Windows Weekly 889 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 Therod and Richard Campbell are here Coming up. Paul, one week later, takes a look at the CoPilot Plus PCs. He's getting better battery life, that's for sure. Notepad finally supports spellcheck. It's a whole new world out there. And we'll talk about the new pricing for Xbox Ultimate. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is windows weekly with paul thorat and richard campbell, episode 889. Recorded Wednesday, July 10th 2024. Works best with Netscape. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft and a few Microsoft OEMs. Today, paul Thorat is there, not here. He's in New York, new York, covering some event. Is it an HP event? Is that what you're there for? Yep, richard Campbell has decided his decline. He has decided to remain in Madeira Park, british Columbia.

01:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And why wouldn't you? Because the views Like the recluse that he is, there you go. Why would you leave that right? You're not going to leave that. The loans Norman.

01:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The loans.

01:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Richard living in a room with, like people, magazines stacked up from the 70s and the newspaper comes every day National.

01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Geographic, that is truly gorgeous. It's mostly empty whiskey bottles, to be honest and of course, paul, it's 87 degrees, and muggy in New York, and Richard it's probably 67 degrees and breezy in BC it's 29.

01:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
29. Oh well, warm it up. We had to bite the air to get through it. It's a little muggy here, it's thick.

01:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, I did want to tell you, I wish. I'd known that you were going to be in New York because I just got word from the Yale Club they're relaxing the dress code. Are you serious? Yes, so it was a big article in the New York Times? Yeah, Because nobody's joining those Ivy League clubs. Yep, yep yep, yep. Because they had a dress code.

02:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't have any ascots. It was a problem.

02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul very famously stayed at the Yaleale club in new york many years ago now, uh attempted to eat breakfast what were you wearing?

02:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I stepped, I stepped out. I was just. I was wearing this like a polo shirt and jeans and the. I stepped out of the elevator into where the it's not like calling it. It's where people were eating. It's. It was an elegant room. You know the breakfast. As the door is closing behind me, I'm scanning the room and everyone in there is wearing a suit and I was like oh no.

02:51
And I'm like I'm trying to hit the button on the elevator make it come back. And the guy walks up. He says sir, and I'm like I know, I know, no, I'm leaving. And he says Apollo is the minimum Nice.

03:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, wow, well now.

03:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apollo. I got bum rushed.

03:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's no longer the minimum Big, big news in the Yoke Club. We were all talking about it the other day. They're going to let people like paul thrott in.

03:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly this is like the wrong god the rabble yeah, yep, so you're calling this episode the morning after yeah, well, you know, sometimes you get like overly exuberant about something and then the next day you're like, oh crap, what have I done? This isn't like that. Um yeah not like that at all.

03:50
It's good, it's all. It's all good. In fact it must be in here, Yep, Uh, yeah. So, as we'll get to I, something really interesting is happening with these Snapdragon PCs, which I think in the history of our industry is actually kind of notable, and I'm in the middle of writing like a gigantic article about that. But we'll get to this anyway. So a couple of things. Just in the wake of last week's you know two hour overview of the computers I have, I'll try to cut this one shorter. You know things are proceeding nicely, Everything's good. I keep waiting. There hasn't really been an Achilles heel type thing. The Surface laptop I'm using has gotten up to over 11 hours of battery life now.

04:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, that's good. So it's learning you right and getting a little more.

04:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I'm, you know I'm slowing down my more spastic testing. You know, like you're using it more normally. Maybe is the way to put it Right. So that's kind of neat. Look, I get it. I'm part of this community. There is there is an exuberance occurring now and people are starting to get a little ahead of themselves and we're starting to see editorials about this where it's like Intel's doomed, it's over, x86 is dead, nice, and yeah, not so much, guys, I mean.

05:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Particularities of my demise are graciously exaggerated.

05:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, you got to remember something Intel in this industry is is dominant there. I know people in the tech industry will have a hard time with this comment, but they actually have a pretty good reputation among normal people. They're in the sense that people understand the whole intel inside thing and they think that's what you want and they don't know any better maybe, but whatever well, and we've already seen sample quantities of lunar lake with great report yeah, I and we shouldn't leave amd out of this discussion, but you know it's not anyone's fault.

05:54
But they often do get left out because, for whatever reason, they're still kind of also rands um, which is too bad, because they make terrific chips and I, very specific, i- was just talking to someone.

06:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Part of the, the pc master race of gamers, says you know, amd and ryzen are nothing right like so gaming machine.

06:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's very nice yeah, yeah, so the actually the. The computer I'm using today for this podcast, because I have to use a focus right and focus right does not work with arm computers, yet is oh, is that true?

06:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's good to know, because that's that's what the gear we see, yeah it's the one major hardware.

06:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's funny bluff I've run into yeah, yeah, okay, there are, because there are others. I've talked to a few folks now that are yeah no, missing stuff that plugs in and is not happy huh it's a driver issue.

06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it's a driver issue. Right, it's a driver issue. It's drivers yeah, but that's a standard USB driver. I would say, I know it just doesn't work.

06:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let us speak of the standard you mentioned.

06:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is this standard?

06:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, look, since 2000, whatever, 16, 17, 18, whatever it was, or since 2012,. Certainly, microsoft has done a tremendous job of making sure that the most common devices are served by class drivers that work really well. Right, and I was surprised. So, for example, we have two HP all-in-one network attached printers at home and they both work fine, came right up and that I expected. They both scan and print.

07:25
I haven't tried faxing it is 2024, but the HP has custom software and it's it's X 64 software. I checked and it works fine with this with these devices. So the, the software, must just be a front end to whatever the backend drivers are, et cetera, whatever. But I expected that not to work. But if you want to do things like in the scanning app, for example, you can, you know, have it auto crop when it scans, which is a feature you need that software for works absolutely fine. So my success rate with hardware has been it's actually N software has been nearly identical in both cases for me so far, unless I'm forgetting something, I've only found one software piece you know, this app or whatever that I rely on that does not work which you know integrates the file system. That makes sense. And I found the one hardware device, which is this focus right. That does not work, and so I don't know.

08:19
It's not. Look in the old days and by the old days I mean the 1990s. I would go to Best Buy with a printout of a portion of the Windows NT 4.0 hardware compatibility list Nice and I would find the one network card they had or the one whatever it was I was buying at the time that worked. You know I'd go down and look Does this one? Nope, okay, how about this one? And then you'd find the one that did work and you'd bring that home and that's what you would use. This is way better than that, and it's certainly better than you know RT or the early days of Windows 10 on ARM. So look, especially this audience, people watching or listening to the show we're going to have some esoteric, you know, 3d printers or whatever they might be. Yes, you could run into some problems, but I bet most of you guys have more than one computer too. You'll be OK, you know it's not like it's your only machine.

09:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you're going to be fine, but we're still battling this core, classic issue of every restricted version of Windows, which is like 95 percent of what you need is working fine, but the five percent that doesn't work. You really need it, you needed it and it's all different.

09:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is the. I don't know if this is ironic or hypocritical or I don't know what to call it, but it is very interesting to me that the most technical people will probably have the hardest time in a way which is not the way it should be right, because we tend you or we, whatever tend to use more of those kinds of devices.

09:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But we also have lots of machines, so it's like it can sit over there.

09:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And when I have to do it.

09:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll do it a different way.

09:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I see, so I hear. Just to kind of put this in perspective slightly, I guess Last night I opened up my MacBook Air, which I hadn't opened in several days, came right on, by the way, kind of a neat feature to look for in a PC and you know, I signed in and I plugged in my. I have a little Samsung. I think it's a T2 SSD, whatever two terabytes. It has my photo collection on it. I wanted to upload it to iCloud or whatever. Could not see this thing. For some reason it couldn't work. I was like what's going on here? Like I kept plugging it Nothing, unplug it Nothing, you know. So I plugged it into a real computer, a Windows computer, and it has BitLocker on it. That's why and BitLocker does not work on the Mac, and right, okay, you know Samsung used to have its own encryption, but you used bitlocker on that one.

10:47
I use bitlocker because you know the t2 used to come with that same thing you know.

10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, I would never trust an asam, so I know I took it. I take it off immediately so yeah I look, I like.

10:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I mean, I the. The point of the morning after headline here was simply that it's a week later. Uh, it's two weeks since I got the first computer, three weeks since these things came out. I would say that the story is pretty consistent. You don't come here for the AI, it's not horrible, but it's not the reason to spend a thousand or 1500 bucks on computer. When it can play a game, it's actually pretty magical. But man, that's like throwing eggs in the air and trying to catch something Like it doesn't work a lot and it's not the reason to buy one of these things. But the reason you buy it is because of the thing I just talked about. You open the lid, it comes on.

11:36
Battery went down by maybe 2% overnight. The battery life is somewhere in the 10 to. It looks like 12-hour range now. Maybe We'll somewhere in the 10 to. Looks like 12 hour range now. Maybe we'll see um, super reliable, consistent, just works kind of thing. We're just. I'm just not used to this in the windows world. I keep flinching like waiting for something to smack me in the face, but where's my blue screen?

11:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it's been good here's the thing, though, that I think everybody really wants to know is how does it run linux?

12:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, leo, I'm glad you asked. No, I'm not Right now it doesn't, but it will right, because Qualcomm has been working with the Linux community from the beginning and they're very upfront about this. They have a website about this. They've spoken at Linux trade shows and in fact, I watched a talk a guy gave back in, I think, april, where they will ensure that all of the hardware is 100% Linux. All the drivers will be there. It's going to be part of the kernel. It's all happening like they're doing it.

12:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm also surprised that the dev kits haven't shipped.

12:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like what's the delay on the dev kits?

12:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you get an email or anything? Yet I mean I get an email or anything, yet I mean I, I just an email to say wait for an email, wait for an email.

12:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here comes another one. Yep, oh good, they're emailing. Oh, we're gonna email you later, don't? We haven't forgotten you? Yeah, this is. This is surprising. It might just be a supply issue. They want to get them out to the oems, maybe.

12:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean that's not a bad thought, or the, or the pipeline's just full right now, or this, or they found a glitch in their implementation, like all this is this.

13:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This isn't gonna last, but in june qualcomm controlled 20 something percent of the pc market by unit sales in june, um, usually it's uh, uh I'm gonna round it up zero percent so it was, uh was a big change. It was a burst. Yeah, I don't know what zero times 20 is, but uh, it was that much.

13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it was a big change, um qualcomm says it's not, I mean on its linux support page that linux support is coming pronto. It literally says, well, okay so literally pronto.

13:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so we, we sort of have this understanding that Lenovo and I'm sorry, qualcomm rather and Microsoft have this agreement and you know, you can see the public impact of it in that, like Copilot plus PCs are exclusively Qualcomm based right now. Right, intel, amd, and then the PC makers will come out with capable copilot plus class PCs soon, but we actually still don't know if they're going to be called copilot plus PCs, at least in the beginning, because there's clearly some exclusivity thing going on. We just don't know.

14:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a deal with Snapdragon.

14:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the question Is it like a marketing like Evo, where they do co-marketing dollars, or is there really something in there?

14:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, because if we're only talking about tops like my RTX kicks ass.

14:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, it's actually not a lot of tops, to be honest.

14:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, listen, you GPU tops-loving idiot. No, you're right. Look, this will change. We just don't know what the terms are. But I think to the Linux point. Don't be what the terms are, but I think to the linux point. Don't be surprised to discover that that is part of the same arrangement that, on the flip side, microsoft's like yeah, yeah, you're gonna put it in linux, but let's, let's have an exclusivity window for windows as well. Right, we want to get this thing out in the world. Yeah, um, and look it's. There's no doubt no one has said this but absolutely, chromebook plus devices will be running on this platform too, and you know, we'll see. It's just, we just don't know when. Right, because again, we're in this little window. We don't know when it closes.

15:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Just wondering if this is actually slowing adoption, Like I'm watching some of these other reviews and they're complaining about things. I'm like that is an arm that's out of their reviews and they're complaining about things. I'm like that is an arm that's not Snapdragon, that's Windows 11 that you're complaining about a lot of these reviews are coming from non-Windows guys, which is absolutely fine.

15:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We need those people just for comedy really, but they, you know, it's like well, the ads bother you in the status I wish only someone had highlighted that earlier.

15:47
But yeah, thank you for finally bringing it up. Um, I wish I, I, I feel weird, like I, I, I find myself being the people who must read my stuff. You can feel them getting upset, like literally in real time, and they're like, oh, you know the um, the like, literally in real time. And they're like, oh, you know the um, the emulator is terrible. You're like wait, what? No, what is what? What are you talking about? Yeah and um, they're like oh, these apps, I use all these apps. None of them work great. And then they list the apps. You're like I, what are these in windows? For 35 years, I've never heard of any of these apps. What are you talking about? Like, so you know, like, again, in technical circles, you're going to run into people who have you know whatever specific.

16:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, this realization that you're talking to a Linux ARM person who this is a hot new ARM device, so they want to take it out for a spin and now they're really experiencing Windows 11 for the first time.

16:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can tell you that if I was a Linux guy and you might want to take the stance yourself, I think this would be the beautiful thing to do in public. Does the stance look like this?

16:52
No, no, no, it does, yeah, except we need to see your behind at the time. Um, the stance should be you know, uh, a snapdragon in arm is pretty cool, but I'm holding out for risk five. You know, like, like, you know, like that this is clearly where it's gonna. If it, when the kernel is written in rust and it runs on risk five, then we can talk.

17:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there is a RISC-V PC out there and I saw a review that said it's slower than a Raspberry Pi 4. So I'm not rushing. I'm not rushing to RISC-V.

17:19
I think this is look, you know there are. You know, as with anywhere, there are Linux people who are purists and so forth and they're going to use RiskV. But I think most user users say I would love this chip. It's a nice chip, apparently. I would love to see how it runs. Linux and Qualcomm is very committed to that. You know Qualcomm, remember, makes chips for Android devices. That's its big business. Those are all Linux devices. So it's big business. Those are all linux devices. So it's not. That's right, it's not impossible at all.

17:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah they're in, they're in that world. They're not yeah, they know they're not throwing away two billion uh devices a year to go to two, you know, 20 million windows devices. Like no offense, like, um, just saying, although, by the way, I uh, one might wonder, I've wondered, uh, you know, they must have invested several billion dollars of the past few years in this. What's the payoff? Right, and the payoff actually is that this will be the base architecture for their mobile chips going forward too. So this is all going to pay off, yeah, even if you know Windows and ARM doesn't, although I think it will yeah.

18:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean this is as people keep quoting. It's like this is not the first time attempted armor with windows. Not that they have direct lineages, I don't know. There's a lot of rt code here like they are.

18:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't imagine there is actually yeah, um, uh boy, I so many thoughts, so I'm writing a lot, a very long piece about that history and, um, probably going to roll it somehow into windows everywhere. I'm not sure how I'm going to do that, but yeah, there's a. There's a lot of interesting stories there. One that people may forget is that Microsoft announced to the public that this was happening. They didn't call it Windows RT yet, but Windows on ARM, as they called it in February 2012, I think, like shortly before you know the year that Windows 8 and RT shipped. It was not that long before, but the summer before there were actually like announcements that didn't make any sense.

