Windows Weekly 1006 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.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Windows Weekly, Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell are here, joined by yours truly, Micah Sargent, while Leo Laporte is out. We talk about some new RTX hardware. Yes, Paul Thurrott goes hands-on with 3 different RTX Spark devices. Plus, OneDrive gets some Copilot upgrades that make it even better. Well, maybe. And of course, Project Helix from Xbox and a special. Special. Theranos cocktail.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:26]:
All of that coming up on Windows Weekly.

TWiT.tv [00:00:31]:
Podcasts you love.

TWiT.tv [00:00:33]:
From people you trust.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:36]:
This is TWiT. This is Windows Weekly, episode 1006, with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, recorded Wednesday, October 21st, 2026. Are you lying to me now, Paul? Hello and welcome to Windows Weekly, the show where we talk to 2 of the foremost Windows washers in the world. I am Micah Sargent, subbing in for Leo Laporte this week, and I am happy— well, actually, this is just the first of a few weeks while he's on vacation.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:15]:
Yeah, this is crazy.

Richard Campbell [00:01:15]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:16]:
Yeah. And I'm looking forward to— Micah time. Micah time. Some people love it, some people hate it, but it's happening nonetheless. All right. Let us introduce our wonderful Windows Watchers. As I said,

Paul Thurrott [00:01:28]:
I'd rather be a Windows Watcher than a window washer.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:31]:
Oh, that's good. I like that. Well, our non-window washing window watcher, Paul Theroux. Where are you reporting from this week?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:40]:
I am back in Mexico City today.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:43]:
And how is it? Temperature?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:45]:
Oh, it's— you don't want to know.

Richard Campbell [00:01:47]:
Well, it's eternal spring.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:48]:
Yeah, it's always— it's 70 degrees.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:52]:
I like it.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:52]:
It's a little cloudy today, actually, but—

Richard Campbell [00:01:55]:
oh my God.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:56]:
I know. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:57]:
And the, uh, never anchored, no strings on him, uh, where are you coming to us from, Richard Campbell?

Richard Campbell [00:02:06]:
I am in Stavanger, Norway, where it is cloudy and cool. Yeah, this is, um, this is oil field country, right? There's big ships and yeah, a lot of, a lot of the work coming out of here, although recently A proposal to put an undersea data cable from Stavanger to Gander to not go to the US with it.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:27]:
I'm not sure that those are real names, but that could also just be my US bias.

Richard Campbell [00:02:33]:
Gander is where we took in all you people after 9/11.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:36]:
Ah, that's where they— so-called the geese. That's probably insensitive. Anyway, let's move along to talk about the show this week. We got a lot of windows to get through. I just, uh, was on Security Now yesterday and heard it was another record-setting week, but we'll get to that. We'll get to that.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:59]:
Actually, we got to that last week, so— but you are correct, sir.

Richard Campbell [00:03:04]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:04]:
Have you been digging in?

Richard Campbell [00:03:06]:
More patches in a month than last year, right?

Mikah Sargent [00:03:09]:
Do you both like print them out on a receipt thermal printer and go through each one?

Richard Campbell [00:03:13]:
I've got them all. I've got them all right here. I carry a separate bag for them.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:16]:
Nice. This is my patch bag.

Richard Campbell [00:03:19]:
Yeah, it's my patch bag.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:21]:
I love that.

Richard Campbell [00:03:22]:
Thousands of patches.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:24]:
You're like, what's going on here? This is not carry-on.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:27]:
Yeah, it's allowed. It can come. All right, let's talk about Microsoft and updating to Windows 11, or updates to Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:37]:
Yeah, so this year, Micah might not be as familiar with this as maybe every, you know, Windows people, but we've been trying to fix some problems. Uh, I know it's a shock to the outside world that Windows isn't perfect. Um, but it's been good, right? This has been a good year. So there's been major, uh, UI changes to Start menu, taskbar, search, etc., etc., File Explorer, a bunch of other stuff coming. And one of the, the points I sort of landed on a few months into this was this work is just going to be ongoing. Like, this is not just for 2026 and then we're done, we're never doing this again. Like, it's gonna be an ongoing process. It doesn't mean it's gonna be this great forever, but we're gonna see more and more.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:21]:
It's not, we're not done, you know?

Richard Campbell [00:04:24]:
And most of these are the Mythos-type security patches that we're seeing, right? Well, I'm— Finding old vulnerabilities.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:30]:
Sorry, yeah, I would say there are two halves to it. There's that, but then there's also just the, like, the functional things. Like, Windows 11 had a lot of functional regressions compared to Windows 10 that freaked out a lot of people. kind of ignored all the complaints for several years, and, uh, and now they're paying attention, you know. And, and we— one thing we've talked about is, you know, because this comes up a lot in when I write things, which is, you know, why, you know, what's the intent here? Like, why are they doing this, right? I mean,

Richard Campbell [00:04:56]:
I mean, are we wrong to lay this at the feet of Bhavan Divaluri? He seems to have been paying attention to the engineers and the customers.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:04]:
That's a good question. Um, Look, I— look, the guy is an engineer. I, I like him. I like his whole vibe. I, I think he presents a good kind of face for the, the team and the product and all that stuff. But I think in many ways, just as the, you know, the decision— not that there was a meeting one day and a memo went out that, but, you know, we're going to ignore Windows basically, or even behave maliciously with Windows. Um, There wasn't really that meeting, right? And I'm not sure there was this meeting exactly either, except that as AI sort of progresses, Microsoft is like, look, we don't have a mobile platform, so we're not Google or Apple. We can't push this stuff out in the world this way.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:48]:
We do have a big presence in the cloud, and that's great, but it's mostly great for infrastructure. We have first-party services. We want that to work. They've done a good job of putting Copilot functionality into the Microsoft 365 apps. That's great. Mm-hmm. But Windows is an operating system and it needs to be stable and reliable and actually work and it needs to meet people's needs and people need to want to use the thing. And developers aren't the only audience, but I would say they're the first audience where it's like, look, and they've been working on it for a while, but we want to make this hospitable for developers and then for users as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:21]:
So there's just like the functional stuff. It's like you have complained about the Start menu. Okay, we're going to fix that. You've complained about the taskbar. We're going to fix that. You've complained about search because everyone has used it once, it doesn't work, and they stop using it. I gotta say, I keep trying to use it, it still doesn't work, but they'll get there eventually, and that's fine.

Richard Campbell [00:06:40]:
And so I think you've gone a step too far there, Mr. Throd. I mean, Microsoft's never been able to make search work. That's just not a thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:47]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yes, I— at some point, yeah, just don't worry about it. Your files are there, they're fine. Just be quiet.

Richard Campbell [00:06:56]:
They're there. You can't find them, but they're there.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:58]:
Yeah, they're there.

Richard Campbell [00:06:59]:
So it's like the internet.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:01]:
Yes. You know it's out there. You don't always see it. Look, it's been a good year for Windows. I do think the intent there was to make Windows work well for AI. I think that was— this is our billion-plus— well, one of the 2 billion-plus audiences we have. It's the right place for orchestration, all that stuff. I think this is the reason, but you know what? Who cares? Even if we don't care about AI, don't wanna use it, don't want it in Windows, whatever, we can all benefit from it.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:32]:
So I think it's a net positive. It's good. And then this past week, they started talking about, they didn't call it this, but I'm calling it this because I always knew there would be more. Mm-hmm. They're sort of talking about some stuff that they're working on right now that is, kind of an extension of the pain points work, right? And so one of the things they've been doing, they've sort of mentioned this subtly here and there, but improving performance across the board and more important, improving the performance on low RAM systems like 8 gigs of RAM, which is not the typical PC configuration these days. But with the component crisis, et cetera, we're starting to get these new lower-end computers like we see with the— Right. MacBook Neo on the Apple side, but all the PC makers are doing this now. And you can buy a hunk of crap computer if you want to with 8 gigs of RAM, and, uh, I guess it will be better.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:28]:
I don't know. I don't know what we're comparing it to. I don't think it's going to be a good experience, period. But whatever. Um, so that's happening. But they announced the first big redesign of an inbox app in Windows 11, which is going to be the Photos app, right? And so if you're in the Insider Program, this is available in a couple of the channels right now. It's one of those things that will roll out eventually, but I haven't seen it yet, unfortunately, because of my travel. It's just been kind of bad timing.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:52]:
I think they announced this, might have been Friday or whatever, but it looks a lot like the current app to me, but it's been redesigned with UI3. It launches faster, all the different component bits are faster, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things that is really curious to me about Photos, it's, it's very unique as an app. Um, if you go back to, I want to say Vista even, or Windows 7, we remember we used to have like a photo viewer app that was just a standalone app that would run when you double-clicked on an image, right? So it was kind of a lightweight app-ish kind of an experience. And then there was always a full-featured Photos app, which went through different permutations and names over the years, but that was the thing you would load to look at your gallery, your photo collection. Mm-hmm.

Richard Campbell [00:09:38]:
And it could do background removal and a few other— I think it even did red-eye removal back when that was a thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:45]:
Yeah, exactly. Right. Very common. Yes. So in the Windows 11 cycle, the Photos app, I'm actually not sure how it was architected before. I'm going to guess it was probably a web technology type app, but it actually maintained that structure. It's very interesting. And, you know, in writing the Windows 11 Field Guide over several revisions, I kind of revisit this topic every time I look at the Photos app because it is very strange.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:09]:
Like, you can today in Windows 11 find a picture, double-click on it, and the Photos app runs, but it's really that photo viewer experience, right? It's just, it's an app, it's just basically for viewing. So you can navigate to different apps in the same folder, but it doesn't do too, too much. But there is an edit button up in the corner, and when you do that or click that, the full Photos app experience loads, and that's where you get the gallery and all the other functionality, right? So they actually talk about this in this announcement. They were, they were talking, you know, there's the gallery view. So if you just run the Photos app, you get the gallery view. This is the thing where you, you know, it's the grid of photos. And if you have photos in OneDrive, iCloud, if you connect that, or, um, your local machine, obviously you'll— those photos appear there. And then you can double-click in the photo viewer.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:58]:
They don't It is called the viewer, by the way, but will load. And you can click the edit button or right-click edit from the gallery and you get the editor, which actually loads in the main gallery window. It's confusing, but there's 3 basic experiences. And so they're retaining that, but they've rewritten it for WinUI 3, which I assume means Windows App SDK. So it's a native app. It's, like I said, faster across the board. A couple of minor additions, but mostly it seems to be just a way to modernize this app and make it run better. So that's cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:36]:
The other one that has occurred, and I'm also throwing this into the kind of the phase 2, if you will, of this pain points thing, is the search experience, which we've been talking about before. So as part of phase 1, they did improve Windows Search. And so the default becomes you do, you bring the thing up and you don't get the search highlights with all the garbage in it, right? It's just like a— it's a kind of a minimalist experience, which is really nice. But what we didn't understand at the time was that this was setting the stage for this next, um, iteration where they're going to add, um, you know, inline, um, actions, you know. And this is like a new entry point for things like using natural language to change the dark mode to light mode, or, you know, change the background, whatever it is. Like, you can just— You don't have to go figure it out. Like, you can just ask it. We'll just kind of do it for you.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:21]:
So it will interact with Canary— Canary— with Copilot in time. It will interact with your system settings in time. Actually, I think that's available today. But these are in the Insider Program. So just like, you know, with this October release—

Richard Campbell [00:12:35]:
Is it gonna be able to ask real questions like, why are you crashing?

Paul Thurrott [00:12:40]:
Yeah, this is— yeah. Oh God, I have so many tandem thoughts right now just related to AI that it really falls on this side, but we'll get to it. I'm going to try to rein that in. But anyway, so that was— this is good stuff. I like this. And there's some OneDrive changes coming too, which factor into this. We'll talk about that a little bit later. That was a separate announcement.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:03]:
In fact, that was just yesterday. They did a big one annually. They do. I thought it was usually in November. And I literally just had to think to myself, wait, is it November? Uh, it's— I believe it's usually in November, but they just had it yesterday. They do an annual OneDrive event where they talk about all the stuff they're doing and the changes they're making, and then some of the stuff they're doing in the future. But we'll, we'll get to that. So there's, there's more stuff coming, I guess, is the point.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:28]:
So the stuff we know— performance improvements, that's I think landed already in the code. The Photos app improvements, or redo. The Windows Search improvements. and then OneDrive improvements. And supposedly they always say— I don't like the way they describe the release schedule for these things, but it's like, you'll have these things by the end of the year. And it's like, yeah, if you're in the Insider Program, you'll have them by the end of the year. But sometime in the next 3 to 4 months, I would think.

Richard Campbell [00:13:52]:
So yeah, I think end of the year is a little too quick, but March is probably not.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:58]:
Exactly. I think that's about right. So that's good. And then in the Insider Program bit, there's only been one announcement, but it was 6 builds.

Richard Campbell [00:14:09]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:10]:
And there are 7 builds. So it was almost all of them.

Richard Campbell [00:14:13]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:14]:
Oddly, I wouldn't say there's anything major in here. And of course, when I say in here, there are 6 builds and these new features aren't in all the builds. So the search stuff I just talked about is in 2 or 3 of these from before. This was from a previous set of releases. There is a new gaming task view experience in Xbox mode if you're using that, which probably almost no one is. And that's fine. Windows Hello facial recognition improvements, which is Microsoft pulling a Google by, this thing doesn't work in the dark, so let's really light up your face by just putting a white screen on and making you brighter, basically. So you'll be blind, but you'll be able to log into your computer.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:01]:
But whatever, that seems to work. It's fine. Or it's something. I don't know if it's fine.

Richard Campbell [00:15:07]:
So how do you get— So is this including ARM, that they have 6 builds?

Paul Thurrott [00:15:13]:
Yes. Um,

Richard Campbell [00:15:14]:
yeah,

Paul Thurrott [00:15:15]:
let me go back and look at this. Yep. So yeah, 2 of the builds—

Richard Campbell [00:15:18]:
Now I'm wondering, I'm wondering, with the RTX machines coming out, do we have another insider build chain?

Paul Thurrott [00:15:25]:
Okay, so actually, it's— since you asked, I will tell you. This surprised me. Um, you— if you think back to when Microsoft and Qualcomm, uh, and the PC makers, uh, launched the Snapdragon X2-based computers. Microsoft— and this would have been, what was that, May? Probably April, May, somewhere in there.

Richard Campbell [00:15:44]:
Yeah, it was this year.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:45]:
It was this year. Um, those laptops come with Windows 11 26H1. It's unique to the— it was at the time unique to the X2 platform.

Richard Campbell [00:15:55]:
Yeah, and it seemed like a stuck branch, right? Like it wasn't getting the same features, it wasn't delivering at the same time. Like,

Paul Thurrott [00:16:00]:
so Yeah, the way—

Richard Campbell [00:16:01]:
I'd almost be angry if I was on 26H1.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:05]:
Well, you're gonna be angrier still in a moment, uh, but yes, uh, yeah, same. So, um, if you have an X2 machine, you're still on 26H1. There's no way to go past that right now. One of the weirdisms of that announcement, the other one just being that they announced this unique version for some reason without ever explaining why, was that, um, they did say at the announcement that this thing would not be upgradable to 26H2, which is the version of Windows that just came out. But it will have an upgrade path in the future. They have never discussed that since. They've never explained what that means. You can speculate, maybe this means Windows 12, maybe it means we're just gonna do Windows 11 version whatever, and maybe we all get together on the same train, whatever, at some point.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:49]:
I don't know. But yeah, you're correct. This year, if you look at all the monthly updates, the cumulative updates they put out on Patch Tuesday, 26H1 by and large has been one month behind the other supported versions of Windows 11 from a feature perspective. I'm going to go out on a limb. I think this has to be correct. I'm sure it's up to date with the security stuff, right? They wouldn't wait a month for important security updates, especially some that are zero days, which has happened.

Richard Campbell [00:17:16]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:17]:
But

Richard Campbell [00:17:18]:
it just speaks to how weird is the pipeline here.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:21]:
I know. Well, it just got weirder because I didn't— it's weird. I was, you know, I was at IFA, played around with these computers. I didn't think to look at this for some reason. I just sort of assumed these RTX Spark computers would be on 26H2. Yeah, they're not. They're on 26H1.

Richard Campbell [00:17:38]:
Uh-oh.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:39]:
Yeah. So,

Richard Campbell [00:17:40]:
so this is the weirdo orphan.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:42]:
Yep. And, and so now no one has said this, right? Microsoft has never, to my knowledge, publicly acknowledge that this happened or that this is what is the case. But if you go back—

Richard Campbell [00:17:53]:
Although it might explain it too, because if they were sort of stuck while they were dealing with RTX implementations, now they have, now that that's out, maybe they can stabilize it and like 26H1 should go away and just be all 26H2.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:09]:
I would think so. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:18:10]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:11]:
I mean, what happens when we, what happens when we—

Richard Campbell [00:18:14]:
They're almost out of time for that. It's the end of October. They could do 27H1.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:18]:
Yeah, that's what I mean. What if it's 27H1? Right. So then, and we just, we're gonna let this weirdness continue. But this time they didn't acknowledge it. They didn't even say it. So you, let's imagine you go to a store, or more likely you buy it online, whatever. You see, you spend $3,000 to $7,000 on this computer. It arrives, you set it up, and look, most people probably wouldn't notice this, but I can tell you out of the box you're not going to get the new Start menu, you're not getting the new taskbar, you're not getting new Windows Search.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:46]:
You're not getting any of those other improvements. Well, most of those other improvements, you know, some of them have been delayed a month and maybe have occurred. But at some point in that first 30 days, depending on when you do this, um, you're going to get the, the October update, the October Patch Tuesday update. And that does have the 26H2 features, right? Because they're a month behind. The 26H2 was in September. So it's not in the, in the box. It probably will be eventually with new computers, but this first round of like first releases, you're on not just on 26H1, but you're on the version that doesn't have the new features. And it's like, what? Yeah, I just spent more money than you could possibly spend on a new computer and I don't have all this stuff.

Richard Campbell [00:19:26]:
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott [00:19:27]:
it's bizarre.

Richard Campbell [00:19:29]:
What about the security patches? Are they keeping up with 26H1? I haven't even looked.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:33]:
Right, so I haven't looked either. And I, like I said, I, I have to assume they are because—

Richard Campbell [00:19:38]:
God, I hope so.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:39]:
This is weird because we talked about this probably a couple months ago, which was they're updating Windows so much, right? And before the AI stuff that's occurred this year, they were already adding new features to Windows like every month. Like, it's kind of tedious. Yeah. And I be— but now that the security stuff has really spun up because of AI, I, I don't remember when I said this, but at some point in the past this year I said, you know, they really need to separate the security updates from the feature updates. in Windows Update, right?

