Windows Weekly 1002 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. Richard Campbell has the week off. Paul Thurrott is here. Lots to talk about, including could it be the end of the line for the Xbox? He's got a brand new Windows laptop he loves, and the Google Book emerges. That and a whole lot more next on Windows Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:00:31]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, episode 1002, recorded Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026: Only B & D Matter. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners. Hello, you dozers.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:49]:
Oh boy.

Leo Laporte [00:00:50]:
This is the show where we talk about the latest from Microsoft. You know, Paul was just telling me, soon our 20th anniversary of doing this show. And for the first 4 or 5 years, I think we just did it with the two of us, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:01]:
Yeah, at least. It might even be more than that. And we were, remember, we were audio only too in the very beginning.

Leo Laporte [00:01:07]:
That's right.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:08]:
Which is awesome. Which I have to say, I really preferred, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:01:12]:
But we don't look a day older.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:15]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:01:17]:
So, we thought we'd do a little throwback episode. Richard is— where is Richard? He's busy.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:24]:
He's away traveling. I don't know what he's doing.

Leo Laporte [00:01:26]:
And so, Paul and I just thought, you know what, we used to do this show together. I used to be the play-by-play. I know he used to be the play-by-play. I used to be the color guy. I think I could do that again.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:37]:
Just a bit to the outside.

Leo Laporte [00:01:38]:
Oh my God. Going, going, gone. I have, uh, this is a humorous little humorous side note. My AIs, uh, sometimes, uh, fall asleep like in the middle of a project. I will leave. I will, at 10 o'clock when I'm going to bed, I'll say, hey, here's 12 things to do. Have them done by the morning. Just work all night.

Leo Laporte [00:02:04]:
And then I wake up at 11 and it's—

Paul Thurrott [00:02:07]:
Right. Still not done.

Leo Laporte [00:02:08]:
No, it's sitting there at 11:00 PM, an hour later. And I said, what happened? You taking a break? They said, oh, oh no, no, no. We just—

Paul Thurrott [00:02:18]:
Oh, I didn't think you were watching.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
Are you smoking? What are you doing?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:22]:
What is this, like a teenager?

Leo Laporte [00:02:24]:
Yeah, they need to be prodded.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:27]:
So, um, sorry, when I told you to mow the lawn, I wanted it today, not like some time before it turned, you know, teeny.

Leo Laporte [00:02:34]:
This is what cracks me up because they're talking about, oh, AI is going to kill us, we're all going to die.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:41]:
Right. And, uh, not with that lack of initiative.

Leo Laporte [00:02:44]:
I don't think so. You know, the only way that works is if you keep pushing them like, come on, hack it, hack it, hack it. You can hack it, hack it, hack it. You have to constantly Correct.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:54]:
By that point, you've done all the work. And I don't, you know, I think the point of this stuff is we don't want to do all the work.

Leo Laporte [00:02:59]:
Well, and there's some culpability, there's some responsibility for the person who writes the Python loop that says, okay, hack it some more, hack it. And that's all it is, by the way, apparently these irregular tests. And now OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini have all said, oh yeah, when Irregular was testing us, they escaped. Yeah, well, maybe Irregular is the problem, right? They're, they're whipping these little agents. Come on.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:22]:
So this, this Google thing where they're like, oh yeah, no, ours also has—

Leo Laporte [00:03:27]:
Ours escaped too.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:28]:
It sort of, it sort of reminds me of the, um, like the Anthony Jeselnik thing he does about like when there's tragedy and it's the thought and prayers thing. And he's just like, don't forget about me. Don't forget about little old me. I know something over there is going bad, but don't look at me.

Leo Laporte [00:03:42]:
I need some, I need some, I need some sugar.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:44]:
And that's what these AI companies are just like that. It's like, oh no, no, we actually—

Leo Laporte [00:03:47]:
Look at us, we can do it. Well, the funny thing is Gemini's was so pathetic because, oh, they escaped, but then they realized that they had escaped and they—

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

Leo Laporte [00:03:56]:
So they came back.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:58]:
Right. So the, your AI agent is like my cat. He's never been outside. And the one time it escapes outside, it doesn't go anywhere because it's scared to death because it's like, what is this? What's this weird stuff out there?

Leo Laporte [00:04:08]:
It ran right back inside. So anyway, it's, it's pretty funny. Uh, so what I decided to do is, um, Let me know when you've moved to the next stage so I know you're going on. And in order to make this more fun for the human, I decided to make it like a Premier League play-by-play. And I got it to do the voice of a very famous Premier League announcer, Peter Drury, which I, again, another copyright violation.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:39]:
Well, you're just using it for your own— oh no, you aren't. All 4 ruled items pass. De La Reina raises both arms. No flag, clean goal. And now the final whistle awaits only the gaffer himself. Verify gate, folks. Nothing lands without the boss says so.

Leo Laporte [00:04:59]:
This is like— Lisa was outside of the house, so I had this— yeah, it's like Soho Horse. I had it going through the whole house, like every speaker in the house was, was the gaffer. And then I— but then I said, who's the gaffer? He said, you're the gaffer, Leo, you're the gaffer. Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm just It's amusing to me. Uh, so this week in copyright infringement, ladies and gentlemen. Uh, none of this is like—

Paul Thurrott [00:05:23]:
This is like unearthed like a 50-something-year-old memory for somehow, like when I was a kid, my grandmother who was from Newfoundland was dating—

Leo Laporte [00:05:31]:
Really? I didn't know that. She was a Newfie.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:34]:
Yeah. Well, Thoreau is French Canadian, but I'm a doctor.

Leo Laporte [00:05:37]:
So am I. Laporte and Thoreau.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:40]:
Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Um, right. Anyway, uh, the guy, the guy she was dating, Chuck, I don't remember actually. I'm not sure where he was from. I, I picture him being Irish, I guess, but he used to get really drunk all the time and he would call everyone Duffer. Duffer. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:57]:
He'd be like, hey, Duffer, give me a can. You're like, what? You're like, you talking to me?

Leo Laporte [00:06:02]:
I think that's what gaffer is kind of.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:03]:
I'm like a little like, uh, you know. Yeah, that's why, that's what reminded me of it. I haven't thought, I haven't thought of this in like 40-something years probably.

Leo Laporte [00:06:09]:
I It's pretty funny. Duffer.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:12]:
Duffer. He called everyone Duffer.

Leo Laporte [00:06:13]:
I think I'm now of an age where I can— I should come up with something that I call everybody.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:20]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:06:20]:
Like, I know why they do it. Because it's coming— I mean, to me, I don't remember anybody's name.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:24]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:06:25]:
So I just call everybody Duffer. That's, you know, that's perfect. So what word should I use? I need a good one.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:33]:
In a more private setting, I'll explain how I did the same thing with the woman who became my wife, because I could never They'll be different.

Leo Laporte [00:06:41]:
There was a very famous Seinfeld episode where he forgot his girlfriend's name. I'm not gonna go into it. Right. Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:47]:
And then he kept trying to get—

Leo Laporte [00:06:48]:
yeah, yeah, exactly. But, uh, it didn't matter.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:51]:
If I'm not mistaken, was that the woman who was later on Frasier? Was it that episode?

Leo Laporte [00:06:56]:
It might be. Her name was Mulva.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:58]:
Yeah, right. Because he was— because he finally gets the call from Mulva.

Leo Laporte [00:07:01]:
We don't have to talk about— yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, is there anything— I'm, you know, this is what the show used to be like, kids. You could be— you could thank Richard Campbell and Mary Jo Foley for keeping it off, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:15]:
Keeping it on track. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:07:17]:
So let me do that. Uh, it is Week D.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:21]:
Yes, yes it is. And I was reminded of that fact at approximately 5 PM last night when I was getting ready to call it a day, and I got that notification that this had occurred, and I'm like, right, it's It's Week D. Why do I never remember this? But I never remember this. I can't explain that. But yes. So the Tuesday of Week D.

Leo Laporte [00:07:38]:
Is that the 4th week of the month? Is that?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:41]:
It's the 4th Tuesday of the month.

Leo Laporte [00:07:43]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:44]:
Well, Week D is technically the 4th week, but it's generally, it's the 4th Tuesday.

Leo Laporte [00:07:48]:
Because Patch Tuesday is the 2nd Tuesday.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:51]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:07:51]:
Which would be Week B.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:53]:
That's right.

Leo Laporte [00:07:53]:
Do they ever call it Week B?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:55]:
Yeah. You don't see that a lot. There's actually A, B, C, D, and E actually. But, um, but yeah, only B and D really matter, um, because those are the regularly scheduled ones. And, um, you know, B is obviously Patch Tuesday, right? Week D is the preview of the Patch Tuesday updates we're going to get the next month, right? And that's what we just got this past week. You might remember last month there was no Week D update, and that day Tuesday of that week came and went. And on Wednesday I was like, something's going on. I wonder if this is somehow tied to 26H2.

Leo Laporte [00:08:25]:
Ah.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:26]:
And then days later, a couple of days later, maybe one day later, I don't remember, they released 26H2 to their— to what, Paul? To release preview, I guess, which is the first time they've ever done that.

Leo Laporte [00:08:40]:
I don't blame your confusion because—

Paul Thurrott [00:08:42]:
I know. Listen, I don't know how anyone keeps this straight. And this is pretty much all I do and I can't keep it straight. Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, we'll get it. I should talk about that a little bit more in a second. But I just, to complete that thought, 26H2, I've not heard anything about that, although that too will come up at some point in here. I know I wrote something about this somewhere, but anywho, yes, but this month we did get a Week D.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:10]:
So it's last month's not having a set of Week D updates was the first time I could remember. I mean, at least in the Windows, like, like last 4 or 5 years. I don't know. It's been a long time anyway. So. Back on track.

Leo Laporte [00:09:24]:
So Weekday is usually not patches, it's features. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:30]:
I mean, it's likely, right? So I don't think that they actually hold off on security patches all the time for the stable release. I suspect that they're rolling these things in as they go and that, you know, it's possible, like in other words, when Patch Tuesday comes, that in addition to the whatever new features may or may not be in here, Some of the security stuff might have already occurred, but yes, but Patch Tuesday is the big day for the security updates. And these days, really big day, right? So we'll see. Maybe they can go over 1,000, wait 2 weeks. We'll see. But yeah, I mean, if I will say, like, there's still some vague kind of non-transparency stuff when it comes to testing Windows and Windows Insider Program. And when does this become this? And when does this hit public and yada, yada, yada. But But they are doing a better job of following a more logical progression through the system, meaning, you know, the names have changed, but not always.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:26]:
But, you know, a new feature or whatever it is, a change will occur in experimental. It will make its way to beta. It will make its way to release preview. And then it comes to here. And this is the case with this month, the set of updates we're seeing across 3 different versions of supported versions of Windows. were all tested, or, you know, yeah, were pushed through release preview about, about 2 weeks ago. I think it's 10, 11 days ago. And that's the right way to do it, right? That's— it doesn't always happen, but it is the right way to do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:57]:
So if you think back 2 weeks ago, 2 weeks ago, 24 and 25H2 got— Well, got the features that I think of as 26H2, but Because everyone gets all the features. Everyone gets all the features. So these are the big things, things like the new Start menu, the new taskbar, the new Windows Search, and whatever else, a bunch of stuff. So that was a big one. 26H1 got nothing because 26H1 is only on Snapdragon X2-based computers. It's about a month behind is the way that's kind of gone. And actually you can see that in these Week D updates as well. So for 24 and 25H2, the preview update that was released It's just, it's in stable, but you have to go get it.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:39]:
You have to seek it. You have to say, I want to get, you know, download updates as soon as possible, is the thing that was in release preview 2 weeks ago. There's nothing major, major in here, but like, you know, a month ago was the really big one for this, for these versions of Windows. It's the additional Copilot key remapping capabilities. So you can remap it to right control or that context menu, right? Um, it was supposed to include Wi-Fi support in the Windows Recovery Environment, but apparently that's been delayed. Um, but we're going to get to that because it's going through the Insider Program, so it's still happening. And, uh, and then a bunch of fixes and small updates across the system. You know, there's Emoji 17.0 in here.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:20]:
I mean, who cares, whatever. So most of it is not super important. Um, the only interesting note here is that this update represents the last set of feature updates that 24H2 is going to get because that version of Windows goes out of support on October 12th or 13th. I can't remember. So they will get— if you're on 24H2 for some reason still, you will get this update as Patch Tuesday on whatever the second Tuesday of October is. I could just look that up, I guess. Is the 13th. Oh, it's actually that exact day.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:52]:
So you'll get that and that will be it, right? Ideally, what you will get from there is a 20— 26H2 upgrade if you're somehow still on 24H2. And that's actually semi-interesting because ever since Microsoft put 26H2 inside of the release preview— sorry, I still have trouble remembering where things went— we haven't heard anything about it. They haven't said anything, right? And so it sort of makes sense that 26H2 would would be released broadly, you know, through Windows Update to people in stable on or before that date, because you have to give those people some way forward, meaning the people on 24H2. So on the 13th, which is the 2nd Tuesday of October, uh, if you are on 24H2, you will get this, whatever this set of updates is, not super important. And then presumably before or sometime shortly thereafter, uh, 26H2 will start rolling out to those guys. But— That's— I'm just kind of half speculating. It's an educated guess. If you're on 26H1, and with rare exception to have the— unless you got it somehow through the Insider Program, that's the version of Windows 11 that comes with Snapdragon X2-based laptops.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:07]:
It's always been a month behind, like I said. So this one delivers all those big updates that we saw last month in 24 and 25H2, the new taskbar, the new Start menu, the new Windows Search, et cetera. And there's other stuff, but those are the big ones. And so that's cool. Like I saw some hints that these things were going to be better aligned and, but that has fallen apart. So that's not what has happened, unfortunately. So, all right. That's that.

Leo Laporte [00:14:36]:
And of course I've spent the past 24 hours, you know, writing all this up, huh?

Paul Thurrott [00:14:41]:
Well, installing it on all my, you know, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:14:43]:
First you have to install it. You can't write it until you install it.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:46]:
I have these.

Leo Laporte [00:14:47]:
How many machines do How many computers do you install this on? I can't even count them.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:53]:
I don't even want to talk about this.

Leo Laporte [00:14:56]:
So you're like an IT guy in a big company, except it's just you.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:00]:
Well, here I am. In Mexico, I have fewer computers, right? Yeah. I mean, here I—

Leo Laporte [00:15:05]:
Do you use— you used to be able to do the updates to a sync once and then apply it everywhere. Do you use that, or do you put it on a floppy disk and walk around?

Paul Thurrott [00:15:15]:
No, I just, I download it live. I do it the normal way.

Leo Laporte [00:15:18]:
So gigabytes.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:19]:
I was just— it's funny. So I— this is not something I talk about a lot. Well, no, I mean, it comes up though from time to time, right? It's not worth talking about too, too much. But just this morning I was— I had a couple of computers going and, you know, there's 2 over here installing and I'm working over here and I'm looking at it. And I did the, you know, you do the WinVer thing where you can see the build number and everything. And I don't remember the— it's like 26200, probably 9550, I think is the update number. And then Or the build number. And the version of Windows Update, Windows Update, remember, was, well, was updated throughout Windows 11 months ago.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:53]:
This is not something that just occurred in this past Patch Tuesday. This is from months ago. And the way you can visually identify it, that lipstick on the pig thing, is that if you look at the screen, there's a little toggle. Well, it's more like a, it's like a calendar button and it brings down an actual calendar control. It's not a dropdown. But even though the two were running on different— the same exact build, the one I was looking at had the new one with the calendar control, and the one I'm running an update on over here has the old interface. And I'm like, I can't— you don't understand. Like, well, you might have some inkling.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:26]:
Like, like, this grinds my whole brain to a halt. Like, this is not— I, I don't— I accept— I do not like, but I accept the— controlled feature release thing they're doing, which is terrible. But this was months ago. How are you still on the old, you know?

Leo Laporte [00:16:44]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:45]:
I don't, I can't explain these things. And I, that bothers me a lot. Like I want to, I want to understand it, of course. And I used to understand this stuff really well. And I don't think it's because I'm getting old. I think it's because Windows is getting stupid, but whatever. Anyway. Um, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:57]:
So I do, this is the kind of, this is how I spend my time. It's like not writing. It's just wondering.

Leo Laporte [00:17:03]:
Um, So this is important, by the way. This is an important tip for computer users. We often want to blame ourselves.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:10]:
Oh, all the time.

Leo Laporte [00:17:12]:
There's something wrong with me.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:14]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:17:14]:
Or in Lisa's case, she always wants to blame me.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:17]:
Yeah, exactly. It's a safe bet.

Leo Laporte [00:17:20]:
Like Google Docs is now so slow because they've laden it with so much software. It's really a very slow, in my experience, I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:29]:
It's funny, I didn't write about this with Google Docs, but I wrote about this with the Pixel camera.

Leo Laporte [00:17:34]:
Well, all of these web apps.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:36]:
That's the point. But it's also just, look, there's no, it's inevitable. Unless you invent some wonderful new user interface no one's ever heard of, when you add features to something, eventually what you're doing is just making it more complex. There's no way around it. This is why Office can't work in a system with menus and toolbars anymore. There's too many It's too many pieces. Too much crap. But this is the thing, you take something that's simple.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:02]:
This is why I— so not to get off on a tangent, but I mean—

Leo Laporte [00:18:05]:
Tangent away, go ahead.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:06]:
I love tangents. I realize the Apple products are not the focus here, but one of the things that Apple did very well, I think, is that they adapted the iPad finally and belatedly to work like a laptop. And they did all the multitasking stuff. And I'm not saying it's perfect, but They did, but it's very good. And they did it in a way that does not compromise the traditional iPod, iPad interface that everyone understands. And most people prefer and still want to use, like the touch that you're holding it and touching it, whatever. And I, and I got to say, like coming from like a vast Microsoft background, that's not the way things usually go. Like that's, that type of thing usually makes something too complex.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:47]:
And they did it somehow. They did it in a way that honestly is pretty good, but I don't see that almost anywhere else. Like, and the, you know, the, um, the camera app on the Pixel, for example, that's nowhere in the notes, but I mean, they updated it. Um, and they have this new interface. It's like the photographic styles, uh, feature. If you're familiar with iPhones, it's a much better user interface. Um, but it's still a freaking disaster, right? It's a, it's a very comp— because it's complex.

