Windows Weekly 907 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here, Richard Campbell has the week off. We're going to talk about 24H2. The quality issues continue, as Paul says, like a parade with no end. A new trick Microsoft Edge has for getting your Chrome data and YARM earns about a tenth what Qualcomm does. Don't even get me started on Apple. All that and a lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therod and Richard Campbell, Episode 907, recorded Wednesday, November 13th 2024. It's interesting being me. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Normally you winners and dozers. We have three of us in the studio, but Rich Campbell is not feeling too good after all those travels. He brought back the tunisian flu or something.
01:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's just me and you, paul I'm surprised this doesn't happen to him more often. He travels to a degree I don't even understand. Yeah, you know, and I travel a lot, or I used to, um, but man, he's on the road a lot yeah, yeah, that's, that's pretty his job, isn't it is?
01:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, is this public speaker? Yeah, right, yeah have podium will travel kind of.
01:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yeah, yeah, no, I mean good for him. I I'm amazed he didn't do it at all.
01:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great, it's awesome, yeah but that's okay because this is, uh, the way windows weekly was for the first 400 or 500 shows, and so we can do.
01:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it, we can do it.
01:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, paul Thurott is in Mexico City. He is, of course, the man in charge of Thurottcom T-H-U-R-R-O-T-Tcom, and he writes some excellent books, including Windows Everywhere and the Field Guide to Windows 11, available at LeanPubcom. And he is Prestige 11 on Call of Duty. Are you? I don't even know anymore. Do you get back to your old Prestige level? Do you have to start again?
02:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I think each game has its own Prestige, but you get little pop-ups when stuff happens. It was like you've won 50 multiplayer games, or whatever.
02:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's nice, it's good, it's nice, it's good, it's nice, yeah, yeah. So, uh, we'll talk about, I'm sure we'll talk about that in our vaunted xbox segment, but before we do that, today we try to do these things in order and, of course, the most important thing is 24 h2 yep, and it's going great, leo, um, you know, like um in mexico, like if you were a mexico travel blogger, you would do something like your daily dose of mexico.
02:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, your daily dose of 24 h2 is like what went wrong today, because this is possibly the most unreliable, most poorly poorly engineered version of Windows ever made. And I made that case I don't know two, three weeks ago. And then every week since there's been new issues. The latest is I got an email from someone who said I just updated from 23 to 24H2. And now it's telling me that my version of Windows is unsupported. So I was like, wow, I've never seen that, but I'm not surprised. And now I'm seeing on Reddit that multiple people are seeing this. So there's going to be.
03:30
I think Microsoft has found out which KB screwed it up. But that's what happens. You know, when you update something like Windows twice a month at least, you're going to have reliability problems. So, yeah, so, but is this for normals or is this a windows insider build? No, this is just normal. This is everybody. 24 h2, and and the weird thing about this is that, you know, in the modern era anyway, 24 h2 in some ways has been tested more than any version of windows I can think of. Right, um, it went out first in june on co-pilot plus pcs. Plenty of time to get this thing right. And man, it has just been dogged by problems ever since the october stable release. So at least they keep updating it and introducing new problems, so we always have something to talk about, always something new. I'm trying to see the positive side of this. I don't know something fun. Yeah, it's like yeah, uh, yeah. So, oh well, what are you gonna do?
04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he says browsing applecom, slash mac, no um, by the way, I did get the new mac mini and yeah it's really cute, is it mini?
04:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what do you call it mini? Yeah, well, this is the box I could, yeah that. That's the size of the um first ipod box.
04:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, pretty much, it's pretty much exactly the same size, you're right, and it's a little bigger than a ipod or even an apple tv, but it's a lot smaller than the mac studio that I replaced it with I mean yeah right, this looks like the uh, the cyber truck version of it.
04:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now yeah, exactly so would you describe it as? Is it as small as like an Intel NUC, because those were kind of notably small.
05:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's NUC-like. It reminds me of maybe a small NUC.
05:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like one of the small NUCs.
05:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's pretty small. Yeah, I had a Linux NUC from System76. It was about the same size, so yeah, I guess it is.
05:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it's a much more powerful computer, though.
05:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what it seems to be. I can't tell, but this is the problem with normal people is that you can have benchmarks, say this is the fastest processor ever.
05:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My browser opens Day-to-day.
05:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's like, eh, that's fine, yeah, but yeah, the reports are quite good yeah it looks good. Enough Mac talk. This it's. Uh, the reports are quite good. Yeah, enough mac talk. This is windows weekly.
05:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's talk about patch tuesday, which was yesterday yeah, so patch tuesday there's not a lot new, but there was one important feature in here for me personally on 24 h2, which is a new co-pilot key setting. So if you go to settings app, I know personalization text input, which is a new co-pilot key setting. So if you go to settings app, I know personalization text input which is a part of settings.
06:08
No one has ever visited that. Um, there's a co-pilot key setting and I was really excited about this because I wanted to turn it off yeah, I remember you saying that.
06:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact I remember kind of saying oh, here it comes, we're have. No, can't turn it off. It's not an option, yeah.
06:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So what I could do is change it to search.
06:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can reassign it yeah.
06:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can reassign it to an app.
06:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So clearly I'm going to have to write an app.
06:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to write an app that does nothing and I'm going to assign it to that because right now, what I've assigned it to is search, yeah, and the only advantage that search has over copilot is that when I summon it by mistake, which I do about 17 times a day I can dismiss it by hitting escape. So that's nice. It's like slightly, slightly more elegant. Uh, fixing of my mistake, I guess, because I have ham hands. But, um, yeah, beyond that, uh, not really a lot going. On Notification suggestions, which is hilarious. I think about that as a notification for notifications. You know, you get a notification that says it doesn't look like you're using this notification a lot.
07:18
Or would you like to be notified about this other thing?
07:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you're not getting notifications for you want more notifications.
07:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I feel like this is a gross misunderstanding of notifications. It also has the new preview of sandbox, um, the 2.0 version, right, um, which is great, other than the fact that I feel like sandbox has a really limited use case and I don't feel that it's the future of virtualization or anything, and I'm a little curious why they're spending so much time on this. But but that's fine. If you don't know what that is, a sandbox is just a temporary, in-time hybrid virtual machine that's based on the hardware of your PC. That comes up in real time. You use it, you make changes, you do whatever. You close it, those changes go away.
07:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So every time you bring it up, it's just like a fresh version and, um, you know it's basically just a way to test software that you might be a little iffy about, so it's not really the type of thing most people are going to notice. So I got a question for you, and I know everybody loves it when I ask questions about okay, let's step through this.
08:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are you open this? It's windows key plus I, oh no no, no, I did win.
08:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did Winver and for some reason it says I'm on 22H2. 22h2. Yeah, that's not good. Yeah, but now remember, this is in parallels. I did update. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
08:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is a little more difficult because it's parallels, right? So I don't know of an official good way just to force it to 24H2. I will tell you that good way to just to force it to 24H2. I will tell you that I did, on my own Mac, force it to 24H2. Okay, but I did it by going to a site called UUP dump. Oh no, I don't want to do that, I know.
08:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just telling you what I did.
08:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I downloaded the. Well, I downloaded a set of files that creates an ISO for the ARM version of Windows 24H, which do oh, I see it over to the Mac.
09:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's because I'm on windows on arm that I and on parallels, right.
09:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's all these reasons why you might or might not be getting the update, and it gets complicated.
09:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this the TPM thing and all of that?
09:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, shouldn't be. I don't know enough about parallel. I feel like this I feel like parallels must offer some official way to do this. That's not what yeah, I have to check, like through parallels, like it says I'm up to date. That's the thing.
09:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I guess, if I joined the insiders program, maybe it would. Oh don, oh, don't do that. No, no, no, no, no. Look, you will.
09:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Crazy. So one of the things that is in the notes for later, but I'll just mention it now. I was hoping to discuss this with Richard because he talked to that said the Windows on ARM ISOs were coming soon, and it's been a month plus. They still have not come, and so there's a whole bunch of things tied into this that are a little complicated. One is that the modern Windows on ARM devices, of course, are Snapdragon based. They have the Prism emulator, much better performance, et cetera, but you will, on your Mac, be able to take advantage of some of the performance improvements in Prism. So you want to get 24-H2. You're actually going to have a better experience, but you also don't want to put your machine or anyone who has an older device or any device, actually come to think of it. You don't want to put your ARM device into the Insider program because that downloadable ISO is not available.
10:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm looking at the Parallels support site and you can see what it says here. It has a process, but it's a process, right.
11:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet if you started a new VM, you would probably get 24-inch too. I would imagine Okay, but yeah, probably get 24H2. I would imagine, but yeah, I just forced the issue. I didn't want to wait. It's a VM. I don't know, I'm not sure what you're using it for.
11:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm happy. I guess it's okay, right? I mean, I'm not yeah. It's only because I want to keep up with the Joneses. I don't.
11:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, to keep up with the joneses, I don't yep. The reality is well, there's two things. So the two sides, you would see better performance 24 h2. That said, you're seeing awesome performance. You probably wouldn't. I'm fine. Yeah, you're not going to notice it. Yeah, and then the way I would use it if I was just like a normal person would be I think it's called coherence mode, where you just kind of run the apps yeah, yeah in the mac, like that's pretty cool actually yeah it a lot, and in that case you'd never notice what the version was right now.
11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I'm happy you made me happy. Sorry, everybody, let's, let's continue with the show.
11:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, actually, while you're doing that, I'm going to write the app that does nothing, so I can fix the copilot key I time I hit the key. That would be pretty funny on a duck. No I hit the copilot. That's probably the sound, that that's probably what microsoft thinks.
12:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I sound like, you know, like it sounds like I don't really care if I'm 24 h2, to be honest, uh at this point no, but I understand why you did.
12:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did. I mean I, you know I went and did the work, you know I they'll get there eventually.
12:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the real reason I was looking is I wanted to do your co-pilot thing, but I wouldn't have a co-pilot key, so it wouldn't make any difference anyway. Right, but you say go to settings, personalization text input I presume, programs like auto hotkeys and stuff. You know there are.
12:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean this is the type of thing I think is going to get better over time, but right now there's just three options, so it's search, co-pilot or custom. If you click custom, you see the apps that are installed in your system. I don't know, I guess I could have 300 instances of notepad running, maybe.
13:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is your point is that you hit because of where the key is. You hit it all the time and you don't want anything to happen. Well, you know what?
13:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it is. It's actually the arrow key right and those arrow keys are small. I use arrow keys a lot for navigation. My fingers are the size of you know, erasers or whatever. Hams, Hams, thank you, and I hit it by mistake all the time. I'm willing to accept that this is user error. I just would like it to stop.
13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. You know, that's kind of the whole thing about customizing your computer is to compensate for your own failings. Yeah, exactly.
13:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. Yes, I need glasses for my co-pilot or something I don't know you know what I mean.
13:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I believe me, I know you. This is, after all, our 907th episode. I know you fairly well by this time I.
13:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will tell you we. I was walking up this down the street whatever up street with my wife from lunch and stephanie said this. She said this is kind of weird. We walked by some group of people, but she says it's kind of weird. But one thing I have trouble with here is I can never tell if people are dressed in a costume or if it's just what they're wearing. And I literally said I've been doing this podcast with Leo for like 18 years. I have the same problem.
14:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like Leo has like always a costume, paul, I'm always hiding. No, I I mean like you have like, like for every event.
14:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like you have hats and things oh yeah, I have. I just wear the same exact thing every day, you know this is actually to go with this outfit.
14:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, like you. Just I'm like, yeah, I'm like you know now.
14:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Granted, the person who walked by looked like a character from a batman movie or whatever. I don't know what was going on there, but it wasn't I like a country where people like to dress up.
14:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's good yeah it's really interesting yeah, yeah, do you think that's exclusive to me? I think it's mexico city, because I think you go out it could be a latino thing, I don't know.
14:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will say, uh, since we're on this topic, not to go wildly off top, off course, or whatever. Um, we went to a cantina the other night and this is a place where, if you drink enough, your food is free and they had live acts who were singing. The first guy to sing remakes of songs like or you know, did like you know famous songs, and then it was all. You know mexican music from the ages or whatever some, and it was all. They were fantastic, very loud.
15:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's mexico yeah, yeah, I've noticed that the bands play loud they.
15:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everything's loud here. This place is addicted to noise. You could have a single person in a store before they're open setting up. They have a speaker the size of a volkswagen cranked to full volume, yeah, while they're cleaning, and I just don't understand it I think that is.
15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is kind of latin culture. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I, I don't I eventually I'll just be deaf and it won't matter but I, that is kind of Latin culture?
15:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, definitely, and I, I don't. I eventually I'll just be deaf and it won't matter, but I, this, this, this place was. It was fascinating because what you saw was men and women of all ages dancing in the aisles with each other without inhibition or any sense of anything. And I said to the people we were with you know, they beat that out of you in the United States when you're like five or six. You don't. We this, this big burly man, muscles and tattoos and shirt open and the chains and everything, and he's dancing like a little kid.
16:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I blame him as gal.
16:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I mean, but it's no, it's wonderful, but it's just here, like it's just the way it is. It's not. I have so much I am so I don't know if the word is shy or I would never. I just couldn't. You know, I don't like to be singing to the radio and I look over and someone sees me singing in my car and can't hear me, and I'm still embarrassed by that, you know or something like that.
16:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah anyway, okay, sorry, I don't know. That's a joyous, wonderful place. It's a different culture, yeah, and I think it's really great. So let's see, we did patch Tuesday.
16:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yeah, oh, and just to add it to that, though real quick I didn't write about this but the Windows update team posted that they're not going to do a preview update for Windows 11 in December. So that would be the week D update. It's probably the week of Christmas, is why. So that means we're not. But they will have a normal update in December, patch Tuesday, and they will have a normal update in January. So I guess that one's just not going to be tested. That's fine. And they didn't mention November. So yesterday was patch Tuesday. That means two weeks from yesterday will be week D, preview update day. We'll see if they have. They didn't mention it, so I don't know what the schedule is there. But you know Microsoft kind of shuts down for the second half of December every year, so maybe not surprising.
17:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are we going to do for the end of the year? I mean, we used to have Chris Capicella on at the end of I know every year. We had mary jo foley on last time.
17:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was fun yeah yeah, I'm running out of surprises um we're running out of former co-hosts.
17:52
I uh bring a mariachi band in and uh yeah, yeah, play loud yep, uh, prism emulator improvements in the canary bill yeah I mentioned this because I was hoping, I was thinking richard would be here and he had. He, I think you, mentioned his most recent episode at the time of renaz radio, or maybe he mentioned it the week before, I don't remember, but it was a, a woman from microsoft who was talking about how arm is now a first-class citizen at microsoft and these things are updated the exact same way, etc. Etc. Cetera, et cetera, and I thought it was kind of an interesting conversation for many reasons.
18:30
But I think to most people that assertion would be met with wait, you didn't just do this like eight years ago, like what do you mean? Like it's now, it's a first-class citizen. You know, it seemed like every time you fixed a bug in windows you would fix it in windows and arm, like you know, and I I don't quite understand that. I will just say that when you go back to the windows, the original windows rt, which was the first arm version of windows, that was not the case. These things were treated as discrete, separate products, much like microsoft has things like windows for iot or had Windows CE back in the day, or Windows Phone or whatever. These were offshoots, but they weren't always on the same train, if you will, for updates or whatever features, even though they were largely similar at the time.
19:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was the episode.
19:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, october 30th, aria Hansen I also, you know, again, I was with the expectation Richard was going to be here. You, hanson, I also, you know, again, I was with the expectation Richard was gonna be here. I was gonna tell him that. The thing I just told my wife as well, which was that it's interesting sometimes being me, because I'll listen to a podcast like this and then he starts talking about me, what you know, it's like, it's weird, like you know, the hunters, you know like it's um, it's a weird experience, right, you know, I mean obviously he's like the host of the show. I mean it makes sense, but I it's still a little surprising every time something like that happens.
19:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was kind of amusing, but well, I'm going to call this show, since you've now given me this opening. Yeah, it's interesting being me right.
19:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we'll see if I can't outdo that um, it's early, yet it's early yeah I wouldn't, uh, I wouldn't etch it into stone quite yet. Anywho, richard asked about the windows 11 on arm isos and she didn't have an answer for that, because how could she? And they're not there yet, so I don't know what to tell you what isos are there? Just the uh just intel, you know x86.
20:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No ARM. Isos no ARM.
20:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've never been. Microsoft has never offered those for public download, other than the Insider Preview version.
20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, hence the issue with 22H4 or 24H2, right, yeah, yeah, it's not great. If I could get an ISO, I could just install it, but I can't.
20:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and depending on the computer you have, you do have the ability to get a recovery image from the manufacturer. So, Microsoft offers those for its computers. God.
20:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't believe there's still I know.
20:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That system still exists, is ridiculous Yep and the fact that they ship 24-H2 without just making this simple download available to people doesn't make sense to me. But whatever, that's my whole life right now. So, yeah, why is that? Why is that?
21:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
for you young people, when you, when you used to be, when you'd buy a computer, you'd get a cd in it. It was called the recovery disc and it included the entire windows install with, you know, extra additions from that manufacturer and you could use it if your hard drive died or whatever, to reset the computer. Then they stopped doing that and they started putting a partition on right.
21:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could do it, yeah recovery partition you could also just download from. Well, things have gotten more sophisticated, right, so I suppose there was an interim period.
21:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember that was really awful, where they stopped putting the CD in because Microsoft was afraid of piracy and you had to make your own CD by downloading a bunch of files.
21:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And, depending on the PC maker, you had one shot at this.
21:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You did right, because if you, ran it, it was over.
21:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It would never let you do it again.
21:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that really I blame Microsoft, because they were afraid of piracy so much.
22:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, okay, so maybe I complain a lot. Just I'll end that sentence right there, and but I I complain a lot about windows, for sure, it's maybe helpful for me. You've reminded me I used to, when I traveled for work. I would ship, I would travel with this little cd case. Yes, we'd have windows office. Yep, you know a bunch of my data. Whatever it was, it would be the way I you know, just in case recovery because you can never trust these things.
22:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what was it? Hiram's boot boot disc? It's like a all that weird. It's like a custom MS-DOS boot Copy and spin right Bunch of yeah, it was crazy and you'd have that in a binder. You know it's funny how this was a part of our life and now year a few years later it's like distant memory.
22:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean. Well, we have new things to complain about. It's not like they've solved all the problems. But to be fair, well, not to be fair, no, it's not fair. There's no version of this where this shouldn't be available, but I suppose as you should have.
23:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ISOs that you could go and use the Microsoft build tool to make an ISO for every computer. That's right. It's just simple.
23:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's even. You could make a recovery disk in Windows 11 on ARM. You can do that. I, you know that's fine. I guess I would having the one. Well, it's a, you know a flash drive now, but I think having the original setup disc is actually superior. And you were talking about how the PC makers would customize those CDs they had at the time, dvds, eventually. Today, you know, we do have a more sophisticated system where they could deliver, you know, crap, or at the speed of sound now. And just, you know you get it through windows update, but you still get all the crap too. So you know you get it through Windows Update, but you still get all the crap too.
23:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know it's way better.
23:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, Way better.
23:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Crapware in a moment. Crapware as a service? Yep, all right, okay. So yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I'm running Windows on ARM only because I'm running in Parallels on a Mac.
24:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I guess, no, look, even on the Mac, you benefit, like I said, or you will when you get 24, it's true from the improvements to the prism emulator, which are dramatic and are about to get even better. That's what I want, yeah. And then the just all the compatibility stuff that's occurred Thanks to the copilot plus PCs. Right, there's a. You can. You just can't get it officially, you have to kind of work around. Yeah, I mean, I wrote an article about it. This is if you want to go see it.
24:30
Oh good, I'll go look on Thrust, but I don't necessarily recommend it to you. Know what I would call normal or mainstream users?
24:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but I would like to see, because Prism has been improved. That's the emulator that runs x86 software under Windows on ARM, and I would like to see how much better that is. Yep.
24:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the biggest I mean maybe for your purposes, virtualization, emulation, whatever the bigger deal is just how much software is now native on ARM and those things will run better on the Mac too.
24:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's true, so that's nice.
25:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just kind of automatic.
25:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Thank you Microsoft.
25:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it only took 12 years. What has it been 12 years? Yeah, okay, not too much to say. On the Windows Insider front, that canary build from last week was a big deal. There's been a more recent canary build today. That's just mostly bug fixes, including that one. The reliability issue I mentioned last week, which is when you open the more info whatever it's called button in the command bar of File Explorer, it goes off the top of the screen because seriously, it's like maybe don't touch it so much and it'll be okay.
25:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it's like if you have a scab.
25:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Windows is like a scab, don't touch it so much.
25:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stop touching it.
25:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Try to leave it alone, it would be better. And then there's also been dev and beta builds. There is one notable thing I'm actually pretty excited about, because it's the type of thing I do a lot, which is Microsoft is adding a keyboard shortcut that will run apps in admin mode, right. So in other words, you double click something and it opens normally under your user account or whatever, and then you hold down two keys and you double click it and it runs under admin, right. So today we have to right click the execute and start run as admin, go through UAC, et cetera. So that's cool, that's good. Actually, I run things as admin all the time because I hate my computer being reliable. So it's good.
26:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gibson was talking about this yesterday on Security, Now that Microsoft's changed UAC a little bit so that I don't know, are you aware of that? I?
26:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
wasn't aware of any change to UAC.
26:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, I don't know where he gets his material.
26:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's beautiful. I thought you were going to say he was talking about pseudo. Well, he would if he could.
26:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but he was talking about how you. He said well, first of all he says I run as administrator and I turn off UAC because, of course, wow.
26:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's actually. I'm actually really surprised to hear that Okay.
27:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, he's a, he's a.
27:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's like saying I bought a new car but I turned off that third middle light because it's superfluous.
27:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't. I don't understand why. Why go to the effort like why even?
27:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I'm not gonna get an accident, I don't need airbags, right?
27:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, exactly no his, but that's kind of his attitude is like I know what I'm doing, I'm a, I'm a security expert, I don't need a uac to nanny me. But he was approving of the new I think he was it's hard to tell sometimes of the new UAC which made it a little bit his Well this is Steve Gibson.
27:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When you say new UAC, do you mean the version they introduced in Windows 7?
27:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know I'll have to go back and look at the show notes.
27:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've not noticed any differences in UAC. Go on, I'm sorry.
27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People are this is in uac, go ahead. People. Uh, are you know? And you inured now to uac, so it pops up they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, they click okay. So apparently I don't know, I'll get this, I'll get the show notes and all.
27:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, in keeping with our keyboard shortcut conversation of earlier, yeah, I, you know you get into these kind of habits. So for me uac is tab, tab, tab and right. You know, like that's right, I don't even think about it like I I let alone go try to find the mouse cursor, right, right.
28:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Although I think sometimes UAC will ask for the password right, and then you can't just kind of tap, tap, tap, that's the that's like. On the more serious.
28:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's a. That's probably a windows Hello Authentication type thing, or maybe.
28:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft account authentication Let me authentication, let me, let me. Uh, okay, let me. Uac wasn't in the way enough, so they fixed it. He says I love it, let me, let me. I'm looking at the show notes. We've all come to know. User account control windows. Clever and workable. There you go. Solution to the age-old dilemma of users running with root privileges. Microsoft uh, let's see. Okay, administrator protection in an upcoming platform security feature in windows 11 which aims to protect free floating. You know this. Admin rates for administrator users lying still performing all admin features with just-in-time admin privileges it's off by default, needs to be enabled by group policy. This is not in windows yet. That's the yes, it's not there yet.
29:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why.
29:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, so it's something called admin protection, which is currently in the Canary builds, I guess Okay.
29:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, that's not been rolled into stable to my knowledge. So, in fact, you know Microsoft's been talking a lot about security this year, for all the obvious reasons and there are. You know I talked about Windows Hello. Ess is kind of an example of the whole platform kind of raising the bar on security. It took I'd have to think about this really 15 plus years for TPM whatever to become required right now in Windows 11. And it's just, we kind of accept this as part of the PC. This ESS stuff is going to be that.
29:47
And then, not because of CrowdStrike necessarily, but related to CrowdStrike, they started talking about all the ways they're going to secure Windows and new ways they're going to secure Windows. This is one of them. And then there are things related to pass keys and authentication, which I actually just wrote about this today, oddly, about a year ago, in trying to figure out what it meant when Microsoft said we just added a pass key manager to Windows. I went down that rabbit hole with 2FA, pass keys and authentication and how things work under the covers in windows. And, um, there are further changes coming there related to windows Hello. We assess. So there's, yeah, there's a lot of stuff coming, but I, I I'm not aware of this being uh, I don't think this is the area right now.
30:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you've got. You've got some time to. I think the idea is uh, it shouldn't be as easy to escalate uh, permissions and uh, and so they're isolating them all inside this new model, which is funny because I just talked about this keyboard shortcut.
30:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That makes it easier and you know well it's easy You're still going to get the UAC prompt right. So in other words, it's easier to get that thing started, but then it's not actually. You know you have to go through the process Right. This is I don't think I put this in the notes, but since we're on this topic, every year Microsoft will announce new features in whatever new version of Windows and most of the time you go down the list you're like okay, and then you get to that one where you're like wait, what is this? And last year it was that PASC thing that set me off on a two-month investigation, research and whatever it was. It took months. And because security, security's hard right.
31:28
Um, in 24h2 they made the claim that we are now automatically enabling bitlocker or device encryption on every windows pc, regardless of sign-in. Right before, if you sign in in with a Microsoft account or a work or school account, an inter-ID account, that would encrypt the disk. That's not possible. I read that and I said it's not. You can't be doing that because the only other way to sign in would be with a local account, and if you have a local account you might not even have a password. You don't have any way to store a recovery key anywhere automatically, like you do with Microsoft's managed accounts. So I spent the past two weeks working on that little topic and the way it works is kind of strange language. But Windows 11 Home versus Pro it's device encryption. You get BitLocker management with Pro BitLocker to go as well. If you sign up with arosoft account, work, school account yep, you get the. It's automatic. If you sign in with a local account, it says it's enabled but it's not activated, so you have to activate it. When you activate it, you have to download that or do something, store it somewhere a recovery key because you have to. That's a requirement of this thing, right? So that explains it. Except there's another difference, right? So if you're using Windows 11 Pro, you could go into the BitLocker control panel and just turn it on. It's fine, because it will prompt you to store that thing.
32:57
But you can do it as a local account. You don't have to have a managed account. If you're using Windows 11 Home, you have to sign a managed account. If you're using Windows 11 Home, you have to sign in with a Microsoft account. So the workaround there is if you accept Microsoft's defaults, you'll see your local account has been transformed into a Microsoft account. That's probably not what you want. So my advice there is to well, hey, just don't do this. Who cares? It's stupid. But if you have to do this for some reason, from a cold boot, your local account is the only thing I'm going to use. You have to create a Microsoft account. Sign-in. Sign in with that account. It will encrypt the disk. Sign out, delete it and you're good to go.
33:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, but yeah, so it will decrypt automatically, even if you're not signed into that account after from then on, it is it well, it's encrypted for good and you can't but it has to, so you can use it you are.
33:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well you could, as the user, turn it off.
33:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm just saying when you log in, it must it must decrypt, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to use your hard drive. It does it automatically on the fly. Yeah, even if you're not logged into the MSA account.
34:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. It doesn't matter which account you use. It doesn't matter at that point. Yeah, that's always been the case.
34:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah. So you need the MSA to do it, but you don't.
34:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
To store the recovery key, because you have to have some't boot up your hardware thing. It says enter your BitLocker recovery key, which is the wrong terminology, whatever but you have to go get that somewhere.
