Windows Weekly 1009 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott is here. Richard Campbell has the day off. We have lots to talk about, including more than 1,000 fixes in the Patch Tuesday yesterday. Yes, they keep on coming. Paul's working with AI and, uh, he has lots of questions. Maybe we'll have some answers. Plus, we'll talk about— well, Kevin calls it the best game of all time, and it's not on the Xbox.

Leo Laporte [00:00:23]:
Windows Weekly is next.

TWiT.tv [00:00:28]:
Podcasts you love.

TWiT.tv [00:00:29]:
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte [00:00:32]:
This is TWiT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott, episode 1009, recorded Wednesday, November 11th, 2026. Creamy nougat center. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, yes, I'm back with a little bit of a cold. Stand back, 'cause it is a cold from Indonesia, which is a different animal. Normally we would have Richard Campbell, but he is stuck in a plane over Prague.

TWiT.tv [00:01:06]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:01:07]:
And so he's not joining us, but good news, it's just me and Paul, and I kinda like those shows. Don't tell Richard, but this is how Windows Weekly started. Paul Thurrott is here from Thurrott.com. And his books are at leanpub.com. And it used to be in the early days, for the first many years, it was just me and Paul talking. And I enjoyed those times.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:24]:
Just audio only for a couple of years, I think.

Leo Laporte [00:01:28]:
That's right, there was no pictures. And then—

Paul Thurrott [00:01:29]:
I remember you saying, hey, we're looking at doing video. And I was like, oh no.

Leo Laporte [00:01:34]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:34]:
You know, like, oh no.

Leo Laporte [00:01:36]:
People said, my, those are 2 very handsome fellows. I did not expect that, they said.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:40]:
I don't even think our wives said that. But you know what? It's fine.

Leo Laporte [00:01:45]:
Uh, happy Veterans Day, and thank you to all who served.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:49]:
Welcome back, by the way.

Leo Laporte [00:01:50]:
And who are serving today. We are very grateful to you. We appreciate it. Um, and on 11/11, we are going to talk about Patch Toots Day, which was last— which yesterday, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:03]:
Oh, hold on, hold on one second. You've just been away for like—

Leo Laporte [00:02:05]:
Hold on.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:05]:
3 months. What, what happened?

Leo Laporte [00:02:08]:
I went to, uh, Southeast Asia.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:11]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:02:12]:
Which is a hike, a lot of flying.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:15]:
By the way, um, I thought we're out one night, my wife and I, when I'm looking at your wife's photos on Instagram probably, and I was— I looked at Stephanie and I said, I don't know why she's posting photos of Katy Perry. What is this? And then I realized it was like an Indonesian, you know, outfit or so. I don't know, like,

Leo Laporte [00:02:34]:
it looked like the Apsara dancers are— do look a little bit like Katy Perry. Yes, come to think of it. It was, it was amazing. It was grueling. Yeah, we saw an awful lot of things in a very short period of time, right? But, uh, I really, I really enjoyed it.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:50]:
When you moved around, did you fly from place to place? Is that how you got around?

Leo Laporte [00:02:54]:
Yeah, so I know nobody wants to hear this, but I'll give you the brief. We flew to Bangkok, which is— you have to fly to Taiwan and then from Taiwan to Bangkok. So that's about, I don't know, 8 hours.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:05]:
Bangkok, is that still called Thailand or did they change the name of that?

Leo Laporte [00:03:08]:
It's still called— well, the real name for Bangkok is too long. I don't even remember it. Yeah. Thailand has its own name, but we here in America, we decided we don't want to call it by its real name, just like we don't call Deutschland Deutschland. We call it Germany. So we call it Bangkok, Thailand. Flew there, uh, we're very jet-lagged and groggy. We, we get out of the plane, go to the hotel, and they say, hey, let's go on a tuk-tuk ride.

Leo Laporte [00:03:31]:
So—

Paul Thurrott [00:03:33]:
I'm imagining the snow creature from the beginning of Empire Strikes Back.

Leo Laporte [00:03:36]:
Oh my God, the tuk-tuks are little motorcycle They're basically, you know, like pedicabs, except instead of somebody pulling you with a bicycle, they're on motorcycles.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:45]:
Like a motorcycle pedicab.

Leo Laporte [00:03:46]:
Yeah, it's a motorcycle pedicab. And, you know, there was a group of us, so we had a tuk-tuk caravan, went downtown to Bangkok, and that was kind of a scene and interesting. Came back, then the next day get on another plane because that's not enough. We need more flying, and we fly to Cambodia.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:05]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:04:06]:
Because I wanted to see the largest temple complex in the world. Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat, which is 1,000 years old and is really remarkable. And we saw a number of temples there and spent a few days in Bangkok, came back, then sailed down to Malaysia, to Singapore. I love Singapore. Singapore is beautiful. Went to Java, ended up in Bali.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:29]:
Don't break a law in Singapore though, man. You'll never—

Leo Laporte [00:04:31]:
Oh, I know. No chewing gum.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:33]:
That's pretty serious.

Leo Laporte [00:04:34]:
And anything more than 15 grams of narcotics, And you're gonna get hung. Forget caning, you're gonna get hung. But it's clean, it's safe, there's no graffiti, there's no chewing gum on the sidewalk.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:48]:
Yeah, you know why? Because you get hung. I mean, yeah, they don't screw around. That's crazy.

Leo Laporte [00:04:58]:
But it's an amazing city. You feel like you're in a city of the future with a monorail and we You know, we did a cable car over the— it's really fun. Anyway, loved that. But my— I think my favorite was Bali. We ended up, uh, with 3 days in Bali. And

Paul Thurrott [00:05:11]:
that's a mostly beach type situation?

Leo Laporte [00:05:13]:
We did not go to the beach. We went inland to Ubud, which Burke told us to go to, and a, um, a, a hotel, the kind of resort hotel in the rice fields. It's just beautiful, very peaceful and quiet. Bali can be kind of like Cabo, you know, where there's parasailors and jet skiers and it's crazy. But we went inland where it was quiet and calm. and very, uh, it's almost psychedelically religious, psychedelically spiritual. Their art is psychedelic. I said, do you guys use drugs of some kind?

Paul Thurrott [00:05:45]:
They're like all refugees from Singapore.

Leo Laporte [00:05:47]:
No. Yeah, maybe. No, it's beautiful. And it's just— and the people are so spiritual and lovely. And I got this— this is a batik shirt I got in the—

Paul Thurrott [00:05:56]:
yeah,

Leo Laporte [00:05:56]:
in Bali. I really enjoyed it. So we had a wonderful time. It was exhausting.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:01]:
Yeah,

Leo Laporte [00:06:01]:
I'm still a little jet-lagged, and I did pick up a cold because we were with a bunch of, uh, people who got sick, and then we all got sick.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:09]:
I'd be sick for a week from that kind of travel. Yeah, no doubt about it.

Leo Laporte [00:06:12]:
Yeah, yeah, it was amazing. Really enjoyed it.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:14]:
Yeah, good. Yeah, well, it looked like a— I mean, from what I could see from afar, it looked awesome.

Leo Laporte [00:06:19]:
Yeah, I don't do social media so much, so Lisa— Lisa is the poster for the two of us. Um, yeah, she posted a lot of stuff. So, uh, You're back in Mexico City, I think. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:29]:
Yep. Yeah. One more. We'll be here next week and then back home for the holidays.

Leo Laporte [00:06:33]:
Okay. Now, can we talk about Windows, Paul?

Paul Thurrott [00:06:37]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:06:39]:
If you insist.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:42]:
God, you're always like on me about this Windows thing.

Leo Laporte [00:06:44]:
What's the latest? Yeah. Patch Tuesday, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:06:51]:
Patch Tuesday was, yes.

Leo Laporte [00:06:52]:
Every Patch Tuesday over the last 3 months has been increasing number of flaws, like Over 1,000 last time. How many this, this time?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:00]:
So actually, that— I, I didn't see a number for that this time. So let me see. Hmm, that's a good question.

Leo Laporte [00:07:05]:
Because Steve Gibson's, uh, opinion is it will go up, up, up, up, and then it'll start going down, down, down as they fix everything.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:12]:
That's the hope.

Leo Laporte [00:07:13]:
That's the hope, that doesn't keep going up, that it will eventually— everything will be fixed and reliable.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:18]:
So, that's an interesting question. I woke up, uh, yesterday, and in a rare burst of self-awareness of what you want to— or memory. I texted the guy I work with. I'm like, hey, it's kind of random, but I, I remembered it's Patch Tuesday. Like, I never remember that. It's always like a surprise when it happens.

Leo Laporte [00:07:35]:
Second Tuesday of the month, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:37]:
Yep. Even though— right, even though it's exactly the same Tuesday every month. Um, so according to Krebs on Security, it was almost 1,100 security vulnerabilities.

Leo Laporte [00:07:46]:
Okay, still going up, in other words. Although it's—

Paul Thurrott [00:07:48]:
yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:07:48]:
Is this flat towing?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:49]:
Yeah, not as fast. Well, but you know what though? I— well, now I see another report that says actually it was 1,235. So, um, I guess it depends on how you count it.

Leo Laporte [00:07:59]:
The register says 1,094, so it's just—

Paul Thurrott [00:08:01]:
yeah, I bet they're— yeah, that's probably the same number that Krebs used. I, I bet the other one I'm seeing might include like, uh, Edge vulnerabilities. You know,

Leo Laporte [00:08:09]:
there was a zero-day with Outlook, but it wasn't like a— it was only a 6.5 out of 10. CVSS.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:17]:
Oh, look, it's always underperforming.

Leo Laporte [00:08:20]:
Um, uh,

Paul Thurrott [00:08:21]:
it's

Leo Laporte [00:08:22]:
the second month of more than 1,000 CVEs, but October was 1,474. So this is— oh, it is starting to go down.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:30]:
Well, that doesn't— I mean, it could go up again, right? I mean, we'll see. I, I think we need to see a long-term picture here. I don't, uh, it's not going to go down to the single digits anytime soon.

Leo Laporte [00:08:39]:
So— And only one active zero-day. Which is a big improvement, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:08:44]:
For Windows, you know, not too bad. Um, I don't know, this is kind of a weird thing. Uh, but yeah, so I guess it could be worse, whatever. Um, the other thing that's notable about Patch Tuesdays this year is that some months have been really heavy with new features and some months haven't. Um, you know, we're doing that pain points thing, fixing all the problems, bringing back features that people want, etc., etc. I don't know why I said we, I'm not doing it, but Microsoft is. And this is one of the lighter months is the way I would say it. Um, so the way things are right now is 25 and 26H2 are both getting the same fixes.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:21]:
26H1 is a month behind essentially, still is. You know, we don't know what the outcome is there. My guess is they will either have an early release of 27H2 or a separate release of 27H1 or something that will update those computers or I'm kind of hoping they just put them all on the same track by next year. We'll see. But I think you missed this. But one of the things that surprised me a little bit about the RTX Spark computers, there's 2 big things along these lines, is that they're on 26H1. They're not on 26H2, which is very strange.

Leo Laporte [00:09:57]:
And you're not getting the update.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:00]:
You don't get the latest stuff. You get it like a month later. The other thing, and this is contrary to what I was told when they first launched this platform, is, and this is true to this day, It doesn't have any of the Copilot+PC features.

Leo Laporte [00:10:12]:
Oh, that's really surprising. Yeah. Because it's an AI PC.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:15]:
Well, yeah. And the way this works is if you go into Device Manager, you'll see something called NVIDIA NPU. And what it really is is 2 of the cores on the SoC. I think it's 2 cores. It could be some number of cores, but they're some of the high-efficiency cores that are used to create what is essentially a virtual NPU. It does meet the Copilot+PC specs. You should have those features, but we do not have them. That's weird.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:42]:
And I don't know why. And I was just finishing up my review of the first of those laptops this morning, and I was looking at this, and this thing doesn't even have like Windows Studio Effects, which is the most basic form of NPU functionality or whatever. It's kind of disappointing. I don't know what's going on there. Anyway.

Leo Laporte [00:11:02]:
Well, I think it's important to say this is just a different beast. It's not a Windows computer as like you're used to it.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:08]:
Well, right.

Leo Laporte [00:11:09]:
It costs a lot more, right? It's not cheap either.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:11]:
It does cost a lot more. The weird— so I mentioned the 2 things that were surprising to me. I mean, one thing I noticed back in early September when I first saw these things at IFA was they are in some sense just computers. You know, you bring this thing up, it's just, it's Windows. It's the same Windows. You could get Home or Pro. It doesn't, you know, depending on what you buy, you go through the same setup process. It sort of looks and works and runs exactly like Windows.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:40]:
The architecture is obviously completely different underneath, but day to day, you wouldn't really notice a difference. And if you want to do the local AI stuff, which we will talk about finally, you're on your own. There's nothing in the system that can help you with this at all. Like, it's kind of weird for something that we've been anticipating for a couple years, and now they, you know, they announced in May or June or whatever it was, so we've known for months it was coming. It feels like they just rushed it out the door somehow, but, you know, I'm sure it will get better. Um, okay, so, uh, the Patch Tuesday updates, nothing major, um, and that's especially true for 26. H1, which again is Snapdragon X2 or NVIDIA RTX Spark-based computers. This is just some small features they added in Patch Tuesday last month for everyone else.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:35]:
So you could remap the Copilot key to a couple more keys. I don't know why, just open it up to anything, please. Um, a couple of additional touchpad gestures, um, which I guess would be supported on those computers, and then small improvements across the board. There's nothing major. And then For everyone else, for most people, right? The vast majority. We talked about this a little bit last week, but Microsoft Edge has this— is Microsoft's using this new accelerated app launch technology, and Edge is the first victim or patient or whatever it is. And so it launches a lot quicker. So if you wanna get to that horribleness quicker, that's good.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:14]:
New context menus, which are now customizable, which I'm actually super excited about. I just got that on a laptop One laptop. One laptop. Um, so I'll have to use that for Hands on Windows, I think, when I do that tomorrow. I think it's tomorrow. Um, some Xbox mode improvements, uh, Phone Link improvements, including in Start where you can see more of the recent messages and other notifications, etc., etc. So from a, I don't know, end-user feature perspective, I'd say the big one there is the customizable context menu in File Explorer, but Not a huge deal.

Leo Laporte [00:13:49]:
It seems— is this— did in the past, has Windows added features this rapidly, or is this something— it feels like this is like there's new features every month now,

Paul Thurrott [00:14:00]:
right? So is that unusual? Not anymore. Now it's just— No, I know, not

Leo Laporte [00:14:04]:
anymore, but

Paul Thurrott [00:14:05]:
it's like cancer, Leo. You get used to it. It's like, um, no, I— this started in after Windows 8 shipped. And it was obviously hated by everybody. All that team, that team basically all left for the most part. A couple of them stuck around. They went to what they called at the time a rapid release model. And this is when they put out like 8.1 within several months.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:27]:
Yeah. They put out 8.1.1, 8.1 whatever, brought back the Start menu. You know, they over— they kind of fixed it quick. And so with Windows 10, they just kind of continued this model. They, at that, and then they moved it to Windows as a Service, right? Different names, but same thing. It's just rapid release of new features and functionality. But with Windows 11, where we call it, or we did call it continuous innovation, which is the worst of those terms, yeah, in any given year, you could get new features every month. And this is the way it's been.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:00]:
And it's kind of, you know, I will say the one big difference this year is that most of the new features we've gotten are actually highly anticipated and desired because they're Listening to feedback and, you know, letting you move the start, you know, the taskbar around and customize the Start menu and to a fairly infinite degree or whatever. Fixing Windows Search, awesome, you know. They're fixing all the slow, you know, the slow kind of web-based interfaces that are jammed everywhere in Windows and stuff. So yeah, it's, it's weird and it's not necessarily ideal, but then again, after years of kind of neglect and abuse, This year's been pretty good, frankly, for, you know, just getting stuff fixed.

Leo Laporte [00:15:39]:
Is it— does enterprise like this though? I mean, I always got the impression enterprise doesn't want things to change, that they—

Paul Thurrott [00:15:44]:
No, they don't want anything to change. So, I mean, so I glossed over— actually, I didn't gloss over, I skipped it. Um, one of the, the biggest changes that's happened in the Windows 11 timeframe was, I guess it would've been 23H2. This was— yeah, because 2023, they announced Copilot. Well, originally it wasn't called that, but they announced what became Copilot. And then they said, look, we're gonna have a version of Windows. They said at Build that year, they tested it in the Insider Program that summer. And normally at that time, the course of action would've been, this will go into, I guess it would, I'm sorry, that would've been 24H2, but 2023, it would've become part of Windows 11 version 24H2.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:26]:
That meant that enterprises could've skipped over it for a year. So what they did was the month before that was released, they shipped all of the stuff that was in 24H2 except for one feature as part of a normal monthly update like it was nothing. And everyone got Copilot because that way enterprises couldn't skip it. And nobody was happy about that. But, but that set the stage for the subsequent 3 years now because ever since then we've been getting major features whenever, you know, it's just the way it works. So. I guess from that perspective it kind of worked. I don't know, like, I don't know, they seem like they're okay with it.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:04]:
I don't know, but it's very strange, or it's just normal now. I don't know, it's just the way it is.