Richard Campbell [00:20:09]:
And more so now than ever.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:11]:
Exactly. And just from a— there's a million reasons for this, but one that Richard in particular would appreciate, or anyone who manages like an environment, is most— well, many admins, most likely, probably most, would be more inclined to ship to their users security updates, especially if they were important, right?

Richard Campbell [00:20:33]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:33]:
Whereas many knee-jerk, and with understandable history, would not want to deploy an update that has new features. The problem is they put them in the same package.

Richard Campbell [00:20:44]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:44]:
So these things should be separate. So I, I don't know anything. I mean, I don't think they're changing anything, but they should change this. Like, the security updates should go out to all supported versions of Windows, and in some cases unsupported, right, if it's super important and there are enough of them out there. And then the feature updates, who cares? They can just follow whatever schedule. And, and it gives you something from like a policy perspective as an admin that you can say, yes, I will do security updates on, you know, an aggressive schedule. I will do the feature updates on my schedule. And that might involve me sort of evaluating them and determining on a case-by-case basis if we roll those out immediately or wait, you know? That's my, you know, that's just my opinion.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:25]:
But—

Richard Campbell [00:21:25]:
And we've been promised this a few times too, right? And again, especially now where they're literally routinely patching zero days. There should be no hesitation to do that installation. And then they go and move the freaking search box.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:40]:
And that just causes that— yeah, it's that hesitancy on the part of anyone managing an organization because they've been bit by this so many times in the past.

Richard Campbell [00:21:47]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:48]:
Where they're like, yeah, you know what? I don't want to roll with those new features. Sorry. And so whatever. I mean, they're not stupid. It's possible they'll just do what we're describing. No one to my knowledge has ever said anything about this. I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:22:03]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:04]:
Um, so yeah, so you get this new RTX Spark computer and it's on 26H1, I think. Yeah. So I just, um—

Richard Campbell [00:22:11]:
How many of these things do you have at $7,000 plus a pop? 4?

Paul Thurrott [00:22:16]:
Well, some of them are only $3,000 or $4,000, but, um, only— I do it— no, I— well, right now I have 3. Um, we'll talk, we'll talk about that in a minute. I gotta— we'll get to this. They're all different configurations. It's actually kind of interesting. Tied to this though, and Microsoft Edge does their own announcements as well. This year, Edge has been notable for a couple of things. They've actually been dropping a lot of features that were just in the product before and no one ever really used and whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:44]:
And they're kind of fine-tuning it down, which frankly is overdue, but that's great. They're following the Chromium support cycle. So as Chromium moves to, what is it, 4 weeks now, I think? Right. They move up. So this is something that used to be like 8 weeks, it was 6 weeks. I believe it's 4 weeks, whatever the schedule is now. So they've done that. But I was really fascinated to see them write what was essentially kind of an aspirational post about like, this is how we want to do this.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:09]:
And what they're saying is we want to move Edge to this more secure model where you use the computer, you're using the browser, there is an update, And it has to install. Ideally, it just installs and doesn't reboot the browser, right? I mean, that can't always happen, but that's ideal. That's ideal, right? And they're actually working on this. Like, their goal is to get to that point. I don't know that it will ever get there 100%, like, but they're working on this.

Richard Campbell [00:23:38]:
Because you can't get the browser out of memory. Like, you need a reboot to get it out of memory.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:43]:
Yes. So The interim solution they've come up with, which is now just an experimental feature, which you have to go in and manually enable yourself. You update to the latest version, go into the experimental features thing, turn the switch on. It's called restart to update on idle. It used to be called instant updates. But when this is enabled, what it will do is wait for you not to be using Edge. So in other words, you're using Edge, using Edge, whatever. And then you go over, maybe you walk away from the computer entirely, but maybe you're actually busy at work doing something.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:14]:
And it will install those updates when you're not using it, reboot the browser, put it right back where it was, because that's how those things work. And then you go back to the browser, you don't even notice it happened, right? And I have to say, that's perfectly acceptable. Like, this is— and they're doing it for exactly the same reason, uh, that we described this thing with Windows, where they should separate security and feature updates, which is AI is finding more and more bugs. This is happening really fast. Some of these are zero days. Some of these have been sitting in this product for years. No one even noticed them, but AI found the problem. Oh, sure.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:43]:
You know, whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:24:43]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:44]:
And, um, look, we need that. We need to adapt to that, uh, world. And, you know, I, I have to say, it— in it, you could argue it's semi-unsophisticated, but who cares? Like, it just— yeah, just update it when I'm not using it.

Richard Campbell [00:24:58]:
Perfect. These bugs, these vulnerabilities were always there, and now they're findable. They have to be fixed.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:04]:
Yep, yep, yep, yep. So that's, you know, that seems good to me. Um, Better to me would just don't use Edge, but do what you do. It's fine. But if you got to use Edge, I mean, that's— I mean, you

Richard Campbell [00:25:17]:
can't update Chrome either for the same reason.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:19]:
Exactly. Exactly. And this has happened. So we'll see if this— first of all, we'll see what this turns into. One of the things that Microsoft Edge does as a team is push back— not push back, but push some of the functionality they created for Edge back into Chromium. Sometimes it takes a while, but the rendering in Chromium has gotten better. I think in particular, the font rendering on Windows has gotten dramatically better because they accepted the code that Edge was using for that, because that's one thing actually Edge does really well. Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:51]:
And so maybe if they land on something that's good, don't be surprised to hear Google say, like, yeah, we're going to put this in Chromium, Chrome will do this, and then every Chromium-based browser will eventually do it. But today, that's not the model. There's a little update now button, And you just feel like, I'm just going to sit here and wait. Not that it doesn't take a long time, but it's kind of nice to not be interrupted, right?

Richard Campbell [00:26:12]:
Yeah. Wait till you're struggling with a bad internet connection. That seems to be really painful.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:18]:
That's true. Yeah, right. Well, I mean, if you think about it, this system kind of handles that in the sense that when you are connected and can download those updates, it will happen. Maybe the time that you reboot the browser, or the browser reboots itself and you don't notice, um, maybe you're offline, maybe you're not, you know, it won't matter because it's already done the install or, you know, downloaded the code. So I'm, I'm good with this. This is good. Um, okay, and then this has nothing to do with Windows, but I— there are so many— sometimes so many software things happen in a, in a given week.

Richard Campbell [00:26:53]:
You tied it together with the browsers. This is fair.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:56]:
I just got to throw it in there. Yeah. So there's 2 more in the notes, but I actually have a 3rd one too. So browser-based, I can't explain this. This is a weird subjective thing, but Opera has way too many browsers, but they have one called Opera Air, which is like a minimalist thing with this kind of wellbeing stuff built into it, mindfulness, whatever, which I don't care too much about that, but there's something aesthetically about this browser that I just love. Yeah. And they redid the UX of it this past week. And I have to say, it's beautiful.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:25]:
I just love this thing. And it is to a web browser what so many things I'm moving to in life are. Like when I got rid of my Apple Watch for this thing, which doesn't alert me or interrupt me or do anything, it just minimizes the distractions, the stupidity, the— Yeah. Your wrist buzzes and you look at it and you're like, what? You don't even know what it wants. And browsers are like that. They're busy. There's all this stuff going on. So this thing has got nothing going on.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:53]:
Like, it's great. I mean, you can turn stuff on if you want it, that's fine. But I, I think starting from a place of minimalism and no distractions and no annoyances is correct. And then you can maybe add back stuff if you want them, you know?

Richard Campbell [00:28:04]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:05]:
That's kind of cool.

Richard Campbell [00:28:06]:
Um, simplify first.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:08]:
Yep. Um, the one that isn't in the notes is just Brave. Uh, Brave has partnered with a company called Near AI to deliver end-to-end encrypted chats in their Leo AI assistant, or as we would say here in Mexico, Leo. This is important for all the obvious reasons, but they're trying to do everything from a privacy-first perspective. And I believe this is— I could be wrong. Maybe I won't say this. I'm not sure how many browser-based AIs have end-to-end communication encryption, but the point of this is no one will ever see it, including Brave, including anybody. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:43]:
So whatever. If you're using this, this is great. And then coincidentally, I just half-watched a video like Proton came and looked at all the browsers and which browser's best. And they did find that Brave is the most private and secure browser out of the box. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:29:00]:
If that's your focus, then that's great.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:02]:
Yep, it should be. But yeah. And then just tied to that, Proton released their roadmaps across Mail, Drive, Calendar, actually too, PassVPN, and LUMO, which is their AI assistant. And, um, they're just, they're just getting rid of reasons not to switch to Proton. Like, and I, I kind of, I just— sorry, go

Richard Campbell [00:29:21]:
ahead. Clearly AI has come to their dev team because their cadence has just gone through the roof.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:27]:
Yeah, yeah. I think there's— well, you know, they're based in Europe, obviously. There is a big European push to get off of US big tech technologies and stuff, and I think they're benefiting from that as well. So Um, you know, there's a lot of like, uh, European, you know, uh, office suites and things like that happening. But, um, this is— I, I mean, I love— I just love Proton, so I'll mention them whenever I can.

Richard Campbell [00:29:52]:
Sure.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:53]:
Okay, hardware. God damn it.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:55]:
All right, because I— yeah, I'm ready for this next section.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:58]:
I am not ready for this, but it's okay.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:00]:
Let's hear from Leo.

Richard Campbell [00:30:01]:
He's the one who runs all the machines,

Paul Thurrott [00:30:04]:
right?

Mikah Sargent [00:30:05]:
All right, we've got a conversation on hardware, or is this more of a bearable moment with hardware?

Paul Thurrott [00:30:11]:
Yeah, it's gonna be a little bit of both.

Richard Campbell [00:30:12]:
He's got his AI toys.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:15]:
So RTX Spark is gonna come up throughout the show. I'll just start this by saying that the way I frame this is Microsoft and Intel came up with the brand AI PC several years ago. An AI PC, I think we might've talked about this last week or 2 weeks ago, but it's a, it's a Windows computer that has an NPU. That's it. That's the whole definition.

Richard Campbell [00:30:38]:
Isn't that a Copilot Plus PC?

Paul Thurrott [00:30:40]:
We're gonna get to that. So, um, with an NPU, uh, the only— there was one feature, like, well, one set of features, which is Windows Studio Effects. And this debuted first, uh, I was gonna say ironically, but coincidentally, on at the time what was very lackluster Snapdragon hardware where you could You know, be talking on camera like we do and like blur the background, or, you know, and then they added features over time. So there's different kinds of background blur. It will kind of keep you centered in the frame if your camera supports that. There's a— that creepy eye movement thing where if I'm looking off to the side, my eyes are still looking dead ahead, and it's— nobody, nobody likes it.

Richard Campbell [00:31:16]:
It's so bad. Oh, it's really weird.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:19]:
Um, but the, the range of those effects that you get, they're mostly video effects. There is one audio effect as well. Depends on your hardware, but it has to have an NPU. And to have any of those, you have to have an NPU. So 2.5 years ago, they moved on to Copilot Plus PC, which most people would agree is not a great brand, but specifies a higher level of hardware, RAM, storage, and also NPU. So this is where you have to have at least a 40 TOPS NPU or better. Right. And the value proposition there is that these things are by and large mostly thin and light premium laptops.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:00]:
They're not priced more than other premium thin and light laptops, but they have a ton of local AI functionality. The tough thing is selling someone on this, right? Because when this platform launched, they went out the gate with Recall and a bunch of little things, but Recall was the kind of— Yeah. Marquee feature.

Richard Campbell [00:32:19]:
And it landed so well.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:21]:
It's gone great, by the way. Everyone loves it. Everyone's using it. I probably don't even have to talk about it, but—

Richard Campbell [00:32:26]:
Really?

Paul Thurrott [00:32:26]:
Yeah. There was a kind of a faux security thing around it and blah, blah, blah, whatever. It is fascinating, by the way, in some ways that that app, that whatever it is, that feature in Windows is still in preview. It's still, it's never hit general availability. I mean, everyone has it if you have a co-pilot subscription.

Richard Campbell [00:32:45]:
I wonder what the, yeah, I just wonder what the usage count is. And by usage count, I'm not meaning that it's snapshotting, but that people are using its search capabilities to get value from it.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:53]:
Yep. So I don't know, obviously, but my take at that time, which is, I would say, is the case today as well, is that some people, you know, it's like the Opera Air thing. I see that and I'm like, oh my God, I love this thing. Other people might look at it and be like, eh, who cares? And I think Recall's like that. Some people maybe think visually or need visual prompts. One of the experiences I've had in my life actually is that I'll see photos from the past and then it reminds me of that time and I think of things that I don't think I would've thought of or remembered otherwise because it was a trigger for that.

Richard Campbell [00:33:27]:
Without a human factor.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:28]:
So recall, I think, works like that for some people. It's just some people will see this and be like, oh yeah, this is great. It's also worth pointing out, for whatever it's worth, that every personal computing platform has some version of recall. Like, it's funny, Microsoft took all the hits, but it's everywhere. You know, there's a screenshot tool on the Pixel that does exactly the same thing. Okay, so there's that. And then, oh, I should say, sorry, but the value proposition there was it doesn't cost any more than a normal premium computer. And here's this list of features we get and it grows over time.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:03]:
Now, like I said, most of them are small. So if you go into, and like, actually I'm on a Copilot Post PC finally. Mm-hmm. When I go into, where is it, Paul? Paint or, Photos are both good examples of this. Right. There's a Copilot button still in Paint, even though that didn't apparently get the memo. And there's a bunch of several, I would say, you know, somewhere between 7 and 10 features in there. If you launch that on like a normal non-Copilot+ PC, there are 2 or 3 features, right? And these are AI features.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:33]:
Like on a Copilot+ PC, I don't remember off the top of my head which exactly or which is there and which aren't, but Image Creator, Sticker Generator, Co-Creator, Generative Fill, Generative Erase, remove background, and restyle, right? Those are the kind of the big ones. If you go into Photos, you get things like that 4K, or that's— it could go beyond 4K, but that AI image upsizing, right? So you have like a, like a photo you might have scanned from in the past, it's like really low resolution, whatever, and, um, you can upscale it and it's gorgeous quality, really, really nice. And you have to have a Copilot Plus PC, it's just whatever. So there's a bunch of stuff and all that stuff is aimed at people. Like normal people, like mainstream users. It's hard to sell because you as a user would not necessarily think, oh, I have a Copilot+ PC, so I have this thing. Like you just use the app and it has what it has and you don't really think about it. But there is additional functionality there and it's for people, right? It's normal people.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:31]:
Mm-hmm. And then there is some selection of third-party apps where same problem, like you have Affinity or I wanna say CapCut is one of the video editors, but there are others where Some of the AI-based functionality, whether, you know, based around image manipulation perhaps or whatever it might be, is local AI running off the NPU. So it's powerful and fast and super energy efficient. And you don't get that with a normal computer, but you still get the feature. It just maybe runs a little slower. And, you know, it's just kind of a weird, you know, that was the kind of problem there.

Richard Campbell [00:36:03]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:03]:
But now we have, so I, to me, Copilot+PC was like the second-gen AI PC.

Richard Campbell [00:36:08]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:09]:
Um, so the RTX Spark is the 3rd gen AI PC.

Richard Campbell [00:36:12]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:13]:
And this

Richard Campbell [00:36:13]:
time, um, it's still ARM under the hood, it's just more.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:16]:
Yeah, the pro— the processor is ARM, but it has an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU built into the SoC.

Richard Campbell [00:36:24]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:24]:
Um, it has enormous— I mean, it's like 5,120 or 6,144 cores, most of which are dedicated to what we would call like, you know, traditional CUDA RTX, whatever graphics functionality.

Richard Campbell [00:36:38]:
Linear compute problems.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:39]:
Right. But there's some small segment of them that are dedicated to other things. And one of the other things that some of those cores do is present themselves to the system as an NPU. So they're high-efficiency cores, they work like an NPU, they can do NPU tasks, um, so that, you know, it becomes a Copilot plus PC essentially. Um, what was the other thing? Oh, and they're one of the things that I'm, I'm still trying to grasp is that Nvidia entering this market, one of my initial thoughts was like, okay, first of all, they're going to benefit from all the work that Microsoft and Qualcomm did on Windows and ARM. Awesome. They are going to also benefit, Microsoft and Qualcomm, by virtue of the fact that they're Nvidia. They have such huge support with game makers and so forth.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:23]:
So the game-playing story on Snapdragon XX2 isn't great, but it's, it's not negli— it's better than a Mac, but it's kind of hit or miss. And that's, to me, the worst thing technology can do is be indeterminate. It's like either work or fail, but don't work sometimes. Yeah. And don't make me install the thing and then find out it doesn't work. Like, I, it's, I don't like that it's that un— you know, uncertain or whatever. Um, so I'm thinking, well, okay, these guys are going to come in, maybe they'll get game makers to kind of bring their, you know, games to ARM, et cetera, et cetera. There may be some of that.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:56]:
I got to say, you have to be really deep in the reads to kind of even remember, understand this stuff. But 2, 3 years ago, Microsoft introduced this technology for developers whose name is now escaping me, but it's something like— Mm-hmm. It's like ARM E64 something something. But basically what it is is a way to modularize an app or a game where it runs natively on x86, but you have these modules that run natively on ARM. And then you can— it will perform better on ARM because not all of it will be running in emulation. And, you know, maybe there's something to that. Maybe, you know, maybe we bring this forward somehow and it makes sense with RTX Spark, whatever. Um, it turns out they're taking more of like a big block, uh, Chevy engine approach to computing, which is just like raw horsepower.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:42]:
And they're like, no, we're just gonna— we're gonna muscle through this. Um,

Richard Campbell [00:38:45]:
here's 6— here's 6,000 cores, that ought to do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:47]:
Yep, just Just throw it at the problem, you know? And it turns out it works pretty good. You know, that, that does work. Um, but there is a bit in here that's fascinating to me, which is, uh, at like— we'll, we'll talk about this in the gaming part. We'll talk about more of the specifics. But the, um, uh, there are a tremendous selection of games that already just work out of the box. And I played several of them. Like, I, I did, you know, and they, and they don't just like load and work. They, they have high frame rates, you know, awesome graphics quality, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:15]:
The part I'm trying to figure out is Nvidia says, this is their documentation, that yes, the games run emulation, but the graphics in the game, which is the game when you think about it, most games are some graphics engine, right?

