Windows Weekly 897 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 is here. Richard Campbell too Actually, paul's not here. He's in Berlin getting ready for IFA, the big CES of Europe. He's got some new PCs from IFA, including a new Dell and a surprisingly inexpensive Lenovo gaming laptop. We'll talk about the Windows recall button that doesn't actually do anything, and trouble ahead for Intel. Oh yeah, maybe Nvidia too. All that coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 897, recorded Wednesday, september 4th 2024. Not the worst curry worst. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft, and we have some news. Today. Paul is in Berlin for IFA. Hello, paul thoretz, hello leo. Say what does?

01:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
ifa stand for I don't know actually, so it's german for consumer electronics show oh, okay, that's perfect.

01:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Basically, yeah, yeah, like I'm not gonna try to say that, yeah, it's an international far for newton day and weirdly, richard campbell is home in uh in madeira park british columbia.

01:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hi, richard, I got home just in time to get all the tomatoes. The garden is going very well wait a minute isn't tomato season over, it's ending, yeah, so yeah, we got back.

01:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Columbia has a seven day growing season. You got to cut them a little slack here.

01:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but did I make BLTs last night for dinner? There's nothing like it yeah. Oh, lettuce from the garden, tomatoes from the garden, a big bowl of sourdough from the local bakery. Yeah, it's all goodness.

01:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh well, now that I've been completely distracted, I guess we could talk about electronics and currywurst. Yeah, currywurst, did you have your currywurst?

02:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
paul, I've had at least three currywursts, I've had a pig knuckle, I've had a schnitzel. Oh, I've been germaning it up.

02:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Germaning it up. I love it. Um, well, good, all right. Um, I'm just gonna bow out here because I'm on the. I have the big, the big, I have half the screen and you guys only get a quarter each.

02:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's okay, when you're here, you're really here, I'm really present.

02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You really are A lot of you there. We're just playing with different layouts so to speak.

02:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I appreciate the Mexico shirt you're wearing.

02:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I thought, because I'm going on vacation to Canada, I should wear something appropriate.

02:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sure it was kind of a NAFTA-themed shirt. Wearing the warm shirt isn't going to save you. It doesn't work that way.

02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We start in Manhattan, we're going tomorrow, we're flying to Manhattan, we're going to do a photo walk and meet up in Bryant Park on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Manhattan, 3 to 5 pm for the meetup.

03:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let me ask you a question are you flying into newark?

03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I heard, I saw your instagram, but newark is a nightmare.

03:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Huh, I've only heard about this nightmare, but now I've experienced it and uh, newark was already the first circle of hell.

03:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what's happening there, but we're jet blue in it to jfk, as one does, yes, and then we're going to have that meetup at Bryant Park Photowalk 5 pm with Joe from our club. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm bringing my good cameras. We're going to take some pictures of Grand Central Station. We're going to do the Golden Hour and end in the Oculus. I can't wait. I'm going to really look forward to it. It's going to be great. Joe wait, I'm gonna really look forward to be great. Joe's an accomplished street photographer. Spends all his time in manhattan, so he really knows the area. And then, uh, lisa and I are gonna hang out in new york for a little bit and get on a boat on monday and and sail to canada.

03:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Huh, as one does that seems like a roundabout way to get to canada. It's very, it's the weirdest. It's the weirdest. It's like three hours to the north by car. You could just drive there.

04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the first port is Newport and then Boston, rhode Island Yep, newport, rhode Island, boston. We're going up the coast of New England, portland, maine Yep, skip right into New Hampshire like everyone else, yep. Yep, skip right by it, and Skip right by it, and then we're going to St John's Nice.

04:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Newfoundland, halifax.

04:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lovely, and Quebec City and Montreal, montreal, that's one of my favorite cities. What is that? St Lawrence Seaway.

04:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
St Lawrence Seaway, yeah, st Lawrence.

04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Beautiful. It will complete my collection. Seaways of the World.

04:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And if you continue on past Montreal, you could make it all the way to Ottawa, where the late great Queen Elizabeth II once said on her very first visit now as the young queen well, you never have to worry about invading this place, because they'll never find it.

04:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which is slightly better than I wish they would rebel.

05:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, wow, ottawa's kind of tucked away, you know.

05:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

05:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're on these big waterways and all busy, and then you sort of hang this corner going up the hall and it's Ottawa, there's Ottawa.

05:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of wish we were going on.

05:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That would be kind of fun. Yeah, you know you can. You can get all the way to Chicago if you try hard.

05:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you know we're gonna do the Mississippi next year and I thought that would really be an interesting trip. Is that?

05:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
like the central square in your waterways.

05:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bingo, yeah exactly I am getting them all. We're going from uh new orleans to and I didn't realize this to uh the twin cities, but it goes all the way up.

05:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can you know that mississippi river is only the second longest river in north america?

05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what is the longest in north america?

05:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's the missouri. I did not know that. I know I didn't either. This is a trivia question. I failed it all right.

05:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm gonna make a note of that for cruise.

05:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know it's gonna come up you're like this is pretty good, but it's no missouri, am I right?

05:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we, I think we passed the missouri on the on the left, but I yeah, okay, um, let's talk about ifa, paul, and, and you can join in too, richard yeah, please the, the big. Uh well, you said consumer electronics show, but I think it's actually one of the oldest trade shows in the world.

06:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's, it used to be a radio trade show, right, and now that c-bit has bit the dust, it's kind of the big thing. Wow, that's cool. So I've never been uh, I've been to berlin twice before this trip, but never to eva and um, this is a. I've had this conversation with a bunch of people here. This is a curiously big year for the pc. Interesting, you know. Yeah, I mean from a hardware perspective. You know, silicon especially. This might be the biggest year in the history of the pc, not not because they're going to sell more than ever before, you know whatever, but it's uh.

06:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The sheer amount of stuff happening this year is rather impressive you know, yeah, the question is how much of it's really relevant. Like I think getting arm on windows serious like is important, but nobody's talking about that. It's all the distraction that it is ai yeah and then.

07:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, we've had this conversation before, but I feel very strongly that this whole AI, pc, co-pilot plus PC thing will recede in the same manner as multimedia PC, media center, pc. Yeah, eventually it's just PC.

07:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just PC. You used to have to buy a sound blaster for your PC. That's right. Then one day you didn't the first time.

07:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The first day I tried to add a cd-rom to my computer I cut my fingers so many times trying to get into all the little pins and everything I actually like started crying. I was like I can't, this is not, I'm not, this is not fun you know 34 pin two rows are not for you. What's funny is I was gonna say that's a lot easier now, but actually it is a lot easier now because we don't have CD-ROM drives anymore.

07:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, that's great, they fixed it. The best part is no part. Yeah, I don't cut myself on the internet, but for a period there was the SATA plug and it's really hard to cut yourself on a SATA plug. Yeah, that's true.

07:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's true. Yeah, that's true. One of the little ironies of the show notes today is IFA actually has not begun. In fact, IFA doesn't begin until Friday and the funny thing is a lot of the people who are here right now covering all of the big events and news of the show are leaving before that show begins.

08:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So they're there for the embargo stuff. They've got their stories in order. They've sent some interviews. They don't have to stay, stuff they've got their stories in order.

08:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've sang some interviews. They don't have to stay. Intel, qualcomm, um, amd and all of the major pc makers have events that occurred before ifa starts, so you could run the rack, get on a plane and fly home and be fine nice is that your intent, friend, are you used to no? I'm gonna stay for the weekend, uh, but my wife came, so we're gonna actually go see berlin.

08:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not going to show oh, you're going to have a great time. Berlin's fantastic.

08:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm trying to do something every day, you know, but we love it here. I love Berlin. Yeah, so IFA's not started, but the IFA announcements have started right, Starting with some answers to some questions that we've had. You know, remember when Microsoft launched Copilot Plus PC back in May, that brand was a little bit of a surprise.

09:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And they did it so elegantly as well. It was really well done, all the vendors were really happy.

09:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, top notch. They didn't make anyone upset, it went great. And you know, now we're riding that wave. It's wonderful.

09:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And what a world that would be. The problem is, we're both terribly sarcastic. You know, one of us should be trying. All of us could just riff on this for 15 minutes straight, imagining a fantasy world in which the world where nobody got walked out of the, the, the meeting or any of those things yeah, I.

09:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So one thing that's going to come up multiple times in this episode is I've talked to people at different pc makers uh, silicon makers, and I have more information along those lines and, uh, I can verify that that's exactly what happened. We talked about that. The intel guys were like no, we're coming, like no, you're not, and ugliness happens. So there's that, um, but yeah, so when that? Anyway, when that did happen, regardless of the controversies of the day, what we walked out of with was qualcomm launched their snapdragon x processors. Uh, all the major pc makers were on hand with one to four models. You know, not a lot compared to intel and not even amd, but you know pretty good showing, um, we've since seen that those laptops are pretty damn good. You know, as far as efficiency, especially, uh, small issues with gameplay, you know, really small. No one really noticed, uh, so that was good. And then recall was recalled and, well, never made it into the box right, yeah, so it's coming eventually.

10:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know you've botched an announcement.

10:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When the primary component of that announcement is canceled at the last second. So yeah, so that happened. And then by the time those PCs launched in June, we kind of understood where we were at. But we had questions because we knew AMD was coming up with Zen 5. We knew Intel was coming up with zen 5. We knew intel was coming up lunar lake and arrow lake and that those things would have processor or sorry, yeah well, the processors with embedded npus that would make the co-pilot plus pc spec. We didn't know whether they would be branded as co-pilot plus pcs. We didn't know, um, if they would just be ai pcs that had support for co-pilot plus pc features um no, we didn't know.

11:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Basically yeah, you think they just expand the brand. It's like, if you care about this brand, and it's like, how many people can we get under the umbrella as long as you? You went to find a threshold. A bunch of us own machines that already clear that threshold.

11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, one of the theories, though, was Qualcomm obviously got a little bone from Microsoft that they would be, as well as should, exclusive access to this brand for a little while at least, and there was some evidence that that was going to be exclusive to them forever, because PC makers especially you think someone would have slipped up, but they kept referring to their devices as ai pcs, which was kind of the old term right and um. Anyway, as of last night, microsoft said nope, um, these things will be marketed as co-pilot plus pcs, or at least they can be. Um, they will have that full range of features that qualcomm now has exclusive access to and eventually recall.

12:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But starting when.

12:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so there's still a little bit of a question. So tied into this is this whole Windows 11 24H2 thing right?

12:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And so we still don't. It's definitely been part of the problem.

12:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so there was this kind of limited release of it with the Qualcomm PCs back in June. I've had this tip about how anyone you know anyone you could do it right now. You could go get it if you wanted it on an Intel or AMD-based PC, no problem, but basically not available and we knew it's going to be the feature update second half of the year, typically October. It's a Microsoft release, so it's staggered, you know, sometimes it's a previously recent October and a broad release in November and it's not really super run until December. But you know, we'll see. We still don't have the answer on that, but Microsoft, as part of their announcement that, yes, these new AMD and Intel based PCs would be in that family of computers or family of brands or whatever, said they will get an update that gives them those features, suggesting that they will not ship with them initially.

13:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hmm.

13:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

13:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But if it was packaged in 24H2, that makes perfect sense, because you can't really per se. Well, yeah, you'll pull the update Right.

13:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So as we record this, it's early September. It's likely that Microsoft has just, or will soon sort of finalize what becomes that initial release of 24H2 for x64 hardware. So that suggests that at least some of these computers based on when they ship, because the announcements we've seen so far, I'll bet they'll be on it.

14:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It'll just be feature flagged yeah, that right.

14:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yes, that's my guess too is that they will actually ship with 24h2, yeah, and that, uh, there will be a cumulative update in november. That pops that out too, yeah, which is just flipping some switches, turning that on.

14:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Literally, I mean digitally, Like it's just a software thing. Hopefully, but you know that November makes it six months. Right, then launch in May. Yeah, clean, that sounds like a deal you could have. It's a clean six months. I give you six months of you own the.

14:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You get this brand and then we got to get with it yeah, we'll talk a little bit about 24h2 later on, but I I wrote a quick article about what's kind of new there and it's not a lot, right? So there's the stuff that if we forget about the copos plus pc features which will be exclusive to the newest chipsets, right from all the uh silicon makers um, it's mostly minor stuff but there have been a few feature updates that have occurred since the I'm going to call it june, you know initial release of 24h2, right, the uh, uh that will be obviously will be part of whatever uh these guys give out later in the year, so it's a moving target. I mean, that's part of the problem. There's no.

15:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But also, you know, it occurs to me that where Build fell on the third week of May, ignite falls on the third week of November. Interesting.

15:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's odd, coincidental, it's odd, it's very odd, it's a coincidence. It's weird to me that you even brought that up. Yeah, so, yeah, that could right. So it would make sense for Microsoft to want to announce that at their own show In Chicago. Yeah, yeah, right, show in chicago. And yeah, yeah, right, so, yes, uh, so, yeah. So we know zen 5's out, uh, desktop and laptop. And now intel has formally launched lunar lake. We don't have any. Well, we have one. Adele has gone live with at least one lunar lake based pc that's available for pre-order now, but as far as lenovo and hp, not yet. So sometime in the next 24 or 48 hours I'm sure we'll hear from those guys and, uh, I think you could expect a lot of lunar lake, uh, some, uh, amd, zen 5, and then, you know, a smattering, a little sprinkling of the qualcomm stuff, although we're going to get to that in a second too, because there was a new announcement there as well. So, yeah, so Lunar Lake is a thing, amd, like I said, zen 5 already a thing, and then Qualcomm, we'll get to that.

16:38
So here's what I've heard, and I kind of I'm not usually the type is like a mary joe thing. Like mary joe, you'd run into someone you know at an event like this and, uh, I'd be like, hey, what's going on? How are your kids? And she's like, tell me something that's going on inside the company right now. You know she's like, she's like, really, you know, she always she's very kind of straight at it, yeah.

17:00
But you know, I've been, I've been out for a little while and I haven't traveled to work a lot, especially not internationally, and haven't seen some of these people in a long time. And I was like you know what, I'm going to put on my Mary Jo hat here and I'm going to find out what's going on here. So I had some really interesting conversations that verified a lot of the things that I'd heard about before, and we've discussed this notion that Intel especially, you know, one of the things that is not obvious from the outside and and sounds borderline illegal to me, but uh, has been going on for decades and decades is that intel pays big, big money to pc makers to make sure that they adopt their chips and, more more importantly, skip other people's chips.

17:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know that would. That's the and that's where the illegal part would come in. Right, like, yeah, I mean, intel basically made intel-based ultrabooks come true. Right, like, yeah, I mean, intel basically made intel based ultrabooks come true. Right, they, they kicked a lot of money to a lot of those builders to do sock design, ram soldered on you know, and chassis thin enough to julian potatoes and and it and it worked like, without a doubt it worked. Those and most machines are still made. I would argue that's a weird little buy-in. I think it was like $450 million. It wasn't a trivial thing but it worked.

18:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is the rare example of Intel kind of doing the right thing when it comes to mobility and efficiency over the past 10, 15 years, because that was something that Microsoft has always been hammering on with them. Pc makers honestly, I don't think they care as much. No, and I and they kind of see themselves as competing with each other. They don't see themselves as competing with Apple. They're they're obviously concerned with margins. I mean, their margins are very low, so every dollar counts, and I think the reason that ultra books took off as a spec is because Intel made it happen made it happen and they I think the pc makers generally believe the customers wouldn't buy them because they're more expensive.

18:49
Yeah, which is so they were they were racing for the 500 laptop.

18:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and suddenly it's like no, we want you to make this ultra book.

18:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a hundred bucks yeah, this is an important part of history. Pc makers embrace netbooks to such a degree that they forever gouge their own price structure and ruin their own businesses, and they try to do it again. People forget this, but when Windows 8.1 came out, there was a 15 seconds where 8-inch Windows tablets were going to be a thing. My God.

19:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Windows license.

19:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They all jumped on this thing immediately and this made Microsoft insane. It was like guys, you got to stop circling the bottom here thing immediately. Because, yeah, you said you know they, and this made microsoft insane. You know, it was like guys, you got to stop going. You know, circling the bottom here, you got to shoot a little higher.

19:30
So the pc market is in much better. Well, actually, that's not true. Uh, the quality of pcs is much higher today than it was at that time, so that that stuff has actually improved. But yeah, uh, man, it's, yeah, it's just kicking and screaming, right. So since then, uh, obviously a lot has changed, but I so just a couple of high level things. I'll say, uh, qualcomm came out and said this publicly, so this is not private information. But qualcomm said look, uh, you know, we, we help subsidize things and we do that kind of thing too. We, we found in the pc market that we had to dramatically raise the prices prices we're paying to make that happen. So part of the success of the Qualcomm launch back in June or May was that they were like, okay, we're going to double the amount we're paying you guys. And PC makers woke up and said, sure, so the type of it's slightly irritating to me that there aren't a lot of.

20:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is messed up, though, right.

20:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is messed up Because that price just gets passed on in the chips to the vendors, which gets passed on to the customer well, but the force we're not discussing, the thing no one will really say on record, is the other half of this discussion. Is intel on the other side saying well, I mean, we'll give you a little extra not to do it? How does that sound?

20:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
how much they get there, and this is where the ftc show up yep, yep, so that stuff.

20:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, this is what's going on in the background. But, um, the funny thing is the two people told me this is so beautiful. I always had this image of ABD kind of haplessly wandering through life, not really caring, like just kind of saying like look, we feel that we make the best chips and we're not going to do any of that stuff, we don't care. And uh, they were like like yeah, that's exactly what they do, they, they, they just don't even try, like that, like they're just we're not going to play that game. Somewhat. This was, uh, an exaggeration, I think, to make a point.

21:11
But somebody told me that the, the amount of money that intel pays pc makers every year is more money than amd makes in a year, you know, which is not literally true, but it's it's. They were trying to put in perspective how different these companies are. Intel we're going to get into this later in the show is having some problems. I don't know if you've been watching the news lately. So it's possible that inroads could be made by AMD and Qualcomm, simply because Intel's focus may be elsewhere, just saving the business. So we'll get to that. But it was fascinating to me to have these conversations with people. I I've always, um, I I've always had these types of conversations in a way, but it's been so long. I, I, I haven't been to this kind of an industry event a long time, because of COVID and all that.

21:56
And uh you know, I, I very early on. In fact I will say that in this case it was Lenovo. Back when all the pc makers were making, uh, 16 by 9 screens, I, I was. I didn't understand why we couldn't go taller, that this aspect ratio made sense for multimedia but it wasn't for movies, it wasn't great for productivity. And I these two guys from lenovo at the time think bad guys were like yeah, no, you're 100, right, it drives us insane. But even them, the biggest pc maker in the world, could not dictate to the display makers to ship panels that were any other aspect ratio. It was too much demand and, um, it took a long time. But today of course we see 16 by 10 is the new standard. So it finally happened. Um, but that's the type of kind of conversation I would have kind of on the back end with people from these companies and uh, so it's been kind of fun getting into that a little bit um, this past week or this week.

22:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, getting down in with those guys and just what they're, what they're worried about. It's interesting.

22:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just you know they see the market differently yeah, yep, and, and I keep mentioning this, but steven sanovsky's book, uh, he talks about this kind of thing a lot. Um, you know, he talks about his frustrations with, and Microsoft's frustrations over time with Intel, with the PC makers, how they would just squabble amongst themselves, didn't want to spend money, didn't want to get anything done, always needed prodding to go down any direction. You know, yeah, it's just, it's it's partners that don't. They have the same customers and they have completely different goals. You know just, and it's. You know it's hard, it's like wrangling cats, isn't it interesting?

23:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that you would think, in that array of PC vendors, that somebody would say, well, we're going to be the premium product, yep, yep, and I think they've all. All of those attempts failed, yeah, of those attempts failed, yeah. I mean, you know, and many of the vendors like, if you look at a lenovo line and you look at a dell line, there is a a low cost product and there is a premium product, like they just try and make the range but none of them necessarily present themselves as the premium company. That's true, right, because there's a lot of pcs bought by, by people who do not care about that.

24:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PC makers are like Samsung is in phones they have a wide range, a big portfolio and the big volume is on the low end. The high ones are higher margin, but they sell fewer of them and overall they do. However, they do Mac and iPhone line up the same way. Of course right, same company, but it's pretty much just premium. Yeah, Apple only makes it premium. It's like why does this work for Apple? Line up the same way?

24:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
of course right same company, but it's pretty much just premium. Yeah, apple only makes it premium. It's like, why does this work for apple and it doesn't work for anybody else?

24:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, that's. This is the one case where I think monoculture makes sense.

24:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, that's probably why you have to control all the variables in that sense I mean, you know, on the it side of this, I've always appreciated that the dells and the hps and so forth have made a line of products meant for assisted men. So drivers are tightly controlled, changes are very restricted because it's like I need to, over a period of two years, buy the same machine well, yeah, so I'm gonna forget the details on this, but dell, uh, probably latitude d series.

25:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They ensure they would go eight, ten years to ensure that every little module that plugged in every whatever peripheral, that these things would be compatible for a long, long time. And that's how you get into business right. That's the guarantee those guys want.

25:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And part of that was that on the software side, those admins were not modernizing with how they did. Images and things Like imaging got, you know, back in the ghost days. That was very necessary and that technology evolved and got way better, but the practices didn't.

25:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know what to say. I mean, yes, you know, it's frustrating I.

25:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I stare at this all the time, paul, and I try and figure out what parts the dog and what parts of tail right Like who's? Wagging who here Yep?

25:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, okay, all right. So again, like I said, ifa, ifa, whatever has not started, but Dell announced Lunar Lake versions of this XPS 13, which is now this ultralight 2.67 pound mini laptop. There's a version running Qualcomm Snapdragon, which you know came back in June, and there's actually still a version running qualcomm snapdragon, uh, which you know came back in uh, june, and there's actually still a version running meteor lake. So you have kind of that interesting choice there. It's no amd version, but you can, you can pre-order that now I think. The prices, I think, start at 13.99, uh, you know, full hd plus display isn't lunar lake with the same processor in that HP you like?

26:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, oh, it's not. No, oh, that's the newest. You have Meteor Lake in yours. It's Meteor Lake, that's right.

26:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah. So Meteor Lake is the first gen. Core Ultra Lunar Lake is the second gen. Big improvements in graphics processing and big improvements in the MPU, and then it's a new architecture too Right, and so do we know how it compares to the Snapdragon?

26:47
Yeah, actually so it's. I'm glad you brought this up because actually my in my notes I meant to discuss what you just asked. So we don't have a lot of reviews or any reviews of these systems to compare yet and, interestingly, there are going to be multiple examples of PCs that will actually ship the same exact computer with the three different chipsets. So we're actually going to be able to make a pretty awesome apple to apple comparison. Yeah, that's, that's never happened, right? So that's very interesting. And also for people like amd um, there's a lot more amd happening than ever before. It's still, you know, a minority percentage compared to intel, but there are a lot of examples across multiple pc makers where you're going to get a zen 5 choice and a lunar lake choice and it's going to be the same hardware. Otherwise, you know, the motherboard's different, of course, inside, but as far as you know, the port screens, whatever that stuff's going to be, all be the same. So there's going to be some good head-to-head. So the way I'm going to frame this is because this is again, this is just from talking to people right behind the scenes. I don't no one's brought up a benchmark or you know, they've just told me what they've seen the. The discussion that I've had about snapdragon x and comparing it to the mac and apple silicon right is look, ideally this thing would have no fans, it would be silent, it would be exactly the same, it would have 15 hours of battery life. But we need to be realistic here. Right, first gen, and the term I use is you kind of want it to be in the ballpark, right? So all-day battery life if it's 10 hours versus 15, it's still all-day battery life, right, yeah, if it has a fan but it never comes on, basically it's close enough, it's in the ballpark right. And I know it sounds like I'm rationalizing a little bit there, but that was the way I kind of approached it and I will say for whatever it's worth, that's kind of where Snapdragon X landed. So, with that in mind, if you think about Zen 5 and Lunar Lake and you compare it now to snapdragon because the look they already have the they have the compatibility. That that's just. It was.

28:51
Intel had an event I think it was on I guess it would have been tuesday night where they basically just crapped on qualcomm for two hours and it was. It was 100 about compatibility and it was almost like a comedy sketch. It was like, hey, have we mentioned how much, how terrible qualcomm is? No, let's talk about it again. You know, it was like you know, oh, here's a video game, this is something you can't do on qualcomm. You know that kind of thing there were. It was. It was a little brutal, yeah. But why are so insecure? Well, because suddenly qualcomm is there, right, qualcomm is. Intel has ignored qualcomm until about 10 seconds ago.

29:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, because they just look, I I mean, and Because they sold millions of machines in the past six months, I don't think they did.

29:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but they're well. Intel's gotten the religion when it comes to efficiency, better life, all that kind of stuff.

29:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what they came to the gate with right. That's the whole chipset mentality.

29:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, qualcomm is making them look bad just from that perspective. Amd, by the way, is too, as it turns out. I mean, they're actually doing a really good job. So the high-level commentary that I heard and this was repeated a couple of times was basically what I just said about Snapdragon compared to Qualcomm, to Apple Silicon. From an efficiency standpoint battery life, just basic power management capabilities Lunar Lake and AMD are in the ballpark, right, they're not as good. No, amd is better.

30:21
Battery life, especially if we'll just accept a round number of 10 hours of battery life on Qualcomm, if we will just accept a round number of um 10 hours of battery life on qualcomm. Amd is going to land around six, I'm sorry, around eight, right, which is still a work day, yeah, and lunar lake six, six and a half, you know. Uh, those are not exact numbers and they're not even. They're not numbers, I'm just just as a rough percent. It's just kind of put them on a scale and we'll see with exact pcs how those, those things land. The mpus are there, that stuff almost doesn't matter, but whatever they're, you know, those capabilities are good, but they exceed qualcomm in certain areas, right, not just compatibility, but the um, the integrated graphics on these chips are unbelievable.

30:59
You know we've talked about that previous gen amd with a 760 or 780M graphics. Those are great. Well, now they have 800M graphics and they're already doing their hybrid architecture stuff on the processing cores. I mean that stuff's going to be fantastic. So the overall picture there is actually very good, and it is that thing I was talking about. They're in the ballpark. They have a really good performance, graphics performance and then compatibility story. They're x64. It's native and now they're getting much better on efficiency. So have they caught up? 100%? No, but it's much better than it was. That's what I've heard. So this is not based on me seeing anything. This is based on me talking to people.

31:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But that's what I've heard.

31:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And as long as they're in the ballpark, you'll go with the chip, you know, right? I mean, yeah, and I think and I've already seen people talking like this this is businesses talk this way, of course, but also just individuals, like there's a lot of distrust of the unknown, yeah, and I, I, there's just certain things that freak people out, and I, I, I, I am right now using a lenovo thinkpad, you know, qualcomm based, you know whatever we've already established, you have an abnormal relationship with pc hardware.

32:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Most people buy a pc once every two to five years, maybe less, I switch pcs every two to five weeks. These are very painful purchases. Yeah, they're typically over $1,000. This is like buying a household appliance it is rare and it's concerning.

32:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I need these people to man up because there's good stuff happening. And look, I giggle like Curly from the Three Stooges. Every time I open the lid on one of these laptops and it just comes on. It's like magic.

32:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll tell you this is look.

32:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a fact. I'm when I go. I'll be gone for seven days. Right when I get home I have these laptops. There's some on my dresser in my bedroom. I I'll open up like the elite book 1040. Nothing's gonna happen. I get that. I can guarantee nothing will happen. There are um some snapdragon. I could open those things up. Nothing will happen. It'll hit power button and it will come up pretty quick because it's whatever it's gone, gone Smart hibernation, whatever it's called.

33:07
But that MacBook Air, I guarantee you 100% it's going to pop right on the second I open it. It's like you hadn't even gone away. We need to figure that out. And the battery will not have disappeared over that week at all. It's incredible, it's magic, you know. So that stuff's real. I mean he's. You know you gotta it's. It's. It's like trying to convince a person who can fix a carburetor in a car that electric cars are a thing you know it's like, but I can't fix it. Yeah, you're not gonna have to fix it. That's the point. You know it takes some time, you know. Yeah, anyhow, yeah, I look, I hope that lunar or intel and am AMD catch up and based on what competition is good.

33:47
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I want everyone to have these benefits. And then, yeah, if you're too, if you're, if you're too much of a Nancy boy to handle Qualcomm, you know, I mean, well, you'll have it. Yeah, so the Dell thing happened, so Qualcomm also announced a new chip at the show, and this one's a little surprising, because it's not a better chip, it's a worse chip.

34:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no.

34:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so it's an eight-core Snapdragon X+, which is the lowest end. So now there's a new low end. It has less cache, the clock speed's lower. The big thing, though I think the thing that's actually the big difference is the GPU is significantly slower from a clock speed's lower. The big thing, though, that I think the thing that's actually the big difference is the gpu is significantly slower from a clock speed perspective. It's the only processor in that range that has a different gpu or a different gpu clock. Um, this might be taking binning to an extreme.

34:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I this is well this is my getting the yield. Like we got 30 of these. That don't make these numbers, but if we cut it down to this, yep.

34:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And the you know from clock. The way Qualcomm presents this publicly is like this is what PC makers have always been asking for. It's the reason we already had three or four or five SKUs and now we have six or whatever. They want these price points and they can hit the different price points for different products. And maybe I mean the different price points for different products and maybe I mean, yes, I'm sure that's part of it, but I actually do think it's. I really think it's about yield and, um, it's fine, I, I will. I. This came up, I don't know, two, three months ago, but I, I openly wondered at one point when are we going to start hearing about snapdragon x base? Uh, chromebooks, right, like this chipset would be huge for chromebooks. They run android apps. Android phones are switching that. Whatever the next phone chip from qualcomm is is based on these chips. It's not an hcx gen 6 or something, it's this thing.

35:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that seems like a natural to me and I, I would say also these lower end snapdragon processors probably would make more sense in a chromebook and there's no chance that they just made a lower end processor not, and kept every other component the same.

35:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yes, I mean obviously, right, I mean obviously.

35:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like, if you're trying to make a lower cost product, why wouldn't you go down on the Wi-Fi chipset, down on the Bluetooth? You didn't, because it's the same freaking chip. That's right. It's the same freaking chip, that's right.

36:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is the same freaking chip. Actually, it's literally the same chip, yep. So, look, I don't know if we're ever going to hear the inside story in this one, but yeah, anyway, they're doing this. Obviously, there will be next-gen Snapdragon, whatever. So whether that gets to announce at their October, uh, at about a month and a half, or not, I, I have no idea. Uh, if it happens next year, and so I, you know, we can't say I don't know, but as of now, we have this thing. So, um, what man would want you? Now, I, I don't know, but I don't know, you can't say that I'm sorry, uh, yeah, and there was some good news, though, at the Qualcomm announcement.

36:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, google Drive, the one-by-one hang-up, the one thing that doesn't work, the one you're upset about it is coming natively to ARM, so there's going to be a Windows and ARM client for Google Drive.

36:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's not there today, but it's sometime in the next month or two.

37:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it will happen.

37:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, express VPN and NordVPN also are now live natively on ARM, and that's huge, because VPNs are also one of those apps you can't emulate, apparently, and they're showstoppers. Yeah, yep, so those are two pretty big kind of concerns.

37:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You won't buy it if you can't have your VPN. A VPN, you can't fake your way around because it's too low level, so it has to work.

37:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's too low level, so it has to work. Yeah, so they got that going. And look, by the way, is this Qualcomm going to these companies and saying how much is it going to take to make this happen? Yeah, probably, but you know what? That's how this stuff happens.

37:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's fine. Now I remember back in the WinPhone days. I mean Microsoft literally was hiring friends of mine to write the Uber app for WinPhone.

37:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or here's the top 10 apps on ios. Could you write an app that are a game that looks like that? Yeah, you know that guy.

37:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There was a lot of go to the company say, hey, we want you to make a wind phone version. Like we haven't got the resources, like here's the resource, they're going to do it. And then they'd make the version, hand it to them and they'd never touch it again.

37:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that happened a lot actually.

37:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it did, that was I get it, you're trying to make a market.

38:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, yep, can we just interrupt? I just want to interrupt here just for a moment to do an ad, but I want to hear about the latest on your Aero Electronics.

38:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just got this email before we started recording.

38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't say anything I've heard about this. I want to know. I want to know and, of course, a lot more, not just from IFA, but in general. You're listening to Windows Weekly. Paul Theron is in Berlin, that's why he sounds German. That, or maybe the excessive consumption of currywursts. It's great to have you, paul, and Richard Campbell at home in Madeira Park, british Columbia. Our show today brought to you by Flashpoint.

38:44
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I can't name names, but you got to think. If you're a big multinational, you need information. You need your own intelligence service. You need Flashpoint. Flashpoint, aaron Day, frost Sullivan 2024 Global Product Leadership Award for Unrivaled Threat Data and Intelligence. The Senior Vice President of Cyber Operations at a large US financial institution, which shall remain nameless, said quote Flashpoint saves us over $80 million in fraud losses every year. Their proactive approach and sharp insights are crucial in keeping our financial institutions secure. They're not just a solution. They are a strategic partner helping us stay ahead of cyber threats. It's no wonder Flashpoint is trusted by both mission-critical businesses and governments worldwide mission-critical businesses and governments worldwide To access the industry's best threat data and intelligence. Visit flashpointio today. I don't know how you'd do business without it, honestly, in this crazy environment Flashpointio. Thank you so much for supporting Windows Weekly and making a truly amazing product. We really appreciate the support. Now I want to know Richard Campbell, tell me about your exciting new developer kit, snapdragon Elite, that's coming to your door any day now.

41:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know about any day.

41:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, there are days in 2025.

41:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's true, there's truth. So I'm looking at my order. It says September 18th 19th.

41:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I haven't actually even looked at the order. I got this email this morning and it's from the Aero aero electronics folks and what they say is hey, thanks for your order, it will be shipping later in september.

42:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they don't give you a date, they say a year yeah no, is it the nedry character from jurassic park but then it's.

42:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
then it says qualcomm technologies would would also like to inform you about an important update to your product. Uh-oh, ready for the important update? Yeah. I will read it verbatim from Qualcomm Technologies. Your device will now ship with a USB-C to HDMI dongle in lieu of an embedded HDMI port. We look forward to seeing what incredible apps and experiences developers produce utilizing this device.

42:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want no dongle. Give me my money back.

42:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is there a sadder sound than sad Trevon? Like what's the next step up from that? No, there's nothing sadder.

42:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's about as sad as it gets. So let's be clear At this point if they're actually shipping later September. There is an HDMI port on the device. It just doesn't work oh, that would be amazing right like that's what's happened is in testing it could now it could be something as simple as an fcc violation. It has too much I would love feedback.

43:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The port was there, but it was like they didn't get approval yeah, it's got it's got.

43:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe it's an emission breed like, and this is all speculation on me, but having been involved in building hardware, let me tell you you've laid out the board, you've started producing the units and you can't get it past fcc yeah, I bet you that's it that makes sense, so you just turn it off.

43:24
Yeah, we want to ship it to you, we want you to have it the last time a guy goes in there with a little grinder and he cuts the traces to disable that or they could just throw a shield on it or something like well, well, that's, I'm sure they tried, I'm sure they were battling that, but considering how late this is in the process, that you hit a point where it's like we need to find the board and they like you don't have time, there's no, there's no time.

43:48
Wow, yeah so well, that makes a lot of sense. Look, I've been there, like I've literally been at that point where we could ship in one country, we couldn't ship in another because different qualification. Yeah, that makes sense. It's, it hurts and it's, and it's like I said, if we'd figured this out six months ago, we would have designed the board differently, like you know, I stood in the prototype, yeah, so anyway, okay later in september yeah, well, I'll be back later in september as well.

44:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you might might have.

44:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You might have an exciting gift when you get home they'll be on my doorstep sitting there for three weeks.

44:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um 18th or 19th I would. I would take that um somewhat later. It's funny I don't even know why I check that order because the date's like different every time I go. So, yeah, it's made. I think they use a random damage generator just to I'm gonna, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna be a bullish here, I'm gonna be the optimist and say that that was what was holding them up, and they finally said, oh, we can't keep it on hold much longer, so let's just ship it with a dongle yeah, I think they fought.

44:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I bet you anything, they fought and fought and fought to try and fix this thing because it was the one last thing and finally hit a point where you know a PM called the ball and said all that's holding you back is this port. What if we disable it? Ship it.

45:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I hope to God that there's super glue poured in that port, and that's how lousy that is.

45:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll let you know, I'll take it apart.

45:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know what?

45:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you don't care do you care, richard, that you have to use a dongle?

45:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
or yeah, and because in the end I was even thinking about using his server. There's not going to be a screen plugged in there. You go headless. But but more you know, I bet you the case is already made I, that's what I'm saying.

45:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet the first version is a tape over it. Great, yeah, like you know it will literally be like one of those silver pieces of tape.

45:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When your warranty is, you know it's void but, and it wouldn't, there's not so many units that you couldn't literally have a guy with a grinder cutting the traces just to disable. Sure, there's a few thousand, probably, right, yeah, yeah, that's doable, and then the next batch will be made differently yeah, okay, good to know, um, that actually, I'm going to take that as an encouraging sign.

45:58
That's amazing. Well, it sounds like it's actually going to be a product like the. Here's the bigger thing, and I've seen this happen too. The fcc just says no, nope, can't do it, you have to design, and now it's a year, right?

46:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would love that not because I want harmed anybody, but I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that, but I that would be amazing like we. We are literally going to cut this part out of the and they're like no, that's not enough, it's not good enough.

46:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, well, I the I mean, we, we dealt with this was ul for an electrical device, where it was that kind of thing, and it said, oh, you have to completely recertify, oh, and you have to get to the back of the line too. So three months, right, try over. Yeah, make your changes and start again. It's like wait you, we were just talking to you but like, but what?

46:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, paul, and I do mac mini's gonna come out, just buy a mac come on man.

46:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it has an hdmi port. Well, maybe I will see, but oh, the new ones may not. I don't know the new ones may not, but I bet they do. Yeah, the new ones may not, but I bet they do. The rumor is they will, but we'll see. Okay, paul in our discord asked chat GPT, what does HTMI stand for? And it said, yep, hilarious digital monkey interface. There you go.

47:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that's what Qualcomm thought it meant, and now look what happened.

47:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Take this stuff seriously Seriously. Oh well, all right, thank you for the update. Oh boy, that's too bad. I'm sorry. What else Surface? Let's talk about something that does get an HDMI port and FCC certification, do they? I?

47:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
don't think they do have HDMI ports actually.

47:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, never mind, Never mind.

47:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft announced the business versions of Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7, which is hilarious because they announced those a month ago. I don't quite understand why they did this, but there will be 5G models coming later in September, so that might be the point of it. That might be the point of it. If you still want a Surface Pro 10, which is the Intel Meteor Lake version, not Lunar Lake, they will also offer a 5G version for business starting September 26. So I don't know. So of course, I've already gotten. Two people have emailed me and said so. Is there going to be a Lunar Lake version? I mean, what about an AMD version? And I would just point you to history and say it's Surface guys, that's not how they do things, so probably not you were talking earlier about.

48:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
there's going to be vendors, like the Dells of the world, that are going to make a model that literally comes in all three chipsets. That's right. Surface has never done that. That's true.

48:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's true, surface has never done that. Well, they've done. Not all three, that's true.

48:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they've done Intel and AMD. I would have said they didn't even do two.

48:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They did two too. So Surface Laptop I don't remember which version, for maybe somewhere in there you could have an AMD or an Intel choice thing. And if you'll go to the surface pro 9, there was uh intel and uh qualcomm, right, and then surface pro x, I think was. I think that I don't remember anymore, but yeah, there were a few.

49:06
But no, certainly certainly never all three yeah, yeah, yep, yep, so, yeah, uh, I almost said something. Okay, so, and then tomorrow, the next day, you can expect HP and Lenovo to have announcements Before IFA. Of course it's Wednesday, yeah, so we'll have a follow-up next week on the remainder of the announcements.

49:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Plus, you're actually going to go to the IFA and I can't wait to hear what it's like uh, I mean, I might drive by it um on your way to currywurst. I get it.

49:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is a do they have currywurst there? Uh, there is, um, the first time I ever had pig knuckle right, which is an awesome german meal. Yeah was actually inside the mess it wasn't a tent, but like the mess tent inside of c bit and uh, it's possible there's good food there. I don't know, uh, I, I probably won't find out. Um, but there is a I. I have a press badge waiting for me. If I do decide to go, you gotta at least step foot in the place do I?

50:09
I guess we'll see yeah, you think I did. I come to germany to go to a trade show. I mean, come on, I don't know. So I would like to direct everyone's attention to something rather incredible which is for some reason. For some reason today yesterday actually, but today the wall street journal published a story about how Qualcomm Snapdragon X-based PCs can't play games.

50:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not timely?

50:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why would Yang Ji, who I think we all know from the Wall Street Journal, that celebrated journalist, write a story about a three-month-old processor right as Intel is launching new?

50:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
processors and.

51:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Intel has this exact marketing message. I mentioned this earlier. They were beating this exact thing to death.

51:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why would they do?

51:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that I mentioned earlier.

51:09
I'm just throwing out ideas that Intel pays a lot of money to make sure that Qualcomm well, amd mostly, but now Qualcomm doesn't get any free rides anywhere, and I find this to be very suspicious. So here's one of the things I find suspicious about this article it never mentions AMD. According to this article, there's only Intel, and now there's Qualcomm, and Qualcomm is terrible. Qualcomm does not play games. Half of the games that they tested did not run smoothly on Qualcomm. This is like a bizarre hit job from a business publication whose readers would never consider these computers to begin with. Why would they have written this story?

51:55
I find this to be rather incredible. Like I said, you can search the article. How many times they say AMD zero? How many times they say Qualcomm, if my memory serves, 14. A lot of dumping on Qualcomm in here, and they talk to experts who I believe were supplied by Intel. I might work for Intel. I'm not. I'm just throwing out ideas. I don't know what happened here. I have no idea why this publication would write this article. It makes no sense. I'm just saying it happened exactly as Intel launched their new process.

52:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This paragraph is like an ad for Intel. That's what I'm saying. It's crazy. Intel aims to introduce its own chips for pcs with co-pilot plus ai functions in september. Computer makers expect widespread sales of those intel powered models next year. At that point, gamers could purchase one of the intel devices and avoid the Qualcomm R issue. Here's the thing. This is appalling.

53:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think both of you guys will have experienced this where you get up in the morning and check your email, there are some number of PR outreaches, some of which are so ludicrous you might read them aloud to your wife or your spouse and you'll say you're never going to believe this, but apparently Philadelphia is the second handiest city in the US and I don't know why I got that PR on each day. Hilariously, so did my wife.

53:28
So we both got that one. But you ignore these things. I block them and I mark them as spam or if it's a legit something, I just ignore it. But uh, I think intel reached out to zhang chi there and said, hey, we got a story, I might want to look into it.

53:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And uh, they took the bait and they also took a bunch of the copy, because this is word for word what is it from an intel press release?

53:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's it sounds.

53:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Does it not sound like it was written by?

53:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
intel seriously larry. She had a 39 year old gamer in shanghai said he'd wait for intel. He doubted serious gamers would even consider pcs powered by arm.

54:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Arm is silly, am I right? They make toys with arm you can't.

54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't play a lot of triple a games on a mac either.

54:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just yeah, oh yeah, so they mentioned. Let's see how many times they mentioned apple once, yeah, uh, how many times they mentioned mac? Oh, three times actually.

54:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does say, although loyal following among non-gamers, max to enjoy a loyal following among my actually actually twice.

54:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, um so yeah, this is, this is a hit shot. I, I, this is a bald-faced, disgusting hit shot.

54:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I honestly long suspected the wall street journal of really being just it's there for everyone to see.

54:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can just read it for yourself and tell me what you think, because it reads like like a. Like a youtube influencer would do something like this, or like a blogger trying to make a name for himself, or something like this is disgusting, and it's in the Wall Street Journal. This is not Bob's blog, you know. It's gross. And look, by the way, the central point is correct. I mean, actually, copilot plus PCs are terrible for games. Everyone who's reviewed one of these things has made that point. But why would you, why would it need to be written Like it's? Nobody has these things, nobody's like. I'm just going to see what Lunar Lake looks like and I'm probably going to buy it.

55:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was about to buy it Then I read this article Are you kidding me?

55:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Crazy. Thank you, wall Street Journal, for saving me. Then I read this article. And are you kidding me? Crazy? I've never thank you, wall street journal, for saving me. I was.

55:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was gonna try to play sea of thieves on my, my qualcomm pc, and and, by the way, as a gamer myself, I I read the wall street journal for this kind of hard-hitting facts about games, because those guys, I mean, they're experts. You know that's who I go to. I, what, what, what is this? It's crazy. So, again, I feel like I'm like that. I'm just asking questions.

56:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, you know, that's what this feels like to me, but you know, every so often I get approached for interesting marketing packages for for the show right, and there's pieces, they there's the things they should be buying, like an ad spot, and maybe you know that they always ask for one more thing where it's like you know I'm, I'm not gonna do that oh, they always do this for us.

56:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say, yeah, they pretend that they're interested in ads, for instance, yep, right. And then they say, oh, and we'd like to get our executive on windows weekly, can we do that? And we say, uh, no not, not an interview show. It's not an interview show you want to know why I don't interview industry executives. That's why yeah, ever so gross yeah well, chris capicella chris is great yeah yeah, he's different, and I doubt microsoft ever begs you to get chris on. In fact, they probably beg you not to put Chris on.

56:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that was him.

56:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They didn't want him on? No, I'm sure they didn't. He's too honest. Where did he end up, by the way? Do we know he?

57:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
hasn't ended up anywhere. Yeah, I know, I was just talking to Mary Jo about this.

57:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's really fine.

57:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact there was a. Mark Gurman was talking about this in his latest newsletter. It's a problem Apple has too. Once you, if you're a successful company and your longtime executives have stock options, they're by now worth so much money they don't need to work.

57:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is a couple of years ago, but I didn't mention this earlier. But the architect of the Zen architecture at AMD works for Intel now.

57:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

57:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. So I mean this is. This is not brand new. I mean this, this this happened a while ago, but you know this is another. Like companies spend money to acquire these people, right yeah, so the Apple thing is really unique. You know what do you do when someone like Johnny Ive leaves, or various executives that they you pretend right, you're staying on, you throw more, a lot more money you know a lot of money and say hey, you don't have to do anything, but can we?

58:02
just say do not, you dare leave and go somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, that's what that really that's exactly what it is yeah, yep, it's smart.

58:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean honestly if you can get or or don't leave and go to the beach either.

58:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, you know yeah you want to look like you went and played banjo like well, you want to have that like I'm.

58:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Steve jobs is a is an extreme example of this. But you want to have that kind of smooth transition thing where someone who's like I've like bob mansfield or um the cfo is leaving now, or whomever like you go mystery, yeah, yeah johnny I've. You don't want, you don't want the. Well, johnny I've is a big one. You don't want the markets to. Oh, they're dead. Oh, exactly, that was the whole point.

58:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's a very smart thing to do. Johnny's not leaving, we've just got a very special job. And then you talk to him three years later.

58:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's like. I haven't even no one even texted me one time. I'm not sure I could find the office anymore.

58:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how you know that neither Paul nor Richard nor I are receiving big bags of cash from anybody. That's right. We're still working kids. Yeah, that's exactly right.

59:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm giving a talk the next month about AI and Windows and stuff and one of my lines. I'll ruin it right now because this is so beautiful it's like. Can you tell me what the big difference is between me and the Beatles? And it's not, yeah, talent, I get it. Stage presence Hilarious. No, it's. The Beatles wrote a song and they still get paid for it. And I wrote an article and no one cares when it's five seconds old. I have to keep going. I'm like a, like a shark. You know you can't stop Like. You have to just keep going and going. That's what that is. We still work. Residual free business there is no. Yeah, exactly, I found the ultimate way to never have to stop working. You know, like I have to keep creating content or I'm pointless. Yeah, it's horrible.

59:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Also talent. I've tried dynamic ad insertion in podcasts. It's a great way to make a podcast really bad.

59:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we do it, but yeah somebody said that it's the best way to get people to subscribe to the ad.

01:00:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Free version of the podcast or just how to learn to like you do the thing where you like. Ad starts, you're like bump, bump, bump, they're back, you know you don't want. Yeah, yeah, yes anyhow all right yeah, anyway, so this wall street journal thing is gross, it is it's terrible it's really quite astonishing yep yep, I think the discord is discussing whether or not it's actually a bot.

01:00:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like nice. Maybe that's not a person, maybe that's just software I hope that's true.

01:00:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That would well.

01:00:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just and I went and looked and they put out one piece a month, yeah, and they all look pretty.

01:00:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, Richard, you can't test 1,500 games on Snapdragon in your spare time. This is a full-time job. Yeah Gross. Oh well, I know Anyhow. Okay, when are we? I don't even know.

01:00:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're going to talk about Windows.

01:00:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want to talk about Windows? Oh, it's windows time. Remember we talked about windows.

01:00:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What a thought we know, yeah, uh, yeah. So windows 11 24 h2 is coming down the pike, right, I expect in the next 30 days. Yeah, again, if it's, this time it's personal um. So now it's coming. You know this will be the broad release. Everyone will get it. Who's, you know, compatible um? We still.

01:01:16
You know, microsoft doesn't like talking about things like rtm and general availability. It's not really in their you know blood anymore. But you know, this month we're in september. So this month we're, if it hasn't already been will be finalized. We'll go out on new pcs, the lunar lake stuff. Uh, almost certainly we'll ship with that. Uh, day one, of course, because that's our world.

01:01:41
My guess is it's October. It's going to be the same schedules last year, right, so October will be like a seeker experience, and then November, everyone just kind of starts getting it. See if, far, essentially so, it will happen over a period of time. Yeah, essentially so, it will happen over a period of time. Um, yeah, and you know, because the, the feature sets of 22, 23 and 24 h2 are essentially lined up, there's not going to be a lot of surprise, right, like this is kind of the the weird thing going on here because, as I was.

01:02:14
I went back and looked at what they had announced. You know that was making it into 24h2 and of course I run 24h2 on most of my pcs, so I kind of see this stuff, but not all of it right. Um, one of the weirdest features they've announced is this that sidecar thing on start like. If you have um uh piece, what's called a Phone link sorry, you know connected with your phone, you'll get this little like sidebar in the start menu. It's like you know, this weird thing like glommed on. So I've never seen that right, so that's not been there. One thing that's not in this list I don't cover a lot of the apps, but the Microsoft Store app has been updated recently so that the downloads and the library stuff is separate in the sidebar but, I'm running 50 on that one, like some.

01:03:04
Some computers it's the old one, some it's the new. You know, I think, some of the things you'll definitely see and, and if you're right, you know, if you use windows 11 today, you're like I, I'm seeing these. I don't. I don't understand what you're talking about. It's already there. You right-click on a file on the desktop or in File Explorer and, instead of the hieroglyphics for cut, copy, paste, save, rename or not, save, rename, delete whatever. You'll actually see a word that explains what that thing does Like. What an idea. When they first shipped Windows 11, what? Three years ago? It's amazing. Is it three years when they first shipped Windows?

01:03:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
11,. What three years ago? It's amazing, Is it three years? I think it is three years.

01:03:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not new anymore, right? Yeah, those were just icons.

01:03:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've taken the most common tasks in Windows and made them indecipherable, yeah and hard to find, and sometimes at the top of the bar and sometimes at the bottom of the bar.

01:03:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love that. I love that aspect of it. There's a reason for it and it's insane. And god, I love microsoft. Um, so there's that uh drag and drop to the file explorer. Um address bar, which was a feature before and remember they removed it. Yeah, 23h2, that's making a comeback. Um different, uh, uh compression formats, you know tar 7z, not just zip. Compress, uncompress, uncompress both directions. Good. My favorite feature, copilot, is an app which means that when I open it by mistake which everyone does and no one has ever done on purpose you can now hit Control-W to close it, which I do every day three to four times. Right, because I hit that stupid Copilot key by mistake.

01:04:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it's just the hover. The whole right-hand corner of a browser is dangerous, right.

01:04:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's brutal, yeah, it's just not much Like. One of the things I've never seen on a single PC but will allegedly be in 24H2, is the minimal new look for that tray notification area, the system tray right, where the date and time display is both minimal. There's no bell icon for notifications because there is not a human being on Earth that uses them anyway. Right, and you can still click the date and time to get to that anyway. So there's no need for that. So that's going to be an option. I've never seen it, one I have seen on every computer. This one's.

01:05:08
Very common today is the new quick settings where you have six icons or really tiles or cards for things like wifi, airplane mode, bluetooth, et cetera. The previous three versions of windows 11, you could customize that. You could just determine which cards were there, you could add more, you could take some away, you could reorganize them. So they've gotten rid of that. Now you get them all in that area scrolls in line. So you have to get into the area and you can kind of scroll in there and you'll see all of the available like on this computer there's 13 of them, all of the available cards. You can drag and drop to move them around, but you cannot remove ones you don't like because Microsoft who cares?

01:05:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just wonder where are the customers that were asking for these features?

01:06:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Those people do not exist, I don't, you know. A lot of the stuff they do is just confusing, you know. I mean some of it's fine, right, there's some accessibility stuff, that's good. There's the deprecated app stuff, which is fine, like, I get that stuff, but as far as well, the hieroglyphics in the context menus yeah, I think customers were asking for that, like when you right-click the taskbar and didn't get task manager in the original version of Windows 11, absolutely, people did ask for that, so I guess there's a little bit.

01:06:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they asked for it back, nobody said you know what made the taskbar perfect. If it back, nobody said you know it made the taskbar perfect if it didn't have the task manager in it.

01:06:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When I click on it, it's like you have telemetry. You know people use this and you removed it anyway. Yeah, uh, what?

01:06:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, so they're trying to make it backish because they just suddenly had, yeah, 11 mb. You know, yep, that's.

01:06:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's absolutely true. Yeah, as far as timing, I mean, we kind of touched on most of this already. But you know, we know, that Copilot plus PC will apply to AMD and Intel New PCs only, right, so Right, there's a lot of you know. Recall is coming in preview, supposedly starting in October, with the Windows Insider program. Yep, that will not apply to existing computers. Right, you have to have an MPU of a sufficient quality to get that.

01:07:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And your high-performance GPU doesn't qualify still, that's right.

01:07:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, so that's the thing I mean. I expect that to change over time, but that's what we're marketing today, so that's the thing you have to deal with.

01:07:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They still haven't built that underlying layer, for I don't care what scalar processor you have everything.

01:07:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Has that MIKE HENRY JR the orchestrator? Yep, this is the orchestrator. My dream for AI is the orchestrator.

01:07:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
MIKE HENRY JR. Well, the ODBC for this layer, but really DirectX, MIKE HENRY.

01:07:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
JR the printer driver layer. Pick your hardware extraction device context yes, yep, yes, beautiful, yes, um, yep, yes, dcs and h wins and all that awesome stuff from um. That's the thing about that was awesome.

01:08:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was evil and necessary, but it made. It's a sacrifice developers made because it made the the user's experience better. Yeah right, you know that they took away a business for me. I should have been suing. I used to, because it made the user's experience better. Yeah Right, you know they took away a business from me. I should have been suing. I used to sit down with companies and go through all the software they used and build the Venn diagram of what printer would work for all of them. Love it. Based on available drivers Right.

01:08:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they made their lives better and your finances worse.

01:08:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and then made an incredibly difficult development problem. Writing for device context is hard. Yeah, you know that's a tough abstraction.

01:08:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean they're going the final mile. Right now they're taking printer drivers away from everybody. Well, because they're dangerous, right the?

01:08:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
same way, they took away video drivers for some reason. Yep, you know the printer crisis continues. I can't do another run as on it. I've done three and I didn't want to even do one. That's amazing, but it's huge. And I still get emails. In fact, I just got another email from someone saying please talk more about printers. It's like what am I going to say except stab?

01:09:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yourself. I have a PR outreach for you and it goes like this you should try buying a printer if you have a Windows and ARM computer. Let me tell you something it's a nightmare. And if you had an Intel computer, that stuff would just work. That's all I'm saying.

01:09:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So what you should do is test like 1,300 printers. That's just. The argument, then, is then you'd have a printer and are you better off? I don't think you are.

01:09:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh boy. So if you know, so, if you guys follow the wire cutter, they make really good record. They started out, I think they started out just doing tech, you know, recommendations. They were kind of like the uh consumer reports for tech. And now they, just now, they god, they just they're into everything. They review wire vibrators and it's like it's crazy. But whatever they've turned into consumer reports and the, the one device type they review, where they don't say, look, this is the best. They say as printers, they say this is the one that will annoy you the least.

01:10:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nice, and it's like they're on the ball right, like that's actually what you're looking for. Yeah, there's no such thing. There's no good printer?

01:10:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no. None of them are good, yeah, but if you want, the one that sucks the less the least.

01:10:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This, yeah, this is the one that old, that old hp laser, color lasers, yet that I have any other room. But now I have to print everything twice because the first one's going to be smeared up and then somehow that fixes it, and then the next one's fine. Yep, I mean, I'm here as I can tell them. The next time I replace that thing it's going to be with the cheap, the disposable printer, right one that I literally toss when it stops printing. I'll buy two and I'll use one, and when it finally fails me, then I put the other one in and they send the other one in for recycling.

01:10:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's it.

01:10:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They all suck.

01:10:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because we're discussing this, I'm going to jump ahead to the HP results, because HP makes two products PCs and printers. Right, their PC business is approximately three quarters of their revenues. The other, well, two thirds. So they made $13.5 billion in the most recent quarter. 9.4 of that was from PCs and 4.9 billion no, no, that's not true. I'm sorry, I got the math wrong. I'm sorry. 4.1 billion is PCs, so yeah, we'll call it three quarters, one quarter. I'm sorry. $4.1 billion is PC, so yeah, we'll call it three quarters, one quarter. I hate to even say this. This is crazy. If you look just at their printer business, how do you think their printer business makes money? Do you think they sell printers? Nope, no, it's 100%. Ink Yep, 65%, but yes, it's 65% of their revenues come from ink.

01:11:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's supplies but generated by horrible software tormenting you to try and ink is a service right.

01:11:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is their one of their business models.

01:11:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's kind of hilarious where you know Microsoft taking over printer drivers might actually make that stuff go away. Like Microsoft might be the good guy here, which is weird.

01:11:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, anyway, I just I, I that a good guy here, which is weird. Yeah, anyway, I, just I, I that's stuck out to me. I was, you know, you go through their charts and graphs and their numbers, you're like, wait, what it's like, what's going on here? That would be like saying, like you know their pc business, you know 65 of their revenues came from, like, game controllers. Or like it's like, wait, wait, what's going on here, what is this thing? But uh, yeah, no, most of their money does come from PCs, which is the old Compaq business, right yeah.

01:12:21
Well, yeah, hp also had, yeah, hp and Compaq combined. Yeah, HPE, you know, spun their kind of what is now basically a cloud business, but their server business spun out, obviously a couple of years ago. So, yeah, they had their first revenue growth in quite a while, which was good. They credited the PC market. But, you know, slight rebound here. But, honestly, revenue growth in the PC business was 4.9% year over year, which is not great. But unit sales growth was just 1% up. Consumer or commercial business, as we saw with Dell and Lenovo, much bigger than their consumer business. 71% of their sales by revenue come from commercial PCs, not from consumers, which ties into what Richard said earlier. Like no one's, like, oh my God, I can't wait to have the next computer. You know what's happening. You know, no one really thinks like that anymore, unfortunately.

01:13:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now I mean, do they talk about like any of the enterprise lines, like they own Cray computers for crying out loud, they own Aruba Networking.

01:13:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, Well, if they own Cray, that's probably part of HPE. Now, not HPE, I would think, not HP.

01:13:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's HP yeah, so no, this is that's so, this is not. It's a separate entity. This is just the PC maker part right, well, it pretty soon anyway.

01:13:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would say meager gains. I mean it's any gain is a good gain obviously. But I there we've had a couple years now we're kind of hoping like, okay, maybe this is the year and I think you know the PC growth stuff is is happening, but it's not the question is is this pc growth through fud?

01:13:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is this the? Is this the ai hype making? People need to buy machines no, you know what.

01:14:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What this really is is really well, actually, for for now it's good, a good what I call good. Year-over-year comparables. We always compare revenue to the year-ago quarter.

01:14:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Year-ago quarter was a bloodbath, you know, and um, yeah, so so it's not hard to do better than not actually bleeding, yeah yeah, we're not.

01:14:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're not. We're not talking about, like uh, pre covid numbers or anything like that. Uh, this is just compared to last year. They're doing better, but I I would argue that's kind of a low bar. Yeah, no, I, the consensus seems to be that this aipc thing is is going to uh implode. So in the show we're going to talk about NVIDIA and Intel and some of the bad stuff going on there. There is some evidence now that the what do you call it? The trough of despair is a cliff of infinite height.

01:14:50
Yes, okay, I'm sorry, we're about to hit it. It looks like so that's coming. But anyway, this is what Uncle Satchit bet on. We're about to hit it. It looks like so that's coming.

01:14:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So um but anyway, uh, this is what, this is what uncle sat you bet on.

01:15:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, uh, there is a there. Well, I think we've talked about this. I, there's a. There's a version of the world where Microsoft wins by losing, which I only mean they'll be, uh, on the back end like electricity and they'll be doing okay because of azure and, um, maybe their first party stuff cash cows are cash cows.

01:15:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, they still exist. Right like, yeah, there are, there are product lines at microsoft with even more inertia. Right, right, right, it's like, hey, you're you and I don't know a point of visual studio. Right like yeah, they're your primary customers, don't want you to change it at all. It's like hey, you're a point of visual studio, right, like yeah, they're your primary customers, don't want you to change it at all. They buy it every year, right, right, and there's no new customers coming in because you've been doing what your existing customers want. Yeah.

01:15:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Turns out that they should talk to Steve Jobs. Oh wait, you know he had some opinions about that.

01:15:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it's totally innovator's dilemma.

01:16:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to pat myself on the back. I don't do this a lot, but last week I saw a story that Microsoft was going to let people uninstall recall. Right, in fact, sorry, that's not even what the story said. It said Microsoft is letting you uninstall recall. In fact, sorry, that's not even what the story said. It said Microsoft is letting you uninstall it now and I thought that's fascinating. It's not even available in preview. How can I?

