Windows Weekly 906 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 is here. I am here. Richard Campbell has the week off. We'll talk about Microsoft's earnings. It came out late last week during the show, but we have a kind of a more granular look at what's happening. Paul's favorite gaming laptop a quick review and then chat, gpt search it's all coming up. Next, on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorada and Richard Campbell, episode 906, recorded Wednesday, november 6th 2024. Turnip boy robs a bank. It's time for Windows Weekly. Yay, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Hello you winners, hello you dozers. We bring them both together for this fabulous program. But we will not bring Richard Campbell together with us this week because he's in. Where is he? Paul Thurott's here from Thurottcom, thank goodness. I was thinking if Paul didn't show up, could I do Windows Weekly? And then I thought, no, I couldn't right, I'd send you the notes.

01:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know I could read them thank goodness Paul Thurott is here.

01:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Rich is going to take the week off we will not have a brown liquor pick, but we will have something for you. How are you, paul? Uh, you know pretty good, uh, just an average wednesday um like any other can't think of anything um although I am said I'm gonna have to retire this mug uh in a couple. Yeah, okay, well yeah, that happens.

01:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'll miss sleeping soundly. I'll also miss reading the news, although I am sad I'm going to have to retire this mug in a couple of months. Yeah, okay, well, that happens, I'll miss sleeping soundly. I'll also miss reading the news.

01:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of enjoy doing that my whole life, except for that four-year period. There I'm not watching the news. I might read it just to kind of keep up with what's going on. But I thought Lisa and I both said yeah, that's it on the 24-hour news cycle.

02:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right.

02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm done with that. So anyway, I hope you all had a wonderful election day. I'm glad you all voted Right. You all voted and America's spoken.

02:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's what happens in a democracy, Unfortunately, yeah, they've spoken, but they have a stroke and you can barely understand them. So, yeah, that's what happened.

02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, you're the one from Pennsylvania, dude. So you know that's what happened. Hey, you're the one from Pennsylvania dude, I blame you.

02:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I might have been the first person who voted this entire country. I voted back in September. Yeah, yeah.

02:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I voted right away too. Nevertheless, you know we're gracious in loss as we are in victory.

02:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just like they were, you know? Yeah, just like they were so.

02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Enough of that, let's get on with Windows.

02:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What so?

02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
enough of that, let's get on with Windows. What's going on in the Windows?

02:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
world. So actually, if you don't mind, I'm going to take a step back and look at earnings just a little bit more, because we lost over it last week. It had just happened during the show. We didn't really have time to go through.

02:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we didn't get to go through it that much. Yeah, yeah.

02:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this didn't make it through to the notes that everyone has them to discord. This didn't make it through to the notes that everyone has them to discord. Sorry, but if you rewind the clock to a better day last Wednesday, I don't know what I'm doing. So Microsoft announced their earnings right, and I was really looking forward to this one because back in I think it was July, august they announced that they were reshuffling the way that the report business segments, certain parts of the businesses, and the big one for me was that the commercial revenues from Windows were going into the Microsoft 365 group, which makes sense. It's part of that group which is under productivity and business processes, whereas the rest of Windows is under more personal computing.

03:43
And if you think back and I can't even remember the timeframe, but several years, many years maybe, I don't know Back when Mary Jo was doing the show, we would do these quarterly shows about earnings and there was a period there where all three of the core or the upper top level Microsoft business units were roughly even right, it was 11 billion a quarter, it was 13 billion a quarter. It was pretty steady for a while. And then Microsoft did their cloud thing right, which is where I sort of checked out on the broader part of the company. But that's when the part of the company that has Azure, which is intelligent cloud, started taking off and of course productivity business processes as well, because of Microsoft 365. So those two businesses were growing bigger and faster than more personal computing for quite a while, and then we hit this quarter. So this quarter we've shuffled revenue out of more personal computing so it should be smaller.

04:38
The kind of thing that's standing in the way of that a little bit is Activision Blizzard right. So year over year Microsoft now has Activision Blizzard. They did not one year ago, this quarter. So that helps even it out a little bit. I guess I'll have to look next quarter, we'll see what that looks like.

04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there is one more political note I have to throw in. Good that, with the new administration coming in in January, you could say goodbye to Lena Kahn and probably say goodbye to antitrust regulations. So that, well, that any, you know the blizzard, uh, activision acquisition, which was such a fight, it's probably fine, yeah, isn't it? It's still kind of alive, didn't the doj appeal?

05:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they appealed it internally, which is a really strong. I know it. I look I wherever anyone thinks I may fall politically. I have big problems with Lisa Kahn and the current. Actually she's the FTC right.

05:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ftc isn't she Lena Kahn's FTC. Yeah, and the DOJ.

05:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But what?

05:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
happens is the FTC makes a decision, the DOJ is tasked with prosecuting it.

05:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, okay, it could be, yeah.

05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's a joint thing.

05:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sometimes one or the other will do it. Yeah, okay, it could be. Yeah, they decide between them. I think Sometimes one or the other will do it. Yeah, so there are multiple antitrust cases in the United States against multiple big tech companies. Things that have already occurred, like the Google breakup order that's going to progress, like that will. Still, it doesn't mean they're going to be broken. Actually, it wasn't a breakup order. I'm sorry.

06:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trump was very much anti-Google, so I think that's going to be yeah that one's going to stick around. It'll be interesting how much elon musk has uh in this, because I mean he got a shout out at mar yeah, maybe there could be an executive order that makes twitter look, uh, like it's a good business again.

06:14
I don't know, oh it is oh, you kidding, it is a good business again, are you kidding? It's the best business right now. But I do think that, uh, elon will have something to say in terms of tech, anti-tech regulation and anti-tech prosecution. We'll see.

06:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think some of it's going to stick and some of it's going to just disappear. That's my uneducated take on that.

06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little late for Microsoft, because Activision Blizzard is done, but they won it's done.

06:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that one we can just not worry about that. It's fine, Do you?

06:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
think that Microsoft, given a free hand, would look at other acquisitions, especially in gaming.

06:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, it's going to take them such a long time to recover from this. That's part of the earnings recap. But every quarter since they acquired Activision Blizzard, there's an enormous overhead to Activision Blizzard. Right, so they contribute revenues, but it's effectively an operating loss and so short-term it has not been paying off right. But at least you know if you're a Game Pass customer it's really paid off. It's been great. Let me just pause for a moment to recover that. Let me just pause for a moment to recover that. So we'll see.

07:27
Anyway, there's a lot going on there, but next quarter will be interesting again because it's a clearer year-over-year take. But for now what we have is a lot of revenues from Windows went into Microsoft 365, which is productivity and business processes, and that is now the biggest business unit at Microsoft. Right, that was number two forever. So $28.3 billion in revenues. Intelligent Cloud, which is Azure, is 24.1, second place and then more personal computing is 13.2. I'm just going to rough this one out a little bit, but I'm going to say, if it wasn't for Activision Blizzard, probably 10 to 11 billion, Really.

08:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so this is such a turnaround for a company that Windows drove for so many years. Yep Windows is now in the third most profitable division.

08:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, to be fair. I mean, I don't know the exact dates, but if you think back, Microsoft in the 90s was the Windows company to the outside world. But really it was Windows and Office, wasn't it? I mean, even in the 90s, and Office was always interesting because it ran on the Mac too, not that. That was, you know, 50% of the revenues. Why did Office become a big part of their portfolio Office was the number one business at Microsoft for a long time, and then they added server.

08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it must have been in the 80s, because I remember they had a mouse for Word before the Macintosh came out. Yeah Well, Windows didn't take off until the 90s and so I don't know the time frame, so Office is kind of in parallel with Windows.

09:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, and then Office as an actual product, as a bundle, didn't really exist until again I'm just guessing here, but probably early mid-90s, somewhere in there. Yeah, that's about right. Something like that. 95 came out. Yeah, so I would say by the turn of the century, as old-timers say, office was bigger than Windows, and then we had the three core businesses at the time at that time were server, windows and Office right so this isn't so different really.

09:30
Yeah, but it's weird how most of the things that are in more personal computing it's almost like the end other stuff bucket, you know, we don't really know what to call this stuff Most of the Windows revenues that are left come from PC makers, so it's almost like a business thing in a way. Microsoft is trying to transition Xbox, obviously, to cloud services and to subscription services, so there's some possibilities there. And then there's Surface. You can hear the flushing sound every quarter when we talk about surface, unfortunately. Um, so yeah, kind of an interesting quarter. I did not spend a lot of time looking at the cloud stuff. I actually kind of don't really care, frankly, but I did look at ai and of course, I looked at the um, you know, the consumer oriented stuff.

10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ai is in the intelligent cloud division yeah, mostly, mostly yeah oh intelligent. I see the word intelligent.

10:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's intelligent yeah.

10:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Apple intelligent?

10:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not so, but they are. Microsoft loves to use vague accounting terms, right, and things that I don't know aren't really verifiable. So, for example, their big announcement this quarter was that their AI business which is not a business is on track to surpass an annual revenue rate. Sorry, revenue run rate. Run rate's a term I've not heard in a while from Microsoft of $10 billion, which means that the revenues to generate in this most recent quarter were approaching one quarter of $10 billion or $2.5 billion. So their revenues were approximately $2 to $2.5 billion, is what they're sort of saying, and they spent $19 billion on it.

11:19
So not an accountant, but if my math is correct, that's a little upside down. And the thing is, the revenues are going up, but so is the cost of AI. They have spent more and more every quarter. Every quarter they've said we're going to keep doing this, it's going to keep going up. In addition to old kind of familiar terms like run rate, microsoft also introduces new terms, right? So like agenic, you'll recognize as a term. All of a sudden, you see everywhere people are talking about agenic things.

11:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Agentic, agentic, yes, oh, okay, because otherwise it sounds like eugenic, which we don't want. Angelic Angelic okay, it's okay, eugenic not, so don't want Angelic Angelic okay, is okay Eugenic, not so much Agentic.

12:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, although you know it's a new era, so we'll see. One of the terms they talk about is signals, right, and they're basing their investments in AI on signals, on signals, signals being a group of signals that they get from customers, from the market, where they think people might spend money on or where they need to have certain assets like CPUs and GPUs and things like that in the data center and so forth. So somehow 2 to 2.5 billion in revenues justifies approximately 20 billion in spending, and if we do this long enough, we'll be profitable or something. We have no way to know how fast the revenues are growing. We do, we can I haven't, but we could go back and do the math on how fast the spending is going up. But you can expect them to spend roughly $20 billion a quarter for the next year building out this infrastructure, unless something changes dramatically right? So that's where that, where that's at um. This was considered a huge success, by the way.

13:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, um, if you go back this is how it works these days which is I know you're. You're kind of counting on the future, do you? How long? How long are they going to have to lose? Yep, so this is the spaceballs question, as I call it. What you're?

13:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
asking is when? Will then be now? And my answer is soon. No, I don't know. We don't know. There's no way to know right. I mean, microsoft is getting signals from space or something. I guess they have some idea, but we'll see.

13:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't it more dependent on the technology improving than it is on whether customers want it?

13:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and on multiple levels, because it's not just the technology that end users or customers will use to do whatever they do with AI, generative AI, whatever it is. It's also the technology behind the chips that are in data centers and whether they can be efficient and cost effective enough for this to start to make sense. Whether there's going to be any real what they call edge computing, npu, ai happening of any substance. There's no evidence of this, by the way. I mean, there's been a lot of talk. We're going to talk a lot about Intel today, and one of the big things they talked about was they didn't use the word signals, but it was basically the same message, which was they got the message from the industry, ie Microsoft, that they needed to move more quickly to get up to speed on this MPU stuff, and they didn't say it. But the message here was pretty clear we spent way too much money on this and got nothing out of it. So this is the fear for AI.

14:41
This is the thing Richard talks about the trough of despair despair that we're in this kind of a bubble and everyone's excited, we're throwing money at it and look, I have no doubt that, broadly speaking, or generally speaking, the software that we use can, and probably will, be made better because of AI. If you look at things like tools that help you write in Word or tools that help you create a presentation in PowerPoint or whatever it might be, that stuff, it's nice. Does it justify the level of investment? You never heard about the Microsoft 365 team spending $19 billion and a quarter so they can make spell checking faster. I don't know. I'm maybe not the right person to even discuss this intelligently. I don't see it.

15:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the way the market's going, though. The whole market's going uh, upside down on ai, and the presumption is that ai is going to be such a big hit sometime in the future that it's going to compensate for I mean, I. I did the math wrong. They made two and a half billion this quarter but spent 19 billion. There's they're they're losing 1616.5 billion a quarter.

15:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See no, no, they're investing 16 and a quarter. I don't know. Look that's a lot to burn, yeah.

15:55
So here's the good news Microsoft can afford it, although, by the way, so I would say, until this quarter they had more of a free cash flow to afford the amount they were spending. So they were basically spending cash this quarter. They didn't make it. Uh, they were actually behind. It was the first time, the cat, the first time they've talked about it that the cash flow was the free cash flow was actually less than the amount they invested in AI to keep using that term.

16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what do they do? Do they borrow against stock? What do they do to make up the difference?

16:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a supermarket in the corner that has a guy in the back and he gives them a no interest loan.

16:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The fig will be $12 a day.

16:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It would be a shame if anything happened in Adela, if you know what I mean Now. I mean Microsoft is the second richest company in the earth.

16:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're doing. I mean yes.

16:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And they have cash reserves as well, right, so they have tens of billions of dollars they can spend their own money. It's fine. The truth is, they could afford to do this for the foreseeable future. It's that Microsoft is a publicly held company and at some point, shareholders and investors, and the board and the press, you know are going to start asking questions. So if you go back and listen to their earnings call, I can tell you no one asked about Windows, nobody asked about Office, nobody asked about anything. Every single question was like so if I could ask you again about how you're affording this, it seems like you're spending a lot of money on AI. How's that going? And everyone's super polite. Everyone seemed very happy with the answers they got. I this is disquieting to me. I mean, they're throwing a lot of money at this.

17:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can we? Is it safe to say it's a bet? Yeah, and it's. I mean, it's unknown how risky the bet is, but it's a bet. They're betting that AI will become the next big thing. So Google does this with its search dollars. They invest in them. They call them moonshots, very rarely pay off, but do they ever bet the company on a moonshot?

17:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See, the thing is there's a story here that may eventually be told. Are they betting the company? Well, this is as close as they've come. Microsoft's often used that term. They've never invested this level of money in anything. I mean, this is a great. You know, use the term moonshot, which I know is a Google thing. You know, for Microsoft is a moonshot. It's like you know, we do these things not because they're easy, we do them because they're expensive.

18:16
I guess we do them because there's only two or three companies on earth that can do it. You know, there's only two or three companies on earth that can do it, you know.

18:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right and maybe Apple's another one. But Apple and Meta both have tossed money down a black hole on projects they haven't delivered.

18:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The difference between those companies Microsoft, google, amazon and OpenAI, anthropic, whoever you choose to name is those two companies have said you know, this is probably not going to be worth it. This doesn't look like it's going to make any sense, and so I sort of respect that opinion, I guess, but I bet the company is a strong term. But man, are they really throwing money at this? The thing that's interesting about this to me is Sachin Adela. Right, this is a guy who became CEO at 2014. Ish engineer came up through being overlooked. That with a server is a super, super, super smart guy. Seems kind of slow moving, robotic. You know, mckinsey esque.

19:17
Yeah, except for one thing I know I don't think that's the true Nadella. I think we're seeing the true Nadella here. I don't think that's the true Nadella. I think we're seeing the true Nadella here. He was kind of pragmatically and aggressively, had called all the product groups into his office when he became CEO Make your company make sense in this new Microsoft. And most did, some didn't, some mixed results, et cetera, et cetera. So we all kind of know that story.

19:41
But one of the things he got really excited about when he first became CEO was HoloLens. And there was no justification for this. It was just we made something cool, no one else has it, and he greenlit this thing and we're going to go to town, we're going to make this thing happen. Something will happen. It will make sense. That never worked right.

20:03
So HoloLens is this little thing that's off in the corner. It was a research project essentially. It became tied into the more personal computing group. Now it's part of what they call devices. So it's basically surface plus this thing, which means it's basically surface. But it never paid off. But he just did the same thing with AI. It was exactly the same thing from my outsider perspective that someone came to him and said oh my god, you gotta see this. This is incredible. And he's like we're doing it and the the amount you have to throw at ai is orders of magnitude greater than what they did with hall lens. That's what's kind of scary. It's weird that this guy from the outside again, you know talks. He's really robotic. He he's like a, it's like he has a gambling addiction.

20:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A riverboat gambler yeah, like he's just throwing all in, yeah he's like honey, get the mortgage, like I'm gonna.

20:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel good about this hand, like what are you doing? So they have the money, they can afford it. But I I wonder you know if this was uh gates or balmer or whatever, maybe that person have made this same.

21:07
Yeah, I don't know. I mean we're. You know the story is unfolding, we're going to we'll, we'll get there. So AI to me right now is yikes, you know a lot of it's a lot of money being thrown at this and I, I don't know. Well, ai is going to come up a couple of times today.

21:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know well, ai is going to come up a couple times today. Uh, I don't know, I, I don't know. I also I mean microsoft's well positioned because they provide the computing credits to open ai. Which is the leader at this point? Yeah, mind sure. I have to say, though I think co-pilot is not necessarily considered by normals as a big hit, right.

21:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I agree. So this is one of those Microsoft might win by losing type things. So Microsoft kind of can make revenues on AI in multiple ways. They've got the developer story. They've got the Azure platform that's a lot of which is based on OpenAI. They've got OpenAI doing their thing on Azureure, you know, for third parties too. So there's all these sources of revenues it may work out that the yeah, the microsoft first party one is the least interesting literally or financially.

22:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All those things, on the other hand, has been quite a success. So copilot on a pc maybe not.

22:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think github copilot is widely considered to be it is, but we're talking about a very constrained market here, is small and not a very lucrative market either. That's what I mean. It's yeah. So yeah, I mean yes, like that's a great example of where ai can be super successful, but as a business, you know, for a smaller company that would be gangbusters for microsoft. It's like a they make more in mice, you know, I mean they probably do right, they probably do even today.

22:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know my github it's cheap. I don't even know what I pay, but it's nothing. It's so little that I don't think about it. Um does uh. Oh no, I forgot what I was gonna talk about. Another way that microsoft could make money, but I, I can't remember what it is. Yeah, I, I well, I think they're gonna make well, whatever, rev it, like they just said, 2.5 billion, oh, but they didn't.

23:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they're going to make well, whatever Revit, like they just said, 2.5 billion, oh, but they didn't say it. They they kind of talked around it. I, uh, using their number, I came up with this math.

23:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if it's two 2.5, somewhere in there.

23:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's not hard math. So, um, what is that made of? We have no idea, but I think uh some of it's going to be Microsoft 365. Copilot, of course, GitHub Copilot. I don't think Copilot Pro, which is for consumers, makes anything. I don't know. I mean, most of the stuff they're doing is suspending. They have all these AI features in Windows.

23:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know what I wanted to ask Business intelligence. There's a use of AI that I think is widely considered.

23:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, all you know already proven yep, which is why, when they move to what I think of as co-pilot, phase two, or microsoft ai phase two, and the agentic stuff, the first thing they talked about was dynamics, right, yeah, um, this notion of these things that will operate in the background on your behalf and then come back when they have something. Um, yeah, there he goes. So here's a human level version of what this is, the place we're in now. Here we bought two and a half years ago. At the time we were buying it, my wife had notifications she would get on the peso to dollar exchange rate right, and at that time it was roughly 20%, and if it went in a certain direction, to a certain degree, she would bring more money over in pesos, because it made sense and she ended up making or saving us about $5,000 by doing this right.

24:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She was doing arbitrage.

24:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So then that year, so two and a half years ago, we completed the purchase. The peso came on strong and so for the past two years ish, the peso has been high. So instead of 20 to 1, it got all the way down to like 17 to 1, which is, you know, for us might have meant we couldn't afford to buy this place, like we couldn't have done it right. So she just came out this morning, she goes. You're never going to believe what my phone just did and I'm like, when she goes, I just got a notification because I was, I had set it up for those if it hits a certain number and she says it just went 20.5 or whatever. It's the first time with like two and a half, almost three years it's been that high and it it has never been anywhere close in the past two years.

25:15
So there's a, there's a what today we would call an agentic ai service working in the background on your behalf, you see, letting you know. So those things can be useful. I mean, and ai, you know you hope it's making. This is just a simple thing. If this, then that right, we've all heard of this service. But, um, the ai agentic services, if they're to work. You have to trust that this thing is making.

25:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not just, if this happens, do this, it's think about stuff, and if all this stuff makes sense, you know, maybe buy the stock or if I'm a ceo of a company, I want the ai to analyze all the inputs, all the data you know, yep, companies have all of this telemetry and tell me what's going on, tell me some trends, in a way that a human analyst may not be able to do or may be very expensive.

26:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you can't get somebody to do that, we'll see I look, I I worked in a big company where someone was looking at a spreadsheet and they started firing people right. And when you do that kind of one like one dimensional thinking, you don't know the human element. One time they got rid of the guy who was our conduit between us and Microsoft for the tech at the time best of show thing that we did and that just disappeared because he got rid of this guy. And it's like, oh sorry, he made five bucks too much a week. We got rid of him. And it's like, yeah, thanks, you just killed our relationship with Microsoft, our most important relationship with Microsoft. And I don't know if AI is going to fix that problem. Right, I mean, it's going to be a lot of one dimensional thinking. You know, we'll see. I mean it will prove me wrong. I guess we'll see.

26:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I might you know, it might be more dimensional. But on the other hand, I don't really care about humans, so it might be less kind it's three yeah 3D chess like in star trek or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. I I don't know. Obviously, microsoft thinks this is the next big thing and they're putting their money where they're very obvious but now you have to answer the questions.

27:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what's interesting. So, yeah, you can go find the transcript you could listen to if you didn't value your time, but you can look and see the types of questions that people starting to ask it. It's getting a little more. So you said this was going to happen. It seems like you're just spending a lot of money. We're going to see At some point. I think there might be shareholders who say, hey, how about throwing us that money instead of throwing it away? Maybe they publicly held.

27:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They give money back every quarter to shareholders, For now they can afford it instead of throwing it away.

27:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know, maybe right. They publicly held. Right now they do.

27:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They give money back every quarter to shareholders like so they can dividends for now they can afford it um at some point maybe not and right now there's a lot of buzz over ai and the big market movers are all ai companies.

27:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look at nvidia isn't there also a lot of but? Yeah, but is it doing anything like? What do we? I mean, has this changed anyone's life?

28:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, at some point it could be a bubble, at some point somebody might pull the plug. I mean aside from Scarlett Johansson.

28:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Has anyone been materially impacted by this? Like I don't know.

28:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's getting the big bucks for her voice, right? Yeah, she better be. You want to talk about recall before we take a break?

28:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I feel like this also happened last Wednesday. But Microsoft announced recall in May it was gonna come out and preview in June. They can't. Delayed it in June to July or late in summer, july or late in the summer. They delayed it till October, on the last day of October. They're just kidding, it's coming out in December and so we'll see.

28:37
But this is one of those things like People feel really strongly about recall and it kind of freaks me out, um, how strong the opinions are, because it's always people who are never going to use it, don't own one of the pcs that can even run it could uninstall it if they hated it that much and happen to have it on a computer, and they feel really strongly they should never have to deal with this thing. And I, I guess I this is just a basic human thing. I would call on people to sort of try to think outside yourself a little bit. You know, I realize you have privacy concerns and security concerns, all of which I think are fricking nonsense, by the way. But that's fine, you can have those opinions, wow, no, but the important? This is all nonsense, but the important thing is and this is the big thing that happened in the wake of all the feedback. To recall, they did a 180 on the most important part, which was not fixing the security, by the way, they didn't almost fix anything. It was letting you uninstall it. Right, that is huge, right.

29:48
One of the things we'll talk about toward the end of the show is my ongoing effort to actually use OneDrive and have it not badger me continually to do things it wants me to do, right, and this has been a year-long quest of mine. I started talking about this in the first week of October last year and this got enough feedback that Microsoft was like all right, we're going to let you get rid of it and it still freaks people out. So you know this thing. They delay it again and look, I'm sorry, but there is some vast majority of people that use Windows that don't think about technology or, by the way, security or privacy, but they don't really think about the stuff like we do, who would just benefit from this and would love it and just let them have it.

30:23
Why does it bother you that other people want it? You know it doesn't matter. If it doesn't impact you, don't worry about it. Yeah, I wish they were this good about OneDrive and folder backup and all that stuff. I wish they applied this thinking to everything they do in Windows, because that would be a happier place. But that's not what Windows is, so anyway, I feel like they got recall right. It's just that we don't have it what windows is, so anyway, I feel like they got recall right, it's just that we don't have it.

30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, um, we'll see. I saw an ad on tv for microsoft ai, which I think was for the co-pilot plus pcs and they. There was an interesting line in there. He said it might not be for everyone. Wow, yeah, I was. I thought wow, that's an intro.

31:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's almost insightful yeah, I mean, I guess, if your knuckles are dragging on the ground or something, it may not be for you, I don't know.

31:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For everyone. I mean, partly that's because they are selling non-copilot plus PCs still lots of them, right, that's the majority of PCs. So maybe that's why they're saying it, but I thought it was a weird kind of concession to make.

31:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like AI, it might not be for everyone. That's a weird way to market something. It's like I'm going on a dating site. Look, I'm not for everybody. You know I'm violent, I yell a lot, I'm angry all the time. I just want to let you know there's going to be someone out there where we're just like on the same page. You know, I feel like you're there. I don't know, that's weird for everybody.

31:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good, I I you know. I thought I saw that and I thought, hmm, I wonder what he knows about. Well, yeah, you're in Mexico. Maybe you're not seeing the same ads, probably aren't. This was on the NFL, I think. Oh yeah.

31:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, so when we do watch sports here, it usually is like the American feed, so oftentimes you'll have Mexican announcers over the top of it. When there's a touchdown, then you go, go, yeah, yeah, it is a little bit like that actually. I love it. Um, it's a. It's a hard way to call a game, because in soccer you can kind of build that excitement over the whatever three hours it probably feels like but in a game like, uh, american football, like they actually score a lot, you know. So it's gotta, it's kind of hard.

32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's exciting all the way through, and that's why we Paul Therat, theratcom, richard Campbell is taking the week off because he's in Tunisia, and you would do the same.

32:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Trust me, I don't know if there's like a camel that's bringing the internet, but it's not working great camel internet.

32:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not quite enough for this show, but he will be, i'm'm sure, back next week and I will be filling in the whiskey segment, but in a different way because I'm really not a drinker. But I have a recommendation nevertheless, and trust me, it's not non-alcoholic whiskey, I wouldn't do that to you.

33:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think maybe this will be the good week for all of you to stop drinking for a little while.

33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just saying I I posted on my uh blog uh, the I voted button from colorado, which is quite beautiful. I had flowers and stuff and I said I think I picked a bad week to stop drinking yeah, right, right. It's like the airplane I put the wrong week, quit him I was gonna say huff glue, but then I thought you ever been to a turkish bath billy our show today.

33:31
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36:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You say that because at lunch my wife and I were just discussing we went to this place, that we go a lot here, couldn't sit at the bar, sat in the back, there was a new guy and he kept referring to my wife as lady, lady, lady. Yeah, and it was. It got weird, you know it's different in.

37:04
Uh, yeah, well, technically the word he was looking for was senora, or maybe senorita if he wanted to be super polite or something, um, but yeah, he kept saying lady. So the first I can't remember how he referred to me and I was like I don't know. And then he's called her lady and I'm like, oh, how do you feel about that? She's like I don't like it. And then he said it five times in 10 minutes and we were like, oh, he's trying to be nice, he's trying to be nice, he's trying to be polite, and it just came out to us wrong. I know what he's like in my own broken spanish. I would, um, I probably do this all the same thing, I'm sure yeah I'm sure I do, but it's just it was the first time that happened.

37:45
It was like it's kind of weird I've had that happen.

37:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, exactly, exactly that they call me lady all the time they call you lady. Yeah, it's the shirt hey, this is a nice shirt. I got a cowboy on it.

37:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I got a horse on it it looks like a marble orboro ad from marlboro ad from the 70s.

38:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's lisa bought me these retro shirts and this is one of them and I really, I really all right.

38:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, um, yes, bug in 24 h2, yeah so a couple weeks ago I talked about how buggy 24 h2 was and it's kind of astonishing, given that they actually had extra time with this one and extra testing. I took a screenshot of it, I put it on everywhere actually, but I linked to the one on X or Twitter or whatever Lots of people seeing this. So if your file explorer window is up toward the top of the screen and you hit that little dot dot dot which is probably see more, see whatever it says, the menu is supposed to pop down. It pops up, so it goes off the edge of the screen. You can't read it. It's like just typical, just the level of quality we get from Windows these days. So just a lot of fun. I noticed this taking screenshots for the book the other day and I was like, oh, microsoft, you know just chef's kiss, you know good stuff. So not a big deal.

