Windows Weekly 980 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. We're gonna debunk that recall security vulnerability. Talk about Paul's hands review of two new Windows laptops. With the latest Snapdragon X2 Elite chip in it. Plus a lot of AI news and Xbox Two. It's Windows Weekly. Next podcasts you love from people you trust.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:28]:
This is tw.

Leo Laporte [00:00:35]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 980, recorded Wednesday, April 22, 2026. Running out of Tolkien's it's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover. The latest from Redmond. I was thinking of calling this the Redmond Gazette or. Yep, something like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:58]:
The Redmond Report. That's the war in Europe continues doing

Leo Laporte [00:01:05]:
his best impression of Walter Winchell. Hello, Mr. T. Hello, Leo. In beautiful Mexico City th his website. Richard Campbell is in Australia today. Richard, are you in Sydney?

Richard Campbell [00:01:21]:
Yeah, I'm in Sydney proper. Yeah, Right downtown, actually. George street, across from the old train station in the Hilton. Here we are. Got a conference for the next couple of days.

Leo Laporte [00:01:31]:
Wave to draft by. I guess he's in town also.

Richard Campbell [00:01:34]:
Yeah, apparently he's in town. Yeah. So I.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:37]:
What's the number? What's the conference? Richard?

Richard Campbell [00:01:40]:
NDC Sydney. NDC stands for short Norwegian Developers Conference or the increasingly incorrect Norwegian.

Leo Laporte [00:01:48]:
Wait a minute. The Norwegian Developers Developers Conference conferences in Sydney, Australia. Porto, if you can find somewhere farther from. From Norway.

Richard Campbell [00:02:02]:
They still actually do one in Norway.

Leo Laporte [00:02:06]:
So it's Norway. The Norwegian part is just vestigial. Yeah, okay, vestigial.

Richard Campbell [00:02:11]:
It's. It's owned by Norwegians. How about that?

Leo Laporte [00:02:14]:
That matters, that counts, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:16]:
It's owned by Norwegian for now. Wait until. You know.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
SA was on our minds yesterday during Mac break Weekly because we talked about Tim Cook's retirement. Announced retirement September 1st. And a new guy coming in, John Ternus, who's been the hardware chief at 21, 20 years ago.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:35]:
Did you see my deja vu photo?

Leo Laporte [00:02:38]:
No, but I will. I'll look for it. Is it in the show notes?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:40]:
I'll just. Yeah, I'll send it to you right now.

Leo Laporte [00:02:42]:
Well, and you probably will talk about this later, but one of the reasons Satya came up because people were saying, oh, he won't do anything to change, you know that Apple is. It's all baked in by now. And I pointed out.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:54]:
Like a pie.

Leo Laporte [00:02:56]:
Yeah, like a pie. I pointed out that when Satya Nadella came in as the new CEO, he made massive changes. He dumped the Nokia acquisition, he killed the Surface rt That had already been built and was in, you know, the warehouse.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:14]:
I mean, I feel like, oh, you're thinking of Surface. Mini.

Leo Laporte [00:03:18]:
Mini.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:18]:
I mean, yeah, the look, he will make change. The question is going to be how long it takes.

Richard Campbell [00:03:25]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [00:03:26]:
Will he wait a little while?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:28]:
Yeah. I think with Tim Cook, you know that. Because they endlessly promote themselves. They kept talking. He's like, you know, Steve Jobs said, don't make decisions based on what you think I would do. And we were like, look, it's impossible not to do that to some degree. But then you look at all the stuff he's done, you're like, no, yeah, yeah. You didn't think of him at all.

Leo Laporte [00:03:46]:
This is the picture from thurat.com of Ternus on the left and Tim on the right.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:52]:
Yeah, I saw that. And I was like, oh, this is

Leo Laporte [00:03:55]:
eerily reminiscent of something Stephen Elop and Satya Nadella.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:58]:
How did they not know that this would be referenced?

Leo Laporte [00:04:02]:
That's hysterical.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:03]:
Because the Microsoft Nokia thing worked out great.

Leo Laporte [00:04:06]:
Oh, that's what this was from is.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:08]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:04:08]:
Because Elop is the CEO of Nokia and. And he's holding that beautiful phone that we all loved.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:14]:
Yeah, we still have him and love them. You know, everything's going right there. That I can't tell from the. It's probably a 1520, but.

Leo Laporte [00:04:22]:
Yeah, man, I missed that phone. I would love that phone again.

Richard Campbell [00:04:26]:
Yeah, no kidding.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:27]:
I. We've lost the third option. Well, but also just like the. Like Apple Briefly did the iPhone 5C where it's like unapologetically plastic and it's like, guys, come on. These things were solid polycarbonate. So you could dent it and it wouldn't lose the color because the color was permeated.

Leo Laporte [00:04:45]:
Let's not apologize.

Richard Campbell [00:04:45]:
There was an ad where 1. A guy threw it up in the air and hit it with a baseball bat. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:50]:
I one time in the Boston subway, jumped up to grab an exposed girder that I could reach, and then my phone fell out of my front pocket. It was a 920, probably blue, and the screen popped right off. You could see all of the guts inside. I cracked that thing back together like a little lobster and it was fine, you know, no problem.

Richard Campbell [00:05:13]:
Yep, they were.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:14]:
I missed that for sure, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:05:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:18]:
Just like those things are solid. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:05:20]:
I had my. I. I kept my 950 shrine for a long time, you know, little corner with a couple of candles.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:28]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:05:30]:
Wistfully, unapologetically canceled, as a matter of

Richard Campbell [00:05:34]:
fact, that my band, too, you know, they all sat together In a sad little.

Leo Laporte [00:05:39]:
And you're Zune is your Zuning.

Richard Campbell [00:05:40]:
That's of course, the brown one.

Leo Laporte [00:05:46]:
We could all make a graveyard of Lost.

Richard Campbell [00:05:49]:
Yeah, Lost. Heck, we adored once.

Leo Laporte [00:05:52]:
Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking of. We were talking about it yesterday, the pilot in the Pre. Yeah, the Kin.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:00]:
The, the Pre is a good example. What could have been kind of scenario. There's a lot of that stuff. Like the Amiga falls into this category.

Leo Laporte [00:06:10]:
The Amiga. You're your first love.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:14]:
Yeah. Or. Or maybe your first love was the.

Leo Laporte [00:06:17]:
Was Delphi maybe was your first.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:19]:
No, the Delphi came afterwards, but yeah, as an adult, for sure. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:06:23]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:06:25]:
You know, Atari 400 was my first love.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:28]:
Yeah. I mean, I had a Commodore 64, but I. Yeah, the Amiga was.

Leo Laporte [00:06:32]:
Nobody loved the Commodore 64.

Richard Campbell [00:06:34]:
Well, I mean, to some degree, 64. There was even a song.

Leo Laporte [00:06:39]:
How about the Vic 20? Remember that?

Paul Thurrott [00:06:41]:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, of course.

Richard Campbell [00:06:42]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:43]:
When 40 columns is just too much.

Leo Laporte [00:06:48]:
Anyway, we're not here for nostalgia. I just thought I'd mention because to his great credit, I think Sachin took the reins and I mean literally took

Richard Campbell [00:06:58]:
them and made it his own and

Leo Laporte [00:07:01]:
steered the ship immediately, without a delay.

Richard Campbell [00:07:04]:
And Cook's going to be executive chairman. It's not like he's going anywhere.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:08]:
Right. To me, this, the Cook thing is more like Gates and Ballmer, where Ballmer becomes CEO, but Gates is still around and there was a lot of friction there for three, five years. Whatever it was. I mean, it took a while for him to kind of let go. Well, I wonder. Cook's always going to look.

Richard Campbell [00:07:27]:
Specifically said he wanted Gates around, he wanted him doing reviews and stuff again.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:31]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:07:32]:
And then.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:32]:
Right. I mean, this is a different era.

Richard Campbell [00:07:34]:
I, I. Yeah, but, but he was also building a. He was building a version of Microsoft that didn't allow for sexual misconduct, and that just doesn't mix with Bill Gates. That's not a thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:44]:
Too soon, man. Too soon. Oh, geez. Well, with that sobering thought. Yeah, I mean, I don't. We'll see. I'm really curious. There's some terribleness to Apple under Tim Cook that I think needs to be addressed, and I hope he does address some of that stuff.

Richard Campbell [00:08:03]:
And I'll be surprised. He definitely can come from the hardware space. Like, you see where the winning cult is inside of Apple. You know, it's very protege.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:13]:
Right. I mean, but you know, Satya coming back, coming to Microsoft to become CEO is, you know, we have an engineer and it feels right, you know?

Richard Campbell [00:08:24]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:24]:
For whatever reason, Apple has never really had an engineer, CEO before.

Leo Laporte [00:08:31]:
So this is good, right? You want somebody.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:33]:
Well, it's interesting. I mean, he's a. He's a product guy. I would say for all of Tim Cook's experience, 15 years presenting and, you know, he obviously knew the products inside and out or whatever, but not really a product guy, you know, not like Steve Jobs was. And no one is like Steve Jobs was, but this guy makes hardware like he, he understands this part of it. And that's Apple. That's still the core of Apple. So.

Leo Laporte [00:08:56]:
Yeah, I mean, the other thing we're talking about is that Apple's hardware has always or almost always been good, but Apple's software has lately especially been gas.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:06]:
It's always been terrible. I do. Let's not pretend this is a new thing. It's always been terrible.

Leo Laporte [00:09:11]:
I don't know if this fixes that problem.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:13]:
Well, it doesn't fix it just by him being there. But we'll see. We'll see. That's the thing, you know, as a CEO, he'll have maybe some different priorities from Tim Cook. I don't. We don't know him very well. We don't know what to expect.

Leo Laporte [00:09:25]:
No, he's a real nonentity. I mean, I've been looking everywhere.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:28]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:09:29]:
And it's, It's. There's very little, you know, German says, well, he's decisive like Steve was and Tim Cook was more of a consensus builder. But I don't know if that's true. I don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:39]:
Yeah, I don't know either. I mean, again, it's gonna. What's gonna make the difference is what we see happen. So I don't know. I don't. Well, then the first, like I said up front, I mean, how quickly he institutes whatever changes to me is the big deal. So we'll see. I don't.

Richard Campbell [00:09:56]:
Yeah. Sasha was a largely unknown for like two years before he was CEO because he took over server and tools right. From Bob Muglia and suddenly was very visible because he was the point end for Azure just at a time when they really need to do something with Azure.

Leo Laporte [00:10:13]:
When Nadella took over, did he favor Azure? I mean, were his changes really to.

Richard Campbell [00:10:18]:
It was his job, literally.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:20]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:10:20]:
No, I mean, that's why he was made.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:22]:
The general direction was set before he arrived. I mean, we were, you know, we had different terms for this, but it was like three clouds and a. Something. I don't really remember anymore.

Richard Campbell [00:10:31]:
Three screens in a cloud was the

Paul Thurrott [00:10:32]:
three screens in a cloud. Microsoft was going to cloud computing regardless. So in that sense, knowing that this would be the new era for Microsoft. He probably did make a lot of sense.

Richard Campbell [00:10:45]:
Yeah. Well, one of the arguments was that when you're in the cloud, then Windows isn't as important. You want whatever operations you want, including Linux. And hey, your CEO was the guy who said Linux was a cancer. So is that going to be good?

Paul Thurrott [00:10:58]:
It's hard to step those things back. But yeah, I mean that was. Ballmer had a perception problem. I think he had all the ideas that were implemented over time with Nadella, but he knew that the board and Wall street were never going to accept it coming from him. And yeah, he did the right thing. You know, he took the. Took the sword.

Richard Campbell [00:11:20]:
Yeah. It must have been. He'd done his main job which was get them through the Department of Justice crisis and that that had happened. So yeah, it had wound up really in 2011 in the end. And so from that point on it's like, all right, dude.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:36]:
Yeah, I mean, you know. And as Bill Gates further stepped back from his at that time chief science office or chief software, Chief architect. Architect or whatever it was. Software architect. You know, Ray Ozzy came in and obviously was instrumental to getting Azure literally started. I mean and, and this was under Ballmer and I did pretty good, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:12:02]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:03]:
It's still doing okay.

Leo Laporte [00:12:04]:
Okay. Yeah. I mean I think the big. For Apple, the big issue is going to be the transition to an AI first.

Richard Campbell [00:12:10]:
Yeah. One would argue that's what Cook bobbled.

Leo Laporte [00:12:15]:
Yeah. Or Cook said, look, I've done my 15 years. This is a good place where financial. He said this actually literally we're financially strong, we've got great product lineup coming out.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:27]:
Of course he would say that.

Leo Laporte [00:12:28]:
But all of that's not untrue.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:30]:
Well, you don't know what the product lineup is. I mean Thompson said that too in

Leo Laporte [00:12:34]:
Stratecheri, that this is a turning point. But it is clear that this is the fork in the road now for every company is what's our AI strategy? Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:44]:
I feel like, look, when Tim Cook took over for Apple, one of the criticisms was. Or it became over time. He's not going to have. He doesn't have this hit like Jobs.

Leo Laporte [00:12:55]:
He doesn't have the vision.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:56]:
He had the big back to back product hits. Right. But the truth is if Steve Jobs was still alive today, they would never have duplicated that success. There's no opportunity for that anymore. So he had some kind of middle of the road hits or whatever. But I feel like the Jobs was

Richard Campbell [00:13:14]:
completely against the iPad mini. It Was like the first thing Cook did was ship the iPad mini and it sold it.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:20]:
Sure, I think so. For John Ternus though, there's no way Apple is going to continue its rocket trajectory for revenues or market cap, however you want to measure it. Right. This is going to be a new era and they'll still, they're big. I mean inertia is great and they have a really good ecosystem that helps keep people there. But we'll see. I mean it's just going to be interesting. Tim Cook might have walked away at the right time because you can look at that rocket trajectory and say I did that.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:50]:
And then maybe. So you can see it's like a relay race. Yeah. And now the next guy's like, you know, it's not going to be as exciting to some degree unless he does something else that's maybe more product related. That is exciting. So you know, we'll see. But I, you know, Steve Jobs success was never going to be duplicated. Tim Cook's financial success is never going to be duplicated.

Leo Laporte [00:14:11]:
Yeah, he turned it into a $4 trillion company. I mean that's.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:13]:
Yeah. Not bad. Although I, the article I wrote about it, I put up Microsoft's market cap and Apple's market cap and they're almost identical. So when you look at Satya Nadella coming in in his case, I think 2013, 2014, somewhere in there, Tim Cook was 2011. They were both in the 300, and something billion market cap and then both got up to 4 trillion at some point. Microsoft is back down closer to three at this point.

Leo Laporte [00:14:40]:
But isn't that interesting that. So maybe it's not those companies, maybe it's the time.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:47]:
Yeah, well, but they benefited from completely different things. You know, Apple is so strong in consumer and devices and Microsoft is not. And Microsoft success was all on Azure growth really. I mean just. And the Apple perception really. I mean the classic, I mean they, they, I don't want to say they're complementary but they're different. They're just different. They, they're both very big successful companies and they're both freaking terrible by the way.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:15]:
Let's not forget that part of it.

Leo Laporte [00:15:17]:
Both of them, you mean?

Paul Thurrott [00:15:19]:
Yeah, I mean both of them wrote in shitification to success. I mean they both did. So whatever. You can't.

Richard Campbell [00:15:27]:
What was in common is the investment environment that there was all of this money to put into a time when tech is dominant and so well, and

Leo Laporte [00:15:36]:
we may be on a new wave with. I mean there's a lot of money flowing for AI right now.

Richard Campbell [00:15:41]:
Mm. Yeah. And I think it's gonna be flowing for the hills pretty soon.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:45]:
In the discord, I bet Tim got solid advice from Apple Intelligence. I hope not. It's like, hey, Siri, should I retire right now? Yes, it's raining. No, it isn't. What?

Leo Laporte [00:16:01]:
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to derail you with that, but.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:03]:
No, it's fine. I. I wouldn't. I didn't put anything in about Apple because I wasn't.

Leo Laporte [00:16:08]:
There's not much to say, honestly. We have to wait and see.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:12]:
Kind of a. Tim Cook is rightfully celebrated for making a lot of money for Apple. But the one thing I would just point out to enthusiasts in our space is Microsoft roughly as successful. Same sort of trajectory on the chart there. Everyone in our world is bitching and moaning about the quality of Windows 11, about copilot everywhere. There's a lot of complaining, you know, about what I would call insurification. And for some reason we're also. But now we're celebrating him for financial success over on the Apple side.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:44]:
And it's like, guys, we're doing the same thing with Microsoft. It's just that you're so firmly in this community that you only see the bad stuff. But you can celebrate Apple's success for some reason. You don't even use Apple products. Who cares? It's a bizarre, I don't know, double standard, maybe. I don't know what to call it, but I would credit Microsoft's financial successes to Amy Hood, frankly. But whatever, whatever, who cares? I mean, hugely successful companies, both of them, and not necessarily as friendly to consumers or users or developer partners or whatever you want to call them as maybe they should be. And I think the problem for Apple is that they are so aggressively promoting how awesome they are all the time, it flies in the face of what they actually do, you know, And I have that little bit of a problem, you know, seeing him give the Golden Award to the idiot child that runs our country that, you know, we're going to suck up to authority, you know, authoritarian regimes like China, you know, and it's just.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:51]:
There's just terrible this there.

