Windows Weekly 935 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..
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott is here. Richard Campbell has the week off. He's on Safari in South Africa. Plenty to talk about. We have the great notepad. Actually, it's four controversies today the great notepad controversy of 2025. The great I don't know authenticator password management controversy of 2025, and the great Xbox content. Look, just stay tuned, it's a great Windows Weekly. Next, podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Episode 935, recorded Wednesday, June 4th 2025: Don't Spritz Yyourself. Oh, hey, hey. All you winners and you dozers. It's time for windows weekly. Paul Thurrott is here from thurrott.com. This reminds me of the good old days, Paul, when it was just you and me and we just had a grand old time ranting and raving.
0:01:14 - Paul Thurrott
I was trying to find my fitbit readiness score, which I think is going to be a negative three are you?
0:01:20 - Leo Laporte
ready. Actually my you know what my uh aura ring says I'm actually. It says we don't understand why your readiness is so good, because your sleep was terrible. I mean look at you. Look at you. Yeah, how's that? How are you doing that? They say Today oh no, my readiness is only 69. I never find mine. My sleep is 53. It says pay attention.
0:01:44 - Paul Thurrott
Where is this thing? It's breast management 67. That's, I don't know what that means. Oh yeah, why didn't I see?
0:01:51 - Leo Laporte
that I don't know. Yeah, and my glucose is elevated. Oh, that's good, but my resistance to stress is solid.
0:01:58 - Paul Thurrott
I go to the. I went to the doctor. I've been dying to get these tests. I'm going gonna write about this soon. Like um, I got all my tests done. His blood works and everything, everything's great, you know yeah blood pressure.
When I measured it was like 150 and over 70. My glucose is down. Wow, my cholesterol is way down. It was like half what it was. So I was like she goes, yeah, she goes. You kind of she didn't say it this way, this is how I talked about it she said you know, you kind of ran the rack on this stuff and I was like nice, and then she goes on medication. Oh, I was like whoa whoa burn, give me one second.
You know like geez, you know don't think you're perfect, Paul, yeah, she's like. You know, like if it was just up to you, you'd be dead like okay, okay, okay, settle down, settle down, please. All right, that's pretty funny new doctor. You know she's tough man I love my doctor.
0:02:50 - Leo Laporte
I I went this on monday because my blood glucose glucose was pretty high and uh, he said okay, you want ozempic? I said I thought I was gonna have to fight for that yeah, he said I would. I'll do this as soon as it's in a pill form yeah, which is uh soon is that happening really, because when that happens um they've passed their first stage clinical trials I get to see whatever I want, right I think the theory is that you don't want to eat you don't want to eat?
0:03:19 - Paul Thurrott
yeah, no, I've experienced that phenomenon.
0:03:21 - Leo Laporte
It's uh, it's powerful there's another thing that happens and I'm and I was talking before the show uh I it apparently reduces your impulse control, so I've made a little table of my weight well, those two things are contrary yeah, I'm just curious to see if they go down too she's like.
0:03:39 - Paul Thurrott
So I've noticed you've never eaten anything all week, but for some reason there are three new cars in the driveway like what's um.
0:03:47 - Leo Laporte
You know, I'm not hungry for food, I need powerful gasoline. Oh boy, uh moose. Espionage in our discord says I'm waiting for a zempic in a in cupcake, cupcake form. Yeah, in god's perfect form uh let us my friend. Well, so I should mention Richard's not here because he's on safari, yeah, he sent me a picture of a rhinoceros.
0:04:13 - Paul Thurrott
Oh man he?
0:04:15 - Leo Laporte
uh, he was in south africa for a conference and then, I guess, is he with his wife uh, or is he alone? I would know that because I follow, all alone looking for lionesses, as it were yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if she was there.
0:04:30 - Paul Thurrott
Actually, the fact that she hasn't posted anything recently suggests she probably is there because the connectivity is terrible that's why he's not here.
0:04:36 - Leo Laporte
He would be here. He would be in his little glamping tent, oh yeah, doing the show because he's so dedicated that way. But uh, there is no connectivity in the VELT. He's a diehard.
0:04:45 - Paul Thurrott
I thought I was bad about this kind of stuff.
0:04:47 - Leo Laporte
He really is. You don't have to be that way, Paul. I don't know. As long as one of you is, I know, yeah, as long as right.
0:04:57 - Paul Thurrott
You have two mental patients over here I go nowhere.
0:04:59 - Leo Laporte
So I just I tootle up to my attic and that's that yep.
0:05:09 - Paul Thurrott
So, uh, I see here that the great notepad wars have begun. What are you talking about that? We have a different controversy every week. This week we have at least two or three. That's pretty good.
Um, I'm gonna lead with the most important story of all, which is, of course, notepad. So, so notepad has been around since before windows. Right, people didn't know this at the time because no one paid attention to this stuff. But there was something you say before windows. Yeah, it was called multi-tool notepad, I think was the name of it. Wow, multi-tool something some right, or multi-tool right, something like that. And then that was going to be the name when they put when windows was happening. But then I said, well, we need something simple in that and became notepad, and notepad has been in there ever since.
So there have been a few notable updates to the app over the first, you know, 30 years or so. Um, it was redone for unicode in windows nt and made into a 32-bit app. There was some big stuff around Windows 2000 related to encoding formats and stuff. There was kind of a focus on IT pros and admins for a while. And then Linux, because of Linux and the subsystem, and well before that, posix actually as well. But this kind of interoperability angle now, developers, obviously because with the Windows subsystem and terminal you can do these kind of cross-platform things and Notepad needs to be able to open those types of documents etc. But when we got, I should say, a couple of minor UI things, very minor over the years up until about Windows 10.
So you know, windows Vista, they did like a code refresh on Notepad. That didn't really result in too much from an end-user perspective, et cetera. I'm probably forgetting some stuff. But Notepad is a plain text editor. It's something every OS has. It's not complicated, unless you try to write one. By the way, because I'll tell you doing my Notepad knockoff NET Pad very difficult. It's actually pretty complicated under the covers. And then we got hit Windows 10. And so with Windows 10, they started changing things. They put it into the store right so they could update it more frequently, which probably set off some red flags in certain places. And then in Windows 11, they really amped it up. So I'm not going to go through every change they've made, but there have been a ton and they first modernized it for the windows 10, windows 11 look and feel, which honestly they've done a terrific job with paint was a two-year nightmare where they screwed that up completely and then it took them a long time to get it right.
0:07:40 - Leo Laporte
But is it okay now?
0:07:42 - Paul Thurrott
is it? Is it? Yep, it's, it's fine. I can't say it's perfect, but it's fine. Um, the big things there were. They added something that looked like a ribbon but wasn't, and you couldn't collapse it. It's humongous. That's still the case today, by the way. Um, so it takes up a lot of ui space. Um, but it was also only light mode when they first shipped it and um, so you'd have a dark mode thing and it was like a you know like a spotlight on your screen.
If you ever opened it, by mistake or on purpose, it was terrible. So it's, and that's fine. They also screwed up all the keyboard shortcuts, which was horrible for people like me that use the app all the time. But they got there, it's, it's, that's in good shape. But notepad has never not been in good shape. They've always done right by notepad, right, right. And so first they did the UI refresh. They put a WinUI front end on what must? This thing must still have code in it from 1993. I mean, there's no doubt about it.
It's a classic CC sharp app from a million years ago. It's legacy code. There is text encoding formats that nobody knows how they work and notepad does them seamlessly and there are people at microsoft who have looked at the code and said we don't actually know how they do this, like it's astonishing.
um, we have no idea they're like, yep, can't figure this out. Um, they basically just take guesses, like sometimes they'll be like, well, if this character is in this position, try this and if it works, fine, if it doesn't do this, you know that kind of thing. Um, so in recent years I'd say last two years the big updates to notepad have involved functional things. They've added things like that recent sub menu in the final menu, so you have all your recent apps or recent documents, okay, cool. Um, they've had, well, the tabs and the, the new settings, ui, all that stuff, new ways to do things like fonts and all that stuff. Good, good, but also the AI stuff.
And so you see these co-pilot features in there for rewriting, drafting, make it shorter, make it longer. One of the funnest features in Notepad today I think this might require a co-pilot plus PC is you can open a document and we'll rewrite it as a poem. It's amazing, it's useless, but it is amazing. And, of course, because of the era we're in now, people who would watch the show, people who read my site, people like me, might look at this and I should say almost always do and say no, this is too much, leave it alone.
Like, why are you touching this and it's a text editor. Why would you bulk it up with features, why would you bloat it, why would you do whatever? But the thing is watching this happen and because I use notepad so frequently, I actually think they've been very respectful to the app and to which users. So if you don't like these features anything I mentioned, anything I forgot you can turn them off, like you can just ignore them. It doesn't actually get in your way. So if you don't want AI, turn it off. It's a switch, you can do that.
If you don't like spell checking, turn it off If you don't like using different tabs, you want to use different windows. There's an option in there for that. Like, you can make it work the way you want. So this to me does not meet the bar of insurification, right? Which there are different ways to kind of define that, but actually I wrote one in this that I thought was decent, so I said yeah. So I said insurification occurs when a company changes a product or service to benefit itself strategically, financially or whatever, while knowing full well that this change will harm users, right.
So you can think of things like Microsoft or Windows 11 saying, hey, would you like to try and fold a backup? It's super useful, you would love it. And I'm like, nope, don't want to do that. And it's like, but okay, but you should really turn it on. It's great. I'm like, yeah, no, I hear you, I don't want it. And then you reboot your computer and it's just turned on and stuff starts syncing between computers. I literally told you not to do that. That's insurification, right? Microsoft wants you to do this. So bad that they will just ignore your explicit wish and do it anyway.
And this stuff in Windows 11, like around telemetry, the crap where the constant feature updates, the forced Microsoft account usage, blah, blah, blah. Whatever that you could argue is in certification, but there's a big difference between Microsoft in this case improving an app and you just not liking it, you know. And in certification, right, you could say, well, yeah, but the co-pilot stuff is kind of pushing their AI aims and all that kind of stuff and it's like, yeah, it is, but, like I said, you can turn it off, you don't have to have it. More to the point, I think the real reason for that stuff is to show off what is possible, right?
These apps are, in some ways, a showcase for developers where they can say, look, if Notepad can do this, I mean, I could put this in my app. One of the big things that they did to build this a couple of weeks ago now was show how easy it is, how few lines of code you need to add to an app to add AI rewriting features, right, and I've done this myself. Back in January, february, I wrote a real stupid, simple app just to show that stuff off. It's really not that hard. So I think that's the point right, and so I guess I've gone across against the grain on this one with a lot of people because I just watch people react in outrage every time Microsoft announces any new feature in Notepad. It's been just you know.
0:12:55 - Leo Laporte
They don't want it to change.
0:12:56 - Paul Thurrott
They don't want anything to change. This is a big problem with the community. These days, I think it's like we're all old enough now. It's like stop changing things. And it's like, guys, just because you've calcified doesn't mean the rest of the planet has, I mean, things evolve.
0:13:09 - Leo Laporte
But historically Notepad's been the plain text editor right.
0:13:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, it still is. Still is Okay, so you're not losing that. No, this has not changed.
0:13:18 - Leo Laporte
It's still writing TXT files, not RTF files like WordPad, it doesn't do RTF files.
0:13:22 - Paul Thurrott
Like WordPad, it doesn't do RTF. It's not anything like it. It's still plain text and that's the thing. One thing I've used Notepad for a lot over the years and now I usually use different methods but people have said this to me as well is you get some kind of formatted document of some kind? You just want the plain text version, pump it into Notepad it strips everything out, copy-paste it. Pad. It strips everything out, copy, paste it back. Plain text. Right, it still works. Great for that like that has. That has not changed. Um, so I've been kind of weathering this as, as it goes along, as they add features, I'm like you know, this stuff's fine like it's like, it's fine like I used. Like I said, I use it every day. I love notepad and um, I love it so much I'm still trying to copy it like I spent a lot of my time on this you have your own.
It's so stupid how much time I spend on this. So this past week, a couple of days ago, microsoft announced that they were updating, providing another update, to the Notepad app. It's in the Dev and Canary channels in the Windows Insider program. Microsoft, you know, they don't always do a great job of explaining things like this, and I feel like this is something that should have come from maybe the developer group or whatever it is, the platform or something to explain why they're doing this, because they still haven't. I have a theory which I'll share, but what they announced was they were adding support for lightweight text formatting to notepad. Now I want you to imagine the sound of a rocket ship crashing into the earth, because that's what happened in my world. The whole world lost their minds. I understand that well, because because when you hear that, you think of the wrong thing, right like what you thought I just said was they're going to support rich text and that's not what they're doing.
It's not rich text. They're not supporting RTF.
0:15:08 - Leo Laporte
But how can you support fonts in plain text files? I don't understand. You support Markdown. Oh, it's going to be a Markdown editor.
0:15:16 - Paul Thurrott
Yep.
0:15:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, I should say it's not going to be a Markdown editor.
0:15:20 - Paul Thurrott
Although you could use it like that, I guess I've not seen it. I literally have three if not four computers on the dev channel that I could get this on and to this moment I've not seen it in person yet. You know they roll out over time, but it's still. It's a markdown. For those who don't know, it's plain text, it's a. It's a markdown language, I guess similar to HTML or XML right language. I guess similar to HTML or XML, right. It is lightweight. It's designed to be both machine and human readable, meaning that a document that was formatted with tags for Markdown where you use hashes and brackets and things, you can still read it. You look at it like, yeah, no, I can read this. It's not all gobbledygook or whatever. It's not like a programming code or like a C programming language thing or something.
It's readable yeah so plain text always will work everywhere. No problem there. Um, there are lightweight markdown. I'm going to call them like sort of word processors. I use something called typora that does this yeah, where you and a lot of like programmer type editors will do a side-by-side view where you write in the code, which is plain, and they show you a preview of what is really an HTML view of the formatted document. But the document itself is plain text. It's just as small as any text document. There's nothing special going on. It's just the language itself Markdown. So it's not changing to Markdown format by default. It's not, you know, it's not. It's not going to show you an HTML view of the document. It's plain text, it's all it is. So why would they do this? Um, is it to confuse people? Is it to, you know, replace WordPad? This is one of the big oh, that's why they obsoleted WordPad. No, it's not. It has nothing to do with that. Wordpad was a security disaster waiting to happen. They got rid of that more slowly than they should have.
Markdown is the language, so to speak, the format, the style that is used by almost all developer documentation now. So if you go up to like GitHub, for example, and you look at a readme file for a project, that's Markdown and it renders in HTML right. Whatever they use in the backend can render that thing so it looks like HTML or it is HTML right. I use Markdown to write my books. I use Markdown to write every article I write on the website.
I use Markdown every single day, all day long, like I love Markdown and there's nothing wrong with Markdown, it's just plain text. It's not rich text, it's not, it's nothing. But people see this and of course, microsoft. You know they're trying to make it friendly that when you're using a Markdown document or if you start typing code that could be translated into Markdown, like you type hash space, whatever that becomes a heading one. It pops up a toolbar with heading bullet lists, bold, italic, you know buttons so normal people can select text and make a link or make it bold or whatever. So people see this picture and they're like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, what are they doing? What?
0:18:19 - Leo Laporte
are they doing? What are they?
0:18:20 - Paul Thurrott
doing so I wrote this article explaining what they were doing, because Microsoft didn't explain it and, uh, I like I said I my guess about why I think it's for developers, like, if you think about, like, all the stuff that's going on, um, with developers in windows 11, and all the changes over the past couple of years, um, yeah, I mean this. This makes, this makes plenty of sense. I'm actually psyched to doing this. It would be kind of amazing to me if I could actually use Notepad to write lightly formatted documents right in Markdown format and not have to install another app right Now. That's probably not true, because the way it is right now it's just going to be pure code-based and I actually do want to see the formatted view. But one of the things I do now is type, know, type pora.
The app I use typically for the website is it supports a keyboard, well, a shortcut for copying, pasting into, like, um, basically non-formatted html, so it's perfectly clean. Uh, html, no extra, nothing in there. It's wonderful, I love it. Uh, notepad's not going to do that. Um, maybe someday it will. I hope so. You know I no one else does, but I do.
0:19:27 - Leo Laporte
Type 4 is a great way to write because it's so clean. It's so clean there's no ribbon, there's nothing.
