Windows Weekly 947 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorada is here. We've got the great Chris Hoffman filling in for Richard Campbell. We'll talk about the protesters taking over Building 34 on the Microsoft campus. Windows UAC gets even more disruptive and AI floundering at Apple. That and a whole lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:30]:
This is tw.

Leo Laporte [00:00:38]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Chris Hoffman. Episode 947 recorded Wednesday, August 27, 2025. Hallucinated clown shoes. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Let me shrink my screen and expand theirs to say hello to Mr. Paul Thurat from Thurrott.com and as we heard last week, Mr. Richard Campbell is on the road again. But we are very pleased to get Chris Hoffman back of the Windows.

Leo Laporte [00:01:15]:
Now, the new Windows Readme newsletter at WindowsRead me.

Chris Hoffman [00:01:19]:
Yes, good. Great to be back.

Leo Laporte [00:01:21]:
And if you were already a subscriber to Windows Insider, you will be automatically getting the Windows readme newsletter, Am I correct?

Chris Hoffman [00:01:28]:
Yeah, if you got Windows Intelligence, you will be getting it automatically. You probably already got it. So if you didn't get it, please look through email because yeah, like unlike.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:37]:
My email newsletters, his actually go out. So. So he's figured that out.

Leo Laporte [00:01:44]:
You know, I keep. It's funny because almost everybody now who shows up on our shows has a newsletter. I mean it's do regularly.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:52]:
It used to be a like a YouTube channel before that it was a blog before that. Maybe you worked at a publication or were a book author, you know. Yeah, it's the new way to reach people.

Leo Laporte [00:02:01]:
Yeah, I guess, I guess. And I feel bad because, well, we have a corporate newsletter which is mostly just, you know, here's what's coming up on Twitter this week. Frida Allit TV newsletter. I do not myself have, you know, the laporte Report, a weekly email.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:20]:
You should call it the Report. LA Report.

Leo Laporte [00:02:22]:
Law Report. The Law Report. Or I feel like I should, but I also feel like I would say they would start it and then I would go, oh, I don't want to do this anymore.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:34]:
Yeah, I don't Gary.

Chris Hoffman [00:02:36]:
Yeah, I still have.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:38]:
Deadlines are a thing. Right. And I, in the same way that I wake up every day without an alarm, I hate putting anything on my schedule. You know, I hate it. So if I have to do a, like back in the day, I would do a newsletter Monday or whatever. I mean I dreaded that day every Every week. I dreaded it.

Leo Laporte [00:02:56]:
Yeah, that's what I fear. So y' all just going to have to look at. Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:03]:
Put up with lazy writers.

Chris Hoffman [00:03:06]:
Well, you know, I think everyone kind of wants to have their own thing. Some people have video show networks, some people have websites.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:14]:
Yeah, that's right.

Chris Hoffman [00:03:15]:
Some people, you know, like myself, you know, we had stuff that we didn't own. And, you know, if I'm. It's a lot easier for me to start a newsletter or keep a newsletter going than to start a whole new website. So I think. I think it's really valuable to have that kind of direct channel. And like, you know, you got thorough.com and you got Twitter. So that's my direct channel.

Leo Laporte [00:03:35]:
It's, you know, it's challenging because you're responsible now for paying yourself.

Chris Hoffman [00:03:40]:
Yeah, well, either way. Either way. So that's not all I do. I am also a freelance tech writer, so I wrote for PC World in our publication, so I'm already doing that. But it's nice to have a publication that's your own thing. It's my direct thing. There's no advertisement. I'm not doing any advertising on it.

Chris Hoffman [00:04:01]:
It's just what it is.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:03]:
The hell is wrong with you? No, that's good. No, that's smart. And plus, you're using substack, which my wife and I use for our Eternal Spring thing. But it's a newsletter. Technically. But I mean, I sort of view it like a website.

Leo Laporte [00:04:18]:
I mean, it's kind of like a.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:19]:
Blog that gives you a website. Yeah, Right.

Chris Hoffman [00:04:22]:
You can just read it on the web if you want.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:24]:
Right.

Chris Hoffman [00:04:24]:
Or in an app or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:04:27]:
I have a blog, personal blog. Leo fm. And that you can subscribe to. I don't know if anybody has. I haven't looked. So it is, I guess. I guess I do have a newsletter.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:38]:
You might have been. In fact, I believe you were an email newsletter pioneer, technically speaking. Well, yeah, because you had this capability always.

Leo Laporte [00:04:46]:
Yeah, a long time ago. You've always been able to subscribe to my blog posts. Yeah, that's a good point. So, what do I know?

Paul Thurrott [00:04:53]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:04:54]:
I hear there was a little kerfuffle in Redmond on the campus. We. We reported. In fact, I think most people underreported the protests at Microsoft's Build Conference.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:07]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:05:07]:
Which. Because you and Richard were there.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:10]:
Yeah, Based on our firsthand experience. You know, people. It's like the protesters interrupted the Build conference for the third time. I'm like, the third time. It was like the 31st time. Yeah. Time yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:05:24]:
So what happened?

Paul Thurrott [00:05:25]:
Well, there's this little thing happening in the Middle East. I don't know if you pay attention to the news, but of course, yeah. So right. Israel and Palestine are having a, we're going to call it a conflict, whatever. Anyway, Israel, the government and also the military are, you know, customers of Microsoft's. So they use Azure. They use Azure, yeah. And there is a small but very vocal contingent of Microsoft employees, some now ex employees who do not want Microsoft to help Israel in their efforts.

Leo Laporte [00:06:02]:
Actually, I'm sympathetic to that.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:04]:
No, I understand it. I mean there's two sides to every story, I guess. I mean you don't like to. Look, Google employees have done this in the past where they protested Google technology.

Leo Laporte [00:06:13]:
Being used for every tech company, even Apple. At their last event WWDC had a guy stand up.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:20]:
Notice though that the Google stuff doesn't happen as much anymore. And part of it was because there were some mass layoffs when you know, last time they did this.

Leo Laporte [00:06:30]:
I feel like this is the right though of the employees, is it not.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:33]:
To say we don't want to be.

Leo Laporte [00:06:35]:
In this business and we're writing code.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:36]:
Right. To give credit to Microsoft, they actually now have said that thing I said way back in May where without being privy to whatever conversations might have occurred internally, you could find this. I said this on Windows Weekly that week. Microsoft is the type of company that would actually be okay with this type of thing if it was done within the confines of the rules.

Leo Laporte [00:07:00]:
It's a little embarrassing, especially when the building gets taken over.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:04]:
Well that's the thing. So they best notice. Yeah. So they look, what do you call it? Non disruptive, nonviolent, whatever protests are right in this country of sorts of. Microsoft allows it on their campus. It's just that these protesters are, they're not taking no for an answer, I guess. So there were disruptions in April 1st, remember at Microsoft's 50th anniversary event where people satya Nadella or Suleyman or Bill Gates at one point or whoever was on stage and people would run out and say things. So that was the first one.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:41]:
I was like, oh, that's kind of weird. And then there were the bunch of things that happened at build across a couple of days there. And last week there were 20 or fewer whatever protesters who sort of took over the outside of a building on the east campus. And then yesterday they decided to occupy a building. And not just a building. Right. So if you've been on Microsoft's campus, a lot has changed by the way. But Building 3435 are kind of the epicenter of the important stuff there.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:13]:
And building 34 is where Satya Nadella has an office, where Brad Smith, Microsoft President, has an office, and other top level executives. And so they just went in the building and locked themselves in offices like adults do and refused to come out until they slid flat food under the doors or whatever and have a weird reference. But eventually Microsoft had to call the police and so they arrested several people. The 20 or so that were outside were asked to leave and they did, and that was the end of that. Except this isn't the end of it, right? Like this is never really going to end.

Leo Laporte [00:08:53]:
Yeah. What is Microsoft saying to these employees?

Paul Thurrott [00:08:57]:
Well, a couple of months ago, first of all, they investigated whether their technologies were being used by Israel to kill people basically, and they didn't find any evidence of this. They still maintain that point. But honestly, the language they've used with regards to the protesters to me is correct, which is, we hear you, we're sympathetic, you don't need to do what you're doing for us to pay attention. We're not in the business of we don't build bomb systems and guidance, whatever. We don't do that. That's not what we do. Like I said back in May, when we talked about this, it just seemed to me like given what I know about Microsoft, they'd be very accommodating to these people. And as it turns out, they have been.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:51]:
So there are protests, I don't know, every day, but all the time on the campus. And it's like, fine, it's okay. You have this right? We're okay with it, we get it, I think though.

Leo Laporte [00:10:01]:
And what the protesters want is Microsoft to stop selling Azure to Israel. Microsoft has no intention of doing that, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:10:10]:
Well, I can't say what their intentions are, but they have not stopped doing that. I mean, I don't know, you know, this is one of those tough things. It's like, you know, before we knew anything horrible about what Apple's business in China has led to, you know, if you go back 20 years or whatever, you know, and Microsoft would want to get into China with, you know, maybe Bing or sell Windows or Office legitimately or whatever it was back in the day, the conversation was always like, look, we know there are some people who don't like these places, but if we're going to do business there, we sort of have to abide by whatever their rules are. And that's kind of been whatever. And so depending on what we're talking about. There are companies like when antitrust occurs in Europe, you'll get these really radical viewpoints where people will say, well, they should just stop selling iPhones. And you're right. Like, yeah, no, that makes sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:03]:
You know, so I don't know.

Chris Hoffman [00:11:09]:
One thing I. Sorry, but one thing I find interesting that I think we're talking about it, but in most of the headlines, I don't really see it coming through that, you know, it's Microsoft employees and ex employees that are protesting. It's not some public protest movement. And most of the headlines it's like protesters take over. It's like it's Microsoft employees. Which is really interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:30]:
Yeah. I mean the number of current Microsoft employees that are actively engaged in this is really small. It might even be less than a dozen. Right. But whatever the number, that doesn't actually matter. But most of them are former Microsoft employees. There was this feeling during build that their activities were a little too on point. It seemed unlikely that some random group of employees got together in a meeting somewhere and said, all right, we're going to do this and this is what we're going to do.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:04]:
It almost felt like they were getting help from the outside somehow, if that makes sense, that there might be a group helping them orchestrate all this stuff. But I don't know that I have a huge opinion on that.

Leo Laporte [00:12:17]:
Doesn't even matter. Maybe there's some overriding, overarching, you know, protest group about Israel's actions in Palestine that isn't a Microsoft employee group but is supporting them. I don't know if that invalidates the protest.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:32]:
No, no, I'm not, I'm. And I'm not, I'm not suggesting their complaints are not valid unless it's the Russians or something. Right, right. Unfortunately, the Gaza, Israel thing is not all one sided. Right. There are, you know, there are two sides. Yeah. It's nuanced, et cetera, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:53]:
So.

Leo Laporte [00:12:53]:
But I, I'm not unsympathetic to their, their goals.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:58]:
Yeah, I mean, I, Right.

Leo Laporte [00:12:59]:
I, I don't, you know, I don't. Obviously you can't occupy the Capitol building and you can't occupy Building 34. But. Oh, wait a minute, you can't, apparently you can't occupy the Capitol building. I'm sorry, that was a mistake. But you definitely can't occupy building retroactively. Building 34. And I understand Microsoft's probably held off as long as they could before they called in the police.

Leo Laporte [00:13:23]:
Right. But these guys were.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:25]:
No, they tried to they wanted to keep this internal and whatever. And the problem was they locked themselves in offices and Brad Smith wants to go to work. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:13:35]:
He said, and I think this is important, the vast majority of Israel's. And this is from your article, Paul. If Israel's use of Microsoft technology is to protect the cybersecurity of the state of Israel.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:46]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:13:47]:
We cannot do everything we might wish to change the world, but we know our role. We're here to provide technology in a principle and ethical way. Is that you think that's true? You think that's credible?

Paul Thurrott [00:13:56]:
I mean, five years ago I would have said absolutely, that's true. Right. Because this was a time when Microsoft refused to sell its own AI to law enforcement in the United States because it was prejudiced against people with darker skin.

Leo Laporte [00:14:11]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:11]:
And it wasn't something they built into it on purpose. It was at the time it was described literally as when middle aged white guys work on AI software.

Leo Laporte [00:14:19]:
It's a training issue, kind of biases.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:21]:
That we saw that with Kinect. Same issue. But back then Microsoft seemed like it was kind of taking the higher ground compared to other big tech companies. And then as soon as this AI thing happened, a flip was switched. And I'm not sure I get that vibe from the company anymore. So I'm not saying I don't think he's correct. Brad Smith is one of the better.

Leo Laporte [00:14:46]:
He's a good guy. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:47]:
People there, if that makes sense. He's the guy that got them out of the antitrust mess in the early 2000s. He's the guy that got Activision Blizzard pushed through with antitrust regulators from around the globe by working with them. The one thing that Apple especially is not doing today, Google is not doing, you know, you hope that we learn from the mistakes of the past and you know, and behave differently, et cetera. And so I don't know, I don't know. I guess the central message here is I really don't know what to say about this.

Leo Laporte [00:15:23]:
It strikes me that Microsoft is acting with an. Even as even a hand as a company can, I think so the fact that some of these people are still employed says that that's the thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:34]:
I mean they haven't, you know, the people that interrupted those Microsoft events. Right. April May by running, try to get on stage, were let go. You know, they violated their employee contract. You know, if you want to protest and hold a sign building. Yeah, they allow that. It's fine. This is not a problem.

Leo Laporte [00:15:55]:
They've been as tolerant as one would expect and as soon as the law gets broken, they have to. They step in, and I think that's not inappropriate.

Chris Hoffman [00:16:03]:
Yeah, well. So. So you look at this, and it's interesting. I'm just thinking about it, you know, why? Obviously the protesters, I assume, wanted this to become public. Like, they wanted this whole public question.

Leo Laporte [00:16:15]:
They wanted to get arrested.

Chris Hoffman [00:16:18]:
But now that we're talking about this, we're all kind of saying, well, we don't. Like what. What did we say? Right. Because Microsoft says they're not doing it, and the protesters say they are doing it. Like, and we're just sitting here going back and forth, like, is there evidence? Like, I mean, these are Microsoft employees. Like, I mean, is there. Have they put out evidence and accusations and everything? Like, I don't. I don't really know.

Chris Hoffman [00:16:39]:
I haven't dug into it, but I would think that it would be really effective to put out an argument and say, like, no, Microsoft is doing this thing we say they're doing. Here's what they're doing. Here's the evidence. We're employees. I mean, if they're employees.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:50]:
Well, I mean, that's like saying Toyota is also contributing to atrocities in Gaza because I saw an Israeli military vehicle that was a Land Rover or whatever. Or whatever Toyota vehicle, which is, I think, how this happened. Right. Well, we know it's public that Israel is using Azure to some degree. So you could just draw the line and say, well, Microsoft shouldn't sell Azure to Israel. But this is what I mean, there is no consensus that what Israel is doing is wrong. We might have our opinions about it.

Chris Hoffman [00:17:26]:
Well, there's no consensus on what Azure is being used for in Israel either.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:30]:
That's right. Microsoft says it's investigated. They came up again because of this. It's like, guys, we've looked at this multiple times. We've never seen anything where our software is being used for something horrible.

Leo Laporte [00:17:40]:
I think it's pretty clear the protesters think that any sale of any product to Israel should.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:45]:
Yeah, but that's stopped. This is literally the we don't negotiate with terrorists argument. Right, Right. Because if the lesson here is if you complain enough, the person you're complaining to, the company you're complaining will stop doing that thing, then everyone's just going to complain about everything. I don't want to undercut the veracity or the seriousness of the charge. And this is above our. It's not our pay grades. It's outside of our worldview.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:14]:
We don't really. It doesn't matter if I have an opinion about Israel and Gaza, it doesn't matter.

Chris Hoffman [00:18:18]:
Outside of my expertise.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:19]:
Here's what I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. I mean, just outside of the technology part of it, which is to me is just kind of a minor thing really, but. Or maybe not a thing. I don't even know what it is. I don't know. That's the thing. We don't really know.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:32]:
So I don't know. I keep.

Leo Laporte [00:18:33]:
Well, let's move on.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:34]:
Sorry.

Leo Laporte [00:18:35]:
But yeah, that's the story.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:36]:
I don't have much. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I knew I couldn't ignore it, you know. No, I hate having to cover it. I don't, you know, but I feel.

Leo Laporte [00:18:46]:
The same way we do.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:47]:
You got to address it.

Leo Laporte [00:18:48]:
I would love to just talk about smartphones and door locks, but so sometimes.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:52]:
You know, copilot is in smart TVs now. Like, what are we talking about? Why is this important?

Chris Hoffman [00:18:56]:
I'm just happy we're not talking about Intel.

Leo Laporte [00:18:59]:
Oh man.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:00]:
Are we? No, we're not. Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:19:02]:
Not today. I'm like, not today, not today, not today. Let's talk about. How about. I got a thought. Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:10]:
Yeah, there's some Windows 11 stuff. So couple of Windows Insider type updates. If you're in the dev or beta channel now, you can download whatever the latest build is on the respective channels and one of the additions is a continuation of this functionality Microsoft's trying to do across Windows that is in some way going to emulate the way Apple devices kind of hand off or have continuity or whatever it is where you're doing something on your phone, phone and then you can continue it on your PC. So the first thing they did along those lines, other than just the, you know, the phone link and well, you know, my phone, then phone link, whatever that stuff. And then the Samsung partnership, of course, cut and paste, copy paste, etc. Is cross device continuity with OneDrive. Right. The idea is that you were in the OneDrive app on your phone, you were doing whatever you're doing, maybe looking, editing, document, whatever, put the phone down and then you sign into your PC and it will come up and say, hey, did you want to continue that? And now they're doing this with Spotify.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:18]:
So I guess we're doing this on an app by app basis, I guess.

Chris Hoffman [00:20:22]:
Here's my question. This sounds like we're creating this great new feature for third party developers in Windows. Is anyone going to use this? How many times have they made, especially in the Windows 10 and Windows 8 days. Look at this amazing new feature for app developers and no one uses it and three years later it's killed.

Leo Laporte [00:20:38]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:40]:
So yeah, this I think has a really good chance of being exactly like that. So if you're running Windows 11 now, one fun thing to try is I got to just put a file there so I can see what it says. Exactly. I made this point some months ago when the right click Menus in Windows 11 were originally designed to be prettier, of course. And. And they're laid out different, like they're kind of more spacing and more modern looking, whatever. But they were also supposed to be simpler with fewer options. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:13]:
Than they were in Windows 10. And they were at first, but they've been growing. And so there are two areas where this has grown pretty well. Actually I get maybe three, depending on what you're doing, where this has grown or could grow dramatically. One is the Open with Submenu, which is just based on whatever apps you have installed. But the two that are a little more modern are the Share with Submenu, which is what is kind of new. It used to just be share and then you would choose how to share from a share pane or share window. But the other one is this list of bizarre AI based features that appear at the bottom of the menu.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:47]:
Right. And so because Microsoft is one of those app platform things Chris was referring to is app developers can build connectivity into their apps where you could right click something like a. Whatever it might be and say do something with this, like open this with this app. You can now say do this AI based task with this app. So instead of just saying like open with paint, you could say remove the background with paint, you know, that kind of thing. And there are suddenly a dozen or two dozen of those, depending on what you have installed. And this menu has gotten stupid. And every time I see something like this, especially the share width is probably the big one and it's probably the closest to what Chris is saying as being the next thing they canc.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:34]:
It's just kind of grown out of control. Like Microsoft has spent so much time working on Share, this feature that's been part of Windows since Windows 8 used to. Remember, it used to be like a sidebar thing and now it's. Then it was like a full screen experience, now it's like a window. But you know, there's all this stuff and depending on what you're doing, you could edit the thing in line, you could copy it to the clipboard, you can send it to your phone, you can share it through compatible apps which are listed Some of which aren't even installed yet. And they want app developers to use this stuff, but nobody does. Right. And so the first couple that have appeared, like WhatsApp, if you can share with WhatsApp, or I think Facebook messenger might be one as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:14]:
Telegram is in there. Microsoft did those. Right. That wasn't Facebook or Meta or whatever company. That was Microsoft. It was like they were trying to be like, look, see, look, you work with third party apps. It's not just Microsoft stuff. But I don't think we're going to see a lot of companies taking advantage of this.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:33]:
I just, this is just not. I don't think people spend their time using computers this way, really. Right. So I happen to use the share pane all the time. I use nearby sharing as much as I can, but I can't tell you the last time I did share and then like, oh, look, I can share it to WhatsApp from Windows. Like I, I'm sure there's someone out there doing it. But yeah, I don't know. So, yeah, this, this cross compatibility thing, cross device continuity thing, whatever we're calling it.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:01]:
Yeah, I don't know. We'll see.

