Windows Weekly 994 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 Thurrott is here. Richard has the week off. He's fishing in Montana. But hey, good news. PC Magazine's Chris Hoffman joins us. We will have Microsoft earnings later in the day. We'll talk about astounding Google earnings.

Leo Laporte [00:00:14]:
Will the market punish Microsoft as they have Google? They also— Microsoft are shifting their own models for AI. And Xbox and gaming. Are you ready for Halo Campaign Evolved?

Paul Thurrott [00:00:28]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:00:28]:
It's all coming up this week— next, in fact— on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:40]:
This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte [00:00:47]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, episode 994, recorded Wednesday, July 29th, 2026, the best kind of correct. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners and you dozers. This is the show where we talk about the latest from Microsoft, although the latest will come later, but we'll talk about that in a moment. Uh, say hello to Paul Thurrott back in Mexico. Old Mexico. Good to see you, Paul. Paul, you've brought, uh, A visitor from the East.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:24]:
Wow, from the Orient.

Leo Laporte [00:01:26]:
Richard is in Montana fishing, but we're thrilled to have Chris Hoffman back, senior writer for PC Magazine Software Division. Hi, Chris.

Chris Hoffman [00:01:37]:
Hi, great to be here again.

Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
I think, I think New Hampshire's the East. I think it qualifies.

Chris Hoffman [00:01:43]:
It's on the East Coast.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:44]:
It's the Eastern Seaboard, as we call it.

Leo Laporte [00:01:47]:
I used to, uh, I used to know somebody, another Cali friend, friendly Californian, who said, you don't call cowboy stories Westerns out here. We call them Easterns because they're east of us.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:00]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [00:02:00]:
And I said, no, you call them Westerns.

Chris Hoffman [00:02:02]:
I have trouble with that.

Leo Laporte [00:02:04]:
Okay, so, uh, the news I was referring to is later today, right? Microsoft earnings.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:10]:
Yeah, so Microsoft will release earnings later today. I assume we'll see the beginnings of it right before we close. You know, depending on the timing.

Leo Laporte [00:02:19]:
As usual, we like to get Paul Workin typing away at the very end of the show, but without whiskey, I don't have time. Unless, Chris, you have a whiskey recommendation.

Chris Hoffman [00:02:30]:
I do not.

Leo Laporte [00:02:33]:
Some, not all, are sighing with relief. Uh, Week D, you have anything to say for yourself?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:43]:
I, I mean, maybe this reflects well on the Windows Insider Program. But this stuff has started to become so predictable. I just feel like I'm repeating myself every week or two now with these updates because we'll see updates hit the Insider Program correctly through whatever channel, make work their way down, eventually get into the Release Preview channel— channels really, but whatever— and then go into the weekly update like we saw today or yesterday, and then make their way to Patch Tuesday to the next Patch Tuesday, right? The next month. So there's nothing new here in the sense that we've mentioned every single one of these things. I would say in the context of what will be next month's Patch Tuesday, or so, this will be the, what, the 8th Patch Tuesday of the year? This is one of the minor ones. So I think there have been 2 or 3 pretty big ones and then a bunch of almost, um, minor ones. non-noticeable ones, and this is that. So, you know, Windows Hello, ESS support for external fingerprint readers— stop me if you haven't heard any of this— um, the new gesture controls for precision touchpads, and then just like minor improvements across a lot of stuff, uh, widgets, Windows Search, voice access, Windows Update, power management, etc.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:01]:
So nothing major, but that's good, especially good for me because that means I have less to worry about for the book, which we were just talking about. So like, there's nothing in here I would even mention like in my book, so who cares? It's just all smoke.

Leo Laporte [00:04:15]:
That's how important it is.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:18]:
If it requires me to retake screenshots, Leo, it's a really big update. It is very upsetting. Yeah, I understand. So this— there's nothing here, so that's good.

Chris Hoffman [00:04:27]:
Well, it is—

Paul Thurrott [00:04:28]:
see that?

Chris Hoffman [00:04:29]:
It is kind of surprising. Like you said, you know, last month's or This month's past Tuesday update was a larger one. It had the widgets changes and everything. So like, there's a lot of interesting stuff in the Insider Program like right now, like the taskbar being movable that you kind of assume, I guess, that'll be in the big fall update. I thought the widgets change would wait till the big fall update, to be honest. So like, we could have a big update in next month with a bunch of changes, or we could not have a bunch of changes till the fall update.

Leo Laporte [00:04:55]:
Yeah.

Chris Hoffman [00:04:55]:
I think that's one of the interesting things right now is you really have no clue Whether an update will have a bunch of big features or whether some of these features will come out later in the year, like, who knows?

Paul Thurrott [00:05:05]:
So, to my knowledge, the Windows Insider Program team has never said for any of these features that they would be available... explicitly, I believe. I can recall one instance where there was a Tech Community blog post where someone not in the Insider Program did say this will be in 26H2. But now I can't remember which feature it was. But yeah, there's a new Start menu and then there'll be another new Start menu in the future. The taskbar stuff, like you said, Windows Update stuff, Windows Search changes, widgets. Some have hit public or stable, some have not. And I don't know, I was just—

Chris Hoffman [00:05:43]:
Some have hit public with a controlled feature rollout. That means you'll get them in 4 months without an update.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:50]:
Yeah, this is my biggest irritation.

Leo Laporte [00:05:51]:
Is that a consistent timeframe or is that—

Paul Thurrott [00:05:54]:
No, no.

Leo Laporte [00:05:54]:
I mean, like, can you count on that?

Paul Thurrott [00:05:56]:
It's consistently inconsistent. And we were just talking about this before we started recording, but, you know, in the Insider Program now, if you go into Windows Update, you know, sorry, the Settings app and then Windows Update interface and, you know, enroll your PC in one of the channels, you can go into a feature flag interface and say, I want this on. You know, you can take the CFRs and make them just be enabled. Um, I don't know if they think this is too complex for normal people or whatever, but that should just be in Windows Update. Like every month when there's a Patch Tuesday update, if someone sees a feature or finds out there's a new feature and they really want it, rather than it randomly appearing on the computer sometime in the next weeks or months or whatever, they could just, you know, click a box and have it just be there. That's what happens in the Insider Program. So I don't know why they don't do that, but then again, this Insider capability is probably less than 3 months old, so.

Leo Laporte [00:06:49]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:49]:
It's still kind of a new thing. Maybe it is something they'll eventually do. I don't know. I still have that issue where I go to different computers and it's like, oh, this one has the wrong Start menu, or, you know, like, well, this one doesn't have the new taskbar stuff, or whatever. Like, it's, it's still very confusing.

Leo Laporte [00:07:04]:
This doesn't happen in enterprise though, right? I mean, because that would be a problem if your employees—

Paul Thurrott [00:07:09]:
Well, sitting in enterprise, they just— yeah, they just block everything in the enterprise, so— or everything they can.

Leo Laporte [00:07:15]:
Um, don't do it.

Chris Hoffman [00:07:15]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:07:16]:
So it's really mostly home users.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:19]:
I wonder though, I mean, yeah, so I feel I'm gonna have to repeat myself a bunch 'cause Chris is here and he doesn't hear this week to week, but one of the weirdnesses of my life is that I used to be able to write a book or an article or anything and say, to do this, do this. It was very explicit. If you wanna get this done, this is how you do it. And now it's like, all right, open this thing up. You might see this, you might see this, you might see this. You never know. You don't know what you're gonna see. It could be anything.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:46]:
If you don't see this, do that. It's like a flowchart now. So it's very complicated. And then there's this stuff just in Windows that's not even related to the Insider Program, like Phone Link. If you have an iPhone, you get a couple of basic features. If you have an Android phone, you get a bunch more. And if you have a Samsung flagship, you get several more really good features.

Chris Hoffman [00:08:08]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:09]:
describing that in a way that makes sense in plain English is also difficult. So, um, this is my weekly— I don't know, my daily cross to bear. I don't know. And Chris's too, I guess, you know, I would assume.

Chris Hoffman [00:08:21]:
And now half the new features with the phone stuff are under some mobile devices thing in the setting, which is not the same as Phone Link at all. Don't get confused.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:29]:
I— listen, so since you just said that, I will—

Leo Laporte [00:08:32]:
Wait, what? No, what?

Chris Hoffman [00:08:34]:
What?

Paul Thurrott [00:08:34]:
Yeah, no, I will further— so sorry. So what— let me, let me compare this to something. If you use an iPhone You are familiar with the fact that you have an app, but the settings are not in the app. The settings are in the settings interface under apps, and you have to go find it. It's stupid. Like, if there's 2 different places—

Leo Laporte [00:08:48]:
It's so horrible. I don't know why they do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:50]:
I hate it so much. It's just the Apple way of doing things. It's stupid. Yeah, what he's describing is similar to this. So we have a Phone Link app. It has settings, but to fully, you know, configure the phones you— or phone and/or phones you're using with the app and just with the system, You actually have to go into settings. Now, if there was one interface for this, that would be, that would be pretty good. But there isn't, because actually there's multiple.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:14]:
And I'll just tell you about one more of them, is if you go into Apps, Resume— this only has to do with phones, it's not in the mobile devices interface, it's somewhere else, I don't know why—

Leo Laporte [00:09:24]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:25]:
You can control whether this feature is on or off, assuming you have a phone that's compatible with it. And then assuming you've installed any apps that are compatible with this feature, you can turn those on or off individually. And why is that not in the mobile devices settings interface? I do not know. But this is, you know, again, this is whack-a-mole. That's what—

Chris Hoffman [00:09:44]:
Different team worked on it, maybe?

Paul Thurrott [00:09:46]:
Probably, yeah. I have no idea.

Leo Laporte [00:09:49]:
I do have to point out, this is the operating system that had 2 different control panels, one visible to all people.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:54]:
Still does. Still does.

Leo Laporte [00:09:56]:
And then one hidden away for the real experts.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:59]:
So this is way out of date, but, you know, back in the '90s at least, maybe the early 2000s. Like Jerry Pournelle would say stuff like this. He's like, you know, the Mac maybe can't do something, and if you can't find it, it's just not there. That's just the way it is. But if you do find it, that's the one way to do it. And in Windows, it was always the approach was, you know, which is so out of date now, but we have this really diverse audience at the time. At the time was the biggest audience, and it was like, we have to have all these different ways to do things because different people do things differently. And that is just, I mean, I get it, but it's the—

Leo Laporte [00:10:33]:
It's actually a religious controversy.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:35]:
It's bizarre.

Leo Laporte [00:10:36]:
Perl, the language, was famous for Tim Tody. There's more than one way to do it. And in Perl, there's like 20 ways to do anything.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:43]:
It's a whole design philosophy, right?

Leo Laporte [00:10:45]:
It's a design philosophy in the very least.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:46]:
Think about the Unix device. You have a command or an app in Unix, it does one thing.

Leo Laporte [00:10:51]:
That's it.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:51]:
And if you want to do something complex, you're going to chain those things. and they're gonna work in concert. In Windows, they're like, no, we're gonna build a battleship and it's gonna do everything. And it's just a different approach. I think they were trying to make it user-friendly. I think that was the— I don't think it was malicious. I just think it was a design decision.

Leo Laporte [00:11:09]:
No, it's philosophy, although I have a feeling that Apple more from the beginning had like this kind of focus on this is— they called it monotony. There's one way to do everything. They literally, that was the, the term.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:23]:
That's right. Yeah. Okay. Not much. We want it to be monotonous.

Leo Laporte [00:11:28]:
Okay. Uh, yeah, probably in the more truer Latin, Latinate sense of the word.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:33]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's one way to do it. Well, they were first with the Human Interface Guidelines stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:11:37]:
I mean, they, they had that big goal.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:39]:
They were thinking about this very early on, right? Microsoft kind of came up later and copied it.

Leo Laporte [00:11:43]:
I feel like Windows was kind of developed like most programs in the real world You build a little here, you build a little there, you build down here, you add a little there.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:52]:
Do we need a solid foundation? No, just keep going up, you'll be fine. Um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, but the GUI stuff is just, um, yeah, Windows came later, whatever. I mean, I, look, I'm not saying one is— the Mac has a stupid menu bar at the top all the time. I like— I don't like that either, but you know, whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:12:10]:
Yeah, there's a few ways to do the window. Of course, everybody knows that.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:13]:
And they didn't do that because they didn't want controls to run off the edge and how would you ever find that? And they were, again, they were thinking through the, you know, how people would react to it. But that was also like 45 years ago.

Leo Laporte [00:12:25]:
You know, things still— Well, times change.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:27]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:12:27]:
For instance, one of the debates in the Apple world was, and actually in all of the GUI world, it was resolved by the time Windows 1.0 came out, was do you do tiled? We've talked about this before. Do you do tiled windows or overlapping windows?

Paul Thurrott [00:12:39]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:12:41]:
And of course they decided overlapping windows is overlapping. But now on my Linux box, I use a tiled desktop.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:47]:
A lot of people like tiled. For all the problems with Windows 8, one of the coolest things about it was you could just have 2 apps side by side, and then eventually you could, you know, use Snap or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:12:55]:
Is that Snap? That was the idea of Snap, kind of, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:12:58]:
Yeah. I like it, but I have a giant screen. Well, I mean, because people lose track of where things are. You know, there was a window and it's gone, but it's behind something.

Leo Laporte [00:13:06]:
Exactly. I think it's also because screens are bigger, so you have more real estate on a desktop, so you can—

Paul Thurrott [00:13:12]:
No, I know, but now that most people are on a laptop, you actually sort of, you know, I find I run apps full screen all the time.

Leo Laporte [00:13:19]:
That's how I do it on the laptop. So I move from workspace to workspace.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:23]:
Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:13:26]:
Anyway, I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:26]:
Times change. Different ways. Styles change.

Leo Laporte [00:13:29]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:29]:
Different strokes. Different strokes. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:13:32]:
Well, we've exhausted that topic. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:35]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:13:36]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:36]:
And then some.

Leo Laporte [00:13:37]:
Welcome to the show, Chris.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:39]:
I'll hold my thoughts He said the wood but not me earlier.

Leo Laporte [00:13:44]:
Do you, do you, uh, do you, do you use tiled windows, uh, Chris, just out of curiosity?

Chris Hoffman [00:13:51]:
Um, I mean, I don't have a— you know, ideally Windows had a better, like, tiling window manager. I, I do a lot of— I do a lot of full-screen stuff. I do a lot of split-screen stuff. Even on my larger, um, on my, like, larger desktop monitor, I might have, like, maybe, like, 4 apps in a grid, but, like, most apps You know, floating is kind of— it's weird to jump across floating windows.

Leo Laporte [00:14:12]:
I'm looking across the way at my desktop, which has a 55-inch screen, so I really do want to have many windows. And it has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and occasionally a 7th window opening up, but they're all tiled, right? So I know, I know where— and it's set up so that when it opens, that's where everything goes, so I know where everything is.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:30]:
And then I have more workspaces if I need You can get into a really complex thing like that in Windows, but you have to use a PowerToy.

Leo Laporte [00:14:37]:
Yeah, this is Linux, obviously.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:39]:
It's, it's, um, yeah, but I mean, they have— there's a tool where you can define a layout and it is what you're trying to do, and then you can bring that back as a thing.

Chris Hoffman [00:14:46]:
It's kind of complex. It's kind of—

Leo Laporte [00:14:48]:
well, yeah, people have tried that on the Mac too. I have a couple of tools that will do that, and none of them really are very satisfying.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:53]:
I don't use it. It's too complex, but it's too complex. It's there if you want it, you know. I don't see it making its way into Windows. I guess I'll put it that way.

