Windows Weekly 931 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here. Richard Campbell is still in New Zealand, but he's heading out right after the show to come back home. We will talk about big changes in Windows 11, a new start menu, believe it or not. We'll also have a little to say about Apple's spanking earlier this week from the judge in the Apple Epic case. Apple epic case and, yes, maybe our long nightmare is over activision blizzard microsoft. I think the ftc has received the final nail in the coffin. All that and more coming up next on windows weekly podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is windows weekly, with paul thurad and richard campbell, episode 931, recorded wednesday, may 7th 2025. The eaglet has landed. It's time.

01:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh my god, he's doing a Dudley.

01:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do-Right, laugh. Now I gotta stop taking so many drugs. Go on.

01:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You guys are all heavily medicated. Oh my god, you know how I avoid allergies, I go to the other hemisphere.

01:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It works like a hot day out. Now's the time to say goodbye.

01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're behind the curtain, but they can't wait to get out on the stage. Ladies and gentlemen, windows winners and dozers, the time has come once again to gather together and celebrate all that microsoft has brought us. Paul thurot can't stop laughing. He's back in mcungee. That's why he's so happy. There you go. A little punchy, a punchy. Did you just fly in?

01:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't want to talk about it, leo boy, are your arms tired?

01:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, and there he is newark in new zealand, but he's about to head for home. Richard campbell hi richard.

02:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hey man. And so three weeks on the road right, we did a syd Sydney and a Melbourne and now a Taronga.

02:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Did you take your family? I was on the road for four months. Give me a break, man.

02:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You weren't on the road. You were home for four months.

02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is Taronga near Terabithia? That's my question.

02:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, not even close. But this place is very much like home for me too. I, but this place is very much like home for me too. I literally was born down the road from here. Yeah, I'm on the family car. You were born here. I was born here, Literally down this street.

02:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's a Kiwi. He's a native Kiwi. To pull out another Star Wars quote, that's convenient. You're going to die there too. You know it's like a we've been. Just what that means. Yeah, we missed may the 4th again it means we're old and we don't know what day it is, what day is it, it's a wednesday time to talk.

02:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft, let's. Uh, you know, I read your headline. I thought microsoft's changing the name of windows 11.

03:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, that's not the big change. Yeah, what are you going to change it to windows 12?

03:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
11.1. That seems to have worked out well for them in the in the past so, but there are big changes are coming.

03:12
Yes yeah, I mean we are. I've been talking about changes all year really and and there's been the speculation, we're going to go into 25 h2 anytime now. Maybe windows 12? Microsoft just announced a bunch of new features coming to windows 11, but they declined to say you know, this will be the next version, this will be in all versions. I mean, I guess they're all tech. Everything they do is technically going everywhere. So maybe I don't know, maybe this is something only I worry about, but the big one is the rumored new start menu. Right, and we had seen that leaked a couple of builds ago, a couple of weeks ago. I guess we'll call it. I actually had it running on my Surface laptop before I blew it away. What is new about the start menu? What is it new, leo?

03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it in the middle still?

04:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's in the middle. Still, that hasn't changed. It's bigger, taller, it has that phone thing on the side, the phone companion.

04:06
But the big thing is right now there's two sections in the start menu right Pinned and recommended, and you can't do much to configure it. You can give more space to pinned, more space to recommended. Keep it equal. If you delete everything from pinned, you just have a big blank space up at the top. But they're changing the bottom so that instead of recommended it's going to be different views of all apps, so there's like groups by default. But you can also just do the all apps list right there, so they're making it all about apps. Basically, I mean you can still have some of the recommended stuff in there.

04:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Weird Start menu is all about apps.

04:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I always thought it was about ads. Yes, they're going retro. The default view down there looks a lot like the app library in iOS, if you're familiar with that the big kind of rounded rectangle folders or whatever but I like the all apps view and you can do it by category or however you are in groups or whatever.

05:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But so when do we get this lovely new?

05:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, you would think well.

05:08
So microsoft announced this, so there's no way to know um my guess is I'm not joking, um, uh, I my guess is this week we'll see it in the insider program and then where it appears will help us figure out where it's gonna right end up. Probably, my guess is actually it will be one of the things they roll out with the next version, but it could be before that. I mean, they just announced it, so it seems like they're ready to go. There's other stuff too. So if you have a co-pilot plus PC, there's a bunch of new stuff coming. Nothing major, but updates to existing features. For the most part Not, but updates to existing features for the most part Notepad.

05:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course they can't stop updating. That. It's funny. You neglect it for years and then suddenly you just can't keep your hands off of it. Wham, wham, wham wham.

05:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, somebody figured out how to recompile it again, and now they're just having fun.

05:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they found the source code. They're like finally.

06:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, look at that.

06:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, wow, look at that, look at it. Go, did bill write this? Yeah, um, this new feature is coming in paint and photos in uh snipping tool. You know all the usual suspects. A lot of this stuff is co-pilot plus b speed plus co-pilot plus pc specific um. But yeah, there's not a lot of um. Well, actually, I most of the co-pilot plus pc stuff at least, is going to be rolling out first to insiders over the next month, so I think this is 25H2.

06:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not saying Is this change for change's sake, or is it like an improvement? I mean, is it like something?

06:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The Starman is an actual improvement, honestly, because that's been something that, to me, has been borderline useless since they did windows 11, and I actually do like those changes. Um, they do seem to just touch stuff now a lot, you know just uh, change for change's sake, I guess.

06:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go move my cheese touching stuff a lot. Yeah well, everybody does that, apple's gonna redesign.

07:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ios, google does that. Yeah, we have this new material design. They leaked Some of that's just so that you feel like you have to get the new thing, or some of it's just to keep you excited, I don't know. It feels like companies do this too.

07:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the basic Windows UI is not changing from what we got in 11 to begin with, I mean, unless there's something coming we don't know about. But um, but yeah, I mean I. The last year, two years have been defined by this kind of chaotic, steady addition of new features I guess it's important.

07:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know they? One of the reasons they say tesla sales have fallen off is that they haven't done a redesign in years.

07:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, that's oh it's because they didn't add carplay to the the screen that stops me I'll be honest that's like, that's it for me that's almost like the number one. You know, carplay, android, auto, like yeah and then it's like okay, so we have that. Is it going to be gas, or is it going to be like right?

07:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
after that you're like that's the only check mark that matters yeah, yeah, couldn't care less I am angry with this rental car because the uh, the android carplay, our auto won't work, just keeps failing over and over.

08:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like this car is defective it's nice because you got the maps and they're up to date. You know they're up to date. You've got your music, you've got all your everything's right there, it's yep.

08:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's really nice, I love it. I really like I have no cars, I don't have a car with it. So every time I get a rental car I'm like, oh, my car's so old. It has like an orange kind of amber screen and bluetooth.

08:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That works sometimes and it's uh, oh, it's just you know, I commend you because you're doing your part for sustain oh no, I'm actively campaigning to get rid of this.

08:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can commend my wife she's the one who was puts the brakes on this, but, like I, I would have replaced this thing five years ago we have perfectly good car at home.

08:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We, you don't need car.

08:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wouldn't say perfectly good, we have a vehicle that has four tires. It did start right up when we got home. That was pretty cool.

08:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's pretty amazing. Actually, I've been sitting there for months.

08:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know Nick collected, you know you didn't, you didn't drain the sump and put it up in blocks or anything. You just left it there, yep, but it's like the piece of garbage it is did you have somebody come over and move it around every once in a while?

09:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no but nothing, I don't have a. No, I mean, we need your tires right.

09:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean this was offered to, I mean it's possible, like one of our nieces or nephews somebody might have taken it without. No, I mean, we, we offered this, like we, in fact, we In fact we kind of would prefer someone to move it.

09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure, you want somebody to drive it yeah.

09:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but I don't think anyone did. Well good on it.

09:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a trooper, it's reliable.

09:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it refuses to die, like most annoying things. How old is it? I think it's a 2013. Wow, a 12 year old car. Yeah, it's not, it's not.

09:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really interesting how much cars have changed in that I know.

09:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know we missed the whole hybrid thing that came and went. I guess that was a big deal for a little while. Prius and all that stuff, and then, uh yeah, now we're doing electric cars, apparently. I don't know, I don't know what's happening. The next step of my vehicle be a horse pulling it on a rope, or something I don't, I don't know.

10:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you are and you know it would look normal here. Yeah, exactly you could wear a big black hat wear a nice little hat.

10:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, now, every time I'm down here I see a holden ute and I want one so badly like you've got to google this. Like a holden ute, yeah, h-o-l-d-e-n-u-t-e, holden ute. What is it? It's a cheap car, probably, no, no, it's. It's like, it's like an el camino, but australia size. Oh, it's a two, two-seater with a bed.

10:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That, yeah, that's it, that's a whole it is like an el camino, it's like a uic.

10:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
El camino. What is it now? It's a pontiac. El camino.

10:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
To be clear, that's a whole, it is like an el camino. It's like a uic el camino. What is it now? It's a pontiac el camino, to be clear. That's. That is hysterical. I love them, I just love them, that's all it needs is a snorkel.

10:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is, there is.

10:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is in hamilton, this picture, so if you do they have the chinese electric cars down there, like bdy and?

11:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so forth. Those are made, they're all over. Uh, they're all over. The old holden here in new zealand fj utility.

11:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a pickup truck, not the same thing, you know. Oh, that's disgusting. There is very ugly. That's a taurus with a pickup on the back.

11:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Try a holden youth malou, that's definitely a color yeah, that's a pontiac front end. There mustard color, so this is a gm vehicle.

11:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's well. Yeah, holden was the australian line, but that little truck bed in the back like, and it's all, and they're rear-wheel driving, you get them in a v8. It's so hideous I can't. I need one of these. They just make me this is for you listening at home.

11:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just imagine a pontiac with a pickup truck glued on the back when steve jobs introduced the first imac, he showed like a piece of junk, uh, with a dial right, an ipod with a dial from the compact computer. He compared it to. That's what this is.

11:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the yeah, a compact computer is a car every time I see one I'm like, ah god, I have one of those. Are there a lot of them? It's ugly and they're rare they haven't been made in in uh 15 years, something like that it is.

12:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the el camino of new zealand of new zealand.

12:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, in australia it's really a whole. It was an. It was an australian car company.

12:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the funk now oh, now this is gone. Well, that's it.

12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It definitely looks like a pontiac front end well, and it's pontiac parts 100, like the motors while I'm looking at the utes windows very kindly, has popped up a little thing that says hey, we noticed you have some unused printers Would you like us to? Oh, I guess I can't. It offered to remove them and then now it hit it. Well, click the clock. You can probably get it. Click the clock. Is that the secret? Well, it's not a secret. It's just we noticed you have some unused printers. Would you like to remove them?

12:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, no, that's actually no, but yeah, but those are my printers. We notice you have printers and it's 2025 would you like?

12:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what do you have printers for? Yeah, what are you doing? Well, they saw me looking at the holding utes and they figured this guy's a loser.

12:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You should get rid of the printers yeah, get rid of the printers. But it really says you have print, you haven't printed in so long we think you don't have these printers anymore yeah, but I do, that's my printer.

13:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you're right, I don't, I only print tickets. I don't usually print much else. Yeah, yeah, holy ute I can't, yeah, I don't print also called the chevrolet lumina or the pontiac g8 sport track so are these?

13:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
these are custom things like they cut the back off.

13:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No no, they were made in a factory man someone made this on purpose. You're saying yeah, and people bought them in droves. They are um, they are beloved blind people or?

13:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, look, here's an article, uh, from gm authority how to import a real hold on Ute into the United States.

13:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One. Number one throw away all common sense. Number two you really.

13:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh look, here's somebody doing burnouts with blue smoke and a Holden Ute. I don't know how they did that Wow.

14:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go. Oh, I haven't, you have been enlightened.

14:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's illegal in the united states.

14:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the problem, I mean it's morally offensive everywhere, but well they're right hand drive, so you have to get them converted.

14:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, they're right-handed drive okay yeah that makes sense, are they? Do you? So it's illegal to have a right-hand drive car in the us, apparently unless it's in the classic category right, you can do anything in the classic. I see people driving the craziest cars around here because you know this is car town, usa, sure it's probably related to safety regulations or whatever they yeah, I'm sorry.

14:37
I mean I may have completely derailed the conversation with this ridiculous vehicle dr du says the blue smoke means there's a new car pope, so that's, that's good to know. I'm sorry for the sacrilegiousness, but I'm just following in the footsteps of our president, which just yeah it's kind of hard to actually be more outrageous. By the way, you didn't say a word about my shirt.

15:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, we did as soon as you signed in. We both made fun of it.

15:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, I didn't have my hair in my shirt. You didn't have your earpieces in, you had mine. We are the children of the corn collection from Abrazos Design.

15:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's an epic color. That's really it's corn. It's good. There you go, it's corn color. Or, as they say in San Miguel elote. That's right.

15:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was waiting for an Uber with a friend of mine about a year ago and he looked at me and he goes maize. You know that means corn. And I was like, thank you. Why are you telling me this, which is apropos of nothing, yeah. Okay, I saw those butter ads in the 1970s as well that means oh yeah, it's indian for corn.

15:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I remember that. Wow, all right, we have really gone far afield. Let's talk about the new surface. Uh, stuff, yeah so they got. They had a big announcement this week yeah, yeah.

16:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So at the same time as Microsoft announced these new features coming to Windows, microsoft announced two I'm going to call them additive Surface devices, surface PCs, so new Surface Pro and Surface laptop models that are different from the existing versions, but also not replacing them, right? So they're both smaller, they're both less expensive, they both have um lower end snapdragon, you know, plus chips or whatever, right um I honestly this could be about your car.

16:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can we talk about your laptop? What's going?

16:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
on. You got an orange screen in it so this is this, this is their.

16:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're trying to push it as an upgrade well, these are.

16:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They don't say it this way. It's sort of like when apple introduced the 16e and they didn't say, well, this is going to replace the sc. Yeah, these replace, like, the go products they used to have. So there was a surface go, which is a little laptop, a little tablet, and then a surface laptop go, which is a little laptop, a little tablet, and then a Surface Laptop Go, which is a little laptop. So these are more. They're full size, but smaller, right? So 13 inch on the laptop as opposed to 13.8 and 15 on the existing versions, and then 12 inches on the Pro, and fanless, by the way, which is nice and the first for Snapdragon, as opposed to 13 inches. So they kind of have this, you know, broader family of both these products. And actually, if you look at the consumer lineups, now, this is it. They have Surface Laptop, they have Surface Pro.

17:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's interesting.

17:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and these are co-pilot.

17:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are ARM-based co-pilot.

17:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PCs Co-pilot plus PCs yeah, but this is the post-Panos hardware now plus pcs now, but this is the post panos hardware now, yeah, this is, um, you know, mike, look, I'm sure satchin dell, whomever, someone, amy, hood, whatever it was, uh, came to them and like they went to a lot of microsoft and said you're gonna have to cut back. You know, we're doing this other thing now it's a little bigger, uh, and windows and um, surface, you know both, especially surface, because surface is just, you know, not a profit center, right. Um, I'm sure, there, you know both, especially Surface, because Surface is, just, you know, not a profit center, right, I'm sure? There, you know, there were a lot of aspirations, but you know it's not making any money. So I think these make sense. Honestly, I think these are cool computers. I think these will be really nice for students, obviously, but also for people who travel a lot and need the battery life above all else.

18:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know what the performance is like on a. I've never used a one of the plus uh chips.

18:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was also thinking this is the last hurrah of the first generation snapdragon ultras. Yeah, yeah. So I just met with qualcomm. Uh, interestingly, and they were kind of talking about, they're on a. Their schedule is basically september. They didn't say this outright, but they're having an event in September.

18:44
So obviously and this confirms, you know, rumors we've heard. So let's say September for V2, focus on the GPU. The focus on the first version was performance, performance per watt, efficiency and then with Microsoft and Prism emulator compatibility right Even with those apps that are not native, although that situation has improved dramatically. So you know, they started out with the kind of the core part of the market, which is that kind of premium laptop, went down market to less expensive computers, so 600 and under now. And the next phase that is rolling out right as we speak is targeting the enterprise, right. They're going after the business customers as well.

19:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So these I mean these are definitely, if I look at the ad aimed at the consumer market, the young consumer market.

19:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but these same products are going into the business line as well. So, starting in, I think that happens June or July, but yeah, today they're launching for consumers, but these exact products are going to launch for business as well.

19:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, got rid of that fancy charging doohickey and it's just a USB port.

19:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and actually on the Surface Pro they got rid of the brick entirely. Like you're on your own, you know. Yeah, the X, but yeah, because the Go products had shipped with a 45 watt um, a little little usb I don't remember if it was usb or surface connect, but um a power adapter you can use either, obviously, with whatever wire, but um these don't even have the surface connect.

20:15
Yeah, it's dead then? Well, it's hard to say so they might still offer it. It's one of those things, because this business makes that a little tricky. Um, so we'll see what they do next. I mean, the previous Surfaces they've announced for business and the ones they did last year for Copilot Plus BC were all Surface Connect. So they didn't say that We'll see what the next gen looks like. But I don't know that this is unique, like I'm not 100% sure that some of the go products didn't ship without surface connect at one point in another as well, but obviously most, if not all, surface products have had surface connect.