Leo Laporte [00:19:13]:
It's complicated.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:13]:
And there were literally, if you, Think about, well, most people don't even know what I'm talking about here, but there are like basically 4 or 5 top-level styles or camera looks. But then there are these creative, I don't even know the term. You can take each one of them from, from there and then apply a different like set of, they're not filters, but let's call them filters. So there's several of those. So you got this matrix of top level and bottom level and like whatever. But then for each one of them, there's a list of, and this, I don't know, 12 to 15. Attributes. These are things like white balance, you know, brightness, saturation, whatever they are.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:49]:
So if you do the math on what I just said from 4 or 5, and then they can be matrixed out to 7, you know, 4 or 5 or 7 more, and then each of them has whatever, 12 or 15, like this is like a million permutations. And it is, it is not well done. And I, it is not obvious how you Configure this so that if you, um, leave the camera app and come back, it remembers what you just did, right? Which is a big problem on the iPad— iPhone as well. If you take the time to go through their stupid little interface and get it exactly the way you want it, and then you're dumbly out in the world taking a photo and you make one little settings change, you, you might blow away everything you did.

Leo Laporte [00:20:27]:
That's because they design it for grandpa.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:30]:
Except that I don't— this—

Leo Laporte [00:20:32]:
I mean, even grandpa would get lost. So grandma's going to get lost either way, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:20:37]:
Yeah. I, so I guess anyway, you were talking about Google Docs, but, but it's, I feel like it's inevitable that in time, like they're like, we want this to be more powerful. We want it to do more. We want to learn. You're like, congratulations, you did it. Now no one can use it anymore. And you know, is that what you wanted? You know, it's a hard, this is a, this is a central kind of user experience battle, I think.

Leo Laporte [00:21:00]:
And It's universal. We designed 11 years ago our Twit website and it was clean. It was simple.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:07]:
It's only 11 years. By the way, your website is actually still simple compared to the world. I'm just, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:21:13]:
It was a lot simpler, but you know, we keep putting stuff on it because that's just the way the world is.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:18]:
You don't—

Leo Laporte [00:21:20]:
and that's why everyone's trying to struggle. And then you just keep doing a Jenga of website, web infrastructure that—

Paul Thurrott [00:21:26]:
Yeah. No, we have a guy, the guy who does our tech stuff on my website comes in all the time and he's like, something goes wrong and he looks at it, he goes, look, I don't know, this thing, it looks like it's like 8 years old. It was written by someone named Bob, not his real name, but— and he's like— and we're like, yeah, we sort of remember that guy. He was only around for like 2 weeks. And he's like, yeah, well, screwing up your whole site and it's still in there. And, and I'm like, yep. And my site's only like— it's not even 10 years old. What is— what date? I guess it is 10 years old, but, um, you know, it's not like this thing's been on the internet for 30 years.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:55]:
Like, it's like This stuff hap— this, this, what do you call this? Technical debt or whatever. Um, it piles up pretty quick. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:22:04]:
Technical debt. That makes it sound so—

Paul Thurrott [00:22:07]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [00:22:09]:
Anodyne.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:09]:
I'm just paying on the interest, Leo. I'm never paying this thing off. So I don't know. Eventually we just go bankrupt, I guess. I don't know. Anyway, that's right. I don't even know what we're talking about. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:24]:
So, um, no, no, no, no, no. All right.

Leo Laporte [00:22:26]:
So 24, 25 H2.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:28]:
26H1, you have weekday updates if you want them. You know, I, they seem to be pretty stable for the most part, um, in my experience, but I don't know. Um, and then, then probably last Friday, Microsoft released an indeterminate number of builds to the Windows Insider Program because that's how they do things now. Um, their official description is that we have 2 channels. By my count, they have 7, but you know, numbers or whatever. Um, So one of the only really kind of— well, this is semi-related to that Windows Recovery Environment thing I mentioned earlier, right? So at some point, Microsoft is going to bring the ability to access an on-disk Wi-Fi profile while in the recovery environment. What that means is you open the thing up, your computer's not booting, whatever reason, you go into the recovery environment and you're not online. Like, that thing's not online.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:19]:
So you can plug in an Ethernet cable, that will work. But they want it to work if you have a Wi-Fi profile, you know, in other words, a connection you've already made inside of your profile, inside of your account on Windows. It can see that. And if it's a known, you know, one of the, you know, they have an understanding of whether or not this is a reasonably good network and they'll let you just connect to it automatically. So that's going to be great when it arrives, but it's not there yet. But there's another tool in the Windows recovery environment that they're still kind of actively working on because it's brand new, called Cloud Rebuild. And if you've ever used a Mac, whatever it's worth, Apple's had this for 10 years. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:59]:
They've had this for a long time. But it's basically a way to— well, yet another way, I should say, to do like a full clean install of Windows. In this case, that will include not just the Windows image, but also the correct drivers for the computer.

Leo Laporte [00:24:16]:
That's nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:16]:
That's actually super important because depending on how you do things, like if you take a clean USB stick and put an ISO on there and boot it and install Windows that way, there's like, in my experience, about a 50% chance you're going to boot into an environment that has no internet connection, no sound, no whatever, there's no drivers. So you have to— today what you do is you do the thing I just described. You connect it to an Ethernet cable just to get online, run Windows Update, then you'll get all the stuff you need and you can connect to Wi-Fi from there, but this will do it in what Microsoft calls the offline mode, which I think is actually super important. So, you know what I miss?

Leo Laporte [00:24:50]:
That is cool. I miss steady state. Oh geez.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:54]:
Steady state. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:24:55]:
That's kind of what it did, right? The whole idea is more for like a kiosk installation, but yeah, you, you'd go boom. It would reboot back into the default state.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:06]:
This is what you want where—

Leo Laporte [00:25:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:07]:
Well, this is what you want this like in an educational lab, maybe in an elementary school or something.

Leo Laporte [00:25:12]:
Or for my father-in-law. Yeah, he's called me now 3 times this week because his printer is doing weird things.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:19]:
What does he have to print? I'm just curious.

Leo Laporte [00:25:21]:
All I know is, well, he's 80-something, so he's printing still.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:25]:
I know, but like, he's 80-something, so what's he print? Like using like the print shop thing where one letter's on every page? He's like—

Leo Laporte [00:25:30]:
No, no, he's shuffling through.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:32]:
He—

Leo Laporte [00:25:32]:
I don't— he prints his email. I don't know, right? I don't know why, but he— but he has a big ass— he, he went to Okay, so he went to an office store. It was Staples.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:43]:
Is he like single-handedly keeping HP's printing business in business?

Leo Laporte [00:25:46]:
Exactly. They sold him an HP— he needed a new computer because this was pretty old. So they sell him an HP computer, an HP printer. And I said, Poppy, why didn't you come to me first, Poppy? Poppy, Poppy.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:57]:
If only you knew anyone who knew something about computers.

Leo Laporte [00:26:00]:
He said, no, there's a really nice guy at the Staples and he just, he helped me out. And I said, yeah, I bet he did. And oh, and there was another thing. He said, well, I couldn't open this one file. So I went back in and he has a card and he only charged me $99 and he made it work. And we were talking about this the other day, a couple of weeks ago, and I realized, oh yeah, he bought Office.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:21]:
Right. Oh yes. I think I heard this one. So the next time he goes back, he's going to be like, that's a really nice Mercedes in the parking lot. Who owns that? It's like, well, I do technically, but you pay for it. You know?

Leo Laporte [00:26:35]:
So, so, so first, I think the first, first problem I went in, I went over and I fixed it. It's gonna get old quick, right? But I went over the first time and fixed it. He's only 15 minutes away. He had two, the same printer installed twice. So I installed one of the two and it worked. Then I went over the next time and this is By the way, I used to, on the radio show, I said, don't call me with your printer problems. I don't want to hear about it. The, the spooler gets stuck.

Leo Laporte [00:27:05]:
This happens all the time in my experience on Windows. The print spool gets jammed.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:09]:
And then it's—

Leo Laporte [00:27:10]:
I—

Paul Thurrott [00:27:10]:
yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:27:11]:
And then won't nothing— all the jobs stack up behind this one jammed job.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:14]:
No one, no one's going to— exactly. This thing is like a single-threaded piece, like a 16-bit code from the 1980s or something. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:27:21]:
So I went in, I said, oh yeah, you got it stalled. I killed the Windows spooler and everything worked again. So now he says— and I haven't gone over yet. So this is my technique. I did the same thing on the radio show. If you let somebody stew for long enough, sometimes they fix the problem before you can fix it, before you have to fix it. So the most recent one, yesterday he calls during the show and says, my printer says I'm out of paper, but there's plenty of paper.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:49]:
Okay. Is it in the printer?

Leo Laporte [00:27:51]:
Yeah, it's in the printer. I think probably he set the tray to— he got way too fancy of a printer. He probably set the tray to, you know, some other tray. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:02]:
He's probably sitting there. Somewhere, somewhere someone's receiving these printouts on fax paper.

Leo Laporte [00:28:07]:
You can't walk an 85-year-old man through this over the phone. You just can't.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:15]:
No.

Leo Laporte [00:28:15]:
I used to try this with my mom. And I couldn't get over there because she was across the country. And I would just— Lisa would say— I would mute the thing and start, and Lisa would say, just calm down.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:26]:
I said—

Leo Laporte [00:28:28]:
and I'm only mentioning this because I know every single person listening to this show has been there, done that.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:36]:
This is a million years ago, but my dad visited while we were in Boston. He used to be a Boston police officer.

Leo Laporte [00:28:43]:
Oh, neat.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:43]:
He was going to some kind of reunion thing.

Leo Laporte [00:28:45]:
Did he have that great Boston accent?

Paul Thurrott [00:28:47]:
Yeah, we all did. Uh, he was, he was also redheaded Irish white cop in Boston. Yeah, classic.

Leo Laporte [00:28:54]:
Um, but straight out of the movies.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:56]:
By this point he had gotten like an iPhone and, um, he puts the phone down on the table and he says to my wife, do you guys have a phone book? And she's like, why, are you going to start a fire? And he's like, what? She's like, you have, you have a magical device in your hand that could look up anything. Why do you need a phone book? A phone book that was out of date the second they printed it.

Leo Laporte [00:29:16]:
The outhouse is out of paper.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:17]:
Yeah. She's like, they don't make phone books anymore. That's so cute.

Leo Laporte [00:29:22]:
No, you don't need a phone book. That's so adorable.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:26]:
Uh, it's like, um, when people— I just saw this reference in a TV show or movie or something. Someone was talking about how you can tell when someone's old because— or, well, they would understand this reference, which is, you know, give me a call sometime. I'm in the book. You know, now it's like, yeah, give me a call sometime. I was in that exploit of user accounts or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:29:48]:
I'm in the latest breach.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:50]:
Yeah, you'll find me. Everyone else has.

Leo Laporte [00:29:52]:
Just go to Have I Been Pwned. It's all there.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:54]:
I could get called every day. So it's working out great.

Leo Laporte [00:30:00]:
The world has changed so dramatically since even for you, even our youth.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:06]:
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:30:07]:
It's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:08]:
Look, the one thing I'm super cognizant of is that I am of the generation that we had the first home video games or just video games, arcade games and home video games and home computers. And this came up somehow, I think, on the show, but a couple weeks ago or something. But in the early '80s or mid to mid-'80s, whenever it was, at some point, I, it became available that I could own like Star Wars at the time on tape. And I was like, oh my God, like this was unbelievable, you know, because that was not a thing like forever, you know. And now it's many years later and I bought it on various formats like 17 times. But so, you know, George Lucas has a Mercedes I paid for, but, um, that's fine. But yeah, I mean, that's, um, Yeah, the world has changed completely.

Leo Laporte [00:31:00]:
Yeah. It is amazing. Sometimes every once in a while, I'll sit there typing commands into my little AI agent and think, yeah, what has happened?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:10]:
Right. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:31:13]:
I, a couple of days ago, I said, I typed to Hermes, do you remember the night of the 21st of September? I was just curious if it would, and it immediately went, yeah, ba ba ba ba ba ba, immediately. And then it's, so it repeated the lyrics and then it said, Or do you really want to know what happened?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:33]:
That's awesome. But it made that leap, like it sort of guessed that this is what you were getting at.

Leo Laporte [00:31:38]:
It knew within seconds. I don't know. I mean, it seems like it knows everything it's got in its weights. It's got every possible reference.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:47]:
Oh, so—

Leo Laporte [00:31:48]:
The other day I said, I think it was talking about storage, and I said, well, 64K should be enough for anyone. And it said, you know, Bill Gates never said that, but it's true. Like immediately, like it knew the reference.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:02]:
Right, right. Yeah, one of the more famous misquotes, one of the best, there's an awesome Anthony Bourdain quote that's everywhere and restaurants have it. It's like, you know, get in a Negroni, have another Negroni, you know, whatever it is. It's like this long thing. It's like, yeah, he never said any of that. The whole quote is wrong. He never said it. And it's attributed to him all, you know.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:24]:
Yeah. It's just, yeah, this is like, we live in a world where it's so easy to find out the truth of things and we never, we just have complete nonsense.

Leo Laporte [00:32:31]:
So interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:33]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:32:34]:
So interesting. Anyway, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:37]:
No, it's okay. You also, just because of whatever. So see, no one's here to stop me. So I'm going to just sideline this whole thing because you just remind me. So, uh, one of the things I don't have in my show notes, because why, why would I, is if you bought an iPhone 15 something and an iPhone 16 something, depending, it depends year to year, but I always buy like the, like a Pro Max version usually. Right. Apple has some settlement where they're going to pay everyone who bought these phones between $29 and $90 depending on how it goes. And I'm like, I owned every one of these phones, so I'm definitely doing this twice.

Leo Laporte [00:33:09]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:10]:
So the way I, as my age, try to solve this problem— well, actually, okay, wait, let me give myself a little bit of credit. I went to apple.com, signed in, went to my orders, and they're not in there. I'm like, okay. And I don't know why exactly. I think it might be because I already traded them in maybe, or maybe, I don't know, maybe it just doesn't go back the the far end. It's like, you can search with the order number. I'm like, that's not going to help. What I need is the serial number, right? And so I look, I go to apple.com, search, like, how do I find the serial number if I don't have the thing? And it's like, you could get it from the box.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:39]:
And I'm like, oh, I definitely have the boxes. I have, you know, because I stupidly never throw these things out. So I'm up, I spent 45 minutes in the attic digging through boxes. I found one of them.

Leo Laporte [00:33:49]:
Oh.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:50]:
Right? So I couldn't get— I did that, filled out the form. Whatever. I'm like, okay, but this bothers me, right? I'm like, I know I have the other one somewhere. Like, I know it's somewhere. I got to figure this out. And so like the next morning when I got up, I was like, and I went first, I went to Siri and I was like, Siri, you know, on the phone, wherever it has everything, right? Can you tell me what my serial number was of my whatever? I think it was the iPhone 16 Pro Max, right?

Leo Laporte [00:34:15]:
It should know, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:34:16]:
So she's like, and then she goes, oh, I'm sorry. But she said, I looked through your email, your calendar, And something in your chats. I looked everywhere. I didn't see this anywhere.

Leo Laporte [00:34:26]:
I searched everywhere, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:28]:
And I have to say, I should say I searched Gmail for this because that I would have gotten. It would be in there somewhere. I found like iPad serial numbers in there somehow. But anyway, then I was like, well, Siri is still Siri. So I would— then I went to Gemini and I said the same thing. I said, and he goes, yeah, here it is, Paul.

Leo Laporte [00:34:44]:
Oh my God. Because it was Gmail, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:34:46]:
Yep. Yeah, it was right there in Gmail and I didn't find it. I looked for it. I never did find it myself when I searched, but it found it immediately. So from the, the moment I discovered I could do this to the moment I actually solved this problem was like one day. But if I just asked Gemini the first time, I would have solved it immediately, you know? So I'm not saying AI is always great. In fact, we're talking about—

Leo Laporte [00:35:09]:
There's another solution, Paul, which is what I've done, which is give your AI access to everything, including your Gmail. I don't know. Can you give Siri access to Gmail? Maybe you can't.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:19]:
You can. Um, that's up—

Leo Laporte [00:35:21]:
by the way, that's an interesting point. It's up to Google, right, to use the Siri AI intents in the Gmail app, and then it could. And so that's what we're waiting for, is every developer should make their app Siri searchable.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:34]:
Yeah. So I would think though, but if you're using like the Apple Mail app, for example—

Leo Laporte [00:35:39]:
Well, yeah, if you're getting it in the Apple Mail app, you should.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:41]:
Yeah. I feel like it would be there, but I Should be.

Leo Laporte [00:35:44]:
Are you getting it in the Apple Mail app?

Paul Thurrott [00:35:45]:
I don't know where I'm getting it, Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:35:47]:
You're probably getting it in the Gmail app.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:50]:
Oh, I'm getting it, but—

Leo Laporte [00:35:51]:
Oh, you're getting it.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:52]:
But I don't—

Leo Laporte [00:35:53]:
Pow, Zoom.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:54]:
Listen, I— the problem I had to solve is solved. I'm not thinking about this any further, but I— but I— yeah, no, fair enough.

Leo Laporte [00:36:01]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:02]:
Look, it's easy after the fact to be like, oh, you should have, you know, like, yeah, you're right, I should have, but I didn't. I don't know. Anyway, I was just surprised how Actually, Siri came back pretty quick. I mean, and even explained why she couldn't find it. I was like, okay, that's kind of cool.

Leo Laporte [00:36:14]:
Well, there is a reason, and that's when you first— people will realize this if they have an older phone and install iOS 27— for the first 2 or 3 days—

Paul Thurrott [00:36:22]:
Oh, you don't even have it. Oh, it's not happening. You mean the indexing thing?