0:19:33 - Paul Thurrott
I know I love it and if I was using a Mac, the IA writer is an even better choice.
0:19:38 - Leo Laporte
That's a good one, yes. God, it's not as good on windows that's why I use obsidian, because I can write yes.
0:19:45 - Paul Thurrott
And, by the way, you know type or what do you call it? Notion 2 is um is good. Yeah, notion uses markdown, that's right. Notion supports markdown syntax. You can already write in google docs in markdown syntax. It doesn't save it as a markdown file, although you can export to markdown.
0:20:00 - Leo Laporte
But if you know markdown everywhere, everywhere, that's, that's the.
0:20:04 - Paul Thurrott
It's literally everywhere. In fact, you might argue that Notepad is a little late to the game. In a way it is a text format. Microsoft does want developers to use Windows. It is a piece of that puzzle where it just works. So to me this makes total sense. But man, I have never well I have actually, but I've rarely seen like this community just lose their minds collectively all at once in such a dramatic fashion, and most of them just misunderstood what was happening. I'm not here to dump on Mary Jo Foley, but I'm going to Does she freak out?
Because I know she's a massive notepad user. Yep, I posted this. You know what I feel like. Probably use it more than she does, but it's fine, it's fine.
0:20:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's all she writes. I'm not going to.
0:20:52 - Paul Thurrott
I'm not going to actually dump on her, I'm kidding, but she did text me, I swear to God, like two seconds after I, to go. Well, she, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I'm not gonna read this word for it, but, uh, you know the attraction. Notepad is as simple as interaction, free and, um, if I want writing advice, I'll use word, one note or loop, like okay. So I mean, this is sort of the stuff I addressed in the thing, and again, I'm I.
Mary jo is very typical of the argument against this, which is like well, first of all, this stuff actually doesn't get in the way. It has never, um, it's never bulked up or bloated or destroyed the ui. Like the app has only gotten better and has only looked better in the last couple years, like it's way better than it's ever been. And, um, you don't. I don't get to say a lot about microsoft. I kind of want to revel in this a little bit, like windows 11, which in some ways is like this cesspool of terribleness. This one thing it's not the only thing, but this one thing. They've really gotten it right the whole time. And when people start like complaining about it, I'm like oh, guys, come on, we've talked about this. There's a lot to complain about. Let's let's focus on the stuff that we should complain about. You know, this is not one of them. I mean, it just isn't so.
Anyway, the thing with mary jo was funny, but I I don't know why I didn't anticipate it. I feel like I should have given her a trigger warning or something, but, um, but yeah, so so we, we went through that yesterday. That was amusing. But, um, I, there's no reason to like to use a different like. I would never install like a third-party text editor in windows for for normal texting, as a viewer, developer or whatever. Obviously there are reasons, but, um, this thing works great, it looks great and I can't wait to try this. I, in fact, I, I feel like I, I'm gonna find it a little lacking, like I want it to go further, um, and we'll see what happens in the future, but anyway, that was, that was the, the controversy I woke up to on monday morning it's like here we go.
I'm like everything's finally calmed down. I I've gotten over billed. Everything's good.
0:23:07 - Leo Laporte
You know, and it's like, okay, well, all right, You've reassured us all.
0:23:13 - Paul Thurrott
So maybe I should Well, I'm sure some people still disagree. I can't, I'm not gonna, I can't.
0:23:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, I can understand people saying you know a program? There ought to be a very simple, pure text editing program in windows. There is, it's called notepad. They don't do. They don't do words anymore, right? They discontinued that. What's that? They don't do wordpad anymore, right?
0:23:39 - Paul Thurrott
yeah. So yeah, wordpad was. Wordpad was always kind of an oddball, so going back to to the it's like mini Word. Yeah, so yeah, in the beginning there was the text editor notepad and the rich text editor Write. Remember from the early-.
0:23:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, right, I forgot about that, yeah.
0:23:56 - Paul Thurrott
So Write evolved into WordPad and then there was also like a separate project that turned into the word processor that was in Works, which was also not word compatible Right. But over time a word pad like notepad evolved in its own way and so it became compatible with word. Because of the antitrust concerns around the open doc, the open document formats in the early two thousands, microsoft open source that stuff and then made this thing part of Windows.
That was compatible as well which is why it's compatible with Word documents right. So today we have a web-based version of Word that does that. But the last major update to WordPad was for Windows 7, when they were promoting the ribbon to developers as the not the simple. What was? It called the scenic ribbon and there was something you as a developer could add to your own app. Um, I've tried this, by the way. That was. That was horrific, but you could do it if you didn't mind writing a million lines of XAML code and you could construct a ribbon. That was a rough approximation of something you might see in office or whatever right the apps that would have the ribbon.
So they added the ribbon UI to word pad, which I think bloated it up frankly, because it was very simple before that and then never updated it again in a meaningful way. So it's been sitting in windows for years. It's a security vulnerability. This is a way people can get a word document onto your computer that has a virus in it that can run and it just wasn't worth updating. So they eventually deprecated and removed it. It's actually been gone from Windows 11, I think, for almost two years now, but at least a year and a half the world has kept turning around the sun. We're OK.
0:25:41 - Leo Laporte
It's OK.
0:25:41 - Paul Thurrott
So, no matter what it is, no matter how little use something is, someone will always mourn it and then bring it up every time something else disappears. Oh, I knew this company was screwed when they killed the zone, you know, or whatever. There's always like the one person who's like I love that thing and it's like yeah but well there's still.
0:25:58 - Leo Laporte
There's still your dot net pad, there's notepad plus plus, yeah, there's all kinds of. You know, the mac has an editor called text edit, but it's by default an rtf editor it does both. That's right. It is not really a good pure text editor.
Yeah, um, so most mac people actually buy or bb edit or use the free version of text wrangler and they're happy, you know, because I think it's reasonable to say you, you kind of, if you do any coding or website development or anything, you kind, because I think it's reasonable to say you, you kind of, if you do any coding or website development or anything, you kind of need something that's not going to add anything.
0:26:30 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, you need right, that's good for that, by the way, I but. But microsoft has visual studio code, which is cross-platform, which, by the way, supports markdown and right. Um, you can I have, and I do for the books add, add extensions that do things like spell checking and grammar checking and markdown, syntax checking and whatever. And that's the beauty of Visual Studio Code, right, cross-section of the world. That is, uh, technical enough that they understand what everything I just said and are outraged by notepad still, but don't have a developer editor of some kind, of which there are a million free versions like it's like what do you?
0:27:13 - Leo Laporte
I don't even know if the s code is another good choice for just plain text yeah, that's how I think of it. Yep, yep. All right, let's take a little break, because we do have a preview update in week d, whatever that means, you winners and dozers.
0:27:27 - Paul Thurrott
You know what that means Paul thorat is here. Richard camel is on safari, I kid you not I know it's like sentences that don't make sense when you first hear them and you're like no, that's, that's what he said, and it's what he meant he won't be back, I presume.
0:27:42 - Leo Laporte
Well next week. If he doesn't get eaten, uh, he would make a fine meal for a lion.
0:27:47 - Paul Thurrott
A lion would be so happy they'd say jackpot, the best day of that lion's ass, yeah, or, like they might say, has this been marinated in a whiskey of some some sort there's an aromatic yeah, it's like when you go to um, what's, uh, what's that place called? Uh, not Fridays, maybe just Fridays where everything is like Jack Daniel's sauce. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:28:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, more to come in just a bit. It's just me and Paul, kind of like the good old days, the good old days of windows weekly. Uh well, they were probably the bad old days, but we don't worry, we'll revert to normal next week.
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24H2. Oh, you're muted.
0:31:00 - Paul Thurrott
I'm sorry. I mute myself because I can't resist making sounds, um sorry poor impulse control, Paul.
0:31:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly I need that as a pick baby um I bet breakfast at the thrott household is a lot of ha. Well, I don't actually eat breakfast, but okay. But if you did, you don't read the newspaper either. Oh no, I do that Do you have a printed newspaper.
0:31:27 - Paul Thurrott
Oh no, no, I'm not a dinosaur.
0:31:29 - Leo Laporte
You're a caveman, geez.
0:31:32 - Paul Thurrott
No, I don't do that I can't remember the last time I got a printed newspaper.
0:31:37 - Leo Laporte
Isn't that funny. I was talking to my piano teacher.
0:31:42 - Paul Thurrott
She has a young student who never saw a newspaper in her life. You know, what I do miss, though, is back in the day, as we say on the Kindle, you could get a New York Times or whatever subscription, and the thing you would get every day would be that day's paper. Yes, so if you have the app, whatever you're reading the New York Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal, whatever it is they promote things. However, they promote them. So obviously there's news that's new, but you don't get the whole day's new stuff in one place. Well, I mean, there's probably a view for that, but I kind of want that to be the homepage, or whatever, of the app. I kind of miss that, like I like to go through like Wait a minute.
0:32:17 - Leo Laporte
You're saying if you go to newyorktimescom now it's not the newspaper, is the mobile app.
0:32:22 - Paul Thurrott
I mean there's probably a view that is like today's paper probably is, but this is not the default.
0:32:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're right, it's, it's like uh editorial. Yeah, so they might show.
0:32:34 - Paul Thurrott
So what happens is I'll miss things, right. There might be like a wire cutter thing or a sports thing or some like I don't really like to read all of the entertainment news, but there might be some one random thing where I'm like I actually would have you know what we're showing our age, because that's really what the print newspaper did.
0:32:48 - Leo Laporte
That's what I'm saying you could scan the front and you'd know what was important. You go to the sports page.
0:32:53 - Paul Thurrott
You kind of knew where stuff was sunday would come and I would separate this thing out, like I was cutting fish in japan or something yeah, this goes here. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna read them in this order, not anymore. No, it's not like that. No, it's all curated.
0:33:07 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if, wow, it's also an infinite page, holy cow. Uh, in the app it ends like you just went by the. Um, okay, the. Somewhere there must be a link that says no no, there is there.
0:33:18 - Paul Thurrott
It's somewhere. Like if you go to, maybe to the top, there's a menu, I'm sure there's a. They used to be no, they're definitely.
0:33:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh, here, that's maybe the hamburger.
0:33:25 - Paul Thurrott
There's definitely something I mean there's a, maybe there isn't anymore.
0:33:28 - Leo Laporte
There's got to be like a today's there used to be a front page length. Yeah, they used to be.
0:33:34 - Paul Thurrott
I mean they do make the paper right, you can get the paper.
0:33:39 - Leo Laporte
I get it for my you know who. I get it for my 92 year old mom, for your painter and for uh yeah, like and for the when you're moving and you need packing material. Uh, my mom. My mom likes the Sunday times.
0:33:52 - Paul Thurrott
I used to get it, you know cause it was kind of fun that was. That was the holdout, Like we would. There was probably a couple of years maybe, where we got just the Sunday paper. Right and you get the crossword puzzle in the magazine we live in you know boston, like the boston globe used to be this enormous high quality publication you start turning into like the highlights magazine you see at the dentist.
0:34:10 - Leo Laporte
You know, like this little san francisco chronicle uh wrapped theirs in the sunday funnies.
0:34:17 - Paul Thurrott
That was the first thing you'd see, that's right, it's the sunday fun, yeah, same thing yeah, gosh, it's funny how you know young people are going.
0:34:25 - Leo Laporte
What are these old farts talking about? But it's funny how you know young people are going. What are these old farts talking about? But it's funny how this stuff is so gradual, right, you don't you know?
0:34:33 - Paul Thurrott
I haven't been inside a bank in years you know, the same right, exactly we, uh, we've been used to be a teller we don't have a bank we could go into. Ours is online only. So, yes, this is like no one. If anyone gave me like a thousand dollars in cash, I wouldn't know what to do with it. Like I, I'm not going to mail it to the bank.
0:34:49 - Leo Laporte
You know what I mean I don't know what envelope, I don't know. Well, cash is probably going away. I know the penny's gone. Yeah, things change, and they change so gradually you don't really notice, except one day you wake up and you go, yep no you can see anyone who's involved in tech can point to these examples of um the transitionary things.
0:35:10 - Paul Thurrott
Right. So the kindle comes out as and whatever, the sony e-reader, whatever that was called. One of the initial features was like that it would have a page turn animation. Yeah, you know. Yeah, it was like oh, it's just like reading a book, or like the all the apple mobile stuff used to have felt on the game table. The whole desktop metaphor was like let's give you something new, but make it a little familiar.
0:35:34 - Leo Laporte
Folder opens. Get you over the hump. Take a file out.
0:35:37 - Paul Thurrott
Folder closes. But enough years go by and you're like why are we doing this again? And everyone's like I have no idea, we just accept it. Why is there?
0:35:49 - Leo Laporte
a picture of a floppy disk for the save icon everywhere. Most people have no idea what that thing is. Never saw one. Well, many people, uh, of a certain age have never seen a phone handset and that's still the icon for the for the phone app on most uh.
0:35:58 - Paul Thurrott
So uh, in a weird coincidence. Uh, raymond chan, who does the, uh, the old, I think it's called the old new thing. He's got a great blog every day. He has some blast from the past technical blog thing he just posted about program manager in Windows 3, had a search button that had a little like magnifying glass Magnifying glass, yeah. And they were like this makes total sense. And then they got an email from a customer or whatever from some other country who said I'm just curious, why do you have a picture of a frying pan next to search? And they were like, okay, so they just got rid of the icon. They're like you know, it's just not worth it, but search frying pan of course everybody.
What does that have to do with?
0:36:37 - Leo Laporte
search. You know that's hysterical, yeah, oh my god. Yeah, I noticed. Notion still has a frying pan next to its search, so yeah and right, I mean notion actually they have an inbox an inbox.
0:36:53 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, Look at that. We just accept these terms. It's like what does this even mean, and it's like oh there used to be a box and you're office in the building you traveled to to go to work oh, what was that work?
0:37:09 - Leo Laporte
oh yeah, I remember that. I know this is what I just said this sounds insane.
0:37:15 - Paul Thurrott
It sounds as insane as I. I'm never gonna get this right. I was watching a youtube video where the guy said something like I use arch linux to run docker so I can do the whatever the name of the image thing is and I'm like you lost me on the second word of that sentence. I'm like I don't even know what you're talking about. I mean, I kind of do, obviously, but it was like we just say things that we don't even like.
0:37:36 - Leo Laporte
In a coincidental related story, Lisa asked me what Docker was.
0:37:43 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, nice, and you said jeans.
0:37:48 - Leo Laporte
I talked for half an hour in circles trying to explain what that is and it's. You know. I remember when I first heard about containers in docker and how I didn't understand, I had no idea. It really took me a while, but now I'm just ever, you know kind of used to it.
0:38:02 - Paul Thurrott
Everything's like this, like the first time you heard about. Like vms, same thing. Right, you're like this, like the first time you heard about like VMs same thing, right Same thing, what? What are you talking about?
0:38:08 - Leo Laporte
You're running an operating system in the operating system. What are you talking about, doesn't?
0:38:14 - Paul Thurrott
make any sense. You've got.
0:38:15 - Leo Laporte
Windows in my Mac OS. Yeah, anyway, anyway, any who?
0:38:34 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know how we got into this old man conversation. I don't either, but it's more interesting than what I'm gonna say. So, um, uh, last week was week d. On tuesday of week d, which is the every other from patch tuesday, microsoft releases preview updates for windows that are a preview of the coming patch tuesday update. They did a 22 H two update. Which bunch of new features that we would expect. We know a bunch of stuff is coming, but they didn't release one for 24 H two and I said I predicted they will do it.
There was some something that this happens. This happened a bunch of times. Um, a couple of days will go by. I predicted Thursday. I think it actually happened late Wednesday. But, um, they will release this preview update because there is going to be a humongous patch Tuesday update in June, right? So next Tuesday. And they did um, and it is humongous, right, it's exactly as you would expect. Um, so I don't really have to go through this exactly because we've talked about all this stuff before.
But this is like click to do is coming to the EU. Uh, ask, co-pilot as an action inside click to do. New text actions in ClickToDo. Shortcuts for pen users in ClickToDo, those search improvements we've been talking about, where I call it semantic search because I think it needs a name On and on it goes Windows key plus C to invoke Copilot, like we used to do with Cortana for a million years, image descriptions and narrative. It goes on and on and on. The the June patch tuesday update is going to be big, and I would say this is probably the second big, big, big patch tuesday update that will happen this year. So if you want to get or it's happened so far this year I should say, um, if you want to get going early on that, you can install the preview update. If you don't, just don't, you'll automatically, it's fine.