20:53
But anyway, usbc is the right way to go this is one of those areas where to to make this thing hit a certain price point, and these are pretty cheap too, like 799, 899 um. You know they had a. You have to make compromises right. So the screens are slightly lower as obviously the there's no surface connect. The usb is not thunderbolt 4, it's usb three points, something I don't know. It's probably. I don't know this for a fact, but I bet it's 10 gigabits per second, not 20, or it's certainly not 40 um. It's uh ufs storage, um instead of ssd, but that's good right or no?

21:31
I think it's good. It's good for efficiency, it's good for battery life. Like it's, it's probably fine, like it's not going to be the highest performance thing, yeah but it's another good cost cutting measure. It's how you keep the thing underground yeah, um, richard, I will say uh, because I know you've been concerned about this. I asked about your desktop computer. Build it yourself, kind of.

21:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thing and they don't see going into this market huh yeah, I don't think there's going to be a snapdragon atx board like you should.

21:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there are going to be desktops? Um, right now, all we have is that mini thing.

22:01
But yeah, they're like the the. It wasn't, I mean, these aren't the decision makers I talked to, but the the. The feeling was like look, we're going after the volume part of the market. We, you know, we, you have to start where most of the people are. Um, I know, you know, they have certainly heard this call, but, um, it's always from people like us, like technical people, who kind of want to do our own thing and whatever. And they're like yeah, and I.

22:28
The testing cost is not small like this is not a little thing to get into yeah, and and this isn't so much qualcomm, but from microsoft's perspective, you know these things are secure core pcs, they have pluton processors, they are windows. Hello ess. You can't really do that in a bill, you can't really do that in a build. You can't literally do that in a build, your own system. There's no way to certify that, right.

22:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you have to have a bunch of hardware requirements that the typical hand builder is not going to follow anyway. Yep.

22:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So maybe that should have been the clue that this probably wasn't going to happen. But it's probably not going to happen, I think's yeah.

23:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, well, how important is this business to Microsoft?

23:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think this is the future of Windows. I think Microsoft is sending a message here in some ways.

23:18
I mean obviously there will still be these Intel AMD Surface devices, occasionally, like we saw that with the business line where they did that rev last year, or was it earlier this year, whatever it was but a lot of that, I feel like, is partner service. I mean, one of the things they were kind of hammering about these devices was, like this notion. They always say things like in the past we used to put these AI workloads on GPUs, but it's actually way more efficient to do that in an MPU and it's like, okay, but that past was like 10 seconds ago.

23:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Welcome to the future.

23:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so you know, surface has always had this kind of weird stigma. They want to be leaders, they want to be perceived as leaders, they want to innovate on form factor.

24:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I always thought they were reference machines.

24:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I always thought. Well, that's actually been part of it, right? They want to inspire PC makers to adopt these designs and they've only really been successful with that one pro tablet design. Right, that's the one. A lot of PC makers did, at least at one point, make versions of the convertible.

24:26
The yeah, but I, I think I now they have that and now they have a laptop. You gotta have a laptop, so it makes sense. But I think like the, the way they can kind of show leadership, so to speak, because they're never going to like win the market, they're not you know which might be best for their relationships with these other oems are really important to their business yes and um, just you know, in the past microsoft would say, hey, we would like you to make a computer like this, and they were like, oh, that's really fun.

24:54
And then they would make their standard laptops and stuff. Yeah, and you know, this is something. This goes back 30 years.

25:00
I mean, well, 20 years, you go make those well, even even when pc makers were on board like hp was the first company and hp was often the first company to adopt anything right so they would come up with the first media center pc and you go to lunch on the first day and it's like this tower, and they were like, yeah, we were sort of thinking about something like a stereo. And they were like, yeah, we were thinking about a tower. And you know, like they just so I, I feel like surface gives microsoft a way to be like, look, this is what it could be like, you know, and um, you know, the laptop's the best seller?

25:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, by far.

25:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh actually I think the pro is the best really oh interesting they haven't really talked people want that convertible yeah, the laptop's never done great per se. Uh, that I know about anyway, but I but the hell. Like I said, you have to have a laptop, you have to have that traditional form factor. Yeah you know, but people like the detachable keyboard well, yeah, and then they complain that they don't get one with the computer and it's like dude. The point of it is you can choose the one you want and it's like yeah, but it doesn't come with one, you're like, okay, listen, this would raise the price of this thing.

26:06
You know you could.

26:07
You could pick the one, because it's like different versions, right, um, and and unfortunately this one that one of the other differences with this one is that keyboard is not compatible with the other keyboards, right? So, oh, it's a smaller size, it doesn't have the magnets in the machine, so it doesn't do that thing where it kind of clips up and you can have the angled typing surface or whatever. Um, so it's, you know, smaller physically but it also just lays flat, which, by the way, is interesting because it sort of positions this little computer tablet thing better against an ipad with a keyboard attached to it, like an iPad Pro. And I would say, until and unless Apple does improve iPadOS, this is actually, I would say this is probably better for most people that want an iPad Pro type computer, in the sense that it's thin, like it's great battery life, but it actually runs real apps and if you render a video and go check your email it doesn't stop rendering the video. It's a real computer operating system.

27:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I've definitely seen in the Microsoft dev community. This is the tablet. Reference device is the is the pro.

27:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

27:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

27:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It seems to be their one real success, for whatever reason, which is why they keep looking.

27:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's funny is like they really did build a good commercial tablet that almost nobody talks about yep, yep, yeah, because it's not thought of as a tablet, it's thought of as a windows device, right, yep, but it is a tablet, I mean obviously yeah, but you know, if you go back to the original rt idea, you know and and, by the way, the the Surface RT was the computer in the beginning.

27:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There weren't two, there was just going to be that one. Um, and then they ended up realizing like, okay, we got to make a pro version. It runs real Windows 8, whatever it runs, all you know, because RT just wasn't there yet and and ultimately, of course, was never there. But, um, this was going to be that. You know, mobile, it can run that stuff, you can plug in a USB drive, you can attach a monitor, you can do all that stuff if you want. But, uh, this was about the mobile app platform and this thing as a device and kind of iPad compete and you know, flashing forward. Now, what is it 13 years later? It's not so much that that's what this is, but it is does have the platform underneath it that is more efficient, right? So it's running on snapdragon, which is good. It's no fan, that's cool. Um, it runs all your apps. It's just about 100 on that. Uh, note, now it's, there's not a lot missing.

28:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is the coming of age of, of snapdragon, of, of all windows arm yeah, I think so, yep, yep.

28:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think this is microsoft sort of subtly saying uh, this is what we always wanted. And the previous little ones they had little Surface computers were all Intel based, but they were like garbage Intel, like even in the scheme of Intel. They were garbage, like, yeah, like, yeah, celeron, I think it was one of them and just terrible, yeah, so.

29:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it sounds like this fall like if I'm coming at this from from an it perspective, this fall with the new chip set is really the first time I'd seriously consider inside my organization yeah, yeah that's been the big push for these guys.

29:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So like uh is, you know, as businesses and meeting those compatibility issues. So like I don't have the numbers right here in front of me, but they're super high 90% native and then one maybe 2%. That don't work at all, but mostly it's just native. And then some emulated, and the emulated stuff runs great and almost nothing doesn't work. So it's there.

29:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's this Surface Connect port that they? That's the thing they don't have anymore. That's that blade. It's their version. What's this surface connect port that they?

29:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the thing they don't have anymore. That's that blade. It's their version of MagSafe.

29:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they say it's on the 13-inch.

29:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is. That's the one that already exists. Oh, this is the old one. The new one is the 12-inch. I mean they're not getting rid of the old one, right?

30:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The old one, so to speak. It is a year old, but it's right, it's um, I see bigger, I see so, yeah, so the new thing is the 12 inch.

30:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, that's right. Okay, and that that mag safe has saved my bacon this week because we have little little boys running around here. They try to be careful around me, but they've tripped over that wire and it just pops off very nicely. And then they hand it back to me and I click it back in again, like it. It does its job.

30:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, when Apple introduced the mag safe, that was a huge Right Improvement. I'm glad everybody's adopted that now.

30:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the thing they used to have. But I still, I've still felt like no one has solved is the Apple for a while had those disc charges? We would coil the cable room, oh yeah, coiled cable rumor, oh yeah, it's like, what do you do with all this key? Yeah, you know, like it was always kind of a problem, but still still is a problem.

30:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Price point is is good. 7.99 puts it right square in the in the uh ipad yep yeah. Ipad air. Ipad pro category yeah, yep yeah, it's the size of and the price of an ipad pro and it? Does it come with a stylus? No, that's also added. No, everything else it doesn't even come with all extras yeah they want.

31:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a couple hundred bucks for the pen, right like. It's not a cheap thing, but that so is apples yeah, yeah.

31:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, when I when, when I bought my daughter's birthday present, it was an iPad Pro. It ended up being more than the laptop.

31:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. I mean you could spend three grand on an iPad Pro, by the way, if you wanted to. Yeah, practically did, yeah, I mean you really could Like over three. Yeah, it's crazy.

31:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I'd also say it's not a winning game for microsoft just to try and go line by line with apple.

31:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apple still has the cache any day of the week, oh yeah, but but again, like microsoft and apple even though it's not like they got together and agreed on this, but they both in their own separate ways were like, look this, we'll call it arm based, but this device, this device-based PC, is the future and they've worked toward that in different ways. You know, we talked a couple of weeks ago about how Apple maybe again is going to finally do what they should do with iPadOS and we'll see what happens there. Microsoft they only did the one rev really, so they kind of just went back to okay, we're doing PC, and they kind of stuck to that. I mean, they still have the mobile app store, but it's all kinds of apps now, obviously, and then the mobile app platform is a desktop app platform now. So they've kind of come full circle on that.

32:33
But, um, but I guess you know this is in that space. Like I said, for someone that wants this form factor and wants to run real apps like apple's, there's some decent apps on for ipad pro, obviously, but these are literal the same app. So if what you really care about is battery life and you want the touch, for whatever reason, and maybe some you know. Maybe you're on a plane, it's cramped and you want to watch movies. It's easy, you can control it with your finger.

32:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good, whatever actually, you know, the pen's only 129. There you go, yeah, so I added the pen's only $129. There you go. So I added the pen and I added the keyboard and I got the high-end processor and that's still only $1,200. That's iPad Pro.

33:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's iPad Pro. Yeah, well, yeah.

33:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No it's cheaper than that iPad Pro moderate spec right?

33:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah Well okay, maybe the better. Like you got this is like 13 inch ipad air with whatever the magic keyboard's called in the pen.

33:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, maybe it's closer to that than the probably right in that price range.

33:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, because the pro now has an m5 and or m4 and yeah, which I think is still the best chip made right now, like it's absolutely free especially for uh ai.

33:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wish it could be freed from apple's terrible operating systems. But you know what are you gonna do it I'm not, that's a matter of windows here.

33:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that what you're doing, okay?

33:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
as it is a matter of taste. But some people have good taste and some people like apple products I don't you know, it just depends oh, the fight rages on.

34:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, I give you, I'll tell you hey, let's take a break, and we have more to talk about with windows. We've got some ai, we've got everything. Xbox news a uh, a lot of xbox today I saw a big chunk of xbox news and a brown liquor pick of the week. Are we going to do something local?

34:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, no it's time, okay, no, no, I'm sticking with a. It's one of the ones I've missed and okay on the list for a while, but the problem is that I can't take. Once I open a bottle, I'm not going to put it in the suitcase dig it home right yeah, so and I'm leaving, so it's a bottle that I've opened here and it's staying here.

34:38
Staying here. I have another weird australian that was given to me literally on my way out the door in melbourne and so it's a little a little man of some sort who's dropped off with a basket his name is a little australian.

34:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, let's take a break in the back of that stupid buick, piniac thing, whatever it was called, the ute or whatever. You just ride them back more windows weekly to come.

35:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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37:10
Just ask Sam. He's the technical operations manager at Bede Gaming B-E-D-E. He gave US Cloud five stars out of five. Saying quote we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month, he says. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to $40,000 or $50,000 a month, it really started to add up. That's a lot of savings. It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure. Identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloudcom. Book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. That's uscloudcom to book a call today. Get faster, better Microsoft support for less US Cloud. Thank you US Cloud for supporting Windows Weekly, and Mr Paul Therot and Mr Richard Campbell. What else is there? There's some more insider news, I think.

38:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we didn't get builds last Friday. That's actually kind of unusual. Usually Fridays are pretty busy. But other than that, we did get one more set of beta and dev builds, possibly Monday night, I don't remember, but you know. Again, they're on the same path. Uh, they did tell people in the beta program, the beta channel, that they will be dropping support for 23h2 soon. So those people haven't opted into 24h4. Hello, 24h2 there. Did I mention a little dart? Uh, are um, gonna be pushed over to that eventually, but for now at least you can stick on 23h2. So if you did go to 24, for nothing major, but they're breaking out some hdr features so that you can configure them individually.

38:59
Now some improvements to the little. What was the term? They had an awesome term for the on the taskbar. If you look down at the taskbar and you've got apps running, there's a little pill of a sort um, I think of that as a status indicator, right? So normally, um, you'll have a little tiny, not quite a. It's not a circle, but it's like a little tiny rounded rectangle if the app is running.

39:23
I think pill is a good description pill is a pill is apparently the official term. If it's the selected app, the current, current app, it's longer and it also shows status. So if you have a file explorer, download or file copy happening, you'll see a tiny little progress bar in there.

39:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, right, it's a little colored bar, right? Yeah, you'd have to really notice that the corners are rounded on it.

39:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ice is all I do. Richard is looking at this stuff.

39:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got a magnifying glass. He's like you have to be particularly mental too.

39:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm like, yeah, no, I am, and so I I think of it as like a app shortcut status indicator. In the windows insider post they referred to it as the needy state pill, oh, which you know. Honestly, I don't think it's cool in 2025. I thought we were over the mental health thing. Uh, a little needy, uh, you know, but anyway, they're making those things bigger and wider so they're more visible, I guess. Um, big deal, I don't know, uh, and then you know we're going to be seeing little changes to recall and click to do, I think, for the rest of our lives. Uh, but one of the things that's a little bit goofy about, well, there's a couple of things. So recall, aside from the controversy, is kind of a terrible user interface and also a terrible user experience in the sense that you have to.

40:44
Still, I got to check this on a clean install now that, now that it's going GA you know it's sort of generally available, but definitely will be as of next Tuesday is what the process looks like for installing the four SLMs, like the small language models that you need, that this feature needs to work, because the way it's worked for me to date and this, and I mean up until about two weeks ago, is you enable it and then you try to run it. It says oh, and it it tells you, it shows you this terrible marble kind of like a marble rolling through a thing, animation and says, oh, hold on, you gotta, you gotta install something. First, check windows update. You're like all right. And then you check windows update. You're like yep, I have this slm to install, so you do that takes a while. You go back, run it again. It's like, oh, you got check it, got to check it again. You got to look again. You do this four times. It's really bad.

41:33
So apparently they are now experimenting with different they're calling them UI treatments and this is literally the UI for how you go back and forth in the timeline and look at each snapshot. It's a lot like file history, if you've ever used that feature, which is kind of legacy now but probably dating back to Windows 7, I'm guessing, if not Windows 8, but probably Windows 7. You know traditional desktop UI. This thing is more of a modern app. It's gross looking, it's terrible.

42:06
They're looking at fixing that, but I hope they fix the UX as well, and the UX is that install part, like this stuff should just happen in the background, like it should, or here's an idea how about installing all four of them at the same time? And you know common sense. I don't know anyhow, we're going to be dealing with that for a while. So this isn't big stuff, but dev beta. It's 24 h2 ostensibly, but probably 25 h2, and I think these things and whatever the new stuff is that I talked about early with the start menu especially, I think that's this is the shift to this next release and, like I said, and also, like I said, if there isn't a major secret pending, I would say 25 H two is probably the right name for this stuff, right.

42:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you would think they're a little overdue. It is almost H2 and now you're going to bring it out. Okay, I?

42:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know it's just whatever.

43:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh well, why would we maintain a naming convention? That takes all the fun out of it, really, yeah. Consistency is overrated which is why I spell it with a K Making an adventure.

43:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah is overrated. Um, which is why I smell it with a k. Yeah, right, exactly, um. So last year microsoft started talking about windows server 2025, and then they released it in early november, if I remember correctly and one of the marquee features of that release is hot patching, right, which is a little bit misunderstood.

43:29
But, um, now we understand it all too well because now we found out they're actually going to charge us per core for it on server, which is crazy, but I think we talked about that last week. The first HUT patch update for Windows 11 is coming out in next week's Patch Tuesday. So at Ignite last year, as part of that Windows Resiliency Initiative or whatever they called it, this was one of several new features security features they talked about for Windows on the client, so it's the same thing as what they have on server. It's only for enterprise. You have to opt into it as an organization, you have to be using Intune to manage your environment and, of course, you have to have some specific kind of enterprise agreement with Microsoft.

