Windows Weekly 886 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell are here. Big shoe too Yesterday was the official debut of the Co-Pilot Plus PCs minus Recall. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about some of the new Co-Pilot Plus PCs Paul's reviews still to come. He hasn't finished reviewing them. We'll also talk a little bit about AI. Oh yeah, oh yeah, and a lot more windows weekly. Oh, whiskey too. German whiskey this time. Windows weekly is coming up. Next podcasts you love from people. You trust this is twit it's.

00:43
Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell, episode 886, recorded Wednesday, june 19th 2024. The old banana in the tailpipe it's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft, and there is a lot of news from Microsoft with us today. Ladies and gentlemen, our stalwarts of Microsoft coverage. Paul Theriot from theriotcom. Hello Paul, hello Leo. You've been doing this show for 886 episodes now.

01:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are you getting tired? It only feels like 884, 885. That's a lot of. It's been a late85.

01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a lot of shows and about a year ago we had this other guy here join us and it's been great. Ever since, rich Campbell is here from Run.

01:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As Radio. I feel like it was like a year and a half ago.

01:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Has it been that long?

01:39 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's two Decembers back.

01:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I was thinking of Two and a half years ago, 8-11 was the show.

01:44 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Oh boy, wow 75 shows ago.

01:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This guy here, this man, this cat, this dude, this guy.

01:54 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I remember telling you, like listen, I travel a lot so I'm probably not going to be able to make all the shows. Yep, where are you today? Where are you today? Where are you? I'm in Berlin, berlin Of all Part of Berlin, that's the old East Berlin. Oh, he's in East Berlin, wow.

02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, on the other side of the wall it's a bit chaotic here, but I still love it, I love.

02:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Berlin. Berlin's a great town. I'll take your chaotic and raise it one Mexico City anytime. Yeah, yeah.

02:21 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I'm not going to go with you on the Mexico City thing, paul wins with the chaos contest Sure In beautiful. Mexico City, mexico. Yeah, all I know is I'm going to wrap up here somewhere around 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night and I am going for Turkish kebab.

02:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So jealous oh, the best kebab in the world in Germany.

02:40 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, doner kebab, it was that, or currywurst and currywurst abomination.

02:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I've never had currywurst, it's okay, just don't do it with ketchup.

02:49 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Oh that's what they do, right. They take curry power, mix it into ketchup and spread it on a perfectly good sausage. These guys know how to make sausage, but then they do terrible things to it. It's shocking.

02:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They figured out how to ruin Europe too. I mean it's not surprising they screwed up a hot dog, are?

03:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you saying that the Curryverse is their version of the scorched earth?

03:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, they blitzkrieg the sausage.

03:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jerks, jerks. This is normal. Paul Mexico, richard in Germany, richard in the US who?

03:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
knows where Richard is.

03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is normal. This is how we are I like it, it becomes even. We gather together every week to talk about Windows and Microsoft. Yesterday was the big day, June 18th. I did not see it. Did something happen?

03:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yesterday I didn't even notice. That's the.

03:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Copilot Plus PC release. Dude, I did not see a flood of reviews. I, I would see like also, but we're gonna talk about that. Yeah, what's going on?

03:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
lots, lots is going on what's happening? So let's see if I can remember the timing on this. Uh, I don't know. A week, 10 days ago, whatever was started having briefings right for specific pcs, we were told. Microsoft asked by which I mean demanded that pc makers not ship out review units to anybody until after they were able to fix recall.

04:18
So oh, that's gonna be a while well, no, no, things have changed. This is all in flux. So at the time, the plan was we're not going to send anything out until the day of the launch, like tuesday. Oh wow, june 18th, right, so no one was going to have, yeah, this stuff until then but, and then, yeah, so it was OK.

04:45
I don't think any of this is like an NDA type thing, but there was a real specific kind of first boot experience they were requesting of us, which was aimed at Nobody getting a peek at what was going to be there originally, right, and I think everybody. Well, I mean, in case it's not obvious um, you know, when you open a computer for the first time and you go through that out-of-box experience, there's a segment very early on that says, well, actually there are two segments in the out-of-box experience, but the the first one occurs very early on and it says looking for updates, and sometimes it will install updates right, and so that's normal. We expect that. I mean, microsoft has a multitude of ways to update Windows now.

05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I plan my life for that, whenever I'm unboxing anything.

05:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, yeah yeah. Somewhere in the news I think I have a joke about this as being like the Xbox gamification of Ubi. Like you know, you pre-install like a call of duty game and then the day arrives you're like, here we go. It's like, oh, we get a little update to install 151 gigabytes.

05:48
Yeah, exactly, yeah so yeah, as of a week or 10 days ago, whatever it was, the plan was that co-pilot pc. You know these things were already in this channel, right, or they're out in the. You know they're out in the world somewhere in boxes and things. So they would ship these things out to reviewers on Monday, get them on Tuesday, unless you live in Mexico, and you get them maybe Wednesday or in some Mexican schedule, we'll see. But anyway, and you would go through this process, right, and it will do the update and you don't get to see the old recall experience, right. There are obviously going to be updates in Windows Update as well. There are going to be app updates. A lot of the AI experiences are in apps, like you know, this is just, honestly, as at least one of the PC makers said, it's probably what you do all the time anyway, but you know we're just asking in this one case.

06:41
So, okay, and then Thursday, microsoft suddenly announced that it was going to delay recall and uh, there's just the rationale for this is so it's impossible not to laugh.

06:53
But uh, they're going to test it, as I say in the notes, with the crack team of testers and the windows insider program first, because those guys are just on the ball. I'm gonna, you know, solve all the problems and no one said this, but it's pretty clear that it was easier to rip recall out of windows than it was to fix it, so to speak, according to the changes that they said they were going to make. Plus, who knows, maybe they found other problems, right. All of a sudden they're paying attention to security again, right? So maybe they did a little review and they were like, yeah, we need more time than this, we need more than a week or nine days, or whatever that was they would have had. So, uh, let's see how to explain this. People probably remember that the previous week, like as of last Wednesday when we did the show, microsoft had paused the rollout of the latest build of 24H2 that went to the release preview program, the release preview channel of the Windows Insider program.

07:56 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Didn't it actually go away?

07:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, they stopped shipping it. You know they stopped putting it out. Now, if you had followed my tip from I don't know a month or so ago, you would have also noticed I think we talked about this last week that last Tuesday was patch Tuesday, a week ago Tuesday and 22H2 got Windows updates. 23h2 got Windows updates, 24h2 did not, and it would have been that same bill that they were sending out to the release preview program, right? So which is the uh, or would have been the so-called like initial stable release of 24h2, the version that you would have updated to on your co-pilot plus pc yesterday? This is like, as I say this out loud, I'm wondering if this makes sense to anybody. I'm sorry, this is the schedule, is what happened, but anyway, they delayed it and that's why we didn't get the patch tuesday update. I think I talked about this last week, um, and then over the weekend, I think on saturday, microsoft uh unpaused the deployment of uh, this patch, uh tuesday update. It went out to the release preview. So if you're unstable, you all of a sudden you check windows update, you would get it. It's the build you will. So if you're unstable, all of a sudden, you check Windows Update, you would get it. It's the build you will get if you have a Copilot plus PC. The experience is slightly different on those PCs because recall is mentioned in the out-of-box experience, but now it says coming soon.

09:19
It's not. You know, click here to do it, or click here to not to do it. Right, or in the past dark pattern. You know, pretend it's not there, don't worry, we're not recording you every day all day long. Um, you know that kind of thing. So here it is. So it's what is it? It's wednesday. So, as of monday morning, the day before the co-pilot pc launch, microsoft had shipped something that was basically the first stable version of 24H2. Pc makers started saying out there, review laptops. And then yesterday happened and yeah, that's why you saw, happened yesterday. Yeah, not too much. Well, a bunch of people went to stores or a bunch of people sat by the front door and waited for UPS to arrive or whatever. And these things, they things. They arrived on time, right, because they were out in the world there's a comment on your site.

10:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who got his surface pro?

10:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you're. A bunch of people did. Rafael got one. Yeah, a bunch of people did. Um, but you know, through the normal channels, right, like my sir, I I sorry, I should say I ordered a surface laptop, as, as I think you know, and it arrived yesterday as well. In McKenzie, pennsylvania, which is approximately 2,700 miles from where I am right now, I had my niece who was staying at the place watching the cat sit up front with a shotgun to make sure UPS didn't just drive by, and she was able to get it. She didn't have to sign for it but it did. And, by the way, the thing came at like five of no ten minutes to five in the afternoon, like if I had been home I would have been going nuts yeah, he says that to me too, oh it's the worst.

10:57
Um, and so we'll see what happens with the review laptop I'm expecting to get, hopefully today. It was supposed to be today, I mean, we'll see From whom. From HP, oh nice, yep.

11:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I'll be getting one from Lenovo as well but they haven't gotten back to me yet on whether they're going to send it here or not. So all the companies that said they were going to ship Copilot Plus PCs did ship on June 18th. That actually did happen. It did happen. Yep, ship on June 18th.

11:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That actually did happen. Yep, okay, it did happen. Yep, well, that's yeah. I mean. So in that sense, it kind of, you know, they kind of made the schedule right, they kind of did it right, so that's good. And then, like I said, you know the experience. Honestly it's not that different from a normal laptop experience and I and you know I've kind of documented this for normal people in the book. You know, when they get a PC they should go through this process anyway.

11:44
But you know you sign in with a Microsoft account if you want to get your. You know the AI features and so forth. Recall requires it, which is not there 24H2. Got rid of most of the workarounds to not using a Microsoft account. It got rid of all of the workarounds for not being online, so you have to be online to set this thing up, although you know I expect we're going to find other ways to work around that. There is one remaining workaround which I'm going to document soon, for I'm sure I've mentioned it somewhere, but that will work if you just don't want to use a Microsoft account. So that's still possible.

12:21
But most people will sign up with a Microsoft account. They'll get the updates, go through the Ubi, they'll get the little recall screen it now just mentions. It doesn't have buttons to press anymore, you know well. There's a next button but nothing to agree to or anything.

12:35
And then you get into the desktop and you know if you're familiar with 24H2 as it is on a PC today, like a normal PC, and on Copilot Plusopilot Plus PC, it's exactly the same. There's nothing different except that in certain apps you get those Copilot Plus AI features which you could fit on the back of a credit card. There aren't that many of them and you should do and we've been advised to. But you should go and install updates right, you're probably going to have a firmware update. Surface has shipped firmware updates. I'm not sure about the other PC makers, but I know at least some of them will have those and then go into the store and update the apps Because, like I said, a lot of those AI experiences are coming through apps like Paint or whatever. And yeah, count on some time.

13:19 - Rich Campbell (Host)
The thing I want to know from you is you're going to go do something in Paint or ClipChchain or one of those apps, and it's going to be dramatically better on the Snapdragon machine. The NPU does something. Let me stop you, right there Dramatically.

13:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, how about just noticeably?

13:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's an interesting adjective. I saw some warnings that some Adobe programs will not even run.

13:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that.

13:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fortnite, wouldn't it was that?

13:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that was something Samsung put out on their Korean website.

13:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's not. No, you don't think that's true? No, no, well, I expect you to immediately turn on Fortnite as soon as you get it, okay, well, I won't, but these things aren't surprising. It's a new chip architecture. Right, I mean there's going to be some incompatibilities.

14:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's going to be a lot less than people think, and I say that without having one in front of me, right and that's because they'll run in the emulation mode.

14:22
Yeah, and the emulator is dramatically better than it was before Dramatically better. So obviously you want to get the native apps when they're available. Most of the time, that's going to be seamless. If you go to download Chrome or Opera one of those browsers it's going to happen. If you go to download Visual Studio, you'll just get it. You don't have to do anything, right? That's how this should work, right?

14:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When Apple. That's how this should work, right? Um, and apple switched to apple. When apple switched to apple, silicon, and I got my first apple silicon mac, I really did not want to install any intel software yeah, very hard not to very hard not to and when you do that, at least with apple. It said, okay, now we have to install rosetta 2, we have to install the compatibility layer. Does windows have that already installed? Yeah, that's already part of it, so you won't necessarily know if you're.

15:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, you won't know, and that's the thing I mean. In the old days and by the old days I mean just a few short years ago you could have made the argument that in fact I probably did that running an x86 app slowly on arm is better than not being able to run it Right, which was the problem with windows RT. You couldn't run it at all, it wasn't even an option. Um, you know, but that's not a good experience. And for this thing to fly with mainstream customers, it has to just work Right. One thing we're not really seeing in the advertising is this uh hey, by the way, it's a new architecture, it's different. You know, like like no one's talking about that, and the hope and the goal here is that it's because no one will notice right that a normal human being, not a tech person, but someone like my wife or whomever, my brother, will bring this thing home, set it up and go on with the life and never once think about it. It will just kind of work it will be boring.

16:07 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Some apps will be better. Yes, you know, they'll notice, they'll be happy with that.

16:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It performs well yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about this kind of stuff because, obviously, well, maybe it's not obvious, but microsoft has uh changed the marketing for this platform from what used to be always connected right to AI. You know, and we can debate and we will, we should debate the merits of that. I mean, the thing I've come to personally is that, having used a MacBook Air recently and I honestly it's probably the fifth or sixth MacBook Air I've owned, but the second Apple Silicon based Mac MacBook anyway the thing that I are, the things that I value there are this incredible combination of thin light, efficient, great battery life, awesome performance. Nothing you throw at it, this is normal stuff, I mean, but uh causes it to hitch or stutter or, uh, slow down. It doesn't have fans, so it can't, you know, make noise, but, um, you know, the normal experience this is another thing I really want to get to at some point in the show is, you know, meteor, like pcs, the, the laptops that first started shipping last december. I've reviewed several of them now and I've had many, many, many, many, many problems, and it was very gratifying to meet some other reviewers a month or so ago and have them confirm with me that they've also seen the same issues.

17:39
But one of the things that we sort of put up with in the PC space without really thinking about it is that our computers will sometimes sound like jet engines, you know, and that out of box experience, the initial windows updates, the app updates. I run a when get script that probably installs you know, I don't know what it is 10 or 15 apps, those machines, like you know, I I'll be sitting here at night, just you know, cause it's automated, like running this while we're watching TV and my wife looks over at me like what are you? What is going on over there? Cause the things like, yeah, it's just going to town and that's that. To me, is the appeal of this platform Not the thing that Microsoft, qualcomm and its PC maker partners are largely promoting the AI stuff, although you know, obviously they talk about the other stuff. Microsoft, qualcomm and its PC maker partners are largely promoting the AI stuff, although, you know, obviously they talk about the other stuff too. But I kind of feel like we've lost the script a little bit on what's important. You know, to your point, richard, you asked if I think you said paint would be dramatically better Anyone who has a Windows 11 PC today can open up paint, and one of the things here's two things to notice.

18:48
One is that at some point they added a microsoft account sign-in button up in the top corner. So if you sign into your microsoft, into your pc with a microsoft account, you'll see a little picture up there. In my case it's a cute little apple cartoon thing. But, um, it has passed through. It has passed through. It has passed through, it has thrown the pass. Uh, the authentication has passed through to the app. Um, anyone who has windows 11 today will see an image creator button in the non-hideable ribbon that the college students who created this app made, and this is a just a ui front end to that microsoft designer functionality up in copilot right. In fact, you can even see you've got like a little token number at the bottom right.

19:32 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Um, because you're showing you the tokens you're consuming?

19:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, and you can choose different styles of the picture and all that stuff, but it's built into paint, which makes sense because it's where you are. You're doing something with images. You might want to create something with designer, like that's cool. If you have a copilot plus pc and it's fully updated, again you have to. You got to do the app updates. I think a lot of people who try to run this out of the box, at least right now, are not seeing this yet. But once you go through the process, you reboot and all that stuff you'll see a second button that is new in the ribbon, called co-creator. So image creator and co-creator are two different things, and co-creator is that the demo they use, which is just so silly, is you have a Surface Pen, maybe, and you're drawing in paint. You can't draw because you're normal, or you could just be using your mouse or whatever and touch. You're making the equivalent of a child's finger painting that someone might hang on the refrigerator, despite the fact that it's terrible. Yeah and uh, you create a, an image of a turtle perhaps flying around mars or, uh, jupiter or whatever it is, and it looks like. It looks ridiculous, but the ai will turn that into a, what I would call a, a pix, uh, representation of the thing you're trying to draw, but you're not an artist and you can't Right. So, um, is that valuable? Is that dramatically better? Um, I, you know what I take an extra hour of battery life. Um, you know, over that I would take a no fan noise over that. I would take reliability over that. But that's just me. I'm, you know, I'm crazy Cause you're crazy like that. Yeah, yeah, I'm not a marketer, you know, but this is the thing. So, yeah, so I wrote an article about this.

21:17
You know, apple is clearly doing this. If you look at their announcements from, I guess, last week, which seems like, doesn't it seem like two months ago? Seriously, the Apple announcements from, I guess, last week, which seems like doesn't seem like two months ago. Seriously, the right? I mean, I know time passes differently when you get older or something, but I mean I'm having a hard time with time right now. Let me tell you. But Apple recently last week, I guess announced Apple intelligence and all that stuff, and they were up front about this and they were upfront about this. But one of the little footnotes is these features will be supported on all Apple silicon-based devices Macs and iPads, right and as far as like A-series devices, there's only one that's supported, and that's the most recent Apple iPhone 15 Pro.

22:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you have to have Pro yeah, I think it's Pro and Pro Max and we think it's because of the RAM. We think it's because of the RAM, that's right.

22:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The 15 only has 8 gigs and the 15 Pro has 15. Yeah, and so whatever that processor is I think it's like an A17 Pro or something, I think. So yeah, apparently has an MPU, and in fact it does. Off the top of my head, I'm going I want to say the MPU might be as good as even 38 tops. I think it's up there.

22:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever it is. No, that was the iPad. No 25, maybe 25, 30, or whatever. Yeah, it could be more like 13 or something.

22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, okay, but it's in the ballpark for what they're doing and it will work. And you know, one of the things I struggle with in our little community here and I'm looking at you people out there is it seems like experts, the people who know the most, are the least willing or able to adapt to change. And you know, in our space there was like this huge outcry yeah, you, cats and burbs I don't even know who you are. I'm sorry, but you know, this recall thing was like this gigantic uproar over nothing. Yeah, you know, and by nothing what I mean by that is just the really tiny audience this would have ever impacted. It was going to be in preview, et cetera, et cetera. Whatever Apple releases this stuff and everyone's like, yep, I was going to buy a new device anyway. Nice, like there's no problem, you know.

23:26 - Rich Campbell (Host)
No, I thought they handled it way better.

23:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They absolutely handled it way better. Yep, they did so it's, and they're also rolling it out better, right yeah?

23:35 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You know Microsoft they're coming from a better position. They're more trusted by their customers.

23:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, they're most. They're more trustworthy. You know Microsoft a company that can't stop delivering advertisements and forced features and whatever else in Windows 11, can stand up on a stage in May, announce a feature that no one has ever tested and deliver it, and plan to deliver it a month later on new PCs Like what, and people will expect that it'll show up that next month.

24:07
Yeah, everything they say they're very, very likely to do, yeah so I look, I, I keep, I, I keep reminding people that this is, you know, these companies are businesses, right, and it's okay that they want us to pay for services or, you know, buy an upgrade. It helps the industry, etc. Etc. We get it.

24:29 - Rich Campbell (Host)
This is a business right, yeah um well, and I'm way happier paying for things than being exploited because I'm not paying for things.

24:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, thank you, yeah, me too I. I would happily pay them 20 bucks a month to yeah let me be the customer, not your product right like that's what, that's what I would like.

24:45
That option, yeah, no, I 100%. But the AI hardware upgrade cycle is very interesting because the discussion so far has just been about MPUs and the MPU thing is it's not artificial, that's not fair. Last week, or the week before, I discussed Stevie Batiste is very short talk at build this year and how the MPU is, in fact, dramatically faster and more efficient, almost exponentially so, uh, certainly, when compared to a CPU, but also to a GPU, right, and that, uh, for this initial class of devices where they're focusing on laptops, um, that's super important right Now.

25:23 - Rich Campbell (Host)
The flip side of that is, of course, there are guys with beefy desktop computers with uh gpus that run games yep, and they're like, what are you doing?

25:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
should be able to hold down 150 tops out of that thing, 450 I mean, yeah, I I that we should be able to process, but still, yeah, I look, I want to bring the electrical grid to its knees, but who cares? I need that paint feature that lets me make a turtle grid to its knees, but who cares? I need that paint feature that lets me make a turtle you know, like why?

25:48 - Rich Campbell (Host)
why can't I do that? I bought this gpu, 11 fans on it and by calling, I want them all I didn't buy them not to use them.

25:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just saying, yeah, no, it's a, it's a fair argument on both sides. I, neither side is wrong, you know, um, but I I also talked about orchestration and kind of the unsophisticated nature of how AI is being rolled out right now. It's just we're just going to use this MPU. This is a little more acceptable in the Apple space because it's Apple. You know they make their own devices. They, you know, they have no control.

26:17 - Rich Campbell (Host)
This is the advantage of the walled garden right.

26:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean there are generations of these chips, but you know it's Apple's MPU, like this is their thing and their software, their hardware, their services. I mean it's a little more acceptable. It's tough in the PC space. We've always relied on that diversity in hardware and software and it will change over time. But short term we have this upgrade cycle. But, like I said, not just MPU. Gpus are getting dramatically better. Amd and Intel both announced next generation chips for PCs that, in addition to having much better MPUs, have dramatically better integrated GPUs. We're getting to the point where integrated GPUs could be used in gaming machines, even like laptops that can play games. Play games like real games, not the games like racing games, like actual, recent, fairly modern games, reasonable resolutions, et cetera, et cetera. So that's really exciting. But the thing is on-device AI. The second biggest requirement, honestly, is RAM. That's the thing Leo said earlier, right?

27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, on-device, it is because you have to store the model in RAM.

27:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So the base requirements for a Windows 11 PC which sounds crazy, because it is is 4 gigabytes of RAM. The base requirements for a Copilot Plus PC is 16 gigabytes of RAM. That's not twice guys, it's four times as much, right, yeah, and we should view minimums for what they are.

27:43 - Rich Campbell (Host)
That's a minimum. Yeah, the Linux people would be appalled.

27:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, look, our windows pcs are gross, it's just I'm. You know, there's no reason to apologize. This is what it is. Um, you know, the, the os, has a certain footprint on disk, um, but when you go to a co-pilot plus pc, the, the footprint is not, again, not exponentially bigger, but much bigger because you have that 40 whatever number models that are on desk and those did ship out with the PCs, apparently. But you also have those recall images or snapshots eventually, right, and these things take up space and so the storage requirements are also, you know, dramatically bigger. In the phone space, android flagship devices, right especially, have typically always come with a lot more ram than iphones, but that's because those systems needed and apple's always done a great job of making those systems very efficient. But when you get into the mpu uh, on device ai era, as we are now, you're going to see new iphones this year, ipads, new Macs, et cetera. These things are all going to have a lot more RAM and it's a great question of.

28:49 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I know the vendors all want us to have AI on our devices. The question is do the customers want it on their devices?

28:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody cares what the customers want, come on. But this is the thing For the short term in the PC space, which is sort of what we should focus on here, there's going to be this divide between what I'll call kind of normal PCs and these AI PCs.

29:26
No-transcript and they look at and they feel it yeah, yeah, so I I think I will, to give them some credit. Um, previous gen arm based pcs were premium, p, very expensive, typically in the high thousands, like 17, 1800 bucks or more. These ones come in at nine, 99, which is um nice, it's a weird thing to say, but it's the entry level price point for the premium PC part of the market, if that makes sense. Um, it's a good price for this kind of device.

30:00 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Below that you start getting an iPad territory basic iPad. Below that, you start getting an ipad territory basic ipad. Even you can load an ipad three grand if you want yeah, yeah, um, but I look anyone.

30:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't have to be a technical person. You know your wife or someone mainstream is going to, not your wife, richie, your wife is smarter than any of us but a uh, more technical than any of us, someone who's just a normal mainstream kind of PC buyer. Four gigabytes has been too little for a long, long, long, long time. Even before these AI PCs, I was like you know, I think we're hitting 16 now. I think 16 might be where people want to be and I think with these co-pilot plus PCs, I think we're looking at 32, frankly, which a lot of guys in this audience are nodding heads like yeah, duh, that's been the kind of minimum we've been looking at for a while, because maybe we have gaming PCs or whatever it is, we do video editing, yada, yada, yada, whatever.

30:54
But there are PCs today for creators of various kinds, pcs today for gamers, workstation customers, et cetera, that have had these high-end specs for a while. Co-pilot plus pcs are another entry in that area, but of course they're unique too because they have uh corresponding like efficiency, uptime and we're hoping, with arm reliability improvements over the x86 stuff. We're going to find that out, um. So yeah, there's a, the upgrade cycle is real and it's it's not just MPU right. But although these things are all going to come part, part and parcel more, RAM, more storage.

31:32 - Rich Campbell (Host)
But if I'm the vendor, like I want to be able to serve my machine from others Like you want these metrics, you want evidence that your product was superior.

31:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So here's the problem Some way evidence that your product was superior. So here's the problem In some way you can press on the customer to buy it. I've mentioned Steven Stavsky's book Hardcore Software several times and I recommend everyone read this. One of the great stories in there is how they brought ARM to market for the first time in Windows with Windows RT. There's all these stumbling blocks.

32:04
When people look at things like why did Windows? Look at things like why did Windows phone fail, or why did Windows 8 fail, or whatever, everyone seems to think it's, they're like, oh, it's this. And they list one thing. It's like yeah, it's.

32:13
It's usually a bunch of things, but among the bunch of things that I think people don't really think about or know about is that there's this kind of give and take with PC makers in the PC space and Microsoft and, like Richard just was alluding to, they want to differentiate. You know, they want to do their own thing, and one of the things that Microsoft had to try to sell on them with arm was like guys, this is going to be a little bit more like phones. You can uh, because of the light customization capabilities that they allow in windows, the differentiation that pc makers can make in arm based pcs is much smaller than they want, right, and in the rt time frame they just basically said no. I mean, obviously some did at first try, but it didn't work out and they gave up on that very quickly and one of the things they hated about it was that all of these PCs at heart were essentially the same computer. Right, right, same computer.

33:09 - Rich Campbell (Host)
so for this time, the way they differentiate- it's always been the problem with the ultrabooks, because they're all sock. There's just not any flexibility.

33:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're gonna be right so when I say right and and by the way, that exhibits itself in a lot of ways like one of the things like I'll complain about when I review laptops is great, you have two USB four, thunderbolt four ports, but they're right next to each other on the same side. Why do you put them on the? You know, your, your, your Lenovo or HP or big you could do this, but they can't because they're buying these system components from the same places and that's how they come. You know they're, they're constrained as well.

33:43
Got two ports, but you can only use one of them yeah, well, I hope you're not left-handed, because then you can't use any of them, um or whatever. So, for for windows on arm, for for this generation, uh, the qualcomm, uh, snapdragon x processors. One of the reasons that qualcomm went with multiple skews was well binning, but also because PC makers wanted that, uh, that, some differentiation, right when you might have a like.

34:09
I was really hoping that part of that would include literally silent machines, right, uh, like an X plus device, yep, but, and I think we're going to get there Uh, there's already rumors about the next gen and whatever, but, um, yeah, we're. It's still a struggle, but I think the thing that's changed is in the 12 years, yeah, since uh, rt, the market has changed. Phones and tablets, have you know, if anything, have only grown x, not again I keep saying exponential, I'm sorry. Uh, they've grown dramatically, etc. Um, and things have happened in the pc market that are entirely positive and I think this they're more open to like. Okay, okay, look, this is where the market needs to go. We need to do this.

34:46
So we're again stuck in a place where they can't really do too much to Windows. You're not going to get an HP version of the start menu. You're not going to get a Dell version of the desktop or any of that stuff. They can't do that. They can bundle up some small number of apps. They can do that. They can pin some small number of apps. They can do that. They can pin some small number of apps to different places, but they're basically left with four processor choices, right, a small set of 16, 32, 64 gigs of ram which is on device, on chip, and can't be changed later. Um, you know, obviously, storage things, although we're not seeing a lot of that. It's like 512, one terabyte typically, and, uh, then you get to make a laptop. You know you can, you can design your. And then you get to make a laptop. You know you can design your own computer, like. You get to do that.

35:28
Ports are pretty much been assigned by the SOC. Yeah, they're very similar. You'll see very similar ports. I am happy to see a mix. Those decisions were made by Qualcomm, right? Well, yes, but not in isolation, right? I mean, obviously, microsoft and the PC makers said look, we want to do this, but you got to give us something here, right? So where in the past we might have just seen two USB ports like a MacBook Air, you're seeing USB-A ports on these devices, right, in addition to USB-C. You're even seeing, I think, some of them. I'm not really sure about this, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that they're all the same.

36:04
Set of ports Like this is not a different. They have choices. I mean, you know, yeah, it's not as diverse as the x86 world. It can't be, my God, that thing's been going on for four years or whatever. But yes, look, PC makers see this stuff. They see the reliability problems. They see the hot bag stuff. They see the reliability problems. They see the hot bagging. They see their customers complaining. I mean, they want to deliver high quality products, Believe it or not, you might not know that, looking at some of the software builds. But they do and they they're, they're trying, you know. Let's give them credit. A lot, a lot more of them have shown up.

36:50 - Rich Campbell (Host)
There. Let's give them credit. A lot, a lot more of them have shown up. There are many more models. I'm stunned that as many got went in as did I am too.

36:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nice to see if anything this ai hype has sold the vendors.

36:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you sold the normal market, let's not forget, yes and so it's kind of a perfect storm of timing in that sense. Um, the the problem we've experienced. So the thing that's happening here is that Microsoft is really pushing AI experiences in Windows and there really aren't that many of them that require an MPU and they're not super compelling. I will once again mention the MPU, the Turtle. Some of them are neat. I mean, like the ability to do live translations in live captions Awesome. Like live captions is an amazing feature, just in your native language. Being able to use it to translate across languages is next level. I mean that's amazing, honestly, but not everybody needs that. I mean we don't all work at international companies or have friends in other countries, or whatever it might be companies, or have friends in other countries, or whatever it might be I mean. So this goes back to that discussion.

37:48
We've had many times where AI, and in this case specifically AI in a Windows computer, is not a killer feature. Although Microsoft thought they had it right With recall, it's all these little things, and most of it's going to come not from Windows, but from Photoshop, you know, whatever video editor, whatever apps you know creators, especially in the early days, are going to use, because that's where it's most obvious, right. Or even Microsoft will deliver it via it's not third party, but outside of Windows, like all of the co-pilot capabilities, microsoft 365, the things that will help you write. You know, essentially you're coming from the outside, right? So this is not any different than the world's ever been, but it's just funny to watch them try to make this big push, you know, for something I don't think. I don't think really resonates. You know, I don't think that stuff matters to most people.

38:35 - Rich Campbell (Host)
No, but you, you know, you kind of I think you're walking around the fact that we've yet to see the killer out.

38:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, I'm not walking around and we haven't, you're right.