19:16
Qualcomm and Microsoft announced an expanded partnership in the middle of the summer of 2011. That was about PCs and I think think you know at the time they were partnering with qualcomm on windows mobile devices. So I think a lot of people sort of said, well, this must be something related to that, whatever. But the initial plan was to go to market with um pcs based on nvidia texas, if you can believe that and Qualcomm-based chips and in the end not that Microsoft says it this way officially, but there was so little support for this they just had to go with the one, and they picked NVIDIA because they were the most willing to work with small numbers. I think that's the only way to say it. I mean, it's just, you know Qualcomm wants, you know you know 20 partners and everyone's involved and they want the whole shebang. You know so, anyhow, um, yeah, so that's a fun thing and and, by the way, this isn't in the notes other, but in the notes either, but you've reminded me of this.

20:15
Um, this came up somewhere, I don't even remember where, but uh, everybody seems to know that windows 11 on arm 24 h2 has this Prism emulator, which is the new version of the X64 slash X86 emulator for ARM. This is a Microsoft design product. It's not actually from Qualcomm, although sometimes it looks like it is. It's not, it's from Microsoft. It is part of Windows 11 24 H2. Right, it is part of Windows 11 24H2.

20:46
And that means that if you have an older ARM device one of you 17 people out there who have, like a Snapdragon 8CX Gen, whatever, or a Microsoft Surface Pro X, sq2 or 3 or whatever those chips were called Whenever you do get 24H2, you will in fact get the prism emulator, so you will see an improvement. It will not be like it is for snapdragon x and in fact there are certain features of that emulator that require snapdragon x, but it actually is going to be available to everyone. So I did do that upgrade on a I think it's a snapdragon 8cx gen 2 based laptop over the weekend, because you know that's how I spend my free time.

21:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Although in general it seems like the ARM stuff pipeline, for both Windows and apps, is not integrated with the rest of the Windows pipelines these separate ISOs, separate web pages, like separate entries in the store, like in general, it seems like they've kind of left arm isolated rather than just saying oh it's the same link, but I could see you're using arm, I'll send you there I feel like that is a bit of a mess and I wish that was clearer.

21:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I I can't say 100, but I feel like most of the time if, if it, if it is in the store, if the, if the arm version, you do get it. But I have run across examples where it just says X 64. I have downloaded it, I got X 64 and I know there is an arm version. Um, I wish there was a and I. I guess the point is it shouldn't matter because to most normal people you don't think about this stuff and you just get something and it works and you don't care. And, honestly, the emulator is good. We all have this vague idea that running apps and emulation will hurt battery life. I've never seen anyone come up with any data to support that. I'm sure it's true, but it's hard to measure because you know we all have different workloads. We all run some different combination of apps and it's you have to. You can't do exactly the same thing. So over some period of weeks you'd have to test different uh combinations of.

22:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know how you would do it. I think it's a rationalization, right, like I have seen numbers where it's like here's two apps running on the elite x. One of them is the emulated one, one of them is the native arm one and the arm the arm one is twice as fast, uh, twice, probably consuming the same amount of power to do that, because it's just you fewer compute cycles, right, you don't have additional that I, so I mentioned this and no one would remember this because it was such a throwaway.

23:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but back around the time of build probably had built, there was one microsoft blog post that mentioned that some ai feature in, I think, windows 11 or maybe copilot, whatever it was consumed some amount of watts of energy when it was run right, and it was a really small number, and that was the point, and I was like we need this measurement for everything now and that to me, that should be in a task manager right, you should be able to monitor that and then get it run a report and get an idea of how efficient this thing is going, because this is the soft underbelly of Snapdragon X that doesn't get talked about enough because no one understands. It is the efficiency bit and from an efficiency standpoint, efficiency is a hard thing to define.

24:07
You know, we talk about you saying when you say efficiency, right, yeah, like, what do you mean by efficiency, right? So performance per watt is one kind of a way to measure some form of efficiency.

24:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But and that's challenging too, because what do you mean by performance Like, is this a clock cycle? With the performance. How do you not? Know that.

24:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's crazy, right, there's no way to define it so well, there is a way you can, but you can't.

24:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's very hard to define at the processor level. You need to really define it at a workload level. It's like I am doing this task.

24:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm running this benchmark, we have Windows PCscs right. So there's a million points of failure and there's a million point, not a million, but there are many points where a slightly slower type of ram could bog things down and make things less efficient or whatever. There's a lot that goes into it, which is bad drivers. Yep, there's all kinds of things that could play into like oh, for some reason on this one computer, even though it looks like most of this stuff is identical to this other computer, it's the battery runs out two hours earlier, or whatever. It is Right.

25:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I was on a team's call with a person who remained nameless, who was doing it from a Snapdragon device, and halfway through the call the video shifted to the left and turned pink. Yikes.

25:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For about 10 minutes. I've done that after a long night out. But yeah, you don't expect that from a Saturday night.

25:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But then it recovered on its own right.

25:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, very nice.

25:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I'm like dude, that was a driver reset after a memory leak 100%.

25:41 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Oh, there you go, nice, I've written that software. Good diagnostic.

25:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I, I can't fix the pro, the actual problem, for whatever reason. So I put a watcher in and as soon as certain things happen, you just restart it. Yeah.

25:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am. I I've been working on uh modernizing this. You know dot net pad app that I have. Net Pad is not an efficient app. If you're looking for something that can display a text document and kill your battery, I have an app for you. It's great. The thing that's interesting about it is You've written a flash of text viewers.

26:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love it.

26:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's WPF, but I've output x86, x, x64 and arm 64 versions of it and they're all just as terrible as each other.

26:32
Honestly, from a footprint uh perspective, so mediocrity, that's very nice yeah, well, that's, you know, I'm looking for consistency, so that's working out good, um, but yeah, as far as like. So, if most. Well, many people will know that, uh, historically this is changing a little bit these days, but intel has long had this u-series processor. This is what came out of the ultrabook stuff evo leo mentioned earlier. Um, these are typically, but not always, uh, 15 watt parts, right, um, but they, but they run in a range of heat dissipation. You know of wattage, right, so, right, uh, under load, that thing, uh, depending on the chip, depending on the generation, could, you know, consume 28 watts or 30 watts or 35 watts or whatever it might be. Um, there are versions that run on it. I want to say seven or nine watts. You know really low end, you know passively cool devices this is again has changed over the years Like an H series chip typically would be these days 56 watts, but those things 100 watts, 108 watts, you know, depending on you, running a game is probably even more, especially the GPU, right, for a little while we had P series because, as they changed architecture, things got a lot less efficient. They had to slot something in in the middle and most mainstream computers went from U to P series for a couple of years. There, I think 11, 12, maybe 13, 12, 13, whatever it was, you know see whatever. So things are changing.

27:58
It's hard to measure these things, but people are. Finally, you know Ryan Trout was talking about this and now we're starting to see labs finally measuring this stuff. So I'm not going to remember the numbers off the top of my head, but, like a macbook air, very consistent, low wattage, uh, under whatever load, it doesn't matter, it's just very efficient. Um, intel chips are all over the map. I mean, they're literally they, they. It's like a splatter pattern of machine gunfire, they're're everywhere. And then Snapdragon X is better than Intel and AMD overall, right, not always, I mean, but it also. You know, these are, I want to say I think they're 28, 20, 30, somewhere in there. They're not super, they're not, they're not very low wattage parts, like you might assume. Like, actually, the M3 is right and they can get up to, depending on the model of the chip, like 80 watts or more under load, because that's, you know, they're emulating X86. It's a big deal.

28:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has to do this, right, they want to emulate it like the power hog that it is, but they want the software.

29:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm doing my best. P4 impression here. It's an accurate animation.

29:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, you want it to just work, and just work means a lot of things, but it means you don't wait 10 seconds for the app to load, right, so we're going to fire up the engines, you know. So this is a major step forward. It's not really the equivalent of the M three on on, depending on how you look at it, but it's. Nobody cares about this stuff, right? I mean, the truth is, what we care about is battery life and literal real-world performance. It'd be nice if the fan didn't sound like a jet engine, and it doesn't on none of these computers it does. That's been great. So you know, yeah, it's definitely a step forward. It's not we're not done, we didn't win. It's not over, and Richard said this early. But Luna Lake is coming and yeah, who knows, it's Intel. They could. They could totally face break, but they're going to get it right Eventually.

30:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Also, we'll try again. Right, Like that's right.

30:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The whole thing is like the good thing about this competition is and there is this thing in the PC world, where there are different kinds of PCs for different kinds of needs and for gamers, workstations, creators, people, whoever needs a dedicated GPU. There are options, lots and lots of options, and those don't exist on Snapdragon X. I mean, maybe they will someday, but they do not now. They don't on Apple either.

30:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Certainly as soon as you get into that exotic like being a streamer, you need a lot of external hardware and that stuff. Yeah, right now, yep, yep.

30:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so look, this is, this is so much better than it ever was, and for me personally and, I think, for a lot of people from the perspective, of other arm devices.

30:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not so much from.

30:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not the best pc you've ever owned, yet well, I I gotta tell you I they're like you know there are different ways to measure that, right? Um, I did this demonstration live for mary jo. I opened the computer and I said did you notice anything? She goes yeah, it came right on. I said, yeah, yeah, it did it, does that every day I. I didn't open it yet today. I stuffed it in a bag. I drove two hours. I came to your place and I opened it and it came on.

31:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it wasn't screaming hot when you took it back out of the bag. Nope, it was absolutely fine. And the battery wasn't near death so cute.

31:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just no, but that is, that is a Windows I don't. I mean, one doesn't realize, like what you put up with every day. You know this miracle that windows does anything. And then you see something that actually works and you're like, wait a minute, it could be like this, that's. It's special, like I that that really means a lot to me. I review a lot of laptops. I gotta tell you some of them are not great. You know, um, the really bad ones you don't really hear about because I'm like, yeah, I'm not even writing about this.

31:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't want me to write about this. It's not good.

32:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So these laptops.

32:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I ever saw with laptops just before the iPad, like early 2010,. Those big plastic jobbies like they're trying to make the $500 laptop and by golly they were they were horrible.

32:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the little Toshiba things with like an 8-inch screen, yeah, yeah.

32:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a great computer to buy if you hate yourself.

32:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it would run like Windows XP Starter Edition, even though it was like 15 years later. Yeah, yeah, well, we've come a long way. But look, amd, intel, they are getting their act together. And this is the thing I think that people don't quite understand is, you know, snapdragon X is not a wake-up call to Intel. They got that wake-up call about two years ago, right, granted, they should have gotten it 15 years earlier. I'm not going to dispute that. Microsoft begged these people to get their act together, but with regards to mobility and efficiency, and they were just like chorus, more chorus. Um, you know it's an addictive drug, but, uh, there's been some stumbles.

33:04
I think we're going to look back at meteor, like as a kind of a nadir of sorts, but it doesn't matter whatever. It doesn't matter what your opinion is of that. It's just that you know they have moved to a hybrid architecture. They went to another one and now they're going on a third one, so they're trying, actually technically fourth, if it doesn't matter, but they're switching things up and, uh, the chances of intel landing in a good place are actually pretty damn good, you know, I'm just saying so. Um, again, if they don't ever have to be as efficient as an m3 or m4 or whatever. They don't ever have to be as efficient as an M3 or M4 or whatever. They don't ever have to be able to provide the 15 or whatever hours of battery life as long as they can be in the ballgame and come on. We would be silly to think they're not going to anything as long as a workday, you're probably good.

33:49
Yep, yeah right, but what's the definition of all day battery? It's not 24 hours. No, you know, sorry, it just isn. What's the definition of all-day battery? It's not 24 hours? No, sorry, it just isn't. And, by the way, and this is very lucky on Intel's part, but, thanks to the pandemic and all of the changes that have occurred since, a lot of us are not far from power a lot of the time now, and that busy business guy traveling on planes, and they still exist, but it's not like it was before. No, I mean.

34:18
Richard is a dramatic exception to that rule, but I am not the guy who cracks his laptop on the.

34:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, there you go.

34:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I use laptop all the time on planes, but I don't travel as much as I used to, you know, for work I just don't, and I think that's more common these days.

34:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So anyway, I do think it's just one.

34:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
one final thing Well, not one, actually, there's a few more things, I guess. Just real quick it is. One of my takeaways from this stuff is that it is astonishing to me how similar these computers are. This was something that, yeah, this was something Microsoft tried to do with Windows RT, which is the reason there were only two devices at launch that weren't called Surface, and then maybe one more in December that year, and then it kind of just tapered off because nobody wanted to do it.

35:08
Because, you know, microsoft went to these PC makers and said look, we know you like to differentiate, but what we really need in this industry is what we have on phones, which is reliability, consistency, instant on, always on connectivity, et cetera, et cetera. We can't do that if you guys are screwing around with these stupid drivers and putting other weird, you know shopping for the cheapest components, like we. We actually have to have a kind of a high quality, consistent board here and we want you all to, you know, use the same one, basically. And then they laughed and laughed and you know Microsoft said no, we're not joking, you know. So nobody wanted to do it, but I think the the conditions of the past 12 years and I think some of the reliability stuff on the Intel side especially has maybe convinced them otherwise. So there's actually a lot more support for these, or for this platform right, than there ever was before.

36:03
And, yes, part of it is Qualcomm waking up to what Intel has always done, which is to pay people to use their platform. But you know, you got to get this thing out in the world and it it has to be a thing. It can't be 12 different things, you know. So it's weird to me. I mean, I you know again, reviewing as many laptops as I do, there's not a lot of inconsistencies between the computers, like I mean, they look a little different, right, because everyone has their own style but they all got their styling.

36:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I was surprised to see that, uh, that lenovo made both a think book and a yoga, and then hp's also made an elite book as well as an omni. That's right, yeah, so they're hitting both sides of the. Yeah, I almost wonder if it was a requirement. Right, because it's clearly a case for co-pilot in the business setting as well as co-pilot in the personal setting.

36:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, and I, yeah, you know the the ai stuff. This is, you know I this is the joke of this in that personal setting. Yep, yeah, and I, yeah, you know the the AI stuff.

36:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this is, you know this is the joke of this entire thing. Right, Is what AI stuff?

37:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, when you look at the each of the three major generations of windows and arm, there's always been a like a marketing point of it, right and the beginning. Like a marketing point of it, right, right and the beginning it was pretty pure in the sense. That was like look, this is stuff happening on mobile that is super desirable. We want to have part of that and it was all good, like I, they may they did it wrong and we can talk about that, but you know we're going to have apps that go to sleep and instant on really good power management, great battery life, etc. Like these are all everyone wants this right, consistent, reliable right.

37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it failed, um, because of apps, right apps didn't work.

37:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know, windows 10 and arm was like no compromises, except for its performance, unless uh, you know, yeah, but other than that, unless you include compatibility and performance, other than that it's great, you know, like it's actually remarkably so. Yeah, given what? How different. Yeah, though, the way it works now is astonishing, and it's, um, you know, again, not perfect, but my god who is much better, who among us is?

38:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I ask you right.

38:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, yeah, right, made by humans, it's going to be flawed. What are you going to be going to be? Except for apple stuff? That stuff's perfect. But anyway, you know IDC, bloomberg, you know they're all saying what everyone who's used one of these things is saying, which is that, look, we can talk about AI, all you want. The truth is this is an interesting point. I'm surprised this didn't occur to me but all the big companies, software companies like Adobe that are doing AI and Adobe's doing a ton of AI are doing a lot of NPU-based AI, right, yes, even though you can make the argument that there's a good case for that in some cases, like for things like video rendering et cetera and they'll get there. But right now, adobe's thing is like yeah, we get people with actual computers and we want to help them wherever they are, they're running it on against cuda, and cuda runs on a lot of machines yep and we yep.