Chris Hoffman [00:24:03]:
Here's another disaster about the Share feature, and maybe it's because you don't use OneDrive, but OneDrive normally pulls in all the documents and pictures and desktop folders. If I right click a file on my desktop and pick Share, I don't get the Share menu. I get the OneDrive sharing menu. I don't know how to get to the normal Windows share menu from most of my files. I don't know, it's probably in there somewhere, but it's like confusing. I have to explain to people. It's like, well, you click Share unless the folder is files in OneDrive, which it might be automatically in the background. And if that happens, you'll get a totally different paint.

Chris Hoffman [00:24:36]:
It's very confusing.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:39]:
So, yeah, they fixed this in a way. So these used to be completely separate and different and they still are by default. But there's a link you can click, I think if you click like make a link for the thing you're sharing through OneDrive, it will then come up with the normal share windows. So it's like an extra couple of steps or whatever, but yes. Well, if you were looking for consistency, why are we using.

Chris Hoffman [00:25:01]:
Oh, there it is.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:02]:
Yeah, yeah, It's a little complicated, but it's not obvious. Right. But the good news is no one even knows this exists. So you know what I mean. You and I are like, what the heck is going on here? But most people just like, whatever, and it will, just like you said, it's going to disappear. This stuff will move right along.

Chris Hoffman [00:25:17]:
I don't understand what the Share menu is still doing there. I mean, it's such a Windows 8 feature. They're still investing in it, but they're using it.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:25]:
They've escalated.

Chris Hoffman [00:25:26]:
If they're investing in it, why is it so messy with OneDrive? I don't understand.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:31]:
I bet it has to do with the. I bet the impulse or the impulse, the rationale for this. So the inspiration or whatever is in fact this stuff we're seeing now, I bet this is what it was about. It was like, we have to build this little bit of an infrastructure here so that apps can do this programmatically. But it's really about cross device, not compatibility, but sharing or whatever. Because fundamentally, if you look at Windows compared to a Mac and say, okay, so what are the pros and cons here? A lot of them are obvious, but it's that cross device thing on the Mac, in the Apple ecosystem more broadly, that's so special and so amazing. And.

Leo Laporte [00:26:15]:
And it also locks you in, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:26:17]:
Yeah, no, it's perfect. That's why it's so great.

Leo Laporte [00:26:19]:
You know, you can't not get an iPhone now.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:22]:
Well, people yerik. So someone would say, well, yeah, you don't want to do that though, because it locks you into the, you know, the Apple ecosystem. It's like, yeah, no, actually I do want that because it's awesome. It's leaving it. Yeah, it's really good. And this is a year and a half ago, but I'll never forget the first time I did this where I was using a MacBook Air at the time, taking a. I took a photo on my iPhone during a meeting of the whiteboard and I was like, man, I'd really like to put this in my notes. And I was like, wait a minute, I think I can do this.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:46]:
That. And then I just copied it to the clipboard on the iPhone and went to the Mac.

Leo Laporte [00:26:50]:
It's amazing, isn't it?

Paul Thurrott [00:26:51]:
Command B and it appeared immediately. And I was like, yeah, no, this is real. Like this, that. And by the way, we have. We. You know, it took them a few.

Leo Laporte [00:26:58]:
Years to get there. It didn't work at first.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:00]:
I mean, it took a few years. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not a.

Leo Laporte [00:27:02]:
But they've been doing this for a long time now and it's pretty consistent.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:04]:
Yeah. So Microsoft's doing it too. They're using that phone link app, right? It works way better. And there's way more going on if you have an Android phone, especially if you have a Samsung phone. But. But there's some basic stuff there if you have an iPhone too, because, you know, this is a pretty good group of people. But I don't know. This isn't a.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:22]:
This comes up from time to time. I don't know what to call this. I feel like Stephen Stanofsky must have used the term for this in his book. Sometimes in Microsoft's case, they'll come up with features that they can then put in a slide that is one of a bullet point of whatever. And the reason it's there is not because they think, oh, this is what's going to cause people to use our platform. It's because this is what's going to cause people to leave our platform, not to leave our platform. Right? That they see some of the stuff that might be available on the Mac in this case and say, you know, it's kind of tempting. And they're like, well, hold on a second.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:54]:
We do it too, sort of, and depends on the kind of phone you have. And it's a little more complicated, but we do it too. We do it, too. Microsoft is heavily involved in fighting these walled ecosystem, walled garden app stores. Right. Part of the reason for that is this stuff might be possible if Apple has to open up their phone more, right. They'll be able to do those things they want to do. It's not just about them putting their Xbox game store or whatever it is on the phone, although they would love to do that for sure.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:26]:
It's some of this stuff too, right? Because that thing is like. It's a black box. It's worse than a black box. It's a black box covered in cement, buried under the ground. Like you can't get to it. So they can do certain things on Android and it's pretty good. And they can do very few things on iPhone. And it's okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:47]:
Anyway. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:28:49]:
It's okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:50]:
It's okay.

Leo Laporte [00:28:50]:
I'm okay, you're okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:52]:
Everyone's okay.

Leo Laporte [00:28:53]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:54]:
All right. So for the past, I don't know, six months, ish, we've been talking about this kind of progressive rollout of what I call semantic search. Microsoft has called it like eight different things now. They've settled on semantic search finally, thank God, because it's a good name. And in Windows 11, it's local, so local AI copilot plus PC only but if you have that kind of a PC now, and it's unstable now, you can do semantic search across the file system and File Explorer Start search, which works from the taskbar or from the start or from just the search window. And to a lesser degree separately, but. But also only Copilot PC in the Settings app, right? With this kind of, they literally have a Settings app AI model on your device only for this purpose. And okay, that's fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:48]:
Now what they've done or what they are doing, this is still in the Insider program and this is across channels is they are adding this capability to the Copilot app and concurrently to that, they're changing the UI of the Copilot app yet again to make it look to me a lot like the. What I would call what used to be the Microsoft 365 app. Like the. I think it's just the Microsoft 365 copilot app where it's, you know, the thought is, yeah, you. Sometimes you go there and you chat and you're like, I want to know what the capital of Alaska is or something or what year did whatever happen. A lot of people want to work against their documents or against their email or against the web or whatever it is. And so it's actually kind of a pretty ui. I wouldn't get too used to these things change every six months.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:32]:
But a lot of people I guess are, you know, want to go into Copilot, throw in a couple of their documents and say, hey, give me the summary of whatever this PDF is or this presentation or whatever it is. And now you can just go into Copilot. If you're in the Insider program. This will probably, you know, come to stable, I don't know, probably October ish or something. You can actually just give it permission to scan your entire file system if that's what you want or wherever you want it to go. There is some kind of programmability there for cloud services, et cetera. So if you are using say OneDrive, but in the future, Google Drive, Dropbox, whatever service and they're using that kind of files on demand capability, you can actually search against that even though those files are not local. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:21]:
So that's useful. And I think we talked about this last week, but we've been kind of stuck with index based search for ever, I guess I'd call it, or at least for 20 years. There were plans in the early 2000s to kind of make that more sophisticated and better. That didn't come together. And I feel like AI is going to get us over that hump a little bit. I have done a lot of searches lately, like we'll talk about Gears of War late late in the show, but I went back to find all the reviews of those games I'd ever written and find screenshots I took from back in the day, literally using a capture card and an Xbox360 or USB thing or whatever it was. And yeah, it comes right up now. It's pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:06]:
Like searching against OneDrive used to be pretty sad in Windows. So much so that I would often just go to the website and that would work better. But now that this is happening, you have to actually index the drive like that actually saw us to happen. Or index whatever you want to index. But once you do that, the natural language search stuff actually works really good.

Chris Hoffman [00:32:28]:
Well, I have a burning question and this is so bad. The fact that I don't know the answer to it fully is a major problem.

Leo Laporte [00:32:35]:
I'm sure Paul has for your burning question.

Chris Hoffman [00:32:39]:
I don't know. Has Microsoft been very unclear? Yes, but you know, I. That's wonderful on a Copilot plus PC. Guess what? My desktop isn't. Guess what? A lot of laptops aren't. There's no such thing as a Copilot plus PC desktop as far as I know, unless something has changed. So is this a feature I can even like? A while ago Microsoft made this big announcement. Oh the.

Chris Hoffman [00:33:01]:
I don't even know. I can't even follow this. The Copilot app platform or the AI app platform, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:07]:
The.

Chris Hoffman [00:33:08]:
Yeah, Copilot Windows runtime or whatever is will now support GPUs and stuff and CPUs and it's like, well that's cool. Like wait a minute, does that mean I get the Copilot plus PC features with a gpu? Or does it just mean third party apps written against the runtime get to use the gpu? I don't understand.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:27]:
It's not even. Yeah, it's right. So whatever that's called now, I think it's just called Windows Foundry now. Windows AI Foundry they renamed it. And it's still not out and stable by the way. So as a developer you couldn't use it even if you wanted to. But the theory there is the same as it is with Apple with their foundational model support. Like these are local AI models that you as an app developer can either access because they're on the machine or cause to download because your app needs them.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:58]:
There's a set of APIs that will allow you to Do a lot of the things you see in Microsoft apps like Notepad, where you know, it's doing summarizing of text or rewriting it to be more succinct or longer or less formal or more formal, whatever the styles are. Right? And these things use Microsoft and third party AI models that are local, like small machine models. Are they the same ones that Copilot plus PC users access without knowing? Not usually, actually. I think in some cases they can be. And in those cases they could run off the CPU too, by the way, right? I mean, they could run on the GPU, but they're not copilot plus PCs, and that's just a. They're not going to discuss that. Right. In other words, the feeling there is Qualcomm has some deal with Microsoft, where at first they were exclusive for a little while.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:55]:
Now they get those features first right before x64 does, usually only by a month or two. So it's not like a huge gap. But I mean, we still sell Intel Mix especially makes chips that don't have good MPUs that qualify. AMD does too, to a lesser degree. But at some point that will end. And the question is, yeah, you have a gaming PC, let's say, or you're a developer or an engineer or whatever you are, you have some awesome graphics capabilities. Why can't I bring down the power grid so I can use Copilot to summarize text or whatever it is, or do the stuff that copilot plus PCs can do? There's no technical reason why this can't happen. And we keep waiting for that day where they finally say, look, we're opening it up to everybody, right?

Chris Hoffman [00:35:45]:
So like from a Windows user perspective, when Microsoft says the Settings app's really complicated, Setting app is really complicated, so we're going to add, put an AI agent in there. So on your Copilot plus PC, you will finally have an easier time changing settings.

Leo Laporte [00:35:58]:
The rest of it, screw you.

Chris Hoffman [00:36:00]:
Excuse me, what about everyone else without a copilot plus PC, which is most people buying new PCs still, you know, one of the issues with the Settings app is the search feature is terrible. In my opinion, all they really need in the Settings app is like a better search database of like equivalent words so that you could search through it and that would help everyone. Then the other thing is like, why can I use a cloud service in Notepad to summarize text, but I can't use a cloud service in the Settings app to find a setting I want to change? It's like there's different parts of Windows and it's like, well, this part of Windows is run by the local Windows team trying to sell computers. And this one, this part of Windows is run by the cloud team. So Notepad, the cloud team got that one, so they're pushing the cloud services. But the Settings app, the local team got that one, so they're pushing the NPUs. It's like, it's just a mess.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:49]:
First of all, I have to express how uncomfortable it makes me when I see anyone being more cynical than I am. It's good for you. Sometimes I feel like I get dulled down by this because it's just like so relentless. But you're right, right, Microsoft, I say insertification on this show to keep pg, but Microsoft is as guilty of that as any big tech company. But also because they're beholden to different kind of responsibilities, I guess. So they want to make the industry healthier, the PC industry. So they want to sell more new PCs. They're tying it a little bit to this Windows 10 end of life thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:32]:
The Copilot Plus PC is an attempt to another more premium type of PC that maybe costs a little bit more. It's good for PC makers, right, because those things have higher margins. So this was, you know, media center, they did this, tablet PC, they did this, et cetera. So I guess the question, well, not the question, but I guess the commentary here is in serving its PC maker partners to the best of their ability, they're doing a small or a disservice of some kind to their customers, which is like. Yeah, like. Yes, right. I mean that's, it's not possible to do the right thing for everybody. So look, it's inevitable that these features will be available everywhere.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:15]:
It just is. Right? And that will either happen because every PC basically out in the world at some point is a copilot plus PC by today's standards because NPUs just become more widespread as older computers get pushed out. Or what you're asking for, I think, and what I think most people are asking for, which is, I just spent 800 bucks on a GPU. What do you mean I can't do it? A stupid little drawing and paint, you know, that for some reason works on a $600 laptop because they have an MPU. So, yeah, I, I mean, if I.

Chris Hoffman [00:38:44]:
Was going to say something, you know, positive of my, I guess I don't know if positive is the word, but I feel like maybe from the PC maker partners have kind of failed them a little bit. I don't know if they expected at this point intel to still be, you know, cranking out CPUs that have no NPU or MPU that's too slow. I don't know if they really expected, you know, the, the latest, I get the latest Gamut game app, laptop. Oh, it has a core Ultra Series 2. It's like, oh, Series 2. It must have Lunar Lake. No, that has a small view.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:11]:
It depends.

Chris Hoffman [00:39:12]:
If it's Aero Lake. It could have Meteor Lake.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:15]:
Yeah, you get the old one.

Chris Hoffman [00:39:16]:
Even the Ultra could have Aero Lake. It says Ultra. Does that mean it have. If it has an npu, it doesn't have a good enough one for Copilot Plus PC features.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:23]:
It's like, so intel was on their own schedule, right? They did Lunar Lake because Microsoft was like, look, we've got this Copilot Plus PC thing. We're doing it with Qualcomm. We know how much you hate them, but we're doing it. AMD's on board and they're like, yeah, we're not going to be ready. It's like, okay, well, I guess you'll be the only PCs that don't have this then. They're like, okay, hold on. And so they rushed Lunar Lake to market. That contributed a lot to their financial issues last year.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:50]:
And there were problems with those chips too, but whatever. But they still had all those other chips that were on the regular schedule. They didn't change all of their schedules. They couldn't afford to do that. Right. And so I am not defending this. Intel should have been on board with this stuff years and years ago. A big part of their problem is they've missed so many boats.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:12]:
But we'll get there, right? I mean, I don't know, IFA is next week, right, in Berlin and then CES is in January and there will be a year where all of a sudden, oh, all the new chips do have those NPUs, right? That will happen. It may not happen. September, January, maybe the fall. I don't know. You know, who can say? But yeah, I will say, based on the way Copilot Plus PC launched a little over a year ago, I didn't expect to ever see MPU lists or weak MPU based processors in the market. And there are probably more of them than there are versions with the MPUs that qualify.

Chris Hoffman [00:40:54]:
So plus, from a PC market perspective, I just reviewed a laptop and I won't use the manufacturer's name, but they use the word AI in the laptop model. Oh, it's an AI laptop. Series 2 or whatever. No copilot plus PC features because the MPU is slow.

Leo Laporte [00:41:14]:
Well, AMD says it's got an AI processor too.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:18]:
Lenovo just did their things and their whole thing was we are the biggest seller of AI PCs.

Leo Laporte [00:41:23]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:25]:
Whatever the mix was of AI PCs to regular PCs has gone up pretty dramatically. But the definition of that term, which by the way was an intel thing is it has an mpu, it doesn't have to even do one, tops. But as long as it's an npu, you qualify for that term. And Microsoft, it's too bad because AI PC would have been the better thing to call Copilot plus PC. Right? But then again, the right thing to do would have been to say, well, you have a GPU that would qualify. I don't understand. Whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:41:54]:
It's kind of a marketing. It's right.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:56]:
It's more than kind of.

Leo Laporte [00:41:57]:
Yeah, yeah. So it's like. So maybe they're losing control of it in the sense that not all AI PCs or co pilot PCs, it's kind of like EVO or one of those other marketing terms where that then that. Then they probably shouldn't be restricting features to something that is merely a marketing term.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:19]:
I'm not.

Leo Laporte [00:42:19]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:20]:
I'm not defending it, but I. This has been look, since maybe not the very beginning, but if you go back to like say xp where there was Home and Pro versions, right. There were some features that are unique to Pro. You know, we went crazy for a little while. We had Home Basic, Home Premium, ultimate, you know, business, whatever. I don't remember all the names, but. And now we're back to kind of home and pro. I know there's education and other versions, but.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:48]:
But those are the two basic ones for consumers. And so Copilot plus PC is like this weird Venn diagram thing where there are features that are unique to those things. So it's in effect sort of a third skew. Although technically you could be running home and have the Copilot plus PC features, but not have the features that are unique to Pro. Right? So it's not a strict superset, but yeah, that's how Microsoft has always done things. So I don't know why this is surprising, but yeah, yeah, I don't know.

Chris Hoffman [00:43:20]:
Like, let's be honest is AI is hyped right now. Everyone wants to put the word AI and everything. The start of 2024 was. It's the year of the AI PC 20. Did you know 2024 was the year of the AI PC? I mean, wow. Like how Many people are Even using the NPUs on their laptops for anything. Like any device can be the most people. If you're using a chatbot or something, it's running in the cloud.

Chris Hoffman [00:43:41]:
If you're using Photoshop and Fire, Adobe Firefly, it's running in the cloud. The average person is not doing anything with their npu. I mean, like, have you used the Photos app? Like, have you tried generating images in the Photos app? It is a mess.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:56]:
Yep, it's right. It doesn't help that the generation capabilities of local AI is vastly inferior to what's in the cloud. Right. These are by definition much smaller models. You don't really notice it too badly with things like text because if it's just about restructuring a sentence maybe or rewriting something, it's actually that's pretty good. The image stuff you really notice, right? Because it's visual. It's so bad. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:19]:
The local AI versions of create an image of whatever are children's drawing on a refrigerator and then the copilot. Well, we'll talk a little bit later about one of the newer ones, but these latest cloud based AI models are like Rembrandt paintings, you know, like by comparison, they're unbelievable.

Chris Hoffman [00:44:39]:
Right? And I'm just going to say it again because I like bang on about this. If you use the local NPU powered image generation features in Windows, in Photos or wherever they are, it needs a Microsoft account, it needs cloud access. It will not show you the image unless it generates the image on your PC. It goes to the cloud, Microsoft cloud service, check it to make sure it's safe or whatever. Then they send it back to your PC and like, okay, I'm not arguing against the safety part of that, but what's the point of doing it locally? Why not just generate it in the cloud? You'll have much better quality, but then you won't be able to market it and say, well, did you know the laptop generates itself the way you say that?

