Windows Weekly 914 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell are here. First show of 2025. And, of course, how does 2025 begin? Just like every year, with CES, lots of new PCs, announcements from Intel, amd and Qualcomm. We'll talk about all of those, plus a new segment Paul's going to call this Week in 24H2 Problems that, and a bunch of AI All coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love. From people you trust this is Twit.

00:41
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, Episode 914, recorded Wednesday, January 8th 2025. Something weird from the closet. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Brand new year, brand new show, exactly like the old one. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Paul Theriot in McCungie, Pennsylvania, where the Arctic cold is creeping down from the 51st state. How are you?

01:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, welcome to the country, richard, you and Greenland, we're happy to have you both.

01:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're all very excited.

01:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Denmark was not amused. But you know, screw those guys.

01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are they going to do? Yes, fight us, put up a strongly worded letter.

01:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, hello, paul. How was your holiday it was? It was fantastic. I wish it could just keep going. That's the problem. I slow down, I yeah. I just want it to never speed up again.

01:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's addictive food, hey that's Richard Campbell of Run as Radio. He's no stranger because he was here for the Twit holiday show and last Sunday's this Week in Tech, and we really appreciate it. We had a lot of fun On this show. We don't have a whole lot of time to talk about things besides Microsoft, but you are just a savant in so many areas. It was really good. Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate it.

02:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I always can tell a story, that's for sure run as radiocom.

02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how was your?

02:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
holiday. Ah fantastic, said, did the christmas in the city with the girls and then the new years with our friends up on the coast. Uh, nobody died of hypothermia, which is a good sign. Yeah, you know. What more do you want, is it? Is it a little chilly? No, it's pretty mild here.

02:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah you get to see. It's funny, it's, it's. It's warmer there in the great white north than it is for paul, and uh, but it's, it's big on gray, it's pretty isn't that great though that's a picture.

02:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's my window and a half we're not likely to see snow. Well, it'll be cool Ever, really All winter. Yeah, maybe one snowfall in the morning, but it'll rain that afternoon. Okay.

02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, now that we've had the weather report, there you go. I'm glad to know that this will be 2025 will be the year of the windows 11 pc refresh.

03:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it, paul it's more likely to be the year of the linux desktop you know um. I guess we'll see we can only hope.

03:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, look, that's me being biased and bigoted against, uh, against the world's most popular operating system.

03:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You mean Windows 10, which is kind of the problem for Windows 11. Yeah, it is. Yeah, so this is the data such as it is. I realize this isn't the most trustworthy source, but stat counter. Whatever, 63% of PCs out in the world are running Windows 10. And we're about, about what are we nine months away from it going? End of life right.

03:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
End of service so 63 of the people using pcs today will be out of luck or sol or eol you know, the number is probably higher, because that probably doesn't take into account certain corporate pcs.

04:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, only that which can be counted, yeah, so let's just go with that.

04:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's okay. By comparison, Windows 7 at this point right before you know, nine months away from its expiration only had 25% usage here, and it was second to Windows 10 at the time. So this is the challenge for Microsoft the time. So this is the challenge for microsoft, and the big debate here is one we've had, which is you know, will microsoft extend support, as it did for xp and seven?

04:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
right well, and it already bumped out 11 once. Remember it was supposed to be april this year.

04:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now it's october, okay, yeah so I, I don't have an opinion on that. I, you know. Obviously they have the paid program in place. They're actually offering it for consumers for the first time ever, for I think in that case for one year of extended support. I don't know. I, I, we've all been out in the world. I've been to dentists, doctor offices uh, obviously, subways, transportation, whatever and seen out of support windows versions all the time.

05:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I see this all the time and what. So I think most isn running windows XP.

05:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the ones that are still running those two maybe I don't know. But, uh, hopefully not, but I don't know. I don't know what to say to this.

05:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I'm astonished that they would say that. You know, I just did the sysadmin show for the beginning of the year and one of the things they said was if I'm making a five-year bet on hardware right now this is a terrible year it is.

05:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everything is changing so fast right now, yeah and um, you know, just, I mean, we talked a lot about intel last year, especially the second half of the year, and this notion that, um, lunar lake was this kind of one-off that they had to do to meet the co-pilot plus pc requirements. And then this past week, this week at ces, they announced the other core ultra series, two chips which were all what they call arrow Lake chips, which are the real successor to meteor Lake. We'll talk about this a little while. They don't have co-pilot plus PC capable MPOs. None of them, not a one of them, no.

06:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's kind of a crazy. You know the the side conversation I've had with folks that are in the space is like they are so ripe for a pe reorganization which really means it is dismantling, like they're primed for that. Yep, which means I mean one hand, if tsmc started making their chips, the chips would be better. But that's two years away. If they move quickly, right, like it's just not that fast to retool to make those chips in a different way, get out of intel fabs. So again, if you, my problem was, if I'm making a five-year bet on hardware not that I think it won't, it'll be unsupported if I bought machines today, they, they'll take care of them, but what'll? What'll be terrible is two years from now there'll be a dramatically better version of of the intel chips or they'll just be gone. No, um, no, I'm seems unlikely, but not out of realms like the only machine I would recommend buying right now from a, from a system in perspective, a five-year commit perspective, amd yeah I, I understand, and windows 11 obviously.

07:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you really don't have it and yeah, and we're talking businesses that want to stick with x86 for all the usual reasons.

07:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, how do you bet on Snapdragon when it's still not fully in management? On an enterprise scale, it just isn't. I imagine it will be sometime in 25, I hope, but at this moment it isn't and that's not a good bet. What's missing?

07:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
SNMP in tune. What's missing?

07:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's more they update. How can I do the manage update cycle the same way like, unless you're on the very latest update mechanisms, which lots of people aren't inside of? Uh, you know, all of that's in twitch for for microsoft as well, like wsus is out update for businesses. You know, on its last legs.

07:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just we don't know how this is going to land what I mean I update plan is qualcomm was coming from behind after several years of defeats and was trying to hit the part of the market that's kind of the volume part where they could make a difference and, you know, did so we'll. We'll see what happens there. I mean, as far as the rest of it.

08:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're going to make a, a enterprise product which is like a Dell Latitude a conservative, reliable, long-term maintenance machine. I don't know how you do that on a first-gen chipset. That's crazy. This just in.

08:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't call them Latitudes anymore. Yeah, do you mind? We could just say Max?

08:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
or Pro Okay, so we'll get to that. Let's say jump ahead.

08:27
Save that, that's for the big ces segment yeah, so, yeah, so, uh, ces is this week. I, when I started looking at the notes, of course we've spent a few weeks since we've been back. So I was thinking you know how do, how do we handle that? You know, there's a couple of weeks worth of news that has occurred. It's it is slow over the holidays, obviously, but things have happened. And then this week there's been a lot of news and then, after kind of moving them around a little bit, I was like you know what, let's not worry about that too too much, but the you know, in other words, we can just go topic by topic like we do normally, and and some of the stuff will be a week or two old and some of it will be as new as today. Um, but you know, if it's new to you, it's, it's, it's, it's gonna, yeah, it's gonna be new. A lot of this will be new to everybody. So, um, the the year of the windows 11 PC refresh is something we've been promised for a couple of years now.

09:14
Um, microsoft is saying it explicitly, which I think is a little interesting. Intel said the same thing, and their announcement for all of their what I? This is a pretend count, but 117 different cpus. They announced cpu models. Um, and amd did the same thing, by the way. And then you know qualcomm's cute, they, they had one. So you know slightly different companies, uh, but it's interesting that they all they, the two of them anyway microsoft and intel are basically citing the same factors. Uh, intel called it a trifecta which is pretty funny of things that are happening this year that will trigger this supposedly End of life is obviously the big one for Windows 10.

09:55
The advent of these AI PCs, I think, is even more debatable, honestly. And then the lingering security fears from CrowdStrike, which Intel named and Microsoft did not, because Microsoft pretends that didn't happen. But they do talk about the enhanced security in Windows 11 as a reason to upgrade, and I will say Copilot plus PC class PCs, and increasingly just all PCs now have this Windows Hello, ess, for example, and the Microsoft Pluton chip stuff, and so there's some good stuff going on there. But, um, I I think the problem for the PC industry is that there's not any enthusiasm there. This is a, you know, for people, individuals who are not businesses, um, it's a tool that they used for work as little as possible. And when you go to them and say hey, what do you think about spending like a thousand bucks on a new computer that does exactly the same thing as what you're already using your eight-year-old computer for? They're like, yeah, I don't think so.

10:48
And then businesses have always moved very slowly, so we'll see it's going to be an interesting second half of 2025 in that regard.

10:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think Microsoft wants them to adopt Snapdragon? They talk a lot about it.

11:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you look at their year of the Windows 11 pc refresh thing, they, they, I almost said double down. I don't ever want to talk like that, I can't stand that kind of language. But they, they've gone back to the well of this comment that snapdragon computers are the fastest pcs in the world, which objectively, absolutely are not, but what? This is one of those asterisk things and it's like what we mean by that is, you know, mpu performance plus this, this, the other thing, whatever. So, um, snapdragon based computers obviously have huge advantages. I think what they want, which is the same thing terry myerson wanted when he first talked about, uh, moving to arm again, not just getting the freaking intel stickers off the laptops, but getting all PCs, whether they're X86 or ARM, to this place where they they're reliable, that you open the lid that comes on. You know this not a lot of nonsense, is not that roulette will affect I always talk about, and that these things actually make sense on portable computers. I have to say, for all the problems Intel's had with lunar lake, one of the things it does pretty well with is battery life and one of the things the AMD chips that Richard was talking about, these N5 architecture chips, including some incredible new ones. They just announced at CES awesome battery life. So Qualcomm still comes out ahead.

12:18
But when you think all day is not a specific number, I mean I have days where I get up at 630 in the morning and I work until 1130 at night and I take breaks for lunch, dinner and bathroom or whatever. But that's not normal and I think for most people a normal like an all day battery life thing would be actual uptime of somewhere between five and eight hours, whatever there's, you know, actually working on battery. All these computers achieve that battery. All these computers achieve that. I mean, if I have a really long day, I still end up charging like a Snapdragon computer basically every day. It's just that I could go days for sure, but all day is the. I think all day is the metric we're really looking for and they mostly do it the new chip.

13:03
So I think we're in a good place overall, regardless of which direction you go.

13:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does feel like, with the ads that I see all over the NFL and we'll see them during the playoffs Microsoft's really implying that this is the smartest computer ever. Right, that this is the best we've ever made.

13:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, someday in the future we're going to find out some secret agreement that these two companies had this, this disgusting cabal of whatever is going on there, but um there's no stickers there. No, there are stickers, uh, unfortunately, but there are. There are stickers, now they're. They have little dragon logos on dragon inside oh yeah, they're still stickers, but um yeah, and then these machines don't run as hot, so they're actually harder to scrape off now.

13:46
but I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm not kidding, they actually do run cooler, but they're just as hard to get off. No, I look, this is the I. Terry Morrison said this. I always felt this was true. If we could just influence AMD and and intel, especially intel, enough to make them make better chips, more efficient, more reliable, etc. Um, and they're trying, you know they. I'm not saying they've completely achieved it, but uh, and there are lots of problems for sure, but I've had so many um laptops in this pa I before the christmas break, I can't think I don't know if I talked. I don't think this was ready in time for the last show, but I reviewed 20 laptops last year, which is a lot more than I thought I did by the way.

14:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you mentioned that last time.

14:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I did Okay, I'm sorry so.

14:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was in your year end wrap up.

14:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, gotcha, I'm sorry, I wasn't sure where I was at with that stuff, the uptime efficiency, whatever this stuff is all going up. I mean there's bugs, we're moving quick and it's not always coming out exactly right the first time, but PC makers are kind of used to that and you see, I've seen anyway where some of the early versions are kind of rough. And then you get toward the second half of the year and it's like, okay, actually these are getting.

15:02
You know they're looking pretty good, so you know they're, they're looking, they're looking pretty good, so you know I don't. I'd love to see a world where we were all running on arm. I still kind of think that's the world um someday, but this is not a horrible interim step and it's um. These computers are really good. X86 computers are still really good for compatibility and even just like game playing. We'll talk about this in the xbox segment. The, this new generation of handheld gaming computers, in addition to just standard, like a business class laptop that could play a triple a game that came out in 2024 at native resolution and high frame rates. You kidding me like what's. Like, what's happening?

15:38
you know there's something really cool going on with harper right now so well from your mouth to bill gates years or whatever, flush twice, it's a long way to new mexico. The point is that's so mean.

15:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's an albuquerque joke. I used to live in albuquerque that's what makes it okay I love new mexico.

16:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am a new mexican yeah, uh, people used to ask me if I needed a uh, you know, like a visa to live there.

16:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm like it's part of the country new mexico yeah look into it yeah, um nothing on the desktop front, like it's all about the laptop so there is stuff happening on the desktop front.

16:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I didn't go too deep into the ces stuff, but there is uh nuc and small form factor qualcomm and x86, new gen amd and intel stuff happening uh at ces right. Uh I don't remember exactly but lenovo and I want to say acer, but also smaller companies like um geekom coming out with snapdragon, nux and small yeah, I saw that.

16:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought, well, that's why we don't need a dev kit, I guess.

16:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I mean yeah, so we're gonna talk about the dev kit a little bit more too with that. Well, that's why we don't need a dev kit, I guess? Right, I mean, yeah, so we're going to talk about the dev kit a little bit more too. Well, that's part of that conversation. But yeah, I see, yes is one of the two major times per year where PC makers release new chips from the hardware makers and then new PC designs from the PC makers. The other one is IFA, of course, designs from the pc makers. Um, the other one is ifa, of course, and um, it's interesting because it's a consumer show, allegedly. But you see, you know, think new think pads, new hp uh workstations and business class computers etc you didn't go this year.

17:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does uh, did you or no?

17:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's because I I'm trying to hold on to the thin thread of sanity, I still have left and it's just too much crazy, isn't it?

17:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I also correct me if I'm wrong.

17:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I feel like there's not a lot to be gleaned there so the, the look, if you, if you cover maybe the consumer market broadly, I guess outside, if you cover tvs, you probably should maybe, if you, if robert, this is the place to be.

17:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they, by the way, they don't want you to call it that there was a headline it said something like ces.

17:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like I found a matter compliant smart refrigerator or something and it's like, well, good for you, you adventurer, you know yeah so I, to me cs, went from you walk around the show floor and your feet are killing you for two weeks to PC makers are on site and you can go have these meetings and see all the devices. To now I can just go to New York and just do it virtually and be briefed ahead of time and I don't have to go anywhere.

18:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the big companies don't go. Microsoft doesn't have a booth right.

18:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what Microsoft does there anymore. They used to be in the belly of the place with their little meeting room and stuff like that.

18:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They used to have the best carpet at their booths they used to keynote it right, that's right. Bill Gates for years did that, didn't he? And?

18:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
then Ballmer after him and Comdex before that. Right, but yeah they're not the center of the universe anymore.

18:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the thing, yeah, and it seems like the Microsoft events team still is reluctant to do in-person events.

18:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've made Bill and ignite in person, but they're not anywhere else. Yeah, I mean, they killed it with ignite, I don't. Oh no, we did, no, they didn't. Um, yeah, so they're still, they're, they're kind of building that, that skill back up.

18:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I guess we'll say I don't know it's been a lot of turnover in that team too, so well it's.

18:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not like riding a bike.

19:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's what they're saying, when I think, if you're like making events and you weren't allowed to make events, you went and did something else.

19:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah you know right, or did events somewhere else, I guess, I don't know. I mean, things changed, yep, that's too bad yeah, I'm not.

19:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not missing ces a bit.

19:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I look at a few of the things it's like yeah I'm just wondering if I'm rationalized because I don't want to go and all the senior tech people say I don't have to do that anymore, thank God.

19:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not going to say who this was, but I was at an HP pre-CES event in December and Dell and Lenovo had their events like right plus or minus one day.

19:38
That's the thing they do events so you don't have to go to CES. That's right. But there was an older guy, older than me, like a guy who had been around you know another, maybe even 20 years before I got involved and I was talking to him and catching up and I kind of said something like hey, you know, I asked him something about AI and he came back and then I could tell after a few minutes talking to him he thought I worked at HP and I was like okay, you're just getting really old, Like it's like it's like you're talking to your like a grandmother or something and they don't remember your name or they call you like the dog's name and you're like, oh, something's not right, you know?

20:14
Oh, that's mean, it's okay. I mean I look like an HP guy. It's fine, it's, it's, it's okay.

20:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like it, I understand it.

20:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's okay, I like it. You can understand it. Yeah, but yeah, so I. You know, richard, you've talked a lot, like for the last half of last year, about maybe building a PC or doing something whatever. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah I look very much or very closely at the new AMD stuff.

20:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm afraid I have to because we're not. I mean, there's no sign of a Snapdragon motherboard. Yeah, that I could actually build from Right build from um.

20:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The intel stuff is completely in flux. It's just foolish to stay away from that mess. Team red baby. No, the amd stuff is awesome and it is uh, it's got more awesome or I don't know.

20:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's crazy. Is it crazy to mix nvidia gpus with amd?

21:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we're gonna get to that too. Stop jumping ahead oh no, oh, I'm sorry. Oh sorry, that's an acquiring minds want to know no, it's not crazy, and actually I have seen is this week at least one example of that right so you're that is an option on certain configurations I actually have that over here in my alien work.

21:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm gonna think of it, yeah so it's kind of excited the prospect of building on a machine with a 5090 because I could probably disconnect the baseboard heater in this room and, just you know, feel well, yeah, are you chilled?

21:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
run a little red dev rejection depending on what you're doing though you could almost get by without discrete graphics at this point, and that's what's so exciting about these chipsets. You know, one of the things I saw at the pre-release thing a pre-cs thing that they're, you know, they've since announced is that these you know they have stupid names but like a, uh, the ai 300 pro max plus, whatever the heck it's called um is allegedly a mobile chip but runs at a range of tdp, so it's, you know, scales up really strongly. They're putting it in laptops that are thin and light, they're putting it in workstations that are desktop machines that have ginormous heat sinks on them. And one of the things that uh, amd does I think Intel does too is, uh, design these things so that the PC maker can crank them up how they want and configure them to go out the door at certain different ranges, or, you know that makes sense.

22:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so the figure them to go out the door at certain different ranges, or you know that makes sense. Yeah, so the the workstation.

22:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One chip fits all is, you know, just elevated on this thing because it has all this um, uh, heat, or um is that because they're doing performance uh cores and efficiency cores now, so they can really so do a mix that makes it's actually different. Uh, amd and intel do it completely differently, so amd typically has one type of core that scales per core between efficient and performant ranges.

22:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kind of like SpeedStep, the old Intel SpeedStep yeah and this was something you guys might remember.

22:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This three, maybe even four years ago, hp actually came out with a Dragonfly. It was a white laptop that used an AMD chip that wasn't available to anyone else. It was just a variation of whatever was normal at the time. But they were doing that and they were bypassing all of the Windows built-in power management so they could control the cores on the fly and determine whether it was being efficient or highly performant, depending on the task, and it was kind of the first step toward what is now just their mainstream chip line is like this now so they all do thatd doesn't have different ways, but they all.

23:28
Yes, absolutely yeah. I don't believe so I'm not a I'm not a hardware guy, but my understanding it was weird.

23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They kind of copied apple with that uh in their, in their most recent.

23:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, that's uh there's. There's goofy little thing. They're not even little, but there's goofy architectural changes you can make to me, not being a hardware guy that are that end up having huge benefits and also um cons as well, you know. One of them is just the physical difference. Uh, distance between Ram and CPU is important, and that's why having that stuff on the chip sometimes is fantastic. Right, you can. Uh, I mean, apple hasn't scaled up to like the discrete GPUs per se, but they're probably close enough. Who cares?

24:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're getting closer and closer, yeah.

24:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, who cares? And I think that's the point, because on the PC side we're starting to see the first steps into that with these new chips, especially AMD, and AMD has discrete graphics, this Intel GPU, what is it called? Storm rage thread ripper whatever these stupid names I know crazy name, but people are saying good things about it.

24:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If I was going to buy, build an AMD machine, sure be rise in nine. But why would you not go radion with that?

24:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like that's kind of that was kind of my well, because if you could get away with it, why bother? You know like what would you need it?

24:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
for or for nothing. Yeah, so your alternative is like or nothing.

24:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can also just say, yeah, I mean. The alternative literally is nothing, and maybe the way to go with this is build it without the graphics now and see how it does use it for a while.

25:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then maybe you actually do. I want files and plus tops. Well, and that's the question, do you want it for AI or do you want it for graphics? What is it you have to do? All of the above, everything.

25:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know.

25:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And space heating. It's going to fit in a NUC enclosure though right, I feel like this is going to be this big. I'm talking about an ATX motherboard.

25:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is actually an interesting time to build a PC. Yeah, totally.

25:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I would go with a mid-size ATX case, right and you're not going to go Intel inside. No, because I don't know what chip to buy. I know how long I keep my machine.

25:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it true they announced 117?

25:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that was just me eyeballing it, but that's what it feels like exaggeration.

25:46
Well, so one of the this has got to be in here somewhere, I guess not? Uh well, it sort of is. So one of the things that's really interesting about cs to me, and just the pc market in general, is intel has kept amd and qualcomm, you know, but mostly amd out of you PC makers by and large. It's why you don't see things like an X1 Carbon with an AMD chip. Intel pays them a lot of money to make sure that doesn't happen. Intel really can't do that as much anymore and their designs, which have been behind for a while, are now, I would say, well behind. And now PC makers have a little more leeway to do what they want and you can see what they do with, given their own decision-making capabilities, that you see a lot more AMD happening right now. So this notion of like individual computers that are shipping both AMD and Intel versions was, you know, fairly rare before. That's happening more and more and more.

26:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think the makers are looking at the situation with Intel and just going. You know, this seems less dramatic.

26:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This would be like buying Intel now in mass, like you were saying, for like a company where you're buying thousands of units right now would be like going IBM on PCs in 1996, right. And it's like do you not know that they didn't have a Windows 95 license? Because I don't know what planet you're living on. But things have changed. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. The year will progress and we'll see what happens. I don't wish Intel ill per se.

27:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I want them to be successful and compete.

27:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

27:29 - AI music (None)
I would like their chips to be really good. Um, I have mixed.

27:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm actually excited this is a path forward for intel, like the a pe firm, taking that company apart and making it de-verticalize and specialize in making good chipset, chipset designs and the fabs being separate, like we could have a few years of extraordinarily good x86 machines before the just for the arm designs do totally overwhelm their archaicness, yeah I.

27:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I keep waiting for some signal that amd especially, but maybe eventually intel 2 um starts to like they've incorporated arm like designs into the chip architectures but actually just like we're going to do arm to. You know. Yeah, at mass for a piece, and I think Microsoft sees.

28:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean arm is an essential ingredient keeping windows relevant. If they, with the Intel, ship so destabilized, regardless of what AMD is doing doing, being able to jump over to arm is a good thing and they've tried many times like yeah, I gotta think there's a couple of eps back there.

28:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like, please this time, please well I mean, yeah, I you know amd wants to make this big push into the data center, especially with ai. Uh, you can have a lot more luck with arm than you are with x86. At that point I mean I and maybe that if that is where they go, they probably won't.

28:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sure they're going to go x86 but you're seeing this in what microsoft is building in my uh, in cobalt processes, because it's a licensable design. They're just licensing their own chips intended for cloud racks. Like I've held that cobalt in my hand, it's the size of a dessert plate. Right, it's math. It really is my entire hand right, right, right.

29:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I miss the days when you can actually see the transistors on the ships, or they had little like little wires, you know you needed new ones.

29:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly you could just do a little soldering yeah, it'd be fine, I do remember the days when you would pull your ram chips out.

29:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, a little bug feet on the bottom. Yeah, yep, yeah, like would bend one or break one off. God help you. And you're like oh, I guess that's, uh, that's the end of that.

29:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know that was a nice little business in the 80s was populating those 640K memory cards for IBM PCs with chips from with the Japanese RAM.

29:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right Right, japan was dumping chips on the market Cheap, cheap, cheap.

29:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, right, until the FTC came after them, let us. Is this a good time to pause? Yep, yeah, definitely. I appreciate that we talked about Windows first, on Windows Weekly.

30:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's pretty cool, just shorter it almost didn't go that way.

30:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was a a knife's edge decision. Uh, all right. All right, hang on, fellas, because we will have more, uh, actually more about windows, even in just a bit. But first a word from our sponsor. Sponsor and a company that you probably should know about we're welcoming back for the year 2025. I'm talking about US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified Support replacement.

30:35
Now, I have to say, when we first started talking about US Cloud, I had a nice call with them, got to know them. I had never heard of them. I'm hearing about them more and more, and you probably are too. We've been talking for uh, it's been a few months, I think about us cloud. They are the global leader in third-party microsoft support for enterprises. 50 of the fortune 500 use us cloud and one of the things they said to me is because we cost less. Switching to us cloud could save your business 30 to 50 percent over microsoft unified and premier support. But, of course, uh and businesses care about the bottom line. That's 50, that's a lot, but I said but you're also better, right, yeah, they said well, yeah, two times faster average time to resolution than Microsoft. Twice as fast. They're also the best engineers in the business. They really recruit the top people, all US-based, with a lot of experience, so you're getting the right answers faster.

31:42
But now US Cloud's excited to tell you about a new offering. They've got something new. They're Azure Cost Optimization Services. This is actually interesting, do you ever? I mean, when was the last time you actually looked at your Azure usage right? And, honestly, I think what happens in companies is you get a little Azure sprawl right. A little spend creep going on. It's just a little at al right, a little spend creep going on. It's just a little at a time, but after a while it can really add up. The good news is saving on Azure is easier than you think with the help of US Cloud.

32:17
Us Cloud offers an eight-week Azure engagement powered by VBox. This is really cool. It identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment and with this kind of expert guidance, you'll get access to US Cloud's senior engineers. As I said, they're great. They're the best. An average of over 16 years 16 years with Microsoft products. At the end of that eight-week period, your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild, even downscale opportunities and unused resources, allowing you to reallocate your IT dollars towards needed resources. You're probably spending more on Azure than you think, or invest your Azure savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support. I always think that's a good idea like a few of US Cloud's other customers and completely eliminate your unified spend.

33:11
Sam, the technical manager at Bead Gaming, gave US Cloud five stars. He reviewed them. He said this quote we found some things that had been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Do the math for three years, he says not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend in Azure, but once we got to 40 or $50,000 a month, it kind of started to add up. Yeah, it's simple. You probably are overpaying for azure right now. Identify and eliminate azure creep. Boost your performance. You can do it in eight weeks with us cloud, just one of us cloud's great services. Visit uscloudcom. Book a call today to find out how much your team can save uscloudcomcom. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly. We thank you for supporting us by going there. Book a call. Get faster, better Microsoft support for less at uscloud. And now back to our Azure creeps. Paul Theroux.

34:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, like you said, you're probably paying more for Azure than you know. I bet they know that they're paying a lot for Azure?

34:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, when they get the bill, yeah, but do you need all that right?

34:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, which you don't know. The answer to is why yeah?

34:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's hard to find out. I'm sure I mean it's.

34:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know these, you know it's a bunch of work yeah, and there are, you know, folks that'll help you with just trying to reduce your azure bill. It's not a trivial thing so think about it.

34:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For you, fifty thousand dollars a month, yeah, uh, all right, this week in 24h2 problems, paul, why?

34:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
are there problems in 24? This week's problem with 24h2 is that if you have auto hdr enabled in your computer, microsoft's going to block that upgrade, because microsoft wrote both of those pieces of software and doesn't know what the heck it's doing. I don't know what's happening. It seems like literally every week there's a new problem. We missed a couple weeks because we were away, but there were other problems. It's 24 h2 is just.

35:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This cesspool of quality problems is too bad, fantastic well and again I keep thinking, ever since the era carly made it clear to me that's a new os and so you know that's a good service pack zero, yeah, of a new os, that's a very good point it is, but I mean they, I mean it doesn't make you feel any better, but it's I.

35:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean I mean it's a reason.

35:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, you know, I don't know, but this is the year of the PC refresh. Come on, guys, oh boy. So they're blocking the update. They're blocking this update now on more computers than they're not blocking it on. This is not gone on the right trajectory so far, but we'll get there, you know it's you know, we'll just buy a Mac. It'll be fine either way.

36:11
So the insider program, like the rest of Microsoft, shut down for two, three weeks there they bounced back and released nothing, so we don't have to get into that too too much. The one thing I will point out is that the, the new beta, build beta is on 23h2, dev is on 24h2, canary is on your guess is as good as mine, and they are adding some more features from 24h2 which I'd sort of forgotten about, weren't in 23h2, including those little um the labels on the icons when you right clickclick something in the test file explorer or the desktop where it says cut, copy, paste, delete whatever share. Um. I guess that that wasn't ever reported back to 23h2, so it's going to be. So that will probably appear in the coming months weeks.

36:57
You know we'll see um, not particularly exciting. Um. I didn't write about this and I don't have a link to this, but uh, leo especially might have seen. Uh, the story with this guy who wrote the original doc for mac os 10, what at the time wrote it for mac os 9 because that was the only stable system they had, wrote a blog post recently about it, which I thought was really cool yeah, there's actually an interesting story there.

37:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's james thompson, who mac users know because he wrote pCalc, which is a very popular calculator for the Mac. Oh, okay, but before that what was?

37:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that little launcher thing that looks a little bit like the dock.

37:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah so.

37:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I actually used to use that a million years ago. It was like a little. What do you call that kind of a Mac app? It's like a, not an applet, there's a term for it's like a, not an applet.

37:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a term for it, like a. It was a term for that kind of desk accessory.

37:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and it would. It would. It was a lot like the next.

37:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it looked like the mac os, but it was kind of like tsrs on on, yes, yes, yeah, back in the day yeah, and stay resident.

37:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's a consumer facing name we are.

38:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is 25 years later almost, and he's describing this. You know stuff that, I think, is I think is cool, so I love stuff like that.

38:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So because we are at the 25th anniversary of the announcement of os 10.

38:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Steve jobs announced it at mac world expo on january 6, 20, 1999 or whatever, but but it took him more than a year to ship it oh yeah, and the first version was and and he, none of the code that man wrote was in the original version, someone else, we did it and whatever, but it's an amazing story. It is I highly recommend it.

38:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's on, uh, james thompson's blog, tla.

38:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's very so it's 2025, so this is also happens to be the 12 I gotta do math 30th anniversary of Windows 95. Happy birthday. The 35th anniversary, you know later, of Windows 3, which was the first version that made any sense, and then the 40th anniversary of the initial version of Windows, which we will never speak of because it was so terrible.

39:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody used Windows 1.0.

39:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody used it. No one at Microsoft used it. It was terrible, but they finally got that little piece of junk out the door and so this is kind of a big year for that. But, um, not as important and not as interesting. But a guy who was on the uh design team, so to speak, for windows uh and contributed to the fluent design system which we still use and is a core part of like when ui3 etc. Um just shared some designs that he had made that could have turned into dynamic wallpapers that were going to be part of windows 11, right. And so you know, again, not a major event, but they're pretty and they're. It's kind of cool. You can kind of, if you uh hold a grudge, like we all do in the windows world, you will remember uh, vista ultimate extras had a dynamic wallpaper feature called dreamscape maybe I think dreamscape, if I'm right um that was oh yeah, that's just what you want to use your cpu cycles for is uh?

39:56
yeah, so paper behind the one I liked was. It was subtle this is why I need a 59 it's a dark wet scene and rain. Rain is hitting the puddles and little you know, here and there, and I love that yeah, yeah, if you're like a cat and you get distracted really easily, you know it was not a good thing. Just build it into the machine, right yeah, all the time.

40:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So right, I always wanted, I always wanted moving wallpaper.

40:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I but I until you actually use it and then you realize oh, I might have I also think about all the CPU cycles that are going to just doing the wall, All right. But see, I would say so. Cpu cycles are like the nuke in Call of Duty. What are you saving them for?

40:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you get the thing you use it, what are you saving it for? What are you saving?

40:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it for.

40:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like it's what you tell your son. What are you saving it for? That is what I told my son.

40:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I walked in one day and he's like dad, dad, I got to tell you something. I'm like. He's like he goes, I got a nuke and I'm like why are you still playing? He goes I'm going to get another nuke. And I'm like I'm like what, you can get two nukes in one game. He's like, yeah, you have to run the rack. So I sat there he said I got two nukes. I said what happened? He goes oh, the game descends, just like it ends if you have one. If you have one and use it, the game ends, it's over. And I was like okay, but what happens if you have two? And he goes? Oh, the game descends.

41:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, you blow one up with the other one.

41:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you use a nuke and the game ends. It doesn't matter, um, you gotta set goals for yourself in life. I thought, yeah. So in this cpu cycle sense, I guess I don't know why they didn't go with this feature. I think some people would have really liked it. I know some people look at this now and say, oh, I would have you know. Uh, starduck, by the way, sells a utility that does this type of thing. If you like this animated wallpaper.

41:48
Solutions out there yeah, I mean, if this is how you spend your time, you know?

41:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but I want it free from microsoft.

41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah first of all, when do you ever see your wallpaper?

42:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, yeah, I mean, I see little corners of it bleeding around like yeah, I don't do everything full screen, but I think most people, or a lot of people, do.

42:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do at least on a laptop, for sure, oh definitely a laptop, right?

42:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, of course, yep, yeah. So yeah, if you're, if you're looking at your desktop, something went wrong. Yeah, you know, like did everything crash what is happening, honestly?

42:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, you hit windows d and ruined everything, or you, or you just move the mouse into the corner by mistake.

42:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like what's going on.

42:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, everything's gone.

42:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Most people have so many icons in their desktop you don't really see anything.

42:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I use a full screen app for looking at screenshots and images on my computer, so there's no Chrome around it, it's just the image, right? I don't want to exaggerate this, but I spent, I'm going to say 10 to 15 seconds yesterday clicking on the close button of a window and starting to get really upset, and then I realized, oh, this is a screen, it's a picture, yeah.

42:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, so I am also getting old.

42:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the old April Fool's joke where you take a picture of the desktop, yes, of like a blue screen or like you know I had a buddy who worked great lengths to make his wallpaper look like the screen was transparent, so it was just the wall behind.

43:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you could do that with a laptop. Take a picture of the wall.

43:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You take a picture of the wall, you get it all perfectly aligned. Then you trim it up. This is something with not enough to do.

43:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to say he must kill it at parties.

43:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's retired and then he digitally added a VESA stand for the monitor stands. It's still there, so it's just the screen was transparent, but the visa stand, the monitor stand, was still in the shop I don't know so mike's not a normal human.

43:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's just. It seems like a lot of things you like. Imagine the details that matter if you lived in isolation.

43:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You accomplished something and you had no one to share it with. Yeah, like what would be. The point is what I would ask this person, because who would enjoy this?

43:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
he would have to be like come here, come here, come here.

43:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look what I did exactly and she's like are you mental? Yeah, she's like, you know we have laundry to do, right, or whatever like what are you doing?

43:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
his day was made when I walked into his office and took a double take at his screen because I'm like wait, yes, what I mean? He's like all right, yeah, but the 40 hours I put into this is worth it now for that moment.

44:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know you just justified the way he spends his time.

44:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually spent many years of my youth practicing spit takes. That would have been a useful place. There you go To be sipping your cup all over the screen.

44:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I told you my spit take story. Yes, this is true. I worked in a bank and the bank had like glass in front of the tellers but there was like an empty space right here that went all the way up ceiling. And I was drinking a hot chocolate and this woman came in and she startled me. I didn't expect it, so I turned to her and I went and there was like this perfect brown circle that it just included her in the middle. It was like easily three to four feet in diameter yeah, diameter, and anyways, it was horribly embarrassing.

44:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you take your sleeve and rub a little hole in it and say something?

44:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was just like you get a little on you right there. So the next time she came in she said you're not going to spit on me this time, are you? And I was like, oh my God.

45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Careers in banking. I tell you.

45:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's not good. Okay, anyway, I don't know what that has to do with, just the ultimate extras.

45:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it would be an excellent disk desktop wallpaper.

45:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess it was a dynamic wallpaper of a type. And as unwelcome as real dynamic wallpaper. Anyhow, the other PC-related thing that well, I'm sure there's more, but that we will discuss today. Well, there's actually more to this too. But is Dell so Dell, like HP last August, has rebranded all of their PC lines and in doing so they have gotten rid of all of their brands.

45:38
One of the best known brands, I would say in computing I would say one of the few brands in our space that is up there with like thinkpad or the xps was beloved, yep and and the latitude for different.

45:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know xps inspiron latitude. You knew what you were buying yeah, so before they, before the.

45:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So these guys got reamed when they went public with it.

46:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this is this is literally a ripoff of apple. I mean, this is well, it's also.

46:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, well, um, so, by the way, everyone's saying that, but actually because of the names, like the names they chose, you mean dell, dell, pro, dell, max, um, yeah, so the apple one and one max, and there's one more there's ultra right, yeah, so well, there will be next year, I guess.

46:22
So, yeah, um, actually I think that might be a joke, that might be, I don't know, but this is actually very similar to what HP did. Um, but in HP's defense, like you know, I cause I asked them at the time. I was like, what are you doing? And they're like well, we had customers that came to us and said you know, you have um, your most popular brands are named after a ghost and a purple bug.

46:43
And I was like, okay, that's a good point and it's good, probably to clear the decks, but you have a lot of investment in a brand, but ahead of the dull public reveal of this, someone this wasn't me, but someone asked them I don't understand why you're using these names. And it's like well, it's logical. Blah, blah, blah. And like, yeah, here's an idea. Why don't you just use xps for the good one instead of whatever the stupid name you're using?

47:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and everyone was like yes it's like like duh, yeah, I mean I just upside to the dell pro max. It means it leaves you room for the dell pro max ultra.

47:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, yeah, oh, the uh dell pro max ultra s e r two yeah, you know it'll like you know, just like your azure bill, it'll start creating more name.

47:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's name creep. I need that name it's just not good. I I appreciate an attempted consistency, I get it I appreciate an attempted simplicity but I guess you kind of know what you're getting right. Here's the problem, though the slide says dell nothing, which, by the way, that's, I know, I know, ridiculous problem in the apple world when you don't have the one that just says dell, which is your name.

47:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the one that's a piece of crap. Is that what you're telling me? Designed for play, school and work? It's designed for no people who don't buy our computers, because something like 70 of their sales are the businesses. What is? Why do you even make those?

48:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
now, underneath this, it says you have dell base, dell plus and dell premium right, and all three of these actually have base plus and premium so you could in theory buy a dell pro max premium base or dell pro max base base.

48:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I got the nicest one, but not really you know like I don't understand. What is that? Who buys that? You got like a Cadillac Cimarron. What is that thing?

48:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like what are you doing? And then the pro is designed for professional grade productivity. Sure, it is.

48:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know.

48:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I mean, look, they obviously have brands like Latitude and Precision in the commercial space. So not, it's not a one-for-one replacement. Is it because they have many more names? They used to, yeah, I don't, I don't.

48:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I disagree with this so strongly, but I also I see this happening jaguar rebrand, right.

48:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is going on?

48:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I, I think this is the this is the question like are hard for sure, but I would honestly Inspiron, precision, latitude, xps. These are unique to Dell. They're not all iconic, but they're I would argue they're pretty good brands. Dell Base what is this Like? Are you trying to get out of this business? Like, what are you doing? Doing I think it's weird you know what.

49:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This may be one of those things where it's like you know, there's another vp coming up who's going to get to be able to rebrand these again and get their promotion oh my god, though, but that's such an I mean, you can't do this back to back.

49:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know you're stuck. You've you've made a years long decision here. You're stuck with this.

49:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'd be surprised at all if they, you know, two years from now it's like they bring back an XPS. Yes, oh yeah, yep, that's just, I really think you're, you're, you're business customers, your enterprise customers. Go sorry, I'm only buying latitudes. You don't sell latitudes anymore than I guess I can go look elsewhere.

50:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And not just latitudes, but like I don't know. I don't know them anymore, but back in the day they were like latitude C, latitude D and they had specific interoperability, not requirements, promises, guarantees, and for many years, and I'm sure they'll continue that I guess I know that's probably my butterfinger, I'll guarantee you.

50:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
there's a document for the salespeople and the big corporate customers. They're just like when you want a Latitude C, it is a this.

50:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you were Asus right now, you should be like all right, listen, we're going to do a Latitude line of business laptops.

50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a really good name.

50:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just right now yeah. That's one of the biggest cell phones like it's amazing, um, they're keeping the alien wear brand. Yeah, but that's I mean that, yes, they are nobody knows, but they're on there. Yeah, I mean, hp actually did the same thing with their. Uh, yeah, they're gaming whatever that not rog. No, they don't own rg. What's the one they own, uh that omen.

51:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, they kept that brand too. Yeah, they're not, but they I mean they acquired alienware in the first place.

51:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right right, yeah, it was a separate entity. It's so different. I think it's sensible because you don't want to tarnish your brand with gaming no, definitely you should try tarnish it with your best customers instead.

51:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, just uh, I don't know, no one was asking for this. It's just so weird, I don't, I don't like it. At least the hp one, I was like okay. Like now, when they explain it, you're like, oh yeah, okay. But then I see the products coming out and it's all like omni elite, something like studio book, whatever. And then it's has these addendums like, uh, you know the x360s they used to have right now called flip. So it's like omnibook x, ultra, whatever flip. And you're like wasn't specter?

51:55
kind of cool and it's like I guess not japan or something, but come on, like you could just rename it there no, lenovo got tangled up in the names, like this too, like is it yoga?

52:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's like there's too many I think this is, this is a period, periodically. This is probably something you want to do is go, you know you know what dell didn't do, that they stuck with the latitude xps is they literally haven't added a brand?

52:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, they really they were clear, so that's why they sold, re-bought and resold vmware in the time it took them to do this one rebranding like they went public and uh, yeah, exactly they went private went back.

52:32
Public bought vmware, sold vmware. They're like should we cover the xps? Some guy in the back yeah, I don't even know why, not, you know what I'm. So leo will remember this because this came up on the podcast. But when microsoft was looking for a ce CEO after Steve Ballmer, one of the chief candidates was Alan Mulally, who went on. Well, I think at the time was leading Ford, but when he went to Ford, he did the same thing that Satya Nadella eventually did at Microsoft bringing all the product Show me what you're doing. And so he has them all there in the room. They get the matrix of all the cars. He goes. Let me ask you a question. I only know one brand that this company makes. It's called taurus and I don't see it on this list. Where's the taurus? And they're like yeah, we uh, we renamed that like several years ago to the ford 500. I think he goes yeah, rename it back. And then and they did they they came back. Taurus came back because of him.

53:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he's like this is a stupid decision. You don't waste brand equity. That's really, I would think, marketing 101.

53:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you've got brand equity built up, people know it, people spend a lot of money on advertising to get those names known and it's so rare to land on one that just is perfect, that everybody knows, this was not broken.

53:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This was not broken. Nope, this was not broken.

53:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like XPS was one of the few really like solid. Everyone's heard of it. Thinkpad level brands in the PC space Totally.

53:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Did nobody survey on this. Like are you crazy?

53:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know.

53:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's sad.

54:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh well, I mean you know. Oh well, I mean you know it's, in the scheme of things it's a pretty minor, it's. Oh, I disagree, this is so many important problems in our industry right now no, I don't know I I it just bought it, just it was so it's just so pointless and unnecessary. I think it's the problem I, I did love the xps's. I owned many xps's.

54:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh my god good ideas, they decided to start down the bad ideas.

54:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah and also all their laptops are not going to be an inch thick. They got rid of that too. They're not doing thin and light anymore.

54:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What would the XPS equivalent be?

54:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Dell Pro Max Premium Wow it depends.

54:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's possible they overused XPS at some point. But it's yeah, it will be the Medium Top. But it's yeah, it will be the medium top to middle, no it should be the top skew. It should be the premium version of that Dell Pro Max Premium. Ultra.

54:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wowie.

54:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, or as we're going to call it, the DPM PM.

55:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, speaking of Dell, though, the one thing they also did announce at CS is they have amd based computers coming out for the first time ever they're adopting amd, so they they don't always, really the first time.

55:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's how they described it anyway. Oh gosh, I thought I could get an amd on a dell, maybe not huh, I don't shop a lot of dell, so I'm not really that one. I'm not well my alien where is? It is an amd, but that's not dell okay but that's yeah yeah, yeah. Uh, they did make the alien wear better by making it more repairable, more standard parts. It was so non-standard. I can't do anything with this alien wear, it's just a weird yeah, so that's a proprietary.

55:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's something we're seeing everywhere, which is really nice exposed screws, normal screws, yeah, no, nothing, get in, in, it's easy, yeah, um, if you have a laptop, they all have um methods for disabling the battery externally before you shut it off, and then that's huge yeah, it's unbelievable. You don't have to worry about, you know, killing yourself. Basically, yeah and um, it's nice. So, yeah, that stuff that has gotten a lot better. Some things are getting better. Yep, most, most things are terrible.

56:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Most things are not.

56:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That one thing way better. If that's where you're at, your life is looking good in 2025.

56:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm trying to celebrate something.

56:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I know it's going to be okay, we all are Leo.

56:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a break. More to come. We're going to talk about arms but not legs. Arms but not legs. Uh, as we continue, we're our men here, we're arm, we're all about the arms also. Uh ai, xbox there's a lot of the xbox news. Um and uh, a little whiskey my closet something weird.

56:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like irish whiskey, so I'm I'm always interested richard, you should see if something weird for myclosetcom is taken.

56:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There, you go, and if it's not, you know Well, I didn't play it in the show, but I did make a.

56:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, play it. When we get to the whiskey thing, you should play it.

56:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will play the new whiskey theme, our new whiskey theme song. It's called Something from the Closet. Actually, what do you the closet?

57:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
when you use spoons on your knee to make music. What's that? It's, it's, it's got that kind of a vibe to it yeah, I, I should have put that in.

57:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I'm gonna do another one that's what it needs yeah it needs spoons.

57:13
We, you know I don't know if I mentioned on this show, because this show's doing all right, but uh, we were really uh close to the edge at the end of the year. We hadn't sold enough advertising to continue operations and we did two things. One is we called for more people to join the club, and lots of you did so. Thank you. We welcome all our new club members. But we also just kind of it was like a Christmas miracle A bunch of advertisers called and said hey, we'd like to be on that Windows Weekly show. Tell me more about that. And one of them is Zscaler, and I was thrilled because they are the leader in cloud security. They make zero trust easy, and now with AI, it's even better.

57:57
Enterprises, you know, spend all this money on perimeter defenses, on firewalls and then VPNs, which lets the employee get in through the firewall. This has not stopped breaches, I think you know. You look at the headlines there's an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks in 2024, a $75 million record payout last year. It is not getting better, it's getting worse. And one of the problems is these traditional security tools actually expand your attack surface. Because you've got public-facing IP addresses, they're exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. Yeah, the bad guys are using AI. And another problem the bad guys are using AI. And another problem these perimeter defenses struggle to look at encrypted traffic at scale. And why is that a problem? Because once you're compromised, what do the bad guys do? They start exfiltrating all your data. They encrypt it first, so you don't know what it is and you can't figure it out. So there are a lot of problems. Vpns and firewalls also assume that once you're in, you're good, so that enables lateral movement. It connects users once they're into the entire network and then they send it out via encrypted traffic. They send out all your data. Look for places they can encrypt with ransomware. I mean, it's just a mess. Hackers exploit this is really the bottom line traditional security infrastructure. They do it now with AI. They outpace your defenses. It's time to really rethink security. We can't let the bad actors win. They're innovating. They're exploiting your defenses. You need to innovate.

59:38
With Zscaler, zero, trust Plus, ai, it does a bunch of things that you really do want to do. For one thing, it hides your attack surface, making those apps and IPs just invisible. So that helps right there. It also eliminates lateral movement, because the assumption is, even if you're in the network, you've got to prove you're okay. Users are only connected to specific apps, not the entire network, and you're continuously verifying every request based on identity and context. You're simplifying security management with AI-powered automation, too, and because you're analyzing over get this half a trillion daily transactions, half a trillion transactions every day.

01:00:25
Ai is fantastic because it can go through all of that and pick out the important attacks that you really need to know about. Hackers cannot attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI. Learn more at zscalercom slash security and we invite you to go to that special address. So they say oh yeah, we're getting a lot of traffic from those Windows Weekly folks zscalercom slash security. Protect against ai cyber attacks with zero trust plus ai with zscaler, zscalercom slash security. Thank you, zscaler for uh supporting the good work that paul and rich do every single week on windows weekly.

01:01:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, let's talk about I've got to tell you I've done it. I've registered something weird from my closet and configured it to redirect to the windows weekly whiskey playlist. So that's fantastic yeah, well, you got a lot done there. What?

01:01:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
jeez, I'm pretty quick one commercial break and he's, I started down a rabbit hole and only got about about 33 of the way through what I was trying to do there me

01:01:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and my friend dn simple, I know what to do there didn't get it squared away 15 bucks a year for a for a prank nice I love it.

01:01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We use dns simple.

01:01:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a very good one yeah, great anthony, or dn simple, dn simple, yeah oh, I don't know that one okay okay, well, it's dns, simple it's okay, it's so simple, I misspelled it there you go.

01:02:00
Uh, did I ever tell you that story? But we got you know. Once upon a time we're on the road trip and we get pinged by another isp when I'm not fond of because they're fairly awful, and uh, but they're offering us money. They want to sponsor, sponsor. And Carl shows it to me. I'm like, but they're terrible. And he's like, yeah, who isn't terrible? And I said Dan Simple is not terrible. And so he literally pinged them and said, hey, we've got an offer from these other guys. We like you better, you should advertise on our show. And they did. That's really good, yeah.

01:02:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, I'm impressed.

01:02:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, you still took the money from the other company, but it was cool to get you know, yeah, but at least now we had competition on the money is money. No, we did not take that.

01:02:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Those guys, my goodness so you have more intestinal fortitude than, say, mark zuckerberg.

01:02:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh yeah, I guess I was willing to let my kids go hungry. How's that?

01:02:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have kids, richard? Yes, and they're going hungry, not anymore, his kids never went hungry.

01:03:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think he had to worry about that.

01:03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're fine, they're adults. Now they are, they make their own way in the world.