So that did happen. And then I have a theory about why it was delayed because I kept checking the page where Microsoft lists the updates for each version of Windows 11. And under 24H2 on the, yeah, actually it has the date, so that's not right. On the Tuesday, last Tuesday the 27th, they released an out-of-band update which I went back about a year and a half and I didn't see another one of these. These happen. I'm familiar with the term out-of-band, but typically you'll get something like this if there's like a zero day or some kind of serious problem. Whatever it was, in this case, something tied to Hyper-V, which is the virtualization platform, and windows speaking, which um. So the day that this would have come out, normally, they released this out of band update and maybe they just wanted to give it a day, uh, because the next day very late the next day, but they did eventually release that um, uh, pat, the preview update. So so that happened.
What else we got? Uh, and then there have been well, three, four, really four, uh, three sets of, but four, uh, windows insider preview builds. Uh, since we last spoke, there have been two canary bills, which is really unusual, including one that just happened. Um, I didn't have the link in the show notes for those of you watching it on discord or whatever, but it's in there now for leo and whoever else. But, um, the canary build today, uh, added features that we are seeing in other parts of the insider program. So nothing serious but, um, energy savers, uh, compatible with intune, the phone companion part of the start menu is re-rolling out, etc. Et cetera, et cetera. So all the stuff you see in there. There's nothing unique to Canary in there, but there's stuff that hasn't been there before.
The build we got on Friday there was only one build Friday, but also Canary is a new accessibility feature called Voice Access. I'm sorry, voice Access is not a new feature. That that's a feature. But it's getting a new um user experience to help you discover it better and get going with um, you know, speaking to the computer. So it's pretty good. Um, yada, yada, yada, yeah, okay, so that's most of the canary stuff, but of more import because I think it just impacts more people was I think it was yesterday, maybe the day before they released uh, separate updates for the dev channel and beta channel. These have been the same for a while now. Remember they were both on 24H2 for a while, or could be beta was 23 and 24H2. But this is the, I think, the first one where they've started to diverge again.
So there's a couple of features that are common to both sides of this equation. Quick machine recovery we've been talking about this is if your computer is having problems booting, it will actually just go right into Windows recovery environment and you'll get whatever remediation, you'll reboot and it should fix it. And then the phone link improvements, which is specifically some improvements to that phone companion sidebar thing on the start menu. So if you have a Samsung or other kind of a rare kind of a few phones that do this, if you have screen mirroring, if that's an option on your phone, you'll see that in that pane. For example, if you're an Apple user and you've got iCloud synced up to your computer so you can access that stuff in photos, you'll see memories from iCloud in there as well. So, kind of bringing those things a little more closely together.
But then there are several features that were specific to the Dev Channel. So a draft feature for Copilot in Word, which I'm not sure why that's Well, it's because it's a click-to-do feature and that's a Windows 11 feature. But if you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, have the desktop version of word installed. Um, you'll be able to use click to do to click on nothing and then draft a new document. Right, it will actually help you get started. Uh, usually you click on something and it does something with that text, but in this case you'll click on nothing, click on nothing.
0:43:59 - Leo Laporte
It says huh, yep, yeah, there are no text actions what would you like to do? Oh my.
0:44:04 - Paul Thurrott
So this is unrelated to what we're talking about, but this just happened. So yesterday I was laying on the bed, I had two laptops open. Like I said, I've got dev channel on.
0:44:14 - Leo Laporte
As one does One for the left hand, one for the right hand.
0:44:16 - Paul Thurrott
Multiple. Well, I was setting something up over here working over. It rings, right. So I pick up the phone. I'm like hello, and I can't hear anything. And then I but this has happened before, I know what's happening. I look at the computer. The computer has picked it up because I have phone link installed right, because I'm trying to get this phone companion thing on all the computers so I can write about it whatever. And sure enough there's a little dialogue that says one of the buttons says, uh like, transfer to mobile device.
0:44:42 - Leo Laporte
So I'm like I I solved it like I get it click.
0:44:45 - Paul Thurrott
I'm like hello, nothing, hello.
I look at the thing go to the other laptop I go to the other laptop, it says it's got the thing up. It says transfer to mobile device. All right, I got this. It's like look at over here. I'm like hello, nope, it was transferring back and it wouldn't. It never went to the phone and I'm like you gotta be kidding me. Like I'm like this is like this is this is the best microsoft description. Like, if you want to understand microsoft, just think about what I just said. Like how insane this is I. So I literally had to close the laptops to get the. Well, I mean, I could have brought this right other ways. Like, but you know, this thing is the background processes, not like closing the app doesn't really help. Like, if you try to close that little thing, it will hang up the call. Like you get it. I'm like so the? Anyway, I, I get to the person and this woman that's a very patient caller.
Yes, and I thanked her for this. She was laughing so hard she could tell this is what. Yeah, she said I don't know exactly what you just did, but I know it had something to do with some laptops or something. And I'm like yep, and I'm like thank you for, thank you for riding that with me. I'm like I so was she hearing you through the laptop microphone? Oh, yeah, because she she's like. And she said oh, now I can hear really well. Before you sounded like you were coming out of a tunnel and I was like, yeah, that's what it sounds like when you're on a laptop microphone Terrible. But she just sat there and let it happen and I was like thank you for waiting, you know. So that was pretty cool. You know what?
0:46:10 - Leo Laporte
We're all modern people. We know how it is these days, but how stupid.
0:46:14 - Paul Thurrott
Seriously, like just honest to God, oh yeah, so, since I'm just on this topic, like we've been talking about click to do and so and one of the things that's associated with this we're going to talk about this a little more in a second is these app actions right? And so there are these. Of course, there's a leaf blower two feet from me but we can hear it perfectly.
0:46:39 - Leo Laporte
That's the good, good, good good that's who's outside now is guys with leaf blowers. That's the only people outside these days exactly yeah, this is like the suburban dream.
0:46:48 - Paul Thurrott
It's a quiet bucolic.
0:46:49 - Leo Laporte
You know every day like I know I hate these things and they're all working like one-stroke engines, so they smell, oh yeah yeah, you know they're disgusting.
0:47:00 - Paul Thurrott
You think they would be flying around in star wars things by now making no sounds, but no, they're louder than ever. There's more of them anyway, so seriously?
um, there are two. There are two related things happening in windows 11. Some of this is co-pilot plus pc specific. Some of it is just for everybody, right, so you'll be able to right click on things that could be an image, it could be a text document and be able to get these text actions. This is is extensible. So Microsoft has apps in windows that support this, of course, um, but they are opening it up to third-party developers. So, like something like notion I, I, you know I'm just making this up, but I could click a text document. It could say add this to notion or something Right, okay, cool, um. I showed this to my wife this morning cause it was just so outrageous.
If you're familiar with Windows at all, you know that you can right-click a file and you get this menu. This menu is shorter in Windows 11. Or I should say it used to be, because it's about to get really long, and among the things that you could get in there were options like Open With, and then you get a list of apps that are compatible with that thing on a submenu, like okay, so when I right right click a PDF file, I see various browsers and whatever else. Cool, there's share also a lot of choices, and then now we're getting these new things, so they're adding actions in there that are specific to apps that are in windows, right, so I get a edit in notepad option on uh, on a pdf file which actually I'm not sure. I'm not sure what that's for, but okay, fine, when I right click a, I'm just making sure it does it.
0:48:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is you just sold your house in a contract, don't worry about it.
0:48:36 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, it's fine and I edited that thing in notepad for some reason. Um, so that's got the new DocuSign feature All right. I said earlier that the phone link thing where it's going between the two computers but never to my phone was the most Microsoft thing ever. This is potentially even better, the most Microsoft thing ever. So when I right-click an image file in Windows 11, now these are the options I see. Um, and these vary a little bit by computer, but pretty much this is it. Ask copilot okay, edit with climp champ weird, that's a video editor. Edit in notepad nope, that doesn't make any sense. Um, edit with paint okay, fine, it's, there's already an open with, but that's fine. And then it says photos, and photos has a sub menu. So what do you? Why would it have a sub menu? There must be multiple actions that photos can do on this image. No, the sub menu has one item.
0:49:37 - Leo Laporte
It just says edit with photos so wait a minute, it's got a edit with photos menu that has a sub menu that says edit with photos well, it says it's a photos menu that has a submenu, edit with photos.
0:49:47 - Paul Thurrott
But the point is, next to that photos main menu is an option that says edit with paint. Why doesn't it just say edit with photos and why does it say edit with notepad? This is Microsoft. If you're wondering why I sometimes appear to be insane it's. This is why it's this stuff, like it's the daily illogical nature of everything I see in windows.
0:50:13 - Leo Laporte
It's it's breathtaking anyhow um, sorry, couldn't, can't you. Am I wrong, or didn't there used to be a folder that you could put stuff in for the right-click context menu? Right, no, leo, the send to folder or something like that.
0:50:32 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, of course that's probably still there. Well, no, they don't really do send to anymore.
0:50:36 - Leo Laporte
You could put an alias in there and it would send to.
0:50:39 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they have share right, and so up until two seconds ago there was a share option. That was an icon but also an item in that context menu. Today, depending on which computer you have and where you're at and things, that is also something that pops open a sub menu. So in my case, on this computer, whatever I just right clicked, it says share with and then you go out and it says phone link, Outlook, copilot, and then more options, and more options launches the share pane which we've been dealing with since Windows 8.
0:51:12 - Leo Laporte
Is briefcase on there.
0:51:15 - Paul Thurrott
No, it should be, though. Yeah, now copy to a floppy and bring it to a different computer. There's another thing kids don't know about is brief, my briefcase or just, uh, you know, turning off the entire internet with an icon on your windows 95 desktop.
0:51:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, you know you can't get on the internet yet. You have to.
0:51:34 - Paul Thurrott
You have to launch it I'm just seeing if this is so, oh you know what I'm late. I apologize. Um, in the classic menu that so is thus the menu in windows 11, and can be reached in Windows 11 in a slightly more convoluted way. It does still say send to. So, yeah, it's still like a vestigial leg in a whale.
0:51:55 - Leo Laporte
It's in there. There's a folder that you could put something.
0:51:57 - Paul Thurrott
And, of course, it's like a documents item that has like a documents library icon from Windows Vista, because, seriously, this is an archaeological dig of the past and what is happening? Wow, I love that. I can send it to the desktop and it says create shortcut parenthetically. Because this document is on the desktop and that's hilarious. Don't get me, please, don't make me go down this path. It's just what.
0:52:23 - Leo Laporte
I do. Let's take a little break so people can try this at home exactly, yeah, just uh, it's like right click everywhere stuff I did with windows you see what happens. I, you know, honestly, I kind of starting to feel for you because as somebody's writing a book that is, in theory, going to document every feature of windows you have, it's the, it's sisyphus you have. There's no way, yep, you there is.
0:52:45 - Paul Thurrott
You're right, you're cleaning the eugene stables this is me coping with the fact that I need to just give up that this is, this is impossible it can't be documented imagine, imagine, imagine I did it. Imagine this morning I'm like holy, I did it, it's done, I got it it's all done I get an announcement microsoft's changing notepad Microsoft's changing snipping tool.
0:53:06 - Leo Laporte
Microsoft's moving the icon on the desktop.
0:53:08 - Paul Thurrott
It never ends. You can't finish this, nope.
0:53:13 - Leo Laporte
So what are you going to do? I'm going to step in front of a bus. I'm going to cut off the soles of my shoes. Get me a sailboat and sail around the world. This is why people retire Eventually.
0:53:28 - Paul Thurrott
Eventually you get too much of this right at some point. It just like you're like am I making a difference?
0:53:33 - Leo Laporte
I was talking the other day about how, for in the early days of computing I don't know if you've you experienced this I felt like it's a fire hose. I can't keep up. Everybody's ahead of me. I'm running as fast as I can. I can't up. But then it kind of the last 10 years I kind of oh, I caught up. It's like not changing that much.
0:53:51 - Paul Thurrott
Well, you know what, though I don't actually think it ever slowed down, I think what happened for you and I both is that the stuff that we cared about care about the part of tech computing that is interesting to us was not the focus. Right, that's right. So when enterprise, enterprise cloud, whatever was happening, I was so happy to ignore most of that, yeah you know, and not worry about it yeah, it wasn't now ai is happening and guess what baby, the spotlight is back yeah, we got.
0:54:16 - Leo Laporte
You thought that was a fire hose.
0:54:17 - Paul Thurrott
This is a tsunami.
0:54:18 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's what I was gonna say. It's it really is crazy.
0:54:21 - Paul Thurrott
Now I mean it's just no, it's insane. It has never been like it is now.
0:54:24 - Leo Laporte
You know, every week I'm preparing for Intelligent Machines coming up later our AI show, and so I bookmark AI stories and it's endless.
0:54:35 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, no-transcript. A little pill bug thing, pill bugs that's what happens to you. Eventually. You're overloaded and you're like I just can't, I can't even function well.
0:55:01 - Leo Laporte
Here's the good news. Apple's keynote is coming up on monday and they're not gonna say anything.
0:55:05 - Paul Thurrott
You know well, that was why this week was so great. And then notepad happened. I was like what are you doing to me? Oh, pad, I just really. I just got over it.
0:55:13 - Leo Laporte
Not so much notepad, but just like the response, like from other people, like hey, Paul, just think we have nothing to talk about, nothing to write about if things like that didn't happen.
0:55:23 - Paul Thurrott
No, that's true, no, I I'm not that kind of glass half full person. But I hear you. I mean, I hear it like I, you're right, I owe microsoft a wonderful career. That's right, and, um, thank goodness we've had to explain this probably not going to go postal on a campus or anything but I. But you know, we'll see. We'll see what the future holds.
0:55:39 - Leo Laporte
It's hard to say that's why he plays call of duty folks gets it out of the system.
Work it out. Let's take a break. When we come back. There is more to talk about. Actually, dma changes because of the EU, but I don't know if we're going to get them here. There are earnings to report. Lots more coming up With Paul Thurrott. You're watching Windows Weekly. Richard has the week off. He's on safari in South Africa.
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What are you laughing at, Paul?
0:59:41 - Paul Thurrott
Well, some discussion about half glass full, glass half empty. I I've told this story before. I apologize. I repeat myself a lot, but I literally said this in this moment. My I don't remember what I was talking about, but my wife looked at me and she says this is many years ago. She's like oh you're, you're a real glass half empty kind of person. I'm like glass half empty. I of person I'm like glass half empty. I'm like I finished the water and I see a crack in the bottom of the glass.
1:00:05 - Leo Laporte
Yes, and I'm just waiting for the internal bleeding to start.
1:00:08 - Paul Thurrott
I'm like glass half empty. I would give anything to be that positive. That's not even close.
1:00:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, there's a crack in the glass. Yep, well, you know the old joke An optimist says the glass is half full. A pessimist says the glass is half empty. An engineer says the glass is poorly designed. Nice, yep, that was a very token laugh.
1:00:32 - Paul Thurrott
Nope, no, I was. There were variants of that. I wasn't sure where you were going.
1:00:37 - Leo Laporte
I was thinking there's an off-color version of that as well.
1:00:40 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, I know variants of that.
1:00:42 - Leo Laporte
I wasn't sure where you were going. I was thinking there's an off-color version of that as well. But yes, I know uh. All right, let's talk uh the digital markets act is the eu's attempt to get big companies to toe the line yeah.
1:00:52 - Paul Thurrott
So if you've been following this kind of these stories, you know that, uh, apple's not following these rules and apple's gotten a lot of trouble. Yes, microsoft, uh curiously, has just kind of rolled over. They're like, yep, no problem, they've been here before. They know they're kind of the model you might want to follow. By the way, guys, apple that is. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know too.
About a year and a half ago, they have a page that describes all the changes they make to Windows for the DMA in the European economic area. Sometime between now and next couple of months they're going to implement a bunch of more changes, just based on feedback from the EU or whatever, and it's all stuff that everyone listening to this is going to want to have wherever they live. Like when you set the default browser, it actually sets the default browser for everything, not just a couple of things, and has a clear link for PDF as well and doesn't make you go to edge in certain circumstances, like, like, unless you chose edge, obviously. Um, you can take, uh, any web search provider out of windows search, including the stuff that Microsoft builds in. You can uninstall the Microsoft Store right, and it will still keep the apps up to date in the background. It just gets rid of the apps. So if you have apps that are included with Windows and they update through the store, that will still happen.