Richard Campbell [00:17:52]:
That I think in the name of shareholder value.

Leo Laporte [00:17:55]:
The funny thing is I said to somebody when the news first came out on Monday, I said, oh, Tim obviously just can't take it anymore, having to deal with government and.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:09]:
Yeah, except that that's.

Leo Laporte [00:18:10]:
But that's gonna be the job.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:11]:
That's his reward. That's what he's gonna do. Like, should he be getting Something good for this.

Leo Laporte [00:18:19]:
Well, I think we decided yesterday that he loves Apple and he decided wisely, at least from the point of view of Apple's future, that since he's got those relationships and they're good relationships, maintain those and take some heat off of.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:36]:
I was gonna say the nice thing about what he's doing is the new CEO doesn't have to deal with that stuff and he can focus on the product roadmap.

Leo Laporte [00:18:44]:
And it's, by the way, not just the us It's China. And Tim's got a great relationship with China. Right. It's the rest of the world. Everybody loves Tim Cook. And John Ternus can be the jerk. It doesn't matter.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:58]:
He doesn't seem like a jerk. No, he seems like. He seems like a really good guy. I will see.

Leo Laporte [00:19:03]:
I don't see. They put somebody we all agree really is a good guy. Johnny Surughi, the guy in charge of Silicon.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:11]:
That guy's a genius and was going to leave Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:19:14]:
That's right.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:14]:
Right. And you knew they threw everything he wanted at him. Yep. And that you need to retain that talent. Like, that guy is why Apple, Intel, Apple, Silicon exists.

Leo Laporte [00:19:25]:
So he's basically taken Turnus his job and more. He's added to the portfolio. He's in charge of all hardware now.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:30]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:19:31]:
Which makes a lot of sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:32]:
But that's the guy you want. You know, you see these people on stage at industry shows sometime. There was a guy. He's gone. He's at Adobe now. But the. The guy used to run the computational photography stuff at Google, probably as long ago as like the. Pixel 2 came out and talked about the, you know, the photography stuff, and you listen to this guy and you're like, oh, my God.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:50]:
Yeah, like, this guy's a genius. Like, he's the. He's like, yes, he went to it. And I feel like the guy running Apple hardware now is in that category, you know, kind of a. I don't know. Dave Cutler is a little bit of a stretch maybe, but that kind of personality, we're like, yeah, you need this guy, you know, running the show. He's. He knows what he's doing.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:10]:
It's good.

Leo Laporte [00:20:12]:
All right, now we can talk about Windows.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:14]:
Yeah. So Apple's doing great, but Windows is doomed.

Leo Laporte [00:20:18]:
No, no, no, don't say that.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:21]:
Just kidding. But am I. No, I am. So this actually happened right before we started the show last week, and I didn't look into it closely enough, but the same security researcher who, after Microsoft announced recall, said that there were all these security problems. And the way he discovered that was by pulling it out of an insider build and removing all the security controls, setting off a six month delay which was like seriously has two years later come crawling out of the woodwork to say that he has, yes, discovered a security vulnerability and Recall. Now this time, to this guy's credit, he told Microsoft ahead of time, that's what he's supposed to do as a security researcher. Right. And Microsoft investigated the issue he raised and said, yeah, this is not a vulnerability.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:05]:
We're not doing anything. That was the end of it. It was like, okay, sorry. And it basically has to do with the difference between the vault, meaning the secure enclave that's protected by virtualization based security that has your recall data. And it's the sort of thing, it's not quite a social engineering attack, but it almost is. I have problems with people claiming vulnerability when the first step to reproduce it is. All right, sign in as a user. Wait, what? Sorry, you're saying I have to be using the computer for this to work? Well, that's.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:50]:
I mean, if you can get into the computer, I can tell you there's a lot more data in my web browser than there is in Recall. What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte [00:21:57]:
Well, also, there's a little irony in all of the kerfuffle about recall because now everybody's putting OpenClaw on their system and giving it access to everything and then having it send it out to the third parties.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:08]:
There is not a modern personal computing platform on this planet that doesn't use some form of screenshot based technology to do image and text recognition in real time. They all do it. There's something on your Pixel phone called Pixel Screenshots. I mean, AI is really good. You could test this for yourself, go to Google Photos or whatever photo service you use and search for something you know is in text, in a photo somewhere, like the sign of a store or something.

Leo Laporte [00:22:38]:
Oh yeah, I can find that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:39]:
It finds that stuff in two seconds, no problem. And that's why they do this. Anyway, look. Yes, I suppose once you've signed in as the user with that data in Recall, you can get your data, I suppose. Oh, and then, sorry, you have to go through Windows, hello, ess, and also sign into Recall to access it. Once you've done that. Yeah, I mean, anyone could access the data. What? Come on.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:06]:
Look, the negative reaction to Recall was so bizarre to me and still is. It is not a feature I want to use. That has nothing to do with security. It's as Secure as anything else that's running in Windows when you're using it. Actually, that's incorrect. It's way more secure than anything else you're running in Windows when you're using it. It's a different level of protection. It's actually kind of uni.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:31]:
But for me, it's also not interesting and particularly useful. But, you know, this is one of those empathy things, I think, especially in our community. A lot of technical people are like, who would want this? And it's like, well, not you, but you understand, some people might. Right? Like, there are other people have different needs. I mean, some people think visually they're like, I was searching for that green sweater on Amazon, but I can't find the link. And you can type in green sweater and recall. We'll find that pretty damn quick because AI is really good at that.

Richard Campbell [00:24:01]:
As long as you're on the right machine.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:04]:
Yes, right. Which is my initial complaint. I've told the story, but when I met the guy who apparently invented this, he said. I said, listen, I got a couple of concerns. He's like, here we go. I'm like, oh, no, they're not the concerns everyone else is going to raise. This is completely different. I said, I need this to be.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:19]:
This won't make sense to me unless it syncs to the cloud and I get this on every computer. And he goes, yeah, no, we know that's in the plans. It's an idea. But we knew we needed to nail the one computer use case first for security and all that stuff. And this is before anyone raised any issues, by the way. Like, they. They'd already secured it really well. But, yeah, I mean, so whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:42]:
Anyway, I feel obligated to mention this topic, even though it's ridiculous and pointless, but, you know, whatever. Anyway, Microsoft said, yeah, we're not doing this. We're not changing anything. It's working. Exactly.

Richard Campbell [00:24:58]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [00:24:58]:
Yeah. Yep. So there's that. There's that last week, last week, probably Friday, or was it early this week? It doesn't matter. Sometime since the last show, Microsoft released new builds across every single insider channel. And. Wow, that means there were two. Right? There were two in Canary and two in Release Preview.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:21]:
Right. Because they're. Well, in Release previews, case are 24 and 25H2. Most of this is not super interesting. You know, the Canary stuff is stuff we've already seen elsewhere, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. But to me, the Release Preview thing is interesting because this is what we're going to see in Patch Tuesday In May.

Richard Campbell [00:25:40]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:41]:
And there's actually some features in here. So this has been kind of a quiet year for big bang features.

Richard Campbell [00:25:47]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:48]:
None of these are going to change anyone's life per se. Not in May, but one of them will have longer term implications. So there's the Xbox mode, which is going to replace game mode, which used to be called full screen experience. Right. Was only on the gaming handheld, so that's coming to all PCs. That's cool. Improvements across things like File Explorer haptics. If you have a certain kind of a smart pen, for example, the drag tray is being renamed to drop tray.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:18]:
And it doesn't matter because you still just want to disable that thing. It's the most terrible UI I've ever seen. And some other small things. But the big one, which again won't actually impact anyone the day it's released, is that Windows 11 will now support agents on the taskbar. That thing they announced back in November. Sorry. At Ignite, where remember Pavan Davaluri got in a lot of trouble for having the temerity to tweet about the one session he would be at. And everyone just crapped on Windows and you know, and said nobody wants this.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:55]:
Which is a lot like the recall thing, you know, nobody wants this. Said one guy who doesn't want anything to change. You know, it's like I. Some people want this. So we'll see what this looks like. This is the.

Richard Campbell [00:27:07]:
That's my question. Like, is this a little twitching icon? Like, ooh, I have something for you. Ooh, guess what?

Paul Thurrott [00:27:12]:
Yes. Well, hopefully not twitching, but I don't. This kind of comparison is a little strange to me, but in Microsoft's language for this, what they're saying is that agents will appear as if they are apps, meaning there will be a icon on the taskbar. You can use that icon to click on it and whatever UI will come up depending on the agent and it will give you. You can see what it's doing. If it needs to get your permission for something or get some feedback or just tell you it's done, it can pop up a toast notification like Windows apps do. So they're trying to fit it into the ui.

Richard Campbell [00:27:52]:
Normal app flow. Right. Looks like every other app.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:56]:
So we'll see. I mean, I don't think that the initial two or three agents that will work with us, the things we get through Microsoft 365, like researcher, are going to be broadly interesting to people, but there will be others and there will be third party agents, of course. And we Will see. It will be interesting to see if big companies in this space, anthropic and OpenAI, et cetera, take advantage of this UI somehow with their own products. Because there's no reason their agents and things can't do this too. I mean, they have their own UIs, and it makes sense that they think

Richard Campbell [00:28:33]:
ultimately Microsoft will publish an interface. Any of these tools can.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:38]:
Yeah, I mean, builds coming up. This would be the obvious time for that, if, you know, there must be something out there in some early preview. I don't know, but I hope.

Richard Campbell [00:28:46]:
I'm curious to system, you know. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:50]:
So I don't find this offensive yet, you know, which is sort of like saying I don't see PC makers bundling software on a PC to be offensive. Oh, have you looked at the software? You know, so it depends. It depends on, you know, what it is.

Richard Campbell [00:29:05]:
I just think back to the sort of Windows 8, the flippy, twisty little,

Paul Thurrott [00:29:09]:
you know, click me, click the old Mac OS X thing where the icon would just bounce and you had to address it or would never stop. It's like, let me know when this is annoying, you know? Yep. It would just never stop.

Leo Laporte [00:29:23]:
Never stop.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:25]:
So sometimes people are software UIs. Get in front of people and things change. We'll see, you know, we'll see if this makes sense. But this is what they came up with and we're getting it. So was it November to, you know, now is what, six months? Not even. Yeah. Five months, four months, five months. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:42]:
Whatever that is. It's pretty quick. I mean, they must have been working on it for a while. And we'll see. We'll see what it looks like.

Leo Laporte [00:29:50]:
I would like to take a break before we talk about those new Snapdragon laptops.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:55]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:29:57]:
Because I know there's one still sitting on the doorstep in Pennsylvania.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:00]:
I know the. The best one is back home and I can't. That's okay. I still. I have some. These are. These are actually very interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:30:07]:
Yeah, no, I'm very interested. This is the new Snapdragon X2 model.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:11]:
And I've been waiting and waiting and waiting like everyone else.

Leo Laporte [00:30:14]:
Yeah, yeah. Before we do that, though, let's pause the. Pause that Refreshes for our fabulous sponsors. Always refreshing to talk about advertising. Now let's take a look at some snappy Snapdragons.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:33]:
Yeah, it's going to be hard to show it to you. Yeah, they are snappy. So there are three levels of Snapdragon X2 chips. Nope. Actually, there are four levels. There are more models than that, but there are this plus on the low end Elite and then Elite Extreme. The one that's waiting for me back in Pennsylvania is the Asus, which is the Elite Extreme. So obviously that's of interest.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:01]:
But I got an IdeaPad, let's see, 7x. Yes. That has the, an Elite version of the chip and then a 5X which is actually a larger laptop, but you know, whatever that has the plus. And if you think, if you know anything about these chips and the current, you know, the previous gen chips there was also like an X. So there was X X plus X Elite. This time they don't have just an X2. But although I feel like the chip that's in the bigger of these two laptops is what we would have called last time, just X or X2, I guess, meaning it's the lowest end version.

Richard Campbell [00:31:44]:
Assuming this is all binning. Right. Like the extreme part is it's extremely unlikely for the whole chip to work.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:50]:
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, but yeah, that's the assumption. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:31:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:55]:
I mean, maybe by this point, I mean obviously they still are planning for tiers to some degree. I mean, you know, they, you know, they, they have to have a range of chips at different price points, etc. It's weird to me how many Elite models there are. And that's probably almost certainly, I should say binning of some kind. Right. That's the most.

Richard Campbell [00:32:14]:
Yeah. So it's the most likely outcome.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:16]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:32:16]:
In manufacturing.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:18]:
But you know, I went through the kind of setup, rigor Merle, I do on both of these things and they're both, you know, the, the lower end one, which is the bigger one, is much like the HP OmniBook 5 from last year. This was the one I bought with my own money. It was five or six hundred bucks at the time. It's the lowest end Snapdragon X chip you can get. And it is wonderful. And that, that this, the. I'll try to. It's got a point list to show it, but it's just like this is very much like to me the successor to that.

Richard Campbell [00:32:49]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:49]:
It's that kind of a thing. But the other one. So this is, you know, this is your basic copilot plus PC, right? 16 gigs of RAM, 512 gigs of storage. The one with the higher end chip though has 32 gigs of RAM and I think a terabyte of storage. I'm sure. But it occurred to me after doing all the setup on both, I was like, you know, I should Test games on this again. This is. So I'll write this up and I'm going to record some Hands on Windows episodes tomorrow.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:19]:
So I think I'm going to do that as part of that, as part of those recordings. But the games I tested, the first one I tried, didn't work. It was weird. I wanted to try something a little newer than the stuff I had been testing. So I installed the latest Doom game, the Dark Ages.

Richard Campbell [00:33:38]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:38]:
Comes up fine. It looks fine. It starts and then it does a little thing where it's going to run the game and then the game never comes on. You can hear it happening, but you can't see it.

Richard Campbell [00:33:47]:
Interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:48]:
Based on my experience since then, I think I'm going to try it again because I realized later that the Auto SR stuff wasn't running automatically and there were some other things that I could probably do to make it work. So that one I'm not sure about, but after that it was like Half

Richard Campbell [00:34:01]:
Life 2, some kind of DirectX bonk or something.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:05]:
Yeah, I've never seen this before. I don't know. But Doom 2016, which did run, I think on the first X Control, which is actually a really resource intensive game. It's a game I have on the iPad. Sorry. On the MacBook Air I have. And it does not run well on that laptop at all. But it runs awesome on this thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:28]:
It required me to install the.NET framework 3.5 and I was like, are you serious? Are you kidding me? But okay, but it runs great. And then Star Wars Jedi, Fallen Order, which I think is the first of those two games now. But eventually three games and I had to install the EA app to get that going. But other than the Doom game. So these are all from emulated as well, right?

Richard Campbell [00:34:54]:
Yeah, these were not ARM native. They were emulated.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:56]:
Yep. And they all run great. Like great. I mean like, not like, oh, this is okay. I mean like, no, this is playable. It's 100% playable. So that to me is actually a big leap, you know, forward. Because the game story in the first gen was like, you don't want it for that.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:12]:
You know, I mean you could find games, you'd had to really look and you know, you could look this up and figure out which ones do work.

Richard Campbell [00:35:17]:
But could you feel the difference between an Elite and A plus? I could just.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:21]:
Yeah. Oh. So I. Right. So I didn't. So at first I was like, I'm just going to put it on the Elite.

Richard Campbell [00:35:26]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:26]:
But then I was like, hold on a second, let me try the plus, you know, the only one I've installed in there so far is Half Life 2, which, you know, again, 20 something years old. This is an older game but looks awesome. Right. I mean they run on a bunch, right? Yeah, it runs identically. Right. But of course it's an older game but it runs beautifully on A plus. So that's kind of cool. But I mean day to day just, you know, you run, you know, web browsers or I use affinity for graphics or whatever it is, it just, it's just normal.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:59]:
Like, you know, you don't really. I could have the biggest portable workstation, you know, with Nvidia graphics or I could have this little X2 plus thing and those apps all run the same, like they just work. Anyway, I'm excited to finally have something so I'll continue with that but. And then I'll see if the extreme is actually extreme when I get home. But yeah, I'm glad this is finally happening. It took a long time. Okay. So yeah, I'm stoked.

Richard Campbell [00:36:29]:
I'm trying to figure out which one I want.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:33]:
Yeah, I mean, give it some time. Obviously there'll be like a roll it over time of from different computer makers and different levels and so forth and you know, we'll see what availability is like, you know, remember the highest end, X Elite, I'm having trouble with the names here. Was not available anywhere. Right. It shipped it in that dev box

Richard Campbell [00:36:54]:
and I think got one in my weirdo dev box.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:56]:
Yeah. And that's it. And it was just, I think there was. It might have been in like a Samsung Galaxy Book maybe, but it didn't. It wasn't broadly available and so we'll see if we have that problem this time around. But I'm curious, that's going to be the big thing. Well, that and I came here, I really punished myself and I did this on purpose. I had review laptops I had to come here with.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:20]:
So I didn't bring any Snapdragon laptops here. The only one that I have is the one I had here which is an X plus, like a 14 inch laptop, which is fine, you know, whatever. But I kind of want to compare this to like Surface laptop, which has the kind of the mainstream X Elite chip that's the most common.

Richard Campbell [00:37:40]:
Well, and therein lies the question, will there be a Surface X2?

Paul Thurrott [00:37:44]:
Yeah, yeah, I think there will be. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:37:49]:
And will I buy it?

