Windows Weekly 894 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 Thorat's here, richard Campbell's here Coming up. We're going to talk about the Google breakup. How does it compare to what happened to Microsoft a few years ago? Also, hacking co-pilot Is it possible? Apparently it is. And a big sale on games at QuakeCon. It's all 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 894, recorded wednesday, august 14th 2024.

00:43
This isn't the airport jail, it's time for windows weekly, the show. We get together with richard campbell, paul thurot, discuss what the heck is going on with windows.

00:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Here they are on my left sides are complicated well stage right, your left, my left, your right.

01:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, paul thurott, thurottcom, t-h-u-r-r-o. Double goodcom. That's also a published author at leanpubcom. Hello paul, hello leo, in mcungie today, yeah yeah, I guess I'm going. I'm going with the postal address today uh, on my right mr richard campbell run as radiocom host. Yes, that rocks run as radio and his fine plant. What is that? Oh, look, you have a switcher too. I have a switcher too he's not afraid to use it. I got a button that Remind us that is the sound of the Puget. No, that is.

01:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Georgia Strait, actually Georgia Strait, or it's also known as the Salish Sea. Oh, so cool.

01:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the fleur de mer.

01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And together the two of them are going to explain everything that's going on today with Windows. We're so glad you joined us.

02:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We are today in the attic studio studio, so all three of us are in our homes. Yeah, let's see, let's uh, this is the first, a broader view of this. You want a broad view, yeah, so this is the background set. Yeah, but I also about this falling through the floor of the attic.

02:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It seems like a lot of stuff it seems like it would be really heavy if, if I were ambitious, I would go over here and show you how light that is. I can lift it with one hand okay, nice, it's aluminum.

02:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that an original mac back there too? Huh, is that an original mac back there? Yeah?

02:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is john jemmery. John slanina, as his retirement gift to me which is a little strange gave me his old 128 mac and we were able to get that running. We had to add a little something that, uh, emulates a floppy drive, but we were actually able to get that running.

02:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's awesome, that's cool.

02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a fake altair, but I always had that right and the fake pdp 11, but they're great. Like moskva mullin, yeah, I'm pretty happy with it and I can show you actually I have an even larger uh, view of the.

03:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you said last week, you have like seven cameras in that room, right, oh yeah there you go, there we go.

03:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, that's right. The library view nice took out the mic in the process uh, that's the little corner, there you go, yeah, yeah and then what's the? Oh, that's a chair, I see when I look like a giant. Looks like is that like a king kong hand prop from the 1978 movie.

03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like one of those chairs that holds you. No, that's the dr evil chair we have okay, nice okay at great expense. That thing weighs a thousand pounds, yeah that's one left at the studio.

03:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the thing that's going to go through the floor. Is that chair, yeah, or those?

03:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
event tags you can't see it, but there's a big beam over here that's supposed to hold me up. Okay, but the problem is the beam goes down into the garage and if anybody pulls into the garage and it's, it's a tight fit. If anybody pulls into the garage and hits that beam, yep it's that beam. Yep, it's going to get exciting, that's when I do the club ads I've got a camera there you go Join the club, so it's kind of fun yeah this is fun.

04:14
We're we're. We're having a good time here in the, in the. I like it. Oops, wait a minute, I seem to have shifted. Let me just move myself over. There you go. Thank you, I have the power, you do have power.

04:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And what do they say about great power?

04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Leo, they say great power leads to Silliness, silliness, pop breakers. Yes, I'm sorry, I'm trying to. There we go, there we go.

04:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's ask Google and Apple what they've done with great power. Nothing but good.

04:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually it's not in your rundown, but the big story of course this week is that the Well, I guess you're going to get there. No, it is in your rundown. Never mind, we'll save that, we'll save that. Let's start with the thing everybody tunes in for.

05:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know Well the good news is if you don't have a lot of time. The Windows part of this show is about three seconds long, so that'll be good, hit it.

05:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hit it, paul. What's up?

05:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
with Windows. Let's see how quick we can get through this. Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, so we've talked about this. We've talked about this over the past three months-ish I don't know but you know we get these week D preview updates. We've had the week D drama last week, or last month's week D preview update for windows 11 version 24. H. Two was a week E update, as we don't call it. But yesterday was patch Tuesday and it, as I expected although you know, again everything's up in the air these days with the windows team it all came together, baby. So 22, 23 and 24 h2 are once again realigned, just like that, that planet alignment that was going to destroy the universe, or whatever. The only asterisk to that is that most of the new features are cfrs. So you'll get them when you get them right. But I noticed on the laptop I'm using currently, which is on 24 h2, when I rebooted I had the ability to drag icons from start menu down to the taskbar. Oh so, you, you do have that feature and I have that one feature.

06:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, on that one computer both my primary workstations which are running when 10 were rebooted this morning, so okay they're. They must have gotten something now.

06:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This one still says 22 h2 yeah, these two computers in here both rebooted overnight as well. Um, I think they're both 23 h2 probably. Actually this one might be two knows you can't tell anymore. What's the difference yeah it's 20.

06:37
No, this is 24 h2, that one's 23. Um, yeah, I mean, I, you know this is a lot like when we had that, uh, there were three different versions of one drive you could have in windows 11 and uh, you know, it was kind of it's a roulette wheel. See what we got, you know. And same thing, you know, I uh open up a laptop and it had four tiles on the lock screen. You know, another one had three, like it's. You know, it's that kind of uncertainty we're never going to get rid of. But yeah, so pretty straightforward. Yeah, let's see. And then there hasn't been much movement in the insider program, unless something has happened today, which I'll check during the first break.

07:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Very likely. Yeah, that's how they do it. They wait till you start and then they Yep. Is he talking?

07:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, good Ship it, yeah, good, ship it, push now, yeah. So we had two. Well, we had one set of builds dev and beta channel. I think it was late last week. The dev one is not particularly interesting. The beta channel has a couple of things that are kind of interesting. They had been testing a minimalist kind of system tray area with a short clock and all that stuff. They pulled minimalist, uh kind of system tray area with the short clock and all that stuff. They pulled it for a while and, uh, they have brought that back. So that's looks like it will head to stable, you know, august, september, probably in time for 24h2's official rollout or second rollout, and with 24h2 now integrated.

07:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that all of the, the snapdragon stuff, like the, the big thing they were pushing for? Is that now like generally available?

08:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, it's defined generally available, uh. So yeah, I mean um it's generally available for snapdragon x based copilot plus pcs, um anyone can get it per the tip that I think dates back to may you can still do that exact same thing.

08:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is it lit? I mean, the question is what defines a co-pilot plus pc right now? Right, is it just? Yeah, just the snapdragon hardware today?

08:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it is yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it's not going to change at ifa or when 24-h2 has its second big release in october-ish yeah, probably well, this is the whole thing right is like how are they defining that right now?

08:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
are they literally just looking for the chipset and saying, okay, this is the whole thing, right? It's like how are they defining that right now? Are they literally just looking for the chipset and saying, okay, this is a Copilot Plus, because that's not sustainable? Like, I should be able to build a machine that qualifies.

08:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, here's what I can tell you. You could build a machine that qualifies, but it doesn't mean it's a Copilot Plus.

08:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
PC, it's not going to be recognized. That's where my question is what's the recognition? I wonder if it's just a registry entry Like could I just flip the flipping bit?

09:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no-transcript, but the. Well, I was going to say the big question mark, but actually there are a bunch of them. But let's just say one of the big question marks is one of the big differentiators is that you have all those on-device LLMs or SLMs or however you want to define those models, language models and it's really not clear how those will appear on everyone's computers, because at some point you will be able to upgrade to this thing, right yeah, If you have a qualified PC or whatever.

09:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And again, it's like how are you qualifying this? Is it just a setting? Because I got a heck of a lot more tops in my, in my, uh, my rtx than that they're requiring.

10:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody cares about those tops.

10:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they only care about one kind of tops and you don't have it I got more tops in my rtx and I'm perfectly willing to plug a second video card in if they want it separate from the actual display, you know like I got a couple on the shelf, I'll do it look I, ever since that day in may yeah, in may, when they announced this stuff this has been one of the big questions.

10:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I mean, we know the well. The amd chips, I think, are all out now. In fact, I think it was just today. The and but there are no amd based copilot plus pcs no, no, and that, and again, we, we have to infer, we cannot. It's gonna be a long state you we.

10:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We said it was six months. That's going to be October. It's going to be a long couple of months, man.

10:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It might be past October. Right, because, as is the case with Windows on ARM right now, qualcomm clearly has an exclusivity window with Copilot plus BC as a brand.

11:11
But they've never admitted that and they've never set a time limit on it. Right, it's now assumed, didn't? Didn't bloomberg kind of leak that out? Somebody did, yeah, yeah, I, I, you know. No one has ever come out officially and said it. Um, right, but yeah, I mean it clearly. I mean, you know we can, we can speak plainly here. You know, there, this is clearly the case. I mean, we can only say what we know. But uh, what we don't know is, yeah, the when and then I.

11:28
I suppose there's still some sort of a look. One of the possible outcomes is that new or pcs based on these new amd and intel chips that meet the tops qualification and have enough ram and all that stuff. We'll just get those co-pilot plus capabilities at some point, either literally in October with 24H2 or somewhere down the road, and we may still not call them co-pilot plus PCs. You know, one of the possible outcomes is that co-pilot plus PC is the name of a set of experiences. They're based on local AI and MPUs and you know it's just like anything else. You know, with regards to specific hardware, you know you can't have a Windows Hello facial recognition experience unless you have a compatible camera right, yeah, but there's a bunch of different vendors that you can get that from and there's a bunch of different machines, right?

12:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is weirdly isolating. And the specifications they said to us this is how you qualify for a co-pilot plus pc.

12:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Lots of machines qualify for that. They just can't get to be copilot. I am not disagreeing with you and um, you're hurting my perception of reality.

12:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I you know you're right I mean, I well, and I I would argue that co-pilot plus pc is going to become an irrelevant term soon.

12:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, because they are hanging it on something like you need to it also feels like a slice in time, because, in the same way that a 40 plus tops mpu is better than a 13 or whatever tops mpu, next year we might have 80 or 100 tops mpus, and then, you know, in the same and then I'm sitting on a 14,000. Yeah Well, remember the 90s, we used to have.

13:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what a 40 to 70 ranks at man Wow yeah.

13:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but it's MPU and we've talked about this. I mean there's efficiencies to that. Right now it's very much targeting mobile computers where that efficiency makes the most sense, or whatever. Right, you know we're going to get past all these terms. You know AI, pc, that's going to come and go because all PCs will qualify for that thing.

13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, isn't it just like Evo? It's just a market.

13:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it is, I mean. So Evo is interesting because Evo is an evolving spec. So there's been at least three major kind of versions of Evo, not that we really talk about that too too much, but the Meteor Lake generation of PCs represent the latest gen where they have to have at least I think it was three USB 4, slash, thunderbolt 4 ports, with at least one on either side of the motherboard, meaning on the other side of the computer. That becomes part of the spec. It's something that improves over time, but it's vague and untrustworthy. I mean, one of the parts of Evo PCs was some number of hours of battery life and I don't think I've ever used the AI.

14:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Experience is already confusing. There's this implication that you need specific hardware to get certain experiences, and now you know you the opportunity to create a brand that would say you will get your best experience when your hardware qualifies this way. That's compelling, and you're going to check it out on an exclusivity agreement. Yeah Well, I.

14:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I yes, I don't know what to tell you. You know when, when you look at the various generations of windows on arm pieces I guess, for lack of a better term there have been different brands that have been associated with each one of them, the initial Qualcomm based stuff dating back to 2017, 2018, whenever it first came up publicly. Those were always connected PCs and one of the big qualifications for that was it had to have built in 4G or maybe by that time, 5g connectivity in ECM form. Right, and one of the big benefits of a Qualcomm motherboard main board, compared to, like, an Intel or AMD one at the time and, you know, still a little bit today is that these this company, has been working on these integrated chipsets for a long, long time, so they tend to be a lot smaller, and so you get a couple of interesting benefits there. You have ECM instead of nano SIM, although most PCs actually have both. Um, the smaller main board allows you to have a bigger battery, so the because there's more room in the in a case, or or just a thinner and lighter computer, obviously right, but the idea there is that um, there are efficiencies in the chipset that are going to deliver better battery life, but also, just, you can have a bigger battery, right, that's also going to help with battery life, right? So, um, but we walked away from that, right, and you know, you can sort of see the competitive focus, I guess, of microsoft, especially how it shifts over time, because back then they they were very much focused on we want to make sure we have these efficiencies that everyone sees with phones and expects, right, that nobody thinks about this, I bet.

16:23
But you pick up your. My phone screen is sitting here on this thing last all day, no problem, I pick it up, it lights up, it does a face thing. I get in like it just works like it. It never doesn't work, right? I mean, obviously, sometimes you use Bluetooth and it doesn't work. No, I mean, I just meant the power management and incident on stuff. Yeah, a lot of stuff doesn't work, but you know it's understandable. Microsoft would want to bring that experience to the PC, right, and they tried a little bit with Windows RT. They tried more with Windows 10 on ARM and you know now their competitive focus is AI and it's like, well, how about MPUs instead of always on?

17:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well and Aaron that's the real thing, right? It's like where's the standard, right? What was great about DirectX was it didn't matter what kind of GPU you had. It didn't even matter if you had a GPU because it would emulate it in the processor if it had to, so you always had a consistent interface. There's a bunch of different MPUs out there. This is a compatibility play and GPUs should qualify.

17:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the orchestration thing I keep talking about. I think a future, more sophisticated version of Windows will do that work for you. It will be the orchestrators. I think of it, for AI is what DirectX is for graphics. Yeah, I mean, it will look at what you have and just do the right thing, so you, as a developer of that game, don't have to think about that. You, as the owner of that computer, don't have to think about it. It's just going to work right. That's the goal.

17:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And so the fact that they created these exclusivity arrangements like you're literally hurting the business. You're hurting it.

17:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but you know, this is we. You know, unfortunately, this is what you get when you are part of a market that has lots of players that all have their own strategies and needs and goals and things, and so sometimes they're contrary to each other, right? You know, we talked about this last week. I didn't mean to do an ad for Apple, but one of the benefits of the walled garden culture is.

18:14
You have one vision and you're doing this thing, but you know we have the choice right, and so you know you. As a desktop PC owner, you can say look, I want my games to be run at AK, I'm going to buy a really expensive graphics card and make this happen, or whatever. You can do that, probably not AK, but you know what I'm saying.

18:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You have that choice. Yeah, no, I totally agree, and it does mean that, even though Apple's a late mover, they have an opportunity to do a lot just because they have a complete control of the stack. And I think, microsoft an opportunity to do a lot just because they have a complete control of the stack.

18:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I think microsoft, in a way, with this deal with qualcomm, was trying to get that effect, we're gonna do it with this one, this one stack, but that's fine. There's so many stories here, dude, I, you know, it's funny like qualcomm actually entered the story with windows and arm at multiple places before they became the story, right, right, they were part of the original announcement of Windows and ARM when it became Windows RT, but only NVIDIA was the go-to market, so they kind of fell out somehow there and Microsoft announced a partnership with Qualcomm for Windows RT 8.1, which never happened. Right, there were no Qualcomm-based Windows RT 8.1 devices, but there was a big announcement you can go find it, you know. And when Windows 10 came around, they're like we're back, baby, you know. So, you know, terry Meyerson, whatever that version of the Windows team wanted a company that could stand up to Intel, right, and Qualcomm sells a lot of chips.

19:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but still, you know, intel is a monster. There's no toys about it. Yeah, yep, in so many ways. Yeah, I mean. And folks are asking about the dev kits. Officially, today is my ship day for my Qualcomm dev kit. Okay, Not that.

19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've gotten an email from him or anything. Mine was supposed to come in the end of August.

19:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you mean Bob's Warehouse didn't send you a prompt email ship notification it and Bob's Warehouse didn't send you a prompt email ship notification.

20:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's, what is it? It's Arrow.

20:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's Arrow, arrow, yeah, I just checked mine and said oh no, your estimated ship date is August 14th. Your Vista print order is on the way, there you go.

20:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't wait. I will have it on the desk right here.

20:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it'll be fun. I think it's going to be great.

20:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we'll see.

20:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I'm immediately going to plug a whole bunch of third-party devices into it. Watch it crash, crash, crash.

20:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, let's see. I mean, actually I'm going to be very interested to see what your results are there, right, yeah?

20:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we'll see. It's all about how the hardware is, but I'm yeah.

20:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Back to your original question. What I copilot plus PC to me is not a great brand. I think it was something they throw out for Qualcomm because, with AMD and Intel breathing down their necks and they had been working on us for years and years and years, billions of dollars and yada, yada, yada they finally had something awesome. It's like guys, you got to give us some Roman in the sun here, and they had already used AI PC with Intel the previous December, so they the previous december.

21:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So they ain't. But in meantime the amd ships are out. Lunar lake is imminent. Like what are you going to call these things?

21:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I right, so they. Well, the pc makers are calling them ai pcs, right, so they've. They have settled on this term. Um, I I suspect, like I said, there are two ways it could go. They could become co-pilot plus PCs, just like that one HP Dragonfly Pro became a Chromebook Plus when that spec came out, you know, it sort of got grandfathered in because it met the specs. Or the other alternative is they just describe it as an AI PC that offers those co-pilot plus experiences, which refers to literally on-device AI. But again, what was the number 40? Something over 40? Yeah, I don't know where those I mean they're going to download. I guess I hope you guys aren't on a metered connection, because that's going to be an ugly couple of days.

21:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Thank goodness, thank goodness for fiber, and I, in the meantime, I'm staring at the. You know the pixel 9 announcements, right, and you know the new the tensor 404 is on it and they're going to do a bunch of slm stuff in my phone.

22:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to talk about this because I'm actually I have some questions. I have questions about you with the. I'm jumping ahead, sorry, yeah, no, it's okay, but I I want to talk to you about that. Yeah, um, that's my job, richard, I just sorry yeah, you're supposed to jump ahead now thank you for distracting me, leo.

22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean richard, I'm confusing you guys um yeah, no, we look a lot alike, I understand um, okay, but speaking of apps that actually do stuff on the machine, yep, estimated delivery 15 august, that's tomorrow dude, that's exciting I like when the estimated delivery is like in the past. I'm very excited. This is. This is cool. Maybe I'll do a special stream. By the way, the people said they like me and underneath you guys.

22:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, that's funny so you're the one top, you're the one holding it, holding this all up, leo, that's what it is. Without you, what is there?

23:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
here's the thumbnail. Uh, kevin, there you go. Right, we got to do the good youtube thumbnail if we really want to succeed.

23:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can do the brady bunch thing where we all look at each other somebody's already done that in the discord yeah, somebody pulled an original brady bunch is the story.

23:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm excited. I I'm glad you mentioned it, richard, because I just checked. Yeah, because they had originally told me it would come later that week, like friday and they ordered it.

23:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, how they left yeah so.

23:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But now, yeah, it says uh, estimated delivery 15 august.

23:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Estimated ship today yeah, I'm sure we're both. We both ordered that day, yeah, supposed to ship today. I'm coming to canada just a little bit further, you know, I honestly I you know.

23:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought, oh yeah, the like with everything else the longer you wait, the later you'll get it. Wait what?

23:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think that they're all shipping, I mean I really feel like they waited till a certain batch was sold and then yeah, all at once.

23:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, hopefully we're in like this. And then they ordered the parts you know something like that.

24:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's coming from qualcomm, I presume. Well, find out.

24:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, this says thundercom technology yep company of the future, tomorrow's technology.

24:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yesterday, uh, okay, well, yeah, somebody filled out paperwork because they thought thundercom was a good name thundercom the pallets of chips are coming in now one wonderful thing that we could do now with our uh uh co-pilot plus pcs is add ai features to clip champ.

24:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go yeah, so I is this what you were alluding to earlier, richard, when you said speaking of yeah so I'm not 100. Sure what happens locally and what doesn't.

24:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can say that this thing does go better when you have a GPU and a faster processor, but I don't know what that means the amount of time I spend running different software with the resource manager on just to see if that MPU flips up at all.

25:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I was using Typora, which is a Markdown editor, which I really like and whatever, and. But there's the HP laptop I'm using now is a weird keyboard problem and so I was typing and I think it's like shift F12 or something. Well, of course that would. Of course that's what it would be, which is really shift home or control. I guess it's control home, but control home is control F12 and control F12. You've done it. Web browser brings up the, the web dev experience, right, so that pops up in the editor and I'm like huh, like that's just. I guess that's what we're doing now.

25:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do we do?

25:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so I guess you could probably do that in chip clamp, chip clamp, clip champ as well.

25:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, chip clamp is, so that's available, by the way, chipclampcom if you want to sign up, chipclamp, anyway, clip now I'm never going to say it, right?

25:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Clipchamp such an awkward word is available for individuals for free. It's part of Windows 11 and a bundled app form. It's a web app and then it's also available for Microsoft 365 workers, customers, right, and they have storage et cetera, associated with it. So I don't actually have this yet, but there are two new AI-based features which are obvious and awesome, right. So background removal and noise removal. And background removal is also background replacement, so you can do like a software-based screen-screen effect which you know it's probably running in the cloud, frankly, but again, this is one of those things. This is a good example of software where I hope that they do that checking and run locally if they can, and get better results if they have the right which would be somewhat unprecedented.

26:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, we talk about this on the Blazor side of the thing when you throw the dev hat on where, right like. We talk about this on the blazer side of the thing when you throw the dev hat on where it's like you can say, hey, run this piece on the client, run this piece on the server, but it's not like this system can decide for itself.

26:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's what you're implying. Is that this well, with an orchestration? Yeah, yeah, that's right, could?

26:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
evaluate oh, I've got an mpu, or that mpu is only 10 utilization. Throw this workload on. Oh, it's a 90 utilization.

27:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Check this to the cloud yep, so everything I just described is a fantasy that I invented in a fever dream, but it, but it makes sense to me, of course it would. But I mean, I think you know, when you listen, when you hear it, listen to it, whatever. It should make sense to you as well, like, uh sure, this whole show is a fever dream it's a, I'm pretty sure this entire sure. Paul, you should tire a 17 18 year run has been a giant fever dream.

27:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've been sleeping for the last 18 years. Wake up, Paul.

27:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're going to wake up my nature extreme stunk. I just worked.

27:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I did, like Bobby from Dallas.

27:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why don't I fly? What is wrong with this? How?

27:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
come, I'm not running through a field toward a unicorn. What is this? Yeah, it's weird. All right, let's, unless you want to do more.

27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's good, or champ clip, or clip champ Clamp chip, chip clamp I really like that, really like that name.

27:53
Let me see If I push this button, does anything happen. Yes, okay, I'm just checking. If I push this button, does anything happen? Oh my gosh, it does. Look at that and it's time for a commercial break. We'll get back to Windows Weekly in just a bit. Paul Therot, richard Campbell we are still in control, which is nice. For 18 years, paul, and you remember this because it was on this show that I got a windows update and decided to uh go ahead and update it.

28:30
Uh, I don't think that can happen anymore, but, but, but don't tempt me, uh, because you're only running max.

28:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that why you can't have any more?

28:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, well, starting tomorrow, I might have a Windows machine. Wouldn't that be cool? Yeah, that would be very, very exciting. No, the show today brought to you by 1Password. We're really happy to celebrate with our former sponsors, longtime sponsors KOLIDE, k-o-l-i-d-e, because they were acquired by 1Password. Remember I told you about that? And now the two together have created something brand new. It's called one password, extended access management.

29:13
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29:33
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30:10
They like to liken it to the quadrangle on your college campus. You can imagine this in your mind's eye the beautiful green sward, the black grass is perfectly cut and it's got these little brick paths leading from beautiful ivory covered building to ivy covered building, and you know it's just gorgeous. So those buildings in the past, those are the company-owned devices, the it approved apps, the managed employee identities. You know the good stuff. And then, as at every college quadrangle, there are these dirt paths that cut right through the grass. They're the shortcuts. People actually use the straightest line from building A to building B. Those little shortcuts, those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non-employee identities, people like contractors in your network.

30:59
Now, most security tools, they only work on the nice little brick paths, the happy little brick paths. But, of course, where do the security problems happen? A lot of them on those dirt paths, the shortcuts. And that's why you need 1Password Extended Access Management. It's security for the way we work today, available now to companies that use Okta. But here's the great news, and this is why I knew this 1Password Collide merger would be so exciting. Now they can expand. It's going to come later this year to Google Workspace and, yes, microsoft Entra. Good news, check it out. 1passwordcom slash Windows Weekly. That's the number one P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D dot com. Slash Windows Weekly. 1passwordcom slash Windows Weekly. Thank you, 1password, for your support of the show, and you support the show when you go to 1passwordcom. Slash Windows Weekly. Is there any way, anthony, that I can always be in the middle, because I kind of like being a sandwich? Yeah, I mean, I don't mind being on the bottom, the bottom's good too.

32:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right. If we jump up and down, do we push him down further? How does this work? The tree- pose.

32:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, I have a button to do that. Whoa, okay, back to the guys, it's.

32:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I said Gilroy.

32:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've fallen and I can't get over it. Leroy, whatever it is, he's using all the lines now.

32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess I'm always going to have to be on the left. I guess that's just the way it works on this.

32:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh well, I don't have a problem when you switch around, it's all good.

32:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of fun.

32:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's all good.

32:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think our audience enjoys change. It's going to be good. Yeah, so let's talk about ai as if we hadn't like there's flaws in your co-pilot or something. Yeah, um, there's a gentleman who uh was a former microsoft security architect. Interestingly, uh now has his own security company, so he is definitely has something to sell, but he uh discovered I think I want to say it was 15 flaws in Copilot. Oh man, which is a big deal, because, and specifically, Copilot.

33:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When you say a flaw in an AI, that just means it would do things that would exceed its safety parameters. Right, there you go.

33:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and this is important. Well, this would be important for anyone, right? But because obviously Microsoft has all these controls built in to prevent that. But in a copilot for Microsoft 365 scenario, where you're working against corporate data that is very specifically try, you know private and don't want out in the world, this can be serious. I should also point out that some of this stuff requires basic social engineering stuff, right, and so you know he used AI to generate things that seemed like they were real, coming from the company of some person. It seems like they were generated by Copilot itself.

33:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because they could spearfish with this.

33:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, that's exactly right. Yeah, but, and for whatever it's worth, you know he also did the right thing, which is, you know, he went to Microsoft ahead of Black Hat and said look, this is what I found and he's working with them and they, you know, they're fixing the problem. So he didn't document anything that someone could go now and abuse.

34:17
But then he still went on and did the talk and said don't worry, microsoft is fixing this Well like I said, he's not a charity, he's still, you know, he's got a service to sell and all that kind of stuff, and that's a big part of this. But and yeah, so I mean I just whatever. Those are the caveats. So Copilot and AI in general kind of introduces a whole new level of problem, right? So when you think about anyone being fooled by a phone call, a text message, an email or whatever and then revealing personal information and on and on we go, this is always bad, no matter how you look at it.

34:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the point being, these are not buffer overflows. You know your classic bugs. This is this new class of software they're trying to put, you know, guardrails around it and it is hard.

35:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, you know, if you go back to the early recall stuff, it was like, um, first, uh, get a computer that's not a co-pilot plus pc, right, okay. Which is like first, uh, give me your administrative password, okay, and now I've compromised your computer, see how insecure it is. Like, done, done, yeah, we're all. So there's a little bit of that, but not. But then again, I mean this in this particular case that is how hackers are going to gain entry to systems and so forth. So I just thought it was kind of interesting on a number of levels.

35:34
But the thing I guess I appreciate the most here is just that, you know, as a former member of a former security architect at Microsoft, he knew how to do this correctly. A former security architect at Microsoft, he knew how to do this correctly, meaning disclose it to Microsoft, right, so, and work with them, it's the right way to do it. So that's. I like to see that kind of thing, so that's good. Intel was going to have something that we're calling Innovation Day, which I bet they regret now that they've had to. Innovation is going to have to wait until next year, folks.

36:05
That's not happening this month? Um, I believe it's going to be in san jose or san paulo alto or something one of the silicon valleys in september.

36:15
Yeah, one of those, yeah in, yeah, in san francisco bay area. Um, obviously they. Their recent financial report wasn't fantastic. They revised their outlook, uh, for the coming year Layoffs, cost cutting. It's not a good look for them to spend a bunch of money on something like this now. And they have other little events that they are a part of throughout the year and we'll see. So, tentatively, they're saying we're still going to do an Innovation Day. It will be in 2025. They haven't set a date or even a a season for that, uh. And, of course, as richard mentioned, they are launching lunar lake, uh, within a couple weeks, right, and then arrow really should do that.

36:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
At events, you know like it's, it's a thing. The whole point about doing the layoffs is to have the funding to continue the marketing that it sells, the product that keeps you a company like what are you doing?

37:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I know well, yeah, I mean. So one of the things that contributed to their financial difficulties is they fast ramped um. Lunar lake, right right, this, this came together much more quickly. Uh, the typical intel cadence would have been this probably would have happened three years down the road, ish, um, and they would have iterated on meteor-like because of the need to get up to speed on MPU especially.

37:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, they did a double talk. Then, right Like they revised architecture twice rather than changing densities.

37:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and, as is the case with cars or anything else, when you drive it over, it's uh accepted limits. Things don't always go well, so in this case they they had to overspend, uh to make this happen and um I would think, just like extra shifts and things, you're just pushing people to do more in less time.