Paul Thurrott [00:45:12]:
It almost seems like they're limiting this artificially, because they are. But no, I said this. I oversimplified earlier, but I sort of said it's like they're serving different masters here or whatever. It's not just PC makers who they're trying to help prop up, however, through Windows, like new PC sales. And they don't just have these direct customers like people like you and I who use Windows or whatever, they also have themselves. Right? So they're using AI, they host this AI infrastructure. It's expensive. They want to reduce those costs Badly.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:46]:
And if they could get this to work and they could do less round tripping with the cloud and the user didn't notice, that would be great. They're not there yet.

Chris Hoffman [00:45:55]:
That's so far away. Yeah, that's basically almost impossible. That is so far away. And even when that comes, like people are going to have, you know, chatbots and AI image generation tools that they can access on their phone in the cloud and they're going to be even more powerful at that point. And they're already so cheap. I mean, in what world? I'm sorry?

Paul Thurrott [00:46:16]:
No, no, it's. No, this is the ongoing debate, you.

Chris Hoffman [00:46:21]:
Know, like, however, like local AI is really cool in theory because you have the privacy advantages. You can run your own model, you can tune in, whatever. That's cool in theory. But even that is going to be.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:34]:
I mean, well, you said, you said, for example, you have a computer with a good npu, you're not using it, which is absolutely true. The weird thing is, every once in a while, depending on what you're doing, you might actually be using it and you don't realize it. Depending on the apps you use and if they've been optimized for local AI, image editing apps, video editing apps, whatever, every once in a while, not the whole app. Right. But you'll file export something and they'll be like, oh, this is an API, an NPU feature. It probably happened like half a millisecond faster than it would have on a GPU based computer. There's nothing to indicate that you even used it. You have no idea that you were receiving a benefit, if any.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:15]:
And that's kind of a chicken egg problem here because, you know, GPUs are optimized for specific things. Right. The reason we separated that off of the CPU was For that reason, MPUs are the same thing. And there are huge, you know, efficiency gains, but also huge performance gains for specific workloads. It's just that the things we're describing are not general purpose, they're very specific and they're individual features in individual apps. You know, you don't buy an app that's like, oh, this is all MPU powered, there's no such thing. You couldn't build that app. The thing I keep blabbing on about is this sense of orchestration, which is what would happen if Microsoft just allowed this to be everywhere, which is that you would just like you run an app now, it looks at your system and says, okay, this one has a gpu.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:07]:
So like we could do whatever the game will run faster, look better, or whatever it is. This one has an mpu. Oh good. That means this can happen. So any apps that support this in the future, this, to me, it's the responsibility of the operating system. It makes a call to the OS and the OS says, okay, this one's best with the CPU and this one's best with the MPU and you know, that kind of thing. And we're just early days, we're just not there.

Chris Hoffman [00:48:33]:
Yeah. Plus, I mean, there's another issue with like, you know, with more and more people using web apps. I mean, you have to use a local app, that is how many. I mean that's some things. I mean it's not the new wave of like everyone should be happy that they have an AI laptop because it can, you know, I mean it sounds good in a press release, but I.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:55]:
Mean, Generally speaking the copilot plus PCs are better than other PCs in certain ways. Right. And that's kind of true, especially on Snapdragon, but it's kind of true AMD intel as well in the sense. But you know, AMD intel, you kind of get the vibe like this was going to happen anyway. Right. Like just natural course of improving processes over time. We're just going to, we're going to get to a better place. And so that feels a little more iterative.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:25]:
But now, you know, we've seen with Apple especially, but also with Snapdragon and Windows that, you know, this ARM architecture or an ARM like architecture, if you're not willing to make that switch as an intel or AMD quite yet, has its benefits. And so they've been, you know, they're plotting their own paths. Right. If you look at the intel processor or AMD processor that's in a very new laptop and compare it to like a 12, 13th gen Intel Core or whatever, they're very different, you know, very different. They're not perfect, but they are very different.

Chris Hoffman [00:50:00]:
Yeah, I'm hoping for more from ARM Windows laptops in the future. Right now it's kind of a mess a little bit like, you know, there's going to be more. I don't know if most people haven't seen like the rumors that they know like Nvidia is supposedly coming out with their own ARM chip and there's going to be actually next. There's that way actually competition. Yeah, everybody, right. I mean right now it's kind of a mess. I wrote, I wrote a book for P0 recently. If you know you get the new Qualcomm laptop And it has the new slower CPU in it.

Chris Hoffman [00:50:33]:
And they said it was going to be $600 laptops. And you know, tariffs, they were a thing, but they said they were going to power 600 laptops. They come in, it's a $750 laptop. You're like, well, right, an average person can go to Walmart and buy an old MacBook for 600 or 650.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:49]:
Yeah.

Chris Hoffman [00:50:50]:
And so like you're bringing in these, these like so kind of bad laptops.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:55]:
You're not wrong.

Chris Hoffman [00:50:55]:
But.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:58]:
That $600 M1 based MacBook Air has 8 gigs of RAM and is whatever, 4 years old or whatever it is. But we're only just now catching. We haven't caught up. We haven't even caught up. And Apple's not stopped. So we're kind of never really going to catch up. I think that the thing that Snapdragon did was at least get us in the kind of ballpark against whatever M3 if you want to. Whatever you want to call it does matter.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:22]:
So yeah, if you're going to buy a $500 computer, you're either looking at like a Chromebook, a piece of junk Windows PC or I guess this used, not used, sorry, old Mac. But you know, eventually years, this crappy old Mac.

Leo Laporte [00:51:37]:
It's okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:38]:
Yeah, it's okay. It's fine. I'm sure. But it's. But eventually the PCs we, we have will be efficient and reliable and performant enough that that $600 computer in the future won't be so crappy. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:51:55]:
Like it, the Holy Grail is running these LLMs locally. It would be really amazing. People are doing it, but at great expense right now. I mean, Copilot's not designed to run locally. I mean the whole thing is still on the server. Right. This is so in a way, copilot is the NPU is.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:13]:
It's just not there yet.

Leo Laporte [00:52:14]:
A MacGuffin? Well, it's not important.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:16]:
It will get there. It will get there like everybody.

Leo Laporte [00:52:18]:
Is it important because you're not running Copilot locally or are you?

Paul Thurrott [00:52:22]:
No, not now you aren't. But I mean, but the goal is to get more and more like for hybrid AI, right. So do more and more locally and then hand off to the cloud lane when you have to.

Leo Laporte [00:52:30]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:30]:
And the good enough point is where we're heading to, it's not let's take that chatgpt, whatever and put it on the computer. It's get one that's good enough that for 80 to 90% of the tests it's going to just be fine. But then every once in a while we have to go to the cloud. That is something, by the way. I keep saying it, but orchestration. You wouldn't notice or care that it was happening. It will just be something that is a feature of the OS and it's better for Microsoft or whomever because you're not killing the server the whole day. And grandma can have her electricity to bake the cookies or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:53:03]:
By the way, I think this is a good excuse for you to go to Hawaii for the Snapdragon event in a couple.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:08]:
Yeah, it is.

Leo Laporte [00:53:09]:
I think you should really be there.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:11]:
I am going to be there.

Leo Laporte [00:53:12]:
Are you? Oh, good.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:13]:
Yeah. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:53:16]:
It's interesting how they have them in such exotic places. You know, I compare it to podcast conferences which are held in places like Dallas in August.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:26]:
You know, if they said to me this show's in St. Louis and whatever, I'd be like, yep, I'll be there tomorrow, I would be happy.

Leo Laporte [00:53:33]:
I think it's gonna be interesting. It sounds like they have a big night.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:35]:
We gotta say why is a pain in the butt to get to.

Leo Laporte [00:53:38]:
No, it is for you, not for me. I could be there. Why don't I go as your proxy?

Paul Thurrott [00:53:43]:
It's still. It's like a. It's basically an 11 hour day, you know, for you.

Leo Laporte [00:53:46]:
Yeah. Because you have to fly across the.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:47]:
Country and then even from Mexico City, it's the same thing. It's now.

Leo Laporte [00:53:50]:
Oh yeah. It's a five hour flight from San Francisco. It's still a long flight.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:54]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:53:55]:
Because I hear it's in the middle of the ocean.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:57]:
I mean, yeah, it's literally an island. It's.

Leo Laporte [00:54:01]:
It's literally a bunch of islands.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:05]:
It's on Maui, but yes.

Leo Laporte [00:54:06]:
Oh, nice. Let's take a break and we will continue. I have the new Parallels desktop running if you wish to examine it in detail. Our show today, brought to you by, and I mean this literally, CacheFly. For over 20 years, CacheFly has held the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content Delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. At TWIT, we have been using CacheFly practically since the beginning. We thought. I thought we.

Leo Laporte [00:54:42]:
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We love CacheFly. You will too. Learn how you can get your first month free at CacheFly.com Twitter that's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com slash TWIT. Thank you CacheFly. Now back to Paul Thurot and Chris Huffman filling in for Richard Campbell and Windows Weekly.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:11]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:57:12]:
Uac.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:14]:
Yeah, remember that one?

Leo Laporte [00:57:15]:
Remember that?

Paul Thurrott [00:57:16]:
Yeah. So Microsoft was like, how can we do that again but make it even more disruptive? And they figured it out. Now, to be fair, this solves an actual real problem that's been a real problem for at least 25, 30 years. We'll call it 25 years, which is that most individuals sign into. Well, all individuals who sign into a new or whatever Windows PC for the first time are administrators. And then they just use it as an administrator. And Microsoft has done a few things in Windows to kind of minimize that. But the reality is everything that you do well can run under elevated admin privileges right by default.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:59]:
And so they came up with UAC as a method to help with this. UAC didn't go over well when it was first released, although by the way, never any more annoying than what the Mac already had by that point, even though Apple made fun of it incessantly, which always bothered me. And there are ways to bypass uac. UAC suffers from what I think of as the third brake light problem, which is like, it was a good idea for the day. Now we just don't even think about it. And I think a lot of people are just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They just kind of click through it. You know, it's really just meant to be a final prompt.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:35]:
Like, you sure you want to do this, like this thing you're doing, whatever that thing might be, like installing an app maybe, or changing certain settings, like for some reason the time, which is, I'm sure, tied to some security thing requires a UAC elevation, right? Or a UAC prompt. It's not really an elevation, but. But you just say, yeah, yeah, I'm sure. And then you move on. And so administrative protection is something that came out of the Windows Resiliency Initiative, which they announced last November, right at ignite, which came out of Secure Future Initiative, which actually predated but became even more of a thing when CrowdStrike happened right, last summer. So kind of company wide, like we got to really batten down the hatches. And so when you look at Windows, you're like, well, security wise, what could we do? There's been a lot of fundamental work, foundational work even around the hardware side of it. TPM2 and then on to secure Core PCs, Microsoft's Pluton security processor, Windows, hello ESS, which is this whole unbelievable process.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:44]:
And maybe there's a better way. And so basically when you enable this, I think it's a mode, essentially it's a toggle. You can turn it on and off, you have to reboot. And when administrator protection is running, basically everything you do is running as a standard user, even though you've signed in with an admin. So it kind of solves that part of the problem. But you do have to escalate your permissions or privileges from time to time. And it does this on the fly with a token that exists only for the duration of the thing. So in other words, if you run, you search for Notepad in The start menu, right click it, say run as admin.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:22]:
That process will be running as an admin until you close it, which doesn't change or is no different in some ways than how it would have been in the past. But the difference now is that it usually is not running like that when you are running as admin, it actually has a different view of the virtualized file system and also the virtualized registry. And it's a temporary slice in time, right? So that's maybe not the best example, but if you say, like, I'm going to change the system time, you're like, yep, yep, change system time. As soon as you're done changing the time, it goes back to standard privileges. So, okay, like this sounds okay to me. The problem is it uses Windows hello and Windows hello isn't the problem. And Windows hello is secure and it's great and all that stuff. But if you have seen the latest Windows hello ui, you will know it's a little too secure.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:13]:
You know, it's kind of a pain. And so it's slow. If it's facial, you get the little eyeball, he's looking around, he's like, oh, there you are. And then you have to click a button. It's like, guys, come on.

Chris Hoffman [01:01:27]:
It doesn't work in the dark anymore.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:28]:
And it doesn't work in the dark anymore. Right? They've made it more. That's the thing. They've made it more secure and less convenient. And so when you think about security, this is the trade off. It's always like convenience versus actual privacy. And most people are lazy and they kind of tend toward that convenience side of the fence. Every once in a while, Microsoft will make a really disruptive change to Windows, UAC and the whole security, the trustworthy computing stuff they did, which also involved Windows Server at that time, Windows Server 2003, the whole.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:59]:
It's a server, not a surfboard. This is when they really tone down what IE could do, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot that goes into it, but you don't really realize because why would you realize? No one would know this. It's astonishing how much this thing comes up. And depending on what you're doing, you might not be able to use it because it's going to be so disruptive. It actually stops things from working. Apps need to be rewritten in some cases to work correctly with this thing. Visual Studio, if you're a developer, do not turn this on.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:27]:
You'll ruin everything you're working on. It's horrible. That will probably get better over time. But I went into this, like, yep, I'm willing. I'm going to take this bullet. I'm okay with this. Like, I want. I want this.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:39]:
And then I've used it and I'm like, you know what? I'm not sure I do want this. Like, this is. It's annoying. So as of now, it's only available in the Insider program. I think it's across the channel, so I think it's Canary Dev Beta. So it's basically everywhere. You have to enable it. Like I said, it's off by default.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:57]:
There are other security features in Windows 11 that are like this, that are still like this. Right. So Smart App Control is one. There is a ransomware protection feature. They're off. Like, for some reason you have to turn them on. And Microsoft has said, well, we're going to. This will be enabled at some point.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:15]:
But I'm thinking when 25H2 comes out and whatever that is, October, that this thing will still be optional. Obviously, businesses could enable or disable it as they want for you, but for individuals, I can't imagine they're going to turn this on. It's just too disruptive. So it's. I'm glad they did it.

Leo Laporte [01:03:36]:
Yeah. But it's no good to have a security feature that people turn off by default.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:40]:
Yeah, yep, yep. No, I know. But you have to kind of get it in. Well. So, for example, like, Smart App, that's.

Leo Laporte [01:03:45]:
An option if you wanted.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:46]:
Yeah. Like, if you want to be more secure, you can do it.

Leo Laporte [01:03:52]:
The point of UAC was that you could be an administrator account, which most people do anyway, and still have the privilege escalation built in.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:01]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:04:01]:
So it wasn't automatic, so you would still have to confirm it and stuff. And I thought that was a good idea. Is this roughly.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:07]:
It was a good idea. This is an evolution of that. Right. So there are better security protections in modern computers now, so they can take advantage of that. Windows slow being one of them. It's just slow. Yeah. It's just that the process is so slow and unfortunately, because now almost literally every process and app you run and whatever is not.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:26]:
Is standard user, this thing actually comes up a lot more than it used to or a lot more than UAC used to. So you won't see a UAC prompt. Well, that's not totally true. No, that might be true. I'm going back and forth between computers, so I'm going to think about that. I think you might not see one.

Leo Laporte [01:04:41]:
Hello is slow or do you think.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:42]:
Yeah, well, the dialogue slow because they wanted to make sure it wasn't spoofed. So they, you know. I know.

Leo Laporte [01:04:49]:
They also don't want you to click it. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:52]:
Hey. Exactly. So you can't because you're like, wait. You're like, come on, come on, come on. And then you're like, oh, there it is. Click.

Leo Laporte [01:04:57]:
Oh, that would try me nuts.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:59]:
It makes me insane. Yeah. And then I discovered that, like, the app I'm working on, a visual studio, just breaks and I can't.

Chris Hoffman [01:05:06]:
So here's a question. I understand why this is part of the Windows resiliency initiative. Obviously, a lot of corporations is going to want this, and Microsoft can say, we support this and that's great. But especially since it's so disruptive, I wonder, in terms of what real world problem is it actually solving for the average PC user? So, like, if I would think about the average PC user, you know, if you use a phone, you can install an app from wherever and the app can't, like, you know, constantly wash your screen or everything you type and all that, because there's a level of sandboxing. And sandboxing is what Microsoft originally wanted to do with Windows 10X. So there's an alternate universe where maybe we have sandboxing that made in here now, but, like, you know, the average person. Okay, well, it doesn't elevate, but it could. You know, the app you download could still be running in the background, watching everything you type and logging it.

Chris Hoffman [01:05:56]:
I mean, so if we're going to introduce something that is disruptive, is this really the disruptive thing to introduce? I mean, it seems like some degree of sandbox would be better.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:05]:
First of all, do not ever make me defend Microsoft. But I'll say this. So the sandboxing thing you were talking about, so Windows 8 does sandboxing for. It started that, right? With modern apps, we're sandbox. The idea behind Windows 10X was that every app would run in its own sandbox, but win 32, which is the desktop, and most apps actually would run in one container.

Chris Hoffman [01:06:28]:
Oh, really? I guess, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:30]:
They were not separate ones for every app. So unfortunately, you could have rebooted that thing or whatever. But the issue, okay, so they've done all these things like this is part of a continuum, and basically what happens is everyone rejects everything, right? And so if you think about the original promise of just the store, if you forget about the app model and all the craziness, the idea is a good one. It's like, look, this is a trusted place where you can get apps. These things are sandboxed. They're guaranteed not to overstep each other. They can't screw up the system. There's one click uninstall, there's no registry nonsense everywhere, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:03]:
Sounds great. Nobody used it. A bunch of fart apps. And then they started expanding what the store could do. And the store now is just a distribution method for all kinds of different apps. And most of them are just desktop apps. Some of them them have their own licensing that's not going through the store. You just sign into whatever account, like if it's an Adobe app, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:20]:
So they kind of gave in on that over time. And then in the process of giving in on that, they started thinking about, well, okay, we could do things like S mode where you know, everyone seems to hate it, but the idea, it's not a bad idea except that it's a one way dead end street, you know, if you could just say I'm going to run my system in S mode, but I also want to run the desktop version of Google Chrome or whatever. To me that seems like a individual decision. But they didn't allow that. Okay, fine, There's a switch somewhere in Settings, you know, Settings, App, something probably advanced, where you could say, look, if, prompt me if I try to install something that's not from the store. Prompt me if I try to install something that's not from the store and there is a version of it in the store, you know, that kind of thing. But they can't, you know, if you enable that by default, like this thing we're talking about, everyone would be like, what is this thing? I'm downloading Chrome, just leave me alone. Like I know what I'm doing.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:13]:
And so, you know, it's kind of a nanny state problem. And so they have these ideas and they try them. Nobody likes it, or it doesn't in 10x's case, didn't work technically, I guess. And so, you know, it's 20 years later we're like, all right, so we did UIC. We haven't moved the needle at all in anything else. But we do have all this advanced security hardware now. And Windows, hello, et cetera, biometric sign in. Maybe there's an evolution of this.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:39]:
And so they called it a different name. But I mean really it's UAC but with a Windows hello prompt. And there's actually better. That's not a guarantee. I don't know what to call it. It's More likely that almost everything you're running normally is standard user, which solves a lot of the problem because it's a hard thing to sell someone on. But. But if you're running, as anyone would any normal person, you're an admin and you get malware in your system, you have no idea that thing's running at admin privileges.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:10]:
It could do whatever it wants. You don't have to be using the computer. It could be sitting there doing its thing, stealing your data, uploading it, using you as a, you know, a zombie, whatever, you know, so it's tr. It's. That's what it's really for. But what it's really going to do is just annoy people. You know, that's the sad part. And until, and unless the apps that everyone uses are updated to make it okay and tied to that thing you said earlier up top, I don't think it's going to happen.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:41]:
So we're going to find ourselves in this weird position of recommending to normal people, mainstream people, that maybe this awesome advanced security feature that really would secure you forever, you should not use. It's like telling someone not to wear a seatbelt. It feels weird.