44:15
There's a list of things that are compatible, but the way hot patching works, if you have all those things and you want this is quarterly you will get a normal cumulative update. Cumulative update could be is the patch Tuesday update could be any combination of what they call quality and security updates, meaning new features plus security updates, right and fixes. But the interim months will be these hot patch and this is hot patch, one word which I don't like and no spell checker on earth likes. But the hot patches are the interim releases that come out, so those two months between each quarterly release, and they're just security updates, which sounds pretty good to me, and they don't require updates, but you have to opt in they don't require reboots.

45:01
Reboots. Right, what did I say? Did I not say reboots, updates, updates. Sorry, they don't require reboots. So you have to have the previous quarter's baseline update, which is the normal cumulative update. You will have rebooted quarters baseline update, which is the normal cumulative update. You will have rebooted. The next two will be hot patched. Only security updates, awesome.

45:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And only if you choose to pay the fee.

45:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The fee doesn't apply on client. Oh, so far, okay, yeah, well, so far, yeah. So apparently April the April patch, tuesday update was the one is the baseline for the first hot patch which is coming out next week. So Okay, you're paying. Look, so you're paying. Look, you are paying for this. Right, you have Windows 11 Enterprise E3.

45:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Don't know why you want hot patching on a client machine like that. Just seems odd.

45:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think this is feels like one of those checkbox bullet points on a slide type of deal, because I forget the exact term for this. Steven snafsky used to use a term for features you had to have because people were going to ask and it was like a complaint answer. Basically, it's not the right term, but right, um. So you hear, you're like okay, so you're adding hot patching on windows server, gotcha, gotcha. Um, so it's the same code base as windows 11. Yes, okay, uh, we're gonna get that on the client as well. You know, like, and the answer is yeah, I guess, but you have to meet all these requirements and you're paying them a lot of money, right, um, it's not tied to it being a co-pilot plus pc I mean honestly, we can debate the need for hot patching on server too.

46:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Especially the cost is because for years now we've just gotten the practice of you run these machines in pools, you roll them off the pool to patch them and roll them back in and how to do a rolling update, and so you have 100 uptime. You just do with multiple instances. That's right, clever scripting. And now I don't know, my instinct is not to trust it like I've.

46:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, this is like a hot swapping, a drive, like I get it. This works. I believe you.

46:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm turning it off but you know shut it off.

46:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am positive you're correct. I am not doing it. Yeah, you know, because I've done, I've listened. I've touched a uh, the cpu on a computer and had it literally explode, like I've had it burn with a little fire. So I've seen hardware problems. I'm not kidding, like I've been. I've been slightly electrocuted by these things, like I. I don't trust it. And and and look, I'm not kidding, like I've been. I've been slightly electrocuted by these things, like I. I don't trust it. And and and look, I'm not celebrating this. But windows reboots pretty quick. I mean, what's the big deal? You know it's not. You know, again, I'm not. Yeah, I don't know. I also find it odd that we can do hot swap hardware and we haven't had hot patching in software ever. Come on.

47:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's way more teams involved. Right. As soon as there's that many moving parts, it's like listen, you're going to need a boot. Sequence.

47:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

47:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. Listen, let's talk about, you know, not being able to fix network stacks without rebooting the machine, like there's a bunch of decisions that were made in windows very early on that we are still paying. Oh my God.

47:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I I've absolutely told the story in this podcast, but this is one of the most beautiful moments I will never forget my life. I've met doing the round of for XP, of interviews with different people from different teams, and it was a Russian guy who was in charge of the network stack. And the big thing in XP was they were adding wifi support for the first time, which infamously went out the door with no security controls whatsoever. And at the launch of this event I connected to all of their backend systems from the audience. Like it was so insecure it was ridiculous.

48:25
But anyway, months before this I met this guy and the big thing at the time was you could have this is so stupid today when you think this limitation will make no sense to anybody but you could have the Wi-Fi connection configured for two different Wi-Fi networks. So if it detected one, it would connect to that and if it saw the other one, it would connect to that. And the idea was you're going to have one at home and you're going to have one at work. And I was like, okay, but there are going to be Wi-Fi networks hotels, starbucks, whatever I mean. If you can have two, why can't you have an arbitrary number Like why can't you have three or four or five, whatever the number might be, and he goes no it's impossible and I was like all right, sorry, Never.

49:06
He was really upset about this.

49:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was like okay, but sure enough, if you understood the problem, paul, you wouldn't have asked that stupid question.

49:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't know how bits fly through space. Yeah, wow, yeah, I was very upset about that. Anyway, yeah, now we, anyone with any device on Earth, my God, they switch seamlessly between everything. It's crazy, it's awesome. I mean, anyway, what are we talking about? All right, so that was the, that was enterprise 2024 h2. I actually I would have, I have, in fact, I do, I definitely have here, I have, uh, some laptop here is running enterprise, but you have to be on one of these plans and use intune, so I can't, you can't. Just well, maybe there's probably a I bet this is a registry hack I could do, but, um, I'd like to see this. I'm kind of curious about hot patching, just to see what it looks like and then realize I don't need it basically, which is pretty much everything in technology.

50:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know you're going to test it and you're going to be frustrated by it. I know, I know your path.

50:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, speaking of which. So I had that blue screen thing on my Surface laptop and couldn't get Ubuntu going right. So I came home I'm like, all right, here we go. You got all kinds of laptops here, break them out, get them all charging and everything. Yeah, it doesn't work. So I talked to them about this. Well, I talked to them because they brought it up. They were talking about all the milestones they've hit this year. It's great, everything's going great. They got the subuntu thing. I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna let me stop right there. Um, I know you made an announcement about this and maybe it's me, but and they're like, yeah, it doesn't work. Like it, it turns out you actually have to modify the bootloader for this particular machine and super technical, like it's. Um, it's not something you would ever know how to do, and not just turning off secure boot.

50:55
More than that yeah, no, it's not secure, but it's not that I mean. In fact, if anything, the the impetus for this honestly was you don't have to turn that stuff off anymore. Before you, with linux, you would turn off secure boot for sure, but you also had to make sure bitlocker wasn't on if you wanted to do a dual boot once it was there yeah you could re-enable it as long as you didn't want to access the files from linux, right.

51:17
But one of the big one of the advances in uh 2504 was is it understands bitlocker, like it's secure boot's not a problem uh anymore. That's been a little while, I guess. But it actually sees and understands bitlocker and respects it and works with it. It's fine. And I was like, okay, I got to see that, you know, and I've gotten it working on a like an Intel computer. But I mean I wouldn't, I wouldn't give that to my worst enemy. I want to like, I want this on a real computer. And it turns out this is still early days so I may still frig with it like on a different computer, but cause I have a couple I could use, but on my there's a. There's a different set of things that don't work on every computer. They're all a little bit different. So is this an Ubuntu issue or or what it's, the integration or the interaction I'll call it, between Ubuntu and the underlying hardware.

52:07
So this is something Qualcomm is working on with Ubuntu and they have this community site where people kind of are solving problems and all that stuff but, like Surface Laptop does some list of a couple of things that just don't work on that side. But the biggest known issue is the one I experienced, which is it will not boot from that disk. It will not boot Like you can make it boot. There's, you have to edit a file, like I said, do all these things, but, yeah, that pretty much stops you cold if you can't boot from the. Yeah, it's, it's, yeah, and I listen, I tried everything, I, yeah, I and I. I brought this up on an h, an hp, I think, an omni book, elite book, I don't remember which one, but I got the same exact product, blue screened, and I was like, okay, so now I'm starting to. I, I've gotten so comfortable with this blue screen I'm it's no longer shocking to me it's just like yep.

52:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There it is my old friend. Hello darkness, hello blue screen. My old friend Yep.

52:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't know. Anyway, I'm going to keep working on that.

53:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is that the only distro that works on Snapdragon?

53:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That I'm not sure of. I just I eventually, just eventually, you know, I feel like they're all of the mainstream ones will like. A lot of them build off of ubuntu or debbie or whatever, and I, in time, I think this will be early days, yeah, but it's early days yeah yeah, it's still early days. I was, I was like I thought this was. I was like this is you know we're gonna do this?

53:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and it's like yeah it says only bleeding edge or rolling release distros like open susa, tumbleweed or developer preview builds of ubuntu are likely to work at all huh, well, they moved it into mainstream.

53:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I know I think it was 2410, maybe, or even 2404, I don't remember, but you could. This is when it started to work, but this was the first time they released a like a general purpose ga, iso, right, but it's still not.

53:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not there. So, according to my ai, yeah, there are issues like tumbleweed will boot on some devices. Yep, yep, I don't know. Arch has possible with heavy tweaking fedora, rawhide, experimental limit. Yeah, you really don't have a lot of choices for a snapdragon elite there was a.

54:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's too bad, because I would like to get that nice little. Yeah, so there's an ubuntu community site that it has very detailed information about how to get this stuff working. It's disgusting, I mean, it's really hard, it's hard, yeah, yeah on the other hand, you guys still have wsl.

54:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, if you really I mean probably the best way to do it put wsl on your, on your windows, install right, wouldn't? I mean it's it's the easiest way to do it? Put wsl on your, on your windows, install right, wouldn't? I mean it's?

54:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's the easiest way to do it right now and and it has good support for obviously all the command line stuff works. But it also has good support for um desktop apps. If you need that for some reason, I maybe. If you're a developer, you're testing whatever it might be.

54:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe you want the I just want emacs, man, I just want emacs. Emacs is life. My friend, I listen I.

55:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't argue the point I think you wouldn't want to argue the point no, I mean, I feel like for everyone, there is that one thing you know, that's it's so out of date and and but you can run docker on wsl, right, yeah, oh, uh, yeah, yes, sure, yeah, that would be another one.

55:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Emacs and docker would be kind of give you most of what you need, I would think, but depends what you need what depends what you need, right?

55:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
some people are literally looking for I don't want windows on this computer anymore, right, and I don't know like I I look, if you're dual booting on a physical computer, you're not getting a lot of work done is what I'm hearing. You know, you're kind of going back and forth a lot, but I'm just this is a little experimental for me. I just want to try it. I just I just want this to work. I I feel like this Snapdragon platform, which has done wonders for Windows, I mean, think about what it could do for a lighter OS like Linux or Chrome OS, right, right, where these things are already more efficient than Windows and not more modern, necessarily, although I guess, arguably, chrome OS might be. I just think it's incredible what it's done for Windows. Like what could it be like?

56:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if you're following this, but we have black smoke now. Black smoke.

56:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so you got to. You got to open up the flume a little more. You open it up. Yeah, Kind of a backdraft.

56:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They keep putting wet straw in. That seems to be a bad idea.

56:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. If only only had a ute. Yeah, throw in some of those crystal things to get the multi-colors going.

56:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go then it's interesting, the new york times has a lied feed of that. Sure, sure that's uh.

56:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's exciting.

56:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the thing it's nighttime in the exciting times in the Vatican.

56:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, shall we Skype it.

56:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the day came and it went, nobody knows.

56:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I feel like I should have done something on Sunday to mark this, because we wouldn't exist without Skype.

57:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Even the people kind of mock it. I don't know that they remember correctly, because everyone relied on this for a long time. It was really good for a long time, yeah.

57:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
NET rocks depended on it for a long time. It was really good for a long time. Yeah, dotnet rocks depended on it for ages.

57:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, my God. Twit literally started because somebody called me on the radio show with Skype and I said what are you using?

57:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You sound so good and they said it's the same, call Skype. I'm on my computer.

57:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm on my computer and I said shut up, Bob.

57:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm on the radio.

57:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I'd had a light bulb over my head, it would have gone off, because I said, wow, that means I can do a podcast with my far-flung friends. Yeah, and it will sound good.

57:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It didn't sound all that good, but Zoom has really improved on that.

57:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, we migrated off of Telos.

57:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
OnePlus Ones and Landlines to Skype, wow yeah. And then the multi-laptop skype before the ndi version, and then suddenly it was over. It's like the and you realize it from the guests when the guests would suddenly I'd say, okay, well, we're using skype, and it's like, oh yeah, skype.

58:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder where that is people who've been watching this show for a long time may remember how um perturbed time. May remember how um perturbed paul would get when we called him, when we skyped into him and all of his devices oh my god rang at once go off.

58:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I listen, I there. There are certain repetitive sounds that just like it's like trauma now.

58:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm going to give Paul just a little PTSD.

58:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would be like an orchestra of these things, yeah, and they wouldn't stop. So I would be on the call, but they'd still be ringing.

58:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like guys, come on. I mean, the good news is that team still does this and I've got about four devices.

58:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't make that sound, though, does it no, but it still rings.

58:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
every phone, every device, it should be under the rings though, like under classic or whatever you go down, and there it is like just a little you're trying to make me cry and it's gonna work. You know, kind of a new orleans style this is like a rave club version, you know.

59:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is. It's a remix, yeah, or are you music Skype? We hardly knew you Actually. That was the problem. We really knew you way too well.

59:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a kid, there's a baby who lives below us in our apartment. He's not there all the time, but when he is is there. He makes the. I might refer to this before he makes us. He screams and I call him the eaglet. So every I I've already, I'm already traumatized by this because, like we, we were on a trip somewhere, we were flying home, we were out in the world the other day and some kids crying in the restaurant.

59:48
I'm like the eaglet has found us like it has landed I can't, like, I just can't, you know, it's like you can't escape these sounds, you know anyway, okay, so skype, yeah, skype's dead. So sorry, skype. Um, if it makes you feel any better, they didn't certify it right at the end.

01:00:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There there's a oh, it had been built in this.

01:00:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a vector for spam. Oh, now it gets to talk.

01:00:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It really became a spam, oh my God. I mean I stopped logging in because it was like a flood.

01:00:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can tell Microsoft wasn't paying attention.

01:00:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would only use it for the test. My audio thing right.

01:00:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They had a really good test thing where you could and I kind of like the Skype thing and it worked before you were in a call, which maybe they fixed in Teams? I don't remember. I don't know, but this was a problem with Teams for a long time when they first came out. Was you had to be in a call before you could test the audio or video? Right?

01:00:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not right. No, now I've noticed that it's in Windows 11. One of the patches of Windows 11. Now, when you get down to the audio section, there is a make a call where it'll record you and play it back to you. So that's right. Yeah, I really didn't have any use for skype anymore but it. But I noticed every time I would fire it up to do that it just was getting worse and more ads, more stuff.

01:00:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's always like I would be part of a bitcoin group and you know I've been added to something how jeez guys come on 101, you know it really begin you can test your microphone speakers camera I want to see if this Click on end test call.

01:01:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
when you're done, will it have the audio?

01:01:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's up?

01:01:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
with the music. Oh, this is some YouTube. That's it. Thanks for watching the video. This poor guy has made a whole bunch of Skype tutorials, which have died along with Skype, although, because it's. Youtube nothing ever, dies. Except for my channel, apparently. Well, they can be killed.

01:01:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It just doesn't die. It doesn't die. A natural death, no natural deaths.

01:01:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want the Skype call test audio. I want to find it somewhere.

01:01:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I miss her. Remember the Skype lady.

01:01:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, what was the?

01:01:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
accent, it wasn't.

01:01:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was. Yeah, I think it might have been aussie right like it was. It may or maybe maybe south african.

01:01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a very strange what I really think it was. It was an estonian who had learned english from an australian from watching friends over skype with an australian and so it had a strange, because it wasn't quite an accurate accent. It was like a learned accent of some kind, I don't know. Anyway, we'll miss it, we'll miss it, it's a sad day. Yeah, what does the team's ringtone sound like? Is it good?

01:02:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's just a farting sound, uh it's. It's kind of like a. It's a long flatulence. I gave you a real softball there it's a balloon deflating. You know like talk about his setup it's like you ever like I had to set an alarm the other day. I I don't set an alarm, normally right. You ever go through every alarm on your phone or device they're terrible. No, they're all awful every one of them it's like oh, every one of them like is this grating?

01:02:58
well, furthermore, I have ptsd from every one of them because lisa's used every one of them, and so, yeah, you know I found the most pleasant one I could and I woke up to me going and it's like oh right, I set this, I did this to myself. This is the worst anyway so, yes, one of those.

01:03:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No audio alarms, please, just the vibrating wrist. That's not a bad one if you.

01:03:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you don't mind wearing a watch to bed, just have yeah I do wear a watch to bed, but I don't trust anything.

01:03:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I always have to set two of these things. That's the other thing that happens. Like you actually get up with an alarm, you're like nice, I did it, and then the other one goes off.

01:03:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're like kill me please my goal in life is to never have to use an alarm. There you go exactly. I will have made it when I never have to use an alarm.

01:03:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Pretty much I never use an alarm except if we're traveling in the morning right, or like on monday I had to drive into new york and or tuesday, whatever it does. Yeah, sometimes you have to get up early sometimes and don't want to do that anymore there there's an affront. You know it's the worst.

01:03:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sometimes you've got to do a live stream at three o'clock in the morning, so sorry Sometimes. I signed up.

01:04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should just stay up all night, and then you don't have to have an alarm.

01:04:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could do that it's like what's worse than four hours of sleep, me on 28 hours of awake.

01:04:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:04:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, or whatever the number is.

