Windows Weekly 904 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot's in Mexico City, richard Campbell's in Warsaw, poland, but they're here to talk about Windows. We'll talk about the mystery of the Snapdragon developer box. Why did Qualcomm cancel it? Qualcomm an arm in court, could it be? Plus some Xbox news. That made me personally very happy. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly Personally very happy.
00:28 - AI (Guest)
All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts. You love From people. You trust. This is Twit.
00:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, Episode 904, recorded Wednesday, October 23rd 2024. Not sexy but important. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft, and we have the Global Travelers edition today Joining us from Mexico City, Mexico. Mr.
01:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mr paul, I can now joke in spanish they were the weakest joke of all time, but totally worth it and people laughed.
01:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it means your, your spanish is excellent that's good, I can be understand, understood like a one-year-old could be understood and my pencil is yellow joining him in, uh, our, uh, our lovely, uh, three-way picture window, mr mr richard campbell, who is in poland warsaw, yeah, warsaw, just finished a closing keynote of the developer days, poland wonderful. So uh, you're now. You have a little time to relax and enjoy warsaw, or Just finished a closing keynote of the.
01:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Developer Days Poll Wonderful. So now you have a little time to relax and enjoy Warsaw. Fly home tomorrow. We had the weekend in Warsaw, oh well, that's good, but it's the third week on the road and we're all real ready to go home.
01:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love this Richard's in Warsaw. His picture is better than mine.
02:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That little ob spot. Tony too, man, that is a banging camera oh, is that where you're using? Yeah, that's a good camera but I got lots of light on me right, I've got the good lights.
02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lights the key quite as cute you know we're gonna talk about today. Uh, I feel is this this new collector's item that I've got zero for let me tell you guys, something.
02:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I think 1 000 people reached out to tell me, and with great alacrity. Yeah, you have to tell leo immediately too. Yeah, I think, I think he heard it, I think he knows I found out.
02:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've confirmed you did not pay for it because I have. I haven't gotten a check, but I know mine has arrived I never got.
02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They never billed me for it. Interesting okay, so I don't yeah. I mean, that's right. I don't know if that's true or not.
02:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah I mean, I'd be paying for it. Yeah, he delivered it to me.
02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We did get uh, I'm sad to say, uh, one email that uh basically let me see where I find it. It basically said uh, that was the worst show I've ever listened to last week, last week never have I mean I can feel walk leo through anything ever again. Wow, I like that. I was the problem. No, no, I don't. Well, that's why I'm trying to find the email. I want to get you the exact wording.
03:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I I did mention this a couple of times. This will be the worst like listening experience.
03:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, you were, and, and this is from, uh, it comes from greg priestley and he's an australian, so I'm going to do this uh in his language, just to let you know. This week was the worst most boring windows weekly ever. Right, who thinks an audio podcast of trying to get Leo to click the right buttons is riveting entertainment?
03:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
mate, nobody thought that See, I take great exception to this.
03:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You warned us. Here's the problem it's going to be bad.
03:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If we delivered an entertaining and educational episode, were you going to get an email from this guy? Because if not, I don't know what to tell you.
04:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, it's fine. I think it was of interest to some but I think also of interest to some is the fact that, for some reason, qualcomm has said yeah, this didn't work, we're, we're, we're not going to send any more out. Yeah, right, and for the two it said there were 200 of us who got them richard congratulations.
04:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're only in the 200. That's pretty, so that's pretty cool uh, well, I think that was.
04:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Might have been speculation by a tech blog, I can't remember, but uh, we're not going to get billed, apparently, and they don't want it back apparently.
04:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so I wonder if they're going to fail. Is the real issue here it's that they don't want to? Yeah, apparently yeah. So I wonder if they're gonna fail? Is the real issue here is that they don't want to?
04:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, that's what I was wondering. What's wrong with?
04:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this, guys, we gotta. We gotta cut to the more important topic, which is maybe leo. We could walk him through resetting the pc today, um oh boy I don't know.
05:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm still keen to put linux on this thing. You know not that I've laid hands on it yet, but we'll see what happens. Anyway, I love a good orphan. That's exciting to me.
05:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we had a call with Qualcomm on Monday unrelated to this, and of course somebody asked. But somebody asked right, and it was just a slightly more nuanced version of the public statement which I just I honestly think is correct. I think they, for better or worse, went with this company. I think this company did not show up with the quality they were expecting, right yeah was arrow just the shipper I don't know, but I it's not.
05:39
You know, people are saying like qualcomm, can't you know? Qualcomm did this clock and it's qualcomm hired a third party the the quality of the device make a mini pc.
05:48
That should have been in our hands by june yep, I think there were a lot of mistakes, that we yeah, the details in some ways aren't important. It's just that, um, you know, it just wasn't right. And now in richard and I had this conversation privately. But it's months later and windows and arm devices are readily available. They're great, and I think I made this point last week. But if you're a developer, that which is was the target for this thing. I mean, let's not get too overblown with this. Like you know, the target for this was a very small audience. I think you'd be better off getting a laptop anyway, because part of the testing should involve all the mobility and efficiency stuff.
06:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you'd also have got it sooner.
06:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So should involve all the mobility and efficiency stuff. So you'd also have got it sooner. So arrow was the distributor. Okay, um, somebody, so, and one of the things that a couple of people have said, both in the twitch chat and our discord, is they lost the license. What does that mean? Who lost the license? Who lost the license? What does that mean that? What license are they talking about? Yeah, let me just go over behind you guys to the other side.
06:47
Yeah, I don't know what that means, who lost the license Qualcomm, what, who, what?
06:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So this, oh, I'm sorry.
06:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we're trying. This is a different, I'm sorry. We'll get to that in a few. We'll get to it this is. That's a different topic.
07:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, oh, oh, oh okay.
07:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the arm licensing. Arm licensing.
07:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, legal issue, but does he think that has anything to do with this?
07:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think people just hear Qualcomm and Arm and they get confused.
07:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you're right. Yeah, so we don't know why they pulled this out of the they said it wasn't up to our standards right, but it seems I'm looking forward to you getting home, richard, and playing with it, and, paul, I'm going to send you mine because you deserve it. I don't know, I deserve it.
07:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You deserve this.
07:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you could figure out what's wrong with it.
07:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know this thing's terrible, but I feel like you would like it.
07:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The other reason is and you said you were thinking about Linux on it, Richard there are, of course, Snapdragon Elite versions, yeah. Qualcomm has very explicitly worked to make that happen, but in effect, Gerling said he was going to send information about his unit to Ubuntu to help them make a better version.
08:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But if there's only 200 in the whole wide world.
08:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I doubt there's a lot of incentives. This is not the specific machine work well on linux, right? This is there's no need for that. They need to make linux work that. They need linux to work well on the idea pad.
08:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, so yeah, so I don't know what unique hardware there is in here and stuff, but all of that would need linux drivers I'm sure it's just like a NUC.
08:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a laptop motherboard essentially, probably some you know generic.
08:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think it's pretty generic. Yeah, I do I mean?
08:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
by the way, you're like tore it all the way down. It's nothing fancy in there.
08:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But one of the most notable things about the first you know, two, three, four, whatever Copilot plus PCs I reviewed was how identical they were. I don't mean I opened the box and looked at the board, but they were exactly the same it's like a laptop in a box, right yeah.
08:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, it does say on the back evaluation only not FCC approved for resale.
09:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Paul, I was going to ask you for a dollar.
09:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will donate a dollar to the charity of your choice to the Leo Laporte Fund, perhaps I can't sell it to you. I saved the box because I thought, you know, maybe in 100 years this would be worth something.
09:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know If it is, I'll give it back to you. I don't think that's going to be. Things are worth something because they're scarce and this is scarce, that's a good point, yeah, okay. Makes it kind of cool.
09:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So was interest in windows on arm, so you know what's that it's one of the things we were when we were chatting on this. It's like this is actually hurt windows on arm Right. I got to miss this window, like if this thing had showed up in June. Actually encourage devs to do more conversions to ARM. Would that make a difference?
09:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think so.
09:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because part of this was. You know, this whole AI head fake is about hey, let's get. Well, you get the fancy version of Copilot if you buy Windows on ARM device.
09:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't know what to tell you. I'm all over the map on this. Richard, I just listened to your Runas Radio. No, no, no, um, dot net rocks episode with chris sells, for example. Right and um, it was striking. I love him and his career is fascinating to me. Yeah, he's great.
10:12
Um, it blows my mind, uh, that you know windows, was it mobile, was it web, sort of. And what's the next wave? What's the next wave? You know, for a little while it was the digital assistant stuff, and then it was maybe v MR, something in there, and then it's like, maybe it's AI, maybe that's the thing, but the problem with these other platforms is that they still require the existing platforms to do anything. Yeah, so I'm not, I don't know that. It's like a wave, I don't, I don't know it's. It's an interesting problem, but I don't, I don't know.
10:49
I, I, I don't think copilot plus pc, on snapdragon specifically, is going to set the world on fire. No, um, but we are all going to have mpus now. So, yeah, well, we don't think too much about, like those, what they call it, like the, uh, the multimedia extensions that intel put in their chips in the 1990s For a little while there was a dividing line between the haves and the have-nots, but that mattered or didn't, I know. But today that's MPUs and, just like TPM, it will just be there yeah.
11:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It will just be there. Once upon a time, having a GPU was a big deal. Yeah. Yep upon a time, having a gpu is a big deal. Yeah, yep, so, and that are in a world of multi, of multi processor machines continues to expand. Yeah, there you go I debate how well it being used. You know I often pulling up the monitor just to see. Does the mpu in this thing ever do anything for me really?
11:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, the answer to that question is no, for the no it really is.
11:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean today it's, it's basically no right yeah, but yeah, so really we don't know what went wrong, not really no, I just I guess.
11:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just think it boils down to. This company was terrible. The product they made is whatever. They didn't deliver it on time. Maybe they couldn't ship it in the volume and there wasn't a need for it.
12:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe there wasn't a yeah there was a need for this in june, before the laptop. This should have arrived before the laptop. So many PC for crying out loud. Integrating a laptop is hard. Stuffing things in a plastic box is pretty easy, so you know this should have been first, and the fact that the moment it wasn't stop.
12:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look. Part of this might be tied to the history of qualcomm and windows on arm and the fact that these guys over promised and delivered for several years before.
12:31
What like actually like before they build a really remarkable yeah, by all accounts, a remarkable chip absolutely, and we'll touch on that a little bit later too, because it comes up again and again. But, um, I, literally I don't think I wrote it. I went back. I had to look some things up today. I went back and read something I wrote last october where qualcomm once again made a bunch of promises and I just said, look, I want to believe I do, but I they've. They failed us every time and it is astonishing how well, uh they are, how good these are, you know yeah, but I also think came out of nowhere.
13:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All comms not used to building the center point of a pc, they're used to building chipsets for phones. You know like this is a different business with different partners and I think they struggled with those differences.
13:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And this mini PC is worse still because they really went off the I'm sure it was about money, but really they should have gone to Dell, lenovo, hp one of those companies and said please make one of these.
13:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Could they have done it for the price, who knows?
13:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think the other part is it was all a loss leader in the first place.
13:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the highest end chip 32 gigs of RAM. I don't remember the storage, but these are pretty expensive components, right yeah?
13:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And Windows Home, which I'm really happy about because I'm in a home One of the first things I'm going to do is try and force a pro license out of that thing.
14:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just had an email from a service that offered me three Windows 10, windows 11 Pro licenses for I think it was $2.08 or something. So if you need to upgrade on the cheap, you can do it.
14:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's just a quick question of how quickly can you get it to switch to a better license before you're fully Ubi'd? Even right, because retroing it afterwards you don't get the same effect.
14:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's true, yeah, especially if you want something like well, I get, this is something I'm still I I, as part of the testing, I have to do them. Here is the automatic disk encryption stuff, right? So windows 11 has always offered that if you sign in with a microsoft account, um windows on home, it's just disk encryption. They don't call it bitlocker, you don't get the tools, but it does happen automatically.
14:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it the?
14:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
same it's.
14:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
RSA. It's the same Strong encryption.
14:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, but the 24H2, supposedly that happens even if you don't sign in with a Microsoft account, and I have to test that because I don't quite understand. You need some way to have a recovery key if you can't get into the computer, to have a recovery key if you can't get into the computer. So I haven't looked at that yet.
15:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You triggered something in me. Now I think if I switch up to Pro will Recall run.
15:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, will Recall run on a system that doesn't have it today?
15:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, presuming, these CoPilot Plus PCs are on a run Recall because somebody said that would happen.
15:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I don't think it matters if you're on homer pro, so that's a good question actually it's.
15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good that there's automatic encryption, because you know the issue is, when you throw out or sell or recycle a computer, you, unless you have it encrypted, uh, your hard drive, you know, very likely is going to be visible to.
15:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I destroy all the drives before I get rid of the machine yes, yeah, but most people don't right.
15:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if you encrypt it, then it's, it's gibberish.
15:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, matter what. So for I would say, for 90 something percent high 90s, that just happens automatically and no one has to think about it, or all phones are that now do that for that reason, um, okay, well, so yeah, I'll send it to you, paul.
16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I'm gonna wait till you get back.
16:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't want to should I send it to? Mexico city no, no, no, no, no, please, why I? I told you my declare story. I don't yeah, the less hardware I fly with, the better you know.
16:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So once you get back, let me know when are you gonna. When are you coming home For Christmas?
16:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, for Thanksgiving.
16:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good, I'll send it to you for Thanksgiving.
16:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It'll be a wonderful way to celebrate the holiday. My other turkey for November, yeah.
16:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Break out the carving night kids. We've got the Snapdragon dev kit right here. That's right. I want the oyster Mostly. I just want to know. I want you to break it. I want to know why they took it back.
16:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You want to know that? Well, I think Rich is going to have our first look at that. I'm curious.
16:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.
16:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.
16:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I bet there's warranty issues and they didn't want to warranty it. Taking money is a good way to just say I have to warranty it.
16:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, by the way, putting a sticker on the box that says FCC not compliant is one way to get around being compliant, and we can't sell it, so maybe the fix was too expensive.
17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, about the same. It comes with an hdmi thunderbolt hdmi adapter adapter.
17:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean I'm perfectly happy it doesn't no, listen, if you wanted to hold on to that, I understand, um it's. That's worth more than the box I would.
17:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll keep the adapter and you have the rest of it.
17:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just sitting here with like an HDMI thing hitting the back of the box. Why does this work?
17:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nicely equipped. You know it's got two USB-A ports, three type C ports and, by the way, very handilyily, they've numbered them in case you lose track, because you know how important that is. Yeah, this is, yeah the numbering is zero, one and two, so I love it. And then they put this hatch, as we showed you last week on the on the trans.
17:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's my favorite part about it, what like, why I don't understand that you don't want someone sticking a quarter in there by mistake or something there's nothing would fit so stupid?
18:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but it's cool. I mean it says x elite on and it has the logo. I mean it is anyway you can put that yeah, if you decide you want to give it away, uh send it back to me and uh postage uh no, I mean I, I will use.
18:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll use it. So I'll explain why. I'll explain how and why I'll use it later in the show because it's going to come up.
18:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh good, All right.
18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's see here. We're only 17 minutes and 50 seconds into the show, but my careful calculations and we have yet to talk about Windows. So let's do it. Let's do it. Do you need to take an ad break first? Well, I need to. But All right, we can get through maybe the first part here. Yeah Well, look at you, it's already done.
18:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like it never happened, okay, so.
18:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have a shared document. Yeah, and foolishly, Paul has given me access edit access. I cringe a little bit every time I see orange text appear in my otherwise pristine document.
19:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's gonna move stuff around, pictures I can do all sorts of stuff to. Really that's good stuff. He's deleting my personal photos. It's at this point.
19:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think paul thinks of me as a precocious eight-year-old.
19:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, annoying him in. No, you know, actually what I've learned is it's not just you, because I I share some notions with my wife, and I don't like when she touches anything either.
19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So but you were really masterful last week. You could have gotten angry, but you were patient, you were calm. You said about what? Click the button?
19:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no the button the one in the upper left, the button.
19:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that okay you did that very well and the other right, as I felt as a senior citizen, I was well served by you also, thank you, windows 11, week d yeah, so it's week d, right?
19:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so we were all really well attuned to the calendar now, thanks to microsoft and their updating policies. So week d the tuesday, week d is when microsoft puts out their preview updates, and so we did get one as expected, uh, and then we didn't get one as expected. So if you're on 23H2, if you want, you can install next month's patch Tuesday update. Now, if you're on 24H2, there's nothing. But my guess, based on history, we'll get one this week, right, some other time. That's how it usually goes. So nothing major to speak up. Well, no, that's not fair, I'm sorry, uh, this will include the co-pilot piece, uh, co-pilot key customization feature in settings, which, I have to say, I'm really looking forward to.
20:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is how you can use, do anything with the key I type really quickly, but I also type really messily and. And you're tagging the Copilot key, you change the context of everything.
20:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and it is astonishing how much I must rely on autocorrect. But God, I'm not. This is going to sound impossible, but I bet I launch Copilot inadvertently 20 times a day plus. There you go.
21:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
See, we need a macro button that counts how many times you hit it, as well as do something less unbelievable.
21:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then followed by control w to kill it, and I bet microsoft's telemetry from mexico is going. They're like we're seeing a lot of co-pilot usage in mexico, guys, you know no, you don't crazy in mexico city.
21:23
This is awesome, yep it must be, because that very first demo use of many ever did was a mexico city itinerary. Remember the original bing launch got them all bing yeah, so anyway, useless. Uh, not much else is interesting. I feel like one of these features it's notification suggestions. I thought that was already in the product. Maybe it's already in 24H2 and not in 23H2. I'm not really sure. If I can't keep track, the Windows virtual keyboard is getting a game pad now for games obviously. So that's kind of cool virtual game pad. But that's about it. I mean, it's not too much in there.
22:02
And you figured it's 24H2, slightly delayed right not too much in there, so and you figured it's 24 inch too slightly delayed, right, like yeah, I base that only on the fact that they've done it three, five times this year already, right, where they deliver one.
22:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well that there haven't been that many months, so maybe there's a lot of quality concerns with 24 h2, so it makes me wonder if they're not really tearing apart trying to figure out what the heck's going on see that would um assume some form of adult supervision over there.
22:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think that's it.
22:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think I think when blue screens and stuff started popping up like the adults showed up and said what are you kids doing?
22:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh god, you would hope so I mean, yeah, I had a guy write me the other day about the forced folder backup in one drive in windows 11. You know.
22:39 - Notebook LM (Guest)
Oh well, I said dude, I sounded the alarm on this over a year ago was his name leo.
22:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, maybe it was you actually during the thing good lord, that was that I I actually am glad I did that.
22:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because I honestly I just thought you were uh I, I.
22:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the response I have every time someone, whether it was december, march, july, now, a year later, where someone's like oh my god, did you notice? I mean, did I notice I switched to google drive because of this? Yeah, I noticed, but I it's astonishing to me that they've not fixed this. I mean, made it better.
23:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's on purpose but you, but you did show me that one switch that you can flip, and then it just it stops, it gives up, and uh, I mean I, yeah, I don't, so I don't.
23:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't ever do that myself. Oddly, I let it do its thing. I feel like sometimes you got to feed the beast, but no, I oh never, but I don't need the beast. Oh, but I don't. But the thing is, the reason I do that is I don't have anything in those folders, right, so it's syncing them doesn't matter.
23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, I had 800 gigabytes in there.
23:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Who would put half a terabyte in their folders? I mean honestly.
23:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's still going to do it because I have stuff in other folders that I made that are outside of that system, but they're still in OneDrive and they still do that little sync thing. It's not because they're downloading the files, they're downloading whatever they call the on-demand version of the placeholder versions of those files. Right, it has to do that for disk indexing purposes, for search purposes. It's just metadata, so it takes a long time. I mean, I have 880 gigabytes of stuff in there somehow, so it takes a while. But I let it do it because I do want to be able to search and I do want to access those things. But I don't worry about the download part because I don't really have anything there. It's okay, okay.
24:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay.
24:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay.
24:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, all right, more arm action.
24:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this week is Qualcomm's big annual event for Snapdragon the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, and it's a multi-day event, so I think there could still be more Windows announcements, including perhaps new chips, right, new generation chips.
24:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see. It would be awesome if they announced new Snapdragon X chips.
25:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they will. I mean, that's where they do it and it's when they do it, so we'll see, but they did last year. That was the original announcement for this one um and my expectation. I don't know anything about it, they haven't briefed me or anything, but that is what I expect. But as we sit here on Wednesday, they've had a couple of momentous days, so, um, on the phone side, they're bringing those uh Orion cores from the PC chips, the, the Nuvia-based chips, to the phone and dramatic performance gains, which is really interesting. Like 40%, 50% over the years. These will be for Android Crazy.
25:33
Yes, there were a bunch of little announcements around software and device drivers, which impacts me directly, although I was really hoping. I was thinking. You know, google said they were bringing drive to arm. This would have been the time and place. They haven't said it yet, so, um, but they did specifically mention the focus, right and the problem. The one hardware issue I have with arm, which is how I will use this device If Leo sends it to me, is at home. I'll use it on my desk. It'll be the thing I podcast with. The only reason I don't do it now is because the Focusrite's not compatible and I need that for the microphone.
26:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perfect, Then I really will send it to you. If you're going to use it for our shows yeah, that's how I'll use it. That's great. Oh right, yeah.
26:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here in Mexico I have just a USB microphone, so you know. But I have the nice Heil Mike at home.
26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, and when the Snapdragon Elite developer kit inevitably blows up, we'll know because we'll be on the air and when the flames shoot out of it.
26:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you guys smell?
26:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
something funny.
26:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We can say it's the sound of a platform dying.
26:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why they discontinued it. Oh, dark, very dark. Jeff Gerling did say that the fans are a little overactive. He said he could hear him. I couldn't really hear him, I don't. I don't think that's going to be a problem, but just to be aware of. We'll check some more.
26:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the entire time I've been here in mexico I've been using the snapdragon based uh surface laptop for all the podcast stuff. Okay, no problems, it doesn't. There's no fan. There's no, it's great.
27:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No wind down okay, so maybe that's related to what was going on. I mean, it shouldn't need a fan.
27:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the whole point well, it does need a fan, unfortunately, but it maybe they were just cheap fans, or yeah, it has what it looks like a copper heat pipe.
27:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can see it through the yeah, the window.
27:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We don't have a single example of a passively cooled snapdragon x pc of any kind.
27:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interesting, maybe someday yeah, and most of the reviewers, including gerling, said it just doesn't hold up. Stand up to the big competition that they're trying to be, which is the apple silicon chip well I, so they're in the I always use this term.
27:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're in the ballpark I I. I think they the. The current gen chips compare well with the m3 right. Uh for the really okay, yeah, so the, but on a portable sense, like the efficiency stuff, the battery life stuff, it's great, but it's not as good as the macbook air. Right, you know it's about two and the m4 is going to be out. The m4 is going to be a different ballpark, yeah, so so we'll see, although I have to say what.
28:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What we've noticed on the apple side is that most of the benefit was switching to this new arm platform and that the subsequent updates from m123 and now I'm for minor have been subsequent updates from M one, two, three and now I'm four.
28:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Minor have been small. Yeah, the the, the bigger, the bigger advances come in the form of apps. Well, the OS itself, obviously, but then the apps going native, and so, as more and more apps go native, you realize more and more benefits, and so, yeah, that's true.
28:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And windows on arm as well, right, yes, exactly that would be the.
28:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that's right. You really want to have a dev machine so that people can get their stuff across well, I should say well, you know, we'll see.
28:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We've not seen a gen 2, gen 3, whatever on the uh dragon x.
28:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean now. Now you're making a useful point there, paul, which is maybe they're about to announce a new chipset and there's going to be new dev machines for it, and why are we still trying to ship the old ones?
29:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ah, really killed them okay that.
29:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, that makes a lot more sense to me than almost anything else I've heard. So, yeah, that could be it. So one of the big things that happened this week was I mentioned this earlier, I don't know if we were before the show or after, but after it started but Qualcomm had a call with the press on Monday, ahead of the show, to talk about Intel, and not to talk about buying Intel, but rather to complain about the misleading information that they provided about Lunar Lake at IFA. Now, ifa to me, was the high point of Intel's year. They released the anti Intel core chip in Lun lunar Lake. They they stepped away from all of the things they had done before and did things differently, by the way, exactly mirroring what they had done when they moved from Pentium to the core chip set itself 15, 18 years ago.
29:56
Whenever that was it's I. I mean I thought their public posture was strong, it was aggressive. It turns out it was at least partially smoke and mirrors. Now look it's marketing right. Obviously, when you make some kind of a product, you want to highlight the things that make you look good and you want to sort of ignore the things that make you look bad. But the types of comparisons that Intel did were questionable. So I'm not saying Qualcomm is a hundred percent right, but they make they made a really good case that Intel I mean. At what point does misleading become lying?
30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of hard to say it's kind of hysterical because Qualcomm has been doing that year after year after year.
30:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'm going to say the same thing that I would say to someone who complains when Microsoft issues an antitrust complaint about someone else, which is that who would know it better than them? We know, we know antitrust violations when we see them. Guys, come on, I mean, it's you know. So, yes, fair enough. But I I look it doesn't obviate the fact that what Intel did was kind of questionable. So, whatever I will say, I'll give credit where it's due.
31:09
I was not thinking along these lines, but Rich Woods brought up well, what about graphics? I mean, you guys are killing Intel all over the place, but you're not killing them on graphics. And, to their credit, the guys from Qualcomm are like, no, no, all props to Intel. That is one area where they're nailing it. The guys from Qualcomm are like, no, no, all props to Intel. That is one area where they're nailing it. For for gen one, we needed to hit processor, like CPU performance and battery life. That was the big goal. They're right. And they're looking at GPU, for they didn't say gen two, but a future gen. So maybe it is gen two, maybe it's gen three, I don't know.
31:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but I'd be real generous with you. Know Intel's do really well there.
31:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes because?
31:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because the next thing to say is wait till you see our next ship.
31:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, right, when Intel announced Meteor Lake late last year the one, the biggest game, what became Core Ultra the single biggest improvement was the graphics, the integrated graphics, and I tested it at the time in Decembercember on just a regular laptop and it could play games like not you know the very latest game on you know 60 frames a second at native resolution, but you know 19 or 1080p, you know 30 60 frames a second. Whatever good triple a games like it worked and this is kind of ushering in a new era for that type of performance. And now with lunar lake, they pretty much have doubled it again, like they did. This. It's not just gen over gen, it's like year over year. That's unprecedented. So for all of Intel's problems and there are many they really got the GPU stuff right and AMD was already in a good place. So it's not like AMD is lagging there behind, but Intel's doing great with integrated GPU. It's the one needle in that haystack. I can believe that has like a positive shine to it.
32:52
So Monday starts with Qualcomm complaining about Intel. Okay, fair enough. Qualcomm announces Orion cores from the Snapdragon X coming to the phone. Awesome, as expected, right. And then sued into or sued qualcomm again for this licensing problem right. So I spent the better part of the morning researching this and didn't uncover anything unexpected or new, um, but sure enough it's. What it boils down to is nuvia had a non-transferable license for arm. Uh, qualcomm, of course, has licenses for ARM. Arm believes that Qualcomm has to pay for Nuvia's license, or they cannot use those designs, they must throw them away. That's in the agreement. Apparently. We don't know that because we don't see the agreement right.
33:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So all we have to go on-. So now you're in this trap where you bought this company, but you can't use their tech unless you pay double for the license.
33:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. So this is a lot like any conversation we would have about any company buying Intel. And what does that mean to the X86 license that AMD has? And everyone seems to know that they have to throw it away and start over and blah, blah, blah. Okay, maybe we know more about that one, because I think that case actually did go to court, or maybe the settlement they had was public. I'm not sure, but what I do know is that there is no rec public record of arms agreement with Qualcomm and all we can do is go. All we can go on is what they've said. Qualcomm is very confident that its licenses and IP assets protect it from this claim and that that if we go to court, we will win, and that the court will see this. So we'll see. My expectation is not that this thing goes to court but rather that they settle or room steps deal.