Paul Thurrott [00:37:52]:
That I cannot answer. So we'll see. I don't know. I mean I just, I just reviewed

Richard Campbell [00:37:59]:
the Surface ecosystem for a While. But it was Dell before that. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't. I've never really owned a lenovo.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:08]:
Yeah, the ThinkPads are awesome.

Richard Campbell [00:38:10]:
I. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:11]:
And well these are IdeaPads but you know they also do ThinkPad and I've

Richard Campbell [00:38:16]:
been handing HP laptops like crazy and I have nothing but respect for them.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:21]:
Yeah, no, HP's are fantastic. I like the Surface Laptop 7 which is probably. It might well. Or maybe the HP OmniBook 5. I mean those are my two favorite laptops.

Leo Laporte [00:38:32]:
They're both even at the new doubled price.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:36]:
Well, that's a problem. But I mean that's not their fault.

Leo Laporte [00:38:39]:
Universal, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:38:40]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:38:41]:
I mean I love, I think pad X1 carbon. I think it's fantastic.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:44]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:38:45]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:45]:
The.

Richard Campbell [00:38:46]:
Although that LXP that holds X1 carbon line were great machines regardless of the chipset.

Leo Laporte [00:38:52]:
Super light.

Richard Campbell [00:38:53]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:54]:
The only thing holding those things back is they're intel based. Right. So you have those kind of reliability issues. And to keep that happening, intel and Lenovo have a partnership where they create this like, this like Aura Edition. They have a couple of handful of, you know, unique features. It's an aura. Yeah, it's like they're not. The aura stuff's not particularly interesting but this is that truck backing up beeping sound story where it's like why isn't AMD on this thing? And it's because the intel truck has arrived with a bucket full of money and you know, they're trying to keep that going.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:26]:
I'd give anything to have a, an X1 with a Snapdragon in it. That's never going to happen.

Leo Laporte [00:39:32]:
But like an AMG Panther lake is. It's pretty good, isn't it?

Paul Thurrott [00:39:35]:
I mean it's really good. Yeah, it's. But it still has that same, you know, the little roulette, the roulette wheel. Sorry, I don't know why that's hard to say for me where you open the laptop lid and you're like all right, let's see what's going to happen this time. Oh, it's going to reboot from scratch. Okay, fun. I guess I'll wait. You know like you never know what you're going to get.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:53]:
It's a box of chocolates but. But yeah, the performance is incredible. The GPU in that thing is amazing. Like this.

Richard Campbell [00:39:59]:
I'm still digging around to see which corporate buyers are into putting army into their, into their employees hands. I still, you know, reticent.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:09]:
It bugs me that I still see someone read a review one of these things and they're like, well, you got to check the compatibility of software. You know, it's like no, you don't know. You don't. It just works. I mean there are esoteric older things like you might have some random printer from 1987 or something, or whatever, but like mainstream software just works, you know, and even games to some degree are starting to just work. I mean this is the final frontier.

Leo Laporte [00:40:35]:
So do you think it's going to replace intel like Apple replaced?

Paul Thurrott [00:40:38]:
I pray to God it does. But like no, I think, you know, you got to remember in the big difference between like Windows and the Mac or just Microsoft and Apple in the kind of computing space is just the whole partnership thing and the diversity of choices and that's a double edged sword. It leads to complexity. But it would be better for the entire ecosystem and for everyone using it for it just to switch to arm for sure. I'd like to see the diversity be like ARM from Nvidia, Qualcomm and whatever other company instead of get rid of intel especially. But we're never going to get rid of.

Leo Laporte [00:41:17]:
My next machine should be an ARM machine. Oh no, I remember I don't use Windows, I use Linux.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:22]:
And that's why Linux and his ARM is still experimental in some ways. But I guess like the latest Ubuntu works pretty well depending on the laptop.

Leo Laporte [00:41:33]:
But I'm sure I'll wait a year. I mean I just got drivers.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:38]:
Yeah. See what happens. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:41:40]:
What's really amazing is I use CLAUDE to fix things. There was a little hesitation, you know, the mouse would freeze for a second and I, I said claude, what's going on? And immediately said, oh yeah, I see in the logs that it's trying to sleep the second screen, but there is no second screen right now because you

Paul Thurrott [00:41:57]:
haven't plugged it in. That's amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:41:58]:
So I'm just gonna turn off that sleep in the kernel and they'll be fine. And it did it fixed it. I might have found that, but I don't know, probably not.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:09]:
This is part of the back of the book thing, but I feel like when you switch platforms, whether it's today or 1985 or whatever year, there's the, you have this software and it might not be on the thing you're switching to. And it's like, well, I got to figure that out, you know, And I think that's gotten a lot easier because a lot of stuff now is just kind of web based or it's just cross platform or whatever. It is But I do feel like there's like a vibe coding personal software thing that could happen that could put things over the top. I think I talked about this recently,

Leo Laporte [00:42:40]:
but he's a great sysadmin.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:43]:
Yeah, just be like, look, well, just you want to run Linux, you run on Mac, whatever it is, like, and you're like, but I have this thing on Windows, I need it over here. How do we do that? If you're a developer to any degree that you could do that right now pretty easily. Honestly, if you're a normal person, I feel like, well, that's why you've got Cowork,

Leo Laporte [00:43:04]:
Perplexity Computer and all of these app based tools that are more than chat that they're more like coding tools. And I think that that's what's going to happen.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:14]:
Literally. Yeah, you just discuss and then, you know, you have a conversation about it until it's exactly what you want and you know, depending on how complex it is. I think being a coder still would help, you know, but we're rapidly moving into an area where that won't be necessary anymore. So I think that's going to help solve problems too. It's going to be a big problem for the App Store. Tell you that. Uh, you know, it's like when you can just design your own iPhone apps or whatever. So you can expect John Ternus now to fight that one kicking and screaming, but I mean eventually it's just going to happen.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:49]:
There's no way around it.

Richard Campbell [00:43:52]:
We got to see what he does with Siri.

Leo Laporte [00:43:55]:
Yeah, you know, it's too soon I guess because WWDC is less than a month away.

Richard Campbell [00:44:00]:
But yeah, yeah, that agenda is cast.

Leo Laporte [00:44:04]:
Actually it's more than a month away,

Paul Thurrott [00:44:05]:
but it's not, it's like it's probably already recorded and you know, but, but that's going to be an interesting too. Is it Tim Cook? Is it a little bit of both? Does Tim Cook kind of see it and then hand off to other people? You know, we don't know obviously.

Leo Laporte [00:44:16]:
But there's a reason why the handoff is September 1st because that's right before the new iPhone announcement.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:22]:
Yeah. So that's when you can get off

Leo Laporte [00:44:24]:
to a good start.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:26]:
You can have a good quarter. Yeah, it should be fine. Okay, sorry. We have. These are all completely unrelated to each other, but I didn't know where else to put them. So the first one was a bunch of announcements across OneDrive, which is really OneDrive for Business and SharePoint and I was kind of went through the list. And I was like, do these apply to consumer? Not really. Like, I'm not going to write about this, who cares? But then there was a one thing, it said OneDrive supports Markdown natively.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:55]:
And I'm like, wait, what? And there was a link to another announcement. And this does impact consumers. This is consumer end business. And you can now view with formatting. So similar to when you will load a Markdown document into Notepad in Windows 11, it will not display the codes, it will display like the formatting. So it does that. You can edit Markdown files and you can do that in a split view if you want, which is kind of the old fashioned way to do it. But the code view over here and then the.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:24]:
The layout, like HTML layout on the other side. So you can do side by side formatting toolbars, you don't have to learn the syntax, et cetera, et cetera. And from that there's the button that's up on the left. It's like create or upload, drop down menu. And one of the choices now is a Markdown file. Right. And this makes sense. I mean, Markdown is everywhere.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:45]:
This is the plain text format that is basically powering all this AI stuff we always talk about. And it's also really good just for light formatting. Plus it's plain text, so it's always going to work no matter where you are. It's really readable. It's great. So that's cool. I mean, I wouldn't touch OneDrive with your computer, but.

Leo Laporte [00:46:01]:
No, it's fine. It's good. Markdown is the lingua franca for AI now. So we've all agreed, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:46:07]:
So I've just randomly been using it. I've been using Markdown since probably. Oh, I love Markdown. Yeah, before it was cool. Somewhere in 2012-2015. Because I use it for the books and then I just use it for all writing now. I've been doing that for years.

Leo Laporte [00:46:20]:
That's probably sexual nature to you. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:23]:
I met a guy and not well, somewhere else in Mexico, but last weekend who was a writer and he said we were. He's like, oh, he figured out I write about technology. He's like, you're going to think this is crazy, but I write everything now. And like just the plain text thing, I'm like, I don't think that's crazy. I'm. That's what I do, you know? I'm like, yeah, no, that's. He was like, I've never met anyone

Richard Campbell [00:46:44]:
that does this I'm like, yeah, there's nobody smarter than the guy who agrees with you.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:48]:
Well, but is a writer, right? Like, to me, that's the interesting thing about it. Like a professional writer who was like, yeah, no, I just. I don't want these distractions. I'm like, no, who needs a ruler

Leo Laporte [00:46:59]:
when you're writing a story you don't need, you know?

Paul Thurrott [00:47:02]:
Yeah, Well, I always say it's like, you don't drive a battle through this anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:47:06]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [00:47:06]:
Yeah. You know, I mean, it's kind of

Leo Laporte [00:47:09]:
like how people used to write before computers. You know, you.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:13]:
You type it or you'd hand write it.

Leo Laporte [00:47:16]:
It's the same thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:18]:
This is. I'm. I'm living flowers for Algernon. I'm basically going to devolve into the point where, like, my computing stuff is all just text mode now. I don't even care anymore. I don't need graphics. I don't need your stinking mouse. You know, I could do screen, I can do keyboard shortcuts.

Leo Laporte [00:47:32]:
I do everything on the command line.

Richard Campbell [00:47:33]:
I mean, yeah, so many people living in the command line these days.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:37]:
No, it's like a CLI world now, which is like Macintosh in 1983, I know did not invent the GUI, but the first kind of mainstream GUI that everyone was kind of aware of. I mean, this is like 40 something years later. And it's like, are we really going back to before that? It's like, yeah, sort of.

Richard Campbell [00:47:54]:
We are NET rocks episode about being a CLI world. It's like your first interface should be

Leo Laporte [00:48:00]:
your CLI and your last interface as I decline into my senility and.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:06]:
Yeah, yeah, it's going to be like a. We need, like, pet ski, so you can have like, little, like character graphics and you could have like, like the little. The little Pulse. Pulseometer or whatever you call it, is going to be like, just text is like, this is very, very, very, very good. Just.

Leo Laporte [00:48:22]:
I want him to be M. Dash

Paul Thurrott [00:48:24]:
Leo has concluded his production of his life. That will be the case. It'll just be like, seriously, it's just going across the screen.

Leo Laporte [00:48:33]:
I'll have the little Claude code guy.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:41]:
So we talked last week about Microsoft raising the price of Surface PCs and the reasons for that and not just their component shortage and all the other terribleness, but, you know, they're not a big player in the space. They don't really get good pricing on this kind of stuff. But now we have rumors from Windows Central. I'm sorry. Actually, it's from someone on Twitter, but of the first Next wave, the next wave of surface PCs. So there's going to be Intel Core Ultra 3, 5 and 7 based surfaces and then in the summer, Snapdragon X2 plus, an Elite based. No, I'm sorry, excuse me. Yeah, there is, I'm sorry, X2 plus and Elite Base.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:26]:
Surface PCs, according to this person. He says Microsoft is not planning to offer any surface PCs with the highest end, X2, Elite, Extreme SoC, only X2 plus and Elite. But those are, those are kind of like the mainstream models to me. So I mean that kind of makes sense. That may help Richard make his decision because it looks like you're not going to, to be able to get the, like the awesome, you know, the, the really high end version. So we'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:49:55]:
The question, do you need it? Right, like that's.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:00]:
No, no, I don't need it. But I don't need any of these. I don't need all kinds of mic that I want. Yeah, exactly. I would like to be entitled. Could you just leave me alone? No, I, you know, it's. Why can't I just be like that? I don't. Yeah, I know.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:16]:
Well, that's the point. I mean, that's why that HP OmniBook 5 was such a refreshing thing. You know, PC makers send me these things to review. They're often the highest end versions of what they have. And it's like I just reviewed a laptop that cost over three grand to start, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:50:31]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:32]:
So you buy this thing, it's 5, 600 bucks to 800, 850, whatever. But, and it's wonderful. You're like, oh, these things can actually be great. Like, who knew, you know, incremental difference

Richard Campbell [00:50:44]:
between the thousand dollar laptop and the $3,000 laptop is small.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:48]:
Yeah, it depends on what you're doing, you know, obviously. But yeah, so this, there'll be something for everybody, I guess. And then I just, I don't, this doesn't mean anything to anybody probably, but Microsoft has a rewards program. It's basically a way to bribe users into using Bing, from what I can tell. And there's, they've started emailing people, people that are active in the program. So I haven't gotten this email to tell them about changes coming to the program which is going to involve it having three levels. It's going to be like a member level and then silver and gold. And where you're at is going to be based on your activity, I guess, using these Microsoft services online and stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:33]:
So this is tied into Xbox to some degree. It's tied into Bing. Like I said Internet, you can Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, you know, whatever. And you know, like other rewards programs, you build up points and then you can redeem them for certain things. So like, you know, use Bing for a year, then you get like a $5 Microsoft Store gift card or something. You know, it's like, whatever. But I. I do think for certain people, if you're of this bent, this, you know, some people just fall into this and love it.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:04]:
You know, I'm just. I just look at this. I'm like, yeah, I don't. I'm good.

Richard Campbell [00:52:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:08]:
You mentioned the email.

Richard Campbell [00:52:09]:
My immediate thought was. You mean both guys. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:12]:
Well, I. Look, it's so we live in a time and we are in a business where an industry where you can't criticize anything without meeting every one of those people who love the thing you just criticized.

Richard Campbell [00:52:25]:
So welcome to Long Tail Land.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:28]:
They're out there. It's just. I'm not one of them, but I mean, I'm fine. I don't care that it exists. I'm not against it. It's okay. I mean, look, if you're going to use this stuff, you might as well get, you know, take advantage of it. It's smart.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:40]:
It's like points on a credit card or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:52:42]:
But when there's something for everybody, there's nothing for nobody.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:47]:
I. That's true.

Leo Laporte [00:52:48]:
I think that makes sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:50]:
That's curiously correct.

Leo Laporte [00:52:52]:
I think it's a deep, very existential

Richard Campbell [00:52:54]:
for a Thursday morning in Australia.

Leo Laporte [00:52:57]:
Convergence for 5am man.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:00]:
Deep thoughts with whatever. Handy.

Leo Laporte [00:53:02]:
Yeah. Jack Handy.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:03]:
Jack Handy.

Leo Laporte [00:53:05]:
I. I don't think we mentioned that because Richard's in Sydney. It is. It's. We started the show at 4am for him. So. Thank you, Richard. I appreciate your valor.

Leo Laporte [00:53:16]:
Let's take a break and if. Richard, if you want to take a nap.

Richard Campbell [00:53:20]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:20]:
Just sit in the dark and wearing a hoodie. You know, it looks like your eyes are open.

Richard Campbell [00:53:30]:
It is now 5am, so.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:32]:
Oh.

Leo Laporte [00:53:33]:
The sun would be coming up any minute now.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:35]:
That's almost there, though.

Leo Laporte [00:53:36]:
It is the fall there, right?

Richard Campbell [00:53:40]:
Yes, Fall.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:41]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:53:41]:
Autumn.

Richard Campbell [00:53:42]:
Yes. It's cooling down, but, you know, it never gets that cool in Sydney, really.

Leo Laporte [00:53:46]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:53:46]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:53:48]:
Well, yeah, take a break. Relax a little bit. There he is in his padded cell. And we will, and we will.

Richard Campbell [00:53:57]:
I always try to find the corner of the hotel room that is not the bed.

Leo Laporte [00:54:00]:
Yeah, I know. I hate it. I hate seeing the bed, especially when it's unmade in the background. Paul will have a little pulque. Richard will have a little nap. Back we go to Paul and Richard and the subject for our next segment, AI Paul.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:17]:
Yes, AI. I'm not sure if you guys have heard what's going on with AI but this stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:54:22]:
Yeah, there's something going on.

Richard Campbell [00:54:24]:
It's not going to be anything. It's not a thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:29]:
Ed Z Tron. I'm not sure. I'm sure Leo knows who this is.

Leo Laporte [00:54:32]:
We've had him on the show. He's a character.

Richard Campbell [00:54:34]:
Oh boy.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:35]:
Yeah, he's a bit extreme to me. Corey. Dr.

Richard Campbell [00:54:38]:
Someone anchoring over there. Right. Like I appreciate Ed takes the hard line.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:43]:
Yeah, he's. Yeah. So he had leaked and then minutes later Microsoft announced that GitHub Copilot is going to move from I guess it's like response based billing to token based billing. And what that probably means is that it's going to get more expensive because in every maybe response isn't the right term request. I guess if you. There are tokens that get expended in making the request and then there are tokens that are expended in satisfying the request. Right. So this is going to change things pretty dramatically.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:24]:
They're also pausing new signups for individuals and I think we're starting to see that, you know, this is where the, the price of this thing has kind of been hidden from us a little bit. And as obscene as it may be to spend 20 or $200 a month on whatever AI, you know, chatbot as we used to call these things, that, that doesn't actually cover the cost of what's occurring, you know, in the cloud.