Leo Laporte [00:17:11]:
There's no enterprise SKU where you just don't get any of these features. That's not—

Paul Thurrott [00:17:15]:
Um, there is an enterprise SKU, um, and then some other SKUs that fall into this category, but you still don't— I mean,

Leo Laporte [00:17:23]:
well, and also if you're in a, you know, the IT department, your users are coming to you saying, hey, I just got this at home. Why don't I have it here? I want to move the taskbar.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:30]:
Yeah, there's no— yeah, I know this, this has been the eternal battle between Microsoft and the enterprise, you know, their biggest and most important customer who doesn't want anything to ever change. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:17:40]:
Um, but they'd like it to be Windows 2000 again.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:44]:
Yeah, I, I think there'd be some support for that. But yeah, I don't know, it's just the way it is.

Leo Laporte [00:17:49]:
It's just the way it is.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:50]:
It's a bizarre world, but

Leo Laporte [00:17:51]:
just the way it is. Yeah, I'm really wondering if the RTX Sparks weren't a— I mentioned this before— a deal, a side deal between NVIDIA and Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:02]:
So yeah, so

Leo Laporte [00:18:04]:
that's why they're so different, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:18:06]:
You'll recall that because there have been reports about this, it's, it's never really been explicitly confirmed, but there was obviously a deal between Qualcomm and Microsoft that they would have a certain amount of time in market before anything else could come in.

Leo Laporte [00:18:20]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:21]:
And it got extended, obviously. Um, they got to do Copilot plus PC first. The other guys showed up, you know, months later in that case. But, um, I, I really— I— this I don't know for a fact. I mean, this is conjecture. I wouldn't call it like a conspiracy theory, but I'll just say educated guess based on how well I know these companies. It's pretty clear that, um, Snapdragon chips were not working. And this thing was failing.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:49]:
And the only way to save it was for Qualcomm to buy an outside company, Nuvia, which at the time was developing data center chips.

Leo Laporte [00:18:55]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:55]:
That had awesome CPU and GPU performance and good NPUs, et cetera. And I didn't understand why Qualcomm entered this market in the first place. They sell to a market that sells in the billions, and now you want to sell to a market that sells in the hundreds of millions at best, but you're gonna be 1 to 5% of that market. So you're never— it's never gonna make sense. It's very clear to me that Microsoft paid them to do this. I think Microsoft, as part of this agreement, either paid them or helped pay them or did whatever to help them. The Nuvia thing happened. Microsoft invested a lot of money fixing the architectural parts of Windows on ARM around, you know, the Prism emulator especially, but also, you know, going from 32 to 64-bit and all that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:41]:
And then having cross-compiler code. We can have an .exe that has some native x64 code and some native ARM code, et cetera, et cetera. When you look at this market, they're like, why would this company have gone to so much time and effort and spent so much money to do this? It doesn't amount to anything really. And I think the answer is Microsoft. They pay it. And so now you look at—

Leo Laporte [00:20:05]:
But it also forks Windows in a way, doesn't it?

Paul Thurrott [00:20:07]:
Oh yeah, yeah, horribly. Yeah. This is a big problem because we already have, think back, uh, 20, 25 years, my, uh, Steve Jobs standing on stage, or that, that French guy, remember he used to run macOS development? He was such a jerk.

Leo Laporte [00:20:22]:
Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:23]:
He was like, oh, you're making fun of, you know, like Redmond start your photocopiers, that guy. Yeah, yeah. Um, so they, at that time, Microsoft had—

Leo Laporte [00:20:32]:
No,

Paul Thurrott [00:20:33]:
no, no, it was the more recent— no, he was the guy who came from NeXT. He was like, um, the— this was early 2000s, like, uh, I can't think of his name. I can't remember, but I mean, look, some of the criticisms were valid for sure. And one of them was that Microsoft, because this had worked so well in Office, had so many Windows SKUs. So they had, you know, for Windows Vista, starting with Windows Vista, had, you know, Starter— well, Starter Edition eventually, but they had like Home, Home Premium, you know, they had like Business, they had Ultimate Edition, they had all these different versions. And they were all like, they weren't even like a straight line with like features. They were like up and down, like, This one had some stuff over here, but this one didn't have down here. It was just really stupid.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:13]:
And now, so we've cut, you know, we have Home and Pro and then of course the whatever enterprise SKUs and so forth. But Copilot+ PC introduces this new set of stuff that's outside of Home and Pro. Like you could get a Copilot+ PC with one of 3 architectures, or well, one of 2 architectures with 3 chipmakers. 3 chipmakers. a set of functionality that does not exist in Home or Pro, but does exist if you have a Copilot Plus PC, like whatever it is. And it's like, okay, that's confusing. And then RTX Spark shows up and you're like, oh, here we go. And like, what is this? And the thing that's unique about this one is there's only one architecture and it's only one company.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:52]:
It's, you know, an ARM-based CPU, but it's a Blackwell, you know, NVIDIA GPU, which is pretty awesome. And It gives you that thing which the one thing that Windows on ARM does not have, which is the ability to play lots of games at really high frame rates and really high graphical quality. And that is, it's awesome. You know, it's not $7,000 awesome, but it's—

Leo Laporte [00:22:15]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:16]:
But it is good. You know, it's—

Leo Laporte [00:22:18]:
But everything costs that much now. I mean,

Paul Thurrott [00:22:20]:
yeah. I mean, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:22:22]:
Everything's gone up.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:23]:
Yeah. These things are the RTX Spark computers are roughly, there are exceptions to this, but I'm gonna say $3,000 to $7,000 depending on the configuration. I mean, you could get one for high or low $2,000s if you tried.

Leo Laporte [00:22:35]:
That's because of the RAM. Yeah, and the GB10 GPU.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:39]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:22:40]:
I mean, a Spark— when I bought my Sparks, and I bought them at not the bottom, they started at $4,000 something.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:46]:
Yeah,

Leo Laporte [00:22:46]:
uh, I bought 2 Sparks at I think $4,800 or $4,600. Now they're $7,000 just for the Sparks. each. So all of this stuff has gotten very expensive.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:58]:
But the Sparks you buy, the Sparks you're talking about, TGX Spark, right? Yeah, the original video. It's a, it's a box. It's not a laptop.

Leo Laporte [00:23:05]:
No, you could run it. I mean, it has, it's, it has Linux. You could run it as a computer. And I think most—

Paul Thurrott [00:23:09]:
No, no, but I mean, but it's not a portable computer.

Leo Laporte [00:23:11]:
Oh, it's a box.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:12]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is—

Leo Laporte [00:23:13]:
And there are, there are RTX Sparks boxes too, right? They're not just laptops.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:19]:
There's a couple of them, although to my knowledge None of them are being sold at this moment. Oh, that's interesting. They announced at least 2 of them. I haven't seen one yet, but it's very clear to me that for local AI, if you're gonna do, well, local agents, like agents, like there should be a box. There should be an always-on 24/7 box.

Leo Laporte [00:23:40]:
Yeah, that's my opinion. You should have a server.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:41]:
Having a laptop doesn't make a lot of sense.

Leo Laporte [00:23:43]:
No, and then you have a laptop which is like my X1 Carbon, which is not running AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:48]:
Yeah, it's just an interface. And then like, who cares? Exactly. You're just a front end to it. And that's the right way to do this, very clearly.

Leo Laporte [00:23:54]:
I mean, as I was traveling in Southeast Asia, I was using my boxes here at home.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:59]:
You could have done it probably from an iPad if you had to.

Leo Laporte [00:24:01]:
From anywhere. I was doing it from an iPad. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:04]:
Yeah. That's ideal. That's really good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:24:09]:
I don't understand quite the laptop idea.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:12]:
I don't either.

Leo Laporte [00:24:14]:
I feel like this is a— they're throwing spaghetti at the wall. This is just like, well, let's see what happens.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:18]:
Well, yeah. But you said— so there's a deal, right? Nvidia and Microsoft separately, and then together probably, saw this threat occurring to both of their business models, which was Apple. And Apple in many ways lucking into an architecture for the Macs that came from the architecture from the phones, where you do want to have unified memory because that makes sense on mobile. And we just never really thought about it this way with PCs, and they just brought it forward. And when they first did it, there were a lot of complaints like, what is this? You can't put like Dedicated graphics, you can't expand the RAM. Well, it turns out this architecture is very good for local AI, and people are snapping up all these Mac Minis and everything. And, um, every— I think every— anyone who knows anything about AI understands, like, okay, look, local AI is never going to be as good as front-end.

Leo Laporte [00:25:06]:
It's always going to be trailing behind.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:09]:
But it will also be good enough for so many things. Most things.

Leo Laporte [00:25:12]:
In 6 months, it's as good as what we have today, is the Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:15]:
And the ideal scenario is going to be this sort of a hybrid AI scenario where you have some kind of a smart orchestrator where you— there's some rules set that you set up or an organization sets up where you're like, look, you're using this stupid thing for everything, but if you have to go to the cloud, this is what we're paying for. Here are the rules. You can't, you can't go beyond these limits or whatever it is. And, you know, whatever, we're getting it by next week. We'll have that. It's fine. Like, this will happen, but But we didn't have this in the Windows side. So Nvidia obviously powers the data center part of this, which is 99-whatever percent of AI right now.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:52]:
So that's awesome for them, but that's going to be temporary. And then Windows is still doing fine. They've ignored it and hurt it for years. It's worked out okay. But now Microsoft is moving on. Microsoft, who has all this infrastructure, wants you to use local and hybrid AI too, to save them money. But what they have is this piece of crap no one wants to use, so they have to fix it. So, and that's why they did this stuff this past year.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:17]:
This— that's why we're getting all these new changes, because they're trying to turn this thing into something people actually want to use. So it benefits everybody. That's great, that's fine. Um, but I— it's weird to me that this thing came to market the way it did with Primarily laptop form factors. I know saying a limit of 128 sounds weird, but you can go to 512 gigabytes of RAM on a Mac if you have to. You would spend 27 grand on that computer, but you can do it if you want. And by the way, you know, the Mac has what I would call true unified memory, meaning that the operating system handles the allocation of RAM and between GPU and CPU or whatever. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:58]:
In Windows, We don't have any way to do that. We have to use the NVIDIA app and then reboot every time we make a change. It's silly. So pretty clearly the next Windows 11 or whatever we call it next year will probably have that built into the system. Hopefully it will actually be dynamic, you know, God forbid. Hopefully we will see an N2X series of chips that has higher RAM limits and faster memory bandwidth. I mean, we'll see, but— Um, I— this— yeah, this feels— it feels vaguely cobbled together.

Leo Laporte [00:27:33]:
Yes, I would agree.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:35]:
I— to be— I just

Leo Laporte [00:27:36]:
want to be clear, spaghetti they're throwing.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:38]:
Yeah, I, I— the, the 3 laptops I have are high-quality premium machines. They're nice. Like, the PC makers have done what they're supposed to do. Like, those are— they're well made. Like, they're nice. The operating system itself is just Windows 11 without Copilot+ PC, which I think is a major downer. And then the point of this is local AI and you're just kind of on your own. It's like, and I could at least, look, maybe I'm an idiot, I don't know, but I've struggled with this in ways I have not struggled with a technological topic in decades.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:15]:
I don't think I've ever struggled this much.

Leo Laporte [00:28:18]:
Well, I got a prediction that's going to throw everything into, uh, and it's after the election, but I thought this was going to happen before the election. And now because of the election, you know, one of the things that happened in elections, uh, at the election is I think 40 of the 41 laws banning data centers passed.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:35]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:28:35]:
Uh, one of the reasons we are in Ramageddon is because these companies have committed memory and chips to these data centers. If they don't get

Paul Thurrott [00:28:46]:
built,

Leo Laporte [00:28:46]:
right? Which it looks like they won't at this point.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:48]:
Yeah, many of them. Yeah, for sure.

Leo Laporte [00:28:50]:
Uh, what happens to all that committed RAM? Suddenly it's on the market. I mean, unless they're going to dump it. I mean, unless they're going to hold it.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:57]:
And there, there, there are reports of companies like Microsoft and, uh, Amazon— well, maybe not Amazon. Well, yeah, but Microsoft definitely. Trying to think who else. Um, there's at least one other company stockpiling GPUs and RAM, right? And, uh, You know, I don't—

Leo Laporte [00:29:12]:
But they're not good in a year because— I was gonna say, these things are—

Paul Thurrott [00:29:15]:
they're not as perishable as, say, like lettuce, but they, they kind of are.

Leo Laporte [00:29:20]:
Almost.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:20]:
I mean, you know, I— yeah, but they are, right? I mean, they're not—

Leo Laporte [00:29:23]:
DDR7 is gonna be here, and, you know, and then you're gonna say, well, I don't want all this DDR5 and 6.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:28]:
So look, there are, there are many, um, examples of this in our industry that date back to Commodore did this in the 1980s. Um, where Apple's done this many times, where you have some stockpile of equipment that's in a warehouse somewhere and someone sees it and works at the company and is like, um, you know, we could sell these things, right? Like, why don't we put them on the market? And they're like, no, no, no, you don't understand. If we put these on the market, we have to write them off at their— because we've paid for them at whatever value, and we will now lose money this quarter because of that. We can't do that. And, um, I'm worried that that's going to be the outcome here. Can you imagine? We've been praying for more RAM and more whatever for, you know, years now. It's sitting there, it's not being used, and they're like, yeah, we're not releasing this to the world. I mean, we're not going to find out about it at that time.

Leo Laporte [00:30:18]:
No, we'll find out later that there's a warehouse.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:21]:
Yeah, we'll discover later. It's like, oh, remember that time you had to buy an 8 gig, uh, you know, Windows PC because all of a sudden you look like—

Leo Laporte [00:30:27]:
well, there's incentives. They want to keep the— certainly RAM manufacturers don't want the price to Yeah. To bottom out again. RAM is very cyclical. The prices go up and down and up and down.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:38]:
Yeah. I mean, look, this is not my world, but obviously you could sell a few things at a high cost. You could sell many things at a low cost. Depending on the product, there's some version where either one of those makes more sense than the other maybe. I don't know. But the problem here is a little bit different because those things have already been paid for. And that's what creates this problem. They were paid for at whatever level.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:00]:
So if a Micron or whatever RAM company could do great even at lower prices, that's one thing. But the problem is no one's going to buy their RAM at any price if Microsoft dumps all the RAM they bought, takes a huge write-off, and floods the market with RAM that they never used. There's no good outcome here. It's a very strange—

Leo Laporte [00:31:24]:
Especially for people who spent a lot $20,000 on a Mac and then it goes down to $10,000 in 3 months, they're not going to be happy.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:33]:
Yeah. I mean, hopefully you bought that thing because you needed it right then and you are using the heck out of it and maybe it's okay.

Leo Laporte [00:31:38]:
Well, that's why I'm mentioning this because I think people should understand. Yes, exactly. If you need it now, buy it now. But I just— if you don't build all those data centers, what happens to all that hardware that was committed to them?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:53]:
The biggest problem I have with them not building data centers is that I was relying on those being trampoline parks 10 years down the road. And I just don't understand where—

Leo Laporte [00:32:03]:
Or Spirit Halloween shops.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:04]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:32:05]:
We need more of those.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:06]:
The world's biggest Spirit Halloween shop. It's like this cavernous Rhode Island-sized building. What is this thing?

Leo Laporte [00:32:14]:
There's more costumes.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:15]:
I need a goblin mask. It's like, all right, walk 2 miles in that direction, take a left,

Leo Laporte [00:32:19]:
Here's a

Paul Thurrott [00:32:19]:
golf cart. Yep. That's crazy, right? Like,

Leo Laporte [00:32:23]:
I— wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:24]:
Yeah, I don't know. So we'll see what happens. But this is— it's a bizarre world we live in.

Leo Laporte [00:32:30]:
It is. And it's very unpredictable. And because it's moving so fast, I think it's even harder to, uh, to predict what's going to happen.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:36]:
Exactly right. And, and you will— with some AI stuff we're going to talk about later, which is a great example of this, like, um, a lot of people have opinions about how this will or not— will not turn out, or, you know, the bubble bursts and the world explodes and we've hurl into the sun or our economy dies. We don't have any retirement savings, whatever it is. Whatever your prediction was for what might happen with AI, some stuff has happened in the past week. I don't think anyone saw it.

Leo Laporte [00:33:01]:
No, no one saw the Chinese spy and Jensen Huang. That throws a whole monkey wrench into a lot of things.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:08]:
It's like, wait, what? The one adult in this area is like, what's happening? I mean, it's crazy, but that's—

Leo Laporte [00:33:14]:
It is crazy. It is crazy.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:16]:
I don't— interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:33:17]:
You couldn't— this was— we're going to talk to Daniel Suarez tomorrow. He's got a new novel.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:22]:
But that guy's screwed because he comes up with all these great ideas, and I just— I'm sorry, but reality has just surpassed him.

Leo Laporte [00:33:28]:
Like, that's what I'm gonna ask him. I say,

Paul Thurrott [00:33:29]:
like, I don't know how you— how do you fix this?

Leo Laporte [00:33:30]:
He predicted everything that's happening now, but what do you do next?

Paul Thurrott [00:33:34]:
Right, right, right.

Leo Laporte [00:33:36]:
His new novel apparently is about billionaires living in a bunker.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:39]:
Perfect, right? Right. All right,

Leo Laporte [00:33:42]:
let's take a little break. And on that note,

Paul Thurrott [00:33:46]:
yes,

Leo Laporte [00:33:46]:
and we'll have more to talk about. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott. Richard is off today because he got stuck in the air trying to get to Prague.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:56]:
Had some flight issues.

Leo Laporte [00:33:58]:
Which does happen.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:00]:
I'm surprised it doesn't happen more, honestly. He travels so much.