39:01
We're just that's how we're doing it. And, um, it is an interesting fact that if you look at the not 100 but if you look at a lot of the companies that are supporting mpu, whatever it is, you know, it's like these smaller companies that most people have never heard of. You know, right, I remember the day of that co-pilot launch, uh, co-pilot plus pc launch, microsoft I've already forgotten the name of it. Um, microsoft, which has an ai video editor of its own called clipchamp, promoted another one, which, with an equally stupid name and it was because this small company that no one's ever heard of that does AI-based video editing put a couple of their operations against the MPU. Right, it's killing me. I can't think of the name of this app. It's actually pretty good, by the way. Oh, it's called CapCut, yeah, so if you thought ClipChamp was a beautiful name, you'll love CapCut.

39:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually started using CapCut because I couldn't. I couldn't remember clip champ and I thought it was cap cut.

39:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and you ran into it, yeah that was my first old guy moment in the 1990s. I went into a best buy and I was. I couldn't find a cd. I knew it started with c and the guy said, can I help you? And I said I'm looking for a cd. I forget what I said. I said something I think the band's called collective. I said something collective tour, collective, something goes to me and collective soul. I'm like, yeah, maybe you know and you know so cap, cut, clip, champ, whatever like it's. Whatever you know, the kids are using it, whatever. Um. So there is um. There are some apps that take advantage of this stuff. They tend to be from smaller companies. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, but it is perhaps notable that the bigger software companies are not really doing too much with NPU.

40:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Many of Adobe's tools are, as they say, in your web page because it's cloud only. All of their podcast, ai stuff, cloud only.

40:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like, for this stuff to be mature, it should use what you have and that goes to your point earlier about the GPU too, by the way, right? So if you're using Adobe Premiere and you're rendering video, actually it does use a GPU today, right? It actually already does.

41:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yeah, Again, that's, that's, that's not, that's that's pragmatic. Yeah, that's not machine learning models either. Right, you're talking about Photoshop Premiere. They've been doing those renders for a long time. That's all ray-traced work. But their new machine learning models, like the podcast AI stuff is all web only.

41:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, we'll see what it's like in real life. The message that Apple gave at WWDC I thought was a good one, which was look, for privacy reasons, we're going to do as much as we can on the device and when we can't, we're going to have to hand it off to the cloud, and when we do, you're going to have. That's going to be your choice, right? And so when I'm using like Adobe Photoshop, let's say, to do some kind of a AI video or photo edit thing, you know, if I have the MPU, it'd be nice if that thing was a little faster because I had an MPU, right.

41:58
The reality is, with these first-gen Snapdragon X-based PCs, you can actually see what it's like to do stuff off an MPU and, depending on what it is, it can be really good or really terrible, right? So, for example, I can go to Copilot in the cloud. I don't have any AI anything on my device. I can do it from my phone and I can say make me a photo and I do my little prompt and it makes me this gorgeous renaissance art thing. That's unbelievable, and then I can change the style. But I can also go into paint on a Snapdragon X-based PC and I have a co-creator feature and I can do the same thing. I'm sorry, I'm describing a paint, I'm sorry a photos feature.

42:36
There's an image creation feature in Photos which works off the MPU, so it uses SLMs on your device instead of LLMs in the cloud. And when I give it that nice gigantic prompt that's really detailed, I get a piece of garbage in return because it's working off an SLM. It's not as good. And the example the one I remember because I used it for an article is I had a detailed prompt about a market full of baskets of apples with light shining in from the top, and it was one apple with a bite out of it in the middle. And I got these gorgeous pictures of markets with the apple, like I asked for from Copilot. But when I did it on the PC locally, I got one apple in the middle of a blank space, sometimes not with a bite taken out of it, not what I asked for.

43:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know. So this is how we're going to know if it's running local or not. Did it suck? Then it's local.

43:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so look, it's not 100%. I don't mean to disparage local AI. Honestly, the Windows Studio Effects, things are pretty good.

43:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The customer's not going to care. This was the whole point with the cloud Just do the thing. Why not going to care? This was the whole point with the cloud just do the thing. Why do I think about where?

43:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's running like I don't care. I know, yeah, yeah, I would like to know that I bought, I spent some money on a new computer, so everything I do is going to be better, whatever that means faster, whatever right there should always be better evidence of this that copilot plus ai gave.

43:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The copilot plus pc gave me anything, just anything, other than it's an arm machine.

43:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then mostly we get the driver compatibility efficiency. Better life consists so far. Look I, I is three weeks. Enough data to be like oh my god, these things are so reliable. No, I mean they are right now. I mean we'll see right, so yeah no, they were great.

44:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
As long as you don't do much with them, they're awesome.

44:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, I do my normal stuff. It honestly, it works good as long as you don't do much with them. They're awesome. Well, I mean, I do my normal stuff.

44:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Honestly, it works good as long as you're just writing, okay.

44:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've been doing my Visual Studio app modernization stuff. That's working great. I've been. I do well, clipchamp is just in the cloud, but I do. You know, I do stuff.

44:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not like just finger painting, you know. I really want to put some instrumentation on the MPU and say how often is this thing used, how much, how long? You know, in a given day of work you use this machine for 10 hours. How many minutes of it had?

44:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
MPU. So I guess the only the number is going to be low now because there just aren't enough of them and there isn't enough software. It's a chicken egg thing, right? This is, you know, whenever, multimedia extensions for Intel chips or, you know, math, coprocessors for SX chips, or trying to think what else, you know, like, whatever, like in the beginning, I mean, usage is going to be low, but hopefully over time this thing has the impact and we'll have these sophisticated computers, whatever they are, yeah, whatever types, and like. This is the thing I talked about, this is the orchestration thing. I want the system to be smart enough to say, okay, look, you have this hardware, so we can. You know, we're going to route things accordingly, you're always going to have the best possible experience.

45:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, this is the way, the way, the various, the direct X behavior, where if I have that, I do this, if I have that to do that. The difference here when you think about the mpu model abstract exactly yeah, the nice thing with the mpus model is you can easily cast that to the cloud as well. It's like I will.

45:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If I have a connection and that's the fastest way to do it, I'll do it that way, I think that might be the secret sauce of ai in a way that it will take time. But, yes, that you it. If your computer peters out, it's not over. Yeah, you can push it up to the cloud and get it done.

45:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let me reach out to that big NPU in the sky and take care of you.

46:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. Right.

46:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think that's okay.

46:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, it's not there.

46:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yet Can we talk about the IDC thing, Because I did read the piece but I was wondering how they came to the conclusions they came to.

46:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So IDC said what is it? Uh, two percent, six percent, I think they said growth I just want to remind people.

46:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Idc is the company that said that windows phone was going to overtake iphone by 2015 or whatever year so you know just, it's not an exact science.

46:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what you're saying?

46:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
grain of salted or whatever. Um, Look, they're predictions, but they talk to PC makers, they talk to people in the channel, whatever they have sources.

46:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My question would have been to all those folks how many of these are you making? Because let's presume you sell them all. I suspect the pipeline's not big enough to actually make a meaningful number of them.

46:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the conversation we had around recall, where I said you know, I mean, how many of these things do you think they're going to be? I mean, if we sell 250 million computers in a year, they start selling these in June. Do you think it's going to be more than one or two percent? I mean really, and if so, what's that number look like? It's not a big number, right? No, I mean really, and if so, what's that number look like? It's not a big number, right?

47:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, even the most generous prediction for these things. I mean it'd be crazy to make more than 10 million of these machines in the first iteration.

47:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Right, especially Gen 1.

47:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, what are you talking about? You're just going to get stuck with a bunch of bad hardware.

47:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, intel and AMD are breathing down your necks, etc. So I the other issue, unfortunately and this is just more of the industry than anything else is that, um, we have I don't know, for in the second or third year in a row now we're like oh, this is the year we're coming back, baby, and it's like idc is like actually, uh, it looks like it's going to be pretty flat this year overall, you know, and they're starting also to exclude China from predictions because China's dragging the entire industry even worse.

48:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and also not reporting actual figures like yeah, not only, not only are the numbers bad, they're also lies.

48:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, right, yeah, right, right. So IDC, twice in the past 30 days, has come out with some I'm going to call it data, for lack of a better term but reports where they, about you know, six months or eight months ago, consumer PC sales, they say, are going to fall 1.1%. Business, yeah, yeah. So some of the things that are happening this year, just to remind people, not this year but next year, rather, windows 7 going out of support Jesus, paul, windows 10. I'll get, I'll hit on the right version. Eventually number, yeah, I don't ever xp 7.

49:00
No, wait, nt, what am I talking about?

49:02
one of the 10 the one that's used by almost a billion people still, oh, yeah, uh is going to exit support. You know, asterix, right, you can still pay for it, but it gets super expensive. So, um, I, it's pot. I mean, look we're. We're always trying to rationalize, like when we change things. You know, um, is the great uh turnaround in business going to be delayed because businesses now can pay for support for a couple of years? I don't know. Maybe you know, I, I, I always think of the PC, the business part of the PC market as being the most reluctant upgrade cycle ever of all time, always, right, I mean, I can make any excuse you want. They don't want to, right. And then, when they do it, they're going to sit on that hardware for eight years. So, you know, are you going to buy a first gen Snapdragon X and sit on that for eight years?

49:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Probably, not, probably not, probably not, not the culture of the people that are buying those machines and not those machines, yep, yep and this. So all of these specifications that make a copilot plus PC are, you know, suspect they are. They are a marketing term that they're hopefully fitting a product into, and that product is changing product into and that product is changing.

50:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I, it's, it's. It's unfortunate, in a way, that these computers got caught up in the microsoft's ai thing, yeah, but then again, there's so much. It's understandable, right, because there's so much attention on this.

50:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and they're so gun shy to failed arm attempts. Now, like you, can't blame them for being squeamish. Yeah, you know they've had it there. They've had their butts handed to them a few times, like they you know. Yeah, this is not how you sell a machine, and you don't sell a machine off of this processor. You sell the machine off of the thing it can do that you want yeah, I mean, I look like I I've said this a million times.

50:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, if this thing works, you'll never even know what you're doing. And maybe after the fact, someone like hey, did you know? Uh, let me, let me lift the. You've been drinking pepsi the whole time. You know whatever. Like you might be surprised, like actually it's been working fine at home yeah exactly yeah, my coffee, um yeah, so maybe it's like that. I don't know, but I think they're're you know. Obviously they've chosen to market it on AI. I think most people agree it was kind of a mistake, but I get it.

51:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't even know that it was a mistake, but know what it is. Yeah, it stinks. Yeah.

51:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it'll stink less if it covers more machines and if it's only new machines it's always going to stink, like the fact that you can now say hey, you qualify as a copilot plus PC if you meet these specs that you could build a machine for.

51:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The thing is nobody remembers this stuff. You know, originally these were always connected PCs. Remember the first gen Windows 10 on ARM. Leo mentioned Evo. Evo is what came out of the Ultrabook non-spec, but Evo is still a thing. By the way, they still have Evo. It keeps getting updated. For some reason it's a sticker on your laptop. Nobody cares. I think Copilot Plus is going to fall into this category, where it's like They'll just sweep it away.

52:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that'll be Cop-pilot ready machines, like they'll just be another one. Yep, I gotta stick with this for as long as the agreement exists for that special with that brought us here.

52:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm curious, right, yeah, so eventually, like I said, uh, we've been talking about intel amd, they're gonna hit thisPS number, exceed it. Are those going to be co-pilot plus PCs? I thought AI PC was okay as a name. I don't know. I guess there are gaming PCs and then there are gaming PCs, there are AI PCs. So I don't know. And yeah, so I don't know. Yeah, anyway, I, I don't know that anyone thought that ai pcs or co-pilot plus pcs were going to rejuvenate the market. But we're always looking for that excuse, you know. So maybe I mean apple. Uh, they don't say these things publicly but, according to you know, the people usually pretty right about this stuff. Apple expects to sell 10 or 12 percent more iPhones this year because of AI. Right, we'll see.

53:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see. You know, they certainly marketed it the best. They don't say Yep and they say I mean Apple, yeah, that might be a best, that might be a best case. Talk about hijacking an entire term early, yep, I.

53:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I entire term early in. Yep, I, I, I love and hate them so much. Yeah, no, they make these apologies so good. If you ever want to feel bad about apple, if you need that nudge, uh, try to set up a home pod. You'll, you'll hate yourself. It's beautiful, um it's still out there.

53:53
Yeah, I just there. Yeah, it does just work, but it takes 24 hours. And then the final issue, which has always been an issue with Windows 11 on ARM, is that Microsoft doesn't make ISOs available. We've been talking about this a little bit. They do make them available in certain channels, which is kind of interesting, but you as a consumer could just Google, download Windows 10 or download Windows 11, and you'll get a link to a Microsoft page where you can download that ISO. It's very simple. You can't do that for ARM. They have ISOs for the Insider Program for ARM, but those always kind of change.

54:31
And you know, I don't know when it was back in May, I think I had that tip about upgrading to 24H2 using an ISO from the Insider program but staying in stable. That was never made available to ARM, right? So if you somehow, if you're one of those lucky I almost said idiots that's not fair but those few people who own a previous gen Windows at Arm device you don't have a path to go to 24H2 through Microsoft, like we did do on X64. So a lot of you have probably heard of a site called UUP Dump, and if you haven't, now you have, and they let you search for ISOs of various Windows versions stable inside a preview whatever and right now it's odd they do not have stable ISOs for 24-H2 for some reason, even though that is a thing for ARM. But you can get the latest release preview build on ARM, which is the stable version, and you'll be right up to date.

55:38
I wrote this on the day before Patch Tuesday like an idiot, so the build number at the time was 26,100.1000. Now it's 1,150, but whatever, it doesn't matter because Patch Tuesday happened, we'll talk about it. It seems to be the most current one at the moment. Yep, yeah, so you can get it. I mean, like I said, I did do this with a previous gen windows 11 on arm pc and it works fine, like it's absolutely fine, and you're unstable. You don't not in the insider program, you, you don't get the patch. Tuesday updates. You can optionally get the preview updates on week it's not a.

56:07
It's not a wonky version um, I will tell you, if you're not a technical person, uh, a, I don't know what you're doing listening to this podcast but B, it's a little bit of a process to use the tiny UUP dump download to create the ISO, which is what you have to do. It's a script you have to run. You can only do it completely in Windows. They actually have scripts for Linux and macOS for some reason, but if you actually want to create that ISO, at the end you have to be in windows to do it in one whack it takes about 30 minutes. Um, if you're the type of person that likes to read like a linux text screen when it boots up, you'll love it. It's just like that.

56:45
Um, lots of good stuff, so, and it it is a script, so you get to see what it's doing. It's not installing malware in your computer and all that kind of stuff, but it is a third-party site. So, yeah, your mileage will vary, etc. Um, I've always had pretty good luck with it, right, but it's not for the faint of heart and it's not a um. You know, it's not something I would point my wife at. You know, it's like I can't run windows. Go to the uep dump, honey, you'll be fine. You know, it's not a conversation, we're gonna don't do that no she's slapping, she's gonna slap you yeah, oh, she's slapping with a.