38:58
But there have been three developments, two of them today in the insider preview channel, which are actually interesting for a change. Um, two big updates today. One of them ties to an earlier announcement. They, I think they made by mistake in asia, uh, ahead of time, uh, but I'll get to that in a moment. So the first first one is that you may or may not know that the emulator that's in Windows 11 ARM is called Prism. Internally, microsoft makes it and it was updated extensively for the Snapdragon X chips and obviously the chips themselves are super powerful and that's very important, but also the emulator was updated really dramatically. So they are now testing in the let me make sure I get this one right in the what Paul um in the Canary channel, a new version of prism again, that is, adding additional X 64 and X 86 instruction sets to the emulator, allowing it to run more apps, not natively, obviously, but emulation, and the one that they cite is adobe premiere pro 25.

40:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, um, so instead of you know which will probably be ported to arm. You know, I think they might have even I mean they make a version for apple, which presumably yeah, I mean, although premiere is not as good on mac as it is on windows it's also kind of modular, so you might have add-ins or whatever that won't work and that kind of thing.

40:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is going to try to take care of that. When you were doing the ad, I tried to. Microsoft uses this Sysinternals tool called CoreInfo. That's a command line tool and I tried to. I'm using a Snapdragon on ARM device here and I was trying to see if I could compare it to what they were seeing, but I couldn't get it to give this exact output. So the point here is that there are 32-bit, 64-bit apps that use certain x80 you know, x86 instruction sets that do not or are not currently emulated by ARM, and that's part of the compatibility story and they're working on that. So this is kind of cool to me, not just because it's arm, but because this is like almost architectural stuff. You don't really get a lot of this from microsoft these days and the windows team, so it's kind of fun yeah, it's encouraging that they're I think they're very excited about windows.

41:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, so it's prism is an emulation layer is that what it is?

41:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it's the emulator. It's their rosetta.

41:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess that's the way to think of it okay rosetta, I guess that's the way to think of it, okay, sort of. And I wonder, because I'm using windows, uh, on my mac, and parallels, yep, it would benefit from that it does that's right, yeah.

41:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, actually, even if you had a previous gen windows and rm pc, as lowly as they may be, you would see some improvement because of the improvements to the prism emulator.

41:39
Yeah, if you upgrade it to 24 h that's cool okay yeah, yep, yeah, and they uh I'd have to go back and really try to figure out when they talked about this, but they specifically called out uh parallels on the mac and said yeah, actually you will see improvements there too, and anyone who uses that will tell you it's. You know, it's pretty damn good wow yeah, it is.

41:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's frankly, it seemed comparable to the yeah, snapdragon dev kit. By the way, I want to send that to you, uh, so uh, send me your mailing address in pennsylvania and the commonwealth of pennsylvania and I will.

42:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I learned that last I moved from the commonwealth of massachusetts to the commonwealth of pennsylvania. If I'm not, there is only one other Commonwealth.

42:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I think it's New Mexico, or where is the other? I think it's Virginia, virginia. Yeah, that's right, maybe someone else.

42:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Someone could tell me if there's others, but I think those.

42:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet you Bing could tell us.

42:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I wouldn't use Bing with your computer, but you could if you wanted to. If you want to look it up, I don't know.

42:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I changed my action button to start a book instead of ChatGPT. I was going to ask ChatGPT see if it knows all of it. Chatgpt AI has gotten pretty good. You try Copilot, I'll try ChatGPT. So does.

42:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Virginia, actually Kentucky is one, so I guess there are four.

43:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
kentucky how many uh commonwealths are there in the united states of america? In the united states, there are four states that officially designate themselves as commonwealth kentucky, massachusetts, pennsylvania and virgin. You just said that, didn't you? I like her voice, though I expect her to say blimey, blimey. That's a good use for AI, as long as it doesn't hallucinate a new state.

43:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is why I think Google could and we'll see what happens, what happens could come out ahead, because they have this vast thing with search. They right, you can see when you want an answer, just throw them the answer and if it's somewhere like make a story thing, use a. I don't know. I feel like that's what search is for anyway, yeah, but that's so.

43:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chat gbt is now doing search as part of if you have a pro version Right, so I haven't been. It's not easy to get to. That's the problem.

44:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, okay, I don't pay for it, so I don't get to see it.

44:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should have done it in ChatGPT.

44:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, never too late. Where did I put this Later in the show we're?

44:17
going to talk about these changes coming to microsoft 365, but only in some places in the world, and I I saw this story and I threw it by laurant, the guy who writes our news, and he's and I said, you know, I don't quite understand what's going on here. I feel like we already have this stuff. And he's like, yeah, I don't get it either. And then I saw this line that said something about using credits to apply to apps that are built into windows, like paint, photos and notepad, uh, co-pilot credits. And I was like you know, there aren't. There's no such thing. There are no ai features in notepad and there are no ai features in paint or photos that are free and would benefit from you know, uh tokens or whatever. I don't understand what this is for. So he's like, yeah, I have no idea.

45:03
And then later in the day, microsoft announced they need to build to the beta. Let me make sure. I think it's the beta channel where they're testing new AI features in wait for it, paint Photos and Notepad. So I think the actually I guess these are Canarian devs, sorry, not beta, but I think this announcement that I'm referencing, which we'll talk about later, might have gone out inadvertently. I don't think they were ready to announce the thing they just announced. They pre-announced it. They screwed up. I think they had to enter in Oops, oops. So we'll get to that, that's another story, but this is kind of interesting.

45:39
So, if you're familiar with how AI features work in Windows today, if you don't have a co-pilot plus PC, everything runs against the cloud, right.

45:48
So there are a couple of features in paint, like background removal, image generation, there's a couple of actually several now features in photos, the co-pilot app, which is a web app. All these things run against the cloud. If you have a Copilot plus PC, you get several other features that run against the MPU and the machine, right, and you know kind of a mixed bag in both cases, frankly, but that's how that kind of breaks down. If you have Copilot Pro or if you're a business customer and you have Microsoft 365 Copilot, you can use the Copilot app in Windows to work against that system. You know you can get additional features. And if you have that, you have Microsoft Word, excel or whatever it is on your computer, you'll get those features in those apps. Okay, that's all about to change. We're gonna going to get to that soon. But as far as Windows goes, it looks like they're going to add generative AI. Well, no, I'm sorry, they literally are going to add generative AI features across those three apps Paint, photos and Notepad because they screwed up with an announcement that will require tokens or credits. We'll call them against Copilot, meaning that if you do enough of this, it's going to say nope, you're going to have to start paying for this thing, and I think some of these features might actually require that subscription. So Microsoft 365, personal or family, or that Copilot Pro subscription, right? So it's kind of a jumble right now. Right now, they just announced this. It's about to go out into the Insider program. Depending on where you live in the world, you should be able to test it without having to pay for anything, but at some point I think they're going to start charging for this stuff.

47:32
So, generative fill that's where you have a picture of whatever aspect ratio and you want to add to it on the sides, top, bottom, left, right, whatever, um, kind of a neat feature. Actually, I use this sometimes with photos. It's pretty good. Um. Generative erase same thing. You've got this image with like an object in it. You want to erase that thing. Neat, that will be in paint. Uh, that's cool. But the the controversial one, the mary jo one, I guess, if you will is they're adding uh, generative uh, I guess we'll call it text creation capabilities and editing and summarizing, et cetera, to Notepad, which I think is kind of predictable, but also like oh, you had this really simple thing and you're turning it into a what Like? What is this thing so?

48:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can only imagine what Mary Jo would have to say.

48:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think she's going to be happy about this. Mary Jo is going to turn into one of those people that, like, keeps an obsolete version of an app on a USB key and then uses the old one all the time. You know, like Steve Gibson.

48:30
Yeah, yeah, yeah right, she's going to turn into that person because they've updated notepad a lot over the past couple of years and Windows 11. And I like it. What they've done so far has been great. And then I look at this and I'm like, oh, I don't know. I mean, hopefully you'll be able to turn it off, but I guess we'll see. So anyway, that's kind of interesting. Again, this is only the first half of a story.

48:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll talk about the rest of it, you know what I find interesting is how paint has gone from being kind of a throwaway right like a program no one really used, although you always used it extensively hysterical to me, but uh, you were kind of the exception, yeah, but microsoft's giving it a lot of love yeah, so I?

49:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um. I always give benito the option, you know, when it comes to naming episodes of hands-on windows. But I wanted to. I did an episode about paint recently and I wanted to call it the microsoft paint master class. And I wanted to call it the Microsoft Paint Masterclass and he thought maybe that was a little too much or something. So I've used paint decades. I used paint from the early 2000s I still do to make our Christmas card every year.

49:37
For example, there was a two-year period there where they screwed it up really bad, where they modernized the UI but they only gave it the light mode and it wasn't even light mode, it was like bright white mode. So if you were in dark mode it was like this beacon of light in the dark. And then they fixed it. And there were also a lot of keyboard shortcuts, screw ups. They didn't fix all of them that, they fixed the most important ones.

50:01
Um, the two I use all the time control e, control w, which is basically um for cropping and resizing, you know, to put it simply. So I use those all the time, so big. That's part of the master class. You could sign up for that on my special website for paid throughout products, but anyway, um, it is like notepad. They've actually, now that they've gotten over the, the humps have done a nice job with it and even I have to say so, like the, the background removal capability and paint works great. So generative erase, generative um creation, I guess we're calling it, or whatever it's called. Uh, generative generation I generation, gender, generation, um, g squared, as we say in the lingo um no, that's good stuff.

50:44
Like I think that's fine, like they it's okay. And, and you know, look, one of the big things that they did in paint that I think is super important was they added layer capabilities. Right, so, as in photoshop, you can create new objects in layers of their own and you can arbitrarily turn them on and off. And that's neat. For my, I use that in the christmas card thing because it's like a grid of images and sometimes I want to see what different layouts look like, so I can hide and show different parts of it's nice I.

51:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a layout that we want to use from now on on the show, where we just take you, put you in a little corner. I didn't even need paint to do that. Little tiny paw, little teeny weeny paw. Okay, but um, does, there is there. Are there family fights over how big a pain each picture gets?

51:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, I try to be really fair about that. I emphasize the kids. One of my big pet peeves with almost every single human being I know on earth is I know the person or the couple it's 30 years in and they send me a pictures of pictures of kids and I'm like I don't know who these people are.

51:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who are these people? You should have.

51:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You should be in there too.

51:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, like I don't understand that everybody should be in the picture, please, because I don't know no, I try to highlight the kids a couple places.

51:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Whatever things we did and I always love your cards.

51:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I save them I too. Yeah, I didn't know you used paint. That's wild. I use paint. Yeah Well, now that makes sense, because there's so much more you could do. It really kind of makes sense that that might be the interface for generative AI, like that's how you might want to generate pictures, yeah.

52:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. I mean, ai is a lot like anything else. Microsoft does. They kind of look at where you are and does it make sense to have it here? So photos app makes sense for sure. Paint, you know paint versus photos. Photos literally is about photos, I think of paint is just like other images, although in this case I'm editing. I mean I'm editing a layout, so there's photos in it, but it's really images.

52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But is paintnet still a thing, or is that? Yep, it is yeah, because that was kind of the notepad plus plus of that's right yeah, I, I, I don't like it.

52:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I keep trying to use it. I go back to it. I, you know, I try. Uh, they've, you know they've had layers from the beginning and they have a lot of other advanced kind of photoshop type features, but I just, I just something. That's why I'm worried about notepad. I I feel like it hit a good, it's at a good place, it does enough, it's nice, it's not bulked out with stuff I don't need and I feel like I hope they don't do that to notepad or paint. But we'll see. We're running out of toolbar space. I can tell you that it's kind of a problem.

53:13
You know, want to know.

53:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, this looks like it's been a windows uh app since windows 95?

53:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, yeah, you know it hasn't. No, that's what I was wondering around, but it is obviously yeah it almost has a um. Well, obviously it's supposed to look a little bit like photoshop, but to me it looks a little bit like visual studio. You know it's. It's just almost like a little too much, like lots of little windows in the corners and things like and can it do anything?

53:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, oh, I'm sure it can.

53:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I absolutely. It does all kinds of things. It's way more sophisticated than paint. I'm not trying to say that the same thing I, I, I just use and I know there are people who just love it and they know it inside and out and that's great. It's just too much for me.

53:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too much. Who needs it? And don't go to paintnet, because then you get this spurious, whatever.

54:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, so you can get it from the Microsoft Store as well. Ah, that's probably the right way to do it. I think you might have to pay for it if you go that direction. Yeah, yeah.

54:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there's a couple of different ways to get it. It's getpaintnet.

54:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But what do you need it for? Now you got real paint, yeah, well, yeah, I mean, there's a market for tools that are photoshop but aren't a monthly subscription that is more than your mortgage, right?

54:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, apple knows that they just bought the big.

54:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, pixel, made the big photo app yeah, I mean aperture was their idea for that. I I'm surprised they're 500 idea for that. That might be why, yeah, so maybe what we're going to get is a. Photos Pro or something, I don't know yeah.

54:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's the thinking. It'll be like Photos Pro what do they call it? Some stupid thing, photolicious yeah.

54:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, okay. The other big one in the Insider Program is related to something that Microsoft vaguely announced a month or two ago, which was that they're going to overhaul the Windows Hello user experience, if you will, the user interface in Windows, and also the way and improve the way that it handles Passkeys, which I think I said at the time is a low bar, because the way it does Passkeys now is ridiculous and useless. So those two things are tied together. When I was updating the book last year for 23H2, I went down this amazing rabbit hole that stretched into three months, that where I figured out pass keys inside and out and figured out all this stuff. But there's.

55:28
I wrote this article, probably about a year ago, called the secret lives of pass keys, because what I discovered I don't know when this started. I guess I could go back and try to figure it out, but in windows 11, 23h2 and newer at least, and possibly 22H2, I guess, when you sign in with a Microsoft account or a work or school account, you get a passkey is created on the system and it's that passkey that the authentication that occurs through Windows Hello is operating against it's actually using. It's implemented with a passkey. Now Microsoft created the basis for Windows Hello and this kind of biometric authentication in long run timeframe. Right, that was part of the whole thing?

56:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they had a single sign on what was that called. I remember that. Yeah, that was-. I had high hopes for that Passport. It was Passport, wasn't it?

56:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One of the names yep, its names were Legion, as we say. But as far as shifting to the point where you could sign into Windows with an online account I think it was Windows 8, I want to say where that happened In Windows 7, windows 7 was like the Mac is today you have a local account, you can tie it to an online account Microsoft's, apple's case, the apple id, right, apple account, um and then they do a pass-through for authentication right in windows. In windows 7, you could do the same thing. It was passport. You're right, it was passport, msn passport, you know, microsoft, whatever the name is yeah, I loved it.