It doesn't break it. This is kind of the old. You know we can't take IE out of Windows, that would break Windows. You know, can't take I e out of windows, that would break windows. You know, kind of argument. So they got rid of that problem. Um, and if you are using bing or the start experience app, which is jesus, what's wrong with you? But, um, whatever, uh, it will no longer keep prompting to use edge. It will just respect your choice and move on.
And you read this and you think yeah this is what a de-insertified version of Windows 11 would look like. So the one thing Microsoft isn't doing is making these changes available to anyone outside of the European economic area. There are already third-party utilities that basically configure Windows as if you were in the EU, and I suspect they will continue working, so there will be. This is something I'm going to look into. Once these are all available, like I want to um see if we can just do this everywhere, because you know, respecting your choice.
I mean, what a? What a concept? Um, there's that, um, there. This is all. This is just interesting because of the microsoft angle on this one. Um bloom Bloomberg analyst Mark Gurman. Uh, as God, has written more words about Apple this year than I think are warranted.
But, um, a lot of hand wringing over Apple intelligence. What's going to happen at WWDC? Blah, blah, blah. Who cares? Um, but apparently they're going to drop the current version numbers that they use for iOS, ipados and all their major platforms and move to a year-based system like the one Microsoft did in the mid-1990s. And, by the way, they don't do that anymore for a reason. And the reason is everyone thought that the software they were using was always out of date because they didn't update their systems every single year. So Apple does, and I guess that's the theory. But the idea there is that you now you have to right like no one's going to be one. You know, if you bring up your iphone and it says, oh, you're using ios, you know 19 or something, and it's three years later, you're gonna be like what's going on there. So I think that's kind of a weird problem.
1:04:15 - Leo Laporte
I brought that up yesterday on mac break weekly, like this was a lesson microsoft learned when people were using windows 95 in 1997. And yep, it's two years old. But the other thing that Apple does update every year.
1:04:27 - Paul Thurrott
They do Right, I think that one you can defend. There there's the potential they might do this with the devices too, so the iPhone. They say everything is going to be 26.
1:04:36 - Leo Laporte
This is a rumor, of course. Going to be 26, this is a rumor of course we'll find out monday.
1:04:39 - Paul Thurrott
So yeah, so right now, if you, if you follow this stuff closely and if and if you don't, you're normal, don't worry about it. But ios and ipad os are in the same version number. Mac os, watch os, tv os and vision os are all on their all different. They're all completely different.
Yeah, so this will line all those products up with the same number by the way microsoft did that before too they did that, and I think it was 1993 when they took Word 5, powerpoint 2, excel, whatever it was on, did the next version and put them all in version six. So I'm not saying Microsoft Innovate or Apple copier, but I'm kind of saying that because it's fun. But whatever, there's a reason Microsoft doesn't do the date thing, though I think Apple, I think they'll be okay, I think it's probably okay. Plus, I think there's some plan where they might start rolling out phones over a period of time. So that will still stay current.
1:05:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're thinking of doing what Google does, which is kind of the mid-year release yeah, that's fine, and the end of the year release.
1:05:35 - Paul Thurrott
I just thought as I read this. I was like man, where have I heard this before? I know I brought that up, I know.
1:05:40 - Leo Laporte
It was like 30 years ago, yeah, yeah.
1:05:43 - Paul Thurrott
I don't want to spend too much time on this. I mentioned there were at least three major controversies this week. I'm going to say there were actually four. Oh, boy None of these are any of them, but I want to get by these so we can get to the next one Microsoft all the big tech companies earnings. Idc has come out with predictions for PC sales this year. Lenovo gangbusters a couple of weeks ago.
1:06:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we talked about Lenovo.
1:06:09 - Paul Thurrott
And then I just saw, was it? Dell did pretty well too. Yeah, dell, hp have both come in, and then NVIDIA, which is only kind of related on the side, but I'll get to that, but the other OEMs didn't do quite as well as Lenovo.
1:06:19 - Leo Laporte
but it is definitely an up market for PC sales.
1:06:22 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, right, yeah. So you know, earnings are always interesting to me because I look at the numbers and I look at how they compared to a year ago. I look at, you know, whatever they provide. I'm very interested in the hard numbers, but the thing that sinks or swims for a company is often just what they say. It has nothing to do with the hard numbers, right?
And one of the problems, I guess, is, you know, hp has this really rigid accounting system and they're they're honest and they were like, look, um, tariffs, uncertainty, blah, blah, blah, we're just, we're just. Look, we don't want to, um, you know, be too upbeat about the rest of you because we really don't know how it's going to go. And their stock like fell off a cliff. You know, like, that's what, even though they're doing fine, like they're doing fine, they're doing, you know, their PC business is doing, you know, not quite as well as Lenovo's, but almost as good Dell, same thing, like, if you compare these two companies like, not their total revenues because companies like the not their total revenues because they're very different companies really, but the the part that makes pcs, hpc, hp's pc business nine billion in revenues uh, dell smaller company, 12 billion um oh sorry, bigger company, well bigger, well bigger, uh sorry, by market share I meant oh okay, yeah, but yeah, I made more money.
Yeah, and the vast majority of those sales from commercial PCs right, not from Right, there's the Dell. Consumer business has fallen off a cliff and I feel like it has to do with the XPS and rebranding and everything is a Dell now. And what are you doing? Like, seriously, the most mental kind of rebranding thing I've ever seen, if you care about brands. But whatever, nvidia is fascinating for all kinds of reasons. We know they're one of the biggest companies in the world. Now They've been doing not just double-digit growth but high-end double-digit growth for a long time, still doing that, although it is starting to slow. They took a $4.5 billion charge because of tariffs and still nailed it and, as a result, their stock went through the roof because it's like these guys are killing it. You know it's kind of interesting, even though they're actually, you know they're getting hit a little bit um on stuff, uh, and there are rumors that NVIDIA and MediaTek will be coming out with a uh, uh, a chipset incorporates an NVIDIA GPU that runs on ARM by the end of the year. So this, you know, we'll see. We'll see what happens there. Okay, that's earnings, all right.
So this is the second major controversy of the week. This one is a little vague because it was reported through Bloomberg. The guy involved in this confirmed it on LinkedIn but there's like no details and there's all kinds of misnaming of things both on the part of Bloomberg and the guy from Microsoft slash LinkedIn. So the current CEO of LinkedIn, ryan Ruslansky I believe he's been CEO for I don't remember the timeframe, but several years is on the senior leadership team at Microsoft. But remember that LinkedIn is run as a standalone company, right, it's run independently. It's not tied into Microsoft's earnings, although they do discuss it every quarter. It's not part of the central company Like it's. You know they bought this company I think it was 26 billion-ish several years ago. They've been just letting it do its thing.
This guy is going to run what he and Bloomberg both called Office. I'll remind you that there is no such thing as Office. Microsoft renamed well, the overreaching product. Our brand is Microsoft 365, but the Office suite as we sort of knew it is referred to as the Microsoft 365 apps or the Microsoft 365 desktop apps. So it's kind of bizarre. But he will report to.
He used to be under Scott Guthrie, so this was Intelligent Cloud, the Azure Cloud, ai part of the company. He's now part of productivity and business processes, which is Microsoft 365. Productivity and business processes, which is Microsoft 365. Also, the commercial side of Windows. He's going to be under Rajesh Jha, who the leader of the Windows team reports to. He used to sort of run Windows when we didn't have a direct leader of that business. He's you know, he oversees a bunch of things. But Microsoft 365, let's say, let's say he described it as let me I just want to get the way he worded it because it's very strange. He's going to continue to be the CEO of LinkedIn, an independent subsidiary of Microsoft, which he calls out, but he's also going to step into a broader role, leading Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Okay, so I guess we're calling it Office again. That's so weird. Weird. I know he refers to it as one of the most iconic product suites in history, although I would say it's not a lapse.
It sounds like it's intentional right, which is really what he says, office four or six times in here. It's crazy. So it is intentional, it's well, or he just literally has no idea what he's talking about. He's from linkedin. No, I mean that I'm I'm not being funny or whatever I think this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
So I don't know what he's talking about. So, yes, the product suite, so this is what it used to, be right? So Office was this thing that ran on Windows, but also on the Mac. There's a web version, but now there are mobile versions of these apps. There's a lot of them. Actually, copilot in the Microsoft 365 sense is an app and a service. That's part of that whole world. There are other components of Microsoft 365 that are, you know, I would call them server or cloud-based, I guess services. Right, he's not in charge of that, so I guess what he's referring to really is the client stuff. I don't think it's like Windows specifically. I think it's all of the clients. But again, I really don't think he knows what he's saying here and he says, yeah, productivity, connection, ai, they're all converging at scale. Office and LinkedIn are used daily by professionals globally, looking forward to redefining ourselves in this new world. I am looking forward to some clarity on this guy because I have no idea what he's talking about.
1:12:22 - Leo Laporte
This is like the new head of Noah, who said what we have a hurricane season in America.
1:12:26 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bloomberg referred to Office as a bundle. I just mentioned that they aligned all the version numbers right back in 93, 94, that timeframe that's when it went from being a bundle to a suite. We haven't used the term bundle to describe Office since I was a child.
That's not Maybe you're reading check the date on this article. I know the whole thing is crazy. I don't even oh, but here. So according to Bloomberg, which I don't know where they got this from Well, actually I do, I'm sorry there was an internal email sent at Microsoft which I'm looking forward to seeing because I think that might provide some clarity. Bloomberg has seen it. They did not publish it. I have not seen it. It's not anywhere, or it wasn't before the show started. So I think we'll see it eventually. But according to Bloomberg and if you know anything about the world I'm part of here, you'll understand how crazy this sounds Apparently they're not rolling out ai quickly enough in the office apps, um, which is not what's happening if you talk to any microsoft customer, I think they would all tell you the same thing.
It's pretty fast, slow down, yeah, but to me, the big thing here is that if you go back to the beginning of 2024, which, remember, was right in the wake or in the midst of really, the uh, the sam altman, uh, drama at open ai and what's going on there and microsoft bet so much, there have been at least three major reorgs uh at microsoft based on ai. Right, there was the creation of the microsoft ai organization. They called it this kind of weird group that sits outside of all the other groups and is led by uh, I forgot his name, sorry suleiman. Um, the guy from, oh, yeah, yeah, suleiman, yeah, yeah, mustafa, suleiman, yeah, mustafa, thank you. Um, I didn't write about this at the time, but I saw him at build and he was the guy who did the day two keynote that got interrupted by the protesters.
But jay parikh, who used to be the software, uh, the, what do you call it? The head of engineering for Meta. They hired him in October to be the AI apps czar. Are we just making stuff up now? What are you talking?
1:14:28 - Leo Laporte
about.
1:14:28 - Paul Thurrott
So we have a Microsoft AI organization, we have an AI apps czar and now the LinkedIn CEO is going to run what he calls office, and I'm like what, what, uh.
1:14:45 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I, I'm look these get vetted. Thoroughly right, these kind of releases. There's no way this is an accident what he wrote on linkedin.
1:14:51 - Paul Thurrott
You will agree this was not vetted in the slightest oh, okay the best part of this is there's I don't know if you saw it. I linked to it in the uh, I can look. Yeah, yeah, there's a. There's a graphic that accompanies this and it's, it's it. I don't know what this is. Look, it's like the way people thinks it looks and it's like a line that goes from school to insert, to associate, to manager, to executive, and then it says how it can look and it's like this mess of different ways with all these different points, and it's like okay, what does this have to do with you running office? Like what it's, it's, it doesn't make any sense.
1:15:29 - Leo Laporte
So when it looks like a hat rack. That looks just like that yeah.
1:15:40 - Paul Thurrott
Is this something to be promoting I don't know is this this is what office looks like at the top, and this is what it will look like by the time I'm done with it. Okay, this?
1:15:51 - Leo Laporte
was it is, it will be more colorful.
1:15:53 - Paul Thurrott
I that's cool. I like yeah, that's in the announcement. I don't know, and he's going to run office. So yeah, I feel good about it. I know it's almost like someone realized I got enough sleep over the weekend, or something.
1:16:11 - Leo Laporte
No, he can't, he may not sleep any longer. Oh geez, that is the weirdest picture I've ever seen. I don't know why you would put that in a business communication.
1:16:27 - Paul Thurrott
I'm sure sometimes I communicate in a fashion where people are like I don't know what's going on with that guy, but this thing is just unhinged. I don't even. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see.
1:16:37 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, is this guy the right guy to run an office?
1:16:40 - Paul Thurrott
I'm sorry I don't think. Yeah, it doesn't exist. It definitely get put him in charge of the product line. It doesn't exist anymore. That's, that's exactly what he's good for, I don't know. Anyway, this linkedin thing that he wrote is like this is the ceo of linkedin. It's like on linkedin like just making no sense, which, honestly, is the most linkedin I've ever seen. If I'm being honest, Wow.
Did I not? What did I do? I didn't have. Oh, I have a wrong link in here like an idiot. That's OK. So sometime I think was about a month ago, I'm sure we talked about this at the time, but Microsoft announced that they were going to why do I not see this? Get rid of the password management and autofill features that are in the Microsoft Authenticator app, right?
1:17:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's a little weird, to be honest.
1:17:33 - Paul Thurrott
So right, and it's reasonable to ask okay, why? Yeah, what's going on?
1:17:40 - Leo Laporte
there. Maybe they don't want to compete, maybe they're worried about antitrust action?
1:17:46 - Paul Thurrott
I doubt it. So I think most people are familiar with the notion of authenticator apps. The Microsoft authenticator app works particularly well with Microsoft accounts, meaning both the consumer Microsoft accounts and enter ID accounts. Well, you have to have it right If you want to do it. Yeah, I actually really like the way they do things, because they mix it up right, so it's not always like just type one of three codes. Sometimes it will send you a number and say put that into the app and something.
1:18:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I like that they you know, but if you want to do passwordless for your login on the windows, you have to use it well, you could use a.
1:18:14 - Paul Thurrott
Well, you could use a passkey, right, oh you can, oh, okay yeah, I mean, you could do that, and paskeys complicate things in some ways. How? Would you do a paskey on windows if windows can say paskeys, so you couldn't do it the first time you logged in. You would probably use an authenticator app or you could whatever your secondary verification was. But once you do that, it actually creates paskey and then you can use pass pass through there because steve gibson was really praising this move.
1:18:38 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I think this is an improvement, security. But he didn't.
1:18:41 - Paul Thurrott
He said but you have to use the microsoft authenticator app well look, there's a lot that goes into this honestly and uh it's better security.
I think frankly, yeah, one of the one of the little roundabout things you can get into is you. You I use um. What do I use, Paul? I came, can't remember ProtonPass, which password managers are really like identity managers, right? So obviously they do autofill on mobile and on desktop, but they do things like credit card numbers, obviously, and there's all this additional stuff. But one of the things they're starting to do is passkeys, and passkeys. That gets you into a weird area, because you don't really want only one app that does everything, because, for example, you should be using 2FA to get into the password manager to begin with and you don't want that in there.
1:19:31 - Leo Laporte
You wouldn't use PassKeys to get into your PassKeys either. That would be probably bad Right.
1:19:35 - Paul Thurrott
So yeah, but one of the fun things I do on mobile is I'll open, like I did this yesterday Private Vault, which is part of OneDrive, which is an app on mobile, and you go in, you have to authenticate, so the Windows, the Microsoft Authenticator app, comes up and then you put your thumbprint on and then you're just in and you're like, okay, so was that secure? I guess it was secure, I guess it was like it's. It feels weird sometimes, but it's important that these two things, um, are separate, but also that you yeah, you don't want to have a million of these things around. Uh, you don't want to have, I mean, people that we talked about this at some point. You know people move from browser to browser and they keep their password.
they don't think about it, so the passwords are out there in a million different places, probably, anyway that's why you use a password manager yes, and and, by the way, I I would add one word, well, one phrase, to that which is use a third party password man, yeah, don't use the microsoft, the google one, the apple one, like um. You want something that's going to work everywhere, right and identically everywhere, and and work well everywhere. You know, we all know the big ones, but you know one password bitwarden, uh, dashlane, um. And the one password and Bitwarden are both sponsors, they're all mentioned.