Richard Campbell [00:39:30]:
Most, yeah, mostly the visualizations.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:32]:
So they say those run natively on these computers because they understand what an RTX graphics card is. That's what this looks like to the game. Go to town. Right. It will work. Now, I need to learn more, but that's the story. And that's interesting. I mean, that, you know, you take the— in some ways you can make this argument that you have this beautiful, I'm gonna call it semi-perfect thing, which is Snapdragon.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:58]:
And you, it's reliable. You know, you open the lid, it comes on every single time. There's no screwing around, there's no nothing. Everything just works. The battery life is unbelievable. Performance is fantastic, but now we're going to block— we're going to bolt this gigantic freaking GPU thing on the side of it.

Richard Campbell [00:40:15]:
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott [00:40:15]:
what does that do to things, right? Well, it lowers battery life, uh, it lowers the efficiency, it lowers the reliability.

Richard Campbell [00:40:22]:
Cranks the fans up.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:23]:
Cranks the fans up all the time. So if you were like— if you bought a Snapdragon computer and you're like, you know, the thing I really miss from Intel is that fan noise, well, this is the computer for you. Because these things crank the bits.

Richard Campbell [00:40:36]:
And they're probably blowing out hot.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:38]:
Oh, yes. The machine itself gets really— they get hot. They get really hot. So there's a lot going on here, but I have 3 of these things in-house and they're all different levels. I'm going to do this out of order a little bit just to make sense of it. But the Lenovo I have is a Lenovo Pro 9N, 15.3-inch screen. This is the lowest end of the things. And it's not the most low-end RTX Spark you can get, but It's the only one I have that has the lower-end processor, so it's the 5120 or whatever it is, uh, CPU cores.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:08]:
And then— no, sorry, that's GPU cores. And I want to say 18 CPU cores. Um, and it has 32 gigs of RAM, which is pretty standard. Um, you could configure it with as little as 24. It's also a convertible form factor, which is actually kind of interesting.

Richard Campbell [00:41:22]:
Is it the whole point of these machines to have 120 gigs of RAM?

Paul Thurrott [00:41:26]:
Yeah, I'm going to get to that because I, I feel pretty strongly about that, actually. Um, So, oh, sorry, I've got this local AI task running over here and it's going to interrupt me a lot. Okay,

Richard Campbell [00:41:37]:
nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:37]:
Um, it just is. Um, the next one up is the HP Omnibook Ultra 16. This is actually the first one I received, but I, you know, couldn't talk about it at the time. Um, I love HP laptops. I love this thing. This is the one I've really grad— uh, kind of gravitated to for day-to-day stuff. Um, 16-inch screen, 32 gigs of RAM like the other one, but the higher-end and 1X processor. So 20 CPU cores, I believe, and 6,144 on the GPU cores.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:05]:
Um, the picture that's on the screen right now, you can see the exhaust. But the other thing is that this is like a tower architecture for the, the screen. And this is something that's very common on gaming laptops because you move the hinge and the display from the back of the machine forward about half an inch or an inch. And that gives— that means that that exhaust will never be blocked. Right? And that's the point. You want, you want the screen away from there. You need this— this thing needs to crank heat out of that. Um, and it does.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:31]:
So there's that. Um, and then I also got an ASUS ProArt 16, and this has the higher-end processor, but it also has 128 gigs of RAM. Right. And so I'm like, okay, well, this is going to be very interesting. Um, to the 128 thing, I got to say, I don't quite understand why they made laptops. Um, I feel like these things should be desktops and should be, you know, essentially workstations, right? Um, it doesn't mean they can't have laptops, but most of the machines— like, the first gen is all but one or two are just laptops. Like, and I— look, the performance nosedives on battery. The battery life is, is good, it's, it's okay, it's— but it's not Copilot plus PC good.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:11]:
Um, and, you know, the fan noise, etc., etc. If you're running local AI, which I— let me check my notes. Oh yes, is the point of these machines, um, that the performance of that actually suffers badly when you're on, um, when you're on battery. So I'm gonna try to—

Richard Campbell [00:43:25]:
Oh yeah, I can't even imagine trying to run these things on battery with that many cores going. The battery bursts into flames.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:31]:
Yeah, so look, I— there's a whole, uh, this next month of my life.

Richard Campbell [00:43:37]:
I got a feeling these are like the P5s are back, right? It's like, yeah, I know you put in the laptop chassis, you just don't use it on your lap. And don't leave your laptop plugged in.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:47]:
Yeah, if you ever want to have children, do not put it anywhere near your lap.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:51]:
Um, oh, that's a shout out to, um, Mary Jo's lappability. Oh yeah, yeah, it's not very lappable, is it?

Paul Thurrott [00:43:59]:
No, no, they're big. I mean, they're big computers. They— it's some of the— actually, I should say what, there are 1 or 2 14-inch models as well, um, which I don't have. I don't have any of those.

Richard Campbell [00:44:07]:
Most of them are 16s, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:44:09]:
Oh yeah. Yeah, and because they need the space. I mean, they just need the—

Richard Campbell [00:44:13]:
yeah,

Paul Thurrott [00:44:14]:
you need that room. Um, I'm still early days on this stuff, and I'm— and this Local AI is confusing. Um, to compare it to the Copilot plus PC thing, I would say you buy a Copilot plus PC, whether you do it on purpose or not, but you just get a new computer. It is a Copilot plus PC. Right. You get the Windows Studio Effects, you get Recall, you get Click to Do, you get all the Paint and Photos and Snipping whatever, all the additional stuff, it's all there. It's great. And you either use it or don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:40]:
You maybe don't know what's— why it's there. It doesn't matter. But the features that are in it are for you. When you buy this thing, you buy one of these computers, you get it home, set it up, it's Windows 11. It's 26H1, a little weird, but straight up Windows 11. There's nothing unusual about it. And then you're on your own. There are no unique local AI features built into this system that you can just run and use and There are no end-user features whatsoever.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:05]:
So that means you have to get into the world of local AI and understand what that even means. And this is something that's come up for me many, many times. We talked about this probably as recently as last week, but this notion that I have this adult lifetime of experiences of people seeing me, like Richard and I might be talking to normal people at the next table and they're like, what the frick are these people talking about? They have no idea. They have no idea because we're in the industry and we—

Richard Campbell [00:45:32]:
You speak in code.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:33]:
Right. The AI, local AI especially, is like this for me, where I'm over on the side going, what the hell is he talking about? And I'm pretty technical, whatever, but there's a whole world of work that has to occur. And the thing that kind of is most striking about this to me is Go back. I mean, if you hate yourself, go back and watch the Microsoft event where they announced this stuff, which was about 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, whatever it was, and try to make sense of it. Because there was a lot of IDEs and harnesses and AI environments and look how this is running completely on the GPU and we're not hitting the cloud and they didn't make anything, but there it is. And would you please spend $3,000 to $7,000 on one of these things? I'm like, I'm sorry,

Richard Campbell [00:46:20]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:20]:
What is the market for this? Um, look, there are going to be, uh, over time— and there are some small examples of this— of not just game makers but app makers who are going to now take advantage of this architecture because it exists, right? So, or, uh, Adobe, I don't think they rewrote their— they— the way they described it is like they started from scratch, you know, uh, and rewrote their apps. But, you know, Photoshop and Premiere, I believe, have both been somehow updated, whether it was the— that, um, I always forget the name of it, but the, uh, whatever that hybrid architecture is so you can go from ARM to x86. I don't actually know, who cares? But there'll be a lot of that. It benefits from all the work that was already done for Snapdragon. Okay, that's great. Um, but they're marketing this thing at creators, which is a broad term.

Richard Campbell [00:47:10]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:11]:
Could be anyone from like an Instagram person out with their selfie stick, you know, making videos in the world or whatever. to people that maybe edit video or edit, or professional photographers, could be all kinds of things. But then there's developers, engineers, and then there's the Leos of the world. And I think there are 6 of them who are these AI enthusiasts that are just in this really deeply and they figured it out. And there's a lot to figure out. There are these AI harnesses you got to figure out. Yeah. There's these frontend apps, there's the models, and Models are tailored for specific architectures.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:45]:
Most models run against GPUs, but you'll find 2 or 3 that work on NPUs. There's some that work against CPUs, which is going to be horribly inefficient. And this thing, I got to say, puts another wrench in this because this is still— it's a brand new architecture. It's still kind of half unknown, you know, whatever. So you kind of make your way murkily through all this stuff and try to figure it out. Right. The thing that I discovered, I don't remember now if it was last Wednesday or Thursday, but it was somewhere, somewhere. So this would have been either before or right after Windows Weekly last week.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:17]:
Um, you know, I interact with the PC makers, right? So all 3 of these companies send me these devices. They have either a reviewer's workshop, which is like an online event where they talk about stuff, or they just send you like a reviewer's guide. And in all 3 cases, the things that they sent were just the things they send for any laptop. It's like, here's the hardware, here's how many ports we have, here's the screen, and blah blah, here are the choices, or the, you know, whatever. And none of them talk about the local AI thing, right? So HP had sent me theirs first. I, I didn't write back. I didn't ask about this. I figured, honestly, at that point I was like, I'll figure this out, I'm smart.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:50]:
So, um, time went by. Um, ASUS came. I think ASUS might have been second. Doesn't matter which was second, second, third. But by the time Lenovo came around, I know that the guy from the review part of Lenovo I've known for 20 years. Love this guy. He's a good friend and really good guy. But he just sent out a random email to me and a bunch of other guys.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:08]:
He's like, hey, by the way, we don't have any documentation for all this local AI stuff, but NVIDIA has incredible stuff. Ask them to get you, you know, just go to their— they have a portal for this. You can get in. And actually, I'm sorry, HP had done that. I went to it and I had to register. So I did because when HP told me about it. But that was like a week earlier and they never got back to me. And now we're closing in, we can write about this stuff on Friday.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:36]:
So it's either Wednesday or Thursday and I can put stuff up on the web on Friday. So I wrote this guy I know back from Lenovo and I'm like, hey, listen, maybe you have more pull than I do or whatever, but I registered for that site, never got in. And I don't know if you could say anything. Is there any way— Actually, what I asked him was not to get me in, but was Could you just send me the— I thought it was going to be like a PDF of documentation. It wasn't. It was 19 gigabytes of data.

Richard Campbell [00:50:00]:
Oh my

Paul Thurrott [00:50:00]:
God.

Richard Campbell [00:50:02]:
In what format?

Paul Thurrott [00:50:03]:
In every format imaginable. It's all kinds of stuff. There's applications, drivers, there's actual documentation in PDF form, there's markdown files. It's unbelievable. But he got back to me pretty quick and he goes, hey, try it again. And I got in. I was like, oh, neat. And then NVIDIA got back to me and I had a discussion with them too.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:20]:
Anyway, so I got in. So just within less than 2 days of me having to publish, what I've seen is this rich library of documentation and other things that I could have used like a week earlier for sure, that to my knowledge is not out in the public. So let's say you do something, I'm just gonna use one example because whatever, but in their documentation they describe how to configure whatever the app is for this the particular traits of these computers in the most efficient and best way possible. It's a multi-step process for all of them. So in other words, you buy a computer and you're like, all right, I'm going to do local AI. This thing is cranking away, by the way. I'm surprised you can't hear the fan. So I'm going to choose an app that could be like Hermes Agent.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:07]:
It could be— we'll talk about this later, but there's a Llama Windows app now. It could be LM Studio. Microsoft has talked about how in the future they will adapt Copilot to support multiple models, including local models. Maybe we'll be doing Copilot someday. I don't know. So pick your poison, whatever. You go in there, you set it up. You want to download a model.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:29]:
You don't know where do you start there? God knows. Depending on the app, they do a reasonable job of looking at your hardware and saying, well, these are the things we think would be best for you. And they suggest whatever they suggest. But the problem is none of these things set those apps up by default the way that NVIDIA's telling you to do it or telling me to do it. And it is better to do it the way NVIDIA tells you to do it, but how do you even know about this documentation? Where is it? How does a normal person find this? So I said up top, I don't know if we were recording yet or before the show started, but I said I can equate this to what it was like in the early days of personal computers. computing, which is 1982, 1983, whatever year you go to Sears, buy a Commodore 64, you're super excited. I'm going to make all kinds of stuff on this computer. It's awesome.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:14]:
Plug it into your TV with that old RF thing with the slider on it.

Richard Campbell [00:52:17]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:18]:
Thing boots up to a blue screen. It says ready. And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. What now?

Mikah Sargent [00:52:22]:
What? A ready blue screen? It's a good blue screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:25]:
Yeah. Back then it was good. It was good back then. Blue used to be good. We forget these things.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:30]:
Man, I did. I didn't know that.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:31]:
You see, Micah, back in my day, blue was not negative. Now, if you were a young go-getter like I probably was at the time, it came with a book and you're like, okay, fine. You figured out basic commands, you figured out how to load stuff from a disk. There's a weird command for that. There's a BASIC language built into it. You can write programs, save them to— if you have a disk or a tape recorder, whatever it is. But I think most people back then would've been like, Hmm. Like, what is this? Like, I thought I was gonna do stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:02]:
And that's what local AI is like right now. It's like, huh. Like, what do I— how do I— how do I— I mean, I know there's something awesome in there, but how do I get to it? Like, how do I do this? And this is a big problem. It's very strange. I have done small things, right? You download some small model on one of the 32-gig machines. You can ask it things like you would ask any AI assistant. I have stock prompts that I always do. Like the very first Microsoft show when they announced all this stuff before it was even called Copilot, Yusuf Mehdi was going to Mexico City where I am now for a wedding.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:46]:
And he was like, I'm going to ask Copilot. Well, they didn't call it Copilot, but Ask Bing Search, whatever it was called at the time, but for a 5-day itinerary to Mexico City. I'm like, oh, cool. I know a lot about Mexico City. I will try that. And the answer it gave was ridiculous. It was like, do this in the morning and then drive 200 miles to the other side of the city, out past the edge of the city and do this, and then come back and have dinner here. And then it was all over the place.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:09]:
It was bad. And of course, over time, what I discovered as AI improves, that gets better. And so if you ask It— this same thing

Richard Campbell [00:54:16]:
today, same prompt now. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott [00:54:18]:
yeah, you get a good— you get a good response. Like, it's meaning stick to our neighborhood, here's the things you can eat here in between, these are some— you know, it generally speaking is pretty good.

Richard Campbell [00:54:28]:
Taking geography into account.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:29]:
Yep, just being smarter about it. So the local AI stuff, whether, you know, um, uh, whether it's like Gwen or Gamma or however they pronounce these things, uh, they work fine, they're fine. I'd also do one like, we use this jokingly as a show title several episodes ago, but as a Tolkien scholar, I will ask it the question of, I'm interested in reading Tolkien, where should I start and how should I progress through these? Are there any I should avoid? Whatever that is. And yeah, I mean, this is pretty straightforward, right? I mean, this is well understood if you know anything about Tolkien. Anyone could answer that question, but you do those kind of things. I've written simple little app things and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I'm like, okay. And then I'm going to move on to other things that are creative, like image generation, videos, and things like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:19]:
So there's a lot more. But when you have your choice between 32 gigs and 128, the 128 opens you up to many different things that are not available.

Richard Campbell [00:55:29]:
Serious models. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:31]:
Big, big model. Big for local AI, like really big for local AI. Potentially the ability to load multiple models at the same time and interact like that. Yeah. I mean, depending on the app you're using, like Clairvoyance does this. They don't call them agents, but they're agents. You set up agents and each one can run against a different model, and then you can have them go set them off on tasks. And you still have to do the work, like, what's the best model for this kind of thing? And that's why this agent exists, which is probably exactly what Leo does, essentially, but much more sophisticated, I would hope.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:03]:
But you can have any number of those things. They can spin up, they take off, they do their thing. The thing is, like, again, like, of the million little problems that I've discovered, um, for agentic AI to make sense, uh, that computer has to be on all the time, right? It lives, it lives on the computer. These are laptops.

Richard Campbell [00:56:23]:
It doesn't.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:24]:
These are— you close the lid, you carry it, you bring it someplace. It's not running all the time. And then when you get to where you're going, the AI model that was running the thing is not running. You have to restart the model depending on— again, depending on the app. It's complicated. Like, it's, it's not necessarily ideal.

Mikah Sargent [00:56:42]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:43]:
Am I, am I not saying anything stupid yet? Because—

Mikah Sargent [00:56:44]:
You're saying everything. That's what I wanted to say, was to cut in to say I feel you, uh, hedging a little bit, and that is part of this too. That's the annoying thing about this, is that there's some Because everything is so different and they all have these tiny little twists on them. Everything can work differently. But for the most part, yes, most people will have that experience. But then how do you teach anyone about it too? Because— I know.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:10]:
Well, first of all, it changes every day.

Mikah Sargent [00:57:11]:
Exactly. Every day.

Richard Campbell [00:57:12]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:57:12]:
It's wild.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:13]:
And it gets better.

Richard Campbell [00:57:14]:
And how much of this is really that they're all running Windows, right? Because most of the headless AI stuff out there these days, it's all Ubuntu or Debian.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:25]:
Right. So, oh yeah, or a Mac, right? I mean, this Mac stuff, people are buying Mac Minis too and they're chaining them together. You know, we talked about this last week, Micah, but one of the advantages that Apple has over RTX Spark, which is kind of fascinating to me because this thing's brand new and it's NVIDIA and how the hell was this a problem? But is depending on the, depending on the chip you have and the RAM, amount of RAM, etc., um, you can get dramatically faster, uh, memory bandwidth on a Mac than you can on any Windows computer, including these.

Richard Campbell [00:57:52]:
And it's just the nature of the M-series chips, right? Like Kind of accidentally Apple did unified memory and they—

Paul Thurrott [00:57:58]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:57:58]:
Yeah,

Mikah Sargent [00:57:58]:
because Meta was really eating that up. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. With their little partnership.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:04]:
These guys do unified memory too, but it's limited to 128. So in the typical Windows PC space, 128 gigs of RAM is unusual. That's a lot of RAM.

Richard Campbell [00:58:13]:
It's crazy. It's for AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:15]:
It's to me, it's kind of the entry level. It's the beginning. It's not the end. It's the beginning. There's no way to scale past that. Not with these first-gen devices. Apple devices, I think, can go up to 512. And then if you have like an M5, base M5, it's a little faster, the memory, than it is on RTX Spark, but they're comparable.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:34]:
But once you get to Pro or Max, they're dramatically faster. I'm doing this off the top of my head. This is not 100% correct, but if the memory bandwidth on an RTX Spark is 300-something megabytes per second, Mm-hmm. It's $1,200-something on the M5 Max. It's not even close.