34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's because people lose this. I know, gosh, I've formatted drives and lost the certificates and I have no way of getting the BitLocker unlocked, and I understand that. So that's when they started storing it on the Microsoft account and that's a good thing, in the words of martha stewart it's a good thing. Yes, yes, all right I want to take a break, uh, and then we will come back and we will talk about edge. Yay, with a, it's learned a new trick, isn't that?
34:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's really an old trick. It's just reusing because microsoft has never had an original idea. But yes, it is a, it's a trick, a new trick, a new trick and uh, and a lot more still to come.
35:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're sorry that, uh, richard campbell's a little under the weather. He will be back, I'm sure, next week, uh, but meanwhile it's paul thorat and me, sorry, doing doing windows weekly. Sorry, sorry, apologies all around I'm here all week. Sorry, uh, no, I'm just teasing. It's a great show and everybody loves you, paul. Um, our show. You know we have that kind of relationship. I just want everybody to know. Paul looks at me and says are you wearing a costume? Yes, right, are you wearing pants? You look like a clown.
35:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You look like a clown. I said that to a college teacher. She said why doesn't anyone take me seriously? And I said I think it's the clown nose I never got along with that woman.
35:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that was the end of that relationship. Yep, this week Windows Weekly brought to you by those great folks at US Cloud and they are the number one Microsoft Unified Support replacement, replacement. So I know probably a lot of you are using Microsoft Unified Support and that means you are paying more and getting less. This is why you should know about US Cloud, the global leader in third-party Microsoft Enterprise support. They support 50 of the fortune 500, so they know how to handle big installations and big companies. They also save you money.
36:32
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37:04
Us Cloud reaches out and recruits the smartest, best people, with an average of 14.9 years, and that's for break fix or DSE. As I said, they're all based in the US. Your data will never leave the US. And here's something that US Cloud does that Microsoft still does not do financially backed SLAs. On response time, initial ticket response average is under four minutes, and you know when your hair's on fire and the network's down and everything's going crazy. Four minutes even feels long. Right, anything longer? No, four minutes. You need somebody to help you fast. Last year, 94% of US Cloud's clients reported saving one third or more when switching from Microsoft's unified support to US Cloud. From Fortune 500 companies to large health systems, major financial institutions, even to federal agencies, us Cloud ensures that vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every single day. I'm talking big brands that trust US Cloud Caterpillar uses US Cloud, hp, aflac, dun, bradstreet, under Armour, keybank. Even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs.
38:22
I saw an interview with the director of information technologies who said and this was so great In fact I got to get a recording of it because he's the way he says it's great and within an hour, us Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. So not only did they bring the right guys to the call, they brought the cavalry. I just felt like wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I'd experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier. We made the right choice, end quote.
38:51
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39:28
Book a call today. Find out how much you can save. And they said you know. They said look how much. We said I said you shouldn't focus on how much you're saving, you should focus on this is better support. These people are. You've got the best engineers. They say yeah, and you save okay, that's uscloudcom. Book a call today. Get faster, better microsoft support for less. It's all of the above. Okay, you can restore your microphone. Now, paul, I have the discord. I have to say I, you know what. I? I completely agree with you. Some of those animated gifs pretty wild, pretty wild. Is it the squirrel that did it?
40:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, it was um, I don't, I don't want to. I this is going to sound like I'm making fun of this person, that's no, don't make fun of anybody.
40:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I, I it's just a club, it's just, it's just like this.
40:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, I read it on the internet, it must be true, type things. It's. Oh yeah, you know, it's just like yep, I, I mean, I read it, it must be there. I, I don't know, it's just not, you know, look there's a firefox, look at that I would love that something as common as the uac prompt has been updated without my knowledge. That would be amazing to me, but uh, no, here it is.
40:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the, this is the quote, that's uh. Anyway, paul, this is a chance for me to say everybody should join the club. Get in the discord.
40:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You too can laugh, along with windows weeklies, paul thurrock it's like a virtual version of a dunk tank at a fair, you know uh, seven bucks a month ad free versions of all the shows.
41:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You get access to the discord. Special events you get to see the video, for instance, for paul's hands on windows. A lot of good stuff. We would love to have you in the club tw events. You get to see the video, for instance, for Paul's Hands-On Windows. A lot of good stuff. We would love to have you in the club twittv slash, club twit. All right, let's continue on with the fun fest.
41:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's Edge up to? I'm curious what you think the motivation is here, right? So this is something I run into a lot because I set up Windows so many times and I think about this. I'm really curious about this. But when you set up Edge, the first time you run Edge on a new computer, you step through three screens right when you and I literally in all three of the screens, I advise changing the default every time.
41:38
So I'm going to get this wrong off the tip of my head, despite the fact I've done a thousand times in this trip alone. But roughly speaking, uh, it wants to sync with your other browser. It doesn't say this, it means Chrome. It literally won't sync with anything else. If you accept that default and you don't have Chrome installed which you wouldn't, I guess it will ask you to sign into your Google account and every time Edge launches, it will sync all of the data from Chrome into Edge. Now, if you're switching from Chrome to Edge, this is arguably a benefit of some kind. I mean, the old way of doing this and you can still do this is just to import your data.
42:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kind of a manual thing yeah.
42:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is just reaching out to Google via back channels. I guess there's some other stuff in there that's really squirrely. In fact, these additions to the Edge first run experience were, to me, so severe that I created a new chapter in the book to deal with this how to stop it from doing all this terrible stuff? The last of the three screens literally it doesn't say this, but what it literally means is we would like to track you more than our privacy policies allow. If you leave this box checked, which a lot of people will do, we will now be tracking you even more, and I I the notion that anyone would actually take the time to go and read and see what was changed and would agree to this is astonishing to me, but I think most people don't read it and have no idea okay, yeah, fine yeah so this new trick they just go boom, boom boom yeah, yeah, right, you got to be careful with this stuff.
43:11
Now, one of the things I do in my book since I just brought this up is I know a lot of people stepped through this and didn't think about it right, just like I know that a lot of people set up windows and didn't look at that privacy page. That's actually very important to look at, and so you I took the time to document. It's too late. So how do you fix it now and you can go back and find where those settings are right? Yeah, one of the one of the settings in edge is when you can't find in the UI, you can search for it and get to it that way. That's how dishonest Edge is. It's just a piece of junk.
43:48
Anyway, one of the many things that Microsoft has been doing in recent years in Windows 11 is trying to prevent you from switching to another browser, right. So they took the one awesome thing that came out of antitrust in the late 90s, early 2000s the default apps interface and they completely kneecapped it in the initial version of Windows 11, specifically to prevent people from switching from Edge to another browser, right. There are behaviors in Windows 11 that even when you do correctly switch to another browser will still run Edge right when you click a link in widgets or in search et cetera. So we all know about this stuff. They've done things like you go to the download page for Chrome, which I'm guessing is the most visited website on earth If you use edge and they see that you're trying to download Chrome and like well, hold on a second, we have a great browser.
44:30
So they throw a pop, but they've done everything they can do, Right. So what they're doing now is you're running another browser at Chrome and it will pop up that thing that you see in the Edge first run experience. So it's not a new experience, it's just appearing in a different time and it's saying hey, you could enhance your browsing experience with Copilot if you use Microsoft Edge, and we'll sync all your stuff. So it will be just like using Chrome, except we'll be the ones tracking you instead of Google, which I don't think is in the language of the dialogue box. But you get the idea. You get the idea, yeah. So yeah, it's a new little man, Microsoft. I just don't. I really I would like so badly for this company to get by these kinds of behaviors, and there's just no evidence of that ever happening. It just keeps getting worse.
45:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is the, this is the dialogue you're talking about, and it doesn't look like you're switching to. Well, you are.
45:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. I mean this is, like I said, very much like the first or second. I think it's the first step in the Edge first run experience where you know your life would be a lot better.
45:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah For you, you know you can have your Edge stuff Br. Yeah, if you uh, you know you can have your edge stuff browse the rep with the best.
45:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How could it be better performing than chrome? Isn't it just chromium? I'm not going to try to justify that.
45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know that's crazy talk how exactly could you be better? I don't, I don't know well I mean, they do have they strip stuff they do have system integrations.
45:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, all right, I the way they're faster is there's a process that runs a startup.
46:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, that's how yeah, it loads when you turn on the machine.
46:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a great tip right there. If you don't use Edge and most of you don't turn that thing off Don't let it run its startup. Okay, Wait a minute.
46:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute. Tell me yeah, especially if you're not using Edge.
46:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This will start up anyway, of course, because they want this thing to run quick in the background. The idea is that you do click on something in widgets or search or wherever else it goes.
46:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, it's just right there. Thank you, Hello. So is this a services? How do you turn this off?
46:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's two interfaces for this. If you go into settings, it's settings apps.
46:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Startup apps. I think is the UI, oh it's the startup apps.
46:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's also in the task manager.
46:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the more standard way, so you don't have to open services.
46:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but you know it's a little. I find the task manager interface to be a little easier to use, but you can sort this list by things that are enabled versus disabled. And it's, you know I'm doing it right now. So you know I'm doing it right now. So, for example, on this computer which I've not spent, I just reset this a day or two ago. So Microsoft Edge is running on this computer by default, even though I don't use it. Microsoft Teams never used that Notion. Don't need that to start up. Quickshare from Google, which I installed for something we'll talk about later. Skype Slack geez Louise. Skype slack, geez louise. Goes on and on. Uh, that's crazy. Brave software update discord, grammarly green shot.
47:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's crazy yeah, but that's all modern computing systems. That's true.
47:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean even linux, that's true if you use brave, then yes, the brave software updater might be something you want running in the background when you first run your computer. But if you use brave, the edge thing is one thing you would not want, right, right, um, so, yeah, anyway, I don't know, I keep trying to. I bridge is one of those things I try to reconcile myself with, and it's almost like a conscience thing, it's. It's, it's okay, yeah, as a user experience, but it's also a little bloated. There's a lot of stuff in there. I wish you could. I wish it was a little more modular. I wish it was easier to get rid of the stuff I didn't want.
48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that kind of thing, but I'm sorry I'm running my task managers a little sidebar in the let me go full screen yeah.
48:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You still can't read it very well. It's time, well, so no, it's not, you're in the processes. So, on the left side, go. It's like the fourth or fifth one down is the, the next one up, uh, this, this little startup, yeah, yeah, so you can sort this by whether they run, and that's the best way to do it right, so you can actually see what's you know? See them all together, yeah, and then you can um disable the ones.
48:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can you right click and disable the? Yeah, yeah, yep, yeah, you can there. You can there, you go. So that's get rid of that, that's get rid of this system security. Well, no, I didn't say that.
48:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry. Sorry, I can barely see this. It's like I feel like I might need that. I'm just saying I don't know, that's the problem?
48:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course it is Yep, you don't know.
48:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Am talk about this, but I know this must have been um hands on windows. So if you go back to the processes view, yeah, um tip the top view the typical reason someone would load this thing is because something's wrong.
49:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, you have an app oh, this is like mark racinovich's uh process explorer.
49:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They probably incorporate that in so, yeah, and they've incorporated features from that, actually. So this is what's running right now. So you look at this and you think, well, okay, well, you're not here just to look at what's running, you're here because something went wrong, right? So there's new things in Windows 11 where you can right-click and you can have this thing run in an inefficient mode. That actually takes the load off the processor and sometimes that fixes problems. But a lot of times what you have to do is just kill the thing, right, and so what you want to do is right click and then kill the process and then kill it with fire. Okay, yes, but here's the problem. So this thing is dynamic, right, as things are running, the, the list of things you're looking at shifts right it yeah, so you do this thing where it's like whack-a-mole, you're like right click right click the wrong thing.
49:55
So if you hold down the shit of the uh control key, it pauses that. Ah, it's kind of a neat thing. So, unfortunately, if you spend enough time in here where you need to know this, something's gone horribly wrong in your life. But it's good to know it's uh, that's handy I spend more time in task manager than I'm comfortable admitting you know I haven't used this in a long time.
50:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to open the services menu and all that stuff.
50:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But this is all in here now.
50:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's nice yeah, that's great okay, thank you sure again, once again. Uh, we've decided that it'd be better for paul to explain how windows works. Yes, and actually cover anything all right so open a hex editor and uh I'm sorry. I won't derail you anymore, paul.
50:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's fine uh, we're about to get derailed again because if you think edge is bad. I'd like to introduce you to microsoft's next tumor, which is called the new outlook. Um, they, they've started reminding customers that, as of the end of december of this year, mail, calendar and people, the inbox apps that have been included in windows since windows 8, are no longer supported, so they're gone from 24-H2. If you do a clean install, you won't see that. Now those, now People's actually been gone technically since Windows 11 started.
51:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's funny because I immediately removed that from my start.
51:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I've been removing, Knowing this was coming. I was removing these apps for a few months here, anyway, I don't use them anymore. They're terrible, but coming. I was removing these apps for a few months here anyway, I don't use them anymore. They're terrible.
51:27
But man, there's something about the new Outlook that has really touched a raw spot for a lot of Windows users and because somebody actually just asked me about this via email and mentioned the show, I guess I'll just say this now which is that I've been writing the chapter for this app for the book for a while now and I've been using this app and if you have a Microsoft account or a worker school account, I think it's fine.
51:50
I don't understand what all the drama is about. Now, if you came in here with a Google account and that's all you're going to use, or you're not paying for a Microsoft 365 subscription and you have a Microsoft account, you're going to see ads, or you're not paying for Microsoft 365 subscription and you have a Microsoft account, you're going to see ads, you know, and that's obviously not a great experience, but I don't know. I don't think that that app is for those people. Really, I think this is for people who found mail mail in particular, be normal people to be a little too simple and not necessarily, uh, very good from sort of an accessibility perspective. Uh, and then find the traditional outlook app to be this big hairball which it is and that this is cutting some happy middle ground it's actually I see it for a it's.
