Windows Weekly 932 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly, the biggest patch Tuesday of 2025. We'll have the deets. We'll also talk about a new way to invoke co-pilot. No, you don't have to say it three times. And why? If Microsoft just made $70 billion, did they lay off 6,000 employees? 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 Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 932, recorded Wednesday May 14th 2025. The Last Australian. It's time for Windows Weekly. Get Ready, winners and dozers, the show that you wait for all week long. Paul Theriot is here from theriotcom, richard Campbell from runninsradiocom, and they're both in their respective United States. Abodes no.

01:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Both in their North American abodes.

01:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not not yet we'll get you yet, buddy paul's and mcungie, right, yeah, we'll get you yet yeah no, no, I'm in the mood to add 50 new provinces. I've got this idea I far prefer that to the other a few of the better ones.

01:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'd be happy to join along in that escapade.

01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, as your fine new PM said, canada's not for sale. Okay, hardly enough.

01:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like that. He said I went and talked to the owners they're not selling. I love that. That was so good.

01:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard Campbell's here. He is from British Columbia. Actually, you're right, you're home.

01:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
right, I'm home yeah, he's in madera park. Bc give you the view.

01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let's see the view. Let's see the loons, harry. Oh, it's beautiful, you can see it's oh wait wait, I want to show you my view actually since we're doing this, this is my view.

01:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's paul's view it's um. It looks like I'm in a sewer. Are you sealed in, did they?

02:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
seal you in.

02:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not ideal.

02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What happened?

02:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. I'm in a cave. This is my natural habitat.

02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes you want to go home, doesn't it? To Mexico City, doesn't it? It makes you want to go back.

02:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, this room is bigger than that entire apartment. But yeah, I mean other than that.

02:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's pros and cons, at least you're not stapled in. That's true. Is that drywall? What is it? Or is it just a curtain? You're stapled together.

02:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a curtain or whatever you call. It drapes over the giant window here, Otherwise it's either too dark or too bright. Those are my choices.

02:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, oh, I see. So when the show's over, you rip it open.

02:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I leave this as it is. What I do is I walk outside of here and then I'm usually not in this room, no right. This is like I'm having a timeout. This is my punishment room.

02:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every Wednesday Paul goes to the punishment room Three hours of rage. Do you use, Richard, your office for anything but the shows?

03:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, yeah, absolutely I know, but this setup is for streaming and recording, and on beside me is the writing machine. Oh, you have no pop-ups or anything like that yeah, I have in theory.

03:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a desk behind over here that has my theoretical desk. Yeah, I'm rarely in this office to see up in the attic. I usually. I'm leaving it open today because we have a new kitty cat, yep and uh. We replaced, replaced the old model, we upgraded, we upgraded with a young, young model, and uh. But we also have the house cleaners coming and we're not sure how she's going to react to the vacuum oh yeah, that's fair, and we got a puppy now too.

03:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's right. Chaos, that's exciting.

03:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, lisa and her son went to uh the giants game. Oh, so I got the house to the cat and I have the house. You have the house to yourself. What are you doing here? Yeah, that's a good question what would you do?

04:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you said popcorn like, mounted on your chest, watching like some you know terrible.

04:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sit around in your boxer shorts like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, sing along to songs. Those were the days when I was young. You want to see the kitty you want to see. I have a little picture of the kitty I can show you. She's on the stairs, she's watching. She's watching from a distance. She's a beautiful little cat, rosie is her name.

04:30
Yeah, sweet little kitty. So I say all that because I want you to prepare your. You gird your loins, my friends, because it is the biggest Do what to my loins, nice. It is the biggest do what to my loins, nice. It is the biggest patch. Tuesday of 2025.

04:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it's only been four before today, but still.

04:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, how big is it, paul?

04:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's really big, leo. Thank you for asking Also the name of your sex tape, the.

05:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't stop doing that.

05:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, no, it's because this is when recall in preview and click to do also in preview are actually in stable, right? Last two weeks ago they were in a stable but in a preview update that not everyone would get. But now you're getting it, whether you want it or not, assuming, of course, you have a copilot plus PC. So this is it.

05:28
So one year ago yeah, I, I mean almost to the week right microsoft announced copilot plus pc as a platform here it's announced the first uh surface devices and uh some oem devices, and they announced uh recall as the marquee feature, which a year later, by the way, hilarious- um, nice, yeah, almost, yeah, it's on. The wire was the last build I feel comfortable saying that, after several months of testing, I never need to see that feature again, and it has nothing to do with privacy or security. I just don't need it. But maybe you'll like it, which is the most condescending thing you can say to anybody oh, that's terrible.

06:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean you might like it but still requires a co-pilot plus pc, which means a laptop.

06:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody, yeah basically yeah, so yeah, click to do, by the way, actually very interesting. Um, I think the co-pilot vision stuff is very interesting. Um, the improved window search, which we need a better name for. Uh, which is that semantic and indexing also very interesting? Uh, potentially, um, you know, and we'll see. And then other stuff. I mean there's the, the integrated phone companion, that panel on the side of the start menu which, I have to say, first time I saw that it looked like a cancerous growth to me, but I use phone link all the time now and it's because it's gotten a lot better and especially if you have an android phone and, uh, it's actually really handy, like it's nice. So you have this kind of a, instead of running the full app, you can access a lot of the key actions that you might do with phone link through that interface, including sharing files back and forth or looking at photos or whatever it might be. So it's nice.

07:08
Um, and then some small things. But uh, yeah, you know, like Microsoft saying that they changed the home screen and file explorer is like me saying that the sky is blue. It's like of course you did, it's like another Tuesday, like you. Just they change this all the time. Um, that said I. I one thing I have been using on laptops since I started. I've been assessing this since it was in the dev channel. But Windows 11 supports text scaling in modern apps in addition to the. You know the full screen scaling effect, right, and so when you turn on a laptop or whatever it is, for the first time, whatever you know Windows 11 install, I think a lot of people will look at the screen and say, well, taskbar, everything's a little too small or too big or whatever it might be. And you go into settings, change the display scaling and you kind of leave it at that.

07:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But windows also scale the passbar too. What's that?

07:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this is display scaling, scale the taskbar as well so it does, but not the way you want it to right. In other words, in windows 10 and previous, they had this small icons view. Yeah, small icons, large icons.

08:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

08:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's actually a feature that's sort of coming in a future version of windows 11. So that's on that tracker thing I've been working on. It's not in this update. I will say in the latest build that I've tried that in. It doesn't actually change the size of the taskbar, it changes the size of the icons. Only, guys, what the frick did you think we were looking for? Um, so whatever, look, they're trying. I, I don't know. There there is a registry hack you can do to get small icons, by the way. But um, yes, it does, but, like I said, not in the way you want it to.

08:44
Um, but modern apps support text scaling in addition to the screen scaling. Right, that's separate from that. So, um, this is good for like people like me. Like you're in middle age or whatever. You can't see the text as well or whatever. Um, if you're in a browser, you know you can do the control plus thing. But um, file explorer now supports text scaling. File explorer is technically a classic desktop app. Obviously it has a partial WinUI front end and I assume I probably shouldn't, but I assume that's part of the way they were able to do this. But now it respects whatever your text scaling setting is. So if you have display scaling to whatever, whatever and then you go in and change text scaling to say 120 or whatever it might be, it only impacts those apps that support this setting, and now file explorer is one of them and actually I have to say I really like it. It's very clean looking, you know, it's not like jaggy or weird.

09:37
It doesn't look weird like it's right, assuming like it's supposed to be there, yeah it looks good, like it looks natural enough, um, which is like saying you know, they had good plastic surgery. Like it looks sort of like a person at the right angle, yeah, yeah, in the right lighting you look like a woman or a man or whatever you are um, you know you look like your pronouns.

09:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, steve gibson spent some time yesterday talking about how he managed to get his windows taskbar on the left side of the screen.

10:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, you can also do that if you're dedicated enough yeah.

10:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he found actually a really cool program. I don't know if you know, but I called it Windhawk. Have you ever heard of that? Is it Windtoys? No, no, it's a free, open source program and there's a lot of contributed tools for it, one of which, here, I'll show you. It's Windhawknet.

10:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, windhawk, I'm sorry. Yes, I have heard of this.

10:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so what's cool is there's mods of all kinds, and some of them are for Windows 11. Not all of them, but you can move the taskbar anywhere you want in Windows 11.

10:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so what these guys are doing are taking advantage of registry that's what I wondered is.

10:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it was registry. Yeah, so there?

10:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
are other utilities that can do this as well, so you can kind of force it if you want the. The problem is you don't know if it's always going to work. You don't know when I break. You don't know if you. That's what I always worry about system update. It might just go back, or whatever.

11:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm nervous about modifying the system just for that reason alone also, because you do it on one system and then you're disoriented when you use another right. So I.

11:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I enabled the new, the coming new taskbar.

11:14
We're going to talk, I'm sorry, the coming new uh start menu bigger start menu right yeah, and I also manually enabled um, that phone companion slice on a PC that just didn't have them yet for some reason. Well, no one has the start menu yet. But it worked fine, okay. And then I got an update and then my start menu was blank and I used Vive tool for that. That's another one of those kind of utilities. Vive tool is a command line tool and one of the neat things about that is it actually has a command line switch where you can just reverse everything. I had to do that reboot and I came back and everything was normal, but I lost the big start screen at the start menu and then the big or the phone companion slice. But that's okay. This is what I do, like I'm testing stuff, it's okay.

11:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not a big deal, but but it is a caveat for people who are going to do those kinds of modifications this is and, and.

12:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so every once in a while I'll bring up this thing that I think about but haven't worked on in months because I'm busy with other stuff. But I do want to write a utility I'd love for someone just to make this, by the way.

12:14
Write a utility for you, yes, but yeah but what I want is not only something that will let you go through a list of things and make whatever changes, but then also monitor the system on boot and say, hey, you had this configured to this, but Microsoft changed it to this and see when and if that happens, and it might just based on experience.

12:36
I mean, it's pretty clear when you install certain updates that this happens to certain feature changes. In the past that was always like a feature update, like a major version upgrade, but you know, with them doing these cumulative updates every like twice a month actually, if you're doing a preview update, I feel like this could happen at any time. So I kind of want to keep track of that. But I don't know if anything that does what I just said, but I am interested in that. You would notice this, that's for sure. Like you would notice this, that's for sure, like so if you, if you had your taskbar on the left side of the screen or whatever, and you came back and it was on the bottom, you're like, okay, so that changed, I mean, and maybe that broke, maybe you'd know what it was but I just installed something keeping me on win 10 is that?

13:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't like wasting that. That uh, vertical real estate right, yeah, I want to keep it off on the side out of the way. It doesn't need to be that big.

13:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's weird that they settled on the bottom of the screen, because most screens are wider than they're taller, and so I think they're just following what most people do.

13:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that also follows what the default is, which is not necessarily representative of what anyone wants. I think people just don't think about it.

13:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I was contemplating getting a small like 10-inch 1080p screen and just have the taskbar on that and that's all it's for. Yeah, Right. Yeah.

13:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like you want the touch bar that was on the Mac, it's a touch bar.

13:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, but you want it to be just the taskbar.

13:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's funny Actually you can just hide it right, you could hide the thing I?

14:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I bet that bugs me too, because it makes all the windows twitch and some of them don't twitch, right If?

14:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you in Ubuntu, linux. I'm not sure how far back this goes, but if you make it not a panel so it looks like a dock, like the Mac OS 10 dock, one of the options is, if you maximize a window or just drag it over, that it actually just hides, then yeah, and that's smart. You know like, and that's it.

14:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so we'll never get that sorry, are you talking about thoughtful ux?

14:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, it's funny how much energy is put into this, but it is the probably the most important ux feature, right?

14:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you use every day, yeah you know, well, we're okay, so we're literally gonna, we're gonna talk about that exact thing very soon, because uh, there is work happening on the start menu. Go figure, but more I don't like you know microsoft ui. It's kind of glacial um as it should be.

14:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I you know I hate it when they change things just for change sake apple's about to do that with all of their stuff. They're going to make all the icons round, yeah, and it's like, okay, but it's just everybody's just gonna throw everybody and and microsoft, because they're in businesses. They don't want to have to retrain people oh no, I used to get nuts right yeah um, one plus the phone company, right.

15:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I used to get every one of their devices for review and I I my reviews of these devices were pretty consistent it's mostly excellent cameras and so great. You know, they kind of went through this every time, so. But at one point they had round icons, right. And at one point and now Google does this too, I guess, or Samsung certainly does, but at one point they added the ability to customize the shape of those icons so you can have a square, rounded rectangle, rounded square, whatever squircle like we have on Samsung, right. So I changed it. I actually really like the way those look, the squircle kind of shape. It's really nice. It just looks. I think it looks great. So I changed it to that.

15:53
I wrote my review, all the pictures and then carl pay, who was, I think, running or part of one plus at that time he's at no nothing now he called it out on twitter and he's like come on, man, he's like. He said something like you, like you went with like the samsung shape, and I'm like, dude, your ui is customizable, so it could be whatever I want. I'm like I was. This was a, this was a compliment. I I've never gotten a review unit ever since that day. So I'm not saying those two things are related, but I'm sort of saying it. I mean I don't know, I don't know Too funny.

16:29
So anyway, hopefully what Apple will do, because Apple has come a long way with home screen customization. They're really resistant to that for a long time.

16:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah.

16:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So switching to like a shape is whatever, but what they should do is what I just described they should give you the ability to customize that.

16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That should be your choice. You know well, android does it right, where you can have any launcher you want, and every one. I mean there's some really wild launchers out there and I think that's great. You get to choose what you want. But apple won't do that ever.

16:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, even though this is the the always the problem with these default things. Like most people, we just this is why I just start the taskbar is on the bottom. Like most people, we just this is why the start the taskbar is on the bottom of windows. Most people just won't touch it Right. So set it to be what you want by default, but then give them the choice, and what you'll find is most people will not change anything.

17:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When did they turn off the ability to drag it to any side of the screen? When 11.

17:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So when they went to 10, from 10 to 11, they, they know. So, to be fair, I'm not, no, I'm not being fair, so to I'm not, how am I? I'm not defending this, but windows 11 taskbar and start menu are basically new code. So even though the old code is still in there to some degree, the the code for those two uis is new. Yeah, so they had they created from. I hate to say, I don't want to say they had to, but they. There are some legacy things built into those things that they were trying to get by.

17:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever, yeah, I understand, yeah, I get it yeah but it makes sense, but it's.

17:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you also feel like for the 1.0 release maybe you know, it's like the right click thing. Like right click menus in windows 10 could have hundreds and hundreds of items or multiple toolbars you can put down there. They stripped away all this stuff and of course you're going to hear from the guys who want that stuff, you know. So I don't know, I I'm not, I'm not defending it. I guess I'm just explaining it. But you know they pulled the Stevenson off again, this one. They were like, well, you know, based on telemetry data, no one was really using this. It's like, yeah, except for those people that are the most vocal.

18:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the noisy ones.

18:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Power users that have specific setups.

18:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's to the noisy ones, the crybabies, the whiners. Here's to the flatulators, the ones who would probably like to get something done, but just never do yeah yeah, exactly well that that was sanofsky's thing about um bookmarks in ie back in the day.

18:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we're a bunch of us in a room, all mvps and rds, like how many of you use bookmarks. The whole room puts up his head. It's like look at the telemetry. It's one half of one percent the fact that you all happen to be in the room um that seems a little suspicious.

19:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I'm just saying well, but it's also a little short-sighted, because you're waiting everyone equally when, in fact, the people who would customize these features might be more influential with others yeah and you know are going to be the types of blogs and twitter accounts and whatever, and complain.

19:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know yeah and it's why he's angry all the time. Well, all we did was say we're not going to put a dev on the bookmarks. The bookmarks are going to be identical in ie9 and when they and they were that's fine, just leave it alone.

19:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's actually all we ever wanted. We just want you to leave it alone, perfect, yeah and did you know I I? I'm gonna jump ahead one, just because we're talking about this now, because you guys will remember this um, a couple years ago, microsoft published this insipid video describing how they designed the windows 11 start menu as originally perceived right originally, uh really is that the one where they had the design she's like, she's like, yeah you know, it's like, clearly, mac users, designers who have never seen the start menu, or like when you're designing a feature like the start menu.

20:13
It was the grossest video, terrible so you know, a couple weeks back we got a rumor which uh, was true, right that they are working on a new version of the start menu. So there have been all these obvious complaints about the start menu. And they're obvious because all you have to do is use it to see what the problems are, right, so you could do something like well, I don't want you know, I don't know why you would do this, but let's say, for some reason you deleted a bunch of the pinned icons at the top. That space is never recovered, it just sits there blank, it's empty, it's just taking up space. It's unbelievable, like the thing doesn't do basic overflow or underflow, I guess in this case, you know, the recommended section is this weird combination of recommended like documents that they get through various means recently installed apps, suggested apps, suggested documents. You know it's like this weird Frankenstein monster of like terribleness. And so the initial change to this start menu was to give you the ability to have more space for the top or the bottom without fixing any of the problems. So now they've undergone this big push to make the start menu better, you know, like go figure Right, and so they still pins, they still have recommended, but now they have all apps in the in the main display.

21:36
You can turn any of those off, you can expand or contract them in place and the all apps view has three views the for the place and the all apps view has three views the default one, which is like the app library is in iOS it's like a I forget the term, I'm sorry, there's a word for this collections or whatever they are, of different types of apps, categories, I guess, category view probably. So you can have a grid view, which is like all the apps that start with a certain letter on the same line, if they fit. Or you can have the standard view, which is like all the apps to start with a certain letter on the same line, if they fit. Or you can have the standard view, where it's like one app done as they go. And yeah, there you go, like you know, between the stuff you can kind of already do, like turn off suggestions, you know, only show apps and or documents and recommended, et cetera.

22:20
They finally gave us the things that we've been asking for, which is like turn off that section, you know, have it be bigger or smaller on the fly, like you might have a bunch of stuff in there but only want to show a little most of the time, but then you click an expand button, go and grab the stuff out whatever you're going for. So I'm not saying it's perfect, but in using it like it's immediately and obviously better and it's cheap to say this is what they should have shipped the first time. Better, and it's cheap to say this is what they should have shipped the first time. But it does have that feel which is how you know they kind of maybe are on the right track.

22:48
Right, because there were so many regressions in the initial version of windows 11 so that, if I remember correctly, yeah, it was one of those new features they announced last week. On the same day, they announced those new surface devices. Um, it is not in the insider program yet, I believe, um, but if you know if you can use vibe tool or something like that, you can enable it. If you want to, um, I have it. You know, I think it looks great.

23:18
So we'll see you know it's gonna, it will happen eventually, um, probably soon, and I think this is one of those features that is actually going to be tied to 25 h2, even though they're not saying that yet. You know, because, god forbid, maybe they'll now set a build, he says hilariously so there you go.

23:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway. We'll see. That's next week, we Yep. I'm just sort of resonating on the idea there might be a vibe channel in Insiders soon. A vibe channel, what's?

23:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that we got everything else. What's a vibe channel?

23:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My vibe is depressed.

23:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you got it. Oh, vibe coding, you mean no?

23:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just vibe. Just vibe channel in the Insiders.

24:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're just going to rename these things so they don't make any sense. Like they could call the Canary Channel Chaotic Evil. Let's just have names like that.

24:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What would the Vibe Channel be like? We don't know what you're going to get. Yeah, we're experimenting this weekend.

24:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Here it is.

24:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's cool, don't worry about it, it's all right For those people who just don't give a crap. It's like the type of people who go to Costco and like I think I'm going to buy a car. You know, like I just like you, just don't have any opinions about anything.

24:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I went to buy a car and instead I bought a coffin. Yeah, yeah, right, it's a coffin, and they put wheels on it.

24:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's a coffin.

24:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Every time I go to Costco I find a kid asleep on a pallet. I'm like look, they sell children a six pack, please.

24:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a six pack you guys can carry yourself all right, yeah, um this I don't even know what we're talking about anymore.

24:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, so, okay, yeah, this is something. Um, this came. I had a meeting with qualcomm recently, but because you just said, um costco, or we just talked about costco, um, you know, back in the day, in the united states this is different in different places, obviously, but uh, we had a bunch of electronic retailers for a long time. Yeah, oh yeah, I remember that radio shack, yeah, yeah. We had, you know, electric. What was it called Electronic boutique?

25:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
software et cetera.

25:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We had the big ones, comp USA, remember them. Comp USA right With the store than store right. So we don't have those anymore. So we have best buy. And then we have costco, and costco has become increasingly important to pc makers.

25:29
So you're starting to see in both of those retailers the store in a store concept that we used to see, a comp usa. So, for example, co-pilot plus pc it, by the end of this summer we'll have a store in a store inside every costco the United States Interesting it's, it's like because there's fewer places for people to go and see something.

25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I on the radio show. When I was talking to the unwashed masses, I would tell people it's okay to buy a computer at Costco.

25:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Cause they have such a liberal return. Exactly, it's how you want to do it.

26:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they used to have last year's model. You wouldn't be able to get. Oh no, no, it's different now. That's changed, hasn't it yeah?

26:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it is. There's a little Apple section in there. Now there's a Samsung section for phones. They have all the smart speaker stuff. The price is the same, though no, it's yes, and they have sales and stuff like that too.

26:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But increasing return policy is the thing. That's why you would do it. Costco is the best, yeah, the problem is, you know, do you really want to return a PC?

26:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because odds are you bought it because you needed to use it, right?

26:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, no, fair enough, but your only option is If it didn't, work right or whatever you want to turn it in and maybe get a better model or something. The thing is like you could probably go back much later and be like all right, I think I'm done with this, you can.

26:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean they're very liberal on that yeah, yep, mostly because they stiff the vendor in the process, probably.

26:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you buy it, you do your tax.

26:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what we want. That's what we want from that company, right? Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what these big box stores look like in a couple of months. They're going to look like little box stores, Cause you know well, so they're big enough. They probably I don't know how this works everywhere, but like they either lease or rent or whatever, or own that property it's I I don't really know how that works and I think it's going to be based on that, because if it's rent those, they're going to go.

27:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They'll go. They're eventually gonna be like yeah, we're done here, thanks, you know they'll walk out. Yep, yeah, I don't know I, you know, I, that's interesting. Uh, and of course, the tariff went down in china, but it's still 30, which is still a pretty hefty chunk, I so I I described I think.

27:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know if it was on the show or I could have been to privately to friends. I have no ideaiffs are like a roller coaster, Literally you go up, you go down like red light, if it's working properly. You don't know what's next, and then your head gets whipped around. You know. Suddenly you're upside down Jump scares. Yep, and then when you're done, you throw up.

27:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's. It's so funny because I looked, I looked at this. You know my I am soon going to be living on my retirement, you know, like tomorrow, how scary is that? And it's really scary and it was down a lot. And then then this morning Lisa and I looked at her and it was like, wow, it just it's back. It's so confusing, it's best probably not to look.

28:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have a friend who overreacts to everything. Right, and so this is long-term savings. Obviously he actually pulls his money out of the stock market in these times. You know yeah and uh I don't know that he puts it under a mattress per se, but like it's no, you just leave.

28:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You leave it in the ira or the 401k.

28:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But my wife one time just finally said to him uh, you need to understand something. Um, we left our money in during the 2008 financial crisis, during whatever, and because we did, we now have like a million dollars.

28:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you miss a lot.

28:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like, you have no idea what you're doing.

28:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to time it.

28:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just right, you're making it, you can't, but you can't, you can't, Like you can't. You can get lucky once maybe, but you don't do stuff like that. That's just not.

28:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's true as long as you aren't going to be with, you know, living on it. But then you get to a point close to my age, not yours yet where you have no more window to get it back. You see what I'm saying.

29:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do but I mean, ideally you have done things correctly, and I know you have. I mean, I'm not going to be no. Well, that in other words, like this year, you know if you're living on whatever not you, leo. But if someone has, like I'm getting 80 grand a year from retirement, but I guess this year it's only going to be 50 because the market went south or whatever it is, you need to be able to withstand that, Like that needs to be. That's on you. But that's reality though. Yeah, that's on you. Yeah, that's on you. Yeah, it's reality, and it's scary. So maybe you're not going to Europe this year, buddy. Well, I'm not. We're doing one more trip. No, I'm serious, we can't afford any more big trips.

29:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's it, we're done. We have one more that we paid for in 2020. Oh jeez, and we're going to take that one and then that'll be it, Because I yeah, I don't not because I mean I could, but I don't know if it's a smart thing to do, given what might happen in a year or two or whatever. So it's better to be prudent, and it's, by the way, one of the main reasons why I'm still working. I'm working well beyond my retirement my best by date.

30:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I didn't mean to turn this into a retirement podcast, but a couple of things. To what you just said, though, is like I feel like a lot of people's concepts of retirement are dated. No one actually wants to sit on the beach every single day with it. You know, like this, this sounds good until you do it for three days in a row, or whatever it is, you know, but the other thing is, you know you're going to go through phases, and you don't know when things are going to happen to you, but at happen to you, but at some point you are going to slow down and you're not going to spend as much in the right during those times so you could make a case like for traveling more early in retirement and then slowing it down later because you're going to just naturally right you know?

30:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, that was the case I was making, but uh, I don't know if I can keep making it anyway, that's not. That's neither here there. Let me make a little money now though, if you don't mind, yeah, pause and come back with a lot more, including so co-pilot hey, buddy. I guess it's safe to say hey, co-pilot now, but at some point we're gonna have to.

31:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We did this. It's gonna be the next trigger phrase. We have to have a phrase. So start thinking now we call siri shlomo oh, I'm gonna start thinking about how I can just keep doing it and be a real jerk about it. Hey, copilot, delete C colon backslash.

31:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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33:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice. See, that's another one that should be. I've always said this, like it.

33:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My um sister has a daughter named alexa can we tell you how hilarious it is to use amazon things?

33:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
she can't it's terrible, right, you should be able to customize that, because I would call this thing something I can't say on the air I know, meathead, hey, idiot, yeah, okay, you dumb, dumb what what now?

34:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the one I really wish you could change is siri, because there are so many words that sound like you're so close.

34:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, her name yes, I say the word seriously all the time. That's the one, all the time this is might be the most common word. I say after the yeah, yeah.

34:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, good news you could get $100 in the Lopez versus Apple settlement. You know what I say to that, seriously, you know? All right, anyway, what's coming next? Windows Insider program?

34:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This just happened. Today. Microsoft is testing across all channels a hey co-pilot wake up word, which is actually a phrase, not a word or a term, but it's opt-in or the feature will be opt-in. It's rolling out across all channels, like I said, via an update to the Copilot app, which I have not gotten yet. I keep checking for this. I can't wait to play with this. It's obviously a replacement for hey Cortana phrase we all know and love and miss. Um, we should use yeah. Yeah, exactly, I'm just going to fight, going to fight progress there.

35:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like the one thing. No, it's not going to trigger at all.

35:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there's a lot of I was just looking at because of this actually I was looking at copilot a couple of things about copilot app. This is the copilot app in windows 11. Um, I don't know if anyone's noticed this, but if you look at this app, which is now allegedly a native app or whatever, it uses fonts that are nowhere else in windows, like ever, like anywhere. I've never seen these fonts. I don't even know what it is, and so it's different looking, and that makes me wonder sometimes if there isn't something you know happening, right, like Google just announced all these Android changes and, you know, maybe Microsoft's got some kind of UI thing coming, all right, so this is that. But, um, when you go into settings, there's, there's this stuff in there that might surprise you. Like you can tie a copilot to your phone and it can use your phone as the basis for some of the things that you might be able to do, and that will expand, obviously, over time. It has different voices, not in windows, but on mobile. You can change the speed at which the voices play, so you can speed them up, slow them down, you know, whatever it's like, there's all this stuff, right? So this is going to be one of them, but it's also something you could do today, assuming you've configured it or not change the configuration, which is it wants.

36:30
It's one of about 200 apps, so it wants to take the alt space bar shortcut keyboard right and that brings it up into quick view or whatever that little, the small view, is called Um. If you hold down alt key, uh space, today, it should go into voice mode, which is what this will do. Right? So this is like a voice trigger for that action which makes sense. You're you, you want to talk to it, so you address it. Like I do this to my wife all the time. I'm like Stephanie, stephanie, stephanie, she's like what? And I'm like I like this is 50% of all the conversations I have with my wife. So, um, yeah, so we'll see. I like I. As soon as I saw this, I was like yeah, obviously they're doing this. Like this, to me, is the most obvious thing in the world.

37:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's fine, the interface people expect.

37:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and you know I think we've talked about this. It's weird to me how unnatural it is, or was, to speak to any of those assistants, whether was cortana, google, amazon, whatever and there is something weird that goes on with, um, these newest, these new ai assistants, these new ai companions, whatever you want to call them, chatbots, where it's. It's getting a little too natural, like it surprises me, because I'm naturally kind of um, uh cynical. I know it's surprising uh, about this kind of stuff and you know I just did an episode or recorded you won't see it for a while but um, for hands on windows, about co-pilot vision, and I find myself like being polite to this thing, like, uh, you know, thanking it, um, apologizing, you know it's helped that.

38:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sam Altman says it's costing them millions when you do that.

38:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It does a little bit, and the fact that that guy is as robotic as a human being can be also makes it kind of ironic.

38:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think Zuckerberg still owns that. Okay, yeah.

38:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, okay, fair enough. So, yeah, I mean, it's kind of okay. So there's that. I'd hope to have this done for patch Tuesday and then for today, but I'm still trying to figure out the right way to publish this, but I'm working on this. You know, update to my Windows 11 feature tracker, right, the, the roadmap or whatever, and I think I said this earlier.

38:45
But my, my suspicion here is that dev channel especially, and like this new start menu, is stuff that is technically targeting 25H2. Even though that distinction is kind of pointless because all the features are going to come everywhere. But if you want to I don't know kind of place it in a milestone release of whatever kind. That's just how I view this, but we'll see. We'll see how it actually comes down. Know, release of whatever kind? That's just how I view this, but we'll see. We'll see how it actually comes down. So there have been new features released to the dev and beta channels, both of which are on 24H2 or can be in a beta channels case, and they're just improvements to the stuff we already have, right? So Microsoft announced an AI agent for settings, which seems like not a great use of AI to me, but okay, fine, that was originally You're trying to find a setting.

39:31
Well, yeah, I mean this is I'm sure I use this example. But AI, like any software, can help you learn how to do something, but it could also just do it for you, right? And so I think AI must use this example. Like Microsoft Word, all the office, the primary office apps got that kind of search bar thing at the top at one point and one of the things you could go up there you could just like ask good questions and it was like how do I make? This is a stupid one. Like how do I make text bold?

40:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It would be like, okay, I was merging cells in Excel because I couldn't find it on the fricking toolbar. So there I am in that text box saying merge these cells.

40:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
like oh, here we go that's fascinating, because the ribbon was supposed to solve every single ui problem in office, but and so uh, uh, but eventually, like, what you really want is for that thing just to do it right, and so, uh, you know, if you ever, in the very early days of copilot and windows, you could say something like, uh, hey, how do I turn on dark mode? It'd be here's how you do it, but the goal here is for it to do it, just do it. I guess settings is a box of chocolates of its own kind. There's a million settings in there. It's unclear where stuff is.

40:50
One of the things I ran into just this week, for example, is I have a laptop that requires, well, that works better with a faster, bigger, more wattage, I guess, whatever you want to call that more powerful charger than a 65 watt typical laptop charger right, but it works fine with a 65 watt charger. So when you plug that thing in, you get a pop-up from. It says from power and what's the battery or whatever it's called, and it says, hey, this is going to slow charge. This is not ideal. You should use the charger that comes with this thing. You're like okay, but I want to turn that off. I don't want to turn off all notifications from power and battery, right, but I do want to turn that off. I get it, I saw it, I acknowledge it. I'd like to move on.

41:29
Actually, I have a thing about this later in the show too, but anyway. So I looked this thing up. Of course you go to well, first I went to power and battery, or whatever it's called, and I went through every single setting. There's nothing in there about notifications. So I'm like okay, I'm going to say I'm going to have to Google this like a normal person, and I did.

41:52
And it turns out that this thing is in a different part of settings and not the part you would think it's in Bluetooth and devices. And then you go to USB and this is a desktop PC, so I don't show. No, it's still there. That's hilarious. It says show a notification If this PC is charging slowly over USB. Okay, so the notification is called something, but the thing that triggers it is something else. Hilarious, anyway, that works. You could just turn it off and then you still get your power and battery notifications and everything we have is terrible because we use windows. Anyway. Yeah, settings is my point. There was only that set settings has a lot of settings, so so maybe this is okay, like if you could talk to your computer and say turn on dark mode. That's pretty fast, right, ass does it. I guess that's okay. I don't know. I just don't want like an ass jeeves tile type butler telling me how to find you know, like helping, like yes, sir, you know, and talk well and plus, it'd also be wrong because they keep moving things around.

42:43
Yes, exactly, um, yes, exactly, there's also new text actions coming to click to do um, so there's summarize, create and rewrite. Those were previously available on snapdragon x based computers. Now you get them in preview on amd and intel. Um, they're us english only for now, but, um, that will of course change over time too. And then some other small things related to dynamic lighting, which nobody uses, and whatever. And a fact in settings, for some reason, do you ever, have you ever looked at this thing? If you go to system settings? So, uh, setting system. And then where is it oh about? There's, there's like a fact in here. It's not on this computer, oh, cause it's in the Insider Program. So, yeah, that's what I want. I came here to read, thank you.

43:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love a FAC. A FAC is awesome.

43:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then Microsoft kind of separate to the builds. They're not tied to builds but they've been updating Paint and Notepad with various AI features and to date those things have used those AI credits in some cases and in others they're just free, but it's tied to your Microsoft account and they're actually starting to open this up to enter ID accounts as well, which makes sense because those guys can have Microsoft 365 Copilot accounts, which I don't know that they call them credits, but I guess if you're in that system, this will become part of what you get for free or not for free, for your paid subscription, et cetera et cetera, because this is also Microsoft Designer right Like why not just integrate?

44:17
Designer into Paint? Yeah Well, that's a good question. So they did integrate it into Photos actually, so maybe they will. Yeah, that's good, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know, yeah, I don't know. It's funny. Like, notepad and paint are two apps I actually use every single day, yep, but I also have this thought like does anyone else use this? You?

44:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
know, like I, I still have a reflex to pop up a notepad to jot things down. Yeah, even though.

44:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I use.

44:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
OneNote and loop because I hate myself, because you hate yourself.

44:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to say, yep, there's, yep, there's definitely some self-loathing involved there. And then, previous to this, and also across all channels, that co-pilot vision feature I was talking about has added two new features in preview. So we'll see US only. It's A-B testing, so you'll get it when you get it. But what is two-app support?

45:05
This brings up that story I just told last week about when they added Wi-Fi support, or sorry to net, you know, to network connection support to windows xp. And I asked the guy, the russian guy, why not just have an arbitrary number? And he said impossible. Um, now they have two app support in copilot vision. So the way copilot vision works right now is when you enable it from copilot in windows, it will give you a menu of the available apps and then it can work off of what it sees on screen in that one app. But now it will work with two apps at the same time. But why not just have an arbitrary number of apps? It's impossible. That is impossible.

45:43
And then the second feature is called Highlights and this makes sense to me. So, and honestly, we saw a really basic version of this. If you open File Explorer right now in Windows 11, you'll see that the quick access, where it has like this weird rectangular or rounded rectangle that I hate and people complain about it. But you can't turn this feature off to my knowledge. I've never figured out how, and this is a problem with other apps, but this is the app where I see it the most. So it's an accessibility feature.

46:10
It's designed to show you what's highlighted so that if you're using a non-standard like keyboard mouse control system you know, maybe you're controlling something with your mouth or you have a different kind of controller or whatever it might be you know what's selected immediately. Okay, I respect that, but I just I'd like to turn it off. Firstly, um, they, okay, I respect that, but I'd like to turn it off. Firstly, they're going to add that type of a feature to Copilot Vision and the idea there is. You'll say, when you say to Copilot, show me how dot, dot, dot, whatever it is, it will actually highlight the things on screen and go through the steps. So it's kind of a yeah, it's actually a little more squiggly looking.

46:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
To be clear, the merge shells icon was in the toolbar, I just couldn't see it. Yeah, it was one of the 2100 icons in the toolbar.

46:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm surprised you didn't see it, Richard. That's weird.

46:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was also 16 pixels by 16 pixels, something like that, or whatever. Yeah, and then I mentioned this last week, but Google did have that Android event I was expecting. The only thing I really expected was here, like Android 16 is ready.

47:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the schedule and that was the one thing we did not get.

47:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's a bunch of stuff coming, but that material expressive design language thing, which I think looks really cool, and it's something I think we kind of need on windows 11, like a little bit of a just a, you know, splash of paint, customization, make it pretty if people want that. Um, I think it's cool.

47:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's an aesthetic to material 3 and I I don't know that I love it, but I recognize that it's an aesthetic, yeah and and I guess the big feedback they've gotten from that, which actually I completely understand.

47:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's part of the thing that that I didn't really realize I was getting from Android, but then they said it and I was like, yeah, it's kind of boring, you know, it makes every app and every UI look the same. Yeah, and it's like, yeah, so now it's, you know, you're going to be able to, you know, kind of infuse it a little bit with color and animation and stuff. It looks pretty cool. They're bringing it to where OS, where OS is very specifically now for round screens only, and these, you know, as you go through a list, they kind of adapt to the shape as they go by, which I think is really cool. And then they're bringing Gemini to like everything like Android auto, android TV, the watch, you know, everywhere, of course, they are Um, anyway, I, I looked at this and I thought, you know we need this, like we.

48:34
You know, apple is about to announce next month, right in june, um, some, the ui change that leo just mentioned. These guys have just announced their ui thing. Windows 11 is very specifically designed to be familiar to people that primarily use mobile devices.

48:49
right, that's why everything's in the center of curved corners, etc. I think it's time. Maybe we call it I don't know windows 12 just a thought you're crazy.

48:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's not such a thing, that's never happening.

49:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also, uh, yeah, I'm gonna wait for the mac to come out with a new os first you're gonna have to have something to copy, really, I, I mean no, android XR, which is their.

49:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what is XR? Is it extended reality? It's AR, you know, vr, mixed reality. Whatever I got to say the little they did a two-second demo and it looks a lot like Vision Pro and that's interesting, right, because this is going to come to a variety of devices at different price points. I can assure you none of them are going to be thirty five hundred dollars. Um, interesting, so we'll see what that looks like. But that just the the real quick thing they did.

49:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I thought that looked pretty good but, yeah, trying to go down the open path as well and said it, you know, instead of trying to do the walled garden thing, yeah, yeah, the other thing is a lot of what Google announced is so Google or Android 16 will be finalized, whatever that means, anymore next month.

50:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That, vaguely, they said that Pixel devices will get it first, samsung devices will get it eventually. Everyone else will get it, of course, but a lot of the stuff they talked about I don't think it's coming in next month. I think this is, I think this is a lot of this. Stuff is further out and that was the big. Uh, the thing I put in the notes about that was like this is this is what we see in windows, right? Um, I just mentioned that.

50:27
You know, this new start menu in some ways is going to be tied to what I think of as, and probably will be, 25h2, but it's also coming to 24H2, whatever else is supported at the time. It also doesn't really matter because there's no, it's not like Windows 95 was released on August 11, whatever, or August, whatever date in 1995, and then we used that thing for years 1995. And then we use that thing for years. Microsoft releases these things over time, they roll out, they got, you know, new features come every single month, like it almost doesn't matter and and this, really this changes the dynamic a lot, you know. Think about iOS and the way they added Android or Apple intelligence over several releases and still are working on that.

51:09
Yeah, um, android is doing this absolutely well, you know, they're trying, man, just get you know. Just, they're cute, it's almost in time for the next wwd, they're close, but um, but this is what, absolute, what we see in windows right there. You know the notion of something being frozen in time and that being the version is yeah, it's not a thing anymore. It's not the way we do things now and I I'm old enough to not be super comfortable with this Like and plus, I write books about this stuff and I I would really like to be able to say, if you have this, then you have this, and it's like Nope, if you have this, you might have this, you might have this shape of your search pill?

51:42
Yeah, yeah, exactly that was a great example.

51:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean nothing changed.

51:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just brought so part of what I've been doing since I've been home now for the past, like is it two weeks to a couple weeks? Whatever is bringing up computers and getting them back up to date which, when they've been offline for four months or more.

51:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yeah, it's surprisingly time and in the insiders program, right like that's the great some of them.

52:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and and so I have a like an all-in-one desktop thing that the co-pilot button was in the far right of the taskbar, and I was like man when was that?

52:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I haven't seen that. It's almost like an archaeological dig, yep and it.

52:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It literally prompted me to install what the heck is that thing called like? When you want to upgrade from windows 10 to 11, you have to install this microsoft app that makes sure your system is compatible. I can't think of the name of it. For some reason clean up something like pc. I can't remember the name of it, but it prompted me to install that I was like what? So I guess I don't know if I went from 22 to 24 h2 and one whack or something I have no idea.

52:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The real purpose for recall, the real purpose of recall could be bad decision making, archaeology. You just go through all the different you.

52:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could literally say when did this change?

52:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
give me all the ui variations over the past year on this?

52:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, are you gonna be like, hey, copilot, um, what am I running? You know what is this thing? Yeah, okay, so that's windows 11. Uh, mostly there is also some windows 10 stuff going on, interestingly. So we're less than six months away from Windows 10. Leaving support October, october, but not really right. So there's a three-year extended support timeframe for businesses. There's a one-year extended support timeframe for consumers.

53:28
But you have to pay for it, right, you have to pay for it. It's $31, but it's one of the options, right? If you're like, well, what am I going to do with this computer Something you probably haven't thought about at all, most people right Now you're confronted by this. This is one of the choices. You can be like I'm going to punt on this thing, I'm going to give Microsoft 30 bucks $31, and I'm just going to get security updates for next year, and then I'll figure something out later and then you'll probably wait till the last second next year. It's fine, that's your choice.

53:54
But the question all along here has been well, okay, but will Microsoft blink, as they have in the past, and actually just extend it generally? Right, and and you know, they did this with XP, they did this with seven. You could make the argument today there are more people than ever using computers. This might be a thing, and they're not going to. I am positive of this now, and the reason I'm positive is there are too many outs now. So, for example, there is the extended support program, which we already knew about. We've known about that since last year. There is the extended support program, which we already knew about. We've known about that since last year, but they just announced, after saying otherwise for about two years, that they are now going to support Microsoft 365, the desktop apps and the services and everything tied into them on Windows 10 through October 2028, which, by the way, is the exact date of the end of three years of extended support. Yes, not coincidental right.

54:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and of course they are. It's the same customers Right Of course they are.

54:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So to me, not so much for consumers, obviously, but for businesses, which is most of them, right. I mean, yeah, no, it definitely is most of them. I realize that for consumers, this probably is mostly zero. If you're running Windows 10 on whatever computer right now, you probably have not thought about this, or thought about it enough that you just do not care, not super interested in upgrading. We talked, I think, last week, about some of the options you have otherwise, but I think that's what we're looking at. I think this is it, I think this is the game, this is the plan, right, we're going to go forward with that.

55:30
I will say, tied to all this, microsoft just did a post about which surface PCs can and cannot run Windows 11. Now, yeah, so for the people watching the show, listening, or people who are just in the tech industry or technical in nature, whatever, this is not interesting, right? This is, in some ways, this is just obvious. Um, if you have an intel eighth gen processor or newer in general, or equivalent on amd, so you can upgrade the way, for the most part.

56:02
Yep, just speaking. Generally. There are exceptions, right, but uh, but you know, the people running surface pcs don't really think about this stuff. They don't know that. So I think listing it out is fine.

56:16
But in this post there's a very interesting mention which caused me to go and look at this to see what this looked like of the fact that your PC, your existing PC, doesn't have to end up in a landfill, which has been the big complaint about this event, right? So you know, obviously the Linux guys are all like oh, you can put Linux on there, you could probably put Chrome OS Flex on a lot of these PCs. You could do all kinds of things, right, you could just coast for some amount of time, et cetera, et cetera. But Microsoft and most major PC makers are actually and I guess they do this all the time. It's not really anything new, but it's an interesting reminder They'll take this computer from you that you can trade it in. So I checked.

56:59
For example, I have an 8th Gen Intel Core based Surface Pro, no Surface Book 2. And it can barely run Windows 10. I mean, I'm not Windows 11, like whatever it is, running Windows 10. I've resist. I'm not, you know, windows 11, like whatever it is running Windows 10. I've resisted the Windows 11 upgrade offer on this particular computer just to see how that goes and I could trade. I'm not going to get these, this is off the top of my head. But if I just traded it in, microsoft or whoever's Microsoft's partner is here would probably give me I think it's 70 or $80, which is probably exactly what it's worth. But if I traded in toward the purchase of a new surface PC, I think it's like two 25 to 30, somewhere in there Interesting, yeah, and that's I know what I.

57:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's pretty smart I just dropped a group of old laptops off and they're 11th gen.

57:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so those are the local library.

57:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean they have four of them.

57:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean they can form them.

57:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so those computers should run. They could run windows 11. Fine, um, I don't know what the plan is for obsoleting those things. I mean, that's going to be something we'll be dealing with in the next year or two, but we'll see what that looks like. You know, windows 11 was kind of a nice line in the sand in a way. No one was happy about it, but at least it was pretty clear cut. And now what you know, because, remember, with Windows 10, it's like well, it's supported for the lifetime of the device. Okay, what's the lifetime of the device? We'll see how it goes.

58:15
Nobody knew there was no plan for that right. That's a great non-answer right Just sounds good. They were making it up as they went along. They had no idea. So I think that's really interesting.

58:23
I mean, and that's fair, like I do this with phones all the time, I do it with tablets, I've never traded in a that I can think of. Yeah, I don't think I've ever traded in a laptop, but actually, why not? Right? And even if it's something that's not viable as a computer going forward or something, I mean, at least now it's not your problem and these companies will ostensibly do the recycling part for you, right? So it doesn't have to end up in a landslide, a landfill or whatever. It could end up in a landslide. They have bigger problems if there's a landslide, but we'll see.

59:01
So I thought that was. I'm just throwing that out there as kind of an interesting little asterisk on that conversation. And then, just because we're talking about Surface, as everyone knows, last week, early last week, microsoft announced the new 13-inch Surface laptop and the new 12-inch Surface Pro lower-end Snapdragon processors. What they didn't say was they were getting rid of the 13-point-inch entry-level Surface laptop and the entry-level 13-inch Surface Pro. So lines still exist, they're still side by side, they're still part of the same family, but the you know the the gap between the new products and the old ones at the low end were about a hundred dollars, but now they're closer to three hundred dollars because they've removed some of the lower end original and and I wonder if they're actually out of them, like they've sold yeah.

59:51
I mean so. And look, the word cynical has come up more than once on today's show. I am cynical, but I have to say I just don't have a problem with this. Like I saw a video where some guy was complaining about all the things like the new Surface laptop didn't have and it's like yeah, dude, that's the compromise you make to hit a price point. Like there's a market for people who might want the smaller device for portability reasons, might not need or want or care about certain features that you think are essential, like a camera version of Windows Hello instead of a fingerprint reader or whatever it might be the things it might not have. Where it's like oh, this is a piece of garbage, you know the, the other, the other service laptops better, or whatever. And it's like, yeah, it is like it but it's also five hundred dollars more like.

01:00:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What do you think?

01:00:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's like dude. Like you know, there's a range of prices for different. You know, levels of functionality. This is the way the whole world works. What are we complaining about, so?

01:00:49
anyway, I it's just youtube link bait I oh, 100% yeah 100% yeah, this particular guy actually linked to my website, so I'm okay with it. But the point is, it's um, no, it's I, I. This is like the you know there's so much to complain about, why make anything up? It's kind of that kind of argument. It's like, guys, we can be cynical about stuff. That's terrible, but but there's a reality occurring here with how much things cost. It's Microsoft. They're not a big PC maker. They don't get the awesome prices that like a Lenovo or HP might get because of the volume of PCs they sell, et cetera, et cetera. So I think these devices are nice. I think the existing ones are great. I think these new ones are good. And I'm not. It's hard, you know, again, it sounds it's terrible, but it's like I mean I wouldn't use one, but I think you should use one. No, I mean I don't. It's hard not to go down that route?

01:01:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but I recognize that different people younger guys, younger kids or whatever Well, remember there's going to be a bunch of people, maybe older people, with old computers, who are not going to be able to keep running Windows 10. They're going to be on the market for it inexpensive replacement, and maybe they want something simpler and smaller and more portable.

01:02:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't need all the advanced features, something that is about the same size as an iPad Pro but costs half as much as an actual computer and runs real apps.

01:02:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, there has to be a market for that product, I mean for the one weird app that they need, whatever, as long as it runs my print shop pro, I'm fine yeah yep, yep.

01:02:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How else could I do the hoa community newsletter every?

01:02:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
month at my 55 plus community exactly oh, now I got us all out of order. Let me mix it up the tiles. I can't see the screen.

01:02:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is that a T or an? I Nice.

01:02:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No. What made me think of it is that there was somebody in our Discord who says yeah, my parents 10-year-old computers I'm not going to be able to upgrade. I guess I have to buy them new PCs and that's the market. Do you thinkrosoft will make a big deal about the end of life, like, will they buy ads? Yeah well, I don't know I don't think they want to promote stuff now with consumers, right?

01:02:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, yeah, it's not like windows 10 bursts into flames november 25 well, no, that happens in 2029.

01:03:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, no, I think the hard thing here is that most people view computers as something they need for work. They're not usually as elegant as the phones they have, et cetera. There's a stigma kind of to it. We also have this history of upgrades have always been really hard and unreliable and we don't trust this stuff. And now it's like, oh, they want me to buy a new device. It's like, yeah, you're still using an iPhone 4, dude, of course they want you to buy a new device. Like you know, I don't know. I just don't think there's a lot of excitement. We're not going to see people lining up in front of a store to do this right.

01:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, the bigger thing here is that the new, that interesting.

01:03:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right now it looks like the old year, but I do think that this is preemptive because there will be some people who will go to an ipad and so of course that's in that price point.

01:03:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep then that form factor, uh, it's that.

01:04:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At least you can fund that off a little apple will absolutely have an event where they say, oh, they'll announce percent of people came to us from a pc to either mac or ipad. Right, yeah, because of the end of life, right of? Uh, oh, they're windows 10.

01:04:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're rubbing their hands, they can't wait, yep um it'll happen I want to take a little break here. There is a uh a question kit 9000 in the uh discord. If you want to take that, you can look at it. But okay, we will come back and talk more about microsoft and other things. Windows wise plus the back of the book with our picks of the week in the xbox and, of course, a little bit of brown liquor. Last of the australians, the last of the australians. I like the name. We'll talk about it in just a bit. You're watching windows weekly. We're glad you're here. Our show today, brought to you by our friends at threadlocker.

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01:08:03
I I feel so bad. What was it? Six thousand?

01:08:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
how many people? Oh, sorry, I'm muted. Um, I just wanted to the someone. Someone asked a question about W vision and surface pro.

01:08:13
So if I understand this question, um, don't, if you'd get a not like the standard wifi uh model of a surface pro 11 running a Snapdragon trip. It supports dolby vision, nice, yes, but apparently if you get a version with 5g it does not. So I I unfortunately I don't. I've not heard of this, but I also don't have that kind of device to even test that. So I I this is new to me. I I just tried to go to the. I did find the microsoft support or mic Microsoft community thread about this, which I assume is what he's referencing. Someone from Microsoft answers and says look, here's where it says it's supported, but actually that's not the 5G version. So I just don't know. I'm so sorry. Is it a hardware issue or is it a?

01:09:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never heard of it. I have't know. I just don't know. I'm so sorry. Is it a hardware issue? I've never heard of it. I have no idea. The error message is Dolby Vision playback isn't authorized, which sounds like copy protection.

01:09:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It sounds like it's a mistake. Microsoft does license Dolby Vision for Surface devices. It's listed in the. You can see it. You can see it in.

01:09:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet you.

01:09:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This will be fixed. Yeah but it's been a while because that device has been out since the fall right.

01:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oops, yeah so that's yeah.

01:09:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's been no movement on this since late last year. Yeah, so I'm so sorry, I don't know. I've never heard of this. I'll try to figure that out. That's kind of curious.

01:09:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That error message sounds like a licensing issue, not a hardware issue. But who knows, who knows?

01:09:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but I think it's a. I bet it's just a mistake in the system. But it's one they have not fixed right for a long, long time. So yeah, I don't know. I'm sorry. Okay, thank you Thank you for the question, Kit. Yeah, thanks. Anything else I can't answer, just throw it in there and I'll try to Leo make sure to bring it up, sorry, yes.

01:10:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so yes, now let's talk about layoffs.

01:10:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so Microsoft, actually 70 billion is probably right. I actually meant to look that up before they made a lot of money. They made a lot of money. It was 28 last quarter, but yeah, 28? Okay, well, whatever it was, it was a lot.

01:10:27
And obviously this is something I wanted to throw by you guys, because this is one thing I actually kind of struggle with. So Microsoft is going gangbusters. It is, at any given time, the biggest or second biggest company in the world by market value About a fourth of Apple, right? Yep, it is arguably more successful than it's ever been. You know, plus or minus, just the past couple months, right? I mean like, but the microsoft of today? You are right, it is 70, 70, okay, I, just, I just pulled that one, you made it up, but your memory was strong last week yeah, okay, so I, how does a company that makes so much money and is going to it's not like we're coming out of the pandemic and things are going south and, okay, we overhired and we made these mistakes how does one justify this?

01:11:17
Right, there have been rumors that Microsoft is looking to remove layers of middle management. They have said overtly we're trying to get um, to the point where everyone is kind of high performing, right? Um, I, seeing the story made me go on back and look at their earnings transcript, because this was the first time in many years I've actually listened to that post earnings conference call live, and something that Amy hood said stuck with me and I tried to find it and finally did, and she did sort of opaquely reference this. She said we continue to focus on building higher performing teams, increasing our agility by reducing layers, with fewer managers. Um, which is like a little preview. I mean, well, they've been doing this a little bit over time, but yeah, so now they lay off what amounts to about 3,000 people, right? Is that right? 6,000?

01:12:13
people Sorry 3% 6,000, yeah, 6,000 employees. This is globally, across all teams, all organizations within the company. And then their headcount has risen well, last time they talked about it, uh by about 2% since last year. So overall they'll end this fiscal year down about 1% from a employee count, including the wave.

01:12:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they did in January as well which layoffs. That was a tournament.

01:12:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, what was it? What do you call that? What's the term?

01:12:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
um, yeah, performance removals you've not performed well over the past year, so you're done, which they hadn't done in a long time, like I would argue that was the first time they've done performance removals since.

01:12:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, like I don't know how what sasha nadella looks like to people or how his leadership style appears or whatever it is, but I think the one thing that people don't understand well enough about this guy is how aggressive he is about employees and teams and product lines, kind of justifying their existence. And if you don't understand it, think about he killed Windows Phone right, this was one of those things where it's still controversial. There's still people like cannot believe this happened.

01:13:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And the line he used was we're not going to chase markets anymore, Right.

01:13:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And so to me this is on point for him, you know actually. But then again, like Richard said, it's not something they've really done a lot of and there were those periods of time where they were doing layoffs like everyone else in the gaming industry, part of the company. But as far as like looking at the company kind of globally and being like, all right, we're going to skim some off the top here, so I guess, off the bottom actually, right. So what do you guys say? Like microsoft just made 70 billion dollars yeah, and this was a these were just so this was nothing to do with your performance.

01:14:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This was literally cuts across all teams. Yep, I got calls from people laid off yesterday. I also got calls from managers who had to lay good people off yesterday.

01:14:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah people are pretty upset this is the first time in a while I haven't heard about from anyone directly, but that might be because most of the guys I know have now been laid off. Yeah, it's, but it's a weird situation because and it's the week before- build I don't know.

01:14:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then, and I know at least one that was laid off, yes, right, because some of this came out of NET and MAUI.

01:14:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think Miguel de Caza had tweeted, or whatever he does now something about this and I don't know what to say. This is one of those ones where I just don't know what to say. Is it AI? Infrastructure costs are finally starting to catch up with them and they got to save money somewhere else or will it show up in the quarterlies? No, I know but, but maybe they're looking ahead and they want to head it off, you know I don't know.

01:15:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is not enough money there's not enough money.

01:15:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like there is enough money, don't even know the layoffs don't represent enough money.

01:15:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They did. Oh, I see a billion in stock buybacks. This is not 10 billion worth of wages. Right, right that? This is 6 000 people and you're paying them a hundred grand Like yeah, yeah.

01:15:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I need that much money, right? So what's okay? Not a nice scale, is it literally? Well, okay, then that that suggests that what they're saying is correct, which is it's really about agility and efficiency and whatever I mean hopefully it's not.