38:43 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I mean, you're 100 but that's what it comes down to, right. It's like what made actually take off, so I put this in the notes, I wouldn't forget.

38:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me show you the killer app. This is the killer app. Everybody watch, got it. See what I'm doing. Watch what happens now.

38:56 - Rich Campbell (Host)
This is opening and I'm so excited to miss it, watch this watch.

39:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, it came on. Oh, here's the thing I review laptops for a living. I have done so for over 20 years. I review 7 to 12, I would say every year. I have somewhere around 28 different laptops in my home in Pennsylvania. Let me tell you something, especially with these meteor-like PCs, when you open the lid of a laptop or just turn on a computer this is where I'm with desktop computers too You're spinning a wheel. I wonder what's going to come up this time, bob, what do we got Bonus round? Yep, a blinking white light. What does that mean? I don't know. Google it, you know.

39:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like you never know what you're going to get. I will, in the interest of defending our sponsor HP, of defending our sponsor hp okay, I just, let's just try it, let's just try it.

39:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, hello, yeah, but let me tell you so all right, but the computer, the computer I'm using to do the show, is that computer? Yeah, and that computer has had horrible reliability problems. Uh, recently, and I I woke, there was one night I I didn't quite finish writing this, I meant to put it up for the show the workstation version, though not the same one as yeah, yeah, yeah no, I, I, I'm sure it's completely different.

40:13
Um, I'm pretty sure they're identical. But okay, okay, the um I, my wife thinks that I have Tourette's, frankly, because I I cannot believe some of the things I see. But Monday night, and I have it all in. I have it all in the battery report so I can tell you exactly what the timeframes are. But at nine 40, I walked into the bedroom. It had been sitting there open because I'd been using it before we went off. Then I closed it, unplugged it, brought it out to this desk I'm sitting at, left it here and went, you know, read and went to bed, whatever.

40:47
The morning I woke up, uh, I left, opened the lid, nothing happened, which is one of the 10 things that could happen. And uh, I waited. I pressed the power button, nothing happened. Like no light, no, nothing, totally dead, totally dead. So I plugged it in, waited a few minutes, turn it on. It came up all All right, literally 1% battery life. So it had died overnight.

41:07
I had to get work done, so I did some work for a couple hours and I figured I'd look this up later. But later in the day I opened the notification and I put this on Twitter. In fact I have a link to this somewhere. But I had, at 1.20 in the morning, the power management part of Windows issued a warning to me via notification that I might want to plug it in because the battery is about to die, and that thing had.

41:31
Even though I had closed the lid, it didn't do what it normally does. It had gone and it just ran, and this thing only gets three to four hours of battery life because it is a DGPU, I guess. And yeah, it died. Now the problem isn't that that happened, although that is a problem. The problem is that I never know what's going to happen. That's one of the things that happened. It's not the only thing and it's not the same every time, and it is that kind of um unreliability that I want to see exercise from the PC platform, and it's the reliability of what Apple has done on arm, on Apple Silicon, that I want for us, right, because there have been times on this trip where I haven't touched this thing for three or four days. It doesn't matter how long it is.

42:18
Nope, I opened the thing up it fires a hundred percent of the time for us, yeah, and the battery has not gone down any meaningful, maybe one or two percent, right? Um, it is the way you want things to work. But you would expect yeah, I think it's reasonable. Your expectations are now so low when you spend this much. I know it's like you know you paid for this thing, right, like you should expect it to actually work, right, especially when it's an expensive, premium device. I just don't want it to be running Mac OS. That's the downfall for this thing. It's like I love what they've done with that stuff. Mac OS I could do without. Like, I really do prefer Windows, I really do. I know people don't believe it or something, but I really do. No, you do. Absolutely Sure, I do so, it's absolutely sure I do so. Co-pilot plus pc yeah, um, I, we got a whole year coming here where we're going to see a bunch of things happen. We're going to talk about 24 h2 later in the windows segment. But as far as hardware goes, uh, obviously we're going to have more co-pilot plus pcs from other chipset makers, right, like amd and and Intel. That will happen.

43:25
Like I said, those the chips those guys are putting out are getting dramatically better, are they? You know the efficiency of a Snapdragon or an Apple Silicon chip? Probably not, but you know what? They finally got the message I. There's a whole story around Intel and the radical changes that they're making with Lunar Lake, which is the next version. And Lunar Lake is fascinating for all kinds of reasons, but one of them is that, remember, intel first shifted.

43:52
Well, in the recent era, intel first shifted architectures with the 12th gen chips. Those are the first hybrid chipsets where they had performance and efficiency cores, adopting the kind of the basics of what arm chips deliver. That lasted for two gen. Meteor lake happened completely different architecture, mpu, dramatically better gpu.

44:15
But, like I said in all the reviews I've done, weird reliability and performance problems, horrible battery life, comparatively you know, and one of the like. Again, I didn't finish this article but I went back and I looked at all the HP Spectre X360 reviews I did over the years and there are some differences with OLED versus IPS and all that kind of stuff. So we could make accommodations for that. But battery life fell off a cliff with the most recent gen which wait for it is. Based on what chipset? A Meteor Lake? Horrible. Most recent gen which wait for. It is based on what chipset? A meteor lake, you know, horrible. It's a bit of a pig, but it's also a weird lame duck. One-off now, because they did this major shift and now they're doing it again. So there will never be more of these things. This is it. They're out in the world crapping everything up for everybody ruining it.

45:01 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Oh, and if you bought one like it's never going to happen again, like it's a different, it's just over, yeah.

45:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is a maybe this will drive a hardware upgrade cycle. Like I have this weird computer I bought in 2023 or 24. I don't know what happened. Like it's really bad. And they're like, yeah, we have the solution. Not going to like it, it, it. It's going to involve spending about 1300 bucks. You know, just get another one. It's like um brad once reviewed destiny 2 and he said it solved all of the problems with the original and I said, really, can I get it for free if I have the original? He says, no, you're gonna buy the new. I said that it didn't solve any problems. You know, like it fixed them somewhere else. That doesn't solve my problems. But yeah, I, I do think, uh, I don't. Well, will this, will this institute, will this make some meaningful difference in what might have happened otherwise with hardware upgrades in the next 12 months? Oof, I don't know. We're gonna find out right, but or are we? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, that's a good question.

46:05
Well, what a world you want me to just do a little commercial here, since we've been talking for hours. Yeah, but before that, let's just because we could almost just wind this up, wind it up. I posted two pictures on Twitter, both of which I'll link to in the notes before the first ad break. The first one is the error message that I got on the HP with the Meteor-like processor that were on PCs, as he called it. He didn't care if Qualcomm or Intel or AMD won, he just wanted those stickers gone. So I grabbed this from a picture. It's a guy from Qualcomm, unfortunately, that was so proud of his new computer and there's three stickers on it.

47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
'm like, mission accomplished terry, there are no intel stickers on the new qualcomm based co-pilot plus pc.

47:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are three stickers yeah, yeah, wow, great, yeah. So huge improvement. Um, if you don't want a sticker on the computer other than you know digging your nails off trying to get them off, um, you know, buy a surface and then you'll have a whole nother world of hurt to worry about. But I, surface laptops don't have.

47:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this sticker. This hp has one intel v pro sticker.

47:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I always take those off, though you can take them off yeah, the commercial, so the one I have is the same one sticker right. Um, stickers are like crap. Whereleo you get less when you have a nice computer, right? So when you buy a consumer thing it looks like a NASCAR vehicle with like all the branding on it and stuff.

47:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because it is, it's an ad. Yeah, that's what it is, because that's why it's there.

47:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right.

48:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right. The reason stickers are there has nothing to do with technical reasons or knowing what's in a computer or it's better for it's, just not it's. It's. It's a couple of bucks.

48:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like I don't want to take it out, because it's like the mattress tag. You just uh yeah, the mattress police are gonna come. There is a there is a federal pc sticker police organization that will that randomly knocks on doors. Make sure you didn't take those things off. Those stickers are still on there.

48:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, I don't know if I have to send this back to HP or not. I'm not going to take this off. They won't care if you take it off, they just put another one on.

48:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you find it offensive and you should they'll send it to Paul.

48:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly. They'll put about four more on some. There's a. There's a gel liquid thing. Yeah, that is very good, for I use that all the time. Yeah, oh, it just came right off. Oh, did it really? Yeah, now I've got intel inside. Did you do that with your fingernail?

48:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, there's not even any residue. You know why?

49:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because they're the metallic type and they just kind of pry off.

49:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think some of these are like embedded into the anodized aluminum, like you'll strip it off and the color will. Yeah, there you go With. Richard, in Germany it's probably not a good Like too soon, too soon, always too soon.

49:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll be too soon, forever I'll just do the hip tab, the trim, the hipster.

49:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Gooby Gone Girl. Would, I'll just do the hip tab, the hipster Gooby.

49:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gone Girl. I look like I belong in Scooby-Doo. There you go. Oh, there we go, gooby Gone. That's it. Gooby Gone. Gooby Gone, it's orange peel extract. Yes, yes. And I have a bottle of it. I squirt it on everything it does not taste like orange.

49:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Take it from me. Put it on my hot dogs. How would you know that? Put it on a uh, a currywurst it tastes like currywurst.

49:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what it tastes like, exactly what it tastes like it's slightly less sweet but if you've got elmer's glue in your pizza, you there's nothing like it, yep.

50:03 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's just, it's binder, that's all it is.

50:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All, it is All right, now I can do an ad. Yeah, why not Please?

50:14 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Go for it. Please Go ahead.

50:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's actually from a company I really like and these guys are so nice. I'm going to talk to them later today. In fact, melissa, the data quality experts since 1985. You know, these guys have been advertising with us for I don't know five years or something. They're believers in what we do and so I really you know, I have some. I really support them. But I also believe in what they do Because if you have, if you're in any business, you know that your customer list or your supplier list, those address lists that you have, those are so, so important, so valuable, and what you might forget is that over time they decay, they fall apart.

50:56
People move, emails change, phone numbers change. So Melissa is a great way to validate those addresses. Melissa is global, worldwide validate those addresses. Melissa's global worldwide address verification and validation service verifies addresses for 240 plus countries and territories, 200, more than 200. I didn't even know there were 240. Rich has been at all 240, I think by doing this, melissa helps you improve deliverability and reduce costly errors, boost your address data accuracy. That's important. You know you're sending stuff to the wrong address. You're wasting your time and money. It'll also increase your delivery speed and, most importantly, boost your ROI and Melissa has solutions in every industry, whether it's health care, better data for better patient care and increased revenue.

51:44
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52:27
Melissa just launched a cool all-in-one lookup that works in Safari and Chrome or, I presume, any Chrome-compatible browser like Opera, like Paul's favorite Opera extension in your browser and then highlight an address anywhere on a web page or a company name or a phone or email Control. Click on Mac or right click in Chrome on the text to open the context menu and select Melissa all-in-one lookup. It basically adds that as part of your right click menu, the all-in-one lookup opens in a new tab verifying the highlighted text address, phone, email, company name using Melissa's verification products. It does that in the background. That alone just a simple, useful thing to have on your system so you can verify it.

53:13
Make sure, do we have the right phone number? How often do you mistype a number right? Get started today. 1,000 records cleaned for free. Melissacom slash twit. Melissacom, slash twit. Melissacom slash t-w-i-t. Melissa. They're uh, they're great people. We, we really think the world of them. In fact, I think I think lisa might be talking with them. Yeah, she's talking to greg right now. Hi, greg, melissa. Right Back to the show. We go and let's say hi to Paul Theriot, who is in Mexico City, and in Berlin, richard Campbell, and move on to our next topic, which is I don't know what.

54:04 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Are we talking about Windows again, on windows weekly? What is this? What windows 11?

54:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
which is windows 12 remember um, before there was co-pilot, there was this other windows stuff. We're going to talk about that stuff oh that, who cares about that? No one cares about that uh, they should, because that's like 99 of what's happening in the world right now.

54:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, oh, okay yeah, all this AI stuff is really just you know early adopters, even in in in Apple's cases. Nobody's using it. You can't. It's all. It's all marketing. It's all hype.

54:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's going to be interesting to see what the world looks like in a year, you know, when we finally have everything we've ever wanted, I guess, and no one's using it still, you know. I guess we'll see.

54:49 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You know who knows, we got it all and nobody cares, and nobody cares yeah.

54:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So so I mentioned before the situation with 24H2 last week and how Microsoft resumed the rollout of 24H2 in the release preview channel and how, if you had, you still can they have never taken this away. If you download the latest release preview ISO, you can use it to upgrade your stable version of Windows 11 to a very unstable no to a stable version of 24-H2. Use Windows Update to get it up to to date. You'll be on the stable path month to month, like everyone else, right, okay, so there's that. Um, since we last met on this bat channel, um, microsoft released, uh, new beta and dev builds last week. Uh, dev had nothing new to it. Yeah, dev was nothing new, but some new features in in beta.

55:44
Uh, they continue to add features to that share pane no one even knows about. I love that. Um, if you're using phone link, which I I assume I'm going to talk about in here somewhere, because I have struggled over the past three weeks now two weeks I guess to document for the book the different experiences you get in phone link if you have an iphone, an android phone or a flagship samsung phone and or a select group of other phones. It's unbelievable how different these things are um, but anyway, we'll get to that. Um, if you are using phone link successfully, god bless you. I don't know how you did it, but, um, you'll be able to share to your phone from the share pane soon. And I don't know, I don't know what that means. Who cares If you?

56:25
Another feature has been around since I want to say is it Vista? No, windows 7. Jump lists, right, are available in Windows 11, but it's Windows 11, so they're not available everywhere. So if you right-click a icon on your taskbar, you'll get a jump list If you right-click let me just make sure this is true before I say it Not. Let's make sure this is true before I say it. Not so much. Yeah, it depends on the app. But if you right-click an app in the All Apps list in the Start menu, you get a jump list. But if you right-click an app in the main part of the Start menu, in Pinned, there's no jump list. And that's coming. Apparently they're testing that. So you know, progress is progress, people, that's all I'm saying. Uh, every bit of consistency is is welcome, um. And then today they released new beta and release preview builds, interestingly, which tells me that that release preview build is probably the week d update that we're going to get. Let me just look at the calendar next tuesday yep, next tuesday right.

57:23
Um, not a lot new going on there. Copilot as an app I feel like we've been talking about that for about a month now. That should be pretty much everywhere soon, so that's happening. Here's an interesting thing that happened while leo was doing the ad. Um, microsoft has paused another build, oh god, in the yep, and this one is as the last week's canary build and the post I saw. Uh, microsoft doesn explain why, but the post I saw. I'm like would they speculate? Because I know why they paused it? It's for the same reason they paused the release preview build from last time in 24H2 itself. It's because it has recall in it. They paused it because people were using it as a workaround to get recall, while recall was not available. Interesting, so, yeah, they yep, I'm positive. That's why. So, when this thing comes out again or they just probably just released a new bill in this case, yeah, there's not going to be, I bet there will be no recall in it.

58:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How hard do you think it is to rip, recall out?

58:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, how hard is it.

58:25 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I bet it's pretty deeply buried in the operating system.

58:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's also yeah right, everybody's gonna want this, they're gonna be vestigial parts left, but the core engine and all the stuff that would actually make it work, the stuff that would actually do anything is is gone, you know, in 20 first year.

58:36 - Rich Campbell (Host)
So um, yeah, it doesn't have to be much. You can disable it out.

58:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can just disable it. You might have all the code there, but just it just took one of the wires off the battery. I think it's just the car doesn't start. Put it up on blocks and take the oil out.

58:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, put a banana in the tailpipe. That's pretty much Windows software development writ large right.

58:59 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Just stick a banana in the tailpipe, I got a feature flag for you.

59:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Could you describe uwp app development? One sentence yeah, yeah, they stuck a banana in the tell pipe. Now, sometimes it works, you know, sometimes it smells like bananas, I don't know what something you do in mcconjee. I think it is you knock over cows and we stick bananas in telltale cups.

59:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, okay.

59:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I have expressed great frustration with a lot of things related to Windows 11 over the last couple of years. And on the flip side, I will say one of the more interesting things that's happened is kind of moving in the opposite direction, which is we have multiple versions of Windows 11. There are different version numbers, but they're actually identical, right. So today you could have windows 11, 22 H, two fully updated Um, and you could have on a different computer it could be the same computer, but a different PC, right, same model. You might have 23 H two Yep, they're, they're identical, right. Model. You might have 23h2 yep, they're, they're identical, right. They don't have to be, but they can be like. The point is those things are. They're identical under the covers.

01:00:10
And this solves an interesting problem because you know microsoft's customers a lot of them, especially in the business side, don't want to install new versions of windows, even though the the line between a new version of windows and just like a monthly cumulative update is kind of vague at this point. And you know, as we've talked, they've improved this process a lot. They've made it a lot easier, a lot more streamlined, a lot more reliable, right? So it doesn't really matter anymore. So you have this audience of people who can contentedly know they're running the last version of Windows and not upgrading, and they love that. But they also have all the features they would have had if they upgraded. And if they did upgrade, they wouldn't even notice a difference because they're literally exactly the same.

01:00:49
Right thing is we have this third new version of windows coming. It's technically here today actually with a co-pilot plus pc, but you can get it, like I said yourself, on any computer. So we have 22, yeah, 22, 23 and 24 h2. 24 h2 is different from 22 and 23 h2. Right, there are new features. You know, you right click on anything actually, but let's say the, the, uh, you right click on a file is the best way to do this, you know. Remember that we used to talk about the little hieroglyphic icons, that are in that one.

01:01:18 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You never don't think about it until you can't find yeah, and then you don't know what they're.

01:01:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like what is this thing? Um, you can most of them, yeah, and then you don't know what they're, you're like what is this thing? You can mosey over them. That's one of the what I'm looking for. Yeah, one of these must do it. Let's click one randomly so in 24H2, they actually get this label, these things. Yeah, so they're labeled. I mean not tooltips, I mean there are tooltips, they're. They're like the words on them, they actually just like a normal icon like we would have had in 1995 or whatever.

01:01:46 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It'd be cool. They should put it in the list with all the other things.

01:01:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're talking crazy talk um, you know, 25, I'm a mad man, I'm wild. Let me throw a 25 h2 at you. Um, so, maybe someday. But here's the thing. Uh, there are other new features, obviously. I mean, it's not just the right-click thing, but 22H2 is going to go out of support on October 8, 2024, which is Patch Tuesday. Right, we know that 24H2 is going to arrive sometime in that September-October time frame. I would say October 8 is a pretty good target date. Now it's Microsoft. They're never going to hit that date. But you know, sometime in a plus or minus two month time frame we are going to have 24 h2. So for this.

01:02:27 - Rich Campbell (Host)
But I would argue marketing, get their hands on it and want to try and sync it with ignite if I was them okay, I mean the way things usually happen.

01:02:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we'll see right. That usually is not even a word you can use anymore. It's likely that they will ship a preview version in october, if not september, and then, yes, the the date would be november is when it goes out and stable, or it's finally being fully deployed, or however they they term it. So, yeah, that does make sense, right, um?

01:02:53 - Rich Campbell (Host)
but for a brief is november 18 to 22, so that's like right where you'd figure.

01:02:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's nice and late in the month too, which is good for them. Actually, the later the better for software updates.

01:03:03 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Um, I'm just glad they're on top of dot net comp. That makes my life somewhat simpler and makes everyone come on.

01:03:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's better for everybody. That's great. They should never have done those back all right at the same time that I think it was a mistake. It was a mistake. Yeah, it's too bad anyway. Uh, so for a little period of time here, for from june through october, we're going to have three stable, supported versions of windows 11. Yep, october One of them will go away, depending on how things go. I guess technically we could have a short period of time where we have only one, but eventually we're going to have two again.

01:03:35
And the thing is, you know, 22h2 and 23H2 are going to get all the 24H2 features before 21H2. I know, I know Now there's an asterisk that because 24H2, as we have it today, is not the final version of 24H2. It doesn't have all the features, right, there will be additional features that get shipped over the course this year. In fact, that thing I just discussed, your phone and share, or whatever these you know these changes they're making now. Some of these will eke their way into 24 H two, right? So these things, you know they, they shift like sand. You know things change. But, um, functionally there is every reason to believe that 23 H two eventually, and then 24 H two. We'll just they'll and then 24H2. They'll just be the same, right, and this summer we'll have this magical confluence of planets, like when they align, and then the world's going to end where 22H2, 23h2, and 24H2 could be identical. Now they do release new features every month, so it's possible that won't be the case, but the feature set of 24H2, as we know it today, is in fact coming to 22 H two and 23 H two. So you will, you will get this stuff.

01:04:45
Copilot is an app. You know, the right click I think I just mentioned et cetera, um, and that's most of that whole bullet list. I guess I went through most of that. So that's where we are in time, right? Um, uh, cop, um, uh, copilot plus features are on top of that, right, those are. Those require very specific hardware components. Yeah, so that's not going to change. And you know, in case it's not obvious, I'm sure we talked about this, but you know, copilot plus pc is not a version of windows, it's a set of features on top of windows. It could be added to any product version of windows today. That is um, home and pro, I guess, although I suspect if you were a commercial customer and you bought an hp or well, yeah, hp or lenovo, consumer, uh, commercial device through channel. I bet you would. You know. Sign in with an enter id. I get enterprise edition. I bet you still get those features too right, because they just sit on top of Windows, yeah.

01:05:41 - Rich Campbell (Host)
The question is will we enable it? Yep.

01:05:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And if you do sign in with an Enter ID, that means you'll have to sign in at the app level with a Microsoft account to get those MPU-based features right. I talked about the icon that's in Paint. Recall will require it, et cetera, et cetera. So there'll be some of that. So have fun everybody. Um. So there'll be some of that. So have fun everybody. Um. And then I, so I. I, I talked about this uh power management issue I had with a computer.

01:06:09 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I what I didn't mention, which you know, it's only happened once.

01:06:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, you know, we can all spray one time, we all get one time.

01:06:18 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Um, we've also. We've both had machines that we we closed up and stuck in our bags. By the time we got to the hotel, the bag was about to burst into flames.

01:06:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The worst one is when you put a bag, a PC, in a bag overnight, go to bed, get up early in the morning, fly to the airport, open up your bag in the plane and warm air wafts into your face. As you open your bag You're like oh.

01:06:39 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You were, yeah, the face as you open your bag you're like, oh, you were spending the, the waft of an entire battery used up in a what is that smell?

01:06:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's the smell of dead electronics. Yeah, that's what c-3po smells like when he's dead.

01:06:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not good whole thing it's not good, put a banana in his tailpipe and see what happens exactly um, that's what that thing on his chest was.

01:07:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was where you stick the banana, the restraining bolt. I know Nerds Anyway.

01:07:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's called the restraining bolt.

01:07:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you remember.

01:07:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Luke removed that and then, of course, soon we had these.

01:07:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like a corporate policy and a hardware. Yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it Listen. Yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it Listen. No one's a bigger hardware nerd I mean Star Wars nerd than me.

01:07:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I get it. Luke used his policy editor wrench and Ramoned it.

01:07:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, what I didn't mention was that I actually had two other Power Manage related failures with two other computers on this trip, different gen, intel in two cases. One was AMD based, one of them was my wife's computer. Now, like I said, normal human being, right, she comes out to me one day and she goes, hey, uh, my computer won't come on, can you help me with this? And I'm like yeah, sure, and then I'm press a couple of buttons, I'm like nope, can't help you. I don't know what's going on. It doesn't.

01:07:52 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's not starting up, you know so I plugged it in my abilities right now yeah, I mean I'm the expert and that's pretty much what I got.

01:07:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Did you try turning it off? She's like it doesn't turn on. I can't turn it off so do you?

01:08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
probably you guys do the same thing I do with lisa yeah which is she says you know, uh, like this is I'm throwing out this apple watch, the battery dies. Said well, I'm sure you could. She says I don't understand why it's only charging for 45 and it dies. But I'm sure there's a sense and do like I'm. Probably what I should do is say, okay, well, let me, I'll take a look at it, we'll, we'll do some research, I'll get Micah something, but instead I just go. Yeah, I don't know, right, you?

01:08:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
know what this is.

01:08:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like the car breaks down.

01:08:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know your car breaks down. You open the lid, stand there with your wife, get your hands on your hips. You're like that doesn't look good. You have no idea. You don't know what you're looking at. Now listen.

01:08:44 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Anything in there I will get a screwdriver, because sometimes threatening it with a screwdriver works. Yeah, you're like I don't know what's that.

01:08:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't know but you gotta, you gotta throw up the effort, you know, tap it. So I plugged it in let's sit there for a while did some buttons, nothing happened. I gave her another laptop. She got back there, you go, at some point I think she went to the gym or the yoga or whatever she did. And I just walked over the computer and I it's like a light on and the thing and I hit the button, the power came up. I'm like she came home. I'm like I fixed it.

01:09:12 - Rich Campbell (Host)
That's what I do too.

01:09:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know I, you gotta really get in there. And you know I read the manuals. I mean, listen, I got my, I got, yeah, I went up to my elbows in this thing. I got greasy. I fixed it because, you know I'm amazing, I sacrificed a chicken. You know, yep, yes, mexico, I mean you know why not? You gotta do what you gotta do. There are literally sacrificed chickens within one block of my home here. So, yes, uh, that's a thing, yeah, anyway, um, the software end of this this is, you know, we've joked about this.

01:09:44
You know, interns coming in and adding features to paint and stuff like that. I'm actually it's not that funny in a way, because I feel like that kind of happens and one of the problems with the quality of the software development that's occurring in the Windows group these days is that there's not a lot of adult oversight. The Windows group these days is that there's not a lot of adult oversight. And Windows 10, I don't have one here, but I went back and I looked this up in my book because, like I said, I've been working on this phone link chapter right, in part because the feature set has improved and I wanted to make sure it was fully documenting every permutation of the stupid thing, fully documenting every permutation of the stupid thing, and I can't find a feature in Windows 11. I can't find it right. It's not on the Microsoft's account site, it's not in Windows. I'm like what's going on here? And I looked in my book and in the Windows 10 book I write about how this works and what happened was in Windows 11, they updated the UI and they got rid of a feature, and that feature is how you remove an Android device from your Microsoft account.

01:10:44
So why is that important? If you have an Android phone and you've attached it to your Microsoft account because you're using it with phone link, you could uninstall the link to Windows app and that would actually do it. That would remove it. That's the one way you can do it today. But if you factory reset, traded in, sold your phone, guess what? You can't get rid of it.

01:11:05
So in Windows 11, they changed the name of this, but there is an interface. If you go into Bluetooth devices Bluetooth and devices, mobile devices there's a button called manage devices and the manage mobile devices Windows comes up and it shows me all of the phones that are attached to my account. My microsoft got android phones. It doesn't work with the iphone because of apple. You can disable it, which means that phone won't appear in phone link, but that's only on. No, that's. I guess that would be everywhere, but you can't remove it. That used to be part of windows. It's gone.

01:11:38
So some college student or whatever is like look, I made this beautiful win ui version of that interface. It's gorgeous. Look at it. You're like yeah, it's beautiful. How come I can't remove the uh phone? I gotta go back to school. It's september, see you later, you know.

01:11:54
So there's an interface in the microsoft account website for this. No phones come up there right now. Um, if you've added them this way, there's actually a couple other ways, but um, there's no, there's no way to remove your phone anymore. So if you don't have your phone, you're going to be looking at that in the list for the rest of your life unless microsoft fixes it. So these little uh you know people talk about like the control excuse me, the control panel is one of those little pet peeve things Like could they just get rid of this, could they just modernize this? And they kind of chip away at it in every version. They don't really ever get there, but there's a million of these in Windows. This is the problem. Someone doesn't know what they're doing. They compiled. We always joke about that it looks nice, it's when you are, it's pretty, and that it looks nice, it's when you are, it's pretty.

01:12:43 - Rich Campbell (Host)
And they ship it and it's like, yeah, but what about the nobody? No, it's not a thing, you're fine, that guy going back to school nobody cares so yet.

01:12:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And yeah, yet another thing to remember. Uh, you know if you're using this feature, right, if it's an android phone, you're gonna want to, don't make you gotta uninstall that app before you sell the phone or whatever you do with it.

01:13:06 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You can always just pave the scene, but that just seems a little dramatic, no, but it's still up in the cloud, it's attached to your account.

01:13:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's still up there. That's why it should be, and it was on the Microsoft account website as well, but it's gone. I don't know, maybe those things are tied together, I don't't know, but no one's talking about it. I just noticed it and this is that you know. If you're wondering why I didn't deliver this app chapter update, like a week ago, it's like stuff. It's stuff like this. This is the battle. Yeah, this is the yeah, exactly, and I already. I then I meant I already mentioned the power management stuff classic you have to be a masochist to write books about Windows.

01:13:45 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Nobody does that. You're crazy.

01:13:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I told you, the guy who got me into writing, we wrote that thousand-page Delphi Super Bible. I got it right.

01:13:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there I'm looking at it.

01:13:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We were working on this book at 3 o'clock in the morning at his house. I remember I used to always go home in the morning when my wife was leaving for work. You know we'd kind of high five each other on the way by. But this guy looked at me and he goes what kind of people write books like this? I'm like what, like what do you mean? He goes this is API that they created. They didn't document it properly. There's probably 1100, you know functions or whatever, or objects. He's like why are we doing this? Like what, what? We're like two people from phoenix. Like what, like, what is? Why do we have to fix this? I was like get back to work just get back to work.

01:14:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What right do we have to write a book, this? How did it fall on us?

01:14:37 - Rich Campbell (Host)
heavy lord, you know.

01:14:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, yeah, don't fall asleep reading that thing well then, so he follows that up with yes I know another tome yeah, I mean the windows um 11 field guys, is about 1100 pages long and it's it's not complete, there's still more to write the delphi super bible.

01:14:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The index alone is like 400 pages yeah, the index.

01:15:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's an api list, I mean it's. Oh, I see, yeah, those are the days.

01:15:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, wait a minute, though. Good news it comes with the cd. Oh, there's a cd, yeah, yeah, nice, I hope it has my first. The first delphi program I ever wrote was something that was just a click here, and if you went to click it the button would move away from the mouse cursor because I wanted everyone else to be as insane as I am um, next time you're up here, please, I want you to sign the cd I'll just write I'm sorry, comma paul and if you just look, that seat is old enough now.

01:15:37 - Rich Campbell (Host)
If you put a pen to it or a marker to it, it'll crumble, yeah yeah, it's like, it's just like the author.

01:15:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pictures of paul and brian langston this is like before and after. I'm sorry, that's so mean, I'm sorry no, sorry.

01:16:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's painfully accurate.

01:16:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the good news is thanks to it, you're a millionaire.

01:16:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, the book writing thing has really worked out. If I could ever count how much time I spent on this, I would have been better off working at McDonald's.

01:16:17 - Rich Campbell (Host)
By an order of magnitude.

01:16:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, then I would be greasy and smell like hamburgers, so I don't know.

01:16:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's because you're the authority that you are, you get to do this show. So it all worked out in the long run. Yeah, hey, let's take a little break and when we come back, we're going to talk about AI, because we haven't talked about AI quite enough yet.

01:16:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I couldn't agree more Enough at all.