Leo Laporte [00:34:02]:
Yeah, our flights were on time the whole way. Uh, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 flights, and all of them on time and easy. It was a little Turbulent flying home. That's scary. You know, if you don't— I don't want to think about it.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:16]:
Especially like in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Leo Laporte [00:34:17]:
The middle of the Pacific. There's nothing nearby.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:20]:
Roughly the size of a data center. Um, yeah, you don't want that over— well, yeah, what's worse? I don't know. I don't know. Like, I guess it doesn't matter where you are. Like, what, what would you like to be over?

Leo Laporte [00:34:31]:
What happens if the wing falls off here?

Paul Thurrott [00:34:34]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:34:35]:
You know, I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:36]:
Maybe you turn this thing into a giant catamaran. I don't know. Like, I— it's—

Leo Laporte [00:34:40]:
I don't know, but you just cross your fingers. You try not to think about it. You go to sleep.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:45]:
You have to, you have to rely on whoever's piloting this thing.

Leo Laporte [00:34:49]:
It's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:49]:
You know what,

Leo Laporte [00:34:50]:
if

Paul Thurrott [00:34:50]:
you think about it, these guys, they're all experts, right?

Leo Laporte [00:34:52]:
Like, we live in a weird world where you can get in a giant aluminum tube,

Paul Thurrott [00:34:57]:
right,

Leo Laporte [00:34:57]:
and fly at 700 miles an hour across an ocean. Thousands of miles across an ocean.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:03]:
Oh, while connected to the internet. And you're probably playing with your AI thing back in California. Yeah. And yeah, this— we live in miraculous times on some level.

Leo Laporte [00:35:10]:
Unfortunately, no. I was on EVA, the Taiwanese guys who decided we're going to use the Panasonic internet, which is nonfunctional.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:19]:
What do they send, telegrams? What do you mean?

Leo Laporte [00:35:21]:
Yeah, I know. It was not good. And everybody who has Starlink, you know, Starlink's the one on the— if you go on United or any of the planes that have Starlink, man, that's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:30]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:35:31]:
All right, we will pay— we will take a break. We were not on that flight, but it's okay because I, I watched some movies. I ate about 8 meals. They kept feeding us,

Paul Thurrott [00:35:40]:
right? I

Leo Laporte [00:35:40]:
said, it's 8 AM and you're feeding me spaghetti?

Paul Thurrott [00:35:42]:
I do this all the time. Like, we eat breakfast in the airport, they serve us breakfast on the plane, then we land and I'm like, I'm starving.

Leo Laporte [00:35:48]:
I want another breakfast.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:49]:
You know, like, I've been sitting on my butt for 4 and a half hours and I'm starving.

Leo Laporte [00:35:52]:
No, used no calories.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:54]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:35:56]:
Oh, all right. And now it's time for our annual Attempt to pronounce Clipchamp. Clipchamp. Um, Clipchamp. Clipchamp. Clipchamp. Clipchamp.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:11]:
So,

Leo Laporte [00:36:12]:
um, did you see there's a way to predict if somebody's gonna have Alzheimer's? They give them— they put all these sensors on their mouth and they give them tongue twisters.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:23]:
Oh,

Leo Laporte [00:36:23]:
and then apparently the AI can say, oh yeah, this, this person is on the downhill side.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:28]:
Yeah, I'm definitely heading, sloping toward that. But, uh,

Leo Laporte [00:36:32]:
Clipchamp.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:33]:
Clipchamp. I could do Clipchamp.

Leo Laporte [00:36:34]:
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:37]:
Yeah, I'm just saying. Trouble with that, probably. Uh, so, uh, I'm losing track of stuff, like when this happened, because Alzheimer's. Um, but sometime a month or so ago, we had that, um, Artcraft, uh, company, which is—

Leo Laporte [00:36:52]:
Oh yeah, the AI made Adobe stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:56]:
Which is amazing. And I, I said Have you been using it? Yeah, so I've been using, um, it's called, uh, what's it called? It's right where it's my— what is it called? Something craft, uh, PhotoCraft, which is their Photoshop clone. Every day, like, it works great for what I do, right? Um, I was using Clipchamp to put a video up, uh, on YouTube, and I noticed they do 4K upscaling now in the app, which is like, it's like awesome. And, um, I was like, wait, you know, I, I use Clipchamp because 2 or 3 years ago, whenever it was, I was using Premiere Elements, um, and kept running into problems. Like, I, I figured out, like, I could edit the videos and put them together, but when I went to export, like, it would always fail. And, uh, it had something to do with the hardware configuration or something to do with, like, GPU support or something like that. And, um, and it just happened to be like, that was the year Microsoft bought Clipchamp. And so I looked at it and I was like, oh, this thing is awesome, you know, and it's gotten better and better over time.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:55]:
Um, if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, you get all the Pro features, whatever they were called, and, uh, you can use your OneDrive storage to store all the assets, and you can access the projects from any computer. It's really nice. But I was like, you know, maybe I'll do like a— like evaluate this against this, uh, FilmCraft, which is the Premiere clone that this guy, you know, the company ArtCraft made or whatever. And then there's also something called Google Vids, which I kind of dispensed with, but there is one advantage to it, which is that, well, it's cloud-based like Clipchamp, but it integrates directly with Google Photos. And so if, like me, if you— if that's where your videos are, it's kind of convenient because you can just load them from one service and the other. You don't have to bring them down to the computer. So I was like, all right, this sounds like a pretty good idea. And then I spent 7 hours writing this thing up and I only got through the FilmCraft part of it, and I was like, screw this, I'm just gonna write that part.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:47]:
I can't deal with this. Maybe I'll do the other ones later. But, um, I have to say, the FilmCraft, uh, clone of Premiere has got to be incredibly faithful because it's horrible. And I mean, it is—

Leo Laporte [00:39:03]:
It's every bit as bad as Adobe.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:05]:
Yep. It is so convoluted and complicated, and very clearly they've just kept building on it, building on it, building on it without any thought to We're gonna make it exactly

Leo Laporte [00:39:15]:
like

Paul Thurrott [00:39:16]:
Adobe. And they— and it— yep. And it succeeds on that level. But I, I have to say, I— and look, I'm sure it's more professional, whatever that means, but, um, Clipchamp— I, I spent so much time with this. Um, I threw together this video in Clipchamp in possibly in 15 minutes. I don't remember. It took me the better part of a day. And then the thing I outputted at the end— the only advantage the FilmCraft version had was that the video was smaller.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:42]:
But there were so many little problems in it with transitions and things that it— I, I don't think it's the app. I think it's just me not, you know, being used to how this stupid thing works. Um, yeah, I, I got through that and I was like, yeah, I'm, I'm done with that. Okay, I— the thing I'm using is fine. Um, you know, obviously there's, there's plenty of free video editors. DaVinci Resolve, if you want something expensive, there's like a Kdenlive thing or whatever it's called, which is supposed to be pretty good, you know, maybe.

Leo Laporte [00:40:11]:
Yeah, Kdenlive is pretty cool. Yeah, but it's also very hard, just like, you know, it's the same thing. You— I think what you're seeing is there's a difference in pro apps and, uh, consumer apps. And for most people, the consumer— Clipchamp is all you need. iMovie is all you need.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:29]:
Yeah, so ideally iMovie is a good example because iMovie is one of those things that works really well. I haven't looked at it in a while, honestly, but I mean, Last time I looked, it was great.

Leo Laporte [00:40:39]:
Very simple, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:40:40]:
Clipchamp is simple, but it's also very powerful. You know, it's, it's actually very good. It's not just— it doesn't just do the basics, you know, like it's— there's all kinds. It will create, um, uh, like a, uh, what do you call it, narration, like a, like a script from the, the video. Like it will do all these AI things now. Like I said, 4K upscaling. It's, it's kind of amazing. Like it's, it's actually very— it's a really neat app.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:03]:
Like it's, it's very, very good. But, um, yeah, Premiere or FilmCraft, like, oh yeah, I remember this. This is terrible.

Leo Laporte [00:41:11]:
It's just hard to use. I mean, I just— super hard to use.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:14]:
Super hard.

Leo Laporte [00:41:14]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, our editors use Adobe Premiere. I'd be very curious. Yeah, they're probably, uh, because they're so used to Adobe Premiere, I'd be curious if they can just look at FilmCraft and say, oh yeah, it's the same thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:24]:
Oh, I'm sure they would be like, yep. I mean, look, if you, if you use some of the more advanced features or whatever, I'm sure you'll find a few things in there that aren't— don't work or don't work the same maybe, but Uh, for my needs, it, you know, I could, yeah, I could do it, but I just— gross. I assume those guys drink a lot on weekends, but, um, it's just—

Leo Laporte [00:41:42]:
Kevin, do you drink a lot on weekends?

Paul Thurrott [00:41:44]:
I would. I just, just to recover from that.

Speaker E [00:41:47]:
Only with my friends or my dad.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:50]:
Yeah, there you go. Oh, that's like, I want something that's more frustrating than being a programmer. Oh, let me show you Adobe Premiere.

Leo Laporte [00:41:56]:
You know, I remember because early in TV I did a lot of, uh, I spent a lot of time in an edit booth. You know, you have an editor and they have, uh, you know, it's pretty old-fashioned, but they'd have a Mac and they'd have this hardware and stuff and they'd be— they have special scrub wheels and things and you'd sit there and for hours going, okay, that, that, that. And I always remember, and this is, this is probably 1992, thinking nobody wants to edit video. Right. Nobody's ever going to want to do this at home. Boy, was I wrong.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:27]:
Well, I mean, I— the people who do that are mostly probably using simple tools, right?

Leo Laporte [00:42:34]:
It's a pain in the ass.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:35]:
It's the worst. I,

Leo Laporte [00:42:36]:
I don't want to do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:38]:
Like, we haven't done this in forever, but my wife and I will like record a video for like Eternal Spring or something. It's like 12 minutes long, and she's like, oh, that wasn't too bad. I'm like, oh really? I just spent 17 hours editing this video. It wasn't too bad for you. Like, I, you know,

Leo Laporte [00:42:52]:
This was one of the very first goals I had with TWiT because in the first— in the early days, it was just me. It was you and me and, you know, I did all the editing and stuff and my goal was someday, someday I will be able to finish a show, step away from the microphone and it will all be handled for me.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:10]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:43:10]:
Well, it is. And boy, that was a wonderful time when I did not have to do any of the work afterwards.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:15]:
Yeah. Post-production. There are already people doing— using um, uh, Claude or, uh, or, um, yeah, I'm very curious.

Leo Laporte [00:43:24]:
You can do this, I think.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:26]:
But you have to have— you have to spend $100, $200 a month for that to make sense. And okay.

Leo Laporte [00:43:30]:
And I think it's actually more work because you have to kind of herd these— I don't know, I haven't tried it, but I just feel like you're gonna have to herd these agents, say, no, no, no, no, no, don't cut it there. Oh, the lip sync is off. Oh no, no, it's just— I feel like still it's too much work. You're not at the point where you could just say, hey Claude, make that good, and it would be done.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:49]:
Video editing is not like— well, at least in Clipchamp, or, you know, maybe a normal app, but it's, it's not, it's not that it's— well, it is actually difficult for me if I use Premiere or whatever, but, um, it's just tedious. It just takes a long time.

Leo Laporte [00:44:03]:
It's—

Paul Thurrott [00:44:03]:
I just don't, you know, it's like, I don't— this is not how I want to spend my time. Like, I—

Leo Laporte [00:44:07]:
yeah,

Paul Thurrott [00:44:08]:
you know, I don't know. But

Leo Laporte [00:44:09]:
well, there's just— there's— but our editors, uh, I think they love it. Uh, I hope they love it. They're very good at it.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:17]:
Yeah, no, I'm sure.

Leo Laporte [00:44:18]:
A good editor is, is incredible.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:21]:
I mean, when Conan was locked up with those other prisoners turning the thing in a circle, he got really good at that too. But like, it's just a, you know, it's horrible. Everyone else died and then he's like this big muscular guy. Like, I, I mean, I guess he got good at it, but—

Leo Laporte [00:44:33]:
I got strong anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:34]:
Yeah, I just like—

Leo Laporte [00:44:36]:
no, our editors really have very developed thumbs and forefingers.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:40]:
Yes, right. They have muscular Yes. Thumb and forefinger.

Leo Laporte [00:44:43]:
You see their forearms.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:45]:
It could be. I

Leo Laporte [00:44:47]:
don't know. I, I don't

Paul Thurrott [00:44:48]:
know. I, I was— I thought I was gonna bang this out in an afternoon. I took— this took days, and I finally was like, I can't look at other editors like this. Uh, what am I doing with my life? Like, Clipchamp.

Leo Laporte [00:44:56]:
So stick with Clipchamp then.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:57]:
It works great. Yeah. Well, you know, but I always like— I do this with Notion too. Notion mostly works great. I was actually— I wasn't joking, but Kevin and I were talking ahead of time, and I was trying to fix a spelling mistake in Notion.

Leo Laporte [00:45:08]:
Which I still see, by the way. It's still there.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:10]:
Oh, good. Okay. But it's part of a link in, in this— So

Leo Laporte [00:45:14]:
every time you click it, I— this is what I find out.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:16]:
Opens in a browser.

Leo Laporte [00:45:17]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:18]:
And then when I try to select the text to write over it, a thing pops up over it. It's like—

Leo Laporte [00:45:25]:
I have fixed it now for you.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:26]:
Oh boy. Okay. Anywho, um,

Leo Laporte [00:45:31]:
I know I went— it's so funny you should say that because I saw the typo immediately. And I did this. I went through the same process. I couldn't fix it.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:39]:
Technology is endlessly frustrating. And if you find something that actually works, wait, because they will screw it up. Oh yeah. Like, it's, it's—

Leo Laporte [00:45:47]:
and I'll tell you the worst thing, and I know this as a husband, as you probably do, is when your spouse or close friend says, I can't, I can't get this to work. And, uh, and you go, oh, it's easy. You deserve it when they throw something at you because it's— All

Paul Thurrott [00:46:07]:
right, so normally wouldn't tell this story, but since you mentioned it,

Leo Laporte [00:46:12]:
yes,

Paul Thurrott [00:46:12]:
we're at dinner last night and we're outside, it's dark, and I take a picture of whatever— with whatever's in front of me. And because my wife is sitting across the table and facing me, I'm like, hey, I just handed her the phone. So she takes a picture, hands it back, and I don't normally even check, you know, but for some reason I looked at it and if, you know, if it's like a bowl, it was like cut, like a third of it was cut off.

Leo Laporte [00:46:36]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:37]:
And I was like, um,

Leo Laporte [00:46:39]:
what are you

Paul Thurrott [00:46:39]:
doing? She's like, and she's like, is it okay? And I'm like, this is kind of weird. I feel weird complaining about this. I said, I don't know, you didn't center it. So she took another one and this one was even more off. And I was like, are your eyes okay? I'm like, what are you taking a picture? What do you— what is it you think I want a picture of exactly? And she's like— I'm like, I didn't understand. I'm like— and it occurred to me, I don't know if you like, on an iPhone there's a setting where you can enable it so like the part that's outside of the crop, you can see on the sides. I think she must have thought—

Leo Laporte [00:47:12]:
Yeah, she could see it and thought that was in the picture.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:14]:
That's my guess.

Leo Laporte [00:47:15]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:15]:
But I just finally caught up and I'm like, I'll just take the picture. I can't— I'm like, well, I don't know what's happening. Like, I'm like This is the— I don't want to spend time on this. You know, I was like—

Leo Laporte [00:47:25]:
Kevin says, I'm a newlywed. I'm listening closely. Yes, Kevin. I never— I said just a few things never to say. One of them is it's easy. You always just say, yes, dear. That's very important just to go along, to get along. There's quite— there's a few things that, you know, will help you stay married.

Leo Laporte [00:47:47]:
I'm the wrong person to ask.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:48]:
No, I am. I'm absolutely the wrong person to ask.

Leo Laporte [00:47:51]:
Well, you're on your 2nd wife.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:53]:
We were out with a friend the other

Leo Laporte [00:47:54]:
night. I'm on my 3rd, my friend. I don't know if that means I have more experience.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:57]:
I would be on my 3rd. My wife is a saint.

Leo Laporte [00:48:00]:
Yeah, that's probably what's true.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:01]:
She's telling some story the other night with our friend, and I'm like, excuse me? I'm like, the way you told the story was we just did this thing. And I'm like, no, we didn't. You said we were not doing that. And I was like, no. And I argued my point, and I was the reason this happened. And that's not part of your memory?

Leo Laporte [00:48:17]:
No. Yes,

Paul Thurrott [00:48:18]:
dear. Of course, dear.

Leo Laporte [00:48:20]:
You're absolutely right, dear.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:22]:
The woman looks at me and she's like, are you crazy? She's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't even know why I said something like that. It was stupid.

Leo Laporte [00:48:30]:
Don't say anything.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:30]:
Oh, yep. Okay, sorry. Anyway, Clipchamp. So use Clipchamp.