01:04:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, this is no way. One more little piece before we take a break. Something new from google google.

01:04:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I referenced this a little bit earlier, but, uh, you know, if you're testing android 60, if you have a pixel or whatever, um, it's on this truncated development cycle because they're moving the, the launch back for their partners, primarily samsung, who wants to launch or which wants to launch the new folding devices? Oh, at the same time.

01:04:39
Yeah, that makes sense, yeah so that's fine, but that also means that this one's on the shortest development cycle they've ever had, which is is fine, but there's really no major new features in here. The only thing I've seen that's kind of interesting is this like Apple has those live notifications that are part of the dynamic island, which is super useful, and actually Samsung has some stuff like that of their own in One UI. But other than that, not much going on. But it turns out they're actually secretly working on two different things which could be pretty big. Now it might not be an Android 16 right at the launch, but later in the cycle you know every they do a quarterly updates maybe.

01:05:17
So there's a major new ui thing coming, which looks a lot like one ui actually, which I think is very pretty, and then also a dex like uh desktop environment right where this thing could be plugged into a dock and keyboard, mouse, big display etc. Etc. So like that's kind of cool and um, yeah, that's why you know for 25h2 with windows. It's like I kind of hope there's something you know hidden in there that we haven't seen. Like uh, it doesn't have to be major new features, but like just a feel of a refresh something a little android jealousy, are you?

01:05:48
well, I don't know, like compared to ios and android's been kind of on the slow boat for a while now as far as like big new features and stuff, Like every release is kind of like. Eh, Leo, you're like I know.

01:06:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They do. They're doing for the first time ever at Google IO. The week before the Google IO keynote, they're going to do an Android keynote.

01:06:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. So, interestingly going to do an android keynote. Right so, interestingly, but right so microsoft just did the surface thing ahead of build, where last year they did it at build. They didn't announce a new windows version, but they did announce new features ahead of build. Android is doing this sort of right.

01:06:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean so? That's interesting, I mean that's a really I don't know, it might just be they want to focus on ai at these shows.

01:06:32
It's probably that's what it is, absolutely. You just nailed it. Yeah, build is the 19th 9 am. We're going to stream that. A little point of order. We're only going to do that in the discord because, uh, and that's not microsoft's fault, it's not google's fault, it's apple's fault. Let's call a spade a spade, um the apple. Uh, lawyers have tried to take us down on both youtube and twitch in the past, so we decided now we're not going to stream any of this stuff on youtube on our normal platforms, are just going to stream it to the club and the club twit, which is good. If you're a club twit member, it means you can participate not so good if you're not. So join the club. Seven bucks a month.

01:07:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, ad, free versions, all the shows do you look into just doing it like we're doing it live with the event, but we're not going to broadcast the event. You could, we tried that last time and that was so weird.

01:07:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh wait, but paul's now in the wrong spot. I gotta rotate everybody. I wasn't gonna say anything because I okay, uh, yeah, we did that last time. We just talked along and then said you know, if you want to watch it, yeah, but it doesn't. The other problem with that is if you're watching it later you. It's really hard to do, so we just I first of all. My opinion is it's fair use we're doing commentary, yeah, and so it's fair use to stream that.

01:07:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I don't think there's any reason you're not ready to lawyer up for that?

01:07:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but I'm not going to go to court over it. Uh, you know, and we've appealed it in the past and and succeeded, but it's just not worth it. It's absolutely, and it would be terrible to lose our youtube channel just ask paul theron.

01:08:09
So I'm slightly traumatized by that um, so I don't want to take the chance. This is a chance to join the club, you can. We're going to do build on the 19th. We're going to do google io on the 20th. Actually, if you join the club and you say we, you really want us to do the android event, I wasn't planning on it. But if you really want us to join the club and say, leo, do the android event, uh, we're going to do wwdc on june 9th. So all the keynotes now will be in the club twit discord it's definitely going to be an android 16.

01:08:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Announce like yeah, you know like rtm and yeah, they might.

01:08:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder if they'll do any hardware. Probably not, though, right, I don't know. I mean uh time.

01:08:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not the normal time, but but well, but they've done that before, right, didn't? Two years ago, I think, they announced all the new devices. I think I am.

01:08:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Am I remembering that correctly, or maybe some? Maybe the fold, and way back when they used to, because they used to put a phone under your chair.

01:09:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well they used to do the the a series then, but they released that, so right yeah twit that tv slash club twit.

01:09:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're not a member, let us continue on with uh the, the program of which you are listening to, and talk about antitrust action I can't believe this is back in conversation again, but okay well, the other thing is it's such an unknown. I mean, you know google and apple. Those cases are over, but microsoft's supposedly under investigation. There's new investigations of apple nothing is ever over in this space.

01:09:41
Well, that's the thing is, and, and because of the new administration, everything is topsy-turvy, so I don't know what you can say about anything, except that apple got really spanked.

01:09:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my, god, if you had said to me listen, we're gonna pay you a lot of money. I want you to write this complete fantasy version of antitrust coming down hard on apple or whatever. I'd be like okay I would not have come on lied apple oh my god, she has referred this case to the attorney general to go after an individual from apple who lied on the stand. Yeah and uh, this is the most blisteringly. I've never seen anything like this.

01:10:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is outrage there were three words in the uh in the decision by judge the judge, yvonne gonzalez rogers. That really stood out for me. She was talking about how apple apple ceo tim cook had a choice, yes, between doing what she said oh, listening to phil schiller as marketing director doing what she said, or listening to that liar and doing what he suggested. And then the three words were cook chose poorly yeah, I they.

01:10:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She said apple could have done the right thing at any step of the way.

01:10:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Instead, they chose the most anti-competitive competitive path, every single time it was, as we said at the time, malicious compliance, yes, but it's amazing to finally so. Look, you live in, we live in the united states. We've been looking at the eu saying, dear god, we're never going to get this here. Like what, what's going on? And then this happens. You're like, oh my god, like this is amazing.

01:11:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this is how you turn mostly a victory for apple into oh god, you just lost control of the app store, now they're gonna you know they're gonna appeal and and actually we talked about this yesterday on mac break weekly and uh, alex lindsey pointed out that apple uh did comply to the letter of the law. Maybe they didn't comply to what judge rogers felt was the spirit of it, but they did. They did comply and the fact that she doesn't like it doesn't mean they did something wrong necessarily, right I think they did something wrong?

01:11:52
I do, but they charged, you know. They said okay, you can have your store, but instead of charging 30, we're going to charge 27 yeah, and the judge was like I have an idea.

01:12:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How about zero percent? But you don't charge any money for stuff that you know. There's all this like just base basic stuff like walmart has an app and you can buy a sweater and apple doesn't take a cut. But amazon has a kindle app and they try to sell an ebook and apple wants 20 30 percent apple doesn't even want.

01:12:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this was the point. Was apple wouldn't even let the kindle app say that you could buy it? No, I know that I mean but, but, but, which is ridiculous.

01:12:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You had to sell it through the app.

01:12:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the original you couldn't even you couldn't sell it in the app. Amazon decided, no, we're not going to do that. So they just didn't mention that you can buy books.

01:12:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's just unbelievable so this is what I wrote, you know, so I today, if you live in the united states, open the kindle app, click on a book. There's a link. It's called get book.

01:12:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, get it, buy it, and there's no extra fee and uh, this is the thing like I.

01:12:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are these apple fans who are like, oh, this company's the best, they do everything great, they're wonderful, and uh, I feel you know I'm doing the right thing, I support this company, and blah, blah, blah. I'm sorry, like I don't care what you think about this company. You can't look at this and be like, oh no, there's a reason, there's a rationale. There isn't and that was one of the things that the judge pointed out was like I asked you repeatedly to explain how you got to 30%. You don't have an answer. There is no answer. It's an arbitrary number that was invented, you know, 15 years ago, never revised, and it doesn't make any sense.

01:13:20
Credit card companies charge two or 3% on transactions. Why? What are you doing exactly? That is over and above what they're doing. Please explain this. And they can't. Also, I mean, how do you let you know?

01:13:32
Microsoft went to them and said all right, we're going to do game streaming and like yeah, okay, we'll just charge you a fee for every game that your players get stream. They're not buying the games, they're streaming them. Yep, no, we understand you still have to pay a fee, but Netflix streams movies and Spotify streams music and you don't charge them a per stream fee. They're not streaming through you, they're streaming from us. Like what's the? It costs you nothing.

01:14:01
And the reason is Apple has a game service called Apple Arcade and it competes and that's anti-competitive. That's just all it is. And that's anti-competitive, that's just all it is. It's why does Apple want to charge Kindle another 30%? Because Apple has something called Books and they have their own bookstore and they want you to buy books there. And so, as soon as this thing went down, a bunch of companies were like all right, we're just doing this now. And you know all these companies that make these announcements, these announcements like we're gonna lower our prices by up to 30 percent. You know nice, and uh I, this stuff drives me crazy. This is I love that a judge in the united states, not in europe, came down like this, because this is what we've needed. Someone just to point out the obvious. Um, and man was she. She was ripped she's pretty angry.

01:14:56
Yeah used a lot of all caps. This injunction is effective immediately. It's not a negotiation, I mean, it's just amazing. And then the the list of restrictions is so beautiful. She just stripped away everything that apple wants to do. It's like all apple had to do was, if apple had come back, I'll even go as high as 10. But if apple had come back and said we're going to charge what credit card companies charge, right, I don't think anyone would have said anything. I think we would have been happy for this win. Uh, I think they could have gone as high as 10. We could just make numbers up, because we're just making numbers up, who cares? But um, but they were like, no, we're gonna do 27, because they know that once we tack on the, the credit card fees, now it's basically 30 and you have to jump through all these hoops and we still didn't let you communicate the way you want and you know all that stuff. And she just made Apple look like the asses that they are. They.

01:15:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're just so terrible, so terrible well, it's a group of people working there whose measure of their quality, of their work is the amount of money the store makes, and so yeah, no, it's, it's absolutely.

01:16:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that was part of the problem. I don't think they, because they didn't really understand what 30 even meant when they did it and then it became a real generator of revenue and they were like yeah, it made billions, literally billions.

01:16:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yikes, you know well my apple doesn't have that many revenue streams, let's be clear. And the margin on the store is nearly 100, it's I think it's literally this is the thing.

01:16:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like this thing isn't free.

01:16:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like it actually kind of is pretty close you understand, like I don't know if you, but for what is really a hardware company? Yep, this is the highest margin business they've ever had.

01:16:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep yep, it's incredible. So, anyway, we'll see what happens there. But this is that thing I was talking about with google, but it applies to apple equally well, which is like look you, you need to come to the table and work with these people, because then you have a say in the outcome. You, you know, this is the most extreme example I've ever seen of that. I mean where, like I said, if 10% are lower, I don't think anyone would have said a word. It would have been like okay, you know what?

01:17:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a huge win for these guys.

01:17:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll take it yeah they misread the room. Oh my God, big time, yeah, so that's happening. And time, yeah, so that's happening. Uh, and then, uh, you. And speaking of revenues, that apple will soon be losing um usv. Google, there's two versions right. There's the search one and then the ad one. Um, this is the final week of remedy hearings for the search trial. Eddie q is up there today.

01:17:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the one that wants chrome right. Yeah, the divesting of chrome, etc.

01:17:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Etc. Um, I haven't published this yet, but you know I'm trying to contort this into something that actually makes sense of this case. But the better outcome for for the world in that case would honestly be to take chromium away from google um, you can keep chrome take away chromium, right, uh, make it an open standard literally, because, right, it's open source and it's free source, but google controlled by google, it's not like it's not really owned by google, but it's kind of fuzzy, but it's other companies who are the maintainers yeah, and I, even though they would complain about this, I almost have the perfect uh company to take it from them as well, and that would be mozilla.

01:18:14
Let them control this and they. This is their mission.

01:18:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The mozilla foundation is open web, open standards, freedom, privacy I mean, one would argue, all mozilla needs to do is fork it and everybody go right.

01:18:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is github for grand allowed yeah, okay, yeah, fair, right, so well, anyway, I I'm trying to understand, like I'm trying to understand, like I'm trying to work through, like how could this even apply to this case? Because this case is very specifically about advertising. But if you, when you talk about denying Google the fruits of their ill-gotten gains, et cetera, they're going after the distribution. Distribution is primarily Chrome, android, et cetera chrome, android, etc.

01:18:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I and I still see this as a negotiation as much as the other judge said no, it's like okay, well, we'll take chrome from you. Now come to the table with a consent decree where you're going to stop buying.

01:19:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right that could very much happen. I hope they're looking at the school or apple thing and being like let's go, you know, maybe we should work with these guys. Uh, I hope they're getting the message, but they could have a say in the outcome. And look, chrome. They could still build all the tracking and nonsense that they have in Chrome, but they would just do it at the Chrome level. Some of that is actually in Chromium, right, so Chromium browser makers will strip out the Google stuff you know and put in their own stuff. Yeah, that shouldn't be there to begin with.

01:19:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, any argument for us all working together on Chromium and so that we all have a compliance standard that we all contribute to Right. And so if you fork this and everybody went with the fork rather than and just Google was left behind, like no, Google has the problem of there's a better version of Chromium being built now over on that fork, there's still small examples of this.

01:19:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean Microsoft. You know we talked about this, I think last week had contributed back the text rendering that they did for Edge to Chromium. Until that happened, text looked much better on Edge than it did on other Chromium browsers, including Chrome, right. So on Windows, but you know, mozilla is freaking out because they're going to lose their payment from probably going to lose their payment, from probably going to lose their payment from google because of this. This is google's version of netscape, in a way where, no, not escape of apple. You know where.

01:20:19
Apple kind of like, oh, let's invest in apple. Look, we have competition for our antitrust trials. Even I told you there were the. There's competition, you know, um, they're kind of keeping these guys around. Yeah, there's no way that mozilla is worth a damn to them. I mean, they have no market share at all. And Mozilla is like we get to have open state, we have to have competition. It's like, yeah, but not at that level. The worst thing about being a developer is having to support multiple platforms and we have Android, ios, we had Windows and Mac. We have different versions of the web. Now I mean, or you have this small company with no resources trying to keep up with Chromium and, to a lesser degree, safari Gecko, whatever it's called Sorry, it's Rendering Engine, I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Trying to keep up with the big guys. These are platform makers that have agendas.

01:21:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and to get back to the rendering engine is no longer a competitive advantage.

01:21:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that's right. It shouldn't be. You compete on features. You know, I'd like to see Apple use this thing and build their privacy stuff on top of it. Google could build their tracking stuff on top of it. I don't care, they can do whatever they want. You know, you can look at any browser Opera Brave, which does the privacy security thing, or edge, whatever. They build features on top of this thing. That's how they compete. No, no one is saying our version of the rendering engine is, you know, 8%. Actually Microsoft has said that, but usually no one is saying that. The point is, this stuff is all a hundred percent compatible and that's what it should be. You know we don't. We don't compete for different kinds of electricity doesn't mean we don't have different electrical providers but necessarily we also have different electrical systems in different parts of the world that's right.

01:22:04
But I mean within that, like in in where you live, you know you don't have like well, bob's electricity runs at whatever wattage or volts and this one runs at something different, like you don. That's not where you compete. This is infrastructure Anyway.

01:22:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's become plumbing, and so maybe it needs to be that way. Yep, the fact that a company has managed to leverage that to control a market is a separate issue, really.

01:22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep.

01:22:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The remedy doesn't make sense except in the context of forcing a consent decree.

01:22:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yeah, it's, it is tricky. The the judge laid out rules for them, uh, for their proposed remedies, and they were very specific, right, the goal is to prevent these abuses from continuing in the future. We don't want them to expand them into AI, it was so. It's like you have to kind of work in this framework and I, I, I, a lot of people look at like, oh, these guys are idiots, they're telling them to take away the browser. It's like, hold on a second. They're not like.

01:23:03
You know, they're looking at how they get this stuff out into the world, right, like, how do they get here? You know they have these deals with apple, uh, samsung, mozilla, um, they have, uh, this monopoly that they've been able to uh extend or whatever, uh or increase through these illegal means. Like, how do we stop this? And it's, you know, it's it gets hairy, you know, unfortunately, but they're going to break up microsoft, right, that's pretty clean. You know, unfortunately, but they were going to break up Microsoft, right, that's pretty clean. You know this one. It's like, well, we're only going to take away one of your apps. I mean, it's not that big of a deal. I mean not comparatively.

01:23:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the argument was you've been leveraging Google to do these you know questionable things, or you've been leveraging Chrome to do these questionable things, so we'll pull Chrome from you, Yep chrome from you?

01:23:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep, yeah, uh. Sundar phi said something to the effect of well, you know you're making this so that this isn't a viable business, like we might not want to invest in this anymore, and they're like right, that's the point. Yeah, we're, we're trying to make this right, wait a minute.

01:24:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You mean, we can't make infinite amount of money from this now?

01:24:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I mean. But what have we been doing? We're just stealing everyone's personal data. What's the problem?

01:24:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, so we'll out of sync in our discord said what about making google create a new non-profit company to maintain chrome instead of selling it and require them to provide support for, say, five years? That's actually is a good remedy.