Okay, but that's, but they are the best right. So any of those you know are fine and they work everywhere. That's, that's really the point.
1:20:48 - Leo Laporte
And they're seamless, and they do Passkeys too, which is great. Passkeys are fantastic.
1:20:52 - Paul Thurrott
I love Passkeys on. I sign into my password manager and then I sign into my Google account and the Passkey choices come up and I select the one I want and I'm in and it's the best.
1:21:02 - Leo Laporte
Actually, for some reason, our workspace account, I think Passkeys are not enabled by default in Google Workspace. So I had to talk to our IT guy and I said can you enable that? And he said yeah, for some reason Google, who is a big supporter of Passkeys, says it's still in beta in the enterprise, which is weird. But I was surprised that yesterday I logged into, I was logging into wired and I have a condi nas subscription. Yes, they support passkeys now directly, right, yeah which is really good.
1:21:31 - Paul Thurrott
I mean more and more places are supporting passkey yeah, a good password manager will tell you when one of the things, one of the accounts that it's protecting, has a better way to authenticate. Yeah, so, maybe it's a 2fa thing and an authenticator app, maybe it's a pasky. Whatever it is like, it will actually tell you. So the goal is to automate that as much as possible. Do the right thing every time mail uses paskies.
1:21:55 - Leo Laporte
I use paskies wherever I can get. How does it like?
1:21:57 - Paul Thurrott
amazon uses paskies. Amazon was an early adopter of PASCIs. They do a good job. But I also have it set up in such a way that I will use my PASCI and then it sends me an OTP on my phone anyway, or Adobe, which is hilarious will send me. You put your username in and then it sends you a PASC. It's like do you have a PAS? I used the passkey. This is okay. Good, Now enter your password.
1:22:18 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, Like Adobe is the worst, like they're just stupid. See, I really want ways to delete. This is why I thought what Microsoft did with passwordless was very cool, because it really emphasized you don't need a password, because passkeys is even more secure.
1:22:32 - Paul Thurrott
It's better not to have it. It's one less app.
1:22:34 - Leo Laporte
Better not to have it, that's right so.
1:22:36 - Paul Thurrott
So the two things I just wanted to communicate about this, because the reason I mentioned this today is they've started alerting people in the app. So if you use Microsoft Authenticator, you will have seen a pop-up that says hey, by the way, this is going away. Here's what you can do, or whatever. And what you can do is not ever use Microsoft password management, Jesus Christ come on.
So the first one is third-party password manager, and I listed the good ones. But the second one is to use this app solely for Microsoft account authentication purposes. You know, 2fa verification it's awesome for that. The one thing it doesn't do is have any sort of cloud sync, and there's some controversy here because the Google one doesn't have true end-to-end encryption, but it is actually encrypted at rest and in transit and all that stuff. But Google Authenticator saves it to your account and what I have to say? I just I love signing into my Google account on a phone and just getting it Like I don't have to recreate it, I don't have to backup and restore.
The problem with that stuff is sometimes you maybe you lose your phone or whatever. Something's wrong and like manually going back and which I've done so many times creating all of those accounts again in an authenticator app is a nightmare. Um, it's possible I mean, I've done it a bunch but having it sync is I don't know. That might outweigh the small fear you might have about whatever, but um, so, but the question I think people are asking is well, why are they doing this? Right, if you're in the Microsoft ecosystem and you use Microsoft products and you're on mobile. So you're using an iPhone or Android, you've probably seen you can use Microsoft Edge, the browser, or Microsoft Authenticator, the app, as your autofill provider for passwords and whatever else. They're working off the same backend data store.
So the fact that they're removing this capability from authenticator suggests to me that maybe they're trying to push people to edge right. Like yeah, but here's the thing you can just install edge sign in with your Microsoft account because it's going to auto go through right. You've already you've already done this authentication work on the thing. You can just install Edge sign in with your Microsoft account because it's going to auto go through right. You've already done this authentication work on the phone. It will have the passwords in there and then you can pass them through. You can use that for autofill, but don't do that really, because get rid of the Microsoft thing and use a third-party auto.
1:24:58 - Leo Laporte
Use a third-party password manager?
1:25:00 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, Don't don't use that, but you could do that. So my, my guess is that that's why, but I don't.
1:25:05 - Leo Laporte
And most, by the way, a good third party password managers will import those edge passwords so you could move it over to edge?
1:25:11 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and import it and then delete them from it.
1:25:21 - Leo Laporte
This is managed to support the same format for import, export, right, um, and then there's you know. A lot of times they say, hey, do you want me to move all your at least bitwarden used to do this? You want me to move all the passwords out of chrome?
1:25:27 - Paul Thurrott
or edge or if you are, if you are using authenticator, um, and well, they'll get, microsoft will do the work for you, they'll actually delete those right. So they're going to well. Except they won't delete them from the cloud, so you can't, in the authenticator app, go and select all delete, it's like oh really, but you can in microsoft edge, so, uh, at least in the desktop version of the browser.
So do that, use it that one time for that. Install chrome and then never use it again. That's, that's right, exactly that's the best policy. But that's just you know, that's just me, okay, uh. So, um, and speaking of things people love, the new Outlook for Windows is now on a monthly update cadence and they're actually starting to add features that people really want, like the ability to disable Copilot, right, which is probably the big one at this PST file support, which is one of the biggest complaints that people have.
In the 1990s literally like 97, 98, I carried around a PST file in a floppy disk in my pocket because these things were so unreliable. When the Outlook first came out, I had to have a backup of this thing and it was everything. It was your whole life in a PST file, right, right, right. So PST they changed the format at one point, but pst is carried through this entire time. It's still a major part of the desktop, the old version, the classic version of outlook, and they're starting to add that compatibility to the new version so they can phase out the old version. So that's starting to happen. If your consumer account, you can move emails between accounts. That's something that didn't work before. Better offline support. So instead of seven days of email by default for offline use, it's 30 days now. That kind of stuff. So it's getting there. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I am saying you complain too much Back in, I don't know, maybe March, february, something like that.
Oh, it must've been March because I think it was part of the big uh co-pilot wave. Two announcements Microsoft announced these two AI reasoning agents researcher and analyst for Microsoft 365 co-pilot. Uh, those are both generally available. Um, I'm surprised they don't have one called a legal or lawyer, you know, um, which is maybe as necessary at this point, cause people seem to be using that a little too much. But these are the things where these agents will go out on your behalf and research deep topics and come back after some period of time and do that kind of analytical work. So I don't have much experience with this. Other than that, I did something like this in Gemini, where I have the standard query. I ask all AI agents just to compare the results. And when I did this in Gemini, where I have the standard query, I ask all AI agents just to compare the results, and when I did this with Gemini, it provided me with the same results but just a lot slower. So if you feel like you need that waiting period, I guess this is the way to go. So that's part of that.
Again, months ago I don't remember the timing of anything but OpenAI blew everyone away several months ago when they announced that Sora tool for transforming text prompts into videos. Since then, of course, google just did their VAO stuff at IO. That was amazing. Microsoft has a history now of taking paid OpenAI products and making them available for free and sometimes in limited form. So there's now a sora based bing video creator that transforms text prompts into short videos. Uh, lots of limitations on this compared to the open ai tool. So it's on the phone only, so you have to install the bing app for now.
Um, so they finally figured out a way to get people to install bing. It's pretty cool actually. Um, it's not. It's free. Um, it's only on your phone.
Right now it only does like, uh, 9 by 16 portrait videos.
It will do 16 by 9 soon. It's limited to five seconds uh, in length for videos where sarah is 60 seconds and the free version can only make 10 of these at the fast speed every month, after which you can just use standard speed or you can actually. Speaking of Zoom, you can spend Microsoft reward points to make more videos at fast speed. Jeez, seriously, I don't know the language of this stuff is so insane. Basically getting AI credits with Microsoft reward points, which is a nonsense sentence. I'm sorry I said it, but it's in the phone. It's coming to the web so you'll be able to do it on a desktop soon.
They'll do 16 by 9 soon. I assume they're going to expand the availability to be longer videos, maybe for people who pay or whatever it is, but I have to say I did make a couple of videos with this. It's pretty cool. I've been doing this with the Firefly stuff that Adobe offers through Creative Cloud, which is kind of amazing, because in that case, one of the options you can actually choose between I think they call it graphics or images and photorealistic or whatever, and the photorealistic ones are like yikes, they're actually they're pretty good, but look at this. I mean this is worth looking at, it's pretty cool.
It's not there today, but soon, if you go to bingcom slash create you'll be able to access it there on the web as well, nice, okay, a couple more real quick. These are just kind of industry stuff. The New York Times, infamously, is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. They did a pretty good job of demonstrating that these things stole from their paywalled content, but, okay, we'll see what happens there. But this past week they announced a licensing agreement with Amazon, so Amazon's going to be able to use content from the New York Times across its AI platforms, both for training but also in their end user products. So we're going to be seeing this in Alexa-based implementation somehow.
So, if you have an Echo speaker or whatever, alexa based, uh, implementation somehow so if you have an echo speaker or whatever, um, you'll be getting the horrible news that the New York time writes, so have fun with that. Um, this one's just a rumor, but it's. This is interesting to me because Samsung is such a big uh partner with Google on Android and Android 16. There's a whole like Samsung interplay thing they're going on where, like live notifications, which are very similar to that Dynamic Island thing on the iPhone, is appearing first on Samsung but going to be part of Android. They're doing desktop mode, which is based on Plex, and the improvements Google made are feeding back into Plex and not Plex I'm sorry, Dex, the desktop environment. It's really interesting.
But according to, again, Mark Gurman, Samsung and Perplexity could announce an integration agreement on their devices that could start as early as the S26 devices and if that happens, this might be the default AI on Samsung's devices, not Gemini. So that's kind of that's interesting, and maybe they're just playing the two companies against each other. I don't know, but I did not expect to see that. If anything, I thought these guys were getting closer together. I don't know.
1:32:13 - Leo Laporte
I don't know.
1:32:14 - Paul Thurrott
I like your AI generated picture for the New York times amazon thing yeah, if you, if you search my site for new york times, you'll actually see, uh, two, three, five, whatever are like images like that, because every time I do a new york times article like this, I use that ai thing and they're, you know they're, they're actually. They actually look like they're of a family of like robots or something.
1:32:39 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of funny. They're all in the family together.
1:32:42 - Paul Thurrott
How cute is that the last one, the robot was stealing the paper and running away from the paper boy because they were stealing the content. But now that's good.
1:32:49 - Leo Laporte
I like that. Yes. What do you use to do this? Is that copilot microsoft?
1:32:53 - Paul Thurrott
designer, which is the it's open ai based, but through microsoft, yeah okie dokie, let's see.
1:33:02 - Leo Laporte
I guess we've got an xbox segment coming up. Are you ready? Let's do a brief, uh, sponsor mention and then we will get into now. Why is that doing that? I don't want to see that. I want to see me. There we go. Let's get into the xbox news. What are we going going to do in replacing the whiskey pick? Because Richard's not here, I guess.
1:33:22 - Paul Thurrott
Oh right, Actually I'm going to talk about spritzes a little bit. I didn't put this in the notes, but this is something. There's been these interesting trends that are occurring in cocktails that have occurred this year that I think are maybe worth mentioning.
1:33:39 - Leo Laporte
All right, good, I like that, and that's one of the big ones spritzes, we have shrubs. You ever have a shrub?
1:33:44 - Paul Thurrott
yeah, it's like uh getting, it's like zoom, squirting, it's like uh, can you spritz me with your zoom, with your alcoholic? Beverage, I sprung a leak. I don't know what's going on here spritzing.
1:33:55 - Leo Laporte
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Here's somebody who did this, Sam. He's the technical operations manager at Bede Gaming, b-e-d-e Gaming. He gave US Cloud five stars. This is his review Quote. We found some things that had been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know 10 grand a month Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure, but once you get to $40,000 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. Yeah, you bet it's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure. Identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance, all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com right now. Book a call. Find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less. And I also say better, faster, better Microsoft support for less. Thank you, us cloud for supporting windows weekly. A lot of, a lot of customers of Microsoft support here. I would bet you. I'd bet you. Let's talk xbox gaming, Mr Paul T.
1:37:54 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, this is the fourth of the four big controversial stories from this week. Wow, yeah, there's a report in Windows Central that Microsoft has now delayed its first party Xbox slash Windows gaming handheld, which could have come out as soon as this holiday season. They're going to focus on the third party stuff. We know there are at least a couple of companies that will come out with these things Right now. They're Windows handheld gaming devices right, they're not really Xbox, but I'm not sure what to say here. I'm not sure how many more delays or holding patterns or whatever you want to call it, that Xbox can withstand as a platform. But here we are.
So I have this now long running theory that Microsoft wants to base Xbox as a hardware platform around ARM right, and this is based on some leaks that came out a couple of years ago around the Xbox platform. They were looking at the time at making the next Xbox console be ARM based, and you know today that's Snapdragon, the Qualcomm chipset, which the second gen of will be announced in September, and we'll see what that entails. But one of the big expectations and rumors is that much more powerful graphics right, which will help with that sort of thing, because all the existing windows games have to be emulated. That's a problem, and you know they've done some stuff in the platform to make that easier, like auto, sr and so forth. But, um, you know that needs to improve. And then the, the part I've kind of added to this, the part that I just sort of thought of, was well, if they're going to do that, it would make sense to have a consolidated xbox platform that ran, you know, across pc and the console, right, that the next-gen software platform, they could do it as a requirement of developers who create games for Windows and or Xbox or both. Right, that these should be maybe the same thing, it should be the same platform and, of course, for developers.
I mean, I don't mean to say all that would mean is, but what that would mean is that you know if you're in the store, you're in the Xbox platform, you're going to target ARM, but it would also run on x64, of course, right, and that will always run. Great, that's no problem. But it would just kind of add that ARM compatibility, dynamic, and I think that is what would put a handheld gaming machine over the top for sure, right is what would put a handheld gaming machine over the top for sure. Right, Because one of the things we've heard a lot, but especially this past week, is that if you have like a Steam Deck or a I'm not sure which of the third-party devices, but I think it's the Lenovo device where you can get SteamOS or Windows. Steamos runs way better, right.
1:40:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh really.
1:40:34 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, because it's based on Linux. It's lighter weight, better battery life, et cetera. The trade-off there is that the selection of games isn't as big.
1:40:53 - Leo Laporte
So if you can live with, what's available through the Steam store and thus on Steam Deck slash Linux, which is not horrible, by the way, but is a subset of what's on Windows.
1:40:57 - Paul Thurrott
The Steam Deck was originally Linux and the Legion was originally Windows, right, but you could mix them, yeah. So if you have a Steam Deck, was originally Linux and the Legion was originally Windows, right, but you could, you can mix them, yeah. So if you have a Steam Deck, you could install Windows, right.
If you have a, I forget which one it is the Legion, I guess the Lenovo you can choose between the two, and I guess if you get Windows, you could install SteamOS right, and what people are finding is, if they install SteamOS, it starts working a lot better. So this is a problem. This has been a problem. Windows is a big general purpose thing. It does everything right. So, xbox, if you think about the Xbox platform we've had since Xbox One, so 2011 or 2013, whatever year that was this is Hyper-V, windows-based, where you have a couple things running at once, so it is stripped down. Is there some version of Windows? You know that would make sense on both Windows, or well, windows or the Xbox console that would actually run the same apps and games. Well, games, really right, games are the big thing. Maybe We'll see so. For now, we'll see so. For now, we're in this little bit of a blip and I'm not sure if it's real or not. So, for whatever reason, um, handheld gaming PCs. To be clear, this is the thing that's a screen with the two halves of the controller, like a steam deck type device or like a uh, a Nintendo switch type device, are kind of a. You know they're having a moment right.
I don't know how big of a market this is. I don't know how sustainable or long-term it is. I'm worried that this could be like netbooks or mini tablets, where the compromise is too great and they don't have any staying power, and that for a brief period of time, it's like, oh my God, this is going to rejuvenate the industry, and I just don't. I'm not sure that's the case. There's also something yeah, I did put this in the notes. Thankfully, I've heard now from two different sources that there are going to be more layoffs at Microsoft this month. A lot of it's going to be in the Xbox area, and that Amy Hood is casting more of a serious eye on businesses that are not profitable. And you know, satya Nadella has always kind of demanded this, but now it's like okay, you've had X number of years, show us the money. You know, if you're not going to make it, then you're going to have to make further cuts and it's possible that this handheld gaming thing fell to that that.