Leo Laporte [00:36:26]:
For the first 2 or 3 days, it's indexing your stuff. It has— it's searching through everything.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:30]:
So I was one of those people, because this was in beta for several months, right? And, um, I don't remember when it was, June, July sometime, but there were like Maybe 2 builds in a row where it just would never finish. Like, and everyone was publishing these different tips. And I also went down that rabbit hole. I never got it to work until I installed a new build and it finally, it cleared up. But once you know, it's like, we're, you know, our brains are broken, right? So once you know this is a thing, you keep going to that thing in settings in this case where you can see that.

Leo Laporte [00:36:58]:
Are you done?

Paul Thurrott [00:36:58]:
Are you done? And you're like, why isn't it done?

Leo Laporte [00:37:00]:
Damn it.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:00]:
You're watching TV for a little while.

Leo Laporte [00:37:01]:
Like, is it done? And then, you know, it's just— Oh, we're so sad. Well, this is why though, I loved, I love doing TWiT. I love working with you and I love our audience because we're all in the same boat.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:12]:
Oh yeah. No, this is like a, this is a recovery group, uh, for people with like whatever, something between autism and ADHD. But it's, um, you know, yeah, we're all in this, this cycle. This is like 30-something years, 30-ish years ago. I went to COMDEX at the time and it's a sea of nerd humanity.

Leo Laporte [00:37:30]:
People.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:31]:
And I had this— yeah, I had that moment where I'm looking at all these losers, these guys I would have like pantsed incessantly in high school. And I was like, these are my peers, my people, you know? Yep. I just—

Leo Laporte [00:37:46]:
I love it. When we— it was— I first experienced that when we were at TechTV. We would— in fact, the very first appearance we did with Kate and I at a Best Buy in Las Vegas, right? And it was like There are people here and they're all like us.

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

Leo Laporte [00:38:01]:
You're like, damn, it's great.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:02]:
I should love this.

Leo Laporte [00:38:04]:
But I did. No, I love it. I did, uh, for a limited time. And then you have to retreat to your cave and kind of—

Paul Thurrott [00:38:10]:
Oh yeah. I mean, I think half these people had their mothers with them. It was the saddest thing I've ever seen.

Leo Laporte [00:38:16]:
Oh my God. It was so fun.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:18]:
I love it. I love it. Anyway, I will make your digressions look like they're on point because I'm, I'm just gonna— I, I can go—

Leo Laporte [00:38:25]:
I kept lost where we are in the, in the rundown here. I think I know where we Let me take a break is what we should probably do. And then, uh, and then we can continue with the digressions. Uh, you're watching a very special episode of Windows Weekly, Paul and Leo Lose It. It's, uh, you know, we do this every once in a while without somebody to tie us down.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:45]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:38:46]:
Uh, back to Mr. T. And I hope by now you figured out where we were.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:51]:
Yes. When you said Origin, by the way, I immediately went to Ultima Online for some reason.

Leo Laporte [00:38:56]:
I know, me too. What a great game.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:57]:
Oh, well, or ultimately, I guess. Yeah. Anyway, uh, so yes, so, uh, some software things. Um, Dave Plummer, you may know from his, um, awesome YouTube channel.

Leo Laporte [00:39:10]:
Um, love Dave.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:12]:
3, 3+ hour interview with, uh, the guy who made NT, Dave Cutler, right? Just saying, if you just watch anything, watch that. It's awesome. Um, but he— his YouTube channel is great. Like I said, you know, I I see every episode, whatever. Um, he's been doing some vibe coding things recently. Some of them are like, yeah, like whatever. Like he, you know, vibe coded the, like a, I don't know, late '90s version or Windows 2000 version of like Notepad. And it's like, yeah, we don't really need that, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:39:38]:
But the one thing to understand is that he, by hand in the old days, wrote like the Task Manager and all this stuff. He worked at Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:46]:
That's right. And that's, yeah, that's part of the reason he's so fascinating. And, um, He has written now using AI a new version of Task Manager. So in other words, you kind of look at this idea you had. There are things you kind of maybe wish you could have done back in the '90s. There are things you never would have thought of, whatever. And it's like the name of this thing is Task Manager OG or TM OG. It is available—

Leo Laporte [00:40:10]:
It's beautiful, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:11]:
It is. Yeah, it's great. And it's available on not just Windows and Windows on ARM, but also on Mac and Linux, right?

Leo Laporte [00:40:17]:
I have it on my Mac. I love it.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:19]:
Yeah, this kind of thing is very useful. And I, I probably do a Hands-On Windows about this.

Leo Laporte [00:40:26]:
What's amazing to me is that, did he have the source code for Task Manager? Was that why he was able to do this? Because this is all vibe code.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:33]:
You know what? Right. So—

Leo Laporte [00:40:34]:
It's prettier than Task Manager.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:37]:
It's a lot prettier. I hope he would not ever admit to that.

Leo Laporte [00:40:39]:
That's how he did it. I guess he couldn't. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:41]:
Although the version for Windows is C, C++, and Win32. It's not, you know, it's not even using a .NET framework or anything.

Leo Laporte [00:40:49]:
Yeah, and I imagine this is SwiftUI.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:51]:
It is gorgeous. Yeah, he said it was actually, so it's Swift and AppKit, if you can believe that.

Leo Laporte [00:40:56]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:56]:
And then on Linux, it's Qt C++, I guess.

Leo Laporte [00:41:00]:
Everybody should have this. There's a free version and a paid version, but this is so sweet.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:05]:
Yeah, I would say the paid version is roughly what Task Manager is in Windows today, plus some other tools like sys— not sysmon, sys—

Leo Laporte [00:41:15]:
I thought it was Sysinternals. I thought it was initially, I thought that Rizinovich wrote this. I was confused.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:21]:
Yeah, no, no.

Leo Laporte [00:41:22]:
But it's not.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:22]:
No, although no, he's, um, so actually Mark Rizinovich recently did port— actually, did he bring— it might be Task Manager.

Leo Laporte [00:41:29]:
I feel like he did.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:30]:
I think he did do a VIBE-coded version. Yeah, that could be, that could be.

Leo Laporte [00:41:35]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:36]:
Um, yeah, I think you're right, actually. See, that I've not even looked at. I should go look at that. Um, anyway, look, this guy does a lot with AI, very technical, uh, these days. And, um, this is, this is pretty great. Like, this is—

Leo Laporte [00:41:51]:
I'm blown away by it. This is a really good—

Paul Thurrott [00:41:53]:
That's a good one.

Leo Laporte [00:41:54]:
If anybody says, are you, you know, vibe coding slop?

Paul Thurrott [00:41:57]:
Right. I know.

Leo Laporte [00:41:58]:
Show them this.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:58]:
No, look at this thing. Like, it's, it's, it's really powerful. But if you want to see some vibe coded slop, let's look at Stardock for a second.

Leo Laporte [00:42:05]:
No, um, no, they're doing vibe. They're doing it with AI too.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:10]:
Oh, I don't know that. But, um, but Stardock is, uh, kind of the last man standing when it comes to like what you like, a company of some kind actually making Windows utilities and games still.

Leo Laporte [00:42:20]:
They do other things.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:21]:
Good ones. And some AI stuff, right, through Clairvoyance. But, um, yeah, they have a whole, uh, suite of these things, um, that just make Windows better across the board. And you can kind of pick and choose, obviously, you know, if you want to replace the Start menu, if you want to, you know, whatever it is. They have different tools for this. So they just came up with a new one today called Snipboard, which is a clipboard manager utility for Windows 11. And so of course you're like, well, hold on a second. I mean, if you know how the clipboard works in Windows 11, it's obviously basic, you know, copy paste, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:51]:
But then you can also enable a clipboard history feature. Ooh, I like that. So instead of doing like Windows key or Control V, you do Windows key V, and then it saves that information. There's just all kinds of limitations to that. thing, you know, like if you have a graphic that you're going to put into the clipboard or a graphic or a file or whatever, it can only be a certain size. Like it does have certain limitations. And so I haven't actually seen this yet. I just came across my desk this morning.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:19]:
But the, the way that Snipboard works is it comes up as a pane that can be on whatever side of the window, you know, the screen you want. You can fully customize it. But each of the items in the clipboard is sort of like a visual thumbnail, like a card. And so you can tell just looking at it, like what it is and what the thing, you know, if you have 4 or 5 images, which the, you know, which one that you want, which makes it very easy to, you know, find what you're looking for and then select it that way.

Leo Laporte [00:43:45]:
This is a nice way to do this. Yeah, it's nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:48]:
It's native TwinUI, et cetera, et cetera. So, but here's the good news, at least for now. Normally these kinds of things, they'll have like a little sale and then It goes up to what price? They never really price things super expensive. But Snipboard, you can get as part of Object Desktop, which is their suite of utilities. Anyone could get it right now. It's in beta and it's free for now. Like, I don't know that it always will be, but if you run Windows and want to try this out, you can just try it. Like, there's no cost involved.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:17]:
So it's worth doing.

Leo Laporte [00:44:19]:
Nice. Yeah, when I used Windows, I definitely had a copy of Object Desktop.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're of a certain age as we are, uh, you would have used like window blinds, you know, to make Windows look like something else, which says a lot about Windows, by the way. Um, you know, this, and of course they're starting with Windows 8 when they got rid of the Start menu originally, that was the impetus for like this kind of recent generation stuff. Brad Waddell was like, I'm going to make a Start menu for Windows. Right. And now of course we have Start 11, right? So we had Start 8, Start 10, Start 11. and various permutations in there.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:53]:
So, um, yeah, some good, there's really good stuff there. So definitely worth looking at. Um, and then I haven't had time to write this up. I just got an email about this and, um, this is actually, this is cool. And I guess semi-obvious, but it's awesome. So Clipchamp is an amazing, uh, video editor. It's easy. It's the type of thing almost anyone can use.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:13]:
It is actually web-based. Um, if you access it from like a Chrome or Chromium type browser. You can sign in with a Google account if you want. You don't have to go through Microsoft. If you do that, you can configure it so that on a video-by-video project basis, if it saves assets to your cloud account, which is kind of cool. But if you're in Windows, you get the Microsoft account sign-in, obviously, and then it gets saved to OneDrive if you want it to be saved to OneDrive. You could just keep it all local. And if you have a Microsoft 365 account of whatever kind, Um, you don't need to get a Clipchamp subscription because you can access all of the features you would get for paying for that subscription, including the ability to output at 4K, which is really cool because that used to be behind a— well, it is still technically behind a paywall, but behind its own paywall, if that makes sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:01]:
Um, and now it is not. So I stopped paying for that because I do have Microsoft 365, so you can do 4K. Nice. But now it has a new feature, um, which is a super video super resolution upscaling, right? So it's AI video upscaling. So you might have a video asset that could be, you know, whatever, 720p or some low resolution, and you can on a clip-by-clip basis, or you can export, you obviously can export, but you want to transform the clip, you know, as it's being edited, and it will just do it right in the browser, which is really good. It's kind of cool. Like I'm trying to figure out if this is 100% cloud-based, or I wonder if they don't download a model. I'm not really sure yet.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:46]:
I'm going to— this is something I can't wait to go kind of check out. But, but the ability to upscale video to 4K for free.

Leo Laporte [00:46:54]:
That's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:55]:
Is kind of amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:46:56]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:56]:
I want to make sure I'm correct there that it's free. I believe it's just free. Yeah. Upload lovers. Okay. Yeah. It looks like it's free.

Leo Laporte [00:47:05]:
I mean, it's been always been very capable of the free version.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:47:10]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:10]:
It says it's available everywhere. So yeah, there you go. Uh, oh, it can run on the CPU on compatible Windows 11 devices or use the NPU on Copilot Plus PCs.

Leo Laporte [00:47:21]:
If you have the, uh, if you have the Windows version or whatever, the NPU.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:25]:
Well, no, it can't. It doesn't have to. Uh, but it can. Um, this will work from the web version. It will work on a different platform as well.

Leo Laporte [00:47:31]:
Probably faster if you let it do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:34]:
Yeah. I wonder.

Leo Laporte [00:47:34]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:35]:
It's interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:47:35]:
I'll have to play with it.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:37]:
Yeah, I'm, I'm decided. Like I said, I just found out about this, so I'm gonna go look at this when we're done. But I'm curious.

Leo Laporte [00:47:43]:
If you just found out about us, this is Windows Weekly, in case you didn't know. And, uh, this is the show we do every Wednesday around 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 1800 UTC, normally with Paul and Richard Campbell from runnersradio.com. Uh, not this week, so good news, there'll be no whiskey. Are you gonna do a drink at the back?

Paul Thurrott [00:48:02]:
I didn't I didn't prepare that, but I, I guess not. I don't know. Probably not. But let me, we don't have another ad, so I'm not sure how I would communicate this to my wife who's now out, but I, um, it's fine.

Leo Laporte [00:48:16]:
There is no obligation to provide more information for Booze Hounds.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:21]:
In fact, I'm not a fan of dry counties, Leo, but I, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:48:26]:
I thought I'd do our cannabis tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:28]:
I think that would be— there you go. If you're looking for the right kind of gummy—

Leo Laporte [00:48:31]:
I don't, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:33]:
To sleep or something.

Leo Laporte [00:48:34]:
Kids, be cool. Stay in school and don't do drugs.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:37]:
Be cool, be cool, be cool. Don't be a narc. Don't be a narc.

Leo Laporte [00:48:40]:
No, I don't, I don't use. I used to, you know, I used to, uh, when I was— God, when I was in college— speaking of old, the old days, how things have changed— when I was in college, you know, we fantasized. Remember that scene in Wayne's World where they talked? It's a very funny scene. I think they're lying on the hood of their car looking at the stars, right? What if you could buy pot at the store, man? You'd go in, you get a cigarette, you could just buy it, right? And it would seem like such an impossible dream, especially as people are going to jail for the possession of a single joint.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:07]:
I'm sure there are still people in jail for this.

Leo Laporte [00:49:09]:
That's the weird thing. And it's still, by the way, kids, still a federal offense.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:14]:
True.

Leo Laporte [00:49:15]:
But in many states, they do sell it practically in the drugstore. You can just go down the street here.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:23]:
Actually, these things look like Apple Stores except they sell Very nice. Little furry balls of green things and whatever. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:49:29]:
But so when I was in college, you know, man, I would have loved that. Now I have— this, this is the real irony— absolutely no interest. I, I have no— I don't— I'm already lost enough brain cells. I, I don't do it. Uh, it just makes me— it made me sleepy anyway. Who needs to be sleepy? I'm already sleepy.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:47]:
So, uh, yeah, I need to stay asleep though. Staying asleep is key.

Leo Laporte [00:49:51]:
Staying asleep. And if I could do that—

Paul Thurrott [00:49:54]:
That's the trick.

Leo Laporte [00:49:55]:
The problem with both drinking, and I imagine with, with, uh, pot use, is it'll get you to sleep, but it doesn't keep you asleep.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:02]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:50:03]:
And that's— I don't have trouble getting to sleep.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:05]:
It's the 4 AM.

Leo Laporte [00:50:06]:
Same.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:06]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:50:07]:
What's going on at this point?

Paul Thurrott [00:50:08]:
Tossing and turning. You look at the clock.

Leo Laporte [00:50:09]:
Wide awake. 4 AM.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:10]:
Like, it's pitch black. It must be 8 o'clock in the morning. Nope, it's 2. Like, great.

Leo Laporte [00:50:15]:
Happened to me today. And then my Oura Ring said, hey, that was a nice nap you took at 6 to 8 AM. What was going on there? I said, because I was up.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:23]:
Listen to stuff before, you know, like I have these sleep earbud things and I put it on Pocket Casts and they have a timer feature and I thought I set it, but I did not. Because when I woke up in the morning, I was listening to a different podcast and I looked and it was like, I, I like ran through like 8 podcasts overnight.

Leo Laporte [00:50:39]:
I was like, tell us what's the secret of your beautiful skincare routine?

Paul Thurrott [00:50:43]:
Yeah. And then I got an award from Pocket Casts because I listened so much.

Leo Laporte [00:50:46]:
Yeah, man. At least there's that. At least you got an award for it.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:51]:
It's crazy.

Leo Laporte [00:50:52]:
Back to Windows Weekly, and the digressions will continue.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:57]:
Right. So I always review over 20 laptops a year, or I have for a long time anyway. I don't usually talk about every one of them, but I wanted to point this one out because it breaks some assumptions and our norms. And I have to say, like reviewing as many laptops as I have, I saw things here I was not expecting to see, and they're good things. So, um, one of the things I feel like I've been a very, um, not a lone voice, but one of the few voices, and this goes back to like 11th gen Intel chips, probably. So several years is just like the horrible reliability problems that Intel has had. And I know this has kind of always been the case really. And I know, because I know people at PC makers that they, they fix the problems that are in the chips in their products and they put them out as firmware updates and blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:49]:
But Intel, yeah, it's been tough. And so when AMD really kind of amped things up, you could see an improvement there. It's not night and day, but they're definitely more reliable, generally speaking. And then of course you get the Snapdragon stuff and that's amazing, right? And so you get these computers that have incredible performance. They're on battery for 10, 12 hours, whatever, super efficient. And they have that reliability thing, meaning the reliability of what I'll call either power management or instant-on or whatever it is where that thing where you open a little laptop and it actually comes on, right? With an x86 laptop, especially an Intel one, you're kind of getting into a game of roulette. I guess not really roulette, but we're going to spin the wheel and see where we land. Roulette was really not— that was more violent than I intended.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:38]:
But But whatever. Um, I guess Russian roulette is the violent one. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I guess it is roulette. So anyway, got this Intel thing. It's a Lenovo ThinkPad X9, right? So this is the ThinkPad line that doesn't look anything like other ThinkPads. It's designed to draw in an audience that might not normally look at ThinkPad because they haven't really changed that much visually over the years. And some people think that's old-fashioned.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:02]:
I think it's classic and awesome, but, um, you know, they're trying to attract the MacBook Air crowd perhaps, or someone who might buy a Dell XPS or whatever it might be. It's got all the good ThinkPad stuff and all that stuff. The keyboard's different. It's got an island-style keyboard. It has kind of a unique design. It's whatever it is. It's a great laptop. Actually, it's an almost perfect laptop, but it has this Intel chip in it, right? And this is the— I talked about the truck backing up to the building with the beep beep beep with all the money in it.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:27]:
This is Intel, right? So they have this big partnership and you're like, eh. And the previous generation of this thing, which ran a previous generation Intel chip, had horrible performance problems when you're on battery. And that's one of the big issues with x86, but especially Intel, that whatever performance levels that CPU can reach when it's plugged in, when you get down to battery, that it plummets by up to 50 or even 60%, depending on the chip and, you know, whatever the thing is you're doing. Whereas like ARM chips, like those Snapdragon X2, there is some tiny single-digit percentage change, but you don't notice that at all. Like it's, it's basically 100%. So this laptop miraculously solved basically every problem I just described, right? And some I did not. So the performance is amazing whether you're on battery or not. So it's a newer generation.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:16]:
It's the, you know, Series 3 Core Ultra or whatever, Panther Lake. It has the B-level Arc B-Series graphics, meaning you can actually play AAA games like the recent Call of Duty games or whatever, and they look wonderful and they play in this case at like 120 FPS. to 110 frames per second, which is crazy. Um, the, uh, instant-on or, you know, power management reliability, terrific. It's possible that at some point, once or twice in the past month or 6 weeks or whatever it's been, that it didn't come right on. Maybe I— but honestly, that stuff's been fantastic to the point where I don't really notice it. But the thing that actually blew me away, and I can't explain this, and I looked at this so many times, I noticed it early I did a trip on the, uh, you know, to Berlin and back where I used this thing all the way on the plane. It's an 8-hour plane ride, and I, I still had hours of battery life when I landed.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:13]:
And I'm averaging on this thing over 11 hours of battery life. And I, I'm not saying— and this is real world, I'm not running video tests or some nonsense like people do. It's not a benchmark. This is actual real world.