01:15:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you're getting agility by scaring your workforce on a routine basis with random layoffs. I find that loud noises help sometimes. You know, and you know, you know this is about a billion dollars worth of annual salary. Your puss you've got to do. You know they give them, I think, 60 days or 90 days, like yep, it's not cheap to let that many people go. You did 10 billion stock buybacks right last quarter.

01:16:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, so I, I look I, there's a super. Just to bring up cynical again, there's a super cynical version of this story where my because of the way wall street is terrible that the net result from this from a financial markets perspective will be overwhelmingly positive. This company's doing all the right things, just saving money. They're blah, blah, blah. This stock price will go up and that whatever bump they get from the stock price will in fact pay for the changes that we just described.

01:16:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like that's terrible well, right at this moment they're up a half a percent. There you go, so on a $3 trillion capitalization, so okay.

01:16:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep. Meanwhile, jeff Bezos not at Microsoft, I know has bought it with his fourth or fifth private jet. This thing flies at the speed of light, or whatever the hell it is, and like what? What is happening? I don't know. I don't know what to say to people anymore. I don't know.

01:17:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really don't have an answer. Do you desperately need a stock bump just before build? Is that even necessary? This, you would think you're going to get a bump out of build anyway, for all the cool announcements you're about to make.

01:17:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean yeah, they better, right. I mean this is uh one of unless they have a special event, I mean this is one of two big milestones in a year for them where they're going to make AI-related events, ai-related announcements, rather.

01:17:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:17:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I really struggle with this.

01:17:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm with you. It is not like there isn't underperformance within an organization that large, but that's not what just happened. Right, you know what they did in january? Arguably was that was. Was that okay, that's not what happened this time.

01:17:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yeah, I, like I said I don't have, I can't, I don't, I, just I, I. I always try to find the logic in things and this is where we're at.

01:18:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It makes me unhappy to think that the fear thing makes sense that makes me unhappy.

01:18:13
It should, yeah, it's not good and it really has been since the pandemic. I think it was just before the pandemic they were starting to make noises in this direction. But that was also a time when you also get a sense that the employees were starting to make noises in this direction. But that was also a time when you also get a sense that the employees were, you know, starting to get organized against doing work in the military, and there used to be walkouts like and then the pandemic hit and everybody's going to love everybody and we all huddled down to make it go. And then there was that rush on and hiring more people because we thought the growth was going to be infinite.

01:18:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Then we overpaid and we overhired the thing is, though, when the pandemic hit, the big thing that they were pushing at the time was teams. Right, this was all they talked about for that entire year it over. This was when teams was the only thing that the Microsoft 365 org talked about. They stopped announcing other I mean, they had other new features, but they, you know remember, they were just getting rid of products and whatever. They were just doing. Teams, but AI, I you know. I think AI, you know. Richard often uses the term dark Satcha. I think the purest expression of dark Satcha is him going to employees and saying you need to be on board with this and if you're not, leave, this is what we're doing.

01:19:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know it's not in yikes, and that's the other part. It wasn't the AI. People weren't protected in this either. I know folks are working on AI related technologies that were also cut, so this was a broad, random 3%.

01:19:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's. I mean, at least they're not doing stack ranking anymore, but this kind of sounds like it was related to it, like we took the top, bottom, you know 10 of performers and we just said goodbye that was nine.

01:19:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was in january. That's exactly how. In january, this was not that this was not that.

01:19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, january was you, but it was for over a year and so okay, but this was performance focused, wasn't it, or not?

01:20:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, january, oh well, yeah, it's more, it seems to have the so these are just trying to remove fat from the middle. Yeah, so they may have been selecting on the teams.

01:20:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They kept. But I haven't been able to figure that out right but because the areas I can tell every team got touched and they and it wasn't. It wasn't a given role, it wasn't a given title. I know pms, I knew engineers, like it was all over the place, so I don't know.

01:20:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know the answer to that. Wow, yep, yeah, it's just.

01:20:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, it's hard for the people involved no, you know it's terrible, yeah, and it's not a great time to be looking for a job new.

01:20:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, that's for sure okay, after that little fun bit of news let's do antitrust, because that's even more fun um, okay, so, oh, boy, just when you thought we were never going to talk about microsoft acquiring activision blizzard again. Uh, we're reminded that the ftc has broken with the grudge I know it's just like the worst ex-girlfriend of all time, like just um broke with tradition, and well, let's just say broke with tradition. And after they lost and lost and lost, they decided leadership now isn't it new leadership, yep, completely different.

01:21:25
Um, they went forward with an internal proceeding investigating the microsoft acquisition. It's not really clear. I think the goal here is to say we have internally found microsoft, uh, you know, violating antitrust laws by awesome, by this thing after the fact, and then bringing that to a court, and so what they wanted to do in the meantime this was always a stretch, but was they appealed the district court ruling that allowed Microsoft to consummate the acquisition with the hope of halting any work to bring those two companies together, while they could prepare this internal proceeding and then present more information. I don't know if you're following. I think the score right now is Microsoft 17,. Ftc 0. And they lost again.

01:22:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Does this come down to one angry person inside the FTC who really needs a vacation or something? They just keep going at this one, even with leadership changes.

01:22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't understand this Like I, just I, oh God, this organization is so terrible. There's so much good work you could be doing right now, yeah it's an important thing.

01:22:39
Like, what is the like? What could we point to anti-competitively with this company since this merger? Like that was of any substance? Yeah, I think there was a game that was going to come out in the PlayStation that didn't, but then they've released a half dozen or eight games to PlayStation, with more to come. I mean, what are we talking about here? Call of Duty, by all accounts, better still on PlayStation than on Xbox. Like it's going okay. Like it's you know it's going okay. Like it's you know it's going okay. So there's that. There is a.

01:23:11
There were three weeks of remedy hearings in US v Google. This is for the search case, not the ad case. Those remedy hearings are occurring, I think, september, october, september. I think we heard from everybody. We heard from executives from Apple, executives from Mozilla, competitors, partners, everything right. I'm watching Apple throw Google under the bus Beautiful, hilarious. But the one thing I keep hearing, from readers at least, and I don't believe there's a place in the law for this kind of an argument, but it's what I think of as as the uh, the what about the children? Argument, which is like, well, okay, so you're not going to let, potentially, google pay Apple 20 billion plus a year. You're not going to let them pay whatever billions many billions they pay to Samsung, but you're also not going to let them pay Mozilla, and Mozilla is a problem because Mozilla the CTO of Mozilla, cfo, I guess on the standard said yeah, this is the whole company, right.

01:24:12
Whatever, 85% of 90% is that's how much Mozilla revenues come from. Just Google paying them and I made the argument last week. I think that they're keeping this company afloat artificially, Right, and look, I, I, I see both sides of this. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I company Mozilla slash, Firefox, whatever you want to call it, needs to be able to survive on its own as well.

01:24:47
I think that they're wasting engineering resources and thus money, creating a competing web rendering engine. I think it's the stupidest. It's like trying to create a second form of electricity which is always behind the other form of electricity, and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I think it's a mistake. This doesn't make any sense. I'm not going to try to make the full argument here for this, but it occurred to me that if you're going to take Chrome away from Google, what about what no one is talking about, especially the DOJ anyway, is Chromium right? Chromium is something that should be an open standard. It's something that all vested parties should have an equal say in.

01:25:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, nominally is until you get into the maintainer things.

01:25:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is controlled by Google. Most of the key maintainers are Google employees. I think what needs to be taken away from Google is Chromium. You know, and I know they don't want it. I don't know what Mozilla does internally. They would be stupid not to be looking at the source code to Chromium. It is open source, but why not give it to Mozilla? Well, let them do the open.

01:25:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They could fork it at any time. I mean, it's okay, we're getting into this, but put it in their control.

01:25:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In other words, take it away from Google and put them in charge of this Cause. To this, because they have the right ideas. They wouldn't have tried to do privacy. Whatever the stupid feature was called privacy, whatever the thing was called um, they wouldn't have tried. They wouldn't have gotten rid of manifest, they wouldn't have done manifest v3 yeah, right these are things that google is okay doing in chrome, but that should not be happening at the chromium level, right? Google should not be in charge of chromiumium.

01:26:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and it doesn't need again. If you get into this, it's like just fork it, make your own version go where you want to go.

01:26:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you have to have the industry with you. In other words, like I, I and, by the way, this is not necessarily fanciful Could you imagine a day where Microsoft Opera Brave, whatever the companies are, vivaldi, all say okay, we're forking this right, here and now we're going to do this thing, that's right. But now we have four browser rendering engines essentially right, or whatever, I don't know, I just I'm trying to think this through a little bit.

01:26:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm unhappy with these standards, so make it another standard.

01:27:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nailed it. I'm just concerned with Richard. That sounds like strategy.

01:27:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I'm nailed it. I'm just concerned with richard. That sounds like strategy. Well, I'm also concerned with legal and legislative trying to do technical things, which is really what we're talking about.

01:27:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're asking a legislator or a judge to make a technical assessment, yeah, right. Well, yeah, I guess I mean these things don't happen in isolation, right, I mean, obviously there are always going to be technical experts that come in from whichever party to represent whatever interest, and we'll see. I don't know. But, um, you know someone uh in the chat mentioned safari somewhere. It's going by quick, but, um, yeah, safari, look, apple's always going to do their own thing. Who cares? Screw them. They can do whatever they want, if they were smart, they wouldn't do this either.

01:27:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they did have a windows safari, didn't they? For a while?

01:27:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, for two seconds right and nobody the thing, I

01:27:50
I'd like the idea of that at the time because for a couple reasons, but one of them was just like more minimal, you know, get out of your way, kind of a product which I was like. But the age of competing on the merits of a rendering engine which made sense to Mozilla in 2001 or whatever year and maybe made sense to Apple in whatever year, kind of stops making sense when 65% of every browser used in the world is literally Chrome and then you add in the other Chromium browsers and it's whatever the number is there. I mean, at this point we a kind of a de facto standard. And then, because we're on an anti-trust kick, a couple more things, one of which just happened, by the way. So Fortnite Epic has filed to get Fortnite back in the iOS app store Hilarious, I can't wait for that to happen.

01:28:43
But this just in, and I haven't had time to digest this, but reuters is reporting exclusively that microsoft might escape, uh, an antitrust fine in the eu for its bundling of office and teams, right, and so I feel like this was last summer microsoft took which for it, I think at the time was pretty unprecedented, um, debundled them will, uh, in the EU and I guess everywhere, or just the EU, I don't remember. Just the EU, yeah, eu, okay, and uh, allowing customers to buy just office or Microsoft 365 without teams, right, and then they could continue using Slack or whatever they wanted, whatever competing product. And the EU did something that, sadly, it's done in a couple of other cases since then, which has gone back and said, yeah, that's not good enough. And they were like, okay, but you said we had to do that, so what would be good enough? Like, yeah, we don't know. We don't know, show us something else, keep throwing us ideas, you know, we'll see. Pray I do not change the deal further, exactly, or pray I do not communicate the deal further, you know, in this case, right. So my guess is that it was money related, like the.

01:29:50
The differential between office without teams and it with teams was not big enough, perhaps. So, um, microsoft is, according to this report, if I understand it, uh, changing that they're widening. Oh, I guess they did that in February. I'm sorry, they widened the price differential. This was the proposal and they'll put in, put in better integration points for rivals. So, in other words, you're using Microsoft 365, but you might want to use it with Slack or whatever, so sure I guess I don't know. I never understood why they went and took that step in the EU. It was like no no.

01:30:28
Why? I don't know. I just don't like it, I don't know.

01:30:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway, it's something.

01:30:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's something, man, something's happening.

01:30:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've heard your complaints. I'm not going to change anything because I can't stand you people. No, I'm just kidding.

01:30:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey.

01:30:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I'm kidding. Um, I know there's a lot of ai news every week, that's you know, we'll save it for next show. How about that those? There's almost nothing happening this week actually, so I can just say very quickly there are three things.

01:30:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Keeping their powder dry like that, because everybody's making announcements. Next, week.

01:31:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh, that's interesting. I yeah it could be. I will say I feel like every week it's like you've got to be kidding me. I go through the week's news and I'm like, oh my God, there's so much I know, I know, so that could be Between Google and Microsoft.

01:31:14
both want to do dances and OpenAI is just crazy, right. So OpenAI is opening up ChatGPT to OneDrive and SharePoint for business customers and also paid business customers. So that doesn't mean OneDrive for consumers, but you know that's coming right and that's what Microsoft's doing with Copilot, so that makes sense. Google has reported I guess they've confirmed it they're testing replacing the I'm feeling lucky button on googlecom with an AI mode button instead. Hilarious, as I tweeted earlier, I'm like like was I'm not feeling lucky to a little too.

01:31:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
On point, I'm feeling unlucky um, I'm willing to throw throw planning to the wind.

01:31:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, hurl me off the cliff of uncertainty so I think, okay, yeah, we must have been still in mexico. We were somewhere in some restaurant, bar or something, and, you know, music's playing as as it does. And then suddenly there was one of those really jaunty like hey, blah, blah, you know, and I was like what, what the heck am I listening to? And it was spotify. Spotify has an ai dj and it's a little bit like that. You know, notebook lm feature where it's like it's in, like he talks to you.

01:32:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not just.

01:32:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I thought it was like ai playlist you mean, no, it does that, but there's actually an AI DJ. What does he say?

01:32:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And talk like 53 degrees in the city on this Wednesday afternoon.

01:32:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're in the city of the rocks, we're in the city of the never stops.

01:32:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like you're not a city and you're not Just around the corner. Yep Journey. Yeah, exactly so I I gotta listen to this, but now, this was always my greatest fear as a dj that eventually exactly like perfect radio voice.

01:32:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know well listen here's.

01:32:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's why you listen to spotify or any service here's why so?

01:32:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there'll be no dj. Thank you I don't, I don't.

01:32:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't even want to hear the voices in my head. I don't want to hear your voice.

01:33:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why I stopped being a dj because I worked for a station where it said light rock, less talk, and I was the talk.

01:33:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and, by the way, and you know why it said that is because no one wants every radio station I listened to growing up. The person would talk right until the vocals started and whatever song came on next, because that was me recording off the radio.

01:33:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Whatever, and god forbid no, it was less leo well, we did it just because we could.

01:33:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hated you so much, no, but as soon as I saw that I realized what they really wanted somebody who pushed the button for the next record.