Chris Hoffman [01:09:59]:
Yeah. I mean, the problem is so many of these features, they sound good, but, you know, like the. I guess it's the ransomware protection, like I. Or don't. Or controlled folder access. I ran into many issues with that. You just start a, you know, just a PC game from 15 years ago, and it's like, it just doesn't work. Because it's like, no, but it's trying to do the same files in your document.

Chris Hoffman [01:10:18]:
It's like they're constantly in their whitelisting apps and it's like, so enabled by default.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:23]:
If you as like a. I almost said compulsive. That's not fair. If you as a concerned user said, look, I'm going to look this up. You wrote an article or someone did, or there's some list somewhere. It's like, look, here are the, whatever security features in Windows that are not enabled by default for some reason. So here's where you go and you turn them on. You're like, all right, I'm doing the right thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:46]:
And then two days later, you install Photoshop or Call of Duty or whatever it is. And then one day, something just doesn't work. You don't know why it crashes, maybe. I don't know. Windows is not going to say. The reason this doesn't work is because you enabled administrative protection or whatever it was that caused this. And this is the uncertainty. This is the problem.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:05]:
And this is why. I mean, we're going to get in that awkward position because we can't guarantee or even predict until we have maybe lists of apps that are causing problems with these things, like what will or will not work. And some of these are really weird. Like, smart app control. You turn that thing on, you're like, nice, I'm doing the right thing. And then whatever you'll get. If you haven't seen it yet, you'll get this dialogue. It's like, hey, part of the app you're running, literally, it says something like that is violating our security standards.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:32]:
We're not going to allow it. And then the app doesn't work properly, and you're like, okay, well, I need this app, so I'm going to turn that thing off. And now you can never turn it on again for some reason. I know there are registries, hacks to get around that, but it's a weird feature where once you turn it off, never comes on again. It's just. It's. Can't turn it on. At least this thing you can toggle on and off.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:54]:
I don't. I'm not sure that's progress, but I don't know. All right, let's spend 20 minutes on the next.

Chris Hoffman [01:12:03]:
I'm really slowing us down.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:04]:
No, no, I don't actually.

Leo Laporte [01:12:06]:
You don't have to help it. Do it all on his own.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:09]:
This is a very natural process. This is like a football game. You ever sit like you were sitting there for two, two and a half hours watching football, right? Nothing's happened. It's like 7 to 3, 7 to 3. Third quarter, set, 7, 3. And then the last 15 minutes happens, and it's a tight game, and all of a sudden an awesome game breaks out. That's what this podcast is like a lot. It's kind of just like.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:27]:
Just kind of goes and goes. And at the end, you're like, all right, we got to finish this up. And then we go into a light.

Leo Laporte [01:12:31]:
I'm the guy with the orange gloves who comes out, and you, like, just.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:35]:
Throw the ball, throw the ball, throw the ball. Okay, so this one I'm curious to kind of experiment with, except that I would never get in the game and use a headset. But obviously there are all these different kinds of Bluetooth, not just versions, but also Bluetooth features like btle, which is the low energy version, et cetera. So if you've ever opened up, like, a more recent pair of earbuds or something. You might have seen a little dialogue pop up in Windows like you would see on your phone. It's like, hey, we can auto configure, do that kind of stuff. And this has worked in Windows for a while. I'm sure Windows 10 has it, but Windows 11 absolutely does.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:12]:
But now there are these other Bluetooth features that work off of that, like Advanced Audio Distribution profile, what's the other one? Hands free profile, et cetera. So to date, those things have only worked in mono on Windows. And so if you're using a headset and playing a game in Windows, you have really crappy audio quality. So they're fixing it. In fact, I think they've already fixed it. So. And this will not benefit just games. This works in things like, you know, teams or whatever apps that might use like headsets and these kind of Bluetooth audio features.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:47]:
So I'm curious to try this, except that I know when I turn my headset on in Call of Duty, what I'm going to hear is going to be so repulsive that I will just turn it off. But at least I got you, Paul. Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

Chris Hoffman [01:14:02]:
This honestly is huge news. I mean like I, yeah, I remember how many years ago, maybe it's eight years, but it, you know, people are saying Bluetooth wireless audio is good now. I'm like, wow, that's great. I'll get a Bluetooth headset. Sounded pretty good. I flipped it. I, I started using the microphone with it and the quality went off cliff. And I was like, what, what happened? It's like, oh, that's just how they work.

Chris Hoffman [01:14:20]:
It's like, that's just how they work. Like, no wonder everyone uses a little wireless now.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:24]:
Remember when the Bluetooth thing was a little thing you stuck in one ear and it's like, yeah, that's what it always sounds like in Windows. Well, even if you look at, there's.

Leo Laporte [01:14:32]:
Different profiles for Bluetooth and the headset profile is very low quality because it's for phones. But there's also a 2DP, which is the stereo version.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:42]:
Yep. So Windows has never supported that until. So now it does.

Leo Laporte [01:14:46]:
Oh, well, that's a huge improvement.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:48]:
It is a, it's huge. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:14:49]:
I can't. Wait a minute. They never support an A2DP.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:53]:
I can't explain. Well, especially in, well, in specific. Yeah, it's like for specific uses in.

Leo Laporte [01:14:59]:
Le with low energy.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:00]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:15:01]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:01]:
So this is most headsets, right.

Leo Laporte [01:15:03]:
There are now in Bluetooth profiles that are even higher quality. I think there is a There is a Bluetooth profile that is lossless, as I remember.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:12]:
Yeah, yeah. If there is, though, that thing does not exist in any shipping hardware like, you know, someone said it does.

Leo Laporte [01:15:18]:
But not. Not in any Windows hardware.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:19]:
Yeah. Oh, not in Windows. Well, even something like this Bluetooth version.

Leo Laporte [01:15:23]:
It'S a Qualcomm thing, aptX. It might actually be on the. On the Snapdragon, on the Qualcomm thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:28]:
It probably is.

Leo Laporte [01:15:29]:
That's actually interesting. Yeah. I have one pair of headphones from Denon that are APTX supported and I've been looking for things that can play.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:39]:
Aptx, by the way, to be fair to Microsoft, again, stop making me do that. This is a mess in the Apple world too, right? You have something like those Apple AirPods Macs or whatever they're called, where they're just Bluetooth and lousy, but you could plug in a wireless cable and then suddenly it does, like lossless and Dolby Atmos or whatever or something like that. I remember the exact details. But you still have these weird things where this stuff is still kind of in flux and, you know, getting better or whatever. But I don't know. Next week I'm going to experiment with this because I'm going to. I'll be on the road. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:17]:
So I got a. I think they're Logitech headsets. Nice. Nice headsets where you can use Bluetooth, you can use their proprietary dongle, which would get, you know, would be better for latency, whatever. But you can also just use a USB C. USB C cable, which is what I'm going to use, obviously, because I want it to actually just work. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:16:34]:
And there are that. Come to think of it, there are a number of Bluetooth dongles that do aptx. So I think Microsoft's probably just presuming, oh, you're going to connect something to the USB port and.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:42]:
Yeah, I don't know what to do.

Leo Laporte [01:16:43]:
If you care about it that much. If you care that much.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:45]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Leo, you said that you were running parallels desktop 26.

Leo Laporte [01:16:52]:
Well, I saw your article and I immediately downloaded.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:54]:
Okay. And you noticed all kinds of changes?

Leo Laporte [01:16:57]:
No, but I do have the updates notes here.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:01]:
And what is. What is. What if you could find an item on that list that you think would benefit you as an individual?

Leo Laporte [01:17:07]:
Brings updated icons across the board on Macs running Mac os. It's really for Tahoe. It's for the latest.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:12]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:12]:
So they number at 26 for match Apple.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:15]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:16]:
Mac OS 26.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:17]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:20]:
There's a long list of what was removed, including shared Bluetooth functionality utility.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:26]:
Bluetooth, that's great.

Leo Laporte [01:17:27]:
It says to connect a Bluetooth device to this virtual machine, consider using a USB Bluetooth dongle. So I was right.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:34]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:17:35]:
Yeah, it doesn't seem like it.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:37]:
Most of it is for businesses.

Leo Laporte [01:17:39]:
The thing that annoys me about both Parallels and Fusion, which is VMware, is they do a yearly release so they can get money out of you.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:49]:
That's right, yep. You pay for this by the year? Pretty much, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:55]:
So they don't want to do a.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:56]:
Subscription in that way. It's almost worse than that in a way because if you stuck on the last version, you still have to pay, you know, you still got to pay. You know what I mean? You still have to pay to keep going. But this is.

Leo Laporte [01:18:07]:
So far they haven't asked me for money. I did update it and they haven't asked me for anything else.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:11]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:18:12]:
Okay, we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:13]:
Yeah, yeah. So look, the hard work there has been done in a way, just getting virtualization working on an M basis.

Leo Laporte [01:18:21]:
Well, this is why I'm running Parallels. You know, Fusion does have a free tier, but Parallels, seeing everybody agreed, was the best on that.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:29]:
And they also, you know, now that Microsoft is finally Putting out official ISOs for non insider builds of Windows 11. Nice. You know, it's nice.

Leo Laporte [01:18:41]:
So there you go. I'm updating my Parallels tools right now. That's very exciting.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:46]:
That's the thing I don't like about the most is all the extra stuff. Yeah, there's always like updates for something.

Leo Laporte [01:18:50]:
Oh yeah. First you update it and then.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:53]:
Yeah, it's like I just want to use the damn thing. Like, oh, you got to update the tools. You want to use the tools.

Leo Laporte [01:18:58]:
Can't do it without tools. Yeah, but the tools do give you some functionality.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:03]:
Those tools are like power toys is on Windows. If you look through them like it's a crazy good collection of things.

Leo Laporte [01:19:07]:
Kind of need it.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:08]:
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool.

Leo Laporte [01:19:10]:
Anyway, I'm happy.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:11]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:19:12]:
As long as they don't want more money, I'm happy.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:15]:
Well, eventually they will want more money.

Leo Laporte [01:19:17]:
Eventually they're gonna.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:18]:
That's their right there, you know, that's not.

Leo Laporte [01:19:20]:
Hey, they're a business, you know, it's not a charity, it's a business, it's not a charity. You're watching as you probably figured this out Windows Weekly, but what you're puzzled by is how much weight Richard lost over the last week. But that's. No, that's not Richard. That's Just a svelte. Chris Hoffman, formerly of Windows Insider, now of WindowsRead Me. The newsletter has moved to WindowsRead Me.

Chris Hoffman [01:19:46]:
That's right. So please subscribe. I think it's a lot of fun and it will.

Leo Laporte [01:19:54]:
So this is your chance. What would I get if I subscribe to Windows? I do.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:58]:
What do I have to do to get you into this newsletter right now?

Leo Laporte [01:20:01]:
Well, besides an email once a week, what would I get? What would be in the email?

Chris Hoffman [01:20:06]:
It's me. I think it's fun. It's. I think it's exactly. No, it's exactly this type of energy. And I think it's something that is missing on the modern Internet. A lot of the time it's just kind of this old school tech blog energy. I mean, we're having it right now on this.

Chris Hoffman [01:20:19]:
I do miss this podcast. It's not viral headlines, it's not, et cetera, SEO. It's not, I'm not. There's no advertising in the newsletter, Chris.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:27]:
Somewhere in the background your TV is turned on and it's, it's running static and it says, chris, come into the AI. Come into the warm embrace of slop. We'll get it mostly right, we promise.

Chris Hoffman [01:20:42]:
Well, I mean, especially with the Internet now, it's becoming more and more AI, which is, you know, I'm not against generative AI. There's a place for it, you can use it yourself. But the entire Internet shouldn't just be pages and pages of other people's AI generations generated content. I mean, I agree, or you know, that, that, that go generate your own AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:59]:
This is one of the best things.

Leo Laporte [01:21:01]:
About AI is it's going to drive people towards stuff like you do, which.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:05]:
We will now call artisanal handmade meeting.

Chris Hoffman [01:21:09]:
Right, right. So it is exactly. That is artisanal handmade. Chris Hoffman content. And, you know, I, I also, you know, write for PC World narrative publications. But this is me directly. No ads. Straight to you in your inbox.

Chris Hoffman [01:21:22]:
I'm doing a lot of cool retro fun stuff. I'm making it personal. I think it's exactly like twit. You know, the conceptually, it's, it's human. This, this is human. This is not algorithmic. This is not AI. This is not a bunch of ads.

Chris Hoffman [01:21:37]:
This is not a bunch of clickbait. This is like real people. This is. Hopefully you're having fun. If you're watching this, you enjoy it, right? I mean, so that's exactly what I, you know, thank you for putting it up.

Leo Laporte [01:21:47]:
So that's the first One is out now.

Chris Hoffman [01:21:50]:
I want it to be like fun. Like I had to bring this kind of fun retro idea. If you scroll down a little bit, you can see, you know, I. I just actually really want it to be fun. Like, I mean, how long did it.

Leo Laporte [01:22:03]:
Take you to do that? Ascii hello me in notepad.

Chris Hoffman [01:22:07]:
Not long. Because if you just go around, you'll find. No, there are old like websites that people are using to make this like 20 stuff to like 20 or 15 years years ago. Right. You can go find those old websites and go boom, boom.

Leo Laporte [01:22:19]:
It's actually a new one I just saw in Hacker News. It just came out to do ascii. ASCII art.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:25]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:22:25]:
Oh, good, nice. Black Viper. There's a name I haven't heard in all these years.

Chris Hoffman [01:22:30]:
Yes. So it's not just like, you know, me talking about, you know, tips. It's like I'm reminiscing about. I remember when I. I use the Black Viper service guide my Windows xpc and like, why that isn't really necessary anymore. And I'm Thank God there's like this whole retro nostalgia thing I'm doing.

Leo Laporte [01:22:47]:
Oh, you know what? This is a good subject. How to bloat your PC in the nowadays modern.

Chris Hoffman [01:22:53]:
And it's. And so that is exact. And that's like, it's not. There's no links out, there's no ads, there's no SEO, there's no AI slop. It's just me actual advice based on all the laptops. I've been reviewing everything I've done, all the like, feedback I've got, like, there are scripts out there and some of them are probably fine. And like GitHub is full of like 800 different scripts from who knows who.

Leo Laporte [01:23:15]:
Right.

Chris Hoffman [01:23:15]:
I can't stand knows what they do to your PC and you shouldn't run them and you don't need to. And this.

Leo Laporte [01:23:22]:
Did you do this on Hands on Windows? I think you did. How to make your Windows look more like a Mac.

Chris Hoffman [01:23:29]:
And look at that. So that I. That is a official Microsoft theme that leaked for Windows XP. That's 100% authentic.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:37]:
Was it called Liquid Glass?

Chris Hoffman [01:23:38]:
Theme.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:38]:
Theme.

Chris Hoffman [01:23:38]:
It's called Candy. They. There was an internal theme and I.

Leo Laporte [01:23:44]:
Like how you end.

Chris Hoffman [01:23:47]:
I'm trying to have fun with it. There's no world where any like SEO site would let you do. Just scroll down a tiny bit more because I. Oh, there's more.

Leo Laporte [01:23:55]:
Oh, there's more. Wait, there's. Wait, there's more.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:58]:
Let's see.

Chris Hoffman [01:23:58]:
So there I'M trying to have like a lot of.

Leo Laporte [01:24:04]:
That's awesome.

Chris Hoffman [01:24:05]:
This is an energy that I think is missing on the Mars largely. Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:11]:
A lot of fun and useful in my newsfeed. I will see things from. It'll be randomly generated site names. It'll be like rai Ks. And it's like Microsoft does something, something about something. And you're like, you know, this thing is just an AI generated nothing.

Leo Laporte [01:24:28]:
I know what happens though. You say, wait a minute, that's my article.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:31]:
Yeah. Well, that's, that's, that was my first introduction to perplexity, by the way. But yes, it's.

Leo Laporte [01:24:36]:
Wait a minute, I wrote that.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:38]:
Yeah. You're like, oh, that's fun. I'm free of the five sources for this answer. That's interesting. Yep. That's. That's a weird moment.

Leo Laporte [01:24:46]:
Yeah, I bet. Anyway, congratulations. It's @WindowsRead me.

Chris Hoffman [01:24:51]:
That's right.

Leo Laporte [01:24:52]:
In beautiful ASCII. And you can subscribe or read it on substack. And there's a paid and free version. Thank you, Chris, for filling in for Richard. Richard will be back next week. He's on his.

Chris Hoffman [01:25:01]:
Great to be here.

Leo Laporte [01:25:02]:
He's on his travels as usual.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:03]:
Thanks.

Leo Laporte [01:25:04]:
Now we resume Windows Weekly, which is already in progress with a look at Microsoft 365. I shall push my button. Apparently I left my camera on for a while and I was eating my lunch. And I apologize to all who saw that. It's disgusting. It's like feeding time at the zoo.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:24]:
How dare you eat like a human being.

Leo Laporte [01:25:26]:
Well, I don't know that people know realize I eat live rats for dinner, so.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:30]:
Ah, well, that would do it.

Leo Laporte [01:25:31]:
That. That might have shocked them, you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:32]:
But Ozzy had went out really on a high note. So I mean, I think anything is possible.

Leo Laporte [01:25:37]:
Hey, don't knock Mr. Osborne.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:39]:
I'm not.

Leo Laporte [01:25:40]:
He was a great, great man. I love Ozzy. Sad to have lost him.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:45]:
I agree with you.

Leo Laporte [01:25:45]:
But at least he puts into a rabid bat.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:48]:
Yeah, moving on. A mistake anyhow.

Leo Laporte [01:25:51]:
Yes, he says that, by the way, he lost his head. He thought it was mean to bite it.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:55]:
He thought it was a. Why would anyone have a live bat anyway? Whatever. Okay, so.

Leo Laporte [01:26:02]:
Oh, what a story.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:03]:
We can't explain these things.

Leo Laporte [01:26:04]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:05]:
One of the reasons I don't use Microsoft Word anymore is that. Well, it was harassing me to save to OneDrive. And the reason it wanted me to do that was because then I could use autosave. And I looked at this objectively and said, you could do autosave. To any location in the file system. What does OneDrive have to do with this? And whatever. But now, out of the blue, and I have no idea that maybe this might be a regulatory antitrust thing. They didn't say that, but I wouldn't be surprised if the EU was somehow behind this.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:34]:
But they are going to support autosave and also just by default to any cloud service. Right. And so if you use, you know, iCloud, Dropbox, Google, whatever, it should work. And it's not available, or I didn't. It's not available in Stable, so I don't have it yet. But. But the version of Word that will likely come out next month in Stable does this. And then they're going to add it to PowerPoint and Excel as well.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:59]:
So the way that works today is by default, it wants to save to your documents folder in OneDrive, and that's what it's set to. It will just do that and you can, I think autosave is also enabled, but now you're going to be able to change that and retain autosave. So you can have a default save location that's not there in OneDrive. It could be in some other cloud service. I'm really curious if this will work with Synology Drive, which is technically a cloud service, sort of private cloud service. We'll see. Or if you could somehow get it to work with just any arbitrary location in your file system, which to me would be great, or whatever.