Leo Laporte [00:55:50]:
This is what Ed's been saying for a while is these all you can eat subscriptions are really subsidized subsidies. And Anthropic has already said you can't use an all you can eat for enterprise anymore. Individuals are still using it.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:03]:
Although it turns out when you.

Leo Laporte [00:56:04]:
It also revealed that Anthropic had stopped people on the $20 plan from using plot code.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:12]:
Code. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:56:14]:
I also feel like they're just, they're following Anthropic's lead like all.

Leo Laporte [00:56:18]:
Well, there's a crunch. There's a crunch is what's happening.

Richard Campbell [00:56:21]:
Well, they want to position it that way, but it's also markets are declining, the investors are getting jumpy and efficiency is now no longer a bad word. You know, for a long time here it was just many features as possible, as many customers as possible. That's all that matters. Now it's how much are you spending?

Paul Thurrott [00:56:40]:
Right. So if you give someone unlimited Internet access or whatever the thing is, or in this case unlimited or nearly unlimited access to AI. It turns out some people just use the hell out of that and it's not necessarily good. And then I think the, the margins aren't tight, they're negative or whatever. They're. They're really bad. And there's also.

Leo Laporte [00:57:01]:
It's not even just money, it's constraints. They don't have enough compute.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:05]:
Right? That's right.

Leo Laporte [00:57:06]:
So they have.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:07]:
Yeah, you don't want like some idiots going to sit there and generate images all day of like him as a superhero. And it's like taking down the power supply to Toledo, you know, and it's like maybe we need to be giving this or providing this to people who are paying us. You know, something that makes sense.

Leo Laporte [00:57:24]:
So OpenAI is using this as a marketing opportunity though. They're saying, oh, you can still. You've code use Codex on our free plans. You can't use very much of it.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:33]:
I'm not sure, I'm not sure that

Leo Laporte [00:57:35]:
they were free originally. It's a way of getting new customers.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:37]:
Do we call it. Is OpenAI a pyramid scheme? What's the term?

Leo Laporte [00:57:41]:
Yeah, kind of is. I'm not sure they're going to make it up in volume.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:46]:
Volume. Yeah, exactly. That's one of my favorite jokes of all. All the time.

Richard Campbell [00:57:50]:
Both Ed and Cory Doctorow are all over this whole, you know, these data centers aren't actually being built. They're not actually operational like they. It's call it under construction.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:02]:
They probably never will be.

Richard Campbell [00:58:03]:
Yeah, and that's exactly the point.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:06]:
So this is not in the notes. I've not written about this. It's. It's something I feel like if I want to write about it, but I know that when I do, it'll be out of date in three months and I'll write about it again and again, you know, whatever. But as AI improves, so to speak, the little asterisks down in the corner is that local AI, meaning like small language models running on a device against a cpu, GPU and or NP or whatever are also getting much better. And so you'll see all the big players, Google with Gemma, you know, they released the latest version of that early April, I think is probably outperforming Gemini or whatever it was called at the time like two years ago or something like that. Like that. Like they're getting to the point where these things are what I would call good enough, you know, capital G, capital E for some things.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:52]:
Right. And so over the weekend, one of the things I did, you know, and I do this a lot as bring up. I brought Gemma. I don't remember the version. There's like three tiers of middle. Middle tier. And I just kind of make something up. And I joked, you know, I'm a Tolkien scholar.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:08]:
So I was like. I asked the question. I said, I want a summary of all of Tolkien's major works, how they relate to each other. Give me some guidance on where I should start in reading these things and, you know, yada, yada, yada, and kind

Richard Campbell [00:59:22]:
of an overview directly to silmarillium. Do not come back.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:25]:
Yeah, exactly. Oddly, it was kind of the opposite of that, but yeah. And I did this to. I did this to Gemma, with Gemma, and then I tried it with Anthropic Cloud, which I'm paying for right now. So I have to say it was pretty impressive. The Gemma version, meaning it was running locally on this machine. I did this on a MacBook Air, so it's running against just whatever the Apple silicon chip. So I ended up running out of.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:54]:
Not to. What do you call it? I guess context or just. It hit a limit at some point, but it spewed out what I would call a high school. A college quality report on this topic, which I know a lot about. And. And then it. And. And I don't know, I didn't print it out or anything.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:15]:
It was probably 10 to 20 pages long. It was big. And then it just kind of stopped because it was like, sorry, we can't do any. You know, we probably. It's a local model, whatever. And, you know, and the anthropic version, that thing went gangbusters. Was fine, but very similar. And I have to say, you know, again, this.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:35]:
Is this the way people. Is this what people do with AI? I don't know, but I. We're. We're not that far from this stuff. Working great.

Leo Laporte [01:00:43]:
Kevin said you ran out of Tolkien.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:46]:
Oh, jeez. Kevin.

Richard Campbell [01:00:48]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:00:49]:
He really is good on.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:50]:
Nicely done.

Richard Campbell [01:00:51]:
Into the box.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:52]:
Two minutes.

Richard Campbell [01:00:53]:
Feel shame penalty.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:58]:
That's a good one.

Leo Laporte [01:00:59]:
No, I know what you're saying, though, is that local AI is only a little bit behind these big frontiers.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:05]:
Yeah, the gap is closing. I mean, there'll always be a gap. And a lot of the stuff we're going to Talk about in 10 seconds is new models, new. Whatever. All this stuff's happening. Whatever. It's amazing.

Richard Campbell [01:01:15]:
But also new models that are smaller and more efficient, which also has to be.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:22]:
I feel like this came up in the context of Microsoft AI maybe a week or maybe two weeks ago. And, and the idea, yeah, it was that Microsoft has a model now, Mai image 2. And now there's an Mai image 2 efficient. And the efficient version, I guess it's. I don't know if it's a smaller model in the cloud or a small language model you can install locally. It kind of doesn't matter. But the idea was there'll be this workflow where you work at a creative professional outfit. You're making some kind of an ad campaign or a movie, you know, movie campaign where you need posters and, and different assets and artwork and so forth.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:58]:
And you would use the smaller, more efficient, less expensive model as you worked through what you wanted to do. But when it was time to go to production, that's when you open up the spigot and pay for the thing that's a little more expensive or is just expensive. And because you're doing the final output and so you'll go from something that looks great to something that's like a flawless, you know, and I, in this, because I can't stop using this word, is in its own way a form of orchestration. Right. That whatever you're interacting with should be able to understand the language of. This is for testing. We're going to do it with the team. We're going to use this less expensive or no expense thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:39]:
And then you say, okay, now we've gotten the designs we want across the board for whatever this campaign is. Now we're going to go into production and it will know from that language to use the, the big one. Okay. Yes. So in the past week, Anthropic released the latest Cloud Opus model, 4.7.

Richard Campbell [01:02:58]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:58]:
Big improvement for advanced software engineering, et cetera, et cetera. But then they released a new, I guess we're calling these products. It's kind of hard to explain, but there's like obviously cloud, which is sort of the chat bottom. That's not really a great term. But they came up with cloud code, which was for coding, obviously discovered, hey, this is actually really good for productivity. So they came up with something called Cloud cowork and now they have something called Cloud design, which is basically about democratizing the creation of visual assets like I was just talking about actually, and taking on companies like Figma or Canva, those kinds of things. And you know, again, I'm going to talk about this in the back of the book, but this notion that you could converse with a tool to create whatever the asset is, whether it's text or graphics or whatever or an application, you know, is an astonishing development. And you know, the asterisk is always like if it works.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:59]:
But I feel like that asterisk is going away and is maybe gone in many cases today. Like it's kind of astonishing what's available now, you know, and I feel like they're just gonna go after every little thing you, that would require time, expertise and, or a lot of money. To hire someone else to do it for you is just, you're gonna be able to just describe it and make it happen. And, and I say that like it's happening in the future. I mean it's literally here now for so many things. And so cloud design I think is kind of the next step along that path. On the open AI side, they also discovered the same thing. They have Codex.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:41]:
Codex is their experience for developing software and they're not doing a separate one. So they didn't come up with something called like OpenAI cowork or whatever. But they are expanding Codex to work with productivity use cases as well. And that includes all the stuff we're all, you know, it's like we become so familiar with this very quickly. But this thing can, you know, has computer use capabilities. You can do this remotely from your phone to your computer. Image generation supports all these plugins, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So this thing works with every document type on earth that you can imagine, can output those things as well, et cetera, and then integrates with, you know, across Microsoft, Atlassian, GitLab, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:25]:
I mean, it's astonishing, right? So this is, you know, this is where we are. When they announced this, which was days ago, the image generation was GPT image 1.5. Now we have image or GPT image 2.0, which is chat GPT images 2.0. And this is a much more precise, as they say it, or I would just say high quality image generation capability and now works for complex creative tasks like those things we were talking about earlier. You're doing a, an ad campaign or whatever it is as a creative professional. And if you, the announcement was, to me, it was actually kind of annoying because it wasn't like text. Here's what we're doing. Here are some examples.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:12]:
It was like a, it's an interactive thing where you flip through all these different designs that they made with this product. It's amazing. So, you know, I, I just, this stuff is just, it's crazy. It's crazy to me how fast this stuff is moving. Google probably had 17. Actually Google today, I don't know if you saw their announcements day. Google announced like 30 different things today. I haven't.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:38]:
I just saw the feed of it before we started the show. So I haven't really looked through this too much. But of interest to maybe mainstream users, or just users, I guess, is some upgrades they made to AI mode in Chrome, the big one. And this is really about integrating search, which is where AI mode comes from. Right. And the browser, which makes sense. I mean, that's what you do. I mean, that's what all monopolists do, but it's good for people too.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:05]:
So when you use. If you are in Chrome and you get an AI mode result right at the top, when you open links, they're going to open side by side. Now it's. It's. Curiously, it's not split view, but it's. It doesn't open it. You know, you don't have to control, click and open a new tab, which I think is kind of interesting. And you can also search across multiple tabs.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:29]:
Right. Directly in the browser or from within AI mode, which is kind of interesting. You could. This could include tabs that are just an image or, or PDF files or whatever. And it will use all that context when you search across Google search, which is using AI mode, et cetera, et cetera. So you're starting to get this kind of cyclic benefit or whatever. And of course it creates images because everything does now. And I hope you didn't go to school to become a graphic artist because we don't need you anymore.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:00]:
It's over.

Leo Laporte [01:08:00]:
There's also those design tools. I mean, it's really.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:04]:
That's incredible.

Leo Laporte [01:08:04]:
I'm not sure I'd want to be a designer.

Richard Campbell [01:08:06]:
You're quoting Jeff Hinton there when he said in 2016 that we're never going to need radiologists again. It's a dead.

Leo Laporte [01:08:12]:
Oh, yeah. That didn't come true, did it? Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:08:14]:
The demand of radiologists has only gone up, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:08:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like. I feel like he will be proven correct at some point, to be honest.

Richard Campbell [01:08:24]:
I mean, it's a great question because part of this is just the. How much stuff never gets made because. Because people are so far behind.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:31]:
This is like you're watching a movie and the guy comes out of the cockpit and he's like, does anyone here know how to fly a plane? You know, which is not what you want to hear on a plane. And you know, this season in the.

Richard Campbell [01:08:44]:
Stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:47]:
I'm so sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:08:48]:
Oh, God. I'll just Remind you that the automated pancake.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:52]:
Yeah, exactly. When you're asleep, every hotel is a five star hotel.

Leo Laporte [01:08:57]:
That's a good point.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:59]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:08:59]:
Unless you're not asleep and then it's

Paul Thurrott [01:09:01]:
not if you're not asleep, it's a minus one star hotel because you're staring at the ceiling and wondering what's crawling on your foot. You know,

Richard Campbell [01:09:08]:
it's that what's. Yeah, what are those scenes on the ceiling? Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:12]:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. We stayed in a hotel in Paris million years ago that we called Hotel Do Shit, which was one of the. One of two times in my life I've slept in a hotel in my jeans. Yeah, like that's not bad, you know.

Richard Campbell [01:09:28]:
Yikes.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:31]:
So Mozilla, which I feel like is going to be in the news a lot this year, they have a subsidiary, mzla, which I assume is pronounced Mozilla, hilariously, just announced something called Thunderbolt, which is like sovereign AI for organizations and businesses. Right. And there's actually a good point here because one of the biggest issues for any company, regardless of size, but especially bigger companies, I would say is keeping their data private. Microsoft spent the past 30 years building controls into every server and now service imaginable for rights management and to ensure that users can't forward important internal email outside of their organization, et cetera, et cetera. But now these same companies, Microsoft and others, are asking us to trust all this internal data to AI. And it's like I. And there's a lot of horror stories, obviously. So the idea here is that you're going to have, it's up to you, you know, the people running the company where you want to go with this.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:35]:
It could be local, it could be privately hosted, whatever. But it's kind of a plug and play, mix and match system where you can have commercial open source models, local models, like I said, integrate with whatever data systems over all the standard protocols, mcp, et cetera, and you kind of build your own. It's kind of like, I guess, build your. It's like a build a bear, but for AI, it's like a. And you know what, actually this makes total sense to me. I feel like even within something like Copilot, and I guess in this case I'm really talking about Microsoft 365 copilot, but whatever. Microsoft itself will probably offer similar capabilities. Right? Meaning yes, you could use their models whenever those exist Inside Copilot or OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever else.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:24]:
I feel like this kind of thing where you mix and match depending on your needs and data, I don't know, sovereignty, whatever you want to call it, security, privacy, whatever needs are. So anyway, this is not going to benefit any individual listening to this, but there's a wait list. If you are a company and want to know more about this, this seems like a good idea to me. Good for them. And then to the point we made earlier about clis and command lines interfaces, Google in the past week released something called the Android cli, right? So we're going to see a lot of this. And this I played with. I have kind of dipped in and out of Android software development many, many times over the years. I've taken courses on it, which I paid for.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:16]:
The language has shifted over time from Java to Kotlin, and the environments they have for creating UIs and things like that have all changed and upgraded, etc. But the Android CLI is really interesting. It's like you can. It literally is. You install it, you type Android and then you get whatever the commands are, but you can set up your environment. You don't have to use Android Studio, you will, but it can create projects that are compatible with Android Studio. It can use all the templates that are in Android Studio, all of which have been updated, et cetera, to create the basis for an app. You can set up an emulator.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:55]:
You can build your application from the command line, run it against the emulator, have it pop up on the screen over this command line, which I've done, and also to a physical device if you have it connected via WI Fi or usb. And then, yes, of course, it will integrate with Android Studio. So if you need to go to the next level, which you will for now. But again, like, I feel like in time, like a lot of people are just going to do this. You're basically just going to sit there and describe what it is you want this app to do. Whichever interface you're using, Android Studio will do this as well. It's fascinating. Like, I.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:29]:
This is. This is taking over the world. I don't think people understand it. I don't. I mean, we talk about it here and I'm sure. But that's what I mean. Like, but the software world is the world, right? In the sense that mainstream people don't have any idea this is happening, right? And they don't need to know about it right now. It's not impacting them, but it's going to impact the software that they use, whether it's on a phone or in the cloud or wherever.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:53]:
I mean, like, this is Even. Well, this will impact. I want to benefit, probably, but let's say impact everybody to some degree. Even if you don't understand it's happening, right? Because the way that things are made, and in this case we're talking about software, is changing, like, so dramatically. It's incredible.

Richard Campbell [01:14:15]:
You can imagine when you think about that, that model, right? It's like you pay a monthly subscription fee for a service that does whatever you need to do, and whenever you ask for a change, it just does it for you. And so you essentially have continuous custom software.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:32]:
I think all three of us. Well, actually, in Leo's case, this might not be as big of a problem because I feel like his wife is into this stuff. But we've all regaled or bored our wives with things in our industry, you know, like, you can't help it. Like sometimes something.

Richard Campbell [01:14:47]:
Exciting times, we're excited about something.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:49]:
You can catch up. You can see them over there, like nodding, you know, and you're like, I'm sorry, sorry. But this is one of those topics. And I feel like the natural extension to this is going to be. You describe I need a part for my classic mustang. And you 3D print it or it's going to extend to physical things. It will be controlling smart vacuums and, you know, smart robots or whatever they are that go and do things around your house. Like, it's, it's a.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:19]:
Like right now we're talking about software, you know, services, whatever. It's kind of hard to see or whatever. But. But I. This will. This is going to bleed out into the world, you know, which is the Matrix, I guess. Yeah, it's astonishing. I mean, it's really.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:35]:
It blows my mind.

Leo Laporte [01:15:37]:
It's very exciting, actually.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:38]:
It is disruptive time. And this is the thing, you know, remember a month ago, whatever it was I was talking about, you know, that those things we don't have anymore in the industry, that sense of excitement and the whole world was wide open. You could do anything. You know, when the personal or back then the home computer phenomenon started happening. And it was, you know, as me as a kid seeing a Commodore 64, probably, or maybe a Vic 20 was like, oh, my God, oh, my God. Like, I can make this. I'm going to make things. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to make games or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:06]:
And it was really exciting. And I feel like we kind of. We kind of lost that along the way. You know, I made the point, the argument anyway, that, you know, Visual Basic in some ways was the last great Thing like that. But I feel like this is it, like this is the answer. You know, this stuff is, you know, it starts with technical things, of course it starts with software development. It will go to productivity, whatever. But it will be fun things too, you know, and it will be something that mainstream, normal, non technical people can do.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:36]:
No doubt about.