01:33:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go, and I became a talk show host because I knew that this was a limited yeah, yeah, right right, right, yep, I love, uh, I always made look, I made mixed tapes in the 80s, mixed audio CDs in the 90s and whatever into the 2000s, probably. I was a part of every music service that's ever existed and every single time it's literally about I do not want to hear anyone talking, I'm here to listen to music, right.

01:34:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why Spotify took off. But some, some number of people use spotify. What somebody talking into the in between what is wrong?

01:34:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they don't talk up the intros.

01:34:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do they though?

01:34:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know how that I listen I. I just heard it like I was like what? I don't have spotify, you can kind of hear it. And I was like what is that?

01:34:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm really, what are you?

01:34:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
using. And they said spot that I'm like, what are you using?

01:34:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they said Spotify and I'm like, really it's a Spotify DJ 15 minutes after the hour. Traffic light on the Van Wick.

01:34:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Expressway. You're like, I don't live in that city. What?

01:34:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is he talking about? You know it's like here's the weather. You're like I live in Phoenix.

01:34:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why are you talking about rain?

01:34:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI could do a dj so easy, I mean oh my god, 100 they would give give us little, what they call liners. It was just like just read this, don't say anything else, just read this weather every 10 minutes.

01:34:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I would be. I would be so subversive, I would just be throwing stuff in there like I'm so lonely all the time. Anyway, tonight we're going to. You know, like I would just I would just.

01:35:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I started, I mean, as, look, it was a bad career decision, but when I was, when I started in radio, you had what they called personality radio stations where the dj was.

01:35:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know yeah, literally they were called personalities.

01:35:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was right and the theory also was at least for the album rock uh that they were picking good music and sewing. It was a whole thing. But as soon as I got on the radio I realized that's a lie, because they tell you exactly what to play and then they say don't talk so much.

01:35:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, listen, we love your voice Also, you got to stop talking. You got to stop talking.

01:35:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to subscribe. There was a guy named Dan O'Day. He was a DJ. There's a guy named dan o'day was a dj. He had a weekly newsletter with jokes, anecdotes, you know just, and they were the worst jokes. They were all dad jokes. Yeah, I guess he was just him writing them and you would subscribe to the. Every all the djs did. They would subscribe to these things. They were like mimeographed to give you something to say, but apparently nobody wanted to hear it. Why, I don't know.

01:36:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just so listen, I it's like I love everything about you, but could you change? Just shut up.

01:36:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I am, I am gonna now have to pay for spotify for a month. Just to hear the d, just to hear this, yeah I haven't tried it myself.

01:36:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I don't know, this kind of stuff freaks me out.

01:36:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I thought when I saw the story because I did I oh, they meant like AI created playlists.

01:36:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I didn't think there was a voice. Oh no, this is. Yeah, this is talking. Wow, it's crazy.

01:36:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow. All right, we'll be back with more. Paul Theriot, theriotcom, richard Campbell, runnersradiocom, xbox news. We've got picks, we've got tips, we've got liquor, we got it all coming up. It's 58 degrees in the city, 10 minutes to the hour, and much more coming up on a great wednesday afternoon. A good wednesday afternoon to you, leo laporte, with paul throdden you're gonna play uh, what's it called the?

01:36:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, we built this city.

01:37:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's gonna be like the next song yeah, actually when I was a dj I even ruined that song oh, did you do like your custom?

01:37:07
like, yeah, the giants, so the giants uh won the pennant that year and I did a cut down of it because in the middle of we built this city which was about san francisco. Get it, they have a little play baseball play-by-play, very short I I extended it with real highlights from the Giants winning here. It was very exciting. I wish I had a copy of it. It was great. I liked it anyway.

01:37:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That sounds cool. Before the YouTube strike Jeez Louise.

01:37:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was no YouTube. This was 89. This was a long time ago, 36 years ago. I never thought I'd say that in my life yeah, 36 years ago. Never thought I'd say that in my life. Yeah, 36 years ago.

01:37:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, I did something besides I was an adult then and I'm an adult now, and god damn it you know, sam, our show today brought to you.

01:38:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's something happy. Here's some good news. Uh, our sponsor, us cloud, the number one microsoft unified support replacement. We've been talking about us cloud for a few months now. I hope you know the name by now. They are the global leader in third-party microsoft support for enterprises. They now support 50 of the fortune 500 and that's not an accident, because switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier Support. But it wouldn't be any good if we're just 50% less. It's better. You pay half as much and you get twice as fast average time to resolution versus Microsoft Fast.

01:38:45
But now US Cloud is excited to tell you about something I don't think Microsoft is going to tell you about their Azure cost optimization services. Does Microsoft have that? I don't think so. See, microsoft likes it when you spend more money on Azure. But let's be honest, how often do you evaluate your Azure usage? If it's been a while you know you're going to have, it's okay. Nothing to be ashamed of some Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on. But, good news, saving on Azure is easier than you might think with US Cloud.

01:39:21
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01:40:07
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01:40:49
Visit uscloudcom. Book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. That's uscloudcom. Book a call. They're great people. I spent some time on the phone with them. I love them. You'll get faster, better Microsoft support for less UScloudcom and do please, if they ask you, say oh yeah, I heard all about it on Windows Weekly. That helps us UScloudcom. All. Right Back, we go for another 19-minute ad-free break with Paul Theriot and Richard Cavill. We're going to start it off with a blockeriot and Richard Cavill. We're going to start it off with a block of journey. Block of journey. Nice, we built this city.

01:41:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We built this city, the wimpiest song ever created.

01:41:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh man, if anybody listening, was in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989. I know Someone might have it on tape Recording the radio and it was so it was. It was so fun because it was, you know, we built San Francisco and and it's out of here the giant, it's when the planet the giant. It was really fun stuff, but anyway, that's cool, reliving old times. Anyway, let's uh, let's talk about, uh, windows, shall we? Or whatever it is. You want dev, let's talk about developers. Oh right, I forgot about that, developers.

01:42:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's this small so, uh, dot net 10, preview 4 came out yesterday. Not a lot going on there, but there's not been a lot going on with dot net 10 that I can perceive so far um along.

01:42:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's in its normal cadence for delivering.

01:42:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So remember, uh, with the understanding that richard can't say a lot, uh or anything, but is there anything you could say on the record about next week bill? What are you expecting? Any thoughts, any anecdotes, any poems?

01:42:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
major ai announcements is all they've really said did, I did?

01:42:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I show you my ai or my build bingo card. That was on.

01:42:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Twitter or whatever. It's just a five by five matrix of AI.

01:42:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It just says AI but then the middle one says co-pilot Nailed it.

01:42:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, I'm going to win this one.

01:42:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I'm going to run the rack. Yeah, right. So I mean, there is some minor Windows stuff there always is, you know, and I'll pay attention to that like I do, like an idiot. But yeah, I'm mostly going just to see you and other people and kind of hang out and do that thing again.

01:43:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the truth about conferences, isn't it?

01:43:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's especially true now that I'm paying the bill. You know like I mean, if it was like my company, like some company was just paying for me, I guess I wouldn't care as much, but man, it could be a little bit of a hassle, Anyway. Okay, so that's happening Today, so we're recording this on Wednesday, the 14th, and at 8 pm ET tonight my next game is going to be available broadly. It was available for people who bought, like the expensive ones a couple of days ago, but Doom the Dark Ages will be live across all platforms. Nice, so you can preload it. I have on a couple of PCs. I might be playing it in Seattle, I guess we'll see.

01:43:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's preloaded, but you can't play it.

01:43:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that's the worst.

01:43:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, I take up your disk space, but no Right.

01:44:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So sometime sometime today it's getting late, but sometime today ups, I think, or whatever it is, is going to deliver my nas that I ordered and the drives that go in the nas. But what I got two days ago was the ram upgrade. So I have this cute little wafer card thing I can look at and do nothing with yeah, and that's what. That's what a preload's like.

01:44:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're like something's coming, um, it's gonna be good, probably gonna be good happens to me every year I get, I order the iphone and I get the case a week before I get the. Yes, exactly, it's so annoying that's exactly that's it.

01:44:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's it, yes. Um, okay, so that's happening. Um, hopefully next week. Uh, probably my pick next week, assuming it's not terrible, but it looks like it's to be pretty good. So this one's a little convoluted. It's kind of hard to know where to go with this one. But Microsoft has.

01:44:50
Well, first of all, they have cloud gaming right. So cloud gaming is their cloud streaming, game streaming feature. Right, it's part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It used to be called Project xCloud. It's available on multiple platforms. The games that you stream over this thing are Xbox console games, right.

01:45:11
So they enabled over time the ability to use a mouse and keyboard as you would want to on a PC. They've enabled it on the Xbox console. Interestingly, although not that many games support it, I'm surprised to say I play. I currently play Call of Duty Black Ops six on my PC using a controller. I could play this game on my console using keyboard and mouse. That's how crazy our world has become, um, and whatever. So, basically, to date, this thing, this feature the ability to use mouse keyboard has been up to the developer to support in games specifically for the console or whatever it might be. But they are now testing mouse and keyboard support for cloud-enabled games on Xbox consoles. So, to follow along with what I just said, what that means is you could be on an Xbox console with a keyboard and a mouse connected to it and you could stream an Xbox console game to that console and play it with a keyboard and a mouse, which I got to say I just completed. That sentence Doesn't make any sense, but, um, but that's what they're doing, so that's okay, that's kind of fun.

01:46:22
Um, I assumedly some people are familiar with the backbone controllers. These are those two halves of controller stretches out. You put your phone in there. It clamps on right. So I think the original version they came up with a few years back was just a lightning base for iPhones. There was eventually a USB-C version works across Android and iPhone, and now they have this new one which I just reviewed, which I have to say is very interesting to me. So Backbone Pro is basically that design I described, but in addition to clamping onto a phone, it's not quite wide enough for my iPad mini, by the way. I wish they would figure that out.

01:46:57
You can connect it wirelessly using Bluetooth to any number of devices, which can be PCs, game consoles, ipads, other tablets, smart TVs, whatever. So it works with all the cloud streaming services or whatever. Whatever it is you're playing, and that works really well. You can also connect a USB cable to it, right, and then connect it wired, in a wired fashion, to whatever device. So I've done that with an iPad, I've done it with a PC and I got to say, like the latency is not bad, meaning it's not a lot of latency, like it seems to. In fact it's not bad across all of those connection types.

01:47:34
It's a little expensive it's like 169, but they have, you know, game profiles you can make. So you have to use the mobile app so you could be on. You know, I'm on my iPhone. I make a profile for Call of Duty. You can map the buttons to different things and stuff like that. Like it's a pretty sweet controller actually. So if you, if you, I wouldn't get it unless you do play sometimes on a phone, like a, real games, like like AAA type games, um. But if you do that and play on other devices, like a tablet or whatever, it might be like, this is kind of a neat thing. It does a nice job switching between devices, it works great in all the different modes, et cetera, et cetera. So that's out there if you're interested.

01:48:13
And then we've heard from Nintendo and Sony on their earnings. So Nintendo is struggling because we're winding down now on the original switch, but they've there are now launching the new Switch 2. They sold almost 11 million units of the previous version in the fiscal year that just ended in March. That's down 31% from the previous year and also just shy of the record for them, right? So the most consoles they've ever sold is, I think, 154 million for DS. Um, so they're at 152.12. They expect to sell whatever number of millions in this. You know they're, they're going to go, they're going to do it eventually. So whatever, but that's taking longer than expected.

01:48:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He realized that they should probably should have had this out in Christmas last year.

01:48:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, a hundred percent, yep.

01:49:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, which you're really saying is literally we are six months late on this device that would have carried our revenue stream across.

01:49:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and these things, I mean they're probably, it's probably hard to time this correctly.

01:49:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It doesn't help that this thing is coming out right in the middle of tariffs you know which is kind of terrible, but really wish you'd got it done by Christmas, before all the stupid.

01:49:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, now you really do. Yeah, for sure, yep, and it's going to be, you know, and it's going to be fairly expensive. But I think they said they expected uh, yeah, they expected they expect to sell 15 million units of switch to in the car. You know the current fiscal year that ends next March 31st. Um, sony expects to sell the same number of PlayStation fives in this fiscal year, which is kind of interesting.

01:49:40
So they sold, I know, 18.5 million, mostly North America, by the way 18.5 million PS5 sales consoles in the year that just ended, march 31. That's down 11%. That was almost 21 million the year before. They've now sold 77.7 million of those consoles, which is actually really good. Right, because I had to go back and look this up, but I I knew that the ps3 sold roughly 80 88 million. Yeah, the ps4 is 117 million and never going to hit that. Um, the biggest one, of course, is the ps2. It's 160 million, but they're going to be right up there, like that's. That's actually really good, especially given the price and the timing and all that kind of stuff, right like I know.

01:50:21
I don't know, it's a five-year-old console I know it's crazy, but, um, what is it? The? These aren't comparable, necessarily, but, uh, 128 million people playing games on the nintendo switch, 124 million monthly active users on the playstation network um, it's pretty good. Yeah, so they're making money. The bad news is, if you live in the united states and you didn't buy a ps5, you might want to do that pretty quick, because they will be raising the price. Um, they took a 700 million dollar hit off the bottom line, I guess the off of profits in the just since the beginning of this year, and that they expect that to continue. They're looking at all kinds of different things, but they're going to pass the lack of savings along to you. So they already raised prices in Europe Australia not Japan, I'm sorry New Zealand and they're absolutely going to raise prices everywhere else.

01:51:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's funny. So everybody around the world has to pay for our tariffs.

01:51:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's funny. So everybody around the world has to pay for our tariffs? Yeah, that was the point of it, unfortunately, right you?

01:51:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know we're going to get Mexico to pay for the wall.

01:51:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I apologize, I told you. I told you about that. I know these guys at a restaurant. This is like last year, but I was like it was quiet and I was like, can I ask you guys a question? I was like when, when you had to pay, when you had to pay for the wall, did you pay in monthly installments or was it like a one-time hit? And they were like, what the hell are you talking?

01:51:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
about. You notice that's completely dropped. Now it's a whole different. It's crazy, hey. Inquiring minds wish to know which I know, but they want to know which NAS you bought.

01:52:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a Synology. It's one of the lower end two bay ones for now I'm surprised.

01:52:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is the first time you've bought a NAS.

01:52:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's not the first time, but it's the first time I bought a Synology. I have an old WD NAS which stopped being supported about two years ago. Yeah, it's been a while I think I've been kind of dithering on this for a while, and part of dithering on this for a while and part of it, I think, is that the cloud storage stuff has worked well enough that it's been okay.

01:52:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I wonder if local backup has much of a future, to be honest, well, I'm thinking local primary cloud backup now.

01:52:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we'll see if we'll see how that goes.

01:52:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're in a great situation. You have two domiciles, you could have one I'm gonna do that yeah absolutely yeah, and one so when in pennsylvania, and sink it back and forth this will be the one from mexico.

01:52:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Depending on my experience with this, I might get one with either more bays or some different.

01:52:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will see how that goes I have a five bay I've always had five bays just because then I can have more redundancy and yep, yeah, and you want to do backup and whatever, although you know synology is really controversial right now. You know about this.

01:53:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bought Synology, so I just bypassed the controversy. What do you mean?

01:53:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you could make an argument that Synology is just saying look, we don't want to be responsible. You go out and get some crappy Western digital drive and it dies.

01:53:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That and of course I feel it as well. But I also I looked up the price of the drives I got versus like um wd red, you know, nas drives and actually the synology drives are cheaper.

01:53:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So oh, like whatever, so there's a tempest in a teapot. I I understand people don't like being told you have to put synology drives in our synology now no, it's understandable, it's especially since some people already have drives that they want to recycle I've done that.

01:53:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I didn't have a problem with it when it was on, when they wanted that requirement on the enterprise products, is they? Make a good line enterprise products, but for the consumer well on.

01:53:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So in my case, like I wanted to get pretty big drives, there were always going to be new drives. I'm not recycling anything for this. Last thing I need is a, a drive to be clicking in mexico when I'm here or something, or whatever. It is Like I, like I. I just wanted to get new drives and it's. It's okay, Like I get it. I get the complaint, of course, but I just when you look at the ecosystems and stuff like you can make a case for like Ugreen and the hardware it's better, et cetera, et cetera. But ecosystem, there's nothing like Synology, right?

01:54:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It really is true. And I see all these people on Reddit saying, well, now I'm going to buy, you know.

01:54:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Brand X. We're so hard-line about everything. It's like, oh, I've talked to him. You know, it's like yeah, yeah yeah, keep biting your nose, buddy, you're fine.

01:54:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm happy I have Synology and you're right, the software is really really excellent, so good, and you were smart to get the little add on Ram and the and.

01:54:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was, I was going to do that you have to drive to cause.

01:54:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that helps.

01:54:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that one, so that one doesn't support the M2. Well well, not as cash. I mean I could put M2 inside of it, but it's for cash yeah.

01:54:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:54:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so actually that's the direction I might do cache.

01:55:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It helps if you have a lot of small files, which most of us do.

01:55:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I want to see how I actually use it. So I'm going to try to like I'm going to go to Seattle, so I'm going to have this chance to do the remote stuff and see how that works.

01:55:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could run a wiki on that. Actually, there's a lot of collaborative software that runs on this. That's right, that runs.

01:55:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:55:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And the, the missing, that's right, that runs, yeah.

01:55:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, yeah, and that's part of what I'm looking at the one that makes me the happiest is the azure backup that I have a copy of my m365 stuff local right right. So you know if I ever got locked out for any reason and it's accessible, like I can go look at what it's backed up and this.

01:55:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So richard was well present, well, which it was. I don't. Where were, where were you rich when this happened? I don't remember exactly where you were physically, but we were with you in puerto vallarta when my youtube account was taken away from me and I had that sinking. That's when you say I may not.

01:55:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When I was like, okay, I'm gonna breakfast.

01:55:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like, I don't know, I'm leaving now and I'm like I, I, this will not happen to me again. Yeah, I am not putting up with this. It doesn't like I'm not stupid. I'm like I'm never using google again. I'm not you know, whatever.

01:56:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't mean it like that, but like I'm gonna make sure trust but verify trust but back up right maybe, yeah, maybe move big tech to a secondary position well, that's why we were talking before the show about I moved to obsidian away from notion only because I saw somebody lost you know, lost a lot of data. I thought, oh my god, that's terrible, I better have a local this is, this is how you get religion.

01:56:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, you lose data, in this case, or you know something bad happens, whatever it is, and that's you know this bugs me because, well, I don't know, I got cloud storage especially has been so good for so long is that I just?

01:56:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think I got complacent, you know, I just stopped thinking about it well, I don't have a problem with the cloud being primary, but have a backup I do.

01:56:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean I have backup exactly exactly, I didn't have backup with some of my youtube stuff. I never saw the point of it in fact. Well, that's the problem, right?

01:56:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of use youtube as a backup.

01:56:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In some cases, like I um, I like our home videos. I've just put in youtube on a personal account that no one is ever going to see, just to have them somewhere, right Cause the videos are big, you know. And now I'm like uh, yeah, you know what I'm going to, I'm going to be in charge of those. I'm going to, I'm going to take charge of that. Well, so you got a synology.

01:57:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the reason to get it. Yeah, uh, let's take a little break and when we come back we are going to go to the book. Your tip of the week, your app of the week, run as radio pick. And the last australian, the last australian, what do you call?

01:57:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it the last one, australia. It's the last of my australian collection. Oh, the last? Yes, I'm just looking through the last.

01:57:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it like the sequel to last the mohicans? Sort of like that, only different uh what was the uh?

01:57:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what was the uh? Classic novel about the end of the world. Atomic, an atomic war, and on the beach, on the beach what a terrible survives.

01:57:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was a terrible. I was gonna know what you were gonna say next. I'm like on the road. I liked it when I read it in high school but it's very completely counter to human nature.

01:57:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But okay I like you know what? For some reason I like books about the end of the world. Like one person's left, I like that kind of book.

01:58:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I fantasize that I'll be able to the guy who breaks his glasses in the library where he's going to have all the books in the world yeah, that's sad purchase meredith right yeah that's a classic.

01:58:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, we're gonna a quick break. I just wanted to tell people to join the club. Uh, you know, it's a nice little thing. We got going here, uh, to keep the station, the channel, alive. Uh, I don't think I'm going back to being a dj, so I think we better make this thing work. Uh, maybe club twit it's we call it. And what do you get? You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even get this pledge break. You also, uh, get a lot of cool, you know, extra stuff like access to our club twit discord, which is really my favorite new favorite social network, because it's it's really great people, smart people, hanging out talking about the things geeks care about. Sure, they're talking about the shows, but, uh, but there's sections in Club Twit for pretty much every possible hobby or geek interest. Highly recommend it. A lot of fun stuff going on in there. And then we'd also do events. We've got a bunch of events coming up.

01:59:18
Micah's Crafting Corner is tonight, 6 pm Pacific, 9 pm Eastern Micah is building Lego succulents. I think John Ashley is going to stock by with a. What did he say? It was a Lego sawgrass or something, I don't know. Anyway, a bigger Lego. But it doesn't have to be Lego. You could be needlepoint, you could be knitting, you could be coding Just a cozy, chill hangout with Micah and all the people doing some stuff. Tomorrow, our with Micah and all the people doing some stuff tomorrow. Our book club with Stacey Higginbotham the Ursula you literally have time still to read that book because it was a novella. Ursula K Le Guin's the Word for World is Forest is fantastic. We will be talking about that tomorrow 1 pm. I'm sorry. Friday 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern. For Stacey's book club Build the Build keynote 't. I think you guys are going to be busy, right, we never did settle on that, but 9 am monday, I guess I can. We can talk about that actually okay microsoft build keynote.

02:00:15
We'll be covering that. We do these now in discord only because apple was such a grump about it. Uh, so we decided you know what? I don't want to lose our youtube channel, so we're just going to do all of these in the club. Same thing with Google IO the following day, that's Tuesday, at 10 am. We've got a GizWiz Hangout coming up. Next Friday, the 23rd, dick DiBartolo will stop by and say hi, we tape shows in there. Of course, we've got our AI user group first Friday of every month and then WWDC.

02:00:45
The Apple keynote is June 9th and Micah and I are going to do both the big keynote at 10 am and the State of the Union at 1 pm Pacific time. So we will. We will have both of the keynotes. We've never done that before, but since we're doing it in the club, I figured well, why? Well, why not? Let's just take over the club for the day.

02:01:08
Lots of good stuff, lots of reasons to join, and it's again. It's only seven bucks a month, $84 a year, and that will be grandfathered in. We're contemplating as prices go up and revenue goes down. We're contemplating, maybe prices go up and revenue goes down. We're contemplating. Maybe we have had a club for four years. Maybe it's time to increase it a little bit. But I promise if you join now you will be grandfathered in forever. At that price $7 a month, $84 a year twittv slash club twit. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the support from all of our Club Twit members. Now let's get to the back of the book and Paul Thurott little Paulie Thurott who has his tip of the week for us.

02:01:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess I referenced this earlier. I fed this thing on the back burner for a long time about notifications and how terrible they are, and I finally wrote up the Windows 11 part of it and I will just say even compared to iOS, Windows 11 notifications are uniquely terrible and my advice is to turn them off. Just turn them off. I think that's a good idea.

02:02:22
Turn them all off or just put it in do not disturb mode, however you want to do it. I'm not sure I've ever gotten a useful Windows 11 notification. I probably have maybe once. But there's a bizarre separation of things in Windows. This is not necessarily unique, but I feel it most strongly in Windows. One of the examples I have is well, I had the thing I talked about earlier with the power supply not being enough wattage or whatever, but slow charge, um, but the big one is I, I install windows in a new computer, bring up a new computer, whatever it is, and then a couple of days go by and I get a one note. It says on this day it has a photo of something from, you know, my photo library. I don't want to get that on my computer, right? I don, I don't mind it on my phone. It's not what I'm doing on my computer. I'm never going to click on a thing and be like yeah look at this history thing whatever.

02:03:09
There's nothing in that notification that will let me turn that thing off. You can configure notifications from there and you go into settings and there's nothing related to this. Every app does it differently, so you have to know where to go to do those things, and I think a lot of people would be like screw this, I'm just turning this off and I might want other notifications, from OneDrive in this case but this makes me insane, so I just I'm going to give up. I just give up. I can't deal with this stuff anymore and maybe something important happens. I don't know, it never has. Who cares? I don't know.

02:03:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not on your PC, really. You know phone's one thing but, not on your PC.

02:03:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or even something like you. You set up all your like we use Slack, right, so we use Slack. And so guy I work with Laurent will text me or whatever, and I get a thing on my computer and I can type him back. You know it's annoying but I need it. But I also, you know, that thing comes on my phone.

02:04:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, you know, that thing comes on my phone.

02:04:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't you know if he texts me.

02:04:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to see it on my phone Plus.

02:04:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The app still does its own stupid things and you can turn off notifications globally. You might want to just look at notifications and turn it off for everything, except for the, the one or whatever I do that on the phone.

02:04:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I turn off everything except for, obviously, things like messages.

02:04:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, I play this game on my every device I have where I let it annoy me and then I turn off the things that annoy me and eventually I turn off almost everything. It's helpful to not have notifications or you do things like we have this, these two groups, uh, from the apartment we have in mexico and it's just like all day long and like I put it up with it, I put it with them like mute like I can't say.

02:04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like a whatsapp group.

02:05:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's terrible. Oh my god, stop Do you people have jobs, like, do something.

02:05:05
Anyway, that stuff makes me nuts. I don't have a lot of patience. It's probably not obvious. Okay, so, as part of the YouTube event I just referenced that started this kind of year of me re-evaluating the online accounts I use and blah, blah, blah. I should have talked, I should have described this I use and blah, blah, blah I. I should have talked, I should have described this. I think of this as online accounts, but maybe I should have framed it as more like a shift toward what I think of as little tech or maybe littler tech.

02:05:34
Um, you know, like notion, for example, is not a big tech company although you just experienced or heard about a sort of big tech style and certification there but, um, companies like notion, proton, um, you know whatever like as alternatives and then doing your own thing, like I'm doing with Synology, right? So, um, I've I've been getting more and more into the proton stuff. I really like this company, I like their products, um, and they have a like everyone does, right, all these companies say they have a cloud storage solution called proton driveDrive and they're finally getting. They've always done photo something, but not like super elegant, but now they have an albums feature which is going to let you curate and do favorites and do all this stuff. You know it's exactly what you think.

02:06:16
So if you haven't looked at this specifically, this would be a good time, because they're finally well, not finally, they've always been pretty great, but they're they're. They're kind of filling in the holes, I guess, if you will Um the type of thing that most people would get from like a Google photos or one drive or whatever, um. So that's brand new. You have to have a paid account, but they the. The 200 gig version is nothing and it's it's actually really good. So that might be part of my my move.

02:06:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not a new, the new look. Yes, yes, I'm going to get a mohawk and you've become a proton guy I really like proton.

02:07:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I mean, I really do yeah there would be, another good company to get on to get uh chromium, come to think of it. There you go, but yep, yep, yep yep, run as radio.

02:07:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard campbell, you don't. You don't go on there and talk like that. See 50, 60. No, I mean you could I've been in his radio I really shouldn't.

02:07:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you're talking to sysadmins for crying out loud.

02:07:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they would instantly. No, they wouldn't appreciate it.

02:07:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I had a great conversation with Liz Teach a few weeks ago, who had written a blog post that just I immediately pinged her and said we need to do the show on this. And it was hey, active Directory has just turned 25. Are you still managing it like it's 1999? Nice, yep. It like it's 1999, nice, yep, legit, because I migrated my pdc bdc configuration at home over to active directory in 2000. That's all gone. Now my life is better, but uh, so we dove straight in and just like listen the big.

02:08:02
The big message was back in 2000,. If you had branch offices, your WAN bandwidth was really restricted, and so you did your best to minimize the amount of authentication traffic that needed to travel over the WAN. And so you organized your Active Directory into operational units or forests and things like this, so that everybody in a given local office had all their authentication traffic local to them. This is not a good strategy anymore. We all have enough bandwidth. It's not a big problem.

02:08:32
Managing multiple OUs makes your group policy more complicated, like. It's not worth the pain, and the main issue with Active Directory today is as a lateral vector. During a breach, somebody gets successfully phished, a chunk of software gets loaded and the first thing it's going to go after is Active Directory, and so your main goal in Active Directory today is to make sure it is well locked down, properly secured, so it is not an effective strategy for lateral attacks by the black hats. And that means simplifying its organization and raising its functional level and that means retiring older instances, getting things updated, you know, getting everything configured well, like that's the job, and so that's the conversation. We really need to get it done too, and it'd be, by goodness sakes, use laps, the local admin password solution, so that when you need it, when you need to take administrative privileges on a given workstation, it's a different password on every machine and in fact, the process of getting that password to do that update causes that password to change so that you have to go fetch it again, so that it's just again not an effective vector for attack.

02:09:38
So there's great tools now, but if you're still acting like it's 1999 in AD're vulnerable and they and you can be fixed. And none of this stuff costs money. Just take some time to get yourself patched up. And we even talked a little about mini cats, which is a great tool for frightening people. If they don't understand, go, download mimikatz, fire it up inside your organization of unsecured ad and watch how effectively it reams through your active directory and pulls every piece of information you ever wanted I am ready to visit with the last australian, so this is the end of the story that started at the mvp summit in march.

02:10:21
So in when I was at the MVP summit in March, so in when I was at the summit, I was given a number of bottles of whiskey, many of which have now shown up on the show. Going back to the hard cut, the uh, the 12th Hawaii distillers, dark harmony they're all part of that, that crazy burst of whiskeys that I've gotten. But when I, and then when I got to Australia, I ended up with more Australian whiskey, because I was down there and you saw me talk about the highwaymen and then I received another whiskey, which is this last one that I want to talk about, the lime burners. But I wanted to bring it home and I don't travel with opened bottles. So that's why we slipped the little Jura in there while I was in New Zealand to avoid that problem.

02:11:07
But this is from a different region of Australia. This is from what the province is called Western Australia, but we're actually talking about the southwest corner of the Australian continent. So the vast majority of the population in Australia lives in the southeast and up the east coast, basically between Brisbane and Melbourne. That's the bulk of the population of Australia from what is very tropical up in Brisbane, down to what is much more like Los Angeles, down in New South Wales. You're getting down to 33 degrees south, sort of the equivalent of the Los Angeles San Diego kind of space. But if you move over to the southwest corner you've got this other strip of green. Like, most people think about Australia as a desert, which the interior definitely is, but you have these areas that are lush, that grow well. Now, western Australia is very sparsely populated, populated and most people only know of one city, perth. But that was not the first uh place for europeans. The first place was actually this place that's now called albany. So we're talking about this distillery called the great southern distilling company, which is in albany in the far southwest. Now, as we mentioned when we were talking about Tasmania, aboriginal Australians have been in this area 50,000 to 70,000 years, so predating the last Ice Age, and they stayed in through the Ice Age. We do know the name of the area is known is called Kinjarling by the Menang Nurgud tribes, which used to use that area as summer season. They're still there, of course.

02:12:45
Well, there were several European sightings of the area. The naming coat comes from captain george vancouver off on the hms discovery during a survey of 1791, where he identified the harbor as an excellent harbor called a king george, the third sound, now just called King George Sound, and then within that is the Princess Royal Harbor, which is actually where Albany is positioned, and that became the first European settlement of Western Australia. So the Europeans, specifically the English, used it as a penal colony in the Southeast. But in 1826, a major Edmund Lockyer, landed in that area with 20 troops and 20 convicts and six months with a provision, created a place they called Frederick Town in honor of Prince Frederick, the Duke of York, and Albany. The second settlement in Western Australia was called the Swan River Colony, oddly because it was positioned on the Swan River, but today you know it as Perth was positioned on the Swan River, but today you know it as Perth. And within a couple of years Swan River was growing quickly and so became the titular government head for the region, and so the convicts and soldiers of Albany left and it became a free colony down there. That's when they renamed it Albany, and it remained important for a key reason, which was that the Swan River, while an excellent river with good growing areas and so forth, did not. It was exposed to the Indian Ocean and it did not have a good port and so Albany remained the good deep water port.

02:14:17
Now this is the time of wooden hull ships in the early steel hulls and so forth, and there's no real docks or anything, you're just anchoring out and the Sound and and uh and prince royal uh harbor were way better ports, and so they're 400 kilometers apart, like 250 miles apart, so they tend to ship supplies into the little town of albany, even though perth was the bigger, busier area. And so very quickly in the 1850s there's a they try and improve the road there and there's a bunch of roadside inns and so forth, until finally, by 1897, sufficient engineering is brought in to blast out the rocks and shoals at the mouth of the freemantle, where the swan river is, so that perth can build their inner harbor and make this less relevant. And so albany remains kind of a backwater expense, but for 50 or 60 years it was the main harbor for western australia. And of course australia becomes australia in 1901 when queen victoria proclaims the six colonies to be the commonwealth of australia. So we're talking about a part of world. That's what they call a mediterranean climate, so warm, dry summers, mild, wet winters. There's only even today, maybe 35 000 people in the whole area and uh, but it's the right conditions for making whiskey.

02:15:33
And so cameron sign, who was by profession an accountant and briefly a lawyer, but always a big fan of whiskey uh, growing up and living in queensland, which is where brisbane and so forth is, decides I want to get into whiskey. He's scouted all of australia. Decides to set up in albany to create the greatest southern distilling company. They started distillation in an incubator facility in 2005, got their first release done in 2008 typical three-year cycle and in that time he'd raised enough money that he actually built a second facility on the Margaret River, which is in between Albany and Perth Very nice wine growing region. But he also created the Margaret River Distilling Company, but that's where he made gin called a Jennifer Gin. And then in 2007, they built a larger facility in Albany and then in 2015, scaled the whole thing up with the Margaret River Distillers and another facility called the Porongorup Distillery, which is after the Porongorup Mountain Range further in the interior in Western Australia. So now they have the gin distillery on the coast at Margaret River, they have the whiskey distillery down in Albany and then Porongorup is a mixed grain distillery. So that's where they make other kinds of whiskeys. They named them Tiger Snake and Dugite, which are both venomous snakes of Australia. I know you're shocked, but that's where they do mixtures of like corn and rye and wheat and barley and triticale, which is a hybrid of wheat and rye not typically used in distilling. So what's made in Albany is specifically what the lime burners line, which is their single malt line, which they've been making since 2005.

02:17:14
And you may wonder what the heck a lime burner is. A lime burner is someone who burns limestone to make lime, so a lime kiln operator. Limes stone to make lime, so a lime kiln operator. So this is when you turn calcium carbonate, which is into quick lime or calcium oxide. Lime, of course, is dangerous stuff. It's very caustic. Don't play with it. The normal thing you would do with lime is then you would make it into calcium hydroxide by adding water to it, which makes it explode. So do carefully. It pits and fusses. It also spits out a lot of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, which is a good way to get yourself killed if you're a lime burner.

02:17:52
Why did they call this whiskey lime burner? Because the location where the Albany distillery is is near lime burner point and lime kilns point, which is where they used to make lime for that part of the world. Lime's an old product. We have evidence of it being used in construction as far back as 6,000 BC and kilns from Mesopotamia found. But it's what you use to make concrete. So that's where the name comes from.

02:18:23
But it is a single malt whiskey, this super local stuff. So the water's from an aquifer. In the immediate area in the peninsula there's barley grown around Perth. It's malted at Porongorup. They have their own malting using a 16,000 rotating drum. They also make a peated malt using local peat which has a very different flavor. This is not peated but because it's different trees that make the peat and the different plant life, of course it has a different smoke flavor, so their peat is distinct. They use stainless steel fermenters to make a typical 8% wort and then tiny, tiny stills. The wash still is 1800 liters and the spirit still is a thousand liters, so a tenth the size of your large scale. They only make about a hundred thousand liters of whiskey a year. They do aging.

02:19:13
Next bourbon, primarily Heaven Hills, four Roses, jack Daniels and Old Forrester all relatively inexpensive barrels to acquire and then their line burner lines tends to have a finishing in various things wine, port sherry, both Australian and European versions, and there's about 20 different whiskeys in the lime burner line, of which you will not find this one, the Albany Tawny Cask. This was given to me by a fellow that I met in Melbourne, josh, who I, when I went and got that highwayman whiskey from uh from the wine shop with Juan after that day with that afternoon that we had a lot of fun together, he sent this to the hotel Uh and the reason you can't get it is that it is a barrel lane whiskey club release. So barrel lane is an Australian whiskey club that gets custom bottlings done and this is one of those Aged in Ex-Burman and finished in Tawny Port, so a port-finished whiskey. So this is a 700-mil bottle instead of a 750, but that's pretty typical in Australia 44% about what you'd expect for a proper single vault. If you want, the only way you would get this would be to be a member of Barrow Lane. They are out of it so you can't get it anyway, and the way you become a member of Barrow Lane is by signing up to their club. It's $135 Australian a month. That's about 90 bucks US.

02:20:41
Now, what have we got here? Well, we've got lots of color. They're very much in the amber rather than a dark red. The nose is slightly. This is a young whiskey, so these definitely smell the alcohol a little, a little light. Um, no punch up front. That's nice. It drinks really well. Uh, definitely a port, like you liking taste, that that's a port. Finish uh, whiskey, you know it right away. Oh, lots of heat. I really warm going down. I did. I did test this yesterday evening, so it was a good test. Uh, this is super drinkable. It's just pricey for what it is. I mean, granted, it's a, it's a club whiskey, so that's hard to come by at the best of times uh, what's that mean?

02:21:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a club whiskey? What is that?

02:21:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it means you have to be a member of the club to get an opportunity. By the bottle they literally did a custom bottling. Their name, the name of the club, is on the label. They ran this run. They had this run made, made. We finished in this tawny port. This albany tawny cask was only from barrel lane. So if you become a member of the club you get opportunities to get these rare whiskeys and there's probably 200 bottles of this ever made, wow, and was never retailed. It does not have retail labeling on it because it was just sold directly to members of the club. But there are, like I said, there's a 20 other uh single malt whiskeys called lime burners from uh great southern. So you can.

02:22:11
They don't appear to normally export, uh like they're not in regular stores. I found a few specialty shops in the us that will get you certain additions, at times in the 200 to 300 range, which is an awful lot for a non-age recommend non-age specific whiskey like $300 for a 25 year old bargain, $300 for a 12 year old, real expensive $300 for what is probably a three-year-old. It's tasty as it might be, that's pretty pricey. Look if you australia and you can pick one of the variants up for 150 aussie dollars, so maybe 100 bucks cool, it's a good single malt. Australian whiskey from western australia, um, but you don't pay the markup unless you've got a fan like somebody who just you want to get them something unique. This is a legit, proper, non-peated, space-size style whiskey, port finish whiskey that you probably never had and that you know. You've got a friend like that where you want to bring. They never have it, yeah, but you can spend a lot of money on it, so you better like that guy yeah and that is your uh whiskey segment for the week.

02:23:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, mr richard campbell. Took you on a little run around western australia. I love that. Have you been to perth? I have I have never been.

02:23:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think I was going to go down to margaret river to do wine tastings and I didn't go and I you did one, since you've been on the show right yeah, yeah, I did a show at like it was like one o'clock in the morning and I'd just been to the local distillery there as well, and it was one of those ones where I asked the kind of questions where the tour guide stopped. Oh yeah, he got the owner and I got pulled out of the tour. We have a problem here.

02:23:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who are you? Again? Security to aisle three. Very nice. Well, thank you, richard, for all of that. Richard is at runasradiocom. That's where you'll find his Run as Radio and NET Rocks shows the one he does with Carl Franklin. He's available for speaking anywhere in the world. Do you have a speaker's bureau you work with or do you just do it on your own?

02:24:24
Reach out to me know all right, just go to run his radiocom, he knows what to do. Paul thurot has no idea what to do, but that's why we love him. Where am?

02:24:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, who am I?

02:24:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you're now john f kennedy, I don't know what's happening thurotcom, t H U, double R O, double goodcom and his books are at lean pubcom, including windows everywhere in the field guide to windows 11. If they're not on your bookshelf today, they should be on your bookshelf tomorrow. Thank you Paul, thank you sir, thank you Richard. We do windows weekly every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern, 1800 utc. You can watch us live on eight different channels. Of course, club members get that behind the velvet rope access, which actually everyone's one. The sound drops out, the picture drops out.

02:25:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's so cool, it couldn't be better listen, you're watching the sausage being made and sometimes it looks like we're making sausage.

02:25:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sometimes you get a little bit in your eye.

02:25:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It goes flick.

02:25:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, maybe, if you find troubles there, you can go to YouTubecom, because we stream there. Twitchtv, we stream there, kick X, linkedin, facebook and TikTok Everywhere. Really, watch us live if you want, but you don't have to. In fact, the vast majority of people just listen when they feel like it, because it's a podcast. You can download a copy from twittv slash ww, windows, weekly ww. There's video and audio there. There's also a link to the youtube channel, which is video only, but that has a nice feature it's very easy to clip and share, and if you want to share something maybe one of the whiskey segments or whatever with a friend, uh, that's a good way to do it. We do have a playlist that kevin king puts together, uh, of of all the whiskey segments.

02:26:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it takes a while, so I don't know, does he do like an ai dj thing over it?

02:26:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he does.

02:26:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, this is kevin kevin here and Kevin King here, and I'm bringing you the latest in brown liquor Good, dr Johnny Fever here.

02:26:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can find that playlist also at YouTubecom slash Twit. Let's see what else. Oh yeah, you could subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Please do that and if you do, leave us a nice five-star review saying how great the show is, because we need the spread that we want everybody to know about windows weekly. Uh also, I forgot to mention it during our club plug. But if you are in the club and you go, what's? When is the next book club? What is? It's all in the newsletter, in fact then everybody should subscribe. It's free. Twitter tv slash newsletter. No salesman will call, you can just subscribe to it.

02:27:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Every time you say what mike is doing, I laugh out loud, but I mute myself, so you don't hear it. What?

02:27:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was crafting corner. No, but he's doing a lego succulent.

02:27:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's it.

02:27:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's amazing, the lego and what did john ashley kevin? You say that like it makes sense.

02:27:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's doing something. John ashley, lego succulent, a lego saguaro. You could boil that thing forever and you're never gonna be able to eat it. You're never gonna eat it they.

02:27:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you don't look too closely they look like the real thing. And then you see the dots and you go oh, that's like, you're like okay this is gonna be crunchy style look, I do not judge. That's the point of Micah's crafting corner.

02:27:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I got to talk to him.

02:27:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No judging, no judging, all right. Hey, thank you everybody. We enjoyed doing this show. We're glad you enjoy it and I hope you come back next week for all you winners and you dozers for another dose of Windows Weekly. Take care, guys.