Leo Laporte [00:55:25]:
You're really tempting me. I have the X1 Carbon, which I love.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:27]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:55:29]:
Um, this is bigger, but it's still got a lot of—

Paul Thurrott [00:55:32]:
They have a 14-inch too.

Leo Laporte [00:55:33]:
They don't have the nub.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:34]:
Right. Right. They, they, aside from the little ThinkPad lighting on the outside and a couple of small things, they purposely went with a non-traditional ThinkPad design. Keyboard's different. Doesn't have the TrackPoint.

Leo Laporte [00:55:47]:
Um, that's too bad. I really, well, is it still a good keyboard? Cause I love their keyboard.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:50]:
Yeah. You know, it's actually one of the best keyboards I've ever used. That's the thing. It's actually It's like, it's actually really, really good.

Leo Laporte [00:55:56]:
It does look different. Boy, it really looks different.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:58]:
Yeah, it's different, but it's just, um, look, it's a good laptop. I, I'm not sure I would have talked about this explicitly otherwise, but I've just never seen an x86 laptop do that well. Yeah, across the board. I mean, it's like performance, performance on battery, gaming performance with the graphics it has built in, um, efficiency, reliability, instant on, and then just battery life. That whole thing, they ran the rack. Like, this is, um, I don't typically see results like this outside of ARM. In fact, I almost never do really. Um, so this is, this one was really impressive.

Leo Laporte [00:56:33]:
I, and as you said, it's not merely Intel, although Intel's clearly—

Paul Thurrott [00:56:37]:
well, here's the thing.

Leo Laporte [00:56:38]:
Their stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:39]:
Yeah. So Intel, it's possible that, well, it's likely, right, that Intel has done some work to improve the reliability of their chips and yada, yada, yada. But this is actually why PC makers matter.

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

Paul Thurrott [00:56:50]:
Because Lenovo has decades and decades of experience with this kind of thing. And in my experience, they're actually the best at this kind of thing.

Leo Laporte [00:56:56]:
Yeah, that's been mine too.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:57]:
HP's right up there. I'm sure Dell, Dell, I don't have as much experience with, but this is one of the reasons you might go with a top-tier PC maker because they're actually really good at ironing out those problems.

Leo Laporte [00:57:08]:
They do their own firmware, their own. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:11]:
Yep. So it's, you know, and this particular computer is that Aura Edition bit is, that's a, a partnership between, um, Intel and Lenovo. So I don't think that played into the reliability of the system per se, but they do have that.

Leo Laporte [00:57:26]:
Um, yeah, mine's an Aura 2. I have no idea what that means.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:28]:
I can tell you what it means if you want, but you don't want any of it.

Leo Laporte [00:57:31]:
It's like Evo, right? It's just, it's one of those.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:34]:
Well, it has— there are 3 smart features. One of them is a standalone app, but they're just like— they have a way to integrate with your phone, which is kind of cute. You can tap your phone to the side of the screen and pops up.

Leo Laporte [00:57:43]:
Oh, that's neat. I never— I have Literally never use it. Yeah, you don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:46]:
I'm not saying do it. Don't do it. Okay. But if something goes wrong, the Smart Care thing is like kind of a white, um, a white glove, you know, support service 24/7, actual Lenovo employees, like technicians. So, um, and then the third one is, uh, Smart Modes, and that's the power management slash, um, CPU— not CPU throttling, but that's what it does. And then it does other things too where it actually does— it does an auto mode now. So, and I was— I've I was watching it. I went and looked at it.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:15]:
Like when I work on it during the day, I'm in working mode and, you know, and you can configure these things. Like when you're in working mode, you could, it could auto-connect to a VPN. It could do, you know, it does these other things, um, which I think are very interesting. But, um, but for the most part, no, you don't have to, I wouldn't worry about that stuff too much.

Leo Laporte [00:58:30]:
But I have to say, I have the OLED screen in the earlier X1 Carbon and it is spectacular.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:35]:
Yeah. And, and, you know, like, so one of the things Apple did in the iPhone Duo is they applied that nano-texturing onto, um, yeah, the screens, which kind of helps hide the crease a little bit more even, right? So it's kind of a nice visual thing. Um, this doesn't have that, but Lenovo did put, um, there are various coatings you can put on screens and also on metals, but, uh, things for like anti-smudge, anti-glare, whatever. So, um, this one has both of those, but I don't— I'm sure it's more anti-glare than the other. But one of the problems with OLED is that it reflects everything.

Leo Laporte [00:59:06]:
It shines.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:06]:
Yeah, it's really bad. And actually, I never had that problem on this. I mean, I'm not— obviously there's reflections, there's a screen, but, um, I was the— I, I assume it was the anti-glare coating, which, you know, I've seen here and there. But, um, but this does not have that super glossy, um, well, it's kind of— it's glossy, but it doesn't have that super reflective kind of quality that is, uh, generally the case with—

Leo Laporte [00:59:29]:
This would be a big upgrade. I have the 14-inch X1. This would be a nice upgrade.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:33]:
It's nice. I was just shocked by how much the battery— I could kind of tell it was working that way to the point where I started looking at it. I started paying attention to it. And then like I said, we were on that plane and my wife and I were next to each other. We only had the one plug between us. So I was like, whatever, we'll just share it. So she used it first and I was doing whatever. And then 4 hours into the flight, she was like, do you need this thing? And I was like, no, I have 65% or 60%, I think it was 60% battery.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:00]:
I was like, no, I'm fine.

Leo Laporte [01:00:00]:
Wow. So, um, yeah, they're aware of this because I noted it has a 100-watt, uh, power adapter, which is the maximum you could bring on an airplane.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:09]:
So yeah, and it has a second plug on it.

Leo Laporte [01:00:13]:
I see.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:14]:
Yeah, pretty cool.

Leo Laporte [01:00:16]:
That's pretty— it's a GaN adapter, so it's smaller than the big—

Paul Thurrott [01:00:19]:
Yep, and it doesn't get hot. And, you know, so it doesn't have a brick, it just has this. Well, it's the— yeah, the brick is the thing that plugs into the wall, which actually can be a problem. Yeah, this is the brick. So ideally you'd have a cable on the other side too, honestly, but a lot of companies have gone away from that.

Leo Laporte [01:00:35]:
It's still USB-C though, right? It's not— when you plug it in, it doesn't have to— so you could use a regular adapter?

Paul Thurrott [01:00:41]:
Yep. Yeah, I do. In fact, that's how I use it.

Leo Laporte [01:00:43]:
Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, nobody—

Paul Thurrott [01:00:46]:
actually, I'm using it right now in the— on this, uh, this podcast. So now it's plugged into the, the dock.

Leo Laporte [01:00:52]:
It's a Thunderbolt 4 dock I have for So you have probably the top-of-the-line model. How much?

Paul Thurrott [01:00:59]:
Yeah, so that's the thing. So by the way, so I wrote this review over some number of weeks, right? So I write parts of it. I actually take notes into the review document as I, you know, like I had a lot of battery notes in there originally. Um, but I had written the part, there's a segment in there that's about like pricing and availability. And I talk about like the base model, this is how much it costs. These are the upgrades you could do. That's how much, whatever it is. And when I wrote this, I'm just kind of, I'm going to, I'm going to get, I, I'm not looking at it, but I believe the price of that base model was originally about $2,000 when I wrote that.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:32]:
So I finished the review and I'm reading through it and I was like, I should probably go look at this again.

Leo Laporte [01:01:36]:
Someday computers will cost only $2,000 again. Well, not today.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:42]:
Now it's $2,400. It's like literally in the probably 2 weeks-ish since I first wrote that.

Leo Laporte [01:01:47]:
That's actually not bad.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:47]:
I know, but it went up by $400 in 2 weeks.

Leo Laporte [01:01:51]:
Like 20%, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:53]:
I know, it's crap. I'm just saying, 2 weeks. It's not like a year later. It's like—

Leo Laporte [01:01:56]:
It's true.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:58]:
So anyway, I, it's, I, I, I just, again, I wouldn't normally, I don't normally call out every like laptop I review. Why would I? But, um, I, this one just kind of ran the rack. Like I said, I've just never, I don't think I've ever seen this on x86. I mean, if, or if I have, it's been many years. I just, I was kind of blown away by it. It's really, it's a great laptop.

Leo Laporte [01:02:17]:
Nice. Will this be your daily driver going forward, sir?

Paul Thurrott [01:02:22]:
Well, no, I got to give it back, but I, that's the problem. Yeah, I know. I'm right. That's the thing. Like I, and actually one of the ways I could, I have 3 laptops I need to review. Right. And I use this more than I maybe should have. I try to move between them and I do, but I kept going back to this because it was so good.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:40]:
Like just the typing. I love the bigger screen and the whole thing is just really, really good.

Leo Laporte [01:02:48]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:48]:
So, oh, the other hardware-related thing is more of a kind of a competitive threat type thing, but Google finally announced their Google Book, right? Which, you know, they had, they pretty much telegraphed exactly what this was. I'm still amused and dismayed that some people are confused by this in some way, but a Google Book is, is an Android laptop, right? Um, the—

Leo Laporte [01:03:11]:
wait a minute, it's, uh, it's Chrome OS.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:14]:
No, it's Android.

Leo Laporte [01:03:15]:
This is the new one. This is it. This is the new thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:18]:
So is it really?

Leo Laporte [01:03:19]:
Have you seen it? Is it— did you go to the event?

Paul Thurrott [01:03:21]:
I didn't go to the event, but I have seen it.

Leo Laporte [01:03:23]:
Jarvis did. We're going to talk to Jeff on Intelligent Machines.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:26]:
I, I mean, I will be reviewing some of these, uh, soon.

Leo Laporte [01:03:29]:
I'll just say that I really liked Chrome OS. I'm nervous.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:32]:
Well, here's the thing though. This is better. So they actually took everything that was, everything that you would say that you liked about Chrome OS is present in this thing. So for example, like back in whenever it was, May, when they previewed it, it's like, oh, I have this list of questions, right? And one of those questions was, well, what about the desktop version of Chrome? Like with extensions and blah, blah, blah. I know, I think you can do extensions on Android too, but you know, you want the full desktop experience. And that is part of it.

Leo Laporte [01:03:59]:
You can run extensions, yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:00]:
And like, well, okay, but what about the Linux environment? You know, Chrome OS is based on a lightweight Linux and blah, blah, blah. I mean, Android is too, but no, it has the full— it's the full Android, the full Linux experience. You know, it's—

Leo Laporte [01:04:11]:
So I can do Crouton or whatever they call it these days and put Linux on it. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:15]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:04:15]:
That's really important.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:18]:
Yes. And the— there are many advantages to making this Android instead of Chrome OS, but the big one is that just the sheer like compatibility across the board for drivers and hardware devices and software, obviously. And there's so much expertise and experience out there of these people writing for Android because billions of devices, not so much on the Chromebook side. And so to kind of catch Chromebooks up at some point, what they wanted, whatever the technology they wanted to add, they would have to reimplement it for Chromebook or Chrome OS. You know, Android just gets it, right? Android's going to get this first. So they benefit from the whole ecosystem thing. So there's stuff that, you know, I, I I always, from the moment they announced it, it's amazing, by the way, to go back and watch the original Chrome OS announcement. It's unbelievable.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:10]:
It really is. And I don't mean in a bad way. Like it's actually—

Leo Laporte [01:05:13]:
I think I was there. We all got those black— Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:17]:
I got one of those too. Yeah. So I wasn't there, but I did get one from them at the time.

Leo Laporte [01:05:20]:
Google I/O.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I might actually still have that somewhere. It was like CR1 or something or CF1. Well, 48. CR48. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yep, yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:30]:
The black one. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:05:31]:
That's funny.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:33]:
Anywho, but, you know, they came out with Chromebook Plus a couple of years ago. Chromebook Plus was sort of like their Copilot Plus PC, it seemed at first. But actually, I would say today, this is more, this more slots into this. It has so many of the same kind of attributes, you know, 16 gigs of RAM, 512 storage. Um, lots of local AI, obviously cloud AI as well. Um, and the, you know, the—

Leo Laporte [01:06:01]:
It comes with anti-gravity built in, which is hysterical. That's their, their bonus for Gemini.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:06]:
Yep. Yeah, you could do vibe coding and, and whatever. So there's a— I, to me, this is the— look, there's a lot of stuff going on here. Obviously they're competing with Apple, which has all this cross-device ecosystem awesomeness. This is a lot. There's some, there's definitely stuff in Chrome OS, but this is, you know, these are native, you know, it's Android. So it's the same thing. So you'll be able to stream any app from your phone.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:32]:
You know, if you're on Windows, if you have certain phones, you can do that with whatever the stupid thing is called, your PC or whatever they call it these days, Phone Link. But, you know, it's a different experience for different kinds of phones. There's actually some iPhone compatibility here no one's really talking about.

Leo Laporte [01:06:49]:
Yeah, because I don't use an Android phone, so I don't— I mean, I have a Pixel. I mean, I guess it would work best with Pixel.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:55]:
Yeah. I mean, right.

Leo Laporte [01:06:56]:
Second best with Samsung.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:57]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean—

Leo Laporte [01:06:59]:
So did they say whether they're good? What are they going to do with the older Chromebooks? Am I going to suddenly get Android on my Chromebook?

Paul Thurrott [01:07:04]:
Yeah. So they haven't talked about this in a while, but very early on they were talking about if you have a Chromebook that meets these specs.

Leo Laporte [01:07:12]:
Yeah. I have to be like that Chromebook Plus. one from Lenovo. Was it Lenovo? The MediaTek one.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:18]:
Yeah, right. So yeah, they didn't talk about this at the event, but almost certainly yes, I would say. Um, you get— I mean, these things are not super expensive. They're like $900 to about $1,200 depending. I mean, that's—

Leo Laporte [01:07:29]:
that seems expensive for a Chromebook, which used to be $400.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:32]:
Well, but compared to a Chromebook Plus from 2 seconds ago, the one I paid for was very much more expensive. Yeah, it was probably $1,000, I bet. Yeah, you know, or close to it. Um, you know, prices have gone up. I mean, that's part of it, I think. But these are not—

Leo Laporte [01:07:43]:
they're not horrible.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:44]:
Um, There's still a real preference for web apps if you can get them. Like even Google's own apps, like if you run Gmail on this thing, it's the web app and they will not let you download Gmail from the store by default. I mean, I'm sure you could figure it out, but—

Leo Laporte [01:07:57]:
Who is the audience for this? Because when Poppy went to the Best Buy or whatever and got this Windows machine, I told him, I had a Chromebook. I could have given you a Chromebook. You'd have been much safer, much happier. But is that still the audience for this or schools? It doesn't feel like it. It feels like they're going after developers.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:16]:
Right. So generally speak, I mean, so first of all, Chromebook, ChromeOS for now, still sticking with us. I don't remember the number, some larger number than I would've imagined. New Chromebooks will be coming out over the next year or two. Chromebooks still have that, I don't know if it's 7 or 10 years, whatever the support timeframe is, is crazy. They're obviously honoring that. I mean, I, The way I take it, they will not say this, but Chromebook is for the low end. This is the $300 to $500, whatever, $600, education, whatever, super cheap, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:47]:
And then these are the premium. These are the Copilot Plus PCs. These are the premium. They meet certain specs. The devices are premium materials. They have a fingerprint reader at the very least, but possibly also facial recognition that actually works. It's got a new security subsystem, which is kind of interesting. Um, so the way they describe the audience is just people who love Android and want that experience to be, you know, familiar and awesome integration.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:16]:
You know, they want the Apple thing. Again, they're not going to say it this way, but they want what someone who has an iPhone and an iPad and a, you know, MacBook might get or whatever, you know, the ability to do all the cross-device stuff, um, kind of seamlessly. So, and then of course, you know, they, they're, you know, we're reinventing things here. So the Chromebook was kind of like the laptop reinvented for the the era of web apps, right? Which Google was riding that wave pretty hard back then, what, 2011-ish, whenever that was. And then this one is, you know, for the AI era. And the theory here is that you want this stuff not to be tacked on. You want it to be built in, you know? I mean, there's a Gemini app, you know, but they have that magic cursor thing. You can kind of shake the mouse and, you know, stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:01]:
And that's, well, it's a different way of doing it, but that's kind of cool.