01:24:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, this is actually what I just said, in a sense, right, like I specifically said mozilla, but I mean to me, what you take away from them is Chromium, like you can have your stupid browser.

01:24:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's the thing is you can't. If you're going to do that, you have to somehow make it not just worse, right? Don't give it a perplexity.

01:24:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, no no, no, it has to be an open standard. That's the point. A truly open standard, yeah, where the everyone, that all the companies that are part of that organization, get some kind of a vote on whatever features or, you know, whatever goes into the thing. You know that the the point of this is to benefit the web, to benefit the people that use it, to keep this thing right and but if you look at who's you know wants it, it's open ai perplexity yahoo which is a great reason to take that away, don't?

01:25:12
let them do that yeah, that would not be a good remedy.

01:25:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're gonna, you're right, we're gonna trade one dragon for another and and puchai said you can't, you can't make us sell our, you know, give away our search secret sauce, because then we, then that's all we got, which?

01:25:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is a good point, and I don't think you want to.

01:25:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want to take away 20 billion a year from Apple, but maybe you do, don't you? $100 million from Mozilla means they're out of business. Is what Mozilla says.

01:25:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, but listen, there's a really good argument to be made that if you as a business only exist because you're being paid off by the devil, maybe your business is not great. Like you're being paid by a company. You don't use any of this stuff. You don't use their rendering engine, you don't use any of their browser stuff. You're just taking money which, at two percent of the web browser market, I I I think google's overpaying them.

01:26:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever they're paying. I don't even know. Is that it? The browser doesn't make money unless you do these egregious things right, Right.

01:26:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the CFO you can't charge people for a browser.

01:26:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We know you can't sell a browser anymore.

01:26:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, of course. But look the other companies that make browsers, that are not platform makers, right? So not Apple, not Google, not Microsoft. They're in a very different position, right? They're in a very different position, right. And opera vivaldi, brave, mozilla, whatever. These are small companies, right, these are not big tech companies, um, and they all have um, not altruistic, I mean they don't.

01:26:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They may all be being supported by google. You realize I mean the revenue from share, the revenue sharing from sending Google search traffic is is probably what's keeping them alive.

01:27:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well here, but the thing is it that shouldn't actually go away, right? It the? The deals that they're trying to get rid of are these there? Are these pay for play? The point of the deals is to keep competitors out. Get rid of these. There are these pay-per-play. The point of the deals is to keep competitors out. You know, one of the things Apple suggested was like well, maybe or maybe it was Google suggested this you could have like a different provider for incognito searches or whatever, and it's like you're missing the point. The point is, you're paying a lot of money to be on that platform. In Mozilla's case, I think you're overpaying. I don't think that's worth a damn. I don't think it's worth anything. If they were just doing revenue sharing on search, whatever, people would just pick Google. It would be fine For the short term. By the way, that's about to change. That's the other problem. People are starting to turn to AI now for search, and that was one of the things Eddie Q talked about today.

01:27:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and there's always been the pressure on how many people search within Facebook or search within Amazon, depending on what they're doing right. In some ways, search markets are already fragmented, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The point here is, if your product is competitive, then you don't need to do these underhanded things to continue to compete successfully. That's right.

01:28:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And if your product was competitive, you wouldn't have your one income stream. You know the way the CFO of Mozilla put it was, if I remember correctly, was Firefox is 90% of Mozilla's revenues. 85% of those revenues come from Google. Right, Just giving them money.

01:28:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the other side of this is that that's not a business, that's a charity. Yeah, and Google has been hooked on their ad revenue. They haven't and they haven't improved the product Like hooked on their ad revenue, they haven't and they haven't improved the product Like. One of the reasons they got caught with their pants down over all this AI stuff is because they refuse to disrupt their primary revenue. Source of that homepage One of the.

01:28:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I mentioned this last week. If not, it was probably two weeks ago, but this comes up from time to time. One of the things that people have a hard concept or a hard thing, a hard thing understanding is people have a hard concept or a hard thing understanding is sorry, my phone just started ringing. That's curious. Are these sort of theoretical situations? Like you'll say, google has the best search engine in the world, yep, However, it could be way better if Google wasn't constantly stopping competition from occurring.

01:29:11
And you're like how? I don't know, you can't really explain it, because what you don't see is what doesn't happen because of what they're doing, right. So if you look at what just happened with Apple, it may be temporary, whatever, but if you look at it, you can see a real world outcome of Apple not being allowed to do everything they want. All of a sudden, these services are like oh, now we can allow you to buy stuff on your iPhone, or now we are going to lower our prices by up to 30%. And oh, you're like oh, that's way better. Yeah, I know it's not always good for big tech to do exactly what they want all the time, yeah, so it's hard to imagine when it's theoretical. But with the Apple thing you can look and say, see, this is what it could look like, and you're like, this looks pretty good, I know, and it's like.

01:30:01
But what about the children? You know like? What about the? No one's talking about the safety and security features built into the store, right Cause I'm buying a book from amazon, you freaking idiot, and that has nothing to do with what you're talking about. You're not providing a service here. I have a direct connection with this company.

01:30:20
Why am I giving you some of that money, that's crazy you're.

01:30:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're the, the medieval lord with the castle that hangs a chain across the river. Yep, and exactly right. And extracts stops and yep and has no choice. If it wants to do its business, it has to pay.

01:30:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which is why, when the Microsoft trial happened, we brought back that term, vig, which comes out of Shakespeare, basically, and it's from that era and that's what that was. It was a VIG. So when you're in power and there's no controls on you, this is what you do. You behave terribly.

01:30:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you stop innovating on your product because it's more profitable. Just keep controlling your market.

01:30:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so Google's got some problems. They've also they've lost even worse to Epic, if you can imagine that and they've lost in search. And now they've lost in ads and the ads trial, the ads case, the antitrust case that will have a similar remedy hearing to what we're seeing now with search, have a similar remedy hearing to what we're seeing now with search, but that's happening in september. So in both cases some months will go by after that and then the judge will issue a final decision and, uh, I don't think it's going to be pretty no, we'll see and then and then the next round will start yeah, yep, or if these companies are smart, there'll be a consent decree that both sides agree to, and they have that.

01:31:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it took bomber over a year to negotiate that consent decree. It was pernicious monopoly in december of 99 and consent decree was november of 2000, like it was. Oh, was that okay?

01:31:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it took a year.

01:31:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, yep, uh, yeah, so but but one would argue that was why the c-sharp specification was public as an ECMA specification, like a lot of behavior that Microsoft was doing at that time was signals to.

01:32:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is why the consent decree will work yep, and honestly it was stuff that I don't think anyone cared about. You know this notion of like we can put any language into dot net, because you know we're all using pl1.net now and cobaltnet or whatever.

01:32:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
22 languages, one platform.

01:32:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was the pitch yeah, and now it's one language, one platform for pretty much everybody, right?

01:32:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean well, and and a couple of thousand f sharp people are happily in the corner doing their own thing, yep, and a couple of disgruntled BB guys are still.

01:32:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we're still here. Shut up, man.

01:32:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Cobaltnet still maintained.

01:32:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I'm sure Fortrannet still maintained, like you know, really For certain niches you know, okay, I'm not going anywhere until they make assemblylanguagenet, and then we can talk.

01:32:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you know, there is managed C++, but nobody uses that either.

01:33:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So no, God damn it, All right. So there's no reason to beat to death a lot of the earnings that have occurred since then. But let's just say that Apple made a buttload of money and, uh, incredible growth in services and, um, I would keep my eye on that one that one might be going down, yeah ten percent, you know we'll see, we'll see.

01:33:23
Uh, this is the first quarter that amazon web services made less in revenues than intelligent cloud, which is the part of Microsoft that hosts Azure. So that happened. Qualcomm's doing great, amd's doing great AMD. Most of their money now comes from data center. They had unbelievable growth 36% in revenues but 476 in profits.

01:33:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow 476%, I should say that just means you're selling more chips of the same design, so their margins, yeah, get improving. For that, I think I called that one at the beginning of the year where it's like I don't know if I could buy intel right now on a five-year warranty I think I wouldn't buy amd, I wouldn't touch anything. Intel makes it. It's a tough time.

01:34:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, for anything long haul amd's client business, which is PCs. The revenues in that business are up 68% Now, relatively speaking, compared to Intel chips. Obviously they're the minor minority player here, but that's amazing and well-deserved, like those latest Zen five chips are amazing.

01:34:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So good for them. I think that's probably the new machine, since you keep reminding me I'm not going to get a Qualcomm.

01:34:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that would be the one. I'm going to love, this thing Even like just gaming off of the internal, like they don't call it this. But the integrated graphics they have a different term. It's integrated graphics, like awesome, it's awesome.

01:34:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's crazy.

01:34:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to put a big hunking video card in there anyway, but you know so because of the timing, I was flying home last week and they announced revenue or their quarterly earnings while we were doing the show. I didn't really I didn't. I usually do a big analysis piece, but the one thing I want to point out for this quarter was going into the after earnings call, which I listened to live I don't always do that, I always read the transcript after the fact, but this time I actually listened because that's when I had the time. There were reports that Microsoft's well, actually it's a fact. I should say they spent less on AI infrastructure in that quarter than they did in the quarter a year ago. It's the first time it's declined in.

01:35:34
I want to say I think it was 10 quarters in a row, something like that. So I was like, okay, it's finally happening. And we heard the reports about Microsoft, had these initial agreements to acquire capacity and kind of walked away from it. So something's happening. But during the call they could not have been clearer that is not happening and they said nope, you can expect it to go up again in the coming quarter, this current quarter, and it will keep going up. We have not taken our foot off this pedal. We cannot meet the demand that we have there's different kinds of spending.

01:36:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They need data centers, regardless of whether it's AI workload or not, and yet they have backed away from a few of them. It makes me wonder if they think they've got better deals elsewhere, so they don't need to sign them all Like there's a little bit of a land grab there.

01:36:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it might be. Openai is a big chunk of it. I mean, there are these stories that have been coming out where open ai supposedly has gone to microsoft, said okay, we need this. And they're like yeah, we're not doing that, man, we're not doing that.

01:36:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that's where that, that's where the stargate thing came from. And now there seems to be more of that and I've also just seen the piece where open ai wants to restructure the deal now and put them into the regular share pool rather than the shared revenue model, which you could see that relationship evolving, which also makes sense.

01:36:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like you're getting a divorce and your relationship is evolving it's it's moving into a new phase well, you saw that there that open.

01:37:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ai has decided not to go for the yeah, so that's actually the right, so there is now a theory that Microsoft might've been the one that put the stop to this. They mentioned very well, not specifically. They vaguely mentioned OpenAI that they had. I got to get the term right because it's crazy how they said this. Civic leaders have expressed concern. I don't know civic leaders.

01:37:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you?

01:37:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
talking about Civic leaders, the mayor?

01:37:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are they Also the mayor?

01:37:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are they talking?

01:37:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
about the mayor.

01:37:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We heard from civic leaders. Yeah, exactly, it was the guy who runs the local OpenAI user group. He was like I don't know, I don't like the sound of this. Maybe they're talking about the administration, I don't know, I have no idea. But they also mentioned, oddly, having discussions with the offices to those attorneys generals to try to prevent it.

01:38:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, delaware, where they're incorporated, also was not real excited about the prospect yeah, so this is not going to happen now.

01:38:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so in some it's still going to change in a way, right? So there's still the parent company, that is, this non-profit which, by the way, is a little bit like Mozilla, except they make a lot of money, and then they have this for-profit subsidiary right, which we think of as OpenAI.

01:38:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stan Altman in a letter to it's going to be a public benefit corporation. Now right.

01:38:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so he's. Yeah, this is a very Google statement. Open AI is not a normal company and never will be right. Well, that's true. That is the first thing you've said where I'm like, yeah, a hundred percent, I agree with you, Um, but he's, he's talking now. The way open I I used to talk, which is like our goal is to create artificial general intelligence AGI that will benefit all of humanity. You know, we're committed to this path, like we're still. This.

01:39:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this is the best way forward and it's like, and it's what it was formed for in the first place, right?

01:39:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but this is not how he's been talking for the past year or so, right like this guy has been very clear, like for us to do what we want, we have to be unfettered and well, and what he wanted to do was raise a lot of money.

01:39:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and it's easier to raise money with a legal, with a, with a business architecture that people understand. That's right, and now that it doesn't matter because he's raised a lot of money.

01:39:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the thing and I think I I they've raised a lot of money and we'll, I bet we'll continue to raise money. I think people pretty much get it Like, no, you guys are going gangbusters, so we'll see, I don't need the restructuring to raise money, because I've already raised money. Yeah, right. So I think OpenAI is the weirdest company I used to think when Google first, you know.

01:40:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This only gets ugly when it goes wrong, like that's when it's going to get ugly.

01:40:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, this ends badly. No-transcript no, you're not, and they could have stopped it. And I wonder now, if microsoft didn't play a role, that's something they wouldn't have said publicly, right, because that would make their the relationship look bad. Those two companies are very dependent on each other, obviously um, I would imagine they're.

01:40:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They come to the table with a deal like here's what we want if we do this yeah right, and the fact that there was some kind of motion there to put them in in to normal shares rather than ownership, makes sense, because you just want to levelize the structure of the company. But they might even do a preferred share option. There's a bunch of ways to do this. Yeah, but at the same time, this entity was formed to yank all those AI scientists out of Google, you know, under the guise of it'll be better for the world, it's better for humanity, yeah, right, which is all sus to me, with a bunch of tech billionaires say this is what's better for the world. Yep, no, a hundred percent?

01:41:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. I look I. This is the like people say about the weather everywhere. If you don't like it, just wait 50 minutes, it's going to change like. If you don't like open as corporate structure, don't worry, just wait 50 minutes, it's going to change like. I think we're going to be going through this kind of thing for a while and I I feel like for such nadela the way that my reaction to the skype ringtone is his reaction to open a. I know he's like it's triggering, it's like you. I don't think you understand what it was like for me to bet this entire company on this thing and have you guys publicly said I'm betting the company.

01:41:56
Yep, Thanks. You waited until that and then did what you. It's like yeah, without calling me first oh, we're going to, we're going to end you, yeah. So I I keep saying this, but I I think the Microsoft open AI thing ends badly. I think open AI might end badly either way.

01:42:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um disagree because they're missing the actual key asset, which is compute Having a human soul.

01:42:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, I'm sorry, richard.

01:42:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, I think it's also important to recognize that Microsoft's no longer the same company. They're not a microcomputer software company anymore, they're a computing utility company with much lower margins. Like that, you know, they don't make money the way they used to make money. That's right.

01:42:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They make money selling computer resources and and I don't know that half the companies clued into that much less the rest of the world yeah, I, I, they're almost like a licensing tech, slash capacity licensing company, maybe it's a way to put it like uh, uh, they have enormous revenues coming in every month. Technically, they could be volatile, right, like you might. Planning out more than six to nine months might be difficult for them at this point, cause they you know they when they moved to office 365 and and before then actually to windows licenses for businesses, the goal was, let's, you know, we used to do this up and down thing, let's, let's kind of smooth that out. And they got there, um, and then, of course, now they're, you know, going up, but, um, but I feel like a lot of this stuff is a little more volatile, um, potentially so well, in the point series, that scale provides stability, right, that?

01:43:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yes, yeah, that's right. Um, I mean, I also noticed in those, you know, getting back to the corporate report, they still did 10 billion in buybacks. Yes, you know, like the, the old company's still in there. They keep saying they're all in on ai. It's like, okay, you're mostly in on a. Yeah, the old company is still in there. They keep saying they're all in on AI. It's like, okay, you're mostly in on AI. Yeah, that's right, yeah.

01:43:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, look, there's no reason for them to give up, or whatever these traditional moneymakers they have. Windows OEM licensing is still a bunch of money.

01:44:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's still billions.

01:44:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, Microsoft 365, the part that is, you know you're selling productivity services to businesses that are rolling out the Fortune 500.

01:44:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Arguably the largest SaaS product in the world.

01:44:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, big money. You don't like to talk about server. You know it's in the same. It's sort of Azure. It's like Azure but not quite Azure. You know they don't like to talk about it. I get that too, but this stuff is still. It's big. You know it's like when you look at Google and you're like, all right, let's pretend this is never going to happen, but we're going to strip away all the money they make from ads. Not impossible, it's not going to happen, but let's say they did. The company that's left over is much smaller, but it's still tens of billions of dollars. A quarter. It's a big company. Um, you know microsoft. The part of microsoft that's not directly tied to I'm going to call it azure slash ai is pretty freaking big. It's a lot bigger than that part of google that's for sure.

01:45:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I do think there's this shift. You know, the thing that's compelling about the software business is the 90 margin.

01:45:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just the incremental cost is so small and that you know. The one thing you cannot see in that public report in any way is the marginal cost of Azure. We would be able to figure out where they are now. If you look at a company like Apple, you can't get it exact, but Apple used to report the exact number of devices that they sold every quarter, so you can kind of extrapolate a little bit. There's some guesswork involved because the average selling price per whatever number of iPhones they sell now is it could be all over the map. We don't know exactly Exactly, but you can look at the channel. You can talk to different companies and get a rough idea of the mix of phones and say, okay, the average selling price has gone up a couple of bucks or down a couple of bucks and that means, compared to, say, 10 years ago, they're selling, whatever it is, 75% more iPhones or something like you can actually kind of do that math. Yep, it's not 100% accurate, never is but I mean the Microsoft, but it's also.