Richard Campbell [00:58:52]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:52]:
And you can go up to 512. Now granted,

Richard Campbell [00:58:55]:
right,

Paul Thurrott [00:58:55]:
that computer is going to cost the same as a car, but sure, if you need it or whatever, you can get it. You can't get it on here. So okay, whatever, but we have this thing. So I'm like, all right, I've done all the stuff on 32 that I've done so far. I'm going to do more, but what can I do on 128 that's more or better or different, whatever? And so I'm thinking, all right, well, let me try. I'm gonna do like a complicated app, but then maybe games, you know, we'll get to that. But let's start baby steps, right? Um, one of the things that was happening concurrently to this is the Google Books came out and they come with anti-gravity. You get a Google AI Pro subscription so you can use anti-gravity with pretty good limits.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:33]:
Yeah. I used it on the Google Book to, um, create a Markdown editor, which is Probably the 17th Markdown editor I've created with AI this year. So super exciting, but it worked great. It took about—

Richard Campbell [00:59:46]:
You've got it figured. That's something.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:47]:
Yeah, I know what I'm looking for now. Simple prompt, took about 30 minutes, bunch of confirmations. Speaking of which, somebody makes— oh, he's going to town over there. So I was like, well, interesting. And I don't remember how I got down this path, but it turns out AntiGravity is available on Windows, right? I guess I knew, I don't really remember. And I'm like, let me see, what can I do with AntiGravity? This is cloud-based AI, right? It's not local AI. And it turns out AntiGravity can make native Windows apps. I'm like, nice.

Richard Campbell [01:00:18]:
Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:19]:
So I was like, well, I spent the last 8 or 9 years of my life working on various versions like Notepad clones, usually called .NETPad. Had to use clairvoyance with cloud, Anthropic Cloud, to finish the latest version, which multiple documents support multiple tabs, et cetera. I'll ask it to make that, right? So this thing churned away for 30 minutes. It made a WPF app, by the way. Fascinating. Nice. And it's great. I mean, there's a couple of little visual things, like I would move a couple of little UI things around, but it does everything.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:55]:
It works great. Multiple documents works fine. I had no idea this thing could make Windows apps. It does. Nice. So now with that on the same computer, on a, uh, yeah, same computer, I'm like, I will now move over to— I don't remember which one I used, probably Hermes— and I will ask it, I'll do the same thing. And so you gotta picture my exciting personal life.

Mikah Sargent [01:01:20]:
Well, you're not gaming anymore, it seems.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:22]:
Well, I do games sometimes, but now it's nighttime. We're watching TV. It's the night before we left to come here, or the 2 nights before, I don't remember. And we're just watching TV. We're sitting there in the dark, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna put this laptop next to me. I'm gonna fire this thing up. I'm gonna set it off on this task, make the app. And this thing ran for 35-ish minutes.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:45]:
I think I had to approve a bunch of stuff. My wife is over there like, did you land a jet engine in this room? What the fuck is going on over there?

Richard Campbell [01:01:53]:
Because the machine— because the machine is green.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:56]:
The whole time. And I'm like, yep, sorry. Um, I think it's almost done. And then like 35 minutes in, it throws up some error messages in red. It ran— it didn't say it this way, but basically the context window ran out. It, it now can't remember where it started anymore, and it's whatever. Presented some choices. This is where I screwed up.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:19]:
I, I guess I didn't read it quickly enough or well enough, but I think I clicked I think it was just like restart or something, and it, uh, it just started from scratch again. Like, so I wasted 35 minutes, didn't do a thing, and, uh, and then it did it again. And I'll just cut to the chase here. I'll just say it ran for the same amount of time and then crapped out it again at the end. Never made the app. Right now, by the way, what in the world? it's working on this again. So I am determined this week I will all figure this out. But here's the thing, I used this gigantic model.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:48]:
Uh, it was a 19 gigabyte download. It needs— no, no, no, no, I think it needs 64 gigs of RAM just to run. But I think I had it configured— that one of the weirdisms of these computers is use the NVIDIA app, of course, to determine how much RAM the GPU gets versus the CPU. So I configured it to be like 2/3 or 3/4 of the RAM, like that, whatever that is. 90, probably 92 or 96 gigs of RAM, I don't remember. And, uh, yeah, it wasn't enough. Um, there's all kinds of stuff going on there, but

Richard Campbell [01:03:18]:
yeah,

Paul Thurrott [01:03:19]:
it could— look, there's something about the tool, it might— there's optimizations maybe from NVIDIA. I don't— maybe in this particular app it wasn't right. Who knows? Like I said, a million variables. But I, you know, here's the thing, uh, just from a, like, a money perspective, from you as an individual, like, um, I don't know why anyone would make a copy of Notepad. It's already on the computer. But Let's just pretend Notepad exists. It's not exactly right. You want it to be Notepad, but with these changes.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:45]:
That's kind of a typical vibe coding use case. It taking 30 minutes-ish is fine. An hour, who cares? It's free. Sure.

Richard Campbell [01:03:56]:
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:58]:
But it's not free. It's $7,000. So you could go to Google and pay for Gemini, the AI Pro subscription, 5 terabytes of storage, limits that are better, blah, blah, blah, whatever. You could go to Anthropic and pay them $20 a month. You could go to OpenAI and pay them $20 a month. And any one of those would've made this in 30 minutes. Sure. And it would've worked and it would've cost you $20.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:19]:
Right. So this is the math. How many $20 per month subscriptions do you have to pay for before it adds up to $7,000? I'm not sure I'm going to live this long. I don't want to do that math. It's a long time. But I understand we're in a slice of time, for one thing. This will improve. These tools will improve, the models will improve, everything's going to improve.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:41]:
I get that. I'm not stupid in that way, at least. But out of the box, I don't quite understand.

Richard Campbell [01:04:48]:
Well, this is a failure of documentation. It's what you buy the machine for. There should be clear guidance to get there.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:59]:
The normal response to that would be, but Richard, these guys are geniuses. They're scientists, they're engineers, they're programmers. They know what they're doing. They know what they want. They know how to set this stuff up. Right. Then I'm like, but my response to that would be, oh, really? Because Microsoft has this thing that they're going to start putting in these— or actually in the desktop version of this— that automatically configures Windows with all these developer toolchains and workflows and whatever. Without any sense of configuration or anything where the guy could be like, actually, I'm not a web developer, I need these other tools or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:32]:
Like, they are handholding in a way. They're just not doing it right now. So I feel like this thing, we've been waiting years for this to appear with the first rumors of NVIDIA getting involved in this, or at least 2 years ago. I don't remember the exact timeframe. It was a long time ago. Mm-hmm. And it is amazing to me. That this thing comes out and it's— there is nothing.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:56]:
Like, you— there, there's nothing you can do on this box out of the— on this machine out of the box you can't do on any other Windows computer. It's just louder and it has worse battery life,

Richard Campbell [01:06:06]:
right?

Paul Thurrott [01:06:06]:
Um, it— if you're coming from a Snapdragon, it plays more games, I guess. Um, so that's good. But as far as the—

Richard Campbell [01:06:14]:
That is not what you bought that machine for.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:15]:
I would hope— I would hope so. The reason you bought this thing, I think, is for the local AI thing. And that is the one area where it just does not give you any help whatsoever. It's bizarre.

Richard Campbell [01:06:25]:
Did you take a look at Windows Subsystem for Linux? Like, again, an awful lot of those implementations run best in Linux.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:31]:
So I've not run—

Richard Campbell [01:06:33]:
If you run WSL.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:34]:
Right. So WSL is installed by default. It's there, you know, the Linux entries in File Manager, et cetera. So, see, I can't remember. I've done so many different preview tests. I'm sorry. Clairvoyance, Hermes, LM Studio, Llama Windows. I might be missing something.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:53]:
So I don't remember which it was, but some of these, one of them, I don't know. It's possible to do that, what you're describing, of course. But again, but that requires me to know that, you know, where do you even find this out?

Richard Campbell [01:07:10]:
Yeah. Yeah, what's the right— what's the right way to get configuration of it? I've only— I've been playing it with that Snapdragon dev kit, and I've had the most success through WSDL just from a driver's perspective because the machine is so weird, right? Like, I'm afraid to pave it and try and just do Debian from scratch. It's safer to leave that version of Windows in there, go WSDL, and because it does have direct access to the CUDA stack, so that should be pretty efficient.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:37]:
This has probably improved since I looked at it last, but I have one as well, as you know. Leo gave it to me, which is very nice. I'm afraid to pave it. My bar for paving it would be that I can create boot media, install media that actually boots and works. And I've never got that. I haven't tried in a while, but I never got that to work in the first place. So I'm not paving it and putting Debian on there. I have to make sure I can get back.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:00]:
You know what I mean?

Richard Campbell [01:08:00]:
Yeah, that's exactly it.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:02]:
I can't do it. Um,

Richard Campbell [01:08:04]:
yeah,

Paul Thurrott [01:08:04]:
look, I— look, I'm gonna spend the next— the month I'm here, this is going to be the majority. Well, this will be a big chunk of what I do. There's, there's no doubt about it. There's way more to come. But, um, I, I just, man, I don't know. I—

Richard Campbell [01:08:18]:
they're just botching the shipping of these things. Like, they just presume that whoever wants them will get them and know what to do with them,

Paul Thurrott [01:08:26]:
right?

Richard Campbell [01:08:27]:
How many RTXs are going to be out there playing flipping Candy Crush, you know, like never used for what they're for.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:33]:
I hate to even think like that.

Mikah Sargent [01:08:36]:
I hope not many. Why are people buying them if that's the case?

Paul Thurrott [01:08:39]:
Yeah, I know. Look, I want to be super clear about this. There's no doubt that local AI, or maybe more appropriately, like hybrid AI, is the future. Whether it's for the benefit of the big tech, big AI cloud companies, or for our benefit, It will save many things from running up in the cloud, and that costs a lot of money. It could be very expensive on both ends. Yeah. It's more private, it works offline. The capabilities are only going to improve.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:06]:
It will be good enough for so many things. And a smart orchestrator, which by the way does not exist, will be able to intelligently determine which model to use. And you'll have rules that you as an individual, or perhaps as a business through policy, will apply that will explain to this thing how and when it can go to the cloud to do something else. And that you're not going to spend $200 to figure out like a Notepad app, you idiot. You can spend up to the $20 I'm already spending and then you're done, or however you want to— Yeah. That has to exist. That does not exist. So it's coming, but Christmas is coming too, and so is 2030.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:45]:
But I have this thing now and I don't You know, it's like, well, I don't know. Um, these machines are all in their own way fantastic hardware.

Richard Campbell [01:09:55]:
Yeah, I mean, you really do need it. You need an RTX Spark image configured with all the stuff you need so that you just—

Paul Thurrott [01:10:03]:
Yeah, right. And yeah, there's some in the NVIDIA documentation, there's some sense of— well, actually, I should say, so there is some sense of you can go in and individually configure the apps that it recommends and the models it recommends. Well, by the way, some of which have already been replaced with newer models since I got this thing last week. I'm not kidding. Like, it's that nuts. This is the world. But okay.

Richard Campbell [01:10:25]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:26]:
And you could achieve that thing that you're talking about there. One of the things that's in there is a PowerShell script, which I believe is supposed to do that. And it does 3 different things. I could look it up if you want, but I don't remember what they are. But it fails on all 3 of those on all 3 of my computers. And it's like—

Richard Campbell [01:10:42]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:45]:
True. Um, so I don't know. Um, next week maybe I'll be a little less insane about this. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how it goes.

Richard Campbell [01:10:53]:
You got to get to the right configuration and use that whole machine and start pressing against— because anything other than LLMs should be very impressive on it. It should do good image generation. Oh, it should do phenomenal parsing of stuff, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:11:07]:
Like, okay, so whatever the— um, yeah, so it's Sorry, I can barely see this. It's like this Quen 338, 27 billion parameter, gigantic model, right?

Richard Campbell [01:11:18]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:19]:
This is the thing that failed twice. It's actually running now. I'm using a different app this time, but it's running it, doing the same thing again. We'll see what happens. We will see what happens. It will happen before the end of the show, I guess. It's running for 37 minutes, by the way, and has not stopped yet. So hold on to your hats.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:40]:
One of the next, I have a list of things I wanna write about, right? So one of them is what you just said, like I wanna use it for image generation, video, whatever. So before I just ahead of that, I asked it, you wait. Oh, I should say too, sorry. In addition to downloading this humongous model, you have to load the model. That takes over a minute.

Richard Campbell [01:12:00]:
Oh yeah, and they're big.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:02]:
They're big. They're really big. And then by the way, don't try to use this computer interactively while you're doing this because it's sucking up all the RAM.

Richard Campbell [01:12:10]:
It's still going crazy.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:10]:
There's nothing left. You couldn't even run tic-tac-toe in this thing. If you want to see what a computer from 1983 looked like, do that. But I asked it, I just asked, I said, hey, can you generate images? Now I'm paraphrasing, but it said no. It can create shapes and it could create little things for documents, but it can't do images. Wow. So I'm like, okay, that's cute. Can you recommend a model for that? And it literally said something to the tune of, well, there are sites like Hugging Face and whatever else that And you can search for this and everything.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:55]:
And I was like, yeah, no, if I wanted to Google it, I would've Googled it, you freaking fucking gig idiot. I was hoping you could just, whatever. So I'm working on that too. Yeah. But the one thing I really, I sort of alluded to this earlier, but between the— look, we're saying, I'm saying local AI, that's somewhat inaccurate in a sense because it's not just local AI, it's really, Local agentic AI, right? The point of this really is not just AI, but rather you have agents running against these models doing things on your behalf, which I think of as background processes or whatever. But those things, they need— the computer needs to be on, like I said, right? You want to be connected to power because otherwise the performance is going to be terrible. This is a laptop. Why aren't 9 out of 10 of these things desktop computers? You need something that sits in the corner of a room and is on all the time.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:50]:
I mean, ideally it's not even connected to a keyboard and a mouse. Like, you just—

Richard Campbell [01:13:53]:
Yeah, it should be a headless unit, right? Like, it should be like the DGXs that NVIDIA made. That was the right form factor, right? You should have a separate laptop for doing your work and you talk to this thing for doing the processing.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:06]:
Yep. So look, I— there are, um, small form factors. They're not technically SFF. I always forget the name. It's either 1.6 or 16L. this size kind of desktop computers, right? That will run this platform. And I don't know what the pricing is, but it's going to be a little bit less than most of the laptops. The laptops have screens and whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:27]:
The thermals will be better. It's always going to be on power. It's always going to— look, when I read documentary, I swear to God, this is everything that I— anytime I've said something where you're like, dear God, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, I can always one-up it because— There's always another thing where it's even stupider. And one of the bits of advice in the NVIDIA documentation was, it's like step 1, this is crazy, go into the Settings app. You can do this for yourself at home. It's a fun little thing you can all try. Go to Settings, System, Power and Battery, and then it says Power Mode, right? So the computer I'm using right now to do the podcast is Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme laptop, it's unbalanced. It doesn't matter if you're plugged in or on battery because the performance is going to be just as good.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:13]:
So you don't have to put it on best performance. It literally said, change that to best performance. You know what? No. Like, you— no, that's ridiculous. You— what? How is it not just configured for that? That's stupid.

Richard Campbell [01:15:30]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:31]:
It's like, you know, it's like, okay, I'm gonna teach you how to use Local AI. All right, step 1, learn English. Wait, what? Like, what are you talking about? Like, it's bizarre. Anyway, there are a handful of these smaller desktops that run RTX Spark. Yeah. I do think if you're a local— Local AI enthusiast doesn't even cover it, but if you're a developer, an engineer, a scientist, whatever it is, and and you're doing what I'm trying to do or more, you need the box. You don't want a laptop. I think the laptop makes sense for creators, right? And that's the 32-gig audience.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:06]:
That's the— some of the stuff you're gonna be doing is actually gonna be cloud-based 'cause it's in Photoshop or Premiere or whatever tool you're using, right?

Richard Campbell [01:16:13]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:13]:
It's, you know, we'll see. We'll see what happens. But I keep coming back to the same sort of set of problems where it's like, you know, I feel like This should be a desktop computer, um, as much as I don't care about desktop computers personally, but, um,

Richard Campbell [01:16:30]:
just for the cooling, just for spinning larger fans with

Paul Thurrott [01:16:33]:
more

Richard Campbell [01:16:34]:
airspace. That's right, that's right. You're, you're straining so many things to fit in the thinness of a laptop. You're dumping heat into its chassis. Like, what are you doing?

Paul Thurrott [01:16:44]:
It is the other thing that's— I don't— Micah maybe knows, uh, I don't know if you've done this with a Mac, Um, probably like a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio. But I do know on Apple, because you have the unified RAM, uh, and more, more available RAM, uh, possibly that, um, you know, they don't have a dedicated GPU. I mean, this thing doesn't really either, but they have GPU cores, right?

Mikah Sargent [01:17:06]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:06]:
And I don't know on the Mac, is there any sense of you having to manually configure how much RAM a GPU gets, or does it just work automatically? You just the workload occurs, if the GPU needs it, the RAM is allocated. Is that how it works?

Mikah Sargent [01:17:20]:
It also depends on the system that you're using. With Ollama, a lot of that can happen automatically. And there's one that just recently, once again, that just recently came out whose name escapes me, that it does do that because it works more directly, I think, with Metal to pull that off. But yeah, there's a lot of, it can be almost like you're working with Docker and you're configuring it.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:44]:
Down to the little bits and pieces. Yeah. I made this comparison on this show before, but Micah didn't hear this. I have a very good memory of mid-1990s going out to San Francisco for the guy I was working for. He had a Mac, which back then was probably like a Power Mac before G3, like 68K, or I guess it was PowerPC. It doesn't matter. Whatever the Mac was back then. And I was trying to use Photoshop on the Mac, And it kept crashing.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:12]:
And I was like, dude, this thing doesn't even work. And he goes, oh no. He goes, run Photoshop, go into About, the About box, and you can change the amount of RAM that you use with the app. And I'm like, I'm sorry, why? What do you—

Richard Campbell [01:18:23]:
why?

Paul Thurrott [01:18:24]:
And by the way, it worked. I mean, but it's stupid.

Mikah Sargent [01:18:26]:
But it's stupid. Yeah, exactly.

Richard Campbell [01:18:28]:
I'm mad that it worked.

Mikah Sargent [01:18:30]:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Why do I have to worry about this?