01:03:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they do, let's talk arm, yes, whole arm section here. Um, so the week, the last week we did the show in december arm holding and qualcomm were in court, um, and friday came and uh, qualcomm wiped the floor with them pretty much. Um, there were three questions that the jury had to consider. Only two of them were actually pertinent, because the third was whether Nuvia violated the terms of arms agreement, which they couldn't determine. By the way, they didn't say that they did, but based on the evidence and testimony provided, they couldn't come to a determination. But the judge said afterwards doesn't matter, that company doesn't exist anymore, so who cares what they did?

01:03:55
Qualcomm is not legally responsible for anything that Nuvia did with regards to a license agreement before they acquired the company. So Arm Holdings, of course, has threatened to. They actually cannot appeal this verdict, but they can ask for a retrial, to which the judge said I don't ever want to see you in my court again. So if you actually try to go for that I'm going to, I'm going to require you to uh undergo mediation first. Um, so I this is.

01:04:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Cause this looked like a negotiating tactic from the first in the from the first. They shouldn't have gotten past the stairs of the car, yeah.

01:04:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this? We speculated about the rationale for what they were doing and it's it is. Everything we speculated was true and worse than what we thought. Basically, softbank has come down to them and said we need you to get more money from licensing, and they got rid of the CEO who was amenable to finding an agreement with Qualcomm and they put in a guy who was not, and they specifically went after. They lied to all of Qualcomm's partners and said their license is expiring next year. It's actually goes all the way through 2033, if I'm not mistaken.

01:05:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, a lot of nonsense that went on there and uh, now they spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on legal oh yeah or nothing I.

01:05:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they've tarnished their little brand there. Speaking of tarnishing brands, I think they made made a mistake, so they did reveal arm holding that they're probably well, they did at one time and probably will in the future pursue their own designs for finished chips that they'll sell to PC and hardware makers, which, you know, these invented designs that do not exist are going to be way better than everything Qualcomm does, by the way, but it was just uh just, it was just classic bicycle shed stuff, right?

01:05:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, it's really.

01:05:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Those other schmucks can do this, we can do it too, like it's not hard I look, I do understand that arm is running the world and this is the smallest company in the arm ecosystem and it kind of doesn't make a lot of sense well, and it does make more than a billion dollars with almost a hundred percent profitability, yeah right well, tell me how this company sucks again like it's crazy well, qualcomm is is a much bigger and more complex company, for sure, but they make 10 times that, literally, um.

01:06:11
But they do much harder, more, more. That's right, far more things. And and the problem for arm is that they're their best customers, so to speak, are not their best customers. Companies like apple and Qualcomm and many other, samsung and many others. They go off and do their own designs, right. And so arm is trying to sell like we have this new generation design, it's going to be more expensive, the license, and they're like, yeah, we don't need that, we barely use your stuff as it is.

01:06:36
It's vestigial almost at this point, like we've gone off in all these different directions. So I don't yeah, I didn't expect this to end well for Arm, and you know it didn't, but I do expect this to be the end of it, even though Arm is pretending otherwise. So we'll see. We're all waiting on the gen two Snapdragon X stuff and we're not getting it. So at CS, they announced yet another line of Snapdragon X chips. So Snapdragon or Qualcomm, when they first announced this chip, it was snack Snapdragon X elite. They then kind of burficated it into four or five SKUs. The, the fifth top is top extent, highest end version being that developer edition that's only in the dev kit. So it's. It's really, you know, whatever number the one that almost nobody got.

01:07:25
And yeah, I haven't announced uh, the plus, and, and there are. There were, I think, two SKUs at one point, and then no, no, I'm sorry. They announced that in the spring and then, at IFA, they announced an eight core version of the plus and now they have this non plus, non, so it's just Snapdragon X. So we have X, x plus and X elite. Suddenly we've gone from one processor to whatever that number is.

01:07:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a big number 12, 13 whatever, pretty sure we came to conclusion this was all binning, but the their yields aren't that good, yeah, and that's what this feels like to me again, right. They're trying to use more of the lower-end chips.

01:08:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, granted, this is something PC makers were asking for, because they wanted a lower-cost part that they could put in lower-cost PCs.

01:08:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And did I read somewhere that Qualcomm's not talking about a next generation chip until like 2026.

01:08:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so supposedly they're going to announce this mid-year and my understanding is it could actually ship by the end of the year. But yeah, they're a little, so maybe they're hedging.

01:08:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're a little off cycle. Yeah, it's too long man, it should be out by the middle of this year.

01:08:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't like the way that. Yeah, so we'll see. I'm kind of hoping we actually see something mid-year and it's better than what you just said, but we don't know yet. I hope so too.

01:08:37
Yeah, and the big focus there, of course, is going to be on GPU, right, because it's the one area where they're not doing fantastic. I mean, they're fine, it's for day-to-day stuff. Honestly, it's awesome, but it is one of those places where they don't do well in the benchmarks and all that. And it's more important I would say for them, because you're doing emulation and this is, I was going to say, workstation class apps, whatever that might be, or games or whatever that kind of need, this power. So we'll see. But they got the primary use case, I think, pretty good, and graphics will be the focus next time. So, ok, so there's that this chip and the Plus will be used by a lot of these Geekom. Lenovo, acer I want to say is the other one these kind of entry-level NUC-style, small form factor Qualcomm-based computers. So that's kind of you know, cool. Leo sent me that snapdragon dev kit, uh, back in december I guess, and I spent congrats weeks I spent.

01:09:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My wife eventually said something to me you got in.

01:09:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I, I work a lot out in the living room and I'll be like on a laptop, a little folding tray thing, right. And so for this, what I did was I put it out there with a like a, a portable USB-C display and then a keyboard and a mouse, and I worked on it and I worked on it, and I worked on it and I worked on it, and then one day my wife came out and said so what do you? What do you think the end game is here with the computer? What are you hoping for? So what I was hoping for was to figure out how to recover it with a usb bootable media. I never figured this out.

01:10:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I've spoken to people I'm so glad I gave this to you, because this is really it might not be possible.

01:10:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is possible to recover it over like a pixie boot recovery over the network. So you'd have to set up like a server that would have the software and I can do that. So like, at least I know I can recover it. So that's what I did finally move it in here after that. But uh, my wife was kind of tapping her toe there like, uh, I don't know we're having people for new years.

01:10:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, maybe it's not the most christmasy thing yeah, I mean, I don't know.

01:10:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has red lights and stuff. What's the problem?

01:10:52
I think it was more the muttering that was going on, that's yeah, and also the hissing of this thing because, unlike all other qualcomm based computers, it uh it has a fan and the fans running all the time, yeah, yeah so my theory on this is the same as it was before, but basically, I think there's a lot of things you could say to this, but I this thing should have come out early, but they wanted the surprise of the platform. By the time they had announced it, there were 20 plus laptop designs out in the world and, honestly, if you're a developer and you want to target this platform, you should get a laptop, because that's the point of these things really. I mean, so it also has the it's. It's. This is not a. This is a very non-standard pc. I think I brought this up maybe last time we talked, but it does not have a normal firmware. This is the type of thing that, uh, I think qualcomm would have probably given to their hardware partners in the past or something. It's just yeah it's so.

01:11:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what it looks like and feels like to me. Yeah, it's, it's not even.

01:11:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's not even a. The theory, I guess, is like, well, they're developers, they can handle this. It's like, I mean, actually, I think even for developers this is outside of the normal, unless you're a device maker, you know, like a driver guy or something. Yeah, this is a very unusual kind of a device. It's not a normal.

01:12:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And the nature of the way you have to configure it like to get it up and running from bare metal is very much like okay, yes, or a hardware oem, right who it's more like a phone than it is like a computer. Honestly, that whole boot process and you can see it.

01:12:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you've ever booted up a like you've uh gone into the developer tools in android, then you do like you can side load and and unlock it and all that stuff you you've seen, like the linux text display that appears sometimes when you boot up. That's's what it looks like.

01:12:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's it's, it's, and apparently folks have figured out how to run Linux on it. So I think my original oh, now I want it back, I think, my original thought that this is going to be the machine that hosts an LLM for the house. So, like, totally local, do that, so it can be. You know, I have no front end on it, it's just a network connection doing processing for me probably I don't know, man.

01:13:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean you can try that. I think you might be better off getting a low-end nook and, um, probably doing that.

01:13:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it's an interesting computer. I'm gonna right like I could also get a low-end nook with a pci slot on it and hang a 5090 on the outside of it under the stairs and actually they have thunderbolt enclosures and you could do that right off of the thunderbolt port, right?

01:13:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you don't even need a special um like port inside of it.

01:13:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So but, I got this for free, paul I gotta put it to work.

01:13:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You should definitely do something with it, but I it's it, but it's so non-standard I I that's part of the problem so, like linux is obviously at the minimum, this is a cautionary tale to others, right like that's the well, I think the cautionary tale is to qualcomm like they should have just gone with a pc maker hardware partner. That would have done a good job, not bob's computing over the corner of the garage there or whatever that was.

01:13:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can excuse this machine. If you shipped it in march for the release in june, that's right.

01:13:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You shipped it in october well, you announced it at the launch in june or may, I guess, and then didn't promised it in june but then didn't ship it till whenever. Yeah, big, big mistake. So I, I don't. Yeah, I think that they probably learned their lessons there. But that's my, that's my take on kind of what happened.

01:14:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and their their emails around this thing and the refund and so forth was very much a sense of anger Like this is seriously screwed up and you should not have to pay for it and we never want to hear from you about this machine again. Here's all your money back, go away.

01:14:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So my guess on that and this is just a guess is that they terminated this agreement with that company.

01:14:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah involved.

01:14:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're like we're going to swallow that cost. Yeah, we're giving you can refund all the money we're paying you, whatever we have to pay you and we're done, go away yeah, it's too bad, yeah, but now.

01:14:42
So now it's c, yes. So, uh, geekom, uh came out a little ahead of time, uh in december, and kind of said, yeah, we're doing this, and then now we know the details. So, uh, like I said, geekom, lenovo and probably other companies are making these NUC and or small form factor computers based on all the new platforms but Snapdragon. I don't know that any are Snapdragon X Elite, but I do know that they are Snapdragon X and plus at least. So that's happening.

01:15:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And this to me feels like what NUCs originally were, which was mobile chipsets without screens, keyboards and batteries. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, packed in the smallest box you could Yep, absolutely. And like that, with a 100 mil VESA mount in the bottom so you can just mount it to the back of a monitor. And it's a tight little system, yep, so wheezing away in the background.

01:15:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:15:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you know, I mean, on this one, yes, but I mean, I think this platform is good for this kind of a form factor. I think it will do fine in a NUC.

01:15:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Especially if they can run it solid state and it's just super stable, Like this is a far more kioskable solution than a lot of other things. Yeah, I'm trying to think.

01:15:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've had at least three Intel NUCs, I think they all. I'm sure they all had fans. I'm sure they did Like a heatsink on the CPU with a little fan. I think that might have been the extent of it. And then I think, on one I had like a little extender on the top that probably had its own fan for whatever additional storage.

01:16:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Unless you really ran them hard, they didn't make any noise.

01:16:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, and that's what I would expect of Snapdragon too. So that should be fine. And then this is kind of late breaking. But one of the big rumors of the past year involved when or if Qualcomm's exclusivity agreement with Windows 11 on ARM and Microsoft would run out. There was some rumors still that maybe it went past the end of last year. We still don't know. But tied to that, nvidia and then Mediaiatek and then nvidia and mediatek together, uh were rumored to be making uh arm chips for pcs.

01:16:41
So last night nvidia announced this supercomputer ai thing running linux, um three thousand bucks and up it's for researchers, scientists and students, which is kind of weird, but not a mainstream computer. But they revealed that, yes, we are working with MediaTek and they helped design the CPU, part of that. And afterwards, during an analyst event I guess the CEO of NVIDIA was asked about this he said under the terms of our agreement with MediaTek, they're allowed to take this processor. That they basically made MediaTek but we use in this supercomputer thing and they're going to make PC designs with it. It's up to them. If they want, they can share that with us and we can make them as well.

01:17:27
But whether they do or not. We are also making PC designs, and this is that thing we keep talking about that we don't have an example yet of an ARM system of any kind really running with discrete graphics. Nvidia, of course, makes probably arguably the best discrete graphics, but anyway, radeon's pretty close too, and they basically just confirmed it, now very vague. He said something to the tune of I can't really talk about it right now, we'll have more to say later. Maybe that's tied to that agreement, I, you know, nobody really knows yet, but he essentially not essentially literally confirmed those rumors. So, uh, media tech and NVIDIA, and maybe in media tech and with NVIDIA together, um will be selling PC chipsets based on arm to PC makers.

01:18:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what's the mediaTek part?

01:18:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
of this, the CPU.

01:18:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a good CPU?

01:18:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what Good so MediaTek? I'm going to find this. I kind of made fun of this. Mediatek describes itself as the world's number one chip supplier for smartphones, smart TVs, arm based Chromebooks, android tablets, voice assistant devices. It's cheap, so, yeah. So if you buy a like, I bet the Amazon tablets probably use media tech, I would imagine. Yeah, I just reviewed a Lenovo Android tablet that I pretty sure, yeah, yes, uses media tech. I just reviewed a Lenovo Android tablet that I'm pretty sure, yes, uses MediaTek, which, by the way, it's fine, it's nice, you know, it's fine.

01:19:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it is, I'm sorry. They're generally known for their inexpensive chipsets.

01:19:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what they're known for, and they're somewhat lower power.

01:19:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would guess I would think so. Yeah, so you know, we'll see, but I do think the combination of arm plus nvidia graphics super compelling. It's why microsoft went with nvidia for the first generation of what was then windows rt devices. Right, which, yes, I know we didn't know fantastic. But the arm chips of the day were not powerful enough to do emulation of x86 code etc. But they literally chose NVIDIA because it was a known quantity. Their graphics chips of the day were back then this is 10, what is it? 12 years ago, 15 years ago, whatever were a big deal, and so they were actually the first choice, right, they had Texas Instruments, which everyone forgets and should, and also Qualcomm on board. Qualcomm eventually came out well, would have come out for the second gen when they were doing mini tablets for Windows 8.1 and RT 8.1. But Intel scuttled that by paying off all the PC makers. And you know the Dell. Remember the, the little dell eight inch tablet. Everyone had briefly ran intel adam piece of junk processor because they paid right here's what my ai, my perplexity.

01:20:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ai generated a table comparing mediatek to snapdragon. They said actually, mediatek has strong multi-core performance and is good for efficiency-focused tasks. Uses Arms MOLLE. I was going to say so interestingly, they use Arms Holdings right.

01:20:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They use that design Instead of Adreno.

01:20:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, adreno is Qualcomm's own thing. That's kind of the point, right.

01:20:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So maybe they use the you know they pay the license. Maybe they use more of the stock ARM stuff.

01:20:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the thing you'd hang behind your painting not with the NVIDIA, but yes, because it's probably fanless you know, yeah right, and now they're making a supercomputer.

01:21:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean that's what you're.

01:21:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, nvidia made the supercomputer. So if you look at the components of the supercomputer, the cpu is just one part of this giant thing right, it's probably more coordination and task.

01:21:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly, you know scheduling anything else, right, right, all the real runs a custom version of linux?

01:21:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, right, um, but the cpu they they call out it has. The way NVIDIA described it this thing is called the name of it is Grace, grace Blackwell. It has 20 energy efficient cores Named after Grace Hopper, right, yes?

01:21:44
almost certainly because this whole thing is named, yeah, the Grace Blackwell super chip, which is the okay, the NVIDIA name is a classic, but best in class power, efficiency, performance and connectivity, which is something any company would say. I guess I'm not really, I don't know what the class. It's a class of one, I think, but there's not a lot of details about this yet. But the interesting thing to me is that they admitted to this partnership and that MediaTek walks away with this processor and can do whatever they want with it and their plans are to make PC chips so the nvidia stuff's on in the system on a chip it's it's not discreet no, it's.

01:22:20
It's almost certainly discreet because it's like this giant box or whatever, but yeah, I mean it's something like 10 000 tops, though right, I mean it's, it's something insane. Yeah, it's literally.

01:22:30
Well, it's described as a supercomputer I don't think that's just, I don't think that's like a brand, I think it's literally meets some. Whatever you know I don't know that world at all but um, what used to be like a cray or a, you know, like these computers that would take up an entire well, your iphone is actually faster than a cray one, I mean yeah, oh yeah. No, I just mean comparatively speaking.

01:22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah but no, yeah, it's a supercomputer. I mean, that's what.

01:22:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what they're calling digits I think it it's super as a computer. The iPhone, I don't know, it's fine.

01:22:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they want to put it on a desk, which is interesting.

01:23:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, you're not running Windows.

01:23:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not a desktop.

01:23:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but I mean, eventually there'll be versions of this that do right. This is the first iteration.