Chris Hoffman [01:27:37]:
I do use OneDrive, but I was really excited that it will just save the file by default. Like, I. I've had multiple situations. I open a Word document, I get in the zone, I write for two hours, I look up at the top of the window, unsaved document. Oh, my God. Or I know it's like cached offline, but it freaks me out.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:53]:
I do this a lot and I'll sort of reflexively just control S. Control S. And then I guess sometimes I forget because sometimes I'll do the same thing. I'm writing, hit Control S. It comes up a save as dialog. I'm like, wait, what? Like, did I not save this? Is that possible? Yeah, yeah, that's possible. If you've ever used a Mac or an Apple device. This is something Apple's been doing with iCloud for a while, actually, probably from the very beginning.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:14]:
Right when Mobile me became icloud. Apple's own apps did this. No, I know, I hate it. But it's an attempt to get by the problem that he just described.

Leo Laporte [01:28:23]:
Yeah, I Understand why they do it, but I hate it.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:26]:
Okay. No, I kind of do too, honestly. But if it's auto saving, one thing you can do, go to the top of the app, just rename it. That's cool. The chances that I wanted it to be where Microsoft wanted it to be to by default are 0. So I suppose even if you are going to continue using OneDrive, you could just change the save location to anywhere else in OneDrive. Right. Which gets by two problems.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:48]:
One is the obvious one, the root of documents is not where I want things saved necessarily, but also B, it's tied to that folder backup feature they auto enable on so many people in Windows 11. And that was part of my problem where I was like, I don't, I don't want this. Like I have a system for. I do save to the cloud all the time. Like, why can't I arbitrarily just save this Anywhere else in OneDrive? So I believe I don't have it yet, but I believe you could just do that now. Right. So I have a paul folder in the root of OneDrive and I go from there and I could be like, paul documents. That's where I want it.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:23]:
And then as you create new folders files, they'll autosave there instead. Right. So it's this. Actually this is a pretty big step for a company that was kind of batting it down the hatches there on that kind of thing. So that's good. And then the next thing that Microsoft people can complain about because you know they're going to NR already is the OneNote for Windows 10 app, which was originally like the OneNote app or the OneNote MX app or whatever, the Store app version. Right. Which started out okay, but got pretty great.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:58]:
And then Microsoft actually got rid of the. I think it was OneNote 2016 was going to be the final version on the desktop. And then late in the game they were like, actually we got to go back to the desktop version. So we're going to deprecate this. When Windows 11 came out, it was no longer included in the OSS. I don't know if it was from day one or it's some version of Windows 11 and now it is going to go out of service or out of support at the middle of October, October 14th. So in the interim years they have made OneNote 2019 and then I guess OneNote probably 2024. I guess I don't use OneNote anymore, but I assume that's in there where all the new features occur, where stuff is happening.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:42]:
It's going to be where the copilot stuff happens. Sorry. So it's a better experience than it used to be. But there was something about the store app I really liked for a little while. It was a poster child for what was possible with that platform, which was kind of limiting and annoying in many ways. But OneDrive was a good. Or OneNote rather was one of the good ones.

Chris Hoffman [01:31:07]:
And now it's a poster child for what happened to that platform.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:09]:
Yes, it is. It is. Yeah. No, that's true. So that's gone. All right. Now we have a bunch of AI stuff that is not Microsoft AI stuff. So I'm going to try to move through this pretty quickly.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:26]:
But I just want to mention these things because some of it is just kind of interesting. Out on the side. Apple is rumored to be looking at maybe buying Perplexity or Mistral. There's so much stuff going on at Apple right now with AI. It's like we'll see where it lands, but. But there's any one of 21 outcomes that could occur there and we'll see what happens. But one of those things is now talking to Google about a version of Gemini that would run on Apple's private cloud. What is the private cloud? Compute servers only for Siri.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:58]:
For that new conversational Siri, they can't seem to get off the ground. And so I don't know, we'll probably find out who won that little battle in the next couple of months. We'll find out. Perplexity, which came out of nowhere with. But it's still right now kind of the best AI browser, if that makes any sense. You know, it's like, okay, but like, what's the model here? I mean, obviously you can pay for Perplexity. There's a Perplexity Pro and probably a Max or whatever that's 200 bucks a month. But now they offer a $5 per month Comet plus subscription tied to the browser.

Leo Laporte [01:32:31]:
You've seen all the security issues with that browser now, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:34]:
Yeah, but they fix them as they come up. It's like Microsoft software. It's fine.

Leo Laporte [01:32:39]:
I actually deleted it. I thought. I don't. But that part of it was because it's Agentic. And this is going to be a problem with all of the Agentic browsers.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:47]:
Yeah, this is the issue that Brave raised. It was like, look, this is going to be a problem.

Leo Laporte [01:32:51]:
Even Brave is doing one.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:53]:
Yeah. And so Anthropic yesterday came out with an extension for Cloud, Claude, whatever for Chrome, which means it will Also work on any Chromium based browser, but they're really limiting who can have access to it. So you have to be one of their max customers. That's a 200 bucks per month thing. And it's only like 1,000 customers at first. And they're really looking for people because they're kind of pulling an Apple here where they're like, look, there's security privacy issues here. We know that we're working to fix them before this goes out broadly, we want to make sure this thing is safe. And honestly that's pretty good messaging.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:31]:
So we'll see if they get it there. But. But Anthropic is kind of like Mistral too, actually. It's kind of setting itself up to be like the Apple of AI and not like Apple is an AI, but the place where privacy and security are respected and that kind of thing. So we'll see. But I think we're going to see over time extensions for every AI and every browser, because of course we are. Right, right.

Leo Laporte [01:33:54]:
Yeah. So now you have a choice. Do you have an AI browser or do you have an extension in an existing browser? Is it that you want to do?

Paul Thurrott [01:34:02]:
Yeah, I think mix and match. This is such an obvious thing in a way, but I think that's going to be the future. All this stuff, Notebook LM is that thing that kind of exploded. And it was the first thing Google did with AI in the post kind of Bard Gemini world, where it was like, holy, this is actually really cool. And so last October, I think it was, they did the audio overview feature where they could turn an article into a podcast, like an audio podcast with two hosts and they kind of banter about the article or whatever. I took a Stephen Sinofsky blog post from 2012, I think it was 8,000 words, fed it into this thing and it was fairly amazing just to listen to this now since then they have come up with video overviews which are not yet there will be, but not yet like avatars of hosts. It's more like watching a presentation where you're seeing like a slide deck or whatever. Instead you're not seeing people, but it's the same sort of thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:54]:
And of course these two things were US English only forever. Right. You know, when they were first released. But now both are available in over 80 languages, each kind of amazing what they're doing. It's astonishing. And this is what, this is where Google scale kind of really helps because that's amazing. Yeah, pretty good. And then AI mode, which I think everyone hates, but I have to say I find myself using it.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:20]:
It is also available in over 180 countries now in search. Sorry, Chris, we're gonna.

Chris Hoffman [01:35:26]:
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:28]:
I mean, you're gonna spend AI mode.

Chris Hoffman [01:35:31]:
Not AI mode per se, but, you know, I think maybe not quite in here so much, but in general, journalists don't like AI mode for obvious reasons. It's breaking the business model. But like the web is so bad that actually conceptually using AI tools to search in some way and summarize content actually can work pretty well a lot of the time. And it's hard to say as a journalist who's, you know, industry is in trouble.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:56]:
Gutted right now.

Chris Hoffman [01:35:58]:
Yes, but I mean, as a, you know. But so. But often I think journalists. I was in a private community the other day and people were saying everyone hates AI mode. And my journalist friends, it's the true. But like, do. Do they like. Does the average person really hate AI mode? I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:14]:
I don't honestly. You're going there to get an answer right?

Chris Hoffman [01:36:18]:
Sometimes it's wrong, but that's not matter.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:21]:
Right? That would be a problem. But for example, there are all these AI developer tools built into developer IDEs and then just into AIs. And you could run anthropic side by side with Visual Studio maybe. Or actually that's the thing behind GitHub Copilot. Anyway, whatever. But the traditional way to do this stuff when you were looking for the answer to a question would be to Google it and say, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I usually type in something like the name of the framework, the language, and then what it is I'm looking for. And then you rifle through what is mostly Stack overflow results and try to find one that does it.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:58]:
And now Chrome at least, and I think Chrome at least. Anyway, I'm sure others do this, that AI overview and you get this kind of expandable summary at the top. So it's done that work for you. Which is kind of, to me is the point of AI save you time and is it always right? No, but if it's something like I'm trying to find the WinUI 3 version of the whatever control from WPF. It's like, this is it. Here are the things, here's the link to the Microsoft documentation. It's like, yeah, that's what I was looking for. It's pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:27]:
I agree with you. When I said that I didn't mean myself. I think for some reason the overall vibe on this is kind of negative and I understand the impact on publishers, content creators, obviously, but. But I don't know, like my. Use my. When I see it, rather than be outraged by it, I kind of look at it and like, oh, yeah, there you go. That's what I wanted in the first place. Hey.

Leo Laporte [01:37:47]:
Incidentally, we mentioned Parallels doesn't support Bluetooth. I think it might be a little bit of a problem for Phone Link because Windows says you can't.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:58]:
Oh, geez. Right? Yep. You did that.

Leo Laporte [01:38:01]:
Without Bluetooth, you can't link to your phone. And so I think that's something people should pay attention to because I was using Phone Link with Parallels before.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:11]:
Oh, so that actually was disabled and it previously worked, Is that what you're saying?

Leo Laporte [01:38:16]:
Yeah, well, it's a different phone, so it may be that. Do I need Bluetooth only to set it up, you think? I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:23]:
I'll play with Bluetooth pretty much. Period.

Leo Laporte [01:38:26]:
That's what I think. And I think the parallel.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:28]:
Okay, wait a minute. No, no, hold on a second.

Leo Laporte [01:38:30]:
Didn't it say I have to have a chance dongle to make this work?

Paul Thurrott [01:38:32]:
A dongle? Oh, boy.

Leo Laporte [01:38:35]:
Anyway, I don't want to. I didn't mean to hijack you. I just. This just came up, so I'm wondering.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:42]:
Interesting then. So I've been looking at AI web browsers. I got invited to check out something I guess I had heard of. I don't remember this, but Norton is still around Norton. Like Corel is still around Norton. Yeah. And they're making something called Neo, which is an AI web browser.

Leo Laporte [01:39:01]:
It's pretty terrible whether or not intel bought them, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:39:07]:
No, Symantec back in the day. And then Symantec split up and then merged with whatever. So Symantec, or it's now. What's the name of the company? It's something like. It's got a real gen, I think is the name of the company gentech or something. And they own a lot of littler companies that you might remember from back in the day. So in the security space is stuff like Avast and other avg, these kind of classic security companies, kind of like whatever Corel's called now owns, not just Corel, but all of the former Borland apps. They own a bunch of these, like Paint Shop Pro and all these.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:41]:
They're like little holding companies.

Leo Laporte [01:39:43]:
It's the last days of these things. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:46]:
Milk it, whatever, all the way down. Anyway, I didn't like it, so I'm not going to talk about it too much, but maybe it gets better. And I don't really care because I'm never going to use it, so whatever. I just felt obligated to try it.

Chris Hoffman [01:39:58]:
This is just the usual AI hype. It's like, oh, AI web browsers. Let's say we made one.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:04]:
Yeah. Every once in a while though, right? So most of this stuff is pretty tame or not interesting or it doesn't work yet or something. And a lot of it's like screen scrape level stuff where it literally moves the mouse cursor around and does stuff in the webpage. You're like, okay, that's kind of interesting, but this is going to be more interesting when it's a controlling it on the back end, something like that. But every once in a while I will do something in one of these browsers where I'm like, okay, that's pretty good. Where I was comparing speakers in Comet actually and then later came up and said, hey, remember the thing you were talking about? Well, it's on sale or whatever. And you're like, no, that's okay. Pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:43]:
It remembers what you were talking about. The summary stuff is pretty big, pretty obvious or whatever, pretty common now. But it's, you know, it works well, I don't know. We'll see. The big change is going to be later though, because it's going to be. It's not going to be about clicking on things and talking. Well, you'll talk to it, I guess. But I think website's going to be really de emphasized.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:06]:
Like the content will still be there but it will be accessed more programmatically.

Leo Laporte [01:41:09]:
Yeah. We had a guy from Rich Scrint from Common Crawl on and he's been promoting and I think he's right that sites have to stop thinking about SEO Search engine optimization.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:23]:
That's right.

Leo Laporte [01:41:24]:
And start thinking about AIO or as.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:26]:
I would call it, A, E, I, O, U.

Leo Laporte [01:41:29]:
But if you, if you're, let's say, selling running shoes, you have to make sure that when somebody does an AI search for running shoes that you show up.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:39]:
That's right. And a lot of companies, oh no.

Leo Laporte [01:41:41]:
Don'T scrape me, I don't want to be in that.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:43]:
That's not scrap. No, it's programmatic. See, we're thinking about this the wrong way. Like the goal here is that if someone goes to your site, you have a pretty site that works, whatever, it's fine. But if someone says like I want to, I'm going to use an AI agent two seconds from now and you want that to be working with that thing on the back end, like you definitely Want that? Because otherwise you're just. That's the way people are just going to do that. Like, they'll be walking from their car to their house and say, just buy me the best pair of shoes of whatever kind. Let's do it increasingly.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:09]:
And it will show up tomorrow. You're not even going to think about it. You'll just say it. You know, you gotta be there, buy some shoes. Doesn't work today.

Leo Laporte [01:42:18]:
You know, my size.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:19]:
Yeah. And then you get these clown shoes, you know, because it's AI and AI doesn't work half the time.

Leo Laporte [01:42:26]:
I hallucinated clown shoes.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:28]:
What is this? Like. Yeah, that's going to be like, look, we all do this today with the Amazon bot. Like, it's like, hey, this is delivery here. It's like, what is it? It's like an Amazon package. And I'm like, what? And I'm like, okay. And then Stephanie will say something like, did you order something? I'm like, maybe.

Leo Laporte [01:42:41]:
What do you think?

Paul Thurrott [01:42:42]:
I don't know. Probably. I don't know. And then you open. You're like, oh, yeah, yeah, that thing I ordered that. That's bad. I clicked on something to get it right. I mean, when I just say it, like, I say all kinds of things out loud.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:52]:
How am I supposed to remember this? Gonna walk in, like a new car is gonna be sitting out front in the driveway. It's like, where's that thing come. Oh, yeah, I was drunk.

Leo Laporte [01:42:58]:
It's got a bow on it.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:00]:
Yeah, I ordered. It's on my AMX card. Great.

Leo Laporte [01:43:03]:
Nice. That's the nice thing about an AMEX card. There's no limit.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:06]:
There's no limit.

Leo Laporte [01:43:07]:
Buy a yacht if you really, hey.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:08]:
If it wasn't gold, I wouldn't have got a nice car. I don't know. So, yeah. Anyway.

Leo Laporte [01:43:13]:
Okay, moving along.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:16]:
Yep. I don't think this is anything today, but Proton makes an AI chatbot of their own called Lumo, which, you know, you can access from their other services, but it's also a standalone chatbot and they're doing what some other companies are doing. And this is the part I think that's kind of interesting, which is giving you a choice of open models and protecting your privacy against the owners of those models, like Apple does with Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT. Right. And right now, kitty cat. It's a cute little cat. And it's. It's limited and it's small and it's.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:51]:
It uses like the small models. Right? It uses like, yeah, Bristol small three, you know, whatever. So they just got. But they're also kind of doing our Eurostack thing, which is what? Meaning they're trying to, you know, loose. Lessen reliance on US Based big tech. Right. And so, you know, they host in Germany or. Well, Germany, yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:13]:
But, you know, European countries, et cetera, et cetera. So this thing is, you know, it's going to be limited at first. Of course, it's like anything else. You can use it for free. You can pay them and get more or whatever. But they did just.

Leo Laporte [01:44:26]:
Even the conversation is end to end.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:29]:
Yeah, yeah, they do all the right stuff. It's. It's proton like they do it right. It's open source. You can look at it. If you don't believe it's safe, you can look at the code. And I think there's a future here, but it's not there today. So this 1.1 release comes, I don't know, two or three months after the initial release.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:46]:
It's a dramatic improvement in both sophistication and performance. But it's still little AI, I guess, but I think it's going to get there. I think this is it, this kind of thing. I think this is interesting. If we can get people to kind of accept the fact that they're probably going to be paying if they weren't really good quality. And then at that point it's like, well, you want to go with a company you can actually trust and an AI you can trust, et cetera. I think there's. DuckDuckGo is probably going to get there.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:16]:
Brave will try opera. Well, I'm not sure what they're doing, but this notion of we're going to give you the models you want to. Right. But we're also going to protect you from the. The big tech predator, you know, that's behind the model. It's not a bad. It's not a bad business model. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:45:35]:
You're a big proton fan. Yeah, no, they're in the position now maybe moving out of Switzerland because of.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:42]:
Yeah, because of the. Because they might change the laws there to be a little less private. So like. Yeah, we're not doing that for them.

Leo Laporte [01:45:49]:
Good on them.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:49]:
Incredible. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:45:51]:
That's what I expect from a bunch of physicists.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:53]:
Yes. Right. They're going to take. And we're taking our CERN with us. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:46:02]:
All right.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:03]:
Chris has a. Oh, no.

Leo Laporte [01:46:05]:
A rant.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:05]:
Controversial talk.

Leo Laporte [01:46:06]:
Should I get the gong?

Chris Hoffman [01:46:08]:
Yeah. I'm going to take us off topic again, I guess, but I don't know, like I was writing about this Yesterday. And I know you've probably talked about Windows 2030 a bunch, but it's just like, like there's this AI in general is. I, I, I feel like everyone is getting it wrong. And maybe not here, but in general, like, it's either, like, okay, well, it's either going to replace everyone's job tomorrow or it can't do anything. And it's like, well, neither of those is really true.

Leo Laporte [01:46:33]:
I 100% agree.

Chris Hoffman [01:46:34]:
Oh, yeah, neither of those is really true and you know it. I think there's just too much hype because there's so much hype that even I want to just come out and, and, you know, yell about AI laptops. And I did.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:43]:
Did.

Chris Hoffman [01:46:43]:
Because there's too much hype. But like, if you could, if there was not that much hype and you could just discover, like, oh, look at, I just actually got access to Comet. And it's like, kind of cool and kind of like it's actually plotting. It's like, do the same Google Maps. It's taking four minutes. Like, okay, clicking that. It's actually, it's interesting. It's not going to, you know, replace.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:00]:
This is what I mean by program. But that's, you know, once it can actually just control that site instead of it.

Chris Hoffman [01:47:06]:
Like, you know, but so, like, if there wasn't this much hype and you could just, just discover this weird technology and that no one was talking about, you think maybe this is kind of cool. This is interesting. I could play with this. Like, it's interesting to play with Comet. Like, technology is, in some ways, it's actually pretty fun to play with, like, chatbots. It's pretty fun to play with, like, Comet. It's pretty fun to play with an image creator. This can be interesting, but there's too much hype.

Chris Hoffman [01:47:29]:
But like, the Windows 2030 stuff, I really was bothered by the, Especially the pull quote of like, oh, you know, it's mice and keyboards are going to be alien in five years. And it's like, that's such a bad way of communicating with your audience, you know? Well, I mean, it actually reminds me of Windows 8. It's like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna be a voice first. Just like, we were touched first. It's like, well, so, I mean, people are gonna want, you know, again, it's actually like a bad, it makes people bristle. It's like, I don't want that AI thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:00]:
No, but okay, but hold on.