01:16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uninstall it. Why would they let you uninstall?

01:16:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it now. But sure enough, if you installed last month's week D preview update for Windows 11 24H2, and you went into the windows features control panel, which no normal human being could find or would want to find, this is the place where you install such things as hyper b, you know, the windows virtualization platform and so forth. Uh, yep, sure enough, there it is. It's in the list, says recall. So when I wrote this article, so I I wrote it up because it's there, it's, it is there, and my headline was microsoft will apparently let you uninstall recall and this is like uninstalling internet explorer.

01:17:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that what you're talking about?

01:17:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, this is no, this is the opposite of what we saw in the wall street journal. Like this was me being like I don't, I don't understand what's happening here. Like, first of all, like I said, it's not available yet. Yeah, a lot of qualification in what I wrote. So, in fact, I'll just you know. I said whether this change is retained in next month's patch Tuesday update and beyond is an unknown. Perhaps this work is being done ahead of the recall preview, which will be tested in the insider program. Maybe it's a mistake or a test. No one outside of Microsoft knows and no one inside of Microsoft is saying a thing as usual. Like this didn't make sense to me, so that's how I wrote it up and then, two days later, microsoft said oh, just kidding, it was a mistake, we're not doing that. So, yeah, it was a mistake Because, yeah, I mean, why would you let people uninstall?

01:17:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
something that doesn't exist, it doesn't make any sense.

01:17:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, the good news is you won't be able to tell if you succeeded or not. Also, like, let's say, you wanted to uninstall recall. This isn't where you uninstall things. This is built into settings. Now, system components that you can uninstall are in settings, right, that's where they would put it.

01:18:11
It never made sense to me. So for two days, the whole, every that, all the three of the conspiracy theorists that hate recall were celebrating, and then, uh, you know, this reality came crashing down. So it's over. So I hope you enjoyed that moment in the sun. There it's over. Um, so, anyway, there's that, and then just a couple quick things here. So, um, vilvaldi, uh, their version of, uh, their desktop browser is now fully native on windows 11, on ARM. So they've been working on that for three months. So that's great. And there has only been one drop unless something happened today and knowing Microsoft, it probably did of beta or preview builds I almost said beta builds. Oh beta, I miss beta, oh beta, I miss beta.

01:18:55
Windows Insider, canary and beta channels have had new builds late last week, and there's actually a lot of stuff in there, right. So some of it is things that we've kind of seen out in the world, things that are coming, like the ability to share to your Android phone if you have it connected through phone link using Windows Share a feature nobody uses except for me. A change to widgets where, if you're left aligning your start button in the taskbar, this thing will now appear over on the right next to the system tray, where it looks horrible and out of place. They're giving you time estimates on Windows Update so you can know how long you'll be offline. There's lots of little things in both these builds, so that's cool. It's nice. I think they're firing up for the post-24H2 stuff that's going to come later in the year.

01:19:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and it's always good to see more native software for ARM. I mean, I would want to compare this back to the win rt days and say, like, have we got more software than back then? Like are we? Are we getting closer to reality here? I think so. Yeah, that sounds about right yeah that's. That's what I'm, that's what I'm feeling. But I guess I'd want to go dig the numbers up.

01:20:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I haven't closer to reality.

01:20:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's all one can ever hope for I mean, it's only been 12 years, you know so wow it's all good.

01:20:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow time is an illusion, delivery time doubly so my kids have become adults in that time frame.

01:20:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, they both live in our house anymore but you know, whatever, it's an amazing thing like what's 12 years? Okay, do you want to take a little break here and we can go on and talk about AI, antitrust and more. Yeah, all right. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by 1Password. You're going to say wait a minute, I have a password manager. No, no, this is something new. This is really exciting. Let me ask you a question Do your end users always work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps?

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01:23:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's get back to paul and richard. Well, I like to long story so I can't look at it. But um, microsoft is hosting an event soon and the big rumor is that they might actually be rebranding co-pilot.

01:23:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's interesting.

01:23:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, what are you going to call a co-pilot plus PC? I think?

01:23:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
designated driver works, I would go with. The smart guy under the hood, that inflatable pilot from the airplane movie, where he's just like you know.

01:23:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never been in a Turkish prison.

01:23:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you first need to grow a band naked. I always liked the Kareem cream abdul jabbar thing where he's like you tried dragging bill walton up and down the court for 48 minutes a night anyway, uh we're talking the movie airplane kids. Yes, sorry check it out so yeah, uh, I think we all agreed that copilot was actually like a really good brand you know, thought of it.

01:24:07
Yeah, that's right yeah and I think microsoft was so over excited about finally coming up with a good brand that they beat it to death yeah, what brand haven't they beat?

01:24:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you mean like outlook, like window?

01:24:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
remember, when you could get windows mediaor Player for Mac. You know like peak Microsoft naming, like it's just come on, guys, or NET.

01:24:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean they put NET on everything and Azure they put on everything they love. Beating a brand to death and part of it is getting a new name through legal is so difficult.

01:24:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like oh, I'm allowed to use this name.

01:24:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm using this name.

01:24:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not just that, but like difficult it's, like, oh, I'm allowed to use this name, I'm using this name. It's not just that, but like, in this case, it actually made sense, like it was like okay, like you know, we talk about the side by side experiences and, yeah, copilot, like I you know, so we'll see. I, I, I don't, I'm not sure I have an opinion about this, uh, but then again I don't know what the new brand might be, so I still, you know, I mean cut them back a little bit, but I think about Cobalt is okay.

01:25:04
No, I don't know, we'll see Back. In March, microsoft surprised the world by hiring basically everyone who worked for Inflection, but then said no, we're not buying Inflection, we're just buying all of their IP and everyone who works there. So that company sort of still exists, in the same way that, like you know, aol sort of still exists, but it's not really yeah, it's not really the same company. So I don't know if I can't imagine the UK was the only country that looked into this, but the CMA looked into it to see if this was in fact a merger or an acquisition right and, if true, whether it would impact competition. And they actually you know the announcement was in March, the UK looked into them in July, and so it's only a month or two later. But they've come back and said two things First, no worries about competition. Inflection wasn't selling something that people were using anyway. So it's not like this is changing the dynamic. But oh, by the way, absolutely a merger, you bought that company. So, um, that's kind of interesting, um now why bother?

01:26:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is just to say precedent wise like listen, yeah, when you do this, we consider it a merger and we're going to scrutinize it the same way. Don't think you're fooling anybody here.

01:26:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so what they said was look, we feel like you did this to skirt regulation or oversight, whatever. And um, now, when you require anybody or hire people, where we reserve the right to look at that under these, expect us to yep, and I don't have to reserve the right.

01:26:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They already had the right.

01:26:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, they could just but I just want to remind you we're here you know I, I we're not too dumb, yep uh, so you know we have our theories, um, but I would think that regulators, other regulators from other countries, should look at this and not that there's any like I think other regulators do.

01:26:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think anybody's confused by what an acqui hire is right. Like it's silly to even consider the possibility that this would legally make any difference at all.

01:27:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, you know they're trying to move quick and not get stopped by what happened with Activision Blizzard, right? So I think, like you said, I think, yes, I think everyone is very clear on what's happening here, interesting though, right, I mean it's, you know, it's interesting, you know, whatever. Okay, chat GPT, which you know, not Aquahire either, but still worthy of Wait for the bankruptcy, so Mm-hmm.

01:27:38
They now have 200 million weekly active users. That's double the number it was a year ago. This was the thing you know. I thinkard was the one who kind of speculated, or maybe it's just pointed out that you know, microsoft looks, looked at the numbers they had at the time and said, uh, we got to get me some of that. You know, we've had this thing called bing that nobody seems to know or care about for many, many years, and they just surpassed us in monthly average users. You know so um it didn't work out.

01:28:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
100 million users in a month.

01:28:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You sit up and take notice you're like hey, uh, we, we invested a lot in that company, didn't we? Yeah, let's start using that stuff. So you know that story we know about.

01:28:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, that's happened lots of relative concept. At that point it was only 3 billion. Yeah, I know Only.

01:28:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, we're going to talk about numbers soon, man, because when we get to NVIDIA, it's just the. It's astonishing what's happening, but anyway. So there's that. Firefox 130 is out. Not a big deal, other than if you go into settings. There's now a I think it's called Firefox labs area of settings and there's three or four of those now, or two or three. One of them is the ability to plug in the chat bot of your choice, but not your choice. There's six or seven of them. You can choose what they have Of an array of choices. Yep, copilot is not one of those choices. Chat GPT is one of those choices and Firefox, like other browsers, is a sidebar and you can have that thing come up while you're reading an article and you can do all the chat body stuff and because it's integrated into Firefox, it will have that context. So when you say, hey, summarize this article, it knows. Hey, oh, there's the article right next door. This is, I think, a very firefoxy way to do this.

01:29:27
Yeah, um, that's just giving access to, giving the chatbot access to the dom yeah, and yeah it's interesting, like, uh, I would say you know, if you look at like brave or um opera, they have slightly different models um from each other and from this um and they all kind of reflect the kind of company and you know what they're all about. And Mozilla, I think they're just like look, we can't even handle web apps. So obviously we're not going to have a chat bot, but we know people are interested, so we're going to plug, we're going to do this plugin system and there you go. Yeah, you can have it if you want it. You can ignore it if you want it.

01:30:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can ignore it if you don't. So I think that makes sense.

01:30:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, and then proton it, because now I'm, I guess I'm obligated to mention proton every single week, four in a row, now, something like that it could be. You love your proton man.

01:30:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You love it just announce stuff all the time. So, um, they have something called people probably don't know.

01:30:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they have something called proton by the way, the Wall Street Journal just called and they said hey, yes, nice.

01:30:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, thurot, how much is Proton paying you, buddy? All right, fair enough, I wish they were, but no, I talk about this stuff because it's great. I've never actually used this particular service, but they have something called ProtonScribe, which is an AI writing tool. Previously it was only available to their business customers. Um, still is. Obviously. They support more languages now. Uh, whatever, that's kind of good, but you can actually get it, uh as an individual, uh in a family or do a plan now as well. So, um, if you know, ai writing assistance is just, you know, again, we're hitting kind of table stakes to this point. It's like everyone's doing this and you know they have the good privacy model and that stuff. So, if you need that kind of thing and you I don't know if you're attached to privacy for some reason you're, you're weirdo they're there for you. So that's the thing.

01:31:26
And it's a bunch of physicists what could possibly go exactly? Everything will be fine. Yep, it's not a. It's not a dan brown model.

01:31:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It probably will be fine relax yeah, yeah, uh, I guess, um how long is the xbox segment? Is it really uh?

01:31:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, we have an antitrust thing before that, so I could do a couple of antitrust. Why don't you?

01:31:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do a little antitrust, I'll move the melissa down and, uh, we'll do an ad after that, okay yeah, so, uh, the uk cma is not done with microsoft.

01:31:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, they've asked, uh, people companies that have complained about apple and their app store fees and licensing uh terms to submit comments, and microsoft did, and they were not surprisingly critical. So this has come up before, but what they basically said was that obviously they're screwing around, right, so we know they're doing the malicious non-compliance thing in the eu. This is the uk cma, so it's not the same regulatory body, but, um, they're, they're go, they are obviously talking to the cma as well and trying to figure out something that makes sense there. Uh, just not as high profile. Um, and microsoft basically explained the way that they're doing things. They can. They've changed it three times since the initial complaint, uh, back earlier this year, and all they've done is, you know, they move pieces around. So there's no version of this where microsoft can host a game streaming service on iPhone or iPad and have it make sense financially, like it's just designed to give Apple 30% of everything, and um, they also really yeah, they pulled NVIDIA into this.

01:32:53
You know NVIDIA's G first notice the same thing us. And there's a reason you don't see these apps on on their story. It's because they've orchestrated it so that it will not ever make sense financially for us, and you know, we'll see. So Apple came back and said nada, nada, nada, no, we're not. And if you read their response it's just like. It's like we never had the conversation. They just say things that are like from two years ago. It's like no, wait, we're having a new conversation now and they just know that it's. They're not listening, they don't. They don't want to make this broke. They don't want to make this right, right, um, this I'm surprised this wasn't kind of bigger news, but um, yelp sued google for antitrust violations in the united states based on the fact that google was found guilty of having uh, I'm going to call it an illegal monopoly. That's not really a term, but, in other words, a monopoly that they are abusing illegally. Yelp is to Google, but it makes sense to do it now, now that they've been declared.

01:33:53
Yeah, now you have the precedent right, let's go. Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of this stuff. But Yelp is interesting because Yelp is a little bit like Spotify is to Apple and the EU, in that they were very early on complaining about this but they never launched a lawsuit, right? Also, google tried to buy Yelp, yep. Yelp agreed and then Google pulled out and just copied their stuff, which seems to be part of the whole playbook for Google, like they did this to Spotify. I mean they're kind of terrible that way, like they did the spotify. I mean they're, you know, they're kind of terrible that way.

01:34:27
Um, yelp has yelp ceo. Other executives from yelp have appeared at countless uh governments. Like you know, the senate will have a hearing and about antitrust, and those guys always show up and complain about google, but they've never actually formally launched an antitrust suit against them. And now they have. So, uh, you know small company relatively speaking, obviously. And uh, you know small company relatively speaking, obviously, and you know they go into great detail about how. You know people will search for Yelp specifically, or you know sort of local things and Google just promotes their own services. It's very typical. You know, it's standard, whatever.

01:34:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, yelp's got their own lawsuit problems too, right, because the restaurants were saying they were essentially extorting from them, like yeah, if you didn't do certain things, or, and then they they only the bad reviews would appear, like that kind of thing. Like yeah, I mean, they're a tiny player in this equation.

01:35:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Comparing comparatively, they're not one of the tech giants this is like yeah, so this is the type of complaint that people will level against like epic games or something yeah like you know, epic games is like a pretty big company, paul, and you know they're pretty terrible too and it's like, yeah, but they're like differently epic games compared to apple is like me, compared to epic games, like I.

01:35:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it's just not. But I would argue that you know you don't go suing google, because the discovery is going to be bad well, but.

01:35:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But. But here's the thing. So, so, unless you do have a dominant monopoly, you know, certain behaviors are perfectly acceptable in a company that doesn't have a monopoly. So I'm not, I don't have any feelings about Yelp. I couldn't care less. Yelp to me is like a brand like Yahoo or Expedia. It's like, seriously, there's still a thing, like you know. But that's unfair in a way, because the reason I think like that is because Google Maps or search is so dominant that I just don't even think about it anymore. So in that sense, google's efforts have been successful. Because I just go to Google yeah, because you're already there, it's easy. So, yeah, it's a little unfair.

01:36:23
The nature of monopolies yep, yeah, literally, that's exactly right. Um, and then, uh, leo, I don't know if you want to keep going but well, I think this now uh would be a good time to talk about some big stuff our little non-AI friend, melissa, yay, yay, this episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Melissa.

01:36:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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01:39:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But my voice will not go away.

01:39:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's unacceptable buttons, buttons, who's?

01:39:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
got the button all right, leo. It's been a couple of weeks.

01:39:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're getting smoother, I'll tell you not smooth enough yet, but I'll get there.

01:39:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, I'm learning, I'm learning this is like the early days, you know. Yeah, life in the attic yeah, yeah, there we go.

01:39:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, everybody's where they ought to be there, you go.

01:39:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is very much a little seasick from the back and forth somebody. I wish we could fix that.

01:40:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somebody said that, uh, we can't uh that it is very much a little seasick from the back and forth, but it's somebody I wish we could fix that. Somebody said that, uh, we can't uh that it is like the attic, it's like more intimate, it's not like I'm in a big studio with lots of people around, it's just me, my little meatloaf sandwich, cup of coffee and you do like a good meatloaf sandwich a little metal lunch bucket, so good like a scooby-doo lunch box.