01:23:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Petaflop and Blackwell is actually the name of a mathematician generation petaflop and blackwell is actually the name of a mathematician. So ah, that's where blackwell comes from. Yeah, they've had other mathematician names for chipsets, like rubin and things like that so okay, interesting so it's really for ai development. 3000 is pretty good price if it's, you know, if it's actually 3000 a lot for a desktop, but not a lot for a supercomputer, right, yeah?

01:23:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I would it's probably like a, like a high-end workstation class something, something well a petaflop is a lot of flops. That's a yeah that's an intel level of you know they're saying 200 billion parameters.

01:23:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's like below gpt3.

01:23:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah running locally on your desk, but running locally Right Two and a half years later. Whatever that is.

01:23:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, actually didn't Microsoft just release open source one of its 200 billion?

01:24:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but it's one of the FI models. These are relatively small, right? These are on-device.

01:24:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Clearly people want to do their own AI and not go out to the cloud.

01:24:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, I guess so. But, if you've done anything with local AI, aside from some admittedly awesome things related to video editing, like the image creation stuff and paint or something it's like really, I mean, it's like the difference between finger painting and a Renaissance painting that's on the ceiling of the Vatican or something. It's just not there yet, but maybe these are the advances we need for them to get there right. Just take a week and a half to download the bottle. You'll be fine.

01:24:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know I don't know, okay, oh yeah, five four has 14 billion parameters, so it's considerably smaller oh yeah, it's not even close.

01:24:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is it's more of a typical, um small language model right yeah, gpt3 is 175 billion it's a 200 apples apex 200 billion like this this is a nice number to aim for right microsoft bang seven. Yeah, that is opt. 175 billion paul and leo together one, one at 1.5 I actually dragged out.

01:25:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, you're overclocked leo by himself is two walking around in the backyard like forrest gump, I don't know it's okay.

01:25:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, interesting. Yeah, I, I saw that. I I wondered who that's for. You know, there's a number of workloads that want llms but don't want a cloud dependency Interesting.

01:25:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I saw that. I wondered who that's for. You know it's not for us. There's a number of workloads that want LLMs but don't want a cloud dependency. The quant in the back row.

01:25:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This reminds me of Microsoft at one point had come up with Windows, whatever version pro, for workstation, right? Or they had the data center SKU in the beginning for server. Where? So do I go to Fry's electronics and pick this up on the? No, no, no, no, no. You call us and we send a team out, we put it in for you and it's like it's, it's, it was. It's a completely different kind of thing, and that this is this strikes me as kind of the open ai thing. That's 200 bucks a month. Everyone's like. It's like, yeah, it's not for you, no, and arguably like this is me.

01:26:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Take going beyond the snapdragon dev box like what would be the step above that. It'd be one of these, by the way sam said that 200 pro account is doing.

01:26:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're using it so much they're losing money on it, Right I?

01:26:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
mean, he would say that there is a demand for that he's a marketer, so maybe, but it sounds like there's a significant demand. He's an AI entity, so who cares? I am a human.

01:26:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we're very, very close within a year, maybe months, to AIs that are competent to replace a lot of uh, white collar workers, it seems like I don't think so, and that's really I mean honestly. If you get a three thousand dollar box, you put on the desk that replaces mabel in accounting, that ain't that's a deal.

01:27:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The three thousand dollar box replaces the, the llm you had four years ago okay, okay, right.

01:27:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's why you want the $200 a month. Yeah Well, four, oh, one or three.

01:27:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This stuff is getting interesting. I I would never use this personally. Tomorrow I'm going to record a few episodes of hands on windows, and I don't have this in the notes, but I'm going to do. You know, I did an episode about paint. I'm going to do an episode about notepad, right, which sounds ludicrous on the face of it, except if you look at notepad now, and this is only available in certain markets, but us, canada, I'm sure, western europe, etc. It has this. It has rewriting tools built in and, uh, it's funny, I don't actually have them on this computer, so it depends on the computer, apparently. But, um, look at this, it's pretty good. Like you could, you you could copy and paste a paragraph from the web. This is how blogs are going to be written.

01:27:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it might already be how blogs are going to be written. I'm going to play for Richard's Whiskey segment, a song that was generated by Sora AI in a minute.

01:28:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but you're talking about replacing jobs that could replace a lot of jobs.

01:28:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a lot of people who write this kind of wallpaper. No, no, I know, that's what.

01:28:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm saying Like that's where it's going to come from. It's going to a lot of the content creation stuff people are going to I mean my grandkids, if I ever have any are going to be like, so you wrote things and people paid you for that.

01:28:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, like no. You know, I don't think robots are going to be delivering your newspaper. I'm old, I don't know. I hope so. Uh, they were my. My brother in law used to ride around petaluma on a horse delivering this paper, that is amazing.

01:28:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We used to get milk delivered in glass yes, is there anything stupider than a liquid that goes bad in a day being delivered in something that explodes if you drop it?

01:29:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
5 am, you know.

01:29:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, there used to be formaldehyde in the milk to stop it from going bad. Oh jeez.

01:29:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's so good. It makes me feel better. I didn't know they actually did it.

01:29:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, oh yeah. That's one of the reasons the fda was formed is because they could it embalms you in milk yeah, well, it stopped it from going bad. You didn't need to refrigerate. It worked. It killed children, but that's a detail.

01:29:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They were dying. But the milk is fine. I mean we. You know that's the uh milk version of compile it and ship it, you know the poison squad.

01:29:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I recommend it's reading. Oh, I want to read it.

01:29:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good, I'm gonna make it under that. So it's about the history of the FDA.

01:29:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and the whole formaldehyde in milk thing and how. Until they had the regulation in place, the folks that were trying to sell fresh milk that they needed to refrigerate and all these things couldn't sell any because this is a good time to read it, because Wouldn't you want shelf-? Well, and there is, you know, there is shape, so now it's uht milk, but that's a, you know, again, a different, different era, different technology are you sure there's no formaldehyde?

01:30:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, just a little just a little is it a book or is it the pbs uh documentary? I think they made a documentary of it's original. Okay, there's a book too. Okay, yeah, I googled it and I'm at coggy did, there you go, and I found a that's just not gonna. I don't think that it doesn't have a ring, it's just not gonna you did what to it. It's all right, you don't have to remember it, because coggy, uh, like every other good search engine that's competing with google, will probably disappear yeah sooner than later.

01:30:31
I'm not sure I've even heard of coggy. Oh, coggy's great, but you pay for it, it. It's got a monthly fee. Remember I used? What was it Neva for?

01:30:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
a long time, yeah, the ex-Google. And then they couldn't make a business model out of it.

01:30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think was the deal.

01:30:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They had to fold.

01:30:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kagi is an excellent search engine. It uses Google's results, de-googled, as well as others. It probably uses Bing, too, else de-googled as well as others. I probably use as bing too. They they have a giant index they make, they build. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Let's take a little break because we uh we are so anxious to hear more about microsoft 365 and ai and, of course, xbox and gaming. And then, ladies and gentlemen, the debut of the brand new. And then, ladies and gentlemen, the debut of the brand new whiskey theme, as created by an artificial machine.

01:31:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not quite Jolene, done by AI, but it's close.

01:31:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's damn close, pretty close. It's pretty darn impressive. It is, yeah, and since we can't afford Dolly Parton, I don't think they could either.

01:31:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that was part of the problem.

01:31:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, I do want to actually, at this point, talk a little bit about our club. You just mentioned Hands on Windows and I thought this would be a good time to mention that. That is a show that you can get the audio of. Everybody can listen to the audio, but if you want the video, that's for club members. There's a lot of stuff we do. We've got a photo review with Chris Marquardt coming up tomorrow. That's a club event Stacy's Book Club, micah's Crafting Corner All of that's in the Club Twit Discord, which is a great place to hang out.

01:32:05
What we try to do is make the club affordable, make the club useful, and we're hoping that that will be enough to get you to join Club Twit. Now, of course, that $7 a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows as well as access to the Discord and a whole bunch of other features. But really, what it does for us hey, welcome old boy. He just joined the club, signed up today. He says Good to have you. Um, what it does is it helps us defray the costs, which are not insignificant, of uh, of the club. Here's a poster from joe in our club, the glad to have you aboard. Club twit retro poster. Uh, these are also part of the many, many benefits of Club Twit, but really we need the money. I want to make sure that I'm clear about that, that the real benefit of Club Twit is to know that you are supporting the ongoing production of this show and all the other shows we do.

01:33:13
Right now, fewer than 2% of our audience is in the club. I want to get that number higher. I'd love to get it. If we got it to 5%, that's all. If just one in 20 of you were in the club, our financial woes would be over. We wouldn't have to worry about advertising ups and downs, we could do more shows, we could bring you more content, and I think that probably more than now, more than ever, you need the content that we are producing here Without fear or favor, more light than heat, and if you have an empty wallet, okay, keith, we would love to have you in the club. Find out more at twittv slash club twit, or you can scan that little QR code if you're watching the video on the upper left-hand corner of the screen. By the way, while you are at the website, I would like to invite you to fill out the survey.

01:34:08
This is something else we do. Once a year At the beginning of the year, we do a survey. We like to get to know our audience. Club members or not, that's not important, we don't want to. We're not collecting information about you individually, but we do want to know an aggregate, what you like, what you don't like, and it's very helpful for us in ad sales to be able to say things like which we do say 80% of our audience are IT decision makers. That kind of thing helps us gain new advertising. So if you would it's a you know, if you don't want to join the club, at least do the survey. Twittv slash survey. It should only take you a few minutes and again, we don't collect information about you individually. It's all done in aggregate. Twittv slash survey. And thank you very much for all the support you all give us. We really, we really appreciate it. You support us even by listening to shows. Uh, all, right, now I'm done begging.

01:35:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The begging bowl is now going to be put away and we can go on with the show, with micro, the big, microsoft 365 I should have combined these two, 365 and ai because it's all kind of yeah, whatever, but nowadays with copilot it is kind of copilot all the time yeah, oh, it's yeah.

01:35:18
So, speaking of which, on one of my computers I got the Microsoft 365 copilot app replacement for the old Microsoft 365 app. I'm not seeing it on this computer yet, but so that's starting to happen. If you're looking forward to that or dreading it or whatever, doing a fragmented rollout there too.

01:35:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm enjoying the fact that they've renamed bing enterprise into just microsoft copilot.

01:35:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's not confusing. No, it's fine as opposed to the non-microsoft copilot.

01:35:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like what? What so if? You are we address the fact that copilot github copilot is free for vs code.

01:35:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just I literally was just going to say that. So I was going to say, literally the sentence that was going to come was if you are a developer, you have heard of, I'm sure, github, copilot, right. So two of the big things that happened with that recently one thing's in the notes and the other one's what you decide, which is it's actually free for everyone now. Now to a limit, right. I think the idea is that if you use it enough, you'll start to like it and say, oh, maybe I do want to pay for this smart. So visual studio and visual studio code, you can use this thing for free now, which is, yeah, actually really neat.

01:36:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm gonna try this with this app thing I'm working on but encouraging system ends to do the same thing because it writes brilliant powershell and good um kql kusto queries for for analytics.

01:36:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like it's very good at getting you unstuck Right, so one of the now, that thing launched years ago, but it was always based on the open AI stuff internally and now I've not used it. But my understanding not my understanding now I know you can choose between different models, like Anthropic is one of the options.

01:36:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Cloud and yeah, yeah, which I think Microsoft being very careful of the position itself, is not dependent on OpenAI, should things go awry, that's right and you know they're super stable.

01:37:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wouldn't worry about that. That from Reuters, not from Microsoft, that they are also looking at replacing or reducing its reliance on open AI in Microsoft 365 Copilot right, which to me is the big, I think a lot of it is called the big user-facing Copilot right.

01:37:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I would argue it's the most important one to Microsoft, because M365 is arguably the most important product to Microsoft. The big, yeah, exactly, that's the multi-billion dollar.

01:37:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The biggest business for their biggest customer group.

01:37:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and when that version of Copilot comes free, then you really know this story is over.

01:37:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and this is where I always think about this as a user. But it will use the right models based on the task you're trying to accomplish, like that it will just do this for you. But I think for the short term I know this is the case in GitHub Copilot you can, as the user, say, well, I want to use this thing. You can't do this in Microsoft 365 Copilot yet and maybe never at all, we'll see. Can't do this in three microsoft 365 co-pilot yet, and maybe never at all, we'll see. But, um, that you can go in there and say, well, I happen to know that, like claude, whatever version around now is really good for this type of thing. I'm going to use it for that or whatever. Um, so that's kind of that's, it's interesting.

01:38:28
Um, and we're going to talk about open ai in a second again. So, um, and then, uh, actually I don't know why these I'm gonna, I'm gonna read, for I don't, this thing has nothing to do with anything, I'm just gonna put these all together. So, um, microsoft in a uh, in a fairly bizarre uh blog post revealed just in a sentence in the two-thirds of the way down. You know, it was one of those pro-america everything we do is we're going to try to deal with this president who's coming in. It's going to be great.

01:38:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think this seemed like a very much a message to Mar-a-Lago.

01:39:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, it was bizarre. But right in the middle of it, or two thirds of the way through, it said oh, by the way, we're going to spend $80 billion on infrastructure, AI infrastructure in our fiscal year 2025, which we're in our fiscal year 2025, which are in the middle of it, Because they've already spent $80 billion. So that's the thing. So they already have. And then, if you look at their last few earnings reports, the amount they spent in the most recent quarter, for which there is a report, which was the first fiscal quarter of 2025, or what I would call the third calendar quarter of 2024, they spent wait for it $20 billion. So, of course, $20 billion times four. Four is 80. So I feel like we kind of already knew this. But the point of this was twofold One, to communicate how much they're investing. Two, to ask for investment from the US government, little handout and oh, by the way, maybe no regulation. How does that sound? They literally asked for less regulation.

01:39:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, please don't get in our way, shall we? Well, they're in good company.

01:40:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they're going to be doing just fine, I know Well good. They're in company, I would say yeah, apple, there might have been a strategic error to say $80 billion. Half of that in the US I have a feeling there are those in the administration would say only half, only half yeah, why not?

01:40:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, but well, here's the rationalization, by the way well, because there are certain uh, the entire eu, oh, you have to have that data has to be there. I can assure you those profits that aren't being stored in ireland. So they're all coming back to the united states, baby. So don't worry, you know. So that's, that's that Apple was storing him in Ireland, by the way, no, that's why I said Ireland.

01:40:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But they do keep money out of the US if they can.

01:40:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No of course they do. But I mean, but that would be how I would answer the question.

01:40:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not saying it's literally, so the profits.

01:40:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense this week in tech.

01:40:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But these data centers, are starting to destabilize the grid in the northeast. Yeah, it's so weird.

01:40:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that's why my screen just went blank, yeah could be, that's could be actually and yeah, that's why we need three island. Uh, three mile, yeah that's 800 megawatts.

01:41:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a lot of power. That's a bunch of data centers and more. It's more power than they need.

01:41:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
maybe that would solve the dim light problem I have out in the dining room. It's like a 60-watt bulb out there, even though it's really like 120 watts or whatever, like it's super dim. See, there you go. Blame the AI. Ai is going to fix every problem.

01:41:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you're seeing them telegraph the fact that they're about to get into the power business and shortly after that they'll have to get into the water business, Because those are the two constraints they have for building more data centers.

01:41:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and then the space business will be next because if there's anything colder than the oceans there are asteroids with water?

01:41:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
now, yeah, the, the, it's the providing water for cooling and so just take one of those big ice balls as they work their way through stressing infrastructure for for cities, they're going to keep having to provide their own.

01:41:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I assume most people are at least vaguely familiar with this term artificial general intelligence and even if you're kind of an expert in this, you're probably only vaguely aware of it because it's kind of all over the map. But the basics here are that kind of what Leo was saying. The basics here are that kind of what Leo was saying that AI will develop cognitive abilities that are as good as a typical human being. Right that it could replace them in jobs that are now done by humans, which, of course, is a nightmare scenario for a lot of people. Sam Altman cannot stop talking about this. Yeah, it's a good way to recruit, I know, but you're also doing an Osborne thing here. They're not there now right?

01:42:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you don't have a choice to use it and you're not going to say, oh well, I won't buy Chet GPT-3040 because I'm going to wait for the next one, I'm going to wait for five.

01:42:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, keep waiting. It's going to be a while. And the actual expert in this space say that LLMs aren't the path right, that we're not actually getting closer to a generalized intelligence, we're just getting good at language.

01:43:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sure there's going to be a nexus of AI and quantum computing. That will be the end of all of us, that's a different class of supercomputing.

01:43:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We really don't have a way forward.

01:43:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, so I my only point here is that, or the reason I mentioned this is Microsoft and open AI have a unique partnership and it's kind of, again, not super public, but it's kind of understood that they open or AI can be free of this contract and of their Microsoft exclusivity in some ways or in their requirement to provide Microsoft with all of their technology if and when they achieve AGI. So the information reported that the details of this agreement and the two companies have defined AGI as not some form of intelligence, but rather an amount of money that OpenAI makes selling their artificial intelligence directly to customers. Nice, as not some form of intelligence, but rather an amount of money that OpenAI makes selling their artificial intelligence directly to customers.