52:36
It's sort of web based in the sense that it's using web view. It's. It is, in fact, a native the sense that it's using WebView. It is, in fact, a native Windows app. But compared to the other inbox apps the apps that come with Windows, it might be the most complex and full-featured of them. It's kind of crazy. There's a lot of stuff going on in this app. It's pretty busy, but it works. I mean, I don't. It's weird to me. Most people use the web. Yeah, so I do, and I don't. I. You know people will say, well, what should I replace this with? And I'm like, why would you even use this thing? You don't need an app. Yeah, I, many years ago, switched over to Gmail through my Google workspace thing with a custom domain, and I configured it so that it collects all the mail from all my accounts and can reply to those messages as if coming from those accounts. So I did that once and now it just works and I don't really think about it and it works great. And I don't know.
53:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, but everyone's different, right I guess every time I set up a computer for my wife or Lisa, I say, okay, I want to back up your data, move your data. She says it's not on there. I said what do you mean? She says everything's in the web. There is literally no local data on my systems.
53:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was the 1990s, that's how old this joke is. In fact, it was the same guy I was talking about earlier with his mother, who I hadn't seen in a long time. But random coincidence there we used to joke about carrying around your pst file in a floppy disk. Right shirt pocket right, because you know this is like yourself at any time, you know.
54:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah and of course it fit on the floppy too um, yeah, I don't.
54:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want this stuff in the cloud. I don't want this. I don't need email local, it's really. I mean, she's using her computer like a, like a chromebook, basically there's there's yeah, it's which, by the way, which almost diminishes what she's doing because that, technically, is more sophisticated. In this case, it's silly to store this stuff locally and have you know it's.
54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's such a, it's just everything's on google drive or gmail. Uh, so she doesn't care what computer she's using. She doesn't care if I've backed it up, it doesn't matter, right right and so and I think that's probably I'm gonna guess that's the majority of users now do it that way. They're in the cloud 100, I think so, except for gamers, or you know but I think this speaks to something that's very well.
55:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe it isn't, but to me it's very particular. To the windows community, what I would call it uh, meaning we have this group of people who have been using this product for decades. They're very specific, they like things to be a certain way. They don't like change, you know, and they complain about everything. And obviously you're looking at me saying yeah, we know exactly what you're talking about, paul. That's you and like I get it, but I everything that changes is met by pushback and you can look at the discord now and see every specific feature that one person needs is not in this app.
55:34
Maybe, maybe it is. They can't find it, it doesn't matter, and they're losing their minds over this. And it's's like guys, this is email, I who cares? Like, what is it? I just don't. I find it bizarre. You know, like, how much negativity there is around this kind of thing. So all I can say is I use the web because, you know, I think that's the right way to do it, but that's for me anyway. And I look at this app and I think it's fine, like it works fine. I use it with Gmail. It works fine. I have to sign up with my Microsoft account to make sure I don't get the ad thing, but other than that, it's fine.
56:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, so you don't get ads if you sign up with your Microsoft account.
56:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't get ads if you sign in with a Microsoft account that has a Microsoft 365 subscription. Oh, because you subscribe. Yeah, if you don't pay for something, you will get ads. So there's that.
56:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that $8 a month I spend on my Microsoft 365 account is well spent.
56:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How does Gmail work? I don't even know. If you didn't pay for Gmail, would you see ads in Gmail?
56:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't pay for Gmail. Oh, I see In Workspace, you know what I mean. Yeah, I don't even know Gmail's unless, okay, and then you could buy workspace. But are there ads?
56:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
or do they just track you around the internet and that's how you pay for it?
56:48
yeah, I use fast mail, no ads, yeah so no, but this is sorry, so I'm just just to beat this to death. One person says your wife is using a 2500 mac to500 Mac to do what a $500 Chromebook can do. That's not true. She's using email that way because it's the best way to do it, and she's using a Mac because she needs it for other things. You know like you're focusing on the wrong thing here. You know like email shouldn't be this thing that gets in. I'm not here to manage my email. I'm here to read it, respond to it or archive it and I move on. That's it.
57:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Increasingly. I mean what the person is saying is not wrong, because increasingly your computer is really just an interface to a browser. But you might like how.
57:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apple does it versus how.
57:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft does it, but it's just an interface to a browser I'm trying to think of what you use does it, but it's.
57:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's just an interface to a browser. I'm trying to think of what you let's, but, but it's. But your wife is not just using email on the mac is the point, but no, but when she uses documents.
57:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's using google sheets or google docs?
57:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, okay, so I don't know if she but these are the models, right, so you could run a proprietary system like windows or chromebook I, I guess Chrome OS and you'll be tracked by those companies all over the internet unless you do something about it and even then probably can't stop it. Honestly, she doesn't care. She runs honey and rack. I'm just saying she'll do that. But when you run a Mac I mean one of the thing, or Mac OS, one of the one of the little agreements you have here is like they not doing that and so that's a decision that people can make, I mean it's.
58:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But she installs raccoon 10 on top and every time I say you know they're tracking around the web, she shows, she waves a raccoon 10, check in my hand face and says, yeah, and they pay me for that. That's um well there you go.
58:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, at least she knows what she's doing. Most people are not that explicit about their choices, right?
58:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think people don't care that much. Our audience does. We know our audience pretty well and they care a lot.
58:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, they care a lot yeah.
58:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's our audience.
58:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I care too. I've spent so much time trying to figure out ways to stop the tracking in Windows 11, stop the bad behaviors in Windows 11.
58:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, but here's a question. Yeah and okay, but here's a question yeah, have we done our audience long-term a disservice by talking so much about security and privacy, making them so paranoid, and they spend a lot of energy, as we do, blocking all that stuff?
59:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but is that have?
59:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we done them a favor, or maybe we've.
59:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe we've made a bunch of paranoid, so look I I can't say universally every idea we've had has been genius or anything like that, but I mean that. But, but understand that the motivation is pure right, that the goal is I. I think there's a much bigger problem in the world of people who don't even put a password on their phone or refuse to use 2fa because it's too hard yes, that's, and and will not accept the the smallest of inconveniences to secure all of their online identity and data, and I don't understand that. So I look, I think you can overdo it. One of the things if richard was here we would talk about Richard is still using, I believe, security keys for his accounts. I think that's too much for most people.
01:00:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It absolutely is. I've kind of given that up.
01:00:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we all do it, and then we're like, okay, this is too much. But there are these things happening now with pass keys and with 2FA, where it's an acceptable middle ground Exactly Between this physical security device and nothing and that's an improvement and it's a huge improvement, and I think I could never talk about that enough.
01:00:29
I think that's super important. So if there are people watching us listening to this who, um, you know, bypass uac like steven, steve gibson or um, they think they know better. Okay, I mean, you're taking your life in your own hands, but it's like riding a motorcycle. I'm a safe driver, okay, but there's a Mack truck out there with your name on it and you don't see it coming, and it doesn't matter how good of a driver you are, and that's the problem. I think there are reasonable things that we can do, and that's part of the problem with the Windows 11 stuff. Is there a reasonable thing I could recommend to everyone that solves all the problems? And the answer is no. So how unreasonable do you want to get? I'm going to break the bottle off and be like you want to go nuts. We're going to go nuts Because you could go nuts. There's all kinds of nuts, of things you can do.
01:01:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've always talked about the balance between security and privacy and convenience and one kind of subtracts from the other. So more security, privacy, less convenient. And I think that we've come, the world has come along a little bit, as you say, with pass keys and stuff, that it's kind of not so imbalanced that you can have you kind of have some.
01:01:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do think that making pass keys portable and maybe not calling them passkeys I know that's a weird one, but just thinking of it as passwordless I think is a little conceptual leap for people and I think in a couple of years time we're going to be in such a good place.
01:01:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We talked about this last time. I like Passport, my old Microsoft Passport. It's kind of what it is. It's your passport to all these sites.
01:02:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like an identity card or something, except the only difference is you have one for every site, which is maybe not ideal, but which is why the portable thing is a step in the right direction because not before you, not only did you have one for every site, but you had one on every machine for every site, or you, you had some weird mix of some were here, some were there, some were, you know, and that was not better. That's not, that's just complexity.
01:02:23
Yeah, yeah, so we're trying, but I, I, I get. I don't want to be, I'm sorry, I just you know you said something. I think it's really important. Um, you know, was our net impact beneficial or negative? Or do we just spinning our wheels or whatever? Um, I'd like to think, obviously, that it was. But I think the important point is blindly accepting what big tech throws down your throat is not the right approach, no matter what. Um, question everything. If what we find is that one, this, one thing is fine, then it's fine, we'll move on. You know you don't have to beat everything to death, but but I think this. I think this is a fight worth fighting.
01:03:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, obviously we've done that for 20 years, but I sometimes, you know, I like to this is my earliest observation.
01:03:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just wrote about this in the in the mid 1990s, maybe the early 1990s. Someone I work with, yeah, so it would have been like 94 ish somewhere around there. I was complaining about something in um windows and I just forgotten it was Novell owned word perfect. At the time I just gotten them to help solve a problem that I was having with the registry in windows three one. If you could believe that word perfect was maybe the first only app that used the registry. Then it became kind of a big deal in 95.
01:03:35
Anyway, this guy was complaining about whatever it was and I said why don't you talk to Microsoft about it and get them to fix it? And he's like, oh, they would never make an ETA, they don't care about me. And I'm like you're paying them. Like, do you not understand the relationship? I mean like you're paying them. I, you know, I even you know, as a young guy I was like which is why the stuff that's happening now with insurification everywhere, but in Windows particularly, is so horrible? We pay for this stuff and, by the way, if we don't, I would like to be able to pay for it so I don't have those terrible behaviors.
01:04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and that's kind of what got us in this predicament was in the early days of technology, companies said we want to scale growth at any cost, and so we're going to give it away like Gmail, but it costs them money to do it. So at some point they have to extract some value out of you, and that's where all of this began.
01:04:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But again, there's a reasonable middle ground here. We talked about Notion a few weeks back and I said I don't understand how they're not charging me for this. I would pay for this thing. Now, what I don't want to do're not charging me for this. I would pay for this thing, yeah, now what I? What I don't want to do is pay a couple hundred bucks a year and have ads everywhere, right. Right, like there's, there's some middle ground. Would that make sense? Um, I would pay, uh, microsoft, through microsoft 365 or whatever, to not have tracking and ads and crap or and whatever else in windows. I would pay, yes people cheap.
01:05:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You and I both like to pay for stuff we use because we understand that makes it more permanent, that gives people incentive to support you. You get what you pay for, but people are cheap.
01:05:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So just a couple of couple of things like in the in the broader world, it is fair to say that security Well, like something like airbags and cars first came to luxury vehicles and then they made their way downstream.
01:05:26
So, there's always going to be a have and a have. Nothing. I can't solve poverty. There will always be people who choose to get the ad-supported version because it is cheap and they can do that thing, but every quarter I do all the financial earnings and blah, blah, blah, whatever.
01:05:45
And one of the companies I'm most fascinated about and I just did it the other day and we're not going to talk about it because who cares is Spotify. And Spotify is interesting to me because Spotify is very transparent and they tell you exactly how many subscribers they have, how many subscribers pay them, how many subscribers are ad supported and how much revenues they get from each. And the ones who pay them is a smaller audience, although, by the way, as a percentage growing pretty dramatically, the revenues are something to the order of 8X. It's not even close. So if you can get a small audience to pay to get something they want and the rest accept the ad supported crap, that's actually a pretty good business model. A lot of companies do it. Microsoft could do it in Windows. They just don't. And I look like I said, I can't solve poverty.
01:06:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it makes me think we should have a club.
01:06:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, for people who don't want ads yeah, I don't know if you pay seven bucks. Yeah, I don't know if you've ever heard of this kind of thing before. It's an interesting model. The minority of people will pay and it's exactly more they're more lucrative to you than the rest of the audience.
01:06:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not yet more lucrative, I have to be honest. But it can be. That's the dream.
01:06:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you're just starting out. I mean, I'm sure if you looked at Spotify from 12 years ago, that would be the case. That's right, that's right.
01:06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's a big help. The people will join the club, but it's only still about one percent of the total audience. We got to five percent. It would be more lucrative than the advertisers, so that's all we need to do. We just need to grow it. Uh, that's all. Hey, speaking of paying for things, if you pay for co-pilot, oh god yeah.
01:07:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the interesting thing about this to me is paying for co-pilot might actually be going away, right? Um, they haven't gotten their announcements lined up, but I talked about that weird thing where the Asia part of Microsoft pre-announced that you would get these things and I said they don't have a thing like this and then they announced it in the Insider Program. So I think the model a year from now is going to be that you have a Microsoft 365 subscription which you pay for. The prices are going to be that you have a Microsoft 365 subscription which you pay for. The prices are going to go up. I mean, honestly, it's been a while, so maybe that's due and you will get tokens or credits or whatever they're calling them, toward co-pilot services, right?
01:07:52
So instead of paying for co-pilot pro, which is $20 a month for an individual, or Microsoft 365 co-pilot, which is $30 per month per user, you just pay for your subscription, like you always have, and then you can use Copilot in things like Word and Excel and wherever else you might use Copilot, and you get those benefits until you've used up all the resources. At that point, if you use it that much, you could say, well, maybe I do want to pay for Copilot, but I think the I wrote, I don't know, probably six months ago, something like I'm not going to pay for AI, right, I am not going to pay for AI. I will pay for Microsoft 365, which will offer AI features. Right, I'm not paying for AI, but AI is part of that feature set that I don't mind paying for, depending on the service, right? So, anyway, that hasn't happened yet. So if you do pay for Copilot ie are a dummy you can now use the new Outlook app that nobody likes and use it to create custom themes, which is the dumbest nexus of things.
01:08:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've ever heard in my life how do you do it? Do you say hey, copilot, do a new theme.