Maybe Phil Spencer went before this I'm just making this up, by the way. I don't know that this happened, but that he went to. Possibly he would have to go to the senior leadership team and say we would like to make this device and they would say, yeah, tell us the last time we made a hardware that was profitable Cause no one can remember that day, and it was probably 1983, with that Apple add-in card for CDM CPM long time ago, um, and they said no, and that might be part of it. But it also might be this holding pattern thing, like, really what you want is not a halfway device that's still running on x86, that runs slower than the Steam Deck, that looks bad by comparison. Maybe what you really want is the ARM-based thing, which requires all the platform updates, requires the next-gen hardware. Maybe it's MediaTek plus NVIDIA, maybe it's Snapdragondragon, maybe it's snapdragon plus nvidia, by the way, because that's something we're already we already see through that dell workstation that we mentioned a few weeks ago.
So we can only speculate, but if this report is true and I don't have any reason to doubt it um, you know if you had your hopes set on this, I would uh, you know, maybe scale them back, unfortunately, so, oh, yes, um, in slightly better news, a couple years ago, there was a group of quality assurance workers that were part of xenomax, which is a microsoft-owned game studio. It was part of bethesda, still is part of bethesda, but owned by microsoft, that wanted to unionize and and Microsoft was like, yeah, okay, we'll support that, and they've spent the past two years in negotiations over this new contract and unionization and Microsoft has agreed to their demands or whatever. So it took a while and it still has to be ratified by the union. But what this gives them is basically everything they were asking for, right, which is protection against being dismissed arbitrarily, grievance procedures, credit, in-game credit for the work they did in the game, which is pretty cool, right, like kind of a original Activision type stuff. There's a separate AI agreement that they reached earlier, which is basically that Microsoft can't just come down and fire everyone and say sorry, we have AI now for this. They have to give employees a chance to show that maybe they could use the AI to do their work, or they're not just going to get rid of people for that reason.
But the big one to me is actually just pay. So the minimum salary going into this was almost $21 per hour. That goes up to $25 immediately and it's going to go up again to $28 and some change in just a couple of months. So basically it's a big pay raise too, at least on the base level in place. So there are other unionization processes occurring.
There's an Activision Blizzard or an Activision QA team that also voted to unionize and we'll see how that goes. And then Raven, which I can't follow the trajectory of this stuff anymore, but Raven was a company that was created to build games based on the early id software stuff. Remember they had like Heretic and Hexen that were based on the Doom engines is through whatever series of acquisitions is part of, activision is actually suing Activision and Microsoft as the corporate parent because of bad faith bargaining practices. So there's all kinds of stuff going on with the unions, but a little bit of good news in there too. And then this one this is kind of a weird one to me. Jay Allard should be best known as being, I believe, the earliest, or maybe one of the earliest, people to try to wake Bill Gates up to the internet in the early 1990s.
1:46:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he wrote that memo.
1:46:46 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, he was one of three people who played key roles in that and it's not clear to me just off the top of my head which one was actually first, but I think it might be Jay Allard, but he was ignored for a long time but he was best known as the man behind the xbox that's right. Yeah, so he played a major role in the xbox, he also played a major role in the zoom, which I think counterbalances that nicely.
And but it's weird to me that he's probably best known among enthusiasts for having creating, created this thing called the courier tablet, which um it's so funny.
1:47:15 - Leo Laporte
On Sunday we were talking about it because we had Lumaresca from Microsoft on and he knew the whole story. Yeah, we talked about Courier.
1:47:24 - Paul Thurrott
This is worth reading If you're interested in Courier, if you actually believe that this thing ever made any sense or was going to make a difference in the world. I strongly recommend reading the Stephen Sanofsky book. Again, this comes up twice. Stephen was unfairly accused of killing this project.
1:47:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what we said on Sunday. It was Stephen that did it.
1:47:43 - Paul Thurrott
Because he didn't want another Windows.
1:47:45 - Leo Laporte
He was in charge of Windows and he didn't want another competing.
1:47:48 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, this was before that, it was actually office-related. He was like oh no, no, I'm sorry, I'm mixing these things up, sorry, sorry, sorry, I'm mixing these things up, sorry, sorry, the Office thing was the sorry, I forget. There's something else, it's a different project. Yeah, this one was Windows. But he's like what is this thing Like? This is not running our platform.
1:48:04 - Leo Laporte
Is there an app for it? Well, it was supposed to be that new Windows right. What was it? Windows X, it was just a concept drawing.
1:48:11 - Paul Thurrott
There was never like a thing they up, you know. But people like, oh, if they had just done this they would have won everything. And it's like yeah, you know, microsoft actually has a rich history of inventing things and not bringing them to market, or bringing them to market and failing, and then something else takes off right and so I look I'm sorry, but this, this would have made.
1:48:30 - Leo Laporte
It was they they later did release kind of a courier like device well, you're talking about the surface duo thing or whatever the duo. Yeah, yeah, that was too little too late in the line.
1:48:40 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, oh, they're folding devices.
1:48:42 - Leo Laporte
Now, good, let's put a two-screen device and they did that tv, that phone, with the two screens, that's the duo, yeah, yeah, well, you're talking about neo.
1:48:49 - Paul Thurrott
Neo is the one they never released. They never released. Never released that okay stupid. It was a stupid idea. Um, so yes, anyway, jay Allard, for whatever reason, it kind of bugs me because he did some great things. I think most people kind of know him for career, but what people might not realize is this guy kind of disappeared and he's one of actually it might've been me thousands. I know so many people who worked at or were executives at Microsoft, left the company and then went to Amazon and a lot of them kind of moved on.
1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
Are they following Panos Panay?
1:49:20 - Paul Thurrott
Well, jay Allard is not, but interestingly, since Panos Panay did this, ralph Groen, who was the head of the design team for Surface originally and then Windows and devices, has since followed him there and Jay Allard last I think it was last last, I don't know october, ish, uh, also revealed he is also working at amazon. It has nothing to do with panos panay per se, although probably related right, because he's he's on the devices and services team.
1:49:52 - Leo Laporte
I think he'll be working for panos.
1:49:53 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so they're probably working together, but yeah, so we're. This is not really getting the gang back together. These guys never work together or anything like that. Um, if anything, they were probably butting heads at one point, if they ever even interacted, but it doesn't really matter. The one thing they both have in common is they both have failed hardware that they made for microsoft, so have fun at amazon, but they're good hardware guys.
I think amazon needs hardware guys so the my issue here is only that amazon doesn't make good hardware. So, you know, it's like the story with panos. As I understand it this is not necessarily a fact, but this is what I've been told, and I've heard this from multiple people is, you know, they were making cuts and he's like I can't be here if we're not gonna. We have to have do all the stuff I want. You know, he had all these ideas and they were like yeah, we can't do that, you're not making any money. And it's like so where do you go? You go to this company that has even less money. Well, I should say, has less money they're willing to spend on anything. Right?
1:50:44 - Leo Laporte
and they put out plenty of money, but they're not spending plenty of money. They're not spending on devices.
1:50:48 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so you know, I look they could surprise me. We'll see, um, but it is interesting. I the thing he's working on. I just I hate this. This is like an Apple phrase. According to a, this is a third party report. Right, this is not like he didn't say this himself, but he is overseeing a team. Well, actually, maybe he did say this. This is JL and he probably did say this. They're working on breakthrough consumer products. Okay, so everyone's like.
1:51:20 - Leo Laporte
I hope it's the curry a tablet, and I'm like you know what I do too. I hope it is too. That would be funny, that would be great. He's on the zero one team, which I think is related to the always day one memo that's amazon's famous for yep I hope he's the zero part of that. But yeah, go on breakthrough consumer products I. You know what. I'd like to see that from amazon here's a fun fact about jail.
1:51:42 - Paul Thurrott
Had briefly worked it in television um no, yeah, so and those guys are going gangbusters. So he's like the uh midas touch wow yep, I think xbox did okay under him yeah uh, I don't know, maybe not the zune if you want to look at the red ring of death. Um, there's a little cabal of characters there, um that he is one of yeah, so I don't know.
1:52:07 - Leo Laporte
That's a good point.
1:52:08 - Paul Thurrott
I mean I don't know, but he's part of it. I mean, look, the whole point of xbox which was they had they gone from winji DirectX and they were like we got to build hardware around this and the decision was do we make this a Windows PC, which is how they went with Media Center and tablet PC, or do we go the device route? And it's interesting because you would call that the device route. But the first Xbox was a PC. Right, it was a Intel Celeron. It was a PC. I mean, it just was a PC. Was it running windows or windows ce? Windows ce? But the hardware was well. Yeah, I'm not even sure it was windows c, but the hardware was just straight up, intel x86. It was a cellular processor, it was a hard drive there was.
You know, it was just exit, you know x86, so anyway it's okay, I just I guess, all I'm really saying is I wouldn't bet your life on this you know, okay, like you know, don't get too excited, but it is happening, it's worth knowing about uh, I I would like to see amazon do something interesting I would too, I I. I just bought a kindle fire tablet just to check in and yep, they're just as terrible as I remember.
They're awful, they're awful you know, I like, uh, the kindle scribe, but I mostly use a kobo reader, a competitor um, I would read on a kindle if I could actually run apps, even if it was a little slow just for reading. But it's just kindle and I'm like, but I read here, here and here you know so well, that's that old thing.
1:53:36 - Leo Laporte
I wish they still had the new york times. You know on it, and I wish, right, you used to be able to have a daily mail from pocket.
1:53:43 - Paul Thurrott
I think it was still do, by the way, still do, no, but pockets gone. But that newsletter is going to persist, so that's okay, you still. You can just look at that.
1:53:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, how will I send it. Well, you can't save it to pocket, leo, um, you could, I mean I, I just open them in a browser and save it to instapaper. Okay, there's different ways there you go, you can do different things all right, well done, bravo.
A fabulous xbox segment. We are going to get to the back of the book in just a second. Paul thorat is here. Richard campbell is he's, you know. I realized he says he's on safari in south africa. But I also realized the edmonton oilers will be playing in game one of the stanley cup finals. You're gonna see him on tv in the.
1:54:23 - Paul Thurrott
I think he'll be at roger's place basically my son was on curfew or whatever, he was in trouble for something, and my wife was like, you can go to the gym, but you have to send us a picture from the gym. So she sent a photo and we both saw it. We we're like, yeah, okay. And then my wife's like, hold on a second. And she's sitting on the TV in the background and it was a Patriots game on TV and it was August or July or something. She goes nope. So I looked it up on the Apple, whatever the I thing was called at the time, and he was like behind a building with his friends in the Scooby van.
1:54:58 - Leo Laporte
And I was like all kids, so maybe he's doing that. I don't know. I don't know. I remember somebody posting on twitter a picture of a flat tire and said just save this for the next time you're late to work exactly but it's snowing in the picture.
1:55:06 - Paul Thurrott
I don't understand it's. I know it's crazy.
1:55:09 - Leo Laporte
That's why we got in the car accident back of the book just around the corner. But, ladies and gentlemen, first I want to put a little plug in for something we like to call Club Ttwit, the best darn club in the world. We'd love to have you as a member of club twit. Uh, it still says seven dollars a month on here. That's the legacy pricing. It is now, if you are not yet a member, ten dollars a month. I warned you. I warned you that we were going to be raising uh prices. Uh, I think it's still a hell of a deal. At 10 bucks a month, you get so much. Let me just. Why does it say that? Let me show it again now. It says 10 a month, you get. You get so much for your 10 bucks. 120 a year ad free versions of this show, but every other show we do. That's a lot of content.
You also get access to the wonderful Club Twit Discord, which is a great hang for everybody, whether you're watching a show or not, because the Discord is full of people like you who are having a great time talking about all the things geeks are interested in. We also do a lot of events in the Discord. In fact, the next event will be the Worldwide Developers. Oh, wait a minute. No, the next event's Friday. Our AI user group at 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern. I think Lou Maresca is going to join us. Anthony Nielsen, we're going to do a little vibe coding. Show you what vibe coding looks like. Darren, I hope you'll join me as well. Darren Oki, in our chat room does a lot of vibe coding. I saw Darren that Morgan Stanley said they've been using AI to save a lot of money. I have a feeling that Darren had a little something to do with that. That's just the caliber of people you get in the Club Twit Discord Really fun people in there. WWD will be in the club. Only Now we've changed how we do our keynotes.
You might've noticed that Build was in the club only, as was Google IO. To avoid takedowns on YouTube and Twitch, which has happened with Apple, we decided, you know, we're just going to do it all in private for the club. So you get special velvet rope access. Monday, Mikah Sargent and I are bringing our lunchboxes because we're not only going to do the 10 am big public keynote, we're also going to do the 1 pm State of the Union keynote, which is really more developer focused. So that's going to be a lot of fun. You have to be a club member to see that. If you can't be there live on Monday, we will put it in the TwitPlus feed Again, club members only.
We've got a photo time coming up on June 13th with Chris Marquart, Mikah's crafting corner. There's lots of special events. We've got a Stacey's book club around the corner. Yes, you are fun, you club twit members. It's exclusive but it's not expensive ten dollars a month. If you want to know more, please join the club. It makes a big difference to us. Yes, we have advertising. That only covers about 75% of our costs. The club makes up the other 25%. That's how important it is to us. Without the club, we'd have to cut shows, cut staff. We don't want to do that. Help us make the programming you love. It's kind of like casting a vote to support, uh, what we do here at Twit. twit.tv/clubtwit. Join the club. We'd love to have you now to the back of the book. Welcome to the family, uh, Paul. Well, let's see. Let's start with a tip, shall we?
1:58:36 - Paul Thurrott
Indeed, yeah. So think back to February, when I was visiting Richard in Puerto Vallarta. Oh yeah, Puerto Vallarta. Yes, google YouTube, whatever, cut me off from my YouTube channel and separated me from the content that's there, yes.
Shocked With no warning. Yes, no, hey, could you change this thing or fix something? Or whatever it was they were looking for? I have no idea. They never came up with an answer. They were useless. I would have gotten locked out of that forever. I just got lucky that Brad had a signing like a 2FA authenticator in his authenticator, like from five years ago, like he just like sitting there, unused, just in there, and he was like this is a long shot, but he's like I think I used to use this. Let me look and he's like oh my God, it's in there. Oh, geez, here we go. Oh my God, what are you doing? My phone just Is that Brad? No, the phone just said it sounds like you had a really difficult, really, uh, difficult oh, you said the g word.
1:59:36 - Leo Laporte
I know, but google's gotten very jumpy.
1:59:39 - Paul Thurrott
I literally flipped this phone over so it wouldn't listen to me yeah, okay, that's a little lesson in itself, right um?
1:59:45 - Leo Laporte
anywho, always listening, always yeah.
1:59:48 - Paul Thurrott
So you know, look between all the En-surification stuff in one drive over the past couple years and and everything else like it's. You know, I've been just kind of shifting things over, not so much just like I'm to be like a hermit living in a cabin in the mountains or anything, but not to rely solely on these big tech things. I want to make sure my data is in different places and I can access it and do whatever. And so one of the things I started planning again cause I had one in the past it got old-fashioned, I never replaced it was a nas oh yes storage.
So I couldn't buy it in mexico because everything there is too expensive, everything electronic related is too expensive. But I that gave me some time to kind of think about it and go over some things and whatever and um, when I got home I ordered a synology. Now, oh good so I'm gonna get a second one and I'm gonna put that in mexico and they can talk to each other yes, and they'll back up to each other.
2:00:37 - Leo Laporte
So you're marrying, so that's kind of cool.
2:00:39 - Paul Thurrott
But, uh, in the meantime I just have the one, so I've been kind of experimenting with it and I have to say, you know, this stuff has improved to the point where it does a lot more than the nasa had before, right? So obviously you can have, uh like, file access locally over the network. Um, okay, that that works great. Remote access, which got turned off on my old NAS over time as it went out of support. But Synology has amazing remote access stuff, which I just actually wrote about today. But they also have these clients, right. And so you have a client, there's a client for photos, you can put it on your phone. It backs up to Synology. I'm like, okay, that's cool, that works great.
They have something called Synology Desktop Client, the desktop client, right. So, and this works like the OneDrive client or the Google Drive client or Box or Dropbox or whatever it is, and on Windows and Mac not on Linux, interestingly, although I think that might be coming eventually. It does the on-demand thing, so you can select files or photos and be like I want this thing to always be available when offline. And you know, it does the seamless kind of background sync. So I was like, well, I got two trips coming up. I went to Seattle for Build. I was gone for five days or whatever. That was Then the Memorial Day weekend. We were way up in the Finger Lakes and then I was doing stuff on my phone so I was like I can access this stuff, you know, in all the ways I do out in the world and we see how it goes and I and honestly, in retrospect I feel I feel like I should have known this was going to be fine, because with a little scary though, isn't it?
it is scary, yeah, but as of last weekend, I actually switched everything over entirely to this. So I still have stuff up in one drive and google drive and eventually I'm going to back up to those services as well. But I'm just using Synology Drive now and it works. It's like it's a seamless, it works perfectly well. So I have this thing where, um, you know.
2:02:30 - Leo Laporte
So this is this becomes your desktop, or this becomes.
2:02:34 - Paul Thurrott
This is more like system yeah so it. Well, it's like dropbox or google drive or whatever. So, like I use in windows file explorer, I have these locations that are in the navigation pane, that point now. That used to be one drive, and then they were eventually google drive and now they're synology, and there's no difference.
2:02:53 - Leo Laporte
Um everything I do works at home. They're probably faster because they're on the land.
2:02:56 - Paul Thurrott
Honestly, I don't notice it at all like it's because it's just syncing in the background, it actually kind of doesn't matter so you're working locally.
2:03:02 - Leo Laporte
The files are local when you work on.
2:03:04 - Paul Thurrott
Most of them are yeah yeah, yeah, so I have these. You know, like, the book folder is all local, the uh, my to-do folder, which is most of my site stuff, is all local so I could be on a plane. It will sync when I connect. I've noticed. I mean, it's only been a less than a week for everything and it's been maybe two to three weeks for some things. I switched these things over in phases, but it's been, it's gone so well.
2:03:25 - Leo Laporte
Um, I just I can't believe how good it is, like it's I'm gonna have to try this because I've been using my sonology kind of in an old school yeah way not that's how I thought I was going to use it originally, just as a backup system. Right but while I was in.
2:03:40 - Paul Thurrott
Mexico. I'm researching this and I was like, wait a minute. I'm like this can't be as good as they're describing. Right, there's no way. But then, as I used it, I was like, oh my God, this is way better than I thought it was going to be. It's way better, I'm going to have.
2:03:53 - Leo Laporte
So you have a desktop client and then you have some software running on the Synology right.
2:03:58 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, the server version. It's in the server. It's called Synology Drive Server, I think is the name of it. I'm not up on the language yet, but it's whatever those packages you install are.
2:04:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Synology has applications packages that you can add on.
2:04:14 - Paul Thurrott
You can do Docker. Speaking of Docker, yeah once you put Docker in your Syn, your synology, really you can run anything, but there's even like there's stuff that I I thought I was going to do this, other stuff that I think, like now I'm probably not going to have to like. One of the things I'm not really going to spend a lot of time doing is like media streaming, although I have hundreds and hundreds of movies yeah, you could put plex on it and use it I could, but the thing like you can just access it over the network, so if I want to watch it.
I've done. I've streamed Star Wars it's 1080p, not 4K, but Star Wars over the cell network to my phone from upstate New York and it was perfect, like just out of the Synology Drive client. I didn't even you know what I mean. It's not a Plex server, I just put, I just streamed stream right from the. It's just a file server. It just works great, like it's surprisingly great. So I don't know, I look, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not the hermit, I'm not saying drop all your big stuff, it's evil, you know, walk away. But like, for me, this kind of shifts the focus a little bit. Like I I thought I would maybe keep using google drive and back up to synology or whatever, right, but now I've kind of flipped the script on that.
So I'm it, like synology has become the main thing and we'll see it's only like I said, it's been less than a week for everything, so I'm gonna have to try a different story, but I'm gonna really have to try. I've been blown away by how well this works do you uh?
2:05:31 - Leo Laporte
do you use their connect to uh? Yes, so that's how you get to.
2:05:35 - Paul Thurrott
That's the nice thing, you don't have to have a dedicated static ip address even yeah, well, actually, the way it works it, I believe it. I don't think you do it's like.
2:05:45 - Leo Laporte
It's like um dying dns. It's a dynamic yeah, so you're basically there, in that they yes yeah.
2:05:52 - Paul Thurrott
so if you don't like that, because someone read, read this and said, well, hold on a second, how?
2:05:57 - Leo Laporte
secure is that.
2:05:58 - Paul Thurrott
Beholding to Synology and blah, blah blah, and I know it's not a big tech, it's like relax. But there are third-party solutions for this kind of thing as well.
You could totally put it on the internet, but I think you know, yeah, you want to be careful there, but you know, over the local network it's all look, the disks are encrypted. It's not just password and account protected. There's all these crazy protections built in for every range of attacks you can imagine. But does 2FA throw an authenticator out? By the way? And when I attach from a Mac or Linux or Windows, if I go through the network you have to sign in.
Do the 2FA authentication I only get access to. Well, I get access to everything. I'm the administrator, but I get access to my stuff, whatever's given to that account. It works normally of the local network, as you would expect, but to me it's the connect to stuff. That's kind of amazing because you get that web browser based desktop, you know, front end desk, whatever you want to call the dashboard, whatever it is, from anywhere, um, and then you get file like the file app access from anywhere on a mobile device. I, I, I'm actually I'm just surprised by how seamless it all is like. It works really, really well I am.
2:07:07 - Leo Laporte
I didn't expect this. You've convinced me. I'm I'm gonna install and you can put it on your your phone, right?
2:07:12 - Paul Thurrott
yep, yeah, no, I've done this. I've done things I would not do normally, just because I just wanted to try it. But, like I said, like streaming star wars to my phone from a cellular connection in the middle of nowhere doesn't make any sense, but it worked great. It works. Um, the file. I have the file app on my phone and my tablet, but I have the photos app on my phone and back up to the sonology from there, which is great. Um, I don't know it's, it's I'm, I'm I look like I said not not an insane person, but I I do. I could see people are like I'm tired of this crap. I want to move on. I want to control my own data. Like you know, if you add something like this to the whatever, that is, the, the protons, the notions, the whatever's of the world, you have the makings of a complete solution. That kind of cuts big tech out of the equation, if that's what you want. So it's there and it works great and I'm really surprised.
2:08:07 - Leo Laporte
So I, I am, I am gonna try it tonight. Yeah, take a look, I'm curious what you think.
2:08:12 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you you know a lot more about this stuff than I do.
2:08:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm still kind of well, I use sync and Synology has a community version of SyncThing you can run on Synology. Yeah, so SyncThing you can see on this if you use the Synology server, you can see the files and everything.
2:08:27 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so if you have Linux and you want to access your files, like the way I just described you I just described you could go over the network, obviously, but you could also use. They have a client for Linux, but what it doesn't support is on demand, so what you would have to do is go into it and say well, this folder I want to sync.
But I just, I just, but not the other folders. So you could do that or you could use a third party app. And sync thing is one of the best ones, is my understanding. I haven't tried it, but my I believe it gives you some form of on-demand so you can actually see every file that you have access to and, I believe, sync two-way in real time. I think I've not tried it Because I don't really need the Linux part of it, I just tested it, but it does not do on-demand. The Synology client that's common though, right, like I think there's no Dropbox, there's no Google Drive. Yeah, that's not on you.
2:09:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you have to go through third-party apps, but I'd be using it mostly with my Mac.
2:09:22 - Paul Thurrott
So when you use a sync thing so I guess you've used it Does it do this thing? I'm talking about where it's basically like on-demand sync, like you can say I always want this offline and it actually works.
2:09:33 - Leo Laporte
But basically the way sync thing works is it's folders that are synchronized, uh, wherever it's installed, it's between two computers.
2:09:40 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you're right. So one could be synology, one could be a pc.
2:09:42 - Leo Laporte
One could be a pc, one could be a mac or and I have, so I basically do that with my documents folder on all the devices I use. It's not great on mobile because of the limitations of ios, but how often do you really need that you?
2:09:54 - Paul Thurrott
know, like that's. You know, the fact that it's there at all to me is interesting, but and it's important, like every once in a while, there is something I actually do need, you know, right? Uh, like just the other night I actually I had something in one drive the private vault thing and I had it on my phone, took forever to get into it, but I, you know, I got it. It's good to be able to get it. But to me it's more about the computers, right?
2:10:16 - Leo Laporte
and so I'm looking at this is this is one of the things that's so great about. I'm looking at my synology, which is across the room, and, and these are all the packages. Right, you know, I can install and, and then including web servers, and, and then, of course, you install docker.
2:10:31 - Paul Thurrott
You can install anything, anything docker supports there's also like an advantage to docker aside from the the whole container thing that it's self-contained. So if you switch um nasa's, if you buy a new nest, you could just copy that thing out and put it on the right, so it just kind of works like right. That's of interest if that's what you want, like for, you know, plex server or whatever so this is it's what's it called a Synology desktop server.
So actually go back to your desktop thing or whatever it's called. You already have it. Oh, it's already installed. If it's not in your desktop, click that thing in the top left and you should see top left, sorry, and you should see in this view Synology. What's the name of it? I don't have it in front of me, I'm sorry. File station, is that?
2:11:16 - Leo Laporte
what you're talking about?
2:11:17 - Paul Thurrott
No, it's not file station.
2:11:19 - Leo Laporte
Hyper backup is what I use, by the way, and recommend for you to sync from one Synology to another off-site.
2:11:26 - Paul Thurrott
What is the name? It is called Synology Drive On the server. It would be Synology.
2:11:32 - Leo Laporte
Drive. I don't think I do have it, so search search.
2:11:34 - Paul Thurrott
Do the search thing to see if it comes up, I'm surprised it's not just there. I thought I assumed it was just part of it, but maybe you have to install it.
2:11:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you probably installed it. Oh that is.
2:11:43 - Paul Thurrott
It's the, the bottom group on the left.
2:11:46 - Leo Laporte
Synology drive server.
2:11:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
2:11:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's it. Yep, okay, applications. Yeah, this is a celeron processor.
2:11:59 - Paul Thurrott
Right, yeah, it's not the fastest in the world, but no, actually it's awesome so far, but like but that's what this uses node it uses like two percent, like the cpu is two percent of left, all less all the time. And the ram I upgraded it to I think six gigs of ram, it's maybe 20, 27 somewhere in there, like it's.
2:12:15 - Leo Laporte
It's fantastic yeah, anthony nelson says yeah, he uses synology drive. It's just like google drive. I can't believe how.
2:12:22 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I can't believe how good it is. I really I was like, maybe, if, even if it's a little slow sometimes, maybe it'll be all right, and I was like, wait a minute, this is identical I'm gonna do it yeah it's so good yeah, on windows and mac it's fun on linux you. I don't care, that's fine. You don't get the, not the on-demand part, but the rest of it is. Yeah, it's great.
2:12:41 - Leo Laporte
Very nice. Yeah, really good. Yeah, I'm installing it right now, and they have clients for all those operating systems. Yeah, so you would, and on iPhone and on Android as well.
2:12:52 - Paul Thurrott
Mm-hmm, yeah, it's everywhere. Wow, so that's good Turning that on.
2:12:56 - Leo Laporte
Right now I'm going to use something called.
2:12:57 - Paul Thurrott
Infuse, I think, is the name of the app on the Apple TV. So, again, without installing Plex server, it just connects. It sees the NAS on the network, connects to it and then it comes up with all this metadata. Beautiful folder, what.
2:13:11 - Leo Laporte
You don't even have to run Plex.
2:13:12 - Paul Thurrott
Nope, just works. What's the app infuse on the apple tv?
2:13:20 - Leo Laporte
yep, it's unbelievable. It's free, you know it's like, it's like excellent. What a world we live in. I know it's crazy. The thing is, there's so much stuff in the world that you know security enhancements for the newly installed package would be better supported after you refresh the web page. Yes, okay, fine, I'm refreshing by the way.
2:13:34 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, if you want to be blown away, I mean look through, I guess it's control panel, and then it's like the network access and the security views are like it's crazy. Oh, I have it, I've gone through it many, many times, really, and I have all the security turned on. Yeah, if you try to log in more than twice.
2:13:51 - Leo Laporte
It'll bounce you and all sorts of stuff. Yeah.
2:13:58 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, yeah, yep, yep, it has protection against you know.
2:13:59 - Leo Laporte
Denial of service attacks and yeah, it's really good, it's really. It's not synology. Is the king of the hill there? You know, lately people aren't happy because they uh run their enterprise uh well, I told you how I solved that problem.
2:14:08 - Paul Thurrott
Right, I just bought synology drive. See, it's easy. No, are they more?
2:14:11 - Leo Laporte
expensive?
2:14:12 - Paul Thurrott
no, it's no, they weren't for me. I went the day that I priced them. The Western Digital Red drives were more expensive.
2:14:18 - Leo Laporte
I understand why Synology does this. Because people just throw. I did, I have I don't know whatever drives that were lying around and threw them in the Synology and then those fail and then you complain to Synology.
2:14:29 - Paul Thurrott
I was never going to do that, but I probably would have despot WD, red drives or something like that.
2:14:36 - Leo Laporte
Well, the nice thing about Synology is, you can just throw drives in there.
2:14:41 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but look, I appreciate, look, I see the inshortification part of this. But I also see, like you know, they had this system for the business customers and they're like look, you want this to work right, like all the time. You know, I, you know, we'll see what happens. Maybe the drive fails in two days and the jokes on me, I don't know.
2:15:00 - Leo Laporte
But so far yeah, I'm I'm impressed, so now I'm I'm going to install this, so now I'm going to welcome to this analogy drive suite. Okay, so that you could actually walk through this.
2:15:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so it's basically it's an office kind of thing well, there's that too, but so this you're running this on the server, right? So? This is when you download the client, which you can do from the web interface or from just synologycom. Whatever you know, it installs right.
2:15:28 - Leo Laporte
And then, uh you you tell them how you want it. Yeah, I did it as two-way sync and then on windows mac.
2:15:34 - Paul Thurrott
Like I said, it does on demand, which I love, and then it's exactly like google drive you right click, you shoot, you know you're like. I want this. Whatever the language is, I want this to be available all the time. It works fantastic, it's unbelievably.
2:15:45 - Leo Laporte
I have 27,383 gigabytes available. I think I have enough for it. Yeah, do not sync that to a laptop.
2:15:53 - Paul Thurrott
No, but that was so. That's the problem in Linux. If you actually just go through and be like, yeah, take it all, it will run out of disk space, and so in Linux you have to do that kind of old-fashioned thing where you're like, all right, you said document your documents folder. That would be fine.
2:16:06 - Leo Laporte
So you just go in and say I only want my documents folder. Yes, that's usually what I do, Right?
2:16:10 - Paul Thurrott
That works great.
2:16:11 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it works great for what it is, and you can even see what's going on, how many people are connected and so forth, which the devices are, et cetera.
2:16:18 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, this is great. All right, thank you for the tip.
2:16:22 - Leo Laporte
I love. It Must be something new, because I thought I knew all about everything.
2:16:27 - Paul Thurrott
I'm surprised I told you anything you don't know about this thing.
2:16:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I've been a Synology user for at least 10 years.
2:16:32 - Paul Thurrott
There was some point where it kind of came across this and I was like wait a minute, could this be? You know? Yeah, and I was like if this works.
2:16:38 - Leo Laporte
I'm using this. I dimly remember when they announced this yeah Okay, yeah yeah.
2:16:42 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know. I don't know the age of it, or anything like that, but it's awesome.
Like it's really good, yeah. And then for AppPick, two things Um, microsoft edge one 37 came out. I think it was last week and it's weird because there's been this staging of like announcements. This is actually the biggest release of this browser, I think, since they went to Chromium, like it's crazy. So there's a bunch of new end user features, picture and picture improvements, uh, improvements to edge for business and so forth. They they're getting rid of a bunch of like, like, pointless, superfluous features they had added in the past that nobody even knows are in there, like the image editor and blah, blah, blah, whatever. They're getting rid of Wallet, which I never quite understood, the Wallet Hub anyway, but they're just going to have a standard password section, like all browsers do. So they're not getting rid of the functionality, just the weird UI and like okay, so you're like whatever, it's a release of a browser, just the weird UI and like okay, so you're like whatever. It's a release of a browser. It comes out every six weeks, who cares?