34:32
Yep, if we make this the simplest possible conversation, qualcomm wants to pay one, arm wants to charge two and we're going to meet somewhere in the middle. That's my guess. I also looked this up. So now that a couple of things have happened in the interim between the time that Qualcomm started making chips for PCs and today Apple came out with Apple Silicon M series chips for Macs, raising the bar yet again. I mean, windows and ARM already look sad and pathetic as it was, but as soon as that happened, it just exponentially awful.
35:06
Microsoft was going all 64-bit with windows 11. It was going to be announced the next year. They wanted to get that going. They wanted x64 and arm 64 to be reasonably identical and they were nowhere close at the time. Arm, by the way, it was going public. So Arm now releases quarterly earnings statements. Arm makes exactly one-tenth as much revenues as Qualcomm Exactly one-tenth. In fact. Last quarter it was literally one. It was to almost a dollar. One-tenth Ten percent. And ten percent, yeah, if like nine hundred something million versus ninesomething billion, yeah, just horrific. So Qualcomm can afford. It is what I'm saying. Now it makes sense that one piece of the puzzle is possible. You really want to play dueling?
35:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
lawyers in this game. I don't know if that's a good idea. The sensible thing here is you don't want the discovery. This is all private information.
36:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's exactly right. Don't want the discovery. This is all private information. That's exactly right. Those documents that I alluded to earlier that are private and not public. Both companies want that to remain true. And the thing is, you know, maybe Qualcomm would pay 1.2 of the two, or 1.3 or something, I don't know. It is odd to me that Arm has been very vocal. Arm has worked to undermine Qualcomm with its statements a couple of times. Yeah, arm announced this during Qualcomm's biggest annual event. Come on, yeah, you think that's a coincidence? Yeah.
36:35
Well, it's, you know, allsfair and whatever.
36:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but yeah, you're literally trying to play public opinion in stock price games Mm-hmm In negotiating. But here's the thing.
36:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what the percentages of arms revenues that come from Qualcomm, or the percentage of arm chips that ship in the world that are Qualcomm's I don't know. It's a big number, right. Either way, they have to be their biggest partner slash customer. They have to be right. When you, as a public company, defend yourself against what you perceive to be some sort of a license or IP violation infringement, you have to right. You're legally obligated to protect yourself. You know you have to. You have to protect your shareholders. However, when you undermine your biggest customer size partner and you could materially harm them, your company in the process.
37:25
You're harming you. Yeah.
37:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that you're harming right.
37:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's a strange dynamic.
37:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh no, they're both running around with a gun pointed at their head saying one move and the idiot gets it right. Yes, exactly how do you do it?
37:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes, and they're like walking backwards. And one of them is going to trip. Yeah, yeah it, yes, and they're like walking backwards. And one of them is going to trip.
37:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. It's very much an ego dance at this point. Or is it a shareholder dance, like you're showing?
37:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
off your shareholder. I would say more yes, we are defending with vigor.
37:55
Yeah, you're not the first person. It's interesting. You said that Ego has come up a couple of times. I know people run companies and people have egos, but at the end of the day, this is a publicly traded company and you have to. They're a shareholder. Ego is maybe the wrong term. Yes, you have a responsibility to shareholders. Yeah, that's why when I complain about, say, microsoft being a lot less transparent about their finances and I could argue in a vague way that that's bad for shareholders because you need to know that information, to know how the company's doing, etc. Etc. Uh, someone from microsoft could just point at the stock price and say that's all they need to know. Idiot, who cares? It's going great, you know. So I don't know. It's an interesting thing. Um, it has an interesting history. Uh, it's always fascinating when.
38:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I mean these two are stuck with each other, they're just bickering right.
38:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, they're not well, from a size perspective they're not the same, but Arm has the same hold over Qualcomm in a way that Qualcomm has over it. They both need each other.
38:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But if either harms either one, both suffer.
39:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's the thing. It's the opposite, like a what do you call it? When you have a? Um like the, the little fish latches onto the shark and catches the uh, the garbage that comes out of his mouth, and they have that relationship symbiotic symbiotic. Thank you, so what's a non-symbiotic relationship? Is there a term for that? Because it's, it's a, it's weird, it's both, I guess it, relationship it's called mutualism is when both parties benefit. Mutual assured arrogance.
39:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Kevin King who is a shark fan. He watches Shark Week religiously, so you can trust him.
39:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's more of a shark life.
39:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, I think, given that you're Mexico City, we should call it a Mexican standoff.
39:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, here of course, they just call it a standoff.
39:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's. Oh, actually you want to do the Orion core thing, and then we can do the ad break.
39:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, we kind of did. Have we done it? Yeah, it's not always clear on the outside, I think, what is happening here, but the processor cores that are in the Snapdragon X, and, like all processor types, there's two types. They don't call them efficient and performance. You know, every company has their own names. I forget what they call them, but if you go back to the original Nuvia acquisition announcement, they paid $1.4 billion to this company. I think it was January 2021.
40:27
Never mentioned Windows, never mentioned PC. But 50% of the quotes at the bottom of the article are from PC companies and Microsoft, in fact, the top one's from Microsoft. So it was very clearly going to be something that was heading to the PC and, of course, they were more explicit about it later. But the other 50% were all mobile companies Samsung, google, right. So it was also always going to go to mobile as well. I think we in the PC space I think a lot of people, but a lot of us sort of saw Nuvia as this is them fixing Windows on ARM, which is certainly what happened. But it's not just that. It was always going to go to the phone as well. And so, yeah, yesterday, I think it was always going to go to the phone as well, and so, yeah that yesterday, I think it was they announced the.
41:08
Uh, I'm never gonna. Their names are so terrible snapdragon 8, some. I think it says 8. I think they're calling it, I don't remember who cares. Uh is their next gen uh phone chip for phone, that's phones and tablets, but it's. But it's essentially the elite in here. Well, it's the same processor. So you know the, the three parts. There's the adreno gpu, there's the mpu, which I think is helix, maybe is the brand they use for that. I don't think those are the same. I think they still have, because you have to meet the.
41:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know efficiency need this is a three nanometer part. Okay, uh, cpu, cpu, cpu, I mean. Yeah, by the way, I've boxed it up, it's ready to go okay maybe a little christmas uh paper on there. You know I will, I'll wrap it but I forgot to take my uh to wipe it, so but you know, you know how to do that right I do not.
41:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Can I walk you through it? You know what? Let's do a special episode, I think leo. Leo tells paul ha to reset windows. It might be the antidote to that guy's complaint.
42:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm excited about the Mikanji Thanksgiving. That's pretty cool.
42:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's a very special episode my family is going to be really surprised when, they
42:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
take that lid off the turkey, and it's not what they thought Greg Priestley, you stay tuned because that's coming up, it's going to be a lot of fun. Uh, poor guy. You were right. We're not greg, we're agreeing with you. You were yeah, no, I I could feel it happening.
42:33
I was like oh yeah paul said it wow this is not gonna sound good this is bad baby, this is bad. Uh little plug for uh club twit here. Ke, who is, as I mentioned, a Shark fan and loves Shark Week, has just told us he does not have a TV. He can't afford a TV. Now that's why it's so very important. Can we get a tip jar going for him that?
42:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you join Club.
42:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Twit, because if you join Club Twit, this young man will be able to watch Shark Week once again, is he?
43:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
on.
43:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, we don't know kevin, have a way to show kevin?
43:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess I do, he's probably sitting there in his underwear, in his house I'm younger imagine one of these guys, but like 25 years younger.
43:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay okay, uh, club twit is our uh is our little uh little uh membership club. We do it through memberful and you know, one of the things that's great about club twit uh is it's a great community of people who listen to our shows and we just love it. Uh, I know we now have about 655 people watching on our live streams on YouTube and Twitch and kick and X and everywhere. And, uh, all of you of you some of you are anywhere seeing it for the first time saying you know it's pretty good. We would like you to join the club because it is pretty good. We've got lots of shows. They're ad free. When you're in the club, you get access to the Discord where you can chat with other members, other winners and dozers. You can also see stuff that we don't normally put out in public, like our Stacy's Book Club coming up Friday 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm, eastern Stacy and I will talk about a brand new sci-fi book that Jason Snell, our MacBreak Weekly host, said is the best book of the year Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model. You know, if you get it right now, you could probably finish it before Friday and join us to discuss it. I also did a coffee thing last week and I think we're going to do more of those, including a tasting with Mark Prince, the coffee geek, and Sarah Dooley from beanscom, and she says she's going to put together a little tasting kit, so we'll fill you in on that. That'll be a club-only thing, but the thing about those, you can watch them live, everybody can watch them live, but we we make them available to club members only on the twit plus feed. So that's another benefit. Seven bucks a month I mean that's a lot, of a lot of podcasts charge that much for one show, that's for everything and uh, and it's, and it really does help us. Uh, keep the lights on. I don, none of it goes into my pocket. It's really to keep people like Kevin and our great team working and to keep putting out these shows and Paul and Richard and everybody. So twittv slash club twit. Okay, thanks in advance. Meanwhile, let me continue with a word from our sponsor and then we'll get back to Paul and Richard and Windows Weekly.
45:28
Our show today brought to you. I just met these guys last week and I was so blown away. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. I hadn't US Cloud. You may want to hear about them. They're the number one Microsoft Unified Support replacement. They do it better for less than Microsoft. Us Cloud is the global leader in third-party Microsoft Enterprise support. 50 of the Fortune 500 uses US Cloud and that's because switching to US Cloud can save you, can save your business 30 to 50%. That's on a true, comparable replacement for microsoft unified support.
46:08
Us cloud supports the entire microsoft stack 24, 7, 365 days a year. They respond faster, they resolve tickets quicker for clients all over the world and you will always talk to real humans and fast too. Check out their proven track record Expert level engineers with an average of 14.9 years. And that's for BrakeFixer DSE. They make an effort. They really work to get the best engineers. So when you're on the phone with them, you're talking to an expert who's really going to help you. 100% domestic teams. Your data will never leave the US and here's something Microsoft still doesn't do Financially backed SLAs. On response time that's pretty good. Their initial ticket response averages under four minutes and you know when everything's falling apart, nothing's working. It's nice to pick up the phone and, within four minutes, get a real expert on the line who can help you. In 2023, 94% of US Cloud's clients reported saving one-third or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Cloud.
47:16
From Fortune 500 companies and large health systems to major financial institutions, even federal agencies, us Cloud ensures vital microsoft systems are working for over six million users globally every day. I'm talking big brands caterpillar uses us cloud, hp affleck, dun bradstreet under armor key bank. Even the it folks at gartner have chosen us cloud for their microsoft support. Here's a great quote. This is from a director of information technologies. It folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support. Here's a great quote. This is from a director of information technologies. It was an interview I heard. It was really cool. He says I'll try to channel him and within an hour, us Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. So not only did they bring the right guys to the call, but they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I had experienced with Microsoft in my eight years being with Premier. We made the right choice. That's a great quote from a person really there, right, really on the front line.
48:18
And, of course, when it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud. Iso, gdpr, esg compliance they're not just regulatory requirements, but strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and their corporate reputation. These standards foster trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders and attract investment and assure long-term sustainability and success in a global market. Us Cloud, I was so impressed. I want you to go to uscloudcom, book a call today to find out how much your team can save. Bottom line better support, faster support for less. Uscloudcom to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less. Thank you, us Cloud, for supporting Windows Weekly and I hope you will call them and, if they ask, let them know. Oh, yeah, I saw that on Windows Weekly. That was cool. Let's go back to the show. Oh my God, what.
49:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What Did I?
49:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
shock you.
49:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Got a good shock. Look out of Paul there. There, it was a good one. Three things just happened in sequence like a. If the discord people could stop distracting me, please.
49:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you oh, too many anime gifs there. Is that the problem.
49:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just clicked on a link in the thing it opened in the wrong browser. Then I went to close it, I closed the notes and I'm like I'm done, I just don't, I don't know how to use computer anymore. I don't know what's going on.
49:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I don't blame you. You know what, if I saw this, I would be a little bit baffled as well. What is this? Yeah, look at that, yep.
49:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, see, this is what happens with the.
50:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Too much coffee. You're talking about coffee, right, I get too much coffee. I get talking about coffee. Right, I get into it. You know, stop being interesting. What's wrong with you? Easily I am. You see, these are the club members. They're great. They're really fun in there get on in there, get on, that's funny. Uh, all right enough. Enough of enough of that. Um, what were we?
50:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
talking I forgot what we're talking about it's insider time ah yeah, so in the past week there have been two bells, unless I missed something, devon canary. Neither one is particularly interesting, but the only thing to really know is that both of them feature at least one feature that is in that week d, I would hope update that went out tuesday, so they're already kind of behind the times, if you will. More interestingly, microsoft announced separately in separate posts which I thought was actually interesting to keep reusing words two new features that will go out across various channels in the Insider program, and one of them is actually instable, at least for me. I I went and looked at my system, the snapdragon system I have here, and I have this feature which is on october. One or two. Microsoft announced a bunch of kind of wave, two co-pilot plus pc features. One of them was a feature called super resolution for the photos app. So the photos app already has um background blur and I feel about these names god yeah right.
51:26
So this, when they this was one of the announcements that I was like, you know, I could actually use this feature. I really could use this. I have old photos that are often low res, like my dad's yeah, in many cases has no idea what he's doing, obviously and they're just low res right. So I thought this would be kind of cool and I have it. I, for some reason, this is in my my, on my stable 24h2 machine. It was supposed to be rolling out to the insider program but, like I said, I already have it so cool, so it's an addition to the stuff that's there. So, background blur, remove and replace is in uh photos, regardless of, you know, copilot plus pc, there's a restyle image feature which is, I can't remember, I think it's unique to copilot plus pc. I, I think um, and that's. This is the one where you have an image of some kind of photo and you can redo it using generative AI in the style Put a dial on it right An impressionistic painting or whatever.
52:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go, make it M1A.
52:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and now they have super resolution. So I tried this on eight different images. I got the same results every time, which some people are telling me is actually what I should expect. But the image I used in my article was me wearing orange clothes at age five ish and survived the house fire. Yeah well, it was the 70s. I mean, we were all doing it, yeah, everybody wore an orange.
52:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I was heading out to studio 51 or whatever, or 57 we just got rid of our black and white world, so of course you're wearing orange.
53:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's right that's a good, that's right. Well, I mean with the with the green matching couch behind me, you know if I'm not mistaken, the harvest gold shag carpet.
53:10
Yeah, yes, I have a very similar picture, paul, actually, yeah, yeah I like well, you, but you're wearing it now, so I have that couch right behind me. Yeah, actually I do have that Coach. So, yeah, you can super scale it or upscale it to 8x, right, so I did, and the same results. So to me the quality of the image isn't any better. But some people are telling me yeah, well, that's the point, right? I?
53:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
thought it was going to sharpen the image Just 8x, it's just bigger.
53:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which you know honestly. Honestly is still very useful, but, but based on their original description, it should also improve the quality, right? So I'm not seeing that it's not so super. It's yes, there, you go right. It's yeah, they implemented that half of it, so but that is better.
54:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, if you blew it up, this big it's humongous.
54:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't remember the exact pixel count, but I think maybe it's in the article but it's very big but it's still blurry and out of focus a little bit.
54:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever, so it's good to know what the limits are A little sharp contrast fix. Yeah, a Photoshop whiz could take this into Photoshop.
54:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I have used tools online to do this from time to time. This particular image I'm going to forget because I did so many of them, but this one only took a few seconds. There was one it went for two minutes Wow, but it runs off the MPU. I know a long time and it didn't look any better. But being able to do this locally is great, honestly.
54:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Any time I can pin an mpu is a good day for me, right like I'm just gonna.
54:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, I'm gonna I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna actually search my photo collection for images under a certain resolution and, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna play with this- I know, make that mpu work.
54:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's been laying around your lazy second.
55:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, exactly, yeah, just taking it for you, kid, let's go yeah. I like it, so there's more to come. They announced several other features, so we weren't expecting anything until November, and that was going to be in preview.
55:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the AI we deserve, right? It's improvements in existing software.
55:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
May you always get the AI you deserve. There you go.
55:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a fortune. It's in a fortune cookie like it's msg right, you just sprinkle a little yum yum on it.
55:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right right, the white dust falls out of the cookie, the the building clears, yeah, and then there's something about cobalt plus in there, for some reason, yeah. So the other one is, uh, microsoft store update, which is not super interesting, unfortunately, but, um, just a more immersive trailer experience. So if you've ever looked through games, especially in the store, usually it kind of plays in the background of the page, you know, and that kind of thing. I don't know who cares, that's not super more seizures, more seizure-inducing yeah, right, yeah.
56:00
For the people who have no attention span whatsoever, we're gonna do everything we can to make this story Distract you further, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So that's that, a couple of AI type things, and yeah mostly actually all Microsoft related. Oh no, liam had a nice break in there, so there's a lot.
56:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I moved it. I moved it again. I was pretty sure this wasn't no. No, you guys are throwing me off. I know, I don't know why.
56:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know why I'm calling it out. I'm sorry. I want people to share in my Sharing your suffering, my reaction or whatever.
56:34
So there was a report in the New York Times detailing all of well, not all of some of the behind the scenes maneuvering that's occurring between Microsoft and OpenAI. I think it's fair to say they don't have the healthiest relationship, oh my God. No, it's terrible. Microsoft, horrified by what happened with Sam Altman last November, I think it was obviously had no warning that this was coming, no idea that it could happen. And then we saw the result they created their own in-house AI. It's not a division. It's weird. The wording on it is kind of strange. It kind of exists outside of the normal Microsoft divisions, right?
57:14
I think it was very intentional yes, coming over from inflection with basically kind of like Nokia. It's like we didn't buy Nokia, we didn't buy inflection.
57:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We just took all their people.
57:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But's like we didn't buy nokia. You know we didn't buy it, but we did, didn't we? You know, like we kind of got it all right.
57:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, um you know, it's interesting microsoft has done we've never there was that moment during the sam altman crazy, where sam was going to come join microsoft and a whole bunch of people were going to go with him that was the threat said maybe we've made a boo-boo, maybe a little boo-boo is the threat. Yes, and I was talking about Dark Satcha, because I like a Dark Satcha.
57:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, the good old days of Microsoft. I miss it. There you go. It would be like if they made a good Star Wars prequel, you know.
57:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let's not get crazy now, Mr Thorn.
58:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will say the ease at which people come and go from open AI should be disturbing.
58:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
By come and go you mean go mostly go Well.
58:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sam Altman came back, but yes, I think I don't know this. Are you kidding he?
58:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
never went anywhere, but if you look at the core leadership of the company.
58:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they've all left at one point or another. I think they all. Mira Marotti just left, and she that's. I think they've all left at one point or another. I think they all left Mira. Marotti just left and she's raising money.
58:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what I mean, I mean she was, yeah, the best idea.
58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She was Altman's replacement, pro tem replacement. You definitely wanted her as the public face. She was well-spoken. Oh, she was the face of the 4-0.
58:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Unlike Mr Altman, I am a human, I am not a robot, you know. Yeah, okay, okay, sam, go recharge, um, you know, kind of a weird guy, but of course ai he would be. So, yeah, this company is scary and I it could destroy the industry or could just implode. It's like a black star, a black hole.
58:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know what's going to happen here but obviously the biggest indicator I've gotten here is they're trying to restructure into a normal company so they can go public and a normal, a normal, a normal company like what they've made this was that weird charter where they were partly non-profit, partly for-profit.
59:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then they realized, oh, this is really expensive. We can't be a non-profit, it doesn't make sense and they raised 167 billion dollars.
59:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah I wonder if, as a cap cap table is coming together, these senior people are not getting the cut they want, and so they're going to.
59:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sam hallman has famously said he's famously said I don't take any money, I have no stake in this but, leo, I mean you say that I, we, we can't believe. I do say that I, you know, um with me. It's true, I'll show you.
59:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll show you the check I'm telling I'm sure he doesn't fly commercial. I mean he must be taking some money.
59:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't know yeah, steve jobs famously got paid a dollar a year.
59:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yeah, he did okay for himself, right, but they gave him a g5, so you know he wasn't barefoot and living in the woods like. Yeah, no.
01:00:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And a new Mercedes every whatever the lease ran out, every six months.
01:00:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And parking in a handicapped spot. Yeah, so I don't know. Look, microsoft has done everything they can this past year to lessen their reliance on OpenAI. Openai has likewise started partnering with a lot more companies, which they were always able to do. This is something Microsoft knew and no surprise. But you know, things are lining up a little differently here, and I think it all was triggered by that sam altman episode a year ago well, and that's what he also got the observer seat.
01:00:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But now that's gone away too yeah, I know, I think there's even more at play than that, because this turns out this ai is very, very expensive. Yep, it isn't the hockey stick that they were kind of claiming it was going to be. Uh there is a well, raise a ton of money yeah, you also got to make a product right like weird right, I don't, you know, I don't think at this point they're saying I mean, if you're suggesting any profit until we have a solution, it's not worth 13 million dollars.
01:01:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have an argument to make to the contrary, so I don't know. Microsoft's investment is sound. That's fine. Everyone. Apple talk about.
01:01:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple, Because they're not putting money in right. They're just putting Azure credits in for the most part, right or no?
01:01:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, no, because OpenAI is worth so much now that if they sold their stake or whatever, they would come out ahead by an order.
01:01:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Until it's not by the way.
01:01:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know, but that's the secret of investing Leo. Here's the problem.
01:01:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Get in at the right time.
01:01:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all paper, because you can't sell it, you can't capitalize on it. Or you'd tank the company. That's right, and so really it's a long bet. It's the arm call calm problem.
01:01:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll see what happens. It's interesting Microsoft has the resources to do AI themselves In the old days. This is a little bit like the team story where Gates kind of came out and said guys, we already have these things in place, why aren't we just doing this? You could make the same argument with AI, I think, and as of now I think they're pretty much there. I'd imagine We'll find out soon enough, I guess.
01:02:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Especially when you keep bleeding talent like they've been bleeding. Suleiman is gone right.
01:02:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's left in open.
01:02:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
AI.
01:02:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, Suleiman is the guy.
01:02:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sorry, not Suleiman Siskobar.
01:02:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean their top leadership from a year ago. Who's?
01:02:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
left.
01:02:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean most of the board's gone, you know obviously.
01:02:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And look, if you're one of those founding players and you're leaving OpenAI, something's seriously wrong, Like this is supposed to be your win. We're leaving up on ai now yeah, you were there at the beginning. You've got founder stakes. You or you should have had founder stakes. You should be looking at this going. I'm about to cash in billions, yep and you're walking the good.
01:02:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I think we don't know what their situation is the company, obviously, but these people are very valuable right now and you could argue that, I think they're getting offers that are unbelievable but, more importantly, altman's not locking them in.
01:03:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're getting control, showing them. Here's your position, here's what you stand to make.
01:03:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Stay here and make great things I mean, it could be the old patriots playbook. It doesn't matter who the player is.
01:03:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We have the plan and it will work in the game it works until it doesn't work yeah, yeah, until there's nobody left, and I'm trying to figure out who's like who's going to be going to turn off the lights at this point.
01:03:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I don't know, elon Musk probably. So this is just a minor story, but open AI released a, an early version of chat GPT for windows, which, by all accounts, is just a web app. Whatever version of chat gpt for windows, which, by all accounts, is just a web app, uh, whatever. But I will just point out that it came several months after it released native apps for uh, or apps for mac and iphone and uh. Why did we spend 13 billion dollars on this thing?
01:03:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's a little weird, isn't?
01:03:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it. I mean, you have a web app but I mean, like, just realistically speaking, aren't most of your uses on windows?
01:04:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know it's weird, but well, yeah, but we just use the web, right?
01:04:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we just use the yeah, no chat, but yeah. But why even put out a mac app? Why would you even make?
01:04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't understand why you put on an app to be that strange.
01:04:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe they're trying. This might have been about courting apple actually.
01:04:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That might explain uh, yeah, because of course apple doesn't have any ai yet but, we'll partner with them on uh the siri stuff so yeah, they have apple intelligence someday next week the first apple intelligence arrives, and it's just a little tiny bit of intelligence it's a little intelligent, yeah, a little bit, but uh, next year it's.
01:04:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They should have called it apple flowers for algernon. Um, you know, we'll see, but I don't know that's an obscure reference.
01:04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think you all.
01:04:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You got to be a smart, literate person, understand I don't, maybe I don't know, charlie, charlie for you movie lovers, charlie. Um, not the ads. You know it's charlie, not those, not that charlie. Um, I'm all over the map today, sorry, okay, so, um, we've talked a lot, let me just tell you something from the other side of 60.
01:05:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pretty soon all your references fall on deaf ears because I'm gonna run for president.
01:05:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I got this. I'm right there, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm uh, I'm weaving okay. So last year the big conversation here around ai was the stuff from build and um and Stevie Batish talking about the three app models for AI, and Copilot being the first one. Inside, inside, outside, yeah, and the beside the app thing is interesting and it's the right way to come to market. You already have this thing. You use Microsoft Word, maybe, or Windows, whatever it is, and we can make it better by this thing on the side. That's Copilot that will work with you and kind of work within the app that you're using. Microsoft now I mentioned the co-pilot plus PC wave two, but before that they also had a co-pilot, really Microsoft 365 co-pilot, wave two announcement and they started reusing, but let's say they started using the term agents and I'm starting to think this is kind of the the phase, the second phase, if you will, of this push that microsoft's making right.
01:06:10
That co-pilot is this thing that works with you, so it's kind of sitting there waiting for you to command it, and then agents are basically these background processes or, I guess, services that work for you, yeah, and that can get really intelligent. It's. It's simple when you think about it. It's like a price alert on an item you want to buy. Yeah, ping me when it hits a certain number and I will buy it. Then that kind of thing. Um, it's obvious. Right like this is I. I think this is going to be, I would argue buy it.
01:06:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If it hits this price, then let me know you've done it oh, there you go, fair enough.
01:06:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean that could be one way you could write like a stock price or something you go buy, buy, buy, whatever. Yeah, I mean that's right, that would be one of the yeah, so the first agent products for businesses but for end users. If you will, are coming out of Dynamics, so I fell asleep. If you will, are coming out of dynamics, so I fell asleep. I didn't really pay attention to any of it.
01:07:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a multi-billion dollar business. Paul, I'm going to call this. It runs a big chunk of the world.
01:07:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hear you and I'm sure you're right.
01:07:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I will accept that as a fact and both guys use the thing. It's really important.
01:07:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think, right, well, you know, and those guys both have a C in their title, so it's okay Like it's, it is important.
01:07:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's ERM and serious accounting software. Like it's not sexy but it's important.
01:07:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am not disagreeing.
01:07:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not disagreeing with anything you're saying. The problem is the word business Cause Paul didn't like that.
01:07:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not business. No, it's some business. I'm okay with some of it. It's just dynamic, crmg, oh, it's dynamic, so like it's a stop, I mean but but look, it's going to come everywhere and I, I, I haven't, I will. I may not write about this or not, we'll see, but I'm going to. I'll just talk about it now. This reminds me of the hailstorm, part of the original dot net go-to-market vision, right, which didn't end up happening we've just declared we've just been declared a finition monopoly.
01:08:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
let let's ask everyone for their credentials.
01:08:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly Now. By the way, hailstorm was actually a great idea. Maybe they weren't able to capitalize it at the time. We were in a much better place technologically for this to make sense today, obviously and I think AI, in the same way that AI kind of makes search make sense right by not solving search, by just forgetting about the traditional ways we would try to find things Forget about metadata.
01:08:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why would you do that anymore when you just have an?
01:08:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
answer Yep, we're just going to do this other thing. I think this can have the same impact. So you know, for example, I'll just keep using the price thing. People will install some sort of a extension in their browser to do like Amazon price comparisons or something. Yeah, there's no end.
01:08:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why would I use Amazon? I have a device that goes looking for prices for a product Right.
01:08:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, so this is potentially disruptive. It's a sleeper.
01:09:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would have gone to Amazon because it's convenient for me, but I've got software that's going to thumb all the sites.