Leo Laporte [01:48:01]:
And by the way, 71%, the most recent poll I saw of People are afraid of and dislike AI. And that's exactly why. Right. They sold the wrong story.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:10]:
Hold on. But Microsoft's not going to make the mistake of Windows 8 again, right? Like these things will be additive. They'll just be, you know, if we're going to talk to our. Like when Microsoft added Cortana to Windows 10, it was like, well, maybe if there was a voice way of making this work, I could see that. And then there were these other things they did in Windows 10, like the live tiles where I was like, no, because you're hiding that. The point of this is it has to be seen to be useful. So there were some things that work and some things that didn't and obviously Cortana has disappeared. But I think that, yeah, that pull quote that you're talking about is the thing that freaked everyone out.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:49]:
And by everyone, I mean us, like people our age and older who are old timers and have been doing this forever and you'll pull my keyboard from my cold, stiff hand or whatever the phrase is. And the point isn't so much. Well, it's literally not that voice is going to replace keyboard mouse, just like touch didn't, but rather that it's something that will be there when you need it. And so I think who they're really speaking to is a younger generation. And I think in one of those two videos they referenced this generation where these people don't use devices that have keyboards and mice and they don't, you know, they don't understand. And this to them is foreign, whereas this to me is a lifeline. But when does. God.

Chris Hoffman [01:49:39]:
I'm sorry, Sorry. But the funny thing is in the pull quote they said Gen Z, which gen Z is 13 to 29. So the idea that a 29 year old is going to find a keyboard foreign in five years is crazy. So obviously they're talking about actually a younger generation. Gen Alpha, fine. But it's funny because the same companies will say one day, oh, you got to be a prompt engineer and be really good at typing the precise things. And you go to be a good prompt engineer. And then the next day it's like, well, you're really just going to ramble at your computer.

Chris Hoffman [01:50:07]:
You're really not even going to need a keyboard. It's like, well, which is it? And also, you know, guess what, guess what? Even OpenAI is going to come up with their new device. They're working with Jony Ivan and people are going to come with new devices. But even if there's a new device and everyone loves it. People are still going to want PCs to be PCs and to have keyboards and have mice and I have a smartphone and I love it, but I need my, my PC to be a PC. So Microsoft's in a bit of a, between a rock and a hard place. But also like, I think they would have a better time selling AI to people if they didn't say insane things like this.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:36]:
Yeah, but I. So this is that competing masters thing. Like who? Look, I'm 58 years old, right? Is that true? Yeah, 58. So I have to always do the math on that. And look, I, I am going to be using a keyboard and a mouse or a touchpad or whatever for the rest of my life. And I came up in the age of computers. Home computers, personal computers, literally, PCs, Windows, whatever. This is my thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:07]:
I'm less comfortable on a phone than I am on a PC. I can't type on a phone. I can type a nut job on a PC, but I can't on a phone. But they're not speaking to me. They don't care what I, I'm going to be retired when this thing comes through. So who cares what I think? And also look, Microsoft, there's no Gen Z or younger people listening to Microsoft talk about Windows 2030. Anyway, who cares? This is for Wall street, this is for stock price, this is for investors. We're not missing this boat.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:38]:
But there's a real knee jerk thing that can occur where you see that and you have that response. Not you. I mean where one like Mary Jo did this. We talked about this last week a little bit jokingly. It's like, no, nope, no, screw that. Stop touching notepad. Stop changing things. And it's like, yeah, I mean I hear you.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:55]:
But the fundamental problem with Windows 8 wasn't the idea or the touch thing or whatever it was that. It was just so one way they optimized this thing for touch in a world where everyone had normal computers. And it was like, guys, you're screwing us all over here. This is the thing. I think they're very careful to be different about now because they saw what happened. Well, no, they are. Keyboard and mice don't go away, you know, not when you, sometimes you need a big screen, you need to type like a person. But the natural language thing will be there too and the computer will have.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:34]:
We've already gone from a world where like, you know, we have webcams, right? We have IR sensors for Windows Low, we have, have integrated microphones and whatever. Computers today have presence Sensors, but they also have these other capabilities. It's kind of a goofy term, but it's like room sensing kind of things you can sense when someone's looking over someone's shoulder and dim the screen so they don't steal your ideas or whatever. And so what they're really talking about is an expansion of that stuff that you will interact more in this kind of natural way. Even people who are kind of cynical about this might have experience by now. This thing where you talk to ChatGPT or whatever it is out in the world, you walk around, you talk, it talks back to you. You have this conversation and then you do this thing, you're like, wow, okay. Actually this is completely different than anything I've ever done and it's actually pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:24]:
Give it a chance. But I don't think while you're doing that, someone's taking the keyboard away from your desk. It's like it's know that's always going to be there. It's a PC.

Chris Hoffman [01:53:36]:
But I, yeah, so, and, and, and like I, I wrote about that. I actually, maybe it's just because I'm like you and I don't really want to type 10 paragraphs on my phone. It's, it's forever like, but like, especially with AI in the phone, it's like rambling with the, the voice to text works so well. But like, you know, it could work well in a computer. But like, yeah, you know, it's just, this is just like, this is just like the AI hype in general. Right? It's either. It's either going to be nothing or it's going to entirely replace the keyboard and mouse. And it's just, I mean, go back.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:05]:
And watch the original Copilot plus PC announcement if you want to see a complete disconnect with reality and then compare it to what actually happened. And it's like, guys, come on, recall. Yeah, well, I mean, just the way they did. As soon as they started talking about that, I was like, oh, I can already tell how this is going to go. And it was way worse than I thought too. But you just tell. They have a certain cluelessness about how they present themselves or whatever. I sort of vaguely appreciate they're even making videos.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:36]:
You know, honestly, this is something. They stopped doing this for a long time. They haven't done a Vision video. I can't even. Decades. It's been a long time. So the fact that they're thinking about the future with regards to Windows is sort of a good idea or good to me or positive or whatever. Although given all the updates we get every month, there are times when I wish they would forget it existed, honestly.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:57]:
But.

Chris Hoffman [01:55:00]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:00]:
Anyway, I don't think you or I have to worry about keyboards ever disappearing.

Leo Laporte [01:55:03]:
But thank goodness carpal tunnel is real.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:09]:
Yeah, I know. That's why I use these crazy keyboards.

Leo Laporte [01:55:13]:
You're watching and I'm so glad you are, my friends. You are watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrock, Chris Hoffman filling in for Richard Campbell. We're glad you're here. We do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live and many of you are. Right now I have 369 of you in our club. Twit Discord on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, Kik.

Leo Laporte [01:55:37]:
We like having you watch live. We appreciate it. But of course you can also watch after the fact on the website Twit TV, WW on YouTube where there's a dedicated channel to the video. Great way to share clips and the best thing to do, subscribe on your favorite podcast player and you get it automatically the minute that we're done on Wednesday. Back to the show. Let's talk Developers. Developers, Developers.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:03]:
Yeah. So I've mentioned repeatedly that in many ways GitHub Copilot is one of the better examples of how AI can be useful. But I'm also me. So it's also one of the ways that has annoyed the hell out of me using a computer, like on a fairly daily basis. And the reason is, is it does things that are pretty great. You can type the beginning of a function or a method or whatever, or type a line of code, whatever it is, and it just auto fills sometimes 20, 30 lines of code. You look at it, you're like, yeah, that was what I was going to type. That's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:43]:
It's amazing. It can be amazing. There are other times though, where I'm maybe typing some line of code and it's trying to anticipate what it is I'm going to type. So I'll type like the name of an object dot, and then it will be the name of like a property or a method that is associated with that thing. And I type the first letter and it autofills some other thing and I'm like, nope, that is not what I want. And then sometimes getting that thing back is a little tedious. And so I'm apparently not the only person that has complained about this, because in the latest version of Visual Studio, which came out, I think last week now they have added several options in Settings where you can actually tune this stuff down a little bit. It.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:23]:
And so for example, you can change it so that when you're typing code, it won't try to autocomplete until you've paused for a second or two. And that's the thing I've been running into, especially where I type pretty fast, right? I'm like, okay. And it's like. Because as I type quickly, it auto fills or auto completes, I guess, and the whole thing fills in. You're like, what is this? Like, I was in the middle of like a single line of code like, what is this? So there's a bunch of little options like that. And if you use this tool, strongly recommend looking at this. I'm experimenting with this now because I want to find the right balance because I do like the, the code completion stuff, but I also. Sometimes it's a little too much, a little too fast or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:04]:
So. And then I guess this is semi related only because when I'm in Visual Studio, this is what I'm doing. But Microsoft has come under a lot of fire for from developers about the Windows app SDK, which is the modern replacement for that app platform we've been referencing a few times that began with Windows 8. Right. One of the big differences is that this actually targets desktop apps. They've gone away from the mobile part of it, but it's the same basic APIs and they've removed some dependencies on Windows versions, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is, well, the problem. There are many problems with the Windows app SDK and you don't have time or care.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:43]:
But one of the big ones is that they don't ever seem to respond to anyone who has questions or complaints. They never seem to fix any bugs. The first time this came up a few weeks ago, I referenced something that was over five years old where they were like, yeah, we acknowledge this is a problem. Never fixed it. The documentation is out of date. Chris mentioned the Windows Copilot runtime which came and went, except that it never came because they announced that in May 2024 and didn't ship the first early preview for developers until the following February. They still haven't shipped it in stable and you still can't ship an app in stable using this technology. It's like, what are you guys doing? It was supposed to be in Windows app SDK last fall or summer or whatever, like a year ago.

Chris Hoffman [01:59:29]:
They're hyping AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:30]:
Yeah, well, yeah. So the look, I even Hate to use this term, I'm not even sure there is a team that, that actually works in this thing. But the people who are still there, who haven't been laid off or whatever or aren't off working on more important things at Microsoft have heard the complaints and are responding and they've come up with a plan. And the end game here is they're going to open source the Windows app SDK like they did with WPF and Windows forums and. Net. Well, I'm assuming part of the goal is that means a lot of the support weight would follow the community where if there's a control that doesn't work right or some whatever it is like that the community can now fix this because Microsoft's never going to. I have run into so many things in the Windows app SDK that are just missing like crazy, crazy things that are missing that are available in older frameworks that have been around for 20 years. Like they just work fine.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:25]:
And as I keep trying to build this version of the app in the Windows app SDK, I keep running into this problem. So. So anyway, they provided an update. They're basically through with what they call phase one. So a preview version of the Windows app SDK 1.8 will, well, has shipped and then they were supposed to ship the final version by the end of the month. What is it? The date is what, the 27th. They've got a couple days, so they could still do it. Probably going to be September, but this is going to get them on the path to supporting this stupid thing better.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:57]:
Hopefully. But I don't. Who's making Windows native apps today other than me? Nobody. Right? Nobody.

Leo Laporte [02:01:03]:
Well, what do they make if they don't make Windows native apps, what do they make?

Paul Thurrott [02:01:07]:
Cross platform apps of any kind of the case.

Leo Laporte [02:01:10]:
It's all.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:11]:
Yeah, yeah. For new apps. Yeah. I mean, why would you target just Windows like.

Leo Laporte [02:01:14]:
Yeah, you're right.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:15]:
Who's going to.

Chris Hoffman [02:01:15]:
Web games. That's it.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:17]:
Yeah, right.

Chris Hoffman [02:01:18]:
Games 12 AI web browsers. That's a new Windows native app.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:21]:
Yes. Okay, that's true. Okay, fair enough.

Leo Laporte [02:01:24]:
That's actually fascinating. That is a big shift.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:27]:
Yeah, well, web browsers, you know, web browsers were stealing share from other apps 20 years ago. Stephen Stanofsky used to write about that back in the day.

Leo Laporte [02:01:37]:
Yeah, but remember when Facebook released an app that was essentially just a web app for iPhone and people hated it. And finally Facebook said, oh, we're gonna do a native app. And that was maybe 15, 10, 15 years ago. Everybody said, oh, maybe 10 years ago. Oh, thank God. Native apps.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:57]:
And now a wrap. No one would even know if you did it today.

Leo Laporte [02:02:00]:
You can't tell me.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:01]:
These things are so sophisticated.

Leo Laporte [02:02:02]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:03]:
And by the way, why are we even thinking about this at this point? Like, these things, like, who cares?

Leo Laporte [02:02:08]:
What is the framework that. Is there one that's generally preferred in Windows?

Paul Thurrott [02:02:14]:
Yeah. No. So there's the.

Leo Laporte [02:02:17]:
It's just electron. It's not.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:19]:
No. So if you look, first of all, there's no such thing. I mean, asterisks for new Greenfield. Native apps on Windows. It's not happening. Not at scale. Right.

Leo Laporte [02:02:29]:
Because what hasn't been written, I guess, is part of the problem.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:32]:
And why would anyone do that? Now I have the greatest idea for a new app and I only want it to run on Windows. Said nobody ever. So that's just not going to happen.

Leo Laporte [02:02:40]:
Isn't that a shift?

Paul Thurrott [02:02:42]:
It's a huge shift. Right. But this happened a lot. Long time ago. I mean, it's happened a long time.

Leo Laporte [02:02:45]:
I just wasn't paying attention.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:46]:
No, I mean, this is something, you know, this is. This is a big discussion. But. But what we do have are these. Like, the Windows app SDK is really. I'm using it to make a new. A new app, which is stupid. But most people that.

Leo Laporte [02:03:00]:
But you're doing it for fun. You're not. This is not a business I'm doing for fun.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:03]:
I hate myself is what I'm doing for. I have no idea why I'm doing. I can't even.

Leo Laporte [02:03:06]:
But that's the fun for you. You love it.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:08]:
Torturing myself is fun. Okay, fair enough. Most people, what they want to. What they have in the Windows space, what they have is a legacy app of some kind. And they want to modernize.

Leo Laporte [02:03:16]:
They got to maintain all that C.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:18]:
But they want to make it look prettier. Right. And so it can be used for this purpose. That's one big. That's probably the biggest use case, actually modernize an app. If you did latch onto that Metro modern UWP framework, you could also transform your app into a desktop app using this thing and move it into the modern world. That's, you know, they're pretty good at that kind of stuff. They rejuvenated WPF last year because so many companies were still using it internally.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:42]:
There were thousands and thousands, tens hundreds of thousands of these apps out in the world, and they were looking increasingly out of date, especially on Windows 11. They're like, all right, so we can support. We could throw a skin on there. Look fine.

Leo Laporte [02:03:53]:
Yeah. That's the thing. It's the skin. The underlying stuff is the same.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:57]:
Yeah. So they're doing. That's what we have. We do have React native. Right. So you could create an app that would. Yeah, React is running across Mac, Windows or Windows.

Leo Laporte [02:04:11]:
The thing is, you want to be available on mobile too.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:13]:
That's right, yeah. And you want. There are all these terms in the developer space. You want your app to respond, be responsive, meaning if you're running it on a big screen, it looks like a desktop thing. If you're running on a small screen, it looks like a phone app. It's full screen, whatever. We're getting into these weird spaces with iPad and Android tablets or Android phones even where you can run windowed apps. And it should, you know, respond to those changes, et cetera, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:39]:
Anyway, we're never going to get a modern native Windows only app SDK ever again. Like it's. That's over. Like it's just over. And by the way, I look at this thing and I'm like, maybe this is for the best. Because Windows app SDK is a dumpster fire. It is unbelievable.

Leo Laporte [02:04:55]:
It's time. It's time.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:57]:
Yeah, it's bad.

Leo Laporte [02:05:00]:
Here we are two hours in and we haven't even done the Xbox segment. So, Mr. Surat, kick it off.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:08]:
Let's go get this stuff happening. All right, so this has been a pretty good week for Xbox again. The big news is that Microsoft, just before the show started. This is a little confusing, but if you're familiar with Game Pass today, you know that there's Game Pass. I'm going to forget the name. There's a Game Pass Core, which is what used to be Xbox Live Gold. There's Xbox Game Standard, which used to be Xbox Game Pass. Right.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:33]:
The one that gave you the day and date on console only PC Game Pass, which is its equivalent on PC and then Xbox. Or I guess now it's just Game Pass ultimate, which is all of that stuff combined, plus cloud.

Leo Laporte [02:05:46]:
I can't imagine anyone would be confused by any of that. I mean, that seems so sensible.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:50]:
It's getting more. Well, I'm about to make it more complicated. So if you do have Xbox or whatever it's called Game Pass ultimate, you get into the cloud streaming stuff, right? This is Xbox cloud gaming. You do that through the Xbox app. You can do it to mobile, you can do it to smart TVs, whatever streaming. They have talked recently, and this is. Now we know why, about the possibility of bringing that capability to like, lower cost Subscriptions. I sort of thought it was going to be like a standalone cloud gaming thing, but I guess not.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:24]:
Instead, what they're doing is in the Xbox Insider program. So on a PC or actually a console, you have to enroll that device into it. You get the new version of the dashboard and or the app, and then you get new capabilities before they're available publicly. You can now test some version of cloud gaming on Xbox Game Pass, Core and standard, and PC Game Pass, which is confusing to date. Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is streaming, has streamed Xbox games, right. So if you're on a PC or a phone or whatever, the game you're looking at is an Xbox. It's an Xbox game, which is, you know, can be bad on mobile because the screen's so small if there's little text. Right.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:13]:
So part of the deal there is they want to update these games so that they can tell what they're running as the reactive thing, actually. And you'll have the option to use touch controls, maybe, or have changed the UI, et cetera. Now, what they're testing on the PC is there also select PC games that will stream via Xbox Cloud Gaming to PCs. So we don't know what those are yet. I actually can't test this, oddly, because I have Game Pass on Ultimate and that's not included in this, so I don't get to see this. But apparently if you're not yet anyway, for some reason this is limited to core and standard tiers of the subscription. You have to be in the Insider program, like I said, and then they're playing around with this, so it's kind of interesting. So I'd like to see this, but I'm not going to start a new account, so I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:05]:
I'm curious about this. Is this in the notes? I think this is tied to this. Yeah. So it's not in the notes, but tied to this also in the Insider program on Xbox is the ability to see multiple stores inside of the Xbox app. So if you have Steam, Epic, gamestore and then Gog and a couple of others, and you've installed games, you can actually access those games from the Xbox app, which is like a dashboard, which is literally the UI on one of those handheld gaming PCs that are coming out soon. So that's right now, of course, that features PC only because those stores are on PC. But the theory is that Xbox will be a PC, you know, will be a Windows PC next gen. And when that's the case, that means that even from what we're going to call a console or whatever it is, or from these gaming handhelds, you'll be able to access whatever games you bought on Steam or wherever else and then do it from that one ui, which is actually kind of cool.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:03]:
So potentially that will be coming to the console eventually. So yes. So someone asked, but not Game Pass PC. Yes, it is. Game Pass PC is part of it, but it's a different test there. They're testing making select PC games available through for cloud streaming. So these would be PC games streaming from Microsoft servers in the cloud, which.

Chris Hoffman [02:09:24]:
Is the first, which is really huge because if you're a PC, especially on the Snapdragon laptops where they couldn't download a single PC game, you go in and you go to the interface, you can cloud stream it. And it's like sometimes there's a game that is on PC, PC, it has a PC version optimized for keyboard and.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:40]:
Mouse, but you're not.

Chris Hoffman [02:09:41]:
And then it has a console version, you're streaming the console version. So it's like, well now get out your controller. It's like, but can I use my mouse? No, because it's not the PC version of the PC game on your PC.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:50]:
Yep. Yeah, they'll get it there eventually.