Leo Laporte [00:48:34]:
Clipchamp. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:36]:
In addition to the— I think we talked last week about Microsoft Edge being, you know, getting that app launch, you know, fat launching performance, whatever it is, update. Um, since then, uh, they updated the Discover feed, which is this thing that appears in widgets but also on the new tab page in Edge. And if you're looking for— if you ever get like, I don't know, like I do this sometimes, like on Facebook, you go through like the Reels or whatever they're called, and I'll see like scary videos or funny videos or like animal videos, and you're like, oh, this is cool, I want a feed like that on my computer. This is not that. This is if This is the opposite. It's like just crap, like really bad content. Um, so supposedly this is going to get better. They, they say they have now trusted content from 1,500 premium publishers, um, content from other 300 or 3,500 creators who I assume are not quite as trusted.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:29]:
Uh, a lot of video in there now. Um, it's— there's a curated by Copilot feature that drives me crazy. You cannot turn it off. Um, and there's more of that. So maybe it's okay. I don't know. I'm— I don't— I skip all this. I never look at this anymore because it's such garbage, but it's different.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:48]:
I guess maybe it's better garbage. I don't know. Um, and then just to— well, 2 other, I guess, web-related, web browser-related things. Opera announced last week that they now have over 100 million users on desktop, and that's across 3 or 4 browsers, right? Because they have Opera One, Opera Neon, Opera GX for gamers, and Opera Air. Um, but that's, that's a good milestone. I mean, it's, you know, obviously not billions, but I mean, for a third-party browser like this, I mean, that's, that's good. So good for them. I mean, they, they deserve it, obviously.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:19]:
And then, um, Vivaldi usually does their releases like a week apart. They'll do like a desktop release every month and then a week later the mobile version. This month they did both at the same time, and they completely rewrote their ad and tracker blocker. And it now has more granular control over, you know, what to block, etc. And this is actually kind of a major update. I'm surprised they didn't call this like a, you know, 9.0 instead of 8.3, but it's dramatically better. And you can configure it on a site-by-site basis. So you could— you might have one site where you're like, nope, I want this to be on super aggressive for whatever reason, but over here I need to turn off most of the stuff because maybe it's a video thing and it doesn't work otherwise, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:57]:
So it's Actually, that's pretty cool. So good for them. Um, Leo, you missed all the earnings, uh, this month. Oh, thank God. So I'm just gonna recap them all right now. Um, no, no, no, no. Uh, I mean, on paper, most of these companies are doing great. Um, the problem is that it's on paper, and a lot of what they're spending we're not actually seeing.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:21]:
So, you know, we have companies like Google and Amazon that are net cash negative now, which is unprecedented, at least in Google's case. But it depends on the company. It's interesting, Intel and AMD are both getting into data center, and that's what, in AMD's case especially, is what is driving their business right now. But then you have a company like Qualcomm, which unfortunately has plans and has chips in development and will be there next year, but doesn't have them yet. Qualcomm is suffering from this component shortage because just like PC sales, tablet and smartphone sales are nosediving this year and will probably continue to do so for a while. Their earnings are down, I guess is the way to say it. They did have a profit this quarter, at least. A year ago, they did not.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:12]:
I think that was an accounting thing, but their revenues were down 8% year over year because that's where their money comes from. It's the mobile industry. It's just not doing great, so not really their fault. Um, and then I just published this before the show, but I, like I said earlier, I have 3 of those RTX, uh, laptops. I wrote a—

Leo Laporte [00:52:34]:
It's, you know, it's a shame.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:36]:
What's that?

Leo Laporte [00:52:37]:
It— with the DGX Sparks, you have, uh, this high-speed connection, network connections, and you can daisy chain them. That's why I have 2 Sparks connected with this Connect X7, and that gives you 2 times 128 gigs.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:50]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:52:51]:
It's the one thing they left out of the laptop,

Paul Thurrott [00:52:54]:
right?

Leo Laporte [00:52:54]:
So you could have 3 Sparks, right, if you could just connect them fast enough. But

Paul Thurrott [00:52:59]:
so there's this— you'll be familiar with this— there's a set of technologies that's starting to appear like everywhere, and they're, um, basically boils down to the ability to access a GPU that's in a device on your home network or local network or over the internet. And NVIDIA's version of this, I think, is called NVIDIA Pair. I've not yet tried it, um, but on Clairvoyance, which is the Star Trek— that's Star Trek— the Stardock front end, or I guess harness for this, um, stuff, um, you can do this over the internet. And it will, you know, you could just assign contacts, you could just do it with yourself. I could, I could I haven't yet, but I will at one point set all 3 of them up at the same time and access the GPU simultaneously from a single system, which is kind of interesting. It's not, you know, it's not exactly the same, but, um, it's, you know, that stuff is becoming more common. I think it's going to be very common. And, um, and it's part of the reason— it's only really a small part, but it is part of that conversation we had earlier where these things need to be boxes, not laptops.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:06]:
I mean, yeah, yeah, you should have a thin and light laptop.

Leo Laporte [00:54:08]:
Then you can do that. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott [00:54:09]:
yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:54:10]:
Well, they— I think they did it to save money. I mean, they kept the cost down by not putting in that several hundred dollars.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:15]:
Yeah, they nailed it because this— they're super inexpensive. It's worked out really great.

Leo Laporte [00:54:18]:
Um, they would be worse,

Paul Thurrott [00:54:20]:
right? So unfortunately, when it comes to these laptops, there's 2 things going on. There's the, the platform itself, and I, I reviewed that earlier, the platform, because I struggled with this so bad. And it's, um, these things are just expensive, heavy, hot, loud. There's RAM issues, there's configuration issues, there's nothing in Windows 11 to help you. Local AI isn't quite there yet for these kind of high-end workloads. There's also one thing I learned very late in the game before the public release was that Nvidia has all these kind of recipes and custom versions of apps that they will give to reviewers so they can have like optimal experiences. And This is not documented on the public web anywhere. It's starting, some of it's on, if you go to nvidia.com, they have some recipes for RTX Spark and you can see that some are not there yet, but it's just a lot of, there's just not a lot of information out there unfortunately.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:21]:
And so that will improve in time, but the other half of it is just the machines themselves, right? And so most of the, to my knowledge, all of the computers that have been released so far are laptops, which again, not necessarily the right form factor. They're obviously premium laptops. They don't have the Copilot+PC stuff, which is terrible. There's nothing in Windows, like I said. One of the surprise positive elements of these things, and you, again, you would not spend this much money for this, is they're actually really good at playing games. This is a first in the ARM area for Windows. Like, you know, Snapdragon X can play some games, Snapdragon X2 can play some more, This one's really good coverage. I mean, I've seen people complain like it's not 100%, like you can't play the latest Call of Duty games, although that will happen next year sometime.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:09]:
Yeah, I hear you. But as far as like laptops that are out in the world right now, this does a better job than most. Like it's actually really good at that. Also, if you've ever wanted to burn the tops of your legs, recommend putting one on your lap. And

Leo Laporte [00:56:24]:
do they get really hot?

Paul Thurrott [00:56:26]:
They get hotter than any laptop I've experienced in my entire life. I've never, I've never had something so hot where I was afraid for myself. I'm like, something— this is not— this is dangerous. Like, I'm like, this is really hot. And I've just never experienced that with a laptop. It's crazy how hot they get. And it's not any one model. It's, you know—

Leo Laporte [00:56:43]:
No, no, it's the GB10s in there. The, uh, the NVIDIA, uh, GPUs get very hot. I actually have my, uh, Sparks, um, speed gauge. In a refrigerator? No, well, I do. Yeah, I have that too.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:56]:
I mean,

Leo Laporte [00:56:56]:
I have a fan. They're in a rack with a fan and a temperature sensor, and it's, you know. But right, I also have— and you can do this, you might want to do this on the RTX, um, you can— there's a setting, an SMI setting, that will say don't let them get above 2200 Hz, cap their clock speed, and which doesn't really impact their intelligence or their speed but it keeps them from getting too hot.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:20]:
So, um, I don't—

Leo Laporte [00:57:21]:
although they're rated to be— they're supposed to run that hot. I mean, they're not, but I, you know, when they get to 80 or 90 degrees centigrade Celsius, I kind of start to worry.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:29]:
I'm like, type gaming laptops, they get hot. I've never seen this before. I, I— and yeah, they're louder than God.

Leo Laporte [00:57:38]:
Well, then the fans have to kick in.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:39]:
Oh my God. And so this is— look, this is a new platform. PC makers have experience in this area. They've all designed unique thermal systems for their laptops. I'm sure that's why—

Leo Laporte [00:57:50]:
But that's why a desktop might be the right form factor.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:52]:
100%, oh, that's 100%. But, you know, they're trying. And like I said, it's not anyone, it's not like, oh, this one over here is terrible, the other ones are fine. No, they're all terrible in this regard. It's just, it's the platform. It's just, this is a great laptop. You know, the prices I think in this case range from maybe $2,200 to blah, blah, blah, I don't know, not quite $6,000. 7, but 6,000 something, I don't remember.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:15]:
But

Leo Laporte [00:58:15]:
so, so this is right now, they're kind of idle, but 41 degrees centigrade, 42 is not very hot.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:22]:
Okay. Um, I'll just ask the, uh, local AI over here something about Tolkien and my apartment will explode in flames. But

Leo Laporte [00:58:30]:
I have seen the Mac Mini get to 90.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:32]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:58:33]:
Um, which seems to me too hot.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:36]:
Yeah, I mean, it's almost cooking egg temperature.

Leo Laporte [00:58:37]:
Um, and, and it does— I think it does impact Well, a couple of things. One, it impacts the lifespan of the hardware, but also it's costing you money because that means it's drawing a lot of power, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:58:49]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:58:51]:
Um,

Paul Thurrott [00:58:52]:
yeah, anyway, I, I'm gonna— I've separated the, the laptop reviews, a review of the laptop, you know, but I wanted to kind of handle RTX Spark separately because it applies to all of them, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:59:05]:
And there's some real interest in these.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:07]:
Yeah. Yeah. I have no doubt this is gonna get better. I just, it's still bizarre to me that they shipped them the way they did without any form of help of any kind, anything in the OS. There's not a single, well, there is a, the Get Started app has one page that says, here are 3 agents you might wanna download. And then it doesn't help you out at all.

Leo Laporte [00:59:33]:
I thought that when you turn them on, doesn't it say, here's the model choice? Isn't there a menu that says—

Paul Thurrott [00:59:39]:
That's the thing I'm referring to, which isn't actually when you turn it on, but it's— but yeah, all it is is a— there's 3. It's like Hermes, uh, I don't remember the other 2, but, uh—

Leo Laporte [00:59:50]:
So it gives you some harnesses, not models. Yep. That's weird. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott [00:59:54]:
that's all it

Leo Laporte [00:59:54]:
does. It wasn't ready for prime time. It's pretty clear. Yeah, but I have to say, the DGX Sparks are the same way. They just presume when you get it, there's nothing,

Paul Thurrott [01:00:03]:
right?

Leo Laporte [01:00:03]:
They just presume you know what you're doing. Here.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:05]:
This is unique for the Windows PC space. I mean, even— well, I don't— I suppose, okay, I mean, I guess you could make an argument if you buy a portable workstation, maybe it's like a ThinkPad P-Series, whatever, and then you're— it's up to you, I guess, to install AutoCAD or whatever you're doing on there. I— you could make the argument it's like that, but those apps that serve whatever those are— engineering, science, whatever it is, developers— those are well-established apps that are kind of plug and play in the sense you install them and you just get going. Like the local AI stuff, you know, even the couple of minutes we talked before the show, I learned something and added to my knowledge of this stuff because this is just, it's like it's happening in real time. It's really confusing.

Leo Laporte [01:00:49]:
It is happening in real time. That's really a good way of putting it.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:52]:
Yeah. I

Leo Laporte [01:00:53]:
spent a lot of time, believe it or not, on x.com. I thought I would never say those words. Because that's where a lot of the local AI stuff is happening. But even there, there's kind of an assumption, you know, you know, you kind of know what's going on.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:08]:
Yeah, I, I don't know. Anyway,

Leo Laporte [01:01:11]:
there— this is, uh, very much of the hobbyist, uh, uh,

Paul Thurrott [01:01:15]:
yep,

Leo Laporte [01:01:16]:
point. And for anybody normal, they're not thinking about running local AI. That's why this machine is kind of interesting. I'm not sure who it's aimed at. Right. Is it business that wants local AI so they can keep their business stuff private? I'm not sure who it's aimed at.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:30]:
Yeah, I mean, ideally that will be the case eventually. Um,

Leo Laporte [01:01:36]:
it's not

Paul Thurrott [01:01:36]:
enough. I did— I just feel like it's an interim step. I, I— one year from now, locally AI will have caught up to the point where it will make sense for all kinds of things. Um, there'll be a lot more, uh, and easier to use apps and, you know, whatever. The models improve, obviously, but And I believe no one has said this, but obviously Windows will be improved as well to kind of manage this stuff kind of automatically, which it does not do right now. So it will be better. And then maybe at that point, yeah, you're a business, you wanna keep your data local, or you're just a human being and you're like, look, I'm gonna do stuff with the cloud AI for whatever it might be. But when it comes to, I don't know, financial stuff or health stuff, maybe I wanna talk to this local thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:14]:
That's how I do it. I just don't want it to be leaked out into the world. Exactly. I just, some of the timeframes are tough. Like, I went, well, this is the back, we'll talk about this at the back of the book, but things that happen quickly and then where the results are really good with like cloud AI, in my case, mostly app development stuff, but not always actually, is either doesn't work at all or is much slower and then the results aren't as good. And it's like, okay, well, it is going to— I know it is. I have to keep telling— I feel like when I tell other people this, I'm really reminding myself because I've had so many bad experiences trying to get this to work. But it is obvious to me, despite all these experiences, there's a future here.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:04]:
This is going to be very important. And it can be today if you really know what you're doing, but there are like 7 of you, and I know you're one of them, but I mean, this is not—

Leo Laporte [01:03:14]:
If you're a hobbyist.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:15]:
It's not that many. Hobbyist isn't even the right word. It's like a hobbyist with deep technical acumen in a very specific area. The way I said this, I said this probably 2, 3 weeks ago, I've been in situations where I'm talking to someone else who knows about tech or whatever. We're just talking. And I could see it could be my wife or his wife or some other person. They're looking at it. They're like, what? They're like, what? You guys, are you talking in some kind of code? Like, my brother said this to me one time, I don't even understand what you're talking about.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:45]:
And I'm like, yeah, that's how local AI makes me feel now. Like, now I, now I completely understand. Now I get it.

Leo Laporte [01:03:51]:
I was talking to somebody on the trip whose son works at Netflix. I said, what does he do? And he says, you know, computer stuff. It's like, yeah, that's, that's how the real world sees this. Yeah. You know, computer stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:07]:
Right. I'm sure my mother probably to this day thinks I run Microsoft. She has no idea what's going on.

Leo Laporte [01:04:12]:
She has no idea. I know.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:14]:
No idea. All

Leo Laporte [01:04:14]:
right, let's take a little timeout for a word from our sponsor, and we'll have more with Windows Weekly and Paul Thurrott in just a little bit. All right, on we go with the show. What's next?

Paul Thurrott [01:04:28]:
Yeah, so AI, because, you know, we haven't talked about it enough yet. Jensen Huang.

Leo Laporte [01:04:38]:
Poor Jensen. I don't know, should I say poor Jensen? I just feel like he was played, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:04:43]:
Look, I— look, well-spoken. He's, um, feels— well, felt like an adult. Um, he runs one of the most successful companies in the world, the only company making what I would call real money in AI right now. Everyone needs his chips, you know. doing great. Unlike the robots that run OpenAI or Anthropic, these guys who are not even human beings, he always seemed real to me. And now I guess we've learned he's maybe a little realer than I wanted to know. But yeah, apparently he's been having this affair with a woman, which normally I wouldn't care about one way or the other because I'm not the Star magazine or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:23]:
But unfortunately, he's also spent the past year or so trying to get the US to, you know, open up to China so they can sell more of their chips there. And now it's possible that this has, uh, been at the behest of a woman who might have been working for China's top spy agency. Um,

Leo Laporte [01:05:44]:
we're going to talk about this, I'm sure, on I Am. I'm not sure. I mean, look, he's going to lose his job. I don't think there's any question about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:50]:
You think so?

Leo Laporte [01:05:50]:
Yeah, absolutely. He has to. The board has to fire him, which is problematic because he is Nvidia, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:05:57]:
He is Nvidia, and there is no succession plan.

Leo Laporte [01:06:00]:
But I don't think you can keep him. However, it's funny because I know he was making all those arguments. I thought his arguments were quite good. His argument is you don't gain anything by cutting off China from our technology. All you do is teach them to create their own technology that's as good as— and that's what's happened.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:23]:
That's what happened in many industries. And I see that every day when BYD cars drive around the place. Uber drivers own them. You can buy a $21,000 BYD here that—

Leo Laporte [01:06:35]:
Don't pretend that China is somehow stupid or dumb. They're going to take— they would like these chips. You don't give them to them? Don't worry, Huawei will make them.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:44]:
Make them better. You have given them the time to end their reliance on us. you've actually harmed us as a country. I mean, it's, it's crazy. But

Leo Laporte [01:06:55]:
yeah, I mean, but I'm a big— I'm a huge free trade advocate. There was a really interesting article in The New Yorker, uh, I think last week or the week before, about microprocessors. And the point of the article was no one country makes microprocessors. The EUV equipment comes from the Netherlands. The manufacturing is in Taiwan. No one country has a monopoly on this. It is a— if you want to live in a world where microprocessors and software run everything, which they do, you need free trade. It is not good to say, no, no, it's got to be made in the United States, because it can't.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:37]:
I was— we were walking up literally the same from the meal with the phone, same Last night, walking up the street and I saw a BYD went by. It was a sedan actually. This is kind of unusual. Usually they're kind of crossover-looking things. And I pointed it out to my wife because we talk about this. And I said, we talk about manufacturing in the United States and trying to bring it back and it's never coming back. It's too expensive. We can't build things at the level that other countries can.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:02]:
And I said, I think it's time to start talking about when does the US auto industry end? We can't make anything. The one thing we do make right now that's in volume is cars, and I think that's going to go away. It's sad.