01:16:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I couldn't agree more Enough at all. I couldn't agree more. Our show today, brought to you by you're cracking me up. Today, brought to you by our friends at ACI Learning. You know the name, I know, you know the name. They're the providers of people behind IT Pro. We've talked about them for years. In fact, I know a lot of you specifically are graduates of IT Pro or taking courses there or have certs because of IT Pro Binge-worthy, video-on-demand IT and cybersecurity training.

01:17:08
And these days who doesn't need that right? And if you're a business and your team is not, you know studying constantly to learn, you need IT Pro. The beauty of it is it's a benefit. The team considers it like you know 401k. This is a benefit that you give them, you get and it works for everybody. You get a team that is on top of it, is up to date, is smart. They get training they love in subjects they're really interested in and they get what is the technical, the business word. They're upskilled. With IT Pro you're going to get certification ready with access to their video library, more than 7,250 hours of learning. Not old, not out of date. It's all up to date because they're always making more, because the tests change, the programs change the search change. So you constantly, you know, talk about writing books all the time. They have seven studios going Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, constantly making more material. If you get a premium training plan, which I recommend, you'll also get practice tests, which is a really good way to prepare for a cert.

01:18:17
Take the exam before you take the exam. I mean I can tell you from personal experience. You go in there with confidence, you go well. No, I've aced it already. I know what you know. It's not the same questions, but you just you know how it works, you know what kinds of questions you're going to get. It makes a big difference and you can keep taking the practice exams until you're ready. So you know that helps these virtual labs which let you set up, configure, mess up whatever you want to do Windows servers, windows clients all in an HTML5 browser. You don't even need a Windows machine to do this. So you are, and MSPs love that because they can test out software too for their clients before they install IT Pro from ACI Learning.

01:18:57
It makes training fun because the training videos are produced in an engaging format. They call it edutaining. I like to think of it as experts, people who are working in the field, sharing their passion with you, and that makes that's what's engaging, that's what makes you love it, because they love it and it's communicable, it's catching. Their love and passion for the field makes you go. You know this is really cool. It is. Take your IT or cyber career to the twit. Use the offer code twit30. You will get 30% off either your first month or, if you know you want this, sign up for a year. 30% off the whole year of IT pro training. Goacilearningcom. Slash twit. The offer code is twit30. That is a great offer and we thank ACI Learning for supporting the work, the very important work paul and richard are doing today on windows weekly watch out, mother teresa, we're coming for you saving the world with ai one ai at a time.

01:20:18
Oh boy, here we go. Yeah, long awaited the ai segment, as if we hadn't been talking about AI at all.

01:20:27 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I did a keynote on the perils and problems of AI and the first version I did of that talk at the Vatican four cardinals in 2017.

01:20:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Having a little existential crisis, there are we.

01:20:42 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I just wanted to review what I was thinking about it in 2017 compared to right now.

01:20:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Good lord yeah, burke just sent me a, a funny um, a picture of an editorial, I guess, about some guy ranting about ai, which is actually beautiful because he's right, but, um, anyhow, uh, yeah, so we talked a lot about microsoft, ai I don't know if you knew this or other companies in the industry, um and uh, they're talking about ai too, ai too, and uh, as we mentioned up front, you know, wwdc was last week, it feels like two months ago um, they have rolled out the first betas of the new platforms. None of them have any of that ai stuff in them, and that's because, you know, apple's on this slow boat thing which I find to be, uh, you know, mature and adult, like and nice. Um, you know, because I live in the microsoft space and I see what it's like when you, you know, throw someone on a bike down the hill and take away the handbrakes.

01:21:39
You, you know they want to lead. Yeah, they want, yeah, but sometimes you lead Leading doesn't always mean first yeah. Anyway, in honor of Apple CEO Tim Cook, I think of this as slow cooked Nice. You're welcome, and you know, yeah, I know I'm a little beat up today. Um, but you know, apple will release its new platforms ios, ipad os and mac os probably in september. It will have some form of this stuff in it. Uh, there'll be more over the course of the year. Some of it's coming in 2025. Right, a lot, a lot of the siri stuff, for example, I guess, is going to kind of be a late follower when it comes to this stuff. And, of course, they're going to have new hardware too, with better MPUs and everything else. So Apple's on this little schedule, which I actually find to be refreshing. I know that's not the normal Apple dynamic. A lot of people in our space will criticize Apple for moving so slowly, but I think that I like it. I like it.

01:22:44 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I like what they're doing. It's good, I mean. Part of me wonders if they had a choice.

01:22:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They clearly cannot be first, so they might as well be cautious well, I mean, I would argue this is actually kind of how they do things all the time. It's just that, because it is ai and there's so much of it, it is going to happen over a broader period of time, but I always use the example of the iphone 7 pro or plus, I guess, whatever. So the first dual camera system they did, one of the features they promised was um portrait mode, right where the bokeh, the background and, uh, that didn't ship in beta until, I think, two months after the ios version and the phone shipped, and then it didn't ship in stable until some months later and that was just like one feature, you know. So I mean the fact that they're able to, or presumably we'll be able to, do all this stuff, whatever period of time, I think, is, you know, I think it's fine. Yeah, I think it's good, I think it's proper.

01:23:37
Apple has published some very interesting stuff in the wake of WWDC if you're a developer, and one of the things they published was the way that they trained their AI and the way they will train things going forward. Obviously, they pledged not to use any customer data or user interactions to train their foundation models. They did do a web crawler thing. You know, like everyone else does, because that's what people do, but I think the only issue with the web crawling thing was that they didn't really say they were doing it and now they're letting people opt out of it, but they already crawled the web.

01:24:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know too late, we already have it. Yeah, yeah, but you know we got it.

01:24:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We have opt out. I mean, yeah, don't look at the timing too closely, uh, so that's, that's fine. I think that's all you know. Whatever, to open AI these guys are literally angels and should be sainted. It's a completely different company.

01:24:23
So you're keeping your subscription, You're not gonna well, we're going to, actually we're going to get to the subscription in a moment. So that's, that's coming. The other thing was you know Apple, you know Steve Jobs used to do the one more thing, yeah, announcing chat GPpt in their systems was a lot less than that, but it came in the same place. It's kind of a throwaway presentation, yeah it was like hey, good night, everybody chat, gpt something see you later, sam.

01:24:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was in the audience? We just want to say hi to sam and chat gpt. Bye, yep, yeah, see you later and.

01:24:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the only thing that didn't make that weird was we already knew what was happening, right. We've gotten so many leaks from mark german and others like we already knew what was happening, right. We've gotten so many leaks from Mark Gurman and others Like we knew this was happening. We know they're talking to Google still, and we'll probably have Gemini models in here as well at some point. But the interesting thing that's come out since WWDC, which again was two months ago, is that there's no money changing hands Like Apple's getting the advantages of…. Yeah Well, it's free. Yeah Well, it's not free. It's like they're giving them exposure, leo See, it's like. What does that mean? Like prominent placement in the app store or something?

01:25:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I get people asking me to write for them all the time. They say we'll give you exposure, leo.

01:25:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll give you exposure Like that's what I need. Thank you, thank, pretty well exposed here, leo, we're gonna put you on the map. Oh, now you're talking, um, I, you know and we'll see, but I, this deal is interesting for a million reasons, but uh, we know that, uh, google is now paying apple like tens of billions of dollars a year for search placement. It's gonna be, you know, they're gonna renegotiate things. It's gonna be interesting to see how things fall out, and not that we'll ever hear about it until some future court case, but this will I think this will impact the Google agreement.

01:26:09
And there's some worries at Microsoft too. Right, like I think those guys were feeling what. I mean, they knew it was coming. But watching Apple roll out all this stuff and then using the AI that they paid for, right, it's like. It's like how I feel about my daughter. You know she's got a great life and I pay for it, yeah, so that's nice, it's good for her, okay, so I have been testing various paid AI subscriptions. I still pay for and use the Copilot Plus subscription, copilot Pro Plus, whatever it's called, whatever it's called, I pay for it. I use it mostly for image generation. I've never used it for writing. I want to think about that for a second, but I've never written anything with it.

01:26:58 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Not even an email.

01:27:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I mean I've experimented with it, right, I've done.

01:27:04 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I've asked it to summarize things. I've taken some very angry emails and handed it to ChatGPT and said Make this less like me, I make this more corporate-speak, please. No I. It takes me a day to derange an email, but ChatGPT will knock it out pretty quickly.

01:27:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I plan to use it on earnings reports, legal documents like FTC, susan Company, just to get it, because you get like an 88-page legal document. These things are written in a very specific kind of language. It's hard to get to the point sometimes, so I will use it for that. But as far as writing goes, never. But I was paying for whatever the Gemini paid thing is with Google Workspace and then open what do you call it? Chatgpt Plus or whatever that's called, and I just didn't find them as useful so I stopped paying for those. That frees up like $40 a month. So I'm like, what else could I pay for?

01:27:56
So I started looking at the Adobe stuff, because the one thing that AI has really worked out for me has been the image creation stuff and I and I I've been using and I really like I've been using affinity photo for the past several months, the latest version. I love it, I, I and I. It works across platform, it's it's. It's really nice. But the thing it doesn't have is even like the basic AI, like element removal stuff. It doesn't have any AI right. So if you imagine like a photo and there's maybe some text under just in the photo and you want to remove that but have it cleanly fill in the background. You can't do that easily with affinity, it's really hard. Even Adobe Photoshop elements does a good job with that kind of thing. So I was like, let me go see what they have, you know.

01:28:41
And so Adobe has approximately 117 SKUs of CC subscriptions. It's unbelievable. And but in my, the thing I care about, which is basically Photoshop, it kind of boiled down to two subscriptions. There was a Photoshop subscription which I don't remember exactly. I want to say it was $31, $32 a month If you pay for it month to month, and then may I'm going to say 25 ish dollars a month if you pay, if you agreed to like a year, right, 300, yeah, you get, you know, said money that way and I was like, ah, still, that's a lot of money. Like I, like I could just, you know, I could just use elements like I don't care shop like photoshop is the, the, the visual studio.

01:29:20 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Of course, editing it absolutely is All the knobs and many more.

01:29:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know Too many knobs, too many knobs, many knobs your favorite?

01:29:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
person, lena Kahn, is suing them for making it hard to cancel. No, we're going to get. Hold on, don't ruin the surprise.

01:29:35 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Okay.

01:29:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was a pun, but I know they're doing all this AI stuff. I get there, they talk to me a lot, I know it's. It is kind of amazing. I'm like I don't know, but they have a photography subscription that gives you Photoshop, photoshop beta, which is early AI stuff, and it's 10 cross platform, yeah, photoshop for the web and Lightroom, both versions, classic and regular, and it's it's actually 20 bucks a month, right so, but 20 bucks a month is what I was paying just for OpenAI or for Google. So I'm like you know what.

01:30:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This looks good. That's a good point.

01:30:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then I went into it and it didn't matter how you chose it. You could go month to month or pay for the year and it was still 20 bucks a month. I'm like nice. So I went month to month because I don't know if I want to keep this con sued them, and because these subscriptions are deceptive and I'm like. I just signed up for one of these subscriptions what are you talking about? So I went back to look at it and, sure enough, exactly what they describe. The reason it's the same price is because I have silently, secretly agreed to pay for this for a year and if I cancel, they're going to give me some onerous early cancellation charge, which is exactly the charge against adobe.

01:30:42 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Now they're going to charge you for the year anyway, just up front.

01:30:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly you'll be like look, screw it, I'll just do it. And they ought to renew when we can play the game again next year these negative billing companies, and then they're just emulating your average isp. Yeah, well, yeah that's like saying they're just emulating satan. What's your problem? Well, I you know Satan is not good.

01:31:03
Um original thinking it's this is old school evil, but the way this ends is is maybe, maybe this shouldn't be surprising. Remember how, uh, everyone would get like an, a serious XM subscription with their car and it was free. And then, six months or nine months, whatever the time frame was you get a bill and you're like, yeah, I'm not doing this. You call them up. You're like I need to cancel this because you have to call them up. You can't do this on the web, you know. And they're like listen, if you agree to stay, we'll do it for like next to nothing. And you're like, oh, all right, you know, you feel like getting a really good deal, right, my wife did that for seven or eight years in 30 bucks for the year.

01:31:34 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I'm like, okay, whatever. So eventually she got tired of doing it and she gave up.

01:31:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, um, that's what adobe did to me, so I went to cancel it. I have seven days to cancel it without any worries. I just did it. So actually I was okay. And they're like you know what, what if we gave it to you for 14 bucks a month? I was like you know what, 14 bucks a month times 12 is approximately the price of a brand new version of adobe elements which I might have bought anyway. Yep, not on sale. But and I was like, but it's full adobe, and I mean full photoshop, and I get the beta version, I get the web version, which works in chromebooks, and I get lightroom, which I've never really used. And I was like, yeah, I'll do it, and that's how they get you. And, uh, that's, that's what I did. So I'm part the problem. That's what I'm trying to say.

01:32:23 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You may well get paid too right.

01:32:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It depends on how the subscription goes, this subscription is paying for itself. Is that what you're saying?

01:32:31 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Well, I think the DOJ is probably going to squeeze them pretty hard for this?

01:32:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think so too. I think so too. I just found it very interesting that the day well, I guess I tried to cancel the next day, but the day after they were sued by the federal government, they were like listen, we hear you, but here's the deal, here's the deal you can't refuse. It's like, okay, You're going to love it, You're going to love it. They are the Microsoft 365 of the creative space, right? I mean?

01:32:58 - Rich Campbell (Host)
that's of course they are. And of course they are because they're adding.

01:33:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
AI to everything I mentioned earlier that there are these AI features in paint, and this goes back to that Stevie Batiste thing. Remember the three app models for AI, right?

01:33:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of them is inside, inside, outside.

01:33:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and so, whether it's beside or inside, you're talking about what I guess we'd call a legacy app, an existing app. Um, it's interesting that you can like one of these. You hear this a lot with various software features, like. One of the benefits of this thing is that you can do this thing you want to do without having to go somewhere else. Right, like you're, you're writing and you have to look something up. So you go to google on in your web browser, you google it and you find it and you go back, like you don't have to break context, right? So in the, in the word, the paint world, rather, you're creating an image, you want to add some generative ai, something, something. For some reason you don't have to go to copilot, copilotmicrosoftcom or whatever service you're using. You can just do it right in the, the product. You don't have to break the context, I guess, is the way to put it.

01:34:04
So adobe's doing the same thing, right, with their products, and you know it's getting like, it's getting weird, right? So they have a, they have acrobat, which is the full featured pdf reader, everything, everything, and then they have acrobat reader still, which doesn't do anything. Actually it's a giant ad, but whatever, they still have it and they're adding generative ai capabilities to these things so you can create and edit images in a pdf now using text prompts, because it's something I wouldn't well, I'm not saying it would never occur to me, but I mean you could imagine. You're in a powerpoint actually probably does this, right? You're in a PowerPoint actually probably does this, right, you're in PowerPoint. You're like I need a graphic of a spinning ball or something.

01:34:47
In the past, you might've gone to the web, or maybe they have a clip art collection, whatever it might be. I would imagine Microsoft 365 Copilot, if it doesn't already do it. We'll probably one day provide something like this, right, you don't leave. And in the Microsoft space, every one of these generative AI features is using, you know, co-pilot or designer or whatever on the backend, right?

01:35:08 - Rich Campbell (Host)
And I guess you know, meet people where they are.

01:35:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It makes some sense. But AI is going to be in everything like GMOs. You know it's just going to be there. You don't know it's there, it's hurting you. You don't know it's there, it's hurting you. You don't know it, but it's there and for some reason now we're all two inches shorter than we used to be and have three, you know, ears or whatever.