Richard Campbell [01:16:37]:
I think about my granddaughter growing up in a world where she'll simply have custom software for whatever she wants to do on.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:43]:
Exactly. I know, it's so different.

Richard Campbell [01:16:46]:
She's going to play our games that she's effectively made. They may be working from a template or anything like that, but they like this is her own creativity will be cast into that tool to make things that she wants.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:59]:
Probably shouldn't say this out loud because I should just do it myself. But someone's gonna make like a. What is essentially a Dr. Seuss book, which is. Oh, the things you'll make.

Richard Campbell [01:17:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:07]:
You know. Right.

Richard Campbell [01:17:09]:
Well, there was other things you'll do.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:11]:
Anyhow, I probably, I really screwed up my whole back of the book thing because that's, that's a big part of it.

Richard Campbell [01:17:16]:
You just gave. Yeah. He just burned up your back of the book. Don't worry.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:19]:
That's all right. I often feel like by the time we get to your. Your stuff, we don't have enough time. So you'll have enough time today and

Richard Campbell [01:17:27]:
then I'm going to breakfast because, you know, things are waking up around you

Leo Laporte [01:17:31]:
and you have a talk today too, right?

Richard Campbell [01:17:33]:
Yeah, dude. I'm doing a refresh on my space talk. So I've incorporated the new Artemis plans and.

Leo Laporte [01:17:39]:
Oh, people will be very interested in that, I'm sure.

Richard Campbell [01:17:41]:
Yeah, it was a special request, so.

Leo Laporte [01:17:44]:
Okay. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:45]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [01:17:46]:
Everybody was so excited about Artemis.

Richard Campbell [01:17:49]:
Yeah. I think that's why they. Because that doc had really died away for the past couple of years. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:55]:
It's been at least since radio silence. It's basically been private companies testing rockets that explode on takeoff, you know, so there's been some exciting things like when SpaceX lands like a rocket on a platform in the ocean. That's awesome.

Richard Campbell [01:18:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:07]:
You know.

Richard Campbell [01:18:07]:
Well, they just did that for the 600th time.

Leo Laporte [01:18:10]:
It's amazing.

Richard Campbell [01:18:11]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:18:11]:
And.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:11]:
Well, yeah, I mean Blue Origin got boring. We stopped even watching it on tv. Right. I just saw a video. I. Well, not randomly but you know, on YouTube that was later that like a late 80s space shuttle just landing like a plane on a Runway. And I still, I get chills just thinking about it.

Leo Laporte [01:18:32]:
It's amazing that they did that. Is it really is.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:34]:
It's awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:18:35]:
It's just Richard, Lisa and I saw. Was it Columbia?

Richard Campbell [01:18:39]:
The Atlantis.

Leo Laporte [01:18:42]:
Atlantis, that's right. The Atlantis at the Canaveral they're calling it these days. And it was incredible to see at Kennedy Space Center. It was incredible to see this beautiful giant vehicle.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:56]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [01:18:56]:
Really, really wonderful stuff. Yeah. It got me excited.

Richard Campbell [01:19:00]:
Tons of spacecraft looks like. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:19:03]:
And then you know what the sad thing is that NASA is being basically defunded. At least all the science research they're going to allow the.

Richard Campbell [01:19:11]:
It's not true. There's just noise from an administration saying they want that. But your congress controls the person.

Leo Laporte [01:19:19]:
Yes. So write your Congress critter and say we like what?

Paul Thurrott [01:19:22]:
Who controls the Congress? What are the midterms?

Leo Laporte [01:19:24]:
That's a really good question. Who does? Who's driving this ship? Let's take a break because we do have the Xbox the much and there's

Paul Thurrott [01:19:34]:
a lot of stuff this week for

Leo Laporte [01:19:36]:
Xbox requested the always enjoyed Xbox segment just around the corner. You're listening to Windows Weekly with paul thurat@therot.com his books are at leanpub.com Richard Campbell at.net rocks and run his radio runisradio.com now in Australia. So your talk and then I see a nap. And then I see. After the nap I was gonna say

Paul Thurrott [01:19:59]:
there would definitely be a nap for me.

Leo Laporte [01:20:01]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:01]:
I.

Leo Laporte [01:20:02]:
You know what? I'm really getting into napping.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:04]:
Well, I wish.

Richard Campbell [01:20:05]:
Thursday night is the attendee party night so we will be up late. So I'm gonna need a nap.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:11]:
Aha.

Leo Laporte [01:20:11]:
He's planning. Oh, you're already in Thursday. I forgot.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:14]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [01:20:14]:
Yeah, yeah. And then I do the opening second day keynote on Friday and it's the hype talk. So.

Leo Laporte [01:20:20]:
Holy cow.

Richard Campbell [01:20:21]:
Sharp for that one too.

Leo Laporte [01:20:22]:
You are working hard.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:26]:
I don't know. I've said this many times but being roughly the same age, I don't know how you do this. I could travel like you travel. I just can't. And I travel a lot compared to most people.

Leo Laporte [01:20:36]:
But I. Richard enjoys it. That's the thing that blows me away.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:38]:
Totally. Yeah. Gets into it. We're all broken in some way. Richard, I think we found out what your brokenness is.

Leo Laporte [01:20:46]:
Well, it's 5.30am in Sydney so the sun should be emerging soon.

Richard Campbell [01:20:52]:
Let's continue our way.

Leo Laporte [01:20:56]:
Let's continue on with the Xbox segment. Mr. Thorat. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:02]:
So here's some really good news. Well combined with some sort of bad news which is that Microsoft just announced it's dropping the price of Game Pass ultimate and PC Game Pass. Right. Which is something that never, ever happens to subscription services, ever. Granted, they raised those dramatically. I think it was late last year, where especially ultimate is, you know, was 29.99amonth. So that's gone down to 22.99amonth. PC Game Pass is going from 1699, sorry, 1649 to 1399amonth.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:38]:
But future Call of Duty titles will no longer be included as day one titles. Right. Which is the, you know. So before Microsoft announced they intended to buy Activision Blizzard, they decided they gave Game Pass subscribers a huge perk. I think everything but the lowest tier. You'll always get the Microsoft Studio games on day one, Right. So if they announce some new Gears of War games, new Halo game, whatever it is, you'll get that through Game Pass. Nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:08]:
Now, when they announced that they were going to buy Activision Blizzard, there were two things I did in the period of time during which they were trying to buy it and then finally did buy it. That the first one was I looked at Activision Blizzard's financials from the last couple of years prior to this and plugged it into Microsoft's financials to see what the impact would be on the company. Interestingly, on the broader company. Not dramatic, I mean, single digit revenue increase, whatever, but on more personal computing. The part of the business that they are now part of, which is basically Windows, some Bing stuff and ads and things, and then Surface and an Xbox. Big, big, big improvement, right? So I was like, okay, that's interesting. But the other one and this one, I never really satisfied my kind of desire to figure it out. But how, in what world does it make sense to offer Call of Duty games through any Game Pass subscription right now? At the time, Game Pass ultimate was probably 15 bucks a month.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:07]:
And then PC and Xbox Game Pass were $9.99 a month. And it was like, I don't see there being enough new subscribers that are going to stay with it. Right. To justify not earning a billion dollars in revenues just by releasing a new Call of Duty game, which we'd have to buy. You know, there's a reason Activision Blizzard never entertained the idea of any subscription services. They were like, no, we sell games and Call of Duty is the best example because it's the biggest one. And I just never figured it out. Like you, you could go in two directions.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:41]:
You could say, all right, at current levels, what would be the price per month? Or how many subscribers would we have to get at 9991499 for it to make sense. And those numbers, it's impossible. Like, it's. I was. My, My basic determination was, I don't see how this could happen. And then, sure enough, right, you know, they announced they bought Activision Blizzard. They raise prices, then they raise prices dramatically, especially for Ultimate. And at the time, what we would have said was, this is where you can see the cost of taking Call of Duty away from, you know, having all those sales.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:17]:
Because the problem, of course, is that you might have people that you can sign up for a month. So new Call of Duty game comes out, you're like, I'm going to play this for November and December, and then I'm not going to. You ever play it again, and I'm not going to subscribe again. I'm just going to drop the subscription. I mean, they lose money on that, right? Essentially. So I, I think this makes sense. It's hard because they made that promise. They changed the subscriptions and took it away from some of them.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:45]:
They raised prices dramatically, especially on Ultimate. And now what they're saying is, well, we're going to lower prices, cool, but we're not going to have Call of Duty in there. And I, I think it, I honestly, I think it makes sense. I think it's the. It's the right thing to do. Also, I just want to point out Asha. Asha Sharma, this woman everyone was so critical of, pretty decisively moved to do this. I mean, pretty quick, right? Like, this is.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:12]:
You don't see subscription prices coming down ever. Like, that's amazing to me.

Richard Campbell [01:25:17]:
But this is all. I mean, she hasn't said this out loud, but the essential statement is the Tier one game idea doesn't work. We're gonna have to get it out of the pass and you just buy them. But everything else fine.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:32]:
You know, the previous people. I just want to say, you know, just remember when this promise was made, they didn't have Activision Blizzard. When Activision Blizzard was in the process of being acquired, there were questions about it. You know, these guys looked at this and they were like, all right, how can we make sense of this? And I think what they came up with was for this to make sense, we have to see some huge amount of growth in Game Pass and. Or raise prices dramatically. And I don't think they just met the targets. I think Game Pass subscriber base has basically stagnated. You'll notice they don't talk about this anymore.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:06]:
I think they found the size of this market, basically, and, and to some degree, this Sort of brings it back to where I sort of feel like it was originally. Well, maybe not originally, but had been for a long time, which was, you know, for a reasonable amount of money per month. This is actually kind of. It's a nice thing to have that if you open the Xbox app on your computer and you look at all the games that are available just on your computer, it's actually pretty astonishing. And the cost of that subscription is 14 bucks a month. Now, if you go to ultimate, you get that for the console and for PC and you get the additional rights for, you know, cloud streaming, etc. Like, it's a little bit, but you get better priority access, etc. Like it's okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:54]:
Like it's free. You know, in a world in which Netflix suddenly cost me 28 bucks a month, this is starting to make sense. So good for them. I mean, you know, she inherited kind of a mess, and I feel like, yeah, this is a good decision, it seems to me. Okay. But I know some people are like, you know, going to freak out because that's what people do. Speaking of Asha Sharma, she tweeted something today that is not official yet, but basically is teasing that Xbox and Discord have a partnership. They've been working together for a long time.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:31]:
This came out of Microsoft. Remember, they had Mixer as their sort of form of Discord, and they dropped that. And now on an Xbox, you can use Discord or whatever, and of course on a PC, you can as well. Anyway, they are partnering or teaming up again for something related to Game Pass, which she has not said what it is, so we'll see what that means. So Game Pass prices just came down. I think we're gonna see something related to why. I mean, we are, according to her, we're gonna see something related to Discord as well. So Discord charges for subscriptions as well.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:07]:
Right. Like, I use. I just use the free version, but you can pay for Discord. I think it's Discord Pro Pro, or what do they call these things? Nitro Basic and Nitro. Whatever. You know, they have different plans, but I. I bet there's gonna be, you know, you're a Game Pass ultimate subscriber, and maybe you get like Nitro with HD streaming or something as part of your subscription. And, you know, Microsoft kind of pays them on the back end, so we'll see what comes out of that.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:33]:
We just. That's just a tease. For now, we are, yep, decidedly in the second half of the month. That means Microsoft has announced more games coming to Game Pass, which we can't stop talking about. Kiln is the kind of. The big one. This is kind of a cartoony game that looks really interesting actually. Vampire Crawlers, which I.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:00]:
Okay. Sledding game. Love it. Final Fantasy 5, which I think we already knew was coming. And I guess this is later. I'll hold off on my other thing about this. But yeah. Anyway, a bunch of.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:17]:
Bunch of new games coming across all the platforms. We also got an Xbox monthly update. So the April update is out. The biggest one here by far. This is the thing everyone's wanted since they announced this feature is if you have a console. There's a feature called Quick Resume. And the idea there is that you've played the game. It's kind of sitting in stasis.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:37]:
You power on the console and you just get right back into it. You don't have to load it from scratch. It's an awesome feature when it works.

Richard Campbell [01:29:44]:
So it does like hibernation.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:46]:
Yeah, yeah. For the game. It's like a freeze dry thing for the, you know, just for that particular game. It doesn't work with some games, especially games that have like multiplayer happening. So Call of Duty is actually one of the examples of a game that works really poorly or not at all. But this. So they're doing what they should have done from the beginning, which is not just give you quick resume, which you can toggle on and off, but let you do it on a per game basis. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:09]:
Because honestly, it's an awesome feature. Like you want it for a lot of games, but when it doesn't work, it fails badly. It's really bad. So that's cool. And then the things that they kind of. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago, like they were testing in the Insider program for Xbox, you know, more groups at home, custom colors, you can have the custom accent color, et cetera and some other things. But the big one to me is the quick resume update, which is big. It's actually really big.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:39]:
We are treading water until the end of 2027 when we will finally get a look at the next Xbox console. So we're doing that kind of frog dancing, dancing, singing dance routine, you know, from that Warner Brothers cartoon, you know, hello. And that takes different forms, but one of those forms is like live streaming events. Like we know there's something the week of E3 or what used to be E3.

Richard Campbell [01:31:04]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:04]:
But on the 23rd, which as we record this is tomorrow, so Thursday the 23rd, there's going to be Thursday here.

Richard Campbell [01:31:12]:
I'm watching it now.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:13]:
You're already watching. Nice. You already know what they announced. Nice. I love how time works. So that's. That's amazing. So this one, there's.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:23]:
They did the teaser, remember, for the Metro, I think 2039, I think is the name of the game. Recently we know about the E3 timed one, but tomorrow they're going to do one for ID at Xbox. So ID at Xbox is the indie game program they have. So you'll see a bunch of new indie games as part of this. And I think ign, the gaming publication is going to stream that, but you know, we'll get the announcements and all that. So that's fun. And I don't want this. I know what it is, but I do not want it.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:53]:
But Microsoft now has Forza Horizon 6 limited edition controllers and headsets. The color scheme to me is the Siri pink purple neon thing, which I hate, but.

Leo Laporte [01:32:08]:
Oh, it's ugly.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:10]:
But you may like it.

Leo Laporte [01:32:12]:
It's for kids.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:14]:
It's. I don't know. Yeah, it's for people. You're either colorblind or you have terrible taste. The controller is 90 bucks, which is super expensive, by the way. Wow. I know. And then the headset.

Richard Campbell [01:32:26]:
Would you like to overpay for a really ugly controller? We can hook you up.

Leo Laporte [01:32:30]:
Well, the good news is you'd never lose it.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:33]:
That's true.

Richard Campbell [01:32:34]:
You could land.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:34]:
But it's an Xbox peripheral, so you will break it. So I, I don't recommend spending a lot of money on something like this,

Leo Laporte [01:32:40]:
but is this what Forza Horizon looks like?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:42]:
No, I think this is the color scheme. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:32:46]:
To be a racing game. What is?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:47]:
Well, Forza Horizon's the arcade version of Forza.

Leo Laporte [01:32:51]:
Oh, okay. It's the unicorn.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:52]:
You know, it's these things like Pikachu

Richard Campbell [01:32:55]:
threw up on them.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:56]:
Like we had to kill a unicorn to get the color.

Leo Laporte [01:33:00]:
Forza. The My Little Pony edition.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:02]:
Yeah, exactly. It's a little bizarre to me, but okay. And then Starfield, right, came to PlayStation 5. That's gone great. They have to release some gigantic bug fix thing for that, I guess. But the game was recently rated for the Nintendo Switch 2, which indicates it's going to come to the Switch 2. So this is, you know, even before there was a Switch two. I mean, Phil Spencer used to talk about this.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:30]:
He wanted to get Xbox games, Microsoft studio games, more of them on the Switch. I kind of expected when the Switch 2 was announced that there would be a Microsoft Xbox something something in there. And there wasn't, you know, So I don't know why, but he talked explicitly, by the way, about Call of Duty. Right. And that never happened. So we'll see what happens. But it looks like Starfield will be coming. So that, I mean, there's definitely going to be other games.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:55]:
Right. I mean, they. This is what they're doing.

Leo Laporte [01:33:58]:
So you can get no man's sky on the Switch. This is kind of the Bethesda version sort of sky.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:05]:
Yeah. That's interesting. Okay.

Richard Campbell [01:34:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:08]:
Apparently it's not the full thing interoperate or I don't know if it operates,

Leo Laporte [01:34:12]:
but apparently it's the full. It's all procedural and.

Richard Campbell [01:34:15]:
Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:16]:
It's not like the local AI version of the game. It's like, you know, you have two planets. Don't get crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:34:23]:
Four fingers.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:34:25]:
Or eight. Depends. This might be kind of fun. I'm always looking for Switch 2 games. I'll wait for this to come out.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:38]:
Yeah. Call of Duty movie has been rumored for a long time. I think at one time Steven Spielberg was talking about maybe being. Taking part in that because he hasn't made enough World War II movies.