01:40:23
Yeah, oh yeah yeah, well, actually I don't need a lunch box because the kitchen is downstairs, so I put it on a plate with a napkin like a civilized human I'm like a five second walk from curry rest. I'm just saying I can't say that, nope, all right moving my friends.

01:40:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is crazy. So Intel? I don't know if you heard this I have.

01:40:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's crazy. I think it's positioning.

01:40:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apparently, pat Gelsinger and some of his executive staff have consulted with the company's bankers and will present options to the company's board of directors this month about moving forward under reduced circumstances, right so?

01:41:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we're all. Are they going to move to the attic too? That's what you're talking about.

01:41:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're moving back to the garage they started in, probably, like you know. So, yeah, it's kind of a tough one. So the consensus here seems to be that they're probably not going to go this route first. But one of the things that's on the table is splitting the company up, by which I mean taking the foundry business, which, by the way, lost $9 billion last year, and making it a separate business, right which they're kind of positioning it that way right now, even though it's part of their earnings, they do separate it out, so you can see like what the different sides of the business look like.

01:41:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But um, is this an acknowledgement by gelsinger that because he did want to separate the two businesses, but not like into two separate companies? No, is this an acknowledgement that his strategy is not working I would call it an acknowledgement.

01:42:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's more of a maybe evidence. You know reading the writing on the wall right.

01:42:07
Yeah, so I always think about Nokia when this kind of thing comes up, because one of the big anchors with Nokia when it came to Microsoft most of it was that they also had facilities all over the world and it was kind of an old school business and like their, their competitors didn't do things that way and at one time that was a huge advantage for Nokia and then it became a disadvantage. It's expensive. Now look, this is a little more nuanced. First of all, they have to ramp up. Intel itself is spending north of $100 billion to do this transformation. The US government is contributing through loans and just straight up subsidies, tens and tens of billions to get some form of domestic chip making capacity going.

01:42:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
As a strategic asset, the same way you make sure you make your own food. It's a national security asset. It's serious right, Because if China takes over Taiwanwan uh that's which is, which, by the way, is impossible. Okay, they can destroy it, but they can't take it over. Okay, those those? There's no way that happens. Those fabs don't go offline and we're all in trouble. Yeah, okay um and then paul froze. Then there was a moment, just a moment, a moment of frozen paul.

01:43:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The currywursts are upon him oh, it does look like that currywurst repeated on him, didn't?

01:43:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it. Yeah, no, it's 10 o'clock, he's not happy.

01:43:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's the face of too many currywursts. Yeah, right there. Oh there's Paulie. What's happening? You're back. We don't know what happened. You disappeared.

01:43:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I just blue screened. Wow, nice Yep.

01:43:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It happens to all of us. Which system is this?

01:44:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I believe this is the first time I've ever seen this on a Snapdragon X computer Wow, yeah.

01:44:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so this is your Surface.

01:44:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So in case you thought it wasn't a real Windows, there you go.

01:44:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Blue screen. There you go. Do you have CrowdStrike installed?

01:44:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, who doesn't? What do you mean? Wow, anyhow, sorry about that. So where was I? Intel, something, something? Yeah, so what we've heard since that story came out is just that Intel is Pat Gelsinger is probably going to go to the board of directors and say, look, we're going to here's cost cutting something, something. And you know, if we have to, we'll go there. But, um, I don't, he's not going to walk up with the uh, the nuclear bomb on the first try, right?

01:44:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So there's financing's usually a big play in this. Banks get want to raise your rates because you're higher risk, and so you offer to break the business units apart because one of them would be lower risk. You get a better rate and the bank comes to the sense and goes oh no, that would be riskier for both. So these are heavyweight negotiating games between a bunch of significant entities. One of them is Intel and one of them is the banks.

01:45:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And another one is the US government. Right, yeah, so right, there's an editorial to be written about what intel should be do, and I'm sure we all have our opinions. I, it's, it's a little early, but, yeah, the national security aspect of it, I there, there's some version of this where maybe the government, you know too big to fail, you know something, something I, I, you know, we'll see. I, I uh, I I don't know enough about where they're at financially to even make an opinion there, but it's troubling. And, and, by the way, if you didn't think it could get any worse, there's a report today in reuters that broadcom has been trying for months to get intel's late at this 18a. This is their manufacturing process. The one that's going to be competitive cannot get viable chips out of this thing. And, uh, they, they did provide a comment and say, look, we haven't made a decision yet. This is too early to say, but there's some indication that one of their big initial partners might just walk away our customers, I guess.

01:46:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So well, okay, yeah, the other thing that's going on with this, the chips act? Partners might just walk away Our customers, I guess. So Well. And the other thing that's going on with this, the chips act and all so forth, is that the number of fabs is going up and the demand is not, so this leaves room for Intel to fail more. Right, right, right, like the, the strategic asset side of protecting Intel goes down if the sufficient ship capacity elsewhere.

01:46:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a weird one. I, during this boom, you know, one of the things that's come up is this notion that Google, which is just dominant, right, given the right set of circumstances, could suddenly become irrelevant right, which is an astonishing assertion. But all of a sudden, antitrust regulators around the world have woken up. The US government has found it to be, you know, illegally abusing their monopoly and things could change, you know, pretty dramatically. So that could be happening to Intel right now. I mean, it's scary and weird, but you know, we'll see. I don't know.

01:47:34
In related news, nvidia, by all accounts, go and get investors right and they just released their latest quarterly results and I don't know if you're following this, but they're, you know, from a financial perspective, are hitting it out of the park. In fact, they're hitting it out of the county, and this is the fourth quarter in a row where they've had triple digit growth revenue and profit. Yeah, year over year. Remember we just talked about this.

01:47:59
Uh, these things are measured year over year and they gave some, you know, an expectation for the current and future quarters and it was fine, but was not blockbuster anymore. Because here's the thing when you, when you're delivering 200 something percent growth, that doesn't last Right, and at some point your comparables will be to the year where you had 200 growth or whatever the number was. So in the most recent quarter their revenues were up 122. So not, you know, not to 200 something, but 120, 122. And here's the problem the next quarter, the quarter after that, they're going to compare themselves to this past year, where everything went gangbusters for them, and there's no way that's impossible, they can continue it's, it's impossible.

01:48:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, it's impossible, it's mathematical and they have not made a new chip set to. Uh well, they have one. Press their existing chip set for that's right, you know.

01:48:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they have one coming out in december, supposedly, although there's been problem. This is the thing, right? So they, you know they're, they're running into that kind of physics problem that everyone wants to do yeah and that you can't hurry these things.

01:49:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's flipping hard.

01:49:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So I'm just getting a small pat on my back Again. I say I don't do this, but I'm doing it twice in one show. But when I wrote this up, I had a cautionary note. At the end I said you know, expectations for the future were likely overblown. Nvidia cannot maintain 200% plus growth forever. That's how I ended that story. Now, when I wrote the notes this morning, initially before I headed over to an event, that was the story I had about NVIDIA. Then I got to the event and I was at the event and the event ended and I checked my news feed and there was another story about NVIDIA and this escalated. So over the past 24 hours, nvidia has suffered a historic decline in their value because investors have looked at this business and said it's not going to be like that anymore, is it? And they lost $280 billion in value in one day the biggest drop in market cap ever for a US company, but only a 10% decline.

01:50:08
That's what happened to your $3 trillion company, right that's the problem with playing with trillions?

01:50:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep.

01:50:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But oh boy, so? But here's the thing this could be one of those snowball things, right, because it's not just NVIDIA. Nvidia has a supply chain, nvidia has a whole bunch of customers and partners, and you know companies like microsoft, google, all the big, big tech guys who are buying from them, every one of which wants to get rid of it. Right? Still, maybe the funniest thing richard has ever said literally uh, at ignite last year, when they brought out the, the from NVIDIA, basically lifted him up and carried him around the stage and then he left and he said, all right, let's announce the chips that we're going to replace NVIDIA with. It was crazy, and that's the thing.

01:50:55
Every one of these companies is trying to get rid of NVIDIA. And, stacked on top of that, this little AI boom and the trough of despair and all that stuff, this might, it might be ending like we might literally be have already hit peak NVIDIA and peak AI, like we could be on the downside of that curve right now. Yeah, and it could snowball. So we'll see. You know, I always felt like NVIDIA was perhaps insanely inflated, frankly, but everyone was buying this. I don't know. It's hard to explain how they rose so fast, but nobody explained it all Right.

01:51:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The whole tech sector jumped on the AI thing. Nvidia happened to be right place at right time and didn't screw it up. That's true. This was. If you just stay the course, you get to go on a ride.

01:51:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not. You're the innovator.

01:51:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You didn't make this market. This market came and flew over you.

01:51:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's true. Yeah, you tripped over it and then held it up. I don't know that there's ever been anything like this in history. I mean not to this degree.

01:52:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the size of it, it's astonishing. Well, and you're hinting at the bigger part here, which is the reason the US government did not go into recession, is six companies all playing the hype game here, right, right.

01:52:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And this is Wall Street, it's speculation.

01:52:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and it's speculation that literally bridged an economy.

01:52:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, nvidia is worth. So I mean, they're still the third largest company in the world by market cap, but after the 10% decline, yep, yeah, I mean. Yeah, it's not $4 trillion, these numbers, it's not $4 trillion anymore, it's $3.49, if I'm not mistaken, something like that.

01:52:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How will they get by? What will the kids have for Christmasmas?

01:52:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
just you got to remember. This is a company whose primary business used to be added graphics cards for piece desktop pcs. This is what they did, right? What a story. So in 2020, this company's market cap was three point, I sorry was 323 billion.

01:53:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah Right, they had 16 billion in revenues this past, assuming they hit their target and, by the way, and a great company like doing well, kicking it own the space, yep, yep, no, nothing.

01:53:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean their software is terrible, but no one, no one, was complaining about the hardware. It's good stuff. This year they hit at one point, like I said, $4 trillion in market cap, $333 billion in revenues by the end of this year, assuming they hit their targets, which they will. So $16 billion to $323 billion in revenues in one year sorry, that's not true. 16 billion to 121 billion, sorry, sorry, sorry, uh, and that's revenues. And then market cap from 300 and 323 billion to 3.1 trillion at the end of yeah.

01:53:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What changed is the space that they're in right yeah, well, like this.

01:53:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The other thing is, the reason they were worth 300 billion was the crypto cycle right right like back when they. If you go back a few years and get pre-crypto mining, it's a much smaller company I called this.

01:54:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want I just want to take credit because I called this three years ago. I said nvidia is firing on all cylinders and they're in many markets. They're in auto, self-driving autos, they're in crypto it's not just gaming and they're in ai.

01:54:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not just gaming is a, is an afterthought gaming is a rounding error if you look at their, they should be giving away those gaming video cards like they're just, they should just

01:54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
spin that off as a as a, those are the, those are the rejects, basically, yeah, exactly that's crazy.

01:54:40
It's crazy so that I do think ai, this ai, I think, is somewhat of a bubble. Right, all this infrastructure, what if it's all this might be the biggest bubble of all time? Well, it might, I mean. I mean, nobody wants to miss out. You saw that, uh, oh yeah, a suitskeeper who was kind of thrown out of open ai or left or whatever, after trying to depose sam allman has a new company now, yes, with a silly name.

01:55:03
It's like I can't safe ai basically yeah, safe, super safe, super ai or something. Yeah, but he just raised uh a billion dollars on. This company has nothing, has 10 employees, no product, no research. In fact, they say we're not gonna have a product until we come up with a super intelligence yeah, so that won't take long.

01:55:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll just use chat gpt, it's fine but they're valued at five billion for.

01:55:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nothing so really, when you look at that, then nvidia doesn't make so far right, like if you're yeah, yeah.

01:55:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's very, I think I it's overhyped. But I also point off and I point to the hype cycles that built this nation. The railroad, the transcontinental railroad, all those original railroads went bankrupt but we got the, we got the tracks and that changed the country.

01:55:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is back to paul's reference of the trough of disillusionment. Like then, we start climbing up the path of enlightenment.

01:55:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's important. Often the companies that start this go bankrupt. The bubble, yeah, the the crash of 1999 and 2000,. Yeah, all those companies are gone, but they put in all that fiber so you can buy kitty litter by mail now.

01:56:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean you can look at next it's a cycle when Steve Jobs started next. It was kind of like a hype cycle in the beginning and then it just never took off what often happens.

01:56:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the foundation for everything they've done at Apple right. Those companies don't make it, but the infrastructure they built is what powers, the Next revolution.

01:56:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Then there lies the question, which is what is NVIDIA built?

01:56:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I think Microsoft is better positioned than NVIDIA in this case. Right, talk about infrastructure.

01:56:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think so. Talk about infrastructure or Amazon.

01:56:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The debate we've had was who's making the shovel here? Well, and you're talking. I mean, I reference Microsoft as a sort of infrastructure, but the real infrastructure, in a way, is the hardware that runs, and when you, that's true.

01:56:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're all buying NVIDIA chips.

01:56:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you're going to have a choice soon of different chips. Right, Microsoft's going to make their own and they're not working with google's made their own.

01:57:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yeah, nvidia seems to have some secret sauce there.

01:57:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that'll be the question we're about to find out yeah, that's the problem.

01:57:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do do they? Uh, do they have lockout?

01:57:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
he has a cool leather jacket. I mean, they got that they do have that. He got that other than that from like an assets perspective. Um, I don't know yeah, no it's.

01:57:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean it'll be interesting to see if all of these other chips can be reduced in quantity and what their real yields are when they're racked and stacked and running on mass. What's funny about them?

01:57:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
nobody has those numbers so the microsoft one of the microsoft ai chip I think it's the maya chip, if I'm not mistaken, they they did a little write-up about it and you know, we, we live in a world where we think about consumer electronics devices. We're talking to like four nanometer, three nanometer.

01:57:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This thing is the size of a volkswagen beetle no, I held it in my hand and you can't hold it in your hand. It takes, yeah, you could.

01:57:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could almost see the transitions, like it's crazy how big it is, like it's a different type of chip. So it's not, you know, it's just a chip server chip, yeah, that's. It's a, yeah, like a data center service. It's a big boy, it's big, um, yeah, so it's a different, a different animal for sure. So we'll see.

01:58:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean we'll see, but yeah, it's, this is we. Yeah, again, we talked about this from the very beginning. We've been on the ride for 2024 to say what can you make? You know, my on donna rocks and run as I'm pursuing the case study. Show me where you use this technology to make your company money, more money than it costs you to run it. And um, still waiting let me ask you.

01:58:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let me ask you this question. So you have whatever companies and whatever business that are competing against each other, and all of them see that they have to Like. This is table stakes. They have to implement the same type of AI in all their products, otherwise they will not be competitive. So they all see that. So they all spend money doing that upgrade. However they do it. They hire people, they buy people, they buy technology, they lease technology, they build it in-house. Whatever they do. They buy technology, they lease technology, they build it in-house, whatever they do, and, at the end of the day, they've invested in some infrastructure that may benefit Microsoft.

01:59:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
NVIDIA, whomever so, does that benefit the business or the industry? Is the net gain still there? Yeah, the company had to tip the checkbox and they spent the least amount to tip the checkbox and they're probably in good shape okay, and that goes back to my problem with, uh, microsoft 365 co-pilot, which is when everything is ai, then nothing is ai.

01:59:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And if microsoft is charging for ai but everyone else is giving it away, what's the business?

01:59:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
again, yeah, you know it's gonna be tricky yeah, we'll see what happens.

01:59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I also think the stock market valuation is a lot. Really just I don't want to miss this boat. It's speculative, it's more of that speculation, it's pure speculative yeah. But you don't want to be the guy who didn't buy into the AI revolution. If you know HAL 9000 comes along.

01:59:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I also don't want to be the guy who's retiring in the year that nvidia and intel tank and take down the entire planet.

