Windows Weekly 936

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here. Richard Campbell is visiting from Sweden. We'll get the latest on his Safari last week. We'll also find out about Patch Tuesday. It was yesterday with lots of patches. And Paul summarizes his thoughts about the developer conference season. It's coming to a close. We had Build, google IO and, of course, wwdc from Apple yesterday. Paul's thoughts on Liquid glass, among other things. Coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paulul thurad and richard campbell. Episode 936, recorded wednesday, june 11th 2025 liquid arrow. It's time for windows weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from microsoft, which may make you wonder why do you call it Windows, since Microsoft is so much more than Windows these days? Well, it's for historic reasons, and speaking of historic, here's Paul Theriot.

01:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Also, who cares about the rest of Microsoft?

01:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Theriotcom. Well, lisa was asking me for both MacBreak Weekly and Windows Weekly, which both have had the same name for almost 20 years. Can we change the?

01:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
name to reflect this isn't kfc leo. We're not changing the name. You know what the problem is ad agencies.

01:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They see the name and they go.

01:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, nobody cares about that, those guys you have an enterprise show.

01:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, yes, that's our enterprise. But yeah, but no, it's windows okay, okay.

01:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so we did an interview on dot net rocks with the Imagine Cup finalists. So these are all 20-somethings, right, cool kids, yeah, so great. And they're like you make a podcast called NET Rocks. Like do you care that much about the NET framework? It's just like they're baffled.

01:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My kids would have been like how old are you? Yeah?

02:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What about a?

02:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
framework. Yeah, who who cares? That's yeah, and I realize, like the, the fundamental thing here is like it is so much easier to learn a language in a platform today than it ever has been right they're not attached to it.

02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why would you attach to?

02:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
any framework right, it's just not a thing, yeah yeah, yes and no.

02:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In some ways paul's not comfortable.

02:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everybody be supportive by the way, I like dot net shut up from dot.

02:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Net rocks a show about a framework. Richard is in sweden, we're in sweden, are you?

02:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm in stock, I'm in stockholm property, yeah sunny stockholm.

02:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, you're having a heat wave today, aren't you?

02:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, I know it's raining, but it's not nice though. No, they are. I got wet rushing back to get to the show, so thank you for rushing back, did you?

02:46
have a fun. I missed you guys so much. I can't even tell you like, actually, yeah, how was the safari? Oh, dude, like okay, first off, not actually a safari. So this is the middle ground between a safari, which is a couple of weeks, and you may see things you may not, and a zoo where you see lots of animals but they're sad, right, yeah, we don't want that. In between is this thing called a game drive, and so a game drive is.

03:11
I am in this big resort that's like a spa place with a pool and nice meals and all that sort of thing, and then they attach to that. It's like 10 000 hectares, like 20 000 acres of fenced off land. Wow, with all these animals on it. Now, these animals are not native to the area. They've been stocked. It's Jurassic Park, yeah, and they do game drives, but before they go out they're game drives Like the rangers go out and they distribute food, so you kind of know where the animals are going to be. Oh, nice, like I got to show you these pictures, like these pictures, like I got astonishingly good pictures of everything. Oh, how cool lions and elephants and hippos and rhinos and zebra and wildebeest and giraffes and cape buffalo and like it, on one hand, was slightly offensive. It's like this is completely staged. On the other hand, these animals did not look sad like they were doing this.

04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, because they're in the wild, they don't know that it's a fenced off wild.

04:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but they and you know, but they were doing the thing and they're well fed, like they're comfortable you can come and do the same thing in petaluma.

04:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have a place called safari west and that you can see the chickens no, no, they actually have just like this it's. It actually was named like one of the top glamping destinations in the us because it's similar. It's not as big as this, but it's similar to this, where you, you, stay in comfort yeah and then you'd get in a jeep and drive around and see the wildebeests yeah, not as good as what you did I mean I just walk outside.

04:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a squirrel sometimes it's similar and you guys already know what my wildlife is around my place when I'm at home. But this I really I mean I wouldn't. What's the?

04:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
name of it.

04:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Give it a plug. The one we went to was the one that I went to is called aquila a-q-i-a-q-u-i-l-a, which is an eagle. It's latin for eagle. Yeah, recommended by the locals, because the locals go to it. And, um, yeah, I, if I go back there with my wife, I will take her there, but I won't go back on my own. Like I've done the thing right, but uh I love it.

05:15
On the website it says big five, safari and spa that's it like part, part of us for the man part of us for the man, part of us for the woman, ladies, why?

05:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
would.

05:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to oh spa. This looks great.

05:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So what fun how?

05:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
long did you spend there?

05:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I had two days there and the whole two days the male lion was gnawing on a chunk of horse the entire time. Like every time we went by he was still there gnawing on the chunk of horse. But yeah, and and also, you can get a massage like legit. I think that sounds perfect. It was uh, it was enjoyable and uh and I, but the bandwidth was shocking. So it's like I'm gonna do a show from here well, you know what I?

05:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I and paul will back me up. I said no, he gets a vacation. Why should he have to do a show every single place? He?

06:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
goes I I mean I'm part of it is I? I get the sense that people think this is fun, that wherever I go I try and make a show, work like I do enjoy, like trying to bring make the rig like you're trying to make that a reality and I'm like trying to live up to that ideal.

06:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, as it turns out, because it wasn't our original deal.

06:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like originally, I said, hey, I travel a lot, I won't do the show then. And then we started experimenting with gear and we were able to make a show. And then people seem to like it. So I do it and believe me like I have drank every single south african whiskey you can think of now at this point.

06:35
So I've been collecting data you get some benefit to that. I have a bottle in the bag that's going to make it all the way home, like tonight's. Tonight's whiskey is a different story, but you know I'm I'm at work. This is my job now, admittedly, like I, I was there for two weeks. I did two conferences.

06:52
I did a conference in johannesburg and a conference in cape town more or less back to back, and then with the extra week there I had reached out to some local communities. So I spent a whole day with some university students which were fantastic, like just an amazing group of kids, nice and interested in everything. So I did a. They weren't able to get to the conference because it sold out and they usually get comp tickets, so I did the keynote. But instead of doing the 50 minute keynote that I did at the conference, I did a three hour version. Oh wow, I just dove into deep because they were younger, so it was a lot of assumptions. So I went and told more history and sort of walked through the things. But we spent the entire morning on thinking about how development is evolving right now and then in the afternoon we talked about startup culture and how to build a company and how to find a partner and what it takes to raise money. And they just they were amazing, amazing students. I was so impressed by them.

07:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I go back in a second.

07:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they're very fortunate to have you. It was a great day and I was delighted it was so much fun to just like the chance to help folks that really want to do more.

07:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, isn't it nice to meet somebody who's excited.

07:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, this was an entire classroom of that.

08:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like you attract people who are like you and I.

08:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, I don't know uh anyway, yeah, it was a great trip we're glad you're back.

08:13
I'm so glad you had a great time, and so I flew back through. I flew, uh johannesburg to istanbul, which is like 10 hours, and then up to amsterdam, stayed for a couple of days with my friends in Alkmaar, nice, hung out with their little 18-month-old little Julie and I'll tell more stories about them. And then I got up to Stockholm. Today and tomorrow is back to keynoting. So do the thing. What's the event? You're going to speak at Dev Sum Two-day show. Yeah, I'm emceeing the opens on both days and I'm doing my futures talk. That's so great.

08:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm a little jealous, I confess it's a good life.

08:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think I really have a lot of fun, and now and then I'm getting home and I'm six weeks at home, which is a more than she can stand. Like I expect somewhere around, somewhere on the three week March, she's going to be like don't you have somewhere to go?

09:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like go, go, go. Yeah, I was the only person who had that problem. It's like, uh, you gotta do huh.

09:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like you want to come to seattle. No, I'm good. Have a good time. Anyway, I've been along. I went away long enough. She's actually missing me, so I sent flowers today, so oh that's a good move very smart flowers should arrive before I do, but I do have some gifts, uh, that I picked up in south africa. So I found a nice collective that was making some interesting jewelry and I picked up some pieces.

09:28
So you're very thoughtful, that's good I do the best I can, man, and I gotta. I get to have all this fun, and the least I can do is like share some love around.

09:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lisa picked something out she likes at costco, so I'm gonna probably all right patch. Tuesday was yesterday. Let's go to work. What happened?

09:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, nothing really. Honestly, I'm not even sure why we're talking about it okay, forget about it um moving on yeah, yeah, big nut, big man there. No, actually this was a big one, so I'm losing track of these things. Someone, someone should make a tracker. Oh yeah, wait you do that.

10:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what is your tracker?

10:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
address. By the way. No, I don't have it live yet. I'm still going back and forth on how I want to do it. I just want to do it once. You're doing it in Notion, right, I am probably doing it in. Notion, but I've been trying some other things too. Yeah, so I think this is the second month in a row we had a really big you know major update. Uh, this time all the updates went out at the same time, so 22, 23, 24, h2 are they still pushing 22? It's supposed to be.

10:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's supposed to be over october.

10:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I thought so too, but right up to the end, right up to the bitter end. Yeah, almost all the well, that's not true. But a lot of uh, some of these features are 24-inch too. Only Some are across all three. Right, you know? I'm just looking at this list. This is like stuff we've all talked about a million times. So the drag tray area. So when you drag files around File Explorer you can, you'll get that pull down thing at the top, like you do with windows and snap, except it will give you a list of app or a, I guess, a grid of apps or a line of apps that you can drag to and then share via that way. The windows key plus C keyboard shortcut is back for co-pilot. Used to be Cortana, then it was co-pilot, then it wasn't, and now it is again, because everybody wants to put Cortana behind them.

11:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

11:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Bunch of things for the taskbar. There's little things going on there with the little it's called the pill. The little indicator underneath it is there when the app is running, it's not just pinned, and then if there's a notification it gets bigger and it turns red or pink or whatever. Just some graphical changes there. Uh, just some graphical changes there. Um, when you share images, uh, the share pane that comes up now has, um, resizing and editing options. Um, I got to add this to the notes still, but that I'm going to. That's tied to my tip, so we're going to get to that. Uh, much later in the show.

11:58
Um, a bunch of stuff for co-pilot plus PCs, so click to do, has come to the EU a month late, I guess, right, month, yeah, month late. Ask copilot available and click to do a new text actions and click to do. If you are using a smart pen, there is a shortcut button that you can, or shortcut you can, use for the pen, so you can do like a double click action or whatever. You can set it to whatever you want so that it runs, copilot, because god knows copilot has to run all the time, all the time. That's one of those what's sorry, but I'm sorry.

12:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, I'm saying copilot all the time, like you can't get away from it now yeah, I the.

12:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the xbox app used to be an example of an app where if you ran it once, even by mistake, it would always just start up with your computer every single time, and I hate that behavior. The Xbox app now has a toggle. You can turn that off, so it doesn't do that. Copilot needs that badly, because when you run Copilot and then turn it off it just sits there in the tray like lurking, like a cereal I'm here to help you.

13:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really want to help you so bad. Oh, did you need me? Did you need me? Yeah, oh, I'm here. Any chance? Did you need me?

13:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know you love me so irritating the Windows search improvement stuff. I'm going to call this semantic search because I think we need a name for this. You know, all this stuff I can take search over time, but okay, yeah yep, look, we're still solving the problem that steve jobs solved in tiger back in 2005 apparently apple's trying to solve again, but yes, no, I know yes and by the way, so I didn't write that in the notes, but later on, when we talk about some of that stuff, um the other question.

13:41
I was giggling the whole time well, no, it's like are we just going to solve the same problem over and over again?

13:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, because we didn't solve it that well last time.

13:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's our industry. We just never get it right. Yeah, so I yeah, that's a thing.

13:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And our whole industry based on another failed attempt.

13:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, you know you got to give them credit. They're like the little engine that couldn't. They're trying, but um, they just, I don't know. We'll get there someday. Okay, so that's um, I think that's most of it. So, patch tuesday I would say this is a big one. So if you haven't, uh, especially for 24h2.

14:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
right, like yes, do you remember the keynote at build several builds ago, with the blind guy that used the cameras to describe what was in front of him? And now it's a feature in 24H2. Any image, it'll just explain it to you. That's right. I'm going to call that progress, paul. It's there.

14:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the narrator feature for blind.

14:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, narrator feature full stop. It's like it's now a part of the operating system, although eventually it'll be still in Insiders.

14:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Other problems are harder to solve, like sets, the ability to add tabs to every single application.

14:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
For some reason hard computer science Don't get crazy. Now Mist.

14:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, we can describe things to blind people. That's it. We can do that, we get that now. It's a weird world we live in. Just before the show, because Brian Wilson has passed away, sadly.

15:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was looking at CNN right, and so there was a story in there, so let's not be too sad.

15:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like, guy lived an intense life and he made it a long way up, but I mean, the tragedy there, in a way, is that a lot of his life was wasted to mental illness and he was being controlled by this manager type, whatever he was. But okay, brian Wilson, genius, right, absolutely. And super. Okay, brian Wilson, genius, right, absolutely. And super talented. But anyway, that that's neither here nor there.

15:30
As I'm on cnncom looking for something about Brian Wilson, I saw this story about something like insert name of company. Adds this feature, insert name of feature using AI, and it's like this is just the headline for everything, right, and so I think this one might've been something like meta is making an AI. It's like a, it's like a mad lib. You could just fill in the blank, it doesn't matter. Like whatever the company name is, whatever the AI feature is, whatever who cares? But I think it was video editing or something like that, or video something or something. Generation something. I don, something I don't know, and I was like you know, we have to be saturated on this stuff. Now, like every app we have, does this now like everything, does like every. Like you could generate, uh, uh, like a cartoon image of yourself using notepad. I mean, it's like not really I'm kidding, but but it's like it's got. You're not far wrong. Yeah it's, it's getting close.

16:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, it's like not really I'm kidding, but it's like it's gotten that stupid, but you're not far wrong.

16:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's getting close. Yeah, it's really weird, like, how common this is. So I don't know, at some point it's like we're just going to fill in all the holes and everything will do everything, and then collectively, we as a people are going to be like is that it? Like? Is that that's the whole thing? Huh, that's all we got. I guess we're done all right, um, anyhow, okay, but we're not there yet. That'll be, uh, july's patch tuesday, so, um, looking forward to that.

16:53
Uh, several updates to the windows insider program. As you would expect. The biggest one, I think, was yesterday. Microsoft added the new start menu finally, which they've been talking about. You could kind of manually enable, if you knew the trick, if you're in the dev or beta channel in the Insider program, you could just get it.