Leo Laporte [01:10:04]:
I keep shaking my mouse and nothing happens.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:06]:
I keep saying no, but it I keep saying, yeah. Um, it's, uh, you know, if you have a Copilot Plus PC, you can hold down the Windows key and then click anywhere on the screen and you get this thing where it will tell you what that thing is, right?

Leo Laporte [01:10:17]:
Oh, that's nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:18]:
Actions you can do against it. So the magic cursor in many ways is the same thing. It's just a different way to do it, right? Um, and that's one thing I think AI has honestly one of the, not that this is why we buy into AI or whatever, but one of the AI's good success stories for visuals.

Leo Laporte [01:10:33]:
It has vision. It can see.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:35]:
It's the vision thing. What is this thing? You know, if you're out in the world, you look at a building, what is this? It will give you the history of it. And, you know, like, I, I'm sorry, but that's incredibly useful.

Leo Laporte [01:10:43]:
And, um, somebody asked me yesterday, what's good software for OCR? And I thought about it. I thought, you don't buy software for OCR anymore. You just use Vision in your eye.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:53]:
Yep. So by the way, I mentioned, so I told you the stupid story about my iPhone, uh, serial number. What I didn't tell you was I'm lazy and I took a screenshot of it because even though it gave it to me and set it on screen, you don't want to type it in. Like, I don't want to type it in.

Leo Laporte [01:11:08]:
Animal.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:08]:
So I emailed it to myself like a jerk because I'm old. But then on my Copilot Plus PC, I Windows key clicked the image and it was like, and I could copy and paste the text.

Leo Laporte [01:11:17]:
What I do is I print it out. Yes. Each of the letters.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:23]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:11:24]:
Yeah. It can read. It's kind of amazing. These, they can just, they read things.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:29]:
Right. Super useful.

Leo Laporte [01:11:31]:
It's really useful. Like, I'll get a PDF or I'll get a Worse, a JPEG with some text I want. You just give it to the AI and it goes, yeah, yeah, I got it.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:39]:
Yeah, here it is. Yep, exactly. So yeah, look, these are little mini miracles. It doesn't explain $3 trillion of spending, but it's awesome as an individual to have.

Leo Laporte [01:11:50]:
I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:52]:
Yeah, me neither. I'll take it. Yeah, look, if the world implodes like some people believe it's going to, we're going to have this derelict left over and we're still going to have these things. So it's like, okay, I mean, we'll be radioactive monsters with 3 arms, but we'll have really good spell check.

Leo Laporte [01:12:06]:
The reason I asked about the market for the Gemini notebook is I feel like Google is seeing a new market that they want to take advantage of. Just like Apple moved from, oh, we're for video editors and Photoshop users to, we're AI now, baby. That Google might be saying, I had this thought. That's why I bought the X1, actually. that all I really want is a thin client and I'm gonna have an always-on machine that I'm logging into from wherever I am.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:34]:
My goal is to make whatever I have with me a laptop, usually. As light as possible. And I don't mean lightweight.

Leo Laporte [01:12:40]:
The minimum, just a thin client.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:42]:
But I mean like just the minimum number of nothing in there. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:12:46]:
Ironically, a Google, a Chromebook isn't quite as good as a, machine, a laptop, because I can open a nice terminal on the laptop, but it's not quite as— you don't get a choice of terminal programs and kinds of things like that in the Chromebook. So I'm still using, you know, it's Linux, but I could use Windows. I mean, still using a laptop as opposed to a Chromebook. But I think maybe Google is going to verge into that territory a little bit. Like, this is for high-end users.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:14]:
Well, I mean, think about like you mentioned, like Gemini Notebook. This is an awesome tool for students in the education market. And this is a, you know, whatever, whatever technologies are being rolled out wherever worldwide in different schools and so forth. I mean, this is a real, this is, this is not an invented use case. Like it's not a, it's, it's immediately obvious. Like certain people will, including students will benefit from this. And it's a great idea. Like it's just a great idea.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:45]:
The Dream Beans thing is a fever dream, but this is a I like Dream Beans. I love it.

Leo Laporte [01:13:49]:
I love it. I made my local AI do it though, because I have— so my local AI does my Dream Beans now.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:56]:
Because you know what I discovered? My wife has a, like, a folding phone, like a Pixel Fold, whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:14:00]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:01]:
And she, when she looks at that on the inside screen, it's not this tall.

Leo Laporte [01:14:05]:
Oh, you get the image plus the text?

Paul Thurrott [01:14:06]:
It actually fills out. And I'm like, oh, I need— I didn't know these images could be that, like— I know.

Leo Laporte [01:14:11]:
Oh, they're beautiful.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:12]:
You get a look at it on the folding phone.

Leo Laporte [01:14:14]:
It's crazy. On the foldable phone.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:15]:
Oh.

Leo Laporte [01:14:15]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:16]:
hardcoded to be—

Leo Laporte [01:14:17]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:18]:
Yeah, they're saying portrait or whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:14:19]:
They put the text over the image.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:21]:
Yeah. Yeah, right. Because if you want to save a picture, like, you can, but it's a screenshot. It's gonna have all the text and whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:14:26]:
No, but you can share the picture only. I found out after a while.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:30]:
Oh, is that what that is?

Leo Laporte [01:14:31]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:32]:
Oh, that's what I want.

Leo Laporte [01:14:34]:
We're talking about this.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:35]:
No, I gotta go back. I know. In my forthcoming book, Mastering Dream Beans, a field guide to Dream Beans.

Leo Laporte [01:14:44]:
It's short, but it's good.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:46]:
It's short.

Leo Laporte [01:14:46]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:46]:
It's a postage stamp size thing. It's good. Anyhow, Google Book happens. Uh, I don't remember the exact date, but sometime in what, mid-October, I think they're actually coming out. And, um, these look good to me. I'm definitely, like I said, I'm going to review at least a couple of these. I could picture buying one, honestly.

Leo Laporte [01:15:04]:
Um, but you would treat it like I would, as thin, as a thin client, basically.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:07]:
Or would you? No, I would. I mean, like I said, like I want the, whatever I'm using, it could be an iPad with a keyboard, whatever, it could be a laptop. I want it to be as lightweight and distraction-free and as minimal as possible.

Leo Laporte [01:15:21]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:22]:
And I feel like just the essence of this thing, just like a Chromebook and just like maybe an iPad, it is that thing, right? It's not, I'm not getting alerts everywhere. There isn't all this stuff happening. I don't know, but I, yeah, the, I, I want there to be a terminal thing. I want, I'm curious. We'll see how that goes. Like I, there's all these unanswered things. Like you asked about older devices. There's questions.

Leo Laporte [01:15:48]:
What happened? Yeah, I'm really curious what's going to happen.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:49]:
We have Chrome OS Flex for third, you know, for older computers. We're ever going to do that? Probably not. But you know, I, at some point, does Chrome OS go away? Almost certainly, but they're not talking about that. Um, I don't know. It looks good to me. Yeah. If you use Gemini, by the way, you get like a full year of Google AI Pro, which is $20 a month, $240 a year, whatever that is. That's a good deal.

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

Paul Thurrott [01:16:16]:
Yeah. That's, I mean, you could reduce, take that off the price if that makes sense. I mean, it's pretty good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:16:21]:
I gave my daughter one and that was one of the benefits. It was great.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:27]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:16:27]:
That's good stuff. You're watching Windows Weekly. That's Paul Thurrott. Richard Campbell has the week off. He will be back next week, as will our whiskey segment. The good news is you don't have to listen to the whiskey segment song.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:39]:
Well, I feel like we should still listen to this.

Leo Laporte [01:16:42]:
We should just play it anyway. On we go with Windows Weekly. Let's, uh, let's talk about— well, Microsoft's got an event coming up in October. What are they going to be doing? Is this a Surface event?

Paul Thurrott [01:16:54]:
They might technically have 2 events coming up. Um, yeah, so the— well, Is there a Surface event? Not that I can tell you. So there is a, there's a OneDrive and Copilot event. This is actually, I want to say this is the second year in a row they've done this, possibly more longer ago than that. But late in the year, there's often a set of big OneDrive announcements, right? And they've been turning it into sort of an event. I think the Copilot plus OneDrive thing is very interesting because This was the one use case really early on when they were talking about, okay, we're doing Microsoft 365 Copilot, we're doing what they used to have at the time, Copilot Pro, remember? And all I wanted, the only thing I wanted out of AI at that time was I want to point you at some folder of everything I've ever written, and then you can find stuff for me. We can talk about stuff and we can, you know, use it in a way that the search does not work. And I have to think, like, I mean, they've been talking about this for years.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:54]:
I, Copilot is available in OneDrive, I should say, business or consumer. But there's, I guess there's more work to be done. So this is, this to me is fine. I also believe there's a separate Copilot event that's not related to this. And I, it's weird, I can't really find anything about it anywhere. But you might recall that Microsoft is working on that super app, right? And so they're gonna, there's like a 2-step thing happening where they merge the consumer Copilot app in Windows plus the business Microsoft 365 Copilot app into a app, but then they had evolved that into this super app, which is like what the other AI guys are doing. In fact, we'll talk about Anthropic's latest push in this direction where you basically have everything inside of a single app instead of having these kind of subproducts, whatever. So Yeah, I mean, Microsoft's doing that, so we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:49]:
Surface event. Yeah, so I'm sorry, there is a Surface event. There's a— Okay, that was confusing. The RTX Spark, uh, event, right? So that's October.

Leo Laporte [01:18:56]:
Oh, that's right.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:57]:
Yeah, yeah, yep.

Leo Laporte [01:18:59]:
Just a word of warning, if you, uh, it's not exactly the same as a DGX Spark because it doesn't have the high-bandwidth Ethernet ConnectX cable, right, right, right? So you can never chain them together. I don't know why you'd want to do that with a laptop anyway. Um, what's interesting to me, and I don't know what—

Paul Thurrott [01:19:16]:
Well, some of them are those, they're not quite small form factor. They're the kind—

Leo Laporte [01:19:19]:
Oh, they do have NUCs. So you can put them in all laptops. They're bigger.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:23]:
They're like, they're kind of like desks, almost mini desktop.

Leo Laporte [01:19:26]:
But yeah, it's almost a Spark, but it, but that missing that one piece. Um, interestingly, and I don't know if this is related, NVIDIA has stopped selling the Sparks.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:36]:
Yeah, I wonder if it is.

Leo Laporte [01:19:37]:
So I think RTX, maybe they intend for it to replace it or they just ran out.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:42]:
It's probably better for them not to sell those directly to people, but I'm— I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:19:48]:
Well, even, uh, the third-party OEMs I think are starting to get low on stock. You could still go to Micro Center and get some, but—

Paul Thurrott [01:19:55]:
Yeah, but if you're a Lenovo or HP, you probably have a much— well, I don't know, Nvidia could probably pull some strings with that actually. I don't know. Yeah, that's—

Leo Laporte [01:20:02]:
I think Nvidia has ins. Yeah, you think? Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:07]:
Yeah. With the Star Chamber. They have a seat at the table.

Leo Laporte [01:20:10]:
Maybe Jensen can call somebody.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:12]:
I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. That's interesting. Okay. Uh, oh yeah. So this is awesome. Um, the Financial Times got ahold of some internal presentation from OpenAI and basically their prediction internally is that over the next 5 years, not going back in time, but just the next 5 years, um, they're going to have a negative cash flow of $200 and I think it's $78 billion. Oh, I got the wrong one.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:40]:
I'm looking at the wrong— yeah, I think it's $278 billion. This has nothing to do with the past. It's just going forward. So there's, you know, whatever losses are behind them, I guess are behind them. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:20:50]:
You know what's so strange is there's also drumbeats and that's probably planted stories that these companies are profitable because we don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:00]:
No, but they're not.

Leo Laporte [01:21:01]:
They're not.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:02]:
They're definitely not.

Leo Laporte [01:21:02]:
I mean, it doesn't make sense that they would be.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:04]:
Um, and you know, they're going to go public at some point and probably go public by the end of the year, right?

Leo Laporte [01:21:10]:
I mean, at that point we'll know.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:11]:
Well, I think we have to. I mean, we'll have to know something. I mean, I, well, they're not profitable. I mean, I'm sorry, but like the thing is, so I got into this, uh, conversation with like a reader. I think it was like, you know, how are we defining profitability here? Right. Anyone could cook the books any given quarter and be like, look, we're profitable.

Leo Laporte [01:21:31]:
Anthropic, who I should mention just for disclosure purposes, is a sponsor. Anthropic actually said they were profitable, but that was because they didn't include expenses.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:40]:
Yeah, that's not what profitability— that's the thing I complain about. Spotify has done this. HP did it in their most recent quarter.

Leo Laporte [01:21:48]:
This is non-GAAP, is that what it is?

Paul Thurrott [01:21:50]:
No, it's not even non-GAAP. Well, it is non-GAAP because that's not legal to say that.

Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
It's not anything.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:55]:
But if you're doing non-GAAP—

Leo Laporte [01:21:55]:
It's not accounting.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:57]:
Well, there's different terms for these things. So typically, not always, but almost always, a company, when they talk about profits and sales, what you're talking about is net income, which is the profit and revenues. But then there's operating profit or operating margins. There's all these different terms that are a form of profitability. But if your definition or whatever the term is you're using is, well, that doesn't include the expense of running the business, then that's not a profit. You're not— it should not be called profit.

Leo Laporte [01:22:30]:
Profit's the wrong word here. Revenue would be the right word.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:34]:
Uh, look, if we didn't have— I, I say this all the time— if I didn't have any expenses, I could retire like that. But I do have expenses.

Leo Laporte [01:22:42]:
I'd have a boat.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:43]:
Yeah. And you know, it's like, sorry, like, I, I, I, I get— like, I go through this every quarter. It just drives me crazy. But, um, Yeah, there's interesting data in this OpenAI thing. I mean, their revenues are going to go up by some, it's not tenfold, but I'm going to call it, I don't know, maybe double, triple, whatever. But its losses are going to go up by 10x. Like, you know, they expect to lose $36 billion this year, but then in 2030, they expect to lose $350 billion.

Leo Laporte [01:23:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:18]:
It's not going down. That's the thing. People get into this, like everyone's— most people that I interact with on this kind of topic are pretty much on board with what I would just call facts. But it's like, well, you don't know that they're never going to be profitable. It's like, I kind of do. I mean, like just looking, I mean, not in its current form. I mean, something has to happen, right?

Leo Laporte [01:23:43]:
I did Well, it's like Uber, right? Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:46]:
It's this changemaker from SNL. You know what I mean? Like, how are you going to make a profit? Volume. Volume.

Leo Laporte [01:23:53]:
We're making up in volume.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:55]:
Think of it like, I was like, so think of it, you have a $278 billion predicted shortfall over 5 years. How many $20 per month ChatGPT subscriptions would one have to sell to account for $278 billion? So you divide $278 billion by 5 for the years, divide that by 12 for the months of each year. That's $4.63 billion, which would be—

Leo Laporte [01:24:19]:
That's more than the population, practically.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:21]:
Yeah. This is more than the— no, I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:24:25]:
The total—

Paul Thurrott [01:24:26]:
Yeah. It's like there are 8 billion people on the Earth.

Leo Laporte [01:24:29]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:30]:
Yeah. So the adult population, you would have to have couples that would both agree to do this. And you're like, well, hold on a second. But that's actually even more simplistic than it sounds because that $20 per month subscription doesn't account for the cost of serving that subscription today.

Leo Laporte [01:24:46]:
That's a loss. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:48]:
So actually, this math doesn't actually make any sense at all. But it's even something like, if 556 million people were willing to pay for the $100 a month subscription, we could get there, you know, $200 billion divided by whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:25:06]:
But remember, in a way, I mean, here's another interpretation. They've got, they're raising close to a trillion, $922 billion, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:25:14]:
Right. Which is why they've not gone public because the only way they can like maintain OpenAI, that is, this, what they're doing. I actually think all this fearmongering stuff, the rogue AI, blah, blah, blah, whatever, is tied to we need to be seen as valuable.

Leo Laporte [01:25:31]:
It's marketing.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:31]:
That's our net worth. Like our net worth is literally bound up in this.

Leo Laporte [01:25:35]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:35]:
And, um, and look, there, there's an outcome here. I, I looked at like, like the worst, um, like corporate, uh, fraud, the worst corporate acquisitions that backfired. There's nothing even close to this. Like, um, you know, like, uh, Bernie Madoff, like Ponzi scheme, $65 billion. You know, there's nothing. Enron collapse, $63 million. Yeah. I mean, these are not— these are— these are—

Leo Laporte [01:26:02]:
Small potatoes.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:03]:
These are laughably small. Um, the only thing I will say, one of the things, the ways that these companies are starting to market AI that might actually pay off for them is the national security angle. Like we talked about, I think last week, like that actually resonates. Um, and, you know, I said this, I think a week ago, but, you know, if there's any entity out there that's bigger than like a big tech company, it's a government. And there's only a couple, like 2, 3, 4, whatever, that would ever need or want or could pay for this kind of thing. But our government rescued Chrysler back in the day. They bailed out the banking industry in 2008. They turned Intel into a viable business somehow.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:45]:
This is the too big to fail thing, except it's not really too big to fail. It's too, I don't know, national interest to fail. Um, so maybe that's, you know, maybe a little payoff. I don't know. Um, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:26:58]:
There is an upside. I mean, uh, I don't know how— I mean, enterprises pay more than you and I do for our cloud subscriptions.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:07]:
Yeah, they do. Sure. I don't— I didn't write about this, but one of the, one of the things that just blew my mind that I read today was a guy was talking about, you know, this investment thing with Microsoft and they were saying, you know, all anyone talks about is cloud and AI, but it's like, actually, there is this business at Microsoft that's paying the bills. I'm like, all right, I got to read this thing. And that business, of course, is software, right? Windows, Office, Microsoft, whatever it is.

Leo Laporte [01:27:32]:
You mean they still make money on that?

Paul Thurrott [01:27:34]:
Yep. Just quietly sitting there making money. And I was like, okay, there you go.