01:44:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nice.

01:44:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that number is $100 billion in profits. This is a company that made roughly $4 billion in revenues, not profits, last year. I don't think they are. I can't imagine they're profitable because of all their costs, but this was designed, I think, by Microsoft to be artificially high.

01:44:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but AI stands for artificial gross income. Right, but there's a reason that milestone's important, right?

01:44:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because then open AI yeah has become a superpower Is off the hook. Sure, no, that is why. But what I'm saying is that these two companies that are the pioneers now in ai have determined, have defined in a legal agreement agi as money.

01:44:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's like guys, come on well, what they're really saying is uh open ai, we own you until you start making 100 billion, that's. So you make enough money, which?

01:44:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is a yeah, because if it was really a super intelligence, then that's basically a way of saying money, which is a yeah, because if it was really a super intelligence, then that's basically a way of saying so. This is a forever agreement, because there's no obvious achieving that. Yeah, but now you said it at a realistic number, a colossal number, like right. You realize. At the same time, they're saying you need to make a hundred billion dollars. They're starting to give away this product.

01:45:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the question is who said a hundred billion open AI or Microsoft?

01:45:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's an agreement between the two, I know, but who came up with that number? Who does it?

01:45:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
benefit? Does it benefit open AI? I think it benefits Microsoft? I think it benefits Microsoft?

01:45:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, hugely Well. And actually I think that bit is important because, as we see things evolve over time, you know, open AI has partnered with Apple, right, and we're like, oh, apple has not invested even a dollar in OpenAI. That seems like a little, you know, weird. So it's like, oh, maybe Microsoft didn't get a good deal here. And then you see this, you're like, no, no, they're fine. They're fine Because they get everything OpenAI does, until this number is reached, and that means they get everything that OpenAI does.

01:45:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is from a story in the information. We should give credit to Stephanie Palazzolo because she came up with this, but I would like to know like who?

01:46:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the old Latin saying cui bono? I don't know that we could.

01:46:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might be a mutual thing, it might be Microsoft. So once they hit that agi uh uh milestone, then the open ai no longer has to provide access to its models.

01:46:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right, that's right they're done, they're, they're remits up, we're independent, go off and they go.

01:46:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's how many companies make more, have more than 100 billion in profit a year, like five.

01:46:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very small, microsoft being one of them so in a way, it's microsoft saying okay, we got you in hand when you're as big as us, then you can go.

01:46:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But if you're.

01:46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sam Altman, you might also say yeah we're going to get there pretty quick.

01:46:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, he is saying that, but I think the idea here is that OpenAI will come back to Microsoft at some point and say, look, we need to renegotiate this. And they'll say, sure, yeah, you know, I will take more of your money instead. How does that sound? And you know that up up front, or whatever.

01:46:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So um, I think this is then the reason I bring it up is it's not really about agi, it's really about how do we lock in open ai, you know, for the longest time.

01:47:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The point of this is if you thought microsoft was getting the raw end of this deal, they're okay.

01:47:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're doing it Unless. I mean, if really you did create super intelligence, that would be worth.

01:47:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, trillions, we might say yeah.

01:47:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It'll make $100 billion making paperclips yeah.

01:47:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then we're going to get into interesting legal issues similar to ARM and Qualcomm where Microsoft will say wait you, but you made this while we had this agreement, so you have to give it a. So, no, no, we, we, you know, we did it after we hit that figure or whatever. Or you know, we'll see how it goes.

01:47:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It kind of makes sense if you think about it, because open AI right now is extremely expensive. It's kind of like Microsoft is the rocket fuel and it can't get off the pad without the rocket fuel that what they're saying, though, is, by the time we hit orbit, we don't need you anymore, and Microsoft saying, yeah, good luck with that, but I don't know who got the better deal on that one.

01:48:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, yeah, we'll have to see what happens.

01:48:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You think so Right now? I think Microsoft did. Yeah, I'd be betting on OpenAI.

01:48:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, we'll have to see what happens and we'll look back at it. You think so?

01:48:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right now. I think microsoft did. Yeah, I'd be betting on open ai, but that's because I think they're going to hit super if open ai had done what they did and microsoft didn't get involved.

01:48:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If they somehow partnered with google or amazon or whatever, microsoft would be done that's true, they effectively like they would just be done right. So yeah, I mean, you know we always talk about this. You know the bet, the company nonsense that microsoft always talks about. This was literally about the company thing. I mean, if they hadn't done this and open ai was able to go with someone else, I I don't think microsoft has a future they took it away from google, right?

01:48:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's really what they were trying to do, of course they did a lot of.

01:48:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a lot of raw feelings.

01:48:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're still and google does not want microsoft to have it and it probably and they can't help themselves.

01:49:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like sunday who's?

01:49:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like open, ai is taking technology from google in the first place. That's why it was set up right right like google has been punished in this space every step of the way.

01:49:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They made google first google looks like the um the putts xerox park of the 21st century.

01:49:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right that you had all this stuff in house you had, you protected your existing businesses rather than going to market with it.

01:49:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's interesting, yeah I mean that's kind of what happened, right, I mean. So anyway, it's an interesting world.

01:49:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess I don't know and really it's, uh, it's all kind of a bet. A bet, uh, we don't like if we could add a crystal ball.

01:49:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We knew 10 years still not providing any profits of any kind anywhere and it's hideously expensive and it's but did I mention that the text rewriting thing in notepad is unbelievable and easily worth the 11 billion dollars and wait?

01:49:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
till you hear the song.

01:49:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, we're making a lot of progress. Things are happening very quickly. They really are.

01:49:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Steve gibson, uh, has been kind of delving into this and yesterday he said I've never seen this is the fastest moving technology I've ever seen yes, thank you, that's exactly, has ever seen yep, and that whatever you said was so today likely will not be true tomorrow the discussion that I've had with people, some would say well, the internet was this fast, you know it's like I mean no, the internet had decades. I would say this well, I mean that, but that rapid you know the 1995 through 2000, if you just think what the song generator just taking songs, song generation sounded like.

01:50:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
remember I played it made a co-pilot song for you guys a couple of years ago. Right, it was, it was.

01:50:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I mentioned the AI Jolene song on purpose, because that was done at great expense by a professional musician blah, blah, blah, whatever. And now you could just do it yourself, for next to nothing, you know.

01:50:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I also point out this is the largest investment made anywhere across the board. Oh, yeah, Right.

01:50:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Altman says it's going to take a trillion?

01:51:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, huge amounts of money are being poured into this and again Altman's saying a trillion is super self-serving. He's the one who has to go raise the money.

01:51:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's a huge part of that Microsoft revelation about the $80 billion, which is not really a revelation. You know we're in a fight against the chinese here. It's important that we keep this in our hands and then we can sell it to our like, the countries and businesses that are our partners, and keep it out of chinese hands, right, so it also turns into like a national security I do think that the real trick is going to be and I'm hoping that the trump administration will see this uh, that we don't want any one company to dominate and control this.

01:51:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a creation for humankind Right and this was the whole idea originally around. Open AI is no. Google shouldn't own this. Microsoft shouldn't own this it should be open.

01:51:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't remember. I only saw the headline. So this is not a great story. But someone has proposed that if ai steals is found to have stolen content, to train itself that that ai should go open source and be made available to the public. Right the idea being that I know it's 100. That was my response was. But that would be all ai, you know.

01:52:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I mean that's kind of the point there are a couple of things that have happened that made this possible. One is incredible computing power, incredible storage capacity and oh, for the last 15 years, humans are putting everything they know into a public repository that can be scraped by everyone can scrape yeah well, this is, this is like.

01:52:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is like the railroads going across the country in the 1800s stealing land and being horrible and killing people and being whatever, and then you know, but at great scale Kind of worked out Like a really good scale, like an amazing scale, yeah, okay.

01:52:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, and I think only government can make make this happen and I think there's a governmental urgency to it because other countries are doing that china.

01:53:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Only we had a country that was as big as microsoft, google or amazon well, once we get canada, greenland uh, there you go, that's, that's us trying to scale there I think we scale up and, uh, the rest is cake. Yep, as long as yeah, keep looking north Greenland's a giant island.

01:53:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you seen it?

01:53:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It depends on which map you're looking at. Yeah, only on Mercator projections. It's either a giant island or a really tiny continent, you know yeah.

01:53:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sorry, I shouldn't mock the uh disabled um, if you do a peter's gall projection, greenland's not that big yeah mercator.

01:53:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mr mercator did not do us any favors.

01:53:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, mercator we weren't supposed to use that.

01:53:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was for navigators, for for european wooden sailing ships, for it's super accurate right at the equator.

01:53:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not really sure what the complaint is it's all about its latitude, not actually precision of size. Not that I have strong opinions about these things. Oh wait, I do. Okay, um, we should move on to xbox moving on oh much better, much more important.

01:54:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, some xbox stuff going on, so this is the bread and circuses section of the show yeah um, microsoft has been taking baby steps to make the xbox experience on windows be more console.

01:54:25
Like right, there's a um kind of a simplified version of the app, there's a simplified version of the game bar, etc. But they want to go a lot deeper than that. And Phil Spencer was talking about, you know, architecturally Xbox as an OS and Windows are the same underlying kind of Hyper-V architecture and that maybe there's a world in which and by maybe he means literally there's a world in which there's a handheld gaming device running that kernel or whatever, that basic part, the foundation, but without all the Windows stuff, you know. But to get there we're going to have to have Windows handheld gaming PCs first. And you know, steam Deck type systems are starting to spread pretty rapidly. At CS We've seen a bunch of these things.

01:55:11
Azure's got one which is a second gen for them, lenovo's offering one that offers a choice of SteamOS or Windows. Fascinating, amd, among their 117 whatever chips that they announced, announced a second gen Z2 chip family. There's three or four of them. Only the top end one is better than previous gen from performance, efficiency et cetera. But the other ones are lower cost and are going to power a lot of these devices at new lower price points. And then we've kind of speculated about this.

01:55:43
Xbox is kind of in a holding pattern from a hardware perspective.

01:55:46
They're almost certainly waiting on arm we talked about earlier, about arm and nvidia and what could happen there, and I think there's a future where and he kind of alluded to this Phil Spencer did that. You know we're going to have these handheld gaming PCs, but maybe the more efficient thing to really take on the Nintendo switches of the world or whatever is going to be a custom OS. Brad and I talked about this this morning. But you know, when you think about Steam OS versus windows, you have Linux, which is smaller and lighter than Windows, and that's good. But and they've done Valve has a bunch of work to make games run, you know well enough as they can on that system. But then on the Windows side, heavier, you know bigger, et cetera, more resource intensive, but the game compatibility is crazy good and you get all the other games like from Xbox, epic, whatever the other stores are. So it's not just Steam and you know, maybe there's another way, maybe Microsoft comes up with a Steam OS type thing that's actually Xbox OS, and you know, maybe we'll see.

01:56:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Most of these handheld gaming machines are not going to survive, right Like. I would be really nervous to buy any of these really nervous to buy any of these so I I I wouldn't buy one myself, but I'm 58 years old.

01:57:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I think you can. Um, you could buy the new switch when it comes out.

01:57:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's well for sure that's the obvious one to buy yeah, yeah, but I but.

01:57:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or a steam deck, but uh but a younger person that wanted, uh, one of pc games and wanted to play them on the go the thing I remember. You know we've gotten into a world where I just reviewed a ThinkPad T14S based on AMD chip. It's not the high-end 9 series, whatever, it's just a mid-level chip. Runs Call of Duty at 1080p+. It's 1920 by 1200, 45 frames per second roughly.

01:57:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a business laptop like I mean, come on, like, we got enough gp unit these days yep, we are.

01:57:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're in a good place. So this is the time for this to happen. I I would have, I think you know, when steam os, steam deck first came out, I guess steam deck, I don't know. I think there were too many compromises at that. And we're just a couple of years in and all of a sudden this is starting to look pretty good. You know, to me the screen is the, the big issue. I could deal with the, you know the control parts. Fine, I play with the controller actually, so to me it'd be the screen. You know, we get a sniper off across the map and it's one pixel on my screen.

01:58:14
Yeah, I don't know what it would be it would be a 53 inch 4k. Yeah, yeah I want right, like it's one to one size ratio, like it's like real life size, like that would make sense, that's awesome.

01:58:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's why we always call them the pc master race in the first place, yes so, anyway, this is.

01:58:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a lot of stuff happening at uh cs around this stuff and phil spencer, as he's been doing for the past year, uh, instead of releasing uh activision titles that can't pass you bastard uh has been talking a lot about these things that may or may not happen and and that's kind of interesting to me, because he runs xbox and he shouldn't be talking like this but there's got to be a reason and uh, I, I think, like I said, I think they're kind of in a little bit of a holding pattern with regards to ARM hardware making sense. I really think that's what they want to do.

01:59:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think that's what they're holding out for is let the Windows on ARM get stable and then make a handheld out of it.

01:59:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and I think these things all kind of align at a good time and hopefully in the coming year We'll see. It is January, so we got our first Game Pass games.

01:59:19 - AI music (None)
Oh, there is an Activision Blizzard title in here. It's the only one I know. Yeah.

01:59:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's Diablo. Wow, like the original Diablo, oh, diablo 1. Yeah, well, I think the new one is already 97?. Yep, so I mean, if you were upset, I mean I wasn't, but if you're upset about activision games not appearing on game pass, I mean there you go.

01:59:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is all the problem.

01:59:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow it's a 30.

01:59:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know man, I, I, I well, there are people who love it and, and you said that diablo 4 is available now. So, yeah, I mean there are people who love it and and you said that diablo 4 is available now.

01:59:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, I mean there are people that love a track tapes too. I mean, I is that on game pass? I don't know yeah, uh, it probably is, if activision doesn't make it. Um, I don't know, I don't know what's happening here.

02:00:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So but reasonably, the rest of the diablos will come. Then you started. I think that's the expectation.

02:00:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, it's only taking a year um, nvidia announced new graphics cards, uh for pcs 5000 series, the 50s, yay. So you know what used to cost uh. Two thousand dollars now costs five hundred dollars. But don't worry, they have a new two thousand dollar card too. So, um, if you, if for some reason it's important to you to go from like 100 frames per second to 230 frames, per second On your 60 hertz display.

02:00:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They got you who needs these, I don't know. I still have like a.

02:00:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what. 30, 70 or something, 30 or maybe a 20 series in my gaming machine. It's fine, it's fine yeah. I mean, but I'm not yeah Right, I'm not. What is it's fine, yeah, I mean, but I'm not yeah right, I'm not um. What is it what?

02:01:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it used to be crisis. What is the call a tough game now? I don't know. Oh god, yeah, what is the tough game now? Um, is there even a game that could take advantage?

02:01:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
of honestly just 4k textures, right like 4k, like for actual 4k, yeah forget ak like actual 4k.

02:01:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is nothing, that's yeah. What is crisis 2025? That's a good question, yeah yeah, it's more.

02:01:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's more about what games you actually run in 4k hdr. Like will they run?

02:01:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I, I this is one of those nintendo might have gotten something right moments where obviously they were kind of mocked for like, oh, the 1080p, that's cute, uh. And then they won the generation and now people are starting to look at gaming pcs and of course you know these. I'm sure steam deck probably runs at 720p a lot of the time or whatever, so, um, and we also get into that uncanny valley thing with uh. The graphics are so realistic, they're not realistic and they look weird. You get the even in call of duty, like this one of the animations where the guy's walking around with the uh gun and before you start playing the game, if you leave it on this, he, as he moves around, like one of his eyes kind of disappears for a second on some computers, like it's, it's like weird.

02:02:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I double check this on the gamer, but and I agree with this completely cyberpunk 2077 oh yeah, out of sync is saying that yeah, so what's the?

02:02:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what's the, what's the resolution? You could run this thing at uh, yeah, no dude but, maxed out cyberpunk.

02:02:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, 4080 at 2160p, 60 frames, a second yeah okay and and you'll boil water in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's that's, uh, that's pressing the limits to do true 4k. It's all in and that's then. That's specced on a rtx 4080, so these 50 series will should be able to eat that up.

02:02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah, I don't I don't know if you've played it is astonishing, like yeah, is it, you like it?

02:02:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and it's a double whammy of an open world game and all the cyberpunk, which is fun, but actually the storyline is excellent and moving and it's, uh, you know, acted by Keanu Reeves.

02:03:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're gonna do that. That's cool, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a 3080 in my Alienware. It's legit.

02:03:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm a little behind.

02:03:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a great machine yeah, your graphics card says for the three Leo, come on, you're so old. What is that? Like the, the first glx card that they made for the original on it.

02:03:21 - AI music (None)
What do you know, man? Yeah, I play, I play, yes I play the sims on it.

02:03:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, it's good on that, oh the sims works great on it and then these other.