Leo Laporte [00:15:01]:
Burke says, tilers are inhuman. We're animals, Burke.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:06]:
I think what you're looking for is subhuman. No, no, I mean, look, we're all kind of power users, but the reality is, especially on a laptop, you kind of want that thing filling the screen. You don't have a lot of space.

Leo Laporte [00:15:19]:
Yeah, it started for me with a tablet, with the iPad.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:22]:
I feel like we went to one extreme and then we're kind of walking it back. Like Windows 1 and 2 were all just tiled, or maybe I love workspaces.

Leo Laporte [00:15:29]:
I love workspaces. And I have a Command key and I go to 1, 2, 3, 4. I know what's on each. It's always the same. Just a natural way to work.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:39]:
Yep. I do that on the Mac. I do not do that on Windows for some reason. I can't explain it.

Leo Laporte [00:15:43]:
But Windows has that capability. You could.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:46]:
Yeah. It's not as good. So Windows has had virtual desktops forever. Well, since NT. Um, it only became a feature in Windows— I don't remember, 2, 3 versions ago, whatever it was. 2 versions maybe. Was it Windows 10 or 8? I don't remember, but eventually it became a feature. Windows also supports full-screen apps, but you almost never see that.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:06]:
You see it with like Microsoft Edge.

Leo Laporte [00:16:08]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:08]:
It's one of the apps that does this, but any app can do it. But in Win— and on the Mac, they've made it into a formal part of the UI. Like all apps basically can go full screen and It becomes a workspace, but I wish Windows did that universe. I wish that was just a global, well, it is, but I mean, but app developers actually have to use it and most don't. So I kind of wish they had that because then you could just, the best you can do now is maximize and hide the taskbar depending on the app. But oh well, I don't know. The Mac has really good touchpad gestures, by which I mean they're the same in Windows, but on the Mac they actually work.

Leo Laporte [00:16:45]:
Oh yeah, on the trackpad, you just, what is it, a 3-finger swipe and it just goes to the next workspace.

Chris Hoffman [00:16:50]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [00:16:51]:
And 3 or 4 fingers.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:52]:
So I literally disable 3-finger swipes in Windows on, I'm going to call it, 95% of laptops I review because the trackpads are so bad. I inadvertently do the— when I try to scroll, I do the thing where it brings up, I guess, Task View, where you see all the apps that are running. And, um, it's, you know, look, I am clumsy. I admit it. Um, I'm sure it's my fault partially, but some trackpads work awesome and that is not an issue. So I can tell a month into this, if I haven't switched that, you know, that off, then this is a great trackpad, you know, or an accurate trackpad or whatever, right?

Chris Hoffman [00:17:25]:
They're, they're all so much better than they used to be though. Like every laptop I reviewed for PC World was so much worlds ahead of like 10 years ago.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:33]:
Well, yeah, because you used to travel with a mouse all the time. You had to. Yeah, right. If you had to do anything precise on your screen, you had to have a mouse. That's not the case anymore. I will say any— that I've never reached for a mouse on a modern laptop of any kind. I'm just talking about the gesture part. Yeah, trackpads have definitely got a lot better, but I mean, I'm not saying they're perfect on the Mac, but I think it is one of the things they nail.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:55]:
If that means anything to anybody, I don't know. But next week on whereimswitchingtomac.com, um, I don't know, they do get that right. Okay, anyway, sorry, weird diversion.

Leo Laporte [00:18:08]:
I have to say, my X1, uh, Carbon, love the trackpad.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:12]:
Yeah, that's a good one. And those guys are holding on to that nubbin thing because ThinkPad fans expect it. That's another example.

Leo Laporte [00:18:19]:
I never use it.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:19]:
Yeah, I haven't touched the nubbin on one of those things in years. Yeah, like their trackpads are fantastic. They also tend to be on the smaller side, which I like.

Leo Laporte [00:18:27]:
Yeah, that's the trend now, isn't it? These ginormous trackpads.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:31]:
Well, they have this— it's like a dinner plate, and it's like, wait, I don't get it. Why is the trackpad 3 times the size of the keyboard?

Leo Laporte [00:18:36]:
Yeah, like, do you buy a laptop based on the trackpad size?

Paul Thurrott [00:18:42]:
I mean, I would if it was smaller. I would. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I don't like it.

Leo Laporte [00:18:46]:
Yes, smaller, better.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:48]:
Like, I have a hard enough time reaching the left end of the trackpad as it is to get a normal click. I'm sorry, it's a long thing. I have a lot of problems. Um, okay, so since we spoke last time, um, yes, 2 sets of updates to the Insider Program. Last week they had done 5 different updates to 5 different channels. Nothing super major. One of the ones they left out was Experimental Future Platforms. Since then, they updated that channel, and it's just stuff that's everywhere else.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:19]:
So it's continuing that Canary theme where it's supposed to be the latest, greatest, it could be breaking, it might not make it into the OS, and all it is is the stuff we put in Windows last month finally making its way. So I don't, there's nothing here of interest at all.

Leo Laporte [00:19:35]:
It's—

Paul Thurrott [00:19:36]:
Sad. I don't know why it continues to be like that.

Chris Hoffman [00:19:38]:
Very strange.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:40]:
Um, yeah, doesn't make any sense. Um, you know, we were— one thing we talk about a lot is, um, you know, Microsoft determines they're going to clean up, we're going to fix Windows, right? We're going to address the pain points. Nice. Um, they're not addressing any of the actual major problems with Windows that are what I would call the certification, so that's an issue. But okay, nice set of updates across the board. You know, we mentioned all of them or most of them earlier, but great. And so they start doing it. And one of the things they were fixing is the Insider Program, right? So they have too many programs.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:12]:
And I think we just talked about this last week, this idea, you know how this happened exactly. You can tell without knowing, without knowing the people, I know this is exactly what happened. They're like, all right, we're going to fix this. We're going to have 2 channels. Perfect. And then someone's like, but hold on a second, what about this thing? All right, all right, all right, we'll add a sub-channel. And then right now I believe there are 7 or 8 channels and it's exactly what it was before. This is not simpler than it was before.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:34]:
It's just as complex. And the reason is these people didn't understand the reasons that led to the stupid stuff that was happening before and they just walked it all back. Like they started this thing off like, no, we're gonna fix this. We're gonna do the right thing. People are gonna love us. It's like, nice. And then it's like, well, what about this? All right, what about this? Oh yeah, I guess we gotta do it. And now we have, they still talk about it like there are 2 or 3 channels or whatever it is, but Technically, there are subchannels.

Chris Hoffman [00:21:02]:
That's different.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:04]:
Is it?

Chris Hoffman [00:21:06]:
I mean, like, you know, that's the message.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:07]:
No, I'm just— I mean, okay, but there's still— look, we can give names to things. I mean, there's still channels. I mean, they're entities to which you can or cannot enroll.

Leo Laporte [00:21:16]:
I'm sorry, sir. You're in subchannel 1A/B3. So you're— Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:22]:
So I think what he's saying, in other words, That's technically correct, which I think we can all agree is the best kind of correct. But there are so many, it's still, it's just as bad as it was before. Anyway.

Leo Laporte [00:21:34]:
Channels too.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:35]:
I don't know, yeah, I don't know when they started this, but sometime in the past, sometime this year I believe, but certainly in the past few months, they started actually documenting on a monthly basis the updates they're making to the inbox apps, the apps that are included with Windows 11, which I think is really cool. In the June update, Uh, there were several inbox apps that were updated with, you know, interesting features to some degree. Um, they just the other day published the list of the changes they had made this month to those apps, and there's nothing interesting really, um, per se. But Calculator, Clock, Media Player, and Notepad all got what I'll call minor fixes. Um, I— no actual new features, but just fit and finish type stuff. And those things I believe went out to all of the major channels, or however you wanna say that, experimental, experimental 26H1, experimental future platforms, beta, and release preview. What's missing from that? Well, and release preview is actually multiple channels too, but whatever. Which suggests we're probably gonna see those updates in the near future, or I don't think they just do it on Patch Tuesday, but maybe they do.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:41]:
It doesn't really matter.

Chris Hoffman [00:22:42]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:44]:
So it doesn't matter anyway because they're not major features. There's no major features, so whatever. But that's good, it's still good they're doing it. And then we get to the hilarious nature, the ironic hypocritical nature of a company putting crapware into a product that's so bad that Microsoft— which I'm not saying invented crapware, but they might have perfected it Actually complained to them and said, maybe you need to stop doing this.

Leo Laporte [00:23:13]:
Steve Gibson says this was the most emailed topic of the week for him.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:19]:
So I haven't written a story about this, and I, I didn't find a link to this, but by the way, HP, which does this kind of thing a lot as well, has pop-up Bing ads on some of their laptops. And so somebody asked Microsoft, you're gonna ask them about that too? And they were like, no, we're not. So that one's okay.

Chris Hoffman [00:23:42]:
But, but here's one pretty bad.

Leo Laporte [00:23:44]:
So you're talking— we should explain. This is the LG monitors, computer monitors that install crap on your PC.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:55]:
Yes.

Chris Hoffman [00:23:56]:
Do you— the monitor doesn't install it technically. Sorry, Windows installs it.

Leo Laporte [00:24:01]:
Yeah, they're using Windows Update Well, and they're telling Windows Update, we have a device driver that we would like you to install, but it's more than a device driver, right? Is that right?

Chris Hoffman [00:24:13]:
It's something like that. There's some— it may not technically be Windows Update, but when you plug in a device, Windows looks at the hardware ID and the device metadata, goes online to Microsoft, and then it sees information from the manufacturer and it says, download this driver, download this software. So I see this happen across a variety of devices like Razer mice and keyboards. You plug it in, It launches an app. How did it do that? Because like the manufacturer says, when you connect this thing, download and launch this supported—

Leo Laporte [00:24:42]:
Is that plug and play? Is that what we used to call plug and play?

Paul Thurrott [00:24:45]:
Yeah, so the, the plug and play bit is you get a class driver that's just generic and should work. So if it's the mouse, you can move the mouse cursor around, whatever. And then depend— like what he's saying is depending on the hardware, it can then actually install whatever it is, the utility, a better driver, etc., etc. So those things used to always come from the manufacturer, but now they can opt in and actually have that funnel through Windows Update.

Leo Laporte [00:25:07]:
See, this has always bugged me. I get a Logitech mouse and it wants me to install 400 megabytes of crap that you don't need because the mouse works without it. Everybody does this, and you know why they do it. It's— they're putting telemetry on your machine.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:20]:
They're adding value, Leo. I don't know what you just said, but, um, uh, so LG monitors.

Leo Laporte [00:25:25]:
But this— but what were they installing? It wasn't— it was supposedly an LG monitor control utility, but it was What was it really? Was it ads?

Chris Hoffman [00:25:34]:
Well, it, it was— well, if you look at the statement, it was, it was just an LG monitor control utility. They were not installing McAfee antivirus. However, the LG monitor control utility had a pop-up for McAfee antivirus, which is different.

Leo Laporte [00:25:47]:
It had an ad in it.

Chris Hoffman [00:25:48]:
And it had an ad, but, you know, as LG said in a statement, that, that's totally above board and they're using a normal Microsoft process that once, you know, big names started noticing, then there were tweets, and then Microsoft got involved and asked LG to stop. But what's— this is fascinating for so many reasons. First of all, it doesn't appear to be that LG broke any rules. Like, Microsoft didn't say LG broke a rule in terms of how it should handle this type of thing. Um, you know, I— we're really threading the needle too here because, you know, You mentioned the HP Bing ad thing. Like, okay, but you know computers come with a lot of bloatware on them, and manufacturers can put as much ads as they want in there. That's fine. And Microsoft can update Windows and put a bunch of Bing and Edge ads in, and that's fine.

Chris Hoffman [00:26:37]:
But in this case, what really is just apparently too much is if you plug in a device and then it downloads an app, and that app has an ad. That's bad because that app is like automatically installed by Windows. We're really threading a really careful needle here. And the other funny thing is this is a monitor. Like a lot of smart TVs and smart displays. and even monitors have built-in firmware that has software. So if they— if LG had released a firmware update for its monitors that had a McAfee antivirus on the, like, oh, uh, display firmware level, this is— they could have got away with that too. But the one thing that they cannot do apparently without getting in trouble is, you know, releasing this through the Windows auto-install system, which is very weird.

Chris Hoffman [00:27:16]:
But, you know, it's, it's good that people push back, but it, it— the whole ecosystem is kind of Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:24]:
This is a— so by the way, this is the behavior, is the behavior of malware. One thing very reminiscent of that Sony rootkit thing from probably 20 years ago.

Chris Hoffman [00:27:33]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:33]:
Um, I'll just say, just anecdotally, right, Microsoft does this all the time, which is what the irony part is, or hypocrisy, whatever. Just before we started the show, I had to reassemble this setup in this new location, whatever, and I was trying to think, like, on this laptop, I used this last week and I like to use a different web browser for the video stream that we're doing and then my own web browser for the articles that I look at. But I couldn't remember what I used last week. So I launched Edge, which launched in this full-screen experience. It's like, hey, would you like to change your settings back to Bing and blah, blah, blah and all this stuff? It's like, no, I explicitly changed that. What are you bugging me about? But it does that all the time. So this is like Microsoft—

Leo Laporte [00:28:14]:
Would you like fries with that, Paul?

Paul Thurrott [00:28:16]:
Yeah, exactly. Except what they're asking is, would you like Alona in your car when you're going through the drive-through for a hamburger? It's like, what do you— what? It doesn't have anything to do with anything.

Leo Laporte [00:28:25]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:26]:
It's not even related. This is Microsoft pot calling the kettle black. I mean, Microsoft is—

Leo Laporte [00:28:32]:
I mean, we were talking about this on Sunday. Devendra Hardwicke said, yeah, when I worked for CBS and they had downloads.com, they used to— right? They started doing this when CBS bought it. They said, oh, look, we can make some money. We're going to install crap. And the vendors said, what are you doing? Uh, you're, you know, they ruined the user experience. Oh, wait a minute, maybe it was, uh, I can't remember, it might have been Jason Snell. Anyway, it was somebody. Uh, but this is a long-standing tradition in computing.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:01]:
Oh yeah, no, I mean, this is, yeah, I mean, it's not good.

Leo Laporte [00:29:04]:
And I think LG got the idea from its TVs because, right, this, my standing advice to people is do not connect your smart TV to the internet because you will be sorry. It's gonna send pictures of you Every 30 seconds of what you're watching.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:19]:
It bugs me all the time. Like, you really— you should sign in, you know, let's get this thing going. Yeah, I'm like, no, I'm just trying to watch TV.

Leo Laporte [00:29:26]:
So, you know, it's the LG TVs guys said, hey, you know, this would be good, we could do this on the monitors too.

Chris Hoffman [00:29:32]:
Well, the, the funny thing is they would have basically gotten away with it, you know, if it was just, uh, adware that comes— a program that comes pre-installed on computers, or was an optional install. If it was just bloatware, they would have got away with it, you know. Like, if I'm working at LG and working on this team, it's like, well, of course we can add an app to our pro— an ad to our app. What's the issue? Like, the only issue was that it was automatically installed. And, and, but it, it, it— I was also thinking about the Sony rootkit thing. It's actually crazy. Like, it was crazy that you could plug in an audio CD— plug in— insert an audio CD and you would get a rootkit.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:05]:
And get a rootkit on your computer.