01:09:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How do you do it? So, if you've ever so, google has something like this in the pixel and I think no, apple doesn't do this yet. They will where you can create, use prompts to create some kind of an image right now, I forget what they call it on pixels I think it's not pixel wallpaper or something like that. I don't have to try this, I have a pixel, yeah, so it's kind of cool. It's just a generative AI thing. It creates an image. So you say something like I want a river, I want a balloon and I want it to be in this style of a, you know, renaissance painting or whatever, all right. And then you get, like, several choices and you can get one or not, and because, then take on this color scheme, yeah, it's pretty cool, right? So it's this. Outlook capability is just like that same, just for outlook. Like. Outlook is a like.
01:09:45
If you look at the screenshot that's in the article oh, I could you'll see that outlook is a is a curious app. This was true of the mail and calendar apps too, by the way. In that unique among windows 11 apps, it has like this kind of background image thing that it does, so it's's not really clear for this picture. Yeah, so each of the pieces of the UI, like the navigation pan on the left, that folder list that's next, and then the reading pan, et cetera, they're actually separated out like as modules, so you can kind of see between them a little bit. And they use this. They have background images or colors or you know, outlookcom, you know, and Outlook on the web have had themes as well for a long time, like classic themes. But yeah, it's, I guess, although you know, my thing is you're there to read the email. When are you looking at a blank background of an app? It's kind of a weird. It's kind of a weird.
01:10:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It says it refreshes every four hours. That means it regenerates a new image every four hours.
01:10:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't have I don't pay for I'll look at him. I refer a co-pilot so I can't even look at this, but it's kind of an intriguing idea, yeah yeah, I mean, I think this makes more sense at the os level, frankly, um yeah, it does so.
01:10:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's better than a wallpaper rotate.
01:10:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, yeah, right yeah because you'll, you'll be sitting there one day and you'll, you know, minimize something. I'm like look at that thing, you know, they're like a weird image on the background.
01:11:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, because you know, ai does anybody do that, say, customize your whole os based on ai image?
01:11:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, I'm changing every few hours it seems like the type of thing, uh, google and apple would have done by now. I think google's gotten the closest with that thing I was talking about, which is pretty. Yeah, on the pixel. The only's gotten the closest with that thing I was talking about, which is pretty cool. Yeah, on the Pixel. My only problem with that is how temporary that stuff is. So you generate something you're like, oh, maybe, and then you generate something again. Then the thing you did before is gone.
01:11:31
Because, obviously they don't want to be storing all this stuff everywhere. Most of it's garbage, but there's some kind of and it's pretty cool. I think that's such neat all right.
01:11:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, mr thurot, so before we move on, cool.
01:11:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yes, I don't know. I did I put this? No, I didn't. This is the right place. Um, I, I still haven't published my laptop review.
01:11:54
Uh, this is the lunar lake thing. It will be after the show or tomorrow, but it will be soon, as I'm just pretty close. I meant to get it done over the weekend. I keep running into issues with this computer. Um, I'll just say this I can't remember what I said about this last week, but there's a problem with lunar lake where, if it's set to the default power management state, it just doesn't work properly.
01:12:16
Um, the battery life is pretty good when it's like that, but it's um, but you can use it. It's kind of like the first generation ARM devices where you're like wow, it gets 25 hours of battery life, can you run any apps? No, no, you cannot run any apps, but it will stay up forever. So you switch it to best performance, which I think most people know intuitively means the battery life is going to go down. If you do that, the performance is fine. Intel says it's a bug, that supposedly they're going to fix this and someday you'll be able to leave it in the default power management, have acceptable performance and good battery life.
01:12:49
But this is in fact I don't have it here. This kills the battery life, like kills the battery life. So I think I was seeing six and a half hours before, compared to eight and a half for the AMD Zen 5, compared to 11 for Snapdragon. When you make this change four hours, maybe four and a quarter, it's not good. So it works good, but you better be near power because yikes, and of course it's an intel chip. So one of the things you also don't see on snapdragon, that you do see on intel especially, but x86, let's say, is a fairly dramatic performance drop off when you're on battery. Um, I don't remember the exact numbers, but with snap Snapdragon, if you use a Mac, for example, like the MacBook Air that I have, the M3, the difference between it on power and it on battery from a performance perspective is negligible to nothing. It's the same Like it's one of the magic things about max or apple silicon or whatever. On snapdragon, the difference is somewhere in the order of three percent, something like that.
01:13:59
It's tiny you don't notice it, yeah, but you really notice it on this thing and it's a problem. Um, you feel slow on when you're. It's not just slow, you run into problems like I. It's been so long for me, having seen things like this, I can't kind of can't believe it happens. Where it stops, the window goes white, it's going to crash, and you let it sit there and eventually kind of recovers, and then you keep working and then it pauses again and you're like what is happening here? And it's just something's wrong with it. And I mean sometimes it's seconds, several seconds, 10 seconds, I don't know.
01:14:39
It doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're in the middle of typing a sentence and the window goes white and you can't write anymore and you're like, is it okay? And then you know, tick the clock and then, nope, it's back, and then it catches up with all the stuff you just put in there. It's just not a good experience. So supposedly, intel's going to fix this. Um, we'll see. It's a tough one, because I really I mean, I really wanted this to work well and it's it's a little loopy, unfortunately well, this might cheer you up.
01:15:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Retcon 5 has taken your prompt and created a river and a balloon in a Renaissance painting.
01:15:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, there it is. See, that's beautiful. How did you?
01:15:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do that Retcon. Is that AI or did you actually find it?
01:15:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This looks like the real deal. It's not formatted to look like my phone.
01:15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, can you? Please have that be a vertical mode too much landscape. Oh, it looks great. I know, is that ai, it's mid journey. Mid journey has gotten so good.
01:15:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, it's a little scary how good yeah, but, leo, what about the people whose job it was to create renaissance style paintings for you when you asked them to like? Where are those guys going to get? Thomas kinkade, master of life is gonna be out of work kids pretty sure he's been a robot for about 20 years, but oh, yeah, he's already.
01:16:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's already retired what's bill mario?
01:16:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what's that guy? The guy, the guy with the afro, with the bob ross, bob ross.
01:16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's he gonna do? Who's gonna paint those happy little trees?
01:16:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
huh that's gonna be one of the styles, bob ross oh, I'm sure it is just like, um, what was uh that documentary filmmaker that, uh, that would do the? Oh yeah, what's the?
01:16:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
guy's apple.
01:16:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He apple stole his name and he was really yeah he got really mad because he would do that effect where he would just scroll over, it was still image ken burns, ken burns. Yes, the ken burns effect yeah, he started with a civil war, civil war, that's right, because there were no movies, you had only still images, right? So you?
01:16:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know, pan and scan the image and apple created a ken burns effect, which in I in I movie, and he was pissed so then they paid him, they licensed it, so everybody's happy but you're gonna see, you know they.
01:16:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe they don't call it that, but it's gonna be like the bob Bob Ross effect. You know the AI.
01:16:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what I've been honest, in the style of Bob Ross, painters are pissed off about, as they say well, you ingested all our images. I love that. You who are these?
01:17:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
painters, the painters. The painter people. I'm not saying they don't exist, I mean don't get me wrong, but like you know, like if you were to list the top 10 careers, I don't think oil painter. I would like to get a portrait of my family and I would like it to take 27 hours. Could you have one of those things I have?
01:17:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in my library. In the other room I have a nice library built-in bookshelves and stuff. That's something I've always wanted and I have a portrait of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great, going back to the 1830s, I think grandfather, done by an itinerant painter. That was a job. The guy would go around on a horse in a wagon and he would say paint your portrait for $50.
01:17:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right and those guys were probably pissed about photos.
01:17:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Matthew Brady comes along and the whole thing's out the window you hardly ever see a painter in a wagon anymore right, great, great.
01:17:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Whatever grandfather that guy could have had like a the biggest smile on earth on in that photo or in that painting. But if you took a photo of that guy, well it doesn't in the painting he had to hold it for like three minutes or whatever right that was yeah, no, but he actually.
01:18:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he's very grim. Maybe don't know, maybe he knew that photos were coming, maybe he was by great because it was the 1830s.
01:18:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know his wife they were.
01:18:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They both got their paintings and I've never seen it. But I've seen, but I have. His name is Anthony.
01:18:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the point is, you know, things change.
01:18:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now we have photos.
01:18:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's a, here's a the type of happy attitude I always bring to everything I talk about. You know, maybe this thing will get people to appreciate the style of paintings more than they did 10 years ago.
01:18:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a beautiful Renaissance painting. I love it, it is.
01:18:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a great. It's a high quality image. Yeah, is Raphael upset that he's not getting a little? Uh, something, something on the back? Oh, botticelli is so pissed. Those guys are rolling in their graves. They weren't already dust, or?
01:19:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
whatever so. So upset, all right, let's uh take a little break before we annoy any more. Uh, painters, and uh yes the crucial painter segment of our radio. Yeah, no more painters listening to our show. Yep, that's how it goes. My mom's an artist. I mean she doesn't anymore because she's getting on. Yeah.
01:19:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I went to art school. One of my best friend's wife graduated from art school. You know, she's allegedly a great artist.
01:19:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my sister has an MFA from the rhode island school of design, very prestigious art school. My nephews both have uh degrees from risd yep, it's not a lot of well. One of them is a graphic artist, so he has a lot of work.
01:19:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, that's will and when I went to art school, they didn't even have a computer yeah, literally.
01:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you studied graphic design though, right? Uh, no, I just no fine art no, I yeah, I left.
01:19:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I only went a year I I quickly realized if I my goal was to never make any money, this was the right career path but I wanted my, my daughter, uh, studied to be a poet, which is even better, frankly, uh, so did you paint the painting behind you?
01:20:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is that, is that your work?
01:20:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, no, so they have great art fairs or whatever here on weekends and, um, no, we have a couple. You can't really see the other ones, but we have a couple from this woman and, yeah, the local, and you know they're. Yeah beautiful.
01:20:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we uh, we have uh, my mom's art is on most of our walls, um, but we have some local artists we really like and I think it's good to support painters.
01:20:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not a painting behind my head, by the way, but that's okay. What is it? Is it a print? What is it? No, it's not a print. It's like a 3D. It's metal and has color insets and stuff.
01:20:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's cool. It's kind of like a modern version of a like a tile kind of a thing.
01:20:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it kind of looks like that I thought it might be a stained glass window, a little bit kind of so. I mean I I can tell just from the commentary here people are misunderstanding the point. Um, it's not that this stuff goes away, it's that it was never big to begin with and now more people will have access to it in ways that are really interesting. I mean it's, if anything, it has broadened the availability of this style of thing to people who would never have known about it.
01:21:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
RecCon 5 could never have painted a Renaissance painting.
01:21:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Still not a painting behind me. I keep getting it's a painting behind me, it's not a painting.
01:21:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not a painting either.
01:21:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Still not a painting.
01:21:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nor is it a neon sign. Yep, but it's not that it matters.
01:21:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It could be. We have paintings, we have paintings, we have paintings right over there.
01:21:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, let me do an ad Sure, a crazy thought, and we'll try to raise some money, and then, when we come back, we will talk more about other things, because you're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat, which has the week off. Our show today, brought to you by Veeam V-E-E-A-M, the data resilience experts. Without your data, if you're a company, your customer's trust turns to digital dust. That's why Veeam's data protection and note this ransomware recovery ensures that you can secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it, no matter what happens, even ransomware. Veeam is the number one global market leader in data resilience, trusted by over 77% of the Fortune 500 to keep their businesses running when digital disruptions like ransomware strike, seems like you know, I read in the headlines this company paid $10 million to ransomware gang to get their data back.
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01:24:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, yeah, they dribble in. That's the problem. So there's a bunch back to back to back. And then you know the laggards, like I mentioned, spotify, for example. We want to talk about them, but just quickly arm and Qualcomm, because they're involved in a something, something that could turn into a legal in court challenge in December We'll see. But arm, which had been kind of creeping up to the billion mark uh in revenues, only hit 844 million uh this past quarter, which that's kind of surprising.
01:24:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's such a small amount of money compared to all the people who use arm yeah for their designs.
01:25:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I know it's crazy. You know, qualcomm the biggest licensee, I believe, of arm, made 10.24 billion in revenue, billion Right, they're going gangbusters to almost 20% growth. Right, both these companies were asked in their post earnings conference calls what's going on with the other guy, anything you want to talk about there? And both of them, you know, kind of say the same thing. It's like we can't really talk about it, but they're wrong and we're going to defend our. Blah, blah, blah. We'll see what happens.
01:25:33
I don't think it makes sense for this to go to court. I think the outcome here is fairly obvious. We probably talked about this, this notion that there's some kind of happy middle ground where Qualcomm pays more but not what Arm wants them to pay, and that makes some sense. We'll see. But um, arm had to um, you know, for regulatory reasons has to assume they're going to lose this case, which they don't say they believe Um, and they're not expanding as quickly into AI as I think a lot of people would like. But uh, they're doing okay, it's fine. But you're right, I agree, I it's. It blows my mind, and maybe this is part of the problem they look over at qualcomm and apple and all these other companies like you know. Those guys seem like they're doing pretty good. Uh, we don't even have a billion bucks.
01:26:23
you know like we're using we make these reference designs, what's going on? So it's kind of amazing. Yeah, um, and I didn't have time to write about this, but when I it just happened. But when I reported earlier in the month I guess, on Intel and AMD, and even in its diminished state, you know, intel is still quite a bit bigger than AMD from a revenue perspective, whatever, from a getting their processors out in the world into PCs. Much bigger, much bigger, and it's kind of the lingering inertia effects of all of their payola stuff over the years. Like you know, they pay to play, like they've done a good job with that.
01:27:02
But AMD, the other thing we would have talked about at the time was their revenues from the data center, which is increasingly kind of AI, gpu based, is going gangbusters, but they're still just a fifth the size of NVIDIA from revenue perspective.
01:27:18
And so there are other two businesses, which is basically client competing, which is, you know, holding pattern. It's OK, although I think they make the best chips for PCs right now in the x86 space and then from graphics cards is negligibleible. That's going down big, big time right, so they're not, it's just not good. So it was very it's very clear they're making a big push in the data center and they had to make a regulatory filing. Or they made a regulatory filing in which they had to admit they are laying off people so they can focus more on that data center revenue. They're kind of shuffling the decks a bit and um less emphasis on the client stuff, more on the data center, which long term I don't know that could be bad, I think. I think amd is important in the pc space. I hope that doesn't fall off a cliff yeah, yeah, no kidding, yeah.