56:56
I thought this is the future no more passwords. But then they start. Then they did full-blown windows low, where you had at the time pin. Remember they did the, the pattern and picture. You do a pattern on a picture, it was right. A pattern pack picture pattern, it was the same one. And then a facial and fingerprint recognition, right. And so I don't, like I said, I don't remember exactly which version of windows this changed, but at some point.

57:20
Um, when you sign into a microsoft account, under the covers it's probably you know there's a local account occurring. Obviously it's doing the same pass-through but in reverse. But the way that they handle that credential is through Pesky right, and so they were using earlier versions of FIDO standards to create all this stuff. Over time They've been working with FIDO on this the whole time and so it didn't really benefit anyone in 23H2. But just so you know, you sign in with an online account. There's a passkey on that computer. It doesn't do much If you sign in with, or it's not sign in If you use Microsoft Edge, obviously there's that pass-through authentication that occurs, but that occurred before. It was a Passkey. I mean, they're just doing it to the standard right, so they're using the Passkey.

58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they're using the name, but it was always Passkeys, that's right.

58:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it was like a proto-Passkey maybe is the way to say it right, because we didn't have that term yet it wasn't a standard if I think of it.

58:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how passkeys behaves is just like passport too, yeah yeah, it's just.

58:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a formal industry-wide standard for that sort of thing, for uh credential management and authentication.

58:29
Yeah, yeah, yep. So uh, like I said vaguely microsoft about a month ago, whenever it was said hey, we're gonna, we're gonna change it, and so now they're being more explicit about the fact that when you're doing this, you're signing with a passkey, you're using Windows Hello for the authentication part of it. That could be facial finger or pen, just like it is today, but just kind of a cleaner UI. So it's kind of interesting just to see the UI. It's nothing surprising, it looks pretty normal. But I think we also talked about, uh, the fido org, um, and yeah, the, the, uh, the password managers, microsoft, the platform makers, apple, etc. Have all agreed to adopt this broadly and so they're going to allow import, export of paskies, pasky, portability, etc. So someday soon, hopefully, windows will become like a full-fledged pass-through implementation.

59:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Hello makes it very easy. I use my fingerprint on Macs, and it's great, or my face on an iPhone, and it's great.

59:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the same thing basically. I mean you have to reach a certain level of you know it has to be a trusted security method or whatever. But they have it on Android.

59:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have it on Chrome. They have it on chrome os. Mac. Most windows pcs have support hello cameras. Or is that still kind of a pre? I?

59:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
don't. I don't know that I could say that, I'm not 100 sure, but all windows pcs do that support windows 11. Technically support windows low, because a pin qualifies. It's not the greatest way, obviously, but it qualifies. It's an extra level of something I don't know what to call it.

01:00:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not using your passport when you're buying a PC. Look for Windows Hello support in the camera, I think.

01:00:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the best configuration is you get both fingerprint and finger and you can choose the one that makes sense for you.

01:00:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I agree that HP laptop we like does both of those things.

01:00:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah it usually works pretty great. And then they have presence sensing capabilities that will see you coming and the screen lights up. You know it's nice.

01:00:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And if you've had rhinoplasty and it doesn't recognize you, you always have it.

01:00:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, less dramatically. If you wear glasses, you know you do it like you're authentic.

01:00:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You enroll once with each face, I guess for lack of a better term Enroll with a better trial with each face. It's like I don't I'm gonna say like gained a lot of weight or anything, but we don't know who you are.

01:00:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're gonna have to do another uh like another enrollment.

01:00:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't want the computer telling you that you're just a little chubby, aren't you a little chubby? I'll be wavy. All right, let's take a little break and we will come back lots more to talk about. Paul thorat is alone, but not not lacking in I'm so alone Stuff to talk about, so very alone. He's all alone. I'm here for you, paul. I'm trying to fill in Richard's role a little bit on the show today. That's why I'm so chatty. Normally I'd just be sitting back, playing, playing, you know.

01:01:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Bedazzled or something Farmville or whatever. Call of Duty, I hope.

01:01:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Call of Duty. I call of duty. I hope call of duty I. You know, I tried the age of empires on the ipad. It's at least initially. It's kind of a different game. It looks the same. Maybe it's just because there's so many cut scenes. I'm trying to help people learn how to do it, but it's a great idea of it on an ipad is a great idea, so I have to get more into it. Yeah, our show today, mr thurott brought to you by one password, speaking of pass keys. But I'm not talking about the one password password manager, which does, of course, support pass keys. I'm talking about an, an enterprise product from one password that incorporates one password password manager into something they call one password extended access management.

01:02:02
Here's a question, and it's purely rhetorical, because I think we know the answer Do your end users always, always, always, work on company-owned devices with IT-approved apps? They never stray, do they? They never bring their phone in or their laptop? Well, of course they do. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on those unmanaged devices, on those unmanaged apps? Well, 1password has a really good answer to this question Brand new, extended access management. 1password extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device because it solves the problems traditional IAM, password managers and MDM cannot touch.

01:02:50
Imagine your company's security as if it were the quad of a college campus. You've got your nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company-owned devices, the IT-approved apps, the managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use, the shortcuts worn through the grass that are the shortest points from building A to building B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non-employee identities. Like contractors, most security tools just assume A. It's happy brick paths everywhere, but a lot of the security problems take place on the shortcuts. That's why you need 1Password Extended Access Management. It's the first security solution that brings all those unmanaged devices, all those apps, all those identities under your control. It ensures every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It's security for the way we actually work today and it's generally available to companies that use Okta or Microsoft Entra. It's also embedded now for Google Workspace customers. Check it out.

01:03:56
1passwordcom slash windowsweekly. That's the number one. P-a-s-s-w-o-r-d dot com slash windowsweekly. This is a great idea. 1passwordcom slash windowsweekly. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and the work Paul and Richard do every week on this fine program. You support them by going to that address onepasswordcom slash windows weekly. You're turning it.

01:04:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is turning into a security show here you're talking, yeah I, and I'm the wrong person to be talking about that stuff, but no, you're not, you know. No, you're not the everyman's approach to steve gibson good, there's gonna be more. I've got my. The thing I moved into the tip today is all about security really fundamentally, so you know.

01:04:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's kind of an issue.

01:04:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I never wanted to go down this path, leo. This is the rabbit hole. You know there's no way out.

01:04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, was that our enterprise computing?

01:04:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we're going to talk about that too.

01:04:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, it's the weirdest episode of all time.

01:05:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what's happening, so I try to highlight every time a major app comes to Windows on ARM. One of the neat things about the Copilot plus PC launch maybe one of the only neat things no, that's not fair, the hardware is awesome Is just the sheer amount of apps that Microsoft and Qualcomm were able to convince their makers to make native ports. Most of the major browsers are there now, a lot of the major productivity apps, et cetera, et cetera. If there are areas where ARM lags behind and there are a couple the big one, of course, is games. I don't have any news there.

01:05:35
We talked a little bit up top about something they're testing in the Canary channel with regards to the Prism emulator and different x86, x64 instruction sets. But the other big one that's missing or had been missing is VPN. So I think there are at least a couple. I think ExpressVPN might be native on ARM, but this past week Proton announced that Protpn is now native on arm and this has been kind of neat for me. I they brought their app to the apple tv last week. I've been using that on apple tv, oh, interesting, yeah, and now I'm using uh proton vpn on this computer.

01:06:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm using here I don't have it on now. By the way, it doesn't seem like porting it from intel to arm would be that complicated, because most of the work done on a vpn is done on the server.

01:06:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, the reason it's, the reason it doesn't just work, is that there's a driver installed with every vpn.

01:06:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has to be underneath yeah and drivers.

01:06:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can't, can't, emulate drivers, so it I'm not saying it's difficult or easy, I actually have no idea, but you know I've come to think of it that that makes a lot of sense, yeah, so that's there. Uh, yeah, if you're a Proton guy, that's a good combination Proton apps and services and Windows on ARM.

01:06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you using their mail yet?

01:06:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, so I'm baby-stepping my way into the Proton world. I use Proton Pass for my password and passkey management.

01:06:57
They do portable passkeys Awesome Works on all my devices. I just started, uh, looking at what it means to use proton drive. That's the only one. That's a little weird. Um, they don't have normal tiers of storage, as I think of it, so you can't, when I, when you sign up for it, you can't say, all right, like to get a gigabyte or whatever, a terabyte, sorry, uh, yeah, you can't. Um, I think at some point what happens is you basically fill up what you have and then you can go to them and say I'd like to get some more, please, and you hold like a little hat. That's interesting.

01:07:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, like tiny, that's weird.

01:07:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a little strange, so I.

01:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just, although you only buy as needed, so I guess so. Instead of having to buy 100 apples because you might use 100 apples, that's right.

01:07:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, the promise of cloud computing is that we only use the resources or pay for the resources when we use them. Yeah, fair enough. Anyway, like I said, I'm still getting into it, but I've been using ProtonVPN as well, so that's been great. The little slice of enterprise we have here is that over the weekend, I wrote about Microsoft generally releasing if you will, making it generally available Windows Server 2025, which they described as the latest long-term servicing channel release of server, but that's the only type of server release they have. So, whatever these things are, support each version is supported for five years.

01:08:18
I don't write as much about server and enterprise stuff anymore, obviouslyotcom, but I thought this one was interesting because, after being so hyper focused on the cloud for so many years, microsoft finally got enough pushback from customers. It sort of acknowledged like we need to invest in this server product as well, not because we're all going back to on-prem, like cloud's going away, but rather every major company and that's their big business, right has some workload, something that can't be put in the cloud for regulatory, whatever it is, and these hybrid environments are super important. And so Windows Server 2025 is really designed to be the on-prem part of a hybrid deployment and they've done a lot of stuff under the covers. So I wrote this thing over the weekend. I was like it's kind of weird they haven't announced it Like it's out, like it's available. And then they announced it on Monday, so they did get to it.

01:09:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway. I never thought I'd hear Paul Th thorat say the words on prem in my entire life. So what's that on prem?

01:09:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I never thought I'd hear you say on prem if life goes accordingly, you'll never hear me say it again um, I don't know that's your server story for the day yep, yeah, it's just not my thing anymore.

01:09:40
Um, and then this is like tangentially related I, I'm just fascinated. I'm fascinated by this one. So last year not this past year, but last year google did the thing they do every year. February comes around. Here's the first developer preview of android. You know, they usually hit beta before or right before their annual show at Google IO, and then they ship it, or they finalize it in August, and then they put the ASOP version out in September, and then they announce their own devices, and their own devices are the first ones that get it right.

01:10:13
Last year they said we're going to try to ship this thing a little early to kind of meet the schedules of different companies that use Android, and they missed it. So it so okay, no big deal. And then this year they were like, look, seriously, we're going to make this one, we're going to deliver this thing early. They were going to try to wrap this whole thing up by august, and at the time what we didn't know was that they were going to release all their new pixel phones in august, and man, they missed it by two months, so they didn't even come close. So for next year they're going to switch the whole schedule over so that the major Android release so it will probably be called Android 16, will ship in the second quarter, so by the end of June 2025. And then they'll do kind of a minor, what they call an SDK release, meaning there'll be underlying features that developers can take advantage of, but the UI and the behavior of Android 16, what did I call it Android 16 is not going to change. And then that will be the schedule going forward.

01:11:06
And the reason that they gave was to more closely align with the needs of their hardware partners. Right, and to me that means Samsung. Right, because Samsung usually does. Their big release now is in August or even July. It's the folding phones that's the big one. And Google has also switched this basic schedule. It allows them to get out before Apple, because the iPhones always come out in September, and maybe this is what makes sense. But when you look at what they do, it's actually alarmingly similar to what Windows is Not so much the time frame, but rather that they have one major release every year. They do that kind of minor release SDK, so Microsoft doesn't really do that, but then they ship new features every quarter and if you're on Pixel, you get additional new features every month For the Pixel drops, yeah, and then they do monthly security updates and sometimes you'll see small things every month. That kind of stuff happens.

01:12:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we live in a world where, like whatever platform you're using, man, it's just getting updated all the time, but they do seem to be coming to a kind of group consensus about how often and when.

01:12:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like that, like microsoft and google, both right or kind of on the same cadence now I don't know if I'm misreading this, but I feel like the I don't know, I can't remember the versions anymore but the last two, three, whatever versions of Android the major releases so 14, 15, at least haven't seen like a big deal from a user interface, new features, perspective.

01:12:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I can't tell, I don't even know, but iOS.

01:12:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what version you were on and be excited about the new yeah, but iOS seems like it's a big you know, big enough, I mean, you know, for an annual release, like at some point I feel like this is going to have to slow down, but they're just, they're on the train, I don't know. Yeah, so maybe Microsoft was onto something with Windows on a service. He says, just because, seriously, you screwed everything up, but whatever um you know, mobile platforms at least are.

01:13:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you can't mess them up as bad.

01:13:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they're, they're. They're important, though, in the sense of people use them. People are more engaged. You know there's more things going on there. Use it more when I sit down yeah, you sit down in front of a computer. You don't want things like where's, you know, like why did you change that? Like like you don't want change, like you just want to get work done, you know right. So I don't know.

01:13:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's my, my little editorial on that, and you also with phones. You got to get it right and they are. You know they are the targets. Much more so now, right that's right.

01:13:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I'm losing track of when I talked about different things, but I think I alluded to this laptop I was going to review you loved this.

01:13:42
So here's the hard numbers on this one. So I put Call of Duty Black Ops 6 on here. I've played it in both single and multiplayer. It is running at full native resolution, which is something silly, like 2280 by 1400, something pretty good, so not 4K, but also better than 1920. Silly like 2280 by 1400, something pretty good. So not 4k, but also better than 1920. Um, it is. It's actually set to a custom graphics configuration, but if you go down and look at it when it's plugged in, everything's on basically medium, but it looks awesome. This thing is getting between 90 and 120 frames per second consistently Wow, which is nuts, and it looks great like it's awesome. So this is just a laptop. It's a gray laptop. It's on sale right now for a thousand bucks. It's not a lot of money for this kind of a thing. It's 32 gigs of RAM, terabyte of storage well, they're different under for a thousand bucks, thousand bucks.

01:14:40
It's on sale right now. Wow and uh. This thing plays the most modern video game there is, in a way that I find alarming. Like it's really great. This is amd.

01:14:50
This really is amd yeah so they they've they've done something really right here and I don't think they get enough credit for this. Uh, this was something I noticed I first started looking at late last year with meteor lake, which is intel. It was okay, and then this past summer I I had that, you know, seven, eight hundred dollar idea pad, which is previous gen, which was, um, very, very good actually but this is showing off.