Chris Hoffman [00:30:07]:
Without it asking. Windows just said, whatever you want, CD, absolutely. And it's crazy that if you plug in a monitor, Windows will just download whatever the manufacturer wants. It could pop up and say, hey, well, LG recommends It's an application.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:18]:
I feel like part of the contract there is that if it— however, if it is going through Windows Update, let's say, like, you know, I appreciate that Microsoft wants to centralize this stuff, but there's a promise there about the quality of those updates and that it's not going to be used as a vector for malware. That's one of the reasons you would go through Windows Update, right? So they'd either— either LG was very sneaky about this, or Microsoft literally is just not paying attention. You know, it's what— it could be both.

Leo Laporte [00:30:45]:
I don't know. Incidentally, let me point out, you're still talking about the Sony rootkit 21 years later.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:53]:
Huge reputation damage. That's the canonical example of this, right?

Chris Hoffman [00:30:56]:
It's the same thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:56]:
It's the same thing.

Chris Hoffman [00:30:57]:
You know, Microsoft recently—

Paul Thurrott [00:30:58]:
Mark Russinovich, by the way, is the one who found that out.

Leo Laporte [00:30:59]:
This damages your reputation. This is a very stupid thing to do. Nope, people aren't going to forget that LG did this.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:07]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:31:08]:
Right or no?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:10]:
Yeah, no, you're right.

Leo Laporte [00:31:10]:
I mean, you wrote a whole book on how to de-enshitify Windows. Now, without LG and people like that and HP doing these things, you wouldn't have a book.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:18]:
De-enshitifying Windows is like the TSA. You're always fighting the last battle, you know, because these losers always find some other new way to do something wrong, you know. Yeah, yeah, well, it's a big problem.

Leo Laporte [00:31:31]:
I'm glad that— I'm glad Microsoft put its foot down, but you make an excellent point, Chris. It's a little hypocritical since how's this different from what— It's not a little hypocritical. OEM does.

Chris Hoffman [00:31:40]:
There was a PR crisis, but again, like Microsoft did not say LG violated a rule. Is this allowed? Could LG have said, no, we're, we're doing it?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:49]:
Like, you know, delivering an ad though through Windows Update, if that's what happened, that, um, if that's not somehow a rule, it, it's, it is today. You know, I'm sure they changed the rules. That's crazy.

Chris Hoffman [00:32:00]:
The actual LG Display app, whatever it's called, is updated through the Windows Store. So they updated their Windows Store app with an ad that in theory By the way, another place Microsoft supposedly has oversight, you know.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:12]:
Well, I will—

Leo Laporte [00:32:13]:
in your defense, Chris, I will say you are not advocating this. You're just pointing out there is a certain amount of hypocrisy here, right?

Chris Hoffman [00:32:21]:
I mean, it's like, like, at what level is the— you know, they're not— they didn't just upload an ad to Windows Update. They're just, you know, there's this kind of cascading failure. So for example, right, not to drag Razer through the mud, but I found an interesting story when I was researching this a few years ago. Razer had basically a security vulnerability in their installer. You'd plug in a Razer mouse, the installer would open up, and then you could get to an administrator command prompt from that installer. It had a privilege escalation vulnerability and they patched it. But that's the thing that this creates. What hardware devices are out there that you plug into a Windows computer and now you have administrator access? Have we audited all these, every mouse and keyboard and display and peripheral?

Paul Thurrott [00:33:00]:
Oh yeah.

Chris Hoffman [00:33:01]:
In the ecosystem. Like, if you want— if you say this is too much, I don't like it, from what I looked at, you have to have a group policy setting to turn this off. So unless you can find some registry settings somewhere, you have to upgrade to Windows Professional and enable a group policy setting to say like, just don't let manufacturers install stuff on my computer when I plug in devices. And that's, that's, that's crazy. And this is, this is like why people complain about Windows, right? Like, if I'm using Linux, if I'm using a Mac, I can plug in a display and the manufacturer does not get a say that We're downloading an app right now. That's just how it is.

Leo Laporte [00:33:35]:
There is no plug and play at all on, on those devices, right?

Chris Hoffman [00:33:38]:
It just doesn't work. No.

Leo Laporte [00:33:40]:
It's on you to, if you want a driver, to go out and get it. Um, yeah. All right. I need to, uh, pause because we're going to take a break, but, uh, it's great to have you. Chris Hoffman's here, PC Magazine senior writer for software. I guess Windows is software. That counts.

Chris Hoffman [00:33:59]:
It is.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:59]:
I cover a lot of operating systems.

Chris Hoffman [00:34:02]:
It is, is very—

Leo Laporte [00:34:03]:
did you know today is the 11th birthday of Windows 10? Did you know that?

Chris Hoffman [00:34:11]:
I did not know that.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:11]:
I forgot that, but I forget Patch Tuesday every month too.

Leo Laporte [00:34:14]:
So yeah, I have it in my calendar so that I will go on Facebook and say happy birthday, Windows. So I think you should do the same.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:21]:
It was a—

Leo Laporte [00:34:21]:
yeah, that was a weird July release, but then, you know, Yeah, I just was kind of shocked when I saw that, that Windows 10 is 11 years old. That kind of—

Paul Thurrott [00:34:31]:
it's 11.

Leo Laporte [00:34:32]:
Yeah, that surprises me that it's that old and still going.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:36]:
How do you think I feel? We're all old. What are you gonna do?

Leo Laporte [00:34:41]:
You know, I am 10 years old now. Uh, no, 11. I just don't have any fingers. Yeah, I don't have enough fingers. We're gonna pause. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott, Chris Hoffman. I take it Mary Jo Foley said no.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:55]:
Yeah, sorry. I mean, I, I had to ask.

Leo Laporte [00:34:59]:
You know who does like you? Steve Gibson.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:03]:
Oh, good.

Leo Laporte [00:35:04]:
Yeah, Steve, because, you know, next week we're going to be doing the show from Black Hat in Las Vegas. The kind folks at ThreatLocker, one of our sponsors, have asked— invited us to sit in their booth. There won't be a PA system. There won't be places to sit. So—

Paul Thurrott [00:35:19]:
Sorry, are we going to be like booth babes? Is that what you just said?

Leo Laporte [00:35:21]:
We're the booth babes.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:24]:
Congratulations. Nice.

Leo Laporte [00:35:25]:
Uh, Windows Weekly will be, uh, first thing in the morning as soon as doors open, and we will stream it live, but you'll also be able to download it as usual. And then we're going to take a break, and then there'll be Steve Gibson. But Steve wanted me to tell you and Richard that he'd love it if you stick around and we could do a kind of a roundtable Security Now.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:41]:
Oh boy. If you want. You just asked me to work double. Um, but no, that's fine.

Leo Laporte [00:35:48]:
Without extra pay, I might add.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:50]:
Yeah, no, I got— that was understood. Um, Yeah, I mean, I'm sure Richard would be happy.

Leo Laporte [00:35:55]:
If you were a booth babe, you wouldn't do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:58]:
I'll just walk around with a number, you know, but like, you know, like the ad breaker.

Leo Laporte [00:36:01]:
One of those boxing— round 1. Um, anyway, it'd be kind of fun. I think, you know what, I think Steve's for some reason worried about content. Like, but we're going to be at Black Hat. There will be plenty to talk about.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:15]:
I was going to say, the content will be between the time I got off the plane and the time I sat down here, how many ways was I hacked? Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:36:23]:
Exactly.

Chris Hoffman [00:36:25]:
I'm gonna—

Leo Laporte [00:36:25]:
so Lisa's been very nervous about going to Black Hat, the big hacker con. Have you been to Black Hat, Chris? Do you?

Chris Hoffman [00:36:32]:
I have not. People from—

Leo Laporte [00:36:33]:
Neither have I.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:33]:
I'm using my Windows phone, so I know I can't be hacked.

Leo Laporte [00:36:36]:
Yeah. So Lisa's saying, well, what should we do? What should we do? And Russell, our wonderful IT expert, who's brilliant, said just turn off your Bluetooth. If you're really nervous, turn off your Wi-Fi too and just use cell and you'll be fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:52]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:36:53]:
Um, I'm gonna leave everything on. I'm gonna take a chance and we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:59]:
You're not using like a graphene phone yet?

Leo Laporte [00:37:01]:
I mean, I do have graphene. I have a Pixel 10 with graphene on it, but I mean, you know what, that wouldn't be a bad— I, I'm Mr. YOLO. I love taking chances, so hack me.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:13]:
You like that, uh, Far Side cartoon with the deer that had the, uh, birthmark that looks like a target? And it's like, bummer of a birthmark, Hal. He's like, I'm just gonna do this.

Leo Laporte [00:37:23]:
It's not a good birthmark on a deer. Oh, Gary Larson. Gosh darn it, I miss him. Uh, all right, let's take a break. Anyway, come out and see us if you're gonna be at Black Hat. We'll be at the ThreatLocker booth. I'll be there all day. Uh, and maybe we can entice Paul and Richard to stay all day too.

Leo Laporte [00:37:39]:
Maybe if I get a good bottle of whiskey. Oh, whiskey. We could— I don't know if we could have whiskey on the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:47]:
I'm sure Rich would be happy to do this.

Leo Laporte [00:37:49]:
It'd be fun. We don't get, you know, we don't get everybody together that often. I think it'd be a lot of fun.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:37:54]:
Anyway, just a thought. Now on with the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:58]:
Well, uh, so I was gonna say this is, this is really crisp, but, um, you know, Microsoft is starting to— well, the industry is starting to release 8GB Windows laptops again like it's the 1990s or something.

Leo Laporte [00:38:10]:
Because of the RAM crisis, right?

Chris Hoffman [00:38:13]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:38:14]:
It's—

Paul Thurrott [00:38:16]:
but anyway, Chris came up with what I think is a really interesting way to test that. I'm curious to hear about this.

Chris Hoffman [00:38:22]:
So while I'm at PCMag now, and, uh, I, I, I did a lot of laptop reviews for PC World over the last few years, and most of them were at least 16 gigs. I had one 8 gigabyte laptop I reviewed for PC World like a year ago, whenever it was, and I couldn't believe it at the time. I was like, just spend another $30 or something And get more RAM because it's not good. But obviously RAM has become a lot more expensive now. So—

Leo Laporte [00:38:47]:
It's more than $30 now, Chris. Right.

Chris Hoffman [00:38:51]:
Yeah, I mean, like, the, the year-to-year Surface laptop prices are— increases are nuts. But, um, you know, Microsoft themselves are now releasing an 8GB RAM Surface laptop, and it's out there, and The Verge reviewed it and said it's not enough for Windows. And I was looking around a lot of this, a lot of this, and there's a lot of discourse. Some people say it's actually fine, some people say it's unusable, and like there's, there's 2 sides kind of talking past each other. And I was really curious, like, well, how good is it? So first of all, I don't have an 8GB Windows laptop. I have a desktop, it has 16GB sticks in it, so I can't really make it 8GB. But you can test this yourself actually in Windows. If you go to msconfig, there's an old troubleshooting option that lets you limit your computer to whatever RAM you select.

Chris Hoffman [00:39:38]:
So if you plug in 8 gigs—

Paul Thurrott [00:39:40]:
Like, my computer's working too well, could we screw this up somehow?

Leo Laporte [00:39:44]:
Yes.

Chris Hoffman [00:39:44]:
Well, it's a troubleshooting— I, I, you could, you know, a developer could use it to— well, actually developers will probably have to start using it to test how their applications perform in these 8 gig machines that are everywhere. But, um, you know, you can test that and you can set that and reboot. And I did. And, you know, it actually works. Windows works with 8 gigabytes of RAM. If you just want the desktop and File Explorer, you're good. In fact, you can even open a web browser and have one or maybe 2 tabs, but don't— I don't know about the second one. Maybe 2 might be—

Leo Laporte [00:40:16]:
One tab?

Chris Hoffman [00:40:17]:
Well, actually, yes. Like, it's that tight. Now, the interesting thing is kind of in the middle, right? And this is, I think, why maybe both sides don't understand each other on this issue, is that if you start opening tabs and programs, you have 6 browser tabs open, It actually is usable. Like, it doesn't appear to be swapping horrendously. It is slightly slower though. Like, it's slightly slower because there's just not enough RAM. So it's doing swapping and it's really efficient at the swapping. And then, you know, once you open a lot of programs, it's slow.

Chris Hoffman [00:40:53]:
Like, you Alt+Tab to Slack and it takes 1 second to come back. And this is on a very desktop with a fast CPU. But in the interesting spot is in the middle where You know, if I was not a geek and I had a Windows 10 computer that was 8 years old and I bought a new 8 gigabyte Windows 8— Windows 11 laptop, I might just think that's how slow modern computers are. I'm like, well, Chrome is just kind of slow, Windows is kind of slow.

Leo Laporte [00:41:18]:
Right.

Chris Hoffman [00:41:18]:
That's just how it is. It's usable. And, you know, if I was working in an office and they were paying me by the hour and they said, here's your 8 gig machine, it's like, fine, you know, I'll move slow because you're paying for my time. But the reality is, if you have that 8-gig machine and you want to use a few programs or you want to use a few browser tabs, it is just slowed down by the 8 gigs. Even in a best-case scenario, unless you're using 1 or 2 web pages at a time, it is slower. Windows actually does not pop up and tell you, hey, you're swapping. You can look at the Task Manager. Back in the day, I'm going to date myself.

Leo Laporte [00:41:52]:
Yeah.

Chris Hoffman [00:41:52]:
Back in the day, you would be using an ancient hard drive and you would hear it swapping, grinding away, you see the light, You'd hear the hard drive. You knew that the swapping was happening. Now it's like, it's just a little slow. Like, it's not obvious what's happening if you're not a geek. And, um, it, it's just, it just isn't enough. I'm sorry, you can use one web page at a time, it's fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:13]:
But no, I, I— 8 gigs is not enough. I— full stop. And look, maybe some of the work they're doing this year to make Windows better will help a little bit, but there's a real future-proofing problem here. There's also, by the way, Um, you know, I don't know how old that computer you used to do that on is, but when you think about new laptops coming out the gate with 8 gigs of RAM, they're running new low-end processors, right?

Chris Hoffman [00:42:38]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:39]:
So one of the things I do— I will review later this summer is, um, I don't remember the brand, the model, but it's a Lenovo laptop running like the Intel Wildcat chipset, which is what we used to call Celeron and/or Pentium, I don't remember. Um, I don't know what— I think they just call it Intel. It might even just be Intel Core something, I don't remember, but it's really low end. The thing is, that laptop though is going to come with 16 gigs of RAM, so I'm also not going to get that exact experience. But, um, you know, look, every time 8 gigs of RAM comes up now, it's like, oh, the MacBook Air runs fine. It's okay. But the Mac— macOS may be slightly more efficient than Windows, but I don't think it's like twice as efficient. Maybe it's 30% or 25%, whatever it is.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:25]:
But you're going to want— if you're actually using a computer, maybe not Linux, but who would use Linux with 8 gigs of RAM? I mean, if you're actually using a computer and this is what you do all day long, you need 16 gigs of RAM or more. But there is this new, newish notion here. This is what the Chromebook was trying to address. It's what the MacBook Neo addresses, I think. And it's what these stupid 8-gig laptops are going to address, which is your primary device is not the computer, it's probably a phone, you know, and which is the case for so many, probably billions of people really, but whatever number of people. And, um, every once in a while you need the bigger screen, you know. And I mean, someday that will just be a screen and you'll probably just plug your phone into it. And I know you can do that today, but, um, maybe it becomes more sophisticated.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:10]:
But, you know, you'd get this thing because it's relatively inexpensive, it has a bigger screen, it has a full-size keyboard, you can type. And you do that one thing, whatever it is, which, you know, and as Chris was saying, is you can do one thing, you know, you can do one thing, no problem. Um, but if you're doing a lot of research and you're browsing the web and you get multiple apps, it's— no, 8 gigs of RAM is not going to cut it. I'm sorry, it's just— this is no way. I don't— I feel like I don't even have to review one of these things to know that. But whatever. I mean, I—

Leo Laporte [00:44:37]:
Apple, uh, when it put out the, the Neo, which is an Apple bestseller, is 8 gigs. And but years ago, didn't they say, oh, 8 gigs is fine with our M1 processor? You don't need—

Paul Thurrott [00:44:48]:
Yeah, they did. But they also switched to 16 gig as a minimum. I don't remember the timeframe, but they did it before Microsoft did. And then Microsoft has not still, I should say. Microsoft has a 16 gig minimum on Copilot Plus PC. So when I look at those 2 things, I say, well, this is the modern minimum, the realistic minimum, not the minimum stated on the spec sheet where it's like you could, you couldn't, Windows 11 supposedly supports 4 gigabytes of RAM. How bad's the component crisis going to get? I almost jokingly, when we were talking about this before the show started, I almost jokingly asked if you were able to use Windows Ready Drive. Do you remember this thing where you could plug in like a USB key into the computer and it would act as cache? So it would help with that thrashing effect.