Paul Thurrott [01:18:33]:
I got the job done, whatever, it's fine. Flash forward 20 years and 25 years, whatever it is, 30 years, Jesus, uh, over many years. And now, um, you can, like I said, through the NVIDIA app— by the way, there's 6 or 7 configuration changes you have to make in that app too, crazy— but you can go into whatever it is, System, Advanced, I don't know, and there's a slider and it lets you allocate the RAM to the GPU. And this is broadly, it's not per app, right? So when you do, like, by default it's 50%. So on a 128 system, it's like roughly 60— it's technically 62.5 gigabytes of RAM, but whatever, it's half. And you can go from down if you want. I don't know why you do that, but you can go up if you want, and that's fine. You can go up to not 100% because you need some RAM for the system.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:22]:
It goes up to 92, 96, something like that.

Richard Campbell [01:19:25]:
Yeah, I keep 16 back for the machine. Like, that's— yeah, it's easy enough.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:30]:
Yeah, it's— it— that's roughly correct. Yeah, it's about that. So, okay, um, I think that's unsophisticated and stupid, but okay, it's fine. It's not fine because every time you change it, you have to reboot the computer.

Richard Campbell [01:19:42]:
Of course you do. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott [01:19:43]:
stop. I mean, just stop.

Richard Campbell [01:19:46]:
Why don't they just make the setting in the BIOS? Like, why do you do it there as well?

Paul Thurrott [01:19:50]:
The fact that then you can reboot the

Richard Campbell [01:19:52]:
computer twice

Mikah Sargent [01:19:54]:
The fact that it's in the app and you still have to reboot to get it to—

Paul Thurrott [01:19:57]:
I know.

Richard Campbell [01:19:57]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:58]:
So this tells you, I think, I hope it tells me that this thing is very early. That's not where that should be. That should be in Windows. Ideally, it would just be automatic. But if we're going to have a slider, it should be in settings.

Richard Campbell [01:20:11]:
It should not be in B. It'll be in 27H1.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:16]:
Right. So you're probably right, or whatever they call it. Exactly. It probably will be. Right. So this thing is— look, I, I'm not against this. I'm a, I'm a tech enthusiast. I don't mind living on the, the bleeding edge or whatever, I guess, to some degree.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:31]:
Um, I've gotten a little soft, there's no doubt about that. This— I'm really struggling with this. I, you know, maybe computers or whatever devices we use have been holding our hands for too long. I don't know what it— but this is like a— this is a whole conceptual problem for me. It's really bizarre.

Richard Campbell [01:20:47]:
Yeah, but But with no documentation.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:50]:
None.

Richard Campbell [01:20:50]:
Like, my God.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:52]:
Now, NVIDIA does have web-based resources. They're pretty good. It doesn't have— or at least last time I looked the other day, uh, it's not the full set of stuff I got, obviously. I would— like I said, I wish I'd gotten this a week earlier because there were things in there like the— they've since shipped publicly, like, uh, a new version of the NVIDIA drivers that do blah blah blah, whatever. Which, by the way, since then have already shipped a new version. In fact, It was the—

Richard Campbell [01:21:15]:
Of course.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:15]:
Before I started this, I installed that new version on this laptop, which already had the, you know, the new version. Um, they had versions of apps. Hermes was one of them, uh, Perplexity Desktop, and a few others that at that time were not publicly available, but I think mostly are now. Um, and that's fine, you know, whatever. But I, I just, man, I just feel like you get like thrown under a bus and then Invariably there is.

Richard Campbell [01:21:42]:
But first you spend $7,000, then you get thrown under a bus.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:46]:
Yeah, that makes it, that makes it a lot worse. Absolutely. I, look, I know I'm— as I say this, there are people who will either hear or see this later, or maybe you're in the Discord seeing it now or whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:21:59]:
I don't even want to know what's wrong with you, Paul, honestly.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:01]:
Well, who are like, I don't get it, I don't see the problem, all you have to do is dot dot dot. And it's like, okay, like, I know you're out there. God bless you. I love that you figured this out.

Richard Campbell [01:22:09]:
Would you write it down please so some of us can find it? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:12]:
I mean, before I can even think about having agents do a thing— sorry, I just wanted to see if it was still going. It's going. It's talking. Oh, I wanted to tell you one more thing about this model. Sorry. This is classic. So the big model, the Qwen 27 billion thing, whatever. This is so weird.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:35]:
So AI moves really fast. I think we can all kind of agree to that. This 3.5 years has felt like 30 years. It's like all this stuff, right? Mm-hmm. I'm going to call this a year ago-ish. I don't remember the timing on this, but at some point all the major model makers, the OpenAIs, Anthropic of the world, came out with what they called either reasoning or thinking models, right? And we still do this sometimes, but it's the type of thing where you're in the chatbot and you're like, dropdown, you're like, I want the thinking one, you know, and because this is important. It's like, you know, I'm not going to ask it what the capital of Georgia is. I'm going to, you know, have it write a report or make an app or whatever the heck it is you're working on.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:14]:
It doesn't matter. And this is how it talked to you, because this was the— this is the digital version of a magician who has the trick, the trick in one hand, which you can't see, sorry. And then the real thing, he's— the fake thing over here, and he's waving this hand. So we can do the trick over here. You're looking here, you're looking here. And this is how they talk to you, these reasoning thinking models. They're like, okay, I see what you want to do. That's a smart idea, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:39]:
Now, to get going on this, I'm going to have to do this first. No, wait. Nope. Sorry. My mistake. Actually, I have to do this other thing first. Nope. Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:45]:
I made another mistake. And it just sits there and babbles. It's talking to itself. You don't interact with it, but it's like, it just talks you through it. Like, all right, now I have to do this thing. And I, and like the hex code for this color is this. And I'm going to apply this to the spot. It just talks and talks and talks.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:01]:
And the reason it's doing this, I think mostly, is yes, it's taking more time because it's going to be a better response, but it's literally distracting you so you're not like, why is this taking so freaking long? What is it doing?

Richard Campbell [01:24:14]:
Look over here. Look over here. Look over here.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:16]:
That QWEN model, that's exactly what it does. And it sat there for the 2 35-minute sessions I did. It's like, okay, Paul said he wants to make a Notepad app. This is a really good idea. Notepad's a very popular app. Notepad has all these features. Okay, so now first I gotta know what the architecture is. It's like, idiot.

Mikah Sargent [01:24:33]:
I love this way to think about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:36]:
Do it.

Mikah Sargent [01:24:36]:
Just do it.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:37]:
Oh, what the frick? It's like going back in time. I'm like, this was not that long ago when this is how AI talked to us. Everyone hated it. And yet it feels old-fashioned. It just does. Isn't that weird?

Mikah Sargent [01:24:53]:
It's

Paul Thurrott [01:24:53]:
talking to itself. What are you doing? You could talk to yourself, you can generate more electricity than half the town, and then you can fail. What are you doing?

Mikah Sargent [01:25:04]:
I think that's why most of the online models hide a lot of the thinking transcript is because of the doubt that you'll see there. When I was first showing folks Running a very small local model. I was putting it through the standard tests and asked it, you know, how many Rs in strawberry? Because it's an indicator of how it thinks.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:28]:
And they were like, Darryl Strawberry or the fruit?

Mikah Sargent [01:25:31]:
Yeah, exactly. And it said, it literally was saying, I kept asking, is the user trying to trick me? This feels like it might be a test that it's running on me. I have to be very careful when I respond to this because I'm pretty sure this might be some sort of test that it's running on me.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:46]:
This is what I, I don't wanna see this. This is the exact opposite of what I want. I want you to be like, oh, I'm doing this thing. I'm going to nail it. You'll hear back from me in 15 minutes. We're done.

Mikah Sargent [01:25:57]:
We're done.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:58]:
I got work to do, right? It's just going to happen.

Mikah Sargent [01:26:00]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:01]:
Nice. That's what I want.

Richard Campbell [01:26:02]:
I'm fully committed to this project.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:03]:
I need an AI version of what is one of my favorite jokes from Scrubs, which is, are you a doctor like Dr Pepper is a doctor, or are you a real doctor? But I need that for AI. Right? Are you just gonna babble to me or are you gonna do the thing? Like, I— do the thing is what I'm asking. I don't know. Anyway, look, maybe I made a configuration change that was wrong. I don't know.

Mikah Sargent [01:26:27]:
You know, maybe I— You didn't really. Um, but the Quen is notorious for getting stuck in those sorts of loops. And also, in theory, what that thinking is meant to do is, yes, to make it better at what it actually ends up outputting. But if it gets stuck in those loops, yeah, there are some configuration changes. You can change the temperature is essentially what it is. But it's—

Paul Thurrott [01:26:57]:
There's a thing, there's all this— I'm sorry to interrupt. It's just that it's confusing and there's so much language. It's like I ran into this with clairvoyance where it has to come compact the, I guess, the context window or something, you know, just to save space basically, and then give it more headroom for new stuff. And, um, and there's a lot of that kind of language. But the thing that bugs me the most— well, maybe not the most— one of the many things that bugs me about this is I, I described what happened, but what I didn't describe was where I was going with this because I can't get there yet, which was I expected this thing to make the app in 30 to 35 minutes, and I expected it to be pretty good.

Mikah Sargent [01:27:34]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:34]:
And then I was going to go to the 32 gig machine and try a different model and compare those. And I was going to go to this 128 machine, knock it down to 64 gigs, and try a different model yet again. And I was going to do all these things. But what happens is I hit a brick wall, and now I'm staring, I got stars in my eyes, and I'm looking up at the wall, and I'm like, I don't know what the frick just happened. And I forget what I was doing in the first place.

Mikah Sargent [01:27:55]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:55]:
You know, it's just, I had all these ideas of progress, you know.

Mikah Sargent [01:28:01]:
It's funny, as much as Leo talks about his local models, one thing that is a subtle drumbeat is how, for most people, the frontier models and the access that we have with online models is just— I mean, I think, Paul, in the time that— in the 30 minutes that you were working on that, I would be able to use Claude to make 3 apps.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:29]:
Oh, I could have done my taxes. I could have gotten health advice. Yeah, exactly. And I don't want to do that stuff in the cloud.

Richard Campbell [01:28:34]:
So many notepads.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:36]:
Right. Yes, this is my— look, I've said this before, I want to be super clear about it. I think it's going to get there. I really do. And look, it could get there in a matter of weeks or months. It might not be a year or 2 years or the next rev of the hardware. I don't know. But you can see something in there, like maybe.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:53]:
But again, I can't get past step 1 until step 1 completes.

Mikah Sargent [01:28:58]:
Exactly. It's weird how that works.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:00]:
Yeah. And I'm the type of person, like, I'm gonna check it again and again. I'm gonna— like I said, I'm gonna do different configurations, different models, different, you know, I want different, uh, harnesses. I want to try— I want— well, now I just—

Richard Campbell [01:29:11]:
There's so much to do, right? Like,

Paul Thurrott [01:29:13]:
I know. And, and the thing that I'm doing it with is getting in my way.

Mikah Sargent [01:29:17]:
Yeah, that is frustrating. Absolutely.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:20]:
It's very frustrating. All right, so,

Mikah Sargent [01:29:22]:
uh, sorry, everybody. No, you— it's all good. I mean, that's— I I think that this is a good thing to talk about because here's my thing. When I'm saying a good thing to talk about, I'm saying the idea that this stuff is not working for you.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:42]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:29:42]:
I have a theory about enthusiasts and particularly tech enthusiasts. And that is that overall, Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna paint with broad brushstrokes and then we can walk it back a little bit.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:59]:
Okay.

Mikah Sargent [01:29:59]:
How many tech enthusiasts—

Paul Thurrott [01:30:01]:
I'm probably just gonna agree with you, but go on.

Mikah Sargent [01:30:02]:
How many people who are tech enthusiasts were also like nerds or geeks or whatever growing up? And a lot of their interests were, were teased or made fun of, and they had to find their group of people who supported them and that they felt supported. Now fast forward to the future, you're an adult, but you still have some of those wounds. And when you are, uh, when you are making large investments in things, be it your time, your attention, or your money, you, one, might have trouble admitting when things aren't working. And that is why, A, Paul, I'm glad that you're saying that things aren't working because I think people need to hear it. But B, I think that the people who, uh, are having all of the success also had to have failures. They're just not talking about them. So I'm glad you are.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:51]:
Thank you. I mean, look, I want it to work. I didn't set out to sabotage this. I am willing to— I have limitations of myself intellectually, whatever it is, knowledge-wise, however you want to say it. When I write about this and when I'm saying this now, there is a big part of me that is kind of hoping and semi-expecting someone is going to say something where it's like, do this... and it's some specific little thing and maybe it makes a difference. Because there are people who have a lot more experience at this than I do. So I mean, I'm open to that and I want that, but, um—

Richard Campbell [01:31:25]:
You ready for the easy button?

Paul Thurrott [01:31:28]:
Well, look, I— yeah, yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:31:30]:
Or the medium button?

Paul Thurrott [01:31:32]:
I don't— yeah, I don't mind a little bit of effort, right?

Richard Campbell [01:31:34]:
What about the working button?

Paul Thurrott [01:31:36]:
Yeah, it just works. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I did this year, this would've been back in June, the big push was like I wanted to cut down on all the subscription services that I pay for. And when you think about things like Netflix or music services or whatever it is, there's a ton of these things. There are reasons we have them, right? And it's not just laziness, but it is convenience. And you sort of understand that if I'm going to do something that actually would be pretty silly, but have only a local music collection, I'm going to use some device for music and not my phone, and I'm going to have a NAS and I'm going to stream it and blah, blah, blah. I'm giving up convenience here. I may have my reasons for that, and good, bad, indifference, we can all agree or disagree on whatever those things are.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:21]:
But I understand I'm giving up convenience to do these things if it's important to me. But this is a tough one because if the convenience gap between a NAS with content on it and some service like Netflix or Spotify is like a gap, this is— a gulf. It's like a— it's a gigantic gulf. And I'm not— I'm not a fan of big tech. I don't like these big AI companies. I think of people that run these companies as the biggest losers our planet has ever created. I don't trust them or want them running the world. But then again, you know, uh, look, I realize I'm, uh, taking power away from a small island in the Caribbean every time I do this, but I could run my stuff against their models and pay $20 a month and it would just work, you know, or would work better anyway, maybe.

Richard Campbell [01:33:10]:
Or $200 a month.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:12]:
Yeah, whatever the cost is. But I don't know, I'm confused, I think is what I'm trying to say.

Richard Campbell [01:33:19]:
You, you can run a lot of workloads for a long time for that $7,000.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:25]:
Oh my God, that's— yeah, 100%. And

Mikah Sargent [01:33:27]:
once you get it dialed in too, I think that, um, you know, it, it'll start to, to show, show what you're looking for. But I mean, Well, so I wanna say this. There is an AI user group that takes place every Friday in the club. And I know that there's—

Paul Thurrott [01:33:46]:
Is it called the Boston Computer Society?

Mikah Sargent [01:33:49]:
It should be.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:49]:
Oh, no, wait, it's not the 1990s anymore.

Mikah Sargent [01:33:52]:
Anthony Nielsen though, he's asking in the Discord right now about your setup. So I think you might end up having a little friend to talk to about this.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:01]:
Okay, yeah. Yeah, I, um, I forgot Leo was gonna be away because I was like, man, Leo will have a take on this for sure. Um,

Mikah Sargent [01:34:09]:
and his take would be to buy 3 more though, RTX Sparks. And I think—

Paul Thurrott [01:34:13]:
yeah, no, I think there's a happy medium between the two, the two insanes. But, um, and hopefully I'm in there somewhere. But, uh, anyway, I do— sorry,

Mikah Sargent [01:34:23]:
I lied, by the way. It's the first Friday of the month, not every single week. I, for some reason, I thought it was every single week.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:30]:
Oh no.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:32]:
Oh, and that was another thing. You're talking about how you had your computer nearby. I was just— Because

Richard Campbell [01:34:37]:
I'm surrounded by them, right?

Mikah Sargent [01:34:39]:
Right. And that somebody had posted on, you know, on Threads or somewhere and said, it's true, AI did help us with our jobs. It helped us going— having to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours to sitting in front of a computer for 24 hours. And you know where I read that? On a laptop where I was running something through Claude. Right, and you're

Paul Thurrott [01:35:03]:
in the dark. And you're

Mikah Sargent [01:35:04]:
waiting for it to be finished.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:06]:
And your partner's asleep and you're like, there's nothing wrong with my life, what? You know, like, yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:10]:
I thought, oh no, I am carrying this laptop around with me to the next place waiting for this project that I'm working on. Okay, any more that you wanna say about the RTX Spark before we move to Microsoft 365? No,

Paul Thurrott [01:35:22]:
I will not bore you further. Well, that's not true. I will bore you further, but I'll do it later. It will come up again. It won't be as exhaustive as this. I'm sorry.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:31]:
All right, well, let's hear from Leo for another ad break. All right, let's get back into the show with— where are we? Microsoft 365?

Paul Thurrott [01:35:40]:
Yeah, so there was a OneDrive event yesterday I alluded to earlier and mentioned earlier, which was really kind of a OneDrive plus Copilot event, which I've only—

Richard Campbell [01:35:49]:
All AI all the time.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:52]:
Yeah. So I read the blog post they put out. I've only watched the first third or so of the actual event video, but it's okay. I'm interested in this. I'll finish that. There's an element to what's happening with OneDrive that is actually present in the stuff we were just talking about, or just in AI in general. When you think about—

Richard Campbell [01:36:13]:
Not just the files anymore.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:15]:
Yeah. Well, I mean, just like the way AI has evolved, I forget, and I suppose I hope or assume others forget too, but it's weird for how fast AI is moving, how much we were promised so long ago that still is not common or available at all or whatever. Mm-hmm. So for example, when I'm writing the stuff I've been writing recently, I've gone back and looked at things I've written in the past. I've referenced the Stevie Batige talks from the 2 builds in a row that were just unbelievable.

