [02:11:52]:
I think. Yeah, we're just in the advanced sample. They haven't done the release on it. So if you were very keen, you could go looking for.

Leo Laporte [02:11:57]:
Oh, you could get that. Okay, good.

Richard Campbell [02:11:58]:
Possibly.

Leo Laporte [02:11:59]:
But like I said, it's not the old malt cask.

Richard Campbell [02:12:02]:
Yeah. So yeah, the old malt cask is the, is the group Hunter Liang that does the various editions and they bottle from all kinds of distilleries. So you can't just look at old malt casks. You got to specifically go hunting for a long morning.

Leo Laporte [02:12:15]:
Well, this is kind of fun. Look at all this stuff. Is this a subscription?

Richard Campbell [02:12:17]:
Absolutely. They're, they're not because it's so hard to ship, but it's one of those things where you kind of have to pay attention. And your whole thing here is go to your boutique whiskey maker that might be on the Hunter Liang list, ask about certain editions, see if you can get a few bottles.

Leo Laporte [02:12:32]:
How fun is this? Look at all these.

Richard Campbell [02:12:34]:
And that's the whole thing about these, these custom bottlers, right, Is that you get all these interest interesting things from it. And just like I said, they're rare, they're special, but they're a way to get very unique bottles of whiskey. If you want to have something unusual. So that being said, I am in Denmark and today I was handed the bottle of Danish whiskey. No surprise. The good news is I'm staying for another week in Denmark and so they'll probably see you next week.

Leo Laporte [02:13:00]:
They see you coming, don't they, Richard?

Richard Campbell [02:13:01]:
They do see me coming. And you know I'm here to help. The nice thing is I'm here long enough that I can open this bottle and share it with friends and not worry about leaving it behind. We'll be able to finish it, but next week you'll see me in a different location. I think I'll be over the Scandic at that point and we'll Will you

Leo Laporte [02:13:21]:
share this story about the Danish Danish whiskey with us next week?

Richard Campbell [02:13:25]:
Yeah, you know I hate to not do a Danish whiskey. We've done one before, right? We have talked about Danish whiskey before, but this is a different one, so. Well, I'll leave it fun until I can finish the research on it takes a little time.

Leo Laporte [02:13:35]:
Well, bless you. You kept it in under an hour and I appreciate that. And you think you're going to give me time to do some more work. So thank you for that. We do Windows Weekly. Reason I say that if you're watching live is in about 10 minutes. We've got Robert Tursik, who was a former creative director at MTV and is a futurist, talking about AI on Intelligent Machines. Machines.

Leo Laporte [02:13:59]:
And so that's going to be a lot of fun. Stick around if you want to watch that. If you're not watching live, well, you'll find it on the IM feed a little bit later. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday before Intelligent Machines. We do it 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can even watch us live if you want. If you're in the club, of course in the club, Twitter, Discord. But also we stream to everyone on YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick after the fact on demand versions of the show at TWiT TV WW.

Leo Laporte [02:14:34]:
We have audio and video there. The video is also on YouTube on the windows Weekly dedicated channel. Good way to share clips of the show. And actually Richard's whiskey clips, you don't need to clip those out. We Kevin King goes through those. He's a little behind. Takes a while. But if you go to something weird from my closet.com you'll find that YouTube playlist with all the 100, more than 100 whiskey 150 and the story of whiskey and all sorts of great stuff.

Richard Campbell [02:15:02]:
That would be the first, the first eight episodes are me explaining the Scottish whiskey making process to my friends here. And it runs two and a half hours.

Leo Laporte [02:15:14]:
Well, it takes 20 years. So two and a half hours, that's nothing. Nothing.

Richard Campbell [02:15:18]:
Might come quick. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:15:22]:
Paul thurat is@therot.com Become a Premium Member and you can actually get copies of his books from leanpub.com and that includes Field Guide to Windows 11, Windows Everywhere and the latest in D and Shitify Windows. Or you can buy them from leanpub.com Richard Campbell is@runasradio.com that's where you'll find his shows Run as Radio and.net Rocks or DNR, which does not mean do not resuscitate.

Richard Campbell [02:15:48]:
In this case for 2,000 episodes. Maybe you shouldn't resuscitate.

Leo Laporte [02:15:52]:
Yeah. No, it's living. It's alive. Do not pound on its chest. It's, it's fine.

Richard Campbell [02:15:56]:
Not quite dead.

Leo Laporte [02:15:57]:
It's just resting, getting better. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Paul. Thanks to all our winners and dozers out there. We'll see you next Wednesday on Windows Weekly. Bye.