57:17
It would be a lawsuit. Is what she's slapping, yeah?

57:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
all right, let's take a break because, uh, we have lots more to talk about and I really want to get to everything. But I also want to say hello to our new sponsor. Talked about him last week. Big id, you know if you've got a lot of data and every business these days has a lot of data, probably in a lot of different places. I don't think anybody has more data in more places than the United States Army. They use Big ID to make sure they know where their data is, classify it accurately at scale, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud, or both for structured, unstructured, semi-structured data, hundreds of data sources now. The army, of course, needs this for a variety of reasons, but one of the things your company might be worried about Not only is where that data is, but is AI exfiltrating it accidentally.

58:21
Data security is very important, right, but now you got to fortify against something a little bigger. All custodians of data, especially modern CISOs, need proactive solutions. With big ID, with BigID B-I-G-I-D, you can trust that your most valuable asset is secured your data. As CISOs, your job, for instance, is to ensure that the promise of AI doesn't become a security pitfall. You know your company wants to use it, but BigID's GenAI solutions help you navigate the labyrinthine world of AI. From the CISO perspective, you can leverage solutions with BigID that take a defense in depth approach to automating manual processes, improving accuracy and actionability, and applying AI and ML to cut through the noise. Use it, use it, improve risk management, enable a robust data security strategy and train AI only on data that's safe to use. So many companies in the early days of open AI said, oh, we're not going to use that, but you can't say no. Right, in the long run You've got to let it in. But you want to minimize your attack surface through policy-driven retention management by removing redundant and outdated data. You can audit and inspect what data is being shared with AI, be alerted when usage policies are breached.

59:45
Who uses BigID? Well, besides the United States Army, telenor a pretty big company they use BigID to show their customers they're handling data in a secure way. Here's the quote from Telenor we want to solve customer problems and regulatory demands. We want to focus on the business and have a partner like BigID to focus on the tech. We wanted a partner that understood what we're doing and a partner that can help us. Companies who use BigID are showing they're taking data seriously. It's important for you. It's important for your customers.

01:00:19
Bigid has won so many awards Market leader in data security posture management. That's from the Global InfoSec Awards by Cyber Defense Magazine In the Cyber Security Excellence Awards best data security company In a coveted spot in the Citizens Jump Cyber 66 report, the JMP Cyber 66 report, which recognizes BigID for elevating data management and security with first of its kind AI technology. Now that's a lot of testimonials I just gave you, but I think this should probably get you thinking. Maybe you should find out more and start protecting your sensitive data wherever your data lives.

01:01:00
At BigIDcom slash Windows, get a free demo. See how BigID can help your organization reduce data risk, accelerate the adoption of generative AI. You can do both BigIDcom slash Windows. Also, there's a free report. They have a lot of really interesting white papers. One of them I'll highlight, a new report that provides valuable insights and key trends on AI adoption, on the challenges those pose and the overall impact of generative AI across organizations. That's one of a bunch of very interesting information. It's available to you free. When you go to bigidcom slash windows. You ought to yourself to at least read up, and I think there's a solution here that you're going to want bigidcom slash windows. We welcome them to windows weekly. Thank you, big id. All right, should we talk about windows 11? Have we talked about Windows 11? Have we talked about Windows 11? Let's talk about. Windows 11. We have not talked about Windows 11.

01:01:59
Oh, my God, it's Mary Jo Foley, holy camoly. Hello, mary Jo, this is so great to see you. I almost immediately knew that Paul was in your apartment. Oh, and there's the gong. There's the gong. I recognize the bookshelf. It's proof that he's here. Oh, it's so nice to see you. How is life? Everything's good, yeah, except for the heat. Oh the heat, I hear it's a little humid in Manhattan right now A little warm. Yeah, it's not great. Not great, we I?

01:02:31
agree, we miss you terribly on the show. Aw, thanks, it's really nice to see you, you guys sucks.

01:02:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got to come back. Get rid of that guy.

01:02:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We want beer, not whiskey Beer. Beer Exactly. What would you?

01:02:46 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
drink today, on a hot day in New York City. Oh man, I would drink a sour beer, a sour Not an IPA.

01:02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I agree with you, mary. I agree with you, mary Jo. We're going to be in New York City, lisa and I, for a little getaway in September, first week of September, and I want to do a meetup and I hope that we can get you to come to the meetup. I'll give you more information as it comes in. We're going to be out there, I think maybe September 6th or 7th or maybe the 8th, so one of those things right after Labor Day day week yeah, paul's like go to rattle and hum.

01:03:18 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
No, they're closed. Well, that's what I was going to ask you, what's the new rattling?

01:03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, now there's one, an uptown one right, but what's the new rattle and hum? No, everything, they all closed they all closed yeah, no, yeah well, um, where's, where's the new we'll have to talk about new spots, new hotspots. Okay, I'm up for it. It's great to see you, Mary Jo.

01:03:39 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Thank you for stopping by yeah, yeah. And Mary Jo, where can we read all of?

01:03:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
your great insights. Now let's give you a plug.

01:03:46 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
First, oh, oh nice. Thanks, Okay, directionsonmicrosoftcom. If you care about anything in the enterprise, we're your people. If you want to know about Microsoft licensing, we are also your people.

01:03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, awesome Mary Jo, so great to see you. I know Sirachi will make an appearance a little later on a cameo. He will. He will for sure. Thank you, mary Jo. All right, guys, stay cool. See you later. She's always cool. Wow, so nice to see Mary Jo Foley. That was a shock Woo Popping up there like that. I was not prepared for that, let's get Paul back in position.

01:04:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Something IPA, something, something I don't know, Something something sour, go have something sour.

01:04:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is the HP event over? Are you there for? Is it tomorrow? Sour, I can handle, it's actually tomorrow, it's tomorrow. So Samsung had its event today, but that was in Paris, I think, and HP tomorrow.

01:04:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah, samsung said you're welcome to come to Paris. I'd say you're welcome to pay for the trip. And they said we'll see you in New York yeah.

01:04:56
Yeah, exactly so Windows 11. Oh, yeah, windows 11. All right, so the biggest Windows and Windows this actually, we should have Mary Jo talk about this was that Notepad finally supports spell checking and autocorrect. So 40 years-h into its lifespan, I mean, okay, I will say, you know, microsoft screwed around with the paint and, in particular, in ways that I did not like. Yeah, took a couple of years. It's actually in a really good place right now, although I'd appreciate it if ribbon was actually a real ribbon and could be collapsed. But whatever, it's okay, they got in a good place.

01:05:37
Notepad, for all the stuff they've added to it the modern Win app or WinUI user interface, we'll leave it at that. Really, the session state saving, etc. I mean, it's never really gotten terrible. I use both those apps every single day. Like, notepad's always been pretty great, which, of course, is why I'm actively trying to replace it with my own app. But no, it's always been pretty great.

01:06:05
So this is just a system capability that's available in Windows. I don't know why this wasn't turned on earlier. I mean, if you have a third-party AI, whatever app like Grammarly, does this language tool? Those work with any app where you can enter text, so you could already have been doing this, I guess, but now it's part of the system, so that's good. So that's not really a game changer, it's just kind of fun to talk about, but I have. So among the many things I've been sort of noticing as I use these co-pilot plus pcs, and in the sense that I consider myself to be the canary in this coal mine uh, this coal mine being the insertification of windows, especially with regard to one drive folder, backup being auto-enabled even after I say no, um, something. I looked, looked this up. I believe it was October 5 or 6 last year when I first reported this. This has been going on for a long time. The whole world seems to have woken up to the fact that this is happening. Welcome everybody. I've been talking about that for nine months, but seriously, good for you figuring it out.

01:07:13
There's also been some misreporting on what happens during, uh, initial setup of a new pc, whether or not it offers you the option to back up your files to one drive or not, right? So actually that's never changed. Well, that's not there. That hasn't changed in a long time is the right way to say it. If you have windows 11 home, it doesn't matter if it's on arm and you know intel amd, whatever you don't get the option, it's going to enable that for you. Uh, you can turn it off later if you have windows 11 pro. Again, architecture doesn't matter um, you'll get an option and you can choose to only save files to this pc, which means it will not be enabled, but it's going to keep prompting you because that's part of the terribleness of windows, and you'll say no or you won't, I mean. But if you say no, like I do, it will eventually just turn it on.

01:08:02
This has been going on for like nine, ten months. Here's the thing. I've noticed something very interesting. I've noticed two things, uh, and they're related, both one, onedrive and folder backup. I stopped using OneDrive because of this behavior last November-ish, within 30 days of that. I also stopped using Microsoft Word, because it also throws up these things, because I want to save documents to the desktop by default so I can then put them where I want them, and it keeps warning me. You know that Word has those yellow notification strips right the Office 365 banners.

01:08:42
Yep, yeah, it's not. I should say right, it's not. This isn't all the Office apps, it's not just Word, but I pretty much just use Word. I just used Word, Really annoying, you know. It's like I don't know. It's like 17 steps to go through the word settings to turn yeah.

01:09:00
You know, here's an idea. I must know what I'm doing. You know, let me just do it. But no, you know Microsoft wants to be the nanny state. So you know I've been using different things. But for the file stuff I've been using Google Drive and that stuff's been great. That thing doesn't bug me at all. The problem is Snapdragon X PCs do not support Google Drive, right and so yeah because it's one of those file system things.

01:09:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the one app I've tried to use that I can't use, so it's not like the Google team hasn't paid some attention, because there is a Chrome for ARM by different teams.

01:09:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it. Yes, I think it's going to change, but right now that's the situation. I can live with this, right. So I pay for consumer and business Microsoft 365, so I have terabytes of storage. I can use OneDrive, it's okay. But I'm also looking to run native apps, and we mentioned that battery life issue. How do you test that? It's very hard, right. And so I thought to myself I'm going to suck it up. I'm going to use OneDrive. I can do this. I'm going to use Word like a normal person. I can do that, and I've even been using Microsoft Edge a little bit. That's a bridge too far, but I've been doing it. It's a soul-sucking exercise, but whatever Could have been Chrome and I, I do not enable folder backup, right. But what I've noticed is on 24H2, on Snapdragon XPC starting with I think it was build 26100.863, I think the one that was not quite the final or initial build of 24H2, you know, they had to screw around with it because of recall.

01:10:36
It stopped harassing me to use folder backup, and the harassment takes many forms, right? Um, one of the minor ones is when you go to a file explorer window. There's a little. It actually throbs, but up in the uh address bar area it says start backup. When you go to one of the folders it wants you backing up, right, and I'm know this is one of the things like I mean. You know you don't believe your eyes, right? I'm like, wait a minute. I'm looking at it. It has the normal icon for a folder location. It doesn't say start backup. I check I'm not backing up, it's not harassing me. I, you know there's something going on, you know. So I've been using microsoft word. Now it doesn't do this right away, but usually within a day or two you eventually I'll save a file to the desktop and yellow banner. Come on, idiot. You know you want to save this thing in a safe place, right to back it up. Let's go.

01:11:33
That has not been happening either and at first I thought, wow, like what if this is like unique to snap copilot plus pcs? What if they actually de-insertify this a little bit, just for those that audience? You know. But unlike most people, I have actually upgraded a bunch of my computers to 24h, to a lot of x64 computers, so I started updating those to make sure I'm on the latest build and on all but one of them, which is, you know the lovely inconsistent behavior. We love windows for so much that nagging is gone. It's actually gone. Wow, like this thing I've been complaining about for like nine months is gone, not universally, but but then again you, you think about it like a lot of this stuff rolls out over time, right? So it's possible and I thought, you know, I even had the idea. Maybe I shouldn't promote this, maybe I shouldn't talk about it because I don't want Microsoft to see this and say wait a minute, do we screw something up?

01:12:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like do we need to turn it back on? Where did?

01:12:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you go yeah, so I wrote about this. Yeah, so I wrote about this. When was this? Uh, oh, july 4th. Yeah, so we've only had one patch tuesday since then, yesterday. So we did get an updated build and, I, you know, updated across these computers, I, you know. Is it gonna start again? No, no, it's not harassing. So I'm not saying it's fixed. I can't claim that it's too early, but I have have. No, this is across, probably not 10, about eight computers and all but one. It's over, stopped harassing, or now, though, maybe. Anyway, but listen, when the other sites start reporting at nine months from now, it will be real, but for now, just remember, I am that canary. This is my job.

01:13:18
Okay, there's that, mark. This is my job. Okay, there's that, mark. The date July 10. Well, it was July 4 when I said it, so, anyway, patch Tuesday happened yesterday, like I said, and talk about predictability. By the way, it rolled out exactly the way I predicted, which never happens anymore. So 24-H2, nothing, just security updates Did increment the build a little further, but no new features, and a lot of new features for Windows 11, 22, and 23H2. Like I said, they're adding all those 24H2 features to those systems as of today. Again, not universally. Sometimes things roll out a little more slowly, every sometimes things roll out a little more slowly, but, uh, these three windows versions have aligned like planets, you know, on one of those special astrological days, nice, um, and we're all.

01:14:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they're all, as the prophecy decreed a great conjunction. Yeah, you can understand.

01:14:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean richard. Ever since he started on the show, it has not been been like this. No, no, it's been a running joke the whole time and in the sense that I could be highly critical or negative of things when they're bad, I just want to point out I noticed it when it was good and I appreciate it.

01:14:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, it's still weird that they're all the same, right? I know, yep, these are supposed to be different. That's why they have different numbers. This, to me, is the most low-tech version of.

01:14:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to let people do what they want, but we're also going to do what we want, right? So you've got this audience that's like I don't want to upgrade to the new version. They're going to say you don't have to, you don't have to, but we are going to add all those features and now you're the version you're using if you think about it.

01:14:58
Yeah, that's what they did with co-pilot the original co-pilot before 23h2 ship. Last october that was supposed to be 23h2, and then in late september in a preview, and then october, I think, in final or however that rolled out was a stupid roll, but however it worked. They were like yeah, everyone's getting it. It's like we it. We don't want to make, because we know if we made it optional, a release, an update that people could skip, especially companies they would. So we're just going to give it to you so everyone gets what they want, sort of.

01:15:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sort of yeah, it's all well and fine until something breaks. Yeah.

01:15:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's the everything breaks. That's the point of Windows, isn't it? We did not get any insider preview builds. Last week, microsoft at one point tweeted you know, maybe don't expect anything this week for some reason, we didn't know why, but then we still don't. But whatever, as of today, unless something has changed since the show started, they have only released a new Canary build, nothing important.

01:16:04
I think most people understand that Microsoft is now putting weather, finance, traffic and sports tiles on the lock screen. For some reason, they do not give you the ability to choose which of those appear. You can just turn them all off or all on right. So in the Canary build they've improved that, not to do that thing I just said no, that's ridiculous but rather to configure other options related to whether they're blurred or the size and spacing and fonts and blah, blah, blah. It's stuff nobody cares about.

01:16:34
There's some small energy recommendation changes. I don't know if anyone follows this, but if you go into the settings app and go to system power and battery, you'll see an energy recommendations area. You can click the little, you go through a series of steps, we'll make recommendations and if you turn them all on, your computer will be very efficient and will also be unusable. But you know that's your, your choice. I guess Let me see what mine says on this one. I never like it's pointless to even bother trying this. But let me just see what this one says. I'm sure I get a horrible grade.