01:15:13
Here you're at the top. I just needed something that was representative. It so happens I have the highest score. That's a coincidence, um, you haven't lost it, have you, paulie? Like riding a bike, leo?

01:15:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, that's hysterical yeah, good on you, good on you man t-bagging like a 14 year old, but um don't mess with the rot.

01:15:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's all I'm saying I also have my hat handed to me sometimes. I'm impressed that you're able to do this on a laptop that really does. No, I am too. That's the thing, and so that's the thing. Look, the PC has always been super versatile. This isn't like a newsflash or anything but as we go off and do different things in different places, most of us use mobile devices, et cetera, and the pc has become focused on multi or on productivity. You know, this is a thing you can do too, and it's kind of cool, like it's not. You know, it's not as seamless as a console, for sure, but we're getting to the point now where, even on like a really kind of pedestrian looking laptop, it's actually better graphics quality, right, like it's kind of incredible, wow so it's neat. But great battery life. What's the screen like? Is it good? Yeah, so this, yeah, it's kind of incredible, wow so it's neat but great.

01:16:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the battery life. What's the screen like? Is it good?

01:16:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, so this, yeah, it's ip, it's ips, that's the thing. So they kind of there's a, I I'm this is conjecture on my part. I think a or hp in this case wanted to do something where they're going to strike a balance between performance and price. Battery life, yeah, you know all that kind of stuff. So that's true too.

01:16:39
The other places where this thing does well is a battery life efficiency and eight and a half hours. I'm averaging normal, not not game playing. I mean, I'm plugging in for games, but it's pretty good and the instant on performance, like I've always talked about with Snapdragon, is almost perfect. It's amazing Instant, reliable, reliable, very good, doesn't get super hot, doesn't get super loud. You know it's uh, it's pretty great. The screen is I. I don't remember the exact res, it's in the uh review, but it's something like 2280 by 1400ish somewhere in there. Ips it's only 60 frames a second, so you're not getting high refresh rate, you're not getting oled. You know these are things that would impact or could well. Certainly oled would impact uh battery life, but it's it's. I mean, it's awesome. Honestly, it's just it's. It's great. And on, even the speakers are great. There's four speakers. It has upper and lower firing speakers, like it's amazing.

01:17:34
Um, and then I have this other piece of junk. No, no, I have this other computer, uh, that's running lunar lake, and I've had lots of problems with it, lots of problems. And I've talked to other people who review laptops and they've seen the same thing I have, which is kind of nice, because this doesn't always happen, um, and two of them recommended to me that what I need to do is put this thing in best performance power management mode and not use the default. Okay, so you won't be. This is not all the duty on that. Well, that's what I. I just tried that today. So takes about eight hours to install. You know it's like 200 and something gigabytes. You know, over wi-fi took a little while. You know, xbox, I think, siphons it down a little bit, finally got this thing running. So it's not. It's not the same experience. The good news is it is playable.

01:18:22
This is, you gotta remember, is a step up for meteor lake. So meteor lake was kind of it was. It was actually a really good graphics boost for intel. Um, lunar lake, for all its problems, the graphics boost also good, not as good as amd, there's no doubt about that. So it's also running at native res. I know, because you would probably want to know what that is. I could look that up if you want. I don't have it in front of me. I'm sorry, um, but it's all.

01:18:44
The graphic settings are on low and you can see this in the screenshots I've taken. It's like if there's like a couple of bodies laying on the ground, and their doorway is one of them. They just look like light colored blobs, they're not detailed in any way and uh, so this, they really have to tune down the graphics in any way. And so this, they really have to tune down the graphics. But it runs at 40, 43 frames a second. So we're talking, the AMD version is two to two and a half times faster now AMD, much better graphics. That's why, right, it's. It's kind of amazing, frankly. So I guess I, if there weren't other problems with lunar lake which I'm going to get to when I finally review that thing I would be okay with this. I mean, it's still better than meteor lake and it's, you know, you can still play the game it's, it runs fast enough, I guess I don't know, but it's not like it. Like the zen, the zen 5 thing is crazy.

01:19:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like it's crazy how good it is so I'm looking for the review on here, do you? Did you put?

01:19:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't have the lunar lake okay, that's why I'm sorry I just, I literally just ran this today. This is one of the I'm. It'll probably be, I assume. Yeah, probably before next week, probably okay by then, yeah, um yeah. But battery life isn't as good. The performance is not even close. I've had lots of reliability issues with it. And then there's this thing where it's like you know it runs, it's better. I guess if I hadn't seen the amd thing I'd be like okay, this is a nice step up from meteor, like I mean for graphics.

01:20:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it just feels so bad for intel.

01:20:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just, it's really just yeah, so yeah tied this. Intel announced their quarterly earnings I don't know if you saw this. It was not great we were talking earlier about Microsoft and their earnings and how much they're spending on AI and was greater than all of their revenues. It's kind of hard to explain why that's so horrible, I guess, unless you know exactly what I'm talking about. But generally speaking, net income or profits are some fraction of revenues. Revenue is the big number, it's the net sales, it's the actual money you brought in. They lost more money than they made. Like this is not good. It's the worst loss in the company's history. This isn't part of my story, but since this happened, they're going to be delisted from the NASDAQ as part of a-.

01:21:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, the DAO, the DAO. I'm sorry, it's probably by.

01:21:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
NVIDIA and the DAO, replaced by NVIDIA, which I don't know If. Replaced by NVIDIA, which I don't know. If you're following the news, they're going gangbusters. So that's kind of sad for Intel. So this was another one where, look, a big chunk of this loss was tied to impairment charges that are related to assets that they have that are less worth, less.

01:21:48
Now that's something you could actually just put in your earnings over two years or whatever. You can do it over time. They're like you know what? We're going to take this loss all at once. We're going to post the loss anyway. Why don't we just bite the bullet, so to speak, and get it out of the way? So I guess I sort of respect that.

01:22:06
But, as is the case with Microsoft, I kind of look at this business and I'm like, okay, so things aren't going great All of their. No, that's not fair. Some of their business is down year over year. The data center stuff is actually up a bit. That's pretty good. So what's going on here? Right, and so, again, as is the case with Microsoft, you can go and listen to the post earnings conference call they have with analysts. They didn't provide a transcript, so I actually had to listen to it, which was thrilling.

01:22:37
But there was some interesting conversation in there and somebody asked about whether Lunar Lake which was a big part of the financial problems that they had this year because they brought this, essentially this architecture, the full architecture they brought to market was three years out cost them a lot of money. I've been told by multiple sources they lose money every time they sell. One of these things Is a one-off, and Pat Gelsinger repeated that word phrase, whatever term, back to that guy twice, at least three times, and referred to Lunar Lake as a one-off. And what does that mean? Lunar Lake is the only modern CPU that they've made where the RAM is packaged on the die with the CPU and the other processors, right, that's the way, like Apple does Apple Silicon, right, it's the way Qualcomm does Snapdragon phone chips, right, the PC chips that Qualcomm makes. They're technically not packaged on the die, but for all intents and purposes they really are. They're, they're, they come together. You can't add ram to one of those computers later. They're based. They're not technically the same package, but they are packaged together, if you will, small p, whatever. So, yeah, they.

01:23:51
They did meteor lake because of the demands for ai pcs, as they call it right. They don't want to say co-pilot Plus VC because Microsoft went to them and said you need to make this spec because if you don't, amd and Qualcomm are going to do it. They stopped doing the Meteor Lake gen. They're not going to rev that anymore. That was a one-off architecturally and then they brought this thing to market more quickly and they cobbled it together from other parts of the different things they're working on separately. So Lunar Lake is this weird thing that kind of came up out of nowhere really quickly and they're never going to do it again. Like this is the only time they're ever going to use this design. This is another one off. Like it's crazy. So I don't know what to say. Like you can't, there's not infinite money, you can't keep doing this.

01:24:44
Now, from intel's perspective, part of the margins issues, part of the reason they lose money on these ships, is that, uh well, they're manufacturing it through a third party tsmc, right, so that they pay for that. They want to bring that in-house when they can. And then there's the whole memory thing. You know, ram, they want to get the best deal on that. And if it's all tied together and you're getting it from that same third party. You're not going to get a deal on it and they're not exactly the biggest customer right now, especially since this is only one of their many chip lines. So, yeah, they're never doing it again. So yikes, anyway, I feel bad for intel. I think it's the short version of the story. Yeah, we're all a little sad.

01:25:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too bad, yeah what are you gonna do?

01:25:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but at least the lunar lake stuff is awesome. Oh wait, oh no, yeah, I would say you know, go back in time. I guess it was two months ago now. It feels like a million years ago.

01:25:35
But at ifa in berlin they came out really confident, presentation a lot of we're the best here here, here, here and here. We had that story a couple weeks ago where Qualcomm was like a lot of that was lies and my whole thing with them was like it looks like they kind of hit it out of the park. They need this, and then you use one of these things. You're like, oh, I'm seeing some of the same reliability problems. You know it's not good, so I want, I'd like them to get it together. It would be better for everybody if they did, but not yet. Okay, and then I don't.

01:26:13
We don't have to go into this too much detail, but amazon and apple both released their earnings since last week. They're both doing pretty good $95 billion in revenues for Apple, biggest company in the world. The thing we're looking at there is iPhone sales, because there was worries that that would be flat again. They've had kind of a problem there for a while. I think iPhone revenues are up 5%, 6%. There's no indication that there's any Shift in which models People are buying, etc. So it's probably Up a little bit. That's good.

01:26:46
Today. I don't have this in the notes, but there was a Story. The financial times Tipped me off of this. I actually ignored it for a couple days Because I wasn't sure it was that Big of a deal. But Apple, like All publicly held companies, files a 10k Form with the SEC every quarter and they have among the many things that have to be in this form, which, by the way, I don't think the SEC does much of a job of oversight.

01:27:09
But whatever is, you have to declare what you see as the risks associated with your business and in Apple's case, those risks were always. You know exchange rates, competitors, you know customers not interested in the products, you know blah, blah, blah, whatever. And they added some stuff to this one that they'd never used before and it's kind of interesting and it does basically amount to we have this really one popular, successful thing that we're never going to beat, and we've introduced a bunch of products and none of them have done as good. And now we're working on things that are really expensive to come to market and it's unclear if anyone's going to want to buy them, and our new risk is that we're never going to be as successful as we were. So it's kind of a weird thing to say, but I think the rationale for it is there. I mean, I'm not predicting doom and gloom for Apple. I think Apple is an amazing business.

01:28:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A malaise in the zeitgeist these days.

01:28:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah but if you have some number of quarters where things go south financially relative to your position. I mean this is going to be huge. You know investors could sue you for this. You didn't disclose material risk to your business that you're legally obligated to disclose.

01:28:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you don't have something, make up something well, I there.

01:28:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, they had a car thing they worked on that went nowhere. They have a vision pro thing that's expensive, no one's buying. They have ideas for glasses and what who cares what else, but these are things that none of which are going to be iphones, you know, and at some point you have to be like, look, look, the whole world has an iPhone. So we've done everything we can. The services business we have, apple, would not exist without iPhone. You could argue that those two businesses, plus a bunch of wearables, a bunch of the other device sales, are all tied to you owning an iPhone. That business is bigger than Microsoft, every quarter, just iPhone by itself. Iphone and its ecosystem, um, so is apple or any other company gonna ever beat that?

01:29:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean yeah it's hard to imagine, but not in my lifetime right.

01:29:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I don't know, maybe ai, maybe.

01:29:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's funny because one of the analysts on the analyst call asked tim cook yeah, well, what if Google loses this court case and has to stop paying you $20 billion or so a year? That's going to hurt your services. And Tim basically said, yeah, we're not going to talk about that right now.

01:29:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why would we talk about it? We've never talked about it.

01:29:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which, by the way, publicly held company.

01:29:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a little iffy.

01:29:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think both Google and Apple think this is going to be many years off, and maybe now, uh, after the election, maybe never, yeah right, yeah, um, I don't. I wonder if they can order the doj to dis.

01:29:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think they can discontinue existing I mean, you know, you attorney general, well, you've already had rulings against the company. You can't just, you know, just kidding. I mean that's not really the way it works. There's a legal process, but yeah, we'll see. I mean, apple has bigger problems, I would say, in Europe than they have here. For sure that's not going away, right.

01:30:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to talk about Microsoft's second biggest business pretty darn soon. But first to work First biggest, First biggest. Is it their first biggest? Yeah, that's the big change. That's the big change. It's number one business. What do you think? It is kids. It's not what you think it is it's mice and keyboards? Yeah, keyboards and mice With copilot.

01:30:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do they still make keyboards and mice? I used to love my Microsoft mouse. They moved everything onto Surface, which I thought was stupid. They signed up with a company. I can't think of it oh yeah, there's another company, a hardware maker, that's going to start selling the old Microsoft stuff. Is it Logitech? Yeah, that's right. I don't think it was Logitech, I can't remember but that's been delayed, so it's not happened yet, but hopefully it will, because I want to stockpile these things.

01:31:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I did. I had like eight or nine of them. No, I used to I'm down to the last few yeah.

01:31:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm down, I have one here and one at home. I don't know what I'm going to do if this thing dies. Yeah.

01:31:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right. Well, we'll talk about that business, the big business we're in mouse business in just a second. Paul Therot is here from therotcom. His book's at leanpubcom. Richard Campbell has the week off. He's in Tunisia. Couldn't get a good connection. We're hoping he'll be back next week. But first a word from Lookout, our sponsor for this segment. I've talked to you about Lookout before Today.

01:31:42
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01:33:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so it's business and productivity online services, which is Microsoft 365 and some other things but Microsoft 365. And the reason they're number one is because the windows uh, commercial revenues move from more personal computing into that business, so they got a nice bump. So I referenced this earlier. I'm sure I confused everybody. It was probably the wrong way to tell this story. But this morning I got up and I came across a thing in my feed about a microsoft 365 change for consumers and I forwarded it to Laurent, who does our news, and I said, if I'm reading this correctly, it says that Microsoft 365 paying customers get some kind of credits or tokens that they can use against Copilot services and they're getting designer and that these things will be working in Windows 11 apps like Paint, photos and Notepad. And I'm like, here's the thing, we already have most of that.