Richard Campbell [01:34:49]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:34:49]:
Is there in Call of Duty.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:52]:
Well, see, this is the question. We don't know. Like, we know it. So now we know the movie's coming. It's going to be 2028, so it's literally two years away. We know, like, who's directing it, blah, blah, blah. What we don't know is if you think of Call of Duty, the game series, there are, I would say, three main kind of story arcs. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:11]:
The classic World War II ones, the modern Warfare, which of which there are now two series, and then Black Ops and then some standalone games that didn't go anywhere. And we don't know. I can't imagine they're going to make another game where people are assaulting Iwo Jima or whatever. But maybe. I mean, I don't. You know, we'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:35:30]:
So it sounds like focusing on Special Ops for this.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:34]:
I feel like it should be. Yeah. The. The. I feel like Modern Warfare slash, Black Ops is the place to be. So. But we'll see.

Richard Campbell [01:35:42]:
Or maybe the one that had that con. The controversy around the airport scene.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:48]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [01:35:49]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:49]:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Which is one of the best multiplayer levels of all time for Call of Duty. But this was the one where your. You as the player character were part of. I guess you were in the Soviet Union or the Russian special Forces, but you had infiltrated a terrorist gang and they went into an airport and they killed everybody and you could, in the game, walk through the airport and just shoot civilians. Or you could just walk through the airport, not shoot civilians. Right. I mean, that was your choice.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:19]:
But this was part of the game, and it was pretty grab, you know, graphic. It's a video game, but, like, it's a pretty. That's kind of an intense thing.

Richard Campbell [01:36:27]:
It generate a lot of controversy.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:30]:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, I don't know that he wanted

Richard Campbell [01:36:32]:
that into a movie. Right. Like, then again, they did.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:35]:
I think that's going to be the movie. Yeah. We got to go right to Modern Warfare 2 and do the Russian thing.

Leo Laporte [01:36:40]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:41]:
I hope that's not it. I can't imagine that's it, but.

Richard Campbell [01:36:45]:
Well, I mean, I felt the same way when they got to the end of the first series of Last of Us and had to do the whole hospital scene, which when I played that upset me, too. Right. Like, that was a big deal.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:55]:
Yes, yes, yes.

Richard Campbell [01:36:56]:
You could not proceed on the game without killing all the doctors.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:00]:
Right, right, right. To rescue the girl. Yeah. And then if you thought that was upsetting, play season two or the second game or watch season two and then wonder what the hell you're doing with your life, which is just whatever. But that's the story. I don't. I didn't. We literally stopped watching after episode one.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:17]:
We were like, yep, we're done with this. So I don't know. Yeah, you know, whatever. It's gritty. Speaking of gritty, I saw, you know, I got, you know, I get, like, everyone else. You read, like, news feeds. You get whatever. It's all, you know, stuff I like.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:32]:
So it's. I saw a headline, and I apologize. I don't remember where this was, but someone said they were revisiting what they thought was the last great Call of Duty game. And I'm like, all right. So I got to figure out, like, find out what he means by this. In his opinion, the last great Call of Duty game was the Modern Warfare 1 remake. Right. So several years ago, they did three of those.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:56]:
They've done Black Ops since then. They're going to do another Modern Warfare this year. If you play Call of Duty, you may know that when you install Call of Duty today, you have the option to install Black Ops 7, Black Ops 6, Modern Warfare 2, and Modern Warfare 3. And they all have their own. All the different play modes. There's also the stuff on, like, the War Zone, you know, battle royale mode. There's the zombie stuff. And I probably.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:22]:
On all the games, I don't play that, but I Assume that those things are in there. You can play those games online, like multiplayer, if you want. But Modern Warfare 1 is not part of that. And I was like, that's kind of weird. The other thing tied to this is this is several years ago now, but they remade or remastered maybe is the term. The original Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2. The original Modern Warfare, this is many years ago now. Multiplayer was intact.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:54]:
You could do that. The Modern Warfare 2 remake, as I recall, did not have multiplayer. And at one point they were talking about maybe releasing it separately. I don't think they ever did. And I don't believe they ever redid the remastered the original Modern Warfare for three of them. I don't recall that. I don't believe. So.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:10]:
When I played those games, I was struck by how old fashioned they were. They had that kind of. They look like the World War II games that preceded them, like the one and two, you know, the early ones and three. I guess to some degree the multiplayer was super simplistic compared to what we have today, because Call of Duty is as complex as an aircraft cockpit. Now, for some reason. And the photos this guy was showing of the remake of the more recent version of Modern Warfare had that kind of gritty look. And he was comparing screenshots to the modern version of the game. If you play Black Ops 7 like I do, it's not really Modern Warfare.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:48]:
It's like futuristic Warfare. It's the future. It's science fiction. It's all glossy and clean and it kind of doesn't have that visceral kind of gritty thing going on. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna play this. I'm gonna try this. And to my shock, what I discovered was I never bought that game. I must have played it on Game Pass or something or.

Richard Campbell [01:40:07]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:08]:
Well, I must add it somehow. I did play it. Well, I didn't have it in my library. It was not available to me. And I was like, huh? This game is not in Game Pass. That's weird. But it is in Game Pass now. So remember last, last time we talked about the new Game Pass titles for April, for the first half of the month, that Modern Warfare game was in there.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:27]:
So now you can go and install it. So if you play these games at all, I kind of recommend this. It is so old fashioned. It is not like these new games. It is gritty looking. The graphics are not as good, but it's all boots on the ground kind of. It's not World War II, obviously, but it's more like probably like, you know, Eastern Europe type locations or like, you know, overgrown, you know, cities with moss and ivy and stuff. And it's, it's actually kind of awesome.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:56]:
Like, I, I wish, I wish it was like that now. You know, I wish they could redo the graphics, frankly, but it's not, it is of a different era, even though it's, you know, and then they went to two and they changed the engine and they changed everything and now they're all tied together, but, but not one. And that, that one, the Modern Warfare remake is actually pretty incredible. I, it's kind of interesting.

Richard Campbell [01:41:20]:
Is it just a passion for retro visualization or it's just a better story?

Paul Thurrott [01:41:24]:
No, you know, no. What's happened? You could. I'm not gonna be able to name all the games, but if you go through the Call of Duty cycle, so to speak, you know, they, they, they went back into World War II a couple times, partially successful, but then they did these offshoots. They did like Ghosts, which went nowhere, which I actually thought was pretty great. And then they did things like Infinite Warfare and Advanced Warfare. They did go anywhere, so they didn't get a series going. Brought back Black Ops, but Infinite Advanced and the more recent Black Ops games are really what I would call like future Warfare. There's little robot things flying around the sky and shooting people.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:58]:
There's like, you could run in the walls. It's all shiny and clean and, you know, futuristic looking. And what these games are, or what this one game is, I guess is, is gritty, actual like man with a gun running around in a, like kind of an herb, like a blown out, urban, you know, area like, like from World War II, but, you know, but literally modern. It's just, it's me. It's what, Call of Duty. Yeah, exactly. It's what I feel like Call of Duty should be, frankly. You know, it's, it's really refreshing.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:32]:
It's kind of weird because I didn't like it at the time. The play mechanics were so different than its predecessor, which. Its predecessor might have been Black Ops 4 or something. I don't remember the time frame, but it was just, I don't know, it's very. If you have been playing these from the beginning and like the World War II ones, especially like the original Modern Warfare trilogy, it's like this is like, it's right in that same wheelhouse. It's nice, cool. It's a little old fashioned, but that's, that is part of the appeal.

Richard Campbell [01:43:01]:
All about the nostalgia.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:03]:
Yeah. And then I guess Sony today, after raising the price of the PlayStation 5 at least twice over the past couple years, has announced a temporary return to the original price of the digital edition of the PS5, which is 399. That's a.

Richard Campbell [01:43:19]:
Makes it a digital edition.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:21]:
Digital edit. Yes. There's no drive.

Richard Campbell [01:43:23]:
What is it? Oh, right. So the.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:25]:
No drive, there's no disk, there's no optical drive, which would be the one I would get anyway. I'm not going to buy disks for any thing. But that's $200.

Richard Campbell [01:43:34]:
Yeah. That's a big cut.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:35]:
That's a big. Speaking of retro, you know.

Richard Campbell [01:43:39]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:40]:
I think, I'm not sure how long this lasts. It's not too. I guess it's going to last while

Richard Campbell [01:43:46]:
stocks just try to ship some inventory.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:49]:
They're going to get rid. Yeah, they dropped the price by 200 bucks. So we have a game pass thing. The price got reduced in PlayStation 5 digital edition.

Leo Laporte [01:43:58]:
Well, they're gonna sell a lot of those. I mean everybody's gonna sell all of

Paul Thurrott [01:44:00]:
them is what they're gonna do. They're gonna sell out, sell them all. Yep. So that's great. If you want one of those things. That's good.

Leo Laporte [01:44:07]:
It's even tempting me. I know, I'm like, I know.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:12]:
It's like maybe now that X, not Call of Duty, doesn't care about Xbox anymore, I guess.

Leo Laporte [01:44:24]:
Hey folks, that concludes the Xbox segment, which means we're just one moment away from the back of the book. Now we continue on with the back of the book, the tips and picks of the week. We'll start with Paul Thurot and his tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:44]:
So this one I already kind of blew away, unfortunately because I'm so excited about it. But it's the idea of using AI to build things, you know, to make things for yourself, which could include custom or what Richard calls bespoke apps, which I think is a great term. I randomly. I had already written half of this story and I saw that Harry McCracken, who's a great guy journalist, had previously. I didn't know he did this, but a year ago you did a Vibe coded note taking app which kind of looks like Google keep a little bit like kind of, you know, like those little notepad things. And then he just created a word processing app using Vibe coding. Right. And like me, you know, he's like word is this battleship of 3 million features.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:33]:
I need three of them. He created this thing that's more focused and is what he needs. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:45:39]:
He also, if I'm not Mistaken. I think he talked about this on a Twit episode, took a game that he wrote when he was a kid and revived it using AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:49]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:45:49]:
I didn't see it because he didn't have the original source code. I think it's on a website. I'll have to find it. But yeah, I was. He's. He's really into it.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:58]:
We talk about. And he's not a programmer, right?

Richard Campbell [01:46:01]:
I mean, well, he.

Leo Laporte [01:46:02]:
Yeah, sort of. He's like you and I, you're more of a programmer probably than either of us. But yeah, he's a hobbyist actually.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:09]:
I think you're probably more of a programmer than any.

Leo Laporte [01:46:12]:
No, no, you're more of a.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:14]:
No, it's mostly Sicily. So it's interesting to me because I had started writing this, like I'd been thinking about this a lot and you see these examples of things out in the world where this is changing. For example, Adobe, last week I think it was announced something called Firefly AI Assistant, which will allow anyone to use natural language to discuss what it is they're looking for, whether it's editing video or photos or creating content, whatever it is, and using all of the power across those various creative cloud tools. You're like, wow, okay, that's pretty impressive. You know, after I had started writing this, Harry McCracken announced or wrote about the word processing app. But just that week I just went back from that. So this would have been, I guess, last week essentially, you know, OpenAI announced a major update to Codex that brings those productivity capabilities to it, similar to how cloud code turned into cloud co work. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:15]:
Perplexity announced something called Personal Computer for Mac, which is. I think they had something called. They do have something called Perplexity Computer in the cloud. And this is. Brings that local. So you can work local apps and files, you can access it remotely via phone like you can with cloud and dispatch. Right. Anthropic announced Cloud Opus 4.7, which talked about.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:35]:
Then they did the Cloud app update, which I think we talked about last week, which was designed for parallel agent usage, which I kind of described as an Outlook style UI where maybe this becomes the UI that we start interacting with our interaction point. Right. Google announced the Android CLI thing I just talked about. They announced a way for. For Gemini to turn workflows into skills you can share with others.

Richard Campbell [01:48:01]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:03]:
There was the Firefly AI Assistant thing. We talked about Scott Hanselman and how he has all these. He and others have all these apps on that website that are all vibe coded. 50 of which are Windows apps. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Like, this was in one week, and I probably missed things. I don't cover every single thing that happens. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:22]:
And to kind of bring this back to something which we haven't talked about recently, which is too bad because we used to talk about it all the time, which is Stevie Batiche and his notion of how Microsoft was going to bring AI to the world.

Richard Campbell [01:48:35]:
Right. He was going to quote it just the other day.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:38]:
Oh, nice. Okay, so AI beside which is that copilot model, existing app, AI over here, they interact AI inside, where you bring the AI into the app, which Microsoft is doing right now, obviously. But then there's the AI outside thing. And this is where the way we do things is fundamentally transformed. And there's an AI orchestrator, which I love that word, that takes our intent, in other words, the thing we describe and then uses whatever apps and services and whatever features to just do it. That's exactly what this is. That's what we call it. Vive.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:14]:
Coding is not a good term, but it's really a creator maker kind of a thing where anybody soon but technical people today very easily can basically create any software game, whatever it might be. This is like we're entering a golden era, I think, of creation capabilities. It's astonishing.

Leo Laporte [01:49:35]:
Yeah, it's really cool.

Richard Campbell [01:49:36]:
An explosion of software.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:38]:
Yep. So I guess the tip is, understand this is happening, see what's out there and go create something.

Richard Campbell [01:49:46]:
You know, take it out for a second.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:47]:
If there's something you use that isn't quite right, see if you can fix it, you know, make a new version of it.

Leo Laporte [01:49:53]:
You know, it's funny, when I first started playing with this stuff, I was kind of challenged to think of, well, what do I need? And there are a couple of things I thought of right away. Now every single day, I sit down and write something.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:06]:
No, I listen to you every week. It seems you have, like, stories about the. These things you're talking about interacting with Sonos, which, by the way, is an example. Well, it's software and services, but you have these physical hardware devices in your home that you can now do things with.

Leo Laporte [01:50:22]:
I can talk to it.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:23]:
I mean, this is incredible.

Leo Laporte [01:50:24]:
I'm sorry, I'd say to my Apple watch, play a book or a music or a podcast on my Sonos in the ceiling.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:31]:
It just happens. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:50:32]:
And I have to tell you, Sonos is getting a lot of heat for its crappy software.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:37]:
Yeah, of course.

Leo Laporte [01:50:38]:
Which it is. It's truly Awful. But having now worked with Claude to write software to control it, I understand why the interface is all over the place.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:47]:
Well, the back end is probably pretty messy.

Leo Laporte [01:50:49]:
It's terrible, it's awful and it's unpredictable. It's undocumented. This is very weird. And Claude struggled with it.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:57]:
We really went back well, because Sona's changed the architecture of how this stuff works. It's sort of like when Skype went from like a peer to peer model to a more centralized thing. Like the entire way the thing worked just changed completely. It just screwed everything up. You know, it's.

Leo Laporte [01:51:12]:
But eventually, by the way, eventually we got it and it's reliable now. And I can ask for an audiobook. The only problem is sometimes I have. There's a collision between the names of a song and the name of an audiobook I have, and I can't remember what the song get the wrong one. And it played the audiobook and said, no, no, no, no, no.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:31]:
I mean, even within songs, that would be a problem. Like there's so many, you know, identically named songs or different versions of the same song even, whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:51:39]:
But.

Leo Laporte [01:51:39]:
Well, then it said that Sonos had no way of playing just a single song. So what did it. When I play the single song, what did it want me to do afterwards? And we decided, well, if there's an album, finish the album, you know, I mean, because Sonos doesn't actually have mechanisms for this. It was really wild.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:59]:
That's crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:51:59]:
That's so fun. But I'm more. By the way, the other thing that's come up to me now is everything needs an API or an interface or an SDK.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:07]:
Yes, that's right. 100% controlled. So we've talked about this. I believe the term for this is actually like semantic capabilities, meaning this yield object model. You have public interfaces that can be consumed by AI services or other apps, whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:52:22]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:23]:
And that's how those things get controlled. That's how the Firefly thing uses an individual feature in Photoshop to deliver you the thing you're asking for or whatever. Or, you know, all the Microsoft Office apps will do this and are doing this. You can right click on things in Windows today and see AI actions. And it's.

Leo Laporte [01:52:41]:
But I understand companies often proprietary and they don't want to share it. But I can tell you that I will say, speaking to these companies, people are going to demand it. And if your software doesn't have an

Paul Thurrott [01:52:52]:
excessive publication, you will disappear. Yeah, you can, you can stick to your stupid model. You'll Be gone. You're just going to be. I mean, you're probably going to be gone anyway.

Richard Campbell [01:52:59]:
More saliently, because you're asking an agent to go get something for you. If the agent can't get to your software because you don't have the interface, it's just never going to appear.

Leo Laporte [01:53:08]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [01:53:08]:
Well, yeah. So in the short term, really have these kind of workarounds. Right. It's. This is the computer. You're single, like, oh, the little mouse cursor click.

Leo Laporte [01:53:16]:
Yeah. That's an easy interface.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:17]:
This is not. This does not scale. Like, you need to have API access to all these things.

Leo Laporte [01:53:23]:
Public interfaces, well documented. Public interfaces.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:26]:
Yes. Yep. We live in a time of wonder. And, you know, we live in a terrible time in many ways, too. But this stuff should give anyone who cares about technology great hope for the future.

Leo Laporte [01:53:37]:
It's astonishing and it's hugely powerful because if you can then combine tools, if you can combine data, your data, you know, as a business, you have all this data. If you can combine tools to apply to this data and generate insights.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:52]:
Listen, Dr. Frankenstein, we hear you, but it is Frankenstein.