01:09:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. Listen, I know I'm not alone in this one. The doorbell rings. It's a package from Amazon. I ordered it. I have no idea what it is. I would say 75% of the time I'm not expecting it. It's a surprise. It's a little christmas every day, or whatever um, it's the magic.
01:09:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's gonna be like with ai up two years later, right, you just know.
01:09:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes yep, I've had that happen. Yeah, but I, in the world of tomorrow, my doorbell is gonna ring. I'm gonna open it and it's gonna be a mountain of boxes there and it's gonna be because ai bought a bunch of stuff for me and said, but you said, you said you know to do this thing at this time. I'm like, okay, that's right. I didn't mean by all the things, I just so we'll see how this goes, but I think it's going to be big.
01:09:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really do I think this is now. I need the agentic based return system and I like that. You have just tried to normalize the word agentic oh yeah, they've been using like crazy and I giggle like if you say it enough in casual conversation.
01:10:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're just going to accept it as a word, you know, and which, I guess, is how it happens. Um, agentic, it's like agentic. Is it like quick, take it out, doctor. No, no, it's. It's okay, it's agentic. It's agentic. Oh no, I might. How long do I know you?
01:10:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know no no you misunderstand all right now I do want to take a little break. You're watching windows weekly it's paul thurot and richard campbell. Paul's doing the play-by-play.
01:10:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Richard's the color man today I like it is that true most days. Who's on first routine over here?
01:10:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
as long as the color is brown, as in brown liquor, I think we're happy with that.
01:10:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, that's coming up somebody asked me the other day about my role at witness weekly. It's like paul does all the writing and I make fun of it honestly, it's just a formal, uh formalization of our normal relationship, our normal conversation, yeah it's, just it's just scheduled now uh, we'll be back with more in just a bit.
01:11:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First, a word from our sponsor, and the word is intelligence. Okay, what Make your own joke up now? Well, we're brought to you today by Flashpoint. Okay, you know what Governments have intelligence agencies right to gather intelligence about what's going on in the world. I think businesses need something similar for security leaders in business today.
01:11:27
2024 has been a year like no other. Cyber threats and physical security concerns have continued to increase. Now geopolitical instability is adding a new layer of risk and uncertainty. How do you plan in a world on fire? Well, by the way, I got some stats that's going to set your hair on fire. Last year, there was a staggering 84% rise in ransomware attacks 84% last year. Data breaches went up 34% last year. That's trillions of dollars in financial losses, threats to safety worldwide. That's why you need Flashpoint Flashpoint. Flashpoint empowers organizations to make the mission critical decisions that will keep their people and their assets safe. It does this by combining cutting edge technology with the expertise of world-class analyst teams. It's your own intelligence agency and with Ignite Flashpoint's award-winning threat intelligence platform, you get access to critical data, finished intelligence, alerts and analytics all in one place. You can maximize your existing security investments and plan for what's happening in the next few months, in the next year, in the next 10 years.
01:12:49
Some Flashpoint customers avoid as much as $500 million in fraud loss every year half a billion dollars and many report a huge ROI something like 482% ROI in six months. No wonder Flashpoint earned Frost and sullivan's 2024 global product leadership award for unrivaled threat data and intelligence. I have a quote from a senior vice president of cyber operations at a big us financial institution. You would know their name. Uh, they said flashpoint is a direct 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're 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. Not everybody's got the CIA, but you can always get. Flashpoint is trusted by both mission-critical businesses and governments worldwide. Not everybody's got the CIA, but you can always get Flashpoint. Here's the deal To access the industry's best threat data and intelligence visit flashpointio today. That's flashpointio. We thank them so much for supporting windows weekly.
01:14:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now, with paul thorat and richard campbell, let's continue on with something exciting I'm still convinced that you're just like secretly messing with me all the time I am secretly, not so secretly, not so secretly all the gas lighting all the time all I mean.
01:14:28
Sometimes the conspiracies are true, so I don't have this in the notes? I mean, they aren't after you that's right, um, microsoft added handoff support to its office apps on mac, iphone and ip today I believe I just saw that headline flash by, so I haven't looked at that yet. But separate from that, they released new versions of OneNote on Mac and iPad that include Copilot, because Copilot has to be in everything. You know. You got your Copilot in my peanut butter.
01:15:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not a of love for one note these days, but if you need a copilot, we got that yep, yeah, maybe it could make it work.
01:15:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like notion is that a thing? Does it do that?
01:15:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
because if it does, because, goodness knows, loop doesn't she's loop.
01:15:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What is this loop? You speak?
01:15:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
of what is this loop you speak of? You know, I'm using. I'm using both and it's like having the worst of both worlds loop is the zune of notion. I know, I'm sorry, I said that so I've now come to appreciate I actually have to open my phone while I'm still using loop on my pc to be sure that everything that's on my PC shows up in my phone loop.
01:15:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just like the sync's not that reliable it's bad. I am okay, I'm going to say this against my better judgment, but there have been a few moments maybe more than a few this year where I've done something on like the Apple side and it's just worked and I sort of you know thought about the massive life of waste I've had.
01:16:10
But so I just. I finally wrote my iPhone review yesterday, or published my iPhone review yesterday, and one of the last things I had to do was get some screenshots off of it to put it in the review. And I attached it with a USB cable an Apple USB cable to my PC and I got this message that's been popping up a lot lately it says the USB port may not provide enough power for the device you just connected. Try connecting it to power. Now, this is an iPhone. I don't understand what are you talking about. Of course it provides enough power.
01:16:45
I spent a better part of this week with another device, going from PC to PC trying to find one that had a USB port that was providing enough power, and I never did so. I had to go through a USB powered separately USB hub to make that happen. I'm not going to do that for the iPhone. So I started to think how could I do this? Do I email these to myself? How do I do it? And I thought, wait a minute, there's an iCloud website. Maybe I could just get them from there. So I went to the iCloud website, signed in. Sure enough, there they were. I downloaded them Great and then I realized I needed one more. So I took the screenshot on the iPhone and as I did it, something moved on the screen in front. I looked over and it appeared immediately in the iCloud website.
01:17:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Immediately.
01:17:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Think about that, think about what I just said.
01:17:29
I mean the reason you have to think about it is because you probably use OneDrive, and what I just said is ludicrous. It's science fiction, but it just worked and that is astonishing to me. Yep, so I'm sorry I said it. Please delete that part of the podcast. I don't want anyone to hear that. Okay, it's just irritating. Like you know, whatever the thing I don't use works great. It's like the story of my life. I think it's like when you get in the wrong line, you know what's the wrong line, the one I got in, yeah, okay, now let me crap on Apple. So there was, you know, there's a meme this year about how Apple is two years behind in AI, right, and Bloomberg semi-confirmed it, mark Ehrman citing several sources inside the company. There is some consensus that that's the time for that. They're two years behind. Now. This might be an overt marketing campaign on apple sport. I know that's the. What does it really mean to be behind? Right? So if it means shipping, okay, maybe, but maybe shipping isn't the greatest thing in the world.
01:18:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know if you have a has shipped so far you got your pics.
01:18:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have your pixel nine, right. You didn't travel to europe with the time right. So you flew safely in a plane. Everything's good yeah, no more. So you must have. Did you get the? You get like a gemini thing for a year for free or whatever. Do you get that deal? Yeah, yeah. So your phone is exploding with ai and um dripping, dripping dripping there's, that's about okay.
01:18:57
It's sopping to my shoe, it's yes. So that's one way to do it right. Yeah, um, it does it. Yeah, put it in there. Who cares? So I think between the two maybe there's a happy medium, but we're going to see. I will say the one thing Apple has gotten right is they've started talking about how they're behind and they're doing it in a really smart way. It's an expectation setter.
01:19:21
Yeah, it's beautiful, yeah, that's a good point, it's marketing, right. But you know, tim Cook did an interview, I think, with the Wall Street Journal or wherever it was. Wall Street Journal Doesn't matter, who cares, it doesn't matter. But he said look, apple doesn't. We're not ever first. We would like to be best, you know, and it's okay, that's good, pithy. You know, craig Federighi though this is a beautiful quote. He says those other chatbots are great if you want to ask a question about quantum mechanics and then have them write a poem about it. Nice, oh, that is so good. But he says they won't open your garage or send a text message by the way mine does.
01:19:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I set it up. I use the open AI interface through Home Assistant. It does my garage.
01:20:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're ruining the quote. The quote was funny. No, interface through home assistant. It does my. You're ruining the quote. The quote was funny. No, um I. But his point is that they're looking at real world use case and actual customer benefit, right, I mean, this is exactly what we expect from apple yes, and exactly what we should expect anything at all.
01:20:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I think they freaked out. I think they they realize if we don't say the wwdc now, we're not going to say it till next year.
01:20:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, and then we look like we're out till lunch. Exactly, yeah, so they had to. Yes, they had to.
01:20:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I don't think they were ready, I don't think they had anything to show. I think they were anywhere 100%. True, and I also think that now that they're looking, at it harder they're positioning Right.
01:20:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I think at the beginning in June, there was some expectation that obviously iOS 18 is going to ship with something you know no. And then, well, I mean not related to AI, but they're like okay, well, we'll have you know 0.1, 0.2 by the end of the year. Good, they're talking about 0.4 now, right, Craig Federighi in that interview talks about this is a years-long thing. By the way, that's realistically true, of course it is.
01:21:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because that's what you need to do when you haven't actually started writing anything yet.
01:21:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're waiting for the AI to be good enough to write it for them. No, I don't. So, you know, whatever We'll see, so sometime by by you know, by next wwdc, we'll all be watching this with these ai powered iphones or something I don't know, and they'll. They'll be in a better place, but I I do look. The one thing they do get right is that thing I just told that story about. You know, these, um, I am often aggravated about things that happen in windows, right, I think this is not news to anybody. I've ranted a time or two. But the opposite of that, which is something I can only imagine it's not something I experienced. That much is when little things happen and they delight you, you know, yeah, and, and it happens. I mean, don't get me wrong, it does happen, but it's, it's amazing. I mean Apple, they're pretty good at it, just give credit where it's due. So chaos.
01:22:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean that's okay, yeah right the one thing they can't do is come out poorly. Yeah, right, right, well it makes sense.
01:22:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what they do. They wait, they've.
01:22:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They never do it right there are things like like apple maps is a good example of them coming up poorly and doing pretty well in the in the long run now.
01:22:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great. By the way, it's pretty's reliable I still.
01:22:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I get in a car and I can't bring myself to put Apple Maps up. You know, I just that's. I don't know, maybe it's me.
01:22:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a lot of anecdotal evidence that it's quite good, in fact, in some cases, better than Google Maps. I've actually started using it in lieu of Google Maps. Wow, but you use. Partly that's because how do we trust this is? This is the delight you were talking about, paul. It shows up on my watch, as you know. It buzzes my wrist. When it's time to turn on my car, it shows up in the heads-up display. I mean, it's all of that.
01:22:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Integration works so nicely let me give you the contrary. Uh, I was eating lunch today my wrist buzzed. I looked down and it was a notification for Google Maps, which is interesting because I'm not mapping anything and I swear to God I'm not making this up. I looked on my phone to see what it was and it said hey, we're working on your timeline over here and there's a gap. Can you tell us what you were doing during that time? Oh my God.
01:23:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a priority. Yikes, what were? Tell us what you were doing during that time oh my god that's a priority. What were you doing on the night of december 5th 1997? Who's that?
01:23:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what do you, what? What are you literally? Asking me to provide personal information about myself go away. Can you believe that?
01:23:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so I guess we have a gap in our stocking of you. Can you fill it for me?
01:23:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, I was driving to friends and she said oh, google maps will take you down this street, don't do that, keep going to go down this street. And I thought oh interesting, I'll try apple maps. Apple maps got it right, so I don't think it used to be, would always get I'm not gonna.
01:23:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not arguing on google's behalf, but I suspect, because google is so widely used and including ways, right, all the data, yeah, there's a lot more. Part of the way that they do things is to make it good for groups of people, not just for you, like, in other words, we're going to send some people this way, some people this way.
01:24:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's interesting, I see what happens.
01:24:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they did not see what happened. Well, maybe I was going to but to kind of normalize the traffic a little bit. So it's, it's better overall, but it may not be the most efficient thing for you personally. Maybe I'm making this up, I don't actually know Right. That's what it feels like.
01:24:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Socialism software.
01:24:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I was going to say whatever the like it's like taking crowdsourcing and turning it back on the crowd, almost it's, it's it's, it's, it's just, we know what's best.
01:24:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a theory of mine. I, I don't know.
01:24:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's interesting. No, it would make sense. You know, you, you, you get a phone. You have to on an app by app basis, like am I going to let this thing send me notifications? So you have something like uber, like, obviously I want uber notifications, these are important, your drive is here, your drive is a minute away, whatever it is, but those aren't the notifications I get. I get notifications for uber eat every day and I, I, you can't turn that off, right, you can? You know like what, what this? We live in a bizarre world. That's, it's getting, it's getting worse and it is you know what.
01:25:13
This is a topic in here, isn't it? Yeah, this is actually literally the next topic, so I let me quickly just blow through this. Because, uh, google, sued by epic, lost order to open up play store, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. We all know this. Obviously they're going to stay that order so that they can appeal, and that's what happened In the case. The judge who issued the edict decided that this was the right thing to do. Because of course it is. You can't give Google 60 days. I don't care how big and powerful you are, you can't just change everything like that. So I don't care how big and powerful you are, you can't just change everything like that. So I do believe they're guilty, but I also do believe they deserve it.
01:25:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They gave him three years, though he said you have until 2027.
01:25:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but really it is go negotiate, make a deal, Right which?
01:25:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
by the way, during the trial you only begged them to settle this case.
01:26:03
Yep, it would be in Google's best interest to settle this case in the long run. But what I wanted to get to was I don't know if you guys noticed, but there's been a lot of weird stuff about windows updates in windows 11 this year. Have I mentioned it? I think it's come up a time or two. No, and I feel like 50 of what I talk about now or think about or look at and wonder about is how Microsoft releases updates, which is really just a futile undertaking because there's no way to rationalize it or understand it. I don't think they do. I think they just make it up as they go along, you know.