01:28:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we'll see, would you say. Intel has fallen off a cliff.
01:28:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, I mean, yeah yeah, of course I mean, but they're still the biggest fish in this small pond that is PCs. Right, right, it's still a couple hundred million.
01:28:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute. Did you just call the PC pond the small pond?
01:28:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well compared to smartphones and IoT and cloud. Yes, what a change, what a huge change. So the silver lining, if you will I made this case probably several years ago now was that Microsoft, which once ruled the industry, was, whatever size it was, personal computing. Today, Microsoft owns the I would say, the smallest of the big three or four client platforms. It's bigger than it's ever been, right, so they're doing fine, you know.
01:29:02
And the PC is okay. It's not. You know, it's not going away. I mean, I think the post PC world that some people thought was imminent is not happening, but it's not going to. I what is it? 20, probably 2011,. 2013 at the latest. We were looking at. Oh yeah, they're going to sell 500 million things. That you know. 500 million units a year. No, they're not. That's never happening. So we're in the two to two 40, two, 50 range I would say right now. But you know, if that's all you have, you're screwed Like AMD is going data center, for all the obvious reasons.
01:29:37
And videos the have. You're screwed like amd is going data center, for all the obvious reasons. Nvidia is the biggest hardware. Well, actually, I guess apple is, but apple, nvidia, are humongous hardware companies all based on our uh, no, not all based on I'm sorry, uh based on, but based on arm on in apple's case and based on gpus and in video's case, in the cloud right. Um, intel dominates this market but it's like they're not doing great. I don't know if you noticed uh not going good. Yeah, okay, I know I really wanted to talk to richard about this.
01:30:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I might just call him yeah, richard does a show called dot neck rocks um.
01:30:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we knew for quite some time Microsoft's fairly transparent about this, always hits the date. But in early to mid-November they have a dot-net conf every year. It's a virtual three-day conference. It's ongoing right now. Literally, you could go look up Google dot-net conf and you'll see a live event happening right now. The first day was yesterday. They released dot NET 9 and a new version of Visual Studio to match.
01:30:37
Net 9 brings a bunch of capabilities across the stack and NET is not the NET we kind of grew up with. It's open source and cross-platform and all the good things. And for me it's mostly about this WPF thing. Right, I've been talking about all year, like back at build. In May they said WPF is back. We're bringing back this app platform that debuted. Well, technically it debuted in 2003 with Longhorn as Avalon, but it shipped, really, I would say, in 2006,. I guess um never got a lot of use inside of Microsoft, which is kind of why it kind of fell by the wayside, but huge use out in the world and to this day it's still incredibly popular. So they've kind of brought it back. It's really sophisticated.
01:31:21
It's my favorite version of that NET Pad app that I write and I spent a lot of the summer updating it for these new features, which include things like Windows 11 theming and so forth. I identified several missing features and as every milestone of NET 9 came and went without an update for WPF, I was getting a little edgy. But they fixed one of the things I complained about in the RTM version and I didn't even know it was coming. And so one of the things you can do with WPF now is have it match the Windows 11 theme, so you get all the controls that look right and rounded corners and all that, but you also get lighter dark mode. So if your computer is in dark mode, the app will be in dark mode.
01:32:02
If you switch it, it switches with it. It's nice, but most modern apps give you a settings interface where you can say no, I want light mode all the time, or I want dark mode all the time, or I want dark mode all the time, or, yes, I'll accept the system state. And that was not a capability to wpf. So the app as it stood until pretty recently it was like well, I mean, at least we get that, but we don't get the the way to um, switch them on the fly. So they added that capability and it's pretty simple. Um, so that's nice. That was one of the. It was one of about four things I need you know for this thing to be there.
01:32:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's kind of a funny little thing not to have to be honest with you. I thought so.
01:32:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It seemed pretty obvious to me. I thought it was so obvious that I actually built the UI for it, thinking it would come.
01:32:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll be there, yeah, yeah.
01:32:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I didn't expect it today, so it happened. That's cool, so I can update the app, that's good. There's other stuff going on. They call today Microsoft Day at NET Conf Tomorrow is Wait a minute, hold on.
01:33:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's hysterical, I know, because, as you said, it's open source. Now it's global.
01:33:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it was a Microsoft technology. Microsoft is obviously the sugar daddy for NET or whatever you want to call them, but NET is the NET foundation. It's out in the world, it's for everything.
01:33:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thanks, to Miguel de Icaza for making it possible.
01:33:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, he's the best. That's really wonderful. Very early on, I think, when they first announced NET, he wanted to make a version for Linux and then did, and then over time, he made a version for Android and that was Xamarin and it became Microsoft Audit eventually. But that work has formed the basis of the open source. What is now NET the old proprietary version, is gone. It literally is because of him. It's amazing. Yeah, it is astonishing. It's really, really, really cool.
01:33:54
Tomorrow they're going to talk about third-party stuff, so I'm looking forward to that. Uno is going to make a big announcement tomorrow. Um, they make a wpf like app, uh framework that works across platforms. So, in other words, like the app I created, dot netpad, you could run on the mac or linux or whatever. So that's very interesting. And then avalon, which was a third party WPF replacement back at a time when Microsoft was not supporting WPF in any meaningful way. So they're still kicking around and we'll learn about that tomorrow.
01:34:22
I just got an email about this, so I thought I'd throw it out there. Like every other company on earth, qualcomm is pushing AI stuff at devs and they're doing the second of two webinars about AI development on Snapdragon X tomorrow, thursday it's free and the first one is you can just go stream it. So this one, if you miss it, you'll be able to see it in the future if you're interested in this topic. So that is happening. But I was, I was hoping. I thought there the dot or the WPF team, I guess, is going to discuss some further improvements they're going to make, I guess, the NET 10 timeframe. So I think that might be tomorrow. I thought it was happening today but I think it might be tomorrow. Awesome, maybe more next week, we'll see.
01:35:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, and I'm sure if you listen to to dot net rocks, there'll be some stuff there with richard campbell at yeah, run his radiocom I've been checking, I've actually been checking this in case they had, like it, lock and loaded.
01:35:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know for dot net cough, but I haven't seen a new one yet. But yeah, yeah, it's actually a bad time for richard to I know I want it so bad because I feel like he might know things. Yeah you know, he might um, but yeah, that's too bad. Well, next week folks stay tuned.
01:35:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching Windows Weekly Normally, paul Therot and Richard Campbell of RenesRadiocom. Richard has the day off. Paul is here in the Roma Norte, mexico City. You're going home for Thanksgiving. Yep, then are you going to go back for the winter, are?
01:35:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you going to? Yeah, this has been our longest trip here so far, but we're going to try to do at least three months starting how does it feel? It feels normal. Yeah, I don't want to go home.
01:35:59
Yeah, I have to say I love thanksgiving thanksgiving's a big thing with our whole family. My wife does all the cooking. It's great, love it. Um, I got some other stuff going on that weekend which is going to be kind of fun. You know, christmas obviously we always do a big new year's thing with friends and family, um. But we also have my daughter graduating from school and we have to move her and then move her again in january and it's going to be just a really busy time. But once that's over, yeah, we're going to come back here. So I don't know do you?
01:36:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
will you rent out your house in pennsylvania or what will you do? No, we don't know.
01:36:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We rent you will you rent out your house in Pennsylvania, or what will you do? No, we don't know. We rent it, so we sold our house. Yeah, we rent it. So I mean, if anything we I don't know if I should just get rid of it, I don't know.
01:36:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will say but then you would have one home, one domicile, and it would be Do you feel strange?
01:36:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It seems normal now. I mentioned this a couple of times for some reason. But when we got lunch today I was saying to Stephanie my wife like one thing I really like here, you know we couldn't eat lunch or dinner outside we do every day Because it's inexpensive and it's good and the weather's perfect.
01:37:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know like you can be outside every day. Yeah, has it snowed yet in Mc mcundee? No, I don't know. We've had frost. I get frost warnings on my phone.
01:37:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know, like here we go, you go yeah, that's the thing I don't. And she, that's what she said. She said, you know, I don't think we appreciate, like how dark and cold it's going to be when we get back because the time changed and uh, that's right, you know we're looking at I think pennsylvania gets about 13 minutes of sunlight this time you don't do a time change either no and because you're fairly southerly, uh, you get a lot of.
01:37:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You get a long day, longer day, that's right. Can I move in with you? It's a small apartment, but uh, I wish we'd planned better, uh, for retirement, but oh well, okay, yeah, well, okay yeah. But who does?
01:37:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean.
01:37:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, right, it is time now, my friends, for our vaunted Xbox segment. You know what cracks me about this first item. Apple, which is not notorious for the volume of AAA games available, for it, does have a couple. There's Baldur's Gate 3. Valheim is now a native on the Macintosh, and one of the games they always talk about is Death Stranding. I didn't realize you couldn't get on an Xbox all this time.
01:38:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I almost went after this game on a different platform and I like it this to be honest it's a fun game. So if you look at it, it's different it looks interesting, I if you look at the timing of it, it was literally almost to the day, three years after it debuted on the playstation 5. Right, and I think they must have had a I don't know three-year exclusivity, or something.
01:38:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, maybe that's what it was it is available on the mac platform yeah, I think it's on.
01:38:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was on pc too, wasn't it?
01:38:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, yeah, or yeah, oh, but you're saying on consoles, On console yeah, so now it's across all the Xbox stuff, so that's great.
01:38:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I haven't looked at it yet, but actually I suspect that on the book.
01:39:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a good game, it looks good. It's a little different story, you know, yeah, and it does have Ned Stark, so that's good. That's is it he looks like no, you're talking about this. This is from the walking dead, oh walking dead guy Norman Reedus, norman Reedus, norman Reedus. Thank you, kevin King. The perpetual state of I shaved a week ago.
01:39:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Somehow I don't understand that weird looking guy they have a thing, they have a special razor. The the one week ago, razor yep so yeah, that came out of nowhere, that just kind of happened.
01:39:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought that was really cool, it's uh, it's a different kind of a fun kind of game. I kind of like it. Oh, there's the ps5 ad for it. Yeah, of course it's gonna.
01:39:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is probably. It's probably how the uh xbox version starts up that'd be funny, wouldn't it?
01:39:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because it is a playstation studio. She had one of these.
01:39:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, nothing creepy about this, um, I know yeesh, uh, there is some creepy.
01:39:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is kind of a it's a different kind of a game kojima is an auteur.
01:40:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so this is interesting because it is a sony game, so this reminds me a little bit of like the is it called the castillo project or I don't know that's got that kind of vibe to it what would you say, kevin?
01:40:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have you played death stranding? Yeah?
01:40:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I finished it you finished it yeah well, what would you say? It's like, yeah, three years ago, like everyone else it's a pretty good game, right yeah, you play as a delivery man right and uh deliver essential goods during a post-apocalypse yeah, so this is like a neil stevenson slash the postman come out right before covid so oh did it.
01:40:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It came out right before covid so it's even older than three years. Wow, okay, but it was remarkably on point. It was prescient. As you say, prescient it's kind of creepy looking. Yeah, it is. It's fun though I, I enjoyed it. Well, it's just on playstation, I mean xbox, it's not on game pass or anything no, I think it's across, I think it's on everything.
01:41:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh okay, let me just make sure, but I believe it's it's also. Yeah, well, it's on pc game pass previously actually oh, yeah, I thought so, I thought it was on yeah, oh, okay, cool.
01:41:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well then I can play it, because I have game pets there you go, uh, they did ask spencer uh, are you ever gonna, yeah, put some microsoft exclusives on ps5 or a lot, oh he said we're gonna put them all on a base.
01:41:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so I mean, like this is, this is a lot like the outlook topic before and honestly it's tied a little bit to this death stranding thing like where these companies want to get their games everywhere, yeah, but it's also super controversial in that kind of fan base way and I look I I said this to brad this morning if you want this thing to survive, this thing being Xbox, you have to understand it's not going to be console. They have to go everywhere they have to. So they still are being kind of cagey about it. But in an interview with Bloomberg he did say a couple of things that were pretty explicit, which I kind of like. Think about a quote like this. He said longer term, I love us building devices. I mean, there's so much to unpack in that sentence. It's so short. Longer term, so you don't like you building devices now is what you're saying. In other words, if you look out further to the horizon, there will become an age where we're building more devices.
01:42:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What does that mean? Is an Xbox a?
01:42:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
device. I don't even know what that means. Well, right now, the big focus at xbox is getting these games on other platforms to increase the audience size. Right, you know, they buy something like activision blizzard. Where those gamers are on mobile, they're on playstation 5, they're wherever they are right, they're on switch or whatever they're all over the place so that you know, obviously, call of duty big deal got it.