Leo Laporte [00:45:30]:
Oh my God. How slow would that be?

Paul Thurrott [00:45:32]:
That'd be terrible. Well, I don't think it's— I bet it's not even it. Well, it's Windows. You never know. There's a lot of vestigial stuff going on in Windows, but Um, well, no, you would see— I— there's no— I think it's going to be gone. But, um, but that was—

Leo Laporte [00:45:44]:
I forgot about that.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:45]:
Yeah, that was, you know, at the time Vista was very resource-heavy, relatively speaking. So this was a way to get around that if you had an existing laptop that you upgraded from XP and would have immediately noticed it did not run as well. Um, you could have used, you know, everyone— well, not everyone, most people would have like a, whatever they were at the time, a USB-A Stick of some kind and you could use it. There's cash. I don't know, it's— I guess the need drives this.

Leo Laporte [00:46:14]:
I don't know.

Chris Hoffman [00:46:15]:
It's interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:46:15]:
Yeah, they don't have a choice.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:17]:
Mm-hmm.

Leo Laporte [00:46:19]:
It's interesting to think, are these cheaper though, Chris? Right, they got to be cheaper.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:23]:
Well, cheaper than—

Chris Hoffman [00:46:23]:
I mean, cheaper than what, right? Like, not— it's not cheaper than the 16 gig machine was last year, but it is definitely cheaper than the 16 gig machine is this year. But I think it's—

Leo Laporte [00:46:33]:
Every company's going to face this, right? This is a Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:37]:
So the thing— here's the thing. Um, first of all, if you are going to run 8 gigs of RAM, I suspect— I've not tried this, this is just off the top of my head— but a Snapdragon X2 would be better, you know?

Leo Laporte [00:46:46]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:46]:
Or a Snapdragon— or Qualcomm eventually is going to come out, remember, with the Snapdragon C, I think they're calling it. We'll see if that's garbage or not. We don't know. You know, the Wildcat stuff is the Intel equivalent. Um, there are— you have to look around. Sometimes it's a sale thing, but Um, I, I— this is not a recent thing that, you know, a $500, if you could get it at the time, Windows laptop was always going to be garbage. Um, and that what you really wanted to get is close to, you know, in the $800 to $1,000 range. You can still buy actually decent new computers, uh, not many, but there are a couple between $800 and $1,000.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:21]:
But really that's shifted upward mostly to the— you want to call it $1,200 to $1,500 range, probably. You need 16 gigs of RAM. I mean, I'm, you know, if you're going to really use the thing, because you're not just using it today, you're using it for the next several years, whatever the time frame is. You don't— you think it's bad now, I mean, wait till you actually use it for a long time. It's only going to get worse. So, and you know, this is one thing, Chris, again, because I'll keep just repeating myself, we talk about on the show all the time, is one of the— on the other side of this spectrum, one of the things that's really nice that's happening in hardware, PC hardware these days, is laptops are becoming a lot more repairable and user serviceable, right? But the one piece that is not never, but almost never included in that is the RAM. The RAM is almost always soldered on or part of that SoC, uh, you know, whatever that is, daughter card or whatever. Um, every once in a while I'll see a laptop where you can actually swap out if they have like CODIMMs or whatever they're called now.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:21]:
Which is awesome because then you could say, look, I'm going to buy one with less RAM than I really want, but maybe down the road there'll be a sale or the prices will finally stabilize and you can upgrade it. But most, I mean, 90-something percent, high 90%, you can't. And that's tough because there's nothing you can do. Just buy a new computer.

Chris Hoffman [00:48:42]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:43]:
Which I think we can all agree is ecologically sound. It's fine.

Leo Laporte [00:48:45]:
Well, I think, I mean, we've already seen PC sales dropping, right? I think we're gonna now see—

Paul Thurrott [00:48:50]:
well, yes, smartphone sales are dropping. All, all the hardware stuff is dropping.

Leo Laporte [00:48:55]:
Yeah, I mean, people are price sensitive.

Chris Hoffman [00:48:59]:
I think you're right. Long term, we probably— unless this— unless RAM gets a lot cheaper, we probably are going to see kind of more device consolidation. Why wouldn't you just want— like, if RAM is this expensive, why do I want a phone with this much RAM and a laptop with this much RAM and a game console with this much RAM. That's a lot of RAM when we could probably just power a display from a sufficiently powerful phone. We could today, honestly. It can be done. The software exists. It's a little janky.

Chris Hoffman [00:49:24]:
But, you know, there's going to— it's probably a better solution long term than 8 gigabytes of RAM in Windows or 4 gigabytes.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:33]:
Yeah. In other words, this may serve to accelerate a trend that might have already been happening, whatever that trend might be toward, like a phone that can act as a hybrid device where you can plug it into a screen and a keyboard and stuff.

Chris Hoffman [00:49:44]:
Well, if only there was such a thing as a Windows Phone, they would be well positioned.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:49]:
Well, it's built into Android now. I mean, I don't know that it—

Leo Laporte [00:49:56]:
Apple.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:57]:
The way Apple moves. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:49:58]:
Apple announced a lease-to-own plan because they realized this fall we're going to be charging a lot of money for some hardware and people might need a loan.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:09]:
I have a problem with that. I mean, I appreciate that they're doing something like this, but it's It's like Klarna, which I hate, and it's rent-to-own. And actually, it's not even rent-to-own. I don't know why did I just say that. It's really not. It's, it's a lease, like a car lease. You don't own it at the end. You can pay for it.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:24]:
But the thing is—

Leo Laporte [00:50:24]:
Right, you could buy it out.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:25]:
The people that need to use this lease thing, you know, tend to be, uh, less affluent. They're the type of people that are not going to have the hundreds of dollars at the end to pay. If they could have afforded a couple hundred bucks up front, they would I guess we're all betting that we're all going to be better off in the future or something, but the more likely outcome for these folks, which is really unfortunate, is that they just keep going with the lease. Since they don't own this device, they're like, well, I'll just keep the payment going. I'll get a new phone in 2 years or 3, whatever the timeframe is depending on the device. And I'm sorry, but that really stinks for those people. I hate that that's the only option they have.

Chris Hoffman [00:51:05]:
Yeah, it's the modern version of a contract though, you know.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:09]:
Mm-hmm.

Chris Hoffman [00:51:10]:
They're back.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:11]:
I know, but, uh, I don't know, I just, I don't know, it's just, it, this feels like victimizing the poor to me. It's not, it's not great. I mean, some people will use it properly, so to speak, and, or maybe you can handle whatever it is, but, you know, I keep— you can pay it off early if you want to, like, whatever, with no fees.

Leo Laporte [00:51:31]:
Your analogy to a car lease is apt because really what your payments are are the depreciation.

Chris Hoffman [00:51:38]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:38]:
So yeah, the difference between a car lease and this Apple thing is that the payment you make at the end is incommensurate with the remaining value of the vehicle. You actually— like, you're not paying off the remainder that you owe, so to speak. You're paying more. Like, they kind of get you there a little bit depending on the car. This one, it is the amount. So if it's a $1,000 device and over 2 years you pay $600 or $800, whatever, you owe the difference. Like, you don't owe more than that. Like, they're not gonna get you at the end that way.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:08]:
But if you wanna send it back and it's not in perfect condition, what's gonna happen then, right? I mean, I've had Apple reject trade-in devices because they have little dings on them, which—

Leo Laporte [00:52:18]:
Well, and here's the interesting thing. It's not really a thing they can fix. You know, I don't know, but when we talked about it on MacBreak Weekly yesterday, Christina said, incidentally, it won't be Apple inspecting this.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:29]:
It'll be Klarna.

Leo Laporte [00:52:30]:
That's what I mean.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:30]:
It's the third party. And that's the tricky bit. And yes.

Leo Laporte [00:52:35]:
Do you trust Klarna to give you every penny that iPhone is worth?

Paul Thurrott [00:52:38]:
No, I don't. And the previous system that Apple had, the iPhone upgrade program, had AppleCare as part of it.

Leo Laporte [00:52:48]:
Oh yeah, you don't get AppleCare.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:49]:
And that makes sense. There's no AppleCare here. So if you want that, if you wanna protect the device with some kind of a, you know, a protection service or whatever, you know, you have to pay for that yourself. If you don't do that, and they won't— again, the types of people unfortunately who are going to get into this thing are not going to pay. They're like, oh no, let me pay $99 every year for AppleCare. Um, are gonna use the device like normal people, and then 2 years or 3 or whatever the time frame is on the device, and then you hand back this crumpled mass of metal that looks nothing like the thing you bought, and it's like, yeah, this is worth 17 cents.

Leo Laporte [00:53:19]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:19]:
You know, I— and you may owe them money. Even if you're like, no, I'm just going to send it back, they're like, great, you owe us $200 now. And not to buy it, just to pay off the damage you did to this thing. We're going to see what this looks like. It's going to— I— this is very— I, I think I— I'm not sure how I wrote it exactly, but it's like un-Apple-y, you know? Apple is really about— well, whatever anyone thinks of the company, I mean, they do have like standards for quality and so forth.

Chris Hoffman [00:53:43]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:44]:
And this is a third party, and I I don't know. I don't like the sound of this.

Leo Laporte [00:53:50]:
Again, I also think this is to be— they're forced to by, uh, the current prices in RAM and hard drives.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:57]:
Yeah, the only thing I can defend them on is they're not unlike, say, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, a couple other companies. They're not directly responsible for these hardware price increases, right? They don't have a big, you know, a big— they're not— they don't contribute that way, um, if you want to say it that way. Um, you know, they don't have a tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in CapEx spending on AI infrastructure like these other companies do. So they're not, they're not a prime contributor anyway, um, to that stuff. So, you know, that's like damning with faint praise, I guess. But they're, they're not that part of, you know, part of that problem, I guess. I love Apple is what I'm trying to say, Leo, and so much.

Leo Laporte [00:54:36]:
And I, I know, really wish— I know that, Paul. You know, you try to hide it, but it's so clear.

Chris Hoffman [00:54:44]:
Just, just as a, just as a tip in terms of trade-ins though, like Apple, like if you're trading an Apple device, if you go to the Apple Store and do it in person, like that works great. If you mail it, you get the same bad trade-in experiences basically any manufacturer. So, right, it would be nice if they had the kind of in-store trade-in, but, um, if anyone's ever got to trade an Apple device, try to do it in an Apple Store. Don't mail it.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:07]:
I had an iPad Air with AppleCare, and I traded it in for an iPad Pro after about a year. And it had a couple of scratches on the corners, which is the type of thing Apple could fix very easily. And they sent it back. They just didn't accept it. It was like $450 of trade-in value that I did not get. And it's like, guys, what the— like, that's nonsense.

Leo Laporte [00:55:30]:
Do it in person is what you're saying.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:31]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:55:32]:
Although, uh, the other thing to consider which makes this such a complicated calculation is sometimes the trade-in from your carrier is even better than anybody.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:42]:
How do you know though? It's so hard.

Leo Laporte [00:55:45]:
Well, you won't know till you do it, right? Uh, so it's a very hard calculation to make up front whether you should do this lease thing or not. It's tempting if you like— I mean, I'm sure— I don't know about you guys, but I get a new iPhone every year.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:03]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:03]:
So in that case, it might make sense. It is an interest-free loan in effect.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:09]:
Well, the only problem is that—

Leo Laporte [00:56:10]:
If your phone is pristine when you turn it back in. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:13]:
So what you're doing is a 2-year term and then you, I guess you can upgrade in a year, right? And is there no penalty?

Leo Laporte [00:56:20]:
The payment just continues on.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:22]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, in this age of us paying for everything every month forever for the rest of our lives, that sounds like an awesome thing to add to that list.

Chris Hoffman [00:56:30]:
You know, you'll never own a phone again.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:32]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:33]:
Uh, yeah, I don't really—

Paul Thurrott [00:56:35]:
I, you know, people talk about like, you know, you don't own that whatever digital content you bought. It's like, yeah, that's not— I, that's—

Leo Laporte [00:56:42]:
I don't even own my house. You don't own anything.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:46]:
And by the way, everything I own is temporary anyway. I'm going to die. Who cares? But I— but what I do care about is all the— but all the stuff you're paying for every month, right? That was— and that's an effort I I used to do this all the time, but a couple of months ago, I stripped down a bunch of the services I pay for. Because all of us, I think, have some number of things we don't use or barely use, and you pay for it every month. And if you just looked at that one bill, you're like, well, it's only $10 to whatever, $30 a month, whatever it is. You're like, yeah, but I have 18 of them.

Leo Laporte [00:57:18]:
I should look at my bill every month. I looked at a bill and I said, what is Shadow? Why is Shadow $20? And I, and I realized I've been paid— do you remember Shadow PC where you could have a—

Paul Thurrott [00:57:29]:
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:57:30]:
Remember like 4 years ago we talked about it, or 3 years, and I signed up for it? I've been paying $20 a month for 3 years, never used it once.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:39]:
So my—

Leo Laporte [00:57:40]:
this is great.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:42]:
So a year and a half ago, we went up to visit my son who's deaf but has cochlear implants, etc. He was talking about he heard the Apple Music had this thing that would be good for him. And I was like, dude, you could switch right now. We get his part of Apple One. He's like, well, I have all these playlists.

Leo Laporte [00:57:57]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:58]:
Yeah. So I was like, all right. I said, I'll pay for this thing called SongShift for like a month. And that's a good thing for all year. Love it.

Leo Laporte [00:58:05]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:05]:
Works good. I've been paying for it ever since. I've never used it once since that day. He transferred all his playlists in the car. Oh my God. I'm going to go check. We were driving somewhere. He did it in 15 minutes, worked great, and now I still pay for it.

Leo Laporte [00:58:18]:
Still paying for it.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:20]:
Yeah, I'm a genius. Definitely listen to me when it comes to advice.

Leo Laporte [00:58:24]:
Look at your bill every month, kids. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:28]:
Some of it's hard because, you know, like when I asked my wife— my wife does, handles our money— and I asked her to do this whenever that was, 2, 3 months ago, and she's like, we have like 17 entries every month that just say Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:58:40]:
Yeah, that's a problem, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:58:42]:
Because you Some of those, I mean, you can go look, I guess, and sometimes they'll bundle things together to make it better for them for paying credit card fees, whatever. But I don't know. You really got to be at the edge.