01:46:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it speaks to the fact that Apple's largely a one product company.

01:46:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, yes, but I mean I guess. But what I mean? Yes, but they literally are. But what I mean by that is, in Microsoft's case, there was never a quarter where they said, okay, it costs the Azure infrastructure, we made this much in profit, this much in revenue, whatever Our CapEx is this, and blah blah. They never spelled it out one time, so we can't even extrapolate. So when they say something like Azure revenues are up 31% in the quarter, we're like, yay, From what Compared to what? We're not really talking about that.

01:46:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Apparently, they're meeting AWS now. Yay, but again with no baseline and no real cost centers. And you know they have them, they're just not required to report them to their shareholders?

01:47:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wonder about that. I feel like Microsoft and everyone else in big tech and a lot of companies probably too I just follow this one market have specifically been rolling back what they divulge every quarter to see what they can get away with. It turns out they can get away with anything because they don't provide almost any hard numbers. If you look at an Amazon earnings announcement, it's a 30,000 word report about all the new products they shipped that quarter, whether they're a new type of DVD case or a doll that they're selling or some stupid you know whatever. It's like this range of nonsense and you're like, okay, but how's the ad business doing? Well, actually, that number they do give you, but you know it's hard to understand where the money's coming from. Plus, amazon's business is extremely volatile. Most of their money comes from retail and very tight margins right.

01:47:50
Yep. And sometimes they don't make any money sometimes they do I mean profit and some but sometimes it's pretty high and you're like, well, why is it higher?

01:47:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
all of these corporate reports amazon, microsoft, google, apple, so forth they always have that element of look over here, look over here.

01:48:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look over here, like you're trying to distract, like a magician doing a trick, but there's a puff of smoke and and server is running over to the corner because don't, don't look at me. Don't look at me, I didn't make any money. Don't look behind that curtain.

01:48:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not a thing, yeah yep all right, you managed to get me ranty today, paul. Good job, paul. Yeah, yeah, I love telling people down to my level it's um I'm sorry that. That was fine it's been. It's this has been eating at me for a while. It's like this company is becoming completely transformed and I don't know that it's even admitting it. It's certainly not showing it, it's reporting.

01:48:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I uh, yes, so in this I don't, I don't go to like a therapist or whatever, but I sort of imagine like I've been or whatever, but I sort of imagine like I've been-. Oh, maybe you should consider it.

01:48:52
Yeah, no, I've been told that. So I but if I did, I mean a big part of what I, if I was doing this like one of the little traumas in my life is trying to understand. Like when Microsoft shifted from being this company that made stuff I really cared about to making stuff I don't care about at all. Right, and Steven Sanofsky approaches this in his book a little bit. He talks about when office shifted from being about people to being about companies and how horrible that was for him. He's like I want to do all these things, you know, benefit people. Burke might need to be stopped. I'm just saying Burke might literally be an AI. At this point I don't know what's happening. I think he's HAL 9000 us or something, so that will make sense to anybody listening to this later.

01:49:46
But Microsoft turned it into this company serving businesses. That was a shift. They've done this stuff in consumer that's never taken off licenses. And then cloud was one of them taken off licenses. And now cloud. And then cloud was one of the. I was like cloud. I'm like really, I mean like who cares? And then AI at least there's an element to AI where this is going to benefit people in the sense that it will be added to productivity tools and I can kind of see this, you know. But but yeah, this has been like a I'm trying to understand the company. It's so many years later, it's like I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. Like what is this company Like? This is sort of what you just said. It's like you wake up one day and you're like I, you guys aren't the same. Guys or people will ask me.

01:50:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Your name is incorrect.

01:50:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like what do you do? And I'm like a writer blah blah. What do you write about? You know well, technology, primarily microsoft, and like microsoft like those guys still around and I'm like, yeah, they're the second biggest company in the world first, but that, that, or okay, but that's like saying, uh, this is what we would have said about ibm back in the day. It's like that, oh yeah, no, I mean, I've heard of this company like I, I guess I vaguely understand they're behind some computing thing that's occurring out in the world.

01:50:58
You know um, but they don't understand it, you know you should say I read about windows.

01:51:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People would say oh yeah. And they would say the same thing they're still around.

01:51:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean you know like, yeah, I know, I know you're using a macbook, I get it, but the you of us still use Windows. I mean by choice, or does your company make you? Is that?

01:51:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why, oh, the discussions you must have, oh it's the worst.

01:51:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to be so bad. Someday I'm going to be like you know I'm a writer. It's like what do you write? I'm like I write books like Stephen King Horror novels. It's mostly horror stories about bad things happening to good people. Yeah, that's pretty much windows user base.

01:51:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, okay, it's very similar to stephen king yeah I think he already did the first ai topic because we've definitely hammered on open ai today. How?

01:51:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
about google's little language lessons, whatever? Yeah, did you see this? This is cute, so this is an experiment.

01:51:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is some engineers inside of Google, you know. Google went to their company, just like Microsoft did, and said hey, this is happening. Figure, what can we do with this? And this group of engineers just created prompts in Gemini to do little language lessons. It's not like a replacement for Duolingo or Rosetta Stone or anything like that Not yet you know. But it's not like a replacement for duolingo or rosetta stone or anything like that not yet you know. But it's a fun little web page. You should check this out if you haven't. It's really cool and they just have little. Uh, they're not completely random per se, but basically random lessons. You can pick little topics and, uh, it just does a little bite-size like language lessons. There's like three or four different types of lessons. Um, they want me to log.

01:52:34
You know it's like kind of a fun little presentation.

01:52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nice I'm not gonna log in.

01:52:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll go in the yeah, it's just it's, it's a nice, it's, it's worth looking at and see if we see that duolingo has been using ai to make their lesson plans now and, like the yeah they say they're suddenly exploded.

01:52:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, everybody was so pissed off when they said this we're getting rid of all the contractors who used to design our lessons oh no, we're not getting rid of you guys, not, not yet.

01:52:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, we're talking about the contractors. You guys are fine. I mean work hard, by the way, but you're fine yeah, but yeah the story. The story with duolingo was something to the tune of uh, it took us 10 to 12 years to remove the number two To do like 100. 150 languages, and then we'd used AI, not language lessons and then we used AI and it happened in eight weeks or whatever.

01:53:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The time frame was. We made another 300 or something.

01:53:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's do Mexican. This would be helpful to you Do.

01:53:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mexican. Yeah, don't look for Mexican in that list because that's not a language Latin American.

01:53:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Spanish, pardon me, yes, and then you are in Mexico, so let's generate some slang. See if Paul recognizes.

01:53:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It says tomaloo, which means take it, which is like suck it, suck it.

01:53:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Two strangers, Mariana and Javier, find themselves stuck in a broken down cable car high above the city of Guadalajara, very specific scenario. Mariana, local artist, is calm, while Javier, a tourist from Guadalajara, is visibly nervous. They've been waiting for rescue for over an hour. Coladas, she says. Would you like a piña colada?

01:54:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, she says no manches.

01:54:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mariana, cuanto mas vamos a estar aqui colgados. So no manches, mariana¿ Cuánto más vamos a estar aquí colgados. So what are we supposed to do now? ¡no, hablo español, oh hit the space bar.

01:54:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's going to continue.

01:54:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, more Tantito Calme tantito, Is that a? That's a slang phrase. Well, anything with ito on the end is small, so it's like Calme tantito um, I actually don't know what tantar probably I read your mother's book and and I really, I still use windows vista I still use windows vista.

01:54:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You admire windows vista what about what about project?

01:54:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what was it called? So this is ai generated, yeah yeah they actually so if you go.

01:54:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They have a blog where they actually show the exact prompts they use to create this.

01:55:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, yeah I'm impressed, which is the cool part. Yeah, I'm, I'm impressed. That's really neat. That was the slang hang. They have others, they have various.

01:55:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not, you know, this is not like a world changing something, something, but it's kind of a cool example of like how this kind of, you know generative AI could be used and, like I said, like there are blog posts that they've created that explain like how they made this, which I think is the cool bit right.

01:55:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
European French for taking a taxi.

01:55:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like the oh no, there is a different. I guess it could be Canadian, french.

01:55:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they had. Canadian as well. Québécois. Bonjour, vous êtes libre. Combien coûte la course jusqu'à le Panthéon, pouvez-vous? Oh, this is good, this is good. Gardez le money. You know what that means. I know it's not what it sounds like guarder la money watch your money says the same word.

01:56:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like gardar is like it needs to protect or keep an eye on whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nice. It sounds like you're putting it in a vault. This is great.

01:56:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is fun. Yeah, you've got vocabulary. You've got phrases. You've got some tips Using vouloir to make polite requests when taking a taxi.

01:56:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Being polite is always a good idea. You know what the difference between French and Spanish really is. It's in French everything is formal by default If you don't know someone it's formal Right. French, everything is formal by default if you don't know someone is formal right in, at least in mexico. In spanish it's always like the two form of the verb it's like we're going to be very familiar right away.

01:56:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah you know like, yeah, that's actually a whole cultural uh.

01:56:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, it's like that's yeah, that's that, that is the primary nutshell right there.

01:56:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's not interesting. Oh, that's cool tiny language done with ai it. It does validate what the dual link up guy was saying. Right, it's like you don't need, you don't need no.

01:57:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's cool. I think it's cool. It looks like a cool little site. I think I guess this was mentioned in the post earnings conference call, but GitHub put up a post about it. They now have 15 million users of GitHub co-pilot, thanks to Forex year over year growth. And then they talk about all this stuff. You know the code review feature has already handled over 8 million GitHub pull requests and this is the thing that's like that cursor AI editor, right? So this is built into Visual Studio Code. It's not yet built into Visual Studio proper, but you can open your thing there. I mean, github Copilot is built and you can use it right inside Visual Studio. But if you want that full solution code review which, by the way, is a blisteringly abusive like, look at your like. It's especially for me, did you?

01:57:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's like you can see it shaking its head.

01:58:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like yeah, no, no it's just as it goes down. It's like no, oh, no, no, no, no, no it's bad.

01:58:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know what you were thinking here yep, I did.

01:58:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I spent much of the past week um with my own app, moving stuff into a class, like a c-sharp class, to isolate it from the rest of the app. Let me tell you, this is like file operations, right? So there are terms that I have not heard in 20 years that have come up in this conversation with AI, not with AI with the debugger, cause the uh, the errors I get. It's like they talk about STA threading and how you can't you can't like change the UI from another thread, and it's like I am what are you talking about? I'm not trying to do that. I mean, what do you mean? Like this has never come up? I've been to do that. I mean, what do you mean? Like this has never come up? I've been, I've been doing wpf now for a long time and I'm like I I am taking your advice and now you're telling me that I'm not doing it right. It's like it's like a double whammy.

01:59:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's brutal so, paul, paul, paul, again with the sta3 threading sta threading.

01:59:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What are you talking about? I swear don't actually tell me what you're talking about. I've looked it up and I know what it is, but I just don't care. I it's. It's brutal, like it's brutal. No, I actually I know what it is, but it's like what the fuck like. I don't want to talk about that put it there, like I you know, and I'll just say I just tumble out, that's all I say.

01:59:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Back to it now so what'd you write in the prompt for the for the re-architecture? Hey, can you aggravate me with my new software?

01:59:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
architecture. Right, right, I would like this to be as time consuming and aggravating as possible. Um, yeah, it just only like oh, no problem, your code is terrible, that's going to be easy, it's gonna be simple. Yeah, I, I was already going there, you didn't even have to say that. Nice, yeah, it's brutal.

01:59:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty funny, I have to say it will probably make it better. I don't know, or I'll just give up. It's going to be so much better.

02:00:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to just start doing like command line apps now. I can't stand this anymore. It's ridiculous.

02:00:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been using cloud code. I told you that last week on the command line. I love it.

02:00:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's amazing, no that stuff is all great. It really these tools are amazing and I think this is the eye-opening thing for me because, like I said a week or two ago, whenever it was like, I don't literally ever use it for writing or for my main work or whatever, but I see what it can do in the coding and it's impressive. I mean we, we need this oversight. I don't know what to call it.

02:00:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it's just, it's brutal, but it's I'm asking it to look at some code, I wrote and say, yeah, give me, give me some suggestions. Did a child write this? What is this? I think claude's pretty friendly, but maybe not, I don't know. Eliminate redundant calculations. Use a hash table to list. Memoize the loop function.

02:01:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Optimize the equal test, use a hash table.

02:01:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, use a hash table. Idiot, idiot dummy. Avoid repeated map copying by using a change restore approach. Actually, this is good. The biggest improvement, leo, would come from a more algorithmic approach that avoids testing each position individually. Oh wow, well, okay, there you go. This is good advice. You could learn a lot. I mean honestly, if no, you really can't this if you, if you weren't, if your feelings didn't get her, you could learn a lot.

02:01:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, well, yeah, I mean, in my case what happens is I spend days converting like file operations, in this case to a class that is completely isolated from the rest of the application. You have to pass things back and forth and then you're like, all right, it's working. I guess, reanalyze. It's like man, you're passing a lot of stuff between classes here and I'm like dude, you told me to do this.

02:01:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like what the like seriously, what would make you happy? Well, it doesn't have much of a memory. I do notice that Like it could tell you to do stuff and then say that was a bad idea.

02:02:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like do you really have to pass that thing? Yeah, I do, because it's you said so.

02:02:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah it's gonna ask you, it's gonna suggest you, flatten it all out now. Yes, yes, you know, here's what we recommend. Yeah, put everything in one class. Oh, uh-huh. Oh, you think you mean the thing I had four years over. Yeah, no, that sounds good.

02:02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uh, hey, everybody so glad to have you, paul thurott here from thurottcom, richard campbell from run his radiocom and you know what you've been waiting for. I know what you've been waiting for. Everybody's been waiting for the xbox segment. Thank god, paul thurott is here with our xbox right yep, yep, um.

02:02:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so this story just happened right before we started the show. There isn't. Oh, now there's more information on. So the only article I could find about it was from Reuters. It was two sentences, but now it's bigger.

02:03:03
So I believe that I don't want to read this in real time, but the way I took this was a federal subpoena court on Wednesday rejected a legal challenge by the FTC to Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard.

02:03:19
It upheld a lower court ruling from last actually, it might have been from 2023, from a while ago and yeah, so I believe this is probably the end of this, right. So the FTC, despite being slapped down repeatedly, right when they were trying to prevent this from happening, in an unprecedented move, decided to move forward with trying to prevent this acquisition from occurring, even though it had already occurred. I believe I don't want to say, but I believe this is this might be the end of it, I hope. But the yeah, this, this newer, longer version of the article says that the FTC was unlikely to succeed on its claims that Emerger would restrict competition. In fact, I don't have this in the notes, we didn't write about this, but the top three downloaded games on the Sony PlayStation last month were all Microsoft owned games, so a spokesperson for the FTC, stopped off without saying a word.

02:04:24
Wait, does this say no? Oh, that would be amazing. Yeah, lisa Khan slowly or quietly stewed in the corner.

02:04:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this sounds like it's over.

02:04:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, think so too yeah, it also makes you wonder if this is what was holding microsoft back from really doing much with activision blizzard and like until this is resolved, yeah now now the anti-competitive behavior can begin.

02:04:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I refuse to give this company that credit. I mean, maybe, maybe I'd like to believe that, but I don't know.

02:04:57
That would be nice if that was true, I don't know, I don't know. Anyway, all right, so that's good. So let me just catch up here with my notes. Where am I? Here we go, okay, so a bunch of stuff. So I can't remember if this was a leak or this is. I believe it was a leak, but Microsoft is working with Asus to put out the first Xbox branded gaming handheld this year sometime. But now we've seen leaks of the images of this device because it has to clear FCC, fcc, what Regulatory? What's the term I'm looking for here? I don't know, for you know, emitting radio waves, yeah, emissions restrictions, like it's got to.

02:05:40
So yeah, and oftentimes we get these leaks right and so it looks like what you think. It looks like like a switch or Steam Deck style, you know, single, whatever.

02:05:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
PlayStation Portable defined this form factor 15 years ago.

02:05:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go, yeah, exactly so yeah, just bigger, but yes, exactly right. So the question here, of course, is whether this thing is literally windows, which is the most likely. But phil spencer has talked about how xbox, the os, is built on top of Windows, and we're trying to work through this right. Like there may be this version of the future where Xbox and Windows are basically the same, the games are the same and they run that kind of thing. So we'll see. So, assuming this comes out in time for the holidays which, by the way, it will it's going through the FCC.

02:06:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're going to learn more about this soon, so they're doing fcc in in maypril, then they're trying to get ready for october.

02:06:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This will be time, well in time for the holidays, I would say so it doesn't look great.

02:06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it looks you know these things all kind of looks like another one yeah, yeah, but I like the kind of the game like the nintendo-y kind of yeah side, handle it's like an xbox controller.