01:35:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um it's your spine, it's compacted yeah, yeah it's.

01:35:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's supposed to be a spiral. What's your problem? Uh, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know why you have to complain about everything. Um, and then brave the web browser maker. Uh, they have had. They were early on to this, not quite as aggressive as opera, but they have had. Well, they've had their own search engine for a while, a couple years. I would say, uh, they have a leo. Um, in browser ai assistant, right, because we have a leo too you think that's the ai I would use, right?

01:36:01
but, yeah well, I could see where it would be the you know I use, except yeah, well, you don't, because you probably tried it. So yeah, you know what that's probably why you know some of these aren't.

01:36:11
Some of these aren't so great. So, um, if you want to make it even less great, like the combat, this is the two turkeys, don't make an eagle thing. Um, you know, brave, I'm sorry, brave, leo will now integrate brave search results when it makes sense, right In real time. So, um, if you add some like I don't know you're at, you ask about a, uh, your favorite artist or some music artist, it will tell you, uh, where they're in concert. You know, and that comes from search. Right, it's not part of the AI thing or whatever. So, um, that to me, just makes sense. I mean, they're doing AI, they're doing search, so they're in that kind of unholy trinity of browser search AI, I guess you know. And there you go. So if you use Brave, you can do that.

01:36:50
I don't use it, frankly. In fact, the whole Brave sidebar thing. I try this and I always end up turning it off. I played around with this when it first was announced last week. I actually put the I do this right. I put the sidebar on for a little while. I hated myself, didn't use it. I would trigger it by mistake. You could have it like when you most over have it pop in. It was always popping up. I hate that. I got rid of it, but but if you're a brave user and you should be and you like this brave search, etc.

01:37:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's what table stakes, I guess, at this point? Yep, I am such a fan of arc. Thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I've turned off all your browser recommendations afterwards because I'm sticking with, so fair enough.

01:37:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I like this is only on the mac, but they did add that kind of live calendar thing up in the little uh in the favorites bit, which I love.

01:37:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean still I'm using it on windows, but it isn't there's no parody, so it isn't that kind of live calendar thing up in the little uh, in the favorites bit, which I love. Yeah, yeah, I mean still I'm using it on windows, but it isn't there's no parody, so it isn't really not yet.

01:37:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it's getting there, yeah, but you know they're like they literally said, going forward, we're going to. There's going to be parody future this week. It's like thank you um yeah, it's a small company.

01:38:01 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You know what?

01:38:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there are interns everywhere it's a small company and it's written in swift, which means right windows is not the most propitious honestly, I vaguely respect it.

01:38:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean it. They pulled it off. It's not like I mean as an application. You wouldn't use this and think, oh, what is this? Is like a web app or something. What is this like? I know it's. It's beautiful. No, it's gorgeous, it's a native app.

01:38:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great, it's truly native. That's real native. Yeah, I mean, they did that in swift.

01:38:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, it's fast, it's mostly I like it not netpad and swift swift pad swift pad. Watch out, you're getting closer to becoming a mac user all the time let me tell you, if I get this Surface laptop and it doesn't solve the problem, we're going to.

01:38:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the problem that it turns on instantly? Is that your main thing?

01:38:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not just, it just actually works. It just works is what I want. I know that it's a high bar, but Very unreasonable. Opening the lid light comes on is one of the things you know consistency would be nice.

01:39:05 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I have to say this is the wrong place to say it. Either an hour of battery life, right An hour of battery life.

01:39:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, more than three and a half hours of battery life would be ideal. I don't know. Apple hardware is so nice it is, it is. I'm tempted to just do Windows and ARM on the Mac. Honestly. Yeah, that's what I do. I'm trying to resist it. I just put the Mac OS whatever Sequoia on it. Wow. So now it has like Windows 7 style snap features, which is kind of fun.

01:39:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, Isn't that funny.

01:39:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it's also like done the Apple way, so it's got the. There's like a little edge around each window so you can see the background through it. It's like a little edge around each window so you can see the background through it. It's pretty. It took them what is that? 17 years or something.

01:39:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but there have been many, many third-party apps that do it.

01:39:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, no, I had to uninstall the one I was using, which is called Magnet, which works pretty well.

01:39:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a little break. Go get a tortilla or something when you get hungry, do you like? Go out the door and there's a guy literally this happened less than 48 hours ago.

01:40:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I said to my wife I can't have any more tacos, I can't do it. We literally went to an italian. No we well, we walked, we went, we got a steak, we went to a steak restaurant but I was like I can't no more talk. If I have another tortilla I'm gonna kill someone. Like wrap me up, like I can't no more tacos.

01:40:20 - Rich Campbell (Host)
If I have another tortilla.

01:40:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to kill someone. No more Wrap me up like a. I can't do it.

01:40:23 - Rich Campbell (Host)
How's the Chinese food in Mexico City? You know so that's Okay.

01:40:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's an interesting question. I've only had it down towards Centro at the same place twice, so I can't tell you. I would love to find a good Chinese restaurant near here. I would that because we don't have a good. We don't have good Chinese food in Pennsylvania. This is a big problem. I go back to Boston that's the big thing like every Thursday of those trips we go out for Chinese food.

01:40:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I miss that so much they do have good sushi, though you said oh yeah, yeah, definitely.

01:40:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a.

01:40:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a ton of sushi here, it's kind of funny because it's a landlocked city yeah, but you know what it's like.

01:41:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paris, right, so all the good stuff comes here and the oceans and the food supply and the water around here is unbelievable. Yeah, really, really high quality.

01:41:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that, that's great. I'm so jealous. Yeah, well, this is a part of the show where I tell people how broke we are and that's why I'm living on tortillas. Um, it's just the weirdest thing. I never thought this would happen. I always said to myself from day one and we, paul, you and I've been doing this for 15, 16, 17 years, something like that yep, from day one, I said we'll do this until nobody wants to listen or and nobody wants to advertise, because, if you know, the advertisers were paying the bills. I thought that was an, you know, fair relationship, whether we pick them carefully and their products that our audience would be interested in. Um, and, of course, the bills. The amount of money the advertiser pays depends on the number of people. Well, like every podcast in the world these days, the numbers of listeners are going down. I, I don't think that's us. I don't, I can't.

01:42:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't believe that's us I think we need to believe that all right, maybe it is, maybe it's us.

01:42:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that there's just a lot more competition, there's a lot more to take your time. And then the advertisers have kind of left in droves too, and I think that's because they're very fashion-oriented and the current fashion is influencers, youtube stars, people like that. The bulk of the money is going in that direction. But what happened was in the last two years actually started really with COVID, but ever since the revenue number has been going down and you probably know, we've had to cancel shows, we've had to lay off staff Because I don't have deep pockets, we don't have investors, it's just me. And if I don't have enough money to pay the light bill, then we don't have investors, it's just me. And if, if, uh, if I don't have enough money to pay the light bill, then we don't have lights and I don't want to get in that situation. So we uh, you probably heard me talk a little bit about it. We tried it yesterday on security. Now we'll be doing it with windows weekly pretty soon. We're trying a system that will let me go home, let our staff go home, we shut the studio down. That'll save us a packet of money and you know why not do it from home? You guys are at home or a hotel anyway. But I mean, what do you need a studio for? You don't anymore. So we're doing that. We're trying to cut our costs. We don't want to cut shows or staff, but we might have to.

01:43:33
But there is another way, though, and actually from day one back when we started this in 2005, I thought we want to be really cool, as if the people who love the shows paid for the shows. So we didn't have to have an advertiser, we just had the people who you know, the community, and the community would tell you if they liked what you were doing, they'd pay, you know, to listen. If they didn't, they wouldn't. Well, we've kind of come around to that again, and that's why we started Club Twit a couple of years ago. Now we try to keep it inexpensive $7 a month. Look, I understand nobody wants another subscription. If you can't afford it or you don't want to pay it, I understand. But if you can and you listen to Paul and Richard and you listen to our other shows and you get some value out of it, seven bucks a month's not a lot, and you support us, you keep us on the air. You keep us doing the shows. You also get some benefits ad-free versions of all the shows we don't need ads for those people.

01:44:24
Access to the Discord great place to chat, not just during the shows but all around the clock. There are people in there talking about all kinds of geeky stuff. You get special events. We've got Stacy's Book Club coming up next Thursday. A week from tomorrow we're going to do the book High Voltage. So I think that we're trying to make this a fun place to be. I know our community is a great community. Love you guys. They've been very supportive.

01:44:51
We are now at 12,037 paid members. Thank you to each and every one of you and I would like to invite you, if you're not in that number, to join. Just go to twittv slash club twit. Leo, if you just said that right up front, we could have just gotten on with this. Okay, fine, cut out the beginning Twittv slash club twit, and I thank you for your support without it. Uh well, the good news is I'll have a lot more free time. Uh, back, we go to paul and richard campbell. Actually, I might not. I might have to do what richard does trounce around the country trying to sell soda pop. It is not easy is it richard

01:45:31 - Rich Campbell (Host)
no, sirree, yeah that says cases of soda kill you. Every time it was a um, all the caps pop off like it's a mess. It's a mess.

01:45:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a mess, it was a. It was a private museum in washington dc called the newsium which is now out of business, and I they had daniel pearl's laptop, the unabomber's cabin, they they had a piece of the World Trade Center, piece of the Berlin Wall. It was really kind of an amazing place. But one of the best areas they had was like this is what it used to take to broadcast live for a TV show. It was a giant truck with a huge crane, giant antenna thing on the back, or radar wheel or whatever. This is what it. This is what you need today. It was just like an iPhone, you know, and I was trying, I was trying to, I was talking to my wife about this.

01:46:20
Yeah, but I said you know with like twit and and you know you coming off of TV, you know when you started twit back in.

01:46:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I built a TV station.

01:46:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You were to TV, you know well.

01:46:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we were the cheap thing.

01:46:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's right, right, right, yeah. And the problem is today like you get kids walking around with like their phones.

01:46:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't need anything.

01:46:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't need anything, you know.

01:46:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's weird how the world changes that way. In a way, we're right-sizing. We're actually kind of. I challenged the staff a year ago. I challenged the staff a year ago. I said think about what we would do if we started today and we wouldn't do this, we'd do it differently.

01:46:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, for sure.

01:46:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're going kind of closer to that. We're going to use a software called Restream. We tried it yesterday. It worked really well. Everybody's going to work from home and I think it will be much more like, much more sensible, frankly.

01:47:14 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but the nice thing is modernization effort had done it. Ross is the same thing. Yeah, you had to write all around code back in 2002. What choice did you have? Right, right.

01:47:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, yeah, I mean things. Yeah, it's a different world and, um, yeah, it's hard, it's. You do things a certain way for such a long time and it works, and then one day you're like what do you mean? It doesn't work. You know like, well, you know this. Well, whatever the overhead and and I'm not- complaining, I mean to be perfectly honest.

01:47:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We did very well for a long time and I, I, I socked money away so I could I mean I could retire, but I, but if I'm going to work, I want to get paid for it. Let's put it that way.

01:47:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's awfully selfish.

01:47:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not a lot, just a little, just a little.

01:48:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:48:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, but it's and it's not really me. I'm often do work without pay, but we got to pay, you guys. We've got to pay the light bill, we got to pay the rent, we got to pay the staff. I mean, it's pretty expensive. We have a million dollar a year payroll, right, and it's hard to pay a million dollars a year payroll when you're making six hundred thousand dollars a year and it just doesn't. Yeah, I'm not an accountant, but something, something's missing on that.

01:48:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah I could see that did you try ai.

01:48:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe ai could fix it yep, yeah, pay for co-pilot?

01:48:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um, I don't know, uh, xbox, xbox. So last week was arguably the best week of the year for xbox so far, with that big uh event, with all the games coming. Everything's looking good there. And, uh, they gave us a second slate of Game Pass titles across console, pc and cloud for June, and sad trombones, because I don't know what I thought was going to happen. There are some good games in here. I'm not dumping on the games, honestly. You know FC24. There's a new game that day and date came out yesterday I think, which is called still wakes. The deep is kind of a horror, you know, slow boil horror kind of a thing which I think I might actually try to play. It looks pretty cool, um, but no, you know, activision, blizzard, anything, anything, um, so I'm still working through my little catalog of games that I get through game pass. Uh, you know, waiting for. I don't know what I'm waiting for anymore what's gonna?

01:49:38
happen. What's the next? One's gonna be call of duty, really, in november. That's what we're gonna do. I don't know. I don't know. I hope not. I hope there's more. But how many hundreds of games does activision have? Can we get a couple of them, something once? I don't know, apparently not. Um, yesterday, I think, yep, yesterday, uh, nintendo had their big game title reveal, right, called nintendo direct. Same thing, you can go watch it on youtube. Bunch of games, I mean a lot of games actually, and their console is winding down, right.

01:50:05
There are a lot of rumors and they pretty much confirmed it that they're going to, really they're working on a switch to they're not calling it that, but, uh, necessarily, but that this is semi imminent now we're thinking maybe early 2025. Um, but they just announced like an incredible slate of games, including a metroid prime 4 title that has been kind of kicking around for several years, frankly, and looks it's pretty good right. New zel Zelda game, new Mario and Luigi RPG. There's a remastered version of Donkey Kong Country, which has to go back to not ColecoVision, but probably around then I probably the original Nintendo somewhere back there. Anyway, there's a bunch of it. So a lot of really neat stuff happening there, and that should be some good life here at the end of the process. And then, since publishing the story, I've seen rumors that Metroid is coming in 2025. This is one of the games they didn't actually have an exact date for, and there's been some speculation that this is going to launch day and date with the new Switch console, right, which would make sense.

01:51:12 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, they're putting everything into Switch. It's what people want. Yeah, that's good stuff. When do they make another desktop or, you know, living room console? I don't know why would you yep? Yeah, I uh if you're an xbox which you can cast to a high-res screen and cast to a 4k like that would be the thing, right, is it?

01:51:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's just 1080p right now. Right, it's not even 1440p? 1080p? Um, yeah, why not? Yeah, a 4k switch? Maybe, I don't know, we'll see. That was expected. I, I, I think at one point they were working on a 4k switch and maybe they held off specifically for a new gen you know they did oled and they did the cost reduced one it also costs.

01:51:55 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It costs money in the games too.

01:51:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that's some different art, like it's expensive, yeah, but I would expect metroid will work fine on a rig og switch and then it will just look better on the new one, right, I don't know, that's a, that's not a bad approach. That's what microsoft, I mean, xbox sony they do the same thing. Um, I have an xbox game pass ultimate subscription. I almost called it a prescription. Um, it's about as costly as medical care in the united states. Um, so that makes sense. It gives you the pc version, the console version, but also the game streaming service, right?

01:52:30
Xbox cloud gaming um, I'm sure there are games that work fine on xbox cloud gaming and I'm sure some of you live in a world where you have some kind of a two terabit something fiber connection. But I can never get this thing to work. And I work well, right for the types of games I have. So, uh, like the modern doom game, for example, which runs well on like a laptop, like a non-gaming laptop, yep, that thing will not play. It will? I mean it plays, it just doesn't. You can't play, you just can't play it. It doesn't work.

01:53:02
And before we got here in Mexico, stephanie told me that the cable company actually it's a fiber connection, but it's only about, I think we were paying for maybe 800 megabits and I think it went up to a gigabit or whatever. Um, and the upload speeds are really good actually. So, like at home, I only get 30 to 40 megabits up and here it's. I think it might be 300 or 500. It's pretty good, like compared to home. So I was like all right, here we go, this is going to work. This is going to be where game streaming works. Yeah, it doesn't work. It does not work. So, on that note, boosteroid, which is a European-based game streaming because of the Activision Blizzard trial or antitrust.