Leo Laporte [00:58:55]:
When I saw Shadow, I thought, this must be— this is something evil. And I had to search for it because that's all it said on the bill was Shadow. And finally I saw, oh, I remember that I subscribed. And I said, I must have an account. I logged in and it said, yeah, you've got a virtual PC. You've had it for 3 years.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:16]:
It's just sitting there doing nothing. We love you. You are our favorite customer. Oh my God.

Leo Laporte [00:59:20]:
Yeah, exactly. I feel terrible.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:22]:
That's the business model, right? They're—

Leo Laporte [00:59:24]:
Oh, sure.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:26]:
Well, what was the exception to this? I got an email. I can't remember the service, but some service emailed me recently to say, hey, just let you know. Your thing is running out pretty soon. If you don't do anything, we're going to rebill you. And I was like, man, that should be the law for everything. Everything should do this.

Leo Laporte [00:59:44]:
But not everybody does it, do they?

Paul Thurrott [00:59:45]:
No, they rely on you just not noticing.

Leo Laporte [00:59:50]:
We do that with Club Twit, by the way. We let you know, right? Don't we, Patrick?

Paul Thurrott [00:59:55]:
Yeah. That was when we switched our system at throughout.com. We moved to something where we'll do the same because You know, people get this bill suddenly and they're like, what is this?

Leo Laporte [01:00:07]:
Yeah. Sigh.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:09]:
Okay, well, this week I'm complaining about subscription services. Uh, all right, we have one more hardware story.

Leo Laporte [01:00:18]:
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:24]:
It's Chris.

Chris Hoffman [01:00:25]:
Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:26]:
Okay, it went to me and I was like, nope.

Leo Laporte [01:00:28]:
It's all right, I'm just clicking buttons at random, Chris. Just ignore me.

Chris Hoffman [01:00:33]:
So the Copilot key, everyone's favorite new hardware feature. There's a really fascinating story this week that Microsoft is testing a do-nothing option that just does nothing when you press the Copilot key. It's really fascinating. I mean, like, we're years out now, and, you know, there's, there's a fascinating, um, article that Microsoft published on the accessibility website that says, you know, Some people have been having issues because this replaced the right Control key, which people need, which it can on some machines replace the right Control key or the Menu key, which people needed sometimes for accessibility reasons. So we're going to eventually add later this year an option to let you make it the Control key again. It's like, well, that's good, but I mean, that happened years ago. I mean—

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

Paul Thurrott [01:01:20]:
So, well, I mean, the history behind this is kind of interesting because obviously 2 years ago Copilot+ PCs come out, they have this key. You're like, great, that's what we need, a way. I'm a sloppy enough typist, I'll hit that key by mistake all day long. They're relying on this, right?

Leo Laporte [01:01:33]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:34]:
But then I think it was later that year or maybe the following January, somewhere in that timeframe, this is going to go out on lots of PCs. At the time, the way it was phrased, it seemed like it was going to be some PCs. It's like every PC as far as I can tell. It's just a Copilot Plus PC, a key is there. Yeah.

Chris Hoffman [01:01:50]:
But prior to the Copilot Plus PCs, I was still seeing that key. That key predates Copilot Plus PCs. That was on some of the original Intel things. with the dinky NPUs that never got—

Leo Laporte [01:01:59]:
It was the menu key, right?

Chris Hoffman [01:02:00]:
Copilot Plus PC features.

Leo Laporte [01:02:02]:
Um, wasn't it? Okay, wasn't it the menu key?

Chris Hoffman [01:02:04]:
I reviewed many machines like that. So it's—

Leo Laporte [01:02:06]:
So here's an interesting—

Paul Thurrott [01:02:07]:
Well, no, I mean, there have been other keys, but I mean, as far as like, but it being the Copilot with that logo earlier, it's like 18. Well, 2 years ago for Copilot Plus PC, whatever it was.

Leo Laporte [01:02:17]:
But I think they remapped the menu key. I think it was the menu key.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:21]:
No, it's not. So if you actually— then, and the only reason I know that is Before they gave you a way to do anything with it, you could use— there's a PowerToy called Key Remapper, which we're gonna talk about later. But one of the things you can do there is have it— I would have it— I would just look at the keyboard and be like, all right, what's the key to the right of that key? So it's on this key. Well, this keyboard doesn't have a thing. It's usually a left arrow key, not always. I just map it to that. That way when I'm sloppy typing, I can, you know, it just does left arrow, right?

Chris Hoffman [01:02:48]:
Smart.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:49]:
Now it doing nothing would be better. But okay, fine. Now, at some point, Microsoft—

Chris Hoffman [01:02:53]:
So I—

Paul Thurrott [01:02:54]:
Well, hold on one sec. I'm sorry. I just wanna say, like, Microsoft partially addressed this, right? So at some point, there's a— if you go into the Settings app, there's a— it's probably in Accessibility or something, but there's a keyboard. Let me see if I can find this thing. I should probably just look up keyboard, I guess. But there's a keyboard page in Settings, and there is a little dropdown for the Copilot key, and you can set it to do a couple of different things. Like, it can run search instead. It can run Copilot, obviously.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:20]:
I can't remember what the third one is, but do nothing is not one of those options. And when I saw that, I was like, do nothing needs to be one of those options, right? So I would just set it to be like unassigned. You can unassign it like it doesn't do anything.

Leo Laporte [01:03:32]:
Make you Caps Lock or something.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:35]:
No, you just don't assign it to anything.

Leo Laporte [01:03:38]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:38]:
And if you hit that key, the Settings app will run and go to that page, highlight that interface and say, you need to pick something. So now imagine me sloppy typing, I'm writing an article, and the Settings app keeps popping up in my face as I'm typing. And it's like, guys, this is not a solution to this problem. So what Chris— the story Chris is alluding to is like, if they actually put that in there, which is honestly in keeping with a lot of the stuff they're doing this year with the pain point stuff, um, then there you go. That they find— so it only took them— it will take them 2 and a half years to solve a problem that they caused.

Leo Laporte [01:04:13]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:13]:
That they was so bad, it resulted in basically every PC hardware maker on earth changing their keyboards. Goddamn it. Like, seriously, think about that.

Chris Hoffman [01:04:25]:
It's, it's really fascinating. No other key in Windows that they ever— there's no option to do nothing when you press the Windows key. I mean, they have it.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:32]:
You can't turn it.

Chris Hoffman [01:04:33]:
You can't—

Paul Thurrott [01:04:34]:
you cannot turn off the Windows key. This is not a thing. It's not like a hidden thing. It's nothing. You can't do it. I mean, think about how amazing would it be if you were a fan of some other launcher like Microsoft makes in PowerToys, like PowerToys Run or Command, whatever it's called, the new one. I want that to launch when I hit the Windows key. No, you do not get to do that.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:57]:
That would be amazing.

Leo Laporte [01:04:58]:
You know, it is a weird key because I was trying to remap it. I wanted to make it my voice dictation key.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:06]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:05:07]:
And it does not behave like a normal key.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:10]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:05:10]:
So on Linux, you can see what it's doing. It's weird. It's doing—

Paul Thurrott [01:05:14]:
that's sending weird stuff. So in that part, the keyboard remapper, I just have to tap my head, but I believe it's function key 23, which does not exist for the most part. Right. Yeah. I mean, most people probably have 12, probably function 1 through 12 or something. Yeah, it's terrible.

Leo Laporte [01:05:33]:
That's what it—

Paul Thurrott [01:05:33]:
that's why you can't—

Leo Laporte [01:05:35]:
You know, most keys, there's a key down, key press down, and key press up event. There are 2 events, right? Down and up. This key sends all these different events. It's weird. It's just a weird— they've done something, and I think that's intentional. I think they want to keep you really—

Paul Thurrott [01:05:50]:
Want you to use Copilot. I don't know if you've heard this.

Leo Laporte [01:05:53]:
I think this is, uh, shockingly, I think this is intentional.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:58]:
Oh, it literally is intentional. Yeah, that's true.

Leo Laporte [01:06:01]:
Because I mean, I had this X1, this Lenovo with a Copilot key, which I don't— Linux is on it, so I don't need it. And I wanted to map it to something useful. I gave up. I finally used the Insert key instead.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:15]:
Oh, so I mean, if you want to look it up at some point, but I believe it's function key 23. So if that helps you remap it to something that—

Leo Laporte [01:06:21]:
Yeah, but it doesn't. It would if it was just a simple key down and key up, but It's got weird— it's sending weird—

Paul Thurrott [01:06:27]:
Oh, I see. I see what you're saying. Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:06:28]:
Yeah, it's not a normal—

Paul Thurrott [01:06:31]:
it's not a normal key.

Leo Laporte [01:06:32]:
It's not like your keys. Exactly. Yeah, it's—

Paul Thurrott [01:06:35]:
what does it say? Uh, now I'm looking at it, it's bugging me. It's F23.

Leo Laporte [01:06:42]:
F— there is no F20. Is there an F22?

Paul Thurrott [01:06:45]:
No, there isn't.

Leo Laporte [01:06:46]:
There's no—

Paul Thurrott [01:06:48]:
yeah, they picked something that purposely does not exist.

Leo Laporte [01:06:52]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:52]:
I know, it's crazy. All right, what a world.

Leo Laporte [01:06:56]:
Anyway, yeah, moving on.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:58]:
This has been a fun 2 years. Uh, a couple of app things because I don't— I didn't— wasn't sure where else to put this stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:07:06]:
But I think it's hysterical that they are testing a do-nothing function.

Chris Hoffman [01:07:10]:
We'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:07:10]:
They're not offering it, they're just going to test it.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:13]:
Slow-moving world that is Microsoft backtracking on their worst mistakes, you know. Well, they will get there eventually. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. But all right.

Leo Laporte [01:07:22]:
Sorry, I didn't mean to bring us back to that.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:24]:
It's just, it's an open wound.

Leo Laporte [01:07:25]:
It's fine.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:27]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:07:28]:
Moving right along. You want to talk about OneDrive Photos?

Chris Hoffman [01:07:34]:
Yeah. Apparently Windows PCs now have a OneDrive Photos app. It's news to me. I saw this news story earlier and then I opened my Start menu and I now have a OneDrive Photos app. which is separate from the existing Photos app. Now, the existing Photos app also allows you to see OneDrive Photos, as does the OneDrive Photos app, and OneDrive Photos also appear in File Explorer. Why there are now 2 Photos apps, I don't fully understand. Um, people are saying that Windows installed this.

Chris Hoffman [01:08:02]:
I think probably under the hood this is like part of the OneDrive installer package, like OneDrive updates separately from Windows.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:10]:
I saw this app Possibly a year or more ago.

Chris Hoffman [01:08:13]:
Really?

Paul Thurrott [01:08:14]:
On a computer, yeah. And it's— but now it seems like it's everywhere, like it's suddenly very common.

Chris Hoffman [01:08:19]:
Yeah, I opened it. It says it's a beta. Um, I don't understand why I would use it versus the normal Photos app. I don't— this is— it's, it's very strange. This is the kind of thing I think people complain about with Windows. Apple doesn't have— here's the Apple Photos app, iCloud Photos app, and here's the Photos app, and the Photos app has iCloud Photos. So—

Paul Thurrott [01:08:38]:
I'm not gonna defend this. This is garbage. Also, I'll say this is the 3rd way you could look at your gallery in Windows 11, 'cause there's also a gallery view in the File Explorer, which is exactly the same as the main view in the Photos app. So now we have this 3rd one. If I had to guess, and it still doesn't make sense, it might be for people who use OneDrive as like people to back up their photos, but the OneDrive they have on their computers maybe for work or something, and they're not mixing them or something. But you can have 2 OneDrives. I don't know why you would. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:10]:
This doesn't make any sense.

Chris Hoffman [01:09:13]:
There's no statement here. We released this new app. Here's why and here's what we're excited about. It's just, here it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:18]:
Yep. Right. It's completely redundant. I don't believe there's a single feature in here that doesn't already exist in the Photos app. I don't quite get it. But I think, but I guess I'm just guessing. It really bothers me. this exists.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:35]:
But like, um, but I do— it's very clearly for that audience or whatever who uses OneDrive solely for photos, you know, because it is a— it's not just a photo app, it's a OneDrive, you know. I know it's obvious, but a OneDrive, like, so it has your, like, those moments they create, like, on this date or whatever. You can go look at that stuff, which you could do in the Photos app. Um, but it's just—

Chris Hoffman [01:09:59]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:00]:
I don't know why Doesn't make any sense. So yeah, speaking of malware you might find on your computer that some company, uh, installed without telling you, uh, there's an example. There's the hypocrisy we were talking about before, right? So I mean, like, yes, um, so, you know, Kev is— someone else said this too, like something about the, uh, Samsung is no longer, I guess, syncing from whatever Samsung Gallery to OneDrive or something like that. But I, I can't imagine this is just for Samsung. Like, I don't think that fully explains it. I don't know, I'm not really sure, but it's very strange. I don't know, I'm really confused by this.

Leo Laporte [01:10:45]:
Yeah, well, I would hate for anybody to get confused by the fact that you're listening to Windows If we can't explain it, good luck. On the fine Twit network. Let's pause. And then earnings. Earnings, my friends, earnings. There's some money in this. Microsoft earnings are coming up. It is earnings week.

Leo Laporte [01:11:11]:
What time? At the market close, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:11:13]:
I was just trying to find that. So I feel like it's 5:00 PM ET usually.

Leo Laporte [01:11:18]:
5:00 PM would be 2:00 PM our time.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:19]:
But that doesn't feel right either. Because we're usually done by about 3:50.

Leo Laporte [01:11:22]:
Usually it's around 4:30, I think, ET. But anyway, we'll keep an eye on it. And as usual, what usually happens has happened in the past is we get the first numbers and we give you—

Paul Thurrott [01:11:32]:
Well, what usually happens is we're in the middle of talking about something and I have like that 1,000-year pause there because the announcement has occurred and I'm looking at it like I can't do 2 things at once. But we'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:11:45]:
I, um, anyway, But Google had its earnings already, and we'll talk about that in just a bit. And so did Intel. And you couldn't have 2 companies with 2 more divergent earnings. But, uh, that is, that is still to come on Windows Weekly. Chris Hoffman's with us from PCMag. Let's talk Alphabet.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:04]:
An airstrike. Um, why?

Leo Laporte [01:12:06]:
Why?

Chris Hoffman [01:12:07]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:07]:
For any reason. I don't know. Um, sorry. Sorry, this was a Discord thing.