02:06:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You cut in half with an axe yeah like an eight or nine inch screen, whatever that is, and then slapped it back on like um. By the way, I know lena khan, I'm sorry, so lisa khan probably left the fc.

02:07:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know that, yeah, she's gone, you don't have she's, but she's doesn't mean she couldn't be in the courtroom crying.

02:07:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was a joke, relax anyway. Um, as far as this goes, I, this part of the market is clearly done. Well enough that microsoft's like okay, we got to do something. I there have been calls for an xbox, portable gaming, something, something for ever since, so they would call this an xbox probably, huh well, this is the question. Right, like this was the ad.

02:07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not an rog everything's yeah

02:07:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so xbox yes, but what does that mean? Is it really a windows pc?

02:07:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, we'll see either way, 36 watt tdps, it's not gonna. I can't have the greatest battery life.

02:07:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean holy cow, it's portable, but you need it plugged in yeah, maybe that's it right. I mean we're getting back to the Dave Cutler-esque mindset of Windows kernel. Yeah, because the Xbox is definitely Windows kernel with a different UI on it, so this might be a different UI.

02:08:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, stripped down. They've been talking about adapting the Xboxbox app on windows to be the ui. They want it to be a front end for all the other stores you might use, right, like epics and epic games and, uh, steam and so forth, and okay, that's cool and that's, by the way, that says pc to me. But, um, I think we're going to see a lot of these. Like, I think this is interesting, I think this is kind of interesting. I I do think the key to this is going to be getting windows to the point where it makes sense on this kind of device. Like you know, the steam deck went with Linux for all kinds of reasons, but one of the good reasons is it takes up a lot fewer resources and, um, you know it's more efficient or you know to run on this kind of a low end device. I feel like Windows could get there.

02:08:51
But this is that argument. You know, like when Apple was making the iPhone or Windows was doing Windows mobile and big Windows, and it's like so are you going to take something big and strip stuff off, make something small, or are you going to take something small and build it out to be something more sophisticated? At what point do you strip away, strip away, strip away from Windows and it just becomes an xbox. You know, I mean if, if, if the xbox os today, or a console is essentially windows, it's really like what I would call hyper v and a very simplified model for switching between open apps or whatever. Not too many, um, you know, where do we land on this? I don don't know, but I'd like to see. This is obviously like a. Well, I shouldn't say obviously, yeah, no, it is. It is an X64 machine, right, so that's fine, that's what you need today. This is what works. But September is going to come around. Snapdragon's going to come out with G2.

02:09:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How do?

02:09:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you build this, not ARM, because it's not ready right now. That's the problem, because the lead time on this stuff is like a year, right, but Asus is about to get crucified.

02:09:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're going to get this out the door just in time, yeah.

02:10:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then there's 36 watts, and then they're going to say here's a five watt version.

02:10:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but what does it run? The Snapdragon stuff has to run these games. There's also this thing hiding in the corner which is NVIDIA, or maybe NVIDIA plus MediaTek, where those guys enter the ARM market and have their graphics thing, and maybe that is going to be more suitable for this kind of a device, for all the obvious reasons, right, and so we'll see. But I bet Microsoft is waiting to put their name on a device for that, and I think this is tied into the next gen Xbox stuff. So in the meantime, this still looks pretty interesting. I mean, I'm glad they're going with AMD, by the way.

02:10:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Something at least. But yeah, this is just a timing issue. Boy oh boy, there's a strong incentive not to buy the first version of this product.

02:10:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know which stinks, because you want it to do well. And then you know what I mean you want it to keep going.

02:10:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just hate that you've trapped your vendor too.

02:11:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, but God, I mean God bless them for even trying.

02:11:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know there's a larger argument here. Paul Phil, especially jumping on, it's like you should be making a new xbox and it should be an arm device yeah, 100, but again I, I think we're waiting.

02:11:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, this is the, you know, when microsoft came with these surface devices and people like, oh, what? Like what about intel and amd? And it's like yeah what about them.

02:11:27
I mean, that part of the market is well served by Snapdragon right now. Yeah, the gaming part of the market is not, and a lot of things have to change. They've done work that they can do given what they have. I think the auto SR stuff is pretty amazing, frankly, and the emulation stuff is pretty good. Given completely different architectures, the fact that anything works is kind of amazing. Gpu needs to get better, like we said, but we also need to get games onto this platform, and one of the ways we can do that collectively is for microsoft to embrace it as the platform for xbox, right? Yeah, um, and so we'll see again. We're kind of in a holding pattern here, um, but I, yeah, I keep, I just I keep coming back to this.

02:12:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's no way I if well, and there's a ton of of develop, of game developers working on arm. They're called mobile developers yeah, there you go.

02:12:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is right. This will come up at the end of the show. But, um, I've been, I play a lot of um call of duty, right, but I play a lot of Call of Duty right, but I play a lot of Call of Duty mobile and that experience has all the mobile garbage right. There's a lot of the in-game. We want you to buy chests and do all that crap and it's just like it's bloated with stuff.

02:12:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, but the gameplay Free to play, pay to win right.

02:12:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there's some of that, but it's the best levels that have ever existed for call of duty, so they're well understood. They're beautiful and if you have like a high res, like an ipad or something, you're gorgeous looking, you know, the sound is amazing. If you have, if you're using an xbox controller which is what I would use, or whatever controller it's, there are moments where you're like I think I'm, this is like on the PC, like I mean this is, it's so close. And you know, mobile games aren't flappy bird and angry birds anymore. Right, I mean they are, but but there can be very sophisticated.

02:13:27
There are very sophisticated games and they're not always just like mostly sophisticated taking money off you, but yes, yeah, I mean, apple's done a small job or some job trying to get bring games down to their mobile devices, where you get like what is essentially the mac probably the mac version of resident evil 7 or whatever version it is and it runs on your ipad and it looks like the, you know the mac version. You're like, wow, this is okay, this is okay, this is pretty impressive and yeah, that's cool. But the thing about call of duty mobile that's interesting to me is that's a brand new game Like that was created for mobile and and is a war zone version as well. Like it's actually kind of awesome and it shows the way, at least graphically and play wise, that mobile could do it, you know, so arm could do it, no doubt about it.

02:14:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, now they could. They could excuse me. They've made new hardware before right like there's. This is not a weird thing in the industry.

02:14:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you actually wanted to make xbox interesting again, you would go with the best chips that you lay your hands on yeah, and if you want to make it uninteresting again, what you could do is stick with the same crap that you lay your hands on, yeah, and if you want to make it uninteresting again, what you could do is stick with the same crap and then raise the price, and that's what they just did, sadly. Now, this isn't their fault necessarily. I mean, this is the, you know the tariff stuff kicking in, I guess, at some point. But we have this hardware business that has not been doing well.

02:14:48
I don't know if you guys have been paying attention, but past uh, several years, um, pretty much consistently making less money, less revenues, have never really been uh profitable, uh, quarter of a quarter, well, year over year, every quarter. And, um, you know, the united states, depending on the system, like some of these are really expensive, like a lot more expensive than they were. Um, you know, depending on, like I said, depending on the unit, depending on the exact model, anywhere from like what, 50 to a couple hundred bucks more expensive, like six months ago they were cheaper.

02:15:20
Yeah, yep, it's like yikes and you know, honestly, this was somewhat telegraphed. I feel like we all knew this was coming. You know, yeah, um, but we we've gotten to the point now where, like this will have to change. It will change, but for now, we're in this weird time where, like, some ps5 models are less expensive than the roughly equivalent xbox, whatever, and it's like, oh, that's not good like it's you know. So I mean, it will change. I'm sony's probably gonna have raise their prices too, but that's too bad.

02:15:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Likely and always. The question is how much of this is tariffing and how much of it is new hardware costs and supply issues or just profit opportunity.

02:16:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I would like to think at this point I mean I can't even almost get this sentence out but like I'd like to think that Microsoft is not profiteering off of this notion of people sort of understand the price is going to go up, and so we might as well, just Now's the opportunity to slide that through.

02:16:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not.

02:16:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like these things were going gangbusters before they were. They didn't sell great during the holidays. So, like what you know, raising the prices isn't gonna help. It's like all these things must be really good. They're like more, twice as expensive. Now, like that's not how people think, you know, like this is, you know, in our community, sadly is so negative now and so distraught by everything. It's like, okay, well, I'm just gonna buy a gaming pc. Now it's like, yeah, because the prices of those aren't gonna go up up, you're going to be fine. Come on, dude, this is not. It's going to impact everything. Sorry, I don't know, who knows, maybe these things revert. That's the problem. Do you lower prices at some point, six months from now, when you've raised prices, or do you leave them where they are?

02:17:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You see a lot of price decreases as inflation came down. Not so much.

02:17:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe my memory is wrong. In fact I'm positive it is. But if you go back to 2005, when the 360 launched, what was the average selling price of a game? When did games become $59.99, right, yeah, a while ago, a long time ago. So somewhere a year ago, two years ago, max, somewhere a year, 18 months, whatever it was we started talking about these $69.99 games. So now we're talking about $79.99 games for this coming holiday season. Not all of them, but some of the bigger better.

02:17:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, your big titles are going to be $80.

02:17:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it's hard to look at that and be like come on, are you kidding me? Because in that case you can make a really good argument that what they really want you to do is get on Game Pass, because that's the model that they want and that's what benefits them the most, because it's good, solid income over a long period of time. And one of the ways you can get people there is to make the physical media I guess we'll call it standalone game, the on-prem version of the game, I guess more expensive, you know, even though, why, I don't know. Anyway, there's that, so that's bad.

02:18:21
In the good news department, it's May. We have a new month, so we've got a new set of games. There's a bunch of them. It's like 10 or 12 of them coming in the first half of the month, the big one being the one we already knew about, which is the new doom. Right, so doom, what's it called the dark ages, is arriving across everything uh on may 15th, so next week yeah, yeah, finally have something that's not call of duty to play, so I'm looking forward to that one.

02:18:48
Um, it's going to be game pass pc xbox series x and s, and you'll be able to stream it over cloud streaming if you have xbox game pass ultimate. So that's good. And then there's a bunch of other stuff, and I find myself in a very familiar position looking through this list, like who cares?

02:19:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what any of these are a lot of them.

02:19:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, um, this one sort of came out of the blue, but not really. But, um, uh, microsoft is remaking gears of war again. This is the second time they've done this. This is a game that launched on the 360 a million years ago, when I I want to say, the first version of this game I bet it was 1280 by 720, something like that and it looks this is, this is a re-remastering. Yeah, so it looked great. And then when they did that, there was a brief push around vista for game, but we now call xbox, but was games for windows, vista or something, games game? What is it called game? Windows live games or whatever the heck it was? Um, basically, xbox on windows, and at that time they remastered gears of war to run on the pc and they went up to 1080p and then they put that back on the console. It was same thing. So it was like probably 30 frames, a second 1080p kind of thing. So now they're remastering it again and this time they're bringing it everywhere, because that's what we do now. So it's xbox series x and s. Playstation 5, pc and game pass coming out in august will support cross play, cross progression, all that stuff. Um, but the big thing is the graphics right. So, depending on the system, up to 4k, 120 frames per second. Uh, in multiplayer, which is astonishing, like that's crazy. Um, so we'll see multiplayer.

02:20:31
Og gears is not great. Honestly, it's like running around with a loaded diaper. But some people, some people like that, I don't know. Um, it's a great game and this is um. You know, this is sort of like, uh, I'm trying to think what other games like this, like halo is. Like this gears of war yes, especially the first two, maybe three um, where it's just like replayable, like every once in a while you go back, it's like the original Star Wars movies. Like every once in a while you're like, yeah, I'm just going to watch this all again, and every time you do, you're like, yep, now I remember why this was so awesome. You don't have that moment where you're like, oh, this isn't that good. Like, no, gears of Wars is great. Like they, especially the first two, especially, I would say, are just fantastic. So I'm actually kind of looking forward to this.

02:21:21
I, I'm, I'd like to see them do. Like, you know, on Halo, we have the master chief collection and we're talking, by the way, about doing a Halo remaster as well, where they will put it out across platform. But before that and now what we have is the master chief collection. That's an amazing collection of games um xbox and pc and same thing. They, you know they better assets, faster graphics, etc. I'd love to see them do that for the. I'm not sure which gears games exactly, but at least the original trilogy would be kind of amazing. So really cool. That's good. And then we'll get into a weird spot where more people are playing gears on play PlayStation, it's okay. Okay, what else? And then in the bad news department we're kind of going back and forth. Mojang announced that it's going to remove support for VR headsets from Minecraft Bedrock Edition starting in October. So I guess it it supports it's vr. Mr, mr, is mixed reality mixed reality? Is the windows platform right?

02:22:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so yeah, the inexpensive goggles so yeah I mean I'm surprised you don't maintaining support for quest, because that's still made. You know microsoft's yeah, dropped all the mr headsets now. So I get that, but right way to make people angry yeah, I mean I guess the real question is how many people were playing it exactly how many people are you making angry here?

02:22:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
both?

02:22:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
guys are minecraft.

02:22:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're minecraft guys. What are they going to do?

02:22:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
write a sternly worded letter they're moving to roblox.

02:22:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah I think, well, you know, look, there is that vibrant update coming, that kind of graphical update. That's pretty cool. Um, I, I think we're gonna, I think we're gonna see further advances with minecraft, which is amazing given the age of this game. But, um, but, yeah, I, yeah, it's, it's. It's one of those things like for me it's kind of vague, it's like it's too bad, but it's like of those things like for me it's kind of vague, it's like it's too bad, but it's like I don't, I don't, I'm not going to do this anyway, who cares? Yep, uh, gta six supposed to come out this year. That has been delayed until March 26th next year.

02:23:22
People leave that number. I don't, yeah, I mean I believe this year. That doesn't surprise me.

02:23:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll bet it's out Christmas next year.

02:23:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Lucky. You know, we just wanted to get it right. We will ship no game before it's time or something.

02:23:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's already been a decade, boys, come on, I know. Largest game in the world, I know.

02:23:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean between it, if it and Minecraft and then maybe fortnite is pretty much, it's got to be like 90 of the gaming industry, right there, right, I mean it's kind of crazy like yeah, uh, how popular these games are.

02:24:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, yeah, okay and then the bigger part is like gta5 is still making money. I know you are, just you have to wonder.

02:24:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's like you know, maybe it's not such a bad thing to push this out. We're still kind of milking this thing Like it's working good for us. Backbone you may remember they did a recent Xbox edition of this. This is the controller where you pull it apart with your phone and slap it back together, so it gives you that kind of effect of that all-in-one portable gaming thing, but with a phone.

02:24:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You could have bought a portable, but instead you got a phone.

02:24:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, thing, but with a phone, about a portable, but instead you got a phone. Yeah, yeah, now I'm old enough where I'm like I for me to play a game on my phone. I have to put my like pachita glasses on. You know, I huddle in front of it like an old guy.

02:24:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But great nice. I know it's the worst getting old anyway.

02:24:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, um, but they just came out with a backbone pro model and this is actually really exciting, and this one works in two different ways. You can put your phone in there before you get that direct connection with USB-C, but you can also connect any device to it using Bluetooth, and that means you could use it as a controller for a tablet like an iPad, a computer of any kind, a smart TV where you might be streaming games, whatever, and it supports multiple um. You supports multiple device connections, of course, seamless swapping between them and also profiles, so you can map the keys and buttons and well, buttons, I guess to whatever the game might be, if you want to customize that. So I actually have one of these in to review and I can tell you like, so far, this is amazing.

02:25:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just realized what your new gamer handle has to to be is teabagging with readers. Oh God.

02:25:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like McLovin, but teabagging yeah.

02:25:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it's the readers. That's the important part.

02:25:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, With the readers. Yeah, exactly I. Just how else would I see it properly?

02:25:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Exactly, Otherwise I'm not going to dunk in the right spot. Come on.

02:25:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I've tried this so far with two phones in the device, but I've also tried it Bluetooth connected and, by the way, you can also they don't really say this, but you can connect it to like an iPad or a computer with the USB cable and you still get that direct connection right. So when you're using it with the phone, let me think about that. Yeah, I think it has its own batteries, but it also works off the battery. It can take some of the battery from the phone as well, so it doesn't go down as fast, but you can direct connect it with a cable and it just works like a controller. The only thing I don't like about it is you can't make it a little smaller. It's a little further apart, like the two sides that aren't a traditional controller. But having one controller that works with everything is pretty amazing and it works great Like it's. It's actually really nice, even in Bluetooth, like the.

02:26:43
I was just doing normal Call of Duty off the um, no, I'm sorry, that's not true, it was Call of Duty mobile on the iPad but the. But I did a Bluetooth yeah and wired, and even on Bluetooth it was like this is this is actually works really well and I love that because that's the type of thing I could pitch it doing on a plane, assuming I had to connectivity, I guess. Is you know, playing like a, like a game, like a, like a good game, not like a pangoo birds thing, but like a arcade, you know, 3d shooter, whatever, not like a pangoo birds thing, but like a arcade you know, 3d, shooter, whatever, like Call of Duty, so pretty cool.