01:53:45 - Rich Campbell (Host)
This is the company that the antitrust group of the UK defended tooth and nail.

01:53:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was the only reason anyone's ever heard of it is because Microsoft is going to let them basically resell their games like through their own game pad, and they did that preventatively before the UK CMA even really came up with a protest.

01:54:07 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Then they started protesting, and this is a problem of this.

01:54:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't recall the UK being a problem. What do you mean? Okay, the worst.

01:54:16 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Anyway, short memories are great, matt.

01:54:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is an age-old Microsoft strategy propping up the competition. Microsoft did it with Apple right in the late 1990s. Gave them a cash injection, non-voting shares, investment in the company, et cetera, et cetera, and I think Apple's still around.

01:54:35 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Right they're doing okay, so that worked out um for three. I mean it's got to be tough, yeah they're only number three anyway.

01:54:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So boosteroid, which I don't know anything about and, frankly, don't care too too much about, but if in the uk you may be interested in this, um, they actually have an ultra subscription plan now in europe that provides 4K resolution somehow, which I'm going to argue is impossible unless you're looking at a still image, that's impossible. Yeah, it's just impossible. Oh, they didn't say what the frame rate is.

01:55:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe it's 4K, 15 frames.

01:55:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's .005. It's good for chess.

01:55:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah chess.

01:55:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's all you need. I don't know what you would play. Anyway, we didn't end up writing it up, but it's there. It's a thing I don't know. God bless them. I hope they succeed with it. But listen, I would be happy to play 640x480 over the internet with this Doom game, Doom Eternal, whatever it's called. It would work. It does not work.

01:55:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you done GeForce now?

01:55:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not a long time. I should look at that again.

01:55:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
actually I would bet that's the best performance.

01:55:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you might be right, and they're nice because if you have a game in your library, I mean you pay for this or you can pay for the service, but you can actually access games you've paid for, right, which I think is a really cool perk.

01:55:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um and if you have a shield, you've got that nice tegra processor running and it has upscaling hybrid ai yeah it's actually it'd be. You know, I have it. I have to set it up and send seat I gotta look at that you're.

01:56:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm glad you reminded me that I forgot about that. Yeah, I used to love it.

01:56:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how I played no Man's Sky for a long time. Nice Load times were slow, but once you're playing, it's fine.

01:56:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think a fast action third person shooter is going to be tough, no matter what, but that kind of a game where it's kind of middle ground, you know, as far as like speed of things and so forth, yeah, yeah, that might be good I'm going to think about that you know what's coming up.

01:56:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard has a German whiskey. Ever hear of that? That's an oxymoron. I know that's the country where Jägermeister comes from, but I don't think we're talking Jäger. Nope Done that and I'm not going to do it again. My son, our son, is 21. Lisa's son, he's our youngest and, uh, he's got a real interest in jaeger. As one does. There's an easy cure for that. It's that or goldschlager, right?

01:57:03 - Rich Campbell (Host)
so yeah, either one of them have the same cure. Just drink a bunch, just keep drinking a bunch.

01:57:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I told him the story of when I was his age, in college, I snagged a bottle of Pernaud and drank the whole thing and I remember waking up in the backyard with the world spinning the wrong way, yep, and saying, actually, I'm doing that again.

01:57:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would argue you haven't lived until you've woken up on the grass in your backyard. I did that one time, yeah.

01:57:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the beginning.

01:57:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was cold and wet and confusing.

01:57:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's awful.

01:57:35 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's not what you want and later in the day, when the neighbors start bringing you back my clothes that I left strewn across the yards trying to get like a deer sleeping next to you, that's it.

01:57:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had a party way back in the day. I had just learned how to make the best lemon drop in the world I still do and so we had a lemon drop party and I make pictures of lemon drops and people over and stuff, and many of them ended up in the hot tub at the end of the night and one of my friends crawled, literally crawled home like a mile, like this, and another guy went home without his pants but he forgot where the party was and he the next day he goes and leaves a note on my neighbor's door saying you have my pants good stuff.

01:58:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, I was uh 21. I lived in albuquerque and there were two times a friend called me and said your house was on the news. One time was when it burned down.

01:58:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh dear.

01:58:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the first one was because we were having a massive party and it was so bad that, like the cars were blocking all of the neighbors, driveways, up and down the street, and there was an inch of like alcohol in the on the floor of the kitchen, you know, and there were people sleeping outside and it was not good, you know. Wednesday, wednesday, he got arrested alcohol in the on the floor of the kitchen, you know, and there were people sleeping outside and it was not good, you know. Wednesday, nobody got arrested.

01:58:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody got arrested, you're saying well, and the thing is, kids, you see us, we survived. You don't see all the people we left behind who didn't make it so yeah, you also.

01:59:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hope it's obvious how broken we are inside. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, did we survive?

01:59:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did we really? Yeah, did we survive? Did we Parts of us survive? You're watching the survivors windows weekly with Paul Theron and Richard Campbell. Time for the back of the book. Paul, why don't you kick things off with a dev pick of the week? That's interesting.

01:59:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't have a tip per se, but I thought this would kind of qualify Grab Maddie's post. Yeah, this has been close to a year, I think, but they announced last year there were a number of initiatives around Visual Studio Code to bring in C Sharp and some kind of more traditional developer workloads, right. So this is the C Sharp dev kit. I think it's called traditional developer workloads, right? So this is the C Sharp dev kit, I think it's called. But one of the big ones to me is the MAUI extension and this allows you to create these cross-platform apps for Windows, mac, ios and Android, including iPad right, using a single code base, right, the successor to Xamarin. So to date you would have used the traditional big box version of Visual Studio, but now you can do so with Visual Studio Code because that extension is now generally available. So it's just out there in the world for you to use. So if you prefer that more lightweight editor which, I have to say, kind of do you know for this kind of thing, nice.

02:00:31 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Different people like it in different ways, you know. But the big thing thing with dev kit was uh, there's a certain group of developers that don't want to go in studio. They're happy in code, but they couldn't see the project yeah, they're all.

02:00:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That wasn't right right that's right, yeah, dev kit made that go away.

02:00:45 - Rich Campbell (Host)
That was part of the dev kit. Yeah, that's right.

02:00:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you're going to use it that way, you need an msdn subscription, that's right you're, in that case, part of a team and the idea is that your employer is paying for that stuff and at least now you have this option you can give to developers. Yeah, that are in Studio. I could be wrong, but no, I think this is true too. They also got GitHub copilot integration in code. I think well before Big Visual Studio. I think that just happened right Pretty much. They were very careful. I think well before big visual store and I think I think that just happened.

02:01:14 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Right, pretty much they integrate. They were very careful with the integration with studio, but studios extension models way more complicated. Yeah, yeah, yes, code because it's newer. It doesn't have all the baggage that studio.

02:01:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and it was right. It was built with extensibility in mind. In fact, the idea there is it's electron or whatever, but it's lightweight compared to visual studio and you add the workloads that you use, so you don't have to, you don't have the overhead of all that.

02:01:38 - Rich Campbell (Host)
and, to be clear, virtually everything is lighter weight than visual studio.

02:01:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes that's true, except for uh teams.

02:01:45 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Uh, yeah, well, no, actually the new teams probably I'll like talk to an eclipse programmer like I feel you oh my god, yes, or or anything based on what's the Android studio is based on.

02:01:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's that thing called? It doesn't matter. Whatever that it's right on the tip of my tongue. Whatever that ID is also intelligent Terrible, yeah, but yeah, yeah. No visual studio code is much preferable to this.

02:02:08 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, baggage I'm talking about baggage, the 70s baggage I'm talking about baggage from 40, 50 years ago.

02:02:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and then you may recall this has nothing to do with Windows, but God, I just love this app so much, late in 2023,. I wanted my one of my regular, you know little jihads to try to find like a news app, like a news feed, basically in mobile, that I liked and because these things are also terrible, like you know, google news and what have the Microsoft things call it. I, I, every once in a while, let's go and try to find something, and I came across an app called artifact. Artifact uses AI, because everything does, but it allows you to go in and be very specific about what you like and don't like, which you know could be good, bad and different, but I'm not using it for news. It's literally just in the morning after reading the actual news. I want to see what the tech news is and this is really good. For that, I fell in love with it. I promoted it in December and then they announced in January they were going away and this was an app that was made by the founders of Instagram, right, and they just couldn't figure out a way to make it work and blah, blah, blah, whatever.

02:03:12
A couple of months went by. Artifact never disappeared. I thought nice, and so I wrote another article I'm like you know, by the way. This thing never disappeared. It's fantastic. The next day, they announced that Yahoo was buying them, which has got to be like a worst case scenario. I thought, yeah, like, here we go. So they're going to integrate their recommendation engine and their AI stuff into their Yahoo news app, which you could not pay me to even look at. So I'm like great, it's dead, whatever, who cares? Last week, yahoo news announced a new version of their or yahoo announced a new version of their yahoo news app with integrated artifact technology. Blah, blah, blah. Whatever. I'm like all right, screw it, I'm actually going to install something with the word yahoo in it. I'm going to look at this thing and here's the thing it's not a new version of yahoo, it's Artifact, with a Yahoo logo on it.

02:03:56
That's what it is. That's what I want. I don't want the Yahoo logo. I don't care. You don't care, you want Artifact. If you looked at this when I recommended it or otherwise, and also were hurt by its death, if you can live with the Yahoo logo and the purple color, look at this thing, because it is artifact. It's not Yahoo News with other stuff, it's artifact. They've added a few things I don't like. Like in the For you view, which is the default. They actually have top news at the top and I haven't figured out a way to get rid of it, but I use it on the iPad. Someone told me the Android version. This was a few days ago. It hadn't been updated yet, but it will be. They announced it for both, so take a look at it, especially if you were a fan.

02:04:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I downloaded it immediately because I loved Artifacts.

02:04:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Great right, you recognize it immediately. It's back, it's too bad, it's tarnished with the Yahoo name I know, but you know what I'll take it. What's?

02:04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
really funny. You know Yahoo Finance is a sponsor because they're kind of a separate division. There are still plenty of, there are a lot of people who use Yahoo Finance. There are still I mean, some of their sites are still the most visited sites in the world. Among us, technorati, they're kind of the name Yahoo kind of makes us snigger, but the Yahoo News we're a little too cute when it comes to stuff. Well, they have. You know, I don't know who owns it. Now it's not Verizon anymore. I don't know.

02:05:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sure it's a group of Chinese investors. It's some public equity. Yeah, it's private equity.

02:05:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's something like that. But, whoever it is, is clearly investing in the properties that still have an audience investing in the properties that still have a an audience, and news is one of them and I have to say, yahoo finance is still great and yahoo news is now back.

02:05:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right, if you find yahoo offensive which you know, I think I could be on board with, like I said, one of the things you can do is control which publications get through with the news right, you can actually remove all the yahoo news sources and there were multiple yahoo news sources, like you said. A few of them there's Yahoo Sports, there's Yahoo, whatever Like. If you don't want to have the Yahoo stuff, I mean, you still have to look at the logo, but you can actually get rid of their news sources. So they're at least doing that. I mean, a lot of big tech I guess they're not really big tech, but a lot of tech companies would kind of force you to accept their stuff, I would say, and I wouldn't begrudge them that too much, but they actually let you take it.

02:06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty white labeled. It's pretty clean.

02:06:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks as you said just like Artifact, except for that Just at the top.

02:06:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the one thing where it's like, and I actually I like it enough that I turned on notifications. That's how I found out Willie Mays had passed yesterday. Love, love it.

02:06:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's amazing, right so they did the right thing with it. I did not expect that. Yeah, well, I didn't expect it because they didn't they. What they said was we're going to add this technology to our app and I'm like I don't want your app, you know. But then that's not what they did. Maybe it was like recall. They figured it was better just to rip it out and just ship this system go to yahoo?

02:06:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
or did he just give them the technology and say see you later, he doesn't need them. They got you know, they sold it yeah kevin's.

02:06:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, you know what they might guy, there were two guys and they might be temporarily consulting or something.

02:07:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, yeah, something, because, as you say, this is just picked right up where artifact left off, which makes me so happy because artifact was fantastic.

02:07:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, yeah, I love it. The only, my only problem is the oh, I should, I should have said. This problem is I spent months fine-tuning, right, I see, and now you're starting over. So now I'm getting stuff like people, magazine stuff, you know, like all the you can go through their publication I did at the beginning. You get you you gotta take it like a day to do that, I know, but it's worth it.

02:07:37
I'm still. Whatever I'll take it, I'm not going to open it. Well, actually I haven't done this yet. I've actually customized this app without signing in right, so at some point I'm going to have to probably suck it up and get a Yahoo.

02:07:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually have a Yahoo mail account still, I don't know why. Well, because you don't delete it, and Flickr was Yahoo for a long time.

02:07:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They got sold. Yeah, it was. That's why I had one, because of Flickr.

02:07:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Flickr was so great. Yeah, I love Flickr. Well, it still is, frankly, so isn't that interesting. Yep, you're back, can't kill him.

02:08:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, richard, richard, just like. Uh, the jala phone running selfish is like a nokia migu migo or whatever it's called, did you see? Yeah?

02:08:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and I had to do this. I did it on twit, the president of nokia making the first 3d yeah surround sound call, and he said this is going to be in phones everywhere and yeah just not nokia phone nokia doesn't make phones anymore. They're hmd, they're not. They just sell the name well, they're still. They're like a network I thought they just make tires now. They're just back to the tire business probably yeah, they're, they're not a phone company.

02:08:47
It was very funny. I had to do the story because it was like nintendo used to make playing cards.

02:08:52
You know, things change I, I, as a result uh, I I learned the uh term, I can't remember if it was from stacy or paris a beat sweetener. You people who work in day-to-day news know this. Which is you're, you're on a beat, you're on the phone beat and you know you got a file four or five stories a day. There's not a lot. So sometimes, every once in a while you get a press release, you go yeah, that'll be, there's one that's a beet sweetener yeah, it's a good story.

02:09:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't.

02:09:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That sounds like a dirty thing it was paris martin, I'd like, uh, two beet sweeteners, a lot of sugar.

02:09:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll see how I feel after that.

02:09:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's uh, let's see how it goes mr richard campbell, what is going on with Run as Radio?

02:09:36 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Well, this week's show is with Yuri Diogenes. He works for Microsoft and he's in what they call the CNAP space, the Cloud Native Application Protection Platform, which they now call Microsoft Defender for Cloud, because there's way too many defenders.

02:09:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Holy man, they're going to get some AI going in there.

02:09:59 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, goodness knows it's. You know Copilot for security, oh man, and we talked about that as well. But actually the Defender for Cloud is pretty rational. It is all of the stuff you need to protect your cloud apps. So that's you know. Protective tools around APIs, servers, containers, storage blocks, any resource management all of those different things all fall under the same umbrella. They used to be different defenders, but they've learned.

02:10:27
Now bundle these together because you need them all anyway, and then they integrate tightly with Purview, which is the data identification and management retention system, and then also Sentinel, which is the scene, which is your tool for looking across all the things that are going on in all of the different defenders and say I think this is an attack.

02:10:49
You know, if you think about the way bad guys work, you're not going to.

02:10:52
It's not like a little flag pops that goes, oh, we're being attacked. It's hey, this is some weird data motion over here and why is this other account logged in over there? And those various things trigger in all these different defender products and each one of them may or may not get your hackles up, but with a tool like Sentinel, all those things come in together and you're like wait, this looks wrong. Let's scrutinize this and start closing some doors. So yeah, the goal here was really how do we put tools and attack path controls in place so that we get ahead of the attackers? We know once they get into our systems, which is not all that easy to resist in the first place it takes them months to actually get ready for a major attack, and these are the kinds of tools that help you surface that and maybe shut the doors before they get to set off their weapon and start extorting you did you say yuri was searching for the one honest microsoft server, or something like that?