01:34:25
So I stopped paying for Microsoft Copilot Pro because I can get designer to do for free. I mean, I'm paying for a Microsoft 365 subscription to make those images right and it even supports widescreen formats and so forth. So I'm like, why would I pay another 20 bucks a month? I just use this. It's the same thing, it makes the same images right. And he was confused by it as well. And then he kind of came back and he said, well, first of all, this isn't in the United States or Western Europe, it's Australia, new Zealand, malaysia, singapore, taiwan and Thailand. And I'm like, okay, okay, so maybe this was something we got first and they're moving there. Great, that's fine, but what's this thing about paint photos and notepad? That doesn't make sense. And that's what they announced for the Insider Program that was at the top of the show that they're bringing new generative AI capabilities to those apps that are going to work against the cloud and you can use your co-pilot credit so you get every month as part of your subscription. I'm like, okay, so obviously this announcement went out too early, because the other part of this that I didn't mention is they're also raising the prices on these subscriptions and they're gonna have a classic version that doesn't have any AI. Actually, I also didn't mention another another part of it. So if you have co-pilot Pro or Microsoft 365 Copilot, you get Copilot features in Word, excel, onenote, I don't know, whatever. Some set of the desktop apps, right, consumers in those countries will gain access to those capabilities too, but again with credits, so every month you'll be able to use so much of your credits and use these features and if you run out, I guess you're done. You can't use those features anymore until the next month, or you could optionally pay for Copilot Pro. So it's kind of a nice way to advertise this other paid offering. I guess nice way to advertise this other paid offering.

01:36:25
I guess I have been wondering about when Microsoft 365, Family and Personal, which today are the two consumer subscriptions, were going to go up in price. They have been $69 slash $99, forever In fact. I don't remember the timing, but at some point they added a user to the family one, so it stayed the $99 price. But now you can have six people on it each with a terabyte of storage instead of five. So, if anything, it's just kind of gotten better. So I think that this is a preview of a coming price hike that consumers are going to get for Microsoft 365, just like the one we got on Xbox Game Pass, right, I mean, it's kind of inevitable. So yeah, there you go and a look at how they're going to kind of position these AI features between, like free stuff that's just in Windows and paid stuff that you get through your subscriptions, depending on which one or two you have so interesting.

01:37:15
So it was a little morning of confusion. It's like I would say, to learn. Like I feel like I know a little bit about windows. I'm not aware of ai features in notepad am I missing something, you know? And uh, he said, nope, you're not. Uh, there are none. And then later in the day they announced it in the insider program. So, because it's in the insider program and if I remember correctly now, uh, dev and canary, these aren't coming to windows 11 until I don't know the spring. So these people, I don't know what they're getting for now.

01:37:45
I think this was a mistake. I don't think they meant to announce this. That's my gut feeling. That happens sometimes. You push the button prematurely, yep, so anyway, it's coming. And then you know more about this one than I do. But open for months. I remember back in May they had that big event and like, here it comes chat, gpt search. It's like, nope, we're going to do it in realistic voices, we're doing you know whatever. And then they just announced chat, gpt search. Well, obviously they're doing that and I have not used it. So you're saying it's pretty good, yeah, and I have not used it.

01:38:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're saying it's pretty good. Yeah, well, I mean, the idea and this is what Google was worried about forever is that someday AI would come for them and they're in their big business, and I guess that's the theory. The problem right now is it's not easy to get to. So here is I'll go to my screen and and pull up yeah yeah, let's see where is it. It's in one of my so you have like the.

01:38:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How do you use this? It's like an app, so you have to go to your chat gpt interface.

01:38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's not like so. Now I imagine their plan would somehow to incorporate into the browser, maybe write a plug-in, right. But so when I do chat gpt, I can either here, let me, let me refresh the page so I can show you what it, what it looks like. No, that's not, I'm sorry, I have mac fingers. Let's go back, let's refresh and, uh, you'll see, it shows you an empty. Well, it's going back to the previous thing, it it shows you normally, which show you the chat. Well, here it is, I guess down at the bottom you can kind of see it. So it says message chat GPT. And then there's that I could type a normal query they need a UX expert.

01:39:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is stupid.

01:39:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little too minimalist how is Babi made? And then it will give me an answer and uh, and actually that's pretty good. Now I can also. So that was the normal chat, but I can also press the search button, okay for that. And then it's going to, and the difference really is only that um chat, gpt's training data is cut off at some point. I can't remember what it is. So this lectures your sources. This is actually now hooked up to the web. What's?

01:40:06
it using no for search. Is it bing? Um? No, its own thing. It's hooked up the. So, basically, what they've done is they've hooked chat gpt up to sources that are, I think that are well, I don't think it's using bing.

01:40:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I know they're using okay like well, so it's more up to date.

01:40:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Partnered with them.

01:40:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:40:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's hard for you to read on this because I can't. Let me go back to the Mac and do chat, so now I can make it a little bit bigger. There we go, now you can see. So that's the search button. Okay, this is the regular thing. So how many star? Let's see what's something current. Oh, I know, I know who won. Oh, boy, this is.

01:40:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who won the Mexico presidential election? Yeah, that was recent, wasn't it? By the way, a woman, interestingly a woman, yeah.

01:41:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah see, then this one says says I may not have the latest updates, right? So that's interesting. Did I use search for that, or did I? Did I maybe mistakenly? Let's see.

01:41:10
Let's put that in search yeah make sure we do this search thing, that's, I think I pressed the wrong button. Now let's see if it knows. Wait, wait, wait, what? There we go, select it. How do I? It has to be highlighted like that. Ah, then we do it. Okay, now searching the web, and it's the same stupid result. Okay, it did give me, on the right here, the actual results. Let's try. Who is the?

01:41:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
resident. This is like a list of who they're partnering with. I guess mexico, assume.

01:41:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's see this is now I'm doing. So, yeah, okay, yeah, so this makes it search. Yeah, the ui's terrible yep, no, it's, it's horrific as of november 6, 2024. So they do have up-to-date information, right? So, uh, that's the difference, I guess. And then on the right here, yeah, we're seeing the citations, which I like because, honestly, you want to. If it's hallucinating, you'd like to see. You know where did you get that right? So, uh, president scheinbaum, yep, um, who you know well because she was head of government of Mexico City for a long time, and so you probably hung out with her.

01:42:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was just telling a story about, I believe, this person last night. There's a little bit of graft involved, unfortunately, but yeah, anyway, it's nice. I guess with her, or just the whole, her and the previous president, not great let's uh, you know what would be a nice um moose bush.

01:42:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A little, yeah, a little, in between the courses. Little sherbet to lighten the palette cleanser, maybe some xbox news okay, please.

01:43:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's a new month, november. Yes, so we have a new round of game pass titles to talk about. Obviously, an incredibly long list of activision blizzard games to brag about.

01:43:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no you lie, no, no, if the good news is though, we are getting a microsoft flight simulator 2024.

01:43:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, um, I I find it weird that the thing they're highlighting the most is that, uh, this one lets you get out of the the plane. It's like this time. It's personal, I think this. I think the thing that's impressive about this one is that the graphics are incredible.

01:43:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it's nuts well, and that's why getting whoa sorry about that.

01:43:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why getting out of the plane I was like.

01:43:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought that happened in my room yeah whoa, whoa, my xbox turn that's uh, that's why getting out of the plane. It's not so much because it's cool to get out of the plane, but the fact that the the reality is that granular that you can get right down next to it yeah, it's supposed to look amazing.

01:43:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, it does look. I mean the videos, I've seen it look amazing and they're doing a lot of um uh offloading to azure curiously, oh interesting, so that you don't have like a terabyte install, you know, to get all those graphics, because the way that works today is you get the better graphics of these world updates that they do, and it's. They're just tens, hundreds of gigabytes each depending on the one, and you know it adds up.

01:44:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So but they're. Are they rendering in the cloud or is it just supposedly? Yeah, that's what they said so we'll see.

01:44:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm curious to try this. This is a, uh, hybrid model, right? So you're gonna have a bunch of the obviously the game on your device xbox or pc um, but a bunch of it's gonna come from the cloud too, wow so huh, you can do aerial if you're in a submarine. You're kind of screwed, you can fly your own little paper airplane.

01:44:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all you get so what do we get? Metal slug tactics go mecca ball. No, the big one, though, is goat simulator remastered that's a fun game don't knock goat but I love that it's remastered.

01:45:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Remastered Because I need the goat to be as realistic as possible using the graphics capabilities we have today.

01:45:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And if you don't want to be a goat, you can be a halibut. With Harold Halibut, you can be a halibut.

01:45:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just okay. One of the games is called Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. You really feel like they're at the bottom of the barrel here. I just don't know what's happening. Yeah, I mean, it's like there's no bigger spectrum than from flight simulator 2024 to turnip boy robs a bank. I don't think that's. That's the spectrum, like.

01:45:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is why I'm weird, because that's the game. I would probably die right right. I want to know more about Turnip Boy and his bank. I don't know.

01:45:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, it's not in the notes. I might have mentioned this a month ago or something. I've been talking to my son about this. I thought it was once a month but apparently it might be as much as once a week. But Prime Gaming, if you're a Prime customer at Amazon, pay attention to that. They add free games to that thing at least every two weeks. I think it's every week.

01:46:04
If you look at it just once a month, it's kind of incredible. And the games that you're getting, some of them are on Amazon, obviously, but some of them are on GOG, the Go Little Games service. Some of them are on Epic Games, some of them are on Steam, and when you get games this way, they yours, they're free forever. Once they're part of your account, they never go away. So if you play games on pc you you should know about that, because everyone kind of knows like epic games gives away a game or two every month or whatever it is. You know it's nice. Amazon gives away like dozens of games every month. It's great, hundreds, maybe it's crazy. Go look at that if you have. Really, where do I get that? They look up just google or chat, chat, gpt, search, uh, prime gaming, and you'll see it there.

01:46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it their version of game pass?

01:46:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, it's just you it's a perk of prime, right, and so you know, with with amazon prime, they're always trying to be like look, you get all this stuff it's. It's not just like the physical thing where you get deliveries next day, second day, whatever.

01:47:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:47:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You get a bunch of these digital perks.

01:47:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This isn't using their streaming service.

01:47:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nope, this is you Like? Go to the Doom one, for example, like this is Doom, you download it. Yeah, you don't download it here. Here, you're just adding it to your account so you get the. I don't know which service this is going to be through, I don't remember, but I got this last month or something. It will I have to activate Prime.

01:47:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gaming first it puts it into.

01:47:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this one is actually from Amazon, I guess. So now it's in your Amazon account, if that's where it is. Oh, no, I get a code. Yeah, that you can. Okay, so this goes to one of the other services I mentioned.

01:47:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so, oh wow, and then it's mine forever, it's yours forever.

01:47:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep.

01:47:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What, the what.

01:47:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I know I don't know why no one is talking about this. There's an incredible collection of games there right now and they're not there forever. So, like that Doom game's been there for two, four weeks. Whatever it is, it's going to go away eventually. Just look at this every week or two. It Look at this every week or two.

01:47:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's crazy Copy code. And then where do I use the code? It should go to this oh what do I do next, from the Microsoft Store to claim the game Open Windows 11.

01:48:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Search for.

01:48:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft Store. So it's the store version, yeah.

01:48:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's awesome. No, it's incredible, but it goes across all those services. I forgot the Microsoft Store.

01:48:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is thebox app on on windows or whatever um, yeah, it's nuts what yep, I never heard of this. I know I. I don't know why no one talks about oh look, bioshock remastered. I know it's, I want to get that.

01:48:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so see where that one is, does it also get a code or something? Let's see, I guess this is going to go to a site, right? Yeah, so you're going to redeem it at gog or epic probably, or GOG or Epic probably, or?

01:48:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steam. Yeah, GOG, good old games.

01:48:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so you have to have the account and all those.

01:48:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, but you're, these are serious. See now, do you click like the top, where this isn't really a stair?

01:48:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
here I know, but do you click that? My favorite one is where you click a bunch and hit enter, then it adds more and you're like guys, can we just agree that I'm on my computer? I feel like this is helping Google in their AI ambitions.

01:49:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just a little too much. Let's see, nope, didn't get it right. Didn't get it right, didn't get it right, so there's a hydrant. That one's easy. Does this corner count? What about the little? I would yep Yay, I've got Bioshock remastered Free. Yeah, so mastered free. Yeah, so you get a site. You'll click through, it'll go to gog and you sign in and there it is. I look uh, it's. It's kind of sad that the most important thing I learned today on windows weekly was how to get free games on well, they're windows games.

01:49:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, good point. That's the point. There are windows games. That's where the accounts. They're free. You can't be free. Well, maybe you could be. I don't know. They could pay you to play it. I guess, I don't know. That is. I know it's crazy. My son and I text back. He's like I can't believe this. I know it's like just get it.

01:49:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who cares? It's crazy. So of course, the snark in the Discord Harold Finch says, finch says prime game redeems is hardly news unless you are leo. So it was news to me, I don't know okay sorry, I'm sorry, I'm not as connected to the whole internet as everyone.

01:50:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just like. My point was if you didn't know about this, you should know about this. It's pretty freaking good. So yeah, that's great, it's crazy, especially if you haven't looked at it yet. Like, when you go through the collection you're gonna be like, oh my god, you're gonna find like 10 of them, you know I could play that game again yeah I loved bioshock I don't. I don't remember how I came across this. Maybe they finally sent an email like to customers or something. I don't remember, but I'm like okay, I'll look at this.

01:50:32
And it was like yikes, like the first day I did it, I think I downloaded or added 12 or 15 games, you know, across multiple accounts, whatever. Wow, it's good. Yes, it's less crazy if you're not paying for prep. Thank you, anyway, I feel like I qualified it properly anyway. Okay, uh, to bring it back, the only well.

01:50:56
The other xbox story is microsoft announced, through the xbox insider program, an ai powered support like a virtual support agent. I don't know, I just I have, I everyone pc makers are starting to do this. Hp and that laptop I reviewed has have. Of course, they have their own ai companion, because obviously the future of computing is like chat interfaces, um, but I do feel like there is an AI function that could be pretty good for solving problems with whatever it is, maybe a console, a PC, whatever. I think that might not be so horrible, but it's not something I'm personally excited to test, so I don't really whatever. Anyway, you can test that if you want or if you're an Xbox insider. It's not very exciting if you don't really. Whatever. Anyway, you can test that if you want or if you're an Xbox insider. It's not very exciting if you don't have an Xbox. Yes, thank you, sorry, okay.

01:51:50
And then Nintendo also announced their earnings. I put this back here because it's video game related, but the big thing to me is that they had to scale back their predictions for how many Switches they're going to sell through the end of their fiscal year, which ends at the end of March. Not too far back, it's just by 1 million units. And if they hit their target by whatever, that is, six months from today, I guess the switch will become their best-selling hardware device of all time. Wow, yeah, not surprising. Yeah, I mean, this thing has done pretty well Since then.