01:17:10
Energy recommended yeah, 5 of 10. Yeah, typical for me, batting about 500. So you know, put your device to sleep after three minutes, turn off your screen after three minutes. That's something I always customize to be a longer time frame. In fact, I did it literally on this computer here at Mary Jo's house, because I got up, got a glass of water, came back and the computer was off and I was like, ah, you know, too, too, too aggressive. You know, there's all. If you have presence sensing sensors, which is kind of a neat feature, you can have your PC go to sleep when you walk away from it. You know that kind of stuff. So you can go through a little checklist Um, they're starting to add, um, energy saver recommendations related to HDR in the Canary build and uh, that's it. That's, that's literally the between widgets and HDR energy recommendations. That's literally between widgets and HDR energy recommendations. That's what we're testing these days in Windows, which is why I installed all the Apple betas.

01:18:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so I have something to do? Yeah, nothing going on. I think the energy thing is kind of interesting.

01:18:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's interesting, but it's one of those things like you want to do the right thing, yeah, and then you do the right thing and you hate it, and then you say I'm going to do the wrong thing, which is what we all did when we flew with COVID. So you know, eventually we're all just selfish and you know, yeah, everything goes to hell in a hand.

01:18:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Knowledge is power. It's good to know anyway that you're being a jerk.

01:18:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's important. Yeah, self-awareness is key to this. Yes, uh, um, this, this is not a new story, but I, I, I, but I'm so proud Well, proud and embarrassed, I guess of this. Um, so I have this book, the windows 11 field guide. It's about 1150 pages long. It's humongous, like.

01:18:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The version is like 377 it is the ben hur of windows book yeah, but the other books are pretty big too, I mean relatively speaking.

01:19:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So windows everywhere and even the windows tenfield guy, which is only um about 500 pages long. They're, you know, big for what they are, and the epubs are just about as big. And this is a problem because if you have a kindle like a normal person and you want to read this thing on it, you can't because it's too big for send to Kindle. Send to Kindle, I think, maxes out now at 200 megabytes. It used to be 50 or 60, but now it's 200.

01:19:24
So people will write me and say hey, I bought your book, thanks, it's great, I think, but I can't read it on my Kindle. How do I get it on the Kindle? And my knee jerk reaction to that is well, that's why I pay LeanPub, because they have a customer service department and they have explanations for how this works. Instead of doing that, I said you know what I get, enough questions about this. I'm actually going to look at this and I went through LeanPub's instructions, which are out of date and incorrect. So the perfect combination of things. And what I discovered is that it's next to impossible, depending on how you want to read the book, to get it on a mobile device of any kind.

01:19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really, you can't get an EPUB version or a Mobi version of it?

01:20:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you, let's say you have, I'll just make something up. I can't remember the exact matrix of options I tried. But you have an Android phone and you download the Ether version, doesn't matter, and it's in the files app or whatever on the file system and you long press and say share or open with or open in or whatever the word is, and you choose some app, kindle, anything else. It just says no, it's too big. Oh, wow, I get it. Yeah, the only exception I found to it was on if you have an apple device, you could have opened it in ibooks or the books app, whatever the apple books app is called for some reason. That worked fine. So I said okay, screw, I got to fix this problem.

01:20:40
I spent the better part of February actually making images smaller and doing things to make it whatever, but this time I brought out the big guns and I did like well, first I did it in measured steps that I backed up first, but I tried like how low could I go on image compression, because there are several hundred images, maybe more than a thousand, in the book, whatever it is, and I got it down to 50%, which was meaningful, you know, in my file system. So I thought, maybe, and I was doing like test runs of it and it looked like I was getting good results. But in the end, like you cannot tell the difference looking at the images in the book, epub or PDF, and it went from 377 megabytes down to 107 megabytes. Wow. The EPUB went down even further. That went from 344 down to 86. Oh, wow. So I was like holy, oh God.

01:21:32
So apologies to everyone who bought this book and couldn't get it on their device. It will work now. It will work, no problem. Couldn't get it on the device? It will work now. It will work, no problem. In fact, this is nice in every way, shape and form, because even if you just have to download it and want to open it in a browser, it's so much faster. The performance is just, you know, because it's so small. I've also made the same changes to Windows Everywhere and to the Windows 10 Field Guide and to the Windows 10 Field Guide version. That's part of the Windows 11 field guide. So wherever you got these books or whatever books you might have, re-download them, because they are dramatically smaller today, and I am so sorry I took this long, I don't, I, I, I don't know what to tell you. So now that I know the secret or whatever, um, and I've tried to do this in the past, it always kind of failed. I used a different application to do the compression and uh are they? They're jpegs. They worked, they're just.

01:22:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they're just jpegs I wonder if png screenshots right be smaller, um doesn't matter well yeah, yeah, yeah so that the main result of compression is the reduction in size is because the images got small the images are smaller. Yes, if smaller on disc, uh lower quality allegedly, although, like I said, when you look at the book and you zoom in like you can't tell, I mean maybe.

01:22:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, if you zoom in like 300, you might see a couple of artifacts.

01:22:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go, yeah this turning makes me sad, okay, okay that's not it's not bad at all.

01:22:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pdfs are notoriously huge but uh, I'm glad to see the EPUB got down by so much. Epub shrunk a lot.

01:23:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The EPUB is even better In every case, by the way. Yeah, Really good. So I spent a good chunk of I don't know Friday, Saturday, whatever it was on this and I was so happy to get this done. Great step up, yeah.

01:23:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep Good job.

01:23:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now you can add another thousand pages and people can still read it.

01:23:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, so here's, let me throw a theoretical at you. So obviously the page count doesn't change. I didn't do anything to the presentation of those images, but one of the things I had done in the past, starting with the Windows 10 field guide, was, instead of having like a full screen image, that is, to the full width of the page, they were actually like 70% of the page. Now I could put them out to 100%. This will make the book longer, right, because the images will actually be bigger and the text will stretch out. So it'll probably be by hundreds of pages and the file size will go up, but maybe probably not above 200. So I could still get in under that limit. Should I do that? And right now I'm thinking I'm not going to bother 200. So I could still get in under that limit. Should I do that? Right now I'm thinking I'm not going to bother.

01:24:04
I could do that one in a batch sense. That one I could batch because Visual Studio you can make changes across all the files in a folder. I could do that very quickly. I think I'm going to take this win. I'm thinking we're just going to go forward.

01:24:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've got the big one. You've got more people able to read. Good for it.

01:24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got the big one. You got more people able to read. Good job.

01:24:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Good job, good job, but also two years ago would have been nice. Sorry, I'm sorry. There you go, Done, done and done Beautiful.

01:24:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you want me to? Do you want to go on or do you want to stop?

01:24:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can do it, Leo. Why don't you stop? Just stop In the break In the break.

01:24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, fine, We'll do that. Now would be a good time to take a break and we will come back with more Windows Weekly just around the corner, Surface and AI. But first a word from our sponsor. We've been talking. Oh, by the way, did you notice our new homage? That's really great.

01:25:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You snuck in last night.

01:25:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Show me, see, see, see, oh nice, the Joe B photo. That's a Joe Belfiore photo.

01:25:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Underneath the Mary Jo Foley there's a Joe Belfiore, but they fit nicely the hairdos, are it slides right in there? Slides right in there.

01:25:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, slides right in, I mix them up. Sometimes I actually might be at Joe B's apartment right now. It's hard to say, who knows.

01:25:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's stop it. How are the fonts? The fonts should be excellent.

01:25:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're perfect.

01:25:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, the typefaces are untouchable.

01:25:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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01:27:11
One password, extended access management cares about the user experience and privacy, and that's what's cool about the solution. It protects you, but it still gives the users the experience they want and the privacy they need. It also means 1Password Extended Access Management can go places. Other tools can't, like personal devices, contractor devices. It ensures that every device is known and healthy and every login is protected. So stop trying to ban BYOD or shadow IT. The good news is it isn't hopeless. You can start protecting them with one passwords, extended access management, and users love it. Check it out at onepasswordcom slash windows weekly the number one p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d dot com slash windows weekly. I think you'll be very, very impressed. I know you will all right now, uh, let's get back to the show and uh, what is up? What is, what is next in the agenda?

01:28:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just, I'm just checking here, I'm just looking surface updates surface eye yeah, we need, we need a right, need the good. What's the right word for that? Surfaces. What's the plural, the plural of surface Surface?

01:28:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Surfaces. It's just a lot of sisses. It's a lot of sisses Surfaces.

01:28:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do feel like sisyphus that makes sense, Sisyphus with your surfaces. So I'm trying to find the main site. Where is this thing? So, yeah, we got Surface Laptop. So Microsoft maintains a website with like firmware update. You know history for their Surface devices, as you would expect. Since the Surface Laptop first shipped, there have been two firmware updates now, and this is since June right Like it's yep, three weeks, four weeks yep, so there were two firm roads, exactly.

01:29:05
Uh, yeah, it's a new device. It's a new device, uh, hardware, yeah, I mean the the day, this one, this made the um the day one experience, kind of interesting, because you know you have to reboot to install this massive. It's just a version update, really, it was, even though it was the same basic thing, but the version of windows, without recall, was apparently required eight gigabytes or whatever. Um, and well, while it's offline rebooting, it's like oh, you can, we'll install this firmware update now too, if you didn't want to use your computer this week. Um, so you kind of went through that, and then on july 2nd, they delivered a second one.

01:29:40
Oh, wow, guys, seriously, but um, I don't, I did not experience any of these issues. Um, there was a similar, literally identical, I, I guess, um firmware update same day for surface pro 11. Uh, same issues, you know, fixing the same issues. I've never noticed any of these um, so I'm not sure what to say. Uh, although, by the way, one of them was momentarily, momentary color distortion. Yeah, yeah, um, horizontal white line flicker during initial device set. Did not see that.

01:30:15
Uh, customize accessibility settings for mouse would reset after reboot. Uh, I actually used the accessibility settings on only the surface laptop 7, uh, to adjust the mouse cursor size because for some reason, in word which again had not been using since last november uh was like literally one pixel thin, tiny, and you could like that little eye beam cursor, you know, for the insertion point. I couldn't see it. I'm like wiggling, I'm like where the frick is this? Like what is going on? And, um, so I actually I've used that, but I didn't notice it not retaining that. So that's kind of cool audio playback, audio jittering, yada, yada. So, uh, I've had a pretty error-free experience, I don't know, but anyway, um, you're going to want to keep up with that stuff.

01:31:01
For some reason, microsoft recommends that you run the surface app to get these updates, but then when you click on it, it just loads windows update. So here's a little pro tip just go to windows update. Uh, that's where you're going to get it, you know, um, and is this true? Yeah, so actually, one of the other ways in which, yeah, the other two Snapdragon X computers, the same as the firmware updates, the driver updates, all that stuff, go through Windows Update, not through Lenovo Vantage, which is typically how you get that stuff, is also consistently in windows update, which is whatever. Okay, um, until about 10 seconds ago, this ai section was going to be pretty damn weak, but actually something really interesting happened. So, um, you remember last week that, uh, apple, after paying um open ai I want to say zero billion dollars got a non-voting seat on their board an observer seat, I think they were calling it which is exactly what Microsoft got after they gave them $13 billion, right.

01:32:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I'm sure OpenAI is sending billions of dollars to Apple.

01:32:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there is a feeling that Microsoft was not happy about that. Uh, you know, I don't think you need too much of an imagination to think that might be true. Yeah, um, and then this morning we got up and open. Ai has dropped both microsoft and apple from their board seats to apparently I mean, according to reports, this is for regulatory reasons.

01:32:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I really wanted to know what you guys thought of this, because there's something going on, right.

01:32:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, here's what I can tell you and this is just a fact because we just talked about this the EU, the UK CMA and I want to say the FTC, but if not the DOJ, but the US government for sure have all I'm sorry in the past announced investigations of this relationship because the feeling is they have a non-standard partnership so they can avoid Microsoft acquiring OpenAI, which would open them up to an antitrust investigation and I think we all agree, probably not going to get approved, right? So there's this general feeling out in the world that they're doing something sly here to avoid that regulatory scrutiny. So all three of these major I would say the three most important regulatory bodies in the world all said, oh, we're going to investigate it anyway. And last week the EU said, yeah, it doesn't break the law, it's fine. Oh, wow, which is kind of interesting, right.

01:33:36
So now there's still remember, they shifted their investigation. Um, they're still looking at it, but from another angle, an anti-competitive. I described it as the eu version of the sherman anti-trucked, antitrust uh act investigation. Right, it's an anti-competitive investigation. It's a different thing because you know they can never stop investigating. But okay, regulatory reasons, I guess, but you were just cleared by the EU. So what's going on here? What is this really about? Well, you know what? Honestly, in a weird way, it might be tied to this competition issue the EU raised, which we all sort of not we all, but some people have kind of poo-pooed. You know, like there's a feeling in the united states that, like, the eu will go after any company as long as it's american. But honestly, that's not really fair, right. I mean, they go for these giant big tech.

01:34:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They go after giant tech companies. The fact that they happen to be american is oh well I mean usa, usa, but they're, yeah, they, they're american. The question mark is when you look at a Sony or Nintendo. The exceptions often aren't scrutinized.

01:34:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, by the way, I don't want to go too deep in this, but I do get a little irritated with people and comments and stuff on my site. I can tell you one thing no American has even looked at even for one. Second is what else is the EU investigating? If you actually looked a lot, it's a lot. So we hear about the big tech stuff but we get all upset about it. But the truth is these guys go after a lot of companies. A lot of them are in the EU. They're on a lot of mergers.

01:35:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not just us, the Siemens, the Maersk, the Mercedes-Benz, big companies, they're all over there. The Mercedes-Benz, like big companies, they're all over there?

01:35:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yep, and a lot of them are what? European? So just okay, just throwing that out there. Just a little balance. But tied to this anti-competitive notion, is this almost like? You almost get this collusion kind of vibe off of this, don't you? Like Apple and Microsoft are competitors in some ways, but they're also partners in some ways, right? Microsoft and OpenA also technically partners and competitors, right? This is the look. It's kind of hard to prove this kind of thing unless someone's like stupidly sent a text message, a drunken text message, at three o'clock in the morning. But like the notion that these companies and maybe others have been like, look, we're all pretty doing pretty good, we're all in the top five biggest companies in the world, whatever it is, why don't we keep it that way? You know, collusion is a tough thing to prove, but I wonder if it isn't related to that. Like you know, like you'll notice, a company no one's ever heard of is does not have a non-voting person on OpenAI's board.

01:36:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's Apple and Microsoft, like right, literally the two biggest companies in the world. But yeah, the microsoft one came out of the sam elman firing right like yep. That was a mistake on satch's part, but only because the board was having what? In-camera meetings? Right, and as opposed to a general meeting or a public meeting there, they did in-camera meetings. And that's the one thing an observer can do when not actually holding a fiduciary responsibility to the board is that they can be in an in-camera meeting.