Leo Laporte [01:12:16]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:16]:
So a couple of light earnings things ahead of the Microsoft one. Google/Alphabet. I had to rewrite this thing I wrote twice. And then there's actually a third item that is maybe the most important of all that is not in my article, which is Google announces their earnings, or Alphabet announces earnings, gangbusters, right? $28 billion of net revenue— net income, sorry, on revenues of $120 billion roughly. These are gains of like 98% and 24% year over year. So they're going gangbusters, right? And you look at their individual businesses, everything is up. Google Services, which includes the ad stuff, is 14.5% gain year over year. 68% of revenues came from advertising.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:02]:
Google Subscriptions, Platforms, Devices, gain of 5.2% year over year. Google Cloud revenue's going Awesome. 14.5% gain, $25 billion, we'll call it. Looks good, right? The first change I made was that I looked this up because in the previous quarter, Google said that this year they were going to raise their spending on CapEx infrastructure to $190 billion, which was double the amount they'd spent the previous year. So I added a note about that and I was like, I'm curious if this is But then in the conference call, they said it was going to be as high as $205 billion. So they actually went up. And the quarter, the spending in just that quarter was almost $45 billion, which I want to say is roughly double what it was a year ago too. So I had to fix that because they adjusted that prediction for the year.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:54]:
But also most of their profits, you got to look at that, actually more than what is their profits, but most of their gain came from investments they made in other companies that are all speculative AI kind of gains. So Anthropic, SpaceX, couple of other companies. They also said that they had 950 million monthly active users for Gemini, which is great and very close to OpenAI, except what they didn't say was how many of those people are spending money on that. Like people using it for free in search everywhere. A lot of those could just be free users. So I was like, all right, But here's the thing. They had a negative cash flow for the first time in the history of the company in that quarter because they're spending so much money on AI. And I'm sorry, but we're reaching some kind of a ludicrous point.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:43]:
So Google's stock price has actually fallen since this announcement. It fell really heavily in the wake of it, even though these numbers are all humongous, as these AI numbers always are, I guess. But I think Wall Street is finally starting to come around to this notion that maybe these guys don't have their hands on the wheel. I mean, maybe they're not as smart as they sound or as they talk or whatever. I don't really see a major payoff for any of their investments, well, ever, frankly, but certainly not in the short term. And I don't know. I think we're finally losing patience with this. But the only other company we have that's of note that also announced earnings is Literally the exact opposite of this in many ways.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:27]:
So Intel, which in any objective sense is a failing business, they lost money in the quarter. They lost money. They did not turn a profit. In fact, the amount they lost was about double what they lost in the same quarter a year ago. Revenues are up. Client computing, which is PCs, which is now combined with another group, but whatever, is up 13%. That's crazy. I mean, that's Compared to how the PC industry's going, that's much better than the industry, right? But also they merged with another group and I bet a lot of that comes from that other stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:03]:
But their data center stuff is doing pretty well. And we see that a lot in Dell, Lenovo, these companies that are traditionally associated with the PC space are starting to do a lot in the data center space. And of course that's where all the growth is. So this is the type of thing that will— Kind of help. The one that really kills me though is Intel Foundry, which is reported separately from Intel, even though they throw it into the earnings announcement. The revenues in this business were up 31% year over year. And you're like, oh, that's great. They only have one customer, it's Intel.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:34]:
That money all came from Intel. It's not coming from other companies. They still don't have a major customer for their foundry. They have a couple of tiny customers, but They're paying themselves and then reporting it as a gain. And this is what AI companies do. It's semi-farsical, but this notion that there are 7 companies trading $100 billion between them in some circular fashion, but the money never originated anywhere. None of them ever actually paid the money. They're just trading notes back and forth.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:06]:
And that's kind of like what Intel's doing with the foundry. This is crazy to me. But because the US government is invested in this company, we have to make this thing look like it's doing great. And Wall Street falls for it. Intel stock jumped 11% after they announced these results. So again, like I said, if you look at this objectively, this company's not doing great. If you look at Google objectively or Alphabet or whatever, I mean, I guess we could debate that one, but the numbers are humongous. And they got killed from a stock price perspective.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:40]:
Intel, like, Intel's winning by losing somehow. This is bizarre to me. So Intel did not sell 13% more computer chips this past quarter than they just didn't. So I don't know where that came from. And their foundry business is a joke. So, okay, USA, USA, USA, whatever. I don't know what to tell you. I find it I find this to be very depressing.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:11]:
Moving on. So back at Build in May, Microsoft announced a bunch of new Microsoft AI models. And I guess we'll call these frontier models, most of them or whatever. So they're scaling up and getting more sophisticated and so forth. I don't know that they released any of them at that date. And I'm not really sure what the status is of all those things. But just in the past week, they announced 2 variants of the models they talked about at Build, both of which are being used in Microsoft products and services, and in some cases exclusively, which means, and this was the headline a lot of people used, was Microsoft is starting to shift away from OpenAI models, which is actually notable, right? So Bing Image Creator, which I think we can all agree is probably not the most popular online service in the world, but actually it's very good for whatever that's worth. is now 100% in-house.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:03]:
So they're only using Microsoft AI models. And then the other stuff is just, well, mostly small. So, um, there's an image model that's the default model for some OneDrive image editing scenarios. There's a voice model that's used in Azure Voice Live, which I don't know what that is, and Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

Chris Hoffman [01:19:23]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:25]:
There's a model that's used for one thing in PowerPoint PowerPoint when you— I think it's when you have an image and you want to transform it into a different style or whatever, it will use the Microsoft model. And these— this is good for a variety of reasons. I mean, this is a baby step. If, you know, if Microsoft is using 100% OpenAI, now they're using maybe 97%, whatever, however you want to do the math. Um, it's still a step forward, right? But the bigger issue is that because they control these things and they're making these things They're specifically designing them to be energy efficient. So like the GPU usage on at least one of those scenarios is somewhere in the 84% less, sorry, 84% more efficient compared to the GPT model they were using before. So that's good overall. It's small, but it's good.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:17]:
I think, I don't know. Did you ever talk when you were at Build, Chris, did you talk to the Microsoft AI guys at all? No.

Chris Hoffman [01:20:24]:
Um, I talked with some Microsoft people about AI a little bit. Um, I can't, but they're, they're very, you know, even with the, the local AI stuff they were pushing in Windows, they really are all about efficiency, which is obviously the big thing now. You know, people are blowing through token budgets and yada yada yada. And they had, you know, obviously it makes sense they want to save their own money in the cloud with running these models. They also are we're talking a lot about, you know, hey developers, get this Windows PC, run the model, run these models locally, you know. So, you know, it's interesting, it's good, it's hard to get super excited about compared to, you know, if the, if the headline is we're doing the same thing or maybe a little bit worse but it's way more efficient. That's good, but, um, that's— it's not the most exciting story to, uh, read about.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:12]:
No. And I, I also wonder what the impact from Wall Street will be to this news, which we might learn later today to some degree. Is this interesting to Wall Street? Is this newsworthy in the sense that it's like you're doing the right thing? I mean, we were just talking about cutting subscription services. When you're one of the top 2 or 3 tech companies in the world with big AI and so forth, their version of that is what they're doing, which is like, we really got to cut back on the cost here. And That doesn't involve cutting AI. It involves like just making it work more efficiently, which ideally would happen on the device, but we're not quite there yet. And then, you know, if we're gonna run models in the cloud, they did what they could do so far, you know, go to actual usage-based pricing, which all of a sudden everyone's like, yikes, like, what am I paying for here? Or just literally make that stuff more efficient and cost-efficient as well, right? So, I mean, they're doing what they can do, I guess, but I also— this is another one of those things, like, they created this problem. Like, I— they, they knew what— you know, they knew this was like this.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:15]:
They knew how expensive this was all along, you know. I don't know, maybe this was a big thing between them and OpenAI. They wanted to reduce the— or increase the efficiency, I guess. And I don't know, they just weren't super into— I don't know, I don't know, I'm not sure, but I feel like they'll get there. Uh, I don't know, when was CrowdStrike? 2 years ago, probably? 3 years ago? Could have been 3 years ago. 2, 3 years ago CrowdStrike happened, right?

Chris Hoffman [01:22:43]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:43]:
So after CrowdStrike happened, all of a sudden, you know, Microsoft renewed security push, blah blah blah. You know, security— I think it was the Secure Future Initiative had already started actually, but they kind of renewed focus on that. Then we have the Windows Resiliency Initiative and, you know, whatever things they've done since then. There's been a bunch, honestly. So this Hugging Face thing happened last week, and we're doing that TSA thing again. It's like, all right, I guess we need to address this as an industry. So I'm gonna call them the cabal of NVIDIA, Microsoft. It's basically every big AI company except for Google, right? Well, no, that's not true.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:25]:
I'm actually, I'm sorry. No, that's not true at all. OpenAI is not in there. Anthropic's not in there. But it's fascinating to me that OpenAI, for all the competition, there's been a lot of standardization on things. And this, I think, only makes sense because all these companies are trying to race forward so quickly that not doing completely different things in different ways does make sense, even though they're competing. I feel like this should be viewed the same way, although some of the biggest companies are not in there, but what they want to do obviously is make sure that AI doesn't turn into Skynet or whatever. But right now it's just talk.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:07]:
I don't know what comes out of this. 2, 3 years ago, whatever the CrowdStrike thing was, Microsoft had a powwow with all the big security companies. I want to say September, October, whatever it was that year. And—

Chris Hoffman [01:24:20]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:21]:
The net result was they just disagreed. I mean, the Mac app, whatever these, the CrowdStrike, whatever the companies that want to get into the kernel because for the best protections, Microsoft wants them out. And they're like, well, you get out and then we'll get out with you. And it's like, well, we can't do that anymore, Microsoft. They get into kind of a weird thing. So I don't know what came out of this, but— Or what will come out of this, maybe I should say. But they're at least talking about trying to figure out a standardized way to secure AI so it doesn't destroy our bank accounts and whatever else. But I don't trust these companies to do anything.

Leo Laporte [01:25:01]:
Good luck.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:02]:
I know, I know. The cat's out of the bag.

Leo Laporte [01:25:04]:
I mean, you know, the big one, uh, the big one they're really afraid of, but they don't want to talk about because they know it's going to scare everybody, is that somebody will use AI to develop a pathogen, a biological Of course. That AI can't fix. You know, these hacks AI can fix.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:21]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:25:22]:
But if you create a new disastrous pathogen that's highly contagious using AI and release it to the world, AI ain't gonna fix it. It's gonna be out there. And according to some, that's what people are not anxious to talk about. And, you know, when you put it that way, yeah, I guess I'd I'm scared of that too.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:46]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:25:46]:
Can it do that?

Paul Thurrott [01:25:48]:
Well, we're also— I mean, there's going to be— every military on the Earth is going to be using AI, probably already is using AI to whatever degree.

Leo Laporte [01:25:54]:
Guarantee you they are. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:56]:
Yeah. So it's bad enough, you know, human error is bad enough, but then, you know, I don't know, you miss a comma somewhere in the markdown file and all of a sudden missiles are launching at Africa or whatever. I mean, like, you know, something bad's going to happen. So I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:26:11]:
The real problem, and we're going to talk about it on Intelligent Machines extensively today, as we will every week, but I think the real problem is there's no good solution.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:22]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:26:22]:
You know, some say, well, oh, we should just slow down. Oh yeah, like—

Chris Hoffman [01:26:25]:
Just slow down.

Leo Laporte [01:26:26]:
China's going to slow down, or, you know. That's the problem. Oh, okay, well, we should create safety guardrails. Oh yeah, those have worked well. Uh, okay, so, I mean, Yeah. Let's just— oh, I know. Congress says, let's put a kill switch on the AI. Okay, so you—

Paul Thurrott [01:26:45]:
The kill switch is like the original debate in the tech industry. You know, the CIA allegedly had a kill switch or a backdoor into Windows or whatever, you know, which—

Leo Laporte [01:26:57]:
Yeah, right. How did that work?

Paul Thurrott [01:26:58]:
Does not exist, actually. But whatever. That was a big belief for a long time. It's— we're—

Leo Laporte [01:27:04]:
look, it's moving really fast. Government does not move fast. Industry has its own agendas. You don't think OpenAI and Anthropic really want to pause.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:19]:
I think it was you, Leo, last week who said, you know, from OpenAI's perspective, the hugging face—

Leo Laporte [01:27:24]:
This is good news.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:26]:
Was good news. This was— it's just like the Fable thing. for Anthropic, even if it was vaguer, was good news, right? That you have just demonstrated how awesome your AI is, right? And yes, maybe your customers are going to be bad actors or whatever, but the one thing these companies need is billions and billions of dollars.

Leo Laporte [01:27:46]:
And they need people willing to pay. What I've been thinking and what I would suggest people start working on is getting your AI to think about defense in depth. Like, how are you going to protect yourself from rogue AIs?

Paul Thurrott [01:28:01]:
I'm going to protect myself by driving a car that has a catalytic converter, you know, a carburetor, a, uh, live in the woods, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:28:08]:
Live in the woods is the only risk.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:10]:
Next to a running stream of some kind for power. Get off the grid. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:28:13]:
Get off the grid.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:14]:
I don't know what you do there.

Leo Laporte [01:28:18]:
Uh, I Am is coming up, Intelligent Machines. We'll be talking about that and many other fascinating topics. Our guest is Henry Blodgett.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:25]:
Oh, wow.

Leo Laporte [01:28:26]:
Yeah, that'll be interesting. He found it.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:29]:
I feel like you have, but have you talked to Daniel Suarez recently?

Leo Laporte [01:28:33]:
I've been just— you know what, it's funny you say that. Yes. So I emailed him. I said, Kill Decision, you— and now with this Hugging Face thing, now you are now the H.G.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:44]:
Wells of our generation. You predicted this thing. You didn't exactly like say this is a prediction. You wrote a story about it. But then it happened.

Leo Laporte [01:28:53]:
It's crazy. He does impeccable research. I have to think he had an inside track. Anyway, yes, I reached out to him. I said, please come on. He said, I'm on vacation. But we— but he's, you know, we love him. The vocabulary was with a Harvard— So I will get him on Intelligent Machines as soon as I can get him to say yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:11]:
I also would like to know what he's writing now because I'd like— he was always like, please just tell me what to expect.

Leo Laporte [01:29:18]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:19]:
It's crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:29:20]:
It should be interesting. Do you want to take a break now? I can't tell where we are. Yeah.

Chris Hoffman [01:29:26]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:27]:
I don't care about Anthropic.

Leo Laporte [01:29:31]:
You know that we're going to be talking about it at 2 PM, all of this AI stuff. Nonstop. Nonstop. Yeah. We're going to talk about Opus 5. Now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and maybe Chris, you don't know this, But this is the most valuable segment on the show, the Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:49]:
How'd that happen?

Leo Laporte [01:29:50]:
I don't know, I'm just making it up. Paul, take it away.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:57]:
Yeah, so, uh, Halo Campaign Evolved came out yesterday as we record this. For everybody, it was available in early access last week if you Paid for the premium edition. Um, I don't— my only concern about this game at all is just the price. You know, the premium edition of this game is $70. Like, are you kidding me? Um, it is on Game Pass, however. Um, so if you have Game Pass, you just— you could just play it. That's great. Uh, no, but not the premium version, the standard edition or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:30]:
Um, you can— and I know this because I did it— if you have Game Pass, uh, pay $20 for the premium edition upgrade and get whatever's in that. I did that only because I wanted to get on the— get the game early. We got a code for review, but Laurent reviewed the game, so he had the code. So I paid for it. And I gotta say, I mean, we're gonna talk about this a little bit more later in the show, in the back of the book. It's, you know, it's great. I suspect based on some— there's some stuff in the game that suggests this, they're gonna redo this for Halo 2 and 3 as well, I think.

Leo Laporte [01:31:03]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:05]:
The big thing here is the switch to the Unreal Engine, which is just gorgeous. Like, it looks awesome. I've been playing it on PC, but it's on Xbox Series X and S. It's on PlayStation 5, you know, which everyone's super happy about. But it's a reminder of how good this game was and how far it's fallen in the years since, unfortunately. But it's a great game. Um, so anyway, it's out now. So if you're on Game Pass, that, that's a great way to, to play that.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:37]:
Um, so as of yesterday, and there's some additional content in there, there's some changes, you know, there's some different stuff, but we'll, I'll talk about that a little bit later.

Leo Laporte [01:31:45]:
So this is the game you already played, but it's just looking better?