37:55
They didn't really break it down, but yeah, I mean, but the thing, but the thing we see, the thing I brought up multiple times, is the fact that meteor lake, which was such a radical departure from the previous gen, which was the 12th and 13th, uh, intel core chips is now an orphan right. It's, it's a one off, they're not doing that again.

38:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't. You don't see lunar lake as a revised version of meteor lake no, it's a it's.

38:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is as radical of an architectural change as meteor lake was compared to what?

38:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they ditched the p, the same way they ditched the p4 and revised the p3 into into duo. They've gone. Okay, that was the wrong way. We're going a different way.

38:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, all the guys holding ultras are a little upset right now yeah, I mean, I honestly, yeah, my experience with these chips has been kind of mixed, frankly, but then again, you know most people don't really care or think about this stuff. I, my only concern would be that, in the rush to move on, we've left these things hanging out there with not necessarily vulnerabilities but inefficiencies. Maybe that maybe won't be patched, whatever it might be.

38:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
For example I'm sorry, you're presuming they're still going to stick with the maintenance on the chipset and so forth. They're not really ditching it. Well, I mean Remember what happened with the whole RAM bus, sram thing where they literally said we're going to send you kits to fix the motherboard.

39:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hope to have this out by now, but sometime soon in the next few days I'll have this review out of that HP EliteBook 1040, which is a Meteor Lake-based system. It's very similar internally in fact nearly identical internally to a HP laptop I reviewed a few months ago that had lots of problems, right and still, and they fixed a lot of the reliability issues HP did, but they didn't fix the battery life problems. So this particular laptop actually the battery life is very good, but you still get that and they did. They described. See, they would never say like, like HP or any PC maker would never come out and say, look, intel builds crap. So what we do is we fix that crap right and then we make it so that it's sellable and then you can use it and not worry about it being crap. They don't say that, um, because you know Intel's like their most important partner, right, so, or one of them anyway, and uh, they don't say that, they would never say that, but they.

40:10
What they did describe a great deal was all the work they did on this one computer to create something called, uh, you know, like a new form of hibernation. They added new sensors to it so that it can tech, being in a bag, detect when you're around if the laptop lid is closed, it does all this extra stuff and the idea is that it's in a very I don't. I mean this. I think they've done what they can do. I actually think that the work they've done is pretty impressive, but it's not an elegant system architecture like you have with ARM. So I like to talk about how, you know, open the lid every day I smile thing comes right on. That's not what happens with this laptop, but they're trying to get to something that's more consistent and reliable, yeah, and can emulate that in some ways, you know and so I know I I don't get the sense that what they did for meteor lake was an extraordinary lift.

40:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you are getting to an accumulation, like it's normal to do revs on the, on the drivers and the controls around a given chipset. As the new chipset comes out. You just usually have more lead time, right Like once upon a time Intel pushed to these vendors sample quantities so they could build initial machine and actually rev it for a while before the mainline came in. It's just that they've been. Intel's been so far behind for so long those samples almost don't happen anymore. It's just like you're going to production, fix it and and then, of course, we have the internet now.

41:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So fixing in in production is less traumatic in theory there are kind of general problems with the x86 architecture or whatever right and and it's interesting that a lot of crap on top of the x86 architecture.

41:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

41:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I mean it's, yeah, you know, and intel's, but jealously guarded, uh, this instruction set. You know they. They had issues with, uh, nvidia, actually with amd and also now with qualcomm. Uh, you know, one of the big concerns when windows went to arm originally, and then when they with qualcomm for windows 10 was like, well, you're not, you're not emulating this right, because if you are, that's our intellectual property. You need to pay for that right and so it's not a virtual version of an x86 processor. They can't do that legally, it's you know, they have to do something else. So I just all I know is that it's interesting.

42:14
Hp I think it says a lot about the credibility of this company has two major examples I can think of in the past two, three years, two years where they've taken an x86 based system and said look the stuff microsoft is doing, the stuff we're getting from the hardware is not enough, so we need to do special work to make this better. Yeah, and one of them they actually worked with amd on the um, the snap, dragonfly pro I think, which I guess was only a year ago it feels long ago and they just undermined the you know, the power management system in windows because they had to right. And then they do the same thing here with this meteor lake pc and some other things based on sensors. The idea is, we don't want to hot bag this thing right, so we know, people going to close it, throw in a bag, go.

42:57
Yeah, it will detect that. It will shut all the way down. Well, shut down into hibernation and hopefully what happens is you leave it sitting on a desk with the lid open. It will see you coming with the presence, sensing uh, it will power. It will come up out of that sleep, deep sleep, and go back into a normal sleep. The screen will come on, windows will kick in and to you walking up to the computer and just it's ready and you just use it. You, the experience there is is good, right?

43:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, and you're just trying to get to a place that other vendors have been quite successful and where I close the machine, stick in the bag and it doesn't try to burn a hole through the flipping bag I I mentioned, I'm trying to figure out what the the time frame is for these things to go into deep, deep sleep, mostly with the qualcomm chips.

43:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But and I still haven't figured it out but yeah, um, like this particular laptop, I know, if I leave it closed overnight and I come on, there's a, there's a little bit of a boot, like you used to get with hibernation, so it's not full from dead boot, but it takes in total 10 seconds maybe or whatever it is. Um, but if it's within a couple of hours it just goes into that light sleep and so you open it up and it kind of comes on and you know it's still intel or, yeah, intel based. So it's like whatever is sometimes it's, sometimes it's great, sometimes it's okay. But, um, you know, I drove to Washington DC. It's normally a three and a half hour drive. I threw guys, I closed it, put it in the bag. I'm like you know, hopefully it's okay and uh, it took.

44:15
We that was, this was hurricane Debbie raining, awful, took four and a half hours checked in, got up to the room and I opened it up and it came on. It didn't go into the deep sleeve Like it was, fine, it was, it wasn't warm, it wasn't it was just being jostled being in the car, right, it had a good day.

44:36
Yeah, yeah, I mean I, yeah. So you know, sometimes it's great and sometimes you know, but that HP had to do that work, you know. So that's good for them, but it's uh, and and this is this is what I mean when I say like, the thing I'm worried about is not everyone does that as it is, and now that we're moving on to lunar lake and then beyond, these things is going to sit out there and whatever inefficiencies they have, whatever power management issues if it's a portable computer, whatever battery life problems it may have those, you know, depending on the company you bought it from, probably not going to be fixed. You know, that's my like.

45:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's my concern, and I think it's a reasonable concern, and any conversation going on, a discord about how much is windows, how much is intel, it's like. Listen, they both have the same problem, which is decades of bolt-ons of more, and more and more.

45:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, when you have a dog, long enough, you, you and the dog start to resemble each other. That's microsoft and intel, or windows and intel, right? Uh, it's hard to know where one begins and the other one ends, and you know they've both been um, you know, co-evolving right and windows has been optimized for the architecture, for good or bad, I mean, just it's the way it is right yeah, but they, you know, they've been playing this game with each other for a long time and both are reaping the consequences of and it's not like Intel hasn't tried to get away from x86, right, but every time they do it goes terribly.

45:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, itanium wasn't good.

45:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, I never wrote about this. There was a flurry of news over the past couple of days, so I'm kind of backlogged here but one of the little things that came out of Intel's financial filings probably in a 10Q or something, they gave up their investment in ARM, right, right. So it's interesting because I believe they have an agreement for well, what would they have an agreement for with ARM? They have an agreement with at least one ARM chip maker to do fab work for them someday in the future, maybe it's even Qualcomm, but they are an ARM licensee. But you know, it's like a Netflix subscription. I mean, it runs out at some point, right, yeah. So I mean I don't know what's going on there. It's almost like they've decided like look, we're going to do a hybrid architecture or multiple hybrid architectures that are influenced, inspired by, as we say, arm, but we're not going to do ARM. We'll see.

46:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wish them all the best of luck. The real question is if they started doing ARM, were they just becoming just another fabricator, just another fab, rather than?

47:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why did they invest in ARM? What was the? I don't even know I what?

47:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
was the was? I don't, yeah, I don't even know. I think it was. I don't remember, I just I I drew the headline aside so I could look at it later. I haven't looked at it, but it was some thing. Um seems like a minor story, yeah but I but I do think it's notable, right? I mean, it's not coincidental that well, maybe they just wanted to cash in. I actually that remind. That was the blurb. If they had just held on to it, they would have had another $40 million, or whatever it was Right.

47:28
But that's the case with any investment, I guess, or many investments, yeah, anyhow.

47:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's always good you sell the go up after you sell them, right, well done yeah.

47:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, intel sold the stock. Good, let's drive it up. Yeah, up it goes. So, um, so, google had a big event yesterday and I gotta say I kind of went into this. I wasn't super. Okay, that's what I wanted to ask you about, so I wasn't super. I mean, everything leaked. It's like okay, what, how exciting could this be? But honestly, for all their kind of post bing, slash, co-pilot missteps and they have been that kind of step on the rake company for the past year and a half, two years, whatever Um, I thought they, I thought this event was really great.

48:09
I thought they did a kind of a fun job of making, uh, ai seem a little bit real, like in the same way that Apple intelligence, even though it's so far out. They they show some kind of pragmatic stuff like here's what you can do with it and it, yeah, okay, cool, and uh, of course, their stuff is all coming out in the next, you know, three weeks, whatever it is, yeah, yeah. So I thought that was. I thought that went over. I thought that went over pretty well, but did you but that's what I wanted to ask did you buy a phone? We?

48:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
haven't bought it yet. No, but you know, talking to the boss, but we're both on sixes. I think she's got a oh yeah you do so we do, and mine definitely has taken enough rads now that it's getting weirder. Yeah, you know, yep Rad.

48:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't think I was going to take it up to the sun.

48:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I fly 400 plus hours a year.

48:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah.

48:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like stuff cooks on me all the time. That's really interesting. So the more you fly your phone like, is it my phone right? All your electronics?

49:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I lose sd cards regularly like you. Yeah, absolutely oh that's interesting. Some stuff's more fragile than others, but you literally fly too close to the sun. That's what I'm hearing yeah, no, I'm.

49:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm at the same line as uh airline pilots for the amount of flying that I do, where pilots are only alert a certain number of your hours a year. I think it's like 450, and I'm right in that number wow, yeah, that's interesting.

49:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't. I'm surprised you've held on to that for so long, um I didn't see anything that really impressed me, right, yeah? Okay, I mean, I think the design now.

49:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Generally I wait until they're done, like yeah, this phone's getting close to done this is a good time to get into it, because we're kind of late in this.

49:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know we're four years into tensor. Um, it's supposed to be kind of a minor hardware upgrade but of course, a lot more ram, this gen which you need for ai, um the new tensor I think I really like the decision, the design decisions, like, I don't like the 6.8, they're too damn big.

49:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, I like the 6.3, but I hate that they always cut features and they didn't this time.

49:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, they didn't, which, by the way, they haven't. They said it was the first time ever. That's not true. The very first pixel did this. It was big and small. Yeah, not pro and not pro I'm almost tempted by the fold.

50:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Honestly, yeah, I um, yeah, it's um yep I know, I know it's like the fold, and that surprised me, because marquez doesn't like folds.

50:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I like the little kind of passport form factor of the last one, but then again, now they've kind of cut the difference between them and the really tall samsung thing. So yeah, it feels like more of a phone when it's folded. I got the flip.

50:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of like the nice flip yeah, I can see, I can like.

50:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I thought my wife would want that because it's small, right? Yeah, she doesn't. Yeah, she's like. No, I want the big one. This is the.

50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the eight next to it. Yeah, yeah, I like it. It's fun, and the thing that google's doing, uh, samsung's doing and apple rumoredly is doing, is making these much thinner, yeah right, so that that was.

50:52
That's the problem with the fold is that it's a big yeah wedge in your pocket it looks like the nintendo ds or something, or whatever it does, right I just I like this because I could just put it in my I know I think it's cool and I like how they're using the outside displays in fun ways, um, useful ways, I guess.

51:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't know. Yeah, so I, I did order a um, a nine pro xl, which kind of matches in size to the eight pro yep, a little, a little bigger, but you know the basically. So, ram, whatever. The thing that's interesting is, if you do have a Pixel, I will say, before the end of the month is the time to do this, because they're giving bigger than normal trade-in values if you buy from Google. Yeah, and I got $700 for my phone, so you have this $1,100 phone. Yeah, the trade-ins are actually $700 trade-in right now. My phone is mint so I'm not worried about that.

51:46
But they give you a $200 Google store credit on a future purchase which you could use for a case, earbuds, whatever. Um, they give you a year of Gemini, whatever it's called, with two terabytes of Google, one that's 120, 200, whatever that is. And then I am a Google one customer now, so I get like 10 off the purchase, but I'm not saying it pays for itself. I'm not, you know, stupid, but it's. It's like it's not. They're not giving me money, but I I'm, you're not spending that much on a new phone, it's not for a brand new flaggeo phone that's incredible, so it kind of made it a no-brainer for me.

52:20
Of course I have a pixel problem, so I'm justifying things here, but I think that's exactly why they do that right.

52:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, samsung does the same thing.

52:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, they do very generous trade-ins and it keeps you in the in the system it sends you to be not richard. Apple doesn't get a new one every year instead of look at trading values, the apple stuff is like, oh, that's great. And then you look at samsung, like what did I buy? Like a plastic piece of junk. What is this thing? This?

52:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this flip cost me like a couple hundred bucks because I had the old one yeah, and that's in.

52:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And next year, when it comes time you're going to be like, of course, I'm going to get another samsung it's where I'm going to get the most value for this thing.

52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's smart, yeah, and I'm glad to do the same thing, because I bought this on google fi. Yeah, oh, so if I want to get a, pixel.

53:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you gotta be careful because also, it's like I found a wireless carrier I'd like to switch to. It's like hold on a second there. Yeah, that becomes a problem. Yeah, but it's easy with a phone to justify over two years or plus, whatever. Whatever you're doing, say, look what is this thing?

53:17
per month, 30 bucks, 40 bucks, I guess in the case of the fold, it could be 50 bucks. You know it gets up there, but this is a device we all use all day, every day it's. It's not hard to justify. I'm surprised you're not ordering it right now, richard, but if you were ordering it right now, which one do you think you would get?

53:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'd probably get the the small pro. Small pro, it's the form factor that I like, and yep uh, I suspect the boss would get the bigger one because she's the the photograph junkie and she'll want the telephoto and all that good stuff. So well, the small I think the small ones got it too. I think the small pros got it it has the same, the same camera.

53:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it should be good, yep, it's interesting I don't know if google's doing this, but what apple did with their intelligence is. They said it'll run on the 15 pro max but, not on 15. It'll run so uh I just google implied that this not only would run about this the new stuff, but it's going to be filtered down to the older phones, didn't they well?

54:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they've always done that with individual features, right. So one of the problems is, if you buy this phone now because you're like, oh, I can hear the three, like um, add me, and whatever those features are they're only on the nine series, whatever and then december comes, it's like oh, I bring it to eight, and then april, like we're bringing it seven, or you know what, or whatever.

54:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
However, it works right well, and the other thing and I mentioned this during our we covered the google event yesterday, jeff jarvis and I you can watch that on twittv slash nice, uh. What we mentioned is that, uh, it's never a good idea to buy a Pixel when it first comes out, because they almost immediately discount it. Oh, okay, I was going to say well, but the Unless you want the trade-in because I think the trade-ins go away.

54:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the trade-in and the special deals. Google Fi has their own things too. Between now, I think it's just the end of the month, the 28th or whatever the date is, it's know. If you're thinking about it, I would look at it.

55:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would just look at it Just to see two issues. One is I got an older phone. The second is I'm in a different country. Man, there's some complex.

55:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, fair enough.

55:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, yeah, I'm curious how that works out for you, but I well, I you know when you live in Canada and you live close to the mailbox. But right like google, fi is not available in canada. You can be sneaky with trying to do it through your mailbox and so forth, but they will abruptly cut you off if they figure out you're in canada and would you get connectivity?

55:32
I mean oh yeah, because you're running an international mode. But now, because that's why they don't like it, because canada will find google. There's also the cross-border taxation and you're bypassing. None of this is as simple as you think.

55:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so yeah, I haven't run into this problem in Mexico yet, but electronics are super, super expensive there, so I always fly with a bag. I don't bring clothes anymore, they're all there. I fly with speakers and laptops and electronics and stuff You've got to learn to just leave that stuff behind.

56:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I do that's. You know electronics and stuff. You get to learn to just leave that stuff behind. You know I do. That's what I'm doing. It's a one-way trip.

56:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're slowly equipping things.

56:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, pretty soon, like everything I own will be there and then I won't you know, I know I've gotten a lot of flack for trap back in the day when I often travel with two laptops and I'd write certain countries, I'd see they have two laptops. Like you're selling one of these. It's like look at it. I have owned it for a while. It is full of crumbs, like it's. It's my machine. I'm not.

56:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have a friend who ran into this the one time he visited us in mexico city, which amuses me to no end because this has never happened to me and I've flown there like 20 times. But I do dread that day and the only thing I can I I will be able to present the email from the company that said would you like to review this product? And say see, you know, I'm not, this is I'm, this is for work, you know, and we'll see how that goes down.

56:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if you don't hear from me for a couple of days, if you just have something for two weeks, it doesn't yeah, you gotta use it.

56:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I use it, for usually I go a month usually but you know they there's, the border guards are looking for people who are squirrely, right, and when you just get annoyed with them, like I've pulled that one when they were grinding me on a machine, it's like if you really want to take that machine, I need your info because I need to tell microsoft you took it, yeah right, like, and that changes their minds, like they're. Then it's like, and it's like, before you do that, maybe you should go get your supervisor because this is going to go badly for you. Does that work by?

57:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the way I just like. I bet it doesn't work as well in mexico but I can see that working in most places yeah, those guys uh, they're tough, they're no, they, they.

57:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's two things to understand about border guards. First, they wanted to be cops and they failed, so they're just not that bright. And the second that makes a mean. They have to follow a very specific set of rules, and if you know how to trigger those rules, you make their lives more and more difficult. Oh, you're suggesting they're not people. You're basically hacking them. Well, I've learned how to add paperwork to their day.

57:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is good.

57:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, this does not work on CPP. The other form of paperwork you could add to their day is to slip them a 20.

57:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Don't do that. That's really a problem. They're under cameras and I've seen it on their faces. When you say the wrong phrase, with it just like that's new paperwork, then they're. They're sad because they don't want to do paperwork right. No one does no and somebody's saying you're going to be put on a list. Listen, I'm on the list I've been a lot of lists. I'm pretty sure I've been secondaried more than you even want to know. Remember I ran a campaign building developer communities in the middle East, like I had all the stamps.

58:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they see that on your passport, those stamps A lot of time.

58:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I could show you the spreadsheets. I timed how long it took me to get out of the room.

58:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I went to Israel and I still worry about that, you know, like 20 years later.

58:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's fine, you know, you just learn to be patient. One thing I've learned is that they're not prepared for you to be bored. That's the one thing they can't cope with. It's like I am not frightened by you. I am not in a hurry. I have high status on the airline. They will hold the plane for me or get me another one. Whatever you want to do, let's do it. Well, I'm fine uh, I, I.

59:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't mean to say I eagerly await the day, but I know someday I am going to be pulled aside in Mexico city and I'm just curious how it's going to go. Like I said, friend, patience not a virtue. We'll see.

59:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah now and you know angry american is a pretty calm is a good trope.

59:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they'll probably recognize that yeah, I'm gonna be on tv. I'll be like the guy with my like. My shorts are gonna be around my ankles. I'm gonna be walking around raving like a lunatic and they're gonna be like please just leave.

59:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know I I kept. I can show you the spreadsheet I've kept when I've got pulled into secondary interrogation rooms because I've happened dozens of times and the fastest way out of that room was to doze, because some guy's trying to watch me to see if I'm sweating and I'm literally falling asleep. That gets old fast.

59:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I was pulled in with a woman one time in Denver and she freaked out in a way that I couldn't find a clean way to say this on a show like this. But it was unbelievable her response to these people and they just looked at me and were like all right you can go, and it was just her yeah, being a woman and freaking on them and I was like so is this the one is this, where you get sss and you get an extra search.

01:00:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what it was in my case, but it sounds like richard's like getting some sort of no it's different. Yeah, this was. He's like going to airplane jail. Yeah, no, I've just. You're thinking, think of the room you're thinking of right metal table bolted to the floor, chair bolted in front of it, light overhead, one-way mirror in front of you. Papers, please. I've been in dozens of them, mostly american ones why you?

01:00:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, that's the thing. I think, the way that the I always thought the because Because I used to go to Canada once a month, remember, for years. Yeah, the Canadians were tough but fair. But I am scared of the US Border Patrol. You should not be. I shouldn't say this out loud, you should not be Because they seem to have unlimited powers?

01:00:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They seem to, but the reality is you're a citizen that's unlimited power. They cannot deny you access. They can make it miserable but they cannot deny you access, okay.

01:01:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you bought a Pixel Pro, Paul Yep XL. You got the big one. Richard and his wife are thinking about the little.

01:01:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Pixel 9. To be clear, if it was up to me, I'd already have one ordered, but there's some negotiating that needs to happen.

01:01:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually fight my wife. She wants me to buy everything.

01:01:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh no, your wife does yeah, because she says it's your job.

01:01:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I say I don't want it, though I don't.

01:01:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Interesting. I don't want it. I usually go into like a lengthy I almost make a PowerPoint presentation to justify my purchases and she's like what are you doing? I don't care, you can share that you know what you're doing.

01:01:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just do it. It's your job, Paul.

01:01:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's your job.

01:01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard.

01:01:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, all right, all right. I am surprised at how much hoops Apple is taking to deliver AI, like we're used to apple saying, hey, we're doing this here, it is, it's done. They're afraid another. I think they're having problems. I think they overcommitted. They knew they had to do that. They had this. There's so much drama around this company.

01:02:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's weird I also think I was talking to mike uh before one of the shows, when he was uh doing it and and he was saying he's like, oh, you guys, you guys have all this like actual news and everything you know it's, or like you know you feel like there is a news you kind of fill the time with like how-to stuff whatever and he's like, and I'm like what are you talking about?

01:02:28
you have like a new rumor every 10 seconds. You spend one year with dealing with rumors about the next release and then, three months before that happens, we're talking about the one after that.

01:02:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So somebody in one of our chats, I think on youtube, a few minutes ago said oh my gosh, mark german just dropped a bomb. And I'm going oh crap, does this mean I have to go look and see what the latest apple rumor is? And you want to know what the rumor was. Apple's gonna release a new uh home pod with a robotic arm.

01:03:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, sure it's gonna come out right after the car yeah, with a robot.

01:03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you? What your drink, sir? But it's attached to the counter, maybe it's.

01:03:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, uh, they have a bunch of those old imax left over and they need something to do with the reticulating arm so, as you read on, the robotic arm is there to turn the screen.

01:03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's like what do you need? A amazon has one the screen probably follows you around the room.

01:03:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sure part of the deal is it does a presence sensing thing right? You think it moves around the room. No, no, I think it turns toward you. But the alexa does that without an arm, it just, it follows you but apple doesn't make crap like alexa, but it's good I like it's actually my favorite charge like Alexa, but it's good.

01:03:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's actually my favorite.

01:03:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can't charge 300, 500 bucks, whatever it's going to be.

01:03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple's going to charge 1,000.

01:03:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
1,000.

01:03:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, fair enough.

01:03:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like slap an iPod mini on a HomePod, let's go. It's not rocket science. What's so difficult about? This they have 1,000 people working on it. Paul. It would be a million people would buy that. They'd buy one for their kitchen, one for their bedroom, one for the bathroom you kidding me?

01:04:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it'll be as successful as apple tv you know, yeah, I'll buy it too.

01:04:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who cares like I? They'll sell millions of them. Yep, I don't know what they're doing. I don't know. Okay, I just can't wait for the iphone era. That's what I'm holding out for now.

01:04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's supposedly next year.

01:04:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this slim, extra slim, We'll see, yeah, sure, that sounds like a terrific Apple product. It lines right up.

01:04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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01:07:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so I slide myself out so that you guys can I just want to say the dozing, why the dozing thing works.

01:07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bad guys aren't bored right in the oh yeah, you're not nervous, those guys jobs is is looking for bad guys.

01:07:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're not a bad guy yeah, don't.

01:07:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is just never let them see you sweat. That's the rule, yeah, or shift uncomfortably as if you might have something that's just my wallet.

01:07:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Continue on, gentlemen, please um, this doesn't bear too much discussion, but the uk cma is investigating amazon's partnership with anthropic for anti-competitive reasons, similar to, you know, microsoft's open ai, you know whatever. I guess they're the burger king to microsoft's mcdonald's in a situation I don't know yeah.

01:08:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Are they doing it because they're actually concerned or because they want to see it seem as being fair? I don't even know.

01:08:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just going to say yep, Because it's hard to say.

01:08:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. An investigation doesn't mean any culpability. It's just like you should scrutinize these things.

01:08:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. I mean Microsoft. Openai is concerning because of what the companies are.

01:08:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The relationship is very deep. The control level.

01:08:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The relationship is really screwy. Yep Anthropic, I think most people would be like who, yeah, Okay. And then, when apprised of who they are, they'd be like why you know? So I don't know, I guess look, it's responsible.

01:09:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You should look at all these things, I guess. But it doesn't. This doesn't say you only got. You got a limited number of resources.

01:09:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are some very obvious things you should be looking at. I don't know this is one of them. Yep, I agree, but you know it's a little island. They got to do something, I don't know, uh yeah, I just don't know.

01:09:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The laughing stock thing bothers them maybe, I don't know, man yeah, I could see with it.

01:09:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let's see if I can confuse everybody. This year, microsoft has been beta testing something called Visual Studio 2022 17.11. This is the version of Visual Studio I've been using with NET 9 Preview over the first six preview releases to do my app work, and over a 24-hour period, microsoft the developer parts of the company announced a bunch of stuff and one of them was that 17.11 is now generally available. So if you're on the stable channel in Visual Studio, you'll get that upgrade, and the next day they announced that 17.12 is going into first preview. So now, and if you want to develop for NET 9 and preview, you should move on to that. They didn't say this explicitly, but my understanding is that, based on the language, is this will probably ship day and date, or very soon or adjacent to NET 9, which we know is coming in November?

01:10:17
Yep, every year, yeah, whether you want it or not, yep, right, every year. Yeah, um, wanted or not? Yep. And then I I was literally up until two o'clock in the morning last night working on some developer stuff and I randomly said I wonder it's been. It seems like it's been a while since there's been anet nine preview. I wonder if there was one recently, and there was one within the like six hours before I checked. Wow, spooky, yeah, which is really weird, right? So, um, I keep looking for another wpf update of some kind and there is nothing. So now preview five, six and now seven have all arrived, with whatever not for me, so I keep looking.

01:10:56
Nothing, uh, but that's out. If you are a developer, are interested in dot net nine, there is a seventh preview out now which you can get. And if you are a developer, are interested in dotnet 9, there is a seventh preview out now which you can get. And if you're using visual studio, which you almost certainly are, yeah, we'll probably go to release.

01:11:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
we'll probably get a release candidate in september and an rc2 in october, if they think they need one, and then you'll go final. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's probably the last preview version before the RC starts. Oh, interesting, okay, yep, and that usually means new feature stop.

01:11:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean it must be on a three-week something based on timing I think the first preview is probably February to kind of do the yeah. Well, actually that could be four weeks, I don't know what it is.

01:11:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's somewhere in that neighborhood and they speed up in the fall. I just want more clarity than I'm getting there.

01:11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that went better than I thought it was going to.

01:11:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, that's true. Wpf is not bound to NET 9, right, it's WPF's own stack. It's part of the WinSD case.

01:11:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, right, where are we? Oh, yes, some antitrust stuff, stuff. Yeah, so the biggest news this past week most certainly was that the us government, rather than a us court, federal court has found google guilty of being an illegal monopoly, and an illegal monopoly means you have a monopoly, so they've stated that and you are abusing it, either to maintain it or to get it. In this case, to maintain it and, uh, one of the things they've done wrong which we've discussed, is they pay apple 20 something billion dollars a year, to be exclusive. Uh, defaults on the iphone.

01:12:32
Yeah, turns out that's illegal who knew?

01:12:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is it it's not like it's been a secret, it's not a bribe, well, it's sort of a bribe.

01:12:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, uh, you know, um, yeah, so the the ruling is incredible. I think it's 186 pages long. I still haven't gotten through all of it. It's, it's very well done, well written, etc. Um, okay, I mean, I don't.

01:12:59
I don't think many people would debate whether google has a monopoly in search, and you know, of course, the question then turns to well, okay, so what are we going to do to fix this?

01:13:07
And that was not addressed the day of the ruling.

01:13:10
But there is going to be a hearing in early September where the two sides are going to come in front of the judge and kind of hash out a schedule.

01:13:18
But the next step is that the government will make a proposal for its remedy or remedies that they would like to see, and one of those one of them that's on the table, by the way is breaking up the company, which isn't as far-fetched as everyone seems to have a real knee-jerk reaction to that for obvious reasons. But that doesn't mean what I think a lot of people think. It means it's more of a divestiture of assets that they're abusing to maintain the search monopoly. So in the case of search, like the component pieces of the company that would prop this thing up. Obviously, the advertising business would be the big one, but also Chrome, which was created for this specific purpose, and even perhaps android, right um, so some combination of those maybe often likened to what uh the doj was thinking of doing to microsoft and ended up not doing well, I mean so, yeah, so ordered microsoft to break up into an operating system company and everything else.

01:14:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Company like that's.