01:36:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep. So Microsoft's official stance on this is like look, obviously, in the wake of what happened with Sam Altman getting fired then coming back, we had some concerns, you know, and we, you know, we wanted to be there to make sure, you know, whatever. And their public stance is look, we've been doing this now for whatever six, nine months. We feel like everything's in a good place. They are better run Now. They have a better board or a more amenable board, however you want to say it than they did late last year. In our opinion, everything's okay. There's absolutely no way. Everything's okay from Microsoft's perspective, to be clear, because Apple's there. I just want to be super clear about this, but that's their stance, so all we can do is speculate. It's fun.

01:37:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you hit on the big one. You put $13 billion in and you got an observer seed. Apple's put nothing in and they're going to get an observer seed, yeah. That devalues the seed. So nobody should have a seed. Make it go away. But I think the bigger one is we're hearing about a restructuring of open AI as a whole. Right, that's right. Let's give up on the not-for-profit thing. The other thing that's interesting is for a privately held company. They're publishing revenue numbers. Yeah, when they talk 3.4 billion so far this year. Yep.

01:38:08
They're going to be okay. Well, also, the point is why do you publish that number when you you know public companies are required to? You're not a public company. Why are you doing this? You're positioning yourself.

01:38:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, they, yeah Right, this is kind of a weird comparison maybe, but the corporate structure of OpenAI is actually very similar to that of Raspberry Pi Foundation, where it's a nonprofit but there's a for-profit arm, you know, and Raspberry Pi just went public, by the way the for-profit part of it, I think, or maybe the whole thing. But yeah, openai is probably going to be a little bigger than Raspberry Pi, just a little bit teeny, just a little bit bigger, any bitty, but there are some parallels there. It's kind of interesting. I do think the we want to save the world vibe that they were trying to throw off originally.

01:39:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, susquehanna is gone right. Like the argument for open AI and this entire structure was to pull those best and brightest minds out of Google brain back in the day and put them out in the public in the day and put them out in the public. Well, all those folks have now left OpenAI to go off and start their own AI startups to make their billion dollars because they're not going to make it at OpenAI. That's right.

01:39:27
And that might even be the pressure to restructure OpenAI, we're not going to be able to retain the talent unless they get to share in this. We need a structure that allows for options and MA and share allocations to our principal employees. Yep.

01:39:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it's probably not coincidental that this new structure will much more closely resemble the thing Sam Altman has frankly kind of wanted all along right, which is, you know, he's not really been as on board with that whole save the world.

01:39:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, yeah, yeah stuff, so yeah there you go, world, yeah, yeah, yeah stuff. So, uh, yeah, there you go. Well, it turns. Actually. You know the other side of this is, since gpt2, they weren't releasing the source code anyway because it was considered too dangerous. Because if you just put that code out there where anybody could run it, you can do really nefarious things. The cloud, as the gatekeeper for these tools, has actually served in a pseudo regulatory position. Right, that it's what's. You know the folks in Wisconsin that stood up a a machine learning model to run for a seat in government, you know they were able to say Nope, that's being turned off. Right, if it was running independently, you couldn't do that, right. Hmm.

01:40:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I, I, right, yeah, I will say. The one thing that is consistent about open AI is that I don't think we're ever really going to understand what this company is doing.

01:40:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like I know, but why would you presume that they know Like oh no, I'm not. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that I'm just saying, like they just remain a mystery.

01:40:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that. I'm just saying like they just remain a mystery.

01:40:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know they're very Open. Ai was formed by a group of tech billionaires that were not happy with what Google was doing. Then they lied, underfunded it, left it stranded. It was never supposed to succeed. They just Everything got screwed up when it worked. You know there's the problem. As long as they were limping along as an, as a, as an ai project, that doesn't do anything, not this, none of this would change.

01:41:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
when, once the billions show up, it's problematic this is like the eddie murphy joke about everybody getting drunk on election night and voting for jesse jackson and they wake up in the morning like he won, you know. And it's like, uh, you know, like, like it works, like you know, like, wait, what are you talking? We've been we've been babbling nonsense for 10 years. What do you mean? It works, yeah, yeah, maybe it was a surprise to everybody, I don't know, it's kind of I think.

01:41:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it was Absolutely yeah Right.

01:42:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, right, there you go, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ultimately, yeah, this is like a twilight zone episode where the little kid has magic powers. You know like nobody can defy him and he doesn't make any sense, but yeah for a moment that any of any of this LLM stuff was a grand strategy.

01:42:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just not the case, right? This is the amount of duck paddling going on underneath those ducks makes it very clear. They're just making this up as they go as fast as they can, right.

01:42:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's that's the story of silicon valley. Yeah, totally, when you think about it, I mean we're at large, yeah, um, yeah know, ai is just fascinating because it happens so quick. You know, that's the thing. It's not happening in slow motion like a lot of stuff.

01:42:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, you sign up 100 million users in two months and people take notice and a lot of money appears because you're going to make it into a lot more money.

01:42:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean pretty soon, like some companies making like computers based around this stuff and nobody knows what the heck happened.

01:42:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, you know, like computers based around this stuff and nobody knows what the heck happened. No, you know that's. You know it's silicon valley is navigation systems for nuclear missiles get turned into ram and then somebody comes up with the cpu. I mean, that's what, that's what, that's the chain right yeah, but self-driving cars work, so that's fine, okay, talk to me about Opera.

01:43:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm trying to care about Opera. It's kind of a late week on AI news, I guess. So Opera has been very aggressive, adding AI capabilities to its browser. They announced a new infrastructure for the next major release of their Opera 1 kind of flagship browser release of their opera one kind of flagship browser. Since I don't know february ish, they've been doing uh, what I think they just call ai feature drops through their uh developer channel, uh, where they're testing ai features uh in the browser and then they push them out the public uh stable, rather at a later time. So on the side, though, they have this other browser called opera gx.

01:43:54
This is a gaming web browser. I'm not sure I 100 understand what the point of a gaming web browser. I'm not sure I 100% understand what the point of a gaming web browser is, but as is the case with, or will soon be the case, I guess, with Opera 1, they have been adding AI features to Opera GX that have come out of that AI feature drop program. They have, and so, as of fairly recently, improvements to the image generation capabilities which they use Google Image N2 for Image understanding, which is where you can show it an image and then it will say this is what that thing is.

01:44:26
This is that model of shoe or whatever. Or this is how math problems get solved because they're visual. It has some basic programming capabilities in there as well. I should ask it about my WPF thing actually Nice, that kind of stuff. It's also using a lot of Google tech, frankly, google WaveNet model for text-to-speech capabilities. So if you want to get your answers from the AI, which is called ARIA in that case read to you instead of text, you can do it that way.

01:44:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is this a perfect microcosm of the AI hype train right here? This is not features that the customers were asking for. This is hey, we're the six string browser. How do we move up a couple of notches? I know let's be first in this AI movement. Maybe we'll get new downloads.

01:45:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The thing I learned here is that Opera has a gaming browser. I didn't even know what is that. Yeah, the thing I learned here is that Opera has a gaming browser. I didn't even there you go. What is that? Yeah, okay.

01:45:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What is that? You guys are so cynical. So yes, it's an ordinary browser.

01:45:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Goodness, no, it's for gaming.

01:45:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't get it. It is for gaming.

01:45:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I'll say this Are you gaming on regular browsers, are you?

01:45:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
browsing. I don't understand I I don't understand. I don't understand why I can't do both, why you limit people like that. No, I don't know. Well, some people play games in browsers. I guess I mean that would be part of it. But Edge has a gaming, so it's optimized for streaming games over the Internet.

01:45:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, oh, does it work. Well, don't get crazy now, mr Laporte.

01:45:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly. Now here's Laporte. Honestly, I've actually used Opera 1. Why the hell would I want AI while I'm gaming in my browser?

01:46:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, it's still a browser. Even if you have a muscle car, you still want a radio you know it's so I do.

01:46:11
You know, again, we've been I don't mean we, the three of us, although I think we all individually have done this and I think a lot of us listening to this or whatever. We all think about this we're trying to figure out AI, right, like what is this thing? And I think one of the things we've kind of come to is that AI, in the end, is just a series of features that will improve the things we use, whatever they might be right, and so adding AI capabilities of whatever form to Word or Excel or edge or opera, whatever, like okay, fine, and some of these things will make sense, some won't, but the the stuff that you know when you think about what people browse for either, and because we've all done this right, every once in a while I actually do need what is actually called a reverse image search and I have to Google what that is every time, cause I can search, and I have to google what that is every time because I can never remember how to do it. But we do do that thing and we are you.

01:47:01
You come across like some article I write and you're like listen, I don't have all afternoon. I want to know. Let's cut to the chase. This thing is 4500 words, right, and it can summarize it and do that kind of stuff. I mean, I think these will just be features of browsers, right, and so the um to keep reiterating some of the things I keep saying. And you know, at some point, if everything is AI, nothing is AI.

01:47:22
Yeah, which that's clearly where we are, and if everyone has AI, you know if you can like, if you prefer Opera or whatever the product is, or like OpenOffice or something, and the AI in those products meets your needs, just like maybe those products do generally for word processing or web browsing, whatever I mean, they'll just use that. This is not why.

01:47:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Opera did this. This is Opera trying to get market share. Yeah, no, no, I'm not. You didn't add these features to protect your existing market share. Well, customers are leaving Opera in droves because Bing AI.

01:47:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So I would say, of the browsers we've heard of, right Opera has let me just think about that before I say this. So far, I would say Opera has been the most aggressive, adding AI capabilities to their browser. There's something to be said for Brave's approach as well. They're doing something interesting because they have a search engine and they do these other things, and they're both doing what I would call like an agnostic AI approach that will allow you to plug in your own local SMLs at one point, or SLM, sorry, or hook into cloud-based LLMs, including those you might pay for, like OpenAI, ChatGPT Plus or whatever. And so, yeah, I mean I think, yes, this is their attempt to be like let's outdo the slower-moving, traditional guys and maybe we'll, yes, maybe we'll pick up some new software We've got to do something.

01:48:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think Opera's market share is still behind, like the default Samsung browsers, so I don't know that it matters all that much. But again, you don't have to move very far to move up, and poor old Brave I don't think is even on the chart To be fair to Opera.

01:49:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They actually have long had kind of an innovative, unique approach to web browsing which you know, depending on. You know it's just like Arc, like for a lot of people. You see Arc and you're like oh my God, this is exactly, yes, I need this. Or some people are like I don't understand this. Opera kind of suffers from that a little bit. And you know Opera, like Arc, actually sees the world from a very web-centric viewpoint and it's like look, if you could just do everything in the browser, why would you even have other applications? You know, and for you know, because it's chromium and it, you know it just works. You get all the benefits of that ecosystem with the extensions and compatibility, performance etc. So you know what they do on top of it either speaks to you or it doesn't. But, like you said, like yes, it's a low usage share product. But you know the people that use opera like, yeah, I, I wouldn't even consider using something else, like this is awesome. Well, what else would I use?

01:50:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah well yeah, well, it makes you miss internet explorer, doesn't it? No, let's not get crazy about old days.

01:50:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This site works. This podcast works best on Netscape Navigator. There you go.

01:50:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This show is Windows Weekly and it's featuring Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, and we are going to get to the Xbox segment, the moment you've all been waiting for. Should I get Mary Jo Foley far? Away for this next portion of the show.

01:50:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's unlikely she will come in here and hit me with a pillow or something. Is that what you're worried about?

01:50:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The cat might attack. That's about it, yeah.

01:50:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The cat has been very.

01:50:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. This looks like the right size Xbox segment for MJ's taste.

01:50:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know she'd love this, that's true. It's only two lines. It's taste. You know she'd love this. That's true, it's only two lines. There you go. It's that small, Paul take it away.

01:51:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, now that you mention it. So all year I've been asking this question when is Activision Blizzard going to come to this Xbox Game Pass Ultimate thing that I've been paying $16 a month for? Microsoft has answered this question with how would you like a price hike, buddy? How about shutting the hell up? And it's like wait what? So, starting in I think it's September or October somewhere they're going to raise the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $19.99 a month from $16.99. Pc Game Pass is going up by $2., and then Game Pass Core, which is what used to be Xbox Live Gold right, is also going up a bit.

01:51:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was looking down the price list looking for where is the Blizzard add-on for an additional $30 a month.

01:51:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:51:57
So, yikes, here's some interesting bits here. They're adding a new tier called Xbox Game Pass Standard. This is going to launch in the coming months and the big difference between it and the PC and Ultimate tiers is that it will not give you access to day one releases of software. All right, so this is the, this is the. This.

01:52:21
I, aside from my concern about game pass, the number one question I think most people have had with um, activision, blizzard and microsoft is well, okay, but a new call of duty game is coming out and this is usually like a billion bucks within hours of you releasing them, releasing it every year. But if you put this thing out on game pass day and date, you're not going to make a billion bucks. How are you going to? How are you going to make it up? And the way they're going to make it up, is it going to raise the price? And then they're going to have this other tier where you just don't get that thing right. You'll get those games later. Games later, yeah, maybe a year, yeah, I mean. Okay, that's interesting. The other change is that and this is the way, this is the weird one the thing that most people think of xbox game pass which is technically called xbox game pass for console right, because it's for the xbox consoles is going away. Um, this thing is currently there alongside PC Game Pass, right, so you had one for PC, one for console and then you had the one that was both Ultimate, which also added the cloud streaming, formerly Project xCloud. So they're actually getting away. They're going away from the console version of this and yikes. That, to me, is concerning um and I.

01:53:50
So one of the weird is this is not unique to Xbox, frankly, but as an Xbox guy, like, forever, when they started Xbox Live Gold I'm sorry, I should say Xbox Live, because remember, there were two versions in the beginning was silver and gold, right, silver was the free version, but gold, had you know whatever perks, but the big one for me was multiplayer gaming. Right, had you know whatever perks, but the big one for me was multiplayer gaming. Right, at the time, if you were a PC gamer, you would have laughed at this, because everybody, every game, has like multiplayer. Like if you were playing Quake or whatever back in the day, you just got multiplayer.

01:54:22
You don't pay for that, but you know Microsoft's offering this consistent experience or offering capabilities like matchmaking capabilities, where you know where you can play against people of roughly your skill level in any given game, etc. They had built up this thing through Halo, frankly okay. So you pay, whatever it was at the time five or six bucks, I think it was 45, 60 bucks a year whatever at the beginning for Xbox Live Gold so you could play multiplayer, but that's gone too right. So they have this thing called Xbox Game Pass Core, which is now it's 75 bucks a year and this is the old Gold that was formerly 60.

01:55:04
This is the old Gold, yeah, so that will still be around. That means you'll be able to. You know multiplayer, I guess on console. But if you're a console gamer on Xbox and you want the subscription, the cheapest price is going to be this Xbox game. Sorry, I'm trying to use this trackpad. It will be called Xbox Game Pass Standard, but you don't get the game's day and date. Now, if I understand this correctly.

01:55:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I shouldn't just assume this, but they don't say when you will, just that you won't. Well they also don't.

01:55:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I'm trying to read this to make sure I'm getting this right. I there was a much bigger library of games on console than there was on PC. If an Xbox game pass right Straight up, the, the, the PC collection is actually pretty good and, by the way, activision Blizzard should be fricking fantastic. But right now I just say it's pretty good. It's pretty good, say, at least a hundred something, whatever. It's pretty good. But the version that's on console is way bigger, like, I think, three times as big, if I'm not mistaken. I don't understand what's happening. I don't understand getting rid of what I think of as the core. That's not the right name, but even though there is one called core that I don't think of as core, the console version of the subscription is going away. Yikes. And by the way, what's the date Starting? Today, you will not be able to sign up for this as a new member. Oh, it's a good thing Starting right now.