02:03:35
I almost don't really want to talk about this. So, uh, xbox is coming to lg, select lg smart tvs this year. What does that mean? The xbox app is going to be available there. So if you have an xbox console and you want to stream your own games there's 50 now that will, or soon that will work you can do that. But if you pay for an xbox game pass, ultimate subscription, you'll be able to access um that library from the lg, whatever the lg gaming hub is so lg is running the old uh web os right the palm.

02:04:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so I wonder. But no, it's just a browser right the way. Yeah, it's just this.

02:04:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's well, it's the vestiges of a mobile platform, right like it's probably, I think the, the programming model is probably all web-based, but that's fine, I mean it makes me really think about the idea that I could leave the xbox downstairs and and then play my games upstairs on the l I would be fascinated if you did that and you were. You found it to be acceptable.

02:04:33 - AI music (None)
Yeah, you know, I just find that this game streaming stuff is like right like I don't know, but maybe, maybe I

02:04:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
don't know, yeah. And then, uh, the less said about xbox rewards the better. But, uh, there were rumors that this stuff and, and you know, microsoft has this set of rewards programs, you know, use bing, use edge, you know, and you'd point so you can get some. There were people who, you know, like anything in life, who use these things religiously and get, you know, apple card gift certificates or whatever it is from all this usage. But, um, they, this has already happened out. Yeah, so, as of yesterday, they've um kind of revamped this program and, um, what people are discovering is that, if you are really into this, this is not as good as it used to be yeah, that's the only way those points programs ever go.

02:05:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they don't ever get better. Yeah, yeah, so I don't know.

02:05:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. I'm not. I'm not sure I've ever done xbox rewards directly or on purpose, like I've done the bing reward stuff sometimes just to see it. You know whatever, but it's, I don't know whatever. The reward of playing games is playing games yeah, who needs a apple gift card? Exactly.

02:05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, I do actually, but you know, okay, whatever, all right, we are. Uh, hey, how exciting. You guys guys have moved right along. We're ready for the back of the book. Uh, and, of course, our whiskey pick and the debut of our new whiskey theme featuring ann murray. I'm sorry, ai and murray. Uh, you're watching this week in windows weekly. That's too many weeks, it's a lot of weeks. It's a lot of weeks, uh, with paul thurot and richard what's his name? What's his name? The guy over there, the other guy, the guy with the beard back of the book time. What do you got paul thurot your tip of the week.

02:06:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'm browsing around my news feed the other morning and this was a mac web website of some kind or like one of those apple whatever and it just comes up and it says get windows 11 pro for 20 and I'm like okay so I go look at this thing and these are all over the web. Right there you can actually get windows and office.

02:06:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I did, I bought it from yes, cheap is, you know, 30 bucks it's a penguin with an eye, yeah penguin.

02:06:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I so I've. I've also done this a few times recently, and the only reason is that I guess it's a k. Yeah, I don't actually. I don't remember the names of the sites I've used, but I've used a few this one I found on tom's hardware.

02:07:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We talked about it earlier. I use it for a vm and it was cheap and it, yeah, it seems legit.

02:07:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's a great right, that's a great reason to use it. Like you, you're in a VM, especially on a Mac, where you want to run Windows, and $130 for Microsoft, $200 for Pro, you're like I just want to run a Windows app here.

02:07:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a Windows 11 Professional OEM product pro key $22.80.

02:07:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, yep. So here's the thing. So people will sometimes email and say is this legit? I mean, this is a scam, right? Or this has to be illegal or something, right? So the site that the Mac slash Apple site pointed to is a Microsoft partner, right? So I'm like oh, that's kind of interesting. And it turns out that the key that they're selling for pro or home was coming from a different company. So I went and looked them up and you could get either for as low as $10 a piece.

02:07:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I'm like all right, I'm going to do this.

02:08:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you couldn't. They had already sold too many. It was. The offer was gone and so I. It occurred to me. On the surface laptop, I'm using that, which is home edition. I actually last week tried to install Hyper-V, forgetting it was home. Hyper-v is not available in home. There's a workaround for that, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I was like you know what? I'm just going to go. Let me see how cheap I can do this now Because, like I said, I've done it in the past. I used to use TechEd and MSDN keys. When those things still worked. I had yeah, I mean honestly, as recently as this morning, I bought a key for I think it was 25 bucks, activated immediately, no problem, and now that's tied to the hardware.

02:08:48
I don't see Microsoft ever taking this away. So why am I telling you this? Because I think people look at this and they're a little bit worried about it. Like, well, what could happen? What could they do? What if they stop letting me download updates? Or I can stop you know, whatever. What could they do? What if they stop letting me download updates? Or I can stop you know whatever. Guys, you got this like.

02:09:08
There's not. Microsoft is not going to remove your data from the computer. They're not going to prevent you from getting into it. They're not going to do anything is what they're going to do. They're going to do nothing. And, by the way, if you know about it and if I've been doing it for the past year, and if the Mac website's writing about it Leo promoted it earlier when he did it on his Mac Microsoft knows about it too, so don't worry about it. The windows 11 upgrade is free If you have a qualifying computer, which is a lot of them, but, as we're about to find out, not all of them. And I. There's no other market for the. There's no mass market for this stuff. No, I. There's no other market for the. There's no mass market for this stuff.

02:09:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one is. I don't think this is a concern, so I'm not. In other words, they're not worried that they're losing money because I don't?

02:09:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they're not losing money, it's? You know what I mean? Like, where do these come from? They buy them in bulk and they sell them per uh, you know?

02:09:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so this is like when you would in the old days. You'd go to egghead and they'd say well, you have to buy some hardware and we can sell you the oem right, an oem key.

02:10:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they're not always oem keys. I've also done this with office to do some of my testing of, like, standalone office versus the subscription version, to see how that changes the equation with, uh, you know, one drive, uh requirements, yeah, yeah, um, it's kind of fascinating, like, uh, the latest version of office, the consumer, which is like Home, and I don't remember what the other version is called, but those are actually still fairly expensive because they're brand new. I'm sorry, did you have the?

02:10:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
name.

02:10:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, the non-subscription versions. Like the Office 2024 Home is the base version without Outlook, and then there's one with Outlook. That's something else, standard or whatever the name is. Like you can get the PC Plus 2024 that can installs on three computers, blah, blah, blah. I guess what I'm trying to say is like I don't think there's a risk here at all. And if there is a risk, like if you spend 20 or 30 bucks and you buy one of these things and, worst case scenario, microsoft's like you're not doing this anymore, we're turning this off, who cares? What were you?

02:11:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
doing before you're fine. Like everything's fine, like don't worry about it, you'll be okay. Yeah, it's all good, the black shoppers aren't coming nope, no one's.

02:11:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No one cares that's, that's my thing, I'm not saying it's literally illegal. But I kind of am because I don't. I mic Microsoft would put a stop to this. Yeah.

02:11:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft Easily. Ultimately, microsoft's goal is to have everybody on Win11, so they have less to expect, right?

02:11:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is how they compete with Linux. This is them keeping Linux off the desktop, I don't know. Yeah, for anyone who cares about this, for some reason I did finish my latest version of NET Pad, based on NET 9 and the new. Wpf stuff before the end of the year.

02:11:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is it faster? Are you happy with NET 9?

02:11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, by the way, found another major bug, which is that if you have an expander control which is what you would have in settings in a notepad app, like Microsoft does and you expand an expander and you change the theme, it crashes the app. And that's Microsoft's bug. They've acknowledged it. Supposedly they fixed it internally, but I haven't seen the fix. Yeah, so you can crash this thing pretty damn easily if you want. Nice, but yeah, so I'm pretty happy with it. I've got a lot of stuff coming this year, including tabs, right, which is the big one. So I'll be, I'm going to keep working on that. And then, as far as apps go, apppick I might actually do another episode about this on hands-on windows, because I did one a couple of months ago and I highlighted maybe three or four of the tools.

02:12:30
I found myself using two tools, a lot more than I ever did before, and both, I guess, are tied to kind of different ways that I'm starting to use computers. So the first one is called PowerToys Awake. If you've installed Power Toys, you've seen the little coffee cup icon down in the tray next to the normal Power Toys icon. What it lets you do is click that and then you can choose some amount of time that the computer stays on and or the screen. You can decouple those. I'll do things where, for example, like maybe I'm playing a video game over here but I'm doing a little bit of work between games over here, and what will happen is my, you know, because these things are so efficient all the screen dims, the screen dims, the screen dims. So I'll just go in and say stay on for an hour. You know, don't dim the screen, it's, it's. I actually use this a lot, it's really cool.

02:13:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It should be built into Windows, but it's a power tool and maybe someday it will. I mean that happens to some of these tools. Once, it's all.

02:13:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
ARM. Yeah yeah, the other big one is and this is because there's a bug in 24H2, where the mouse cursor disappears in certain circumstances, especially when you're working in text. And it's what's it called? It's called Find my Mouse. You double tap the control key. It puts a little, it does a little like focus circle, nice, like overlay on the mouse cursor. And I, I use this every single day. Maybe I'm just like old and blind or something might be it, but like I, I'm the biggest game multiple screens yeah, and the game I play the most is where's my mouse, where's the mouse?

02:14:03
and I'm like moving the thing around like I I don't see it, you know. So you do double tap and there it is. There you are.

02:14:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's never where I thought it was, yeah, yeah, very useful. That's good. I like that one. Oh, and, by the way, just to be sticking on the app, I noticed you. You know. I finally gave in and started using a new version of outlook, because of you.

02:14:25
That's the sentence paul hates because of you as of this you said, you said, and and I think a couple of times on the show I've come and yelled at you about this, but this was the week where I noticed it wasn't annoying me anymore oh, or actually knew where the workflow that wasn't what I expected at all okay, good, but it's one of those things results that I'm like hey, I'm still using the new outlook and I'm not and you're not like.

02:14:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't want to poke your eyeballs out yeah, I'm not raging, right that's good. Okay, I'm glad to hear that because honestly I think, especially if you have a a commercial account or you have a paid microsoft 365 consumer account, it's, it's actually, it's actually pretty full feature, like it's kind of nice it's a nice looking used to where things are, and it's got a couple of smart things about it, like yep, yeah.

02:15:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And if I just realized like I'm now used to that workflow and it doesn't make me angry anymore so we were just talking about the like, who does like, who cares about wallpapers and stuff like that.

02:15:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So one of the things that's interesting about this app and this was true of mail and calendar, well, mostly mail uh, in windows 10 and you know before this app was unique among inbox windows apps you can configure it to have a background image, right, and the new outlook, the way they draw the ui, is you have these kind of columns and if there's no email selected, like he had there, you can see the image really well. But the image comes through if you look at, look between in the little gutters, between things.

02:15:45 - AI music (None)
Oh you can actually see the image in there oh yeah, there it is.

02:15:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of neat, like it's. It's subtle on the screen, but like on the top of those two columns where it says favorites, whatever you can see, it it's in there too, like it's it's back, like those things are floating in space.

02:15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sort of it's kind of nice. Oh yeah, it's subtle.

02:16:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I like it, it's pretty. I think so.

02:16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm not going to use it, but no, who would I mean?

02:16:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
come on. I mean it's crazy, 2025, wake up but, but yeah, well I, I got beat me over the head with something. When I see you in a couple of weeks.

02:16:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to get that all the time because of the radio show. People would call and say hey, you know, I talked to you a couple of months ago and you said to do this, and I go, you're like here we go.

02:16:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like brace for it, yep. This isn't going to end well.

02:16:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm amazed that power toys is still around. That is just it's. It's expanding.

02:16:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's I around that is just it's.

02:16:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's expanding there's yeah, I, there's more toys that's a stupid word, but there's more utilities. I wish you could. I wish they were separate, frankly yeah, I'd like to which is what people say about office too it's like, I just want to install this, this and this you can't install them individually.

02:16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to know.

02:16:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a big giant thing, but it doesn't seem to be super resource intensive like it's good, they're all tsrs really.

02:17:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, there you go.

02:17:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just sit in the sister, do the thing yeah, ladies and gentlemen, this would be an excellent time to consider subscribing to the wonderful run as radio podcast with your host, richard campbell. What's?

02:17:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this. I'm staring episode 1,000 in the face this year, are you?

02:17:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow.

02:17:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow. But this week's show was with Bailey Bursick, who is one of the senior product managers on the security and identity team. So this is the Entra folks, and I've been bringing them in every so often because Entra's done a lot in the past year and a half, two years. It's starting to really have some fruition. And so what was fun to talk about with bailey was the really looking at what we call least privilege, or just trying to mostly for administrators. Uh, give them fewer privileges, don't have them run around with super user accounts anymore, because they're the vector of threat. Now it's very's the. The black hats target sysadmins because they they have all the privileges right and if they're running in a super user account. And so there's been a real push on just enough administration that you only elevate those privileges when you need them, that kind of thing. But it's been really clunky to do, but it isn't anymore. But it's been really clunky to do, but it isn't anymore. Intra has given us a bunch of new policy features so you can do things like assign your domain account a super user privilege, like the backup manager privilege, for an hour, and for that hour everything you do is logged. So it's kind of a big deal. We have a good record that you're using a privileged service, but also at at the end of the hour, you don't have to log out and log back in or anything. That just goes away. So nobody lives in, uh, high-end privileges anymore.

02:18:52
Um, we also dug into things like the uh, um, what was the name of it? Let me just pull that name. I got the enter permissions manager. So the other question was what privileges does this account have that have never been used? So actually being able to have a log of what privileges were actually tested and used and when they were used, so that you can start granulating, saying, well, that privilege hasn't been used in a year, so let's take it away as well as what ones have those things. And we're not just talking about administrators or users, but also applications, because you have to give permissions to applications as well, and so Entra has an overview of all of that and basically provides a dashboard to allow you to see all of the privilege utilization and then be able to tweak and tune it as necessary, so you can sort of pull back privileges bit by bit to again create a sense of least privilege. You only have the privileges you need. Very nice. Yeah, a great step forward. I'm very excited to see that this is becoming easier.

02:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Finally, okie dokie. I am ready to play the ai generated theme for the whiskey segment, the theme is called something from the closet. It's just like a horror movie, only because it's so good. This is from Suno S-U-N-O-D-A-I For a drum of that old whiskey.

02:20:16 - AI singer (None)
Long on the shelf, ears gone by. It's all the change in myself. Dusty bottle, hidden well Out of sight. Now we'll drink to the memories and toast to the night.

02:20:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Pretty good. Huh, that's not bad, it's insane.

02:20:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wrote the lyrics too.

02:20:42 - AI singer (None)
From my closet Secrets. It's kept With whispers of nights when nobody slept.

02:20:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How would a machine know that Golden?

02:20:58 - AI singer (None)
liquid Warm and strong in my hand. Let's raise a glass, let the stories expand. Whiskey in the closet.

02:21:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So weird, oh my God all right, that's enough of that. You get the idea. It's crazy. Listen it's kind of amazing or whatever it is with this song, sorry.

02:21:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's like something from lilith tour yeah, I mean it.

02:21:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I think it sounds pretty like if I didn't tell you ahead of time, you would might think a human wrote it it's not.

02:21:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not. It doesn't trigger the uncanny valley like a lot of the others.

02:21:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think that's the big difference, that's what's crazy about it? Yeah, yeah, yeah uh, I wrote, uh, I wrote another one here. I'll just play it briefly. This is the lyrics that I wrote. This is the mandolin one. Yeah, it's a little shorter because the lyrics are only five lines.

02:22:10 - AI music (None)
What weird stuff did he find today? Is there something in your closet from the Isle of Tollay?

02:22:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the guy from Halloweeneen. He's coming to kill you it'll always be whiskey to me.

02:22:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's pretty good too. It's pretty funny anyway, richard campbell, I'm sorry about that. Everybody, you're gonna need a good wee dram of something right now to get that.

02:22:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got a little something, something, all right I felt like I hadn't talked about irish in a while. Looking back, I love irish whiskey chain, you know. Last one was jameson, which was I don't know three months ago, four months ago. So, uh I, I went to kill bagan. Now, kill bagan is a town near the center of ireland. It's uh in the county of Westmeath on the river Brosna. This is literally in the route between Dublin and Galway on the M6. Although there's a little bypass and stuff these days. Old town, nominally created because of Saint Bacan, which is considered one of the 12 apostles of Ireland who founded the monastery there.

02:23:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how you pronounce that, not B-I-N. I would say B-I-N.

02:23:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's of ireland, who founded the monastery there. That's how you pronounce that, not being, oh, you know. Say b and it's bachan, I'm guessing I'm not gay. Can you know you're?

02:23:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
gonna fight about it, okay? No, I don't think you're guessing.

02:23:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it sounds right, yeah and and the name kill bagan actually comes from this seal bacon which is like the church of saint bacon oh all right, uh, which of course you know, as churches do burn down was lost to time, that sort of thing.