01:26:37
But it is very interesting to me that if you look at the mobile space, this year it's been just as chaotic. Right, we talked about Apple intelligence and their need to get that out the door and announce it even when it wasn't ready, and now being very explicit about we're going to do this, now this and then this and that very unusual. And then Google the second year they tried to do this, but this year explicitly tried to get Android 15 out the door two months earlier than usual Well, technically, 60 or 30 days earlier than usual so they could make the earlier pixel launch failed. But not only did they not make it, they released more new products at once Our new phones at one time than ever before. I'll ship with last year's Android.
01:27:20
This thing came in late. It didn't just ship on the normal old time, it shipped two months late. It just just ship on the normal old time. It shipped two months late. It just came out um on my pixel device for the first by pixel 9.
01:27:31
I was in the beta and for the first time ever you usually you uh unenroll in the beta. You then go back to whatever the shipping version is. If you want, you can hold off the update and you'll just get to, in this case, 15 when it comes out. That's not the way this worked. They were telling people they had to wipe their phones and go back to 14 for the first time and then later said, well, actually just wait until the release and then we'll get to it, and we'll just keep ignoring the update message. Every single day for two and a half months, maybe three months, whatever the time frame is I have had to dismiss a notification on my phone telling me I need to wipe it, and it was only today that that message changed and they gave me the non-wipe version. I could just upgrade to Pirate. Yeah.
01:28:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's been the weirdest year. They relate with the migration tool. That's really interesting.
01:28:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has never happened before. And so, for all the chaos that I see on the Windows side and it is nothing but chaos it's interesting, it's not you know, not for the same reasons, but this, the layoffs and sort of the almost psychological oppression of those workforces.
01:28:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, you know, this random layoff thing is really and I wonder if we're starting to see it in the software like that.
01:28:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, you know there is one. You know what the one common element to this is is, ai right, the mad it really is. I mean, windows was a mess before this, but remember the big event of one year ago now was Microsoft rushing CoPilot out the door into Windows by making it part of a monthly cumulative update. What would have been a major version upgrade they just released like it was another tuesday in september or whatever it was, and it's been crazier than ever, ever since.
01:29:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, right, so it's been nutty, but I just don't know it's been a crazy, crazy year it's hard when you kind of go.
01:29:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't get what's going on I don't either. That's what I mean I, if there's a rationality to it or there's an explanation for it? Yep, but then if, if things are happening, it's like why that's when conspiracy theories start to take off. And even even me and I think I'm a fairly cynical, yes, son of a gun, but even I am starting to think what are they up to?
01:30:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean you will never find any lack of evidence that most of this stuff is eh, and they're pushing it like it's the second coming. You know I wrote this in a comment in an article, someone's comment, and I said something like you know, the amount of marketing and push that you see on AI is not commensurate with the value that you're getting from it. It is commensurate with the amount of money they have to spend on it.
01:30:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.
01:30:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it's it, and it's a weird. I don't know that there's anything like this I can think of it in the history of the industry. I mean, it's crazy.
01:30:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, most of the time when we're forcing a function like that because we need to spend a bunch of money to get to a value we know about right and some of this.
01:30:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're just looking out. It's foggy, it might be okay yeah, well, this is.
01:31:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know. There's a delusion around ai because of science fiction, that's made everything harder.
01:31:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's right. What scares me is, I think, that some of these AI people are true believers.
01:31:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we definitely, without a doubt.
01:31:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they're planning a world where AI is really capable, right Right is, uh, really capable, right, right. And I almost feel like they're thinking the rest of you is you're expendable once this ai takes off.
01:31:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, that's, uh. It's how cultists work. The problem is that eventually, you know the comet doesn't come, and right, right, there's a room and you're stuck wearing bad nikes and a jump yeah, exactly yeah, with an open ai logo on them I worry, I really, I really do.
01:31:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there. There are people out there sam altman's probably one of them, peter teal palmer lucky that are just kind of thinking, or, or elon you notice they all have.
01:32:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're just gonna go to every one of those names. You just said they're just, it's like ai bros they're ai bros.
01:32:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the new thing. Yep, and, and I mean, elon genuinely thinks we can live on mars, and he would prefer to do that than fix what's going on here. Right, which is problematic to say the least. That's right. Yeah, 100, I'm trying to stay sane in a crazy world we all are. Um, where are you?
01:32:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've lost track. It's time for an ad it's time for an ad. Okay, I'll take your word for it you know, do an ad, I demand it I love it really. We're just here to serve paul, that's right but we've gotten to the part where I'm like looking forward to an ad oh dear well, I got a good one for you.
01:32:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a good product I got a really good one for you. This is something called veem, do youeeam? Let me tell you something If you don't know Veeam, you need to know Veeam. If you're in business, your data is everything. Without your data, customer trust turns to digital dust. I wrote a poem. That's why Veeam's data protection and this is I want you to remember these two words ransomware recovery ensures that you can secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it, no matter what happens and when I say no matter what happens, even if you get bit by the worst possible thing ransomware. Veeam is the number one global market leader in data resilience trusted by. Veeam is the number one global market leader in data resilience trusted by. This is an amazing stat over 77% of the Fortune 500. Over 77% of the Fortune 500 uses Veeam to keep their businesses running.
01:34:01
When digital disruptions like ransomware strike. I mean I don't even want to focus on ransomware alone, because there's so many things that could happen. Right, you need data resilience. You need to have a plan. Veeam lets you back up and recover your data instantly, no matter where it is across your entire cloud ecosystem, and with Veeam, you can proactively detect malicious activity so you can stop the bad guys cold before you get bit by the ransomware. Remove the guesswork by by and this is really important automating your recovery plans and policies. You do have recovery plans and policies right.
01:34:33
So many don't get real-time support from ransomware recovery experts. Look at, you need veem. Data is the lifeblood of your business. Protect it. Get data resilient with Veeam V-E-E-A-M, two E's V-E-E-A-M. Go to Veeamcom to learn more. I don't want to see you in the headlines. Go to Veeamcom right now. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and the good work that Paul and Richard are doing, keeping us all up to date on what's going on in the world of Windows. Now the moment. At least 10% of you are waiting for the Xbox segment. The Xbox segment.
01:35:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Great, I'm riled by this because I think we're not in the same here it comes.
01:35:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute, kevin has to play this. Look at the sting. It's the backwards Halo, backwards Halo. It's like Bizarro World in Superman. It is Bizarro.
01:35:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
World Bizarro. So I was going to say the yeah. 10% want the Xbox segment. The other 90 are just waiting for Richard to talk about Brown Liquor.
01:35:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's okay Between the two of you. We got the coverage.
01:35:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just like Steve Jobs, you know, between the back and the PC we have 100% of the industry Actually this first story really excites me because I am an Age of Empires fanatic.
01:35:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, yeah, I love this game. I mean I haven't played it in a while, but this was for a long time my go-to.
01:36:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't have any idea if this is any good or not, but Age of Empires Mobile is now live. You can go get it. Where can I get it? I'm getting it iOS and Android. It's in the store. It's in the Epic Games store, Leo, so you'll be able to get it there.
01:36:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's everywhere you want it.
01:36:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Speaking of Bizarro World, I don't know. You know it could be a touch game, I think so. I just I think we talked about this briefly maybe a week or two ago. Diablo mobile is fantastic yeah, so love it.
01:36:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that was a really great team that put that version together like it's not diablo it's it was problematic in the way, though, that it made you continue to give them money oh well, but that's what games are now.
01:36:47
I mean that we, we just accept the fact that, uh, you know pay to play is a thing right, so well somewhat by the way, I blame apple a little bit for this, because they don't allow you demos, they don't allow you to give people a game for a week and see if they, like you, have to either buy it or not. And so what happened? It really drove a market of freemium games so people could download it and play it for free, but at some point you got to monetize so they had all these you know, in-game purchases.
01:37:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think apple's I mean, if you could, kind of, I can't speak to how diablo does this, but if there's a version where you pay and don't have to worry about that, I mean, no, there's not, there isn't. Yeah.
01:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So and because it's immortal.
01:37:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Really, I mean you could I've been playing it without giving them a penny right, but it's, it can be irritating, yeah no, even though something like duolingo, which is not a game, but it's kind of, you know, gamified, becomes irritating because of all the ads, if you don't just interrupt it. Hey, you know just yeah right, I want to do this with windows and all the junk that's in Windows.
01:37:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will always pay up front a flat fee, rather than get pinged every five seconds. Yeah, exactly, I'm downloading Age of Empires right now.
01:38:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm very curious to hear what you think about this. I will let you know within seconds.
01:38:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is still a Microsoft game, though, right yeah, they own it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um so it's so funny, because so many people want to play age of empires, that there is forge of empires, game of empires. There are so many clones.
01:38:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Another problem with the app stores on mobile. Oh yeah yeah, this kind of junk very carefully. When you only have one place to go to get something, that's how that happens. Right, you wouldn't see this out in on the web or whatever. I mean, you would see a little bit of it, but it's, I think that heightens that effect as well. Um, you want people to click on the wrong thing, right? Yep I mean that's one strategy, I guess, for making a game.
01:38:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a fairly big game because it's taking a while to download. Yeah, it should. It's a beautiful should be you're done.
01:38:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it would look nice on an ipad.
01:38:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this make makes sense. Actually it's touchy, you know, it's a mouse, it's a mouse, it's a touchy, don't be touchy, it's touchy, it's a touchy game.
01:39:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, yeah, I mean we, I it's a couple of months ago, but I I looked at some what I would call kind of triple a or former triple a games on mobile. I mean these things, these devices are awesome. Now I mean, so, you know, call of duty, yeah yeah, and, and they have.
01:39:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know this has an and the processes are awesome yep, the gpu stuff's great.
01:39:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apple's got a great uh hardware, accelerated uh api, the new iPad.
01:39:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You could just watch that battery drain. That's true, that's true you know what you won't hear on an iPad is the fans Right.
01:39:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll put it on the new M4 iPad too. That might even be better than this. Oh sure, here it is, it's playing.
01:39:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They hid the volume. You could video out from this thing with USB-C.
01:39:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I can actually.
01:39:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's kind of nice, is this the new season of Ring of Power?
01:40:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It really seems like that Crown Princess Josephine.
01:40:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's Roberta Williams' back.
01:40:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, just think how we felt about this 30 years ago.
01:40:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We were playing a little graphical animated sequence that has essentially nothing to do with the actual game well, that's true too.
01:40:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always skip those.
01:40:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, sorry, go ahead, let's do some halo news yeah, so week two ago we were talking about halo, the halo studios, switching over to the unreal engine. But the other and anti entity entry in this space, of course, is one that doesn't ask you to write c++. Yeah, unity hasn't screwed up their whole lives over the past year. But they're back and, uh, they're not doing that controversial runtime for anything that didn't. Yeah, funny how they backed off on that I believe they fired their CEO right, Didn't they? Or they left anyway. It's encouraged design.
01:41:11
Yeah, so they have a new version of the Unity engine, but speaking of which it's been coming for a while.
01:41:17
Yeah, unity 6. During I think it was yesterday's Qualcomm keynote. Tim Sweeney was on. He might have been videoed on a stage, but he there talking about on there's an unreal engine version for mobile that you know looks awesome, because that's that. You know. That's the reality of these um chipsets now. They're just. They have incredible graphics. So I think this is going to be a golden era for um error for mobile gaming, unless you're netflix. Um, I didn't write this up, but I I will go back to when they originally announced this.
01:41:55
I don't understand netflix being in gaming personally, and but okay, sell more stuff to their customers well, I mean, apple was a computer company and then they became apple and they do other things. I mean, they're all-.
01:42:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, Chick-fil-A has gone into streaming video. I mean it's a weird world. Like I said, I don't get any of it.
01:42:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think of this as the breakfast cereal phenomenon. Once you have a breakfast cereal, that's where you've gone off the rails completely. So, look, it's entertainment, fine, but don't put it in the Netflix app. Yeah, anyway, I haven't written this up, but they started up a big AAA game studio, hired a bunch of really famous people from other game studios. We're going to release AAA games on Netflix and they just closed it down. Wow, I thought it was harder than they thought. Yeah, this semi-verifies what I've always kind of of believed, which is that they can't make money doing this. This doesn't make sense, yeah, so I think I think it's harder than you think I am uh.
01:42:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, this is coming straight off the ipad and you write video right into hdmi that's pretty slick and this is the game also not age of empires gameplay no, I've never seen any of these cut scenes. This is bizarre, but whatever.
01:43:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, at some point it's going to go back to that mile high view of the place.
01:43:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is the yeah. So I have to find the holy sword, this is it.
01:43:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is actually what's happening. So it's zooming out. Ok, there you go. That was just a cut scene, and so now that integration between the cut scene and what it looks like. It was better yeah, that's not bad.
01:43:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So here we are and I can uh, border exploration, tap to repair the house. Okay, um, I can zoom in. Oh see, it keeps going to cut scenes, but this is. You can skip the training.
01:43:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the yeah, you know you'll do another walkthrough um click the button up on the top no, stop, stop, I think it's.
01:43:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just triggered ptsd. Yeah, this, um. So let me, can I zoom? Now I can't pitch to zoom, which is kind of too bad, because that was how. Examine the dead bodies. Oh, there we go.
01:43:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We have to examine the dead bodies, it told me to I, I would have given my left leg as a child playing dnd. I know I've had this kind of a game. No, no I had like an 8-bit bard's tale. You would go down the hallway so slow it was like you know, grandpa with a walker and it would have to redraw every single frame. It was horrible, you know.
01:44:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at this, let's see if I've got the volume up. Oh, it's trying to do the volume through the hdmi. That's what's going on.
01:44:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so I know not not to totally move away from the whole Unity thing, but I think Unity 6 might be the equivalent of Windows 11. Ooh, because. Unity 5 came out like 2015, and they've been doing annual updates ever since. I don't know why they decided to declare a new version number.
01:44:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay.
01:44:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But they've kind of changed the pattern Right. So I don't know, you know, what that was about, other than, obviously, unreal engine shipped a new version which was genuinely, you know, a revolutionary version of unreal engine oh, we're having some combat here.
01:44:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We got some combat going on. I don't know what's going on. I don't know if I'm supposed to do anything I noticed this game is demon free.