01:52:25
I didn't link to it, I guess. But they've also said that whatever the next thing is, they will announce that before the end of the fiscal year. My guess is they don't want to announce it now because the holidays are coming up and that might screw up sales further. And they do want to hit that target right, but probably in January might screw up sales right further. And they do want to hit that target right, but probably at january january 1 or something they'll announce the next thing and it will be backwards compatible with switch. So if you have this library software, it's going to work on the next one, I will almost certainly so. It says windows weekly isn't very exciting if you don't have a pc. That fair enough. I mean, I, yes, I. I will now qualify everything I say that way. I think that's true. It's true, although.

01:53:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm running. No, I should you know what. That's not true, cause I'm running windows.

01:53:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The simplest way to say it is if this topic is not of interest to you, this story will not be interesting to you. I think it's, you know. Yes, fair enough. It's like anything is intuitive if you already know how to do it. Right, you know, fair enough. Um, so we didn't write this one up either. But uh, sony has, or the reviews have come out for the playstation 5 pro, and most of them are pretty meh in the sense that it's not a dramatic improvement in quality and it's expensive, right, and it's super expensive 700 bucks. Um, you pay extra for the drive if you want. Or, yeah, it's not a dramatic improvement in quality and it's expensive, right, and it's super expensive 700 bucks. Um, you pay extra for the drive if you want, or?

01:53:45
yeah, it's 700 bucks without a drive, although you know what I to be clear, they mean an optical drive. I don't. Oh, yes, you have storage. Yeah, I'm at the point where not having an optical drive is actually. I don't need an optical drive. Yeah, no no, but yeah, it's very expensive game stop anymore instead of the size of, like a, a truck, it's the size of a car, you know it's still pretty big. It's a weird shape so it's hard to fit it in the same design.

01:54:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks, yeah, same basic design um, what's pro about it?

01:54:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
bigger processor it does more games, consistently 4k, 60, basically it's just it does upscaling. Um okay, um too nice to I know you're reading the discord.

01:54:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know I'm getting distracted anyone?

01:54:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
for the three minutes I will play call of duty today. If you want to get in the game and t-bag me. I completely, I'm not saying I live for it, but I, I would understand it, it's okay. Um, I, at least these guys are doing the pro thing. I mean, microsoft is kind of treading water here. Um, you know, we discussed possible.

01:54:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like these pro releases or these secondary releases are really just trying to stretch out the lifespan of a console.

01:54:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's 100, true, but you know, for people who are fans of the uh platform and can afford it, I mean, there are probably people who have upgraded straight through. Now this generation has been different Sony and Microsoft. Microsoft released two different versions from a performance graphics capability perspective. Immediately at the same time. Sony released two versions, one with optical, one without. At the same time, sony released two versions, one with optical, one without, at the same time.

01:55:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So now, Sony has a better graphical version, which is probably above everything we see on the Xbox side.

01:55:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it has two terabytes. It has plenty of storage, yeah. Well, you need it because for all those graphics, textures, right, I mean you're going to be a lot of resources there. But yeah, I think you know it's expensive. It is interesting to me that Sony being expensive this generation hasn't hurt it. Back in the PS3, xbox 360 days, it being expensive was a really big problem, Right that I guess hasn't been the case, Because it was $100 more.

01:55:54
Then again they're on track to have the speed limit worth selling PlayStation of all time. So maybe I'm wrong to me, maybe they're not doing the right thing, I don't know, but yeah they are.

01:56:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm curious.

01:56:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So my uh, our son is, uh, michael's, a ps5 guy do you make him sleep like in a separate building in the yard he's?

01:56:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
literally sitting in a separate building. But but um uh, I'm curious to see if he's gonna. Now he's spending his own money at this point.

01:56:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If he's gonna I mean, what happens like what? What could be next, right? Uh, we know, nintendo is overdue for a refresh, a new console, I mean xbox sony, I mean an oled screen on the switch, so I don't know what yeah, but they never did even like you know, 4k do they even do? Is it 1080p?

01:56:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, 1080p yeah, on an oled screen, which is fine on a screen that size it's this big yeah yeah, that's great right um I don't know you're right. I I've I've asked this question years ago. Or is it the end of the line for consoles?

01:56:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
console gaming I mean I mean 8k like actual 8k. I mean sony was advertising that for a while yeah, but what? Are you gonna play it on? I don't know. Yeah, that's what I mean. I I don't. I know it's not why, but it's one of the reasons why maybe microsoft's approach to go multi-screen makes some sense.

01:57:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know where do you go next jeff makes a really good point in our youtube chat. He says where are the games? Because if you don't have games that are like I gotta get this, I gotta play this I mean, I think that the uh, the goat remastered thing kind of speaks to that or turn it boy. You know, turn it boy, turn it boy robs the bank.

01:57:40
It's beautiful, that's really funny uh, all right, let's take a break. We have the back of the book still to come. Paul thurott we'll be doing his tips, his picks and, uh, the usual, we are still gonna do a run as radio and I have a brown liquor movie pick that's crazy coming up it is a documentary or like a movie movie no, it's a fictional it's like one of the great films of all time, but it's pretty old so I don't know if it's a new movie about guys who decide that it's a.

01:58:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's like danish, maybe that mad sky, that's was in um oh yeah, I like meds yeah, he looked this up, because I'll look it up. Uh, there's a. There's a fairly recent movie where this group of friends, they're like we're just going to be drunk all day long and go about our lives, and this is supposed to be a better approach. Another round.

01:58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Another round.

01:58:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've not seen it, but it's an amusing premise it sounds awful.

01:58:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who would go see a movie about a bunch of guys day drinking? I mean, I did, I mean I did see hangover, but that was more about this kind of movie.

01:58:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You might like this movie, that's all I'm saying and I believe hangover involved roofies but I might be wrong right 2020, so yeah, times have changed.

01:58:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in those days because covid sitting around the house getting drunk all day, seemed pretty good, seemed like uh, maybe it was a solution to a problem, not a problem.

01:59:03
Look in search of a solution yeah yeah uh, ladies, gentlemen, this program today, this here program, this windows weekly episode brought to you by threat locker, love these guys and I love the concept. You've heard us talk, uh, about zero trust. This is a brilliant way of of doing security. I think it was first. I first heard about it. Google was doing it, idea being, yeah, you have a great, you have great perimeter defenses. But you know what keeps me up at night? The idea that somebody might get inside and then they've got full power, full trust, right.

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02:01:45
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02:02:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
second oh oh, my wife and I got some feedback on our youtube channel, which is about mexico city, and I'm gonna I'm paraphrasing I don't remember exactly how he said it, but he said I appreciate you promoting intentional problems, but there's something like that Like I don't, what are we doing? Is this your eternal spring channel? Yeah, Like, in other words, like we were like you know, street food is safe to eat. And he's like oh yeah, If you want to get sick, it's safe to eat. It's like have you ever had street food?

02:03:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, the street food.

02:03:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No the street food.

02:03:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you kidding?

02:03:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Perfectly safe.

02:03:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, it's so good.

02:03:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know if you live in the United States, you get sick of eating at McDonald's, just to say just you know the street food in Mexico.

02:03:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what Mexico City is like, but it's unbelievable. It's got to be amazing.

02:03:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and it's so inexpensive. I struggle with the. You know the exchange rate thing a lot Because the number's really big. And then you do the math. You're like no, that can't be that small. And it is.

02:03:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's stupid. Well, that's why I like the 20 to 1. Because then it's a nickel. A peso is a nickel.

02:03:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. It's easy to remember when it goes.

02:03:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't do the math.

02:03:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So look, in my role. You know I write the Windows 11 field guide, for example. You know I'm trying to give advice to people who, by and large, are normal users. They're not highly technical and one of the things I've been talking about probably since it's been a thing which I guess I don't know Windows 8, certainly Windows 10 on has been you know most people are better off signing into Windows with their Microsoft account and you know you get some pushback from that. But if you're technical enough to push back on that, then you don't listen to that kind of advice. Don't worry about it.

02:04:36
In recent years, of course, they've been making it harder and harder not to do that right. They've gotten rid of the UI that lets you sign into a local account. They've made it hard right and there's little strategies and workarounds for that kind of thing. But there was this note with I started with Windows 11 24H2 that I didn't understand because to my knowledge, this was already happening. Because to my knowledge this was already happening, which was that when you install Windows 24H2, or if you get a new PC with 24H2, the disk is automatically encrypted Right, as it should be, yeah, but it already is. Like I didn't understand. Where does that come from right? Oh, it's not BitLock. What's the point of that? I see, and the point is that if you get a new PC or you reset a PC and setup comes up and it says sign into your Microsoft account, and you do, once you do that, it encrypts the disk. And it does that because it can store the recovery key in OneDrive so you can get to it from a different device. That's the thing that's missing. When you encrypt, you know you must acquit. No, when you encrypt the disk, you have to have a way to recover it, right, if something goes wrong. And I was curious, like, what does that look like? And so I did a couple of. Well, you know, for the book I had updated for 24H2 anyway. So I had to see which workarounds still work. So you do a clean install of Windows. So you get a new computer. You want to bypass the block and settings that prevents you from using a local account.

02:06:03
Does it encrypt the disk? Like how could it? It can't back up that recovery key. Like, how does it do it? So it turns out it sort of encrypts the disk, but it doesn't fully encrypt the disk until you let it save a recovery key. So you actually have to go into settings and say I'd like to fully, you know, activate the encryption if you will, is the term. And then it says okay, but now you have to save this recovery key and you can't save it to the disk, right? Because it could be, you know, it's on the disk that you might not be able to get into later. So you have to save it to a file and put it off sites, email it, you know, whatever, and that's that is a little bit of a change, but that made me wonder. That's kind of interesting.

02:06:41
So it means so does that mean that one of the main reasons to use a microsoft account doesn't apply anymore? And if you don't care about all the pass-through stuff I talked about earlier with pass skis and everything, if you don't care that your microsoft account will automatically pass through the microsoft store app or to the outlook app or to one drive or whatever, whatever it might be. Is there a way to do this as securely or at least securely enough if you will, where you don't have to use a Microsoft account? And if you did that, could you configure Windows in such a way that a lot of that certification stuff I'm so concerned about would not happen. In other words, it wouldn't badge you to enable folder backup in OneDrive or whatever. And so I did a bunch of different tests to do this and mostly successful local account sign-ins, perpetual version of Office instead of Microsoft 365 subscription or the Microsoft 365 subscription Sign-in to just the apps you're going to use.

02:07:36
So you still get. It's not pass-through, but you still. You know you're well, it is pass-through. You still associate the account is still registered in the system, but it's not password, but you still. You know you're, you're well, it is password. You still associate. The account is still registered in the system, but it's not the sign-in account. You apply a strong password, you use a pin and then you add windows hello facial or fingerprint recognition. You know you're secure.

02:07:55
You're secure. I mean technically not. You don't have every single security protection that you have with a microsoft account, for example. Your biggest lack is you don't have every single security protection that you have with a microsoft account, for example your biggest lack is you can't forget your password, right? There's no 2fa, there's no account recovery, right? That's what you're saying, that's the that's the biggest loss.

02:08:12
That's the big one. But if you're a technical user and I'm guessing if you're listening to this unless you somehow really ended up in the wrong place and you were expecting martha stewart or something um you probably are, martha stewart on windows is a hell of a good, you know she's a mac user.

02:08:29
I think it's. There's something interesting here. So I'm going to keep going down this path. I mostly not because of the security element. That's the thing I didn't want to highlight too much, because you can secure that account, that you can encrypt the disk, you can do all the right things. The thing for me is how far do you go into the Microsoft MSA hole before it starts nagging you? You know so I've done two physical computer installs slightly differently one with perpetual office license with, uh, microsoft 365, and so far not that this is scientific, but neither one of them has badgered me, even though I'm using one drive in both.

02:09:10
So I like that's the concern right is that somehow microsoft's gonna get you because you didn't use a microsoft account well, they're gonna just start being them again, you know, they're gonna start ruining it, you know just be, you know, and so so far it's kind of.

02:09:22
This is interesting to me and this raises the specter of I I speak to a mainstream audience as well, especially in the book. Can I recommend this to people, right? If that that's the certification stuff is a problem. Yeah, I don't know, but I'm, I'm maybe, maybe that's the question. Yep, anyway, um, if anyone is doing this, um, are you doing it?

02:09:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you do?

02:09:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, you've done a couple, but well, I just started doing it, so I don't normally know I always sign up with a microsoft account. So yeah, um, honestly, the experience isn't that different. It's just that I don't get passionate to use folder backup, so I kind of like that from Office or Windows. Right, there's two parts to the badgering. Right, if you use Microsoft Word, that you get through Microsoft 365, you're in Windows 11, you're not using folder backup. Actually, it doesn't matter if you are or not. If your default save is to an outside of OneDrive location, it will badge you every single time you use the app, with a yellow bar across the top. It's really irritating. But the version I get with Perpetual Office or 2024 or my Microsoft 365 account but I've signed in with a Microsoft sorry, a local account it doesn't badger me. I'm fascinated by this.

02:10:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Well, now I have to buy a Windows pc, so I can try this yeah, just uh.

02:10:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, hold on to that copilot plus pc hack into it so you don't have a. You know, no, I, I think the snapdragon dev kit.

02:10:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should have that um, unless you don't want it no, no, I do want.

02:10:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I definitely. I will literally use it every day, um but but you could do this on any computer. I mean, you could do this. Maybe I'll get the HP, oh yeah.

02:11:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it the Omen?

02:11:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's the.

02:11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Omnibook Ultra yeah, okay.

02:11:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a couple of configurations. The upgrade to the best processor, best graphics is possibly $30. I mean, it's not expensive. It's worth getting Sounds, it's, it's not expensive it's, it's worth getting.

02:11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It sounds like it's worth it, yeah.

02:11:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the Omni book is kind of their consumer, isn't it? Yeah, the way they rebranded their product lines this year, so anything that's the obvious. Consumer elite is business right Book is laptop right. Ultra is the top of the line from the model perspective, So's like ultra x, and then I think and they have gaming below that with the oh well yeah, that's outside of that, but yeah, yeah, gaming is outside so which one did you like the it's called omni book ultra ultra, not x, because that's no snapdragon there it is, it's ultra okay this is the amd ryzen 9 ai yeah

02:12:02
899 yep, but then I can upgrade it like you can configure it should I get pro.

02:12:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, oh, we're getting to this. We're getting into. Paul tells leo what buttons to click realm uh, maybe I'll stop now I wouldn't.

02:12:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My advice is not to get it through hp. There are okay, get it at best, buy or no, I mean just online, like there are places that sell keys, basically okay because the price is better, way better, yeah, oh, okay, that's good.

02:12:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I'm not gonna get it. I just I'm messing with you, I'm not gonna not to do that, but it's well.

02:12:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I all I can promise you is it's something I'm gonna spend a lot of time on now and I think it's as I do new pcs over.