02:23:47
There was another monastery built in the same site like 600 years later in the 1100s like I love the time spent on this, although that one stuck around for about 400 years or so till you have the revolutions in the 1500s and and then the land gets taken from the monastery, granted to a local family called the lamberts. They dismantle everything, although as I was digging into this, I found this geophysical survey where they were using, uh, multispectral analysis and found the outlines in the ground of the original monastery and so forth. So, while it had been lost for a few hundred years, it was found again in 2003. But this is actually a story about whiskey. I just told you about the town and this is a good whiskey area just a few kilometers to the southeast Tullamore, another great Irish whiskey, and this is a very old whiskey town because this distillery was founded in 1757. So about as old as you get. This is from the McManus family, a gentleman by the name of Matthew McManus who put it together and apparently in the notes they used a bunch of the stones from the old monastery as part of the construction for this place and of course it's the 1700s, so it's all water powered. So they built it right on the river with a paddle wheel which, by the way, still exists to this day to power the pumps to operate the distillery.

02:25:09
The Locke family, another old family from that area, takes over the distillery in the 1840s. In fact, to this day, if you go to the Kilbeggan distillery you will see the name Locke Distillery on the chimneys, so that even though it's generally known as Kilbagan because it's in Kilbagan, it was the Locke family that ran it for many, many years and that's also when the Industrial Revolution came. So they put in a steam pump or a steam boiler to run the power plant when the water wasn't available. The Locke family very respected in the area and one of the reasons was that John Locke, who in the 1800s was running the distillery, took good care of his people.

02:25:47
He built cottages on the site for some of the workers. He would buy coal in massive bulk because he needed it for his boilers, but he also, as part of your compensation package you're a worker at the Locke distillery is he provided your coal for you, for your home and to the point where there is a famous newspaper story from the 1860s where they had an accident that damaged one of the boilers at the lock distillery, which lock couldn't afford to replace, and the town raised the money to replace the boiler it's kind of like the green bay packers and that kind of thing and a related story from that same newspaper was that in 1878 there was a big fire at the distillery and the whole town came out to fight the fire, including rolling a lot of the barrels out of the burning buildings to save them, which I also think is a separate motivation.

02:26:32
High priority yeah, save the whiskey. And they became a public company in 1893. John Locke and co become a publicly traded company. Now, like many distilleries, they had to shut down during World War I when the grain supplies got short and they were hit hard by US Prohibition, went back, were up and running again with a younger generation of the Locke family in the 1930s after Prohibition was over. But Ireland wasn't having a good time then either. Within 20 years or so things got very tough and in 1953, they stopped production, continued to sell some barrels, fully shut down in 1957 when they couldn't pay their taxes, but the government never did anything with it. They were kind of raided in the 1960s when Europeans would come in and buy barrels and certainly resell the whiskey and make some money there, until finally the citizens of Kilbeggan rallied and then in the early 80s 1982, they formed the Kilbeggan Preservation and Development Association and one of their goals was to save the distillery, and so they did build. They raised the money to build a museum to distilling, not even trying to restart the distillery per se, which is to preserve the building and not have more bad things happen to it until a fellow named john teeling came along.

02:27:47
So teeling was an entrepreneur in ireland. In the 1980s he bought up an old potato alcohol distillery in louth, which is north of dublin, and created the cooley distillery, started making some good whiskey using column stills, um, but he was low on space up there and so he bought Kilbeggan from the town for a bargain in 1988 to use their warehouse. The warehouse was largely empty at this point All the barrels have been sold off and so he stored his whiskey in Kilbeggan and over time started using more and more the facilities of Kilbeggan that were still intact. And so by 2007, coincidentally the 250th anniversary of Kilbeggan he starts actually making whiskey in the Kilbeggan site again. Now he did the mashing, fermentation steps at Cooley, but then he'd bring down the wort and do distillation in the original 180 year old stills in kilbagan and then barrel it up and store it in the kilbagan warehouses, and so that and they there's a big ceremony that was done for the first firing of those old stills in 2007, and he had representatives, descendants of the mcmanuses and the cots and the locks that had operated the distillery for the past 200 years, although at that point had been shut down for 50 years.

02:29:05
By 2010, killbagon is a fully operating distillery again. They built out their own mashing and fermentation facilities again, most of which have been lost. And in 2011, uh, the beam corporation, as in jim beam, acquires cooley, which, of course, owned killbagon, and then, a few years later, suntory bought Beam, as we know. So now the whole package is owned by Suntory, both Cooley and Kilbeggan. In 2015,.

02:29:30
Immediately following that, teeling, which you may know the name, took his profits from selling off Cooley and Kilbeggan to Beam and Sauri and created a brand new distillery in Dublin called the Teeling Whiskey Company, which will deserve its own story, although it would point out that by 2023, had sold it to Bacardi. So John Teeling man building distilleries and selling them, he did a bunch of it. So, and Forsyth, who are the famous Scottish still makers actually approached who are the famous Scottish still makers actually approached Kilbagan in 2019. They made an exact replica of the 200 year old copper pot still, so they could preserve the original and continue to produce whiskey in the same style, which Kilbagan has a very interesting approach to it. So now the contemporary version of Kilbggan today uses an oak mash tun, so all wood, also wooden washbacks as well. And then they have those replica stills a wash still of 3,000 liters and a spirit still 2,000 liters. But they only do a double distillation.

02:30:35
Most Irish whiskey is triple distilled, but Kilbeggan is not just twice distilled. And then they have this large granite rack house. It's a arced concrete structure with a hard floor. They store their whiskey upright on pallets. I think you got that picture up there perfectly timed there, leo. So notice five high, which is very tall. So they use forklifts to move this around, which is why they need the concrete floor and upright barrels, so a little less wood contact. Most of those barrels are used bourbon casks. That's their normal barreling.

02:31:04
For the variety of their whiskey they make a few different versions.

02:31:09
I'm going to talk about their blending because it's the basic, but they have a small batch rye which they first started making 2010 about 30 percent rye.

02:31:16
The rest is both malted and unmalted barley, which is remember our irish stories that's a common trick for the irish, so they don't just use malted barley, because there was a period there where the Irish government would tax malted barley, so they started using unmalted barley. They have a single spalt still addition which is both malted and unmalted barley plus 2.5% of oats, because the Irish are crazy. Actually, that's an old school irish whiskey, but going back into the 1800s, so they do all these things and there is a triple cask edition which is bourbon sherry and virgin oak. That is not what I have here today. So back in 2011, we did a dot not rocks tour across, uh, ireland and we stopped in dublin and we went up to belfast and I got a chance to see the bush mills and then we went across to galway and on the way we happened to stop at kill begging and this is the bottle that I bought.

02:32:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's a pretty, but much prettier than the one on the website. Yeah, this is the old school bottle.

02:32:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These are largely gone, so this is literally a batch two edition bottled in august of 2011, and it was that fall that we came there, so this was brand new. Oh, this is an old bottle from the closet. And the cork has immediately broken on it. That's excellent.

02:32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good sign. Yep Is whiskey like wine, it gets better with age. It's really that old no In the bottle?

02:32:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, it does not. You don't normally have air exchange in a whiskey bottle. That's why they do a foil seal on it, and so it is what it is when it gets put in. But you take a look at the color of this, so that's not bad. Uh, there's no age declaration on this, which is pretty common. It has to be a minimum of three years, which is sort of normal. Um, I know that this distillery reserve is only barley, so again, it was one of the early whiskeys they were making at least 16 years old now.

02:33:01
It's been sitting in the bottle that long. Yeah, uh, for, for better or worse, only 40, because they don't really go in for a lot of that stuff. Uh, wow, now that's so irish, isn't it? Just just uh, no, no, no, offensive nose, light on the tongue. You're just drinking happy, you know it doesn't have a big hard hit, it doesn't go out.

02:33:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
God, you make me want to drink.

02:33:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's something wrong with you, yeah, no it's like it's, it's such a definitive irish drink just like that. That's why I just pointed you to the blend, because the basic kill bag and the one you can actually get in the US like this, was only made for a couple of years and only at the distillery and I found it. You can get this at auction. Now I found a site that was auctioning off these bottles for about 70 pounds or maybe $85, which is typical of Irish whiskey. They're not super expensive, but the regular blended bottle, which I absolutely rank 25 bucks, you know, and it's a classic irish whiskey that you probably haven't had it's a little bit off the beaten path. Um, we've got a bunch of questions in the discord this time. This is very funny. Uh, what's the difference between horizontal and vertical barrel aging? Vertical is the standard where you lay the barrel on its side in a rack. It increases the surface area of the liquid exposed to wood, to the air you have to rotate the barrel if it's on its side.

02:34:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is that normal?

02:34:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they normally don't no, okay, um, and then they see from, and that's also where the bung is. So if you're going to thief from it, you're able to pop the bung and see from the hole.

02:34:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can't do that in a vertical placement uh it's a technical term okay.

02:34:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Does whiskey ever? Does whiskey go bad in the bottle? No, not when the bottle's full, but I have. There's been a general conversation these days when you get to about a half a bottle of whiskey, if you let it sit for too long you've put a lot of oxygen in the bottle it does start to oxidize and so it sort of loses some of its character, which is really a way to say if you got a half bottle with drink, call some friends yeah, knock it out.

02:35:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess you could use a coravan or something and put nitrogen in there and preserve it yeah, you could.

02:35:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just very, very vino kind of mindset yeah, he's like or or just drink it here's an idea

02:35:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually have something that might bring you to drink. I've written a little song.

02:35:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, I knew you were awfully quiet there for a while In honor of old.

02:35:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Irish Saint Began, If you'd like to hear it. It's kind of historically accurate. I hear the fiddle. Yeah, a little Irish fiddle. Old Irish Saint Began In building his church.

02:35:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah little Irish fiddle Wow.

02:35:51 - AI music (None)
This is like something you hear in a pub at night in Ireland. You know I got it. That's crazy. Began his lord did please, so they named a whiskey after him because it brought you to tears. Now it's kill megan a whiskey for years how about that?

02:36:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how about that?

02:36:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that is crazy I'm pretty sure that's the woman from the chorus, um, so that's, that's amazing, yeah it's a true story.

02:36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, that's uh why he became a saint, because he built his church on his knees, crying the whole time, which, honestly, I probably would have done too true enough.

02:36:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that's kill begging. And, like I said, if you can get any special editions, feel free.

02:36:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The blended is fine it is a classic irish classic irish whiskey they're a little sweeter.

02:36:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, they're a little. Yeah, they tend well, most irish whiskeys are triple distilled, so they take a little more the character out of it. It's just as an easy drinking lighter whiskey, yeah this is a double distill, which makes it unusual for irish. They tend to age in the bourbon cask when the bourbon imparts a certain amount of sweetness as well. So uh yeah, but no p, no, not a, not a thing. Not a thing in ireland. That's a scottish thing. You know what the irish? You got wood you need pete.

02:37:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was gonna say good taste. What do you mean? Yeah?

02:37:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I just kind of like why I like irish whiskey there's no risk of.

02:37:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, yeah, smoke, you kind of can't go wrong and look, it's rarely my first choice just because it's not as easy to find right. If there's always jameson and bush mills, that's going to be on everything. Yes, tell them more. Do a tealing. Legit is red red red breast 12 is one of my very favorites. I've talked about the green spot and the yellow spot. There's blue spot and red spot as well. Much harder to find fabulous whiskeys. Yeah, uh, you know you want the clonic guilty ain't bad.

02:37:48
Clonic guilty was lovely but much harder to find yeah, we do the red breast, I think we've.

02:37:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, my brother-in-law's a big irish whiskey.

02:37:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you're gonna have a nice irish whiskey, the one that and they plus they have age appellations. People feel good when you pour them a red breast 12, yeah, they feel good, don't they? Yeah, oh, you're bringing out the good stuff, that's it well, I don't know, actually 12, the 18 still in the back of the room you turned that clonaculti.

02:38:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or what no? The uh kill, god kill, gob the kabagahaga yep. By saving it in your closet for 13, 14 years, you made that an old whiskey saved it forgot that it was at the back of the room.

02:38:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's like oh when I was looking at what whiskey to talk about. I'm like kelp bag and that rings a bell. Did I have one of those?

02:38:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
then go digging around are you gonna do any more dot renet rock tours? That would be fun, oh boy last one was 2013 a lot of work.

02:38:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are a lot of work. Five shows a week, you know, uh, and I'm, you know, latter half of 50s these days.

02:38:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's hard on the body yeah, I know we used to do a lot of stuff like that. In fact, you know we did uh paul knows this a 24 twice. We did 24 hour new year's uh marathons, yep and uh. It was great. Our patrick delahanty who has a nice irish name, I think uh, in the discord in the in the club twit at new year's eve played each of the uh shows each of the hours. So we actually redid it in our club for new year's eve 2024 we did a.

02:39:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We did a long weekend dot net rocks, where I think we we streamed 16 hours a day, three days in a row, and you just like a marathon or a telethon trunk right, yeah, yeah yeah, it was fun.

02:39:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lisa said it was fun for you, it wasn't fun for anybody else. Okay, well then, I guess we won't do those anymore.

02:39:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and we and we, you know we we had different guests for each of the hours. So in theory, we're making a whole bunch of shows and in the end we had to throw a bunch from away yeah, because they were too and they got stale man, they got way too old yeah, yeah, ladies and gentlemen, uh, this is not stale, this is made fresh like bread.

02:39:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every tuesday or wednesday, I should say, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1900 UTC, you can watch us do Windows Weekly, as with many of our shows, live on eight different streams. Club Twit members get to watch in the Club Twit Discord, but there's also YouTube Twitch, tiktok, at least for another couple of weeks. I don't know what's going to happen on January 19th. There's also K, also kick, xcom, linkedin and facebook, so I'm pretty sure half of those you just made up, I don't even just say random words now there are people watching in the somebody?

02:40:34
uh, we're making a vine it's chats in all of them, so we get chats from facebook and so forth. It's pretty cool, that's pretty cool. So, anyway, that's how you can consume the show live. Honestly, you'd be nuts to do that, although we do love having that live audience. You can also download it and watch after the fact, because it is a podcast, after all. First place to go, the website twittv slash WW for windows weekly is a link there to the show notes. There's also a link there to the YouTube version of the show, the video, and, of course, to a couple of podcast players. Any podcast player should have windows weekly, both audio or video you choose.

02:41:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Did you see Patrick's?

02:41:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're streaming on skiboodle and cast fast with a k of course I love it. Hey, he's our web engineer. If he says so, it must be true, must be, he would know.

02:41:32
I mean, that's all I'm saying go to the website, take the survey twittv slash survey. We'll keep it up for a couple more weeks. You get a chance to let us know what you think, who you are. We really appreciate that when you do that. It helps us out. And, of course, join the club. If you're not already a member twittv slash club twit. You'll find Paul Thurott at his website, thurottcom. Become a premium member. There's so much good stuff there. It's such a great site, and his books Windows Everywhere and the Field Guide to Windows 11 are available at leanpubcom, where you set your own price. They're also automatically updated. You probably don't update Windows Everywhere, because that's more history, so actually, I am going to be updating that soon, yeah.

02:42:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice this year at least. Yeah, oh. With NET 9?. So I ended it with the release of Windows 10. So I think I'm going to continue that part of it, but there's a bunch of dot net stuff I want to get in there. I'm waiting which? Is book nuts and uh, there's some, there's some, there's some interim materials, there's a bunch of new stuff. So very nice, yeah, very nice hopefully hopefully um.

02:42:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard campbell is of course at dot net rocks dot com. He also does the fabulous um show with carl franklin don and rocks. Oh yeah, I said the wrong thing. You're at run as radiocom, I am at run as radio that's what got me confused? I'm also on that rocks oh, there's a dotnetrockscom, yeah, sure, okay, why not? And there's also.

02:42:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now, what a scaboodlecom, I don't know, I am literally right now trying to sign up for the service.

02:43:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what's happening from the closetcom, something like that. Yeah, uh, what is it? What is the new?

02:43:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
domain Skaboodle no no no.

02:43:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The domain I just registered was something weird I found in my closet.

02:43:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Something weird I found in my closetcom. I love that eventually we'll take you to the playlist. So great that we've made kevin king's done a great playlist of all of your whiskey recommendations, uh, and that's on youtube and so eventually that as soon as it propagates we'll send you there. That's an easy way to do it.

02:43:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Something weird from my closetcom it's a lot of typing but you only do it once, but you know all the words, right it's not a word. You know, unlike scaboodlecom, give it give it a day to propagate, and I you literally just almost walked into a tagline.

02:43:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like words you know from people you probably shouldn't trust Don't trust those people.

02:44:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, don't trust those people. Hey, what did you know from questionable folk? Yeah, you shouldn't be listening. Thank you everybody for joining us. I apologize for the music, uh, but I do thank sunoai because it's pretty amazing what it can do amazing, it is unbelievable yeah we will see you next wednesday on windows. Weekly thanks paul, thanks richard, thanks everybody.

02:44:24 - AI singer (None)
See ya, have a great week for a drum of that old whiskey long on the shelf years gone by. It's all the change in myself. Dusty bottle, hidden well out of sight, hidden well out of sight. Now we'll drink to the memories and toast to the night.