Leo Laporte [01:27:39]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:39]:
I mean, that's true. That's fine. But Look, Microsoft bought Nokia basically, and then wrote it off or wrote it down, I don't remember, to the exact same dollar value. They're still profitable. They weren't not profitable that quarter, I believe, but maybe they weren't. It doesn't really matter. But it was a one-time shot. These companies will either be acquired or merge or restructure at some point.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:09]:
And then what comes out the other end of it could be like, yay, we're profitable now. And it's like, yeah, we're not. Because we're not adding up all of history here. We don't, you know, um, my point about profitability in these companies is that they're never going to make enough money in the future to pay off what they've already lost. Like it's never happening. Um, and that doesn't, that, but that's not how we do accounting. So it doesn't really matter. Um, you know, would the government, the government be able to get Intel for a credit line? I mean, I, I could picture that happening honestly.

Leo Laporte [01:28:37]:
Or, uh, you, uh, nationalize it.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:41]:
Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:28:42]:
This is the very thin tightrope that these companies are walking. Because I agree with you, it's kind of marketing to say, oh, we're so dangerous.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:51]:
Ooh, scary. That's why do you think Google said anything like, oh, don't forget about it. What about Google?

Leo Laporte [01:28:56]:
We're scary too.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:56]:
Oh, poor little me.

Leo Laporte [01:28:58]:
We can be the Scooby-Doo.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:00]:
Yeah, we hacked someone too. We're hackers. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:29:03]:
So it's good marketing, but it's a fine line between marketing and getting the government to take you over. or make laws against you and stuff. I think they've got Trump well in hand.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:12]:
I was going to say, this is the golden era for that if they want to do it.

Leo Laporte [01:29:16]:
But there's only 2 more years.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:17]:
I know. Hopefully not that much, but we'll see. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you, but Corey Doctorow, one of the things he talks about is when WorldCom and the dot-com bubble burst, et cetera, 2000-ish, You know, there's stuff left over. You know, we still have all the fiber companies laid up in Vermont somewhere or wherever it is, you know, um, like it doesn't just disappear. We're not reliving Foundation, right? Um, we're not starting over. These things don't just go away.

Leo Laporte [01:29:49]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:50]:
Um, so yeah, companies are gonna lose a lot of money that, you know, companies are gonna fail, but whatever, like that infrastructure is still sitting out there. Those AI models still exist. Um, those capabilities are still there. And, um, Yeah, I think we're going to see that style, whatever happens. I'm not predicting exactly what's going to happen, but I mean, whatever happens, however bad you might think it is, I think on the other end of it, we're going to have the same benefits we had after the dot-com burst.

Leo Laporte [01:30:16]:
Or the railroad collapse. All the companies that built the Transcontinental Railroad went out of business, they went bankrupt, but we still got a railroad.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:25]:
Right. Right. And did Did anyone cry for those guys at the time? I don't—

Leo Laporte [01:30:29]:
it's hard to say. No, they were not well run.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:31]:
They were rapacious, terrible companies.

Leo Laporte [01:30:33]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:34]:
But I mean, you see, like, right. And so, um, you know, we— so stupid, but like any business that's a big chain that's already— that goes around, like, you know, Best Buy is everywhere. Best Buy used to be a regional thing, and we had our own stores in the Boston area. And, you know, uh, what else is like this? Like, uh, clothing stores, hardware stores are like this. There's all kinds of versions. Toys R Us, you know, like we had Child World, Toys R Us put them out of business. Toys R Us went out of business. We used to have little local stores that sold toys.

Leo Laporte [01:31:02]:
You know who put them all out of business? Amazon put them all out of business.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:05]:
So do we feel bad for the thing that was terrible to the thing that came before it? You know, it's kind of hard to say because there's many generations out there, but—

Leo Laporte [01:31:11]:
It's the food chain. The little shark eats the bigger shark eats the—

Paul Thurrott [01:31:15]:
But eventually even the big shark gets old and slow, you know, and then it gets eaten. But anyway, I don't know. So look, I guess my only point is without predicting what might or might not happen in this industry, whatever happens like this, we're going to have this stuff. We talked about a few of the small benefits, but I mean, that stuff goes forward, you know, no doubt about it.

Leo Laporte [01:31:34]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:35]:
So that will happen.

Leo Laporte [01:31:37]:
Yeah. This, these, yeah. What the AI slowdown.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:43]:
Woo. Yeah, that's what everyone's shareholders want. Yeah. Could you stop making— could you just stop going so fast, please?

Leo Laporte [01:31:50]:
I think the pause is over, actually. They released new models this week.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:52]:
I'll tell you what Wall Street doesn't like, businesses that never make more money than they did the year before, but they're super solid and everything's going great. Nobody cares about those businesses. It really is all about growth.

Leo Laporte [01:32:03]:
It's a fine line. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic said, oh, well, that's it on our IPO. We're definitely not going to do that. now.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:13]:
No. Yeah, for a little while. I mean, at some point you have to, you know. So we'll see. I, I'm, uh, OpenAI made, uh, reorganize their company to be a, a for-profit company, or at least a part of a for-profit company.

Leo Laporte [01:32:29]:
Um, Anthropic's a public benefit corporation.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:32]:
Yeah, right. I actually, I think, isn't that what OpenAI did as well?

Leo Laporte [01:32:35]:
Initially they were nonprofit.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:36]:
Yeah, I know, but they're in their Or is that what Mozilla— maybe that's what Mozilla is.

Leo Laporte [01:32:41]:
Yeah, Mozilla's not intentionally, but it's not—

Paul Thurrott [01:32:45]:
Well, no, no, I mean a public benefit company, right?

Leo Laporte [01:32:48]:
Yeah, so there's 501s, which is a nonprofit, but there's also these—

Paul Thurrott [01:32:53]:
I didn't mean to start a charity, Leo, but that's how my business turned out. I don't know what to tell you.

Leo Laporte [01:32:59]:
I know all about charities, baby. Yeah, all about them.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:03]:
I do too. My daughter texts me and she's like, do you have a keyboard? And I have a $90 Apple keyboard is on the way.

Leo Laporte [01:33:10]:
I have a drawer full of keyboards if she wants one.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:13]:
I was positive I had one and then I realized I brought it to Mexico. Um, so that was that. Anywho, uh, that's my little loss center. Um, and then we have, you know, the New York Times is suing my—

Leo Laporte [01:33:24]:
or at least just kind of parenthetically, Lisa the other day bought a mouse. I said, honey, I got a drawer full of mice. I got so many mice.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:35]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:33:36]:
She said, but I wanted a new one. I said, well, all right, all right, that's fine. At one point I bought 3 or 4 Microsoft mice.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:43]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:33:44]:
Or mouses, I don't know what you call them, because I loved them and I didn't want— yeah, so I just have them all.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:50]:
I used to have a— the— well, the one here now is the HP version, but the, that kind of the Microsoft, you know, sculpt— yeah, yeah, keyboard. I, at one point— well, it would have been not here in the house, but, uh, I had like 3 of them in boxes just sitting there as backups, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:34:05]:
It's kind of—

Paul Thurrott [01:34:05]:
now they're all gone.

Leo Laporte [01:34:05]:
Like, geeks too.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:07]:
Yeah, I have one here and one in Mexico now.

Leo Laporte [01:34:09]:
I wonder if Steve Gibson still has 7, uh, Palm Pilots in his freezer because he bought— he literally bought like a bunch of Palm devices thinking, well, at some point they're going to be gone and I love them too much.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:21]:
What was— I just watched—

Leo Laporte [01:34:22]:
I think he probably still has them in his freezer. Maybe not. Maybe his wife cleared them out.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:28]:
Honey, I just watched a movie that took place in 1998 and one of the guys was using a PalmPilot incessantly with that little—

Leo Laporte [01:34:36]:
Yeah, the little stylus.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:37]:
You could barely—

Leo Laporte [01:34:38]:
Graffiti.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:39]:
Yeah, yeah, right, right. It's crazy. We all learned to be stenographers.

Leo Laporte [01:34:45]:
Yeah, you got to learn how the computer wants it, not how you want it. Don't write it like you want it. Um, I know, you know, I don't even worry about typos anymore when I'm writing to my AI. I can type the stupidest mistakes and it completely knows what I'm saying.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:03]:
That's been good for a while. But the one thing, if you haven't seen this on the latest Pixels, and these, this will be in the Google Books too, is that Rambler feature where—

Leo Laporte [01:35:11]:
Oh yeah. I haven't tried that yet.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:13]:
It's, it's, oh my God. It's, it's literally flawless. It's never made a mistake for me so far.

Leo Laporte [01:35:18]:
You go, um, oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:19]:
And you can backtrack anything and it's crazy. Like, but it, the only difference is normally on these systems, you see it as you're talking. And in this case, you don't. It has a little animation, so you have to kind of hit the send to see it. Oh no, you don't have— you'd stop and then eventually it pops up. But yeah, um, and I, I cannot believe how good it is. Like, it is— it's insane. And because I, I can't think of a good example, my phone is being used for the camera, so I can't look.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:48]:
But it's the type of thing where you, you say something like, I know it's going to screw this up because it might be a tech term or Right. Some whatever in it. Nope. It is. I mean, I'm not saying it never will, but I, so far in weeks of use, like perfect. Like it's amazing. I love it.

Leo Laporte [01:36:03]:
Really interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:05]:
So good. Uh, yeah. So, um, da ba da ba da, New York Times suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I look what anyone thinks about this kind of case. I, the thing I love more than anything is when big tech companies go to court and they have discovery, and then we see what's really happening inside this company, and it's hilarious. And in both OpenAI and Microsoft's case, the lawyers from the New York Times have all these awesome quotes about people inside of Microsoft and OpenAI being like, you know we're stealing, right? Like, everyone knows we're just doing this. But so it's kind of a—

Leo Laporte [01:36:44]:
But these are internal, right? This wasn't—

Paul Thurrott [01:36:45]:
Yeah, yeah. This is not an official Microsoft stance.

Leo Laporte [01:36:48]:
Why people put stuff in writing is beyond me. You know, just say it on the phone. I know.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:52]:
This is why we have third-party app stores and Google Play now. It's like, yeah, if you're going to document it, bad news. So we'll see. Anyway, New York Times is looking for a summary judgment of liability. To me, the big issue here is just the paywall bit. Like, I don't know, you know, whatever anyone thinks about training models and stuff like They had a, they bypassed a paywall. Like, you know, I don't know. That's a little weird, but that's not the thrust of this trial, obviously, or this case, I should say.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:21]:
Um, on the Anthropic side, so I mentioned, you know, you're starting to see this merging of functionality in these chatbots and Anthropic. I don't, I can't forget who's first now. You know, you have like Code and CoWrite and I don't remember the names anymore between Anthropic and OpenAI. And I certainly don't care what Copilot does, but whatever. They all have these things.

Leo Laporte [01:37:41]:
Cowork.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:42]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:37:43]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:43]:
So they're merging everything into a single interface, which, duh, you know, like makes tons of sense, right? So Claude Cowork is merging into Chat, so it'd just be in Claude now or whatever. Um, but they also announced, and this one, this is beautiful. Um, I honestly, if I had to make, bet money on one of these companies, I would bet on Anthropic because they, I just feel like they're like just kind of nailing what it is that actually people actually want. like pretty consistently. So they're adding a Docs, or there are Docs and Sheets experiences to cloud, meaning documents and spreadsheets. You could already go into any of these things and say, hey, I need this to be a Word document, or I need, I want this in some presentation form, whatever. But like, this is to me like how work changes, right? And it's ironic perhaps that Microsoft pursued this style of computing for decades and Failed repeatedly, but the idea being, and this was the point of Windows Phone, which not to scrape on that scab, but one of the really good ideas that never made any sense for anyone who was a third party to Microsoft was don't think about the app, think about what it is you're trying to do. If you want to look at photos, we're going to have a photos thing or a pictures thing, whatever they call it at the time, and all the apps will be in there, but they'll let you do things that those apps can do with a press and hold menu or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:08]:
And that is an awesome idea. And because you don't, you know, you think about like typical iPhone usage, you're like, I have to send a text message maybe, or whatever kind of message. And you're looking at your phone, it's whatever grid of icons you set up. You're like, all right, what's the app I need to use for this thing?

Leo Laporte [01:39:23]:
All right. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:24]:
And where is it? You know, you go through this kind of mental thing, whereas, you know, what Microsoft was looking for and what I think AI is going to accomplish is it could be a phone, it could be a computer, whatever. You're not thinking like, okay, I want to— you're just thinking, okay, I'm going to do this thing. And you don't really care what happens on the backend. You don't care if it's using Microsoft Word or some third-party open-source something-something or whatever the heck it is, doesn't matter. And whatever it is you're making, like, you don't really care. Like, who cares what the app is that made the thing as long as you're given that thing that you want or need, right? And anyway, I feel like Anthropic is just kind of killing it in this area. Like, to kind of consistently, you know, they beat Microsoft to market with certain integrations in the Microsoft 365 desktop apps. Like what? I mean, that shouldn't even be possible, but it happened.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:13]:
So it's crazy. Anyway, this is interesting to me. I'm kind of, you know, whatever anyone thinks about big AI, that's kind of interesting. So Google Labs made an announcement about an experiment, as they call it, called CC. Like as in a CC on an email, right? That actually made things come together for me because you may recall that a couple of weeks ago I recommended Gemini Daily Briefs. And that was the time when Leo said, oh, I have something like that called Dream Beans, which I'd never heard of. And then I got Dream Beans and I talked about that last week. They're not exactly the same thing, but they're both AI-based kind of to-do presentations or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:54]:
The Google CC thing had never worked well for me, but I realized belatedly that it was because I was using it with my Gmail account, which is not where my email is, and not with my Thrott.com account, which is a Workspace account, right? So Gemini Daily Brief works across my main account, and actually that works way better. Turns out those 2 things, CC and Daily Brief in Gemini, are in fact the same thing. So I had been beta testing the CC thing since late last year. But now it's available generally to everybody, at least in the US. I'm not sure worldwide, but as something called Daily Brief Inside Gemini. And I'm like, oh, actually, okay, that makes sense. So I'm like, oh, I wonder if they're going to get rid of CC. So it turns out they made an announcement because CC, the original functionality has occurred and is available out in the public and stable or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:43]:
They're going to evolve CC, the Google Labs experiment, Now to be an AI agent for families and households instead of just being a kind of specific AI agent-ish thing for creating like a to-do list for the day based on what email has come in and what you might have on your schedule, et cetera. And that's interesting to me, but it also kind of takes me out of the loop because my family's long gone. And I, you know, my wife and I are getting older. The kids are gone. Like, there's not, I don't have anything to manage. you know, for like a family of people. But, um, I think this is a really cool idea. Like, and the way this will work is that it will create a Google account for the agent, which has its own identity, its own set of permissions.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:24]:
You as the creator of this can enable up to 6 people in your family to manage and collaborate with this agent. And you see this kind of shared email, calendar, tasks, you know, whatever other data you want to share. And it creates a different daily brief for everyone in the family, but sometimes there'll be that crossover stuff. because dad might have to drive Susie to the soccer game or whatever it might be, right? So it sounds really cool. Like, it's actually, that's a cool idea.

Leo Laporte [01:42:50]:
And it makes you want to have another family, doesn't it?

Paul Thurrott [01:42:52]:
Oh no, I've seen little kids and nope, I'm done.

Leo Laporte [01:42:56]:
This is enough.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:57]:
Yeah, I don't, I didn't have the patience for my own kids. I'm surprised they lived.

Leo Laporte [01:43:01]:
Do I do admit when I see these, I go, oh man, I wish we'd had these when I was—

Paul Thurrott [01:43:05]:
Everyone's exactly, I know, people like, oh, like, how did you handle your kids and smartphones? I'm like, oh, you're cute. I mean, my kid didn't get his first smartphone.

Leo Laporte [01:43:12]:
Didn't have that problem.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:13]:
Maybe the 11th grade or, you know, it was pretty late in the game. So, yep. Um, yeah, we didn't really have that kind of thing. Um, if I, you know, um, smart home stuff, unless you're using, uh, what's the thing you're going to— Richard, use Home Assistant?

Leo Laporte [01:43:28]:
Yeah, Home Assistant. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:29]:
So unless you're using something like that, you're probably in the Apple ecosystem or the Google ecosystem. And there's also Amazon and sort of Samsung, but I think Google and Apple are the 2 big ones. Um, in my experience, the Apple one is actually way better. Um, Um, Google has been working hard at this. They've been talking about this since late last year. They've released an unbelievable number of updates over that year, and it's still not there, but it is better, right? And if you're, you know, you're in that Google space, you might have one of those Google TV streamers. That thing's a Matter hub and does, uh, Thread and all that kind of stuff. Great.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:01]:
Um, maybe you have the speakers, and if you're, if you're in that world or whatever, Google Home might make some sense, but, you know, whatever. Um, they still have, uh, smart displays that are several years old, have never been updated. There's a lot of work yet to, to come, but whatever, they're getting there. Um, but they— this is interesting. This isn't— this is an unexpected from Google, right? From Apple I could see this, from any other company I could see this, but Google, this one's a little weird. They're actually going to open up their, um, Google Home platform using MCP, right? The Model Context Protocol, which is essentially like an AI of sorts for AI chatbot or AI assistants is how I'd call them these days. And, uh, that means you're going to be able to use, you know, OpenCLAW and get cloud in there if that's what you want to use or whatever. It's kind of like what Sonos did, but from Sonos's perspective, it makes sense.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:50]:
Why would Sonos want to make anything for AI? Like they make speakers and they do music and theater and stuff. And it's like, why, why are we doing that part of it? Stupid. There's all these, you know, standards out there. And we can allow our customers to use whatever they want. That makes sense for Sonos. Sonos is tiny. Google is humongous. And they're like one of the top 2 or 3 players in this, probably top 1 in this area.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:13]:
So for them to open up their home smart home platform to third parties through MCP is actually kind of surprising. They're not kind of, it's very surprising. I'm actually very surprised. I mean, you could probably make it, well, they already made an argument for it. They're doing it. It's only in early access right now. You have to have a Google Home Premium Advanced. Jesus, and you thought Microsoft named that— what, Google Home Premium Advanced? That's awesome.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:37]:
US only right now, but eventually it's going to roll out to everybody. So interesting. Didn't see that coming. And these guys—

Leo Laporte [01:45:48]:
Apple, by the way, is going to do the same thing, we think, next month.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:51]:
And that makes sense to me. Or when they do their whatever they're calling the Smart Display, which—

Leo Laporte [01:45:55]:
Yeah, they have a whole operating system around this. And yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:59]:
Yeah. So to me that, right. So it makes sense. Like I, it wouldn't, I don't know how this would impact Microsoft. They don't really have a home smart home thing, but you know, Microsoft, it wouldn't make sense to me, you know, for them to do this, but I don't know. Everyone's doing MCP everywhere now. I, that is actually really going to help.