Leo Laporte [01:53:56]:
I have made a Frankenstein where I am talking to my watch to talk to other hardware, to do things. It's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:03]:
It's just sort of like I have a DJI drone thing and we were using it out in Mexico somewhere and. And as we were using it, I got a notification that said, oh, you can control it from your Apple Watch now. And I'm like, I can't see it on my screen. Why would I want to go to, like, a black dot in the middle of a blue sky?

Leo Laporte [01:54:22]:
I want to do everything with voice. That's my goal. Everything with voice.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:27]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:54:27]:
Anyway, I agree. Just make.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:29]:
That's very exciting.

Leo Laporte [01:54:30]:
It's a good tip, I think.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:32]:
Don't be thwarted.

Leo Laporte [01:54:33]:
Just do it, because you will get better.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:35]:
Well, yeah, so you raised an issue which I think any programmer, every program has run into, of any skill level, which is, you know, you want to. You want to. Maybe you're learning a new API, a new framework or new language, whatever it is, and you're like, all right, I got to write a program. What am I going to write? And, you know, you kind of finding that starter project is often difficult, but I think, you know, also people, especially mainstream users of, you know, phones, tablets, computers, whatever, don't think like this. You know, they're not like, you know, we all curse some computer thing. We hate it for some reason. It's terrible. And it never occurs to us like we'll do something about it, you know, and we're entering an era where that's going to be very possible for everybody.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:18]:
You know, I don't like that thing, whatever it is.

Leo Laporte [01:55:22]:
Yeah. Give me control.

Richard Campbell [01:55:23]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:24]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:55:26]:
App pick of the week.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:27]:
Yeah. So I've got two. They're both web browsers. Leo, you're going to want to install this one.

Leo Laporte [01:55:30]:
Oh, please.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:31]:
If you've never heard of it. So this, this is. So it's a new lightweight Chromium based. Is Chromium based browser. But it's completely open source. 100% open source. It's all secure and private by default. It's got Ublock Origin integrated into it, so it blocks everything.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:48]:
It's called helium. Yeah, it's kind of like a slightly lighter weight version of Brave, but completely open source.

Leo Laporte [01:55:54]:
By the way, Brave now offers for sale a lighter weight version of Brave.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:59]:
That's fascinating. Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:56:00]:
They call it Brave Origin. You can buy it. It's one time fee.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:03]:
Brave Origin. Yeah. Okay, I didn't even know about that. That's funny.

Leo Laporte [01:56:06]:
But both of these are Chromium based on chromium.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:09]:
Yes. Right. Which, you know, look, for some people it's like, yeah, no, I'm not interested in that. And I actually have a solution.

Leo Laporte [01:56:15]:
Helium is nice because it comes with U block Origin built in.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:18]:
Yeah. And by the way, so there's a. The EFS as a cycle, cover your true tracks and you can go there with Microsoft Edge with no extensions and discover this thing is not protecting you in the slightest. This is the only browser I've ever used. Granted it has Ublock Origin integrated into it where not only does it block all the trackers, all the hidden trackers, but it also anonymizes your foot, your fingerprint, which is actually a big deal because a lot of the tracking that occurs, like when you think about like you have meta apps on your phone and you've opted to block them from, you know, tracking around the Internet. They use fingerprinting to figure out who you are and your behavior and they still have different rights to things like location and whatever it might be that you might grant them that. They build a profile of you. They can figure out who you are.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:05]:
That's fingerprinting. This is the only browser like out of the box I've ever seen that actually has an anonymous fingerprint. So to me that was very interesting and obviously lightweight is just interesting. So I've started using it across my different computers. It's worth looking at.

Leo Laporte [01:57:22]:
It's so fast. I mean, you know, after using Firefox for a long time, I realized, oh my gosh, Chrome is fast.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:31]:
Yes. So speaking of Firefox, I'd given up on Firefox years ago. I was like, remember the poster they did in the New York Times where all the people had contributed Spread the web or whatever the phrase was. My name is in there. It's like in 0.5 inch, you know, point type, it's. You'd have to magnify it to see it, but it's in there. I'm next to the O in Firefox, I think. But, you know, I used to be a big Mozilla supporter.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:58]:
I feel like I'm becoming one again. I like their direction, I like what they're doing. But they had that announcement, which I think a lot of companies maybe wouldn't have promoted so heavily, where Anthropic's Frontier Red team helped define 22 security sensitive bugs and then 90 other bugs in Firefox. And that was just in part of Firefox, I think it might have been. I don't know if it's the rendering engine or the JavaScript engine or whatever it was. And now, you know, they're going to partner together. It's good for Anthropic because it's a big open source code base, et cetera. Plus they want to talk about it like a lot.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:29]:
You know, I feel like Microsoft would have been like, let's keep that in the dialo. Well, a month has gone by and we learned two things. One, this is in fact that Mythos thing, right? The super secretive anthropic cloud based AI model. That's what they're using for this. And it's a month later and they've announced the next version of Firefox, which, remember last month it was 90 bugs altogether. And then 22 security sensitive Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities. Yikes.

Leo Laporte [01:59:02]:
Thanks to Mythos.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:03]:
Yep. That's incredible.

Richard Campbell [01:59:05]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:59:05]:
Isn't that amazing?

Paul Thurrott [01:59:06]:
They're promoting this and that. What they're basically saying, which is what I'm basically saying, which is everyone as a company that creates software, it needs to do this and promote the fact that they're doing this. You know, I think a lot of people want to be secretive about it, but this is.

Richard Campbell [01:59:23]:
But it's a good threshold to say I'm taking my security C secretly. I've gone through this process because I got to tell you, on the Black Hat site, these guys are using these tools and they Move fast.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:34]:
Yep. And look, AI could be used for terrible things. Of course, AI sometimes doesn't work great. This is a great use case for AI. This is, you know, I know this is too simplistic, but when I say Microsoft should take AI and Rust and remake the NT kernel and Rust, they could do that. People are like, oh, that's so stupid. No, they could do that, like two seconds away from this. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:00]:
By the way, they will do that. This is going to be used to harden things like the Linux kernel, you know, whatever the Azure OS is under the COVID of the Azure, whatever Windows, of course, like this is. Apple would be crazy not to do this. Google would be crazy not to do this with their platforms. Like this is going to, this is going to dramatically raise the baseline for security.

Leo Laporte [02:00:29]:
Microsoft has access to Mythos. I hope they're, I hope they're using it.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:33]:
You know, they've been talking, look, they've been very open about Rust and you know, their desire to use that to, you know, for new parts of these kernels, etc.

Leo Laporte [02:00:43]:
Rewrite it in Python, the whole Windows, it should be.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:49]:
Look, if this thing was architected correctly, everything would be API and CLI based and then there would be a GUI on top of it that anyone could change.

Leo Laporte [02:00:56]:
But Steve was talking about this yesterday. He did a whole show basically about how Mythos is not marketing hype, it really is.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:07]:
Well, that's not what OpenAI says, Leo.

Leo Laporte [02:01:10]:
No, it really is. And this 271 bugs in Firefox are part of the proof. But he quoted a paper by a bunch of CISOs, some very well known names in security, saying it's the Mythos area, we gotta get ready. And it had this graph, this is a graph of how long it's taken between the disclosure of a CVE and the confirmed exploit. And you know, eight years ago it took two and a half years to get to an exploit from the CVE.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:36]:
But notice that two and a half seconds, it's 10 hours. 10 hours.

Leo Laporte [02:01:41]:
So it's truly a zero day. Last year it was 23 days, right. This year it's 10 hours. So when that CVE comes out, you will be exploited by it within 10 hours.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:56]:
Look, we've already experienced just in the past two months, you know, Apple at least twice has released emergency patches to their software platforms. Microsoft has had to reissue. Well, that's just incompetence, but you know, fixes for their Windows updates, et cetera. I mean, but this is, this is how we get ahead of that, right? This is where that hopefully, I mean, obviously the attackers are also getting more sophisticated.

Leo Laporte [02:02:23]:
But I asked Steve, I said, what's the end game? Because it's going to get better and better and better and eventually. Are all bugs gone? He said, yes, it's completely possible.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:36]:
Well, so this is my dream. I've said this. I've been since I was a child. Software is ones and zeros. It should be perfect.

Leo Laporte [02:02:42]:
It should be. It's deterministic.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:43]:
You should be able to write perfect software. Yeah, I know. I. I know everything that comes out of my mouth is overly simplistic, but I just.

Leo Laporte [02:02:50]:
But, well, Steve agrees.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:51]:
Very excited for that to actually be somewhere close to being true.

Leo Laporte [02:02:55]:
You know, it'll be an iterative.

Richard Campbell [02:02:56]:
Always gates his position. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:59]:
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte [02:02:59]:
You know, and actually Steve's always said, I don't release my software with bugs. But he's hand coding this right in assembly. And he really.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:07]:
He's an artisanal software developer. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:03:11]:
He's picking up each electron with a pair of chromium, putting it in place one electron at a time.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:18]:
Hey.

Leo Laporte [02:03:18]:
All right. I think it's time for Mr. Richard Gamble and Renaissance Radio.

Richard Campbell [02:03:26]:
This is a fun show and a kind of a sad show, too. So I. Michael Niehaus, who's a regular listener to Windows Weekly, I might point.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:34]:
Yeah, I was going to say. And we know him. I mean, do you know him? Yeah, we know him.

Richard Campbell [02:03:37]:
Spend time with him. Yeah, yeah. Former Microsoft employee and one of the guys who led the Microsoft deployment toolkit, some. 13.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:45]:
Are you going to say something bad about him? Like something bad happening?

Richard Campbell [02:03:48]:
No, I'm not going to say anything bad about Michael.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:50]:
No. I mean, like, is something wrong or

Leo Laporte [02:03:51]:
he said something sad.

Richard Campbell [02:03:53]:
What's sad is that Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, as of this year has gone. Microsoft just abruptly dropped all support for it. So MDT is really for sysadmins and it's for preparing images for setting up machines for your company. Right. So you have sort of standard templates of the versions of things you want to use in software and so forth. So it just speeds the process deploying onto a machine. And it's been around for more than a decade.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:18]:
I was going. I think it's been around for 20 years, actually.

Richard Campbell [02:04:20]:
I mean, I think first versions were like 2013.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:24]:
Oh, maybe. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I confused it with MD up there. Sorry.

Richard Campbell [02:04:28]:
Yeah, there were products before that. It never had an officially supported version for Windows 11. And then there was some vulnerability detected in it. Actually, no, we talk about it on the show right that there was this, there is this vulnerability issue with it and Microsoft is response is just to drop all support for it, take it offline, take download downloads. We're not going to fix this. We're not dealing with it. Now Michael himself, now working for Tanium has fixed it or rather shows you how to work around that vulnerability so you don't have to deal with it if you don't want to. And then we also discuss all the other ways to do MDT like things so you don't have to deal with it.

Richard Campbell [02:05:08]:
But it was when I saw that announcement back in January, my response was just to reach out to Michael and say can we talk about this? Because I feel like this is sort of the piece of history that we should finish on. And he was happy to come and chat with me for a while and we just talked through the life and the death of mdt.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:25]:
Wow, so sad.

Richard Campbell [02:05:29]:
It's a software software that a lot of people depended on, man, like it was. Yeah, it did, it did a lot of work for us.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:35]:
What's the modern replacement for this?

Richard Campbell [02:05:41]:
Yeah, if you ask Microsoft, they're going to tell you to do it with autopilot and intune and then you're paying per month per seat. Like it's the idea of just doing it yourself. You got to go, why can't you

Paul Thurrott [02:05:53]:
just pay a subscription fee and not be a jerk about it?

Richard Campbell [02:05:58]:
Well because the reality is most system is you're just not willing to go to the CFO to get budget for this thing. Even if they could make the case for which they, you know, there's an argument that they should. But if you, you know, if you want to stay with free software you can. There are open source solutions out there. You just have to put them together.

Leo Laporte [02:06:15]:
Right. All right, you ready? Ready.

Richard Campbell [02:06:22]:
My little glass. And I got Ned.

Leo Laporte [02:06:27]:
Hi Ned. Ned's a hero in Australia.

Richard Campbell [02:06:32]:
Oh yeah. We're going to have to talk about who Ned Kelly actually is. No way to be.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:36]:
Is this like a next a breakfast whiskey that you're having?

Richard Campbell [02:06:38]:
Is that what I'm seeing looks and apparently I drink whiskey at all hours now these days.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:45]:
Just trying to understand.

Richard Campbell [02:06:48]:
We're about to let me take you on this ride. It's a little nutty and I didn't know going in how nutty it was going to be. So there's a company called Top Shelf International, has two founders, Jason Red Fern and Drew Fairchild. And they very much had a vision around the idea of making local alcohol products in Australia for Australia. But they don't export Ned at all. So they, they right off the bat again. Both these guys have a background in the booze industry, mostly in marketing. So they knew how to brand and all of that sort of stuff.

Richard Campbell [02:07:20]:
So they did the normal thing that non alcohol manufacturers do. They made a contract with a company called Ital Wine, which is called IDL, which has been around since the 1960s and does a lot of these custom beverage solutions and so forth. And the original project from tsi, from Top Shelf International was these what they call Ready to Drink. So these were. They're actually prefab cans of Whiskey Cola. Right. Just like your Jack and Cokes if they're already in a can. So by 2015 they're cranking out the Ready to Drink cans.

Richard Campbell [02:07:53]:
They released their original versions on Australia Day and sell just in New South Wales, where I am right now in Victoria, which is where Melbourne is like that. And they're based in, their main facility now is in Campbell Field, which is in Victoria. In fact, they get that site in 2017 to build a distillery and actually go, they want to go complete vertical. So malt processing, so a brewery, the distillery, canning and bottling operations, they do the whole nine yards. By 2018 they're actually producing. And then in 2019 they put out the first version of Ned. And yeah, as, as Leo caught on right away. This is a story of Ned Kelly, who's an absolute legend to Australians.

Richard Campbell [02:08:35]:
And the challenge here was to summarize this in a reasonable length of time.

Leo Laporte [02:08:41]:
So I have to tell you, there have been eight movies made about Ned Kelly, most recently Heath Ledger. Yeah, but before Heath Ledger, Mick Jagger.

Richard Campbell [02:08:51]:
Yeah, like that's a big deal. Right. So we got to go back to the origins of Australia. Right. Edward Kelly, which was his name, they called him. Ned was born to a. His parents, his father specifically John Kelly was a transported convict. That was the term for there.

Richard Campbell [02:09:10]:
He was an Irishman convicted of stealing pigs whose punishment was to be sent to Van Diemen's Land. And we've talked about this before, that's Tasmania now for a seven year sentence. And he was let out a year or so early. And now you're in the colonies, right? It's the area, it's the 1830s. And so he goes to work for a farmer in the Port Phillip district that's now known as Victoria Province. And within a couple of years he marries the farmer's daughter, a lady named Ellen, and has a bunch of children, as you do in the day. And Ned was actually the third child and the first boy, that part of the world in the 1850s experiences a gold rush. And so there's a fair bit of money flying around.

Richard Campbell [02:09:56]:
And so even these former transported criminals do pretty well enough that they end up being able to buy a farm, except they don't buy a good farm because that whole process is pretty obsolete. So it doesn't grow particularly well. And this is also, you know, the criminal part of Australia is winding down. But you do have this schism between the former conflicts and family and the traditional colonists, the military and so forth. In fact, one of the things that was going on there was this idea that was called squatting, except the squatting was being done by the wealthy people. Like, traditionally we think of squatting as. That's what the poor people do, is they squat on land. This was actually the wealthy farmers using crown land mostly for livestock that they didn't actually own, and then defending it.

Richard Campbell [02:10:48]:
But because they were closely tied to the law generally, the law always fell in their favor. So there was, you get this real schism between the sort of poor farmers trying to follow the rules and these wealthy folks. At one point, just before confederation, they started calling it the squattocracy, like it was. It was that nuts. And of course, largely this ends in the early 1900s with Confederation and so forth. John Kelly, this is Ned's father, dies of, gets in trouble with the law as he's struggling to support his family. He's a heavy drinker, and eventually alcoholism kills him. When Ned is 12 years old.

Richard Campbell [02:11:22]:
Ned also gets into trouble as a teenager. He starts falling in with the bush rangers. And there again, very classic name for a group of robbers that live in the bush and then rob banks and trains and things like that. But they call them bushrangers, so somehow they're appealing. So fast forward to his early 20s, but they call the Fitzpatrick incident. This is in 1878 when Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick comes to the Kelly house to arrest Ned's younger brother Dan for theft of a horse. Then we don't really talk about whether he actually did or not. That's secondary to the point.

Richard Campbell [02:12:01]:
But there ended up being a confrontation, and the constable gets shot in the arm, like it's not fatal or anything. But he does get shot, and Ned and Dan flee to the bush to go hang with the bushrangers. And so the police's response is to arrest the mother, Ellen, and put her in jail for aiding and abetting, which really makes people angry. Like, you don't go around putting mothers in. In jail like that. And this begins this sense of persecution. I mean the Kelly's always felt like they were hard done by with the failure of the farm and, and those sorts of things. But that after Ellen is arrested, they form the Kelly gang, which is these two Kelly brothers and several of their friends operating as bush rangers.