01:14:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think the question is what they didn't do it well because they negotiated a consent decree right, but it was because of some um unethical behavior on the part of the judge. Plea bargained it out. Well, no, but that came later, like that came a couple of years later, I mean. So they eventually did settle, but the thing you got to remember, a couple things happened here that are big one was the judge was found to have behaved improperly. He was taken off the case. That didn't vacate his uh findings of fact, by the way, nor did it technically eradicate his uh order for microsoft to be broken up.

01:14:47
But it's funny, I don't remember this. What did he do wrong? He talked to uh the press during the proceedings and behind closed doors that didn't admit, you know, didn't disclose that, which you were not supposed to do anyway, but uh, and was very um negative about my very opinionated about microsoft. Yeah, interesting, um, so there was a bias there that they it was. This is apparently not allowed by. There's some judicial uh conduct makes sense, rule of law, whatever it is, yeah, um you can.

01:15:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can give apple 20 billion dollars, but you can't talk to the press. That's the key. Yeah, right, right, but you can't talk to the press.

01:15:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the key. Yeah Right, I mean Apple doesn't talk to the press either, so I don't see what the problem is. I'm being facetious, but the other things that happened was there was an election, so a Democrat went out, republican came in.

01:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That Department of Justice was not as inclined to go after this company so I didn't realize it was that close to having microsoft break up it would be a good thing for microsoft that didn't go away because of the judge like it went away because of some other things, like I said, so 9-11 happened right.

01:15:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So after 9-11, gonna think the federal government had some bigger priorities. You know they looked at microsoft in that perspective. They were like you know what.

01:15:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's just let's uh figure this out but they also realized that and this is the big problem with all of these kinds of actions they work so slowly through the courts that it and and it didn't survive the administration that had brought the you got to remember that.

01:16:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, the Clinton administration tried twice to go after him uh, after Microsoft, him uh with the FTC first, and then in the early nineties or early in the nineties, and then again with the DOJ DOJ court case was incredibly successful. The thing is like a lot of people look back on that and they think, well, microsoft won. I mean they got everything knocked out. It's like hold on a second. None of the findings of fact were vacated. Those are legal facts. So the Microsoft, the consent decree actually required Microsoft to undergo an incredible series of behavioral changes.

01:16:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They had an ombudsman inside Microsoft reviewing everything they did right For a decade and also just changed the way they create products too.

01:16:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, the ability to bundle and keep third parties out and all this, so there was actually a lot to it. I mean it sounds. Do you think there's a?

01:16:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
chance in hell that Google would be broken up.

01:17:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I do, actually, actually, I really do. Yep, wow, because we could look at at&t as the obvious example of something like this happening, where it's hard to express to people like people have a hard time understanding this. They look at google. They're like wow, but the search engine is so great. But the thing you don't understand, the thing that it's hard to understand this is the innovation that doesn't occur because there's one company has a stranglehold and they're concerned for their business, not for these other awesome things that could happen. So I think it's very clear that Google is.

01:17:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For instance, google's ownership of YouTube completely pollutes their search. The fact that Google is selling and buying advertising at the same time is clearly a conflict of interest and, honestly, I would love to see a Google search that was untainted by advertising interests, that was untainted by interest in promoting their own services. It would be a much better search, but would it be a?

01:18:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
viable company Right.

01:18:02
So, it's going to be interesting to see where the DOJ lands. They're talking to Google's competitors and partners. They're talking to industry experts. They're trying to like what does this look like? How does this make sense? So one of the things that could come out yeah, you could open up no-transcript, and you know we'll see. The goal here is to allow that innovation to happen, to allow competition to happen and to allow the natural byproducts of those things which are better and less expensive products and services, right? So, uh, you know we'll, we'll see this. By the way, this doesn't always work. It's not like it's like a magic wand and everything's fine but you were talking about.

01:18:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The AT&T broke up, but they gradually rolled back up again over 20 years.

01:18:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, that was a geographical breakup? Yeah, nothing is yeah, but because that happened in the you know, like that did. Honestly, it led to the internet as we now know it in many ways too. I mean it's you know you introduce competition, the prices go down. It did benefit consumers. Um, you know, we'll see.

01:19:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I I'm, I'm fascinated to see what comes out of this. I'm interested in what their model looks like. Like. Obviously it would be a business unit carve-up, but when you argue that the proof of the monopolistic behavior was paying to be exclusive on search.

01:19:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that was a proof, Right, right, I mean, there's all this stuff. I mean there's so much to this. That's the thing. It is a very lengthy ruling. The parallel? Well, the parallel. One of the kind of general parallels between Apple and Google today and Google and Microsoft in the past is that when you have a monopoly, it allows you to behave like there are no competitors, because there aren't, right that matter. In other words, the introduction of a new competitor or the introduction of new features from an existing competitor do not change what you do in the slightest. Right, you have a monopoly. You know, that's one of the ways, because you just don't have to react to normal business activities. Right, because you don't have a normal business, you have a monopoly.

01:20:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The question here is who is the Brad Smith in this equation? When does a grown-up show up? Oh, let me tell you something they don't have a Brad Smith Because they've done a terrible job.

01:20:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, look, they're not as belligerent as Apple, but are as belligerent as, say, microsoft was back in the day pre-Brad Smith Microsoft. Their current guy is Kent Walker. He is, you know, fight it till the death kind of a watch what they've done with the whole news payment thing around the world.

01:20:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, okay, belligerence has worked for them.

01:20:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's a belligerence as a service. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's one of the tears of Gemini. It's belligerence, gemini, belligerence. So it's, I don't know, I will see. I, you know. So one of the things we're about to talk about is Google, or Apple rather has been incredibly malicious in their so-called compliance with the DMA right. They've gone kicking and screaming into this in a way that is almost an art form. It's incredible, right. And that said, every once in a while there's like a little chip in that armor, you know, and like this just today, the whole Epic battle yeah it's a part of that.

01:21:24
Epic is a beautiful example. Spotify those guys are probably on equal footing epic and spotify just the way apple's trampling all over them. Um, apple makes changes to their app store rules to adhere to the dma, but they're just just as in violation of the DMA as their old rules. You know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So they just in the past 24 hours have announced that Spotify can communicate with their own customers and their own app. Thank you, you know five years of you, mr. Yeah Well, spotify, you know I don't know how long they were talking to Apple behind the scenes, but five years ago launched this complaint with the EU. Like what's going on here? We just want to point them to a sale or something Like, why can't we talk to our own customers? That doesn't make any sense. And now they're just doing it.

01:22:11
But the list of things that has happened since then is incredible and includes the EU creating the DMA because of this kind of behavior. It's like several EU investigations, the creation of two sets of antitrust laws. What's the other one called the DSA? I don't deal with the other one too much, but the DMA as well. Two rounds of Apple complying, but not really just kidding Two rounds of Apple complying but not really just kidding rejecting Spotify's app redesign that included the feature that the EU told Apple they had to allow $2 billion in fines. And now we wake up on a sunny day in August, five years later, and they're like eh, go ahead, yeah fine.

01:23:00
What the heck is going on. It's crazy, right? The other one this one isn't as long-lived, and there isn't like a single big market player that kind of stands there like Epic or Spotify, but three-ish years ago, the EU went to Apple with a complaint and said we've investigated you for not allowing competing wallets to use the NFC hardware in the iPhone. Only Apple's wallet can use it, and that's been a couple of years go by. There were some indications late last year that maybe Apple's going to make some concessions, and then one day in July about a month ago the EU commission dropped its investigation after Apple agreed to open up NFC to third-party developers, and today they announced that that will be coming out in iOS 18.1, so sometime between September and the end of the year, so we have kind of a rough timeframe.

01:23:53
The interesting thing with this one, though, is that, unlike most of its other pushback concessions, this one's going to be worldwide, right. So the Spotify concession, where they can actually talk to their own customers and say, hey, we're having a sale, or click here to go to our website, you don't have to pay Apple, that's only in the EU. That's one of the little belligerent things that Apple's doing, like, even when they're forced to adhere to this, they're like, well, we'll just do it in the EU. Yeah, they're like, well, we'll just do it in the? U. You know? Yeah, that's, they're the ones with the way. Right, this is like windows n.

01:24:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so, but their nfc change is coming worldwide. So, uh, not saying it's perfect, I don't know how you restrict it, man, I don't think they're doing it willingly. It's like how would you?

01:24:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
restrict that dude. Listen some of the changes they're making in the dma. Some of the things that have come up are I am a developer. I work for a multinational company. We sell our product in the EU, but also in the United States and elsewhere. I live in Montana or wherever New York, it doesn't matter. Oh well, you can't work on that software then because you have to be in the EU. Right, I mean it's like guys, microsoft is not perfect. I mean it's like guys Microsoft is not perfect. In fact, I think I built a career to try to prove that to people, but they typically not always and this is maybe a Brad Smith thing when they are forced to do something like the GDPR is a great example Data sovereignty stuff are like look, it doesn't make sense for us to have different rules for every country or every region, something like the GDPR. You know what? We're just going to adhere to that everywhere. It's just easier to do that.

01:25:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's easier for us it's less money. No, no, it absolutely is. And so when you range it, when you limit it like that, it's because you want to punish the customer. So hopefully they'll speak to their government right and the Windows N thing.

01:25:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I think this Teams thing sort of falls into the same ballpark. It's like all right, you're protecting your citizens, let's see how much your citizens like your protection. Yeah, and if I'm not mistaken maybe I am mistaken when they pulled teams out of, uh, microsoft 365. That was worldwide too, wasn't it? I think it was no. No, that was just to you, yeah okay, in that case you have an eu tenant.

01:25:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right like there's a clear, if there's an eu tenant, this is the rule.

01:26:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hilarious, yeah. So yeah, they're all terrible. I think I've made that point right. These companies are all terrible. There's no good one. There's no like oh, surprise, actually you know, it's like oh the Farsight?

01:26:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Were you looking for the kinder?

01:26:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
gentler, tech giant, I'm sorry, like the South, you, they're down in hell. And the guy's like I have a question which religion was right? And he's like, oh, that was Mormon. They're all like, damn it. You know like the old shows were on, you know it's like there's no good big tech company, right, they're all terrible. That's the power thing we talked about.

01:26:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean with great power comes great abuse. I found the announcement from Microsoft. It's only for regions in the EEA the ea that that, and switzerland that they are pulling teams. You can have a separate team's offering. They started it on april 1st 2024 because april fool's day is a good day to do that sort of thing yeah yeah.

01:26:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't know, I, I geez, this is just everything. Everything is terrible, I think, is the theme and uh, whatever. But we, you know, with apple, uh, all you can hope for these little minor half step forward victories and uh, we got two of them today, which is kind of kind of as kind of a special day. Um, on that side and that note or whatever, I mean, this is still violating the you know dma to an egregious way, which is would be comical if it wasn't so terrible.

01:27:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, um, there you go all right, let's take a teensy weensy and, uh, when we come back, it's xbox time for all. Our show today, brought to you by lookout. Not a big tech company, just a good tech company company. Every company today, big or small, is a data company, right, and that means every company's at risk because where's your data live? All over the place. Cyber threats, breaches, leaks these are the new norm, and cyber criminals grow more sophisticated by the minute.

01:27:57
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01:29:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's time to talk xbox yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This this could have been a tip. I don't know when this ends, maybe someone out there does, but quakecon was last year, was in person again, so people carting their PCs around, hooking up to Ethernet cables and deathmatches.

01:29:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That sounds like fun.

01:29:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That sounds awesome. So Quake is obviously a new software game. It's software is owned by Bethesda and Bethesda is owned by who? Everybody Right, microsoft, zenimax, which then owns Zenimax, which is owned by yes, so there's a big sale. As we speak right now, that sale is still going on. It's everywhere you can buy their games. It's not every single one of the games, so it's mostly games, a lot of the games. So if you're on Steam or Epic Xbox, wherever like these, these things, you should go. Look, this is worth looking at. This is the doom games, the quake games, the Wolfenstein games, a bunch of stuff. Fallout yeah, there's a fallout. Well, was there a fallout? I'm not sure if fall is on sale, but there was a fallout announcement. Fallout 76 is getting a new update soon.

01:30:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a bunch of announcements around stuff. The saddest version of Fallout.

01:30:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, maybe it needs the most love. I don't know it definitely needs something.

01:30:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think finishing writing it would have been good.

01:30:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, one of the things it's not like a George RR Martin type problem, but I hear you. So one of the things they did which is kind of interesting. Going back to the original Doom, so OG Doom and Doom 2 from 93, 94, if I'm not mistaken uh, have been available in a million different ways. They've been remastered, they've been, you know, upgraded with faster speeds and resolutions and all that kind of stuff, and so they're actually packaging those things together now, uh, as a single game.

01:30:53
It has a bunch of the uh add-on episodes that have come out over the years, like master levels for doom 2, that tnt, that TNT, Evil-lution, which I love, plutoni Experiment, no Rest for the Living, and then Sigil, which is the add-on that John Romero created a couple of years ago. That one's actually pretty new. There's a whole new episode called Legacy of Rust, which was made by former people from it, together as a team, optimized renderer, 120 hertz, 120 hertz, 4k, new accessibility options, which, by the way, are awesome. Somehow the game still looks like the game, right, I mean, it's the way it is, but um, new soundtrack by the original guy, um which sounds awesome.

01:31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love this cartridge for the super nintendo. There's a super nintendo cartridge.

01:31:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's hyster the thing is like if you ever bought OG, doom, like almost anywhere like Xbox, steam, gog, epic, wherever it was, wherever you might have gotten it, you're actually just going to get this. So if you bought Doom or Doom 2, the OG version, you're going to just get this new update. So if you didn't, you can get it for 10 bucks. I just you know I've been talking about like gaming or just laptops for games. I'll tell you you couldn't find a laptop that couldn't play this game like. I downloaded it that hp was talking about earlier, kind of got back to work. I went to check on it. It was already done. I'm like what? This is already installed, like it was just like it's like boom, boom, boom. Right, it's awesome. Yeah, it's like the size of it. This is an exaggeration. It's like an mp3 file. Like it's hilarious how small this thing is, but there's a lot of game there like it's this. It really does hold up. It very clever.

01:32:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The graphics aren't there you know, that's not why you're 30 years old. It's, it's.

01:32:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is about the nostalgia yeah, it's, but it's still fun.

01:32:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's still fun like it's actually still, you're at the real point, which is. It's one of the reasons we're so in those nostalgic games is that these realism games became less fun because all the energy was put into the realism yeah, that's, yeah, that's a good point.

01:32:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, yeah, you still, you want to have a good like a lot of the early atari, activision and television, whatever games I mean would look. I mean they're pathetic looking today, but a lot of them are actually very good games and the gameplay is one of those things that sometimes does get lost in the mix when you can make it look hyper realistic richard you said is it fallout 4?

01:33:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's, it's your favorite? Uh, fallout um because?

01:33:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's on sale like good old games for 16 bucks yeah, so this will be the case like virtually everywhere, right, and that's the game you want to play.