Richard Campbell [01:36:46]:
Inside, outside, beside, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:47]:
Yep, was the first one. And then the MPU and that kind of stuff. Microsoft has been talking about, and they're not alone, but mostly cover Microsoft, right? Microsoft has been talking about local AI, has been talking about agentic AI, has been talking about all this stuff that still is not super mainstream, or at all mainstream, right? And I don't mean for like a year, I mean for 3 years. They've started talking about this stuff back in 2023. And if you go back to 2023 in your mind, you might recall that in the first half of that year, they in February came out with, at the time it was Bing Search and Microsoft Edge, we're gonna have these AI capabilities. Yeah. Sometime within just 2 weeks or so, they used the Copilot brand for these things, which they had previously used or first used with GitHub. Right? GitHub Copilot was the first.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:40]:
They announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, which became Copilot for Microsoft 365, and then went back to Microsoft 365 Copilot, whatever. They announced—

Richard Campbell [01:37:48]:
Naming is hard.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:50]:
Yep. Windows 11 would have a Copilot app built into it. And, you know, everyone knows the story about how later in that year, they jammed it down everyone's throats rather than putting it in the new version of Windows to make sure that everyone, including businesses, had Copilot on their computers, even if they didn't want it. wanted, right? Really just terrible. But, but that year, uh, 2023, uh, you know, 35 years ago now, um, was in AI time, which is the opposite of Uber time, by the way, but that's a different discussion. Um, is, um, there were, there are things that have come and gone too, right? One of the things that came and went was something called Copilot Pro. Copilot Pro was a paid $20 dollar per month service for consumers that you could pay for on top of any Microsoft 365 consumer subscription to get higher limits and all the Copilot AI stuff. So similar to Microsoft 365 Copilot, but without any of the admin controls and company-wide, organization-wide permissions and blah, blah, blah.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:50]:
It was for individuals, right? And when that thing— I subscribed immediately. And when that thing first came out, one of the things you were going to be able to do was one of those other stupid freaking terms that AI drops on us every 15 minutes, which was make a custom GPT. That was the term. Right.

Richard Campbell [01:39:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:08]:
And okay, um, that disappeared within about 2 months. They just got rid of it. I tried to use it right away, but my— the first thing I tried was this thing where I— what I wanted was, because I have these massive, um, file-based archives of everything I've written over 30-something years. And I wanted just to point this GPT at that and base, or I guess ground, its knowledge in all of my writing. Because one thing I do almost every day, honestly, is I go to my own website and I search for something I, I wrote, because I can't remember everything I wrote. I write too much, like, I've been— and I've been doing it for decades. And it would be really neat to be like, hey, just bring up everything I've ever written about whatever the topic is— Clipchamp or Copilot or Whatever. And I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:54]:
Okay, right. And then, you know,

Mikah Sargent [01:39:56]:
yeah, that's a cool use for it for sure.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:59]:
I wasn't— this was 3 and a half years ago. I was like, I'm doing this thing. Yeah, it didn't work. Later that year, Copilot, Windows 11, you know, happens. And that was the first time they started talking about using Copilot with OneDrive. OneDrive being one of the places where you might, you know, as a Windows user, you might have your files there. Okay, this would accomplish the same thing. And just as a reminder, that was 3 and a half years ago, 3 years ago.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:23]:
They had a Copilot OneDrive event yesterday. They were talking about it again. They're still talking about it. And this is one of the bizarre things about this industry or this part of our industry is there's so much that people see. We all know what's gonna happen. We're definitely gonna be using AI against our files. Some people already are, right? Obviously Google does. Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:42]:
I mean, all the major AIs, you know, plug into your file system, whatever it is. you know, this occurs, but whatever. But Microsoft in this case, they've been talking about this for 3 years. What's it going to happen? Anyway, it's happening again, I guess. We'll see. And there are new capabilities based on the generative capabilities of Copilot today where they can make these beautiful HTML reports. I have to say, AI is really good at making what I would call like infographics or reports or whatever you want to call that thing. Ideally not a very long document, but graphics are great, presentation is nice, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:18]:
There's also a OneDrive CLI because everything has to have a CLI these days. Yes. Actually, that's important for AI, actually, and I love CLI, so that's awesome. Bunch of core file system improvements, including the ability for this thing to run effectively in as little as 8 gigs of RAM, which is part of that pain points push. That's true on Windows and Mac. because now Apple again has 8 gig computers for some reason. And then a bunch of other stuff, including the Photos app, which we talked about earlier, but big OneDrive integration there. But then just photos, the 2 primary use cases for OneDrive, especially for individuals, are, well, files obviously, and then photos, right? And so whether you use Google Photos or Apple Photos or whatever service you use, they all kind of do the same thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:05]:
You know, uh, AI editing tools. You can frame and recrop and blah blah blah. There's kind of create tools now, like, where you can like reimagine an image in a different style. You can create collages and holiday cards and yada yada yada, whatever it is. Uh, there's a map view that's coming, I, I suspect. I think Google, Google Photos probably has a map view. I'm not really sure. But, um, anyway, bunch of stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:28]:
It's cool. It's great. Like, it's fine. It's all good. It's all good, except like, am I in Groundhog Day now? Are we just doing this like every year? We're gonna talk about that. This is coming. Absolutely coming. I feel like this will come before local AI, but you know, that's a low bar, right? Like,

Richard Campbell [01:42:43]:
yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:44]:
But okay. Anyway, I'm gonna continue. I'll finish watching the event. I'm sure it's fine. I don't know. And then on a completely different level, honestly, because one of the big problems that AI has as an industry or just a business or however you wanna to say it is like distrust. Like everybody hates these companies. Everyone— not everyone, most people, many people, over 50% of the United States does not trust AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:10]:
Um,

Richard Campbell [01:43:11]:
well, and it's accelerated the distrust of these companies mostly due to their own behavior.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:17]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:43:18]:
There are lots of people who distrusted them before the AI wave, but the AI wave has given them a whole new opportunity to be distrusted.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:23]:
Yeah, I know. We got people are picketing data centers. Like data centers are coming into communities and bypassing the normal meetings where people get to vote on it that are just happening. And now it's like forcing

Richard Campbell [01:43:34]:
their councilmen—

Paul Thurrott [01:43:35]:
Yeah,

Richard Campbell [01:43:36]:
forcing their council members under NDAs, and it's pretty horrible stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:40]:
Yep. So everyone hates AI. And— oh no, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be absolute. Many, many people hate AI. But in this world, we got the doomers who are like, oh yeah, it's going to become sentient and take over the Earth. It's going to be like Terminator or whatever. It's like, geez, guys, it's math. It's like, come on.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:59]:
I mean, it's ridiculous, but whatever. They're all marketing like, oh yeah, our AI went rogue and broke into a company. It wasn't because we lowered the security as people. It's always human error, by the way, but whatever. There's just a lot of distress. And now the next step, which by the way, again, has been the next step for 3 years, we're going to have agents doing everything. We as people are going to have personal agents. Uh, Google has one, Microsoft has one.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:28]:
It's called Autopilot, used to be called Scout. Um, everyone's going to have one of those things. It's going to be, you know, it's going to be like— it's the thing that Cortana was supposed to be, but Cortana was brain damaged, right? And I told this story on this podcast before, but I distinctly— I'll never forget, this guy emailed me, got Windows 10, you know, he's like, yeah, Cortana, it's like I clicked on the thing And it's like, I have to give it all my information. It's like, I don't want to do that. Yeah, it's an assistant, idiot. How's it going to know your calendar to tell you about something if it doesn't know your schedule? Like, whatever. So you got to open up yourself to these things, right? But no one trusts AI, and they're selling it to businesses. I mean, if AI is going to make sense as a business or industry, businesses are going to have to adopt it.

Richard Campbell [01:45:12]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:13]:
So one of the pushes that's occurring now And I didn't write about this, but Brad Smith, God love him, he said that AI was less regulated than milk, which is so great.

Richard Campbell [01:45:27]:
It's true too.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:28]:
It is true, right? That's why it's great. From Satya Nadella on down, Microsoft has been trying to figure out some model for making agents make sense from what I'll call a security or safety perspective, right? So this week they announced their plans for this. We talked last week or 2 weeks ago, I don't remember. Well, actually, it was probably 2 weeks ago. I think it was tied to that Windows event where they talked about MCX or what's it called? The Microsoft, what's the connection? The Microsoft blah, blah, blah, the container. Oh, MXC, the containers, the Microsoft, what's it called? Execution container or whatever. So these things are gonna run in these containers, but that's not the whole story, right? I mean, yes, containers, but there's a whole other thing that has to happen around identity and permissions and enterprise or organization-wide visibility and accessibility of different resources to different people. How does this thing work on a computer? Because it can't run in your context because you're an admin on Windows, almost certainly, and you don't want to let this thing loose on your computer, let alone the world.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:31]:
And so they've come up with this strategy, I guess, which encompasses a lot of different things. It's a part of something that Microsoft had already kind of announced a year or two ago called Project Perception. But perception is a great word, by the way, because the perception is horrible. But the idea here is just to— this is for businesses, the discussion so far. And Ignite, by the way, is coming up, which I, you know, was why they announced it now. I think they're going to talk about it more at the show, I know. But basically, this is a way to update the entire Microsoft stack from Windows to Microsoft 365 and all those apps and and all the backend services that you might use from Entra to whatever else you have in your organization to understand and work with this thing and be able to actively monitor and understand what these agents that are running out there, background processes essentially, what they're doing and why, and make sure they stay within their boundaries and so forth. So there's a whole, it's a lot of work.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:30]:
Mm-hmm. If you're cynical, and I am, you might say, yeah, this is the type of thing they should have announced 3 and a half years ago. Why did we not have this? Because at that time, well, to this day, I mean, these companies are all racing to improve the capabilities and get as many users as they can to ensure that their positions remain. Yeah. But anyway, Microsoft, I'll give them this much credit. I mean, one of the benefits that Microsoft still has, but always had in the cloud, was because they were responsible for the previous generation of infrastructure, which was local to businesses, meaning on-premises. They could offer a hybrid computing model where some stuff that made sense was up in the cloud, but the stuff that whatever your organization, whether for regulatory reasons or just your own privacy reasons, whatever, you could run that stuff locally on-premises. So they had this hybrid model.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:22]:
Microsoft, everyone's talking about hybrid AI, but Microsoft's hybrid AI is called what, Paul? I already forgot the name of it. Hybrid intelligence, right? And I will say, I mean, just by virtue of history, I mean, that maybe in the same way they were uniquely positioned for cloud computing, maybe this will help them. We'll see. I think there are going to be other problems, but whatever. I like that someone is finally talking about this because this is necessary. And there's no mention of how this impacts individuals yet. These things have a way of coming downstream. So, Like OneDrive, there was also, I didn't talk about this, but there were SharePoint components to that, right? So SharePoint being essentially the highly managed complex version of OneDrive for businesses or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:08]:
But we'll see some version of this. The sad thing is we will see Autopilot in Windows 11 before we see some version of this, right? So—

Richard Campbell [01:49:15]:
Sure.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:16]:
We'll see what this looks like. It's a little alarming. And then this one's just fun for me. This came out of nowhere and I think it's cool. OpenAI announced this week that they have a version of GPT-6, Astra, which is an AI coding model that's trained on old programming languages, Fortran, COBOL, Visual Basic. And you're like, well, why? And the reason is—

Richard Campbell [01:49:43]:
Migration.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:44]:
Well, yeah, half the world is still running on those. software codebases, and either they need to continue and be modernized, or they need to be migrated to a more modern codebase. And that's exactly what this model helps with.

Richard Campbell [01:49:57]:
And arguably, because these things are stable, there's not major changes happening to them anymore, the tools can work really well against them.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:04]:
Exactly. So, one of the interesting things about— well, I don't know if it's interesting, but one of the maybe semi-obvious things about coding models is that if you are coding in a modern, environment with a modern language. So, it could be like SwiftUI if you're an Apple guy, or C# and whatever framework in Windows, or if you're on the Google side, they have all kinds, you know, whatever's Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, you know, Flutter and Dart, whatever. There is a ton of information out in the world about this stuff, whether it's the official documentation or Stack Overflow or whatever the sites are, there's a ton of it. But these sites and services all occurred before those things came into effect or during their lifetimes. The Visual Basics, the COBOLs, the whatever, they just don't have this. They're from before. They're from the before days, right? So getting models trained on the correct data, I don't know how they did it.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:56]:
They probably stole books. It's OpenAI. But however they did it is fine, whatever. But this is actually very valuable. It's not something

Richard Campbell [01:51:03]:
I

Paul Thurrott [01:51:03]:
need myself, but this is

Richard Campbell [01:51:06]:
But the ongoing effort to retire COBOL stuff, because we just can't get the COBOL devs anymore, this is the first set of tools we've really seen that open the door to that.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:15]:
Yeah. But mark my words.

Richard Campbell [01:51:17]:
Let's be clear, the Visual Basic to Rust converter never worked right. But

Paul Thurrott [01:51:21]:
this one— So, I gotta say, Micah probably doesn't know, I wouldn't listen to the show either, but we've been talking a lot about these kind of vibe-coded apps and things, right? Everyone knows about the Adobe stuff and the Microsoft stuff. People are reverse engineering games.

Mikah Sargent [01:51:40]:
REA, right? Reverse engineer.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:42]:
Incredible. This is scary and horrible, but also kind of awesome and awesome, for lack of a better term. But it's a brave new world, whatever. So this is happening. It's just our world. And this is a world where Not yet, but soon any normal mainstream user who doesn't know how to program is gonna be able to make the app they want or be like, here's this thing. I made this assertion a couple of years ago, back when Microsoft was sort of baby-stepping its way into adopting Rust, which Linux has done as well, and I'm sure other places. But there have been milestones along the way.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:22]:
There's stuff in Windows 11 today that was built in Rust. But what I said, and I said this knowing it was overly simplistic, was what Microsoft should do is use their AI or some AI to rewrite the NT kernel in Rust, and then just work down the stack and do that whole thing. And everyone was like, oh, you're so cute, you're an idiot. And I'm like, yeah, no, I get it. I know we're like 15 minutes away from this, but the thing is, the way the world's gone, the question I have now is why hasn't this already happened? Just do it. It's like, this is... This has become a well-established thing. You could do this.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:57]:
And you're Microsoft. I'm not asking you to reverse engineer or REA some other company's product. This is your product. I mean, and maybe they are working on this kind of thing. I don't know. But we are in that— one thing Rich and I have talked a lot about is this notion that there may be already, and probably is, some number of problems they found in Windows, or pick your codebase, it doesn't matter. Where they're like, you know what, we can't actually fix this, or fixing this will require like a functional—

Richard Campbell [01:53:28]:
Huge changes.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:29]:
Yeah, like worse than SP2 back in the day with the firewall and all this stuff. Like a really, really bad, big problem. And that dealing with that, because I don't know if you noticed, but people are pretty change-averse, um, is gonna require some PR, you know, of some kind. Like, it's not enough to just fix the problem.

Richard Campbell [01:53:46]:
Yeah, actually, I've I've got a pretty good sense they're sitting on a set of those and they're waiting to get the whole group together to come up with a strategy to deploy them all.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:54]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:53:55]:
I poked at enough people whose reaction was, I really can't talk about that, to know, oh no, that's absolutely true.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:04]:
One of the things I said this when we talked about it, whatever this was a couple of weeks ago, but the ArtCraft, which is basically a guy and 3 AIs or something, when he recreated all of the top 7 Adobe apps. If you go and install any of those on your computer, you're gonna notice 2 things. Well, 3 things. The first one is they install fast. If you've ever installed an Adobe app, you have to sign into your account at least twice, probably 3 times. It takes half the afternoon.

Mikah Sargent [01:54:35]:
So many times.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:36]:
All right, that's the first one. It takes forever.

Richard Campbell [01:54:38]:
Half the time it kicks you back and goes, you haven't got the right license anyway.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:41]:
Yeah, exactly right. Right, exactly. But okay, but let's say you got it installed and you're like, all right, I'm going to run the thing. Now look, maybe you have the fastest computer in the world, so it only takes several seconds to run, but it takes a while. It's not— doesn't come right up. These apps launch instantaneously. They're written in Rust, by the way. This Rust is not just memory safe, it's actually incredibly performant.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:01]:
Um, the third thing you're going to notice, and that will vary by individual because it's going to depend on what you do, is whether or not it actually does everything you need that app to do. Like in my case, the Photoshop clone is perfect. It works perfectly well. It does everything I need. Now I may run into some obscure feature in the future, but they're pledging, or he is pledging, he's gonna fix all, you know, he's gonna solve these problems apparently, or AI is. And we'll see. But when you witness this, this is eye-opening, you know? Just the performance, you're like, holy crap, that's amazing. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:34]:
Do this to Windows, Microsoft, please. Do it to Office, do it to everything.

Richard Campbell [01:55:38]:
What if there's just an internal version going around right now?

Mikah Sargent [01:55:43]:
I thought you were going to say, for the third thing, you should look at all of the helpers and other weird networking tools and toolkits and bloat that those first-party— that Adobe apps install. Because they're like, 12 of them that pop up in the settings that are all doing all these different things in the background.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:04]:
I don't know if this happens on the Mac, but I can tell you one of the weirdest— well, one of the most aggravating things about Windows is there are a variety of ways that you can go in and see what apps are running at startup. And those lists are horribly incomplete. So there are certain things— Adobe is a great example. There's some McAfee stuff that does this. If you install like the Intel Driver Configuration Utility. That's not in that list, but it runs when your computer boots. So there are ways to find those things. It's complicated, but you don't get the full list.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:39]:
Here's a good use for AI. Can I actually see everything that's— well, actually, Mark was the one that wrote this tool 25 years ago. But don't just take forward the crap from the past, but also maybe make some architectural changes that will be beneficial to everybody. Maybe now you can do that container thing you were talking about for Windows 10X that never happened. Not just the new UI, but actually the more sophisticated foundation for the operating system. Maybe it, you know, yeah, I mean, getting the thing just to work is great, but while we're there, you know.

Mikah Sargent [01:57:11]:
While you're in there.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:13]:
Why don't we fix some problems, you know?

Mikah Sargent [01:57:16]:
You were saying, Rich, you think there's an internal build that's like a lighter AI version?

Richard Campbell [01:57:21]:
I bet you they've done a ton of Rust stuff. They're just not ready to roll it out anywhere.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:25]:
Yeah. Okay. I hope to see a lot of— I mean, we'll see, you know, who knows? Like I said, Ignite's coming up. There are Rust events. Mark Russinovich has appeared, I wanna say, at least 2 of them. You know, maybe we'll learn more.

Richard Campbell [01:57:37]:
No, and he's been a huge advocate for Rust. He's like, you have to justify to me why you're not writing this in Rust.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:43]:
His best story, you know, because he basically told He's the Azure CTO. He's like, yeah, we're not doing C++ anymore, we're doing Rust. And then Satya Nadella, who actually runs the company ostensibly, called him. He's like, yeah, I saw this thing where you said we're only doing Rust. He's like, are you serious? He goes, yeah. And he goes, okay. He's like, I know you know what you're doing. I'm like, okay, that's fine.

