Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Leo Laporte

Dec 13th 2023

Windows Weekly 859

Taste the Darkness!

2023's final Patch Tuesday, E3 officially dies, the future of NPUs

Records live every Wednesday at 2:00pm Eastern / 11:00am Pacific / 19:00 UTC.
Category: News

Grab your favorite whisky and join Paul, Richard, and Leo as they meander through a delightfully geeky/tipsy conversation spanning Windows updates, AI advancements, Big Tech antitrust issues, and more!

Windows 11

  • The final Patch Tuesday of 2023 arrives 
  • Copilot now opens on the display where you click its Taskbar icon (or it will, thanks to CFR)
  • Copilot now appears in Alt + Tab (but not in Task view/WINKEY + Tab), oddly (Same deal)
  • Account notifications in Start and Settings (disable this nonsense in Settings > Privacy & security > General)
  • For Windows 10 users, Copilot is now available to everyone in preview with the Patch Tuesday update (CFR, need to manually download it). No Windows integration settings yet. A few other changes on Windows 10 too
  • Canary/Dev (Thursday): Copilot undocked mode, Widgets changes, Windows 365 Boot and Switch changes, Windows Share improvements (WhatsApp integration, curious), character count in Notepad (how cute)
  • Beta channel (Friday): Windows Share and Windows Store improvements
  • Dev channel (today): Transitioning Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) to voice access because WSR is being deprecated 
  • Also Canary: New Windows Protected Print Mode
  • Clipchamp quietly added four new features recently, and you’re never going to believe what happens next 
  • AMD unveils Ryzen 8040 series mobile CPUs with a new NPU on select models
  • Intel’s Meteor Lake is coming in hot

Antitrust

  • UK CMA and US FTC are both investigating Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI
  • After failing to reach a settlement, Google loses Epic antitrust trial
  • Why it has so far done much better against Google than it has against Apple?
  • Apple to be punished for App Store business practices in the EU 
  • Apple likely to open up NFC chipset in iPhone in response to EU concerns

AI

  • Microsoft reaches agreement with AFL/CIO on AI
  • Google Releases Gemini Pro to enterprises and developers
  • Google releases Gemini-powered NotebookLM in the U.S. Keep on steroids, basically

Xbox

  • An ad-supported Xbox Game Pass offering is likely on the way
  • Xbox Cloud Gaming is now on Meta Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro
  • Balder’s Gate 3 lands on Xbox Series X|S
  • Microsoft reveals two new games at The Game Awards
  • E3, which has been dead for years, is now officially dead
  • The next Digital Eclipse interactive documentary looks about as amazing as the first

Tips and Picks

  • Tip of the week: Get your Xbox Year in Review
  • App pick of the week: Fences 5
  • RunAs Radio this week: SysAdmin Gifts with Joey Snow & Rick Claus
  • Brown liquor pick of the week: Balvenie Double Wood 12
     

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Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

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