Richard Campbell [02:12:42]:
And so they pay their bills or they make their living essentially by robbing banks. And they're a little bit famous for that in the sense that they don't hurt anyone. Right. They do their very best to almost be entertaining. They hold hostage while they get the money out, that sort of thing. And they do this fairly well. But of course you keep going around robbing people and then. And folks get annoyed.

Richard Campbell [02:13:02]:
And so a larger police force shows up. And the next major incident in Ned's life is the thing they call the Stringy Bark Creek incidents. And this is where a group of serious, you know, police looking for criminals confront them and it ends up in a shootout and three of the police officers are killed, killed, one of them escapes. Now at the time the Kellys argue that these police were not there to arrest them, they were there to kill them. And they were really fighting in self defense. But this is when the colonial government declares them outlaws, which is a meaningful thing. When you're declared an outlaw, it means that anyone can kill you and they will not be punished for it. In fact they will be paid.

Richard Campbell [02:13:42]:
They put out a bounty or reward on their heads. And anybody who is seen as assisting these outlaws is guilty of a crime as well. So you know, this is not that unusual at this time. This is the 1850s. Like it sounds very Wild west and it was very Dutch, that sort of thing. So why has Ned Kelly become so famous? Well, he keeps dictating letters that they get sent to the press and sent to the government and so forth. The most famous of this one is called the Geraldieri letter, which is like 7,000 words like this is a treatise.

Leo Laporte [02:14:17]:
It's kind of analogous to Bonnie and Clyde though, right?

Richard Campbell [02:14:19]:
Yeah, it's a little of that. You know, we could throw a little unit bomber in here. I don't know, it's kind of nuts. Now then the police kind of botched this because after these things are going on they do this big crackdown in the area including arresting 30 people they think are sympathetic to the Kelly gang and never charged them with anything. They release quite a few after just a few weeks, but nine of them are held for months without ever having a trial, without ever having evidence. So the whole local population is. If they weren't on board with the Kelly gang. They kind of are now like he's Robin Hood.

Richard Campbell [02:14:53]:
Like, although he's not certainly giving to the poor, he's just like, he's manifesting the frustration of the poor farmers of the area at the time. The reward thing gets out of hand at one point it's £8,000 for the kill or capture of the Kelly gang, which is just an astronomical amount of money, the largest ever. And finally we get to the Glen Rowan incident and this is again, you want to talk about legend and what they put into the movies. The Kellys get aware that there's now a train coming up from Melbourne with a lot of police officers, like professional hunter types to come and get them. And so their goal was to derail the train and they thought there was an informative guy named Aaron Sher who, who they kill. And then there finally is a confrontation. The scheme ultimately fails and the police arrive in Glenrowan. And this is when you discover that the Kelly gang, those, the four, the two brothers and the two others have made armor out of old plowshares of the mold, boards of the plows, helmet, chest piece, shoulder paltrons down to their waist.

Richard Campbell [02:16:05]:
And then there's this massive shootout. The other three are all killed in the shootout. Ultimately, the armor only works so well. Ned is hit 18 times in his armor and we know this because that armor is on display at the state library in Victoria. But his legs aren't well protected, so he gets pretty chewed up in the legs. But he survives and is captured and treated for his wounds and then arrested and put on trial for murder. He pleads on guilty, talks about being a victim of the police and being persecuted, and he only ever acted in self defense, but ultimately sentenced to death by hanging. He's 25.

Richard Campbell [02:16:49]:
There's a huge petition that comes in the area, 32,000 signatures pleading for clemency, but they hang him anyway. And afterward do an extensive investigation into the accusations of corruption and find a bunch of it that results in reprimands and demotions and suspensions and so forth. But also that investigation says that the police behaved appropriately to the Kelly's crimes. So there was nothing changed there. But they do release Ned's mother. And arguably part of that was to say because the big concern here when Ned was killed was there's going to be a revolution, like it's going to get way worse. That's not actually what happens. They release Ned's mother and it, and you know, they clean up the police, so to speak, and sort of things.

Richard Campbell [02:17:33]:
Calm down. So you. I mean, by any definition, Ned is a criminal, but he's also this folk hero. And these insane things like the armor and stuff just make him a legend. So this whiskey, and the funny thing about this whiskey is that it's very much an American style bourbon. It is corn, wheat, barley. But it was all about sort of tapping into this. And what was interesting about Tsi, because most of the Australian whiskies that we've ever talked about are very boutique, they're very batch.

Richard Campbell [02:18:00]:
That is not what TSI went for. When they built their distillery in Campbellfield. They folk, they do it in the bourbon process column still. Rectifier, large scale. This is quite inexpensive. Like we usually talk about 500 mil bottles for 200 Australian dollars. This is 60oz. This is like 40 bucks.

Richard Campbell [02:18:22]:
They've never published any specifications for how they make this stuff. Just that it was a combination of Australian grains being corn, wheat, barley, likely in that order. It is labeled as a sour mash. And just a reminder that that means they take the spent mash from a previous distillation and put it into the fermentation batch, which lowers the acidity or increases the acidity, lowers the ph. That's the. The sour part, which is good for the yeast, bad for lack of bacillus and other things. So it sort of stabilizes the flavor and gives it a particular taste. And that should be the end of the story.

Richard Campbell [02:18:55]:
I mean, shouldn't it, Ned? Whiskey, Right? Like, and it's. By the way, it's. It's just basic bourbon.

Leo Laporte [02:19:02]:
They say it's Australian for bourbon.

Richard Campbell [02:19:05]:
Totally. And this is. It's super drinkable, right? Like, it just. It's nothing. There's nothing offensive about this. It's nothing amazing. It's a very young whiskey, right? They haven't been around that long, but that first came out in 2019. So 2020 is when they decided to go public, right.

Richard Campbell [02:19:23]:
During the pandemic and so forth. And they also add a vodka to the line. They've really scaled up and done a good job. And then, I don't know, they go nuts. They decide they're gonna make tequila. Of course they're not allowed to call it tequila because that's a Mexico thing. So agave spirit. So back in 2019, Drew Fairchild, which the other co founder at that time is the CEO, he has some relationship with this old experimental agave plantation in the northern Queensland in Ayr.

Richard Campbell [02:20:00]:
It had but was belchy defunct. There was like 2,000 plants on it that were overgrown and unmaintained and so forth. But it was sort of proof. Blue agave, Weber agave, the stuff they normally make tequila from, will grow in Queensland, although it's very different conditions that's much more tropical, right? Like traditionally Mexican tequila plants, like the blue agave has grown at altitude. It's kind of deserty, dry. Things like when I was in Queensland in November, we did those show stuff like it was hot and humid, like it's an intense environment. So in 2021, they announced this thing they call the Australian Agave project. And they hire in a guy named Trent Fraser who comes from Louis Vuitton Moat Hennessy.

Richard Campbell [02:20:42]:
He had actually built the tequila business for lvmh. The tequila we know is Volcan Tierra, which is good tequila, no two ways about it, but made totally traditionally, no big deal. They acquire a massive plantation. 438 hectares, it's about 1,000 acres. They call the Eden Lassie plantation, plant 50,000 agave plants with plants that go to a million. In fact, by 22, they have 500,000 agave plants growing. And again, traditionally, in tequila biz, agave takes five to seven years to mature. But one of the things they learned from the old air plantation was that because it's so warm and so humid, the gavi grows really quickly and sugars up quickly.

Richard Campbell [02:21:29]:
Although I suspect they're doing a little cheating too, that they do an additional process to extract more sugars and things like that so that they're able to get to a spirit fairly short order. So by 23, the old founder, Drew Fairchild, who started this madness, steps down. So the Trent Fraser, the guy who made a tequila project before, is now running as CEO. It was presented as a planned succession, but okay, and. And in December, they actually opened the distillery. And again, they're going full vertical from plant to bottle. They're doing the whole thing, which is not the way traditionally tequila is done. The growers are very different from the process is very different from the bottlers.

Richard Campbell [02:22:09]:
They do the whole thing together. So by 2024, they release their first blanco tequila. So two years crazy fast. And they call it act of treason, which is hilarious. But because they're trying to make tequila and they're all the same tequila, right? Like nowhere. Except, you know, when they're quoted or interviewed, anything, they go, you know, agave, they use that for making tequila. We make an agave spirit. I don't know why they're so smitten with this idea.

Richard Campbell [02:22:36]:
They climates lets it grow fast. They've got more sugar from it, they win awards for this blanco, this fast made Blanco San Francisco World Spirits Competition, which is no fooling. And the World Drink Awards, the sort of best new spirit and so forth. That's in 24. By September of 24, that publicly traded company known as TSI suspends trading for a restatement of finances. And apparently they had spent so much money getting all this started, they had not been paying their excise taxes. And so the Australian tax office basically orders them into receivership, although they battle back. So they owed millions of dollars in excise tax, which you.

Richard Campbell [02:23:21]:
The excise tax is what you pay every time you sell a bottle of booze, right? That's what it is. And they're fairly steep taxes. And so last year, by 2025, they actually sell off that Campbell Field facility, the thing that was making Ned whiskey. And, and this whole operation, the deal was actually completed in May of 25 for $8 million, which is absurdly cheap. Now, again, this was all done in receivership. So 3.2 million of that is just straight. The excise tax is the ATO gets paid, paid off. The other 4.8 is to other debts.

Richard Campbell [02:23:54]:
But remember that IDL, who is the acquirer in this, had been making a bunch of product for them. So I wonder how much that money was already owed to IDL anyway, that they are able to by the distillation operation in Campbellfield, which is very helpful for idl. It allows them to expand their product lines. And part of that deal is they do continue to produce the TSI products. So the whiskey, the canned products, the tequila and the vodka. But they don't buy everything, they just buy the production. Another company pops up called Blue Sky Drinks and they buy the brands. Again, working with idl, what's never been sold and is still forced in receivership is the Agave Plantation.

Richard Campbell [02:24:37]:
So that's just sort of hanging there while they sell this other product. But I did not pay. I saw Ned thought, fun. I'll tell the story of Ned Kelly. Let's go talk about an inexpensive Australian whiskey. And then stumbled into this crazy, just crazy plan. Like this is going to be a case study in overreach. This was a very successful company, done extremely well.

Richard Campbell [02:25:02]:
And then they just tried to go for something so difficult that they burned every bit of their money up. Now, like I said, this is an inexpensive whiskey for Australia, right? It's $64 Australia, about 45 US. But I went and priced a bunch of booze in that price range, so you can go cheaper, like 50 Australian and you'll get Bally's, Jim Beam, Canadian Club Bells. Even Maker's mark is only $50 Australian down here for the 700ml bottle for the same price for what you would pay for a bottle of Ned. You can get a bottle of Monkey Shoulder or Johnnie Walker or even Glenn Livitt. And if you want to spend a little bit more now you're in the range of Woodford Reserve, Famous Grouse or even lefroy is like 72 Australian dollars. So there's a reason they're not trying to export this in any way. This is an Aussie whiskey for people who want to drink an Aussie whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:26:01]:
And so it's priced roughly in that range. If you care about, you know, if you don't care about where your whiskey come from. So you just want the best stuff. I don't know that you're going to pick this. It definitely bats at the same level as a Monkey Shoulder. Without a doubt. I would argue that Maker's Market is better than the mall by, by a non trivial amount and cost less. I don't know what's going to happen to tsi.

Richard Campbell [02:26:22]:
This is kind of a sad story because of Tequila, because admittedly if they pulled it off and basically made a new class of agave spirit made in Australia, okay. That would have probably could be huge and it might still be. I think somebody's going to pick this up at some point in just see the value in it and the opportunity there. But it's just a nutty boo story. Like such a strange industry to, to have jeopardized everything to do this agave thing.

Leo Laporte [02:26:52]:
Lose your shirt and. Yeah, a fake.

Richard Campbell [02:26:55]:
Well, and more importantly, lose other people's shirts. Right. This is a publicly traded company on the asx, so yeah. And it's been in receivership ever since. If you own stock in TSI, you've not been able to sell it since 2024. It's been locked up.

Leo Laporte [02:27:09]:
Now I think Paul, given his appreciation of peanut butter whiskey, might enjoy their golden Bicky flavored Aussie whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:27:18]:
Yeah, this is a liqueur actually.

Leo Laporte [02:27:21]:
Oh yeah, it's a liqueur.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:22]:
So it's more coffable.

Leo Laporte [02:27:24]:
It's more coffable and it tastes like cookies.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:27]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:27:28]:
And again that's, that's almost the same price as the whiskey. You know, that's for a liqueur that's very pricey.

Leo Laporte [02:27:35]:
Yeah, but you know, cookie flavored liqueur.

Richard Campbell [02:27:40]:
Yeah, well, I don't know. You know, Bicky is a very Aussie Word for biscuit.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:45]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:27:46]:
Yeah. So, I mean, I, I always enjoy telling craft stories. Right. Of a group of guys that used to make whiskey for other people, said we should make our own. And they do that little craft thing. That is not this story. This is a story of business. People trying to make the business in silk whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:28:01]:
They find a niche, without a doubt, and then they go off the rails.

Leo Laporte [02:28:07]:
So what was it that that caused them to lose their shirt? Was it the farm?

Richard Campbell [02:28:12]:
Just the sheer amount of money it takes to start an agave operation from beginning to end. They had to build another processing facility because the processing of penis is totally different. They had to set up that entire farm and then they overscaled it. What are you doing? Planting half a million agave plants.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:29]:
Another victim of Mexico's booming economy.

Leo Laporte [02:28:33]:
It's funny. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I guess it's also because they can't charge enough in Australia. It sounds like Australians don't like to pay for their liquor.

Richard Campbell [02:28:42]:
Well, you know, this stuff gets expensive. Like we were talking about, like Harmony and like those very fancy craft spirits that are 200 Aussie dollars for a 500 mil.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:56]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:28:56]:
You know what I loved about net is the contrast. Traditional size bottle, very reasonable price, relatively speaking, for an Aussie made product. Like, they had a winner here. I hope it survives. It's just gonna have to be under a different ownership. Is the moment where, you know, they're sort of in flux. But the brands have been locked up like it's legit and it's fine. Nothing wrong with it.

Richard Campbell [02:29:16]:
If you've got an urge to drink whiskey at 6 o' clock in the morning on a Thursday.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:22]:
You lost me at the 6 o' clock in the morning.

Richard Campbell [02:29:24]:
Excellent choice. Really?

Paul Thurrott [02:29:25]:
I was like, I do have it. Oh, wait. What? I have an urge to be asleep at 6 o' clock in the morning.

Richard Campbell [02:29:32]:
Yeah, that's not, that's not how my day is gonna go.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:36]:
No, it is not.

Leo Laporte [02:29:38]:
Well, there you go. Thank you, Richard, for getting up early in the morning. It's, it's, it's getting a little bit more unreasonable. Sun will be up soon. Richard Campbell is in.

Richard Campbell [02:29:47]:
It's brightening up out there.

Leo Laporte [02:29:48]:
Yeah, I can see the lights coming out. Just in time for a little bit of Ned.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:53]:
Glad to hear tomorrow's going to be sunny.

Leo Laporte [02:29:55]:
Go, go. Richard's got to go make some armor.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:00]:
Protect your legs.

Richard Campbell [02:30:02]:
Yeah, don't forget, I got to go to Victoria and see that armor now. Like, I know I want to see

Leo Laporte [02:30:06]:
it count the holes.

Richard Campbell [02:30:07]:
So great. Eight no holes. Dense. 18 rounds. Stopped. Worked by that.

Leo Laporte [02:30:13]:
It worked, Ned.

Richard Campbell [02:30:14]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:14]:
Ned, we're gonna have some weather here. It's thunder and lightning now. Oh.

Richard Campbell [02:30:19]:
Oh, fancy.

Leo Laporte [02:30:20]:
Very, very frightening. Mr. Richard Campbell is@runasradio.com that's where you'll find his run his radio show and dot net rocks that he does with Carl Franklin. And the geek outs are in there too. Space Geek out and others. I guess you're to update that now

Richard Campbell [02:30:35]:
with Artemis doing a space geek out on 10 o' clock this morning.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:39]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:30:40]:
In front of a crowd.

Leo Laporte [02:30:41]:
Have fun doing that. That'll be fun.

Richard Campbell [02:30:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:30:44]:
Paul Thurot is at therot.com Become a Premium Member and get all the goodness in there. It's a wonderful site. And of course his books are@leanpub.com although if you become a premium member, the books come along with it. They come along for the ride. Field Guide to Windows 11 featuring Windows 10 inside Windows Everywhere and his latest, D and Shitify. Windows could be yours for a song. Paul and Richard get together every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC, to do this little thing we call Windows Weekly, aka the Redmond Gazette.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:25]:
Yes, and if you want a pencil behind our ears, a hat on and a piece of paper in there, it says press.

Leo Laporte [02:31:33]:
If you want to watch it live, you can. We stream it in our club. Of course in the club, Twitter, Discord, but also on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. But you don't have to watch live because after the fact, we package it all up, put it on a reel to reel tape and mail it to your house. Or for convenience sake, you can always go to the website, TWiT TV, WW, download the audio or there's even video. No need for that. Super 8 projector. You can actually just get it from the website.

Leo Laporte [02:32:02]:
There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great place to share clips with friends. And of course you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast player. The best way to get all of our shows. Thank you so much, Paul. Thank you, Richard.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:17]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:32:18]:
Thanks to our club members for making this possible. And thanks to all of you Windows winners and dozers. We will see you right here next week on Windows Weekly.