Chris Hoffman [02:09:54]:
They're getting it there apparently.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:57]:
Oh, it is. I'm sorry, that was actually a notes. I was just talking about that. But there it is. So for the past year I've been playing Call of Duty again. So I'm playing the latest game. I don't play it as much as I used to, but it infuriates me just as much as it used to. So that's good.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:11]:
And actually they found a way to infuriate me even more. So instead of just it being some random camper idiot who's always in the same exact place on a map, they are giving out. These are selling them. I don't know how the price selling them, but they've been doing these tie ins all year. Now this is not unique to this year, but it's been really bad this year. So. So the first one was that I can recall might have been oh, squid game. So there are all these squid game characters running around in Call of Duty and you're like, okay, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:40]:
It was like Terminator 2. You're like, okay, maybe. So you're sitting there playing the game and you're looking down the thing and you hear some voice behind you go, I'll be back. And you're like, oh, that's hilarious. What does that have to do with Call of Duty? I have no idea. But then it got really weird. There was a Seth Rogen skin. No.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:56]:
So he walks around mumbling to himself, and he's like, I'm not even sure I care. What are you doing here? It's ridiculous. And I don't even know what that's tied to. It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Well, no, it's not, because the next thing is the stupidest thing. So from there, it was like Mutant Ninja Turtles. Those guys are hopping around with the stupid shells and whatever. And then the latest one is Beavis and Butthead.

Leo Laporte [02:11:16]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:16]:
So, like, you're playing the game. First of all, these things, they're humongous. So this guy's hiding by the wall. You can see, like, his head because it's huge, sticking over the top. You're like, all right, we're going to kill this idiot. But the whole game, it's like, I'm going to score. You know? And it's like, oh, my God, what are you doing in this game? And the thing is, look, I don't care that they offer this stuff in a way, but what I do care about is I can't turn it off myself. Like, I don't want to see this crap.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:39]:
Like, what is this? Like, so Fortnite.

Leo Laporte [02:11:44]:
You could blame Fortnite for this.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:45]:
Yeah, absolutely. I do, actually. Right. And by the way, this is where that stuff belongs to in Fortnite. This is a military shooter, right? So Microsoft or Activision recently announced Black Ops 7. So this thing's shipping, I think, in the beginning of November this year, obviously. Battle. What do you call? EA has announced Battlefield 6, which looks unbelievable.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:05]:
Super realistic, military, grounded military shooter, whatever. This game's never going to outsell Call of Duty, but this has intensified the calls from people who are like hardcore Call of Duty guys to be like, could you. You stop doing this, please? Like, the stuff you're doing is terrible. So one of the things they had announced a week earlier was that all of your stuff from Black Ops 6 multiplayer would come forward to Black Ops 7. Meaning if you bought that Beavis and Butthead skin, you could play it. You could play as those characters in seven, too. And, you know, you hear that, or I hear that, and I'm like, oh. It's like, oh, I don't know if I want to do this anymore.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:41]:
Like, it's is so annoying. So they got so many complaints about this, and I think Battlefield 6 really helped. I really think this is what put it over top, that they actually Announced we're not doing that anymore. So forget it. Like, we're not doing it. They're still going to bring things forward in Warzone, which is their battle royale type game, the Fortnite type game. But in the main Call of Duty game, the multiplayer modes, those skins and weapons too, and whatever else are not coming forward anymore. And thank you.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:10]:
Like, just return to, you know, common sense.

Leo Laporte [02:13:13]:
Like, don't you make enough money already? You have to start selling Seth Rogen skins.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:18]:
Come on. Seth Rogen? Are you kidding?

Leo Laporte [02:13:20]:
That's weird.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:22]:
It is bizarre.

Leo Laporte [02:13:24]:
But it's me. It was very popular in Fortnite. All these, like, Sabrina Carpenter skins.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:28]:
Well, some of the Fortnites. It's like Darth Vader or something. Okay. It's fun. It's fun. Like, I get it. I'm not like a. Like a goon about this, but like.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:37]:
But it's so stupid. Like, I don't understand why I can't turn it off. Like, I can turn off the microphone so that no one I don't have.

Leo Laporte [02:13:43]:
Because somebody paid a lot of money for that skin.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:45]:
Okay, but all they. Look, if you have the skin and no one else sees it, how would you know?

Leo Laporte [02:13:50]:
Well, that's true. How would you know they wouldn't be shooting at you?

Paul Thurrott [02:13:54]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:13:54]:
That's a good question.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:55]:
No, how would you know? Who cares? Like, as long as you bought it, you're happy. Like, it benefit yourself and whatever. Okay, so this is a good mini rant.

Leo Laporte [02:14:05]:
I like it. Good job.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:06]:
Well, it's super localized to something very specific. But, like, I don't know, just as an adult, I'm looking at this thing. Come on. What are you doing? What are you doing? Yeah, there's been a bunch of things that happened recently. I've been sort of reading up on the game video game industry for various reasons. I read this book about Gabe Newell that was terrible. But. But he's an interesting person.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:29]:
And I went back to some older games or older books I'd bought like a million years ago. There was a book about Nintendo and some. I'm just anticipating some things down the line, but I came across something where I was like, wait a minute. And maybe this is common knowledge, but I just wrote about this. The 30% fee that mobile app stores just kind of do without any reason whatsoever. Like literally pulled that number out the of. Of the air with no regard to anything is from Nintendo. And When Nintendo.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:59]:
When 1983. Two big things happened. One, the video game crash occurred in the United States, killing Or basically killing all of the consoles. We had at the time 2600, 5200, Mattel and television, ColecoVision, et cetera. That was the end of that. And then we had like a two to four year time span where nothing happened with video games basically and we moved to home computers. But the other thing that happened in 1983 was Nintendo released what we call the NES, the Famicom in Japan. And it was originally released with just games that Nintendo made.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:32]:
And to me in the early 1980s, looking at Nintendo, to me they were like a B level, kind of second rate kind of video game company. It was like they didn't have Pac Man, Galaxy and the good stuff. They had Donkey Kong, Young, whatever, Popeye, it's like, who cares? But then two of the game companies, including Namco, which made Pac man, went to them and said, look, you're going to let us make games on this thing, how's that going to work? And they were like, oh, because the market had just died in the United States, which was the market. They said, well, we can't let that happen again. So too many games, no quality control, no licensing, no anything. It was just third party developers in many cases either left Atari and just knew how to do this stuff or reverse engineered it, whatever it was gluta video games, the crash card, whatever. So they're like, well, they're like, what do you think we should do? And these two, I can't remember the other one. One was like I said was Namco, but I can't remember the other name, the other company.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:30]:
But they basically said, well, you should have a licensing program and then you could just approve of the games that come out on your system. Also, we're small companies, we can't afford to do this. You could make the games, you could actually physically manufacture them. You could charge us for that. And they were like, okay. So Nintendo and the two companies arrived at a 10% fee for licensing, which sounds like a pretty good fee by the way, for Apple and Google. I'm just saying. And then the other 20% was physical manufacturing of cartridges, which was expensive, right? And that's where this came from.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:03]:
Sega immediately adopted this. They had a similar system in Japan. They both came to the United States in nineteen nineteen eighty seven. Ish. And that was the thing. They didn't sell these things as video game consoles. They were like, it's an entertainment system, it's a control center. They did everything other than say, this plays video games.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:21]:
Look, you can play with a little robot, it's fun. It's for kids. And Sony entered the market, whatever. And this has been the fee structure ever since. And so Apple will never admit this, but when Apple came up with 30%, it wasn't like, well, how much is this costing? It's like nothing. This is going to be hugely profitable. Like, okay, 30%. Yeah, let's do 30%.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:42]:
You know, so that's, that's Nintendo. So I guess, I don't know if you want to thank Nintendo or if you want to thank the 1983 video game Crash, but it is astonishing to me that 30, no, 40 years later, we are still living with the ramifications of this. Right? So we'll see. I think antitrust will unwind this, but I feel like if Apple and or Google had just said, you know what, we'll take 10% this, we wouldn't even be talking about this now. Like it would this. That would be the end of it. No one would care. 10% sounds about right.

Leo Laporte [02:18:17]:
Yeah, I don't. You know, they never do mention the fact that the gaming companies are taking 30% and well, that's.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:23]:
So this is also part of the story. So yeah, they are. So when people write about antitrust and Apple especially, they'd be like, man, video game companies are going to have to watch out. It's like, why? But why? No, I mean, why? Because it's the same system. Apple has a monopoly and also controls a market that is several billion people. Nintendo. I had to write this. I have to look this up because I don't remember this, but if you just look at the best selling console of all time is the PlayStation 2.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:57]:
If I'm not mistaken, the current gen, like Nintendo Switch is about to overtake it. This thing has sold fewer than 300 million units over several years. Apple sells that many iPhones in two quarters every year.

Leo Laporte [02:19:13]:
I'm sure that's where Apple got the 30%.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:16]:
I am too. No, I am too. Which was fine when the App Store was small and they weren't in any way dominant and it didn't matter. But Google, like Sega did to Nintendo, just copied it. They have no rationale for it either. Apple's doing it. That's our reason. Look at these companies today.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:33]:
The best year Nintendo ever had financially was 2020. $16 billion in revenues. Apple's revenues that year were $275 billion, order of magnitude bigger. Last year they were $390 billion. Apple's profits last year were over $90 billion. In each of the past four years, Nintendo's highest ever profits were $6 billion. These are completely different markets.

Leo Laporte [02:19:59]:
Yes, it's a really different category.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:01]:
Completely different market. That's why antitrust is so important at scale. Scale is a big part of it. The market definition is important. If you have a monopoly on corner markets in some neighborhood, nobody cares. It's too small. But if you have a, a monopoly in this kind of market, that's, that's serious, you know, that's serious.

Chris Hoffman [02:20:20]:
Antitrust is such a big part of it. Right. You know, Steam Also, Valve takes 30%. But you know, Valve can say, hey, we use it to make things people like. And if you don't like it, you can go to epic and get 10%. But guess what? People love Steam. But you know, Apple is. It's not a competitive market.

Chris Hoffman [02:20:36]:
Even Google can make an argument like, well, people prefer the Play Store to the Amazon App Store. Look what happened to the Amazon App Store. But Apple, well, you know, obviously you can't get apps from elsewhere. So.

Leo Laporte [02:20:46]:
Yep, let us, you know, that's a signal to me you guys are ready for the back of the book. And we will do that in just a bit. Tips and picks coming up. No whiskey this week. Sorry to say. But the good news is Richard is traveling the world collecting whiskeys.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:03]:
That's right. Yep. He's like a magnet for whiskey bottles.

Leo Laporte [02:21:07]:
It just, it adheres to his body. It's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:10]:
That's right. Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:21:12]:
Yeah. So he'll come back with lots to talk about. Chris, you don't have any vices you'd like to share with us?

Chris Hoffman [02:21:21]:
I'm on the road right now. I do not have. I do not have.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:24]:
I was really gonna have my wife do something, but I actually forgot. And then you know what, we can keep it on. We can keep it.

Leo Laporte [02:21:30]:
Your favorite, chewing gum.

Chris Hoffman [02:21:31]:
My advice is windows. Unfortunately, sometimes it's pretty bad for me.

Leo Laporte [02:21:36]:
What's your favorite candy? Do you have a candy that you like? I think we should have a candy segment on this show.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:42]:
Candy of the week.

Leo Laporte [02:21:43]:
Candy of the week. Fried fruit of the week. I don't know, just something. Anyway, think about it.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:49]:
Kombucha of the week.

Leo Laporte [02:21:50]:
Our Kombucha of the week. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat, Chris Hoffman. The great Chris Hoffman filling in for Paul. We great to have you. Thank you, Chris. We will have more in a minute. The background of the book coming up, of course.

Leo Laporte [02:22:05]:
A reminder. All of this happens thanks to you and your support in the club. And we do, we do, we are very grateful for all of our Club Twit members, they make this possible. Club twit is 10 bucks a month. With it, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the best darn, you know, social network in the world because, well, it's frankly, it's exclusive. You gotta figure when people pay 10 bucks to be in our Club Twit Discord, they care about it, they've got an investment in it and so it's that much better. That's why the animated GIFs are real.

Leo Laporte [02:22:43]:
Their animated GIFs are real. Look at that. They're now choosing their favorite candies. You support also the programming we do and that's key, right? Without you, we would not be able to do all the shows we do. We'd not be able to hire and staff it up as we have because frankly, Club Twit now pays 25% of our operating costs. That makes a big difference. We thank you so much. TWiT TV Club TWiT.

Leo Laporte [02:23:15]:
We've got some events coming up you might want to know about in the club. On Labor Day Monday we're working Paris and Jeff and I are going to be interviewing Karen Howe. Her new book, The Empire of AI is really a scathing indictment of OpenAI and its practices. 5:30pm Pacific September 1, the Apple event has been announced and perhaps you know this, but we, you know, we used to love to do these, you know, simulcasts of the Apple and other events, but because Apple has tried to take us down so many times, we've decided to keep those in the club, only they're no longer in the public. So if you want to watch Micah and my coverage of Apple's awe dropping event September 9th, you got to join the club. We'll be doing it in the discord, which what's good about that is it means you can participate as well. We've done this now a few times with the Made by Google event and the Microsoft Build keynote. We're going to do Facebook Connect as well.

Leo Laporte [02:24:12]:
So in fact we're going to do more keynotes because of the club. So thank you. Also shows like Paul's Hands on Windows, Home Theater Geeks, Hands on Apple with Micah Sargent, Our photo time with Chris Marquare. A lot of stuff happens in the club in the club. No Bottle Fiddle bub. But you will be in the club. So I hope you will be in the club. Go to Twit TV Club Twit support what we do.

Leo Laporte [02:24:38]:
Think of it as a vote in favor of the content you get at Twit. We really appreciate it. It makes a huge difference to us. As you know, we no longer get government support. So it's really important that you. We never got government support. If only we had gotten government support.

Chris Hoffman [02:24:54]:
Support.

Leo Laporte [02:24:54]:
It's up to you to keep it flowing. Twit. TV Club. Twit. And thank you in advance to all our great club members. Now Paul has some tips.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:04]:
Maybe there's a government intervention that could save us.

Leo Laporte [02:25:08]:
That would be good.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:09]:
You know, I feel like we're a national security. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:25:11]:
Support for Windows Weekly is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcast. The Commerce Department.

Chris Hoffman [02:25:18]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:25:18]:
The Commerce Department apartment.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:20]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:25:21]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:22]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:25:22]:
It's not going to happen.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:23]:
So we're going to round Robin this. I guess. So Chris and I both have a tip.

Leo Laporte [02:25:28]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:28]:
And then we both have a.

Leo Laporte [02:25:30]:
Okay. Well, I'll. Let me. Let me then pull Chris back in. I was going to give him a moment to go have some kombucha.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:36]:
Yeah. Don't you dare. This will be correct. I pulled this one out of the AI section because I was actually kind of blown away by this. I mentioned that Notebook LM when it first came out especially. But Ongoing is just super impressive. But they also just updated the Gemini model that does image creation. And this is the thing.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:57]:
Remember when it might have still been called Bard at the time, but back when Google first came out at the gate, they kind of stumbled and face raked and did really badly out of the gate. They had to pull the image generation stuff because it was creating crazy racist imagery in some cases or whatever. And they were like, all right, we got to get a handle on this. And I can tell you they kind of turned the corner on this because if you haven't looked at it, go to gemini.google.com, whatever, and just have it create an image or have it edit an image that you already have. You could have it add or use two images to create a single image. Like, here's a dog in one photo and here's me and, like, make a photo of us, but we're on the beach and I'm hugging the dog kind of thing. Like, it's crazy how good this looks. Like it's really, really good.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:37]:
And anyway, it's worth looking at. So given that this just happened, Microsoft obviously does image generation stuff through Copilot, and it's designer.Microsoft.com et cetera, et cetera.

Leo Laporte [02:26:50]:
Is this the new Nano Banana or is this.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:53]:
Is it. No, this is an order of magnitude better than what Microsoft does. It's not even.

Leo Laporte [02:26:59]:
It's really Interesting. The competition that's going on now because each of them is getting better and better. And turn.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:05]:
Yep, I'll have to turn up. Yes, you can expect Microsoft will turn. You know, they'll turn up some knob and they'll get there too. But like this thing, when they announced, well, even before they announced, remember, this thing kind of leaked. Like this nano banana thing. It's like, what is this thing? And it was the next gen version of Gemini's image generation model. It's super good. I did a.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:24]:
I don't know if I could. I'm trying to think if there's an easy way for me to do this.

Leo Laporte [02:27:27]:
Put it in the discord and I can show it. Can you paste it in there?

Paul Thurrott [02:27:30]:
Yeah. I'm trying to think how would I get to it from this computer? Let me see.

Leo Laporte [02:27:36]:
I've seen a few on Twitter that are kind of.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:38]:
Oh, did I put it in an article? Yeah, I did, actually. So if you go to the article.

Leo Laporte [02:27:42]:
Oh, okay. I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:44]:
It's there. So there's a picture that Mary Jo and I are in it that we took at Ignite 2019. So the last ignite before the pandemic.

Leo Laporte [02:27:55]:
Oh, you turn into a cowboy.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:57]:
Yeah, like an old west thing.

Leo Laporte [02:27:58]:
Wow, that's great.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:59]:
Yeah. Now the guy in the front, Gary, 100% nailed him. Like, it's perfect.

Leo Laporte [02:28:04]:
You looked like you lost 10 years and.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:06]:
Yeah, Mary Jo did too, and whatever. But. Whatever. But. But as far as, like, it looking like a photo and looking realistic and kind of matching the style I was looking for, et cetera.

Leo Laporte [02:28:15]:
It's a western selfie.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:16]:
Yeah, this is pretty.

Leo Laporte [02:28:18]:
It'll do video too, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:28:20]:
That's a separate model, but yes, they do that too. And so that's a. That's might be veo, but, or vo, however you pronounce that. But that's the one where you take a photo and it makes it into a 10 or 12 second whatever video, which was that cool kind of effect where it's like a photo from the 1920s, like your great grandparents and they're just holding each other in black and white. And then you do a color version where they actually kind of move around a little bit and you're like, oh, my God, that's amazing. Some of that stuff is pretty cool. But the image gen stuff was kind of their Achilles heel for a long time. And I really feel like this one, it's like, you gotta.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:53]:
You should look at this. Like, it's worth looking at.

Leo Laporte [02:28:55]:
This is. I mean, this is on Twitter. I don't know if it.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:01]:
I don't know if.

Leo Laporte [02:29:02]:
I guess this is. So it's from Barbie. And they swapped in the face. They took Ryan Gosling's face and they swapped in President Trump's. And that's pretty amazing. That's apparently Nana Banana, according to the Twitter folks. So I guess it can do more. Yeah, it's got a banana there.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:24]:
There is a banana. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:29:27]:
Oh, wait a minute. It's VO3 and cling 2.1.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:30]:
I thought it was VO4.

Leo Laporte [02:29:31]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the Higgs field. Swap to video whenever that is.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:38]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:29:38]:
You see stuff on X.com and you just go, yeah, that must be true.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:43]:
You could go back. It's not that many years, Right? They did the AI generated Grand Moff Tarkin in that Star wars movie, and.

Leo Laporte [02:29:51]:
It was clearly fake.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:52]:
It was, like, really fake.

Leo Laporte [02:29:54]:
Not so good.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:54]:
But then you look at this stuff and you're like, yikes. Like, it's like. And you could just do this on your phone.

Leo Laporte [02:30:01]:
That's what's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:01]:
What are people asking me about? What am I. What am I doing? What bottle am I holding? This is a Dunkin Donuts coffee mug from the 1980s.

Leo Laporte [02:30:08]:
It's not alcohol, Duncan.