Leo Laporte [01:08:19]:
It's terrible.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:19]:
I'm not saying it's not. I'm just— But it's the way of the world. VW, Volkswagen, Mercedes are going to have lots of problems.

Leo Laporte [01:08:27]:
Maybe you could save the auto industry, but you cannot make microprocessors solely with US technology.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:36]:
Yeah, that's true. And so I, I don't know, I don't know. We'll see what happens here. I— this is—

Leo Laporte [01:08:44]:
There's no way. Well, it's just, I, I can't— I don't see how the board can say, yeah, you could stay. Sure, you were sleeping with a Chinese spy, uh, but that's okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:53]:
I mean, James Bond did this all the time. Um,

Leo Laporte [01:08:56]:
it's not the infidelity, as bad as that is, it's not the infidelity.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:00]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:09:01]:
Well, okay. He fell for a honey trap. Now, I don't think he did it on purpose.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:05]:
No, no, no. I can't imagine anyone's argued that.

Leo Laporte [01:09:10]:
No. He was a guy and he was a sucker.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:14]:
I don't remember where I said this, but the problem with these companies being so powerful, Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI especially, is they're relatively— they came out of nowhere. They're on the world stage. All of a sudden, they're in the middle of national security issues and international politics. And these people are not— they can barely function as human beings. They're geniuses in their weird little areas, and they're good at this stupid one thing. And we can't trust them with this kind of stuff. No, I mean, it's just— there's no way. They just don't have the— in this world, they're naive.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:48]:
And, um, and that's how I see this. It's just, um— You know, he's not getting an NSA briefing every morning, you know, nor should he.

Leo Laporte [01:09:57]:
Well, and of course there's this story, uh, which Marco Rubio clearly leaked, right? Little Marco got a little dig in and said, yeah, yeah, I told the president about that months ago. Yeah, on the way to China when we were picking up Jensen in Alaska. I told him, but he ignored me. Uh, clearly that was—

Paul Thurrott [01:10:16]:
It's weird because usually from a leadership perspective, we usually nail it. Um, So, yep, I don't know what to say.

Leo Laporte [01:10:24]:
So you can't fire the president, but I think you could fire Jensen. And if the board doesn't, I don't know how they're gonna get around that.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:29]:
You can fire the president, Leo, and, uh, we're gonna, we're gonna work on that. But, um, but for now, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:10:36]:
It does make you feel like it's a little corrupt, perhaps?

Paul Thurrott [01:10:39]:
A little. I like that you qualified that for some reason.

Leo Laporte [01:10:44]:
Um, Mr. President, I'm gonna give you $25 million for the ballroom if you just Turn your eyes elsewhere.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:51]:
Yep. And it works. Consider it done.

Leo Laporte [01:10:54]:
Consider it done.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:55]:
Yep. I don't know. So we'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:10:57]:
But now we— I don't know what this is going to do for the industry because, uh, Jensen— I mean, this is the question, is how vital is Jensen Huang to Nvidia? He built it from scratch. Ironically, he and his wife built it from scratch.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:09]:
Yeah, yeah, right. It's just too bad Epstein wasn't still around for him, you know. Anyway, um,

Leo Laporte [01:11:16]:
oh geez Louise.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:17]:
Too much. I'm

Leo Laporte [01:11:18]:
sorry. Jeez, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:20]:
It's just a shame.

Leo Laporte [01:11:23]:
Yeah. I mean, it's a tragedy. There's no question about it. It's a tragedy. And maybe a tragedy for the entire AI industry. I don't know. Maybe we're going to be glad that the Chinese, that Huawei and others have made chips that are as good as Nvidia's. You know who's doing really good chips right now? AMD.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:41]:
Right. That's right.

Leo Laporte [01:11:42]:
And AMD may end up being a strong competitor. CUDA, You know, I— what I don't like is that, uh, NVIDIA has made their proprietary technology CUDA, uh, exclusive to AMD, and, uh, that forced people to buy AMD hardware. Well, guess what? That, that—

Paul Thurrott [01:11:59]:
Well, AMD is fine, and also, uh, Google with the TPU stuff is doing this as well. And yeah, there's this, um, you know, so many little versions of this, little announcements, but we're going to live in a It's really kind of a bring-your-own-model world in a way. Like, you're gonna— you're like, I want to use like the Microsoft front end for some reason, but I want to use this model on the back end for this. And this, you know, this is going to be the world. It's going to be this giant heterogeneous—

Leo Laporte [01:12:27]:
It's hard to predict, but if I were going to predict anything, I would say what it looks like is happening is you're going to have these high-end frontier models which take giant data centers and terabytes of memory and You know, those are never gonna be able to be run at home, but I think you're gonna have intelligence everywhere. I think you're gonna have little models in your phone, little models in your refrigerator. You're gonna have AI everywhere. Everything's gonna be intelligent in a, you know, and that's what a lot of progress is happening now along those lines.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:54]:
100%. This is the hybrid AI thing, and it is gonna be, it's gonna span every device you own. Absolutely. There's no doubt about it.

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

Paul Thurrott [01:13:02]:
The trick is—

Leo Laporte [01:13:02]:
so just as computing has moved to the edge,

Paul Thurrott [01:13:05]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:13:05]:
The next stage is intelligence moving to the edge, and that changes a lot of things.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:09]:
The one thing I latched onto at least 2 years ago, but maybe 3, was this notion of orchestration. And it's not like I did not invent this term. I didn't come across it independently.

Leo Laporte [01:13:19]:
Is it Steve Battish's?

Paul Thurrott [01:13:20]:
Yeah, he's the one who introduced it to me. But this becomes— any operating system is in a sense an orchestrator of whatever kind. But this notion that we're going to intelligently shift between model usage, not just in the cloud all the time, but from local to cloud and back, is what makes this work. This is the engine that makes this thing work. And it's not quite there yet. There's different takes on it and whatever, but this is happening. And this is why it's so important that Windows has this in the OS. It's why Apple will do this in their OS.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:55]:
Google is doing it in their OS. It's, uh, yeah, this is the— this is the— I don't know what to call it— the keystone, the linchpin, I don't know, the, the central part of this whole puzzle, um, is that orchestration bit.

Leo Laporte [01:14:09]:
But everything that we know is, is about to change. I mean, is it going to be a phone? Is it going to be a computer? Or is it just going to be intelligence, right? You know, kind of floating around. I, it's— I think 10 years— we don't know what it's going to look like in 10 years. I hope we're doing the show in 10 years. But I can only imagine what we're going to be talking about.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:26]:
If we're doing it in 10 years, it's going to be like our heads are going to be in like a bucket of water and like we're going to be—

Leo Laporte [01:14:31]:
We'll be like the spice guys in Dune.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:34]:
Yeah,

Leo Laporte [01:14:34]:
yeah. Floating in a little aquarium.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:36]:
I was thinking more like Futurama, but yeah, that same thing. You know, yeah, that was not inarguably first, but yep, it's going to be— we'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:14:47]:
We'll see.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:48]:
It is definitely— and this is kind of the Yeah, the end of the back of the book stuff is kind of about this. It's fascinating.

Leo Laporte [01:14:56]:
Speaking of which, let's move along because we gotta get outta here. We got about an hour and a half, hour and 10 minutes rather left.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:02]:
Yep, okay. So, um, um, what? So there's a—

Leo Laporte [01:15:08]:
Sorry, I hate to do that to you. I wanna— No, no, no, you're right.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:10]:
No, you're right, you're right. So there's a tool called Google Anti-Gravity. It started as a web-based app that could create web-based apps. It uses Gemini on the backend, whatever. It has evolved dramatically. There are now apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It still uses Gemini in the backend, obviously. If you have a Google AI Pro subscription, you can use this thing to make apps.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:34]:
And if you bought a Google Book, I'm sorry, 'cause those things are horrible, but it does come with that and comes with the Google AI subscription. You can make your own apps, which is good, 'cause there are no good apps on a Google Book. But it's been, rapidly expanding. This was the thing back in May, I guess May, when they had Google I/O. They had improved it at the time, and I was vibe coding Markdown editors with it. And I was like, oh, this has gotten a lot better. This past week, they added remote agent support to it. They added voice mode, which is obviously needed.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:06]:
The future of everything is gonna be us talking to the air. We used to make fun of people with Bluetooth headsets. They'd be walking down the street gesticulating like, what's that guy doing? He's talking on the phone. But now we're gonna be talking to the AI agent or something, but it's gotten a lot more capable. And then yesterday, I think just recently, they're doing what Anthropic did to Claude and— well, to Claude Code, I— code or co— code?

Leo Laporte [01:16:34]:
Claude Desktop, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:36]:
Well, the code, the coding part is just code, code, right? Yeah, code.

Leo Laporte [01:16:39]:
Yeah, Claude Code, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:39]:
And OpenAI has Codex. in both cases, what those companies just discovered was like, you know, we, we made this for coding, obviously, thus the names, but these things are actually really good at like productivity work. And so they kind of made like Work or Cowork depending on the AI agent. And, uh, and then now they're kind of pulling them in and they're, you know, have an all-in-one UI. Google has just done exactly the same thing. And so when you— if you launch this from scratch, you haven't installed it yet, um, or you just installed it you'll actually choose between knowledge work and coding now, and you can go in and change it on the fly if you want. And I have not tried this yet, but I have to say, like, um, having used this tool a bunch— and again, this is part of the back of the book thing— um, it's actually— it works great for coding. It's actually pretty amazing.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:24]:
Um, I'm actually— I'd say I'm kind of curious about this. This is maybe the most success I've had yet with, like, what I'm going to call agentic AI, because I haven't really done too much of it, but Um, I'm— now I'm curious. Like, I think this, this is actually kind of interesting. So,

Leo Laporte [01:17:39]:
you know, so you were asking about what harness to use. You could use Anti-Gravity as your, uh, harness, I think. Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:45]:
Uh, oh, for Local AI?

Leo Laporte [01:17:47]:
Yeah, I'm asking right now. I use it. I love it, by the way. Uh, Anti-Gravity with Carbon, um, the latest Gemini 4 model, is spectacular.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:58]:
I did this— well, this again is some kind of— well, I'll I could say, it doesn't matter when I say it is, but, you know, I do like this, the same app essentially, Local AI versus this thing. I made a full-featured Markdown editor. It looks exactly like the modern version in Notepad in Windows 11 in 7 minutes with gravity, anti-gravity. And I think Hermes and whatever Gwen model chugged away for 2.5 hours before they pumped up this thing. It looked like a child's painting. They wouldn't even like hang on the fridge. But, It's super impressive. Like, it's really cool.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:29]:
It's really good. I have not looked at it for productivity, but I will. And again, part of the back of the book thing will factor into that.

Leo Laporte [01:18:36]:
But I use all the command line ones. I don't,

Paul Thurrott [01:18:39]:
but— So I, you know, I have to say, I have, I'm super interested in the command line ones. Like, I really, I actually really like that. I, there's something about it.

Leo Laporte [01:18:48]:
I— It's kind of like the old days.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:50]:
Yeah. Yeah. I do really like that. Adobe, as a company, I have some issues, but I have to say they're kind of killing it with AI, which is funny 'cause they're about to be killed by AI. But their Adobe MAX is this week in Miami. I think it's twice a year. And there's a lot of stuff that came out of this, but they're opening up all their apps to third-party AI assistance. So if you wanna use Photoshop—

Leo Laporte [01:19:17]:
That's the future, by the way. Any app that is closed to AI, you're making a huge mistake.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:20]:
And it's like in both directions, right? So in other words, like let's say Like, they have their whole— they have a whole Firefly app environment now that's all about natural language and using features from their other apps. And that's cool. Like, that's great. That's smart. But then you could also— they're partnering with OpenAI and whoever else. So you could go into ChatGPT and use capabilities from Photoshop using natural language in ChatGPT, which is also great. But now you kind of take it in the opposite direction where it's like, well, I'm actually a Photoshop professional, maybe. or whatever the app is, but I want to use the ChatGPT models for whatever reason.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:56]:
And you can do that now. Like, it's like it's in both directions. It's pretty cool. Um, so I like all that stuff. Um, there is a— I've not— I don't know why no one has really written about this in my space, or I haven't seen it, but, um, Adobe Express is going to be integrated into Microsoft Photos and Windows 11 soon. Um, and so that's part of a series of Partnerships, you know, so with on the Microsoft end, there's that. There's the native ports of Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, and several other apps. I think there was some more that were announced just today actually, uh, to Windows 11 on ARM, uh, and also the RTX Spark computers, of course, right, which are Windows 11 on ARM.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:32]:
Um, they're partnering with the Walt Disney Company in kind of a vague way, but they're going to work with them on concept exploration and, uh, related like, uh, parks and cruise development. pipelines, like they're gonna, you know, just use AI to make, uh, all, you know, because I think of Disney as like the service, but Disney is parks and cruises and stuff. That's their— that's where they make all their money. Is pretty cool. And then, uh, separately also with Google, right? So, uh, you'll— Acrobat is going to be integrated into Gmail and Google Drive, and, uh, Gemini and Gemini Enter— uh, Enterprise are going to integrate with Acrobat and other Adobe creative tools, and on and on it goes. Like, it's just like it's It's, it's, I don't even know what anything is anymore. Like whatever, however you're doing work today, it's about to change pretty dramatically. So that's kind of interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:20]:
Um, I don't know if you saw this. This is bizarre to me. I, it's mostly bizarre because I found out about it the day they announced it, which is really unusual for this kind of thing. But the, the, there's a team of people who made Cyanogen, which was like an Android alternative based on AOSP. that kind of came and went. And I think some of these, at least some of these people might have originally worked at Google as well. And I'm trying to think what the other, there was another big open source project, but they're creating a new Linux distribution and, you know, shocker, 'cause we need one more of those, but heavily integrated with native AI capabilities. And their shtick is like, look, the audience for this, which is basically the audience for RTX Spark, is pretty small.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:03]:
But it's also kind of a lucrative market and this might make some sense. And we'll see. And so they're like rethinking every component of the OS in terms of how does this change when AI is a thing. And it's going to be like everything's sandboxed and the File Explorer thing is going to be— you're going to be able to use basically what is like natural language search to find things inside of documents, et cetera, et cetera. So, They just announced it. This might never happen, um, to any degree, but they are partnering with Qualcomm, interestingly, and they will be bringing this not just to x64 computers but also to Snapdragon X2. So—

Speaker F [01:22:43]:
Read it, Baba. The input box grows on build 2402 on the air. I will note that as confirmed in the project notes.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:52]:
Yeah,

Leo Laporte [01:22:53]:
that's my, uh, that's, um, that's, uh, Claude Code. She Claude Code talks with Eartha Kitt's voice, just so you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:00]:
Oh, because that sounded like—

Speaker F [01:23:02]:
The Mac text box marked confirmed in the notes.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:06]:
So if Eartha Kitt was a giant nerd, that is what she would sound like.

Leo Laporte [01:23:12]:
Well, my favourite, though, is, uh, for Any Gravity, for Carbon, uh, I use Marisa Tomei for my cousin Vinnie, and she is very— she does sound very much like a kind of nerdy— because it's the scene where she, uh, Yeah, she's driving the

Paul Thurrott [01:23:25]:
thing about the tires and

Leo Laporte [01:23:26]:
the— Yeah, the car.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:27]:
The depth of the car.

Leo Laporte [01:23:28]:
Yeah, exactly. It's perfect. It's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. So she actually used Anti-Gravity and Carbon for my sysadmin, and it's great. I had it yesterday during MacBreak Weekly. I had a switch die, and I, you know, I had to scramble around and replace it.

Leo Laporte [01:23:43]:
And then after the show, I said, all right, let's see if this switch is really dead. And she, and she just can diagnose it. She said, plug it in. Okay. Yeah, it rebooted 3 times. It's definitely dead. You know, I mean, it's really useful. I don't configure anything anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:23:56]:
I have the AI do it.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:57]:
So this is interesting because I— this will— again, I keep alluding to this, like, or referencing this back of the book thing, but, um, I, I've been doing a— I've been— I'm taking, like, my steps in this direction. So this is, like, this is kind of— it's interesting you say that.

Leo Laporte [01:24:13]:
Um, it's a little hard for people like us because we take pride in knowing how all this stuff works and doing our own configuration and Yeah. And I have to say, it's a, it's a little bit like GPS where you stop knowing how to drive. You know, you don't know how to get anywhere without the GPS.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:30]:
Right. So that's—

Leo Laporte [01:24:31]:
I have stuff set up. I don't— if it breaks, I just hope AI's here to help.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:34]:
That's actually a really good example because I had a big problem with that. And, um, my daughter doesn't know where anything is. And I had a conversation with her.

Leo Laporte [01:24:42]:
She just tells me where to go.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:43]:
I said something like about taking a left on whatever the road was. And she's like, what I don't know what that is. And she goes, it's where your house is, you freaking idiot. Why do you— how do you not know? You've lived here for 7 years. Like, like what? Anyway, um, actually, I'll just, I'll just tell this one because it just happened yesterday. So yesterday I was working on the HP RTX part, and I was using Gemini, and I was typing something, and the screen went black, and then— Oh no. It wouldn't come back. Like, I would close the lid, open it.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:15]:
Yeah, it wouldn't come back.