01:42:56
Some of the king games are mobile big deal, yep, got it. But microsoft wants to apply this model, um, to a lot of what they do, and they want to apply some of what they've done right or semi-successfully or whatever. That something, or think maybe I should say the the things that were strategic to them are strategic to them that weren't for activision, blizzard, like getting called you on game pass, right. So they've got this kind of mix of things they're trying to figure out right now. It's been a tough year. I think everyone understands that. But, um, we got a pretty weak console refresh. There are rumors uh, leaks, I should, they're not rumors that Microsoft has been working on true next-gen consoles that are really interesting, one of the possibilities being based on ARM right. When you hear something like longer term, you can kind of imagine like there are going to be more devices. Some of them will be maybe traditional consoles like we know today. Some of them will be portable gaming something, something we'll see. One of the things I speculated was that perhaps microsoft could license xbox os to hardware makers, like they license windows, and let companies that are better at this, or smaller companies that could withstand smaller margins, make the hardware right. Maybe there's some version of the xbox as a developer platform where you create a game that runs on the console, maybe it runs streaming or otherwise on mobile, maybe it runs on Windows. Maybe these things are kind of closer than they are today. So we'll see. We don't really know. What we know is that short-term hardware sales are falling off a cliff. Activision Blizzard I guess you could argue from a revenue perspective is kind of keeping it afloat, but they have a lot of good ip right. And so halo gears, pirate, whatever they this stuff should be on playstation, which, to a certain part of this, you know, population out there, the community is not what you want to hear. I get it, but I I always point to Call of Duty as the example of why this can work. So when I was heavily into Call of Duty, one of the things I saw happen over time was that 10 years ago or whatever, when I got online, I was playing against Xbox people. At one point it changed so that now I was playing against Xbox and PlayStation people and that made up for a dramatically bigger audience. Now I play against, now one could play against Xbox, playstation, pc and game streaming users, meaning someone could be sitting there on an iPad with a controller streaming the Xbox version of Call of Duty over the cloud and playing against me in a multiplayer game, and I could be on the PC, I could be on Xbox, whatever. So that's, that's the model, that's the I don't know big tent, I don't know what we call that Like. It's a more diverse, open, big market and that's what Xbox is becoming, and some people can't stand it.
01:45:52
But he kind of addressed a lot of this in a very short interview and said you know, look, we're trying. There's no version of the future where we make a $1,000 console and it sells Like it's not going to happen, which is a slight dig at PlayStation, which sells a $700 console, which is not going to sell, right, I mean, it's just not going to make a difference. But he wants to make mobile devices, whatever that means. People have been asking for that for maybe decades, but certainly for years. They want to open mobile app slash game stores on iOS and Android and that's held up in all the regulatory nonsense that's going on right now. So we'll see what happens there. They're trying to make a go of the game streaming stuff over the cloud. Obviously they're pretty, they're set up pretty well for that and they have these subscription services right, which one might imagine. What if you were an XPEX game, a game pass ultimate customer and you could play those games on Nintendo or PlayStation right? So we'll see. We'll see where the world goes, but if he's making devices.
01:46:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It sounds like he. Do you think that Microsoft wants to make, for instance, a Steam Deck or a Switch? Yeah, I do. That's what they're talking about. Yep.
01:47:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Interesting Vaguely because they don't know what model might work right.
01:47:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I have sort of said so they don't have hard plans.
01:47:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They just so, they don't have hard plans. Well, I mean, if you look at the current generation of consoles, we talk PlayStation, xbox all day long, but the reality is the big seller here is Nintendo with Switch, right with the Switch. This is a thing that has cartoonish graphics. It's portable. You can dock it, play it on your TV, but you can also sit in a bus going to work and play games there.
01:47:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we were talking about it. People love them COVID there. Yeah, we were talking about people love them covid games. I somebody in the chat room like me played animal crossing. Yeah, uh, for like a solid year in 2020 on our that's the only way you could cope with this right because it was the only way we could cope. And uh, yep I'm thinking I might need something like that.
01:47:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean brad made this comment today, so but he goes well. I don't think of that as the traditional xbox game or whatever it's like, right, it has to be more what it is that's it needs to be bigger the casual game universe is much bigger.
01:47:59
It's a much bigger market and and for all that stuff that we just talked about, the three major consoles, pc, which is probably roughly the same as those three things combined tiny compared to mobile gaming, right. So there's a whole world out there that xbox is trying to get into in a meaningful way and I like, if microsoft has proven anything it can't make hardware successfully.
01:48:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's as bad as it, that's a little screenshot from animal crossing.
01:48:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
New horizons, just yep that's 2020 in a nutshell right there, right there.
01:48:31
That's oh god, yeah, oh look, I, I'll just say look I. Obviously a big focus of mine in gaming for 10, 15 years, whatever that was was call of duty. Um, I have in recent months, played call of duty over the cloud. It worked fine. It wasn't it wasn't perfect, but it worked fine, especially single player. I played Call of Duty on mobile with an iPad and a controller. It's surprisingly good.
01:49:00
You know, the world is changing. So even if you're kind of a what we would think of as a hardcore gamer the type of person who might, in the past, have built their own PC, swapped out the graphics card every couple of years, whatever, you know, that stuff was always going to be there. But I, I, I think we can bring what I would call like modern, sophisticated games to a bigger audience now because the devices we have are so capable. Yeah, so anyway, that's the Xbox thing. The one thing that hasn't deviated when they talk about the future is the plan, right, which is just. It can't just be this console. It's too small, right, you know. And it's weird that the people who care about the Xbox the most are the ones who are resistant to that the most, because the thing they like is this little sliver.
01:49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think releasing Age of Empires on iPads?
01:49:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
was that a kind of he specifically mentions that in the interview actually, oh yeah, what?
01:49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
does he say yeah, let's go to the tape Like a toe-in.
01:50:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, let me see. Yeah, it was a oh, actually, maybe we didn't quote it. Let me find the original. Yeah, so Age of. It's a lot of fun, I have to say. So they partnered with tencent on that.
01:50:14
Yeah, right oh he says it's, yeah, it says a big, obviously big mobile developer yeah, yeah, and big in china, right like this is kind of interesting, actually mentioned, yeah. So he says it's been a good area for us to learn from creative teams that have really unique capability. The real opportunity is to partner with creative teams in china for global. So you know, when microsoft was trying to buy activision blizzard, they would talk why are you doing this? You're going to spend 68 billion dollars, like what you know, and the assumption and it was always well, it's about call of duty, you know, but it it was to some degree, but really the number one thing was mobile. This was an area where Microsoft had just made these tiny little incursions with some Halo offshoots that you know, whatever. They were okay, but they have these great franchises that they haven't done enough with, and with Activision, blizzard, they have even more of these things. Plus, you get these studios that have been doing these mobile cross-platform games for a long time. So I think we're going to see more of this stuff. I think we're going to see more of this stuff. I think we're going to see a positive. We're going to see Halo gears on PlayStation for starters. They've already said they're going to bring Halo back to Nintendo, to the Switch or to whatever the next thing is.
01:51:27
I, you know, extending my Call of Duty multiplayer thing. I think there's no reason. I don't know. I know there's no reason why a native iPad version of Call of Duty could not be playing in a multiplayer match with people on PC and console. There's no way, it's possible. It just isn't happening yet. So I think there's a lot going on. I think they've been a little too quiet, except when they have to lay off people. They've been pretty loud about that. I wish there was more in the way of positive yeah announcements this year, but that's the way it's gone so hey, let's talk about that major new activision release on game pass.
01:52:03
Everybody's pretty darn excited about that so I literally, I've heard several people who literally said to me see, see, it's happening they're starting to bring activision games to Game Pass. They just brought three of them to Game Pass. What are you complaining about? What I'm complaining about is that these games are called. Spyro which is, by the way, an ancient Sega game that's from Sega. What is this?
01:52:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who cares Are you kidding me?
01:52:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We just brought Atari. Was it a PlayStation game? Okay, who cares? It's geez, come on. Anyway, I'm glad for the people who want this. Congratulations. I guess you got what you wanted. I don't know. It's not something I care about personally, um, I used to play this with my kid there you go. When he was a kid. When he was a kid, when he was a kid, right.
01:52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is a long time ago. Yeah, it's like you know, congratulations.
01:52:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Death Stranding came to the Xbox Great. It was on everything else years ago First. Yeah, it's weird being in that position right Like we're in all. This is like the way they bring games to the Mac usually like or right. Oh, you got, like here's yesterday's triple a game exactly. You know that's how the mac gets it second class, you know. So to me that's not very exciting, but I don't know anyway. Yep, stupid purple dragon. So you get that.
01:53:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you don't get it on the on the on the playstation original playstation yeah, no, geez, really that long, yeah, yeah okay, I suspect the graphics a little bit better.
01:53:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is everything it's reignited.
01:53:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
all right, forgetting it's. It's reignited. Forget graphics are better.
01:53:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's reignited, yes right, he's a fire dragon, probably blows fire. Yeah, he's a fire dragon. I already thought about this more than I want to, so this was kind of off book. They usually do two or even three Game Pass announcements per month. This was one they just kind of came out with, just like the Death Stranding thing. It kind of came out of nowhere. So that's fine, it's a gimme, it's, you know, found money or whatever. This will just read like wait, they didn't have this. So Microsoft has brought back a feature that the Xbox community has been clamoring for for years now, which is called friend requests. The social experience on Xbox has kind of changed a lot. Honestly, this was something dating back to the Xbox 360, if I'm not mistaken, and now it's back, so I don't know. Like what this means is from your console, you can send, accept and and remove, I guess. Uh, friend requests you can now follow or accept followers on xbox, right, like you can't do this before.
01:54:42
Yes, so okay 15 years ago whenever the heck it was. I know, I know it doesn't make any sense to me, but it's back, so okay, uh, it's coming. Yeah, it's coming back. I know it's it's, it's painful, even talking along with spyro the dragon.
01:54:55
It's exactly what's old is old again or whatever the phrase is. Um, it's still old but it's back, I don't know. It's like, uh, super resolution, I guess it's. You know whatever it's a thing, yep, um, a couple of nvidia stories. So n has a GeForce now service. That is an alternative to like Xbox cloud gaming, I guess. Um, this is where they they're hosting PC games in the cloud and then you stream and you can play. It's a pretty good service, it seems like.
01:55:23
But one of the cool things well, there's a couple of cool things about it. Um, they have paid and unpaid tiers and of course, you know the, the tier the people who pay get, you know, better placement in the queue and so forth. But, um, what they didn't do until right now is limit your ability to play games each month. But now they actually have, uh, they're starting to cap usage, even for paid users, because I guess a lot of people were on there for a long time. So let's do the math on this. So, um, they're going to have different tiers. So the I think the I think it's the basic one is a hundred. Basic pay plan is a hundred hours a month. Let me bring up calculator here. So that means you could play for about three and a half hours a day in a typical month. I guess were you doing this more than that?
01:56:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
for almost anybody.
01:56:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I couldn't agree more. But how much do you want to do that? I don't know. They're gonna have like 15 hours of playtime rollover per month.
01:56:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They must. I mean, they've done the math, they know that that's yeah, they know what it's costing them yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:56:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's always the case of online services. There's some tiny percentages abusing it and taking advantage of all the resources and yeah yeah so they're gonna make you pay for that and then if you go over the uh, the hundred hours, you can pay.
01:56:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's three bucks a month hours is a lot I mean, unless it's your only gaming platform.
01:56:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe if you were, that was it I mean three and a half hours seems like a lot, trying to imagine that human being, I, I, but I.
01:56:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I suppose, yeah, it's possible.
01:56:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I might sometimes have eight hours sesh yeah, but you're playing it on your device or whatever right, like on a computer, like it's 55 inch screen. I'm yeah, I mean viking world. You're not streaming it from a data center.
01:57:09
It's like you're, you know yeah, that's right I mean that that's what's weird to me, although, like I said, you know the game, though the cloud gaming experience has gotten better, I think with call of duty, black ops 6. They wanted to make sure that was a pretty good experience, so they bumped up all the resources and whatnot, but, uh, I don't know. I can only imagine what ai services suffered because of that little change. But, my god, you're killing us. Yeah, it's kind of weird, but, um, anyway, that's good. Uh, and then nvidia, infamously, on the pc, has this app called the geforce experience, which is quite an experience, by the way, if you've ever used it. So what is that? Is that windows? Yeah, so I don't remember when this started, but a couple years ago they they actually force you to sign into an nvidia account to use this thing, and you get it on when you have an nvidia graphics card and oh this, I love this.
01:58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yeah. So what it does is a lot of features.
01:58:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It makes sure your drivers are up to date, but it also optimizes for the games you have installed. So you see this. There's a lot of things that do this I'm a lot of. You know this is kind of a common thing, but they're replacing it with something called the nvidia app and to me, the big change is you don't have to sign in anymore, so and it's also a lot more responsive. I think the, the original geforce experience app, which was probably written in visual basic or something. It's the. It's just this ancient, terrible thing, and I feel like every I run it, I have to install drivers, like every time. I don't know what's going on with it, but so this is probably going to be a big improvement. So I assume at some point they'll push you to it. You know, if you're on GeForce Experience, you'll just get this at some point, but right now you can go to the NVIDIA website and just download and see what it's like at least so, and see what it's like at least so. That's out and that's good.
01:58:55
And then, finally, sony revealed, as part of their earnings right more earnings that they have now sold 65 million PlayStation 5 consoles, which you know, for the price of this thing and the fact that they launched in the pandemic. There were supply issues in the very beginning, pretty good. So the problem for PlayStation 5? There were supply issues in the very beginning, pretty good. So the problem for PlayStation 5 is it's on track to be the lowest selling PlayStation console of all time and what they need to beat is the PlayStation 3, which the numbers vary, but I want to say it's about $88 million. So somehow, between now and end of life, this thing has to sell another. What is that? 23 million?
01:59:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
units-ish. What would really help you sell those 23 million units is make a $700 version of the PlayStation 5 and call it I don't know Pro.
01:59:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's an idea Sell a 1080p version for 200 bucks.
01:59:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would sell like gangbusters right there you go Exactly.
01:59:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I doubt that their developer pipeline could accommodate that. I think that's the problem. I bet the assets are so humongous. That's it. I don't know how they would ever do such a. You know we need, like I just mentioned, super resolution. We need like super d resolution. You know, take a, take a game and like d asset it downscale downscale it.
02:00:13
Yeah, yeah, I mean they can make Doom run on a toaster. I guess this is technically possible. But anyway, the big deal here to me is I would just say look, we don't know what Microsoft has sold seven, eight million. No, it's probably I don't know 30 million somewhere in there somewhere. It's less than half, certainly, of what Sony has sold. But just given the circumstances and given this part of the market and the way the world's gone, honestly I'm not sure it could have done better, other than the fact that cost reduction hasn't really happened. That's typical with each console generation. And then they've had things like PlayStation VR, which did great on PlayStation 4, and fell off a cliff and they stopped doing it on PlayStation 5. So they're obviously seeing the effect of some changes to the market too. But yeah, 65 million that's a Microsoft would kill for that number.