Richard Campbell [01:58:07]:
That's good. You're really gonna argue with him? I don't think you are.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:10]:
Well, he's like, I just want you to know I noticed. And okay. Cool. It seems like you're done. Um, okay. Uh, Xbox. Xbox. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:22]:
Do we need to break or are we good?

Mikah Sargent [01:58:24]:
Ah, the Xbox has happened. It is time for a break. Up next, we'll talk about Xbox and gaming. All right, let's do it. Oh, there's— there is a theme song. There really is.

Richard Campbell [01:58:42]:
You thought I was kidding. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:43]:
Yeah. This song is called, um, Paul Is Dead MP3 because it's just the Halo theme backwards, which by the way, I, I think eliminates all the intellectual property concerns we might have. It's fine. Copyright problems. Also, it sounds— I gotta say, it sounds just as good backwards as it

Mikah Sargent [01:58:59]:
does— It does sound really good backwards. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:01]:
It's kind of bizarre.

Mikah Sargent [01:59:02]:
I liked it.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:03]:
Um, so we have a lot of Xbox news. This has actually grown since the show started, for what it's worth. Um, I don't believe my, uh, window— my news guy has probably not gotten to some of this stuff because he lives in France and is probably asleep right now. But, um, but some of this stuff just happened. So the first one was, um, is, I should say, uh, that there was a report about Project Helix, which we've understood to be the next Xbox console.

Richard Campbell [01:59:29]:
It's the next console. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:31]:
Yeah, it's a little more nuanced than that, as it turns out. Um, one of the bad news bits is that this was in Fortune. They said that the anticipated price point for this console—

Richard Campbell [01:59:41]:
$2 million.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:43]:
Yeah, pretty close. Uh, $1,200 to $1,800. And, um, that is a surefire way to ensure that 3 people buy that thing. I— oh, that's— look, I, I said this to Brad this morning, but you know, whatever the Xbox Series X cost at launch, $400 maybe, and maybe today it's $700. Like, we can all agree that's terrible, but We understand component crisis, whatever things happen. Um, but you don't go from that to $1,800. What? Like, what are you talking about? Yeah. So we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:12]:
Um, Asha Sharma, who runs Xbox, uh, went up to X or, um, um, Twitter or whatever we're calling it and kind of tried to refute a little bit of this. But in doing so, she provided a little bit more detail. So one of the bits is we had understood that Project Helix would arrive by the end of next year in some kind of a preview form. This sounds really late to me. I feel like this has to happen more quickly than that. And I guess I had secretly hoped that in fact it would arrive maybe by mid-year and then we could sell one for the holidays because we're going through a major downturn in the video game industry, but Xbox in particular. Yeah. is problematic in this way, as everyone knows.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:59]:
And, uh, they don't have anything to sell. So there are like small things, like we had that little cute controller, and there'll be an Elite Series 3 controller at some point. But like, we don't have new consoles, right? And we're not going to have them for a while. And yeah, now the, the report claims that— I think it's that report, I can't remember who said what— but, um, the first Project Helix device will actually be a gaming handheld. Right. And then for $1,200

Richard Campbell [02:01:25]:
or

Paul Thurrott [02:01:25]:
$1,800, I guess we'll see. Um, but we'll know. So that will happen, that will happen at the end of next year. And then the, the actual console, the thing that will sit in your living room, uh, will be the next year. So 2028. And we're like, it's like, guys, uh, I don't know what we're doing here.

Richard Campbell [02:01:40]:
But when did the Xbox One X ship? It's been a while.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:44]:
I want to say it was the pandemic year. Um, Because I feel like it was before—

Richard Campbell [02:01:50]:
I thought it was even before that.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:52]:
No, well, I don't remember 100%, but I, I feel something in my back because Sony and Microsoft both did the new consoles. They both had, um, component shortages at the time to deal with, which today I think we would all be happy to have those problems. Um, but whatever number of years, it's— yeah, it's going to be a while. Now we kind of— we knew this, right?

Richard Campbell [02:02:12]:
2017, my friend. Wait, what? 2017.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:16]:
So wait, what am I thinking of then? Um, you're saying Series X and S?

Richard Campbell [02:02:22]:
Xbox One. Yeah, the Xbox One is 2013. The X and S are 2017.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:28]:
Oh, okay. That's way worse than I thought. So 2013 to 2017 is not that many years. 2017 to 2028 is— geez,

Richard Campbell [02:02:35]:
like, okay, a decade.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:37]:
Now, I— to be fair, I'm not— well, I'm not defending them exactly, but Things have changed. The Xbox One had 3 generations of hardware, each of which got better than the last. The Xbox Series X and S were unique because they released both side by side. They were both supposed to be revved, but then weren't, not in a meaningful way. But yeah, that's a long time. I don't know what to say about this, but Ashish Sharma was saying that, look, We need— we needed to trim Windows down for these devices, the handheld gaming devices. Um, pretty— I would say pretty good. I mean, you know, it's Windows.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:15]:
Windows is a pig, but pretty good. Um, the Helix OS is being built on Windows. You know, the Xbox and Windows teams are working together on this thing.

Richard Campbell [02:03:23]:
So it's probably Windows kernel but with a different shell.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:28]:
Yeah, and, and I think that's where it gets lightweight. Plus a different shell— like, in other words, in In Windows 11 with Xbox mode on or on a gaming handheld today, you can go into Xbox mode essentially and it turns off a lot of the background stuff. It lowers the RAM usage and you won't be distracted by notifications and whatever. And yeah, I mean, that would be the basis for a console because that stuff would never be needed. And it only— Xboxes and probably all consoles are basically optimized to run a game. at once and then some lightweight shell, relatively lightweight. Um, you know, they don't really multitask between games, right? Like you just do one thing. Um, so this thing can be pretty lightweight and, uh, it makes sense it would be based on Windows.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:11]:
We already know this. We've seen the work. Like they have Xbox compatibility. Almost. Started coming to Windows.

Richard Campbell [02:04:16]:
That was Cutler's push all along was one kernel to rule them all, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:04:20]:
Yeah. No, it makes sense. Especially—

Richard Campbell [02:04:22]:
And Ant Nielsen has clarified that 2017 was the X Xbox One.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:27]:
Oh, X. When

Richard Campbell [02:04:27]:
X— the Xbox Series X is 2020.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:31]:
Okay, so that— okay, that's what I thought. Yeah, that

Richard Campbell [02:04:33]:
makes sense because names are hard.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:35]:
Okay, but, uh, but, um, okay, so then we go 2013 to 2020 is 7 years. So 20— yeah, it's still— so it's going to be a little longer. It's not going to be that much longer. Yeah, so 8 years. Okay, I

Richard Campbell [02:04:45]:
mean, still a long time. And also, like, let's face it, we've, we've hit compute limits, we've hit Resolution limits. Like, it's almost impossible to build a game that you can make money on that actually presses the limits of those machines. Like, it's hard to justify.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:01]:
Some of this is coincidental, but one of the nice things that has occurred in the same time frame is things like AutoSR, which allows you to run games at lower resolutions,

Richard Campbell [02:05:10]:
scale

Paul Thurrott [02:05:11]:
higher frame rates, but it looks like it's a higher resolution. Perfect. Who cares? As long as it looks— it runs great. Um, there is also this kind of DLSS or AMD has their similar technology for filling in frames and essentially upscaling, another way to— an upscaling technology or whatever. There's also, I don't have this in the notes because we haven't written about it yet, but there's Nvidia. One of the issues with modern games, big games, so the Call of Duty games, Gears of War does this, the new Halo Combat Evolved, Evolved Combat? Evolved. Remake? What's it called?

Speaker F [02:05:48]:
Campaign Evolved.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:50]:
Campaign Evolved. Thank you. Um, they all have to render shaders before you can play it. So like one of the indignities of a Call of Duty user like myself is on Wednesday, I think it was— oh no, today's Wednesday, so 2 days ago, whatever, Monday, um, they uploaded the new game into the existing game and I, depending on the computer, I had like 200 to 300 gigabyte downloads. So to update the app so I can play the old version of the game, not the new version, but it's loading the new version. But when it does this, you have to— it has to re-render the shaders even in the old game. So after the indignity of waiting for an hour to 2 hours for this stupid thing to download, you're like, all right, finally I can play the game. Nope.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:33]:
Now you gotta wait another 20 minutes for the shaders to render. So they're starting to do, um, it's not— well, I guess it's technically pre-rendering, and the way they're doing it is by matching your hardware configuration to known configurations in the cloud and just applying that configuration to your computer in this case. Um, so in other words, instead of sitting here for 20 minutes waiting for it to render, it will just go boop, oh, here you go, and then hopefully it will be nearly instantaneous because that's how it should work, at least on a console. But it— maybe this will come to PCs too. Anyway, I get the point of all this is that some people are freaked out that the next Xbox console might be based on Windows, but I think it actually makes a ton of sense. Windows PCs are the biggest gaming— well, not including the casual gaming on mobile or whatever. Switch. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:19]:
It's the biggest platform. So being able to bring Windows PC games to a console, being able to bring old Xbox games to a Windows PC through backward compatibility, these are all good things. And now that we have this component shortage and components are really expensive or hard, you know, impossible to get, whatever. Um, I'm not saying that these things can or should ship with lower-end hardware than the previous gen. That would be stupid. But they can get away with more because now we have all these technologies, most of which were made with AI, by the way, that can, um, render games. Like I said, like, who cares what it really is? If it looks beautiful, it looks beautiful. Like, who cares?

Richard Campbell [02:07:58]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:58]:
So there's a lot going on there. But anyway.

Richard Campbell [02:08:01]:
Well, and definitely gaming consoles have gotten away from their, uh, halo games, their reference games for their new console. But, you know, that worked. You had to, you had to show something that made people want that console.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:16]:
Console gaming has changed a lot, you know, and, uh, over the years, but in recent years especially. Um, okay, and then this just, this just happened like 15 minutes ago. Um, Microsoft has been talking about having a Cloud gaming tier for Xbox Game Pass. So instead of just having Game Pass subscriptions with different access to cloud gaming, which is their cloud streaming service, they're— they were saying we're going to do a, uh, it's kind of like a pay-as-you-go, um, cloud gaming service standalone. So you don't have to have Xbox Game Pass, you could just pay for this thing. And they just announced the pricing for it, and it's— I guess it's available to Xbox Insiders today, but It's 10 hours per month for $4. This is US. 25 hours per month for $8, and then 50 hours for $12 according to Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:05]:
So we'll see. I don't— if I could— if you said to me you have to give up one part of the Xbox ecosystem, I would say I will give up cloud gaming. I could not care less about this thing. But I— but it's, it's possible there are some good use cases that go beyond, um, I just wanted to see if the game was any good before I actually took the time to install it, you know, that type of thing, because I already get it through Game Pass. But, um, maybe— I don't know, the technology has definitely improved, so maybe there is— maybe this will be a viable thing. I don't know. Um, ASUS, uh, made the first-gen, like, what they called ROG Xbox Ally, uh, gaming handhelds last fall. Uh, this past year they announced the second-gen, basically an OLED screen and $200 price hike.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:48]:
Um, it's called Xbox ROG— no, sorry, ASUS ROG Xbox Ally. Jesus. X20.

Richard Campbell [02:09:55]:
They've learned a name just like Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:58]:
Exactly. That's why they're perfect partners. Um, uh, so it's available now if you want it. It's got kind of a cool style. Super expensive though. It's like $1,300 just for the, the device itself. And then you can get like a collector's bundle with the VR glasses and whatever for like $2,500. It's crazy.

Richard Campbell [02:10:16]:
How much is the Switch 2? $400?

Paul Thurrott [02:10:18]:
Exactly. I know. Yeah, that's tough. This is tough.

Richard Campbell [02:10:22]:
Um, and I just got this so figured out, like, and they're just making it easier for Nintendo every day, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:10:29]:
Uh, yeah, this will be some awesome collusion thing we'll find out later. It's like, look, we're just gonna give you the console market. Could you just, you know, just do right by it? Um, Did I mention the DLSS or whatever we're calling this stuff? Upscaling, I guess, AI upscaling. AMD has their technology. They're bringing a new version of it to the Xbox ROG Ally and Generation 2 gaming handhelds, but also to the Xbox Series X and S. Mm-hmm. And to Windows PCs that have specific generation Radeon, whatever they are, RX, whatever graphics. So this would be kind of like their high-end Copilot plus PC type things.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:09]:
And then if companies are building, I don't know, gaming laptops, I guess, off of this Radeon, I don't see a lot of that. I see more Nvidia. But anyway, that's good. And same, you know, jump in visual fidelity, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, this is actually a little late because it's the 20th. But this morning, I think it was, or maybe it was last night, Microsoft announced the games that are coming to Game Pass for the rest of this month. They usually do one at the beginning of the month, one in the middle, um, as is so often the case these days. I don't recognize most of these, um, but the big one in here is the remake of Final Fantasy VII, which looks pretty awesome, honestly.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:47]:
Um, but there's a bunch of other stuff in there. There's a Plants vs. Zombies—

Richard Campbell [02:11:50]:
What's the current Final Fantasy? XIV? XV?

Paul Thurrott [02:11:53]:
I was gonna say 110. Uh, yeah, it's— yeah, it's a pretty—

Richard Campbell [02:11:57]:
You know, these fantasies aren't seeming to be all that final.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:00]:
Right, right. It's like that Friday the 13th movie that was the final chapter and then they made 8 more of them or something. Yeah. Um, uh, oh, and then, so I, I, I promised and/or threatened, um, to mention RTX Spark.

Richard Campbell [02:12:14]:
Sorry, 6, 16. 16.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:17]:
Okay, nice. Um, so I, I had mentioned that, um, NVIDIA claims that, um, A lot of these games run natively, if that makes sense, against the graphics card in these things, and that's why it works. But they do have a really nice list of games that work already, and Microsoft has already said the next Call of Duty will work on this thing as well. I've tried some of these myself. It's funny because I didn't use this list to determine what to try, but like Doom: Dark Ages, which does not run on a Snapdragon X, although the previous Doom games do, runs wonderfully on RTX Spark. Um, Flight Simulator 25, Fortnite. Um,

Richard Campbell [02:12:58]:
when I'm dropping $27,000 on a laptop, I'm thinking Fortnite.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:04]:
Well,

Richard Campbell [02:13:05]:
I mean, you could be playing Minecraft, I guess,

Paul Thurrott [02:13:07]:
right? So you don't— by the way, that works too. Um, you don't buy it for that reason, but I, I— there is some benefit to having a computer, one thing that does everything, like If you are making apps with AI during the day and want to play a video game at night and whatever, you have the one— I mean, okay, I mean, whatever. It's definitely—

Richard Campbell [02:13:27]:
One laptop to rule them all.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:29]:
Yeah, it is a much better, um, situation than Snapdragon for sure, because that's just pure, pure emu— well, pure emulation plus AutoSR. Yeah, um, you don't get any of the, you know, native NVIDIA, uh, um, yeah, RTX GPU stuff. Um, I'm not going to spend any time on this at all, but ID@Xbox is Microsoft's or Xbox's indie game business. And they just had a big online event where they discussed a bunch of the games that are coming out over the next year from indie game makers across the consoles, PC, and Game Pass. And most of them are just new, so there's nothing to talk— I don't know. There's a video you can watch all these things. One of the ones that's coming out is kind of cool to me because I, I was really upset when this went away, which is, um, Telltale, um, the game maker. They, they made those kind of interactive games, like Walking Dead was the big one for me, and there was a series of those.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:23]:
And, uh, but they had a bunch of other ones. Um, they're bringing back like a remastered version of The Wolf Among Us.

Mikah Sargent [02:14:28]:
Yeah, my significant other is very excited about that. Uh, loves all of those.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:33]:
I'd love to see all of, all of those games come back. Yeah, those are really cool.

Mikah Sargent [02:14:37]:
I watched while he played them, and I thought, it's even great to just watch. Yeah, they're really well made, like the writing is very good.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:47]:
Right, so there are only a handful of games where I thought like my wife, and at the time in my brain I was like, and/or daughter, but my daughter actually turns out plays games. Richard, can you guess what console she owns?

Mikah Sargent [02:14:59]:
Does it come from Nintendo?

Paul Thurrott [02:15:00]:
Yeah, it does. So, but back in the day before she had such a thing, before I thought she cared about games I was like, you know, there are a handful of games out there I think like you guys would actually kind of enjoy because they're just interactive stories, right? And these, yeah, these, these are among those. And, um, as is The Wolf apparently. Anyway, that one's coming out next week, by the way, on Xbox consoles. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I'm moving. I'm on all cylinders now that I'm not talking about AI anymore. Um, and then I haven't— we haven't written about this yet, and I'm not sure, right, if this is just inside report rumor slash whatever, but Um, in the context of the video game industry is cratering right now, um, EA is shutting down BioWare, uh, the studio, which is too bad.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:44]:
Now EA, you may recall, went private recently, uh, with a $55 billion buyout. And— oh, maybe— I'm sorry, no, they did announce it. This is official. So yeah, this is unfortunate. Now I don't know what comes of this yet. I haven't had a chance. I didn't even know they officially announced it, so I'm not sure what's happening, but Um, when Microsoft shut down some studios recently and talked about doing this, um, they gave some of them at least the option to like go private or sell the studio to some other company and you can take everything with you, that kind of thing. Um, hopefully this stuff doesn't just disappear.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:19]:
Um, but for those of you in the Xbox space, you may remember BioWare from Mass Effect, right? Which is actually a series of games, but—

Richard Campbell [02:16:26]:
Yeah, that was their— one of their big hit titles.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:30]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [02:16:31]:
I mean, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter were good too, but— and they had a bunch of Star Wars stuff.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:36]:
Oh yeah, that's right.

Richard Campbell [02:16:38]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:39]:
Okay, well, unfortunately—

Richard Campbell [02:16:42]:
But the Mass Effect series was great, except the last one. That was not that great.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:47]:
Yeah, I, I only— I played— I'm trying to think of— I think I only played the first one. It was a long time ago. This— that would have been— that must have been Xbox 360. It was a long time ago.