17:09
And so the phone companion sidebar actually debuted last month in Patch Tuesday, although it rolls out over time, so you may not see it everywhere or anywhere. I see it in some places but not others. I just brought up this computer. It does not have it. I see it in some places but not others. I just brought up this computer. It does not have it.

17:40
So hilarious, but it's not tied to the new start menu. But if you have the new start menu, there's a little toggle up in the corner so you can turn that companion sidebar on and off like on the fly without going into settings, which is not its biggest new feature, but it's kind of cool. But the big thing here to me is when I go back to my original assessment of Windows 11, when it first debuted in mid 2020, well, the final release of the public release was in October. To me, the biggest thing about it was how unfinished it was, and the start menu was so stupid that if you went up to the pin section and deleted every icon there, it would just be a big blank piece of nothing. It would.

18:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It wouldn't reflow I mean, at least that's honest.

18:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, okay, I don't think that was the reason. Um, no, but uh, I, I just to me is like just really lazy software. And over time they, they did little subtle things that didn't address what I just said. They, you could have more space for pinned and more for recommended or whatever. The bottom thing was called um, but they didn't really address the over, the auto flow or whatever you want to call that. Uh, and now they have right, and so there are multi. Now there are. They could have three sections. You could have the pin section, recommended, and then I think it's just all, which is just apps which could be organized different ways.

18:45
You can turn these things off, you can. It will auto flow automatically. If you do, it will just like it actually, and it's cheap. We always say this it's like this is what microsoft should have shipped four years ago and it's like, yeah, I mean I guess so, but I'm not, they weren't really there yet, right? I mean like let's be, let's be fair, but um, but also let's be critical, because what they did ship was terrible. But I think this is, but it's the internet.

19:07
Well, just gonna be updated yeah I think this will address most people's complaints or whatever about the start menu unless you just say windows 11, in which case I can't really help you there.

19:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know what linux is there for you it is there for you yeah, um, dhh is a whole rant where it's like I've switched to linux and I'm so much happier and I'm like who is it? Well, david hanneman, hansen, like dhh, you know base camp I I the guy who killed ie6 like, yeah, I mean I'm not his biggest fan or anything, but I respect what the man has done and he's been right a few times right, well, I mean, look, if you don't want to be annoyed that's.

19:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a pretty good start, yeah, yeah, he said some really stupid things too, but yeah, you know part of the course, like what are you gonna do?

19:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
who has not?

19:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
who hasn't as recently as in the past 15 minutes I'm thinking um. It's just life, right? So anyway, I I do think the new start menu is a big improvement, and having used it, I miss it.

20:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're working on it Like they're genuinely. There's clearly more than one person. It's not just an intern. They're really trying to make a new start menu.

20:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not just someone who's used a Mac and has no idea what the start menu is for.

20:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we're getting so. I mean, first we had the salvage out of Win 8, and then we had the we want to be Mac 11. Now we're going somewhere else Right.

20:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, now that Apple's doing this glass thing, they'll probably go back to Aero Glass and Windows 12. So we have that, we're jumping ahead.

20:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm glad you're talking about it, but we're jumping ahead.

20:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A lot of people are going to be like, oh God, please do that. Oh man, oh God please yeah, my first reaction, though I have to say, my first reaction was how did they write it um arrow is the pot well, no, they copied windows phone in ios 7 and now they're copying windows vista, like all right, you're going backwards, save it save it uh this might be a good place to take a tiny little break, uh, before paul goes crazy with arrow.

21:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's fine, everything's fine, everything's fine it's okay, it's gonna be good um, anyway, there's there's a.

21:12
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25:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It pays the bills?

25:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it pays the bills. There's some other new features coming in the Windows Insider bill. Yes, talk about it.

25:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are. So, in addition to that new start menu we talked about last time, two new AI features are coming to the Photos app probably two of 20, really. I mean, they're just kind of rolling these out over time. These two are both for Copilot Plus PCs, and the way they've been doing this is, if you're in the Insider program I think this is the beta channel you'll get it first on Snapdragon based PCs and then, probably a month from now, you'll get it on x86 based copilot plus PCs. But the first one is Relight.

25:54
This was actually announced back, I think it was ahead of yeah ahead of build as part of when they announced the surface devices, the kind of refresh of stuff, so just a image editing feature and then wait for it. Semantic natural language search where this, in this case they actually call it that. So I guess.

26:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think the other one was unnatural language.

26:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was their best attempt, at the best they could do.

26:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How natural is it?

26:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, it's like a baby's butt okay, actually that's a little too natural okay um, okay, um, there's a major update to the microsoft store coming. If I could find my article about that, where is this? I don't have it. I think I linked to the wrong thing. Um, but that's okay. So this one's kind of interesting. I think this one is available across channels If it's not all channels then it's probably beta and dev, but I think it's everyone and they keep kind of screwing with this.

26:55
But the big part of this underneath the cover is because they rewrote it last year to be faster, which was necessary. They're adding that search experience, right, which in this case they're not calling semantic search, but same thing. The idea is you're going to see this kind of I'm going to call it semantic search, this natural language shirts feature kind of appear everywhere, right? Someone had asked me on one of my Friday articles. I find article or apps that are specific to co-pilot plus pcs and I was like surely the microsoft store, which has an ai hub, will have a section for that and they do not.

27:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, um, I'm still trying to figure out what is a co-pilot plus pc. At this point it's, it's. I mean I know it's snapdragon, but it's, but there is an AMD machine that qualifies.

27:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yep, yep.

27:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's just Lunar Lake for Intel that qualifies, right.

27:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So one of the review laptops I have in now is Intel Core Ultra Series 2, whatever the number and I was like, obviously this is Lunar Lake, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And I was setting it up and everything, and then I moved over to I don don't know, it was paint or something and I was like, wait, where the there's? No, none of those features are here. What's going on? And it turns out this is an arrow like chip. So arrow lake doesn't qualify.

28:16
Yeah, it's the generation that intel would have done after meteor lake had microsoft not come to them and said hey, by the way, we're given this special treatment to call com, if you want to jump on board, you got to do this, this and this. And they're, like you know and uh, a major contributor to intel's problems last year, uh, getting this thing out the door. So lunar lake is the one that has the good mpu, yeah, integrated, and actually better graphics too. So the uh, the arrow lake is more powerful as a processor. So it could be good and better in certain circumstances, for sure, but the graphics in the mpu are not as good right, it's the adjacent stuff that matters yeah, you could add, and they don't.

28:57
It doesn't rely on integrated ram either, and that's good or bad, you know, depending how you look at it. But in the good news department you could theoretically upgrade one of these computers, assuming the pc maker allows that right. So that's a possibility anyway. This stuff is so confusing now I'm just I can't even, I can't even think straight when it comes to this, uh, but anyway. So, um, there's just a lot of updates graphically to the store layout, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's not really that big of a deal. But the big deal to me is just the search bit. And of course they're doing that. They're doing that everywhere, as they would. And then I don't notion keeps scrolling down to the bottom. For me, for some reason. This is very strange. And then there was a canary build on Friday, and we don't know why. We don't know why canary exists. We're not really sure what the point of it is. Am I not bringing up the right thing?

29:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean the fact that I called it. Canary bills like this is the one that could die at any time.

29:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what that's supposed to be yeah, a lot of the stuff that's in here is stuff that's just been elsewhere earlier, right. So the energy saver which is not what it should be.

30:00
Yeah, there's phone mirroring capabilities, uh, in in phone companion, but that's elsewhere. There's taskbar tweaks, like I talked about, for the pill thing at the bottom. Those are elsewhere, like I, I don't know that there's anything unique in this build. Uh, maybe once or twice this year they've been a few unique features in canary, but but honestly it's a pretty short list. It's kind of too bad. Okay, now what else? What else? And that's it. I think that's it for Windows 11, believe it or not, amazing Wow.

30:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So how'd you do it when Windows 12, Paul when? So moving on to WWDC yeah really no Fine, no no.

30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fine.

30:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, yeah, it's a good question, yeah. So if you look at the schedule right Someone asked me this too, you know, as people would right Like when, when's this going to happen? It seems like maybe this would be a time we are roughly within one week. Four years ago, when they announced Windows 11. Right and then they shipped it in October. Years ago, when they announced windows 11 right and then they shipped it in october. So if they were going to ship it this october along with windows 10 going out of support, they could call it windows 26.

31:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go is that apparently stylish now?

31:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it will be 2026 edition, or you know it's back um look, give, say what you want to say about apple, but the version number of that thing is 26, it's not 6.2 or whatever. You know whatever windows.

31:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they don't have those obscure. I mean, maybe internally they do and they kept the uh they kept the geographic. You know it's tahoe. Anyway, we'll get to that. I don't want to get to that. Yeah, let's talk about build.

31:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, well, let's talk about developer shows, because we're hitting the end of the season, so every year we have run of shows. Yeah, Build IO WWDC and you have a chance.

31:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have a chance Closer together this time than they usually are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

31:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google doing IO the week of build and all the awfulness that happened to me at build was a a wonderful happenstance it's one of the.

32:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean I keep looking back on that week going that is one of the craziest weeks and the layoffs on top of that, just like what a weird.

32:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The whole thing was nuts and apparently microsoft said we're never doing it in seattle again. Yeah, that's part of it.

32:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So and not because of, not because of protesters because of the homeless well, so I, so I mentioned this in passing. This was not a joke.

32:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because there's fewer homeless in San Francisco. Really, that's where we're going.

32:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I've yet to be assaulted by a homeless person in Seattle. That did happen to me in San Francisco, but I mentioned this but it was quick because the other stuff was way more important. But twice I saw a homeless person in some stage of disarray get out into the middle of an intersection in the crosswalk and just yell up yeah at the building. And you know, in one one case I actually I was walking by him and I sort of looked up and I looked at him and I was like I don't, I don't I don't see it.

33:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know what. What are you yelling at um? So yeah, yeah, this is a metal illness.

33:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Seattle's always had kind of a tough. It's really tough. Seattle is like the Clippers to the Lakers. You know, it's like with San Francisco. It's like we've always aspired to be just like San Francisco, but they forgot, maybe not do the bad stuff, and that I yeah, seattle is such a beautiful city, I love it so much and it's like San Francisco. I go there and I'm like like there are things about it that are just um, you know whatever.

33:32
So, yeah, microsoft, uh, there was a a private exchange between Microsoft and the visit Seattle um organization that does the conference center stuff. That was basically like, yeah, we're not coming back next year. Also, we're not coming back ever. So all of the holds we had on future years, you can forget about it, we're not doing it. And it was because they've been complaining about this homeless person thing and the open drug use and whatever else for years and Seattle has done nothing about it, like nothing. And so showgoers and Microsoft executives to go there and they walk between the arch convention center and the like, the hyatt grand, which is, uh, probably where I think richard was probably there, where a lot of those guys stay, and it's, you know, two, three blocks, not that far, but it is. It's like this fallout hellscape of you know yes, it's terrible, has that too.

34:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Weirdly, it's right next to city hall yeah, and to be clear, it is not that bad.

34:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he's in danger no, it's kind of disgusting, is the?

34:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it's not as tidy as it could be yeah, I, I saw a homeless person defecate on the sidewalk in san francisco. I haven't seen that yet in san francisco. Um, you know, there's the. You know there there are things I, you know, not a fan of, but we call them unhoused paul I hope you'll.

34:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I'm sorry.

34:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will continue to be insensitive to everyone who has a problem.

34:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry um it's you know it's a very difficult problem. Yeah, but it's not just I mean I don't blame seattle, I mean, they're not doing what beijing would do, which is bring out bulldozers and just bulldoze them away.

35:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and this is not a real reason to pull out of a car. That's not why, that's the thing.

35:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that was kind of, in some ways, is the point. I wonder well and I guess we are wondering now openly if this wasn't a little bit of a cover, because I read this thinking this will be how they communicate, like we've we wanted to keep doing this. Actually, we don't think it makes any sense. Here's why. So here's one of the problems, though, with Seattle. Like are not being in Seattle for Microsoft it. It gets dramatically more expensive for Microsoft to host the show because when you're in Seattle, their employees are all there, yep. So they would have to ship and house thousand something plus employees in some other city which they are currently deeply against right.

35:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like they, they are super tight with their travel budget. So we know, as if these shows weren't already struggling, and let me be clear they are like.

36:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're not the shows they should be like they now they just made it harder for no real reason. Runs the convention center that their expectation was that build 2026 would have 4,500 plus paying attendees. I know from my sources at Microsoft that they barely cracked 3000 this year and only did that by lowering the price.

36:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I don't know. I wonder if they decrease their attendance by lowering the price too much. Like that price $11.25, like that's crazy cheap. That just sort of says, wow, we don't think our show's that good.

36:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, also I can tell you from experience, they cut corners pretty dramatically. You know, the old convention center is called Old for Reason and I mentioned the one day of meal that I got for free from my, you know, press pass or whatever.

37:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
usually you were taken care of all week as you would be, but um, you know, what would be an interesting idea is take the money that microsoft will have to spend to move it and put it towards the homelessness problem. Yeah, now somebody in the chat room is saying it's really about a new tax. Is what is that mr matt saying? Do you know? Have you heard anything about that?

37:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, all right, I don't know about that, but um, I don't know, I I know, I look I we're not gonna say I'm just I'm just saying, this is what happened, that's all.

37:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you remember a few years ago, seattle did propose charging a special tax for the big companies, microsoft and boeing, that no other company would yeah, that makes sense that failed.

37:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so you've been successful in our state, right, we're? Oh, congratulations.

37:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, you win the lottery in reverse um yeah, so okay, so the, the microsoft, the microsoft show business tax in Washington State.

38:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mr Metz says Right, so Microsoft doesn't like it.

38:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So Microsoft should come out and say, hey, this new tax is driving us out, we're off to Vegas.

38:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just be honest yeah.

38:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
San Francisco. Well, they haven't been dishonest.

38:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They never said anything. This was private.

38:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They never announced this publicly. They did not.

38:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Good, no-transcript. Have been the protests or no? No, because that's going to happen anywhere, although, yeah, um, actually mary jo seattle's a little more active than many so I had this exchange with san francisco.

39:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Come on, that's not gonna be any better yeah.

39:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay. So I had an exchange with Mary Jo yesterday and we were talking about the assumption that they're going to San Francisco and I said, yeah, it's not like I'm not going to protest in San Francisco. And she says you're telling me that those employees are going to travel on their own dime to San Francisco to protest and lose their job. I don't think so, and I was like you know what. That's actually pretty smart, maybe. That's true, it's super convenient to protest when you just have to get out of bed and drive into Seattle.

39:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if you actually had to travel somewhere and potentially stay at a hotel or whatever it was, maybe a little bit more, I don't know. Maybe they wouldn't do it as much, but that said, absolutely they're going to be protests. I so google, was in public, but of course they're in mountain view, which is not really suburban, but they also had the risk of protest, right, and so, uh, this didn't get widely publicized, just like the thing with microsoft didn't?

40:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um, they had a lot of security there and they were on the outlook, just like Microsoft was for employees, because their employees have also protested, whatever deals they have with governments and militaries, whatever. And the one thing that I saw with Google that I didn't see with Microsoft and I had made this point back in, I guess, april, whenever that, uh, the 50th anniversary protests occurred, when I said you know, look, say what you want about Microsoft, but I feel like I could be wrong. But I feel like this is a company these people could work with and they would. Microsoft would give them a venue to voice their concerns publicly, if that's what they wanted. They don't want them to disrupt the keynote, obviously.

40:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I do feel like you said there were 30.

40:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, have a space somewhere where they could be and let people go see it and take pictures, and they could have a bullhorn and do their thing. Now this is in Seattle, not Microsoft campus. So that's what happened. But on the Google side, wherever that facility was in Mountain View or whatever Google did give that to employees, by the way, so employees were able to go out and pick it and you know, do their little protest thing.

41:16
And so I'm not saying one was right and one was wrong. And I don't know for a fact that Microsoft they didn't approach Microsoft and say, hey, you know, we feel like we need to be able to voice this, and Microsoft said no, I don't know, I just don't know, but I've not heard that. And my knee-jerk reaction a couple of months back was they seem like the type of company that would have been open to that. You know, but maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. Since the show I'm feeling like it used to be.

41:46
Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. There was a story right after Builder, right at the last day of Builder or something somewhere around there, where Microsoft is now filtering email for certain terms, so that if it's a blast email that goes out to everyone in the company or to large groups, they actually won't let those through automatically anymore. And so terms like Palestine or Israel or whatever are on that list. Right, because one of the little subversive things these guys were doing was constantly spamming these internal mail lists with their, you know, complaint or whatever.

42:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So again, I, I'm not here to. Times have been tough. Uh, this has been a bad month at Microsoft from the employees I've talked to.

42:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

42:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
At the same time as a record quarter and the highest valuation of any company in history.

42:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, yeah, Right. So I don't know what to say to that. This is not a fair comparison in some ways, but I think you'll understand what I mean when I say it. I'll write a story, or Laurent will write a story and I'll just make something up. You know, Microsoft fixes the whatever problem in the new Outlook and the response you invariably get from a dozen or more people is great, but when are they going to fix dot, dot, dot, whatever. My thing is right. Or you know, someone releases this thing for this thing and you're like okay, but what about this other thing? And it's like that's not what the story's about.

43:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Like okay, but what about this other thing? And it's like that's not what the story's about. The story's about this thing. Don't worry, when they fix that thing, I will write that story.

43:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If that was part of it, it would have been part of the story, that kind of thing. The thing I'm trying to separate, because the numbers are so big, is how, or whether Microsoft being what you said they are, which they are the most valuable company in the history of the earth, a stunning quarter nailing it by just spending 20 billion, whatever on AI every month and not even feeling the impact of it financially. And yet not only do they have layoffs, but they have layoffs that came suddenly without warning, without any sense of justification, or you know, it wasn't performance-based, like the old things Like how do you rectify this? We've already, I know we've discussed this a lot, but it's hard, like I'd like to know or at least have an idea. Oftentimes you can look at something and say, well, this is probably why I got nothing. And if the thought was, we don't get enough buy-in internally on this AI stuff, maybe we should threaten them. It's like that's the way. That's where the wheel landed when you spun it. What are you doing?

44:10
Yeah, that's crazy to me.

44:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it's a. I literally been saying terrorism, Like you're just scaring people, yeah, and and and. Oddly enough, you've succeeded. They're scared.

44:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They are scared and it's unfair. They shouldn't. Those people should not be scared. No, this is the. That's terrible. What were you thinking?

44:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, like it's, as if the world wasn't scary enough.

44:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's. I think thinking is the thing they're not doing, you know, or at least thinking clearly oh no, it isn't, nevermind. So, yeah, I mean Apple or Microsoft and Google. Those shows happened concurrently. It was weird, it was an explosion of news If you look at those two companies and we'll look at Apple later too. But, yeah, right, which makes sense. I mean, that feels obvious as I say it out loud.

45:06
But you know, the Microsoft advances are all around. You know, obviously, cloud power and productivity, that kind of stuff. These are Microsoft's strengths. You know Google has a much stronger hold with, you know, consumers through all the services they have. They have like billion plus users and they can throw AI features at stuff that impacts people at scale. Microsoft does too, but I don't think anyone cares if, like, preview gets like an AI you know feature or whatever. Or you know we're going to use AI to determine some kind of a policy on identity or whatever. So, yeah, it's really exciting. But you know it's like photos is getting, like you can turn a picture into a video. It's like you know it's fun, like.

45:43
So I think the thing that Google has that Microsoft doesn't is just it's more interesting to people like individuals and thus it's more interesting to people that want to write news about those things and actually have readers. And you know, that's the kind of. You know that's the world that we live in, unfortunately, or or whatever it's worked out for Microsoft. I mean it's financially, like Richard said, they're going gangbusters, but from a can you pull like an exciting news thing out of there for it, like what would my wife be excited about other than me being gone for a week, like about build? You know what I mean? Like I can't, I don't know that there is a. You know, maybe someone could come up with something, I don't know.

46:22
But the Google thing. I was like there might be parts of this keynote you might want to watch. And I said to her as a normal person, non-technical, because you know she uses Android and she reads on a tablet or whatever and does her thing. But it's like this might actually benefit you in your day-to-day, whereas I, the microsoft stuff, would. That would be true if you were like an it admin or someone working in a microsoft uh oriented shop or whatever. Absolutely there's a lot of those people, but it's not interesting for you know, it's not. You know the fun photo stuff even though microsoft does that too.

46:59
Um, it just doesn't, you know, it just doesn't kind of they need a.

47:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They need a place to. To see apple uses their wwdc conference as a keynote for real people, not for developers yeah google does too, right? Yeah, somewhat google does, but microsoft definitely doesn't, do they have a venue where they could?

47:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so this should have been my tip. I'm gonna throw this out right now. In fact, you can, just you can google this easily. Um, theired Podcast did a follow-up three-hour interview with Steve Ballmer. I watched it twice. It is fantastic. I can't really stand those two guys. But Steve Ballmer is amazing. It's on YouTube. It's an incredible and probably elsewhere it's an incredible reminder of what this guy did and to the tune of.

47:47
I think a lot of people don't even realize it was him and there was so much that came out of this. But in the past he and Bill Gates have both said, when asked what is your biggest regret If you could have done anything differently, the two of them at one point or the other, both said separately I would have gotten phone right and I was like both times I was like nope, nope, you blew, no, no, that cannot be your biggest regret. It cannot be. And he on this show said what I actually do think it was his biggest regret, because I see this this came out of. This was repeated again and again in that Steve Sanofsky book I keep talking about, where Microsoft targeted enthusiasts and then individuals and that kind of went to retail and became the big thing from the 90s, but then businesses of different sizes and ultimately enterprises and all that stuff, and that was Steve Ballmer did that, I mean.

48:38
But what he said was, when we got into this, my intention was not to drop consumer and completely lose that, even though this enterprise thing was going gangbusters, it was to do both. He's like I always felt like we could have done both and everything we did on the consumer side once we embraced enterprise was just half-assed and I and I was like, yes, that a hundred percent, because Microsoft at that point in time was personal computing. They could I'm not saying it wouldn't, you know, apple and Google and Amazon, this stuff would have happened to some degree. But the world would probably be a different place if Microsoft had just tried. You know, and they really, for all kinds of reasons, right and still aren't right.

49:20
I mean, how are you going to get it back now?

49:22
Yeah, we talk about OpenAI's monthly users compared to Copilot monthly users, and OpenAI has got the consumer market Yep and Microsoft does not, and the enterprise market is moving very carefully into using LLMs and so the adoption rate is slow yeah slow, yeah, and you know, look I, there are going to be businesses that see and those that do not see the balance, or the benefit rather, of these ai features, like some will embrace it, be like oh my god, this is amazing, here's why. And some will be like, you know, we keep trying and I, I just don't understand the point.

49:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean that's not what's holding enterprises back, it's the system is going. I'm supposed to have my data at staten's daughter and I don't I how to do that.

50:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but if it was amazing enough, this would be like getting Macs or iPads or not iPads, iphones or whatever in the enterprise, where C-level execs would come down and say, look, we're doing this.

50:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, we're doing this. Yeah, I don't care what you say.

50:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're doing it, so figure it out.

50:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, we're definitely at the product phase where we want this. This would be amazing. So go try stuff and find something amazing for us.

50:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and Microsoft's key advantage in this space aside from the obvious scale they have just the sheer reach they have in the Fortune 500 and the biggest companies in the world, etc is that thing that's getting them into trouble with teams in Europe, which is we can make this a feature of the thing you're already paying for and make it more valuable. You could view that cynically as kind of a form of lock-in, but I think the reality is most people that use the Office Suite which we're not supposed to call the Office Suite, or Microsoft 365, whatever and when I said people, but most businesses, I don't think any one of them are like man, I'd love to drop this boat anchor and move on from this. I actually think most businesses are like yes, obviously we're using this. It's the standard. It works great. Everyone loves it.

51:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well and more sanely, and all the alternatives scare the snot out of me, so I'll stick with what I know.

51:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so when Microsoft approaches this, it's not like we're going to come up with this like Zune AI thing. It's like, okay, well, microsoft 365 has gone gangbusters, we'll add it to there and we'll we'll. This is how we'll improve these products going forward. You'll get more value out of this. This will help us raise prices, as we're going to have to do as time marches on, but it will be. It will make this thing that is already invaluable and kind of a no brainer for so many companies, even more invaluable and more of a no brainer if that makes sense.

51:39
Um, anyway, the Steve Ballmer stuff was amazing. I'll just real quick on that. I should have put this in the notes. The other thing that there's a lot in this is three hours long. It's an amazing. It's him talking is amazing, those two idiots being like oh, I didn't even know that product existed. I wanted to strangle it through my screen. But he is amazing.

51:58
And you know, one of those things that comes up is well, you were CEO for X number of years. Bill Gates was CEO for X number of years. Why did you have to move? Like, what was the point? Did you want to move on? And he's like no, I did not want to move on.

52:13
But he's like here's the thing I was good for Microsoft's bottom line financially, but not good for the stock price bottom line financially, but not good for the stock price. And one of the reasons I wasn't good for the stock price is because I was always the guy saying we need to spend money on this to win it and we need to invest and invest, and invest. And I was the one who built up these big businesses that were that might be the next big thing for Microsoft. He was part of the reason that Microsoft became more of a multi-product and definitely an enterprise company. And he said look, I could not have gone. He goes everything Microsoft is doing now I started.

52:57
He finally said it explicitly. He's like I did all of this and he said but no one's ever going to give me credit for that. And if I went to Wall Street and said, look, I know I've been spending money, I know I'm the spend, spend spend guy, I got the religion, I got it, I fixed my ways, I'm not going to spend money anymore, just believe me, you know it wouldn't. He's like it would never, no one would ever. I had to leave. He's like there was no way the perception of this company was going to change unless we made a change, even though I was the one pushing the change. We made, you know, and I, you got to watch this thing. It's uh, it, he is. I miss him so much. He's so great. Yeah, he really is.

53:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I miss him so much. Yep, he's, he was way. He was a lot of fun like, just like a much more interesting.

53:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't here's one for you. I had no idea that he was considered a great Well, that's the thing.

53:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It depends on who you talk to, Right? But yeah, you know he was um, you know he wasn't perfect, I don't mean it like that, but as far as like a leader of a company who was actually like literally a cheerleader of that company, and he's also the.

53:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
he's also the guy who kept the company together, Like he brought in his CEO to get through the consent decree and he did it.

54:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
His comparison of running a company like Microsoft to running a sports team like the Clippers is astonishing and awesome and instantly believable and real. And again I keep saying this, but you got to just listen or watch or whatever you do, but he's amazing.

54:22
But are we souring on such a no, that's what so no, I'm not sure I was ever a huge fan. So honestly, this guy cut to me comes off as really robotic. I have a hard time, you know, like I have weird hearing as it is, but there are certain sounds like we'll be in a restaurant, maybe in a. There'll be a large area with lots of people and there'll be someone 28 people over, cackling like an idiot, and there's something about his or her voice where it's on some temp timber or whatever, where it hits me and it's like painful and his voice is yeah, his voice is like that.

54:55
It's like a. It hits me sharp, like it's it. There's something about when he talks.

54:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like, oh god, that kind of bothers me, I think that's a new problem, though, paul, I know, I know, I know, I know so, but he's what was.

55:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But what was the rationale for him? This is the guy who ran bing. Why do we think he would be an? Okay I? There's a theory out there right now, internally and externally, that the person really running this company is amy hood.

55:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just gonna throw it out there, but well that I would. I would agree with that post Because she definitely got control of things during the pandemic.

55:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But here's the thing, this guy, the one thing Balmer says, and he likes Satya Nadella. He said Satya was one of two or five people that, early on, microsoft felt internally like maybe, like you always have to have these contingency plans for a CEO, for leadership, right, and some of it is long-term like look, I think I'm going to be here for X number of years. We're going to try to do this in the meantime, and then we'll move on to something else. Some of it's I walk out in the street, get hit by a bus, and so you have these lists of people who could kind of fill in, and I guess Satya was on the short list for longer than I would have thought. But the one thing he said, though, and I was like, okay, this actually makes sense to me. He's not an engineer. This guy does not have an engineering degree.

56:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The big selling point for him. No, no.

56:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the big selling point for him was we need to bring back someone like Gates, who was an engineer.

56:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Like a technical person.

56:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't think he's a visionary in the slightest. In fact, I'm developing a theory that Satya Nadella when I said oh, I said this to someone from Microsoft last week. I think Satya Nadella is a high stakes poker player who constantly is betting his family's home on a last ditch chance to win some bet.

56:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And sometimes he's right and sometimes he's wrong.

56:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who spends $68 billion on Activision and then proceeds to fly Xbox into the ground, like, what? Like? How do you take that amazing regulatory victory and just screw it up? You know? So, I don't know. He, he, he also talks. You know when does someone mention what? His phone? When his phone was never going to succeed. But he was pushing for Microsoft to make their own phone for several years and the board kept saying no, kept saying no, kept saying no. And then they said well, they bought Nokia after you left. He goes, I know he goes. I have to live with that and I, I, I wanted to like.