Leo Laporte [01:25:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:17]:
So I had to— I was like,

Speaker G [01:25:19]:
um, schedule watch failed. The AI model service was rate limited. Too many requests. No backup provider succeeded.

Leo Laporte [01:25:26]:
That's, uh, David Spade. He is,

Paul Thurrott [01:25:29]:
uh— okay, interesting. Um, so, and that's okay. But I, I, I did— I had to do this. I was in the middle of doing something, and I also had an open document. I didn't want to lose anything, but I was like, all right, I have to Force power this thing down, which takes a while. So the thing comes back up. I'm like, all right, boot it up. Good, good, good.

Leo Laporte [01:25:46]:
We know that your reboot, that's the first thing you do.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:48]:
And then I just got back to work and it happened again. Oh,

Leo Laporte [01:25:51]:
and

Paul Thurrott [01:25:52]:
I was like, oh, come on. And I'm like, I'm— I knew at the time, like, I'm going to publish my review tomorrow of this computer and you picking this moment to not work. So I have to figure this out. You know, so I did the same thing. It takes a while, you have to hold on, but, you know, wait for it, you know, whatever. So I'm thinking to myself, like, okay, I'm gonna dig this out of my past. Like, I know how to troubleshoot this. Obviously I can go look, you know, there's logs in Windows, you know, these are— have you ever gone through the logs? Like, it's horrible.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:22]:
But, uh, but then I was like, wait a minute, I asked the AI this question. So I went to Gemini and I said, I explained the thing and it said, do this. And it was like, uh, you know, the Windows Reliability Monitor, which is this tool from Vista that it doesn't even appear in the UI anymore, but it's still there. Look for the red bang. Yep, there it is. Copy and paste the error code, which I did. Normally I would have just Googled this, I guess. But, um, it said, yeah, you have a, you have a GPU driver problem.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:54]:
And I was like, huh. So I ran the NVIDIA app. And it said, you have a GPU driver update that fixes a hard stop on RTX Spark computers.

Leo Laporte [01:27:03]:
And

Paul Thurrott [01:27:03]:
I was like, you got to be kidding me. And so I installed it and it's been fine ever since.

Leo Laporte [01:27:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:08]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:27:09]:
The next step is just to say fix it.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:11]:
Right. Right. And yeah. And when Windows is sophisticated enough, that will just be built in. Like that will just happen. Right. But I, look, I would have fixed this, but part of the problem was it wouldn't stay up a long time. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:25]:
So I had to kind of get moving here, but it worked. And I was like, okay.

Leo Laporte [01:27:31]:
It's the first step, Paul. You're headed down the road.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:35]:
Well, this is, for me, was actually the 17th step because it just happened. This happened late yesterday. But like I said, we'll get to this.

Leo Laporte [01:27:41]:
It's only a matter of time before you completely rely on these little guys.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:46]:
I'm ready. I'm ready to— I've already—

Leo Laporte [01:27:48]:
Nobody needs to know any of this stuff. You shouldn't have to.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:52]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:27:53]:
It's important—

Paul Thurrott [01:27:54]:
Look, by the way, so I'm sorry to interrupt, but this has always been the case, right? And this is— some version of this has been said about so-called experts for years and years and years, which is this: you don't have to know everything. You just have to know where to find the answer, right? And when you can do it this quickly with AI, this becomes that much more valuable because, look, 20 years ago or 30 years ago, I guess I could have gone to a store and bought a book. Or there would've been some insight in some magazine article or something or whatever. Then we have Google Search. That's great too. But finding an answer is great. But what you said, I think, is the next step, which is just implementing the fix or doing it. Please fix this.

Leo Laporte [01:28:37]:
Something's happening. Please fix it.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:38]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:28:39]:
And sometimes it doesn't get it the first time. I mean, it's not perfect, but it's better than me.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:45]:
Yeah. Just worked pretty good.

Leo Laporte [01:28:47]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:48]:
And this is just a minor example. I mean, I, I think I have better examples than that, but we'll get there.

Leo Laporte [01:28:53]:
I had a weird HDMI bug that with Strix Halo would blank the screen and then not come back, and I didn't know what was going on, similar to what your problem was. And, uh, the AI goes, oh yeah, that's the Strix Halo bug, I know how to fix that, and fixed it.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:08]:
Yeah, I was going to say it sounds like a GPU bug, like basically, like driver bug or whatever. Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:29:14]:
It didn't get it the first time. I admit it had some ideas about how to fix this, but ultimately it did and it hasn't happened again. So it, you know, it's like having, um, kind of a, a semi-smart intern. It's an assistant. It's not you. It's not better than you. It's an assistant, but it knows some things.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:35]:
I'm actually convinced it is better than me in some ways. Um, no, I mean it. Like, I'm not joking. I, It

Leo Laporte [01:29:41]:
knows more. It's seen every—

Paul Thurrott [01:29:43]:
That's what I mean. You can only retain so much, right? Right.

Leo Laporte [01:29:46]:
It retains it all. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:47]:
If you're an expert in whatever area, that's great, but that means you're not an expert in all these other areas. And yeah, anyway, part of my problem is that I do what I do and I've been doing it for a long time, set in my ways or whatever. And my wife is over here. doing more and more AI stuff every day.

Leo Laporte [01:30:09]:
Oh, she uses it for writing, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:30:11]:
Yeah, not for the actual writing, but for work, right? For other things that are not the actual work. Research and stuff. She doesn't use it for writing, but is also moving into more stuff, like doing beyond work, I guess, is the way I would say it, for stuff for us, like whatever. And there was, I think, yeah, Micah was here for this. There was a single day, This would have been 3— well, no, this was before we went to Mexico because we were in Pennsylvania. But she fixed the toilet. What was the other one? She did 2 things in one day.

Leo Laporte [01:30:46]:
You mentioned this.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:47]:
That would normally, like, the type of thing I would handle. And she's like, I could ask him and wait, or I could just do this. And yeah, it's interesting seeing this happen. Finally, through being beaten into the ground enough times, I'm like, all right, I gotta figure something out here. So I have it. This has not even been a week really, but it's astonishing on a day-by-day basis how much more I've used it every day now. Like, it's kind of incredible. And, you know, for you, this will be like kind of quaint, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:24]:
But I mean, but I just— I wasn't using it for anything before. This is still a big deal for me. It's an interesting thing. But anyway, we'll get to it. I don't know why I keep talking about it. Sorry. There's 2 quick dev things. .NET 11 arrived yesterday if you're interested in that.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:46]:
It's a short-term release, so it's only going to be supported for 2 years. .NET Conf is this week. Yeah, I don't know, whatever. And then, uh,

Leo Laporte [01:31:57]:
if Richard were here, I'm sure he'd have more to say about it, but he's not, so

Paul Thurrott [01:32:00]:
it's not worth talking about. But, um, well, it's worth mentioning, but, um, because you always get major performance improvements, etc., etc. Um, those Artcraft apps are interesting because of how good they are as clones of those apps, but I have to say, to me, having downloaded and run a lot of them, The thing that is in many ways as impressive and maybe even more impressive is, and this is especially true if you have any experience with Adobe apps, they install in seconds, and I mean like low single-digit seconds, and then they launch in under a second every time. They are the fastest, most performant apps I've ever seen, and they're big, heavy, beefy, complex apps. I don't know— well, no, I do know, I'm sorry. They're written in Rust. And Rust is known for being memory safe. That's the reason it exists.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:52]:
But actually, it's a little bit like when you do tracker blocking on a browser, all of a sudden the internet runs faster because you're not loading all this extraneous junk. And Rust kind of has that. It's not exactly the same, obviously, but it has that kind of effect. And now that this has happened and they're doing Microsoft Office app alternatives and some other ones too, including by the way. I think AutoCAD might be one of them. Um, and other people are doing this, is that reverse engine, you know, engineer anything movement and blah blah blah, whatever. Um, I, 2 years ago, whenever it was, I was like, Microsoft should rewrite the Windows kernel in Rust. And it was like, oh Paul, you're so quaint, you don't know how computer science works.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:34]:
And I'm like, no, I, I think I nailed it. Uh, they need to do that, and AI can make it happen. But, um, Discord is another example of Um, a service or an app maker or whatever that's rewriting their app in Rust.

Leo Laporte [01:33:46]:
Thank God, because they were in Electron and that is awful.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:49]:
Yeah, well, so Discord and Notion to me have the same problem, which is that every single time I run these apps, I have to install an update. Dear God, make it stop.

Leo Laporte [01:33:59]:
Yeah, I agree.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:00]:
That makes me, that makes me crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:34:02]:
That may not be fixed. I mean, uh,

Paul Thurrott [01:34:04]:
yeah, that I cannot— yeah, that I'm not sure of, obviously. But it looks like this thing is going to be dramatically more performant and less resource intensive.

Leo Laporte [01:34:13]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:14]:
Awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:34:15]:
Like, Electron is a pig.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:16]:
Yep, I love to see this kind of thing. So that's great.

Leo Laporte [01:34:21]:
All right, all right, well, that concludes, uh, the, um, middle portion of the—

Paul Thurrott [01:34:27]:
middle portion of the creamy nougat center of Windows Weekly. I don't know what we call

Leo Laporte [01:34:30]:
it. The center, the creamy nougat center. Um, you're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot is here. If you're looking for Richard Campbell, he is— was supposed to be on from Prague, He is so peripatetic.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:43]:
He's such a slacker, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:34:46]:
You know, after, uh, suffering this miserable jet lag,

Paul Thurrott [01:34:50]:
right,

Leo Laporte [01:34:51]:
uh, from flying from Indonesia, I just— I feel like crap. I don't know how he does it,

Paul Thurrott [01:34:57]:
right? I, I've been— look, we're basically the same age, and I, I say this to him all the time. I don't know how you do this. I couldn't— if I— I, I couldn't function if I traveled as much as you travel.

Leo Laporte [01:35:07]:
I feel like I've aged 10 years. I just— it's like

Paul Thurrott [01:35:10]:
not

Leo Laporte [01:35:10]:
Good.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:10]:
Can't even get out of bed, you know. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:35:13]:
Uh, so anyway, um, Richard is out of bed, but he's unfortunately still on an airplane, uh, on his way to Prague and couldn't join us. But he'll be back next week from some other Eastern European capital, no doubt.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:27]:
Yes, or British Columbia, which is basically the same.

Leo Laporte [01:35:29]:
Or BC, we don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:31]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:35:32]:
But the good news is, one thing we never lose, as long as Paul Theroux is here, it's time for The world-renowned Xbox segment. Is it? Yes, here it is. You've been waiting all day for the Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:50]:
This song is unique because it sounds just as good in reverse, and I have to say, it's true. I don't know how that— I don't know how that's possible. It doesn't make any sense.

Leo Laporte [01:35:59]:
It doesn't sound like it's backwards at all.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:01]:
No, it sounds like it's correct. Like it's—

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

Paul Thurrott [01:36:04]:
Hopefully we're not violating someone's IP, but it just seems like it's unique.

Leo Laporte [01:36:09]:
We haven't been taken down yet, so it's fooling Content ID somehow. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:13]:
Oh, good.

Leo Laporte [01:36:14]:
We should do the whole show backwards.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:16]:
So every once in a while I'll mention, you know, Microsoft tests features through the Windows Insider Program for Windows, obviously, but they also do so for Xbox through the Xbox Insider Program. This has changed a little bit. Lately, it seems like they've been just putting features out there from time to time. And one of the ones, or this past week, they announced 2 new features, one of which is incredibly uninteresting to me, but you could use your phone with the Xbox app as the controller using the Xbox app on your smart TV because you're doing cloud streaming. And okay, whatever, that makes sense. Or it makes some sense. I don't know. It makes whatever sense it makes, but I don't— that doesn't impact me.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:02]:
That's fine. But the other one is, I just, I realized as I saw this, I was like, this is the realization of a dream I had several years ago where I openly, I wrote an article about Microsoft asking them to do this exact thing, which is they just released a Nano controller. So it's a small Xbox controller. It's available now if you want to buy it. I think it's $60. And one thing they did not mention when they announced this a couple months ago is that in addition to having Bluetooth connectivity, or obviously over a cable like a USB connectivity, it supports Wi-Fi connectivity. And what that means is it connects to Xbox the service, Xbox Game Cloud Gaming in this case, directly instead of going through the device you're using. So if you're using it with a console or using it with a PC or using it with like a Fire TV Stick or whatever it is, you're not beholden to that Bluetooth connection between the 2 devices and whatever latency that introduces, which can be dramatic.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:03]:
This is exactly how Stadia worked when they had the Stadia controller. It is how I believe Amazon Luna still works if you use their controller. The controller connects to the network. So it reduces latency dramatically and it eliminates one of the biggest problems with cloud gaming, assuming you you have a decent enough connection to play the game, obviously. And this is years old now because this was Stadia, but back at that time, Stadia was the only service I could use to play what was probably the latest Doom game at the time, which I think was Doom 2016, but maybe Eternal. I don't remember, but one of those 2 games. And it only worked well on Stadia, and I credited that to this direct Wi-Fi connection. But that's a feature of the Nano controller.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:48]:
So, um, you can install this, uh, feature now through Xbox Insider Program if you have that controller and use it. And there have been many leaks of a new Xbox Elite Series 3 controller, which has not been announced yet, but you have to assume that's going to be part of that as well. And then eventually just be part of all controllers, and that's the way it should be. It's great. Like, it's kind of awesome. So this kind of might— what would have been otherwise kind of a minor you know, whatever, a couple of features. It's like, oh no, this is awesome. Like, this is, this is actually going to make a big difference.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:17]:
So that's pretty cool. Um, the Xbox app, and this is the version that's on PC, uh, web, and mobile, I believe, or maybe TV, one of the— I don't know. Well, the version on PC anyway has been updated for sure. Um, this is almost certainly an Electron app as well, by the way. Um, and maybe it isn't anymore, I'm not really sure, but it was originally for sure. But it is now, uh, launches like 60% faster, and then just day-to-day usage is some percentage faster. But it is noticeable. And they updated the UI a little bit, but it's, um, it's definitely better.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:50]:
And, uh, I feel like a lot of these kind of game ecosystem front ends like Steam and, uh, the Epic Games Store is like this too, although they too are updating their app, um, are just kind of like sloggy, slow-moving, crappy apps. I don't— and they always run in the background, terrible. But, um, so that's kind of a nice update as well. Uh, when— let's see, was it the original? I think it was the original Snapdragon X. So a couple years ago, Microsoft announced something or released something called Auto SR, which is Super Resolution. And it was— it's one of many things in Windows 11 on ARM that helps these computers that have to emulate games run a little bit better, right? So you run a game at a lower resolution To achieve higher frame rates, but it lowers the quality. So Auto SSR upscales the visuals. So to you, it looks like it's running at a high res.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:38]:
So you might be running 720p, but it looks like it's running 1080p and you get like 60 frames a second. It's great, great idea. But of course, when you hear about that, you're like, well, that would benefit all computers. Like, why do you know, why don't we have that anywhere else? Like, I love that it's on Qualcomm chips, like awesome, but it should be everywhere. And I don't remember, a couple weeks ago, um, Microsoft brought it to, uh, the latest generation of Intel Core Ultra, so the, uh, Panther Lake chips. Um, you can download this for that. And now today they just announced the release of this for AMD chipsets as well. So if you have an AMD-based Copilot Plus PC or an, uh, a ROG Xbox Ally, whatever they're called, gaming handheld, you can get this thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:23]:
And it's basically like You know, like NVIDIA has DLSS or whatever it's called, it's upscaling, right? So you can, again, run at a lower frame rate or lower resolution, but you don't see it 'cause the visuals look great 'cause they're upscaled. And then you achieve higher frame rates and graphic qualities. So awesome. Like that came together pretty quick. Like 2 years ago, I was like, why isn't this everywhere? And then it's not everywhere, but it's on all the modern chipsets now. So that's great. And I believe it's, is it? I think it might be. I think it's on the RTX Spark as well.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:56]:
I'll have to look at that. I think it is.

Leo Laporte [01:41:59]:
Um, no, people don't talk about that, but it's probably a pretty good gaming laptop, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:42:03]:
It's an awesome gaming laptop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It, um, yeah. So

Leo Laporte [01:42:08]:
like, I don't think that's the intent, or maybe it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:11]:
Well, it's, it's— look, in the sense that you buy a computer that can do everything, right? Um, like if you bought a Snapdragon laptop Highly recommend it. But the one thing is, if you're a heavy gamer and you're a PC gamer, you're gonna need another computer for that.

Leo Laporte [01:42:23]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:24]:
You know, it's not, it's not gonna work. Um, a Snapdragon X2 laptop, which is what I'm using for the podcast, um, can run the 2 earlier Doom games, Doom 2016 and Eternal, but not Doom Dark Ages. Um, the RTX Spark can run it, uh, native resolutions. Like, I think this one is like 2880 by 1800, you know, over 60 frames a second, all the graphics settings on the highest setting. And it's gorgeous. Look at it. It's smooth and awesome. Like, it's just great.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:52]:
And it's— yeah, it's the NVIDIA GPU stuff. It's really interesting. So yeah, that's good. Uh, if you are interested in GTA 6, which is coming out actually this month now, right? Because it's November all of a sudden. Um, it is available for preloading, which is always fun. Um, I like preloading because it wastes your time twice, because I can assure you When this game ships, you will be preloading it again because— or loading it again because there'll be a massive update. There always is. But, um, I mean, I, I would do it.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:23]:
I'm not, I'm not super interested in this game, but, um, whatever. So if you pre-ordered it, you have a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox console, you can preload that and get ready for the launch, which is when? It should be soon, right? Like, uh, That could I— yeah, November 19th, which is next week all of a sudden. Dear God. Okay, so it's coming quick. Um, and yeah, be sure to set aside 200 to 300 gigabytes of space because, you know, modern games, they're big. Um, on the opposite end of the spectrum, um, this is such a great story. So some guy who worked at EA, or works at EA, went into the vault, like, asked— started asking around, like, Where's our old— where's our stuff? Like our old stuff. And he went into the vault.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:10]:
You can read this. There's a huge story about this on— It's a great— Yeah, it's an awesome story.