01:33:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you love the movie and you never played the game like or the series play for I'm gonna buy it right now.

01:33:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's awesome.

01:33:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Three is also excellent as well, but yeah, three and four are both great nice uh, a new vegas cited, yeah, so the original. Three is very much, can I play it dc.

01:33:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, here's a question on my new qualcomm snapdragon.

01:33:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now that is a great question. That's something I'm definitely going to be, you know what?

01:33:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
okay, I'm embarrassed, I didn't try this. I bet, og doom runs fine. I don't. I can't say follow it, but I bet four is pretty old.

01:33:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it would depend on the emulator being oh, now I want to do that. It only takes 10 seconds to install, it's gonna be quick yeah, and that's really tempting.

01:33:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and kevin talking about you know if you're gonna play new, get the patches, like definitely with all of those Fallout games three New. Vegas four go check out the community and look for the optimal configurations. People have improved graphics. There's an incredible community around those games.

01:34:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're really fun. One of the big attractions a little bit well, wolfenstein 2, actually, but the two original Doom games and Quake, obviously, and Quake World and all that stuff was that you know, the guys from it were big into opening these engines up and letting people make games right. And so back in the Doom world we had like WAD files, you know, and then they improved but also made more complex that system in quake. But, um, when you move forward into modern times with these more complicated games that are running on like in walled gardens of their own, you don't really have this kind of mod capability. So bethesda, or id, which is owned by bethesda, announced the release of something called I think it's id studio or id.

01:34:55
I think this is id studio which is going to allow modders to create um levels for doom eternal, which is one of the modern games, using their engine and the tools that they use to create the game. And right now, to get into this you have to opt into a PC mod preview which is available on Steam and the Microsoft Store, so you can actually go and browse and play available mods, meaning third-party levels, multiplayer, multiplayer levels in doom eternal. So this is starting. You know this is. You know, we're kind of going back to our roots here a little bit, which I think is really cool, so kind of a neat um, neat improvement.

01:35:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So so you? What you're recommending, though, is uh, do the third party fan mods, as opposed to yeah, I what I'm saying.

01:35:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not going to demand any given thing. I'm saying it is in your best interest to spend a little time in the community. Yeah, you'll see people showing their optimal configuration of the game and so forth and just get a sense for what is possible in that game. Yeah, it's really extraordinary and a ton of fun nice, very nice.

01:36:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, sorry, we didn't mean to.

01:36:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
However, you game. Uh, look at the store and see, look at for the bethesda stuff, there's a lot of stuff on sale. This is like you just showed, like that follow-up game um, some really good prices up, nice, nice um let's see so.

01:36:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, wait a minute. What's this compact mode for game bar?

01:36:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah. So if the xbox app on windows started off as kind of a kind of a joke, like just a front end for like games, like yet another way to like play you know, launch games but it's now the front end for all of the xbox game pass stuff on pc, which is great. Um, it also, and and the game bar, which is actually what used to be called the xbox game bar, is another feature of windows 11 and I think 10, but 11, let's say, for now that is an overlay that appears on top of whatever you're doing. So you, it's, you can hit the controller white button and bring this thing up. It's got widgets and different windows and etc. It's the way you can do things like uh, you know, play, play Spotify music while you're playing a game, or take screenshots and make recordings and manage those things. It's just kind of a cool little extensible interface, right. So now they call that the game bar. They have opened it up so that when you have third party launchers like steam and Gog and some others not Epic, I don't think, but a bunch of others they can appear in there as well. It's not just Xbox which that's the name change. Yeah, ea Play and Riot Games are up in there, so it's just for all games Like. In other words, this is one like a nice overlay. You can get like the frames per second and see how your GPU is doing all that stuff right. So it's kind of a cool thing.

01:37:35
But starting I think it was late last year, they released a compact mode for the Xbox app and the theory here is that this might become the interface, the front end for gaming on Windows handhelds in the future, because the compact mode makes sense on those small devices right which are essentially a screen with a built-in controller right and a built-in computer obviously. But you know it works well with the controller, which the Xbox app does not, and it works well in these small screen devices, which the Xbox app did not, but now it does. So now on the Xbox Insider program, they're testing a compact mode for Game Bar as well and, if I understand it, this is just based on shots. I don't have this. I believe what it is is you still have that one window for the main interface which is like a toolbar, and then I believe there's only a single floating window, whereas on the PC typically you have like a multiple windows, one for every widget and then you can tab between them using the bumper buttons, right? So it's a way to bring that interface down to these smaller screen devices.

01:38:37
So I would imagine this is probably going to ship in the October release of 24 H2, based on the timing right. This will become a feature of Windows 11 sometime in the near future. So they're they're, they're doing. This work, you know, kind of begs the question like is Microsoft working on a handheld gaming thing?

01:38:52
they're not talking about, like, maybe this is interesting. You know how we get there, right? Yeah, cause you'd need a compact mode for a smaller screen. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I mean it's that seems like a good idea. Yeah, I think simpler is always better. I like to. I mean, I know this makes me part of the minority on the in the pc space, but, um, because of my 20 years, whatever playing on consoles like, I still typically want to play games with a controller, and so anything that helps you navigate these interfaces without having to go back to the keyboard or whatever is, to me, makes sense okay, so I am a terrible pilot, so I'm gonna like this then well, assuming you could land the plane.

01:39:32
See, this is the trick. This, oh, you have to get there.

01:39:34
Taking off is not a problem, landing the plane is difficult unless you're trying to crash into the eiffel tower or something like, but which which I've done by mistake about 100 times. But apparently so there's a new version of Flight Simulator coming. I sort of I don't know, maybe this was naive on my part, but for some reason I sort of thought Microsoft Flight Simulator would just continue and be improved, but now that's like the 2020 version. So there's going to be a Flight Simulator 2024 later this year. That's upgraded in various ways, but one of the features they're going to have is the ability to get out of the plane and, I guess, take advantage of the reason a lot of people play this game, which isn't necessarily to fly a plane, but it's to enjoy the scenery, because one of the things they've been doing to fly a plane, but it's to enjoy the scenery, because one of the things they've been doing, yeah, they've been bulking out their collection of really high-resolution assets for different places like Paris or parts of Europe.

01:40:29
I'd say everywhere there are famous sites and things. They've done a really good job with that. They've done a phenomenal job, yeah, yeah, it's crazy, so you could be flying. It's like sunset, it's a mountain. You could like land on the mountain, walk out, go, sit on the edge of the mountain, enjoy the sunset, then get back in the plane and keep going, or whatever I mean the problem with getting out of the plane thing is that whole landing part.

01:40:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like you should be able to get out of the plane, right?

01:40:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It would be useful after that to have a parachute.

01:40:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, if they gave me a parachute, I'd be up for for it yeah, knowing microsoft they, that's probably how it's. I can't imagine it's like now you got to do a pinpoint landing. It's kind of a short thing because it's a mountain you know, like you know I I don't think they're gonna do that to people, but it would be funny if they did. Yeah I was just trying to enjoy the sunset, yeah no, I like that scene jump.

01:41:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You just hop out of the plane and yeah now I'm gonna get to hang out there.

01:41:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's kind of goofy, but it begs the question, like you know, what about train simulator? We're gonna have like a? Oh you know, enjoy the view, for you know, I don't know, I will see, but yeah, I think it's kind of I don't know.

01:41:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting, somebody, somebody wants them to merge flight sim with forza, with this jump over the train, yeah or the plane or jump under the planet.

01:41:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I jump out of my, my piper cub and I hop into a bugatti chiron and that's right right it's like yep, it's like that um olympic event where you like ski for a while, then shoot. Yeah, then ski for a while and shoot like this, yeah or like any uh, fast and furious movie, frank.

01:41:57
There you go. Um, yeah, that's interesting and this isn't really gaming related, I just almost don't want to even talk about it. But there is a rumor, and unfortunately it's from Zach, so I kind of trust the guy. I do trust the guy, so I'm kind of worried they might actually be doing this, but despite the fact that Microsoft canned Windows Mixed Reality as a platform, they have supposedly ordered the parts they need for hundreds of thousands of micro OLED, oled, oled, oled. Sorry, there you go Displays you have to say it that way, you know, like in English, to use for next generation mixed reality devices. Like guys, seriously seriously.

01:42:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do you think it's, do you think it's HoloLens three parts or do you think it's something else?

01:42:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And arguably HoloLens four and arguably the rumor is that it's for a new kind of mixed reality headset. Um, that's going to be consumer related, so games, movies and metaverse stuff, right so a vision pro for a thousand dollars or something yeah, I, I, jeez, I listen I at some point, I think, for microsoft, you got to just play to your strengths and um stay in the Stay in the enterprise.

01:43:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what you do. Just don't. Well, and by all accounts, there was a HoloLens 3 in final prototype before they canned it because it wasn't good enough. And the team's not gone. They're still maintaining the several hundred thousand units that are out there, but they're basically saying we're waiting on hardware to make the next one.

01:43:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's saying we're waiting on hardware to make the next one. And separately from this, microsoft has partnered with Meta with the Quest products to do kind of Microsoft 365 in this environment. Meta has since gotten out of their own productivity services and apps, so it's kind of wide open for Microsoft. They can see how well that's doing and that's kind of the volume player in this market. It's not doing great. I can't imagine why they would, you know, do this. I mean it's not going to be like, uh, windows, uwp apps or anything like that. I mean we're not doing this anymore.

01:43:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and therein lies the real question all along, which is can you introduce a new platform where you don't support the information worker first? You know, I just need I was gonna say I mean I, it was the blackberry leads to the iphone right, like you need we that that smartphone platform only worked with because the enterprise was there first. I mean, that's the presumption.

01:44:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know, that's actually true, but even if you just restrict the conversation to microsoft, specifically xbox, end of story. You know, know what I mean. There's no other version of like. You know how we're still all using Encarta. You know, remember the like. You know the Mungo Park contents I see is due with Amazon. Nobody, nobody remembers Like. This stuff is all come and gone. I, windows Phone, launched primarily as a consumer device at the very beginning. Big mistake, I just don't. I don't think this is their wheelhouse. I don't know what they're.

01:44:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, this would not be the company I'd pick for this, so like I hope there's an enterprise play there or maybe that it's not what we think it is.

01:44:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe they're working with meta on this, maybe it's something. I don't know I, I, we don't, I don't know I, I just this seems like a team's branded headset. All I want is a new app platform for Windows. We could just get that going. We can talk. I mean, like guys, enough, like just stop.

01:45:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I don't know. It's good to try things.

01:45:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are not going to stop the show, but we are going to pause so that we can get ready for the back of the book coming up next. On this fine Wednesday afternoon, morning, night, whatever it is for you, paul Theriot, richard Campbell, you're watching Windows Weekly and I think let me just check. Yes, ooh, a nice beverage coming up, as well as the back of the bottle. But first a word from our sponsor, Cachefly. For over 20 years, I mean, Cachefly has held the track record for high performance, ultra reliable content delivery. For two decades they serve over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries, including us. We've been a Cachefly customer for 15 of those 20 years. We've been using Cachefly for a long time. What do we love about Cachefly? Their lag-free video loading, their hyper-fast downloads, their friction-free site interactions. You know what I really love that I never have to worry about you getting our shows because I know you're getting them from Cachefly, and it's ultra reliable. Cachefly is the only CDN built for throughput. Let me give you as an example there ultra low latency video streaming, concurrent users 1 million with less than one second latency. That's unbelievable. If you have a game, you'll love lightning fast gaming with Cachefly. Downloads are faster, there's zero lag, zero glitches, zero outages. Cachefly is super reliable. If you have a site with images, you'll love mobile content optimization from Cachefly. It offers automatic and simple image optimization so your site loads faster on any device.

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01:47:45
Cachefly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. It allows you to shield your site content in their cloud, which means you have a 100% cash hit ratio. No cash misses. That's what we've been doing for a long time. I think we were an early user of this, and with Cachefly elite managed packages you get the VIP treatment we love how we get treated at Cachefly. Cachefly dedicated account manager stays with you, is with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 24-7 support when you need it. Learn how you can get your first month free at Cachefly.com. You've heard me say it a million times Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cachefly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com Cachefly. Thank you, Cachefly. Now let's see Back of the book, back of the book time. All right, paul thorac, kick us off with your tip of the week. I probably have a sound effect for that. That's not it.

01:48:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not it well, we'll see how the zip goes, okay? Um, there it is. So I've been talking a lot about proton, uh, lately. Um, they have individual products, you know mail, calendar, proton password management, et cetera but they also have the all up subscriptions, right. So they have an individual subscription. Well, they have a couple of them, actually, family subscriptions. But now they've introduced a Proton Duo plan which sits between the individual subscription and the family subscription and is, as his name suggests, designed for couples, right.

01:49:27
So the base Proton Unlimited plan for individuals gives you 500 gigs of storage and full access to all the apps and services For $9.99 per month when you're billed annually. This is the same thing but for two people, but with two, I'm sorry. One terabyte of storage for both people, right? And then it's normally $19.99 per month when billed annually, but it's on sale. If you're interested in this kind of thing, have you been waiting for it? I have been for $14.99 per month, so I think I might be taking this myself. So $60 savings per year, plus every year you're there, they give you a bonus 15 gigabytes of additional storage. So I'm going to take a look at this one.

01:50:09
I've been very interested in Proton, as I said, for a while, so that's exciting. Semi-related to this their ProtonPass password manager, which I have been using since, I want to say, june. Now it's been a while. It's excellent, but they just kind of completed the final well, one of the final pieces of the puzzle here, which is full identity management, meaning you can create identities for yourself, like work and home, and then for other people if you have to do things for them online, and it's all the stuff you would expect Name, address, phone number, um, you know, for all the autofill stuff.

01:50:47
So, um, kind of kind of weird that this hadn't been there. But, um, they also turned on biometric authentication on desktop, right, so it supported this on mobile for a long time. But if you have windows with Windows Hello, or the Mac with the Touch ID, you can use that to sign in, which, of course, is the most seamless way to do this. So awesome. So this thing has gotten a lot better. It's always been pretty great, but it's gotten a lot better recently, so that's kind of cool, you did a whole hands-on Windows on password managers.

01:51:16
So since you mentioned that, a little side story. No-transcript if it happened to anybody else, but for me it's like it's it's the most frustrating thing in the world. So this day I had to do pass key, password management stuff and I'm thinking it's gotta be live, obviously, right. So I set up a new account on a different thing and I tried, you know, and I tested everything and then I'm like now I have to go to this other computer and do it again with different accounts and uh, I'm like this is never gonna work. And it was fine, like it worked, like for once in my life it actually worked. Yay.

01:52:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so benito is the best I love working, yeah well, we, if you, uh, if you're a club twit member, you can see the video of that, uh, and if you're not a club twit member, you can see the audio of that. And if you're not a Club Twit member, you can see the audio or hear the audio of Hands-On Windows at twittv. Slash h-o-w if you want to know more.