But then a couple of days later they announced the general availability of Game Assist. Right, and this is that little mini browser that goes in the Game Hub, and this is delivered as part of Edge 137. So if you play video games on Windows, it doesn't have to be Xbox games, whatever game, it doesn't matter. Well, it matters, you have to use the game bar. But you bring up the game bar and that's a choice now, and you can pin it and you can have that mini browser running with you while you're playing the game. And this is what a lot of gamers do. They're like, oh, I'm stuck on this level. I want to go look in here and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I think we talked about this, I'm sure, last week, but big deal.
But I also mentioned this Windows 11 app action thing where you right click on something or you do the Windows key plus click if you have a Copilot plus PC and you get compatible actions with what you see on screen. So today it's text and image. I think that's going to improve over time, although I guess technically, most of what you see on screen is a text or an image. But third-party apps can add themselves to this list. This is going to be a big extensibility model in windows.
And when, uh, edge one 37 adds that support to a progressive web apps that are created with Microsoft edge. So if you have a progressive web app um and install it through edge, you'll if it, if it supports this feature, which it can now um, you will get that um app action support as well. So it's actually it's's like kind of a, it's kind of a big release. I mean, don't ever use edge, it's terrible, but it's kind of amazing, like what they're doing here, like it's there's a lot, of, a lot of stuff going on there. So if you do use edge, it's worth, uh, definitely worth looking at this. It's it's, it's surprising, um, how much is in?
there edge 137 ladies, I know yeah, so one more thing real quick, sorry, oh yes, sorry, this is not really related to Windows or anything, I just think it's kind of interesting. So a couple of months ago, three months ago Adobe announced a full well, you know, for mobile, full Photoshop app for the iPhone. When that thing shipped, you had to buy a subscription to use it. Right, they introduced a new mobile plan for Photoshop I think it's like Photoshop mobile and web which is $8 a month. So it's a fairly reasonable way to get into this.
But the Android version came out yesterday and it's still in beta and while it's in beta, it's free for everyone. It's really worth looking at because Photoshop has all kinds of problems, in my opinion. But the AI stuff that they've been doing Adobe is actually kind, kind of amazing and a lot of those key AI based features around image editing and so forth, like, like selecting objects inside of an image or spot healing or the magic wand stuff and all you know, the remove, background remove for whatever it is. That stuff's awesome and that's all in the mobile app, and I I'm not trying to promote Adobe per se, but actually I have to say this app was pretty impressive. It's worth looking at. So if you have an Android phone, check it out.
2:20:23 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it's surprisingly good, it's a beta though still, it is a beta, but it's.
2:20:28 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, it seems pretty, it seems like it works pretty great pretty stable yeah it was good enough, like it actually made me reinstall Photoshop, and then I was like, oh yeah, that's why I hate this thing.
2:20:35 - Leo Laporte
But it's um, but it's for the phone.
2:20:40 - Paul Thurrott
It's good yeah, it's a well, because you know, a lot of times you're out in the world doing whatever on your phone and you're like, oh, I'd like to post this photo, but those two idiots in the background or whatever, and this is you know wow, I guess too, that's cool to get rid of them.
2:20:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, nice, all right, Paul, uh, we're absent. Uh, Richard't, I mean we can say what's on Run as Radio this week. Yeah, we can do that. I can give him a little plug Fixing a security vulnerability in Active Directory with Steve Sifus. Okay, okay, why would a security vulnerability take more than two years to fix? Well, kb5015754,'s why? Glad you asked that's why. So that sounds like a kind of a fun detective story. Uh, Richard Campbell, run his radio.
2:21:28 - Paul Thurrott
It's at run his radio dot he doesn't talk about um, uh, dot net rocks on this show, but I I actually end up I listen to both shows, but I listen to more of the dot net rock stuff and I those shows are often fantastic yeah with carl. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've had carl yeah, yeah.
2:21:47 - Leo Laporte
Well, you can get it all as run at rena's radio if you go there. So, Paul, you said you want to talk spritzes yeah.
2:21:55 - Paul Thurrott
So when we were in Mexico we were there for about four months there was kind of this interesting series of events that were related to, like cocktails and cocktail bars and stuff and so like just for the local aspect of it. Um, mexico up until late last year was kind of weird because there's a lot of bars and restaurants and Mexicans are incredibly friendly and, and you know, love social engagements and stuff, but there were very few places in Mexico city where you could actually go to a bar and sit at a bar and have that kind of bar experience. There were many places in Mexico city where there's an enormous bar seats and you cannot sit there. It's just like sit. I know it's bizarre, you have to stand, but between November and maybe January last year that must be their drunkenness prevention.
All of a sudden, all these cocktail bars started opening and I don't know who does this, but the whatever organization does, like the top cocktail bar, top bars or whatever it is in North America and Mexico City Like a bunch of places we go are in there now. Mexico City, like a bunch of places we go are in there now. In fact, one of our favorite new bars is a speakeasy in Condesa that I think was number 11 or something, and they were never on the list before. Like they deserve it, like they're fantastic. So there's that. I mean, if you're listening to this, you probably don't care about that unless you go into Mexico City.
But the other couple of things that happened was a lot of people are probably familiar with this notion of like you get ice and it can be ice cubes or whatever. They have the big cube cubes, like the big ones, and then if you go to a nice place, they'll have like those perfectly clear ice cubes and you can buy kits at home to make this yourself. But it involves like getting the air out. It's complicated, time consuming, it's not great. Like we've tried a couple of different ways to do this. It's just not really worth the effort. But if you've ever gone to a really good cocktail bar. They have those like perfectly clear ice cubes, like as if they cut it out of the cup full or something.
2:23:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know how to do that.
2:23:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah but the other thing about cocktail bars is that, um, they're like different glass styles, right. So you get the you know the tall, thin glasses, the you know whatever I don't know the names of these things but we started seeing those kind of really clear ice cubes in. It was almost like a like a triple like height ice cube, so it's like a. It's a tall ice cube that fits into the tall glass like exactly. I call them tower ice cubes. I'm not even sure that's the right term, but I I saw one and I texted my brother-in-law because he's really into the stuff and he he's like that's weird. You just said that I'm starting to see these things all over the place here. So for his birthday we bought some. You get these plastic or rubber kind of Amazon trays to make ice cubes and they make those now in the tower form.
So, you can put them into a tall glass. It's actually kind of a cool thing.
2:24:31 - Leo Laporte
Is it a picture on your Instagram or somewhere? Yeah, or?
2:24:39 - Paul Thurrott
somewhere. Yeah, I don't, um, I'm not sure if I could find it easily, but, yeah, if you go to like the pictures we have of ruby, uh, the ruby wine bar, uh, is that they? They have a, an entire refrigerator full of these things pre-made within the glass so that when they make a cocktail it just comes out with the ice cube in it and they can just go right to it.
2:24:53 - Leo Laporte
The problem is there's so many pictures of uh alcoholic drinks on your instagram.
2:24:57 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, I know that's kind of hard to narrow it down, Paul, uh yeah, you make me so hungry when I uh I'm sorry when I visit you if you go past.
2:25:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, go past, Richard, yeah yeah, uh, this is all back home.
2:25:12 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you got to go back to mexico a little bit more, a little bit more. There. You go in here somewhere, um so ruby, that one says, ruby, maybe look in there, that's a possibility. Oh yeah, there's a bunch of them in here. Yeah, let's see but yeah, it's uh there, you go, there, you go there's a big square block of ice in there it's like a.
It's like a column of ice cube what the hell I know they're beautiful and those that place does it right. So those, those ice cubes, are perfectly clear they're gorgeous.
2:25:37 - Leo Laporte
There is a way you can. You can buy a thing that will make clear ice cubes in your home. It's yes but they're. It's you gotta, you gotta get the bubbles out. That's the key. There's uh air and dissolved in there. Well, all right. So next time I'm in mexico city, we're going well, no, they're.
2:25:53 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, it's happening in the us. This is the thing it's like. It's just S too. This is the thing.
2:25:55 - Leo Laporte
It's like it's just a trend, right.
2:25:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but the other trend-.
2:25:58 - Leo Laporte
Lisa got one for her sister for her sister's birthday, but it isn't exactly a square ice cube. Okay, it's got a shape it might recognize.
2:26:09 - Paul Thurrott
I don't want to get too many details. We were more traditional, more of a family event.
2:26:15 - Leo Laporte
A family ice cube.
2:26:19 - Paul Thurrott
No more of a family event. A family ice cube? No, we have, um, like the cubes of a couple of different sizes, because some don't fit, depending on the glass. Um, but yeah, we, yeah, so I I just, the first time I saw it, I literally I took a picture of it and I said to my I'm like dude, what is this? And he's like, I just saw one of these, like, like it's become a thing this year.
2:26:34 - Leo Laporte
I mean uh it also means that you don't have as much beverage in that glass. Okay, but yes but is it somehow colder, is it somehow better?
2:26:45 - Paul Thurrott
and working right, because there's more surface on it or whatever uh, if it's the glass you know, I mean a lot of the big ice cubes aren't going to fit in that kind of glass. You want to have the. It's not. This is true of wine and apparently of cocktails as well. You want the right shape glass, depending on the drink. I guess I'm not an expert on that, but, yes, yes, if you, if you and I had gone into a bar, like a year ago, yes, and someone had ordered, and like an aperol spritz, I would have been like, oh, that's a nice drink, nancy. What's going on there?
2:27:14 - Leo Laporte
it's kind of a girl drink, yep, but apparently ruby has uh something yeah so this has become a big thing, so I want a fluffy paloma.
2:27:22 - Paul Thurrott
What the hell is that's a? Yeah, it's like a spritz version of a paloma, but uh they do something to. It's not whipped, it's not egg, but it does something that foams. Ah, they froth it a little bit. Yeah, um, the ruby is a, technically a, like a. It's a wine cocktail bar, meaning a lot of their cocktails are made with wines. But wines mean a lot of different things, because there's like, uh, fortified wines and uh things like vermouths and you know all this stuff.
So the vermouth is also a big thing in Mexico city. Right now, vermouth is Spanish, but it's become a really big thing. There are a lot of places we know that make their own vermouth, including Ruby, by the way.
2:27:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh, Ruby brands the buns even.
2:27:58 - Paul Thurrott
Look at that. They're going to brand my buns the next time I go back Brand your buns.
2:28:02 - Leo Laporte
There's more of this tower glass, yeah. So wait a minute.
2:28:07 - Paul Thurrott
You're not drinking Jaeger, no no, no, that's almost certainly a vermouth, I bet actually.
2:28:13 - Leo Laporte
That's Jaeger in a bottle, I recognize. But um, that's, yeah, you're in a bottle, I recognize it. It's definitely not here.
2:28:20 - Paul Thurrott
So uh, anyway, um so, but uh, aperol or spritzes are actually like really light and they're refreshing and they typically have less alcohol. Yeah, and it occurred to us like I actually like spritz yeah, this is a good drink for, like, warmer weather.
Yeah, it's like Tang with alcohol in it. So the two classics for spritzes are Aperol and Saint Germain spritz. Right, those are the two big ones. Yeah, but that place Ruby in particular, but not just Ruby, other places too, because it's another thing we started seeing around they're starting to make other kinds of spritzes and so if you get something like a Manhattan, you can typically make a Manhattan with vermouth. But you can also like in Mexico City in Spain as well. Obviously, you can drink vermouth straight up, you can drink it with ice, you can drink it with soda water, you can drink it as part of a cocktail. So they had, like there's an alternative to vermouth, called I think it's pronounced China or Sinar, which is it's. It's. It's actually made from an art choke, which makes it sound terrible, but it tastes it's.
it's an Amaro type you know, just like a vermouth really, and it's. They had a China I'm going to call it China. They had a China spritz on the menu. So I was like I should, I will try this. And I was like, oh, this is really good, like I would never think about drinking China solo or whatever. But I was like this is actually very tasty. So I was like, well, you guys make your own vermouth. This is a vermouth place. How come you don't have a vermouth spritz? And that guy you saw the picture of Sebastian was like oh, that's complicated. And I'm like it's not complicated, just take the China right, put it in, you know. But he was like no, no, it's more complicated. And then he spent a bunch of time working on this and he calls he calls it a Paul spritz.
But it's like this uh, I don't know the exact, I don't know invented a drink just for you, Paul he worked on this thing for like half an hour and I was like I don't understand why you're not calling it like an ah Paul or all spritz. But he's like oh, Paul, or all no, no, no's like no it's Paul Spritz, I'm like, okay, fine, but it's basically a vermouth Spritz. That sounds delish. It's even better than the China Spritz. So this is like a whole. I mean you won't typically find more than like you'll always see like.
Aperol Spritz and maybe St Germain Spritz and then beyond that, it depends on where you are and what. Yeah, yeah, but this is becoming a thing and actually, if you're looking for kind of like a light summer alternative, that's to like a hard liqueur type, uh cocktail or just a hard liquor or liquor, um, these are really good choices like they're. They're really good looks like fun.
2:30:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, very refreshing, very light and, if you can get it with a uh, a tower ice cube, yeah, depending on the glass, they look so good actually yeah, that's amazing, very nice. That's uh all on Paul's instagram. If you want more deets today on how to become an alcoholic Paul's first steps it goes down easy kid, yeah, yeah that's part of the problem.
2:31:20 - Paul Thurrott
But yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:31:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, I, I, uh. I stopped drinking apparel spritzes because I met, ran into people like you who made fun of me yeah, no, I'm that kind of a bully it's not, it's not.
2:31:32 - Paul Thurrott
um, it's not something I'm proud of, leo, but I but I also fall into it a little too easily. It's, you know what it's light? It's light, no, it is light. Honestly, they're really good. I'm sure they're not good for you, but they're just. You know.
2:31:48 - Leo Laporte
It's good for you, Paul Thurott, Thurrotttcom. He knows what's good for you. That's the place to go. Get a premium membership. You can read all the extra content, but there is a. It's the place to go to keep up on windows and microsoft news, t-h-u-r-r-o-t-t dot com and, of course, his books, the field guides to windows 11 and windows everywhere, which is really interesting history of windows available at leanpubcom and you pay your own price at leanpubcom. Paul, you're going to be in mcungee next week. Are you going back to mexico? Should be here what?
2:32:24 - Paul Thurrott
where is it? Yeah, at least a month, maybe you're gonna stay for the fourth of july, of course, yeah, at least yeah at least it'd probably be mid-july a little bit after that, gonna stay for the fireworks, all right, very nice.
2:32:37 - Leo Laporte
Um, anthony nielsen is reminding me about curious elixirs, which is actually I used to subscribe to these. They're non-alcoholic. Um, they're very, uh, herby yes, by the way, more herby than I like, but I did like these and I used to drink them without the alcohol.
2:32:57 - Paul Thurrott
The thing I was drinking earlier today was a I almost said Sambuca, a kombucha, which is not alcoholic. It's just like fermented whatever, but it's close to a cocktail. So if you're kind of looking for something that's a little bit, you know.
2:33:14 - Leo Laporte
I drink kombucha. I drink a non-alcoholic kombucha, so it doesn't even have you know, drink kombucha. I drink a non-alcoholic kombucha, so yeah it's uh. It doesn't even have you know one percent alcohol in it, but uh yeah, but uh yeah. No, I, but I like these sprits my god, what's wrong with you?
2:33:27 - Paul Thurrott
no, that's fine, it's fine, yeah uh really good, really good.
2:33:30 - Leo Laporte
It's nice to have something that's like an alcoholic drink, but it is yeah, that's the trick, I mean.
2:33:35 - Paul Thurrott
A lot of times you might just be out with a group of friends and like, yeah, I want to be social but I don't want to drink.
2:33:40 - Leo Laporte
The mocktail thing has become a big deal like that.
2:33:42 - Paul Thurrott
You see that pretty much everywhere now so love it.
2:33:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's good. Spritz yourself with an apparel, don't spritz apparel spritzer. Oh boy yeah.
2:33:54 - Paul Thurrott
The language isn't great, but you know what I'm saying.
2:33:57 - Leo Laporte
Spritz yourself. Tomorrow is, of course, Nintendo Switch Day, so I don't expect to see you around for another week Spritz Switch, whatever, Whatever, whatever, thank you all for joining us.
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