Leo Laporte [01:46:17]:
I just hope they don't make more silos because this is what killed HomeKit. Automation.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:21]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:46:22]:
And day one is that we're all different.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:24]:
Well, I think the fact though that they're doing MCP means now it doesn't matter. I mean, um, I don't— I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet, but for example, on the Sonos side, like one of the problems is because those 2 companies have a legal battle ongoing, they— you can do less with Sonos on Android than you can on iOS. There's no way to cast from the phone-based whatever. Or use the app of your choice. But because they're adding MCP support to the Sonos OS or whatever, the Sonos Fabric, whatever the heck it's called, you'll be able to use any third-party AI of any kind. And that means as a Google person, you could use Gemini, right? So I mean, maybe that, you know, I still want to see those guys get together, but that is its own form of interoperability. That's very good. So Yeah, this is, this is what I would call like a small-o open platform.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:18]:
You know, when Google says Android is an open platform or Microsoft's like Windows 11 is an open platform. If you know anything about anything, most of you are cringing at that description. That's wrong. But it is an open platform in the sense that they allow, in the case of like, say, Windows, any third party can write apps that run on Windows. It's not like sealed off like iOS is. And I feel like MCP makes, well, I was going to say AI, it's not really AI. If you adopt MCP, it opens up your app to be controlled, automated by any third-party AI. So it's, I don't, to me, it's just, it's open.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:57]:
It's like open. It's open like a de facto standard.

Leo Laporte [01:48:01]:
Like a SOAR.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:02]:
Well, open like a SOAR, basically. It's open like beer, not like, no, wait, it's open. I don't know. I'm trying. I can't come up with a good example.

Leo Laporte [01:48:11]:
Anyway, it's open. Like you could play with it, but you don't own it. We own it. Right. Well, what does open mean? Open source, is it?

Paul Thurrott [01:48:20]:
No, that's what I mean. It's not open source. That's not the point though. The point is just the APIs are open. Anyone can do it. I mean, you could, if you were like you would from a command line, you could type stuff and you can control your Sonos or whatever, or Google Home soon. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:48:34]:
I like, actually, I love this idea. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:36]:
I actually think in many ways, well, you need the threads and the matters and those kinds of things.

Leo Laporte [01:48:41]:
I got all that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:42]:
You need all that. But I also feel like you need this part of it too, because this is what makes anything. If there's some, like you're stuck for some reason you adopted, what does Samsung call their stuff? SmartThings or something or whatever it is. Smart, smart.

Leo Laporte [01:48:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:55]:
You're stuck there, right? If they open this thing up to MCP and allow you to control it from anything, it kind of is like a, a longevity thing. It actually makes it more viable for longer.

Leo Laporte [01:49:07]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:08]:
I think. I mean, well, I agree. I think it's obvious. Like, I think that's just a fact. So anyway, to me, it's good. Yeah, this is, it's a different kind of standard. It's not, it's not like directly inside the smart home, but then again, you could have MCP interfaces to things that are different that are smart home based, like Hue lights perhaps, or Sonos smart speakers or whatever, smart door locks and cameras and blah, blah, blah. And from an AI assistant, automate those things in concert, right? Even if they're not talking to each other, right? Maybe one of those devices connects to Apple Home, one of the other one goes to Google Home that for whatever reason, they just don't have that interoperability.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:50]:
If they both have MCP, well, that doesn't matter. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:49:53]:
The problem is, I mean, that's what I've been trying to do. It's not easy, is get my AI to be able to open my curtains and turn on the Sonos and yeah, all of that stuff. This would be nice. I like this because I have a bunch of Google stuff. I have a bunch of Apple stuff, right? I have a bunch of Chinese stuff nobody owns. I want to— and of course I have the same thing Richard does, which is the Home Assistant Green, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:50:18]:
Right. And that's going to be a great platform for this kind of stuff, honestly, because you're going to— that market by definition is enthusiast-based and they're going to be active getting that stuff working in there. It's good.

Leo Laporte [01:50:28]:
Yeah, that's true. I think.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:32]:
A lot of—

Leo Laporte [01:50:32]:
I'm going to say my favorite word, XAML.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:36]:
I'm like, what?

Leo Laporte [01:50:38]:
Oh, XAML. I just love the word XAML.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:40]:
If you had given me 10 choices, I never would have gotten that.

Leo Laporte [01:50:42]:
That wouldn't be the first one. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:43]:
No, it wouldn't be there.

Leo Laporte [01:50:46]:
Pecuniary.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:49]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [01:50:54]:
Espetado. Right?

Paul Thurrott [01:50:55]:
Is that Spanish? So there's a lot of vibe coding stuff going on in the world. This one is really cool because it's very much targeted at the Microsoft guy, if you will, meaning not because everything you do is Microsoft these days, but you grew up in that world of Windows 95 and NT and and everything else and whatever. And this stuff will in fact run pretty much anywhere depending on how you do it. But what they've created is a web-based IDE that you can use with any AI with a coding agent that will write, build, and fix C# and XAML native apps. So these are .NET apps, like .NET apps. WPF is supported. WinForms is not WPF, so I'm actually not sure if it's in there, but various Microsoft frameworks are supported. But the thing that's amazing about this is that you, you can then go and kind of target it on other platforms using, like, you could run them and you can run them in the browser using like WebAssembly on the backend or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:00]:
You could even take Silverlight apps, which kind of came and went in a blink about 10 years ago, whatever that was. Yeah, 10, 12 years ago. and make them run today if you wanted to, right? So this one's interesting because you have to have some kind of an— well, they give you like AI, they give you like $5 of AI, AI bucks or whatever they call, uh, $5 of free AI usage per month without paying. They have a subscription you can get for— that's $20 per month for $20 of AI usage. But one of their awesome examples— so I should say, I'm sorry, this thing is called xaml.io. which you can just go to the web and see for yourself. They created the Windows 98 version of Paint with this agent. And this is awesome.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:46]:
And it is the full app. It's not just something that looks like it. It's the app. They describe in great detail how they did this. And this agent created 3,500 lines of C# and XAML code. It took 42 minutes. And so based on the, you know, the cost that someone would pay if someone did this, The cost to create this app at that speed would have been $57. You can go and open this app yourself in the web, and there are others too.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:13]:
But this is, this is curiously specific because it's like .NET and it's C#. And, and you can use this thing to just vibe code a new app, do, you know, create, you know, recreate an app from the past, whatever it might be. You can publish it directly from here in different ways. But you can also push it into the full desktop version of Visual Studio as a new workspace and just keep going from there. If you use this as the starter maybe and then build it up from there. This is really interesting. That paint thing is like, it's just blast from the past awesomeness. It's just awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:53:55]:
Well, there we have it.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:56]:
I mistakenly played the video. Although it's like—

Leo Laporte [01:54:00]:
XAML.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:01]:
Sorry, it was like the beginning of a sporting event with the loudest music imaginable.

Leo Laporte [01:54:06]:
It wasn't me, was it?

Paul Thurrott [01:54:09]:
No, no, it was the video for the XAML.

Leo Laporte [01:54:12]:
It's the XAML talking.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:14]:
Yeah, really cool though.

Leo Laporte [01:54:16]:
Nice. Vibe coding IDE for .NET.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:20]:
Yeah, I know it's super specific, but it's just so awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:54:25]:
I don't—

Paul Thurrott [01:54:26]:
we haven't talked about this too much, but, uh, Xbox has had some troubles. Uh, this year.

Leo Laporte [01:54:29]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:29]:
Wait, wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Leo Laporte [01:54:30]:
You can't just launch into the Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:33]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:54:33]:
How long have you been doing this show?

Paul Thurrott [01:54:35]:
20 years.

Leo Laporte [01:54:37]:
20 years, my friend. Ladies and gentlemen, you've been waiting for it. So have I.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:44]:
You're going to play the whiskey music though, right?

Leo Laporte [01:54:46]:
It's time for the Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:50]:
Because if you're an Xbox fan, you're probably drinking a lot of whiskey these days.

Leo Laporte [01:54:54]:
Um, I, I— Kevin, is Kevin not— oh, Kevin's on vacation.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:58]:
Kevin's gone. That's why.

Leo Laporte [01:54:59]:
Oh, you know, he's— you know what he's doing? Can I tell you what he's doing? Is it secret? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:03]:
What is it?

Leo Laporte [01:55:04]:
He's getting married. Oh, to some guy named Dan.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:08]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:55:09]:
No, it's not a guy. She's a nurse and she's beautiful and he's very happy and they're having a shark wedding, I'm sure. Shark-themed wedding.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:19]:
Is it Shark Week?

Leo Laporte [01:55:21]:
It's always Shark Week in his house. Always. Uh, uh, so, um, I don't know who's running the board, but whoever it is probably doesn't have the button to play the backwards Halo theme. So just imagine it in your head. And now— actually, really, we should have the, uh, because It isn't exactly good news for Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:49]:
Well, you know what though, in the, in the scheme of things, there's some bad stuff in here, but, um, Microsoft or Xbox announced, you know, months ago that, look, we're gonna— we're resetting the business. There are gonna be changes. That there was that thing that happened that I, I, I would— I did— I can't say I predicted, but I asked out loud, why can't they just do this? Which was let these guys go, take the IP with you. And finish the game you're working on or, you know, whatever it is. And it was like, oh, you can't do that. It's a business. And they, they actually did that with several of those game studios, right? One of the— oh, sorry. I should say they, at that time, they said that they were going to lay off 3,200 people between that point.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:32]:
I think it was in July. And I don't know when they conclude by the end of next June, which is Microsoft's fiscal year. They laid off 1,600 people at that time. So there's like 1,600 to go. So this past week, yesterday, I guess they announced, um, I don't even see their exact number. I want to say it's like 260. Yeah, 268 job cuts. Um, so, you know, I look, there's still job cuts.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:00]:
I'm not, I don't mean to, I'm not underplaying that, but it's not, first of all, we already, we should have known this was coming. Like we knew this was coming, right? Um, there was some good news in here about some of the studios that are being divested, right? Um, you know, Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Undead Labs are independent now, you know. Um, unfortunately, the other 2, Ninja Theory and Arkane, have not resolved. And it's not clear what's going to happen to those studios. So they're going to try to figure out something for them. I think it was Arkane was the one doing the, um, mental health game, kind of. It's like an action adventure mental health game. Uh, uh, I believe that was those guys.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:44]:
They had showed off the third of those games. Um, it's possible one or both could just disappear. I mean, we're going to see what happens here. Um, there's also some restructuring in here, which is really interesting. Um, Bungie developed Halo, right? Originally. Um, when Bungie split away from Microsoft, they created something called 343 Industries, which carried on that. Um, a couple of years back, not even maybe, but a year or two ago, they renamed this to Halo Studio. Halo Studio, um, I think with that name in place, actually, I think the only thing they released, I believe, is Halo Campaign Evolved, which everyone would agree is an excellent half of a game.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:24]:
It doesn't have the multiplayer part, but it is a, it's an awesome— Like kind of remake, remaster, whatever you want to call that thing. Um, but it looks like they're going to go away because the Halo games are going to Activision and there's going to be some small team of people from the Halo studio that will maintain existing, um, games while they go through their life cycle. But I, I think this might be the end of Halo Studios, which is kind of crazy. Um, there was a rumor and I don't, I wish I can remember where I saw this, that Microsoft was thinking about putting all of their kind of first-person shooter stuff inside of, uh, Activision. So it, you know, not just Call of Duty, but it would be like, you know, Doom, Quake. Um, it would be Halo, right? Would be in there. And they didn't do that. Um, that they didn't say anything about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:14]:
So we assume that's still part of Bethesda because Bethesda owns id Software, which is that stuff, or ZeniMax owns Bethesda, they don't, whatever it is. But they're part of Microsoft. Um, they're merging studios like, uh, Turn 10 and Playground Games are merging. Um, there's some other ones. I think, uh, Obsidian is going— yeah, they're moving studios around and not just, um, Halo Studios, but Obsidian is going to be part of Bethesda. You know, there's stuff like that. So I don't know. It's You know, this— look, there's, uh, 3,200 minus 268 is just supposed to, you know, minus 1,600 is what, 12, uh, whatever that number is, 1,400, whatever the number.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:57]:
I can't do math, but there's still some number of layoffs to come. I mean, we still have several more months to go, so there's gonna be more. But look, at least they— this was not— this didn't come out of the blue. I mean, the timing—

Leo Laporte [02:00:09]:
No, this is why they put, uh, Asha Sharma in there.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:13]:
Yeah, it seems— it does seem so.

Leo Laporte [02:00:15]:
Yeah. Now we know. I mean, good Lord. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:19]:
Just— yeah, I mean, the worst case scenario for it, for the conspiracy theorists out there, is that she was put here to, to shut it down, get it— yeah, get rid of it somehow, you know. I don't actually—

Leo Laporte [02:00:29]:
I don't see that personally, but, um, but how close can you cut to the bone before you don't have anything left? Yep. Right. And yikes, that's scary.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:39]:
Yeah, they still—

Leo Laporte [02:00:40]:
I mean, they still want to be a billion-dollar business with, you know, well, they are. I mean, well, a couple of titles. Yeah, they got that business unless they sell it off. It's not Nokia, is it?

Paul Thurrott [02:00:52]:
No, no, no, no, no. Uh, Activision was terrifically profitable, actually. I think they were doing great, right? Um, I, I've said this so many times and no one who loves Xbox wants to hear this, but if they just got rid of the hardware, they would be doing great.

Leo Laporte [02:01:04]:
That's That's the— but that's what I think is happening.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:08]:
I think it's inevitable. And look, they'll put out this next one because they promised and they talked about it so much and whatever. Everyone seems to want it. And when nobody buys the damn thing and it doesn't go anywhere, they can say, look, we, you know, we did what you asked and it didn't work. Sorry. So I think that's how it's going to go down, but we'll see.

Leo Laporte [02:01:27]:
Interesting. Very interesting.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:33]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:01:34]:
Well, uh, okay.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:37]:
And that's it. That's all I got. I know, I know.

Leo Laporte [02:01:42]:
Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:42]:
It really falls flat when there's no music, I gotta say. I don't know what John's doing.

Leo Laporte [02:01:46]:
I, it's— I think, uh, we gotta blame Dan.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:49]:
Dan? Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:01:50]:
Yeah. And, uh, and bring Kevin King back. Sorry, you can't get married, dude.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:54]:
Dan? Oh, Dan, the Dan, his life partner Dan. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:01:59]:
Yeah. Fiancée, my friend.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:01]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:02:02]:
They're, by the way, a really cute couple. I don't have permission to share the pictures, so I won't, but they're just adorable. And I'm very happy for Kevin. They deserve great happiness. John Ashley says, no one told me about the music. It's okay, John. It's really okay.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:19]:
It's not okay, John, but it's not your fault. It's not your fault. We do get that.

Leo Laporte [02:02:25]:
It's not your fault. It's a whole thing that Kevin put together of backwards Halo music. It's weird.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:30]:
This is just him protecting his job, you know? That's exactly right. I think we gotta see this for what it is.

Leo Laporte [02:02:34]:
He's not gonna hand off the keys to the car.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:36]:
He's like, yeah, and I wish I could tell you how to make the music. I just know how.

Leo Laporte [02:02:39]:
And I— oh, let me tell you, I probably shouldn't be— oh, that's the wrong thing to show there. I don't know why it's showing that. That's our guest Coming up in just a little bit on, uh, on the fabulous intelligent machines in about half an hour. Now it's time for the back of the book. We call— we kick things off with Paul's tip of the week. Paulie, I think you're muted and I don't believe it's my doing.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:10]:
No, I did that. I'm sorry. I know I can't control myself. Um, When the Snapdragon X family of chips came out a couple years ago.