Paul Thurrott [01:31:49]:
Yeah, and there are some differences. There's some, uh, prequel levels, um, you can go into, um, But yeah, it's— and, and, you know, because it's Unreal, I have to say, yeah, it's a modern engine, so there's a lot of like, uh, fog-type effects especially. I would say it's incredibly diverse, which is weird because my big complaint about Halo— and this was especially the first game, but nope, Halo 4 was like this, I think they were all like this to some degree— is you go into some environment, so it could be someplace on the ring, it could be inside of a ship, it doesn't really matter.

Chris Hoffman [01:32:21]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:22]:
And then you go back through it on the— you go out the same way, so you have to re-experience it. And sometimes it changes, right? There's some stuff with the Flood where you go through a normal area and now it's all Flood, you know, it's all gross. And but it's the same layout, you know, and it's like, like they're reusing, you know. I'm sure 25 years ago when they were making this game, it was like, well, like we're dealing with, you know, we don't have a lot of disk space or whatever. But, um, but on the flip side, I I kind of forgot how many— how, like, there were— how diverse the environments are. There were gorgeous alien landscapes and things that look like, you know, forests on Earth or whatever, and, um, snowy areas, which I completely forgot about. There's a— it's, you know, there's a lot there. Um, the quality kind of goes downhill over time, but, um, the first 3 games are fantastic, at least.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:06]:
ODST, ODST, I remember being really good too. Um, but this is the best one. There's no doubt about it. Single player anyway.

Leo Laporte [01:33:13]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:13]:
And this is only single player. There was some kind of multi— I think it was just split screen at the time when they did it. Halo 2 was the first one that one took advantage of. I think that one actually— maybe I'm getting my timeframes wrong. I probably am. I think it was Halo 1 that actually influenced Xbox Live, but they incorporate these ideas back and forth. So by the time Halo 2 came out, that one was— that was big for multiplayer. It was a big deal because you could play online.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:38]:
It was excellent. Halo 3, same. But this one, this remastering is just the single-player campaign, which is, you know, solid. It's great. It's a great game. Of course, the day it came out, Xbox was down most of the day. I'm sure this is a coinciding. I did, I will say that day, literally, I got home.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:03]:
We were out, whatever, doing whatever we were doing out in the world. And I got home and I'm like, I have an hour, maybe more I could kill. I will catch up on this game a little bit. Yeah, that didn't happen.

Chris Hoffman [01:34:12]:
Oh.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:13]:
So it was down. But, you know, Microsoft is blaming basically human error. That's not the way they phrased it, but basically human error. An irony because we live in this age of we're getting rid of physical discs, right? Sony made that announcement a couple of weeks ago. Microsoft is allegedly trying to determine whether or not it makes sense to have a disc player in the disc drive. in the next Xbox console. I don't actually think it makes any sense personally, but whatever. Um, if you, if you had a game on a disc and had to get online with that for some reason, you were fine.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:48]:
And I, I guess, uh, Microsoft is also going to work off of that to kind of— well, I'm sorry, you wouldn't get online, you would just play this game offline. Like, in other words, this is a single-player campaign, so you don't really have to be online. Um, except that you do if it's a digital game. So They're gonna work to make sure that's the case, I guess, in more instances. But I think that actually did work out for— well, how would that have worked out for people on Halo? Is there a— there must be a physical version. But anyway, yesterday was a disaster, but we're used to that. That's kind of par for the course, I guess, in the Microsoft world for this kind of thing, unfortunately. And then in the Insider Program for Xbox, not the Windows one, but the Xbox Insider Program, they're testing an ad-based version of cloud gaming, which is the game streaming service, which originated as a perk of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, but now there's some level of it in most of the tiers they have.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:44]:
So you do gain access to game streaming to some degree. But I think this is gonna be a standalone cloud gaming tier, which we've always kind of wondered about. I don't know if there'll be paid and ad-supported versions or just the ad-supported version. It makes sense to me they would do this. I mean, it works for Netflix.

Leo Laporte [01:36:02]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:02]:
et cetera. The one thing I will say is that game streaming has actually gotten a lot better over the years. It was really janky in the beginning. If you wanna play a game like Call of Duty online, that's not gonna work, right? But single-player things like Doom, the recent Doom games, I'm sure, I have not done it, but I suspect this Halo game, et cetera, actually work. You might be surprised like how well this works now. It's pretty good. So they've kinda gotten it to a good place. So having a, A standalone version of that actually does make sense to me, ad-supported.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:35]:
Hopefully there'll be a just a straight-up paid version too. And, you know, if you have a Snapdragon X2 computer, right, and there are games you cannot play on that thing, this is a good way to get around that as well. Um, and then in other good news, um, so, you know, obviously Ubisoft, uh, this is the, the guys that make like Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, etc. a partner with Xbox like they do with all the big platform makers. But Microsoft has this kind of, it's like an Xbox Play Everywhere capability, which is about retaining your achievements and where you are at game progress, et cetera. But a lot of game makers like Activision does this, well, has done this. I'm actually not, I think, I'm not sure if they still do it, but there were at least a few years there where—

Chris Hoffman [01:37:21]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:21]:
You could buy the game for Xbox. You could buy a game in a cross-platform console version, which would work on either Xbox or PlayStation, which is $10 more or something. Microsoft's games tend to work across Xbox and PC. You just buy it once and it works in both places. Ubisoft announced they're just going to do that. And so if you buy some of its games, and these are like these are gonna be recent games and then games going forward. If you buy it on the Xbox, it will just work on the PC, which is awesome, right? So Assassin's Creed Mirage, Assassin's Creed Valhalla is in there, Far Cry 6, The Crew 2, The Crew Motorfest, you know, a couple of Tom Clancy games, et cetera. So, but from July 21st, which was last week onward, Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:12]:
You buy a digital version of one of these games and it will work in either place, which is great because this is actually a lot of the way I play games because I am playing on Xbox through the PC, but it would work on— I don't really play on console anymore, but it would work. Most of those games would work either way, so that's cool. And then I don't know what to think of this one. So, you know, when Google Stadia disappeared It left Amazon Luna as the only kind of cloud streaming service where they, you know, they have a controller that is a discrete device on the network. It's not connecting through whatever Bluetooth maybe to your PC, which is the thing connected to the network. So it kind of gave you better latency, which is really important for game streaming, right? And, um, I don't know that this service has been doing too well, but it's Amazon, so unlike Google, they don't just kill it, you know, in 2 seconds. They've been kind of keeping along, but I feel like they've been dropping, uh, you know, they dropped any pretense of even trying to get like, um, you know, unique content that will only be on Luna, etc., etc. But if you have an Amazon Prime subscription, which you probably would, right, if you're even looking at Luna, um, they're gonna have games stream through Prime Video, which is sort of like what Netflix does on mobile where they, they're, you know, they have games now as well as movies and TV shows.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:31]:
So I guess we're going to keep throwing this spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. But, um, I don't know, I, I have a, I don't know, I have a bad feeling Luna's not going to be here for the long run, but it has certainly outlived Stadia. So who can say?

Chris Hoffman [01:39:47]:
Game streaming is, is weird. Um, you know, even going back a few years, we had a GPU shortage, and at the time we had cloud gaming, and those services didn't take off then. And I don't know if they're taking off now either. Even we have, we have RAM We have prices going up. It seems like, like my experience covering sometimes game streaming is that there's not a lot of interest. I don't know how much people are really using it. Um, I don't know, are we seeing that changing? Like, that's, I think, probably one reason Google killed Stadia, that not really anyone was using it.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:17]:
Yeah, I think they, you know, early on they too were trying, they were like, all right, we're gonna have exclusive content. No, we're not. You know, they kind of went through that whole thing. I mean, there's more competition for data center GPUs now than there's ever been, which is obviously a huge problem. But I, you know, for casual games, this kind of thing actually does work pretty well. So again, a modern AAA shooter, especially if it's multiplayer, no way, but single player maybe. I don't know, it depends. But I don't know, I mean, I, there might be some crossover in the Amazon space with that market, you know, people who might play more casual games.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:56]:
I mean, they've A problem because they don't have really a phone presence, right? So I guess you might have Amazon Prime on your phone, but I don't think it's your go-to for anything.

Chris Hoffman [01:41:05]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:06]:
But I do feel like game streaming can work in that kind of casual sense where, you know, I see people here in Mexico, they're always on their phones playing like some jewel game where it's like, you know, looks like Tetris kind of, but it's jewels. And like, people do this in their off time, whatever, standing in line at the supermarket, whatever it might be. Like, there's possibly a use case here.

Chris Hoffman [01:41:27]:
Yeah, but, you know, like GeForce Now actually works pretty well in a lot of situations. But like the idea that like there are a lot of casual gamers that are like, I really want to play the new Doom, but I don't have the computer— that's not that— that— I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:43]:
Yeah, the only computer I can't play the new Doom on is one of the Snapdragon computers, right? For some reason, the, the previous 2 Doom games actually do play on that So I get you could stream that, right? I assume through— I haven't tried that, but I assume you could stream it on whatever and that should work okay.

Chris Hoffman [01:42:00]:
Well, mind you, the way RAM is going, maybe that'll be what pushes it.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:04]:
Well, you know, GeForce Now, obviously we can assume it's subsidized in some way by Nvidia. Amazon is obviously in some way subsidizing this whole thing. Microsoft to some degree tried to stop doing that, raised prices, didn't go so well, you know, so whatever. But yeah, I mean, you have to allot your— the reason the prices— well, there are many reasons, but one of them surely would be we can't dedicate— it doesn't make sense to dedicate GPUs to this when we can get so much more money from a company like OpenAI to pay for those GPUs to do what they're doing. And I don't feel like this problem gets solved in the short term. So I don't know. But it has gotten better. I don't do it a lot, but when I go in every couple of months and look, I'm like, actually, This is pretty good, you know, like it's surprisingly okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:50]:
There was a period of time there where it was not at all okay. Yeah. Um, so it's definitely gotten better, you know, whatever that means.

Leo Laporte [01:43:00]:
Is latency still the, uh, yeah, bugaboo?

Paul Thurrott [01:43:03]:
Yeah. Yep. But that's the thing, like Luna is— there have been rumors that Microsoft's working on an Xbox wireless controller that will do what Luna and what Stadia used to do, which is it's the thing that connects directly, well, it's one of the things that connects directly to the network. That actually does help reduce latency 'cause you're not going through another device to translate all the button presses and stuff. But I mean, obviously in the meantime you wanna use a wired controller, right? Not Bluetooth, Bluetooth is garbage. But latency is always gonna be an issue, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:43:37]:
I think this is the problem is that a serious gamer is never gonna settle Nope.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:42]:
Right. No. And that's why—

Leo Laporte [01:43:42]:
That's where the money is. Well, right. No, no, he's playing the biggest, uh, casual game.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:49]:
Yes. Uh, I mean, the biggest part of the gaming market is casual gaming on mobile, right? I mean, I—

Leo Laporte [01:43:55]:
Yeah, on mobile.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:57]:
Well, I mean, you could do Luna. It's in the Prime— Prime Video is a way to get Luna on your phone.

Leo Laporte [01:44:04]:
Yeah, but right, that's real.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:06]:
I'm not— look, again, I'm— I— look, I I played part of Red Dead Redemption through Netflix on an iPad just to see what it was like.

Leo Laporte [01:44:15]:
How was that?

Paul Thurrott [01:44:16]:
Just to do it. It was pretty good. It was pretty good, actually. I think you could install it, by the way. I don't think I streamed it, but, um, that game is also more, um—

Leo Laporte [01:44:24]:
it's a good game, more story. It's, it's not—

Paul Thurrott [01:44:27]:
yeah, yeah, well, that's what— that's the type of thing you would— I mean, a story, like a single-player experience, is always going to be better than streaming, right? Always. Oh.

Leo Laporte [01:44:34]:
It's the only way to go.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:37]:
I don't think you could— I mean, you're just asking, you're just punching yourself in the face. I'd like to go in and never kill anyone and lose the game. Yeah, you should stream it is the solution to that problem.

Leo Laporte [01:44:46]:
Instantly.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:48]:
Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:44:50]:
All right, the back of the book coming up once again in about 45 minutes. Uh, it's Intelligent Machines. We will talk about all the AI stories, and there are lots. Our guest, Henry Blodgett, is a really an interesting guest because he bears the scars from the dot-com bubble. He was right there. And now he's on the forefront of the AI bubble.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:12]:
He's never learned.

Leo Laporte [01:45:14]:
Yeah, yeah. Double scarred. Henry Blodgett will be our guest in about, well, it's now 40 minutes. And while we're doing this break, maybe Paul, would be a good time to check and see If there is anything—

Paul Thurrott [01:45:30]:
Sorry, I have a Samsung promotion in my text messages. Very important.

Leo Laporte [01:45:34]:
Don't listen to that voice.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:36]:
I literally put my phone in do not disturb mode and it somehow made its way to the lock screen.

Leo Laporte [01:45:40]:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:42]:
Microsoft Investor it is.

Leo Laporte [01:45:45]:
It's now time for what we call the back of the book.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:49]:
Actually, before we do that, I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:45:50]:
Oh, we might have earnings learnings.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:53]:
have occurred. So this is going to be like fog of war stuff, but, um, uh, $35.8 billion in net income, up 31% year over year. $90 billion—

Leo Laporte [01:46:04]:
Wait a minute, income up 31%?

Paul Thurrott [01:46:07]:
That's profits. So that's— that one's variable. I wouldn't put too much into that one, but 18% gain on revenues. Um, Intelligent Cloud has not been their biggest business for the past 3 to 5 5 quarters, I don't remember, but it is again this quarter $39.3 billion, up 32% in revenues. Productivity and business processes, Microsoft 365 roughly is $37.8 billion, up 14%. And they kind of warned on this one, more personal computing, which is Windows, Surface, Xbox, some others to search, whatever, $12.9 billion, down 4%. Year over year. So I mean, we kind of knew that was going to be a bad one.

Leo Laporte [01:46:50]:
Look at this story. At the close of market, in anticipation of these results, they were down almost $3. Now, having seen the results, the market in after-hours trading, they're up $10. Up 2.5%.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:05]:
Well, the post-earnings conference call occur and we'll get more details on CapEx.

Leo Laporte [01:47:09]:
Yeah, maybe we're waiting We'll see what happens. But this is the opposite of the old buy on the rumor, sell on the news. They sold on the rumor and they bought on the news.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:20]:
It's going to be in here somewhere. Oh, here it is. Okay. Yeah. So Microsoft, that's really hard. Jesus.

Chris Hoffman [01:47:26]:
I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:27]:
Microsoft CapEx spending is up 70% year over year to $41 billion in the quarter.

Leo Laporte [01:47:31]:
See, this is what bit Google, right?

Chris Hoffman [01:47:33]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:34]:
This is exactly what bit Google. And in fact, those figures are roughly identical, I believe, off the top of my head. Now, they do have a positive cash flow, unlike Google.

Leo Laporte [01:47:47]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:48]:
So that's good. But their free cash flow is down 23% year over year, reflecting higher CapEx spending, right? As we invest, we, Microsoft, invest. But they did, they're a net positive $19.6 billion on cash flow. So they're not as bad as Google, I guess, if that makes sense. We'll talk about this more next week. It's kind of hard to look at this quickly and make a decision. Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:48:13]:
We always do our Earnings Learnings show the following week, but the top line numbers are interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:20]:
Yeah. Yeah. I'll have to have a write-up tomorrow about it. Well, plus I have to listen to the call. They'll say more during the call.