Leo Laporte [01:44:14]:
I love it.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:15]:
Yeah. So he started organizing it all and it's mountains. It's like, it's like the, the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like it just goes on forever. And they have all the assets, all the everything, the code, you know, from all their old games. And so they've just released, uh, remastered versions of like basically the entire Wing Commander series, the entire Ultima series.

Leo Laporte [01:44:35]:
Yay.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:35]:
Road Rash. Um, Crusader Games, Privateer, I think is sort of a take on one of those game series, and some other games, but they're on Steam, they're on GOG, they might be elsewhere, but normally these games are going to be about $10 apiece. This may have changed since this happened, but when I looked the other day, they were on sale for $5. I mean, so if you have some kind of a memory of these things, like Mark Hamill doing a— what do they call it? Yeah. Full motion video.

Leo Laporte [01:45:04]:
Yeah. Wing Commander.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:05]:
Yeah. Wing Commander 3 or whatever. Yeah. Awesome. So some of these, you know, some of them have been updated. Some of them are just like, now it just runs on modern hardware.

Leo Laporte [01:45:11]:
You don't really want it to be updated. You want it to look like it did.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:14]:
I love the graphics. I love this. This, this looks like Amiga graphics to me. Like I just really like the look of these things, but, um, that's fun. I love this kind of, I love anything related to like game preservation, whatever. It's just so good. Um, so that's great. Um, and then, uh, Microsoft doesn't do this, but Sony and Nintendo still talk about how many consoles they sell.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:35]:
Both have gone down dramatically this quarter year over year, which is particularly bad for Nintendo because the Switch 2 is not that old. It's only about a— it's not even a year and a half old, but we'll see how that goes over a longer period of time. But Nintendo sold 6.49 million Switch 2 consoles in the year. That's down 37% year over year. That's kind of a tough time for that to go down that bad. Um, they're still on track to sell over 16 million units through the end of their fiscal year, which ends at the end of March.

Leo Laporte [01:46:07]:
Watch what happens now that they've re-released, um,

Paul Thurrott [01:46:11]:
the Zelda game. Yeah, so the game— so since— yeah, so that, that game sold over 5 million copies in less than 48 hours, uh, which makes it by far the best-selling game on this console. And

Leo Laporte [01:46:23]:
it's just a— it's just a— it's, it's not new, right? It's the old game.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:27]:
not best-selling over time, I mean best-selling ever for that period of time. Like, that's amazing. Like, it's obviously going to be one of the best-selling games ever. Um, that's really cool. I, you know, so we'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:46:37]:
And I imagine it's going to sell some Switch 2s.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:40]:
Yeah, yeah, I would hope so. Yeah. And they've— look, they've had to raise prices this year basically everywhere globally, but, um, they're not going to raise prices, they said, at least for this fiscal year. So if you haven't bought one and, you know, you should be able to get one, uh, I would hope. Um, Sony sold 2.6 million PlayStation 5s, um, at, uh, which is down some— where's the number on that one? I don't know. That's also— yeah. Oh, 35% decline. So very similar to Nintendo.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:08]:
Um, but that brings total cumulative sales, or at the time it did, to 98 million over the course of the lifetime of that console. Um, today they announced they actually hit 100 million. I'm not sure— It's just like way too days. But, um, so now they sold 100 million. Like, that's actually a significant number. And, um, that's actually very good. That puts it up in the top, you know, half of like console, you know, for best-selling console of all time. It's not threatening near the top or anything like that, but it's still, you know, that's still very good.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:36]:
And, um, well, it's also much further into its life cycle, right? So they've started talking about, uh, PS6. Um, it's not gonna— probably not gonna be next year, but— When you think about these things have a natural life cycle, PlayStation 5 was launched 2021 or 2020? 2020, I think, alongside the Xbox Series X and S. It's probably outsold it by a factor of, I don't

Leo Laporte [01:48:03]:
know,

Paul Thurrott [01:48:04]:
4, something like that. It's not good, but they're declining, of course, but it's been around for a while. Honestly, this has been a very successful generation for these guys. So

Leo Laporte [01:48:17]:
I think it must just be because it's the default. Like, yeah, if you say I'm gonna buy a game console, people say just get a PS5.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:24]:
And

Leo Laporte [01:48:24]:
I don't know why Xbox didn't get that kind of, uh, yeah, love.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:27]:
We, we had it briefly with the 360, and a big part of that was they had that, um, partnership with Activision on Call of Duty. So those games would come first to that console, but then it went to Sony, and now you know, Microsoft owns it, which is kind of ironic. But, um, the thing is, like, if you follow— what's the site, like Digital Foundry, I think, uh, does— always does the graphics comparisons and performance comparisons of games. I— if it's not 100%, it's like 99% of the time the PlayStation 5, especially Pro version, is the best console version. Always. Like, it's just—

Leo Laporte [01:49:04]:
But is that pixel peeping? Is that minor difference, or is it very clear?

Paul Thurrott [01:49:07]:
It's all— it's, it's frame rate, it's No, it's, it's clear. It's often very clear, actually. It's— yeah, it's often obvious. You could buy it.

Leo Laporte [01:49:14]:
I would have thought it was the very expensive computer. In other words, people buy Switches because that's where Zelda is, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:49:22]:
Yeah, I think— well, Nintendo speaks to a different audience, right? I mean, to me it's like the Disney part of the market, like the, you know, it's cute and cartoony and—

Leo Laporte [01:49:30]:
right.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:30]:
But they also, you know, they're fun. Like the game—

Leo Laporte [01:49:32]:
if you want to kill something, get a PlayStation.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:35]:
Thank you. Or a PC. Or a PC. If you're serious. If you're hardcore killer.

Leo Laporte [01:49:39]:
If you're really serious, you get a PC.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:40]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:49:40]:
In fact, if you're really serious, you're going to get an RTX Spark.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:43]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:49:44]:
Right. Can you connect it, at least connect it to a big monitor?

Paul Thurrott [01:49:48]:
The Spark?

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

Paul Thurrott [01:49:50]:
Oh yeah, of course.

Leo Laporte [01:49:51]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:52]:
Yeah, it's a computer. I mean, you can do anything.

Leo Laporte [01:49:53]:
It's a computer. I don't know. Is it a computer? I don't know what it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:56]:
I did the last 3 episodes of Hands-On Windows I did were all recorded on that. And it was driving 3 screens like no problem.

Leo Laporte [01:50:03]:
Wow. All right.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:05]:
Yeah. This week I'm going to do—

Leo Laporte [01:50:06]:
I mean, it's a big GPU. It's not, you know, it's a hefty GPU.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:09]:
Yeah. I noticed you can put it on your lap if you doubt that. Um, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's

Leo Laporte [01:50:14]:
a

Paul Thurrott [01:50:14]:
hot Navi. It's the heat of a thousand suns.

Leo Laporte [01:50:16]:
It'll warm you to your heart.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:20]:
Yep. Whether you want it or not, baby.

Leo Laporte [01:50:23]:
Now, my friends, now it is time according to my careful calculations. For the back of the book, Paul Theroux's tip of the week. Paul?

Paul Thurrott [01:50:34]:
Yeah, it occurs as I was just clicking through these, like maybe I should have done this in reverse order, but as part of trying to incorporate more AI into my life, I came across a couple of services, or an app and a service I guess, that are, I think, are going to be generally useful to people. So one is about transferring all your playlists between like music services, right? So there are services that do this. I've been paying for one called SongShift. It only runs on Apple devices, you know, um, but one of the problems I have is my music is in YouTube Music, which is great, it's fine, but— and, and one of the things I love about it is that you get the entire YouTube catalog that you can pull in as songs in your playlist. So if there's like a live concert video of some band you love you can bring it in as a song and you can play it as music, right? It's just a unique kind of an integration feature because YouTube and YouTube Music are essentially the same backend, right? But when you go to transfer that to another service, it becomes a problem because whatever the thing you're using will be like, I don't know what this thing is, what is this? And you run into issues, right? So there's a free service called FreeYourMusic, which by the way, good name, which will transfer between all the services completely free. It works awesome. It's honestly the best thing I've used, including better than the thing I was paying for. And, um, you know, you have to triage the, the ones that can't find, but it actually just does a really— it does a better job of finding like alternatives or the version of in some cases.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:06]:
Um, and it gives you— if you— if it can't, it matches them and it does like a kind of percentage match. And the one that's at the top is usually the right one. Like, I've just— this has worked out really good for me. So this has been nice and it's good to know about, like, if you're gonna switch between services. The other one that's super useful, this is an AI thing, is upscaling of photos. And so some years ago, my dad, I don't know how he did this or if someone did it for him or however he did, but he scanned a lot of photos from the past, from the 1960s and maybe early '70s. So there's a bunch of pictures in there of me as a baby or a very little kid or him and his—

Leo Laporte [01:52:45]:
Aw.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:45]:
Second wife, who was the woman that we bought the home from here in Pennsylvania, or not even not in Pennsylvania, but back in Pennsylvania when she was really young, you know, my sisters when they were very young, etc. But these things were like, some of them were like Polaroids, so they're, you know, not great to begin with. They're small, the resolution is low. And if you have a— there's various ways to, you know, upscale photos obviously, but if you have a Copilot Plus PC, you can use the Photos app. It has a really good upscaler. It's built in. But you can only do one at a time. But there's an app you can download to your computer called Upscayl, but it's up, like the word up, S-C-A-Y-L.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:26]:
And it does batch upscaling. It also has different models. So these things will improve over time. It works with local models. So you need like a good GPU or it works on Snapdragon X2, by the way. So like that GPU is pretty good. Like I guess that works well enough. You don't have to pay for it.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:44]:
You can choose between the models, and they have— the models have different effects. Some of them are better at, like, um, you know, details or whatever. Some of them, you know, kind of do a better job of smoothing things out if you have too much grain or whatever it might be. I've done a couple of versions of this where I, um, I go through, like, my dad's photos. It's like almost 600 photos. Um, it takes— it took 45 minutes the first pass. It took less than that, so I didn't write it down, but I think it was like 37 minutes the second time. But The second pass I did, which using a different model, was like, yep, no, this is it.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:14]:
But the other thing that's interesting about it is you can, you know, hold on to the originals because as these models improve, like we've been talking, chances are pretty good you're going to get a better model that you might want to do it again, you know, sometime 15 minutes down the road or whatever it is. But completely free. It works awesome. I was really happy to find this because it's just, just for the batch functionality, right? So because of, you know, I, I delayed my trip to Mexico by 10 days. Um, I had to, but I meant to delay it by 2 days, but I had to delay it by 10 days because of the cost. Um, because I was gonna get what I thought originally was like an RTX, you know, Spark or RTX, but then I ended up getting 3. But so—

Leo Laporte [01:54:59]:
Who's, who's, who are the makers?

Paul Thurrott [01:55:02]:
HP, Lenovo, and ASUS.

Leo Laporte [01:55:04]:
Okay. But are they functionally identical or are they different?

Paul Thurrott [01:55:07]:
They're mostly identical, but the big difference is going to be the RAM, the processor, because there are 2 levels of N1X processors. They're not that different. And then the form factor, right? So the Lenovo is a convertible form factor, which doesn't matter too much to me, but it could matter to somebody. It has the lower-end processor and it has 32 gigs of RAM. Uh, the HP is the higher-end processor with 32 gigs of RAM, and then the ASUS is the higher-end processor with 128 gigs of RAM. Um, so yeah, I went from like, I got nothing, to, oh God, now I gotta cover— carry 16 pounds of laptops to Mexico thinking I'm gonna be stopped at the border. Nobody cared. I went— these things went through machines.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:52]:
Nobody, nobody even Nobody even blinked. But anyway, since we've been here, I spent, you know, the first— I don't know, I— well, I actually, I spent a week-ish in Pennsylvania and then a couple weeks here just trying to get stuff to work. And this is stuff we talked about when you were gone, but, um, stupidly— I mean, the basic chatbot stuff works fine, obviously, with Local AI, but the, um, the advanced things are more complicated. And of course, I, I go from like 0 to 10 by going from like, what's the capital of Maine, to, you know, make me a complete app with all the bells and whistles, you know, kind of falls apart. Um, I, I failed so much and was so frustrated, and I, I, I, to remind myself like this kind of thing can work, I, I went, I, I, because I got, I, I got a, I bought a Google book, it comes with a year of, uh, Google AI Pro, I think, whatever it's called. And so this was part of it. And I had made a small app using on the Google Book with it. And I was like, well, I'll install this on Windows and see how this works.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:53]:
I wasn't even sure it could make native Windows apps. It can. And I was kind of blown away by that. And I was like, okay, that's kind of interesting. And then between like just, I'm trying to figure all this stuff out. I talked about my wife a little bit and she's using AI all the time. And I was like, I have to, I talked to her about this. I was like, I wanna, figure out a way, like, how do I integrate this kind of thing into my life more? Like, where can I use this, you know? And so some of it, yes, is coding type stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:23]:
I wrote a— I wrote like, yeah, I wrote— I didn't write it. AI wrote a utility for me that fixes like the trackpad in Windows, which is awesome because it's garbage. I had worked up a cover, like we do a different edition of our Eternal Spring book every year, which I make by hand, right? And I was going to do it again, and you kind of change the colors a little bit. You have a new color, like a new photo. But I, but I, I've always really been into like, uh, like, uh, vintage, like, travel posters. So I went to, um, it was Gemini in this case, and I was like, hey, here's my book, here's the book cover, this, these are the designs for the past couple years, this is the one I was working on, but I want it to look like kind of a vintage travel poster thing. And it made this, and, and I was like, I want to use this photo on the COVID So it was a photo I took from like a hot air balloon, like over the pyramids. And man, it made this thing and I was like, oh my God, this is gorgeous.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:16]:
And so I removed, I had it remove all the text it added. I redid the text. We have our own font there. Well, actually that's part of this. And so it's not out yet, but I used it to design like the next cover of my book, right? And then the font thing was part of it. 'Cause one of the tricks is in, I took an existing font and I stretched it out different ways, but I had to save this as like a template. I use it like over and over again to recreate text wherever I need text in that font. And I was like, could you just make me a font? Yeah, I can make you a font.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:51]:
And so it just made the font, like stuff like that, right? That's how it started. Um, but then since then I used it to reorganize like that Markdown book I'm writing on. I, uh, we have a bunch of book updates, uh, that we We have like a site in the book and we used it to— my wife did this one, but she pointed it at both and said, tell me what's on the site but not in the book. And then it just made this report and then we could go to our own site and add it to our own book. Like, 'cause we could have done that by hand, but that would have taken a really long time, right? One of the biggest ones is like the maps for the book is a disaster. That one's still in progress, but using it to help make maps that work not just as images in the book, but it goes to Google Maps and you can click into it and go to all the different places and stuff. That stuff has been kind of awesome. And then the stuff I just mentioned, the photo upscaling, the music transfer stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:46]:
There's a price tracking thing. Like I had, I did this in a couple of different places, but also in Gemini, I was like, I wanna buy this Google Play speaker, it's $300, but I only wanna buy it when it's under $250. Give me an alert. And it just alerted me the other day. And I went to Amazon and it was the regular price. And I'm thinking this will be a Black Friday thing. It was probably just a little too early. But then the thing that's amazing about this is that was just the weekend.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:14]:
I just described the weekend. And I blew through it pretty quick on purpose because seriously, who cares? But since then, let me see if I can find this thing. This is the part, like, I'll write about this next week or whatever. I used it to fix that crash like we talked about. I write these laptop reviews and a lot of it, I have like a template for the reviews and I take notes in the template for the— because I'll copy it for the laptop. And then like I make note of like battery life stuff or whatever I'm doing, whatever it is. And then, you know, I write the review, but, you know, 30 to 50% of it maybe, or some percentage is Just communicating what the specifications are, and not just for the one I have, but all of the possibilities for this model of laptop, like whatever it might be. So there's different RAM amounts you can get, different storage, different— often there are 5 or 6 display types or processor types or whatever it is, like what the exact specifications are of every USB port.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:14]:
This is just rote work, right? And every time I write a review, and I write like 25 of these a year. I go, you know, maybe they have a reviewer's guide. They— I go to— I search for like their technical documentation, not just the stuff that's on their public website where they list the stuff, but what they actually put in their service manuals, like trying to figure out exactly what the stuff is. So for the— for this laptop review I published today, I was like, look, here's the— here's the 3 documents. It's like a service manual, the page for the thing, the configuration page, whatever. I need you to list, and here's my template. Don't put it in the template, but just list, bullet list, what are each of those components? And just spewed it out. And I was like, awesome.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:56]:
You know, um, there's some Christmas stuff I don't want to talk about yet that I'm working on, but, um, uh, I have a problem with, uh, my tweets from throughout.com, which go through DeliverIt. Um, they publish correctly, but the links aren't clickable. Oh. So that, I'm working on that with that one. I just started working on, but, um, And then because the big one for me though, so since the weekend, it's Wednesday, is again, we have this book Eternal Spring and it's published on LeadPub. It's mostly text, right? But I've always wanted it to have either to have the book itself be like some beautiful magazine-style layout thing with color and beautiful layout, which is terrible because anytime you make any change, it changes it. It's horrible. But then I was like, well, We could do like a, like a booklet that was like a companion thing.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:46]:
And we, we've talked about different things that this could be, but I was like, what if this was like kind of a concise, like, you know, there would be like one page, nice layout for every chapter in the book that had like the top 10 tips or whatever from that chapter, but with a nice layout. Nice. It would, it could look like the new book cover design, whatever. So I, I started this with Gemini last night and I, the, I, I Fed it the PDF version of the book, and I was like, I wrote this book, these are the chapters I want. I described what I wanted. It made that list in approximately 30 seconds. It might have taken 40 seconds. I don't want to exaggerate, but it was like it just spit it out.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:28]:
And I was like, yeah, no, this is great. And then I was like, all right, now I want to turn this into what will eventually be like a PDF page, one page of many. There will be this booklet thing. And, um, as of this morning, like, I've only done the one chapter worth of one page, but it, it just like makes it— like, I, I, I use Affinity for this, or well, I use Affinity a lot, but Affinity has like a layout component, which is a page publishing thing, which is like InDesign or whatever. And I asked it to make this thing. I asked it to make file in AF format with Affinity format. And it told me that Affinity format is proprietary and it cannot do that, but it could make it as an SVG file and then it would give me all the assets separately. And if you import that into Affinity, it will be perfect and then you can just save it as an Affinity file.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:22]:
And I was like, man, that sounds like nonsense. And then it did it and I was like, nope, that's perfect. That's amazing. Like, so I'm just— this is just me kind of stepping through, not writing, right? I mean, I write, I write, I do my own writing. That's not going to change. But there's all this other stuff around me that's work-related that is rote work or just hard work or time-consuming or tedious, whatever it is. And I've been trying to make a to-do list, and I'll see how long it goes. I don't know that I can do a weekly article for the rest of my life.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:58]:
my life on this. But for now, at least, as I'm kind of rushing forward trying to figure this stuff out, it's amazing to me because again, I've not ignored it like on purpose, but I have kind of ignored it. Um, like how quickly it's kind of come together. And I'm trying to think if there's anything that just overtly failed. I don't— so I don't think so. I've had to work around a couple things, I guess. But like, so far it's been like Mostly it's been dramatically positive. Like, it's just been like, like, you know, like the book design, the first thing it spit out, it had did its own thing with text and stuff.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:36]:
And I was like this, but the image, which was like an AI vintage poster version of a photo I took, was gorgeous. And I was like, nice. Uh, I believe, and, and here's something actually, you would, you would know this to be true too. Like a year or two ago, if you went to any service and were like, make me a photo of dot dot dot or whatever it was, and it's like it comes with a picture, and you're like, this is a really good picture, but the flag is wrong or the thing is whatever it is. The thing it spit out next would not be that photo with that change; it would be a different photo, close but not the same. But when you do this now, like for example with this thing because it did the text and stuff, and I was like, I love this photo. or this image. I specified the resolution and aspect ratio, the whole thing.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:24]:
It was amazing. But I said, but I want it without the text. And it just generated the same exact image but without the text. And I was just like, okay, this is, this is freaking amazing. Like, it's awesome. Like, so I spend, you know, like, uh, even the way I was doing like the, like the COVID of the book before is something that would've taken me I don't sit down and only do that, right? I mean, I have a job too. But it would've been several days. I would've shown it to my wife and we would've talked about which photo and blah, blah, blah.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:56]:
And this time I made this and I keep saying like I made it, but it made it. And I did edit it and whatever. I put our font in there and everything, but I showed it to her and she's like, oh my God, that's perfect. I'm like, I know, I know. I don't know what to tell you. Nice. That's astonishing. Like, it's astonishing.