57:37
By the time we bought that company, we had to do it to save our platform. It was going to die, otherwise we should have done it earlier, like we should have done, you know the right thing earlier with it. He was trying to do that, I guess, for several years. Anyway, I look like I said no one's perfect. I don't mean it like that, but this is a very revealing interview, um, and if you're mixed on this guy, or if you love him and miss him or you hate him, whatever, I don't care, watch it.

58:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you'll be. You'll come away with something excellent. It's, it's. It's pretty impressive Before we get to um Google and um Apple and I know I'm dying to hear what you think of liquid glass?

58:20
You mean air glass? Oh, liquid glass, liquid, sorry, sorry, yeah, I want to take a break, if we, if we, if I may, and we will continue in just a moment with Paul Thurott and Richard Campbell. I'm so glad you're all here, you winners and you dozers. This is windows weekly for June 11th. See that it's there. We've got a special clock Now you know, to the millisecond, to the millisecond, where we are in the show, our show today, brought to you by one password.

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01:00:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so the great recap, the great recap. We kind of did this last week, right?

01:00:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if it's going to be great. It's going to be, it will be a it takes a while for the dust to settle, and that's the thing, right, so well, we'll get to this.

01:01:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I. The Apple thing was especially interesting. People are so divided over this, um I with Google. There's been a two year long kind of vibe with them where, like they're behind, like they're not, somehow they're behind, you know, and I feel like IO was kind of a show of force for them. It was, um, really hard to understand, to keep on track of it.

01:01:21
Um, that said, uh, android is usually kind of a big deal at the show. Android was not a big deal at the show. They sort of announced Android 16 before the show, but it wasn't ready yet. And actually today it just finally came up, but not really all of it, because they're going to ship more and, like you know, they do this quarterly updates and there's three really big features the desktop mode that's based on decks, the material um, what's it called? Uh, the new material expressive, uh, design. And then there's live notifications, which are like um notifications you get on an iPhone with Dynamic Island and so forth. We're all coming to the platform this year, but not today.

01:01:59
So you know, there's that kind of weirdness. Okay, and you know Google is one of those things like Google is the ultimate ADHD company because when they're on it, when they want something, they can focus and it's unbelievable and they lose the script on other things all the time. So, like they haven't released a speaker in 17 years. They don't really do the home stuff that much anymore. There's like they kind of just drift away. You know, um, they're, they're weird like that. But, um, you know, I I wondered, like a lot of people did, like why would you do this the week of build? You could do this show anytime. You to your place, like you could go. You know it could be anytime and I can't explain that. But man, it was a, it was a tough one. Uh, you know, because the people who material you was the previous one, I think this is material expressive, or yeah, m3 expressive m3 expensive, yeah, um, I don't know.

01:02:56
Anyway it was. I'm never gonna catch up on the google stuff, like I'm never every single day. There are multiple stories where it's like we added, like it's the the thing I was talking about earlier. You know ai feature to ai or app service, whatever it is, and and you're like you know businesses, consumers, and it's just like a matrix of all the stuff they do, which is vast and is looks like the Milky Way probably, and there's so much of it and it's just like, yep, they're just filling it all in and it's astonishing, like I like the stuff that they're doing is really kind of incredible and if anyone like actually seriously they're behind on AI, I feel like you're not really paying attention, but I think they're doing, I think they're going full stop. It's kind of amazing. The Apple one I would just like to have a moment of silence here while I collect my thoughts.

01:03:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like I don't like they had to make a call on Apple intelligence and they did. They moved away.

01:03:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they did it well actually, because I do too.

01:04:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I came away, I agree.

01:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what they've done now is they've gone on a, a tour, a interview tour, where they elaborated on the point that Siri version 2 was what was not working and so they postponed it. But I thought what they did that was smart and of course we'll see how it works. But presuming it works is just kind of sprinkle AI throughout in a useful way.

01:04:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think this goes back to a year when everyone's like, oh, they're behind, they're never going to catch up. And then they announced what they did and you're like, yeah, but this stuff's not going to be available for the iPhones. And then they kind of slow boil or release it over time.

01:04:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you go back and rewatch that keynote from a year ago and compare it, to when they demoed something that was 100% fiction Never came to this, but when they demoed something that was 100% fiction Never came out Because it never existed in the first place.

01:04:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They claim that's not true. They claim that that software did exist.

01:04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they said it was V1 was working, but not well enough to release it. Yeah, it was buggy. You know what this is a problem with AI. If the AI is right 50% of the time, I know Then it's wrong. Then it's wrong. That it's wrong, you know, right. You have to trust it.

01:05:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but, by the way, again, like there's a cynical view which is very easy to adopt, and then there's a view where you're like, well, they're being mature here, they're being. Look, they have a couple of billion, 2.5, whatever the number is billion users. Yeah, we have this incredible ecosystem with cross-device capabilities. We are promoting privacy. This has to work and it has to work in a way that the Google stuff doesn't have to work or OpenAI doesn't have to work. These are companies that just stole. I mean, google has search results and all their stuff, so they have data, but like OpenAI, all these other companies, they had to steal the data.

01:05:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting is they're using chat. They're using OpenAI models in many cases, like, for instance, they have this really crappy image playground where everything comes out looking terrifying, and they finally said, yeah, we're not doing it, so we're going to have that be OpenAI doing that, which is the right thing to do. Yes, but most of what they're doing and this is why I want to withhold judgment until we see it is on-device using.

01:06:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, so they just announced an on-device sdk or api, whatever it is.

01:06:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, so any developer can access I love that too, the neural engine, that's awesome.

01:06:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft's been doing this for two years. I mean, this is not.

01:06:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not new, like on their google has been doing this for two years on pixel, on copilot plus pcs, that's what that is oh okay, and it started before that, when they had Windows Studio Effects and other NPO features. Good, so do a lot of app developers use that.

01:06:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no one does, because the problem is on Windows. That market is relatively small. So, like Snap or Qualcomm will be like, oh yeah, we're like 15% of premium laptops that were sold in 2024. Great, but what percentage are you of the billion, whatever user base? We're like, yeah, less than 1%. So who's going to do that?

01:07:02
I will say, a year ago at Build, when Microsoft announced what was then the Windows Copilot runtime, I was like, all right, well, I need to try this, we'll see what it looks like. I didn't get a chance to look at it, no one did until January or February I guess it was 2025. So that took them seven months to ship a preview. That's still not public, by the way. And then they announced the, the update to. That's called the windows AI foundry, and that is that. One's actually more interesting because in that case, what you have is a combination of on-device and cloud-based AIs. The on-device AIs are a combination of AIs that run against the CPU, the GPU and or the MPU, and so you as a developer can pick and choose and use the models you want for whatever your needs are right. And so, obviously, the big use cases there are things like creator apps, like video editors, photo editors, that kind of stuff.

01:08:00
But the problem with this stuff this is going to be the problem for Apple as well. You just said like Apple is sprinkling AI all over their ecosystem, and you're right, that's 100% right. But there isn't a single feature that would cause anyone to go buy an Apple device to get that feature Right. So when you say stuff like well, I can make um, whatever, they're called gen mojis, and now my people in my contact list in the new version of iOS can take my gen moji and have it make reactions where they're editing me and you're like okay, so look, that may be fun. That might be something lots of people do in the future.

01:08:35
I don't know, but I can tell you no one's buying the new iPhone to get that Like. That's not a thing. And this is the problem we see on windows as well. And this is the killer app problem we talked about. We've been talking about this for two years, like what's the killer app? There is no killer app. There is a. We took a killer app and we shattered it on the floor into a thousand pieces and there were a thousand little things and, depending on your needs, there may be one or five or a hundred things that are nice but not awesome.

01:09:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but that's not. And that's not. When they came in on the door and we talked about this last year, apple had to at the point in the hype cycle for AI last year, felt like they had to say something.

01:09:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They had to do something yeah, they were pressured in effect, but I also feel like, look, I in the same way that the like the iphone appeared and it killed everything else. Right, yeah, the only thing that survived out of that. The cockroach was android, which they had to change completely.

01:09:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because of the iphone.

01:09:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was going to be like a thing with a keyboard.

01:09:36
They went back to the drawing board yeah, they were the only ones that were like nope, stopping change everything. We're not doing that. Every other company on earth everyone's like oh, microsoft failed because the iphone, you know microsoft. What about nokia? What about rim and blackberry? And what you? What about motorola? What about the companies that only did that one thing? They all failed too. So sometimes these things come out of the blue and they blow you away. Apple was actually early to the game with what they call a neural processor, an MPU, and capabilities built into the devices that took advantage of it. They've been doing that for several years on the Apple. That's true. It's been in the Apple store.

01:10:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just that, and because they've needed to, because they don't own enough cloud to do it any other way.

01:10:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, this is before there was any cloud AI. I mean, they've been doing this for many years, so all of a sudden this cloud thing happens with a chat bot and there's a breakthrough. And look inside of Apple. Everyone looked at this and was like, oh my God, actually this is real 100 million users in two months.

01:10:34
This is really good. So that put Apple in the spot. Maybe that RIM and Palm and whatever companies you want to name back in 2007 were in where at first you're like, well, we got this, we're us, look at us, we're great, we're not going to fail, we got everything right. We have a history of coming from behind and doing our little secret sauce thing and getting it right eventually and, by the way, that could still play out.

01:10:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just saying yeah, no, I think this is a confidence issue. Last year, if they'd had the confidence, we said, hey, we're looking at this, we don't think it's good enough yet we'll let you know we got something better. They didn't do that. They said, hey, we've got it, here's the thing you'll. You'll get it soon, and now a year later, so and the momentum's off. Like people aren't that impressed with AI, like now, it's easier to say we're willing to wait.

01:11:20
Well, I, we could be like we told you so, yeah, they could have been there, but that's not what happened, I know, but we're not used to Apple blinking on the confidence equation, and that's what we just saw.

01:11:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A hundred percent, but they still can say look here's the. We announced whatever. The number was 28 things. We released 27 of them. I'm not saying they're all awesome, but we also did give Siri this pink purple glow thing, which is pretty fun. It's pretty fun. It distracts you from how stupid it is, but it's fun.

01:11:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It still doesn't understand what you're saying. But now it's being comparable.

01:11:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's ridiculous, but I mean but this is the ultimate hand, like look at the purple and pink it still. It just did it to me. I think it was today or yesterday. It popped up and I'm like what are you doing? Shut up. It always comes on when I don't want it. And not when you do. I never do, but anyway.

01:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they fell for the general consensus that the AI should manifest itself as a chatbot.

01:12:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And they didn't have the chatbot. Well, that's the one thing. See, they're not doing that right. They're not going to do a chat.

01:12:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now They've learned.

01:12:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They wanted to.

01:12:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They thought that was the way to do it. They were going to do a phone too.

01:12:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
actually, I shouldn't say they're not going to, but what they've said publicly in those interviews you were referencing, that kind of provide a little more color on the Siri thing was like look, the internet happened and we had internet stuff in the Mac, but we didn't make a search engine. There's all these examples because I think and, by the way, this is actually credible on their part I'm extremely critical of Apple, but they do look at things and where they do feel like they can provide value, they pursue it and when it comes out it's usually pretty good. Those are examples of that is not what happened this time. Well, but they looked at those things and said we're not going to do this, we're not going to have an app. Well, again, they might actually be. Know they didn't, the plan for last year was not and it all culminates in an apple ai chatbot. You know it's like no, like they're doing what microsoft is doing, but to phones and their devices, which is adding ai everywhere and hopefully it makes your life a little. You know better for users.

01:13:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That makes more sense. I mean, and you can always chat with claude or chat GPT or somebody else, if you really want to.

01:13:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the user doesn't care where any of that stuff runs. Actually, no, they don't care. I would argue this Apple has stayed loyal to their core business style, which is that they're a hardware vendor that makes exceptional hardware and the software is an ancillary point.

01:13:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's the value. Yeah, but you do get more value from Apple the more you spend. I know that sounds like why wouldn't you but their walled garden works well, but they're really good at that.

01:14:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They really are Good lock-in, but I would also argue this is not what Microsoft's done.

01:14:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, Microsoft used to be a software company.

01:14:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they're now an infrastructure company.

01:14:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just before the show started my someone in my family, my extended family, texted my wife and I and I texted my wife back and I said, please, god, give me the strength. And then I wrote sorry, that was for chat, gpt, um, like, because you know, people are just like, like it's like a therapist. Now you just talk to it and it's like paul, you seem like you're down. What do you think of liquid glass? I'm not so, honestly, I I realized that was the big thing up front, right, and if that's how they started, yeah, if you look at, it, in my opinion, the most important story, and I think you agree at the end.

01:14:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But liquid glass was the first thing well talked about.

01:14:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I actually think there was a lot of good stuff in this keynote.

01:14:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like I said, it's really easy, especially with these highly produced things they do apple makes a hell of a show, by the way there's no protesters if you record ahead of time, although there was a protester and cupertino, an apple employee who did stand up, a pro-palestinian protester, and was escorted out. But the thing is, nobody saw it, but no one whatever, unless you were there, because you're watching a video that they're watching there.

01:15:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're're not watching them. Watch the video, yeah Right. So look, I wrote a long, long piece about this. Um, liquid glass. Though it was promoted as kind of the big thing, this unified UI across all of their platforms is actually, at least on iOS, well, you know, iphone, ipad especially, but even on the Mac, too, it's a very minor change. There's stuff going on in liquid glass that doesn't require the glass effect. That is actually kind of cool. Like they have new UI, widgets and things and you know, as you scroll down a page they kind of contract and get out of the way and like that stuff's wonderful, doesn't require glass, right, it's just not. They're kind of commingling these things the way that it looks.

01:15:56
I'm not 100 sold on like I, I. This is um. Apple had this problem with, uh, mac os 10. Microsoft later had this problem with windows vista, where the first implementations are off. You know, like, if you go into, like control panel no, what's it called? Control center, you have like the glass clear style, whatever. You can't actually see some things like it's, it's. I've had things where, like text jumbles up at the top and it's all the same color and it's. You know it's a beta. I mean I get that, but I feel like iOS seven was like this at first, like the first version was mostly there, but then over time they kind of refined it and it made sense. Um, I think not wind phone seven, like I'm no um but he didn't.

01:16:42
When craig federighi was talking about this, he kind of said you know, think about how much time has gone by, how much more powerful our processes are. And I thought what he was going to say is now we have the graphics capability to render the see-through glass effect.

01:16:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the implication. I mean Arrow didn't work because it was so sluggish on XP Right.

01:16:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was the argument for Arrow. Yeah, for Arrow Right, Exactly so. It was like Microsoft. That was a tough time for them, because people have been hammering them for not being as innovative in Windows as Apple was with the Mac. Apple has hardware, accelerated graphics, They've got PostScript or PDF-based text rendering and whatever.

01:17:17
It was all the stuff they had, and it was like you have bitmaps, it looks stupid. You make an icon go big and it's all blurry. On the Apple, it looks like a photograph. So they're like all right, we're going to do all that stuff. And then they did, and everyone's like, oh, it doesn't run on my computer. And you're like, you told us to do it, Like you know. So I, I look that was a temporary problem. They solved it with a service pack and then with windows seven, obviously, but, and they also made the. The important thing to me, though, is just the um, the glass effect got better, If you will, I, I, I actually think flat is better and opaque is better for this kind of interface, but, um, you know, if you think about a big screen, multiple windows, the idea that you might want to see what's behind the thing you're working on is a decent one. This is not something you do on the phone, you know, not that much I mean. Sometimes I maybe I don't try to think of an example.

01:18:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They had examples but like so little uniform across all the platforms too, right?

01:18:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, I said on iphone especially, it's more on on the mac and if you're using an ipad with windows for some reason, um, yes, this becomes maybe more of a thing, although if you look at the shots of the windows on the ipad, they are not see-through, they're just windows. So I, I, I don't know, I, to me, it's not, I don't, it's not, I don't know, it's not awful, but it's, I don't. Aesthetically, this is subjective. I don't think it's an improvement over what they had two, two seconds ago and all of the stuff that is cool about it related to, you know, toolbars and widgets and whatever you call these things. That kind of contract and go away and come back, whatever they do, um, could have been done with any. There's nothing to do with liquid glass. Like it's just like there are effects that occur. I don't have my iPhone here, but like you can press a button that is smaller than the tip of my finger and if you look at it from an angle, you can see there's a little glass effect. Great, I don't need that there. That's this is. It's just pointless. I can't even see it. So I don't know, I don't know.

01:19:19
I think people were worried that they were going to turn the iPad into a Mac and that they were going to dumb down all their UIs to make it look like Vision Pro. And I think that making things consistent to whatever degree makes sense, given the platform is fine. I think it's fine. It's the consistency. Platform is fine, you know, I think it's fine, like it's the consistency, although you know, microsoft learned in the 1990s like their semi or less intelligent version of this was make all the toolbars in the office apps as similar as possible, because that would be familiarity and then someone who uses word can use Excel more easily.

01:19:47
Not true, it's completely untrue and people can handle different UIs as it turns out. But it's one of those things that sounds right. So when you say, like we want to make all our platforms consistent, it's like okay. But you know, sometimes the UI I see on a phone makes sense on a tablet, makes sense on my Apple TV, maybe even on a Mac, but a lot of times no right. So I guess the trick is in the implementation. I guess we'll see. Plus, you're basing your ui, your unified ui, and the one thing no one bought, like what, like what? Maybe the ui on that thing is the problem. You know, like what? Did it occur to you that maybe that wasn't right. It's like we everyone loves the apple watch, so everything's bubbles. Now we're gonna bubbling uis on all our devices. You'll on a mac. You'll have giant bubbles.

01:20:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It'll be great like they did, high resolution retina bubble, exactly retina bubbles exactly.

01:20:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. I thought I don't know. We'll see. I need more time with it. I it's easy to knee jerk this kind of thing yeah, I mean, I also did you install the developer.

01:20:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I installed it on everything. I have it on my watch, my phone, my mac and my apple tv.

01:20:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, yep, do you like? I do that with the google stuff too. I mean, yeah, I, it's fine, like I. I can't say that any of them. I don't think it's like I have. It's like I have a new iphone on my iphone yeah, no, no, no.

01:21:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think it's a big deal. It's a ui change.

01:21:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do think what they did with the iPad is a big deal, I do too, because this and, by the way, so I've been yapping about this one for years Apple could have put a knife in Windows, and especially in Surface, forever, and I think under Steve Jobs would have To me the big, bizarre thing about the iPad.

01:21:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, it's funny, Everybody debates Steve Jobs because I'm hearing a lot of people say Steve would never have let this happen.

01:21:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh really. Well, then you should go back and listen to what he talked about, because he was talking about the post-PC era, not the PC Plus era, like we're still going to PCs.

01:21:43
end this thing. And, by the way, go to the iPad 2 launch. And his visceral reaction to all of the everyone suddenly had adopted this term consumption device. Right, and he was like no, and he made sure that the ILF apps whatever they were called at the time these are going to be first class on the iPad. We're going to prove that this thing can be used to get work done. Did not do that, though, I'm sorry to say they did to some degree. And then he passed away because that year was the year he died. So, right, 2011, to some degree. And then he passed away because that year was the year he died. So, okay, right, 2011, so that's right.

01:22:17
I, I look. I I'm not saying we would have landed where we are. I. I agree that when you see things like a pointer and floating windows with the green and red and yellow buttons, like you have on a mac, it's like well, I didn't mean make it the mac, you know, but, but what they did?

01:22:31
I it is quick, again, it's too early, but but they appear to pull this thing off where, if you want to use the the iPad like it is today as a full screen device with apps, you can't. It doesn't change, right? If you have an iPad pro or a big screen I've had error, whatever it is you can add a keyboard and trackpad like a cover or whatever, and you could a device that gets way better. Well, better, hopefully, better battery life, but has, like that hybrid capability where it's a laptop and the thing it was before. I mean, that's to me that's the dream, right? That's what all these folding phones and folding laptops and whatever we have coming, whatever, is about it's like. Is there a world, a version where I can replace two things with one thing that actually works really well for both? Right, and so far the iPad has been really good for the consumption stuff and not so good for anything else.

01:23:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's okay.

01:23:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So now look I this. This is going to be a lot like a lot of other things. People have been hammering at this for years. Some people are looking at it now and they're like what are you doing? You're screwing up everything as special about the iPad. But they're not right. They're just adding something that you don't have to touch. Pardon the pun A year ago there. Well, they've been kind of slow boiling features that make the iPad better for that kind of thing. So a year ago I was like look, this is the list of what you got to do Background processes. So if you're rendering a video, it doesn't stop. If you know huge I mean you get the, the best processor in the world and you can't do background. What are you doing?

01:23:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, it's because they they were is basically the iphone. They were protecting the battery and and that was silly because someone's doing video.

01:24:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they're probably on power, by the way yeah, just do it yeah anyway, that was default, default apps for opening uh file types. And we leo you, you might remember this we had this thing about files. You're like files of the past. I'm like not for this audience. No, you need files, I agree, you're working with assets in a video or whatever it is.

01:24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't need a full finder or a full explorer, but you do need access to the files.

01:24:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the point. Look, there's always going to be this power user who points to this thing and says well, it doesn't do dot, dot dot. Yeah, of course I use files now all the time. Yeah, of course, because now it's actually pretty good. Anyway, I listed out all the stuff that this thing needed. They didn't do one of them. Last year at WWDC. They did all of them, and I listen. That's not how Apple does things. Usually, what happens is like all right, this year you're getting a pointer, next year you're getting this, next year you're getting that. Like they usually do it, like that. Yeah, the fact that they just shut me the hell up like in one whack is I'm really excited, astonishing I'm a big ipad user and this, to me, is exactly what they need to do.

01:25:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I will point out yes, the major distinction still between the ipad and windows, or the ip iPad and the Mac, is you have to install apps from the app store on the iPad. There is no side loading.

01:25:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that's a big deal Without worrying about whether that's ever going to change. It's never going to change.

01:25:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can tell you right now, I don't think it matters.

01:25:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We should jailbreak the iPad Okay.

01:25:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that's us. For most people that might even be a selling point right. Oh, I agree, it's part of the platform promise that this thing, even though they don't really do that much to make sure these apps aren't doing anything bad, but whatever.

01:25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It keeps it from being a full computer, though, because I Yep, I can't install everything.

01:25:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe that's better. Yeah, no for the people-.

01:25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For its audience. I agree.

01:25:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe it's better, but that's the audience that I think Steve Jobs saw, which was a much bigger mainstream audience than the technical people who maybe need what I would call a workstation because they're a developer or a scientist or an engineer or whatever you're doing, or a creator right To some degree, Although honestly, a lot of people Did. You see all the podcasting stuff they announced on the show, Like the audio.

01:26:13
That was really surprising to me I know Like they're really going after that audience. I mean it's interesting. So this is what I saw for the iPad so long ago and I just almost I basically gave up. I'm like they're never going to do this. Tim Cook is protecting the Mac. I don't know what incentive there was to make it all happen now.

01:26:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe I'm just thrilled because they've always had this great hardware and they never had the software to live up to it, and I believe they do now.

01:26:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The M4 shipped first on the iPad. You could spend 1200 bucks on this thing and you couldn't render a video in the background. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? I mean, this is like a Ferrari, but with a limiter on the engine. It can only go 30 in a school zone or whatever it's like. What are you doing? So, anyway, yeah, they finally unshackled it. And look to me, the important point is if you don't like it, if you don't want it, if you have an iPad mini or or normal, whatever it is, and you don't want that, guess what you don't have to use it. You actually get a choice in the beginning. You can just turn it off, right? Um, I, yeah, just I mean, I think if you're using your iPad to read and watch movies, yeah, you don't need this.

01:27:25
But if you are thinking like no-transcript, and it's a hundred percent somehow- and then you use like an Android device and all it did was check the time and it's on 83% in the same amount of time. You're like what's going on, Like they do something right, and look at me again because it'll be you're gonna look again, buddy.

01:27:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Huh, you know like it's it's. You know this is slightly different thing going on there, so that is maybe the argument for sticking with the app store is that you can kind of get that's part of that.

01:28:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we're assuming apple does anything on the app store, by the way, but I'm sure I. There's a lot of stories about how all kinds of stuff yeah really seem to get through. Yeah, anyway, um, look, I'm that to me is that to me was the most important thing personally. But if you look at all the products well, most of the products there wasn't really much in that. The Workup Buddy thing is like the cringiest thing I've ever seen. I don't care about Vision Pro.

01:28:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, good going, you just ran a half mile, nice job.

01:28:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and then that's when I'm like, okay, how do we turn this off? Shut up, shut up. Can I turn it off in a way that will cause this thing pain? Because, seriously, oh, stop Apple devices, sorry.

01:28:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not everything can be a winner, Paul Not everything.

01:28:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway. So now that Apple's event has kind of come and gone, I will say I mean, each of these events were so emblematic of these companies, they were all. So it was like Build was such a Microsoft event, google was Google, io was such a Google event and, you know, the Apple event obviously was only Apple, you know, do you think the iPad now is a threat to Surface? Yeah, I do, in fact. Yeah, I do. I think this might be. This is extreme. Maybe I shouldn't say it this way, but I think surface has been able to coast for a while, in part because Apple never did this. Like, apple had the power to kill that thing and they never did.

01:29:22
The joke is, what was the, the Tim cook line about? Yeah, we could combine a refrigerator or a microwave, but no, I never wanted that. And it's like well, you just did it, buddy, also that. And it's like well, you just did it, buddy. Um, also, that's one way of combining things. You could also combine a like a microwave and an oven and those things work out pretty good. So you know, these things are sort of closer than you're making them sound, right I think my apple still has distinctions between the two lines.

01:29:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they can still sell uh, macbook airs and even though I mean they don't really care because they both are equally expensive. I mean it's not like you save money by buying an iPad.

01:29:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I actually like that. It's not about the money, right, Because you could get an iPad pretty cheap. I mean, you could buy a base iPad and a keyboard thing and honestly be pretty good, right.

01:30:08
But if you want a pro Yep it's funny the best screen they make is on the iPad Pro Right Now, if you want bigger than a 13 inch screen, you got to buy a Mac, macbook Air, macbook Pro both come in 15, 16 inch screens right, great. And there are going to be capabilities around expansion and the number of screens you can add and the things you can do with those screens I can use. Emacs, emacs, yes. There's got to be an Emacs in the store, but um or there will be soon.

01:30:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know that'd be interesting.

01:30:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, I don't know who said this, but someone had offered up this idea that, um, a platform isn't real until you can create that platform on the platform you're like. In other words, you have, yeah, developer tools that run on that thing, right, so that's, that's another thing that differentiates the mac. I know there's like the uh, swift playground thing, but to make you know, apps like an x, like there's no x code on the, yeah, that's right, you still need it. Now, by the way, there could be, right. I mean, of course there could be. Why wouldn't there be a version of x code, right that makes ipad and iphone apps and I, I guess, watch apps or whatever like, or whatever like. Why, yeah, there could like. Why, yeah, there could be. I don't know, there could be very good reasons, by the way, I don't know. But, um, yeah, I, I love that.

01:31:19
They did it, I, they uh, I, I did my take on the um, the famous line at the end of planet of the apes. You know, they finally really did it. Um, you know, um, although I made it, I met that in a positive sense in this case, because this is what I've been asking for for since the iPad was the thing like this, this notion of this beautiful slab that is light and thin and gets great battery life, and then I can click on and do actual stuff on it, uh, but not deal with the bulk and crappiness and bad battery life or whatever. Of like a computer, there's, there's a place for this, you know. Of like a computer, there's, there's a place for this, you know. So we're going to find out, but I, you know, a year from now, we're going to be like what were we concerned about exactly? Like it didn't change anything, like it doesn't matter, I don't know. Anyway, so the three, anyway, the three shows happened. We got by it. The summer doldrums can occur. Now this is the week that would normally be E3.

01:32:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, too soon, don't bring it up, I know.

01:32:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, all three of the companies that are the big console makers Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have, or will have, some set of announcements that would have been at E3 if E3 was still a thing, right.

01:32:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did I miss the story that Microsoftrosoft is shipping a handheld xbox?

01:32:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, yeah, we're going to talk about this. Oh, all right, a lot, because there's a lot.

01:32:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a lot going on. It's the longest xbox segment ever coming.

01:32:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, not by word count, but maybe by the amount of time we spent on this okay, we'll see where you're watching and you're glad you are.

01:32:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet windows weekly paul thurad and richard campbell, who's in stockholm, sweden is it uh past midnight yet in stockholm?

01:33:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, no, it's, uh, it's almost 10 o'clock, it's, oh, it's early 10 o'clock in uh june, so it's like noon is what it looks like there right the sun is literally overhead.

01:33:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's dark now, but oh, is it dark really okay I was in helsinki I pulled my curtain, so yeah, I was in helsinki on the uh summer solstice and it really it's weird how, how late the sun is still out.

01:33:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you get this far north, it just keeps going, it's the same in van Vancouver it's wild.

01:33:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching Windows Weekly. Thank you for watching All you winners and you dozers. We continue on now with the much-awaited, the vaunted Xbox segment. I wouldn't mind an Xbox Steam Deck.

01:33:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is that what we're talking here? Yeah, so this has been one of those rumored things. There are still rumors that Microsoft was originally planning to have a first party, meaning their own device, as soon as this year, but that has been delayed. There's a lot of speculation about what's going on with Xbox hardware hardware in-house that you know. We had gotten that leak a couple years ago about these refreshes that look really good to the xbox series x and s, and then what they shipped was basically the same consoles, like slightly different. You know, maybe you got the white one in black or the black one in white and then a little bit more storage, whatever. Um, there is one of the things they were looking at was make going with arm for the next generation right, and we know that makes a lot of sense, yep, and especially for a portable device.

01:34:40
Right, that's where that kind of thing makes sense. So, totally. For that to work, though, that means that we have to get buy-in from developers and you gotta get games compiled arm.

01:34:50
yep, so what I? I had, I developed a theory, before any of this happened, that microsoft was going to combine windows and xbox uh for a gaming as a gaming platform, meaning that the same exact game would just run on both, and that you know, if you go and get like an xbox logo for your app, which you have to get to sell that app in the xbox store for the console, that the next gen version of this it will will just it will be a Windows game, basically it's, which makes it a lot easier on developers when you think about it, because there's a lot of developers creating just Windows games. And now maybe that opens up the console to this different kind of a thing. And I thought you know, we've, we've seen what they did in Windows 11 on ARM over the past year with things like AutoSR and the Microsoft Prism emulator to emulate apps especially, but also games to run better, so you can run like an X64 game, and not in all cases, but at a lower resolution, but it looks fantastic so to your eyes maybe it's 1080p even though it's running at 720p, or even less, improves the frame rates, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe this is the thing that will make this ARM dream come true if they're still pursuing that.

01:36:00
Phil Spencer has been talking about portable devices. They've been thinking about this for years. Arm would make a lot more sense on portable and so. But we're in this holding pattern, right. This is the problem with Xbox right now. It's just been a tough couple of years, right, and so you know it is a lot of uncertainty.

01:36:21
But, uh, microsoft had a uh Xbox game showcase on Sunday. They announced a bunch of stuff. You know the next call of duty, uh, there's a remake of the original gears, and then there's a future gears of war game coming as well, et cetera. A bunch of stuff. But, of course, then they announced this Xbox branded what they call a gaming handheld, not a gaming handheld PC. By the way, it's a gaming handheld and it's got the Xbox logo on it. It's the first time Microsoft has allowed a third party to ship a I'm going to call it a computer or a device that's not a peripheral, but their logo on it.

01:36:54
Um, microsoft, if you've been following gaming on Windows, or especially in Windows 7, you know that they've been improving the Xbox app and the game bar dramatically. Both of them support a compact mode which is explicitly for this new category of device, but I would have called it a gaming PC, but now we're going to call it a gaming handle, I guess and I think this might be a preview of how this platform is going to shift a little bit here. Because if you look at this business Microsoft you could make the argument that Microsoft Games, or whatever that part of the company is actually called, is really like Activision, blizzard and some other stuff, and the stuff that loses money is the worst part of it is the hardware, right, right, this has been the big problem for them it's always been at least just a break-even proposition.

01:37:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
At best it's the money in the games yeah.

01:37:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So microsoft? Just look, they, they. If they've proven anything on the hardware front, it's that they can't make a profit doing it.

01:37:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's true, surface as well, farm it out you know I mean neither can sony, like there's no money in the console hardware but they make a lot of the razor blades right and and companies like sony and microsoft or a nintendo, are actually much better at cost reducing over time, so that they actually do make money on that hardware eventually somewhere in that life cycle.

01:38:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, they've done that. Microsoft has never been able to do that. So yeah, I thought, well, you know what, if um like maybe the next consoles, they don't have to be made by microsoft, right, yeah, and when you?

01:38:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
see, what do you care if you're making the games?

01:38:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, and what do you care if you're an xbox fan, right, other than the very basic comment that you want the platform to succeed for whatever reasons that you love it if the next console is kind of pc based which, by the way, the current version, the version and the first version were all PC-based?

01:38:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just a momentary lapse of reason in the middle.

01:38:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was that weird PowerPC jumping the shark moment there, although, by the way, that was the most successful one. They've done a terrific job of bringing forward games from the past. So you have this library of backward-compatible games. They they have the play anywhere stuff, so your games work in as many places as they can do A lot. You know, some of that is constrained by the publishers, but look, say what you will about this business. They've done everything they can to expand the concept of Xbox and the availability of the money. You've spent the games that you bought with that money and they've done a great job with that. This will be a lot easier if this thing was a PC platform, to say a lot easier. So this is very interesting to me.

01:39:21
So this Xbox branded third-party gaming handheld right Made by Asus is runs on what's called the AMD Z2 platform. This is the version of their PC chips made for handhelds specifically for all the stuff. So they rely on like a small screen with a lower resolution than you would have on like a, like a 16 inch laptop with the dedicated graphics or whatever. You guys will know I write about this, I talk about this all the time. One of the biggest things that's happened over the past I say almost two years now is the integrated graphics especially. But the chip sets that are in just mainstream laptops have improved to the point where I now just play games on a laptop and not a gaming laptop. Not a gaming laptop with dedicated graphics, but uh. Anything based on lunar lake is fine. Anything based on the AMD Zen stuff Zen five, depending on which chip you have is either unbelievable or off the charts, like just it's excellent. What about?

01:40:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
the.

01:40:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Snapdragon. So the Zen stuff is really good and no so the Snapdragon. Well, so Snapdragon had. We're waiting on Gen 2, better graphics and whatever platform improvements come, so this is part of that, which is still a year away.

01:40:31
Yes, and NVIDIA and MediaTek are rumored to be working together on something, something that would have NVIDIA dedicated graphics with an arm, which makes that obviously very interesting, Right so? But again, if you're going to make Xbox be a PC which no one has said, I'm just speculating here then you want to go with the best chip. Now, AMD does make the chip in the Xbox. They made the chip in the previous Xbox. They make the chip in the PS4 and the PS5, or at least the PS5. I don't remember on the PS4. They're good at this.

01:41:05
This is a strength, I can tell you on the PC side of just a mainstream laptop. That stuff is off the charts. It's fantastic. I play Call of Duty at 2880 by 1800 on a laptop that does not have dedicated graphics and it's 110 frames a second with all the graphics on. It's unbelievable, Like it's really good. So the Z2, I can't speak to that. The Z1 was in previous gen gaming handheld PCs. The Z2 is the latest version. You know 16, I think 32 gigs of RAM, 512 or a terabyte of storage. Doesn't have Thunderbolt 4 or whatever, but it's a seven inch screen, 1080p, I think it's 120 Hertz on both of them. There's two models Xbox controller on the sides right, Kind of a standard factor for these devices.

01:41:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It looks good. It's good looking. It looks pretty good. Yeah, it's good, it's good looking.

01:41:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks pretty good, yeah, so I'm excited for this. I don't think this saves Xbox. I don't mean it like that. I don't think this is the secret weapon.

01:42:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This could be part of a new Xbox.

01:42:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not about the hardware, I think this is the tip of an iceberg of other things that are coming that might include such things as third-party Xbox consoles next-gen that have a just like Co-Pilot Plus PC has a spec that you have to make sealed in the box from the factory to meet this spec. They will do something like that for Xbox and they could call it whatever you want to call it.

01:42:27
But on the software, side Xbox certified, right, yeah, or the Windows Xbox or whatever you want to call it, it doesn't matter. The handheld OS is windows 11, but it's been heavily modified. It doesn't boot into the desktop, it boots into it's sort of like. Remember back in the day you could boot into program manager, but you could, you could boot into notepad if you wanted to, right. So you boot into this, into the xbox app in compact mode. It has access to your other stores. So they showed off, well, their store, what's it called? Not Blizzard, but Bethesda has a store, whatever. It's called Battlenet, but they confirmed later that Steam, epic Games will be in there as well. So you have like a unified dashboard for all of your games, wherever they are. If you have those subscriptions through Microsoft, you get access to the game pass stuff. You get access to the game streaming stuff. Again, I don't have personal experience with the processor, but based on AMD in general, I probably think this is pretty good, like on the device 1080p, seven inch screen. You're not pushing a lot of pixels, it's probably going to be pretty good. And it's PC, right, it's not Xbox, you're not playing Xbox games, but but I'm thinking this might be where the platform goes and then you get this thing. You get to this idea where windows has gotten better for gaming. It's not perfect, so windows desktop OS, but you have this highly optimized thing. Um, they didn't mention Dave Culler by name, but they talked name, but they referred to the architects from Windows who had worked on Xbox OS before modified Windows 11. Like, you know, that's that team. It's the same people, right, that did the Hyper-V stuff for the Xbox, where this becomes the platform, right, and so if you think about, like, what's good about an Xbox, what's good about Windows, you know, on the Windows side you kind of trade complexity for infinite graphics. If you can spend the money, you can keep upgrading and keep getting better graphics, better performance, et cetera. On the Xbox side, you turn it on and it just works, and so this thing, and it's acceptable, like it's good, the graphics are good.

01:44:27
So I think that this thing, um, basically, is the. It's like a middle ground, it's like something in the middle. It's still windows, so it has, you know, the advantage of all the compatibility, which is fantastic for games, the thing you don't get, by the way, on steam OS, because it's Linux space, right, you, it's not. You know, it's not exactly the same. It, yes, it runs faster because, because it too is smaller, like they, you could basically get back like two gigs of ram, which, on a 16 gig system, is meaningful huge.

01:44:56
Yeah, yep, um, so I think this is the makings of something, and so, based on what I've been thinking so far, I was like well, what if, like you could imagine, like an xbox series s is basically like a knuck, and then an xbox series x, whatever the next version is called, is basically like a little mini tower, called that Like a dedicated graphic thing. Yeah, and I'm sorry, but this makes sense to me. I'm going to jump ahead just for one second, because there is a four terabyte of storage card that you can buy for your Xbox today. Four terabytes, right, that costs 500 bucks. $500 is more than you would spend on an xbox series s. It used to be more than you would spend, or as much as you would spend, on an x. I think now it's a little more 500 bucks yeah, yeah.

01:45:42
How much would it cost to add a four terabyte ssd to a pc right now? Yeah, 29 cents. Do you get it free in a box of cereal? Are you kidding me like I?

01:45:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
comes with a whistle yep, I'm just.

01:45:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean give it a break. So I'm look like I said I don't think this thing solves Xbox. I don't mean it like that. But one of the things you could do to help that thing as a business is back off of the hardware thing or at least even if Microsoft had to make it for some reason, you know base it literally on standard pc parts like um, just just make it a standard pc.

01:46:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, yeah, whether it's armor. Have all that power for free?

01:46:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep, just give it. Yep, just do it. So I, you know I'm getting ahead of myself in a way here, like we don't. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. We don't know how much these things are going to cost. We know they're coming this holiday season. We know there will be be more next year and that these things will all run that OS.

01:46:35
I've got a lot of questions from people who are like well, I would like to run this on my PC and I get that. But the thing about the PC, the thing about the PC that is so beautiful, is that infinite expandability. So if you're like a PC gamer and you're not running 32 gig system right now, at least you're not paying attention. I don't know what you're doing, but, um, I, saving two gigabytes of Ram and losing a lot of the stuff you get normally in windows is maybe not the right approach. But there is a feature in windows that nobody ever thinks about, um, which, if you go into settings, there's a thing called games gaming, sorry. And then there's a feature called game mode and it's just on right and it optimizes your PC when you're playing by turning off things in the background, which, at a very high level, is what this new version of windows does. The difference is this new version of windows is more aggressive because it's a dedicated device and it starts at boot time Like this is something a Windows 11 does while you're gaming and then when you come back you're like we're back, everything's normal again.

01:47:39
It doesn't work 100%. I get phone link notifications from my phone while I'm playing a game. What that should never happen. That's ridiculous. So that's a problem. But it's also not configurable in any way. If you go into settings and look at the feature I was just talking about, there's an on off switch. It's on by default. I believe you don't. There's nothing you can do to configure it, but you just turn it on and there's a webpage you can go. That tells you a little bit about what it does, but it only tells you a little bit about what it does and it's mostly just around background processes and stuff. It's not a big deal, but there's no reason that game mode could not be expanded in normal windows 11 to be more like this little thing. You could today emulate this right. You could run game bar in compact mode. You could run Xbox app in compact mode. Launch your games from there, play your games, access the game bar, everything happens, kind of full screen. You could do it.

01:48:32
You know, I mean everything happens kind of full screen. You could do it, you know I mean you're still gonna get outlook notifications and you know, whatever it's, it's windows, um, but I I do see a path, for I don't see microsoft giving us this for anyone, but I do see, uh, them improving game mode in windows 11 to be more like this for those people that want that and it does get it make a case for, eventually, your pc is just a good gaming machine regardless.

01:48:55
Yeah Well, now that the iPad is going to kill the PC, this will be the last thing we have left, so it's really good timing.

01:49:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I guess we'll see. Anyway, I'm excited about this Xbox iPad.

01:49:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, the Xpad, I knew it Gaming's pretty good in the iPad, but, um, but yeah, I, I, definitely I. I booted up, uh, right after this was announced. I think it was that same night. I went in here, I turned on my Xbox for the first time and I it could be two years, it can't be two years.

01:49:28
It could be like a year and a half it's been a long time, a really long time, and I thought what I was going to do was spend a day updating it, right, but the thing was this has been plugged in the whole time, so it's actually been doing that thing in the background. I've probably been sucking down all the electricity in the Lehigh Valley. So my Xbox that I never used can stay up to date, because you know, that's also another problem with that console, by the way, so constantly needing updates.

01:49:49
Well and not being super energy efficient, even though they keep working on that right. So you know, windows PCs and the chips that go in them and the software that runs on it have all been. I'm not saying they're great, but it's gotten better over time. For sure the Xbox has also improved, but they were starting from a much worse place. I mean, these things are designed to be boxes that are plugged in all the time.

01:50:10
Yeah, heat rooms, yeah, and the best experience you can have as a gamer unless you don't, unless you care about the environment more in which case you wouldn't be a gamer um would be to not let it do that, um, not let it be constantly connected. There's a stamp, whatever they call the mode they can turn that off an energy saver mode, whatever and then every single time you run the thing, you'll have to update all your games in the system, because nothing will ever work and that will will be a good gaming experience. So you don't do that. You let it update in the background, but it's super inefficient, it just is. So I think that's another thing that moving to literally a PC platform not just PC chips and stuff, but like literally to a Windows PC platform might be better efficiency on these devices. I use the NUC as an example, but there are AMD, zen 5, whatever, the best chip you can imagine that costs no more than an Xbox Series X today. Lots of RAM, lots of storage that will run these games great, like great, and that's before we even get into dedicated graphics. Like it's going to be great.

01:51:10
Yeah, so this is a good future, assuming my fever dream is correct, because no one has ever said this. I'm, you know, I'm tea, leaving it in a way, but, um, anyway, so I'm excited. I hope you can. Yeah, okay, uh, I mentioned the four terabyte uh ram thing or a storage thing that no one should buy. Um, there's that not that way. Anyway, yeah, not that way. Yeah, exactly. This is one thing actually sony does do better, right, because sony, you can. It has to meet a certain performance characteristic, but you can just plug an ssd in that thing. Right there you go. That's, that's what you want. Um, a bunch of new game pass games, uh, across all the platforms. Uh, actually recognize some of these. That's pretty cool about baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2. Have both been enhanced around there. Warhammer 4000. Ea Sports FC 25, which I assume is the soccer game, crash Bandicoot 4. It's all about time, etc. And then, of course, the Barbie Project, friendship, which I'm now going through with my daughter I'm just kidding, I'm a man.

01:52:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway, nobody plays that. Your daughter's not nine yeah.

01:52:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My first solo movie watching experience with my daughter was the Shining, so she's not really loved it anyway, and that's why we don't trust dad.

01:52:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, exactly.

01:52:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She's like what does Redrum mean? I'm like oh man, you're going to love the end of this movie, all right. So Apple has been trying to prevent Epic and other developers from communicating with their developers and they wanted to stay that ruling. They were denied that, so you can still play Fortnite in the app store or the iPhone, ipad too, and developers are just kind of embracing this. And I think the Epic number was kind of interesting because everyone's you know, people fall on either side of this debate, but for a lot of people it was like well, you know, the app store is safer and it's better, and blah, blah, blah.

01:53:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like okay, you're fine.

01:53:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean so Epic's own customers? No-transcript, and we just talked about the pc versus a console. Like, one of the nice things that goes in the pro column for a pc is choice of game stores and where to get games, and you know you can actually own them and no one's going to flip a switch and take them away from you, that kind of stuff. So, um, not that that's what's happening on the iphone, but I think any anything that opens it up a little bit and gives some choice is probably not a horrible idea. Um, nintendo launched the switch. I think it was thursday or friday last week, right?

01:53:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
somewhere in there thursday, and it was huge.

01:53:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess it's huge. I will say, from my cave here in the uh, in the dark, I have not noticed anything. I none of you yeah well, I walked into costco for for other reasons, and in the front there's this big nintendo switch thing. I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting, they actually have these things. No, so I just walked over to look at no, they have the controller so you can buy.

01:54:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got excited too. I did this. I didn't get excited, I just wanted to see. It's a giant palette there.

01:54:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You got tons of them yeah, there's no version of the story where I walk out of there like, honey, I just spent 700 bucks. You know she's like that's great, you're sleeping outside, um, but they sold, uh, 3.5 million units in four days. Wow, that's uhikes.

01:54:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the reason that's amazing, yeah.

01:54:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's better than any console in that period of time and, granted, if they they could sell zero now and it's over. You know it's hard to say, but, um, it's definitely the biggest launch in that time period. You know, asterisks, asterisks. Um, this thing is like half again as expensive as its predecessor, right, I mean some of that's tariffs.

01:54:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they built the tariffs yeah I mean.

01:54:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But but real world it doesn't matter. I mean, the price of a hamburger is what you pay, right, so you know as far as you're like you, one might make the case. Maybe this will be cheaper next year. I should just wait. But no, like their fan base is so strong people, yep, whatever, I'm gonna stand in line. I'm gonna do the whatever. The one thing I've learned is, prices don't go down you know well I'm not saying.

01:55:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not saying, it makes sense but yeah sure they'll release a light version.

01:55:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, anyway, I guess that's a big deal. And then, uh, I don't, I'm not sure like what I mean. I, I do this on other devices like mice. This is a big thing on mice now. So I don't know if this is part of the bluetooth le standard or whatever, but you but PS5 controllers are actually going to support multiple Bluetooth connections at once, so you'll be able to switch between I don't know if it's two or two or more, but some number of devices, which is something I do frequently. Well, I don't do frequently, but I do do with certain things, like that Backbone Pro controller, does that? Actually, that's really effective? Um, and, like I said, some mice and stuff. So that's kind of an interesting idea. It's something I prefer the Xbox controller because I have, you know, man-sized hands. But uh, well, actually PlayStation is pretty big now, isn't it? Yeah, it used to be kind of, you know, like thin, kind of weird, but well, that was a very refreshing xbox segment I looks, I there's.

01:56:18
I I'm pretty excited by this and and look, maybe it's um colored by the fact that it's been a tough year for xbox, frankly yeah, yeah, like I was kind of. I kind of need some good news. I'm nervous about it, um, and, like I said, not going to save the platform, but good it's good news.

01:56:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, here's my good news. It's time to subscribe to club twit coming up by the way, the back of the book, the tips, the picks, the brown liquor. But first I want your money, honey. Um, if you're not a member of club twit, you're actually missing out. Club twit is how we stay around. 25 percent of our operating costs now are paid by club members. Thank you, I sincerely mean that, but I think we give you pretty good value for for money.

01:57:05
You uh get access to the club twit discord, which is fantastic, a great place to hang out and have fun. All the events are in there too. In fact, we've been doing our keynotes in there, only exclusive to Club Twit. You can go to the TwitPlus feed and find our build and Google IO and WWDC keynote coverage. We also have special shows, like our Chris Marquardt monthly Chris Marquardt photo time. I submitted a geometric picture. We'll be, we'll see them of those when that's coming up.

01:57:38
Friday at 1 pm. Pacific wednesday. Next wednesday week from today micah's crafting corner. I love that. 6 pm, micah's chill and he's doing lego. It's fun.

01:57:49
Now we're going to move this. Our ai user group, we just noticed, is on. It's always the first Friday of the month, but that's the 4th of July and in some places that's a celebratory day, so I think we'll move it to the 11th. So just a little heads up. But that's just a sampling. We've got Stacy's Book Club, lots of events.

01:58:09
By the way, ad-free versions of all the shows. I probably buried the lead. That's a big reason that people subscribe so they don't have to hear ads like this one. But really the main thing for me is it makes a big difference in what we can do and the capabilities we have. Thanks to the club we're able to do so much more than we used to. We did tighten the belt a little bit. We shut down the studio and canceled some shows, laid off some people, but I think we're stable now thanks to the club members. Thank you, I really appreciate it and we'd love to have you. $10 a month, $120 a year. You can pay more if you wish, but that's the starting price. Thank you very much to all our Club Twit members. We really appreciate you and there's some great, great folks in the club. It's always fun to hang out. Twittv slash club twit. If you're interested, twittv slash club twit To it. Time for the back of the book. We kick things off with Paul Farat and your tip of the week.

01:59:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a small one. I was just trying to check different computers to see where I have it and where I don't. But Windows has had a share feature since Windows 8. And so in Windows 8, it was one of the charms. It worked with all of the modern apps that were in the store at the time. Windows 10, windows 11, they've expanded it. Now it's more of a floating pane thing.

01:59:38
You'll see it in right-click menus in File Explorer. You'll see it in File Explorer itself, in the toolbar, and I feel like sometimes I'm the only person that uses this feature that one of the sub features of it is something called nearby sharing, and so if you have nearby sharing turned on on one laptop over here and one lap over here as I often work on multiple laptops you can copy over the Wi-Fi network seamlessly. Just between the two it's like a direct connection, which is really nice. But it also supports all kinds of stuff. This is expanded dramatically. So all the apps that make sense to share, to like, if you are, uh, if you have a text in the keyboard and you want to share it to notepad or something, it will do that. If you have a phones connected through phone link, you can share to the phone. If it supports that, it can also share out from the phone to the computer, et cetera, et cetera. So again, I can't. I believe that this might have been just added in the Patch Tuesday update that went out yesterday, but I actually see it on all three of the computers I have here and they were on different builds so I'm not 100% sure when it debuted.

02:00:36
But if you right-click and share an image, you get this new kind of a header in the share pane and there's a couple things going on, but one of those things is the ability to edit it, and that actually opens a like a window with editing capabilities, which I think is a little bit much. Frankly, you can copy it to the clipboard and then you can just go paste it in another app, but there's a little link that this is the thing I wanted to tell people out. So it says the name of the file, it says how big it is, and then it says original and it's underlying like a hyperlink, the dropdown next to it, and you click that. You see original, low, medium and high choices, right, and so instead of sharing the full resolution or full-sized version of the original image, you could save it in different, same resolution, but different quality levels, right? So if you use PowerToys, you might be familiar with the right click. Do I have it on here? It's probably over here. Let me just right click and see what it says.

02:01:35
Um, so if I right click an image on this computer that does have power toys, uh, and you have this power toy installed, one of the options you get is where is it? Oh, resize with image resizer. So image resizer is not about quality, it's more about the resolution, right, and so this, this is actually something beyond that, because what I found I'm going to write this up as a tip so low and medium, you can tell the difference. And it may not matter, right, it may. It might be a silly meme thing you saw you're sharing with someone, but the the high choice is actually up to 10 X size. File size reduction Um, like, yeah, 10 X, and I can't tell the difference in most of the images. I've done this too. So, like this is actually something I kind of wish I had a better way of doing, just with it.

02:02:25
I mean, I use, you know, photoshop or, uh, affinity photo does this as well, but it's kind of a neat way, like this image I'm looking at here on this computer is only 1.5 megabytes, but if I go, uh, the high version for this one's actually half, so it's 765 kilobytes. Um, but it's, but there, you can't tell them apart. Like it's, this is useful, so it's just something to know about it. It's one of a million little features that Microsoft has added or is in the process of adding to windows. Um, that no one knows about. So anyway, take a look, I there's. I I think share is the type of thing most power users especially be like I don't need that, I know. You know I use wind get to. You know, I mean I use, like you know, I copy over the network with the command line, like okay, but for the rest of us it's actually really useful. So something to look at. I'll do like a. I think I'll do a new episode of Hands-On Windows.

02:03:17
Oh, that'd be great, thank you, because there's a bunch of stuff, not just the thing I just said Okay, and then the app pick of course is not for Windows because I have no idea what I'm doing, but one of the big stories of the past year has been the Arc browser and how some people love it.

02:03:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Some alternative browsing ideas.

02:03:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I loved the Arc browser, but they deprecated it, they killed it.

02:03:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they had this idea for an AI-powered browser that they wanted to do in Arc and it was just too much going on there and they were like, actually we're going gonna have to rethink this and restart from scratch. And so a lot of the people who love arc were disappointed by this decision. Yes, but they announced, I think in late last year, something called dia, which the next browser, um, the days the mortes did a muerte for arc, am I right?

02:04:07
so, uh, it's also fair to say like other browser makers are building these kinds of things into their browser. But if you, the fundamental thing that's happening here is that. So first, I should say the first beta version is available on mac, so if you have a mac, you can get it now, hopefully it won't be six months.

02:04:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm running it now actually so, but it doesn't have a lot of the features arcade, nope and right.

02:04:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So a lot of that's going to come, but the fundamental UI difference, and that's a big thing because, honestly, there were a lot of UI differences. But if you had to pick one, it was that Arc subverted, if you will, or changed the way that new tab worked, right. So Control-T or Command-T on a Mac would typically switch between browsers, but in that case it brought up basically a command bar, right, um?

02:04:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they're not doing that, so well, you can you.

02:04:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It goes to a new tab window or whatever it's called.

02:04:58
Oh, I see this is a new tab window, but it's not a command bar, right, right so in dia, though, the address bar or that search bar, whatever it is that you just saw in the browser in the new tab window, functions as an address bar. It does all that stuff, but it also is where you can do this AI stuff, so you can interact with AI. So there's a side pane you can put next to it, like you would put in any browser, and summarize this webpage, do that kind of thing. But what this thing is going to do, if you let it, you have to sign in for the well, no, they had accounts, I guess thing. But what this thing is going to do, if you let it, you have to sign. You have to sign in for the well, no, they had accounts, I guess technically before too. But you sign in. I don't know, uh, yet what they're doing with ai doesn't know who's the president of the united states, that's a problem probably yeah, so it's probably anthropic.

02:05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I don't know whatever it is, it says in mid 2025, the government's officially led by joe biden a world that would be, it seems, unlikely.

02:05:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, maybe we're living in a different timeline than these guys.

02:05:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, we're definitely living in a different timeline.

02:05:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so the first thing I asked it, it hallucinated.

02:05:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but the point of this is, as you browse around the web, it kind of takes note of what you're doing.

02:06:02
So one of the things you could do is you could have like multiple browser windows open to, like, say, computers and be like which one of the computers I'm looking at now should I buy? And then it will go look at those tabs and kind of give you answers, Right. So it's it actually kind of prompts you in the beginning. You can, you can tell it kind of the things you like, what your interests are or whatever.

02:06:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have the show notes open on the left and AI is always there Right. So, on the right, I said what would be a good name for this show. It suggests, among other things, the Patchwork Pod.

02:06:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, not for the show, for the episode.

02:06:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or Left of Center Tech or Cat on the Command Line. Wow.

02:06:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think some of this is because I mean you could put a thousand monkeys on it, but they're not going to write a PowerShell script.

02:06:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all I'm saying it does ask you to personalize it, and I think maybe that's my mistake because I said I have a cat.

02:06:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well it's also day one, right, so presumably a week from now. As you use this thing every day oh, it'll get smarter. It will, yes. So kind of the point of it. Now, the the problem these guys face is that there's like 17 people in brooklyn, or whatever it is, and google's working on this, microsoft's working on this. Microsoft has a sidebar too right?

02:07:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is this an agentic browser? Is that what they're trying to do?

02:07:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, okay, yeah the, the, the documentation that they provided with this release is not even negligible. It's non-existent, um. But if you go back and look at the stuff they've said before and they've given example, they've shown UI like this is how we want this thing to work. It's actually a really interesting idea and it's turned out to be not a hugely unique idea actually because, like I said, like other companies are kind of doing this too. But I think the difference here is that, like when Arc came out, yeah, we saw a couple things that copied it, like zen browsers, a mozilla version of that thing, right, but it wasn't like microsoft mozilla or, yeah, mozilla, uh, google, opera, whatever looked at that thing and said, all right, we're gonna do this, you know the workspace thing, we're gonna. You know, no one actually copied that stuff, um, but when they started talking about this agent, well, they didn't call it this at the time, but agentic browser everyone is like, yep, this is probably the future of the web.

02:08:16
Treat the web like the data store that it is and then personalize it heavily, which is what you want as a user, and then have it do the thing you want, whatever that thing might be, like the simple get me the best price on a flight to Mexico City to whatever like I want to buy a shirt. And they'd be like the simple get me the best price on a flight to mexico city. To whatever like, um, I want to buy a shirt. And they'd be like, well, you know, yellow is not your color, buddy. Uh, maybe you want to go with green or brown or whatever. You know something like that. So, uh, again it's day one, but and we can't get it on windows yet. But I'm really really curious about this.

02:08:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, and we'll see okay, so it can't actually do anything agentic yet, it's just doing circles.

02:08:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's just, but just, it's just again, it's v, it's not even v1. Right, it's like first beta.

02:08:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah it's a very early beta yeah it's pretty, it's clean. I loved arc and, uh, I was very sad, uh, that arc is gone. I'm not sure I really want a browser with ai built in, to be honest, yeah.

02:09:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, what does that get me? Just for the bites, and then like, what is the differences?

02:09:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think you're going to have a choice in a way right, Unless you want to go with like sleep in there or something.

02:09:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's going to be everything. I think it's the another links anniversary. You can speaking of text text based browser.

02:09:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there you go that's an awesome reaction to everything that's going on. You're like you know what I'm gonna put it. You talked about booting into, like some windows thing. No, I'm gonna boot into a command line. I'm gonna type everything.

02:09:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's enough nothing's gonna type back.

02:09:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All I need are words I don't care about pictures, w3m browser and emacs. That's my strong we we talked about I think Bill Atkinson passed away.

02:09:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One of his great innovations and he had many was the Macintosh had a black and white screen. It was not a grayscale screen. So he came up with a dithering algorithm that would take a color photograph, dither it so that it looked like a black and white photo, meaning a grayscale photo. Right, that looked beautiful and you could do that for uh email or not, for you call it for links. Yeah, it's just like actually that dithering algorithm lives on.

02:10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a very good algorithm. Everything he did lives on.

02:10:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He did the thing he did for overlapping windows, the clipping which he thought he saw at park but did not. They did not figure that out. He invented this that became bit blit in windows like um, I, I, everything, I, the ipad with its windows, floating windows. Guess what?

02:10:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's the 21st century of the bill atkinson ui and I don't want to say anything, but you're sitting in a round wrecked right now, so there that's the one of the great stories.

02:10:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, he was like we don't need round wrecks. He's like what are you talking about? Steve jobs said no, they're everywhere. He's like where. He's like they're there. They walked around the streets like the parking sign, everything. He's like all right, all right. He's like I'll do it, and God, he's just doing rectangles. It was amazing he's crazy.

02:11:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he was pissed that they didn't really think I was a genius and unlike a lot of these tech guys.

02:11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like you know, you knew him like he's a good guy, he's a great guy, you know. That's what. That's the thing.

02:11:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Genuine guy, yeah, yep okay, anyway, I will try. I'm gonna try dm in it right now. I mean, I give actually I give arc a lot of credit because that's how I learned about perplexity. They they use perplexity in their ios app and that turned me on to it. They they were very early on using ai and search, so I'll give them some.

02:11:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I wish that some of the Arc features. They're like I'm not going to try another one of their browsers after Arc. It's like guys, I mean it's just, you know. Well, let's see, they're trying to move quicker, I mean.

02:12:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. Yeah, at least they're experimenting. It's literally a different mindset, and that's cool that's hard to think about browsing differently yeah, dia, from the browser company it is.

02:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you have to sign up for the beta and there's a wait list, although, because I was an arc user, I was able to get oh yeah, I was gonna say I just right, I they.

02:12:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They said you had to be an arc member or whatever. I downloaded it without signing in. I just, I know, I think they just in fact, I tried to use my arc account and they wouldn't let me.

02:12:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had to make a new account for TV, yeah.

02:12:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just, I don't know.

02:12:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't understand. I think it looks good. I mean it's early, but All right, Mr Richard Campbell, you're on time for Run as.

02:12:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Radio One of the shows I grabbed about a month ago at NDC in Melbourne I got really lucky and got a chance to talk with Liz Fong-Jones, who's one of the original site reliability engineers Like, essentially part of inventing that space worked at Google is now at Honeycomb, and so the conversation was all about telemetry at Honeycomb and so the conversation was all about telemetry. And she just came at it from a really broad view of not, it's not about the tooling, it's about the culture that you build, starting with the leadership, really about having a room, room to fail, uh, room to measure stuff in detail and uh, and to learn, and and to get better. And without those things you know, no amount of telemetry is going to save you. So you really need the tools, but you also need the culture to make it work. So it was a philosophical discussion but I thought, a really powerful one for folks to just think more broadly about how they make things work Run as radiocom and go.

02:13:47
And again she's a legend, Like without a doubt yeah, canada's still in the playoffs. Exciting times, yay boy they. They sure aided on that last game. Six to one.

02:14:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just want to point out that you're losing to florida.

02:14:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Come on that's so weird.

02:14:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, by the way, again right, yeah, it's a replay of last year, that's so weird, it's crazy, so I don't speak whatever language this is.

02:14:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But uh ben j jar of order did you say yeah it's, yeah, it's dutch so okay listen and use your translate feature. They will make an english version eventually. Uh, I was just in the netherlands staying with my buddy remy, and uh remy owns a whiskey store now, so his favorite name martin it is not okay just checking, but he is his little.

02:14:43
He lives in in alchemar, a little town in in in the netherlands, and he had a favorite, favorite whiskey shop, been around for a long time and the old guy wanted to retire and he didn't want to lose the whiskey shop. So they made a deal and now he owns the whiskey shop and the now, over the few years we've been doing this, I've been in his place a few times and we've always had unusual whiskey because he's always he loves his whiskey and so we'd always try something fun and I would usually put it on the show, uh, and that happened again this time. Only this time it's his store, uh, and the whiskey he brought me which is an important part of this, this whole equation, is this glenn lossy 26. You've never heard of glenn lossy, never have, nobody has, because it's just like one of these invisible distilleries. It's been around a long, long time. It's a Spey. It's on the A941 with a bunch of other distilleries as well. Literally, glen Elgin is on the other side of the road from Glen Lossie. It's been around for a long time.

02:15:47
It created by john duff uh in 1876 and uh, john duff went to where he first worked in glendronach and which is further to the east and then, after he made the glen lossy distillery, he helped build it, uh, with his partners. He then left for south africa very coincidental uh and tried to make the whiskey industry work down there and he failed, oh, and then when he gave up on South Africa, he moved to the United States for a while and tried to make it work there. It didn't work there either, and so he came back to Scotland and just a few years later and almost immediately built another very famous distillery, the Longmore Distillery, in 1893, which is just further up the same highway and then next door, built in 1898, ben Reak, really the best known of all the distilleries he's built. So this guy made a lot of distilleries and Glenn Lossie is one of them, but in 1876, when he was building it, when it went into production, they never made a retail whiskey ever. That distillery was built to make blends and from the date from day one it was providing whiskey to go into hague and dimple, although there are other blends since then.

02:17:02
Now it's went through the normal rough patches that every distillery went through. We've talked about it over and over again scotland so shut down over world war one and when they went to start back up in 1919, they didn't have enough money to finish repairs and so forth and so were sold to the distillers company DCL. During Prohibition there was a fire and it was burned down, but it was rebuilt. During Prohibition there was a fire and it was burned down, but it was rebuilt and then going back into operation after World War II because again they shut down for that and business was good in the 60s. So they flew right around. In fact it did some expansion and then by the 1970s built an additional distillery right next door, manic Mar. At that point it was owned by DCL, had become the Scottish Distillers Corporation, but then that became United Distillers, which then, of course, in the 1990s got acquired by Diageo. So they are at Diageo.

02:17:59
The only time you'll ever see Glen Lossie on a label is either the flora and fauna bottlings that are done by Diageo, and they only have done that a few times. For Glen Lossie, which I've never had, there was a 91 edition in a 2004 and a 2019. The usual place you find Glen Lossie is custom bottlers, and there are a couple of websites out there that'll literally keep track of every time a custom bottler does a bottling from a given distillery and there are hundreds for Glen Lossie. You name the bottler ad radley, black adder, caden, head, douglas haig, duncan taylor, gordon mcphail, murray, mcdonald. All of them have done bottlings of glen lossy and this particular one is done by the maltman I think, he chose it because it's the maltman.

02:18:45
26 yes, well, and it's the Maltman 26. Yes, well, and it's a 26-year-old and it's a single cask, just like Apple, a single cask of Glen Lossie and it's 26 years old Now. The distillery is a big distillery 2 million liters a year, Yikes. And it's a space-side distillery Again, never a public run. Eight wooden washbacks, three pairs of stills, 16, 000 liters on the wash still, 13 000 on the spirit still. They use a conventional pear shape, no additional domes or anything like that it looks like.

02:19:16
Early on they did an addition to their spirit stills called the purifier, which is literally a mechanism on top of the lie arm that causes additional reflex, and it's because they didn't put onion bulbs into stills, so sort of an inexpensive way to increase reflux to make the whiskey smoother, uh, and they did that with their new still in the 70s as well. So they all three of the spirit stills have them. Uh and I did make a note here because I know it would be important to you too they use creamed yeast. Oh, thank god. Yeah, they also have one of the largest rack house sets in the whole of scotland 250 000 casks, 60 million liters of whiskey being aged in the rack house around glen lossy, wow.

02:20:06
And because they're owned by diageo, there are barrels from all kinds of distilleries there. They, uh, do not do any tours of any kind. They have no, they've never had a visitor's house. They don't do any of that stuff.

02:20:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't even have a website.

02:20:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They just know, and they don't even have a website, which is why I had to point you to remy's site, because that's all there is.

02:20:23
There isn't anything else this is a secret whiskey distillery they do and they starting in the 1970s and expanded with now being owned by diageo in the 1990s. They do what's called residue processing there for more than 20 distilleries. So this is both draft and pothale. Now, draft is the stuff you get, that's what's left over from the mash after you extract the sugars from it, from your washbacks, right, that's sort of it's the remains of the mash, and they process 100,000 tons of draft a year. They also process 8 million liters of pot ale, which is what you're left over in the stills after you've finished distilling. So it's the remains of the alcohol, it's all the excess. All of that stuff is processed. They call this dark grain processing into animal feed, high protein animal feed. So nothing's wasted. They also have a biogas processor. They do some energy generation and so forth. Like it's a very contemporary site for having no visitor site, no public brands. I just love that there's this great big dark distillery, essentially for the rest of the world, but inside of Diageo it's important still, and so, like I said, most of these bottlings are custom bottlings. This Maltman bottling is a unique one. It's a 26-year-old, so it was distilled in 1997, bottled in 23.

02:21:42
Wow, and they have 387 bottles from a single cast, which should give you pause. What's weird about that number? 387? It's too many. Normally, if it was from a single cast, it should be under 200. Why would it be 387? Like, how is it even possible? It's from a Sherry Hogshead, where the bourbon casts are 250 liters, and so you're lucky to get 200 bottles from it. Sherry Hogshead are 500 liters and that's're lucky to get 200 bottles from it. Sherry hogshead are 500 liters and that's why there's 387 bottles, of which there is virtually none left, although if you I think remy has one these are very popular. Look, I'm not a big fan of old, old whiskey. Like a 26 year old. Yeah, this is really old yeah they're.

02:22:28
They tend to be expensive. This one's like 350 euros, which is not hugely expensive for a 26. Like you can even spend a thousand dollars on a 26 year old whiskey. But they're also get really oaky Like they're not great. This is not that whiskey. This was amazing. Just big fruit notes was amazing. Just big fruit notes. No burn, no chalkiness. Just like my god, what am I drinking? A very, very dangerous whiskey. Whiskey should not be this good. Like you will get yourself into trouble. And if that sounds exciting to you, like I said, there's a couple of bottles left. There's only 387 bottles of this stuff.

02:23:07
But meantime my friend has decided he wants he's going to take care of this whiskey shop and one of the things he's doing very deliberately is only shelving these custom bottlings. His whole point is like if you want the balvini 12, you can go to any store for that. But if you like balvini, he's got a custom bottling of a valvini for you. And and or maybe you want to. You want something from mccallan? He's got a custom bottling of Balvini for you. Or maybe you want something from McAllen? He's got a custom bottling of McAllen. He's just chosen unusual whiskeys so you can just have an experience. You'll go there and have a whiskey you wouldn't have anywhere else, and this Glen Lossie is one of them. Just an exceptional whiskey and a very odd distillery, like one unlike almost anything else you'll see.

02:23:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should I buy some right now? Will it change my life?

02:23:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know, I don't know if you can get it to america. They're not. They're not shipping in.

02:24:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're only shipping in the eu. I think that's what they said. Yeah, sad to say only shipping.

02:24:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not just the rules, but that was a fun uh drink to have with my buddy and really fun whiskey to write about. I have some south africans with me, so those will come in later weeks.

02:24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And still on the ride for unusual drink well, I thank remy for that amazing, the only thing better than owning a whiskey shop is having a friend who owns a whiskey shop.

02:24:32
Uh, wow, all right, everything's coming up 26 this time. Uh, thank you mr richard campbell in stockholm, sweden. He's far away, but he's near and dear to our hearts. You'll find him at runnersradiocom. That's where runners radio and dot net rocks his podcasts live. Thank you, richard, for making making the trek. Paul thorat, it's at thoratcom t-h-u-r-r-o-t-tcom. Make sure you become a premium member for all the great goodness. And his books are at leanpubcom, including the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere, and we look forward to the hands-on windows covering this new share feature. That's cool. Mr T, mr C, thank you for being here and a special thanks to all our club members who made this show possible.

02:25:28
We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. I mention that because you can watch us live if you want. Club members watch inside the club, inside our Discord, the kind of behind-the-velvet rope access that only club members can enjoy, otherwise everybody else. You can watch in seven platforms YouTube, twitch, tiktok, xcom, facebook, linkedin and Kik but you don't have to watch live. We have on-demand versions of the show on our website, twittv slash www. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great way to share little clips with friends and family, spread the word or subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically as soon as the show's done. And if you do that, please, if your podcast client allows reviews, leave us a five-star review. That would be very nice. Thank you everybody. Thank you Paul, thank you Richard. We will see you next wednesday. Windows weekly bye.