02:27:17
Anyway, something to look forward to or look to look for. Look at what am I talking about? It's not, it's a good. It's a good year.

02:27:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, well, we got through that almost painlessly.

02:27:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I blame myself. I felt a little pressure from last week. There was only one Xbox story.

02:27:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you made up for it.

02:27:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Xbox like crazy.

02:27:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We got Xboxed.

02:27:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, guys, we have 18 minutes left, so this means the back of the book is going to be jam-packed with excitement. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurott, richard Campbell, and now let's kick things off on the back of the book with Paul's tip of the week. And actually, steve Gibson was talking about this last week or yesterday, rather yeah, so I'm going to make this one quick.

02:28:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Supposedly, if you create a new Microsoft account now, it will be passwordless by default. That has not been my experience. I've been trying to create a new Microsoft account ever since they announced this and I'm always prompted to create a password. So I don't know what's going on there. But anyway, anyone can go into.

02:28:20
I know it's so. If you go to accountmicrosoftcom, log in with your Microsoft account, obviously, go into security and privacy. You can set up these other ways to authenticate, so you should have 2FA going there. You should have a Microsoft authenticator or whatever authenticator app, pass keys et cetera, et cetera. You can remove your password from your account. This is a vector for attack. It's not a bad idea. Now that this stuff has become mature enough, we have all these other ways to authenticate, so it's something to look into. I'm going to look at this more. I'm probably going to do a hands-on Windows episode about this soon, assuming I can ever actually make this account, but we'll look at that one in the future.

02:29:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So basically, they're talking Passkeys here.

02:29:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, that Microsoft would like you to come to it to create an account with, like, a Gmail account or a whatever account, because that account already has security built on top of it, so there's already this layer for them. Like it's less to worry about with this Microsoft account. Supposedly, though, this is for new Microsoft accounts. So you come and you're like I want to make an outlookcom account or Hotmail. You can make a Hotmail account if you want to do. Right now, it's supposed to let you do it in a passwordless way. So you have to create up these second. They call them I can't remember the exact term, but it's like secondary authentication, essentially. So you have to have a recovery email or a recovery phone number or an authenticator app or whatever it might be. Ideally, you have all those things right, but you don't have to have a password, supposedly.

02:29:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not been my experience, but soon. So I see under additional security. In managing my security I see turn it on, turn on passwordless account, so I should turn that on I'm not saying well, maybe I am.

02:30:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, I mean, steve says it's better leo's gonna email and be like, so I just lost access to my microsoft. Uh, thanks for that yeah, so I'm approving this in the authenticator. Yeah, so I did this with my account to see what it looked like, and you're doing this now, so so my password's gone.

02:30:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't have a password, that's right, so you live in the dream less, wow, yep, but I do have two step on which I want still right of course yep, but nobody can guess my password now or hack my password and get into my account. That's the theory of it.

02:30:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, that's good there's no way to get there on the flip side of this equation.

02:30:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um yeah, microsoft has an authenticator app, uh, called microsoft which I use for Microsoft accounts.

02:30:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what I usually recommend. If you're all in, if you're in M365 and so forth, use Microsoft authenticator.

02:31:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They just do that stuff, right it's much easier with their products.

02:31:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a regular authenticator for everything.

02:31:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I actually like Google authenticator better for every other account, but for Microsoft accounts it's the best, and that's the advice I've given.

02:31:19
If you're not an M365, don't bother, use Google, yep. So one of the things that's done to date is it also supports password management and then does autofill. On phones. You can also do that through the Edge app. So if you don't use Microsoft Authenticator, the same database of passwords and stuff is available to you from edge and you can set edge to be your password autofill etc. Um, they're actually getting rid of the password management and autofill features from authenticator sometime, I think by the middle of the summer, um, which is making a lot of people upset, but I I feel very strongly maybe you should be using a third party password.

02:31:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and this is an opportunity for the one passes and the bit wardens of the world to say, hey, we have a migration tool for microsoft, authenticated for you yeah that would be my recommendation. I'm I'm when I got off of last pass because last pass and moved to bit warden. It was far less painful than I thought like the hard part is getting into a password manager. Once you you're there, move on to another one. It's just not that tough.

02:32:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is like the first time you change like a cable or like a high-speed internet provider, the first time you're like, oh, I don't want to screw with this. And then you do it. You're like okay, now I can do this.

02:32:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do it every day. Well, and in reality is there's a moment where all your passwords are spit out in like a csv format or some kind of very unprotected format for you to upload into the other thing.

02:32:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I don't like this, you know you hate everything about that.

02:32:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then you've got to delete those files like as soon as you're up. That's the thing.

02:32:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the thing no one does. And, by the way, that csv file. If you wanted to save that, I mean if you use one microsoft stuff, consider one drive as a uh, that encrypted first, please, well, but this is no, this is what encrypts it. Like you can put it into the personal vault oh, put it in the personal wall.

02:32:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still would encrypt it locally. Okay, basically get rid of it. Why are you saving it? Yeah, create it. I'm just trying to give you one out.

02:33:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know for people like oh, I don't, you know one of the big arguments against password manages, but now I only have like one place where everything is right. Yeah, that's the point, that's the point.

02:33:18
You want it, you want it to be a secure that should have two fa and you know all those things. Yes, uh, and that's pretty much it. I and uh mobile I mentioned. Uh mizzou last week said you use brave, brave for android. Now, now does content removal from individual websites like it does on desktop. That's awesome, by the way, but also Opera for Android, which is based on Chromium and really good, has really sophisticated tab management stuff, if that matters to you. But I won't beat that to death. I'm sorry, richard, you should probably. That's all right, I'm so sorry probably.

02:33:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm so sorry. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to go searching for the one honest man Run as radiocom Steve Gibson.

02:34:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a show that was requested by a listener. Who's like, hey, how do I get into the careers in IT? And it happened to be that a regular on run as radio, yuri Dajunas. Who's like, hey, how do I get into the careers in IT? And it happened to be that a regular on Run as Radio, yuri Dajdashinus, who's been at Microsoft for 20-something years, has always been in the security space and literally wrote the book how to have a Career in Cybersecurity. So I'm like Yuri, do you?

02:34:26
want to talk about this, he goes oh, I thought you'd never ask, because we usually talk shop, like talk about the products he works on rather than the books he's writing on the side. And Yuri had a lot to say, not surprisingly, like. It was a really fun conversation because, starting with, I mean, the term cybersecurity is ridiculous. It covers such a vast array of roles, of different kinds of work you might be doing, and so we sort of had to break all that down, like what are we talking about when we even say this? And he got to the essence of it very quickly.

02:34:57
The main it doesn't matter what you're doing, if you are a white hat just trying to defend a system, or you're working on the red team trying to do penetration, testing, so forth, or you're a consultant. There is one common attribute to anybody interested in security, which is insatiable curiosity Just trying to figure out how things work, why they behave the way they do, why did that thing happen? Because if you're not interested in root cause analysis, this is not the job for you. This is what is valuable is that you will grind away at a problem until you pin it down and can really work the whole flow out. So if that's something in your nature. It's like it almost can't be taught. If you have that, you can harness the rest of the skills and you can go to some interesting places and have an interesting career, without a doubt. So super fun conversation. I was very pleased with the way it came out.

02:35:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice.

02:35:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We enjoyed it.

02:35:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We enjoyed chatting about it Now, before the clock strikes 12.

02:35:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now I to get I fly in five hours. Oh, you got time. That's crazy. I got a three hour drive before I fly, oh, let's get this done then what's your whiskey?

02:36:05
pick of the week, my whiskey pick of the week, sitting right here. I've been drinking it all week. It's. I'm not going to call this a filler whiskey per se in terms of our schedule, but I have another Australian bottle I'll deal with next week because I didn't want to travel with it. But Jira is the only distillery on the Isle of Jira, and Jira is just northeast of Isla, so it is part of the Inner Hebrides. It's a small island 150 square miles, that's it. There are quote unquote mountains on the island, three of them that are about 2,500 feet high. They're called the Paps of Jura. They're conical quartzites. Otherwise, this island has a little bit of forest, lots of peat bog, because again suffering from the same weather conditions that Isla is, because it's right nearby. There's evidence of humans being on that island for island for a very long time, mesolithic and neolithic. There are ruins, uh, there are monuments, there are cairns, all kinds of cool, there are empty whiskey bottles uh, there are more whiskey barrels on jira than there are people.

02:37:05
Wow, wow, like isla. These islands were largely controlled by the gaelic peoples what we generally would call irish, until, of course then. Then the Vikings came through and killed everybody and kept control of those islands for hundreds of years, until the Treaty of Perth in 1266. And after that it was part of the Scottish kingdom. So these islands were controlled by the MacDougalls, the McDonalds and the McRorries, although after a couple hundred years they were fomenting an insurrection against the king, and so the lands were taken away from them, this 146 square mile island and given to the Campbells of Craiginish, who controlled the island until the 1700s.

02:37:47
As you start to form the conventional state and the concept of the United Kingdom and so forth, you start to form the conventional state and the concept of the United Kingdom and so forth. The peak population of the Isle of Jura was in 1831 at a whole 1,300 people. Today it's a little less than 200. There really are more barrels than people on the Isle. There is exactly one town. It is called Craig House. It has a general store, a church, a primary school, a gas station, a tea room, the only hotel that also has a bar, and just a little bit out of town is the distillery of Jura have you visited.

02:38:25
I have not. No, I have not been down there. The easy way to get there is via a ferry out of Talvalich, which is a pastor-only ferry during the summer. It's about 30 pounds to take a ride across to Craig House and your main thing you would do there is go to tea and or go taste whiskey. There is the all year round. Transport is from Isla, on the west side, the Port Askeg ferry, which is a five minute ferry. You're expected to be in the line on the Jura side before the ferry leaves Port Askeg, because they just go over, they pick you up and they take you back.

02:38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very quick. You got five minutes. Baby, Get on that boat.

02:38:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The claim to fame for Jura is that George Orwell wrote 1984 while renting a house on the island.

02:39:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No kidding In 1947, 48.

02:39:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He finished it in late 48 and then sent it off to the publisher and immediately left the island to get treated for tuberculosis. And publisher, and immediately left the island to get treated for tuberculosis. And he did die of tuberculosis a few months later, but not before he saw that his great masterwork would be published. And that house, by the way, is still for rent, essentially in the same condition that Orwell left it. They've preserved it and you can rent it if you would like to have that experience.

02:39:29
Back to the whiskey side of things. So in Craig House there was a distillery first formed in 1810 and on this bottle it talks about 1810 established, which is a complete lie because the distillery, uh well, formed by a campbell, an archibald campbell. Uh, it changed name several times over the the next 90 years. It was called small owls, it was called kale allen, finally it was called j. But it went bankrupt and was shut down in 1901 and stripped of parts. All the equipment stills, everything was removed when it sat empty for another 60 years.

02:40:01
1963, robin Fletcher and Tony Riley Smith, with backing from the McKinley Co Group, rebuilt the distillery, so really new of the 60s. Their first production was in 74. They did well enough that by 78, they doubled from two stills to four. They were bought out by Invergordon Distillers in 85, which became White McKay in 93. And White McKay you know of we've talked about them before. They've owned Dalmore, Tamnavulin, brookladdock and Tolibardine. And then United Spirits bought White McKay in 2007, which has now been merged into Emperador as of 2014.

02:40:39
That's a Filipino liquor distribution organization and this particular edition of Jura their whiskeys again is contemporary. This is a 2018 redesign of the bottle and the product, which speaks to the fact that it is not heavily peated, considering where it's from, because they use a carry style yeast which is a little bit different, typical in south. Only a 54 hour fermentation, which is short. We many are much longer than that. They got six stainless steel washbacks about 50 000 liters each, and then just two sets of stills 24 000 liter wash stills and 15 000 liter spirit stills.

02:41:15
But what they are famous for is being extremely tall, 28 feet high. At the time that they were, they were put into production in the 70s they were the largest stills in the world. That's not true anymore and certainly they stayed the largest stills. In scotland, jack daniels has the biggest stills now, but a. A couple of the Scottish distilleries now have larger stills. There's what they call a lantern style, so great big bulb on the bottom that chokes up into a tighter neck, with a second bulb and a high lie arm that then has a slight decline. So lots of reflux, which makes for a very light whiskey, and they use standard rack warehousing which you're used to the wooden structures, barrels on their sides, dirt floors.

02:41:56
They make a lot of different whiskey. Again, they're very much a contemporary whiskey company now. So their signature range of which this is the base product, they actually have 14 variations in. Some are peated, some are not. They have a bunch of different barrelings, including, I mean, most stuff is aged in bourbon because it's inexpensive, but they also do finishes in wine, in beer, in sherry, import and rum. And then they have a set, nine varieties of what they call travel exclusives, which are duty-free, which universally I loathe. Um, just generally speaking, duty-free whiskeys are a mistake. Don't do it.

02:42:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody's you know, don't do it pay the duty or just drink it there there is then one.

02:42:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The third line is called what they call the rare and limited lines, which they do special editions of here and there. The ultimate rare and limited, if you care to try and find it, is the 1984 edition made in honor of orwell. So, uh, distilled in 84 and then bottled 30 year old. Last time one up went up for auction because there was none for sale, it was over a thousand I was gonna say, geez, you're not gonna find that now, don't worry about it. So the juror 10. This is the baseline and signature line aged and bourbon cast, not surprising inexpensive. It's got a tiny tiny bit of peter. And if you don't think I'm going to drink whiskey at nine o'clock in the morning in new zealand, you are mistaken this is my job.

02:43:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm here, it's his job they don't call him campbell for nothing I just put two and two together, you come from a long line of scotch whiskey drinkers for sure so just the tiniest hint of pete.

02:43:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's 0.5 ppm, which is really just enough to go. Just how?

02:43:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we like it.

02:43:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I've met, have been there. Uh, it does have a finish in sherry, so it's been a little less than a year of sherry at the end. So that a lot of color for a 10 year old and, um, so tasty I like sherry, finished, I think yeah, it's a good way to go, and this is an expensive bottle 40 abv.

02:43:47
You can find it at bevmo less than 40, not a big deal. Here's what's fun about this, because I've been drinking it all week with my cousins. It evolves in your mouth as you drink it, so the initial hit from it is still a potent whiskey. It's only 40, so it's not real heady. Like you're not gonna, you're not being clubbed over the head or anything. It's got that little smoky flavor which you rapidly forget about and then it just gives you a bit of heat and a bit of fruitiness and sugariness because it's light. It's a very light tasting, light drinking whiskey. So it's a friend. You can keep this around, it's an everyday drinker, it's not expensive, but it's proper Scottish whiskey from the inner Hebrides and that's an awesome thing.

02:44:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Made by a tiny island community, and that's what you're looking for.

02:44:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're probably talking. A dozen people work at that distillery and that's it.

02:44:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's really cool. I have to say, that is really cool.

02:44:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just glad it's not called jira.

02:44:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I'm saying honestly. And if they say the bottles are designed for uh, uh, you know, travel on ship uh to to export is, does that make?

02:44:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
sense or is it a? Little flattened yeah, it's kind of a cool I mean, this is not your standard scotch bottle, which is great because this is a better.

02:44:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's better looking it's not round and it's got little indentations, so you know exactly where to hold it yeah, it's good scrippy the 1810 on the back.

02:45:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I already told you that. You know that's like. Come on, guys, not really. Nah, this was designed in 2018 and it shows because it's so drinkable sounds good.

02:45:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, sounds good. As some of our sponsors say, if I were a whiskey drinker, this is what I'd be drinking there you go. Yes, they, for some reason, they put that this line in our ads. Now, if I were to use this product, this is the product I would use, okay okay if you say so. Uh, that concludes this is thrilling, gripping edition of uh windows. Weekly you'll find richard campbell at run his radiocom and now he's going to run to the airportcom.

02:45:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm gonna take this rig down, get it all back in the bag, get in the car, get out of here, get out of here.

02:45:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The rod is at the rotcom and, of course, leanpcom for his books. We are at twittv. We do this show every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm, eastern time, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live in our club twit discord If you're a club member. Otherwise, youtube twitch, xcom, tick, talk, finkton and Gick Finkton and Gick.

02:46:12
Yeah, so we just I'm trying to get through this. And after the fact, you can also get a copy of the show. Download audio or video from our website, twittv, slash, www, or share a clip with your friend. Spread the good word about Windows Weekly using our YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. All the videos are there. Or, best thing to do, subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically and you can watch and listen whenever you should choose. Thank you, paul. Thank you, richard. Have a wonderful, wonderful flight home. We will see you in Mad Park next week.

02:46:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Quick 15 hours on an airplane. Strongly recommend watching on.

02:46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
GIC. I hope you have something to occupy your time and spirits.

02:46:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have a nice live flat seat with a 17-inch screen. I'm not going to be suffering too much. Oh, that's nice.

02:47:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice Catch up on all those crappy movies you missed. Yeah, thank you, paul, thank you Richard, thank you to all our winners and dozers. We'll see you next Wednesday on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye, hey, buddy. Are you a geek? Are you a tech enthusiast? Then I would love to invite you to join a tech community like no other.

02:47:21
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