02:12:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm gonna do this and it's to see if it's not hard. You used to have to jump through hoops to do this. Is that not the case anymore?

02:12:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, you still have to jump to, you still have to jump through hoops to configure it out of the box with a local account.

02:13:00
But but you can do it right from setup by turning off internet or what. Yeah, it's in my book, leo. No, it is in the book, but there used to be several ways to do it. One of the easiest ways is to make the install. Well, you wouldn't do this on a new computer, so on a new a, yeah, there's a keyboard thing and you go back and you know there's no internet and you just do that. If you are have your own computer and you want to reset it, you don't care about getting the stuff that the computer comes with. You can use rufus. We'll work around that. Create install media.

02:13:33
That doesn't um so there's install media that doesn't require, yeah, it turns off the switches and setup so that you can do whatever you want.

02:13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it bypasses all the hard. Oh, rufus does that. Yeah, I remember that they still do that. Okay, good, okay, yeah, I think that's fine. Look, I think that's how people should do it.

02:13:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it's, I know, but it's a hard thing to say to a normal person like, all right, so you got to do a little bit of a. It's gonna seem hacky, it's a weird, it's, you know, um, but you can do it. You know it works and and microsoft has cut back on the methods that work, but the there's that people have done the command line thing. It's that, oh, or ubi slash bypass nro still works. You know, you just have to make sure you don't connect to the internet over ethernet or whatever it might be, and then you can get through it.

02:14:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is hands-on Windows for this week, so everybody should watch this week's hands-on Windows.

02:14:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I did it. It is, I think I did do one. Oh, you're saying it literally came out this week.

02:14:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's fascinating, yeah, because you do them ahead of time, right? Okay, so it's this week's hands on windows.

02:14:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I thought you were saying you should do it for this week.

02:14:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, right, it's on the twit plus feed or you go to twittv. Is it twittv slash, how? I think it is. It's also in your book, which you can get from lean pubcom, the field guide to windows 11. Is there an article on throughoutcom?

02:14:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I, yeah, it's in there. Oh really, I don't even need the book if I have the premium. Yeah, if you want this, just the web versions.

02:15:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like every time, I update it I update the web version too, so they're always together. I've been a premium member since you started it.

02:15:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I can remember these. I used to have a list, you know, so now it's just like all right, just do this. This is one thing that always works. It's fine, fine.

02:15:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I certainly I feel comfortable doing that. Yeah, I understand You're worried, that's the point.

02:15:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not going to tell my wife to do this. Here's an idea Log in with a local account. You know she doesn't care, you know. Well, that's the thing. If somebody knows that there is such a thing or wants to do it then right, I would say, and if they don't know and don't care, then don't just let them let the windows be windows. Just accept the warm embrace of the matrix, you'll be fine.

02:15:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's talk about your app pick of the week, sir yeah.

02:15:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I mentioned proton vpn at the earlier in the show. There's also been an update to proton drive. They have a docs solution that's like google docs, right, and now they have kind of everything. Now that's yeah, they're they're expanding. It's nice, yeah, um, their docs app now supports a track changes feature that they call suggestions, which is our suggesting, I think, but it's, uh, the way they bill it is. We're the only end-to-end encrypted cloud service that offers track changes.

02:16:20
Right, works inside and outside of your organization or, if you're an individual, works with people external to your account. So you know it just works the way you would expect. They're just kind of building it out, so this is not something I actually use yet. Like I said, I'm kind of baby stepping into this, but I am kind of curious about this because I really I like Proton a lot. I think that's obvious. I kind of mentioned them a lot, but I like their whole approach to things and it's hard to argue, you know, with what they're trying to do. So it's something to know about. I don't think many people know that Docs even exists.

02:16:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it's so funny because I have a proton everything account and I just don't ever use it. I mean, I had it, I got it so I could try it, like you, if I try it, look at it. And I just never use it. But now I'm thinking I should really take advantage of it. I'm paying for it, let's. Uh. I know richard's not here, but I think if richard were here he would certainly mention that the fact that the next run as radio show features aiden finn talking about his friend, by the way, yep, uh, does he work for microsoft? He does microsoft training.

02:17:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No he's on microsoft, you know, outside of microsoft, but supporting microsoft customers, yeah software defined networking.

02:17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How does that work in azure? That's kind of interesting. Yeah, that's the usual he also did run as radio. They did one about uh, blazer, blazer, uh, which is that dot net web tech in dot net nine, also worth listening to, ah yeah, richard does two shows, run his radio and dot net rocks with the carl franklin and they're both well worth listening to, as always. And I know Richard will be talking about Aiden Finn, I've got to look at that because that looks suspiciously like someone I know there.

02:18:13
It's hard to tell. He's kind of a blob. Now, richard's not here to do a whiskey thing, I am sad to report. Uh, he's in tunisia. I'm hoping he'll be back next week and maybe he'll do two whiskeys back. Yeah, you know, I I don't know if there's any such thing as tunisian whiskey.

02:18:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, um, but I am more of a hookah thing.

02:18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Probably I'm gonna recommend a movie about whiskey, Is that okay? Yeah, when I was a kid my aunt brought me to a screening of a movie from Ealing Studios, old British studio called Tight Little Island. And the fun thing about Tight Little Island is it's a true story about a US cargo ship filled with whiskey that ran aground off this Scottish island. But what's funny is the island had run out of whiskey and the ship was full of whiskey.

02:19:23
This is a very funny movie. The original title was Tight Little Island. They've renamed it Whiskey Galore. It is available on Apple TV. I've never heard of this. It is a hysterical fun, great movie, especially the scramble to get all the whiskey off the rocks, whiskey galore, tight little island. Uh, it's a very old movie. I think it comes from a 1940. It says 40. No, I'm sorry, oh, it's not that old 1949. It looks like it comes from 1930 but I guess it looks.

02:19:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This looks like king kong era it doesn't it?

02:20:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
1949. I remember my aunt taking me to this because it was one of her favorite movies and it was one of those kind of weird midnight screenings or something. Yeah, it was like not in even a movie theater.

02:20:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See, this is more appropriate for a child. How old were you?

02:20:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was maybe 12.

02:20:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, my father took me to see excalibur and I was scarred for life. It's like my mother didn't want to go to these, like scary, r-rated movies. Yeah, yeah, so he would take me this was just fun.

02:20:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a movie kids could enjoy, but adults maybe get a little more out of it understanding what it would be like to be on a little island with no whiskey. And then and it's a true story too a freighter runs up on the ground with 50 000 cases of whiskey were they bringing it to the island to save? Them.

02:20:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I think it was just it just happened to be going by just happened to be going by. I think there's more to the story. I think someone got underneath it and was like, yeah, could be, it's um yeah.

02:21:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think if you look it up on Wikipedia, uh, there is quite a bit of uh lore around it and it is apparently a true story. So, yeah, I wonder, I wonder what, what, what really happened? It's on Wikipedia as whiskey whiskey galore so maybe that's the original title, but I remember seeing it as Tight Little Island.

02:21:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't even recognize the well Bruce. No, I don't recognize these actors either. No, this is very strange.

02:21:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You might recognize Ealing Studios. That was an English movie studio that did a lot of Alec Guinness movies and some fun movies. That did a lot of Alec Guinness movies and some fun movies. The story is based on the running around of the SS politician off an island. The island had run out of whiskey because of wartime rationing. The weather was so poor over production that its 10-week schedule ran over by five weeks. That's crazy. It's a Scottish movie and I'm Scott. And maybe that's crazy, it's it's a scottish movie and I'm scott, and maybe that's why my aunt brought me. I don't know, but I will. Uh, it's a wonderful. Yeah, the man in the white suit from ealing lavender hill mob. That's right, kevin uh brewer knows all of these uh movies.

02:22:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The original title was tight little island I think there's a version they could make of uh, you know, like during the pandemic, pennsylvania was the only state in the united states that decided to shut all the liquor stores down. Oh and uh, you know, maybe like a plane with whiskey flying overhead could have crashed in the lehigh valley.

02:22:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apparently there was a remake of it. Now I'm seeing on imdb. There was a remake. Don't get the 2016 version 1949 e-link.

02:22:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what's Studios? What's that? One rated, though the one you recommended was 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

02:22:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's a classic. Yeah, it's a classic and I don't think many people have heard of it. Yes, it got remade as Whiskey Galore, but don't know. Well, you know what? See the original first. I guess is all I'm saying the 2016 movie. I don't know. That is it. Actually, it doesn't have very good ratings on IMDb.

02:23:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No one does it no.

02:23:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get the old one, that's the classic, and maybe you'll start getting into Ealing Studios movies, which are all amazing, amazing movies, movies, um, ladies and gentlemen, despite the lack of a richard campbell and whiskey, we've survived, yep, the length of this show, the brett's and the gers with I always um I always think of um.

02:23:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you remember douglas adams? Obviously the author of the horse uh hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, like a lot of people that are writers or comedians or actor whatever, really into technology, he had, at the end of his life, had a blog. He would like blog about technology and I remember, after he passed away, the guy who was like his personal assistant blogged for a little while on his account and he talked about at the time it was Mac OS X Tiger and he said you know he would have have got tiger, he would have really enjoyed tiger. Like I feel bad that he wasn't around to see this and that's kind of how I feel about richard not being here. It's like richard would have added some stuff. You know like richard would have enjoyed this conversation. You know like he, richard, would have got this. You know it's a shame, yeah but it's not dead.

02:24:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It kind of reminds me still with us. He's just in tunisia and he will be back next week. We do the show every wednesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm, eastern, 1900, utc. You can watch us live on eight different streams. Club members get to watch in discord, uh, which isn't necessarily a benefit. Can you do them all?

02:24:43
at the same time you could have them all on. They'd all be in somewhere different on the show. It'd be a. It'd be like being in a clock shop at midnight. It'd be kind of cuckoo, but uh, who knows, I don't know has anybody ever done that. So you'd have to tune in discord, be a club member first. Seven dollars a month ad free versions of all the shows. Please join discord. Uh. Youtubecom slash twitch live. Twitchtv slash twit. We're also on xcom. Uh, as long as elon doesn't kick us off. Uh, for being democrats.

02:25:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, jeez I'm a registered independent.

02:25:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you very much oh good, I'm glad to hear it. That's good. See, uh, elon, he could stay. Uh, uh, we're also on linkedin, facebook, kick and tiktok, so we're really everywhere kids yeah for the kids 880 people watching us right now.

02:25:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we should be dumping our like water buckets on our heads or something. I can't. I haven't figured out tiktok yet, but I think it's something like a challenge is a few years ago, paul.

02:25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But uh, if you want to do the harlem shuffle, it's okay. You get up on your desk, dance around. Uh, we'll find something for you to do on tiktok. Anyway, if you don't want to watch those streams, you can get. Get the show on the website twittv slash. Ww. Paul also carries the audio version on his site. Or do you put video on your site? I just link to it.

02:26:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I link to the yeah, okay, I don't like host it or anything.

02:26:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you shouldn't, because we do, that's our job.

02:26:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's what we do Want people to know it's.

02:26:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, audio and video available on the website. There's a link on that website to our YouTube channel, which is a great way to share little pieces of it, like if your aunt doesn't know that Amazon Prime has games.

02:26:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or that you could sign into Windows with a local account.

02:26:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This would be the ideal way to tell her about that. Just clip that and send it off.

02:26:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or maybe she'll be like who is this? Who sent me this?

02:26:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why is this here? There's also a RSS feed so you can subscribe in your favorite podcast, client, audio or video. Either way, please watch every week because we love having you. If you're not a club member, support the show by joining Seven bucks a month, ad free versions of all the uh, all the shows. You also get access to a twit plus feed which has special stuff. We only do, uh, you know, at special times. For instance, we just did last week, uh, chris marquardt's photo review. Uh, we did a coffee thing. I think you'd enjoy this. I know you're a coffee lover, paul. We have a kind of an occasional coffee show we do with mark prince, the coffee geek. Uh, we're gonna, the next one we're gonna do, and I'll, I'll give you, I'll let you know when we do it is a tasting. So, uh, we had, uh, last time we had the woman who runs beans, which is a subscription coffee bean service and she's gonna put together with a z.

02:27:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I think I've heard of this.

02:27:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, she's going to put together a little five-bean set that everybody can get A five-bean tasting. Five-bean tasting.

02:27:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, there's more than five beans.

02:27:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Five varietals and we'll do a little tasting. That should be a lot of fun. We'll let you know about that. The Stacey's Book Club.

02:28:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's all sorts of good events going on inside the club.

02:28:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm thinking about bringing back a little call-in radio thing, because I yeah, I'm actually surprised you don't do that. Um, I've, you know it's a technology thing, yeah, but I found, I think, uh, something called call-in studio and I even have a number, uh, and it's just a matter of getting all the details worked out, but it would allow us to take phone calls and then I might start doing a little kind of tech guy-like show. I really enjoyed doing that. I miss doing that. Anyway, lots of reasons to be in the club for all of that and more. Go to twittv slash club twit, or scan the QR code in the upper left-hand corner of your screen.

02:28:39
Paul Theriot lives at therottcom, that is, uh, become a premium member and then you get the book and all sorts of additional content, including how to sign up for an msa, a microsoft windows account without msa I'm still it's.

02:28:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like it feels weird. I'm still working through it this is what people want.

02:28:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They want freedom. Do it. It's your chance to show them the way. You can also get his books at leanpubcom. Richard Campbell, when he's here, is also on yeah.

02:29:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When he bothers to show up.

02:29:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He bothers Show up. I hope he's having a good time in Tunisia. I don't know what. I don't know what.

02:29:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what happened in tunisia everything I know about tunisia I wrote in a seventh grade paper well, you know, it's not much and then and then had to retain since then. I know where it is geographically it's in africa, right? It's in north right of the northern coast, like mid, like basic middle right, I've been to morocco right next door.

02:29:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's close. Um, uh, the greater metropolitan area of tunis tunis is often referred to as grand tunis. There you go. Okay, that's like when I start referring to.

02:29:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They don't want you to call it greater tunis that's all I can say.

02:29:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, it's in the maghreb. Anyway. I hope he's having a good time. I'm sure he is. Yeah, and he will be back. Maybe he's traversing the grand avenue habib bourguiba, which is often referred to as the tunisian chancelize I wonder if he I hope they refer to him as the desert fox- actually I'm very'm very interested, cause he wasn't he going to go to go to Carthage, visit Carthage? Yep, yeah, that's right.

02:30:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that will be interesting. Older than my desert Fox reference, but yes. Yes, that is there.

02:30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, we cover all the ages. Thank you, mr Paul Thorat, so good to have you. Appreciate your time today and we will see you next week right here. All of you winners and dozers on Winners Weekly, bye-bye.