02:11:47
because his last name diogenes.

02:11:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get it. Yeah, never mind, yeah forget.

02:11:52 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I said that you're doing a little, you know, doing a little greek mythology for me. There, there you go, there you go I watch too much jeopardy.

02:12:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the problem. Let's, let's do whiskey instead. What do you say?

02:12:04 - Rich Campbell (Host)
uh, um, look, I'm in berlin, so you got to tell some stories. Uh, this particular hotel is very lovely, we had a great time here, but it isn't what used to be east Berlin, right, and the two halves of the city. You can still tell the difference. They're not the same. You know, the western part of Berlin got a lot of money, a lot of development and as much as unification, which was now, decades ago, supposed to have evened a lot of it. It's just not like that actually. But even more than being here in the city, I had it today I had a day out, uh, at a friend's place, which is always great. You know, I've stayed in plenty of hotels and so forth.

02:12:40
But to go to a home, um, they've got little, little kids running around, like all of that fun, and we took a, we took a walk and we actually walked along the path that is where the Berlin Wall used to run, to divide off the outer part of West Berlin from East Germany, which was all around it. So this is out in the forest, in the fields, and after they took the wall down, they just made this a walking path. In fact, they have an ultramarathon that runs the whole thing all the way around through Berlin. The area is called Hannenberg, you can find it. There's actually a thing they call the Old Fort, which was a Prussian-style military fort brick and concrete, built in the 1800s, which is now just a tourist destination. But they have a new thing they call a new fort just less than a kilometer away, and it was actually an old gravel pit that, as they were restoring Berlin after the war in the 60s, they piled all the construction debris into the pit until it became a hill. That's how much stuff is there. It's now 45 meters higher than the rest of the area, around about 150 feet.

02:13:53
So we hiked up there to get a look back at the old fort and the area around and you can see where the, where the wall still went used to, used to go through. And weirdly enough, my friend pointed out to me uh, the tufelsberg, and this is a little more famous, but tufelsberg was another couple of kilometers further out and it's the old NSA listening post that was also built on an even higher rubber pile from recovering from the war, but that's, you know, all the cold war stuff was still right there and it really struck me that like once upon a time this country was cut into quarters and the city was cut in half, and you can see it. You can still see it. You know, it's not, just's not that far away. Anyway, apropos of nothing at all, we were going to talk about whiskey, so we have to go even further west, away from berlin, past leipzig and marburg, uh, into the harz mountain, uh, and, by the way, this is the place during world war ii, the southern part of the harz marz. This is where the, the middle works were, where they were building the V2 rockets with slaves underground, because they're full of these old mines. But there's actually been people in that area. There's some excavated sites with Homo erectus in it, so 750,000 years ago. This is old school human inhabitation I read a piece about. They think that Neanderthal used to live in the area and when the Homo sapiens came in about 100,000 years ago, pushed them all out.

02:15:20
First documentation of the Harz Mountains in sort of what we consider modern times go back to about 800 AD, where they were finding silver and they were starting to mine. The area is full of silver and iron, zinc and a few other minerals, and they've been mining for more than a thousand years, and the family that's responsible for this distillery is literally part of that lineage. They have a clearer picture. For the better part of a thousand years they call the distillery the Hercynian distillery. Hercynian is actually a Roman word and it means the dark forest. The Hercynian forests were all of the forests of southern Germany that were generally considered very dangerous by the Romans, enough that they fought a lot of wars in there and didn't go well.

02:16:07
But it's also known as the Hammerschmied distillery, and Hammerschmied means hammer mill. So where this distillery sits now there were hammer mills going back to the 1200s. Then these were the machines that basically worked the iron to make it usable. But then we shut down in the late, in the early 1800s. You know, after six or 700 years of use, which is an interesting thing to think about, just how old that particular space is. And this is where the Buchholz family used to be mine and machinery operators. But one of the family members at one point took that old hammer mill and turned it into a factory for making metal parts and then, when that business started to dry up because the metal was getting rarer and more expensive, the mines were closing down. He opened a restaurant and that restaurant, like many in that era, in the late 1800s, made its own booze, although most of it was liqueurs, you know, various kinds of herbal flavors. This is where all your Jägermeisters and things come from. It's a normal practice in that part of the world. The restaurant actually shut down in 1998. So we're right back in the modern times. Because the booze was being very successful so they actually closed the restaurant to focus on spirits.

02:17:21
They didn't start making whiskey until 2000. And they actually called it the Harzer as in Harz Mountains single malt whiskey, which is exactly what's still printed on the box to this day Harzer single malt whiskey. Admittedly only 20 years ago. The first new make went into barrels in 2002. Their water source is up in the mountains there and it's called the Ellswell, which is a spring in an area they call Ellsbackel, which translates literally to the Ells Valley. But seeing how they were following a Scottish whiskey practice, they actually called the whiskey Glen Ells, which upset the Scots because Glen is the Gaelic word for that. So then they later changed the name to Ellsburn, which is the other Gaelic word for Valley. So I don't know why. That would necessarily make them happier, but that's what they've done.

02:18:17
This is a I mean, last week we talked about Ballandalloc and how small and boutiquey that distillery was. This is even smaller. This is a little place. They put out 10 000 liters of wash a week. They're only running four sessions, only one mash tun. They've got four 3 000 liter wash boxes that are made of french oak unusual they usually. They're usually made of pine or cypress and they do a fermentation that runs between 96 and 144 hours. And you're like, why the giant range? It's like, well, because they're running the wash mills over and over and over again and then loading it all into the washback and letting it ferment. So it comes in over days and so some of it's going to be going for three days. Some will be going up to six days, it depends they combine them all together. Two 700-liter wash tills you could almost fit this in your garage, they're so small and an 800-liter spirit.

02:19:09
Still, their new make only comes in at 70%, which is relatively low for their base spirit, and then they dilute it down to 60%, which is pretty normal, a little bit low. Traditionally bourbon goes in the barrel at 62.5 and Scottish whiskey goes in at 63.5. So they're only going in 60, but they almost exclusively, more than half use sherry casks, but they also use Malaga and port casks, and everyone knew what Malaga is. Malaga is Spanish port, so all the same kind of thing, fortified wine barrels, if you like. They've also got some Marsala, madeira, amarone, moscatel, bordeaux, saturns, a little bit of rum, a little bit of bourbon. They have some fun and they age at about five to ten years.

02:19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to point out you have not tried this yet. No, I just opened it right now A virgin bottle, and he's never tasted it before. What could go wrong?

02:20:08 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Well, I think this is great, we've never done that.

02:20:11
No, I usually am drinking the whiskey I've had before before I go put it on the table, but it's not this time. So the nose is super mild. No little flare. This is only 43%, which is a little low. They don't chill filter either, so this should probably cloud if we threw some ice in it. It's coming in at 43 like that. But, yeah, no fiery nose Doesn't feel like my hairs are peeling back. Wow, okay, this is pretty gentle, like still 43% alcohol. So you really, oh, there's yeah, okay, so the nothing until about here, like down in the chest and it's like I have landed. Yeah, no, the mouth is really nice on it.

02:21:00
This wins a lot of awards. It's quite popular. They've been cranking them out, but they only make this Ellsberg that burn the journey. They make 13,000 bottles of this in a given year, so this is the 2023 edition. There are only 13,000 of these. I mean really small productions. Here's the one I couldn't find now that I've learned about the whiskey. They make a smoky whiskey, but not a peated whiskey, because they have no peat. So the master smoked it, as it is very. He smoked it with alder and beech hardwoods to dry the malt and made it initially just for himself, but it was a hit. It's called Ulrich, and so just a totally different kind of smoke. There's not a bit of smoke in this, it is just a real straightforward, like kind of creamy caramel.

02:21:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is my kind of whiskey. This is what I would drink, like kind of creamy caramel. This is my kind of whiskey.

02:21:54 - Rich Campbell (Host)
This is what I would drink. What do you think your expectations would be with a German whiskey?

02:22:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It should be a little hairier than this.

02:22:03 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It tastes like rye bread, I think, or beer. It's not beer-y at all. But again, you know, yeah, they've got a winner here, nice About 50 euros for a bottle. You know, that's a bit pricey, without an age notation on it, but it's not that old, so they haven't been in business long enough. They've been making whiskey for 20, 22 years. But going to be a trick to find. I happen to be in Berlin and as it was, I still had to go to a specialty whiskey shop where they had one of them and not the line, because I might have gotten a couple more. But I think I'll be taking this with me to montana and feeding it to my friends.

02:22:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, your friends the uh, the elk, the fishermen oh, you're going fishing again. Oh yeah, you went fly montana when is that gonna?

02:22:50 - Rich Campbell (Host)
be flying fishing, so that'll be over the weekend. So then from there, this is a six-leg trip. I've been on, I left on the third. I'll get home on the 29th. This is leg four. So leg five we'll be fishing in Montana. Leg six is at the Kansas City Developer Conference in Kansas City, missouri. Because names are hard, I don't have enough labels for you, I'm going to break your software.

02:23:15
Leo I can't, and they have a floor podcasting space. So I'll try it out. We'll see if it's stable and the noise level is reasonable. Otherwise I'll go hide in the hotel again. But it might be more fun to shoot from the floor. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, this is a surprise whiskey for me. I only just learned about it. I hunted a bottle down yesterday. I just tasted it now. I love happy surprises.

02:23:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ellspern, the original Helsinian shingle malt whiskey. Love the name. There are your whiskeys. Yeah, it's one of the hottest mountains. That's why it's Hoshinian, right, yeah, right, look at it, it's the town of Ida. Wow, so that's the western part of the hardest mountains.

02:24:04 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's a total surprise.

02:24:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pretty cool, what the heck. And maybe we could try these other ones at some point.

02:24:10 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I want to find the Ulrich. I want to try a smoky whiskey that is in heat.

02:24:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love the label.

02:24:19 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah. They only make 1,800 bottles a year. That's going to be a bugger.

02:24:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And 95 out of 100 in the Liquid Gold Award in the.

02:24:28 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Whiskey Bible. If Jim Murray likes you, you've done something right. Yeah, wow, anyway, I'm so happy. If Jim Murray likes you, you've done something right. Wow, okay, anyway, I'm so happy I found this.

02:24:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know what to look for for your birthday.

02:24:41 - Rich Campbell (Host)
There you go. I'm going to find an excuse to do more driving around in Germany and I think I'm just going to pop by that Germany's fun.

02:24:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, absolutely All right. Well, thank you, my friends. That's Richard Campbell right there. Run as Radio is his podcast and NET Rocks. You'll find them both at runasradiocom. Paul Therot, right here on your left there. I should really I got to remember. I got to spatialize you guys, so you come from different parts. I do.

02:25:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I need to be spatialized.

02:25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Spatialize you guys. So you come from different parts. I do. I need to be spatialized. Spatialize you. Paul is at therotcom t-h-u-r-r-o-tcom. He's also got his books at leanpubcom.

02:25:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I'm sorry, the delphi 3 super bible is out of stock I'm gonna read the audiobook version soon, though, so I like doing things that don't make sense and take a lot of time you know it, it's so funny because I love audio books, but they never put programming books in audio books.

02:25:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They never do.

02:25:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, x equals backslash Reading code is bad.

02:25:42 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Bad. Don't do that, Do not read code Bad bad, bad, okay, okay, Okay, okay.

02:25:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, leanpubcom has his current books, which is a field guide to Windows 11, constantly being updated, thanks Microsoft. Inside the field guide to Windows 10. So it's always kind of like a Russian doll nesting doll of Windows versions. You should just put them all in there.

02:26:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like you know, if Windows 10 field guide looks like a pamphlet now, yeah, compared to 11.

02:26:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish I could be that concise. It's not your fault, paul. There's also the Windows Everywhere book, which I loved. I read excerpts of it as a premium member of Theratcom, which I recommend, by the way, and the book fantastic, windows Everywhere the history of Windows through its programming languages. A lot of fun. Thank you, my friends, travel safely and we will be back here next Wednesday. We do this show every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. We do stream it now live on YouTube, youtubecom, slash twit, slash live, and if you subscribe and smash the bell, as the kids say, you will get a notification when we go live, right at the beginning of the show. We are. We played with it yesterday, as I mentioned. You know we're probably going to shut the studio down in a month or two to save money and I'm going to move this all to my house. We've been talking about how much of this can go. I didn't know you were a hoarder. I don't know how much of this can go to my house.

02:27:21
Help leo de hoard well, I you know we did. We did the swedish death clinging at the house.

02:27:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we have but you know it's a shame to fill it up again.

02:27:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You need, like, a shipping container or something good, well, I've got all that stuff out now.

02:27:33
I can't bring the top part because it's too high. This ceiling's too low for it, but I can bring they're detachable I can bring the bottom part, which would give me a good good chunk of the garbage that I've collected over the last 20 years. So that's good. Um, I think there's fezes inside that cupboard anyway. Uh, what was I saying?

02:27:53
We're gonna do it, uh, from the house, everybody's house, and, um, that will mean, uh, I can't. Oh, I know what. I know what I was talking about, that we tried it yesterday. We streamed it simultaneously. Uh, in youtube, twitch. We can do it on xcom. We're gonna stream, I think we do instagram, although they have a one hour limit, so we have to. We can only do like the first half. That would be a problem. Yeah, okay, we're leaving instagram now, but if you want to watch more, go to xcom. Yeah, exactly, I don't know, but but I love the idea of streaming in more places, because even then, even when we did this, people said, said oh, you're still alive. Wow, I didn't know you were still around. So that's, I guess, good, get rediscovered.

02:28:41
So there will be more ways to watch live. But right now you do it on YouTube, youtubecom, slash, twit, slash live. Of course, you can also watch after the fact, which is really for most people how they watch, because it's more convenient. You can watch at your leisure. We make downloads of both audio and video versions available on our website, twittv slash www. There is a Windows Weekly YouTube channel. You can watch the video there. Great for sharing clips. Best thing to do subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you get it automatically the minute the show's available. You don't miss anything. But you know, I know one of the things I noticed with myself if you, if you subscribe to a bunch of podcasts, then you feel guilty. If you don't listen to them, it's okay.

02:29:23
Just you know, listen to the latest, and if you feel like you're okay with it, I guess I'm okay with it, and if you want more you could go back in time or whatever, but at least you have it right uh, I got 1900 episodes of dot net rocks.

02:29:39 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Do not go back to the whole account, do not?

02:29:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's too many and the effect really is true of our shows too, because they're pretty topical, unless you want to know what we were talking about when we did a vista came out or something like that.

02:29:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't have to do that. I have, uh, listeners and viewers who remember everything I've ever said. If I could just bring up something from 16 years ago, you said, like I say a lot of things, I'm an idiot.

02:30:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is one thing we're going to lose in the new studio is I won't have this nice screen to look at, because this is a little more complicated than we can do at home.

02:30:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you'll have like a laptop or something.

02:30:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'd be a single of me screen. So it'd be like this, maybe a little like this, and then there'll be a picture of you and we can do it side by side. We did with. If you want to know what it's going to look like, look at the security now from yesterday, cause it's, and so I can throw a Tux Lennox Penguin at you. That's why, oh Holy cow, I guess we don't need that TV anymore.

02:30:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what my skull sounds like. Wow.

02:30:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a good thing we're getting rid of it. I've heard of Glass Chin, but anyway, alright, my friends.

02:30:56 - Rich Campbell (Host)
My flight to Newark's just been delayed.

02:30:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no.

02:30:59 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Oh no, I'm sorry, Well take a nap, get some rest.

02:31:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let yours begin yeah, have fun, good luck. We'll see you next week right here on Windows Weekly. Thanks, club members. See you next time.