Chris Hoffman [02:30:10]:
No, it was in the picture. That was.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:13]:
Oh, and the thing. Thing. Oh, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. In the image. I'm sorry. That. That was just. Yeah, that looks like.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:19]:
Yeah. Oh, what am I? So in the real life, that was a bottle of whiskey brought to us by Kyle, who was the guy with the white shirt from Australia, which was one of the reasons, like, we had a couple of different things from a couple of different people. And it was like we had to get out of the bar. And I was like, let's just go back to my room.

Leo Laporte [02:30:37]:
So one of our. Did you pretty fly for assist guy. Did you do this in the new model? He took Steve and me and cowboyed us up.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:50]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [02:30:51]:
That's good. That's pretty good. I like it. So, yeah, I think this is fun. I can't wait to play with this a little bit. Nano.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:58]:
It's worth looking at.

Leo Laporte [02:30:59]:
It's no longer Nano. Banana was like a secret code name, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:31:03]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:31:04]:
And now they've come out and said.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:05]:
Yeah, they didn't want people to know what it was until it's really Gemini. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:31:09]:
Oh, it looks like it's stuck. That's interesting. Maybe it's a changing reality.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:16]:
That is amazing. All right, maybe you're just wearing a.

Leo Laporte [02:31:18]:
Hat or maybe I'M just wearing a hat. All right, continue, continue. That's a good one. I like it. You, you, you get points for that. What else?

Chris Hoffman [02:31:31]:
Yeah, so my tip. A two part tip. Main part of the tip. Subscribe to my new newsletter.

Leo Laporte [02:31:38]:
Good tip. Good tip.

Chris Hoffman [02:31:40]:
It's a good tip. Is free and like it's email. If you want email, you could read it on substack. You read on substack on the web, you could read in substack in the app. And when you're doing that, you can read substack as well. Of Eternal Spring.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:55]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:31:56]:
Which is not about Windows, despite its name.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:59]:
Nope.

Leo Laporte [02:32:01]:
Moving to Mexico.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:02]:
This letter of yours, it must be full of apps. No.

Chris Hoffman [02:32:04]:
But there's no ads. No, but I think you'll really like it. If you like this, I'll write a little bit about. I'll write something about Windows Weekly this week and you can check that out too. But in terms of actual relevant tips, like I was writing about debloading Windows and I've had some conversations with people over and over who are shocked that, you know, I know Paul Thrott has talked a lot about OneDrive and you know, OneDrive should be optional. I do end up using it. Fine, but it should be optional. And guess what? Most people don't realize you actually can just uninstall OneDrive from Control Panel.

Chris Hoffman [02:32:37]:
Every time I tell that to someone, they're shocked. Yes, you can uninstall it and it's gone. And you actually don't have to like modify a Windows ISO and reinstall Windows to get rid of OneDrive. So that's something I would recommend to people. And in general, like deblo, the amount of stuff you can actually just uninstall on a marn version of Windows, often even just from the start menu, just go. So right click uninstall. Right click uninstall. Back in my day in Windows 10 days, you had to open a PowerShell thing and run the right commands to remove these.

Leo Laporte [02:33:07]:
I remember I had a script to do that.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:09]:
Yes.

Chris Hoffman [02:33:10]:
So actually a lot of the scripting stuff isn't even necessary anymore. And it's easy to miss that if you've just given up or if you're just in a habit of running a script. But it's actually pretty easy.

Leo Laporte [02:33:21]:
Yeah, that's good because I would prefer to do it with the uninstaller rather than do it with a scratch, to be honest. I used to. That's what I used to do. I used to go through all the Things I could uninstall manually in the uninstall and then in the remove software. They still have that remove software dialog. What was it? Add, Remove software. Yeah, they still have that. So you can go through that?

Paul Thurrott [02:33:45]:
Well, you can do it from Settings as well.

Leo Laporte [02:33:46]:
But yes, I like it all in one spot. Add, remove software. You see all the list and then you can go, yeah, take that out, take that out. And more than you think, I think you told me, Paul, about this one OneDrive exploit. Remember me suffering, suffering, suffering because OneDrive kept popping up like a.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:06]:
Like a whack, a mole, like a cancer.

Leo Laporte [02:34:09]:
And I. And finally said, you know, you can't uninstall it.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:13]:
Yeah, well, is, by the way, this is another area where I think regulatory action actually kind of helped because they were forced to do this in Europe and in this case they actually are just making these changes everywhere. So not all of them, but the uninstalled. Like a lot of the system components are pre installed apps. You can uninstall them, which is great.

Leo Laporte [02:34:32]:
Like Candy Crush and all that.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:34]:
Why would you want to? Come on, let's be sitting here for a second.

Leo Laporte [02:34:37]:
Never that, Never that.

Chris Hoffman [02:34:39]:
A Microsoft first party app. App now.

Leo Laporte [02:34:41]:
So that's why I get PTSD when you say Word is now going to save by default to OneDrive account.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:47]:
Yeah, well, because you've used it on Apple and you realize that as a human being with a brain, maybe this isn't the thing for you.

Leo Laporte [02:34:52]:
But the first thing I turn off on a new Mac is the save desktop and documents to one to iCloud. I don't like that.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:00]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:35:00]:
I want them local.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:02]:
Yeah, it's the type of thing. Maybe you're on a phone or an iPad and you're like, okay, I could see it. But like on a Mac where it's a desktop operating system, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:35:10]:
Yeah, I get it. This is Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Chris Hoffman filling in for Richard Campbell. Let's see, Chris did one and Paul did one. So I think it's your turn now, Chris.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:24]:
What?

Leo Laporte [02:35:25]:
No, no, no, that was Chris's. It's near turn now, Paul. Okay, I'm paying attention. I really am.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:33]:
Yesterday a couple things happened. Helldivers 2 came out. Haven't tried that. But Gears of War Reloaded came out and I did try that. So Gears of Wars Reloaded is a remastered version of the original game. It's actually a remastered version of the last game, which was a remastered version of last one, which was not the.

Leo Laporte [02:35:51]:
First time they've remastered is what you're saying.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:53]:
No. So there was the original Xbox 360 version, which kind of maxed out a 720p, but rarely hit that, but looked amazing for the day. And it's a great game.

Leo Laporte [02:36:01]:
It's always been a pretty game.

Paul Thurrott [02:36:03]:
Yeah, it's incredible.

Leo Laporte [02:36:04]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:36:05]:
And they at least single player multiplayer is kind of garbage. But this was really innovative and beautiful and a great game, a good story. And they did a remastered version for Windows Vista and what wasn't called Xbox but was Xbox, which was games for Windows live. You know, Halo 2 was one of the big launch titles for that and that added, I want to say 1080p support. And they added levels that couldn't have fit on the Xbox version because the Xbox version in that year, which I think was late 2006 when that game came out, was, you know, an optical disc that only had like, it wasn't even DVD size. Like it was small.

Leo Laporte [02:36:43]:
It's a CD rom.

Paul Thurrott [02:36:45]:
Yeah. So they had to cut out some content they wanted, including a great level that's actually in the. All the promotional materials for the game with the dinosaur is attacking. He's got the guy riding on his back. So that level had been cut out. So that version went back in the game, some other stuff. And then a million Years later, probably 2016ish, they did a version called Gears of War, I want to say Ultimate Edition, which was for Windows 10 through the store. And they added 4K120 frames per second support, some other controls, etc.

Paul Thurrott [02:37:21]:
So the version we're getting today is a new version of that. So if you actually have that game, if you ever paid for that or have it in your library, you're going to get this one for free.

Leo Laporte [02:37:30]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [02:37:31]:
It's not that different, honestly on the PC, but the. Because they've added some things in the interim, like you could, I think before it was like could be 60 or 120 frames per second. Now it could be, you could just say, look, I want to limit this to like 30 frames per second. But I want to focus on quality graphics, whatever. I've been playing it on a laptop that has a dedicated GPU, like a nice GPU. And it's awesome. It's like 110, 120 frames a second, 2.8K, you know, native resolution, HDR, all the effects on high. And it's like, yes.

Paul Thurrott [02:38:02]:
Like this is. It's really good.

Leo Laporte [02:38:03]:
It's the Unreal Engine.

Paul Thurrott [02:38:05]:
Yep, yep.

Leo Laporte [02:38:07]:
And you said the sounds improved too, in Your article?

Paul Thurrott [02:38:09]:
Yeah. So yeah, they've added, I think it's like Dolby soundtrack and all this stuff. But the biggest thing is it's basically everywhere. It's not a Nintendo, but it's on PlayStation 5 for the first time ever. It's on Steam. It's across Xbox series X and S, obviously Xbox and Windows, which is Windows PC. Game Pass. Game Pass.

Paul Thurrott [02:38:29]:
Ultimate Xbox Cloud gaming. So if you want to stream it, you can do that. And it does cross play and cross progression across all platforms. So you could start playing the game in single player on a PlayStation, PlayStation 5, move over to your Windows PC, pick the game up, keep going, come back to the PlayStation, whatever. This is the big selling point for Xbox as a cross platform platform. Right.

Leo Laporte [02:38:53]:
And this was a famously exclusive Xbox game first.

Paul Thurrott [02:38:57]:
Yep. Back when Microsoft was still trying to do that. Right. Halo was the biggest one. But remember the three? Well, people forget this stuff. Like people forget how much everyone hated XP when it first shipped and become the most beloved version until 7 or whatever. But when the 360 came out, they didn't have any AAA in, you know, in first party title. It was nothing.

Paul Thurrott [02:39:18]:
Halo 2 didn't come out until a year later. Right. Or even a year, whatever the time frame was. Or Halo 3 or whatever. Halo 3, I guess it was. Sorry, Halo 2 or 3. I forget the timing, but. So this was a.

Paul Thurrott [02:39:31]:
This came out a year after the launch, but it was like, okay, here we go. Go. Like this is. This is. This is a big deal. So. And plus, remember the original trailer for this thing was awesome. It was that Mad World trailer with this awesome song, you know, from Tears for Fears or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [02:39:46]:
Yeah. So yeah, over the years this thing has gotten just prettier and prettier basically and the performance is better. Same game. Right. So I feel like I could blow through this in like 5 hours if I had to. Like, I've done it so many times, but it's just as good. And I'm hoping now they'll take this and move it to a Master Chief collection type thing where they may do Gears two and three and maybe even four, five, six, you know, eventually, but. And have it as a package or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [02:40:13]:
But this is a good first step. Well, fourth step, I guess. I don't know, whatever step it is. But anyway, it looks great and it plays great on just about anything, so it's good.

Leo Laporte [02:40:26]:
Keys of War Remastered. Remastered, Remastered, Remastered.

Paul Thurrott [02:40:29]:
Also not my article, but if you have a PlayStation, PlayStation is a little speaker in their controller. So the radio transmissions and the game speaker. So they sound like it's a radio thing.

Leo Laporte [02:40:40]:
That's really cool.

Paul Thurrott [02:40:41]:
That's the real reason PlayStation is better than Xbox. Guys, I don't know what people have been telling you, but yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:40:49]:
Let'S see. That means it's your turn, Chris, to wrap this puppy up.

Chris Hoffman [02:40:53]:
Yeah. So I'm going to put my money where my mouth is because I've been talking about copilot plus PCs a lot. If you do not have a copilot plus PC but you have a desktop PC, a laptop, what have you with an Nvidia GPU. Not many people talk about the Nvidia Broadcast app, but it's pretty good, pretty impressive. You may not have access to Windows Studio Effects, but Nvidia's Broadcast app can do a lot of that type of thing with the fake eye contact and with the background removal and even with like real time voice and video processing, especially on the higher end GPUs. If you have a recent Nvidia GPU and you just want to look better in a video meeting, seriously, check out the Nvidia Broadcast app. And like I said, it's especially good if you are using a powerful PC that Microsoft says you don't get Windows Studio Effects on. But yeah, if you have a modern Nvidia GPU and you want that type of, of Windows Studio Effects style, real time AI, machine learning type of processing, it's really worth checking out.

Chris Hoffman [02:41:55]:
I do think that in general, I'm not even using Windows Studio Effects right now. Right. I just have a good microphone and a good webcam and I think it's kind of good that it looks a little raw and I don't really want everything to look like AI polished. Right. Like if I had an AI polished background and my fake eye contact, it would look a bit uncanny. But, but for video meetings and et.

Leo Laporte [02:42:16]:
Cetera, we've had people do that on our shows. I think Daniel Rubino was doing that with the Nvidia thing and it was a little.

Chris Hoffman [02:42:24]:
Hmm.

Paul Thurrott [02:42:26]:
Well, I don't know why you his eyes run out. Because I think it looks incredibly realistic.

Leo Laporte [02:42:32]:
You can never tell you've moved into the new place.

Paul Thurrott [02:42:36]:
Yeah, my arms are totally natural. There's nothing going on there. What's your problem, man? Turn that right off because that's terrible.

Leo Laporte [02:42:46]:
Yeah. Why don't you.

Paul Thurrott [02:42:46]:
Yeah, that's fun.

Chris Hoffman [02:42:47]:
It actually works. I think it works better than that. I don't think that was Nvidia's.

Leo Laporte [02:42:50]:
No, that was. No, no, that was Restreams. I don't know what that was. No, the Nvidia one's supposed to be very good.

Chris Hoffman [02:42:57]:
It actually is. I was, I was pretty impressed by it. You know, I don't, I don't really want to. I don't know if I want to use it for like professional like videos because I want to kind of look raw and human and have a good webcam, but especially have a worse webcam. And you're just doing video meeting. But it's actually great. It's actually great.

Leo Laporte [02:43:12]:
Yes, yes. What is the minimum GPU you'd need for that? Did they say.

Chris Hoffman [02:43:19]:
That is such a good question that I should have been prepared because I.

Leo Laporte [02:43:22]:
Think I only have like a 3070 or something.

Paul Thurrott [02:43:26]:
What are you poor?

Leo Laporte [02:43:27]:
Come on. I know, it's sad.

Paul Thurrott [02:43:30]:
That's a good question. Oh, RTX 2060 or higher, I guess.

Chris Hoffman [02:43:37]:
2060 or higher.

Leo Laporte [02:43:38]:
Oh, so I could use it.

Paul Thurrott [02:43:39]:
Okay.

Chris Hoffman [02:43:39]:
Yeah. And there's some like really, the high end real time voice and video processing stuff. The super. Oh, it's studio quality audio or studio quality video. Like they fake, they, they change in real time. Like the lighting and actually is like kind of wild looking but so that needs like a you know, 5080 or 5090 type thing.

Leo Laporte [02:43:57]:
But that would make sense.

Chris Hoffman [02:43:58]:
Most of the effects can run on basically anything. Well, anything slightly modern like that. Like we said a 26 year newer.

Leo Laporte [02:44:05]:
And it's called the Broadcast app. Is that.

Paul Thurrott [02:44:07]:
Yeah. But look at this GPU be if it can't run recall. Like I'm just saying, you know, think about it. Just think about it.

Chris Hoffman [02:44:16]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:44:17]:
Oh, look how good you look in that shot.

Chris Hoffman [02:44:19]:
That's good. Well, yeah, so, so I, that, that, that I wrote about it there and kind of show off the app so you can check it out because there's actually not that much writing about the Nvidia Broadcast app and it's easy to miss because it's. Right. It's not even included in Nvidia's like driver suite. It's not even included in GeForce Experience. You have to hear about it and go hunt it down.

Leo Laporte [02:44:39]:
And this will work as a camera, so you could use it in Zoom or teams.

Chris Hoffman [02:44:43]:
It works as a camera so you can use it in any app. And it's like a pass through.

Leo Laporte [02:44:47]:
It does. It's a little uncanny Valley. Chris, I can see why you.

Chris Hoffman [02:44:50]:
Well, I enabled every single effect for that one.

Paul Thurrott [02:44:52]:
Right.

Chris Hoffman [02:44:53]:
So that is like too much. But it shows, goes to show how much it can do.

Leo Laporte [02:44:58]:
It can do a lot. Hold on.

Paul Thurrott [02:45:00]:
But we can make, I mean there's a Windows Studio effect that is way worse than anything that you're showing there.

Leo Laporte [02:45:08]:
Do you want to show us?

Paul Thurrott [02:45:08]:
I'm going to see if I can do it. Maybe I'm going to see if I.

Leo Laporte [02:45:10]:
Can turn it on.

Paul Thurrott [02:45:12]:
Do I have it in here?

Leo Laporte [02:45:13]:
You still need a good webcam, as you point out in your article. This is at the Micro center website. You do need a good camera.

Chris Hoffman [02:45:20]:
Ideally you want a good webcam.

Paul Thurrott [02:45:22]:
So it's that one. We did it one time when I was in Mexico. It was like. It's like a water painting effect and it's like the. It is so awful. Like it's awful. And actually for some reason it's not on this particular computer.

Leo Laporte [02:45:32]:
That's like the old photo booth kind of effects that they used to offer where that. Yeah, they weren't. They weren't so great.

Chris Hoffman [02:45:43]:
Little gimmicky.

Leo Laporte [02:45:44]:
Yeah, a little. Little gimmicky.

Paul Thurrott [02:45:46]:
Get it to come up. I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte [02:45:48]:
Very nice.

Paul Thurrott [02:45:49]:
Using the right camera. Let me see if I'm on the right camera. Oh, it's because I'm on the wrong camera. Oh, because I can't do it. I don't know how to do that. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:45:56]:
I can.

Paul Thurrott [02:45:57]:
If only I knew how. Windows.

Leo Laporte [02:45:59]:
I could join you from the Apple campus. How about that?

Paul Thurrott [02:46:01]:
Oh, there you go. Nice.

Chris Hoffman [02:46:02]:
Oh, wow.

Paul Thurrott [02:46:03]:
That's actually pretty clean looking.

Leo Laporte [02:46:05]:
That's an apple effect. But you can see on the edges. There's not great, but I have a green screen. As soon as you put a green screen behind it, it works very well.

Paul Thurrott [02:46:12]:
Yeah, this is.

Leo Laporte [02:46:13]:
This is without anything special so you can see. Especially hair. Hair is very tough.

Paul Thurrott [02:46:16]:
Yeah, hair's tough.

Leo Laporte [02:46:17]:
Yeah.

Chris Hoffman [02:46:18]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:46:18]:
That's why I go for the helmet head look. You know.

Leo Laporte [02:46:22]:
A good coiffure goes a long way. Let me.

Paul Thurrott [02:46:25]:
You don't want any stray hairs out there. I'm just saying.

Leo Laporte [02:46:27]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:46:27]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:46:28]:
Well, I guess it's time to say so long to. Oh my God. To our family, Chris Hoffman, the brand new newsletter. It really looks good. I'm definitely going to subscribe, Chris, and I promise I won't leave you in the archive folder for long. That's where all my newsletters go. This is when you're going to want to read windowsread me if you want to subscribe. Although if you're already a Windows Intelligence subscriber, you'll get it automatically.

Chris Hoffman [02:47:00]:
We've already had it.

Leo Laporte [02:47:02]:
Thank you, Chris Hoffman for filling in. Richard will be back next week and I think he still does run as radio even when he's not here because he's got a lot of them in the camp. So you can go to run his. Smart, smart man. We like to do it live because you never know when Paul's going to go off the rails.

Paul Thurrott [02:47:20]:
I don't even think that's ever happened. I don't have a memory of that.

Leo Laporte [02:47:27]:
That's right. Paul is@therot.com that's his website. And of course, his books, including the Field guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere are at 11. We join up every Wednesday to do this show, and I hope you will join us next Wednesday for another thrilling, gripping edition of Windows Weekly. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [02:47:49]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:47:50]:
Have a wonderful week. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye, all you winners and dozers.

Paul Thurrott [02:47:54]:
Take care.