Leo Laporte [02:03:20]:
You didn't go to Hawaii this year.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:22]:
No. And it's because there isn't like a big PC thing happening. There's some PC stuff, but it's mostly—

Leo Laporte [02:03:29]:
They're having their big conference. They do this big thing in Hawaii every year.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:32]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:03:32]:
It's a great junket.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:35]:
Yeah. It's not bad work if you can get it. Yeah. It's just not as PC-focused as it's been. Or sometimes it's—

Leo Laporte [02:03:43]:
yeah, they're talking now really a lot about Android, I think, as much as their PCs.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:48]:
Yeah. I can't remember which days are which. Like, I don't want to say anything, but I know it's— yeah, there's other stuff. But yeah, not just phones. The phones was yesterday. But yeah, there'll be lots of stuff. It's still interesting. But obviously when you have Windows on ARM running on the ARM platform, you have to run x86, x64 software.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:08]:
You're going to run this in emulation. Microsoft came up with something called the Prism emulator, which just perfect timing, the right chipset, the right emulator, everything's great, but not games. So gaming has been a struggle, still is a struggle on ARM, but one of, I'm going to call it 2 or 3 different advances Microsoft and/or Qualcomm made in this department was To figure out ways to make games run acceptably. Like if we can get a game to run in emulation, but it's running at really low frame rates, obviously you could lower the resolution, but then it's going to look like garbage. So Copilot plus PCs, AI, they come up with something called Auto Super Resolution or Auto SR, which is a little bit like that 4K video upsizing thing I was talking about earlier. But the idea here is that You lower the rendered frame, the rendered resolution, sorry. So if your native resolution is 2880 by 1800 or whatever it is, 1920 by 1200 or whatever, instead of running it at full resolution, you run the game at, you know, 600p or 800p or whatever, a lower quality level, a lower resolution. And then it will render it visually to look better, right? So.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:25]:
It's going to look like it's running at 1200p or something, even if it's 600p, whatever. And honestly, pretty good, right? It doesn't solve all the problems, but it's, it's a big step forward. It opens up a kind of a new swath of games that you can play on ARM. But as soon as you, or at least when I saw this, it was a couple of years ago now, I was like, okay, but why wouldn't we just use this everywhere? I mean, this seems like the type of thing that you would use on like a video playback, which there are solutions for this, right? You've got this old YouTube video. It's like 320p, 480p, whatever. And have it as it live renders, have it use some sort of auto SR to make it look like it's 720p or 1080p or whatever. Like, I don't understand why this type of thing isn't anywhere. Maybe this is like the low-hanging fruit.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:08]:
This is just a good way to do it. I'm not really sure. But when you think about, um, you know, gaming in general, not just ARM, but just x86 laptops or whatever, or whatever computers. running Intel or AMD chipsets, I mean, they would benefit from this too, right? I mean, like, you know, like, uh, I just talked about that Panther Lake laptop, which is Intel Core Ultra Series 3 with that awesome Arc B-series graphics. Um, okay, but if you— wouldn't it run awesome? Wait, couldn't we still use it there? And, uh, they just took the first step toward this. I didn't see this coming, but the other day Microsoft announced that that they have brought AutoSR to Copilot Plus PCs based on Intel Core Ultra Series processors. So including that laptop I mentioned earlier, and you don't really need it so much on that particular laptop, but it will work. This means that Core Series 3 or Core Ultra Series 3 laptops with lower-end GPUs, because actually most of them are, will also work better.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:07]:
And that's going to be a bigger deal there. But the idea here is it's optimized for 800p. So in other words, you set it You set the game to run at that resolution, and then it will render at what looks like probably 1080p, I would imagine. But it can go higher than that. And there are a bunch of Doom games— sorry, I said Doom, but I guess I'm looking at the word— but a bunch of games that have already been kind of— no, it's not that the games have been optimized. It's just that Microsoft tried them and they worked particularly well. So the recent Assassin's Creed games, Control, Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, which is the latest version, and a bunch of others are or just ones they recommend. I did try this with, it was actually Call of Duty Black Ops 6, so not the very latest game.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:52]:
It had a weird effect, like it made everything look almost like cartoonish. Like it's, I think I went too far down in resolution or whatever. I took some pictures of it 'cause it was kind of hilarious looking. But then as I reran the game, it actually started to look better. And I was like, wait, actually this might be okay. Like, it's kind of interesting. interesting thing to do. Um, and so hopefully it will come to AMD soon.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:14]:
But if you have one of these, if you have a computer with this chipset, I would, I would give this a shot. This is very interesting.

Leo Laporte [02:08:20]:
Yeah, no kidding.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:22]:
Yeah, it's free. It's available, you know, free download, whatever. Um, and then last year, probably, um, uh, Affinity, which had been acquired by Canva at some point, had 3 separate apps. And I used one of the 3 all the time. It was, uh, Affinity Photo as sort of a Photoshop—

Leo Laporte [02:08:40]:
Me too, loved it.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:41]:
Literally a Photoshop replacement. Yeah. And then sometime last year they announced that they were combining those 3 apps into a single app and it's just gonna be called Affinity and it will do everything that those apps did, which is not quite true, but pretty much true. Super, it's astonishing like how well these tools work actually. And so I've been using that ever since. It's free, it's just free. I mean, there's certain things in there, there's some AI features and it's just a handful of things where you can download a local model. And then there are some that actually require like a Canva subscription or whatever kind.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:12]:
So I just don't use those. But they just released a major update to this app. And I noticed it before I saw the announcement because when you boot into the app, you install an update or whatever. There's a new menu that pops up one time where you kind of choose the environments or whatever those views are they have. So it could be like pixel-based or vector-based or whatever they have. Kind of interesting. Basically, this is just like 60+ new features, a lot of them photo editing, different AI-based tools, et cetera, as you would expect. But the big one to me, honestly, because a lot of this stuff is semi-obvious and this is what customers were asking for, that's great.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:51]:
They now support like full scripting capabilities. And anyone can build on that if they want. It will work across all of those major experiences. But they also released an AI connector for cloud that could automate workflows for you. So this is that thing I was talking about earlier where I haven't tried this, but using that AI assistant, you could say, here's the photo, I need to do this with it. And what it's using on the backend is whatever capabilities that Affinity exposes through this interface, right? And so, you know, I'm sure people who use this will still use Affinity, the app, but I I also think over time, the goal is that that's not the app anymore, right? It's the AI thing. So whatever, it's interesting to see them just kind of embrace this. But it's worth it.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:41]:
Look, if you haven't tried this, dear God, please try it. It's amazing. But it keeps getting better. And this is a big one.

Leo Laporte [02:10:48]:
Yeah, I think it must be so hard now if you are a software company to plot your future.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:55]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:10:57]:
Because the world is really about to dramatically change.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:01]:
You know, as you just said this, I'll tell you how I got to this, but it sort of occurs that this model, this thing I'm talking about, maybe we're talking about it, where you're talking to an AI and it's using some backend feature of an app. And so of course that's great when the app's there, but when you're not buying the app anymore, because this thing's just doing this, like how does this work? And you know, whatever. And actually it could be like music streaming, right? And it could be a little bit like what they're doing now with usage-based billing, where that whatever that backend thing is, whether it's Adobe or Affinity or, you know, Canva, whatever they are, if there's some little, you know, micropayment that occurs and, you know, I mean, I maybe that's the, that's how this will eventually work, you know, instead. So instead of, you don't buy the software anyway, but I, Which is weird, but I guess they're trying to sell you on a subscription. But if they could do these micropayments for, you know, on-the-fly access to capabilities, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:12:00]:
Yeah, and that might work for a year or two. Here's the problem. Like, I now have a free OpenWeight vision model or image model that's as good as Midjourney was. I used to pay for Midjourney. I now have it running on my computer.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:14]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [02:12:15]:
And it, it does everything Midjourney could do faster and better.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:19]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:12:19]:
And it's free.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:20]:
Yeah. This is what I saw when I was in Berlin and it was like, holy God, this is just an open weight, open source model running locally on a computer. And it was a miracle when you had to use Midjourney or whatever bot or whatever you were using. Um, the fact that this thing is just, yeah, it's just gonna be there. I know. Look, I talked about some, you know, you could use XAML.IO to create, oh, someone already did create the, you know, the Paint app from Windows 98.

Leo Laporte [02:12:48]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:48]:
Nice. Well, someone paid for that, right? It was, I guess it was $57, but you don't have to pay for it. It's just there now. It's just done. I mean, I, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:12:58]:
Increasingly we're in the situation, I think, where people are just gonna not even use apps. They're just—

Paul Thurrott [02:13:03]:
That's what I mean. That's exactly. So I'm just trying to, as you were talking, I was, I, I came up with this idea that this is essentially usage-based pricing. So the things that you— like, we used to sell apps on some physical format, a floppy disk or a CD or something. We had stores. We would go to Best Buy and buy a box that was mostly air with some disk inside of it. And now, of course, we just download everything from the internet. But we also have all these subscription services and things.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:29]:
And, you know, if you're— I can't remember who was who anymore, but whoever has like a cloud, you know, interaction piece or whatever, so you're paying Anthropic directly and maybe that goes into it, but those guys get something on the back. I'm not saying they do, but they could. That could be—

Leo Laporte [02:13:46]:
That could be one of the many—

Paul Thurrott [02:13:47]:
The people that used to have apps are now basically backend services for the thing, for the app everyone's actually using.

Leo Laporte [02:13:56]:
It's really hard. I'm just, that's one of many possibilities, but that's my point is that how do you predict? How do you know what's But you know, you just try stuff. Everybody's trying stuff. And it's pretty hard to imagine what the world's gonna be in a year or two years.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:12]:
Well, even, but I look at some of the, this like, you know, image upscaling is a free feature on a Copilot Post PC. It's built into the Paint app, the Photos app. Like that's incredible. But that's been done. Like it's been done. Like that work is out in the world somewhere. Like anyone could just get that at this point. Anyone could do that right now.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:34]:
And you look at like the features that like the AI stuff that they put into this new version of Affinity and it's, you know, SDR to HDR, generative upscale, you know, the thing where you can add to the outside of the image and, you know, if you want it to be a different aspect ratio, whatever it is, turn something into a 3D model, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. These, we're just describing APIs essentially are just like features some, any AI could grab and use and—

Leo Laporte [02:15:02]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:03]:
And that's the thing. That's what I mean. Instead of that thinking, like, I want to make a graphic or whatever it is, I have to use this app. You're like, no, I just talk to the space time.

Leo Laporte [02:15:16]:
What I like about it is that silos are falling. All of these fake walls that companies have built up to protect their profits and their—

Paul Thurrott [02:15:24]:
That's what makes MCP so astonishing to me because that type of a standard in a normal industry— I'm sure they don't want to do that. No, I know, but they all did it. But they have to. How long would it have taken if, like, because what those guys want to do is compete with each other. They want to put the other people out of business. Interoperability is bad for these guys.

Leo Laporte [02:15:43]:
Well, that's why I wonder what Adobe's going to do because Adobe's managed somehow to survive all of this.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:48]:
Not just somehow, they're actually very profitable.

Leo Laporte [02:15:51]:
They are very profitable.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:53]:
They have this audience of people who just, I don't want to say knee-jerk, but knee-jerk, just like we're using their thing. Like, this is what we're doing. That's what I was going to say. So I saw this. I would never write about it or talk about this kind of thing, but it was something to do with— oh, I'm sorry. It was tied to this Microsoft business that is still making money software, right? One of the things they referenced, I forgot this part of it, I'm sorry. One of the things they referenced in there was that one of the big profit centers inside of Microsoft 365 is this thing called an E7 subscription.

Leo Laporte [02:16:21]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:22]:
So I'm going to guess E5 is probably the biggest You know, population of, but I'm not really, but they have E3, E5, E7. E7 is $99 per employee per month. Yeah. So, you know, we're all shocked, like OpenAI or Anthropic is like, yeah, we have this version of our stupid chatbot that is going to be $100 a month. And we're like, oh, you somebody pay that? You know? And it's like, actually, um, we've been training people to pay that much money for a long time.

Leo Laporte [02:16:51]:
That's why I say it's hard to judge their profitability because we don't know what enterprise is paying for AI right now. It's probably a lot. If they see that value, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:17:01]:
Right, right, right. I mean, the goal over time for Microsoft in this case is going to be to convert what will one day be seen as these legacy Microsoft 365 subscriptions into some, they'll call it a Copilot something subscription, where you get all the capabilities that have ever existed in any of those apps, But you never have to stare at that ribbon and all this shit.

Leo Laporte [02:17:22]:
You don't have to figure out where it is.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:24]:
Yep. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to use this command key. You're just like, I need a document that did whatever, you know? Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:17:31]:
Well, and that's what I think. That's where Microsoft sees it going. That's what they're trying to do. That's what Copilot is all about, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:17:36]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:17:37]:
That's what our friend, what's his name, said. That was exactly the transition.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:43]:
Are you talking about Corey Doctorow?

Leo Laporte [02:17:45]:
No, no, no. The guy at Ignite 3 years ago.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:48]:
Sorry. Oh, Stephen. Stevie Battish.

Leo Laporte [02:17:51]:
Battish.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:52]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:17:53]:
He mapped it out so beautifully and we loved it. And so far, by the way, even though that was a couple years ago, he's not been wrong.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:01]:
No, he's— I think that's a genius for one thing.

Leo Laporte [02:18:03]:
But yeah, I mean, he, um, that is the kind of where we're headed sort of thing.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:09]:
Yeah, no, the end of apps. I'm, I'm, I'm with you.

Leo Laporte [02:18:12]:
I'm all in on it, man. That's Mr. T, Mr. Paul Theroux. You'll find him at theroux.com. If you're a premium member, you get copies of all of his great books. Or if you're already a premium member, go to leanpub.com. You can buy them there, including The Field Guide to Windows 11, Windows Everywhere, his book about the history of Windows through its frameworks.

Leo Laporte [02:18:30]:
And of course, the one we all need, De-enshitify Windows.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:36]:
I also have a Markdown book coming out that is—

Leo Laporte [02:18:38]:
Yes. When is this coming out?

Paul Thurrott [02:18:40]:
I've already published like 3 of the Oh, good. Chapters to the site, but I'll, the book in book form, uh, sometime.

Leo Laporte [02:18:48]:
I'm a premium member.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:49]:
I expected to do it by now. Yeah. Sometime within a month.

Leo Laporte [02:18:52]:
We interviewed, uh, on, uh, Jeff Atwood's Off by One, uh, John McFarlane, who created CommonMark, which is this real Markdown standard.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:01]:
Yep. That's, that's one of the tricks.

Leo Laporte [02:19:03]:
Yeah. That Jeff Atwood financed. Uh, but he's also the guy who wrote Pandoc.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:06]:
Right. Which is also, by the way, crucial to this whole story because it's how you get it from whatever to some form of You know, you may use it all the time and not know it.

Leo Laporte [02:19:14]:
I, you know, the other day I said, oh, I don't want these Markdown, uh, documents anymore, Claude. Can you just put up an HTML page? And I was looking and it just called Pandoc to do it. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:25]:
That's the— yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:19:26]:
Yep. That's what it's doing. Mr. Tharad, so great to see you. It's kind of fun to do a show just you and me.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:33]:
Yeah. Sorry.

Leo Laporte [02:19:34]:
No, Richard. No, I'm, I'm serious. I'm sincere. I, it's—

Paul Thurrott [02:19:37]:
I was kind of stressing over this, Tim. I'm like, ah, man.

Leo Laporte [02:19:39]:
No, don't stress. Uh, Richard will be back next week. Uh, and when is our 20th? You said it's soon.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:46]:
I believe it's the 28th. If you go, you know, you could—

Leo Laporte [02:19:48]:
It's like this week.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:49]:
I, I think September 28th, 2006.

Leo Laporte [02:19:53]:
I can find out just by going to twit.tv/ww1, and that will bring me to Windows Weekly number 1, which was September 28th, 2006. Okay, 2006. Paul, if I'd known, I would have had another—

Paul Thurrott [02:20:08]:
yeah, hey, it's okay.

Leo Laporte [02:20:11]:
1,000 episodes.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:13]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [02:20:14]:
And you see, one of the topics was the real Vista ship date because it was still XP. The other thing that's to note is it was 39 minutes long, right? Let's just hear the beginning.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:24]:
Like Windows, we have bloated this thing somewhat.

Leo Laporte [02:20:27]:
What? I'm just curious what it sounds like. Oh, we were still Netcast.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:33]:
We probably have like Donald Duck voices.

Leo Laporte [02:20:35]:
Hey, Leo.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:36]:
Oh, Paul's right here.

Leo Laporte [02:20:38]:
20 years, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:40]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [02:20:41]:
Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by CashFly at— It's kind of hard to believe we've been doing this for 20 years.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:47]:
.com.

Leo Laporte [02:20:48]:
I never thought when I was a kid I'd do anything for 20 years.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:51]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:20:52]:
This is Windows Weekly.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:54]:
I've been doing the second longest relationship. I was just gonna say, when you think about it, I was just gonna say longer than my marriages.

Leo Laporte [02:21:01]:
Brought to you by— Who are our sponsors? Safer, better money. Visa. Visa takes Visa. Wow, we had some, like, a real advertiser back then. That's when the consumer brands were buying podcasts. They don't do that anymore, right? Well, they do. They buy Rogan. This was that Great music.

Leo Laporte [02:21:22]:
Yep, I think Derek did this, as I remember, and I'm playing way too much of it because—

Paul Thurrott [02:21:29]:
What's really going on?

Leo Laporte [02:21:32]:
I want to hear Paul. This is episode 1 of Windows Weekly, uh, and I'm so glad, you know, we cast around. We knew we had to do a Windows podcast. I mean, you can't— I mean, we're doing everything else, how could you not do a Windows podcast? And, and I thought for about 4 seconds and the name Paul Rot leapt to mind. I mean, I, I don't think there's anybody who writes about Windows today who is more outspoken, I think has more integrity. It's a hard thing to do when you cover just one operating system, not to be in the back pocket of— I have learned so much about you since then. But anyway, let's— let— no, I'm kidding. It's true.

Leo Laporte [02:22:04]:
That's right.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:04]:
That's right.

Leo Laporte [02:22:05]:
Nothing more than that. And there's this— I want to hear Paul.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:07]:
Microsoft can't afford the—

Leo Laporte [02:22:09]:
Guess not.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:10]:
The bandwidth.

Leo Laporte [02:22:10]:
It's just so expensive. I think it's probably— You sound exac— it's the same.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:14]:
show, basically.

Leo Laporte [02:22:15]:
It's the worst. I think at the time when people first met you, they hadn't heard you before, they didn't understand your dry wit.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:23]:
Yeah, no one does. This is, this is how I judge people. I just watch them react to me.

Leo Laporte [02:22:28]:
But now we get it. And, uh, I get it. And it's— you're one of the funniest guys I know. But it's so dry that sometimes you miss it. Anyway, you've—

Paul Thurrott [02:22:37]:
Every once in a while my wife will do, do it to me. And I'm like, I got to be honest. I don't like how that feels.

Leo Laporte [02:22:43]:
You know? 1,002 episodes and now 20 years of Windows Weekly. That's kind of amazing.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:52]:
Yeah, it's crazy.

Leo Laporte [02:22:53]:
Paul, it's been a great pleasure and honor to work with you for 20 years.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:56]:
Here's to 20 more. I'm not sure if I have 20 in me, but I'll go as long as I can. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:23:03]:
I'll be 90.

Paul Thurrott [02:23:04]:
I was going to say, the world was pretty wide open 20 years ago. Like, I'm thinking 20 years out, I'm like, I can barely get to the bathroom right now. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:23:12]:
Thank you, Paul. Have a great week, and we'll be back next Wednesday, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, for Windows Weekly. So long.