02:01:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How many Xboxes?
02:01:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to guess 30, 25, 30, somewhere in there. We have to guess it's less than half. Yeah, we don't. I'm going to guess 30, 25, 30, somewhere in there. We have to guess it's less than half. Yeah, there was a point where historically, it had been 20, like 50% for a long time, and there was a point where I don't remember who said this some analysts but it was like actually, it's closer to a third now, like it's not, it's not great. Yeah, yeah, that's not great.
02:01:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching windows weekly. This is mr paul thorat. You probably have met before. I hope you have. If you're new to the show, we welcome you. We stream. Well, you know there are new, you know I, I, I assume that everybody knows you and knows the show, but we are streaming now on all these new platforms eight different platforms so I think we are getting some new people. Every once in a while we're on tiktok now I see people saying leo laporte's still alive, things like that. So things like that.
02:01:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So what do we have to do to be popular on TikTok Like, is there some kind of a dance we have?
02:01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to do? Yeah, we have to do a dance.
02:02:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like remember the Fortnite dances were big for a little while. I'll just start doing that because that's like how out of touch I am.
02:02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, look, we're putting landscape video on TikTok, so you kind of get a sense that we probably don't know what we're doing, but we are also on Discord for our club members. We're on YouTube, twitch, linkedin, facebook, xcom. We're on Xcom, we are all over the place and right now we have 600, so people watching on those various streams. So thank you, welcome. And if you've not been here before, this is our Microsoft show. Paul and usually Richard Campbell's here. He's got the week off. He'll be back, I hope, next week, and we'll get Richard's contribution. Of course his website is runisradiocom, of course his website is runasradiocom, and I will use this as an opportunity to just plug, as he often does, the latest show, which is about SQL Server Management Studio with Aaron Stilato. We miss you, richard, come back, come back soon. Meanwhile, we continue with, uh, the back of the book and your tip of the week. I even know what's happening.
02:03:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't have a tip per se, but I, I wrote something today that made me go back and look at this, and one of my big goals for this trip uh, and we've been here for almost seven weeks is to get the windows 11 field guide updated. So, if you have this book, um, I've actually updated 28 chapters so far. Holy cow, oh yeah, and. But here's the thing. So that's actually, you know it's a lot, you know it's a lot, but, um, I, though I think what happens is, you know, if you, if you go to throtcom and see the updates, you're like, okay, so he updated, so he updated the file explorer chapter. That's really exciting. Or he updated, um, you know, the one direct chapter, like big deal.
02:03:57
But the thing that I'm actually kind of most excited about with this is that most of these chapters have like new content that's meaningful, and I think when you see it, you might say, eh, who cares? But actually, you know, if you own the book, you should download it again because it's something like I want to say it's 1168 pages or something stupid, unbelievable. It's a stupid amount of time, it's big. So, but I got to figure something out for the next version. You know, maybe figure out something a little more manageable. But anyway, in the meantime I will keep updating.
02:04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think you should. I'm really glad that people, ie you, still do kind of the definitive book with everything you'd want to know and more. Yeah, I mean honestly these days, you couldn't publish this book because it'd be too thick for the presses. That's right. But the fact that you can do it online and you can buy it at leanpubcom and you can pay as little as 10 bucks- and you keep it up to date, which is the big thing that that was the point of.
02:05:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and it's forever updatable.
02:05:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah uh, if I drop it to 10 bucks, the authors earn pretty much nothing, so yeah, get get in there and slide that slider over to the right and give the office, do as you will, but a little something. And the other way to do it, of course, as you mentioned last week, is if you are a member, a premium member, at therotcom. Yeah, they get the web version Also. Get all the web versions of this.
02:05:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I keep the site up to date with the book. Nice, yeah, 24h2 version date with the book. Yeah, nice, yeah, 24 h2 version. I'll get it in a couple of years, paul. I mean, I've done, I, I do. We just talk about this. I I did a bunch of um local account work the past few weeks. You did on hands-on windows too, that's what you're thinking.
02:05:44
Yep, it is and the hands-on windows kind of feeds off the stuff that I've been. You know, updating the book I. One of the big things now is just um kind of what I would think of is like power user things where you have updating the book I. One of the big things now is just um kind of what I would think of as like power user things where you have to use the registry or maybe even a third party utility to kind of fix a problem in windows. Whatever. I'm trying to get all that stuff in there. So it's getting there. Okay, good, okay, um, I do have two app picks.
02:06:07
Uh, our friends at Stardock released a desktop GPT which they announced oh boy, may, I think back in May. Probably it's only available as part of Object Desktop. It is, you could argue, it's you know, yet another way to run AI and AI LLM basically on your computer. But there's some interesting stuff going on with this one and actually the reason they released it is they were using ChatGPT at the time at the company and said you know, we found some really useful ways to use this product. We should, maybe we could turn this into a product so it works with multiple LLMs. It's I'm going to call it scriptable is maybe what they call them templates.
02:06:48
But you can create these little keyboard shortcuts for things that you want to automate. So if you want to do, you know all the typical AI things like summarize a document, rewrite a headline, you know whatever it might be. But you can also have these things run against specific LLMs, which is really interesting. So if you know that one of them is particularly good at whatever tasks, you could have that run against that. But then, uh, follow it up with a different command or prompt that runs off a different llm, so it's extensible as well, which I think is kind of interesting. And it's not a standalone product. So you know they sell this thing called object desktop which comes with most of their popular desktop utilities, and you get it as part of that. So kind of their microsoft 365, I guess. Um, so worth looking at for sure. I also saw that google, which has a thing called QuickShare it used to be called NearbyShare has or is updating it to work on.
02:07:42
ARM, and so this is the thing that Google uses with Android and Chrome OS to share between those devices, but they released a version for Windows I don't know a year ago, whatever it was, since renamed it to QuickShare and that's a way you can share in both directions, back and forth between your phone and your Windows PC. Oh, so it's like their version of Apple's AirDrop.
02:08:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I use that on Apple's all the time.
02:08:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's really useful. Yep, it's amazing. The seamless nature of that is just astonishing. So this is pretty good. It's um. It actually runs on windows and arm right now, but it's an x64 f, so I don't know if they're gonna actually make an arm native version. I didn't.
02:08:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I never thought to try it on windows, but it works fine as long as it works. Yeah, maybe you don't need to. It's not about speed, it works it works fine.
02:08:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, would rather see google drive on windows and arm. Remember they promised that oh yeah kind of curious where that happened. What's going on there? But um, that could solve some problems for me.
02:08:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know why these things are really good now is, um, our cameras, are our phones right and we, we take pictures, and it's really nice to be able to get it into the computer without having to hook up the phone or mail it to yourself there are a couple ways to do this.
02:08:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, um, windows 11 and phone link. If you're nearby, yeah, it will actually pop up a notification now, which is cool. Yeah, they also do cross device copy and paste, which I love that. But yeah, this but this is this, is this solves a problem. When they first announced this, I I said could you just integrate it with the thing that Microsoft has? But if you go into nearby sharing, which is a native Windows 11 feature, if you have configured your Android phone, you can share to your phone from that as well. That's nice. So there's some back and forth.
02:09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a pretty good way to do it. I like that. Yeah it, I like that.
02:09:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, now, unfortunately, we don't have a brown liquor pick of the week but, uh, fortunately, your wife is a brilliant okay, so I should say she did not invent this one. So, okay, I asked her. I said could you get a cocktail going? And she said yep, and then what she gave me, what it gave us now, is this thing that she has. Well, we've discovered it, or whatever, in Mexico City. So there's a crazy story behind this.
02:09:58
And we go to a place called it's called Cafe Taco Bar, or just Taco Bar. It literally has the best tacos I've ever had in my entire life. That's where we ate dinner. Last night I've been talking about walking back and forth, whatever. I literally I don't understand. I don't understand why it's a. It looks like a dive bar. The cocktails are off the charts, super inventive, very, really, really good and the tacos are the best. Like I said, they're the best tacos I've ever had. It makes no sense. So we know the owner. This place is hilarious, like there's a. There's a quirky kind of personality to it. It was our neighbor and friend who brought us there the first time and we were standing outside and it said you know, taco bar? And said Mexico city, paris, new York. I said they have places in Paris and New York and she goes no, they don't, they have this place here.
02:10:49
So there's a bunch of that kind of stuff. So, like they have, like they have a video, like a little tv in the corner it does like a photo slideshow and a lot of it's just pictures of cocktails and food. But every once in a while we'll say something like, uh, mexico city top 50 bars, and then it's like number 2614 taco bar. So there's kind of a funny thing going on there. But we've gotten to know the owner and he was telling us this story, that he had gone to europe and he, uh, came back with this cocktail called the salmon cito and he introduced the salmon cito to mexico city. We're like, yeah, there's no way that's true. You know what I mean. Like there's no way everything else is made up. Why wouldn't that be? Yeah, stephanie researched this and what she discovered was that that story is not true. Yeah, he invented this cocktail.
02:11:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He did.
02:11:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The guy from Taco Bar invented it. It's from Mexico City, oh my God. And it's based, because I think what I'm going to have to go talk to him about this now. But I think what happened was he had a Negroni in you know Spain, or somewhere Of course, and he said let's do this, but we'll do a version that's different. You know, that's maybe lighter and more appropriate for Mexico City. So we invented something called the Salmoncito. So the Salmoncito is basically a gin-based Negroni, I guess is the way I'd call it. So it's, you know, dry gin, campari, grapefruit juice it's a big grapefruit thing. The last item there my wife had to explain it because I thought this couldn't be correct but it says grapefruit twist and grapefruit supreme is just referring to that slice of. They do this kind of hand cut of the grapefruit which is the size of a soccer ball in this country. It's unbelievable.
02:12:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's a wedge.
02:12:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a garnish. Yeah, it's basically a garnish, okay, and it is fantastic. It's very refreshing. It's not like, you know, like a negroni is kind of a heavy yeah, taste. I don't know what it's heavy, I don't, this is the only way to say it. It's uh, you know, because it's it's whiskey or bourbon based or whatever, but um, and you know those that combined with campari is, you know, it's a little it's heavy. Yeah, this is half campari. It's a little it's heavy, but this is half Campari. Yeah, it's almost a health drink, honestly, it's. It's um, you know it's, it's zesty and grapefruity and you know it's a health drink, yeah, yeah.
02:13:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I haven't got it for yeah.
02:13:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh, actually, let me read what she wrote here. So I didn't. I didn't paste it, I wanted to kind of surprise people. Yeah, so it was invented in 2013 by christian de la torias. That's the guy from, uh, from congo. About the guy, the owner uh, spread through the native mexico city. Um, it's like I got okay. So I guess he had a previous place called artisima.
02:13:25
You can look this up for yourself, I guess. But anyway, now we it's now it's a big thing at cafe taco bar. So it's pink, it's uh. Well, actually they described it as a riff on the gin and tonic. I think it's more of a Negroni. It's my wife's really into Negronis. Um, and then that Supreme bit is a. Is the cut? You know it's like hand cut grapefruit. Um, if you cut it just right, it looks like a fish. That's that's the names. Little salmon, a little salmon salmon, sito someone's? Um, yeah, and then you know, normally, when you, when you cut the flesh out of the uh fruit, you, you would often toss the rind away, but they always, you know, they rub the glass with that and it's yeah, it's amazing, lovely, yep, that sounds incredible yep, it's a cool drink, I love it well, paul?
02:14:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, you know, despite the loss of richard campbell for this week, I think we've done a pretty good job of holding down the fort.
02:14:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I've been practicing drinking this whole trip, just in preparation for this moment.
02:14:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, the salmoncito I wish I were going to the taco cafe, taco bar right now. You've made me very, very hungry. That sounds so good, they're so good, it's so jealous how good they are we should have bought the place across the street. I blew it.
02:14:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet it's gone now I we know those guys really well and I refer to him as leo the time, and it's confusing to him.
02:14:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's supposed to be my place. Paul Thurott is at thurottcom. No matter where he is in the world, you can always find him at the website thurrottcom and the book leanpubcom for the field guide to Windows 11. Also his newer book, which is great too Windows everywhere, kind of a, if you love Windows and you like the history of Windows, this is a look at Windows history through the lens of the developing frameworks and things like that right?
02:15:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is that fair? Yeah, it's probably more broadly interesting than it sounds honestly.
02:15:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But oh, it's great, but it is yeah.
02:15:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Whatever was happening in the world at the time influenced Windows, or vice versa, from a developer.
02:15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I read most of it on the website because I'm a premium member at throtcom, so I know how good it is. It was very engaging, so I highly recommend that too. Leanpubcom, of course, is a great thing. To join paul's uh website. Become a premium member because you get great content, but you can use it all the time I do to get windows news. Um, richard campbell, if you were here, would tell you run his radiocom is where he hangs out for his shows. Run his radio and the show he does with carl franklinnet rocks. Richard, feel better. I hope we see you next week.
02:16:12
We do do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, 1900 UTC. As I mentioned, you can watch us live on a variety of streams all over the place, but probably most people aren't there at that right time to do that. So the good news is you can watch it at your convenience by downloading a copy, whether it's from our website, twittv, slash w w, or there's a. Actually, if you go there, you'll see there's a link to a YouTube channel which contains the video of every show. That's great for sharing. If you wanted to share the salmon seat, though, to a friend, you could just clip that little bit and get the history and the whole thing in there and send it to them and everybody can watch youtube. So it's a good way to share and it spreads the word.
02:16:57
Another way to spread the word, of course, join club twit and for everybody you get to join with you, you get a free month. So give that a try at twittv slash club twit and get your special code so you can share that to everybody. You can also subscribe to the show After the Fact. It's on every podcast client everywhere. Just search for Windows Weekly and subscribe Audio or video and you get it. When we're done on a Wednesday afternoon you can listen to that at your leash. Paul, have a great week, enjoy your tacos and I will see you next week on Windows weekly yes, you will whether I like it or not yeah, like covet, I'm coming back baby.