Richard Campbell [02:16:57]:
Oh yeah, yeah, you know, you're way talking way back, man. 2007.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:02]:
Yeah. And I— look, this is the unfortunate byproduct of the gaming industry, which is, you know, yeah, emotionally we all want these things to continue and blah blah blah, whatever. But, you know, Phil Spencer made this case before he left. Asher Shamir has talked about this. Like, in some cases it's like, yeah, everyone knows the studio name, they made some great games, but what have you done lately? Nothing. Like, you guys have sitting here, you haven't released the game in several years. In some cases, they've been like—

Richard Campbell [02:17:27]:
They've been working on another Mass Effect forever, and clearly with Andromeda being kind of a dud, I think they just got paralyzed. And a lot of talent left, you know. The EA acquisition had a bunch of lock-in for a few key people. When that was over, they were gone. And yeah, you know, eventually your, your, your brand is, is torn apart.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:49]:
Yeah, that's too bad.

Richard Campbell [02:17:51]:
Yeah, it happens.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:53]:
Yep. All right, so that's that.

Mikah Sargent [02:17:55]:
Let's head back to the show and to the back of the book.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:01]:
Indeed.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:03]:
Time for the tips and picks of the week, and up first, it's time for some apps.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:08]:
Yeah, so I usually have a tip and an app pick, but I just went with 2, uh, app picks this week because I think these are both useful. Talaria is actually, it's a vibe-coded Notion replacement. It started—

Richard Campbell [02:18:20]:
Yikes.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:21]:
What?

Richard Campbell [02:18:22]:
I said yikes.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:23]:
Oh, okay. That's good. It's what many people who are looking to get off Notion are looking for, meaning it writes files to the file system, they're Markdown. You can sync it to any cloud service you want, thus it will be available offline everywhere you are. It's not a proprietary thing up in the cloud where you don't have much control over anything, et cetera, et cetera. This guy has a— his name's Luca Rossi. He has an excellent email newsletter that I get where he talks about this stuff, like how he makes it and what he's doing. And it's actually rather— it's kind of incredible.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:59]:
But when I looked at this last, it was a couple of months ago, and there were just a couple of minor things, and I was like, I'll look at this Yeah. And he just came up with an update. He's bringing the app to mobile. These are still alpha/beta versions, but iPhone and iPad are available now through TestFlight, which is the Apple system for testing those things. And then the Android version is actually up on GitHub, but he's like, this one's not quite ready, but if you want to get it, you can compile it, you can run it. If you want it, you can do it. It's there. So it's happening.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:35]:
And, uh, and because this happened, I went and looked at Tolaria again on Windows, and I was like, oh yeah, actually this works great. So I'm going to look into, uh, whether it makes sense for me to migrate off of Notion to this thing. And so we'll see. That, that won't happen. That's not imminent. But I really do like this app quite a bit. And, um, I don't know why it took me so long to look at it again, but it's great. So that's cool.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:57]:
Um, the other one I mentioned, uh, was released in the past week and is part of this RTX Spark set of documentation and whatever else, and it's Llama Windows. So Llama had a version of their, like a Llama CPP app on the Mac already, but now this version's on Windows. I don't know why they changed the name. This is possibly, you know, I spent a lot of time complaining about how hard this stuff is to get up and running. Mm-hmm. The sense that all of this stuff is actually pretty terrible, this might be one of the better ones, meaning it's somewhat automatic. It does a pretty good job of recommending the right models for whatever it is you're looking for, et cetera. It runs as a tray app in Windows, and then it has an Alt+Space keyboard shortcut to bring up the kind of chat interface.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:47]:
And it is the thing I had been using, I thought, to try to build this next Well, I guess first version of the Notepad app off of that gigantic Quinn model. However, one of the oddities about this app is that if you click away from it, that interactive window goes away. So of course I'm recording a podcast, so I'm not sitting there staring at the thing. So every once in a while I'd look over and maybe the computer went to the lock screen or whatever, so I hit the spacebar, it comes back, But one time I mistakenly clicked outside of it and it disappeared. And I'm like, oh, come on. And then I, I ran, you know, I Alt+Space, bring it back. And like, I noticed like the fans aren't running and I'm like, oh, what did I do? And, um, so during the break I was like, hey, what's going on with this app? So it's, it's, it's, it's typing stuff now. So I can't, it's gonna, it might scroll past this.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:42]:
I just wanna read this if I can. I'm gonna read it verbatim because it's funny. Oh, it's gone. Where is this? Here we go.

Speaker F [02:21:52]:
Paul, you gotta speak into the mic.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:53]:
No, I know. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to get it to the right place. I know. He says, I need to be honest. Nothing has been built. Okay. I just want you guys to understand that this thing ran—

Mikah Sargent [02:22:04]:
Nothing has been built. It's been running forever.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:07]:
And that entire time, the fan was going to town. It was sitting there going the whole time. And so I don't know the amount of time it was running. It wasn't the entire podcast length, but I started it over half an hour before we started. And, um,

Richard Campbell [02:22:21]:
so it's been 3 hours.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:23]:
Yeah, it's done nothing. So now it's like super energized. It's super excited to get this done now. So maybe by next week I'll have— I don't know. Anyway,

Mikah Sargent [02:22:30]:
I need to be honest, nothing has been built.

Richard Campbell [02:22:34]:
I, I just— nothing.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:36]:
I don't like the way AI talks to me. I'm really— I'm just, you know, ah, God, I can't— I couldn't fire you enough. Like, I, I just, I don't, I don't, I just don't understand.

Richard Campbell [02:22:49]:
Cannot fire you enough.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:50]:
This is the perfect bookend for this show, you know? It's perfect. But don't worry, I used a ton of electricity. Anyway, uh, you know, who knows, maybe someday.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:06]:
I wonder what it's been doing this whole time.

Paul Thurrott [02:23:08]:
I, I can't— I, you know, I'll— I don't know. I don't, I don't know.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:13]:
When we see your Instagram and there's just you in front of a bonfire, I'll know. Yeah, what's going on?

Paul Thurrott [02:23:20]:
It's gonna be like that scene from Office Space with the printer, except this will be like an RTX laptop.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:25]:
Oh my goodness.

Paul Thurrott [02:23:26]:
Oh boy.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:28]:
I need to be honest.

Paul Thurrott [02:23:31]:
To be clear, that's the model, not the app. The app's— the app is very good. Um, that's the model. I'm definitely going to look at other models. I mean, I always intended to, but whatever. I— frick's sake.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:44]:
That is—

Paul Thurrott [02:23:45]:
I just— welcome to my— this is my life in a nutshell. If you— my mother came to me this many years ago, 10 years ago or something, and she's like, I'm thinking about learning how computers work. I'm like, Mom, let me tell you something. Don't. Don't. You've gotten through 70-ish years of a life. You didn't need it. You do not want this frustration.

Paul Thurrott [02:24:06]:
If you are looking for something that never works, yes, then please, I can help you with that. But just don't. And this is like— this is that for me, you know? It's unbelievable.

Richard Campbell [02:24:18]:
Nothing done.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:22]:
All right, well, uh, we can at least get something done here. Do you want to tell us about Run As Radio?

Richard Campbell [02:24:30]:
Yeah, uh, in good timing since Microsoft's obviously coming out with new rules, security rules around agents. That's pretty much the show I did this week. This is an interview I did with Will Velita, who is a Microsoft employee. He works on the team that supports some of their biggest customers trying to deploy agent-related stuff. And so we ran down OWASP, which is the security group that does the top 10 for various kinds of security problems, has a list specifically for agent applications. And so we talked through, you know, issues like, uh, memory poisoning and goal hijacking, privilege abuse, and just all of the sorts of things that can go wrong with agents. From an administrator's perspective, it's okay, you guys want this stuff, what do I gotta look out for? And so, you know, there's a ton of links in the show, 'cause Microsoft does have literally toolkits to help you get your hands around what the security risks are gonna be as you start to use AI tools inside of your organization.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:29]:
Nice. All right. Well, definitely check that out, everyone. And then let's hear about this week's brown liquor pick of the week.

Richard Campbell [02:25:41]:
Well, um, Micah, there's something you don't know. I went on a whiskey tour. I did a week on a ship, on a schooner, uh, sailing ship, uh, in the Inner Hebrides around Mull and Islay and Jura. And so in 7 days tasted 40 whiskies.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:59]:
Oh my God.

Richard Campbell [02:26:00]:
And went to— yeah, that was a— I recognized by the second day, no extraneous drinking, no wine, dinner, no drinks in the pub. Like, there's just too many whiskies to try. Like, it was, it was intense. And, uh, the weather was worse than planned, so we actually had to alter our route. And we anchored off of Islay in the Sound of Islay by the Bunahabhain Distillery for a couple of days, and then went by car. We took— we rented all 3 taxis on Islay and took everybody over to a couple of distilleries. But just south of Ardnahoe, of Bunahaven, is the Ardnahoe Distillery, which is the newest distillery on Islay. It's a small island, 3,000 people.

Richard Campbell [02:26:45]:
It's got 9 distilleries that are in operation. There's several more that are not. Ardnahoe is the Gaelic for the height of the hollow. So this was founded by Stuart Laing, and the Laing family is a very famous whiskey family in, uh, in Scotland, going back to a guy named Fred Douglas Laing, who after World War II— he was in the Air Force— he got into the whiskey trade and was part of developing a brand post-World War II called the King of Scots, a whiskey I've actually tried. And by 1948, he realized he was on to something, so he set up the Douglas Laing and Co. company in Glasgow, and their business was blending and exporting whiskey, which was the product popularity at the time. So contacts in other markets, getting whiskey more available to the rest of the world as they're coming out of World War II. Uh, his son Fred Lang is— or his 2 sons, Fred Lang and Stuart Lang, both joined the company in the '70s.

Richard Campbell [02:27:46]:
Uh, Fred Douglas, or really just refer to him as Douglas, insisted that they worked elsewhere in the whiskey business before they came to work for him. And so, uh, um, Fred had been at, um, uh, it was up in the, in the Speyside. Stuart was at Bruichladdich, which another whisky distillery I'll be talking about soon in Islay. And they take over, they're running the company full bore by the 1980s. Uh, actually, Fred and, uh, Douglas Laing passes in, in '84. Uh, by the 1990s, uh, they focus on independent bottling as blending's falling out of favor and single malts becoming much more popular. They just start buying barrels and doing specialty bottlings. In fact, they have one of the most famous independent bottling brands of them all, one called Old Malt Cask.

Richard Campbell [02:28:35]:
And I've even talked about a few of these. They also make Old Particular. And when the peat thing got really big, they made an edition specifically called Big Peat, which was all launched around 2009. which was a blend of Ardbeg and Bowmore and Caol Ila and even some Port Ellen. But mysteriously, there's been no real discussion about this. The company splits in 2013. Uh, the brothers go their separate ways. So Fred actually— Fred Jr.

Richard Campbell [02:29:00]:
brings in his brother— his, his daughter Kara to continue operating Douglas Laing, and Kara had done her time at Morris Bowmore. But Stuart forms a new company called Hunter Laing, And he actually has the old malt casks with him. So they continue to do the bottling and so forth, but apparently he always wanted to make a distillery and actually bought this, the land, uh, the Ardnahoe land in 2015, got plans for construction, spent several million, uh, pounds to build out the distillery that was, uh, started doing distilling in 2018. So very new. Uh, and then they had their showroom open in 2019. So for several years you could tour the distillery, but you couldn't taste their product. Is it, you know, it has to be a minimum of 3 years before it's even allowed to be called whiskey. And generally when you talk about Scottish whiskies, you'll almost never see a whiskey younger than 8 or 10 years.

Richard Campbell [02:29:54]:
That being said, the whiskey I tasted was what they call their inaugural release from 2024, and it actually is labeled as a 5-year-old, which I think is very cool to just have the nerve to go, hey, this is a 5-year-old. And it was, it was young. Like you knew it was young. It, it, it was a little fiery. It was peated heavily. But we're on Islay. What'd you expect? And much more grainy than you expect and oily. Like it was pretty darn good.

Richard Campbell [02:30:26]:
So it's nice that they got an edition out because Stuart Laing, his sons have been running the distillery. Um, Andy and, um, and Peter. And Laing actually passed— Stuart passed this year.

Mikah Sargent [02:30:38]:
Hmm.

Richard Campbell [02:30:39]:
So at least he got to see his dream come true of them actually making a distillery. And you know what's hilarious is Douglas Laing, the, the, the other half of the family, actually in 2019 acquired a distillery, the Strathhurd Distillery. So now both sides of the family own distilleries. So they're all making whiskey now. Anyway, this particular, uh, vintage or this 5-year, again, it's Port Ellen malt, uh, with 40 ppm of peat in it. And they do their own, but they still do their own grinding. So they're buying the, the, uh, grist whole and then grinding themselves in a Vicar's Bobby mill. Uh, the water comes from Loch Ardnahoe, hence the name.

Richard Campbell [02:31:16]:
And they use a stainless mash tun with a copper top, about 25,000 liters. 4 Oregon pine washbacks of 25,000 liters each with about a 70-hour fermentation. That's nothing outrageous using Maurer yeast. Uh, then they only have one pair of stills. They're both about, uh, the wash still's about 13,000 liters, the spirit still's 10,000, 11,000 liters, made, uh, at Speyside Copperworks. Um, famously famous, uh, still makers in, uh, in Speyside. And their, their stills are not particularly big. They're big, but they're not huge.

Richard Campbell [02:31:47]:
But they have this unusual sort of conical, uh, diamond shape. Uh, they call it a lantern shape. And they literally have one Longest lie arms in the business. These are horizontal lie arms. So as it comes out of the top of the still, it turns, and then it goes straight out for 24 feet. So presumably this is just providing an awful lot of copper contact for the distillate to take the bitterness of the sulfurs out entirely. And then traditional rack houses, so no dirt floor, concrete. Uh, 3-high side racked, pretty normal stuff.

Richard Campbell [02:32:24]:
This particular edition, the inaugural release, is now very hard to find. It's mostly just a collector's edition. It was £70 when it was released. Uh, again, only a 5-year-old aged in ex-bourbon and Oloroso sherry casks. And for a small new distillery, you would think they'd only be in Scotland, not widely distributed. You'd be mistaken. They actually have a US distribution branch in And you can go, you can search for this for Ardnahoe Distillery US, and they will ship to you. And they have a few of their newer editions available.

Richard Campbell [02:32:56]:
So this is a whiskey you can try, but probably not the inaugural release. That's just gone rare now.

Mikah Sargent [02:33:05]:
All right. That brings us to the end of—

Paul Thurrott [02:33:08]:
Before we go real quick, my wife did come up with a Theranos cocktail.

Mikah Sargent [02:33:12]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [02:33:13]:
Oh my God.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:14]:
I put it into the Discord if you want to see it.

Mikah Sargent [02:33:16]:
Oh, yay. Let's

Paul Thurrott [02:33:18]:
see. There's some humor in here. I didn't know she was this funny. The base is a mezcal sour centered around Mexican ingredients because Elizabeth Holmes probably wishes she had escaped to Mexico. Mezcal because the smoky flavor brings to mind smoke and mirrors. Bitters because a blood-red drop will top the cocktail. And then as a bonus, by the non-alcoholic ingredients, Alcoholic ingredients at Walgreens as an homage.

Mikah Sargent [02:33:43]:
Oh.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:43]:
Because that was one of the little partnerships they had where supposedly they were gonna have these testing machines.

Mikah Sargent [02:33:50]:
That's fantastic.

Richard Campbell [02:33:52]:
Brilliant.

Mikah Sargent [02:33:53]:
And after you see the film, all I'm going to say— I promise this isn't a spoiler.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:00]:
I don't care about spoilers personally.

Mikah Sargent [02:34:02]:
Okay. Uh, the, the egg white is even more brilliant once you've seen the film.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:08]:
Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah, uh, I think we should do the next podcast like that, um, like that documentary. Like, so I do like this.

Mikah Sargent [02:34:17]:
Yeah. Paul, so what you're saying is your AI, uh, is, is working, or you're saying it is—

Paul Thurrott [02:34:24]:
Everything working.

Mikah Sargent [02:34:26]:
Everything.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:26]:
Is it— Michael, let me tell you something. I've never told a lie once in my life.

Mikah Sargent [02:34:31]:
Are you lying to me now, Paul?

Paul Thurrott [02:34:32]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [02:34:36]:
Yes, I am. Oh, golly. Wow, this was a delight, gentlemen. Thank you so much, uh, for your time today. Thank you to everybody who tuned in today to the show. Uh, we'll be back next week with another episode. Of course, you can get Windows Weekly by heading to twit.tv/ww. Uh, the show publishes every Wednesday, and you can subscribe to it in audio and video formats.

Mikah Sargent [02:35:00]:
I remind you once again to join the club. Paul Thurrott, Do you have anything else you'd like to pitch?

Paul Thurrott [02:35:06]:
Oh, one more thing about RTX Spark. No, I'm just kidding. Um, no, I guess not. Coming up next is the RTX Spark Field Guide, um, which will be like just every page will just say, this page intentionally left blank. Um, uh, it's gonna be, it's gonna be really long though, uh, because it takes a long time.

Mikah Sargent [02:35:26]:
I think you should do, uh, like a, a black box theater thing where you just stand up and you ramble just about nothing, and then you're like, and that was my RTS project.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:35]:
What are you doing? Actually, that's— so Saturday we're going to a Halloween party. I'm going to go as AI, and they're like, they're like, what are you dressed as? I'm like, he just asked me what I'm dressed as. Well, that's a good question. The reason you're asking that question is because I don't appear to be dressed as anything. Here's the thing, I am in fact dressed as something. Have you guessed what it is yet? I'll just, I'll just go on for like 15 minutes.

Mikah Sargent [02:35:54]:
Oh my God. And

Richard Campbell [02:35:55]:
then you, and you finish, I have to be honest with you, I didn't dress at all.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:58]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:35:59]:
Yes. Yes. All right.

Paul Thurrott [02:36:01]:
Let me be honest. I, yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:36:03]:
Oh golly. Uh, anything else from you, Richard?

Richard Campbell [02:36:06]:
I'm good. Uh, this weekend I'm on another whiskey tasting cuz it's, you know, it's been a couple of weeks. I might as well have done that. So that's sure to produce something odd, uh, for next week's show. And then on the, and then I'm over to my friend Remy's Place in Alkmaar, the guy who bought his favorite whiskey shop when the owner wanted to retire. So that's going to lead to more whiskey. So the whiskey tour whiskeys are going to have to be delayed for a few weeks now, but there are many more to come.

Mikah Sargent [02:36:34]:
Wowza. All right, well, uh, you can find me at chihuahua.coffee, C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active on.

Paul Thurrott [02:36:42]:
That didn't exactly roll off the tongue there. What was that?

Mikah Sargent [02:36:44]:
Chihuahua.coffee. Okay. And I'll be back next week. Thank you, everyone, and goodbye.