Leo Laporte [02:07:15]:
Which model did you use again?

Paul Thurrott [02:07:17]:
Uh, Argon. Is that Google? For a lot, yeah, it was the Argon stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:07:20]:
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott [02:07:20]:
yeah,

Leo Laporte [02:07:21]:
yeah. Google, because that's, you know, Nano Banana or whatever. They have very good images. Yeah, all of them do now though, I have to say.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:27]:
Well, yeah, I mean, some— someone at some point, I think because they were probably confused, like, why aren't you using Anthropic or whatever? And they were like, why are you— why are you using Gemini? And I was like, because it's free. I have it. I, I bought it. It cost me $1,000 to buy a laptop, but I

Leo Laporte [02:07:41]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:42]:
Now I have this thing for free, I'm going to use it. So why not? And the results are awesome. And it's good. Plus, just random— well, not randomly, but because of the laptop, I tried Anti-Gravity again. And even since May, that thing has improved. And then even since I've started using it for this stuff, they just added this productivity thing yesterday, which I've not yet tried. The rate of improvement Yeah. And think about making an app.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:11]:
I've made a million versions of Notepad-type apps or Markdown editors or whatever. There's quality, like it looks good. There's it works right, like all the menus do the right thing and it actually works. Keyboard shortcuts work nice. But there's also just how long does it take and how little do I have to say to it to make it do the thing or whatever? Um, that's— every part of that has gotten better. And I don't mean like in 2 years, I mean in whatever that is, 4 months, um, 5 months, whatever it is. It's astonishing. Like, it's just, uh, because if you, if you're just on the periphery and you just look every once in a while and you're like, eh, it's good or bad, whatever, I don't care, and then you don't look again, uh, you blinked and you missed it.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:59]:
Like, you gotta go look. You have to look again. Like, it's Yeah. It's astonishing, like, in such a short period of time how much better it's gotten. So it's just been the big— look, no one had to explain to me that this stuff is amazing. I, I do get it. I've always, you know, or not, I don't— pretty much I've always gotten it, whatever. But, um, but just the big deal for me is actually just kind of using it, like doing it, and that's been Honestly, it's kind of— well, not really because I've been doing the RTX Spark stuff and I've been going back and forth.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:34]:
But I mean, but just in the past week, everything I just blurted out and a couple other things, I mean, this has been the past week.

Leo Laporte [02:09:43]:
Yes. Dave has a rule that when he talks about AI, he always adds the word today because whatever you say about AI today, Yep. Will change tomorrow.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:55]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:09:57]:
I've never seen anything this—

Paul Thurrott [02:09:59]:
No. Technology has always moved fast. Remember in the '90s, this is so quaint, it was internet speed, remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was the big thing. Netscape is going to kill Microsoft because of internet speed. Internet speed is like a sloth walking in the slow lane. I think people, unless you're actually experiencing it, I think there are a lot of, especially technical people who have been around a while, are going to be like, yeah, no, you're exaggerating. You have no idea.

Leo Laporte [02:10:26]:
I think a tiny percentage of people, a very small percentage, are actually experiencing what you've experienced.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:32]:
Right. It's revelatory. I mean, it's—

Leo Laporte [02:10:36]:
You're AI killed, my friend. It's happened.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:39]:
Okay. I just want to be super clear. It's not going to write for me. I will not do that.

Leo Laporte [02:10:45]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:45]:
Here's the example I use. I want to write, but I have all this other stuff around me I don't want to do.

Leo Laporte [02:10:51]:
I wouldn't let— I have, I don't know how many hundreds of pictures from my trip. I would not let AI pick my best pictures. It's not going to do that. It's not going to do that.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:01]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:11:01]:
Once I get— once I, with my human brain, choose the pictures I love, will I let AI organize them? Will I let them put together a web page? Yes, there's a lot of things. So you just, you learn what it's good at and what it's not good at. And there are things There's things that human judgment, there's no replacement for. That's why when people say, oh, we're all going to be dead and AI's going to replace us, I don't worry about that because there are things we do that are unique.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:27]:
I think the perspective I think many, many people lack, and it's because they just weren't alive at these times, is that this was the reaction to the pen, to the painting, to the photograph, to the train, to the plane.

Leo Laporte [02:11:41]:
I'm sure

Paul Thurrott [02:11:42]:
the first time

Leo Laporte [02:11:42]:
somebody saw perspective in a painting.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:46]:
Yeah,

Leo Laporte [02:11:47]:
they went crazy.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:48]:
They were like, are you the Antichrist?

Leo Laporte [02:11:50]:
Yeah, they probably burned a few people. You're right.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:53]:
And look, you know, everyone's like worried about jobs. I was just— said, actually, this is a conversation with my wife, um, you know, a couple years ago, the one of the things I would have said about AI, and I did, was I could go to AI and have it make 3 versions of a graphic because I want to use it on my website. There is no graphic artist on Earth who can do this.

Leo Laporte [02:12:12]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:12]:
I'm not taking someone's job. They— this job was— this was never a job,

Leo Laporte [02:12:15]:
right?

Paul Thurrott [02:12:16]:
But now I'm like, yeah, no, I'm pretty much destroying 17 jobs right now. Like, I'm— I've gone way beyond this. Like, it's, um— but even that one thing was amazing for the time. And the— I mean, I, I, I don't have the words. Like, I'm kind of amazed, even though I shouldn't be, by how much more capable it is over a much broader range of stuff. I'm not doing this, but Claude has a financial service now that will help you with the finances.

Leo Laporte [02:12:47]:
Yeah. And see, that's an example of where you want local. You don't want—

Paul Thurrott [02:12:50]:
Yeah, no, I know. But you know what? I bet it's pretty good at it. I'll just say, you bet.

Leo Laporte [02:12:55]:
I bet it's really good at it.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:56]:
I'm not going to do it myself, but I bet it's really good at it. We have asked financial questions, but without providing any details. I actually did this during this podcast maybe a week or two ago, asked it about— I said, most of my retirement savings is in 401s. There's a tax penalty every time I take money out. There's going to be a penalty. I'm old enough now that I don't get a penalty for that, but how do I minimize my tax exposure? This thing published a 37-page book. That was local AI. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:13:32]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:32]:
And then it was like, to help you better, I need to know more information about where your money is and how much it is. And I'm like, yeah, we're going to end it right there. But I was like, this is— no, but that was impressive.

Leo Laporte [02:13:45]:
I have a local AI that does all my finances. Every close of market every day, it does my net worth. It downloads all my transactions. There's a site called SimpleFin. that is kind of like Plaid except that it's private and you give it logins to all your stuff. It's read-only, and then the AI can use that to get all your information. Uh, and I trust them because it's read-only. And, uh, and, and then it's very useful at like, how much did I spend on Uber last year kind of stuff like that.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:20]:
So yeah, we just— so that was the— so my wife does our finances and she was saying Because of the thing she did with finances with AI, she was like, all right, I'm going to just dedicate this day afternoon to finances, which made me get a bunch of emails like, why did you spend this on this and whatever? But she realized she has been manually— we have a guy who does our taxes, so we have to send in expenses and you have to categorize those things. And a year ago, this was a hugely manual process, but today, whatever the services she's using is, it's obviously AI-based. Sure. It's smarter about, like, you spent money here before and you said it was this, so we're going to put it that by default, and then you can review it. And, you know, if it's like a restaurant, pretty straightforward. Like, it's not, you know, whatever that expense is, like, whatever that type of expense is for us. But, you know, if it's an Amazon thing, Yeah, who knows what it is,

Leo Laporte [02:15:22]:
right?

Paul Thurrott [02:15:22]:
Yeah, that could be— some of that's going to be work-related, some of it's going to be personal. So you have to kind of go through it. But this is another area where AI is going to be really good at helping streamline that process. And this is the point that you can go back 3 years, we talked about this. Like, in the beginning, I was like, well, AI is about saving you time. But then I realized, really, it's about saving you time and money. And, and then this expansive thing where you are introduced to kind of new capabilities that were not previously available to you. It wasn't a matter of time or money.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:53]:
It was just like you couldn't do it. And this is incredibly exciting.

Leo Laporte [02:15:59]:
One of the reasons I got into this is 'cause I'm an older person and I know that I've seen this with my parents. My memory and my mind is gonna start slipping a little bit. And I'm hoping that by spending some time now with AI, that it can help me through that time. I started, remember I was wearing this bee Yeah. A bracelet a couple of years ago. This is something like that. Amazon bought them and I went, no, no, no. But Amazon sent me the Frontier version before we left on the trip.

Leo Laporte [02:16:26]:
And this is— it doesn't have to be always on, but it can be. So I'm leaving it always on. It doesn't transcribe everything. Well, I guess it does, but then it makes notes and throws out the recordings and transcriptions. So one of the tests, one of the things that happens to me, I don't remember people's names and faces.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:42]:
Thank you. I was just going to bring up this exact example.

Leo Laporte [02:16:44]:
Terrible. So on a cruise, on a trip like this with this travel, you meet a lot of people. I had it create an Obsidian note every time I meet somebody. My local AI reviews the notes from the Bee, and I have an Obsidian note of all the people I've met, details about them, where they're from.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:02]:
I do this in Notion, but it's manual. And I was just talking about this with my wife and some friends. I would like this to be automatic because You forget, but my notes are borderline hilarious.

Leo Laporte [02:17:16]:
Well, it's better than nothing.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:18]:
Well, it's just like—

Leo Laporte [02:17:19]:
Because you have to remember to take notes.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:20]:
It's like the person and who they are, or it'll be like— I'm trying to find one that's like— yeah, this won't mean anything to anybody. It's like Javier is a guy who works at a particular place here in Mexico City, wears glasses, and then it says twigs, which is just a— That's enough. It will be, you know, I know what it is. Or it's like, Daniel is Chris's friend from high school. Louise is the owner from FOMO, which is—

Leo Laporte [02:17:44]:
So you're in the same boat as I am.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:46]:
Yeah, I need this so bad, but I do it manually. And I was just saying to people, and I, I use that Bee thing as a reference or as an example, like, I need to be able to— look, we're going to be doing this on watches, phones, whatever. Like, just, um—

Leo Laporte [02:17:58]:
Well, the Apple Watch is supposed to do this eventually, but the Bee does it now.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:02]:
Right. But you'll say something. In other words, you could do a— you could say like, you'll have some keyword you say out loud and then you just talk and then it will add it to that note or whatever.

Leo Laporte [02:18:12]:
This is all, and I hope I'm not revealing any details, but this is all— it remembered all the people. It remembered their names. It gave me— and I didn't do any of this. This is the AI reading the Bee kind of notes as I met people. Occasionally I will say into the bee, oh, don't forget that's Valerie. Um, things like that. This is mind-boggling. And for somebody like me who's getting old, this is really useful.

Leo Laporte [02:18:42]:
And here's some names of people I didn't get.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:46]:
My, my note has the— a list of the names of 7 dogs that we see in one bar.

Leo Laporte [02:18:52]:
I'm not kidding. Then you want to know their names. You want to remember that.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:56]:
Nelson, Bruno, Henry, Mono, Pinta, Chompy, and Cal.

Leo Laporte [02:19:02]:
Chompy. That's a good name.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:04]:
Chompy.

Leo Laporte [02:19:04]:
We got to run because we've got a great guest coming up in a few minutes. But Paul, I'm glad that you have finally seen the light and joined the cult.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:14]:
This is what I was nervous about, is you're going to come back and I'm like, dude, I need to talk to you so bad. And you're like, oh, I was away for 2 or 3 weeks. I don't even care about this this anymore. I'm like, I'm done with AI. Stop.

Leo Laporte [02:19:24]:
It's all about golf for me.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:25]:
Do not do this to me. But no,

Leo Laporte [02:19:28]:
don't worry, I'll never play golf. Uh, it's all about AI. And even though I downloaded Zelda, I'll probably never play it because every minute spent playing a game is a minute I'm not spending working on— Wow. Local AI.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:39]:
But you know what can help you play that game? I bet. AI buddy. Yep. Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:19:45]:
Paul Theriot is at theriot.com. Become a premium member. You'll get all the extra content, but there's all sorts of wonderful stuff there for everybody. You can also get his books. You know, if you become a premium member, you get the books. But if you don't have the books and you're already a premium member, go to leanpub.com. There's The Windows Everywhere, De-enshitify Windows, The Field Guide to Windows 11, all of that at leanpub.com. Richard Campbell is at runhisradio.com.

Leo Laporte [02:20:10]:
He will be back if he's not in the air next week. That would be sad if he's still circling. In a week. Uh, that would be terrible. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 1800— no, see, I got to redo this. So now we're not -7, we're -8. Anyway, you figure it out. You figure it out.

Leo Laporte [02:20:32]:
There's a UTC time in there. I feel like it might be 1900 UTC. I don't know. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:37]:
Wow. You really did just get back from vacation.

Leo Laporte [02:20:40]:
I'm gonna have to ask AI. What time is it?

Paul Thurrott [02:20:44]:
Where?

Leo Laporte [02:20:45]:
Where am I? Who am I?

Paul Thurrott [02:20:47]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:20:48]:
Um, you can watch us live if you want. If you're in the club, of course, the club, Twit Discord streams it live, but also YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. You can watch it anywhere. Chat with us while you're watching. I love that. After the fact, on-demand episodes at twit.tv/ww. There is a YouTube channel for Windows Weekly aficionados where you can watch the video. Or best thing to do, subscribe in your favorite podcast client.

Leo Laporte [02:21:14]:
You'll get it automatically the minute we're done, which we are. Thank you, Paul Thurrott. Thank you, Scott. We'll see you all next week, you winners and you dozers. Happy Veterans Day, and thanks to all who serve and who have served. We appreciate you, and we will see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.