01:56:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, yep, so my tip is don't sign up for that today.

01:56:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's no longer available.

01:56:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right Shoot and I just learned about it today. Yeah, so I look learned about it today.

01:56:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I look, I have to make some assumptions here. My, I should look it up. I shouldn't, actually, it's going to really make me upset. But if I go to like account Microsoft dot com and I will find that I have a, I have a couple of subscriptions that are kind of pushed out for a while. I assume and again this gets you into trouble, but because my Xbox Game Pass Ultimate I keep wanting to call it a prescription subscription is pushed out to whenever it is, despite the price hike, I assume I will just keep getting it right and that whenever my renewal date comes up in the future, which could be a year and a half away, then I will start having to think about paying the higher price or walking away, I guess, yeah, so mine, mine, is good through december 5 2025 so I'm.

01:57:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've gone to the site now looking from a canada perspective. And the pc only one says you do get new games on day one, but you don't get multiplayer. And the console only one says you get online multiplayer, but you don't get games. You don't get day one right.

01:57:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they've totally figured well, what. What are they? What are they channeling you toward? Right? Yeah, xbox game pass, ultimate or standard, I guess always. Um, yeah, so 20 bucks a month now, 20 bucks a month for what they're currently offering is a little bit high, but when you factor in activision blizzard, I think you could make this case. In fact, this is the argument or discussion, why do this before you start putting activision.

01:58:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Blizzard in like, yep, there was an easy opportunity to do this like sign renewed to this new, new policy and hey, here's fallout yep, I don't.

01:58:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I cannot answer. I, I am so confused by this. I do not. So xbox game pass standard, like you said, includes online console multiplayer. Yes, but not. That means it includes console period as well. So you get console collection, but not the day one stuff. Okay, right, when do those come, or do they ever? I mean, I don't even.

01:58:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They must someday right. They must come eventually. They must come eventually. It could be day two, but I suspect it's not.

01:59:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, here's your answer, because this is very clear At a future date. So yikes, I don't know what to make of this. This, to me, was pretty clear, cut before. The value proposition was whatever. You either looked at it and said yep, or you're like nope, but whatever, it was very clear.

01:59:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But we are announcing this in the summertime when people are on holidays.

01:59:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I know. So if you're a current subscriber, well, you might be paying month to month. I don't know, at some point you're going to bump into a problem. Yeah.

01:59:33
Um, if you paid out for a year, um, you know, you're in good shape for a little while, but you're going to have some decisions to make and I, again, I don't understand announcing this and not saying the way yeah, there was such an easy, sweet blizzard. Yeah, yep, such a sweet, because I it is completely understandable that the price would go up to include that stuff. I, we never we would have talked about this last year, you know, yes, like how could you? How could this not happen? Um, but yeah, here we are, so I don't know what to make.

02:00:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't want to make uh, you know, lena paul, I can tell you Lena is a little bit less bad news.

02:00:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And the fear is there's going to be a Blizzard add-on.

02:00:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hey, would you like the Blizzard games? It's a nice $20 a month.

02:00:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe they don't want Lena Khan to get upset.

02:00:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what? Lena Khan is apparently the most easily defeated regulator in the history of regulators. But the person you don't want to get upset is the you know.

02:00:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Marguerite Vestager or whatever.

02:00:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
From the EU, right, because that woman's not messing around. So I don't, I don't know. This is, like I said, very confusing to me. This just happened today. They haven't actually had a formal announcement. It was revealed via a support document, which is, you know, an awesome Microsoft way to do things. I'm hoping in the next day or something, we're going to get that announcement where Microsoft says oh, here's the other half of that coin, and it's not all bad news, but right now it's like guys, what, what are you doing? So it's a little, a little freaky, deaky there, but so it's a little freaky deaky there.

02:01:15
Last month, Microsoft announced it was partnering with Amazon to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to select Fire TV sticks. That has now shipped. You get Fire TV stick 4K or 4K Max from 2023, which is the newest version. It's basically just an updated version of the Xbox app on the device, so you get it through their store and then you know it'll be one of the three apps you can get in the Amazon store. And then you can connect a wireless controller via Bluetooth to the Fire TV stick and access the games that way. Interestingly, we'll work with PlayStation wireless controllers in addition to Xbox wireless controllers. Interesting, yeah, and there's probably some market out there for people who own a PlayStation console Just seem so cobbled together, right yeah.

02:02:04
Yes, fair enough. And if you don't have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which, by the way, just went up to $20 a month, Microsoft is allowing people to play Fortnite for free over the Fire TV stick through their app.

02:02:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What else would you want to do, really?

02:02:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, Fortnite's free anyway, isn't it?

02:02:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'd probably play it on my iPhone is what I'd want to do, but since I can't because I live in the United States, I guess that's what we get. Right, I can't because I live in the United States, I guess that's what we get. Right.

02:02:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, it costs a lot less than an iPhone yes, it is.

02:02:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes, you get what you pay for. But, yes, fair enough.

02:02:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what you don't get when you pay for it is when you join Club Twit, I'm just realizing, leo, you are the master of the segue I'm just realizing leo you are the master of the segue that the seven dollars you pay for club twit really, I mean you get so much for that. You get ad-free versions of all the shows, you get the discord, you get the community, you get shows we don't put out otherwise.

02:03:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You get video from shows like would you say I'm sorry to interrupt, but would you say it pays for itself?

02:03:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it pays for itself. In fact, it more than pays for itself. It is a deal and a half, because the real reason you might want to join Club Twit is to support what we're doing here. What we're doing here is operating at a deficit, to be kindly.

02:03:29
You know, look, for a long time we made money. That was great, it was happy, everybody was happy. But those days kind of are gone. Unless you have a minor TV show in the WB network, you probably don't have a successful podcast Advertisers. Just for some reason they think you know podcasting's old hat. But if you like podcasts and you want to keep them going, one way you can do that is by supporting us. So I'd like to invite you to join Club Twit $7 a month. You get like all those benefits plus the good feeling that you're helping keep Twit alive. We are doing everything we can to cut costs. We're shutting down the studios in a couple of months. We'll do everything from home and that'll help. But really what we do need is you Twittv slash club twit. You can join the club or you can watch these two starve.

02:04:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's up to you. Wait what, or the puppy gets it. What's?

02:04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
happening or the puppy gets it.

02:04:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Or the puppy gets it what's happening, or the puppy gets it one wrong move one wrong move, all right.

02:04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for the back of the book and paul throck kicks us off with his tip of the week, and there is. By the way, I should just let you know there is heavy voting going on right now that mary jo come in and hit you with a pillow before the show's over I just want a good thing for me.

02:04:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She can't hear any of this so nice lucky thing, all right your tip of the week sir they might have the stream on in the other room. You know my back is to the door.

02:05:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, uh, last year I november ish, I don't know I, I I bought, uh what what's called the affinity v2 ultimate suite or whatever. So it's affinity photo 2, designer 2 and publisher 2 across windows, mac and ipad. I've actually not tried the ip app. I should look at those and honestly, I really like these apps. Well, I really like Photo. I don't use the other two, but it's a good, solid alternative to Adobe Photoshop Elements anyway. So I have been testing Adobe Photoshop Elements lately for the AI stuff. But you know there's something clean and fast and good about photo which I like, affinity Photo, and at the time I bought it it was on some kind of a nice sale and so right now Affinity is having a sale again. So all their stuff is 50% off. You can buy the apps individually, just on whatever platform you want, or all three. You can buy the whole suite, any platform, all platforms. It's your choice. So 50% off is a great price.

02:06:11
But they are trying, of course, to get people to switch over from Adobe and they are offering literally free, no obligation. You can use all three of these apps, v2, all platforms, no limitations, no watermarking, no anything for six months. Six months, that's a good amount of time. Yeah, you could be a new customer, an old customer you could, it doesn't matter it's, it's available to everybody. It's just wide open and it's free. The only thing you have to do is create an account with them, right, um? So, yeah, they might email you or something, but, of course, um, there's no obligation. You know that when that six month period ends, uh, the apps are still there. They just won't do the stuff, but they'll. They'll offer you the upsell. Um, you don't lose your documents. You don't lose any of your work, you don't. There's nothing like it's. You know this is like a no pain. Give it a shot. There's no reason not to do this. It's, especially if you use like a photoshop type thing. It's absolutely worth looking at photo. Um, really, really good app. So that's great. Um, everybody should do this, except for me, because I already bought it. Um, and then, as we've been doing lately, it seems like browsers are just getting updated all over the place. Uh, I mentioned opera gx above. Uh, in addition to that fire, it's been four weeks, because, my god, every time I turn around, this new firefox. So firefox 128 is out.

02:07:29
Um, they have built in language translation, I think it's. I think it's two English, I think it's US English and whatever Canadian is Canadian English. I know it's for US and Canada. Come on, no, it's US. It's limited to US and Canada. I'm sorry, let me say that in a way that actually is English. Yeah, we translate everything into Canadian. It's sorry, let me say that in a way that actually is English.

02:07:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My apologies. We translate everything into Canadian. It's Canadian.

02:07:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks exactly the same. There's more use.

02:08:00
European vacation is. Using the translator, it's like souffle. The French word for souffle is souffle. Come on, that's not right. And then this is an ESR release. This is their extended support release, right? So I think the current one is 115. So for now you don't have to upgrade, but as of, I think, October, you're going to be pushed into this if you're on that program. So that's neat. And then, oh God, we could two-go Vivaldi ship 6.8 for desktop. Now it is out for iPhone, iPad and Android too. There's a bunch of crossover there, as you would expect, but also there's some unique features that are only available on one of the others. I wouldn't buy a phone based on this browser, but if you do use Vivaldi, I like Vivaldi too, by the way, Speaking of browsers that nobody uses. But that's a good little browser.

02:08:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I mean you know how browsers that nobody uses, but um yeah it's a good little browser. Well, I mean, how many ai? Features does it have?

02:08:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, then why would I use it? Actually, I'm sure it has plenty, because that's the one that's got everything, including an email client bill valdi.

02:09:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If anything is a little too much too much yeah, like if you didn't think you could customize something. Enough, you're wrong. Look at vivaldi it's nice, but but some people love that.

02:09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some people love that. No, I agree, I agree. All right, richard, you're up run as radio. What's coming?

02:09:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
oh yeah, I published this this morning. Uh, the one of my conversations for bill this is with ronnie barker, who's a cvP in the silicon side of things. She comes from Intel and has been making chips and when she arrived to sit with me to do this interview she had with her one of the Cobalt 100, the ARM processors size of a side plate. Let me hold it in my hands. You'll hear it in my voice. I get a little giggly.

02:09:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You totally. I tell me you took a selfie with this thing. I shouldn't. I couldn't even think to take a picture, I'm just staring at it it was.

02:09:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's massive. Uh, and yeah, we just two hardware geeks going hard right for for a good 35 minutes or so, but we got to dig into the whole dedicated hardware path. What are these architectural differences with cobalt? And then also that, their neural process? But we got to dig into the whole dedicated hardware path. What are these architectural differences with Cobalt? And then also their neural processor called Maya, their NVIDIA alternative and the path that's going on.

02:10:20
She works purely in the cloud space. So this is about expanding Azure Compute with dedicated processors, and so we end up in a conversation around just how are these workloads going to be distributed? How do we know this will be a good neural network load? Those kinds of things as well as just this recognition of this is not a machine that any person would buy. You want to consume this kind of compute by the minute through a cloud provider, and that's why they're making these dedicated machines, because this is what they're now offering. So, yeah, both the Cobalt and the Maya, we have a good conversation about them, and I do get down in the weeds on the hardware architecture differences, memory approaches, that kind of thing. She had a good laugh with me because we geeked really fast. So but yeah, brilliant, brilliant woman Knows her stuff. Cold I got a chance to ask a few hard questions, just like ah, you must actually know things to actually even ask that question, and then went driving down into them.

02:11:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, very, very fun, runasradiocom. You know, when people come up to me and they say, can you tell me what Richard Campbell's really like, I often say he's lightly peated with a rich, dark fruit flavor. There you go, that's a good line. Just a hint of peat. A hint of peat. He's Hebridean in his spirit. Hebridean, that's the correct phrase, yes, hebridean. And that's the brown liquor you have for us this week.

02:11:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, this was brought to me from the isle of rossay by a friend of mine and it's mostly gone now because it's that good. But notice, it does have the export sticker. So this is available at certain specialty shops, but they don't make very much of it, so it's tricky to find. So what is rossay? Well, rossay is an island, uh, about 24 square miles, a little island between the isle of sky, one of the largest, the largest of the largest of the islands and the Scottish mainland. So this is the inner Hebrides, that's, dozens of islands, but also includes Islay Skye, moe and all along there.

02:12:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The better known Hebrides.

02:12:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, Rossay is a lesser known, lesser known right, and as opposed to the outer Hebrides, which also exists yes, those are the islands that actually create that buffer in the northwestern part of Scotland that makes the highlands quite a bit milder from those very severe storms. The thing you know, if you ever look at pictures of the Hebrides Islands, both the inners and the outers, just remember this one thought these are the rocks that the glaciers couldn't crush, right?

02:12:55
This is hard-bitten land this is, you know, from the glacial period, and the folks that live on them, you know, are serious. It's a challenging place to be. It's incredibly beautiful and harsh, but it's really something and Rassay itself. The name is actually from Old Norse. It means the Isle of the Rodear. Now why is there a Norse word in the middle of Scotland? Because that's who named it back in the day.

02:13:26
Now there was actually Gaelic colonies on that island and that area going back into the 6th century. But by the 8th century the Norse folks coming out of Norway and the rest of Scandahuvia took control of all of the islands. So there were the Northern Isles, which would be the Shetlands and the Orkneys, and then what they called the Southern Isles ran across the inner and outer Hebrides, so from the northwest corner of Scotland all the way down to the southwest corner of Scotland, and actually the, the central island, the command island, so to speak, was the Isle of man, that southernmost island between England and Ireland. Now, all of these islands were yielded back to the kingdom of Scotland inland in 1266 with the treaty of perth, as of course you well know. Uh, and from then on largely ruled by the clans, the local clan for the for rossi was the clan mcsween, although they were really ruled by the mcleods from the 15th and 19th century. Uh, rossi, best, best, most famous person would have been Bonnie Prince Charlie, who's hit out two nights on Rassi following his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

02:14:42
Bonnie Prince Charlie is Charles Edward Stuart, the Stuart family having been in exile, having lost the kingdoms. But there was a bunch of fans of his grandfather, james III. They called them the Jacobites, and so when Barney Prince Charlie made his attempt to recapture his kingdom, he landed in northwestern Scotland and pretty much their first major battle against the English under the Duke of Cumberland was a decisive defeat. So he may have been Barney, but it didn't go very well for them, and you know as much as Bonnie. Prince Charlie hit out for a couple of days on Rasse and then decided it was too easy to find in there. So he fled and was able to escape. The folks of Rasse suffered brutally. The Duke of Cumberland ordered all buildings razed, all boats destroyed, all livestock killed, and that was actually the kickoff of something they now call the Highland Clearances, which is really what the English was doing up there.