Leo Laporte [01:48:29]:
As always the case, the Discord club members are saying the whole stock market was down, uh, okay, at the end, at the close. So that's why.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:37]:
Oh gosh. What's the Chinese stock market doing right now? Is that something I could invest in? I feel like that's going to be—

Leo Laporte [01:48:42]:
Dow down 2%, the NASDAQ down 1.75%, the S&P down 1.5%. So yeah, it was—

Paul Thurrott [01:48:48]:
I mean, all the big tech companies are plus or minus a week to 10 days doing their earnings right now. So yeah. Yeah. Cash paid for property and equipment was $36 billion, up 110% year over year. Yikes.

Leo Laporte [01:49:03]:
That's buying all those data servers there. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:08]:
Yeah. They're just like lease owners now. That's how fun. Remember when Microsoft used to make software? We used to talk about them like they were software maker. It was fun. I liked those days. Oh well. Okay, Chris, I'm sorry, I kind of took the air out of this a little bit by mentioning it earlier, but we do have a tip.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:29]:
That's fine.

Leo Laporte [01:49:30]:
What's your— what's your— oh, we're gonna let Chris do the tip.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:35]:
Yeah, I have a little bit.

Leo Laporte [01:49:35]:
Aren't you fancy?

Paul Thurrott [01:49:36]:
Talking about it, but aren't you fancy?

Leo Laporte [01:49:39]:
What's, what's your tip of the week, Mr. Hoffman?

Chris Hoffman [01:49:42]:
Um, you know, it's really funny, like, seeing the Copilot key news and, oh, oh, they'll let you make it do nothing. It's like, okay, you can already do that. It's Windows, it's powerful. Like, you don't have to sit there and wait for Microsoft to maybe add an option a year from now. Like, one of my favorite ways to remap keys these days is with the Keyboard Manager PowerToy. It's even made by Microsoft. It's not installed by default, but you can remap it and you can make it do nothing. You can make it do anything else.

Chris Hoffman [01:50:10]:
And I think more people should really take advantage of that. Obviously, I feel like the Keyboard Manager has probably seen a lot of usage in the past year or two due to the Copilot key. So I would really recommend it. And if you cannot run the Keyboard Manager because you have a managed company laptop, well, hopefully Microsoft will add that option.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:32]:
Right. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I just, because I've been talking about this, so I mentioned, I think I mentioned this before the show just to maybe the 3 of us or whatever, but past couple of months I've been working on rewriting the entire Windows 11 Field Guide, which started out as a 1,200, almost 1,200-page book. PDF form was like 300 megabytes, it's humongous. So I've rewritten everything now as of today. I haven't published the final one chapter. The final chapter I didn't do was Phone Link, but it is now—

Chris Hoffman [01:51:04]:
Oh, okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:06]:
Instead of 300 megabytes, 44 megabytes, and instead of 1,200 pages, 745. So I literally completely— well, I'm sure I cut and paste a couple of paragraphs here and there, but I mean, it's my work, it's okay. But like, I rewrote it to be more concise and reshot every single screenshot to be smaller file size, but also take up less vertical space, you know, 'cause screenshots, when they're square, take up like half of a page or 3/4 of a page. So super excited about this, and hopefully this be more maintainable going forward. So if you own it or if you're part of Threat Premium, this update will be out after the show and after I write about earnings, because now I have that to do. But that's okay.

Leo Laporte [01:51:50]:
1,200 pages down to 745, not because you cut one word.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:56]:
Well, many words. I mean, well, oh, you cut many words. One of my favorite memories was I had written the Windows At the time it was called Windows 7 Secrets, right? Which is this unbelievably thick— I think it was 1,100 pages.

Leo Laporte [01:52:08]:
I owned it. Yeah, great book.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:10]:
Yeah, it's a good monitor stand, by the way. Um, and I went to the Netherlands for the launch, the Windows— I guess it was the Windows 7 launch. It would be, right? At, you know, I spoke at that launch there, but I did like a book signing thing. And, you know, the Dutch people are so, um, direct, which I love. And this guy said, Let me ask you a question. If Windows 7 is so easy to use, why did you have to write an 1,100-page book to explain it? And I said, I padded it with screenshots, which is not true, but what are you going to do? Anyway, I've been working to be more concise, I guess. So this is— Windows 7 came out in 2009. So I'm on a 17-year journey here or something.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:54]:
Oh no, No, it's worse than that. Is it worse than that? No. 9? Oh no, 17 years, I think. Math. I'm a writer, not a mathematician. Anyway, um, the app pick this week, we already talked about it at length, so I don't have to go into too much detail, is, uh, Halo Campaign Evolved. It is excellent. And, and, you know, we play the music when we do the Xbox segment here, but in reverse, um, for, you know, so they don't take it down the show, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:20]:
But when, when— Ooh. The one thing that— no, not the one thing. One of the many things this game does really effectively is as you kind of progress through it, there's this mounting kind of musical, you know, it is that, you know, they do an awesome job of that. And so the kind of, you know, whatever level it might be, it's got— you're getting to the conclusion, it's probably gonna— the end of it is you jumping onto some warthog thing that takes off and whatever it is, and you escape. But the music like builds as you do it. And it's just really well done. Like, it's It's, um, it's a great— it's just a great game.

Leo Laporte [01:53:52]:
Nice, nice, nice, nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:55]:
So it's worth— it's worth it.

Leo Laporte [01:53:57]:
Lovely. You know, we should, uh, we should let Chris plug his new newsletter. I think this is a big time to do that.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:05]:
Since I just plugged my book for the 125th time? Yeah, sure.

Leo Laporte [01:54:08]:
Yes, it's only fair. I would show it, but you actually have to go to PCMag and sign up for it.

Chris Hoffman [01:54:15]:
Um, yeah, absolutely. So Since last time, which I did instantly, by the way. Thank you. Yes, uh, much appreciated. And, uh, since last time I'm on here, I'm now, uh, full-time at PCMag. I'm happy to be part of their team. I am, uh, basically the resident Windows whisperer, among other things. So I was at Microsoft Build.

Chris Hoffman [01:54:34]:
Uh, I, I, I write a lot about Windows there. I have what I hope are intelligent— what I think are intelligent, uh, takes and thoughts. And, uh, You know, I actually just recently took over their Windows newsletter. So anyone who's subscribed to the existing newsletter sees a piece from me every single week directly to your inbox. And as anyone, as you may know, I've written a lot of newsletters in the past few years. So this is now my current newsletter, but that's where to find me, PCMag. And honestly, I will honestly just plug PCMag as well for a second. It's a great team.

Chris Hoffman [01:55:07]:
It's a great group of people. online journalism and tech journalism is in not a great place, but I would say that PCMag is still a really good, really good place, and I hope you check it out.

Leo Laporte [01:55:20]:
I'm so glad PCMag's still around, 'cause I, you know, I mean, this was— this is a legendary magazine. I hung out with the editors, and of course John C. Dvorak's Inside Track was in the back of it for years, and this is, this is a legendary Publication. It's kind of cool that you're part of such a great history.

Chris Hoffman [01:55:40]:
Yeah, it's awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:55:42]:
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Hoffman [01:55:44]:
Subscribe to my newsletter.

Leo Laporte [01:55:46]:
Nice. Chris, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate talking to you. Chris, of course, Chris Hoffman, senior writer at software at PC Magazine. His newsletter available now. Paul Theriot, we've already plugged his stuff in interminably.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:04]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:56:05]:
thurrott.com, T-H-U-R-R-O-double-good.com, is the place to go. Become a premium member, you get a copy of all of his lovely books: The Field Guide to Windows 11, Windows Everywhere, which is a great history of Windows. I love Paul's history angle. And of course, uh, De-Insidify Windows, which becomes more and more valuable every day. Uh, uh, we do Windows Weekly, uh, Right here, if Leo shows up on time at 11 AM Pacific time.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:32]:
You were probably busy installing a Windows update. It's okay. You don't have to explain yourself.

Leo Laporte [01:56:36]:
I updated my router. I thought that'd fix it, and it did not because I'm still— I don't know. I am racking my brain. I don't know what's going on because everything seems fine.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:48]:
Right. You're on wires though, right? Like, you're not on a—

Leo Laporte [01:56:50]:
I'm absolutely wired. I have a Ubiquiti router connected to Comcast business.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:55]:
That actually makes it harder because there's less you can do there.

Leo Laporte [01:56:58]:
You know, I've rebooted everything. I rebooted the machine, I rebooted the router, I rebooted the modem. I went outside and I kicked the box that Comcast comes in on. We switched over to Starlink, I thought, because that's our backup. That didn't fix it. So I— it's— I don't know what it is. It's probably not the internet.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:17]:
Yeah, we got— I don't know what else. Kevin said something like, if something goes south with us today, we'll I'll send you guys a Zoom link. And I'm like, why are we starting this with this is going to fail? And I guess it's because—

Leo Laporte [01:57:27]:
No, Zoom was worse. Zoom was worse yesterday. So I apologize. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:34]:
Did OpenAI attack your network or—

Leo Laporte [01:57:36]:
Well, I do have at least 3 agents running full-time constantly. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:42]:
Could be. Why don't you ask one of them?

Leo Laporte [01:57:44]:
What are you doing? You know, I'm looking at my bandwidth, everything. everything's fine. If I, uh, you know, in the UniFi, if I click on it, it says my connection is excellent. Latency is 15 milliseconds. Uh, I, I, I don't, I don't know what's wrong.

Chris Hoffman [01:58:04]:
Hmm.

Leo Laporte [01:58:05]:
Peak utilization exceeded limit. I don't know what that means.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:10]:
What, what did you say? Which, what exceeded limit?

Leo Laporte [01:58:13]:
My peak utilization. Oh, uh, I don't know. I don't know what that means. But anyway, I'm getting, uh, I'm getting just fine, you know, plenty of megabits up. I, I don't— I just don't— anyway, so I apologize for my lousy video. That's all I can say. Uh, we do do Windows Weekly though. I, like I said, I had to reboot my router and that took an unexpectedly long time.

Leo Laporte [01:58:40]:
Uh, normally we'd start at 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, that is 1800 UTC. And you can watch us do it live. Now, of course, club members can watch in the Club Discord. Discord's not great for live video, so a lot of them still watch on the other 5 different places, 6 different places you can watch: YouTube, twitch.tv, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. Any of those will work. If you're chatting in there, I will see the chat. I have a unified chat right in front of me. Uh, so we appreciate all of you in there.

Leo Laporte [01:59:11]:
It's nice to have you all. Uh, after-the-fact on-demand versions of the show available at twit.tv/ww. That's our website. There's also a YouTube channel with the video, and we put it up there pretty much right away. Uh, best thing to do though, subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically because it's a podcast. It's funny because the advertising in industry is pushing us right now because they want everybody— they don't really like RSS feeds because we don't know anything about you because of the RSS feeds. They want everybody to listen in an app, right? Spotify or whatever, Audible, whatever app.

Leo Laporte [01:59:50]:
Because if they— if you listen to an app, A, they know who you are, they know how long you listened, they know which ads you heard, which ones you didn't. And ads— ad people are You know, the more they— you would give them, the more they want. They want all the demographics. So we— I have to say, it's hurting us. It's harder and harder to sell. And I think next year is going to be worse because there's this big move to getting— to say, well, downloads don't count. You know why downloads don't count? Because they don't know anything about you.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:21]:
Once it's offline, nobody knows.

Leo Laporte [02:00:23]:
Exactly. They want you to listen in an app streaming, and we believe in RSS feeds, so we may be a little bit out of luck. Anyway, I don't know why I got started on that. Oh, I know why. Subscribe to the RSS feed in your favorite podcast client and don't give them any of your information. You can if you want.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:41]:
Listen, that's fine. And then also now announcing the new native Twit app, which, you know—

Leo Laporte [02:00:47]:
We did, you know, we actually— I don't know, did I ever tell you this story? We went out and spent $75,000 on a native Twit app, and it was so bad I never released it. It was just crap.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:56]:
Yeah, I briefly had a native app at Windows IT Pro like a million years ago.

Leo Laporte [02:01:01]:
I could probably vibe code that.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:02]:
It was on Windows Phone and iPhone, I think, at the time.

Leo Laporte [02:01:04]:
Yeah, I could— I mean, honestly, probably could vibe code it. Certainly could do a better job. Anyway, thank you, Paul Theriot, and a special thanks to Chris Hoffman filling in. Next week we go to Las Vegas.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:18]:
Because you do.

Leo Laporte [02:01:19]:
Paul is jonesing for the craps table. Do you gamble?

Paul Thurrott [02:01:23]:
No.

Leo Laporte [02:01:24]:
No. They, you know, it's so funny, Vegas hates it during CES and the other geek conventions.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:30]:
Yes, because everyone's like— well, not everyone. I, I had an early Microsoft experience where I was a bunch of young guys at Microsoft, and the theory was if you could, if you had infinite money, you could just keep betting on roulette, double, and you double, and you double. Yeah, they did not have infinite money and they lost big. And I saw them, I'm not going to remember the number at any time, but it came up, let's say red, I literally think 28 times in a row. And the whole crowd had gathered, people, lots of employees, security, whatever. And it was the Microsoft guys and they bet red again and they lost everything. Yeah. It's a metaphor for Microsoft.

Leo Laporte [02:02:06]:
It's a little bit of justice there. Uh, yeah. Well, Well, I know from experience at COMDEX and then now at CES, they cover half the tables with tarps because they know you can— Geeks know probability. Who knew?

Paul Thurrott [02:02:20]:
I mean, some people are into it, but—

Leo Laporte [02:02:22]:
Yeah, but it's a smaller number. Anyway, we're going to Black Hat. Another reason to cover the crap stage.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:28]:
Speaking of gambling, we're going to be in a hotel with a bunch of Black Hat hackers. Do I gamble? Actually, as it turns out, I guess I do. I'm going to this place.

Leo Laporte [02:02:38]:
That's a gamble. We will be Wednesday, we'll be doing the show as soon as the show floor opens. Come on over to the ThreatLocker booth, that's where we'll be doing the show. But I do have to tell you, there's no PA, there's no seating, uh, it's not a presentation. They just let us use their booth, uh, to do the show. But Paul and Richard will be there following immediately after. Steve Gibson is going to do security. Now we're moving that, uh, to Wednesday just for this event.

Leo Laporte [02:03:01]:
It's gonna be a lot of fun. And, uh, and And we would love to see you, and we'll be signing autographs. Actually, nobody wants autographs anymore. They want— you know what they want? They want selfies. Paul, just do it. Let's do a selfie, Paul. Let's do a selfie. That's what they want.

Leo Laporte [02:03:15]:
So, uh, we will pose for selfies.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:19]:
I'm not good at selfies.

Leo Laporte [02:03:20]:
You're not?

Paul Thurrott [02:03:22]:
Oh my God, come on. I can barely handle a web camera, you know, like trying to figure out like which— like, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:03:27]:
We will, we will be posing for selfies. All of us but Paul. Come by if you're gonna be at Black Hat this year. And Windows Weekly will be a regular podcast just like usual. We'll stream it, we'll put it out. But one thing we don't know is how good the internet will be. We have an Ethernet cable, right? Are you gonna connect it to— on the other end? I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:50]:
You can do your own record. Like, Richard could record it. I bet Richard's—

Leo Laporte [02:03:52]:
Yeah, we'll record locally. That's— no, we have the means. But it's just, I'm saying for people who watch live normally, right? Could be like this, could be good, could be bad. I don't know. Uh, we'll do our best. Uh, but we will see you next week on Windows Weekly. Thank you, gentlemen. Have a great week.