01:45:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is there a reason we're not playing Diablo?
01:45:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is peaceful Diablo. All I know is we're playing video games on a podcast. Okay, let's stop doing that. I don't want to annoy our Australian fans.
01:45:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know that that was a complaint.
01:45:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it was just an observation, other than Manal. Well, I always am doing that behind the scenes. So there you go nice.
01:45:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, that's what I used to do on work calls until they made me actually be on video. Yeah, so you're playing call of duty are you wearing pants?
01:45:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah right. Um, microsoft uh announced a rev of its xbox wireless headset, so this is basically. Well, there was a wireless version, a wired version. It's a little expensive but it has. I don't know, it's always had. I guess it already had Dolby Atmos I wasn't sure if that was new. But voice isolation, bigger battery, bluetooth 5.3, whatever that gets you. I assume that has something to do with quick connect or whatever.
01:46:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so I don't know I would, as I need the xbox one.
01:46:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean can't you, that's what I. Why not just go with a good pair of headphones? Some people like the brand I don't know. But yeah, I wouldn't.
01:46:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wouldn't buy an xbox brand yeah, that was not the brand I would think of like I mean I'd go for the.
01:46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you like, jabra? Do you use a job? What do you use?
01:46:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've used Jabra. I'm part of the PC master race. I would never do any of those.
01:46:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right, Of course. What do you use when you fly? What do you use when you fly? You must put headphones on.
01:46:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've got a pair of Bose earbuds.
01:46:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those are pretty good. Apple just this new 8.1 that you were talking about, that's coming out on Monday, we think has a new capability with the AirPods to turn them into hearing aids. I know, genius, I wear hearing aids. So I was actually very curious, because my hearing aids cost $7,000.
01:47:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, and I could buy several hundred AirPods for that you could afford to lose a few AirPods, yeah, so I set it up.
01:47:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got the beta downloaded, it set it up. I'm going to talk more about it on MacBreakWeekly next week, but I wanted to see, and there's one big issue that I don't like. It works In effect, pretty much works like hearing aids. You do a hearing test. The hearing test was wrong. It said you have no hearing loss. I don't knowlude your ear, so you hear this everything around you. They're just amplifying the voice.
01:47:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're relying on their whatever they call their pass-through technology, with apple it seals your ear and so everything.
01:47:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All the audio has to come through the microphone, right? I did not like that. I thought that was not a good so for those who are thinking very apple vision, pro-ish right.
01:47:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like don't worry, we'll give you what reality, take care of it well, this is the.
01:48:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is kind of a standard earbud issue in a way.
01:48:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right like you well, and I'm wearing sealed ear in-ear monitors right now because I don't want to hear background. No, I want to hear exactly what's going out on the podcast. But when you're wearing hearing aids, you're out and about, you're in the real world. You want to hear the real world. It's amplifying the human voices so that you can understand.
01:48:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, do you um hear yourself. You must hear yourself through.
01:48:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There, it's you do you do a little bit.
01:48:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a problem I would want to.
01:48:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I find it odd when you can't the more modern hearing aids are getting faster and faster. They're putting better processors in, so you used to be a little chorusing. You know where you hear the voice twice. You hear it through the hearing aid, but you also hear it through your body. Oh boy, it's like a translation almost well, but it's not so slow that it's like an echo.
01:48:48 - Notebook LM (Guest)
It's more like a chorus, like two people singing a little bit off, a little off, yeah, and that distance has gotten Middle phase reverb.
01:48:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but it's gotten better and better and better as the processors have gotten faster, right. So instead of sounding like this, it doesn't it sounds.
01:49:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm so sorry if that's what it sounds. It doesn't sound, you get and you can immediately get used to it. This was the conversation that richard you had with uh, chris sells about the glasses, the problem of getting processor whatever into these small form factors. You know um it. Hearing aids have been around for a long time so you know it makes sense that they're kind of audio needs a lot less compute yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm.
01:49:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The bottom line was no, I don't think the airpods are a replacement for hearing aids. Yes, they're a lot cheaper and for some people they'll be helpful.
01:49:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think yeah right, they're like uh sometime in my 40s I walked into a crowded room and someone was talking to me and what I could hear clearly was not the person talking to me, it was someone over there, you know, and it was this weird kind of moment of like what's going on here? You know, you must have everyone hears differently, I guess, but you must have all had that experience where you hear, maybe, a voice here and it sounds like it's someone right there, and you look and he's over there maybe, or you know, it's off somehow and I I feel like that would be a problem with these things, but I don't know. I mean, I'm intrigued by this.
01:50:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I well, you'll be old soon and you can try them, and yeah, like tuesday I mean to be honest.
01:50:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's appalling that hearing aids cost so much money, thousands of dollars and they're not usually covered by insurance or medicare doesn't which is ridiculous, because this happens to basically everybody and you need it yeah, you need it.
01:50:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a lot of evidence that if you start, we're not covering your hearing sorry, it's a, it's a pre-existing condition why those earbuds are useful? Because they give you the idea, hey, your hearing could be better that's true, and the hearing test is good and I have, I guess, friends who refuse to acknowledge they can't hear anything exactly.
01:50:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know there are a lot of people won't wear them yeah, who might wear airpods all the time?
01:50:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, because that's the other thing is, you have to wear airpods all the time and your wife's gonna say are you listening to me?
01:51:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, I was that when you first said that I I that's what flashed my brain. Like we've all been out in the world and seen someone just talking to space, but they're talking through earbuds or something Right, and so at some point that becomes normal.
01:51:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, might be schizophrenia. Might be Bluetooth, you don't know.
01:51:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We got used to it with Bluetooth. Well but I thought those be the way the AirPods look, with a little little drip of white, I thought, no, that's terrible, but we all got used to it, everybody except one thing we were used to it because we know what they're doing, but when you're right in front of me and we're talking and you're wearing two
01:51:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
earbuds. I'd be like that's this thing to me, you know, like you'd have to say I'm using these. We're going to have to have another level of acceptance here. So before we move on, I just want to say real quick, the new Call of Duty is coming out this week, so we won't see much of you for a while, friday. Yeah Well, I'm actually. I might set this one out.
01:51:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Where is the Xbox right now?
01:51:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which Xbox you mean, my Xbox. That's telling it's at home.
01:52:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But, as I alluded to earlier, I'm sorry, don't you own that place in Norte.
01:52:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Isn't that home? Okay, yes, you don't have an Xbox in your apartment. Where are you leading me, your Honor? What do you mean?
01:52:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm trying to figure out if there's an Xbox in Mexico.
01:52:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is not, but I do several PCs and at least a few of them can play games really well. There you go.
01:52:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting. Now you were giving up call of duty for a while, but that's over, is that was no it's not I'm, I'm actually.
01:52:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I have not played call of duty, so wow, still I. I don't see that changing it's good.
01:52:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good when you acknowledge that uh accepting you have a problem.
01:52:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have a problem and you don't have control over it. Gotta, it's got to be one of the first stages of something.
01:52:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, no, that's good.
01:52:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.
01:52:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I have a problem.
01:52:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't want to admit you have a problem. Uh, the game's out on Friday, so enjoy that.
01:52:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I may have an age of empires problem. She's got a problem today. It looks like it would be a fun mobile game.
01:53:06
We all have our thing. Our show today we'll take a break and then the back of the book's coming up Brown liquor tips picks, that kind of thing. But before we do that, let me tell you about our sponsor, experts Exchange. It's funny. When we first talked to them on the phone I said there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I used to use Experts Exchange during the radio show.
01:53:29
People would ask a question and Experts Exchange was like my backup expert and I don't know. I lost track of it over the years, as maybe you did. Other sites came and went and so forth, but I went back to Experts Exchange and I to say the quality of the answers, the quality information is unbeat. It's a network of trustworthy and talented tech professionals. You can go there to get industry insights and advice from people who are actually using the products in your stack and that beats paying for expensive enterprise-level tech support. And they are the tech community for people tired of the AI sellout, and I like that. No AI man Experts, just real people. Real experts with real answers.
01:54:18
Experts Exchange is ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence. With Experts Exchange, you get access to professionals in over 400 different fields Coding, of course, that was one of the things I went there for Microsoft Azure, devops, aws and on and on and on. And here's the thing not only is there no AI, there's no SNARK, so many of these other sites where you go and they go, oh, that question again, we aren't going to answer that, their sites. They'll close it and say, oh no, we answered that. We aren't going to answer that, their sites. They'll close it and say, oh, no, we answered that. Never mind, go away. Or they'll say, well, you could do it that way, but I think you should do it this way. No, no, not an experts exchange. Duplicate questions are encouraged. There are no dumb questions. The contributors there are real tech junkies, people like us who love it graciously answering all questions. They've realized that the true benefit of becoming an expert in an area is that you could pass it on to others, not patronizingly, not condescendingly, but genuinely helping other people, lifting them up, paying it forward. One member said I never had chat GPT. Stop and ask me a question before that happens on EE all the time.
01:55:33
Experts Exchange is proudly committed to fostering a community where human collaboration is fundamental. I think that's community is a big word in my book these days and humans. Only we can do that right. Their expert directory full of experts to help you find what you need, including, I'm proud to say, some people who listen to our shows, like Rodney Rodney Barnhart he's a VMware V expert, regular Security Now listener, cisco design professionals, executive IT directors and more. And, really important, you know that we see this more and more. Linkedin started doing it. Reddit's been doing it.
01:56:10
Many of these platforms betray their contributors by selling the content to train AI models. X does it At Experts Exchange, not X Experts Exchange. Your privacy is not for sale. They stand against the betrayal of contributors worldwide. They have never, and promise they will never, sell your data, content or your likeness. They block and strictly prohibit AI companies from scraping content from their site to train the LLMs. Their moderators strictly forbid the direct use of LLM content in their threads.
01:56:42
You're getting human answers from human experts. That's great. Experts deserve a place where they can confidently share their knowledge without worrying about some company stealing it to increase shareholder value and humanity deserves a safe haven from AI Experts. Exchange real people who are there because they want to support you and help you and, by the way, it's kind of everybody helps, so it's not just you go there to ask a question, but then you may answer a question too. That's what's so great about it. It's really a helping community. Experts Exchange. They believe that you will find this so valuable that they have actually said we're going to give you three months free, no credit card or anything, just three months free so you could try it out. So you don't have to take my word for it. Visit e-ecom slash twit to learn more 90 days free. E-ecom slash twit Experts Exchange. And now back to our experts, starting with Paul Theriot with his tip of the week.
01:57:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not sure I've ever recommended a podcast, given that this is a podcast, but I mentioned I was listening to one of Richard's podcasts this week and I don't listen to a lot of tech podcasts but I listen to Richard's and Scott Hanselman has a podcast I like, but I kind of select the episodes and Scott and Mark razinovich just started a podcast oh my god, to me now that's superstars, wow it's not.
01:58:13
Uh, yeah, these guys are great. They're great together. These are short episodes. They're not really competing with anything. It's just interesting to me that they're doing it at all so well they did a couple of stage things of build and that worked yeah, they usually have a little comedy routine thing going um, it's good.
01:58:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, now that jeffrey snover's gone, I guess I don't know, yeah, yeah, yeah nice, scott and mark learn two, and then it's different stuff yeah, dot, dot, dot, right exactly.
01:58:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And uh, yeah, it's not, it's not gonna be. Well, who knows what it's gonna be? Actually, I was gonna say it's not like honestly super technical, which I think is kind of the point. You know it's not going to be. Well, who knows what it's going to be? Actually, I was going to say it's not like honestly super technical, which I think is kind of the point. You know it's kind of, although it's, you know, tech adjacent. It's interesting. So I just throw it out there. Good tip.
01:58:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And we love both of those guys. They're fantastic, they're great, they're great.
01:59:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we talked about notebook lm, the google tool week to go, whatever it was. Um, it is now generally available. This is the thing that you throw text at. It could be a giant document, whatever, and it turns it into a podcast with two ai created hosts that banter and talk about. It's crazy, it's crazy.
01:59:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of those sounds just like me yeah, yeah, they treat um, it's, it's a little insulting because it sounds a little bit too much like our shows. Yeah, it's like oh god, really do we sound like that? Wow, yeah, yeah, we do. So you transformed a synopski blog post into a podcast yeah, you should just play the beginning of it's crazy it's. Oh, that's funny not that one.
01:59:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They, um sorry, go. Yeah, just click the video like the. Uh, no, this, we're doing it again okay, tell me what to click the video.
01:59:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the video, the vid, the vid, this video. Okay, okay, here we go, okay, so don't reboot the computer.
02:00:01 - AI (Guest)
You're cruising on your windows pc, right, but it feels like like super snappy, you know, like your smartphone. No waiting around, just smooth sailing. That was kind of the whole idea behind windows on arm. Woa, we're calling it.
02:00:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's how you can tell it's. Yeah, it's, that was not a human. That's like connie chung saying dose yep I'm trying to remember the.
02:00:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's an audio book where they did something very similar and it was the whole book. So imagine it's a book about windows and arm and they mention it 11 000 times and say arm 11 000. Oh, I hate that it was something like that, yeah it was crazy.
02:00:37 - Notebook LM (Guest)
Today we're going way back, like 2012, back to microsoft, when they first jumped into this whole thing yeah, the tech world was like freaking out with excitement and, lucky for for us, we get this inside scoop.
02:00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say, the voices are really, really, really, really well done, yep, and they don't sound mechanical or machine-like. I remember Castle Wolfenstein oh boom, this is really good.
02:01:01 - Notebook LM (Guest)
It was by Steven Sanofsky. He was the big cheese at Windows back then and he like spills the tea on how they made WOA happen. The engineering craziness, the tough calls, all of it.
02:01:11 - AI (Guest)
You said it. I mean ARM processors. They were just starting to get big in phones and tablets.
02:01:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You'll never get over it On this new hardware. That was a whole other rodeo.
02:01:19 - Notebook LM (Guest)
Oh, totally a gamble. See ARM and by 86, what most PCs use. Back then Okay.
02:01:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it's tough, but seriously, the voices are amazing and it's so natural.
02:01:33 - Notebook LM (Guest)
Except the arm bit, uh guys, they probably fixed that by now, you know.
02:01:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, they keep tweaking it.
02:01:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As a friend of a friend of mine once referred to our boss, says you know, you almost sound human. Um, it's really, that's fascinating, this is wild. Yeah, wow, yeah okay, here we are the ai.
02:01:55
You see the light at the end of the tunnel it's a train. Um, let's see. So okay. So I mentioned qualcomm, talking about more and more apps going native on arm. They had some things that weren't super interesting to me, but they talked about Affinity Photos, which I do use myself and pay for. If you have Affinity, you might be able to do this anyway, but if you have or don't have, maybe Affinity Photo 2, there's a beta version that you can download from their site directly. I think you have to sign into your account, but it has some new AI-based features that work off the MPU in a Snapdragon X-based computer.
02:02:34
Now, I may be also against a x64 computer. I'm not sure. Qualcomm was the one promoting this, so you know there's probably more to that story. But object selection and subject selection, which are two pretty obvious features, but object selection and subject selection, which are two pretty obvious features. This is actually interesting to me because this is where Affinity Photo falls apart today compared to Photoshop. So when you want to do things like select objects, it's actually not too good at it. Anyway, I have only used this a little bit, but when you buy Affinity products, you get the updates as long as they don't do a major version upgrade. So this is 2.6. So it should be coming to everybody, I think next month.
02:03:16
And then also Opera 1 R2 came out today. So this is the new version of that company's flagship web browser, which has a few new AI features as well. But honestly, I guess it's AI-based technically, but I think the most interesting feature is the features as well, but honestly, I guess it's aivis technically, but I think the most interesting feature is the uh, new dynamic themes that they have, which include glass effects, which will be triggering for us in the windows community because it goes back to, um, you know, the arrow glass stuff from longhorn and then windows vista etc. Yeah, um, but it's a pretty browser. The ai stuff, I don't know. It's interesting.
02:04:01
They introduced like a command line environment for their ARIA chatbot, so you control slash and then you're looking at, which is a conversation I have with myself a lot, where I look at something on the web and say what the hell am I looking at? You know, um, I'm not sure aria could actually answer that question, but you know, just ask it why, yeah, why the existential question. That's the questions I cannot answer. You know like they'll say why, why would mic Microsoft screw up Windows 11? I'm like I can't answer that. I can just detail the ways in which they do it.
02:04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The ways in which they do it. That's okay, I'll take that. I have no answers. I do like Affinity Photos. I use it on my iPad. I like it a lot. It's great.
02:04:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It makes you wonder why buy?
02:04:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why buy photoshop frankly?
02:04:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, they don't have a monthly bill. I kind of don't like that, but other than that it's pretty good yeah, just wish they'd bill me monthly yeah said no one ever.
02:04:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, exactly, um opera, did opera. Oh, you did. Okay, that means you know what that means. It's me Run as radio time.
02:05:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, had a conversation with my friend, jim Duffy, working for a new company called Island Systems, and we were talking about using Azure virtual machines or Azure virtual desktops so isolated client instances for security purposes. Now he'd gone down a very particular path on this, which is getting compliant with the new government supplier regulations, because the US government is getting very big on supplier attacks and so there's a new specification called the NIST SP 800-171, which has over 100 requirements in it, and so you know if you're a hundred requirements in it and so you know if you're a supplier to the U S government. It's pretty serious business. Do you need to be compliant with this in the next year? And that includes getting audited for it, and that's not necessarily what I wanted to talk to him about.
02:06:01
It's good that there's a standard, because that's a very high bar, but then actually talking about how to get there and talking about truly securing data, including with remote workers, so having virtual desktops that you basically control all the information in the cloud through your security perimeter with the cloud is pretty compelling. The other part that I really appreciated from Jim is saying, hey, you don't have to fix your entire company's network, you can take this high security project you're doing and package it up this way and it's still a social company but it's got a higher security perimeter than the rest of it. So it sort of spoke to a way for us to move quickly in key areas and then see the advantages of this, of really protecting data, of being ransomware resistant, of dealing with all those issues and saying do I want to propagate this across the rest of the company and it's based on a very significant government standard from Nest.
02:07:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh-oh Are we.
02:07:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm with you.
02:07:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bonk Okay.
02:07:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Are we bonky?
02:07:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You had a little kachonk.
02:07:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A little kachonk little kachonk, he's eight bit. I'm all the way from poland what are you gonna do?
02:07:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
do you need me to redo anything?
02:07:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, just keep going, you're good all right.
02:07:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I went, popped down to the bar today and picked up a couple ounces of nectar dior from glenn maranchi, one of my favorites, and the reason I did that is that we were out for dinner a bunch of us, the speaker cadre for this particular conference. At the end of the meal, when they asked me what I wanted for dessert, I said whiskey, which is hardly a surprise, that's a pretty normal thing for me. And I looked at the list of whiskeys. They had several of the Glenmorangie versions. Now we've talked about Glenmorangie before. I did a few weeks ago talking about the Quintus Reuben, which is the port-aged version. The Nectar Dior is a Saturn version. So Glenmorangie is up in the far north of Scotland, nominally considered a highland, although its style is much more like the Spey. It's actually up past Dalmore. Dalmore. There had been whiskey made there literally for hundreds of years. Officially that area was making whiskey, starting in 1843 by a fellow named William Matheson, when he actually bought up a couple of giant gin stills, really, really tall ones. They call them the giraffes because they're over five meters high, about 17 feet tall. And it's important to note that in 1843 the coffee still had been invented about 10 years before, and so a lot of the gin producers were switching over to column stills, the coffee stills, because they were more efficient, and so these stills were, these old style gin pot stills were cheap, easy to come by, and so matheson grabbed a pair of them and made the mirangi distillery, although he would later rename the place glenn mirangi, meaning field of tranquility, you know, if you squint close in gaelic. So good enough, and you'd think that their uh logo would be the giraffe and they do celebrate world giraffe day having a couple stills named after giraffe. But their logo is actually based on the cad bull stone from the pics which we talked about in the previous show. Very cool, uh bit of technology. So, um, producing since the 1850s, converted up to steam in 1887, which is very early, getting rid of the risk of explosions, and then it was sold to McDonald Muir in 1918. They are a large operation 10 Dunnage buildings right along the water there, plus some extra rack rooms, and they have been doing tours since the 1990s. They've been doing single malts since they became cool. The company was acquired by Louis Vuitton, motemesi, lvmh in 2004.
02:09:51
They age in bourbon cast. This particular style they call the core range really came about in the early 90s and their whole idea was that they, aged in bourbon, cast primarily Jack Daniels and Heaven Hill, for 10 years, and then some they would bottle as is as a 10-year-old, just aged in bourbon, and then they would do finishing ages. So La Santa did two years in sherry, quintus Rubin does four years in port and Nectar Dior two years in satyrin casks. That's a sweet dessert wine from France. There are other additions on top of that and in the whiskey industry this was sort of looked down on as kind of a tacky party trick.
02:10:38
Rather than committing to one right way to make their whiskey. Here they were doing all these different things and sort of like pick and choose your thing. But the reason I had Nectar Dior at the party was that and brought this whole story up is that when I went to order whiskey a bunch of other folks stopped and sort of looked at me like, ooh, richard's ordering whiskey, what are you ordering? And I said, well, I think I'm going to get the Lembarangie. And I told this story about how they did all these things and they actually happened to have both the original 10 and the Nectar Dior on the list. So I got both, and so you're able to taste the 10 year and then taste the Nectar Dior and see that those couple of extra years in the Saturne cast really did something cool to them. So you know, this is a light whiskey. The wine cast really add a sort of fruitiness to it. Just what you'd hope a little sweetness. It's cool. It's really nice drinking.
02:11:35
Now Nectar Dior is relatively easy to come by. It's about $75 US for a place like Total Wine or BevMo 45% ABV. The Saturn casts are a bit smaller so the contact level is fairly short in that, but it's not going to be around much longer. It looks like Glenmorangie is moving on and this has happened to a few of the other editions as well when originally this core inch was all 10-year-old bourbon casts with a couple of years or maybe four years of finishing casts.
02:12:05
Today, when you go on the website, you'll find that Nectar Dior isn't there anymore. It's now called the Nectar and it's a 16-year. So apparently they now have had these bourbon casts laid up long enough that they're putting 14 years into the bourbon cast and then they're doing two years in sweet dessert wine casks, although this new addition that they're calling the Nectar is actually both Saternes, mont Bazac, which is also French, moscatel, which is a Spanish dessert wine, and Tojaki, which is a Hungarian dessert wine. So they're sort of mixing and matching and pulling them together to make something new called the Nectar. I don't have pricing in the US yet. It's only available in Europe, so far running about 80 euros if you can find it. But I imagine in the next year or so we will see the Nectar appear in the US as well. And that's what I got. Thanks, leo.
02:13:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Great, great, great talking to you, Richard. Thank you for being here, richard. Great, great, great talking to you, richard. Thank you for being here. Richard Campbell, in Warsaw Are you coming home soon.
02:13:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, leaving for home tomorrow, the next show will be from home.
02:13:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's amazing, he was drinking and talking at the same time. That's our Richard. Hey, that's it for Windows Weekly. Richard will be back from Warsaw next week in beautiful British Columbia. Paul, you're going to stay in Mexico City for a little bit.
02:13:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, until right before Thanksgiving.
02:13:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, well, we shall communicate. Do you want me to ship you the Snapdragon dead? Get now.
02:13:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so you have a little gift waiting for you. No, I would wait, just in case I don't. You know, I don't want my neighbor to hobble over and take it off my porch oh, look, a collector's item.
02:13:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, it's a turkey.
02:13:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could sell this on ebay well, I'll see it like it, as a potted plant or something inside the window.
02:14:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know there were only 200 of those, 200 of those shipped worldwide. And you have one and I have one. I don't think so. Right exactly, paul Thurott is at Thurottcom. That's his website. T-h-u-r-r-o-o no 1-0, t-h-u-r-t-h-u.
02:14:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was agreeing to that. I was like yep, that is exactly how my name is spelled.
02:14:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
T-H-U. I got that much right. Double r, then there's an o, then there's a double t. Dot com become a premium member. I am, and it's really worth it. Lots of great stuff on that site and of course, his books, including the windows everywhere book, which is kind of a history of windows through its development platforms, and the field guide to windows 11. Both are at leanpubcom. Richard campbell's at run as radio. That's where you'll find dot net rocks the show. He does uh with that lovely carl franklin. You should get carl on the show sometime. Yeah, I love carl yeah, he's great.
02:14:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love that show. I I, I really like I just I like both of his shows, but that one's more is dev focused, so it's kind of more, yeah, interesting to me usually, although I know a lot of the people he has on the other show too, on run as.
02:15:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But uh, yeah, love it run as radiocom for both of richard's shows. We do windows weekly, uh, on a wednesday around 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern, 1800 utc. It will remain 1800 utc until after halloween and then it will become 1900 utc, right? No one knows so mexico doesn't do.
02:15:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was, I almost said celebrate mexico doesn't do, daylight safe, I know they celebrate a lot of things in mexico. Let me tell you, yeah, every day is a celebration here, um, but it's not daylight savings, it is literally a party every day, but um yeah, they don't do it.
02:15:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So day of the dead you're gonna, are you now? Traditionally, mexico city didn't used to do it, but they do it it. So day of the dead you're gonna, are you now? Traditionally, mexico city didn't used to do it, but they do it now.
02:15:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, because of the james bond movie because of specter, that's true. So that's amazing. It's really big. So I I will not go to zocalo for this. They do a parade up the reforma, which is like the mexico city chandelier or whatever. Yeah, but um I, the metro gets dangerous with that many people. It's not because of pickpockets.
02:16:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's crazy. Yeah, yeah, it's nuts.
02:16:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so yeah, they, they do it right here. It's, it's, for you know, you would think they'd been doing it for 2000 years or something, but it's years.
02:16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will see you next wednesday. It'll be the day after, is that right that? No, not next wednesday. No, no, it will be uh yeah, yeah, it's the start? I think it starts in the start of it's right around then yeah, the 30th, and then officially it's november 1st and 2nd, but uh yeah sometimes it stretches a little longer than yeah, just a little yeah.
02:16:47
All right, well, we will see you. I'll be wearing my Day of the Dead costume Nice, just for you. You can also get the show on demand after the fact. Paul has it on his website. We also have it on ours. Twittv slash, www. There's both audio.
02:17:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just link to it to be clear. I don't host it or anything.
02:17:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's easy to find. If you're at therotcom, you go. Oh yeah, there's a show. He also does a show with brad sams. Uh, that is is that's daily right.
02:17:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we could call that a like a show with uh, you know, it's zero. We talk for five to ten minutes a day, it's just, we just check in with each other that's nice, that's fun sometimes we talk about grass seed. It's not really on topic.
02:17:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like the Scott's Grow guy.
02:17:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what you're probably talking about I like eggs I like eggs. You never know what you're going to get.
02:17:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, let's not go down that road. What else was I going to say? Oh, there's a YouTube channel for Windows Weekly Great way to share little clips and of course, you can and I encourage you to subscribe so you get it automatically as soon as it's available. Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Windows Weekly, paul, we've been doing this a long time now, yep, and I am very grateful to you and Richard for making my Wednesday mornings a lot of fun.
02:18:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's a very polite way to say it.
02:18:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I've been playing.
02:18:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, you know it's a good age of vampires going in there.
02:18:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good let me just look when our first show was I if we go, I can tell you exactly when it was.
02:18:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, well, within a couple of weeks, I mean it was right, it was before windows vista shipped. It was, uh, the closing days of the xpr, so probably the first one was road to rc1 for windows 6 or 5.
02:18:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
September 28th 2006, very first episode september 28th yeah, that sounds about right. 28th, that's right. All of them, by the way, are at twittv slash www so you can go back in time and hear all of them. The real Vista ship date Wow, I know. Oh, and the new office ribbon we were looking forward to this stuff. This is how long? It's been. Young and naive Young and innocent, still excited about the world Crazy.
02:19:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I had so much hope in front of me and so much disappointment that I didn't know was coming.
02:19:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul Thorat, Richard Campbell. Thank you so much. We will see you next Wednesday. Thanks to all of you, winners and dozers. Special thanks to our Club Twit members. We appreciate it. See you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.