02:15:43
This is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, and so the agricultural approaches were changing and they needed to redesign the fields. When you're working fields by hand, you make small fields that people can operate and you need a lot of bodies, so you have sharecroppers. But as agriculture was advancing, there was this recognition that they needed larger pastures, they needed to break down all those little paddocks and things and they didn't need so many sharecroppers. So they looked for excuses to evict tenants, and the english would happily put this land up for auction, even though other people believed they owned it, lived on it, and this led to the thing they politely call the highland clearances. What they were was literally driving people off these islands, and rossi was one of them. What did they do?

02:16:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the clearance out of spite, out of racism, out of genocidal blood.

02:16:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they did it out of pure profitability. Profit, yeah, no. Your farms can now be more productive if you change your land design. So, and they're just scots on it, drive them off, right, they're interesting they think they're people. Well, and this was on for the better part of 100 years. It largely only ends after the Highland potato famine in the 1850s. So you know it was quite a stretch, that's pretty awful.

02:17:06
Well, yeah, and so just to recognize, you know, when you talk about Scottish culture, especially this part, that the Hebrideans this was all that challenging land and they went through a lot. So I mean, today this island is primarily a tourist island. There's lots of ruins on it because there's been people living on it literally for thousands of years and at a very small native local population. There is a regular ferry run from sconce over on sky over to rossay and it runs about every hour, costs about 20 pounds to bring you and your car across and you'll be going over there because you want to take some hikes, you want to see some of the ruins. There's a lovely set of bed and breakfasts and a couple of hotels, including, for the first time in its history, at least legally, a distillery.

02:17:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, now I'm going, I'm on my way.

02:17:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This sounds wonderful. There you go. Yeah, this is a very simple to get to. You can drive to the Isle of Skye there is a bridge from the mainland and then you can take this little ferry across. It runs Everything is sort of synced on that ferry which, like I said, every half hour. So, uh the um the creation.

02:18:16
This is a very intentionally built boutique distillery. So bill dobby and alistair day are friends. They formed a distilling group distilling group in 2013. They knew a lot about making whiskey. They spent a long time trying to find a place to build a distillery. They finally committed to the Isle of Ressa in 2015. They were able to raise some money and they acquired a building called the Bordale House, which has been there since the late 1800s. It was a Victorian mansion. It had gone.

02:18:44
In my research, because I am prone to such things, I ended up getting into some archives and saw several articles of the Bordet house being restored, the Folladay house falling into ruin, the Bordet house being restored again, and so this latest iteration happened in the 2015. It is, and it was grown out to be a distillery as well as a hotel restaurant visitor center. Like they know what they're doing and laid up their first barrels in 2020, so you're literally knowing that the scottish whiskey rules is a minimum of three years before you can call it anything. They have only just started production. However, I mean there and there lies the question. I've got some right here. Let me just take a little old sip. You and I do know, and I do know what it tastes like, because it's how little is left in this bottle, because I've been, as I've been researching, I've been drinking it. Boy oh boy.

02:19:37
Their intent all along was to build, create a modern interpretation of a hebridean whiskey which largely doesn't exist anymore now. Because they're on the aisles. There's's a limited amount of wood, so peat was a normal factor of a Hebridean whiskey, but not a lot of peat. But most peated whiskeys in the contemporary form that exists today are very high in peat and otherwise sort of simple sweet notes. They were trying to go after those dark fruit notes, the richer notes, but normally this would take a decade plus of laying up barrels to make it true.

02:20:12
How do you make a drinkable whiskey, and so short of a time? With a little organization, including the restaurant and hotel, there's only 25 people that work here now. It's good because there's only 160 people on the island, although I imagine it's some folks who can live over on on sconce or on the sky side and take the ferry over every day. So they bought a pair of small stills italian stills actually. The wash still is only 5 000 liters, the spirit stills 3600. That's a good ratio.

02:20:40
Both have sight glasses, which is unusual, but they have adjustable lie arms. So especially on the wash still they have their lie arm. Uh is actually cooled. They have a water jacket on, they can open and close and apparently they only use it. Uh is actually cooled. They have a water jacket on, they can open and close, and apparently they only use it in certain modes. They also have a small rectifier which is a kind of column, still tied into the spirit, still for doing higher alcohols because they make gin I mean, I saw that from yeah, and this is a normal practice for a new distillery right when you're new.

02:21:09
You've just spent all this money, all this equipment you need to sell product. Oh and gin doesn't take as long to mature. You can make it in a day, right, right like you can. You can crank out gin every week and you're all this. You're on russay for a reason. It's not because there's a lot of people around, right? Not a whole lot of local market. You're after a terroir, you're looking for the character, and so the botanicals grow on rasay, and so their gins are made with local botanicals.

02:21:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's got a style all its own.

02:21:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This sounds really. Have you been? It's. It's clever. No, this is my friends of mine have been, and it's like you need to go. It's you know.

02:21:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm Scots and I wanted to do the obvious thing, but this sounds kind of interesting.

02:21:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it's just and again this intentionality like we've been subsumed by the Diageos and the Centauri and so forth. Not that I have anything necessarily bad to say about them, and I would not be surprised if, within five years, rassi is grabbed by one of these pig groups, because these folks knew exactly what they're doing. They know they have a new distillery, they know they have to get product on the market quickly. They've picked a style. They only put out about 94,000 liters in a year. 125,000 bottles total. You know we talked about Jack daniels last week. That makes 15 million bottles a year. Like this is a teeny little operation in comparison. So they they have a set of washbacks, uh, like everybody else does. They've got six washbacks uh, again small. But they use two different kinds of yeast. They use a user usual distillers yeast because that makes standard whiskey. But then they also are using a champagne yeast because it has stronger fruit notes in it and the champagne yeast is known as a killer yeast, as in if you put champagne yeast in with any other yeast, all the other yeast dies. So it's a very aggressive yeast. So they have to keep their runs separate. It means their mash tons need to be super clean each time they're going to do a run, because otherwise everything turns into champagne yeast. Uh, they're also splitting up productions and barreling, so keeping their barrels relatively small. They've got a mixture of warehouses. They have a palletized warehouse which is upright, barrel stacked high, and they've got a dunnage warehouse which is your typical earth floor with horizontal bottles, three high, and then they're on rasay. They're surrounded by the sea so it's always close.

02:23:38
This particular edition because they've made a few different ones is the first they called a single malt. They're using only scottish barley, which is not surprising. But they do use local peat. They spit, they split the batch multiple ways. The first thing is that they do runs of the base whiskey with no peat and then they do runs with peat. They only do 50 ppm, which is relatively low. Then they split the barrelings as well.

02:24:05
Uh, they use a variety of different barrels. The number one barrel they use the most is actually Woodford Reserve rye barrels, brown Fornums. They specifically went for the rye. The mash bill on the rye edition of Woodford is 53% rye, 33% corn and 14% barley. So that's where they're stealing their spicy note, because they don't have time to get it from the wood, they've got to get it from the, from the whiskey, and uh, they're also not remaking the barrels. And you know I've talked about this before that when you buy american bourbon casks because they're done in imperial, in us gallons which are smaller than imperial gallons, they'll tend to take five barrels and make them into four to get up to the standard, what they call a butt size. Uh, they don't do that. They're keeping the barrel small. In fact they're keeping many barrels smaller because it ages the whiskey's flavors faster.

02:24:58
While they're a new shop with small production, they can afford to work with little barrels and get more wood surface onto the alcohol to get more flavors quickly. So beside the rye cast, which is the dominant barrel for them, they're also using chinkapin oak. So this is as opposed to. This is an American oak, but it's not American white oak, which is querulous alba. This is querulous Mullerga Berge. Did I say that right? No, I did not. This is so. This is American oak. It's not as common as the white oak, but so this is American oak. It's not as common as the white oak, but it is a raw oak and normally when you use raw oaks like that, it becomes a dominant flavor. It's way too strong, especially if you use them in small barrels. But what they do is they char them heavily toasted and charred so that they again a wrap. You've only got a couple of years to lay up to try and make a product. How do you get as much flavor as possible? So a heavily charred virgin oak barrel, again from America. They're probably not going to use these for very long. You leave that in for 10 years. It's probably undrinkable.

02:25:59
They also have a deal with some French wineries down in the south of France. So they have some Bordeaux casks and so they take a part of that batch, some of the peated, some of the unpeated, and they put it into some Bordeaux casks. So you've got essentially six combinations peated and unpeated, rye, virgin oak and wine casks to age in, and then they combine them to create all this complexity without a lot of age. So there's no age appellation on there, because it'd be a three or a four and that's not a good number to put on a bottle. But instead by using those small barrels short aging, strong flavors they're able to make a combination there.

02:26:40
Now I was able to catch a clip of the master distiller working there and one of the things he said is like I can't wait to see what happens in 10 years with some of these barrels. But they are going to keep some of the initial barrelings early on. But they found a way to create a fairly unique hebridean character without having to wait 15 years no chill, filtration, no color, the fact that it's not as pale as it is while still having some color, and it means they're not overdoing it. On the wine side, this could be dark red if they weren't careful. But they're winning awards for a very young whiskey.

02:27:16
They. It's been four years since I've been putting stuff in bottles, which, by the way, they do themselves. They have their own bottling facility. So these guys have bought all the 21st century technology to build super modern scott Scottish whiskey and then are deliberately making an ultra old school whiskey from it. I think it's another example of a modern boutiquing of the product. Because of the technology that's available today to be able to work in relatively small scale, you can be clever in other ways. So they're completely compliant with the Scottish standards.

02:27:50
They're making Scottish whiskey, it's just that in the last of four years they have a complicated whiskey. It's crazy, but it's extraordinary, and it's if you can find a bottle. You're looking about 85 for this 700 ml bottle. That's not incredibly expensive, but it's not cheap either for a young single malt. And uh 46 it's got a little clout. That's kind of the right number, uh, and one of the reasons you're doing that is because they have no chill filtration, no color. Uh, it'll cloud if it was lower alcohol level. So the 46 health's protected to give it that good look sounds like a lovely tipple just, it's not smoke to impress, right, this is not.

02:28:36
I need to lick an ashtray today. This is just a. Not it's smoke, it's a character. It's a little flare right, it's not owning a thing. It's mostly rich fruit notes right, it's plum and cherry and like strong fruit, but then it's just like except you set it on fire at some point.

02:28:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So up here in the wine country, you know the, the winemaker is the celebrity, and they move from famous winery to famous winery and you know the name and they go oh that's, you know, that's what's their names. That's going to be good. Is this the same with whiskey? Because this is clearly. Somebody knew what they were doing when they set this up. Yeah.

02:29:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and I deliberately look for that and you've seen me do these pieces before where it's like they went and got this great master stiller. Where did the seven different distilleries run? Nope, I don't know who this guy is. I watched this video of him being interviewed and talking about it. He clearly knows what he's doing, but he was a well, he was maybe 40, 50, something interesting. Right, generally, when we talk about these monster masters stillers, they're older people. Yeah, so this guy is clearly experienced, but that wasn't. They were doing something different here, that's great, I love it, they're actually a young crew.

02:29:46
I mean, the whole thing is young crew very interesting yeah, yeah, by the way they're, they are looking for a front of house person too. So if you're looking for a job on a little island in scotland, well, these guys are hiring I I look good in a suit, maybe, uh, maybe you're on an island?

02:30:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you don't really. How's the internet and the island?

02:30:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, I know what you always get starlink, and goodness knows there's not a tree to be found there, so you'll be able to get a clear shot of the sky.

02:30:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This really is cool. I definitely want to go.

02:30:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Blown away by this distillery. How clever, 21st century clever approach to making modern whiskey. You know you're making an old school whiskey in a totally new way. Yeah, and I guess the terroir in whiskey is important, right? I think that's true. I mean, again, they're using, they've got, local water. It's called the well, is called the way well of the pale cow and they actually have a pale cow as a mouse mascot.

02:30:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A good, uh, scottish long hair that's not a very nice thing to call me. It's the water's local.

02:30:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, the odds are the the um, the barley is probably produced elsewhere and pre-ground for them right. Like they're ordering to spec, which is totally normal, and, considering the scale of the operation, like they're not going to do their own maltings. That's not practical. What what they've done here is use very contemporary stills with lots more control than typical stills, so they're able to very refine their product and an interesting array of barrelings to introduce flavor quickly and then make their own bottling. And that is astonishing. It's so intentional and it got so far. I defy you to say this isn't a 10 plus year old whiskey, it's. That's really it. It's not. It's such a great story, such a great story Isle of Rasse.

02:31:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Rasse Distillery dot com R-A-S-S-A-Y Distillery dot com. Richard Campbell is at Run as Radio dot com. That's where you get his shows. Dot net rocks and run as radio and of course he's here every Wednesday, as we do Windows Weekly. So is Paul Therot. Therotcom is his website. I'm a premium member, you should be too. Great stuff there and of course, his books.

02:32:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now the new Lean Thin version of his books available at Lean pub. I'm putting the lean and lean pub baby field guide to windows 11.

02:32:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you gonna do the same thing to win us everywhere? It's not as big, is it yeah?

02:32:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did, it's all. I did all the books. All right, it's all been compressed now.

02:32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, now smaller, for your delectation. Every wednesday, 11 am. Pacific, 2.m. Eastern.

02:32:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's all I'm saying.

02:32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's. You know he's got him sweating, sweating to the oldies Sweating to the oldies also works.

02:32:43
11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern time, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live now on every possible live platform, Thanks to the folks at Restream who made this possible. We are on Discord, of course, for our club members. Youtube, as we have been for some time. Twittv Actually, it's youtubecom slash twit, slash live, but we're also now on Twitch, back on Twitch with chat on all of these too. By the way, we turned the chat on Live on Kik, live on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Xcom. Are you going to be live on Boosteroid, Boosteroid? If it's yes, the UK streaming game service. Oh yeah, that's right, the game streaming platform.

02:33:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wherever we can be, watch us on your NVIDIA Shield.

02:33:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you'll be good. So do watch us live. But you don't have to, because on-demand versions of the show are also available at twittv slash www. That's our website. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly, so if you want to share a clip, that's a great way to do that. I have a feeling Richard's whiskey segments are highly prized clips being shared around, but you can also subscribe to the show and that way you don't have to think about it. You just get it automatically and listen whenever you want, anytime between Wednesday and Wednesday. Thank you, paul Thorat. Thank you, richard Campbell. Thank you, sir. Thank you, thanks to our esteemed club members who made this show possible. We're very grateful. Thank you, and we will see you next week. Where are you going to be, paul?

02:34:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are you going to be back home? Yes, he doesn't even know. I got some weird travel coming up, but no, I think July pretty much home.

02:34:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good Well, give our love to Mary Jo. So nice to see her. I will. So unexpected, richard Campbell, you're going to stay in Madeira Park, are you going? Nope, I'm staying. This is the summer, summertime. It's the best time of year to be in Madeira Park.

02:34:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the summer. Yeah, I'm staying in place. Yeah, yeah.

02:34:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We got the kayaks out, cleaned them all up, fixed them up. Go for a paddle, go harass some otters. You know the usual. Thank you so much to the two of you and to all of you who watch and listen, all our winners and our dozers. We thank you and we'll be back next week for another gripping edition of Windows Weekly. Bye-bye