01:52:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How I'm trying to find an appropriate emoticon for this.

01:52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't. Anyway, we're glad you do that. It's a great feature. Micah does Hands-on Macintosh. We're doing more and more of that, I think, and I'm excited about the idea that we can, thanks to oddly enough, getting rid of a big studio makes it possible for us to do more little things like that.

01:52:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, interesting. I like the hands-on stuff, it's just.

01:52:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it. We're so glad you do it.

01:52:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's it's. It's fun, it's comical, like I said, it's just, it's unbelievable, like how much time I spent like, all right, I got it, it's perfect.

01:53:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We edit all that out, though I mean, nobody will ever see that part, right.

01:53:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. Well, someday in mexico to completely cratered. So stuff happens anyway. Um, also tangentially related to this topic, um, dashlane another password manager, fantastic released their first annual report now about pasky adoption, and this is actually kind of interesting because you can see which companies are driving um adoption of paskies to some degree. One of the asterisks here is that Google and Apple, which are the big identity players in this on mobile, they typically have you go through their stuff, so you're not typically using Dashlane. Although Google you can push through a password manager and I do, apple you can't, right, because Apple does their own kind of special thing. So the data is a little off because of that.

01:54:00
But Amazon, amazon number one, 89% growth over the past three months in PASC usage Target, moneybird, ebay and then Adobe in the top five. Um, when you look at like like GitHub, which I've kind of called out because, uh, password implementations are all over a password, a pass key sorry, implementations are all over the place. Some of them are really good, some of them are, like you know, github is just fantastic. They're actually in the top 10 for growth. They've done 36% growth over the past three months Fantastic, which is really interesting. And then they also looked at like the percentage of authentications that go through pass keys as opposed to well, I guess it would be passwords or maybe 2FA of another kind, and these numbers are really small, right, because Passkeys are still. You know, people struggle with this stuff. So, like 13.8% of eBay's authentications go against Passkeys. That's the best one, right? The rest of them?

01:54:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
are all single. Was that a percentage growth or is that the actual no percentage?

01:55:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
of actual authentications against eBay. So they've done a good job of kind of promoting it to people.

01:55:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think it's going to take off?

01:55:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, that's a real question. I do, and what it comes down to. This blows my mind. But when I talk about 2FA, I hear from people all the time it's too inconvenient for me to pick up my phone and do whatever I'm supposed to do on the phone, which to me is ridiculous, like that's a little bit of inconvenience but it's so much more secure. It's so smart to do like an authenticator app right. Passkeys are even better because they can be well. They're device specific, which introduces a little bit of complexity you have to create one on every device?

01:55:36
Well, they're not if you use a password manager. Right, that's what's going to put it over the top. So right now, like I said, I'm using ProtonPass. I went in and pushed new pass keys for Amazon, all my Google accounts, microsoft I can't remember if I did. Yeah, microsoft, and with Google, especially like Google, I've had a lot of problems with the Google stuff. Now it's awesome. Just type in your your email address, hit enter pass keys the default. The little thing from the password manager comes down you click it and you're in.

01:56:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It all depends on who gets there first, though, like I've had that problem where I've gone to set up a pass key with something like github, and that's right, microsoft, windows, hello is intercepted. It, that's right, the pass. He's like no, no, I want this in Bitward please.

01:56:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You want it to be portable. You're right. You're 100% this kind of speaks to the implementation thing. The other thing is portable pass keys are not part of the spec. When companies do this, like Dashlane does this or ProtonPass does this, they're doing their own thing. Now, those are trustworthy companies. That's not the issue. It's just that FIDO might at some point come and agree look, here's the way this should be. It should be a standard, and you'll be able to move passkeys around at some point, right? So in the same way that you import all your passwords, when you adopt a new password manager, you'll be able to import all your passkeys, and I think that those are the things that just make it.

01:57:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would also think adoption is slow because the kind of people that even consider this are already using a Fender case. That's right. Like what does this buy? Yeah?

01:57:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
security key. They're already doing the right stuff, but we're going to look back on passwords the same way we look back at like smoking on planes. We're not going to believe that we ever did it, doesn't make any sense.

01:57:17
Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. I probably could have put that in the regular show. I just wasn't sure where that would go. Good place, yeah. Last week I talked about some new releases of web browsers. A little bit less going on this week, but there was a new version of Firefox last week. They've actually .01 that Fix some bugs and promise you, if you're a Firefox guy, get that. And and promise you if you're a Firefox guy, you know, get that. And then Opera, not Opera On, as the notes say but Opera One, which is their new flagship AI.

01:57:46
Oh shoot, I thought there was a new Opera called Opera On. No sorry about that Is now on the iPad and iPhone, right, so you get that same kind of really clean experience. You get the ARIA built in and all this.

01:57:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you like?

01:57:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this. Should I? No, you shouldn't. I do like it. People are asking me this. I still like Brave and I like Arc. I'm using.

01:58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Arc on the iPhone and it's a little weird because it's an AI. Yeah, it's not the same. It's not a browser experience.

01:58:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's interesting. It's like it feels experimental to me. But the thing is is, once you use authenticator apps, password managers, and then if you have some sort of a third party something, something for bookmarks or just don't use them, which is actually the better approach, um, moving between different browsers becomes really easy. So you could say, I'll just make something up. You're like an iPhone person, like I'll just use Safari, who cares Right? And then when I'm on windows, I'll just use it. Well, I wouldn't use it. It's just crazy. Use a, you know brave, or you know arc or whatever Everything's. You know you still get the same password stuff. You seem to get the portable pass, use all this stuff. So you know, by doing this stuff, you you can kind of take have the best experience wherever you are. I experience wherever you are.

01:59:02
I don't know opera. Opera to me is a. Is is great, it's. There's nothing really wrong with it. It's. It's a little complex, although compared to arc it's like a walk in the park, but it's um, it's. I think it's really oriented well for power users and for people who like to really configure their experience, and especially on desktop, because you know there's more capabilities there. It is very good. I just you know personal preference thing uh, you also have.

01:59:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, no, that's it, no, that's it we're done, thank god.

01:59:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it feels sometimes like I'm never gonna stop. No, just teasing, so sorry, no it is.

01:59:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is rich about myself Run as radio time. Ladies and gentlemen, richard Campbell, it's coming up Speaking of pass keys.

01:59:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Today published episode 945, which I did with Tarek Dawood, who's part of the Entra team and a brilliant guy, really fun to talk to, and what did we talk about? But pass keys in the enterprise. So this is an ongoing set of shows. I've been talking to a bunch of different entra folks so we're getting deeper into where they're at, and so, uh, tarik did a great job of sort of drilling through how the fido alliance has tried to move this thing forward the sort of renaming of password lists, and you know where the pass keys thing came from and what they're trying to do inside of entra to make pass keys more widely adopted. Like Paul, you mentioned sort of Google and Apple doing their own thing. Clearly, microsoft's doing their own thing as well, and so MFA is pretty much essential now for an M365 entity. So we're on the same path for pass keys as well. It's not being official yet, but definitely they're working that through.

02:00:38
We did talk about the inconsistent implementation of passkeys. Just look how difficult it is. Uh, and passkeys are supported by microsoft authenticator. So you know, when it comes to microsoft related sites and identity using passkeys, you'll you'll probably want to land them in authenticator, but there is no pc-based authenticator thing. That's all going to be hello. So you still have the portability problem, like, if you're already down the authenticator path. I don't know how you move on this. And and most admins I've talked to are like, listen, it's enough that I got these guys to mfa. Tell me what you want me to change now, like and for what. So I think there's still a resistance to it. We're not. It's not buying things for us and it definitely feels like one of those products where the longer the wait, the easier this is going to get awesome run as radiocom certainly when it comes to phishing resistance.

02:01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, this is what this is about it just seems like such an improvement to be passwordless.

02:01:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah passwordless the best, it's just the best yeah I mean I? I don't once you're fully onto a password manager where you don't know your passwords anyway.

02:01:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like life is already good, whether you, that's the, that's the letting go moment. Well, that, and deleting your old passwords, that moment where you're like you know what, I don't need to know this, I don't know any of them oh I will never delete the passwords that's a, that's a nut.

02:01:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's crazy crazy.

02:02:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know there's going to be a day when the Passkey doesn't work. That's one thing for sure. With every Passkey account I've set up, I have not removed any other authentication strategies. Keep it all.

02:02:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, if you're a Microsoft account holder, you could remove your password entirely from that account if you want. I don't know a single human being that's done that, but if you wanted to, the point is you could Go nuclear, you know.

02:02:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, you have earned your brown liquor pick of the week. Back of the book, mr Richard Campbell.

02:02:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So still moving in here, you know like I rearranged the cellar this weekend, and one of the things that happened was I dug through a couple of boxes of whiskey that I had for a while, and one of them was this Beaumont 15. Who knew? I think that's a very good whiskey. It's a very nice whiskey, and it's a one liter bottle too it's the big one. So probably a birthday present, does it?

02:02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have a handle.

02:02:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nope, not a handle, but it is a liter, so you don't know why I would get the 750. Uh, this is, of course, an isla and that's the southernmost island of the inner hebrides, about 20, 20 miles by 25 miles long. There's about 3 000 people live on that island today. It's had a storied history of all sorts of things. Uh, an amazing place. There are really only three areas on isla where whiskey is made. There's up in the northeast, close to Jura, where Badaab and Ardeno and Kauila are made. Down in the southeast, which is what most of the time when you see photographs of Islay, that's what you see. That's Ardbeg, lagavulin, lafroix, port Allen. There's a new distillery under construction there called the Port of Truin, which is owned by Elixir, and then where Beaumont is, which is Lock and Doll. So if you see a picture of Isla, you'll see that there's a bay in the south and in there is where you'll see Beaumont, brookladdock and Port Charlotte, which has been open for forever, but it's still a famous and popular distillery. Lock and Doll is a saltwater lock. It's quite shallow and rocky, so it's not meant for big ships. There's a bit of a corridor cut through to the dock at brookladec, but other than that, uh, you know, shallow water boats, fishing boats, that kind of thing. Uh, during world war ii, raf coastal command stationed their flying boats there to protect convoys from submarines and, uh, of course, all things.

02:04:18
When it comes to isla, they're known for their peated whiskeys. That wasn't always true. Peated whiskeys used to not be very popular, but after I've told the story before, we talked about Lagavulin, when United Distillers did their classic malt series in 1988. And Lagavulin was the only of one of the Islays that was on there and it was peated and it was not expected to sell well and it sold huge and essentially started was peated and it was not expected to sell well and it sold huge and essentially started the peated movement. Uh, I think, when you think about the timing, then that sort of gordon gecko ish, the you know peated whiskey and cigars go well, I think I remember that from the movie.

02:04:54
Yes, yeah you know that if you like a cigar, you're gonna like a peated whiskey, and one of the reasons I have beaumont out is that it's barbecue time and I've been smoking ribs and salmon and all sorts of things and when I've got a lot of smoke going around me I like smoking my whiskey as well. Most of the time I don't drink peated whiskey, but this is the time of year where yep peat works for me, and so I was happy to find that Bowmore and crack it open and enjoy it, and so I thought I'd tell the story. You'll see right on the bottle it says established 1779 by a guy named John Simpson. There's no evidence that he actually made whiskey in 1779. That seems like a marketing play. The first license taken by Simpson to sell whiskey was in 1816. But if you use a 1779, then you get to call yourself one of the oldest running distilleries in scotland and likely the oldest uh running in isla as well. Uh, he, not that. He kept it for forever.

02:05:45
It was sold to the mutter family out of gosgo in the 1830s. They were whiskey blenders and very successful ones, who held on to it for the better part of 100 years. It shut down during world war one and coming out of the war and into prohibition, the mutters sold it off to another company in 25. And then it changed hands again in 50. The one that everybody knows really is formed in 63 when Stanley Morrison buys it with a group of partners to create Morrison's Beaumont Distillery. And that's sort of a key time for BeaumOR.

02:06:21
When you talk about buying a $10,000 bottle of BOMOR, which you know I talk about all the time, you're talking about a 1960s edition from the Morrison era. And it stayed that way until Suntory started getting involved in 1989. So that's around the time of United Stolich and so forth, and Centauri took complete control of Belmar in 1994. So that's sort of the evolution of the company per se. By the way, they have a great tour. It's beautiful and in fact, if you are all in on the whiskey thing, they have a set of workers' cottages from the 1800s that you can rent if you want to hang out there do you have a lot of space there in austin martin?

02:07:03
apparently you do they have a big deal with austin martin, so, yes, there's a lot of austin going on there oh, you get to.

02:07:10
You get a chauffeur driven tour of the island and it's not a huge place and it's very beautiful. I mean scotland is is tough terrain this is the southern, more part of scot Scotland but beautiful spot. There's no bridges onto Islay, you have to take a ferry. Wow, that's pretty cool. I have talked about Bowmore before when I was doing the Scottish series back in the day On 818, I mentioned Bowmore because we were talking about malting and one of the things that Bowmore promotes is the fact that they still do floor maltings to this day. One of the things that Bowmore promotes is the fact that they still do floor maltings to this day. So they buy barley off of Islay and they actually malt it themselves. Their normal process is they only peat it after it's malted. So it's turned green, it's starting to sprout, then they dry it and the first 18 hours of drying they do with peat and then there's an additional 40-something hours with just heat because they don't want too much peat. This is not a heavily peated whiskey but to be honest, these guys make way too much whiskey. They make millions of liters of whiskey a year and so there's no way they're doing that all in beaumar and the reality is that they buy the vast majority of their barley already ground to specification and peated to specification like everybody else. But they maintain a small amount of floor malt still because they just don't have the room to do anything more. Their water comes from the river laggan which runs through the center of isla and drains into loch and doll. They do a relatively short fermentation, only 48 hours or so. They have six wooden washbacks, about 40 000 liters each and two wash stills and two spirit stills. Relatively small 20,000 liters for the wash stills, 12,000 liters for the spirit stills. Their new make typically comes in at 69% but of course they barrel at 63.5 because they almost exclusively do their initial barrelings in used bourbon casks. And as we know I hope you memorize this because it will be a test the Americans barrel at 62.5 when they make bourbon casks. And as we know I hope you memorize this because there will be a test the Americans barrel at 62.5 when they make bourbon. And so the Scots have learned to go in at 63.5 to pull additional flavors from those used bourbon casks. It's 1% more. That 1% makes all the difference. Their warehouses they mostly use Dunnage warehouses, that's the dirt floor side rack, three high have one racked warehouse, so the pallet style warehouse which I think they do. They're finishing in primarily and, uh, in the case of the 15, they do 12 years in bourbon and three years in sherry.

02:09:34
The question here, and the one that hit me when I was looking at this particular bottle, is what's up with the 15 versus the 12 or the 18? Like you see that pattern a lot. So I went and dug around for a while and there's a lot of distilleries that make like a 12 and a 15 and an 18 and then a 20 something. Many of them make a 21. In the case of Bowmore, they make a 25. Like on the Spey, fittick, dalmore, dalmore, mccallan, live it, they all do it.