02:00:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why you shouldn't be putting your retirement into this. Yeah, right, but I know this is. You know, people are people are.

02:00:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You bet they are plenty of pension funds in there. Yeah, exactly, you gotta be super careful with this and you'll know when they get out because, yes, because that will, that will contribute to that Downward spiral.

02:00:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, no, exactly.

02:00:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They'll get out before you got out Exactly, it might have just happened.

02:00:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's all we know. Yesterday's blip, that might be it Right, we're going to find out soon. Yeah, okay, quick Xbox.

02:00:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a big Let with xbox news, because xbox news is all good news oh I don't have any bad news, right, so?

02:00:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the blizzard apps are out. Phil spencer didn't step on a rake this week. Uh, you know, there's nothing really super bad. Um, if you call the duty fan, black ops 6 is available now in early access. It's on xbox, it's on game pass, so you can do that. I have not looked at it even for one second, I promise, uh, but it's there if you want it. Um, I'm still trying to. I I don't. I really don't play as much as I used to, but I've been slowly going through. You know doom, and I'm going to get through, uh, what's the most violent game?

02:01:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the most? I mean? This looks like it's no, no, not even close. Which game do you mean? Doom?

02:01:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
just in general.

02:01:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you're just, you're playing these are humans you're in doom, you're just killing aliens. That's what I'm saying, like they're just aliens who cares.

02:01:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like they're just they're. They're fake, like they're just you know.

02:01:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like that's, you know who cares I would say like pretty violent, because it's humans that you're going to have, even if it's a moral combat.

02:01:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I tend to agree, but it is comical, you know, when the kill moves literally ripping the guy.

02:01:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're saying you couldn't rip out like exactly. Uh, I don't know, maybe postal I don't know.

02:01:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I'm not sure postal was like notorious right postal is pretty gross really the game that made your parents really angry did I did.

02:01:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did last week. Did I discuss the whole right click problem? Did that come up last week? Yes, I think it did, because it's coming up in the notes this week, because my notes about uh, the game pass thing goes to a different story and that's exactly how that problem exhibits itself with track on something, at least two so far.

02:02:12
Yeah, it's a huge no this is it's the problem is real. Either that or you just accept that I have like serious, like, uh, dexterity problems, which is also a possibility. Um, so, uh, microsoft uh did. Really. It's the beginning of september, so there are new game pass titles. Um, I'll just point out that none of them are for activision blizzard, and I'm not paying attention anymore because I refuse to.

02:02:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Even I love that. Even you've abandoned hope.

02:02:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That makes me I just I give up. Here's what I want to do. I want to do with game pass what I do with audible, which is pause it. So I don't, you know, I I'll. I'll come back when there are actually games from activision blizzard, like we are closing in on one year. Are you kidding me? Yeah, there are two games from activision blizzard in this thing. I, I know I I've spent so much money on this subscription. I could have just bought those games outright and I would have saved money.

02:02:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah that's ridiculous. That's not what it was that but october is generally when you do your big christmas push yeah, if they don't pull the trigger in october, then really this is nuts.

02:03:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I am not comfortable even guessing that that could happen because, seriously, this entire year is.

02:03:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's really been crazy.

02:03:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's driving me crazy it is driving me crazy um playstation 5 pro. The design of the case leaks. Uh, shocker. It looks like that link is wrong also.

02:03:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, well, uh, good so it's so fun clicking your links. I never know what I'm gonna get.

02:03:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Still a thing it's, you know likely it doesn't go to a foreign site, it's just uh stuff, I don't know. Um, anyway, it looks exactly like the other playstation. So if you thought the uh kind of uh, you know, geiger style design was fun, it's still like that's crazy oh, is that really a? Tribute to geiger? You think? No, it's not. It looks like a tulip. To me it's like a flower or something it's not.

02:03:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not horrifying what did it?

02:03:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what it does?

02:03:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, but it's horrifying can stack on top of it, because right, it's horrifying when you put it in a stereo rack.

02:04:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks. It looks.

02:04:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nothing like anything else like you're supposed to put it on a pintle in the center of the room, because sorry right, everybody wants to admire this lovely design.

02:04:18
Yeah, yeah, there's an argument for don't allow the vents to be blocked. But yeah, still yeah, and we're still firmly in the camp that there's no way to make a higher performance machine because there's no game company that can actually utilize the machine as it stands right now, sure we're running into a also a storage problem, right you when, if you like, I'm gonna make an ak game like an ak version of call of duty.

02:04:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no ssd big enough to store those models?

02:04:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
what are you talking about? One cut scene and your terabyte is gone.

02:04:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's over yep, yeah, it's like back, you know, when windows 95 shipped. You know like a post-it chat video of a guy going down like a video like I'm skiing, and it was like, oh we're done.

02:04:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, you know the, the the escalation of game development costs, which you know why they were outsourcing to to developing nations and things, for a lot of that skill has hit an impossible threshold. What's interesting, when I talk to serious game designers right now the friends of mine it's about incorporating generative AI to reduce costs. There you go, right.

02:05:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's hey, can I?

02:05:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
not script all of this dialogue. Can I literally have it generated? I like that. I that feels like a good use of ai to me yeah, actually right because it's in, because if it's wrong, oh well, you know. It's not like games ever have bugs well also.

02:05:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh oh, you came up with a horrible story, uh, great. Well, you're just like every other video game. Who cares you?

02:05:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
know, yeah, but that's right. The, the, the modeling behavior, the facial behaviors, like all the stuff that they've done the most expensive way possible. Uh, it needs to go it needs to.

02:05:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no, there's no version of an ai that can't create better side quests than what's in halo. Infinite I will. I will plant my flag on that.

02:05:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's it what kind of side quests do you get? Halo? Who cares?

02:06:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they're nonsense. It's just like like, uh, you're like no, seriously, like they consider, like the table of elements, like all the creatures, you can have all the weapons, you can have all the scenarios you can have kind of get them all into a like you roll the ball and you come out with the pills and you're like, yeah, it's just the same thing, it's like you a design, it's like a mad lib, like it's just the same thing over and over again. Who cares?

02:06:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
okay, I asked you what the most violent game was what's the worst game.

02:06:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh god, I told you, if you want us, if you want to cure a video game addiction, just play halo infinite double solve.

02:06:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what happened to me. I did it.

02:06:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's interesting yep, yep, solve it. It's not. No, you know what it's horrible is the wrong word. Redfall might be the most horrible game. It's not horrible, it's just pointless. It's just like oh look, it's Halo, and it's the same thing over and over and over. Oh my God, please, anything. Did you play Concord? No, and it's too late because, yeah, so I. This is one of those schadenfreude things. If you're an xbox fan and you were kind of hoping for sony to step on a rake, this is it. Um, they released a game called conquered which, I understand, is basically like a mobile game where they try to get you within app purchases and stuff. Oh, no wonder they sold in the tens of thousands of copies, uh, not in the millions, so they've already killed it. Um, which, by the way, is what microsoft should have done with redfall, but they didn't.

02:07:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, not really, but sort of that's. Uh, that was one week, yep, it just came and went chimney.

02:07:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I guess that's what happens when you don't like um license a marvel superhero or I don't know.

02:07:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. I also think people are pretty burned out of the genre, right like you're. Just a little late to the game.

02:07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it's uh nope it looks a little like overwatch, was it kind of yeah?

02:07:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, because we need another one of those games right like uh too late?

02:07:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, but if it takes 10 years or five years or whatever to develop a game, it's easy to miss the trend.

02:08:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That game for me was perfected in 2003. It was called Unreal Tournament. We're done. Oh yeah, it was a game.

02:08:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was it All right. I'm sorry. All the fun is gone. The game section is over. I'm sorry.

02:08:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You'll love my whiskey.

02:08:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I can't wait. That's coming up back of the book, all the good stuff's in the back of the book. It's uh, it's just like uh, that, um, I love your chocolate bar huh.

02:08:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, his pics are either like yep, I know exactly what that is, or what are you just like? Is this a jumble of words that you put together?

02:08:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this one says the jumble of words.

02:08:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like it's a hundred percent of what. Yes, yep, like what what is that?

02:08:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
all right, I thought I thought I knew something about this.

02:08:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do not, I thought I did too, it's weird Stay tuned, Coming up the jumble of word whiskey.

02:08:48
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02:10:43
I slam it, I slap it.

02:10:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was I blew screen today. I want to. I'm taking, oh yeah be gentle.

02:10:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Be gentle feeling a little timid, don't blame you.

02:10:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, yeah, a little gun shy there. So, uh, I didn't put this in the notes I I only noticed it 10 seconds before we started the show. But someone is making a mini PC like a Nox style PC that has a co-pilot plus button on it Nice, like they have on laptops. That's not my tip, don't buy that, that's stupid. But I just reviewed that Lenovo IdeaPad, which is the AMD R radion, previous gen now uh, 780 graphics etc. And I I am kind of blown away by it is the cheapest, most inexpensive thing in the world. The cheap bit means if you look at you could look at any component screen, the ports, the material they make the case out of anything, pick it anything you want and you can see where they've shaved you know money, the cost off of the machine, right it's it also symmetrically inexpensive.

02:11:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, speaking of shaving costs. I like how you shot this entire photo layout on your lawn furniture no, no, this is at a. Uh, this is at a winery, oh nice oh yeah, I see the people drinking heavily in the background. That's right. Was this a lenovo event?

02:12:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, this was we went up to the finger lakes last weekend. Oh nice, always I always take at least one. I do, honey, I'm gonna bring a laptop.

02:12:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're gonna do a photo shoot. You don't mind, do you?

02:12:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, no, this is. This is the third year in a row. Everyone, everyone gets it. It's fine, they know what's gonna happen no, there's paul again. No better with the laptop did I see you doing this last year actually, I really like it because it's it's a, it's geometric.

02:12:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of a cool. It's really cool to be honest.

02:12:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got a look going here, friend.

02:12:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you absolutely do so here's the thing, though it's cheap, and I mean that in the literal sense of the word it's also inexpensive.

02:12:34
You know it's cheap, yeah, but like 600 bucks, oh wow. But here's the thing like, honestly, I, I the thing I would compare this to, is probably like the Xbox series S, uh, except that it's it's a like a PC that is like. You know, it's a good piece, still a good PC. It's a 14 inch screen, like this thing plays games really really really well. Um, probably a version coming soon with the, you know, the, the zen 5 stuff, and then we can have a different conversation. But, um, I played a bunch of games on this thing and I it just kind of blows my I, I'm I'm considering getting one just for myself, like it's nice, like it's really nice it's more, in a way, a statement of how uh pc technology has kind of migrated down and now a consumer grade laptop has a lot of horsepower.

02:13:23
There's a line we've crossed where gaming PCs and regular PCs used to be two different kinds of things, and a gaming PC would be this thing that got one hour of battery life if you were stupid enough to unplug it.

02:13:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You had enough time to run to another outlet, but that was it.

02:13:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they've kind of met in the middle a little bit. So I you know these. This. This is integrated graphics.

02:13:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not a what's this picture? Did a picture sneak into the role here, and that's the web that's agent smith. Oh, that's the webcam, okay, yeah, um, good looking, though. Good look I tried to. I tried to fit in every minute I could on this trip for work I enjoy a visit to a winery when you can shoot pictures when it can be a business expense yeah, oh, never mind well, yeah, look, you're in the three car.

02:14:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, in the thing for three hours. You know what am I gonna do? Listen to my brother-in-law's radio station. I got his stuff to do, so, um, anyway, I, I look like I said cheap, yes, but awesome, like, yeah, actually, yes, like it's kind of awesome, it's, it's so, I, this is all. This is what I've been using to play games on lately. It's really that's great. Yeah, it's neat. Um, and then so I love, uh, I love our community. Um, we, we are really focused on all the wrong things and so, predictably, it's just beautiful. People are outraged by Outlook, the new Outlook. I guess I get it. I don't actually understand people liking Outlook in any way, shape or form, but they're out there.

02:14:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, there's the hate, you know, and there's the hate you don't.

02:14:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, it's like people who watch a tv show they hate, but, and they can't stop talking about it and it's like what are you doing with your time here? But I, I don't know. It's a thing. But um, here's another one for all you guys. Um, the remote desktop app that you know we've had since probably xp, um, actually maybe even 2000, I don't know somewhere in that time frame.

02:15:20
Um, microsoft, and there were many versions of it. Right, there's the version that's in windows. They ship versions for, you know, mac and mobile platforms. There's a web version. There's a version for windows dev box. There's the version for, uh, micro windows 365.

02:15:34
They're all merging into a single app, which microsoft and its infinite branding wisdom is going to call the windows app, because, hilarious, that's not confusing at all, yep, and you can just write the headlines yourself. Branding wisdom is going to call the Windows app, because, hilarious, that's not confusing at all, yep, and you can just write the headlines yourself. Now you're going to be able to run windows on your iPhone. So, um, yep, so every version of this app will be GA within the next 30 days, except for the one on Android. Um, sometime it might be October, that will come out in preview that one's actually not available yet, oddly uh. But the others are all hitting ga soon and uh yeah, enjoy the splashy when ui graphics. And just remember that I I typically cover consumer tech and I don't want to hear about it, so you know, I'm just throwing it out there.

02:16:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Richard is more the guy, I think, for this so well, we've been blocked, we've been told not to use rdp for a long, long time, yeah, so it makes sense that they would have to push it down to consumers yeah oh, this is rdp.

02:16:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh how interesting, that's really. Yeah, this is the new one.

02:16:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, oh, that's interesting which makes me it's like all those administrators have done all that work, blocking all those ports. Now they're gonna have their users complaining because they can't remotely log into their machine at home with Windows app. Why are you blogging Windows app? Because it's RDP. Wow, yep, hilarious.

02:16:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's. You know, they did the spit shine on one or a notepad. It's a modern app now, right yeah?

02:16:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
there you go, it's got tabs.

02:16:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, it's fun. It's got curved corners. It's new. It's all sexy.

02:17:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, the Windows app.

02:17:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right Time for Mr Richard Campbell, and first let's start with Run as Radio what's coming up.

02:17:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've realized now that when I get desperate about this whole AI situation, it's making me crazy. I go talk to real professionals and Allison Cassette is one of them, because she's actually a data scientist. You know, she does the real. She did the real work before. It was fun and cool. And so I'm like is it just me? Like what is? What are we doing here? Are we, are we crazy? And and she's like no, no, we're definitely going through a crazy time, uh.

02:17:37
And so the conversation was really like how are we going to evolve out of this? And the point and Allison hit square on it's like get back to testing, because that's what we used to do with every machine model extensively before we deployed anything. And they're just bypassing those steps right now and it's going to burn them inevitably. And so if you want to be responsible as a sysadmin remember that's who I'm talking to and running as it's like you're bringing this stuff into your organization and you want to head down this path, you've got to get serious about how you validate.

02:18:08
And, interestingly, around the time I was recording this show, I was having conversations with some startups that were implementing generative AI technologies and saying we can't deploy this to our customers because it's too inconsistent. We're building out our testing infrastructure to make sure we get it right. So I do feel like I've gotten a lot of reinforcement on this. But what I appreciate about this show is some really good conversation about taking this technology seriously, where we've really come from, and that there were procedures in place. It's just that a lot of you know jackey pt van boys have come on and said, ah, it's fine, everything's fine, just use it and not do the responsible thing and really understand how it's working for your company very good, all right.

02:18:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul said it was gonna be weird.

02:18:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let's uh let's see if you just saw it by the name like familiar or huh it's either a product you've already heard of or you've never heard of it.

02:19:06
So and this is a byproduct of me going visiting friends in the netherlands, and every time I've gotten a weird whiskey or two from them. But this is taking it up another notch, because I've had to dig deeper into this again. I thought I knew my way around whiskey before I started hanging out with you guys all the time, and now it's really. My mind keeps changing. I'm not accepting the blame for this, I'm sorry. Deeper and deeper and deeper into this rabbit hole.

02:19:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, first thing you're going to have to tell me is what this means. This means RU18.

02:19:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Bevistic, you're lifted. Yeah, even when you're on the english site, it still pops up the dutch, are you a thing? Um, so this is clay whiskey, uh, and this is a one of these modern micro distilleries, uh, founded only in 2015 in the in rotterdam, which is one of the largest city in in the netherlands. It's where the big ports are right, and they. The old joke in the netherlands is that rotterdam makes the money and de haag spends it on amsterdam, like those are the three big cities. Um, the founders, uh, paul dendelic and maria nivs. They named it after the road that they built the facility on, called clay road, which was first marked on a map in 1611. So you know, for all the colonies are doing much anything, there was Clay Road.

02:20:21
When roads really were made of clay. Yeah, true enough. Paul's education in distilling actually comes from Geneva. Geneva is a Dutch alcohol. Well, it's not really Dutch, it's regional to the northwestern Europe. So that's Netherlands, belgium, parts of Western parts of Germany, northern parts of France Going back to the 1200s is a very old school drink, but it is a juniper spirit. So before gin there was Univer. And, by the way, if you ever fly in the business or first class seats of KLM, they'll give you little um house made of of ceramic I have a whole row of them on my kitchen couch and they are filled with yeneva, really I, yes, that's what that I was wondering what was in there.

02:21:10
I knew it was on there oh, I have lost a couple of weekends to the stuff I do not recommend.

02:21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is what does it?

02:21:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
taste like it's basically gin gin it's a simplified gin.

02:21:20
Um, it's made. It's made with alambic stills the old school still and in fact, uh, the school where paul was educated. He purchased one of their alambic stills and that's what clay whiskey uses. They make a gin as well as set of whiskey, and when I say micro distillate, I I'm not kidding. This place makes 10,000 liters of alcohol a year, so somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 bottles total. Right, and in the 2015 is not an accident, because in 2014 is when the Netherlands passed laws for micro distilleries, where they reduced the taxation rate of the alcohol. When you're under a certain level of production. As you get bigger, then you pay more tax per liter. This is very similar to what I described when we were talking about the Lerida-Fintry out of the Okanagan, where British Columbia has the same micro-silling rules. So what's made this expansion of distilling in small scale grow so much has been that we found ways to allow these companies to stay small, to be profitable, to not have to grow to big factories with 24-hour-a-day shifts to be able to make enough margin to function. It looks like Clay Whiskey is succeeding on 10,000 liters per year, and so they have a lot of some advantages in the size of things. You're talking about a small operation. You know realistically. They're selling this bottle of whiskey for 70 euros, maybe $80. And they're probably keeping a fair portion of that because they do a minimal amount of marketing. We'll get further into that. So you're still talking about a total budget of $250,000, maybe $500,000 a year all up. Less cost of goods Like this can't be more than three or four people running the whole place, like that's what it takes to make this work.

02:23:16
This particular edition I had a chance to taste at my friend's place where I was before I went to Copenhagen visiting with his little baby and, and so he pulled this out and I took a taste and I took some pictures and did some research. The name Palo Cortado is actually a type of sherry and I can't believe we're talking about sherry again to the point where it's like I time for me to finish reading all the specs on sherry, because I'm learning more and more about it, because each time we go down this path you've got to understand what's a Hexa Paula Cortado versus the other kinds of sherry. So this particular edition of their whiskey, which they don't have any more of, so you have to go find a bottle at a specialty shop spent three years in bourbon casks super normal for whiskey, right, made in Europe, inexpensive way to get your three years in Barrels, don't cost too much. And then a year and a half in a Palo Cortado octave cask. An octave cask is a really small cask. It's 64 liters or about 17 gallons, as opposed to a normal American bourbon cask cast which is 200 liters or 53 gallons, although if you're in scotland they always remake them as hogsheads right, they get five bourbon casts together they make four hogsheads which are 250 liters or about 66 gallons each. I presume that is what clay whiskey did with this is that they remade them into the 250s. They did their three years and considering how small a batch you're, maybe only one or two barrels, right Like there's very. This is very small batch production and after the three years they do this. Year and a half in an octave cask, these tiny little casks, and a year and a half in a cask that small is a long time because the contact level for the spirit is really high when you're down to a cast that small. So the flavor on it is astonishing for something that's only four and a half years old and you never see Appalachians on any of these biker distilleries. It's got big, rich flavors.

02:25:12
Now I'd be remiss if I don't explain what a Palo Cortado is, because it's a very unusual type of sherry and I mentioned sherry briefly when we were talking about um, last week's, the mascar mascatel, which is another sherry, finished small distillery. Uh, um whiskey. The most common type of sherry, like 90 of it, is called fino. It's made from the palomino grape. It's a fortified wine, so they add about 15, 15%. They raise the alcohol using grape spirit up to about 15% and they put it in barrels. And remember, they stack the barrels. So the oldest ones are at the bottom and the newer ones are higher up and you take about a third out Year over year, typically three years old. Well, I did talk about this at the time because it seems crazy and I want to dig further into it.

02:25:57
Maybe I'll have to just do a whole sherry piece, because in the phenols specifically because they only fortify up to 15% as the sherry sits in the barrel it grows a layer of yeast they call fluor, and this layer of yeast actually stops the sherry from oxidizing, so it keeps its color, kind of protects it when it ages. And then in the second year they move a third of it down. They move a third of it down a barrel and they move a third of it down a barrel until finally, after three years, you're taking a third of it out to put into bottles. But a small percentage of time that doesn't happen. Well, what really happens is it really depends on the flavors. But a small percentage time that doesn't happen. Well, what really happens is it really depends on the flavors, and this is where even the name Palo Cortano comes from.

02:26:47
So when they initially make up the sherry, they taste it as they're putting it in the barrel and the overseers, these barrelmen, mark it If they're happy with the flavor. It's coming out really nice. They'll put a single stroke on it, which that means it's gonna be a Fino, which is this kind where they're gonna leave a certain amount of room. It's gonna grow the floor, it's gonna last us three years and they're gonna serve it. If it's stronger flavored, they'll make it into an Oloroso sherry.

02:27:11
So now it's marked differently. There's a stroke and a dot and they actually raise the alcohol because they don't want it to spoil. At 14% or 15% it can actually go off, and so if they raise the alcohol level higher, it kills all the bacteria and so it's safe. Then they have a whole procedure for it. If they're not sure how the barrel's going, they'll actually put two marks on it, which means go back and check it again and then if they get bad right, if they're not good ones, they'll put three marks on it. That means this goes to the vinegar makers or it'll be distilled into a kind of brandy Like there's other outcomes for it. But Apollo Cortado means a cross stroke. So what's actually happened is that some point in that first year or so, typically the floor dies and disappears and now it's oxidizing and so they'll cross the single stroke because they thought it was going to be a pheno. And they raise the alcohol level to 70% protected and it makes this kind of mixture of the gentle aging of the pheno with the Oloroso aging as it finishes, and that's Palo Cortado.

02:28:17
I've never had a Palo Cortado. Now I want one, now that I've seen how crazy this is. But this is the particular kinds of barrels that the clay whiskey folks lay their hands on to make this edition only, and the reason you can't see it on the retails is that they sold it almost entirely through whiskey clubs, oh oh. I'm seeing this more and more and I realize it's a whole other business model. You've got your discount on your taxes for being a micro distillery. You're trying to do direct sales on the web, which is its own challenge, but you've got to move enough units right. And if you're a big distillery, of course you're doing big scale marketing and you're doing all your branding exercises and so forth. But more and more I saw this with Ballen Dalek and I've seen it with the Mossgard as well they're working closely with these whiskey clubs across Europe and essentially making special editions for the club only.

02:29:14
And some of these whiskey clubs, these little shops, are selling a hundred bottles. Like they have a serious, loyal membership and when they like a bottle they're going to be able to give it to a whole bunch of their members. And if you're only making 15,000 bottles a year and you can sell a hundred to one club like, you don't need that many clubs before. That's your whole business and it it to me it's fascinating because now the retail relationship is very personal. You're not just only driving on the brand so much as you're one of the brands, you now have a relationship with maybe a hundred people, right, the ones that run these powerful clubs, these successful clubs, that then they have a hundred or so key customers and boom, you're 10,000 bottles. Like you're good, you've got a working business at that scale. And all of this is by way, to say that my friend is realizing that his favorite whiskey club, the guy who's running it in his 70s, is ready to retire and he may take it over and I might be investing in a whiskey club.

02:30:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh hey, good idea.

02:30:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, it's not a good idea. It doesn't mean I'm not going to do it, it's just you know.

02:30:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it. I like it for you.

02:30:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like it for you, but I love this change in business model, right, this opportunity to have these small units. You know that this is a successful business. And then they have this supply chain that's very personal, that's very individualized and it only makes sense at the small scale. And these are not businesses trying to grow to become owned by Diageo. These are businesses that are happy making the product they're making, experimenting the ways they want, and when they make a batch they really like, they can tell because their clubs buy it all and that's it. They don't do any more marketing than that, do you think?

02:30:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
small scale in general is better than big scale production.

02:31:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, when you get bigger it's easier to get lost, right, right. My concern with a place like Clay Whiskey is they only have to make a couple of bad batches that the clubs don't want to buy. Then they're in trouble. Yeah, right, and you can already see if you poke through that website. They've got about four or five editions of whiskey running right now and some of those are going to be more popular than others. But that helps them target in on what their real customers want. And you again, you're only talking about 10,000 customers, right, like? It's not an outrageous number and they're not trying to directly control them. They're connecting with different clubs. Now you get a couple of hundred clubs going and you can mix and match and they're going to have different flavor profiles. You notice that they have a peated, so they're playing with some other flavors in there as well.

02:31:44
This particular edition ran about 70 euros when it was available and there's still a few bottles out there I found a couple, so $80 US. It's cast strength, so 51% is really what it came out after those years. It was hand-numbered. I have the photograph of it. It was bottle 97 of the batch and it was only a 500 centiliter bottle or a 50 centiliter, 500 milliliter bottle, so as opposed to a normal 750.

02:32:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's what yeah, they look kind of cute 18, 18 ounces like it's a little little small. So I think you have a marvelous opportunity. If you did a whiskey club, richard I yep, you would say. I mean just you run this show alone yeah, the challenge here is shipping.

02:32:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Where can you actually deliver to? So one of the upsides to being in the eu is the rules are pretty straightforward for moving whiskey around in that area, but the rules of the us are convoluted. Yeah, every state's different, yeah phrase you're thinking is interstate commerce.

02:32:42
And it's the same problem in Canada with interprovincial commerce. It is difficult and that would end up being your whole business is what does it take to deliver? I think you have to go to everybody's house. Well, there's that, or it's just the clubs. So do you figure out where your clubs are and it works. So this may only work in northwestern europe. Uh, I hope that's not true. But uh, it is an interesting part about.

02:33:08
You know, spirits have been tightly controlled for a very long time. Uh, and it's very tough to ship between entities. Uh, for spirits, because they all have their own rules. Like you cannot sell a 60 abv alcohol in norway full stop. Like you can't. It's a lot against the law. They said a lot ages ago. It's kind of a silly. They all have their own rules. You cannot sell a 60% ABV alcohol in Norway Full stop. Like you can't. It's against the law. They set a law ages ago. It's kind of a silly law today, but it's still there. And so when we went and got a bunch of Avalor Abunda, which can run anywhere between 57 and 62, they literally have to sort the cases out to stay under 60 to sell in Norway. Wow, it's that kind of thing. So yeah, rule to rule. These things are hard, it takes the fun out of getting drunk.

02:33:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know it's the whiskey version of binning. Yeah, yeah it's been, it's been.

02:33:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're gonna add some water to it so we can sell it in norway. But yeah, these I'm, admittedly, I'm getting pulled into the business models now in these and how these micro distilleries.

02:34:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just there. That's too bad, because I mean you, you have this perfect bully pulpit. No for a whiskey club you could call it whisk. You know richard campbell's whiskey club? Yeah, and I think everybody listening, would join it.

02:34:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just a question of how to sell it. But, uh, you know, provide it to people.

02:34:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, richard is that why? In the pocket of big whiskey, but now I understand why the whiskey advent calendar you very kindly gave us last year it can't really be branded because they have to figure out how to get around shipping it to all these different states.

02:34:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, Well and literally it was only available in certain places because folks have only gone so far and I hate the. You know you want to learn to hate your business in a big hurry. What if the secret sauce of your business is you know shipping rules Like that is sad. That's a logistics business, not a whiskey business. That's not what people want to do, but that's where I think these clubs may be a proxy for a bunch of those problems.

02:34:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're in a good campbell run as radiocom. That's where his podcasts are. Bothnet rocks and run as radio and he is home for the nonce. But his trip vegas next week, his tribute, his tribulations and trials begin next week. Thank you, richard, we'll be back, really back. Really appreciate it. Paul Thurott, thurottcom, he's in IFA and I'm sure you'll have more IFA coverage at Thurottcom. Are you going to come back next week? Yeah?

02:35:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll be home next few weeks at least, and then eventually I go to Dallas and then Mexico.

02:35:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dallas. Okay, so I will not be here in the next couple of weeks. I'm going for a little trip, but I will be back in three weeks. Meanwhile, Micah Sargent will be taken over and he does a great job with the show. He won't be doing all this kind of weird stuff that I do.

02:35:56
I got to tell you. But Paul has also got at. His books are at the lean pubcom. If you want to buy the field guide to windows 11 and, of course, windows everywhere, which is a great book and I see you're doing somenet stuff on the throtcom for the premium subscribers it's worth it's worth subscribing.

02:36:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Besides, I spend my entire time on the plane right here, writing that you know the next two articles in that.

02:36:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know the next two articles in that series, so yeah uh, ladies and gentlemen, we do windows weekly on wednesdays, 11 am. Pacific 2 pm eastern 1800 utc. I'm glad we're here. The asteroid hit the earth, but we but we survived. I was wondering if we'd have a show today, but we did.

02:36:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's that cloud on the horizon, though? That's okay, right, nothing to worry about.

02:36:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's always a cloud on the horizon and a light at the end of the tunnel. You just got to hope. Neither of them will get you After the fact on-demand versions of the show. Oh, we do stream. When we stream, I should mention, because, thanks to the club, we are able to stream in so many places. The Discord, yes, but with the help of Restreamio, we're also on YouTube, twitch, kik, facebook, linkedin and Xcom, so you can watch us live. There are 743 people watching on those various platforms. We thank you for being here. Thank you for watching.

02:37:22
After the fact on-demand versions of the show available at twittv slash ww. When you're there, you'll see a link to the youtube page. I always recommend that. If you want to share little clips, it helps us, but if you see something you go oh, you know what's his name would be very interested in this. Just clip it out at youtube, send it to him. It's an easy way for anybody to watch. Uh, best way maybe not the easiest best way for you to watch is subscribe. Find a podcast client you like, subscribe and you'll get it automatically as soon as it's available. After Kevin King does his magic, I'm going to be gone for two weeks. See you in three. Thanks to the club members. If you're not a member, add free versions of the show available at twittv slash club twit. I hope to come back and see thousands of new members and I also hope to see a few of you at Bryant park on Saturday. Yeah, that's so fun for a photo shoot at 5.

02:38:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PM and I would have showed up for that if I was home. I'm sorry, I'm not.

02:38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe Mary Jo will come over, I don't know. Dick DeBartolo is going to stop by. It'll be fun. I also see that there's rain in the forecast, so bring your umbrella, because Park has trees. You'll be fine. Oh, we're going to stand under a tree and then, when the lightning hits, we're going to move to another tree, that's where you want to be under a tree, Under a tree always. Thanks, Paul, thanks to all of you for joining us. We'll see you next time on windows. Weekly bye.