02:10:06
12, 15, 18, 21. Uh, farkless does everything. They make all kinds of things, right? Uh, when you talk about the islands, highland park, 12, 15, 18, 21. Beaumont, 12, 15, 18, 25, kyle, ela, lafroy, uh, even in the lowlands lock, and uh, akintosh does it, glendronach does it. Like. There's a lot of different distilleries that follow this pattern of the 12, the 15, the 18 and a 20 something. But why, why? Why? Why would you do this? Like, what's the big deal? If you look at it from a pricing perspective, 12 year olds are very tightly priced together In thes dollars, you'll find in between 60 and 75 dollars across the board these days, which is hop right. It didn't used to be this expensive, but you know things cost more these days. The spread's a little bit bigger when you get to 15. So 75 to 150 dollars, the 18s, the spread gets bigger, now 125 on the low side up to over 300 on the high side I want the bore more black from 1960.

02:11:00
Wait a minute, there's one as old as me, yeah yeah, they, belmore's been making whiskey for a long time and if you've got an urge to spend the price of a house on whiskey, oh, they are willing to help you. But would it be better? That is the question, leo why am I talking about?

02:11:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this is the smartest thing richard has ever said to me. I'm sorry to interrupt, but like I know, I I know exactly where you're going with this and this is the greatest knowledge you will ever get okay, tell us, tell us, is it?

02:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
problem with age does it get better with age up to a point.

02:11:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right like I've drank a lot of different whiskeys and, uh I, some 20s are great, some are not. I've never met anything older than a 20 and I've tried 40s.

02:11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've even tried a 50 no, no what happens if, like, god help you, if it is the best thing you ever, oh, yeah, well, that's now.

02:11:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're talking about something else, which is yes because now well, I've had this experience. Now you're screwed, yeah. Like now, this thing is you know I met a centary bottle that was like $15,000 for the bottle. It's $750 a shot and I didn't try it because there was no good outcome. Right, $750 for a shot. If you don't like it, you blew $750.

02:12:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you do like it. You want a 15 000 bottle of whiskey and you're about to get divorced right, like, don't go there, so awful.

02:12:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What would your recommendation be?

02:12:32
The 15? It depends. Listen, the reason, the reason they cost more mostly is because the market will bear for more, and the reason they follow the same patterns is because they've educated the public to expect more from a higher price. Well, and it it does. For some, it does cost more to store it longer. Right, the? There's two things.

02:12:47
There's a few things that are going on here. The longer a barrel stays in iraq, the less alcohol it's in it. So you know that if the 12 year, a given barrel, a 12 year old, produces a lot more whiskey like 10, 20 percent more than the 15 year old, and then the 18 year old, like you literally, are going to get less whiskey for barrel. So that costs something. You are paying for maintenance and storage and so forth. Also, the barrels are individually insured. So the longer you store that barrel, the more likelihood there's something wrong with it. So the insurance costs more, like there's a bunch of things that add up here, but it's mostly what the price will bear. Here's the other thing that's going to get you. That'll surprise you when you talk about, like, let's talk about the 12, 15, the 18 and 25 of Bomar, all of which I've had, including the 25, which, by the way, is on YouTube. If you search well on YouTube and I'll give you the key thing to search for, which is drunk kitchen, you will see me pouring a Bowmore 25. They're not made the same. So the Bowmore 12, which is a I think I looked on Total Wine it was $68 US. Right now it's a 40%. It's peatier than the other ones because it hasn't been aged as long. The peat comes in at the beginning on the grain. It doesn't come from the barrel, so the longer it spends in the barrel, the milder the peat gets. And for the most part, barmore 12 is only aged in bourbon. It looks like it does a finish in sherry, maybe six months, nine months. That's about it, you know, but former doesn't need to tell us.

02:14:11
The 15 we've already talked about. This is about 120. Bottle of whiskey uh 43, which is relatively low. But this is chill, filtered and colored for consistency sake, so that's why they can be so low. They don't worry about flocculation. 12 years in bourbon, three years in sherry. That's the clearest one, the 18. So now you're jumping up to about 175 dollars for the bottle. Same abv. They are quite clear about saying it's made only in bourbon. And then finally, the 25, which, if you can find one, is a $640 bottle of bourbon, of whiskey, again still 43%. They do say it was aged in sherry. They don't say how long.

02:14:55
The thing to know is that when a distillery lays up a barrel, so clear spirit goes into a barrel, that's not like they know. You know, 18 years from now this is going to be awesome. They don't know right. Every year the weather's a little different. The location the barrel stays affects things. This thing's right by the ocean, so it's going to have a certain amount of salt, like they have to sample it, and if it falls below 40%, they can't sell it so often. So it's going to have a certain amount of salt, like they have to sample it, and if it falls below 40%, they can't sell it so often. If it's losing alcohol too fast, they'll get rid of it to somebody else, to one of the specialty bottlers, rather than try and keep it in their own lines. And you don't know when it's going to be good, when it's going to be great, or when it's going to be the right flavor profile. So often they're not happy with the barrel, so they'll lay it up for longer.

02:15:43
So most of the time these older barrelings, they've been laid up because they didn't surface as the product they would sell the most of the 12s or the 15s. So you've got to think in the terms of the somewhere around a year 11, of a bunch of barrels being laid up. They're tasting them and going. You know what this set is going to work well for 12. Do their finishes in the sherry and set them on the way.

02:16:08
These ones, man, we're not quite happy with. Let's finish out the 12 and then we'll kick them over to sherry At the 12 mark. You're still not happy with it. You don't want to put it in the sherry yet. So maybe that's going to be 18 barrels. So you leave them lay for longer to see if they're going to turn around, right in some ways. These older and older additions, they're all the problem. Children, right, like they weren't doing well, and so they kept them for longer. It's not like they knew. This thing's just going to get better every time. They don't know and they charge a lot for it. Now back to leo's real question where's the value?

02:16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I just want a good. I mean, I I'm not sure is value the right way to put it? I'm not a value drinker, yeah, I'm just. I just want to know if I get bang for the wine with brandy, with sherry, with port.

02:16:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Age often equals a better yeah not, and not always, not always, but none of these are bad, like let's be clear. The 12 is peter, right see?

02:17:11
that I would like to pay to get rid of right and look, if you're after pete, go get an art bag. 10, like that's like licking a forest fire you're gonna have all the pete you ever need. Right, the 15 with its extra years in sherry, it's twice the price of the 12, but pretty damn good drink. So the 18. Now you're writing 50 of the price again and for the same volume. You know that, and that's going to be smoother and lighter still, so it does get smoother with age?

02:17:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess that's the question I was asking, it does something.

02:17:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But if you were, after smoothness, go get a dalmar 12. Right, right, like the whole thing is, you were there, you didn't buy a bowmore because you didn't want pete. So what are you doing, right? Yeah, good point. And now? Now, why did I have a 25? And and why did it end up with YouTube? And like, you guys can figure that out and we'll do a test later. Again, it was a gift you know a friend of mine for, for a major bribe If it's given a head after the favor.

02:18:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go yeah.

02:18:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But look, is this peated you? This is pita whiskey. It's not a poke in the face p, but it's like no, there's smoke in there and I've been smoking ribs, so I want smoke right?

02:18:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I guess that's right morning smelling like smoke. That's all I'm asking you know, it's like have you been sitting around?

02:18:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
a campfire all night. The day after I smoke ribs. The next morning, when I take a shower, I smell the kickery smoke again yeah, it all comes out.

02:18:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, my wife, you lay down in a pillow and then you roll over and you can smell it in the pillow. Yeah, what have I done, lisa?

02:18:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
says that's the best perfume is is a is a smoker's smell. The smoke not smoking cigarettes or cigars, but yeah you know, hickory, I do.

02:18:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do the ribs and hickory and I do the the salmon and alder. I've done pork shoulders with applewood?

02:18:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you do it on a plank or the salmon?

02:18:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, not right. Plank is a different thing. I'm actually talking about a proper hot smoke. So, alderwood, how long oh it takes. 45 minutes of hot smoke, oh, pretty quick. Okay, it's just not cold smoke. Cold smoke is a different thing. Then you're curing the fish. Yes, that's what I like. You have to be more careful. Yeah, making lox takes more time. Yeah, oh, so good, I got the rig for it, but she usually shows up with a side of stock. I was like smoke this.

02:19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's wrap this show. It's time for gas station sushi, and I'm in the mood.

02:19:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Speak and a smoke. I like my salmon with a little touch of diesel, a little diesel flavor.

02:19:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's pretty good when you get it, when it's fresh. No, it isn't.

02:19:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it isn't. Anyway, I wanted to talk about the aging, this aging behavior, just to recognize that it's not that it's a scam. You're definitely getting different products. You're not buying it because you're getting a huge value for the money. That's not the case.

02:19:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like Lojo's remarks.

02:19:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like binning CPUs, right, yep, a lot of ways it's like, the binning of whiskey, that's good stuff, well, and bidding of whiskey, yeah, that's good stuff, well, and I've spent time with the barrel guys and that's sort of the reality of it, like, and and the funny thing is the anxiety gets up as it gets older, where it's like I'm gonna have to kick this over to cupis green or or to gordon mcphail, which I'm gonna get wholesale price for, versus I can get the retail price for this, although, admittedly, and when you look at it at 150 for a bottle of whiskey, how much of that is going to the the, uh, the guy who made it? It's like 20. You know, even here in british columbia, the markup for commercial whiskey and I think I talked about this when we were talking about the craft whiskey thing 125, right, governments take a huge chunk of the price of alcohol. Anyway, I get to drink whiskey at my job. It's good.

02:20:46
Um, should you buy this? Absolutely? This, I mean, it's one of the nicer peats. It's not a big peat, right, like, if you want a big peak, get the lagavulin. If you really want big peak, get an art peg. If you're insane, you'll get an octomar. Don't do that. But uh, yeah, with a cigar, which I don't do, I'm don't smoke. I don't smoke anything, um, except meat. Uh, with a cigar these things are fantastic and uh, around a barbecue, absolutely, like I said, it's very seasonal for me, um, and don't worry, I I found weirder stuff in my cellar when I reorganized it, so I've got a couple of weeks of things sitting here. Now we're gonna go strange places from here. This was the normalest thing I found in that, in those I'm excited I am really excited.

02:21:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, richard campbell, we actually, uh kevin king, our producer and uh editor, made a whole series on youtube of uh richard's whiskey talk uh, which we do at the end of every show, and uh, there's some there's an educational kind of mailing in a little bit lately.

02:21:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is that what the point was last week?

02:21:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think he's I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I think it's all good, it's all delicious, even the jack.

02:21:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like it all yeah no, I mean, you know I'm I'm having an experience too. You know I came into this thinking I knew my way around whiskey. But a couple of years of hanging with you guys and doing this every week, I see whiskey differently now.

02:22:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's really good.

02:22:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that you're obsessed about this, like the way I'm obsessed about Windows 11 updates. We all have our own little.

02:22:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I did not show you the graphs I made of the pricing of 12, 15, and 18s. I got to a point where, late at night, I looked at it and said this three hours qualifies for one sentence, yeah.

02:22:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, you got to put the time in. That's part of it.

02:22:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I pulled the numbers together.

02:22:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's got more of those whiskey clips coming. So thank you, kevin, for doing that. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, it's really fantastic. We have come to the end of this edition of windows. Weekly uh been a lot of fun. Uh, the first one up in the attic, yeah congratulations, man.

02:22:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love your attic. I think it's pretty, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's awesome I do.

02:22:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I apologize for the. You know I'm, I'm doing the switching and I'm and I'm getting better and worse at it. At the same time, there's a a lot more Learning how to use it Sliding and slipping around.

02:23:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like riding a bike, Leo.

02:23:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a new rig. Maybe I've never ridden this bike, so it's like riding a bike you've never ridden before maybe. But I have to say you know we're working on it. I love the fact that I can pull in chat. Yeah, because that working on it, I love the fact that I can pull in chat, yeah, um, because, uh, that really makes it kind of fun to put in these little comments as we go. I love it that we're streaming now, uh, on twitch, on youtube, on discord for our club members, on kick facebook xcom. By the way, no, no DDoSing. So far on Xcom, we've had a flawless stream.

02:23:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Also no slurring, no slurring. We've got that going for us.

02:23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That might come later after the whiskey, although Richard was working on that. Yes, I'm doing my best, friends, I really am. Seven different platforms, so it's easy to watch us. We're live on Wednesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. If you don't watch live and I know you know it's a work day and you probably have things to do you can always watch on demand. That's the whole point. It's a podcast. You can get the show from the website twittv slash www. Paul puts it on therotcom. You can also see it on YouTube. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly for the video, or subscribe to the audio or video version, whichever suits your fancy, in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically as soon as Kevin polishes it up, fixes my transitions and gets it out the door on the website.

02:24:36
Thank you everybody for being here and a special thanks to our club members. Without you, we are nothing. You paid for this attic. Thank you everybody for being here and a special thanks to our club members. Without you, we are nothing. You paid for this attic, thank you. You paid for Richard and you paid for Paul and all the stuff and Kevin and all the stuff we're doing. The club makes a huge difference to our bottom line, and I think you get some great benefits, including ad-free versions of all the shows, plus this very special graphic carefully designed by Anthony Nielsen. If you're watching the video subscribe, either click the QR code in the upper left-hand corner or go to twittv slash club twit and you will be able to spend seven bucks a month to support what we do, and that is really important to us and we are very grateful to all of you. Thank you so much for your support to our Club Twit members.

02:25:26
Of course if you're in Club Twit, you get in the Discord too. You can be part of it, so that's fun too. Paul Therot is at therotcom. That's where his writings go. Become a premium member, as I am, and you'll get even more. Mr Richard Campbell does two podcasts Run as Radio and NET Rocks. They're both available from runasradiocom On top of Windows.

02:25:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Weekly I really do three podcasts.

02:25:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you do. I forgot about this one. That's a good point. I didn't think about that. And yes, I know you don't click QR codes. You scan them. Yes, click them with your eyes, that's the way to do it or your camera.

02:26:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It'll work better with your camera. Yeah, do it with your camera.

02:26:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm really you know what, this instant feedback? I'm not sure I like it.

02:26:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it's fine as long as you don't listen to it.

02:26:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody likes to be judged is all I'm saying then you can have instant feedback.

02:26:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You just don't have to have an instant response.

02:26:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm just kidding. We love having you in the audience. Thank you for watching, thanks you for listening and if you'd only listen after the fact, you know, make some time on a Wednesday just to to watch the live stream, cause that's a lot of fun before and after as well. Thank you, richard. Thank you, paul. We Thank you, richard. Thank you, paul, we will see you next week. You're going to both stay where you are or we have some travel. One more week, I'm here, okay, so we will do this all again, just like this, from our homes. Thanks everybody, we'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye.