Windows Weekly 984 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's here. Richard's here. We've got things to talk about. Winheck is back for the first time in eight years. Paul talks about his experience vibe coding a program yesterday and what he thought of the Google I O keynote. That and a lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly.
Leo Laporte [00:00:32]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Episode 984, recorded Wednesday, May 20, 2026. For entertainment purposes only. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And ladies and gentlemen, winners and dozers alike, here they are, your champions of Microsoft journalistic fortitude.
Richard Campbell [00:00:59]:
Good boy.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:00]:
Your Hugadores Day, Microsoft.
Leo Laporte [00:01:03]:
You know what? I'm going to adjust a little bit because you guys are a little lower than me. There we go.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:06]:
Yeah, right. I don't know why. No, don't do that. I'm slouching. Oh, the ball's deflating.
Richard Campbell [00:01:16]:
That would have you done.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:19]:
Okay. Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:01:21]:
I think we're good.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:23]:
Head height.
Leo Laporte [00:01:24]:
You're kind of in the middle there. Paul, you might want to sit up. Just sit up.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:28]:
I don't know what I can do.
Leo Laporte [00:01:28]:
You know, you have big hair. It should reach the top of the screen.
Richard Campbell [00:01:31]:
Stop slouching.
Leo Laporte [00:01:33]:
Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you our dear friends and Compadres in arms, Mr. Paul Tharat of tharat.com.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:41]:
hello.
Richard Campbell [00:01:42]:
Hello.
Leo Laporte [00:01:42]:
Paulie T. And little Richie C. Of Runasradio.com.
Richard Campbell [00:01:48]:
there I am.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:51]:
Happy Days reference.
Leo Laporte [00:01:52]:
Yeah. Richie Cunningham. Hello there, boys.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:56]:
I found my thrill.
Leo Laporte [00:01:59]:
You came back to Pennsylvania?
Richard Campbell [00:02:01]:
He's in Penny, that's such good news.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:03]:
You know what the worst part about coming back is? I have to go through Newark
Richard Campbell [00:02:08]:
Fair.
Leo Laporte [00:02:09]:
I hope America welcome you back with open arms. That the CBP folks said, Paul, we've been missing you. Welcome back. And we see your Twitter account.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:17]:
Yep. The only part of our government that's functioning correctly right now is the whole TSA Global entry thing.
Leo Laporte [00:02:23]:
Oh, you've got.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:25]:
Oh, my God. Right? It was, like, right through. Yep. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:02:28]:
All you have to do is show them your eyeballs and you're good.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:30]:
I spent more time waiting for an Uber than I did getting from the plane to the Uber.
Leo Laporte [00:02:33]:
Isn't that great.
Richard Campbell [00:02:34]:
Yeah. As it should be.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:36]:
Yeah. Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:02:38]:
Well, on behalf of Newark, I welcome you home.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:42]:
Screw yourself, buddy.
Leo Laporte [00:02:44]:
Get out of here.
Richard Campbell [00:02:46]:
What's that smell?
Leo Laporte [00:02:47]:
And, Richard, you're in B.C.
Richard Campbell [00:02:49]:
nope, I'm in the Netherlands. Ah.
Leo Laporte [00:02:51]:
You were at Antwerp last week. So you've just crossed over Alkmaar.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:55]:
That's right. You're on the way to Berlin, right?
Richard Campbell [00:02:58]:
I already did Berlin. Yeah, I went up. I went up to Alkar for the weekend and then I popped over to Berlin, did the show there, and then came. I took the train this morning. The fast trip from Berlin.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:09]:
Yeah. That's the big yellow train or whatever.
Richard Campbell [00:03:11]:
Yeah, yeah. Boogie. 200 kilometers an hour. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:03:17]:
How fun is that?
Richard Campbell [00:03:18]:
And back ensconced in my friend's home, the guy who owns his own whiskey shops. And needless to say, this week's whiskey is amazing.
Leo Laporte [00:03:26]:
Amazing.
Richard Campbell [00:03:27]:
And it's always good to be. You know, this is my home, too. I get very comfortable here.
Leo Laporte [00:03:31]:
We put the whiskey segment at the end of the show so that you don't have to listen unless you want to. And I'm making sure Paul says nothing of value after it. So there's no reason to stay tuned if you don't want to.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:41]:
I mean, there's a pretty good chance.
Leo Laporte [00:03:44]:
All the complaints. Actually, there are zero complaints about the length of any of our shows. Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:49]:
Well, except for me, you know, except for our host.
Leo Laporte [00:03:52]:
The hosts are constantly the host.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:53]:
This is a living hell. But, you know, whatever.
Leo Laporte [00:03:55]:
I wanted to listen to Lex Friedman's latest podcast with David Henemeyer Hansen of the Ruby on Rails guy, until I saw that it was six hours long.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:04]:
Oh, yeah. And the way that guy talks, it's gonna feel like 12 hours long.
Leo Laporte [00:04:08]:
Yeah, he's a slow talker.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:10]:
Yeah. I don't like. I don't know what his deal is.
Richard Campbell [00:04:12]:
You can definitely run that one at two times.
Leo Laporte [00:04:15]:
Maybe that's the theory is that. Well, you're really only going to listen for three hours.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:19]:
I don't know. Yeah, they bury something important.
Leo Laporte [00:04:23]:
I'm just going to say I no longer feel at the least bit guilty about the length of our shows, which are really pretty, you know, concise compared.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:33]:
Concise. Yes, that's the word I always use.
Leo Laporte [00:04:36]:
Concise. The concise Windows Weekly. Let's talk. I don't know. I'm thinking Windows.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:42]:
Yeah, I got a lot of stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:04:44]:
Oh, well, forget concision, folks. You're going to get concision detail.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:51]:
We live in interesting times. So Microsoft seems to be getting back on a normal. Normal. I almost put that in air quotes. But an actual normal release schedule for Windows. So sometime in the past. I don't know, it was Friday. I don't remember what day it was, but.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:10]:
Because I just traveled and I'm out of my mind. But there is A series of Release Preview channel updates in the Windows Insider program, including what I think is the first 26H1 build to make it into Release Preview. And I know, I think last week it came up that 26H1 which is on all these new Snapdragon X2 laptops, is like a month behind the rest of the planet from a Windows Update perspective. And so the 26H1 release preview update is like last month's patch Tuesday and is a preview of the next patch Tuesday, which will be the second June and second, sorry, Tuesday in June. June patch, yes. And it's not. There's nothing new here. You know we talk about all this stuff a lot but to me it's interesting they're finally doing this.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:02]:
So shared audio for over Bluetooth if it's supported MPU usage which is already in Task Manager. But I think I'm more expended view of that multi app camera support if your camera does support that and some magnifier improvements, et cetera. So whatever. Anyway that's happening. Of more note however, was a set of updates that went out before that across the new channels, like experimental and the new beta I believe, which is our first look at the new taskbar features they were talking about as part of that pain point thing. And this is a weird Paul problem I guess I'm going to call this, but I came from a small apartment in Mexico City where I have 10ish computers to this place where I have 40ish computers. And man, I spent a long time trying to get this update on something like I, you know, like the computers I'm actively using right now for the most part are these new Snapdragon X2 computers and I, I can't get. Well, I could but I'm not going to screw on with one of those.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:05]:
And then as we'll discuss later in the show, I.
Richard Campbell [00:07:09]:
You've been gone for five months. Like every single one of those machines needed an update, maybe three or four.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:17]:
Right. So.
Leo Laporte [00:07:18]:
And they were sitting on your doors
Richard Campbell [00:07:19]:
to start plugging them in. Not even the new ones.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:24]:
I did have two computers and boxes waiting for me and then I brought I don't know, four home I think, I don't remember. But yeah, I mean they're all over the place. So I, I think between Google I O which all the AI going on there, which we will talk about a little bit, I think took down the west coast, me bringing up all those computers at the same time and updating them brought down the east coast and I'm still not done, but I finally got one. I have to do some hands on Windows stuff tomorrow and I'm pretty excited. I finally got it. It's a good computer too, so it'll be good for the show. But finally got that installed, so. No, this is.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:03]:
No, no. The Asus Toss secret.
Leo Laporte [00:08:06]:
It's okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:06]:
No, no, no, it's not. It's just. No, it's just a standard X64. It's a X64 computer, is a pretty good GPU, so it's a good computer to do like screen recording on. It's like a Ryzen AI7 something something. I don't know. Anyway, so, yeah, so everyone, you know, it's a lot of. It's big news, I guess, that you can move the taskbar around again, you know, like, I don't think anyone does that.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:33]:
I mean, I don't mean literally anyone. I don't want to hear from all seven of you. But to me, the bigger deal that's in here, and it is in here, is the ability to make the taskbar small again, which is something we lost, I guess, from Windows 10. I don't even remember it was in 10, but I get it probably was. It's been a while, but, you know, certainly before then. Because the default Windows 11 taskbar is actually pretty tall. You know, it's big, it takes up a lot of space. So one of the things I spent a bunch of.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:58]:
I probably spent over a year doing this is just like hiding the taskbar. And then I had to put some little clock app that appeared over everything up in the corner because I couldn't see the time anymore because the taskbar was gone. And I found out that I actually look at the time a lot, you know. So anyway, having that be like a little skinny thing is awesome. And I used. One of the other things I tried was if you install Starduck Start 11, one of the many options in there is you can have a small taskbar. So I was using that too, but now it's going to be built into. Into Windows, you know, directly Windows 11.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:33]:
So that's. That's great. You know, there's no new Start menu stuff, right? So they're going to be changing that too. You're going to be able to resize it and do different things there. That's not part of this. But. But if you like your world upside down, you can put your task for on the top of the screen. That's fun.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:54]:
And I guess that one also came to Canary later in a separate Update or whatever a couple of days or a day later, but who cares? Okay. And then I put this in sort of an insertification remedy section because I wasn't sure what else to call this, but they all these things all. And actually that last thing kind of addressed that notion that you know, Windows 11 isn't exactly what people want and Microsoft is finally paying attention and they're doing things right. And so the first one on this list is Microsoft just held its first winheck since 2018.
Richard Campbell [00:10:29]:
Such a flashback name, man. Like I know. So when admittedly it was an online event.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:36]:
Well no, they were somewhere. It was in not Shanghai, it was somewhere in the middle, the far East.
Leo Laporte [00:10:43]:
Their hardware.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:45]:
Yeah. So when this thing began, if you think about the natural progressions of things back when Microsoft made sense, you would Win hack would be the lead place where you'd find out about some future version of Windows because they had to do the low level stuff first. So if there's going to be some hardware advance like when they were doing TPM stuff maybe or you know, a graphics driven user interface or whatever it might be, you know, when heck would be the first place where they would talk about that stuff because that's where the driver developers would go, the hardware guys, et cetera. It became newsworthy enough that the press used to go all the time. So I been to many Win Hex, although I not to be.
Richard Campbell [00:11:22]:
It was in Taipei. Wow.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:24]:
Type thing. There you go.
Richard Campbell [00:11:25]:
Yeah,
Paul Thurrott [00:11:27]:
but and then they would go from there and then they would have
Richard Campbell [00:11:30]:
really like to have gone to that. You know, that would have been fun.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:32]:
Well, except I have to go there and it's like yeah, no thanks. You know, I'd love to be there but I don't want to.
Leo Laporte [00:11:38]:
You know, you should go there while you still can. That's what I'm thinking.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:41]:
Oh, good point. That's true too. So anyway back in the day after that they would do a PDC and now a build. But you know you now you're talking to application developers and they usually put a beta out and then whatever that was the progression. So they haven't done this a long time. They haven't done a win Hex Since 2018, like I said and they just did one. So among the things that occurred there, they announced something called the window, I'm sorry the driver quality initiative for Windows. And this is, you know, Microsoft basically kind of doing what they not taking it over like they did with printer drivers, but rather doing the work that this probably came out of.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:19]:
CrowdStrike where, you know, you have, in that case security vendors who are able to write kernel code and they can screw things up and did in that case, etc. And of course one of the problems with drivers is that there's a transition between kernel mode and user mode in many cases. And so what they want to do is kind of raise the quality bar there so that, you know, drivers won't crash your computer. Essentially. There's a. I mean, they added this in Windows me originally, but there's long been this notion of if something hardware related caused your computer to crash, you just installed a new driver, you could roll it back when you came back. But now what they want to do is constantly monitor this and get you the latest updates through Windows update, obviously, etc. Etc.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:03]:
So, so that's good. Yeah. I mean, again, I don't think this is something a lot of people were clamoring for, but it's hard to look at this and be like, okay, this is, this is nice. Microsoft also revealed through a support page. So they didn't reveal, but they, but in a support page they're going to allow users to remap the copilot key to write control, which if you think about it is sort of what it used to be before. So we used to have a control key to the right of the keyboard with the right alt. It turned into a right click menu key or whatever you call that the context menu key for quite a while and then it became a copilot key. And of course everyone hates the copilot key.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:46]:
And you know, Microsoft, blah blah, blah, you know, they try different things, they don't really want to change it. They kind of forced the entire industry to adopt this. You see this in all kinds of new computers. When they originally announced this, I thought it was going to be a something you only saw on copilot plus PCs. But no, it's on pretty much all computers now.
Leo Laporte [00:14:04]:
Yay.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:04]:
And after a lot of complaining, they put a control in into Settings where you can change it away from Copilot but only have it go to Search or some custom app. And what I want it to do is nothing. You know, I don't want to gouge it out with a knife like I'm Steve Jobs taking the Apple logo out of his Mac when he went to Next. But I hate this key so much and I've been using the PowerToys Utility Keyboard Manager to remap it. I usually map it to the right arrow, I'm sorry, the left arrow key, whatever is to the Right. Of it on that keyboard. Actually, this keyboard. That's not even close.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:42]:
This keyboard has all kinds of additional things going on. But a traditional laptop keyboard, typically that
Richard Campbell [00:14:47]:
would be the next one right beside my left arrow key on my search.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:49]:
Yeah. Because I'm like, you know, I type like an ape, so I'm gonna. I'm making mistakes and that's probably what I meant to hit.
Richard Campbell [00:14:55]:
But yeah, when I'm rolling my face on my keyboard, I generally want the keys.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:59]:
Yeah. Or my cat walks across it, whatever it might be.
Richard Campbell [00:15:01]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:03]:
Since they announced this or said this, I've been sort of, Look, I've been on a couple of computers remapping it to write control, just to see if that makes any difference or does anything.
Richard Campbell [00:15:13]:
But the goal for me is key. That does nothing.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:17]:
Yeah, right, exactly. I want to. Yeah, I'm typing, like I said, like an ape. And I just want to keep going and whatever.
Richard Campbell [00:15:22]:
Just don't interrupt me. Don't flip up a dialogue. Don't. Just don't.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:28]:
Right. So my goal in life is not to just write articles that rip on other human beings. Like, I really am not into that. And there was a thing that came up recently I would have talked about on the show. There was an article on PCMag or PC computing, whatever. It was some former magazine guy who's been around for a long, long time, Neil Rubin King, who I like and respect. I'm not trying to criticize him, but, you know, he basically said, you can't trust what's built into Windows. You need like a third party antivirus.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:02]:
And we talked about this. I was like, yeah, no you don't.
Richard Campbell [00:16:04]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:04]:
And. And I went through the whole thing that he wrote and looking for some like, kernel of justification where I could say, okay, he's making a point here. And I didn't find it. And, you know, you can't write something like this without, you know, you got to mention who it was and whatever. And I'm like, I, you know, I hate it. I just wanted to be really clear up front. Like, I'm not disrespecting this person. I just disagree with this opinion, you know, whatever.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:26]:
So that kind of came and went. I thought, well, okay, good. You know, be like another year, you know, or something before I have to deal with that kind of thing again. Then I go on YouTube and I watch this video from this. Like, I've been watching a lot of Linux content lately because I'm doing that Switcher series and there's this guy who most. He's a privacy expert, I guess, or a privacy nut, at least. But he does a lot of Linux videos and I respect his opinion. I like his content.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:49]:
I guess he's kind of a weird guy, but of course he is. I just described what he is. And you know, those people are what you think they are and then come out of nowhere. Yep. So, of course, because I'm watching his videos, YouTube recommends a video to me that he made about Windows. And just like the antivirus one, I'm like, yeah, don't do it, don't read it, don't watch it.
Richard Campbell [00:17:11]:
Why would you. What do you.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:13]:
And it kept coming up and I'm like, okay, I don't value my own time. I'm going to do this. And then I, yeah, the only way
Richard Campbell [00:17:18]:
to get it off the roster is to actually watch it.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:21]:
So people listening to this podcast pray this experience with me, which is meaning I'm in this case listening to this guy, and I'm like, no, no, no, God damn it, no. And then I'm like, all right, so I have to deal with this now.
Richard Campbell [00:17:34]:
Now I must respond.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:35]:
But I decided in this case just not to go through his thing point by point. I just kind of. He's conflating privacy and security, which, you know, obviously they're interrelated. But my central argument here, and this is very general, is that if you care about your privacy, you need to properly secure that thing first. In this case, a computer, that, that will go a long way to protecting your privacy. Now, obviously, if you're using Windows, you have other concerns because there's telemetry and other things you may not like, et cetera. There's tracking going on where they're, you know, going to serve you ads because of that, yada, yada, yada. So there's additional things.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:09]:
Absolutely. I, you know, that's, that's true, but I, I went through this and I was like, oh, try not to do this, try not to do this. And so I wrote an article just without going into every little point he made, you know, the Internet privacy guy, just about, you know, how this matters and whether it matters if you're going to stick with Windows or go to another platform, etc. Etc. But then, you know, because I can't help myself, I wrote a very long article about configuring Windows from the get go. Meaning you buy a new computer, has Windows on it, you're not going to install Linux or something else, you are actually going to use it, but, you
Richard Campbell [00:18:48]:
know, you don't want to Use the pre installed version of Windows.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:51]:
Yeah, but you, you don't want Microsoft in there as much as possible. In other words, you're not going to use OneDrive, you're not using Edge, you're not going to use Teams or whatever else is in there. You want to turn off the telemetry, you want to do all that stuff. You know, I just wrote a book about distance certifying Windows 11 and you know, because I feel like normal people are going to read this, you know, one of my bits of advice in there is, you know, just use a Microsoft account for all the right reasons, but then do the things to protect yourself as well. And in this case I was like, all right, look, these guys, when you, you go on a Linux, it's a local account, you sign into a Mac, it's a local account, you can sign into Windows with a local, let's just do this from the get go. So there's, there's problems with this configuration, including such things as your disk does not get encrypted when you do that and you can encrypt it after the fact. And this was part of the thing where in his video I was like, nope, nope, no. And so I was like, I'm just gonna write the one where it's like, no, this is right.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:47]:
And so if you're interested in that configuration, I've written a pretty long article about it and I have two computers here that I'm using this way. I didn't use anything like wind upload or tiny 11 build or anything like that. It's like I said stock Windows but then do all the right things. I never used the Microsoft configuration settings. Yeah, winget for every app, I don't. And, and from the web, not from the store, no Microsoft account, no one drive, no Edge, no whatever. And you know, the thing is I, I think for a lot of people, I, I watch videos where people freak out about like all the ads in Windows and all the times things pop up and everything. And look, I, I live this nightmare more than anybody and it's not as dramatic as people are making it sound but, but I get it right? And so in one of the little Zen of Linux things for me is that there, there is a certain, if you're used to Windows and you experiment with Linux, even you can kind of see like, oh wait, this is my computer again.
Paul Thurrott [00:20:47]:
That's fun. You know, there is that kind of aspect to it and you can, you can actually kind of achieve that with Windows. So that was the, the point of this. So I'm, I'm doing that and we'll see how I'm going to keep doing it and we'll see how that goes. But it's, it's very long and yeah, if that appeals to you, there it is. And then I think last week we talked about. Yeah, last week Microsoft was found to be loading every password you own into
Richard Campbell [00:21:14]:
clear text as designed as on purpose.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:19]:
Which sounds crazy. It's like, why don't you punch yourself in the face? You're like, that was by design. Relax.
Richard Campbell [00:21:23]:
Yeah,
Paul Thurrott [00:21:26]:
and I, you know, I, I probably compared it a little bit to the recall thing that came up recently, only because Microsoft came back and said, actually this is by design and in that case was not a security vulnerability. And I will say, look, one of the issues here is that you have to be signed in as a user to even access this information. But that's how virus, you know, malware works, right? I mean, and it will run in the context of your user account. So if you're an admin, which you are in Windows, you know, this, that obviously is a problem. So I don't remember exactly how I phrased this last week, but I do know that my initial reaction to this was like, that doesn't sound smart because, you know, all of the browsers don't do this. You know, Google Chrome encrypts these things and decrypts as needed as you access each password, you don't load the whole thing into a plain text file or whatever. Anyway, Microsoft. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of worse than lazy.
Paul Thurrott [00:22:21]:
It feels like an oversight. You know, I don't feel like there was a bunch of meetings where everyone discussed it and we're like, yeah, no, let's leave it as it is. You know, So I still feel very strongly that you should use the third party best advantage or not use whatever nudge.
Richard Campbell [00:22:34]:
But that's what we agreed on last week too. It's like, yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:22:39]:
Which by the way, will encrypt that stuff and decrypt on the fly. But Microsoft is going to fix this. So if you do use Edge and use it in the default configuration, you're probably not watching this podcast. But if you know anyone in your family or whatever who is doing this, just know that this will soon be safer than it is.
Richard Campbell [00:22:56]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:22:57]:
Today. So I guess that's good. I don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:23:00]:
Fair enough.
Richard Campbell [00:23:00]:
Safer.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:02]:
I don't.
Richard Campbell [00:23:03]:
There is, there is.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:04]:
Don't recommend using Edge personally, but, you know, whatever.
Richard Campbell [00:23:08]:
And then Chance. They had a chance to make a great privacy. They just chose not to.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:14]:
Yeah, right. So maybe as part of this pain point thing Microsoft is doing in Windows, there'll be some edge work. Well, this is an example, right? I mean, we'll see. Well, while I was in Mexico, I got two Snapdragon X2 laptops from Lenovo, which I flew home with because I like to carry hardware back and forth and Asus offered the ZenBook A16. So this is the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, right?
Richard Campbell [00:23:42]:
The highest and the only one you've gotten. Right?
Paul Thurrott [00:23:45]:
I like that. Yeah, yeah, I think it's the only one in the market. I could be wrong, but I think right now, one thing. We'll talk about this in the next section, but there appears to be like a, A supply issue with X2 chips.
Richard Campbell [00:23:59]:
I thought, I thought Aces had an exclusive like they.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:02]:
Oh, they could.
Richard Campbell [00:24:02]:
I mean.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:03]:
Yeah. So in the last gen, the Galaxy Book, whatever from Samsung had the only. Not the one that was in the dev kit, but the next one down, I believe was the only laptop that ever shipped with that one chip. So maybe they're doing. I can't imagine they're going to relegate this chip to one computer. There are two tiers of the Extreme Elite. The notable thing there is that these things have the memory integrated into the SoC. The bandwidth on that RAM is dramatically faster.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:33]:
And I have this in the article somewhere because I looked this up. I was really curious about this. But for example, if you have a Snapdragon X1, you know, the original family, no matter which version, the. The bandwidth for RAM is 135Gbps, which I believe is roughly the same. Let's see if I can find it. I think that's roughly what like an M3 MacBook Air is, you know, so it's got like, I think all MacBook airs. That's the speed of the RAM.
Richard Campbell [00:25:01]:
I think that's. That's PCIe to times eight.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:06]:
Okay. So, yeah, on the X2 family, other than the Elite Extreme, the, The Normal elite and the plus chips all run. The memory bandwidth is 152 gigabits per second. So it's a, you know, a small. But the Elite Extreme chips run at 228 gigabits per second.
Richard Campbell [00:25:24]:
Okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:24]:
And that's a 50 improvement over the normal X2s. Right. So money compared to the Apple side. I had to go look this up. This is something I hadn't thought about too much ever in my life, I guess, even though I review these things all the time. But to get a Mac that has that like RAM that's in the rough, you know, roughly the same category, you have to go up to a MacBook Pro, but then you also have to go to an M5 Pro chip. Right. And so the base MacBook Pro, the RAM is not as fast as it is on the X2, but if you get a PRO chip that's faster, it's 307 gigabits per second of bandwidth for RAM.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:58]:
And if you get the M5 Max, it's 460 or 614. Yikes.
Richard Campbell [00:26:05]:
Start to understand why that machine is that expensive. Because it's a $7,000 machine.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:11]:
The cheapest MacBook Pro you can buy that would compete with this from this perspective, which granted is not how anyone buys a computer, is over $3,100. Yeah, double.
Richard Campbell [00:26:23]:
But the max is almost twice that.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:25]:
Oh, it's probably three times that. Yeah, it's a lot more. I didn't even look it up. I don't even care. But. So this computer is a 16. It's 16 inches. It doesn't have a numeric key for it pad, which I love.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:38]:
It's so light. It feels like an engineering sample. I had my wife like pick up just two 16 inch laptops side by side and I showed the first one normal. She's like, yep. And I'm like, now pick up this. And she's like, woo. And I was like, yeah. I'm like, it's like it's.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:50]:
It's like there's nothing inside it. Like it's that light. It's crazy light, especially for the size. And look, I review a lot of laptops and I gotta tell you, they're gonna have a hard time getting this one back for me. I. This is this laptop.
Richard Campbell [00:27:04]:
Yeah, I think I might need one of those.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:07]:
It's awesome. Yeah, it's really, really good. So I mean, I'll go through the whole process, but I'm using it for this. But it's, it's awesome. It's just awesome.
Richard Campbell [00:27:19]:
It's nice to see. I mean, I have nothing bad to say about how brilliant Macs have been for the longest time because I thought it would just push the whole.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:26]:
No me. By the way, I would say me too. The exception being the os. Like I, I hate Mac OS so much. I mean, I just hate it. And if I could deal and I do everything I can to make it work, the more like I want it to and I just hate it.
Richard Campbell [00:27:43]:
And the A16 has an HDMI port on the side of it, so.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:46]:
Yeah, it does.
Richard Campbell [00:27:46]:
That's one less dongle I need to get carry.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:49]:
Yeah, I think there's a. Yeah, there's like a. A normal USB port then 2 thunderbolt 4/ USB for ports is a head. You know, like a headphone jack thing which is becoming less and less common. Whatever. Yep, it's. Yeah, it's mostly pretty great.
Richard Campbell [00:28:06]:
You know, eventually your Bluetooth earbuds run on a battery. Ask me how I know. Plug regular wired headphones in like an animal and let your headset charge I guess two and switch between them. Like I don't know the answer to that. Right. I put the head. The wired headset on.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:24]:
I have USBC wired headphones that I keep in a bag just in case. Right. You know, and I, I don't like to use them unless I really have to, but. But I love using these things so. And that's why I connected and disconnected because I had plugged in the headphones after I connected to the screen. Whatever we're using here.
Richard Campbell [00:28:43]:
Yeah, I should get the. I should get a pair of my over ears with the USBC connector on it.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:49]:
Yeah. So anyway, that works great. So I'm super.
Richard Campbell [00:28:53]:
I'm glad it was worth the wait then.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:56]:
Well, I mean not waiting would have been good, but yeah, it's. It's a good one. Yeah. I feel like this thing, you know, before the. So this configuration I think is this non touch and touch versions of it. And this is the non touch, which is what I want. And it's probably 16, maybe 1700 bucks, which is probably 2 or 300 bucks more than it might have been a year ago because of the commodity and stuff. But it's still.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:20]:
I don't care. I mean it's not realms I might be buying one.
Richard Campbell [00:29:27]:
But 48 gigs around.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:29]:
Yeah. Which is curious. Right. And so I, I saw someone in
Richard Campbell [00:29:32]:
the comments compromise on price.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:34]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:29:35]:
32 be too little. 64 be too expensive. 48 milligrams.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:39]:
So yeah. So someone had said something like, well, the X2, the normal X2 elites come with 32. The extreme comes with 48. And they're like no, that's not a hard. You could put any amount of RAM on any of these computers. It's just that that's what they.
Richard Campbell [00:29:54]:
I just double checked. The M5 Pro Max comes with 128. So.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:58]:
Yeah. Right.
Richard Campbell [00:29:58]:
For $7,000.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:00]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:30:01]:
So in a system on a chip they might actually have.
Richard Campbell [00:30:05]:
It's hard on. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:06]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:30:07]:
So it Might be that they don't make that. That's the part they made, right?
Richard Campbell [00:30:10]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:30:11]:
I mean, Apple. Apple has that issue with the Neo, right. It's only eight gigs because that's the part they have, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:30:18]:
Yep. No, I mean, that was the decision here. But the point is a PC maker could say 164, I want 128, if
Leo Laporte [00:30:24]:
they can get the SOC with that in it.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:25]:
But the point is they could do it. They just.
Leo Laporte [00:30:28]:
I guess the constraints are pretty tough.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:30]:
But no one's building those things because they're going to sell eight of those and what they want to do is sell a billion of whatever. The other thing.
Leo Laporte [00:30:35]:
Who makes this one?
Paul Thurrott [00:30:36]:
Asus. Yeah, the laptop.
Leo Laporte [00:30:38]:
I'm sure they went to TSMC to get it, right? I mean, who else?
Paul Thurrott [00:30:42]:
Well, I'm sure Snap or Qualcomm did and Acer's got it through them. But. Yes, I mean, the effect is still the same. I mean, in the Qualcomm is humongous. In mobile, they're the biggest company by far, but in the PC space they're not much. Right. So, you know, so they're at the back of the line, right next to Microsoft.
Leo Laporte [00:31:01]:
Nvidia and Apple are eating all the capacity.
Paul Thurrott [00:31:03]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:31:04]:
So more.
Paul Thurrott [00:31:05]:
More.
Leo Laporte [00:31:06]:
So Nvidia. I wonder, I mean, do you see part people making this with more ram?
Paul Thurrott [00:31:12]:
Yeah, but probably not this year. Certainly not in the someday. Not before the end of the year. Yeah, no, this is.
Leo Laporte [00:31:18]:
We have the six, whatever TSMC offers them.
Paul Thurrott [00:31:21]:
Yeah, no, I mean, when we went out to the Snapdragon Summit last year, someone that. This actually came up. That. Not in the context of the component crisis, because that wasn't really clear at the time, I don't think, but rather, you know, are. Are they restricted to this, this or this? And you know, what they said was like, no, you can, you can connect this to any amount of RAM you want it. It's just that it has to be made. And then in the X2 Elite Extreme or. Yeah, Elite Extreme variant, it's on the, you know, it's on the SoC.
Paul Thurrott [00:31:50]:
So that's a special. That's a special order right there. So, yeah, so for this particular computer, yes, it is 48. And I think that was just an attempt to further differentiate it from a. Like a normal X2 Elite. Right. And they'll come with 32 or 16 to 32, depending on the laptop. And then this One comes with 48, because 48 is a bigger number than 32.
Paul Thurrott [00:32:11]:
So. Weird. I don't know.
Richard Campbell [00:32:12]:
Must be better.
Paul Thurrott [00:32:14]:
Yeah. Oh, Richard, it's better. It's. It's better. It is better.
Richard Campbell [00:32:23]:
So much better.
Paul Thurrott [00:32:26]:
I don't have any kind of battery life estimate yet. I did a couple of rundowns on it. It's been in the 9ish hours, which is not high for a Snapdragon, but it's early days too. And my experience with the previous gen is that that actually goes up over time and so we'll see what happens there. But I guess it's not unreasonable to expect this thing to maybe not get as good battery life. And that's part of the trade off. Right. You're getting to performance levels that are more typical for much more expensive computers.
Paul Thurrott [00:32:57]:
So especially. And not just like the M whatever on the Apple side but, but they also are competing with intel and AMD chips that have very good integrated graphics. And you know, you can buy, it's not really, it's not a mobile workstation or anything but you can buy like a pretty pedestrian laptop with one of those newer chips and play AAA games really well, you know, so that's the, that's the competition for them really. I don't think anyone's shopping like Mac against Snap Fragrance to only in my dreams. But you know, maybe someday. I think really what they're shopping it against is other, you know, against x64 laptops. Mm. But we'll see, we'll see where, we'll see where that lands.
Richard Campbell [00:33:41]:
Yeah. The conversation about Snapdragon and the Enterprise is still an interesting1. The x2 is the great promise but we're not seeing enterprise style machines so far. Just.
Paul Thurrott [00:33:51]:
Well, part of the reason I think is the component crisis and in this case because specifically in the Enterprise they're in a holding pattern. Right. It's like we're going to eke out more time with the things we've already purchased as much as we can. Look, Snapdragon has always suffered from that kind of fear of the unknown or resistance to change kind of problem and this only exacerbates that.
Richard Campbell [00:34:14]:
But I, Well, Microsoft has got the ARM machines into the normal Windows UP pipeline now and that's.
Paul Thurrott [00:34:20]:
Yep, that's maybe next. That's the next story.
Richard Campbell [00:34:23]:
It's another piece of the pie. So. But I'm waiting on the hardware in that degree.
Paul Thurrott [00:34:28]:
This is the market that should embrace it. Like I, I would imagine uneducated with regards to tech. Normal mainstream consumers do not understand the, the benefits are not, you know, maybe be nervous about it. But to me, and this is not what has happened but it seems to me like the. This should have been embraced immediately by the enterprise. This is a better computer. It wasn't much more reliable, you know. Etc.
Paul Thurrott [00:34:54]:
Etc.
Richard Campbell [00:34:55]:
It was just a bear to maintain like your normal maintenance tool. You needed to have a separate process for our machines and I don't know to men this we're going to willingly embrace another process.
Paul Thurrott [00:35:03]:
Yep. They're so lazy.
Richard Campbell [00:35:07]:
They got enough to do.
Leo Laporte [00:35:08]:
Let's pause for a moment and we will have more of Windows Weekly in just a bit but Paul needs some more cranberry juice and Richard, we don't know what he's drinking but I'm sure it's delicious.
Paul Thurrott [00:35:19]:
I feel so.
Richard Campbell [00:35:20]:
Water.
Leo Laporte [00:35:20]:
What time is it in the Netherlands right now?
Richard Campbell [00:35:23]:
It's 10 to 9.
Leo Laporte [00:35:25]:
So it's early PM. Oh good. Oh good. So the sun's gone over the yard arm is my grandpa.
Richard Campbell [00:35:31]:
Still a little light out there, but it's getting down that way. Not that it's ever held me back before for.
Paul Thurrott [00:35:36]:
Well you're also like heading toward the middle of the year. So this is going to be one of the longer days of the year. The sun will probably set pretty, pretty late.
Richard Campbell [00:35:43]:
I remember being pretty late around here
Leo Laporte [00:35:45]:
on the 4th of July and it was like wow, it's. It's mid.
Paul Thurrott [00:35:48]:
So you know, so you know, I've lived in the northeast United States for my entire life basically we lived in Phoenix for several years and whatever. But you know, this should be normal to me. Right. But we got home, we went to our favorite restaurant, we walked out of there at 7:30. And it was full light.
Richard Campbell [00:36:05]:
Yep.
Paul Thurrott [00:36:06]:
And I was like, what the hell is wrong with this place? Like it's weird. It was, it was like three o'clock in the afternoon.
Leo Laporte [00:36:11]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:36:12]:
And I'm like, you know Mexico, you walk. It doesn't matter what time of year you walk to the place. It's dark at, you know, 7pm and then you walk out and it's really dark. And that, you know, that's feels normal to me. And like now I know this is nor. I mean like I'm like I say I'm. I recognize how stupid.
Leo Laporte [00:36:30]:
You need one of these. You strap this.
Paul Thurrott [00:36:32]:
Yes, that's exactly what I need.
Leo Laporte [00:36:34]:
And a good lid.
Paul Thurrott [00:36:35]:
Yeah. What am I like a Chilean minor? What is it?
Leo Laporte [00:36:40]:
You know, I like this one has red so it won't blind you.
Paul Thurrott [00:36:43]:
What is that thing actually, what is it?
Leo Laporte [00:36:44]:
It's just a headlamp.
Paul Thurrott [00:36:46]:
It's a headlight.
Leo Laporte [00:36:46]:
It's so you can walk to the taqueriya at 8pm and not get fall off the curb.
Paul Thurrott [00:36:55]:
Yeah, I have done.
Leo Laporte [00:36:55]:
A friend gave me this and I thought. I don't know what you're trying to tell me, buddy, but thank you.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:00]:
If you're worried that, you know, expats, whatever they're called, like, stick out at all and this would.
Leo Laporte [00:37:06]:
This would.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:07]:
That would do it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:37:08]:
I have the San Miguel shirt, so you know, with the Mariposas on it.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:12]:
Yeah, Cyclops in Spanish. But I can assure you that some of the ragging you would get would involve that word.
Leo Laporte [00:37:19]:
It's funny because you go to Hawaii and people, you know, the Hawaiians aren't wearing Hawaiian shirts. It's just like a big fat sign on you that says tourists.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:27]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:37:27]:
I wonder if that's true in Mexico. If I wore this shirt in Mexico, would I stand out? Especially with a headlamp.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:34]:
I was wearing a shirt that would look nothing like that. It had a pattern, but it was a short sleeve shirt. Was not a Hawaiian shirt.
Leo Laporte [00:37:40]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:41]:
And. But I had my sunglasses, you know, hanging in the front. And one of my friends there walks up and he said, hey, Magnum, are you going to get a ride home in the helicopter after dinner? And I was like, what are you talking. I didn't even understand what he said.
Leo Laporte [00:37:53]:
I was like, what?
Paul Thurrott [00:37:54]:
Because I've made this joke to a friend of mine, like years ago, but he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. So I actually got this thrown back in my face. But it took me a sec. He had explained what he meant. I was like, oh. I'm like, what? This is not a Hawaiian shirt.
Leo Laporte [00:38:06]:
I mean, this is made in San Miguel de Allende. This is a Mexican shirt. But I think probably on cursory examination you might say, well, wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:15]:
No, it's very colorful. I mean, it's funny because when I
Leo Laporte [00:38:17]:
went to Hawaii, I forgot to bring any of these shirts to Hawaii. I just said, boring shirts, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:38:24]:
I mean.
Leo Laporte [00:38:25]:
Yeah, yeah. We ended up buying a couple just so I would fit in with the tourists.
Richard Campbell [00:38:30]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [00:38:31]:
No, everybody there is wearing a T shirt. They're not stupid.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:33]:
Let me tell you what happened if you walked into like a place I'm going to dinner tonight in the Pennsylvania kind of Philadelphia area with a Hawaiian shirt on. You know, be like, what are you, a Mets fan? Okay, good to know you're in danger.
Leo Laporte [00:38:50]:
Time for a little break. Then we'll come back with more Windows talk. Anyway, Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:58]:
He was a regular appearance at all the shows and stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:39:01]:
Yeah, we talked about him a lot.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:02]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:39:04]:
On this show. That's how I know the name. So Microsoft announced new hardware.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:11]:
Yeah, so someone was just asking me about this last week in that weekly Ask Paul thing I do and I knew this was coming and I couldn't really talk about it at the time but of course the question is when is Microsoft going to rev its Surface hardware for the latest gen processors, be them intel, which is what they usually use on the X64 side or the Snapdragon X2? So what they've done is refresh the business line which uses the intel chips and so they've moved on to Pantal Lake. I have to say, you know, for. I wouldn't use intel on your computer but if you know, if you have to go that route or you want to go that route, that's a good choice. Like the Panther Lake stuff is actually very. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:39:59]:
Of all the intel chips in this line is the most impressive.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:03]:
Yeah. On the mobile side. Yeah, for sure. It's a good chip.
Richard Campbell [00:40:06]:
The first since Lunar Lake that really wowed.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:08]:
Yep. Yeah, it's good. I have limited experience with this particular chipset so I can't make any broad statements about reliability, etc. But my experience has not been great in that capacity. But you know, we'll see, we'll see how things go over time. The problem though and the thing that really stuck out in my brain when I read through this thing, the announcement is these things are wicked expensive. Wicked, wicked expensive. And I don't mean like 20, 30% more than last year.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:43]:
I mean in some cases like you know, 50 to 70% more expensive. Like really expensive. For example, a 13 inch surface laptop. This is the, the kind of the newer version like the. When as originally or as before the previous gen, like when they did the Snapdragon Gen1 chips there was a 13.5 and a 15 inch model. They still sell the 13.5 but now they sell a smaller 13 inch as well. So you could make a pretty good argument that this thing is competing with like a MacBook Neo, except it's not at all like, not even close. Not for that price point because.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:20]:
Yeah. So in the markets it's available in today, it starts at 16 gigs of RAM. It's a 24 gig configuration as well. It's a copilot plus PC. That's a requirement. Right. The base price of that thing is fifteen hundred dollars for this. I mean I, I'd have to go look at it.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:37]:
Yeah, like, come on, like this. This should have been 900, right?
Richard Campbell [00:41:40]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:41]:
But they're going to Sell a version with 8 gigabytes of RAM later this year. I wonder what really, what made them think of that. Wow, $1300.
Richard Campbell [00:41:52]:
That's too much.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:53]:
It's way too much. So I, I look, I like this
Richard Campbell [00:41:57]:
is not the question is what's the full load? Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:00]:
Like well the, one of the, that's one question. Right. So part of one of the look, they're doing work in Windows now to reduce resource usage, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, that's cute. That's cute. We do have a Snapdragon. I'm sorry a copilot plus PC spec which you know granted is semi arbitrary but 16 gigs of ram at least 256 gigs of storage which I think is inadequate but whatever an NPU that could do at least 40 tops. Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:26]:
So that thing will not be a copilot plus PC. So in 2026 they're going to sell a business class Surface laptop that does not is not a Copilot plus PC unless they arbitrarily change the spec. Right. Or do what they should do which is make those capabilities across whatever computers if you have a gpu, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, no word on that. So I don't know what to tell you there but I mean and you could spend a lot of money like the, on these things. The 13.5-inch version 13.8 I guess starts at almost $2,000.
Richard Campbell [00:43:05]:
Wow.
Paul Thurrott [00:43:06]:
Look in the scope of the PC maker space, Microsoft is a boutique PC maker. You know they don't qualify.
Richard Campbell [00:43:14]:
There was always a case for them to be sort of reference hardware, high end price.
Paul Thurrott [00:43:19]:
Yeah. The problem is with this component shortage you're seeing how this can be a real Achilles heel. And you know, look, I, I, I don't, whatever anyone thinks of this stuff and whatever anyone thinks of the quality, whether that's up to date or out of date information or whatever. I will say, you know they, they did kind of formalize this kind of 3 by 2 tablet form factor with the pro starting with surface pro 3 many years ago now this is like 12th edition to give you an idea. Yeah, it's, this is, this is going to do, this is almost like the final death knell for this brand. Right. And it's not their fault in this case a 13 inch Surface Pro for business. The base model is $1950.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:09]:
Before you buy the keyboard pen and guys. No, like just no. And by the way businesses are not buying computers right now. Yeah. So I, I don't know, it's again I'm not blaming Microsoft. I. They've made mistakes or whatever and surfaces, whatever it is. And now you're seeing, like I said, the kind of Achilles heel here is they just don't get preferential pricing anywhere.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:37]:
So now you're seeing what that looks like in this component shortage era.
Richard Campbell [00:44:40]:
Well, yeah. And this is. You have to wonder if Panos was still around, would he have fought for this? Right. You know, would have made cut a better deal, been a part of the launch.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:51]:
Right. Like if.
Richard Campbell [00:44:52]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:52]:
I don't know that this world is completely gone. But there's always been this argument with Microsoft hardware and certainly with Surface where you're essentially betting on some percentage of the customer base to have Microsoft 365 subscriptions. And that can in some way make up for you breaking even, losing money or whatever it is on the hardware. And I just feel like they're like, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. Like this, you know, just like with AI where you're starting to see, as pricing on AI moves to more of a consumption model, like actual consumption.
Richard Campbell [00:45:23]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:24]:
You're starting to see what I think of as the true cost of the thing.
Richard Campbell [00:45:27]:
Yep.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:27]:
And I think that's what you're seeing
Richard Campbell [00:45:29]:
exactly how we're talking about.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:30]:
Yeah, this is the same thing. It's. It's unfortunate because I feel like a Lenovo could sell a laptop with this exact spec and it would be 11, maybe $1200.
Richard Campbell [00:45:42]:
Yeah. 30% less.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:44]:
Yeah, it's. It's gross. Like how awful.
Richard Campbell [00:45:46]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:46]:
I mean, it's just awful. So it's too bad. I, I feel bad about this because, you know, these are. I don't have one and I'm not going to get one. But these are probably really good computers. They're just stupid expensive and it's just a shame.
Leo Laporte [00:46:00]:
Who would buy this?
Paul Thurrott [00:46:02]:
An idiot. No, I don't know. I don't know. I really don't. Well, I will say this. One of the reasons you go out to businesses first with this because they're obviously taking it slow now because the component prices is they get volume pricing just like they do. And what you can do, and this is where you can kind of make up for it, is this is a customer who's already paying for multiple seats of Microsoft 365, various SKU levels, etc. And they're doing a service contract and whatever.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:29]:
And so you can kind of a deal maybe on the heart. Like the. These are retail prices, like the businesses that buy.
Richard Campbell [00:46:34]:
Yeah. I have to wonder. And when it's sold internally. Do they get better deals? I don't know.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:40]:
Yeah, like an IND. You could as an individual go to surface.com and configure one of these things out probably and buy one. As a person that would be dumb. Unless you super, super need a new computer and you know, whatever, it's for work and you have to do it and whatever. But I mean as a person, this just doesn't make sense as a purchase. These are just too expensive. Buy a MacBook Air. It's stupid.
Paul Thurrott [00:47:02]:
It's too bad.
Richard Campbell [00:47:05]:
Well, goodness my friend, when it comes to enterprise PCs we're even stingier because we are buying 100 of them. You know the big argument last year was I'm not paying for an NPU if I'm not using it for enterprise machines because that's another hundred dollars I can cut out of that machine.
Paul Thurrott [00:47:22]:
Yeah, and that's a good chicken egg problem too because then, you know, it's a non virtuous cycle. You know, there's no one's paying for the mpu. No one's developing software because no one's paying for the NPU. It doesn't have the NPU. A lot of questions around a lot of people GPUs though, you know, that keeps coming up. It's like I don't know. So I don't know. This is what you know.
Paul Thurrott [00:47:45]:
Look, the, the fact that Microsoft's going to let you configure a copilot key on a keyboard to a control key is a minor step in the right direction. But it's a step in the same direction as how about letting those things work on a computer with a good GPU or an integrated modern GPU that you might have on an intel or an AMD chip? You know, just a thought. Let them, let people do what they want to do. I don't know.
Richard Campbell [00:48:10]:
Weird.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:11]:
I know. That's not how the world works. I couldn't recall. Did we talk about M Dash at all last week? This is the Microsoft.
Richard Campbell [00:48:18]:
No, just being in msh.
Leo Laporte [00:48:20]:
Steve did yesterday.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:21]:
Of course. Okay, so everyone knows. Well, most people probably know. Anthropic has a model, very mysterious and secretive model.
Leo Laporte [00:48:29]:
Mythical.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:29]:
Almost mythical. Yeah, one might. And obviously people at different companies are trying to get involved with that. One of the questions I had with last week's Patch Tuesday updates were is Microsoft using any of this stuff yet? Right. And so it turns out Microsoft has been working on an in house multi modal not model. Well, I guess it is multimodal agentic scanning harness. This Is this word if you watch the Google I O keynote, came up 115 times if you were going to have a drinking game. Harness is the new term in AI that everyone's using.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:10]:
But anyway, it uses 100 specialized AI agents across various frontier, what we used to call like just LLM models and distilled models to discover, debate and prove exploitable bugs. End it. In other words, they've made their own version of Mythos. So I don't remember the exact number, but I think that it found 16 of the 20 something Windows vulnerabilities or whatever the number was that Microsoft patched last Tuesday. I expect that this month or coming month and then going forward, these will be much, much bigger numbers. One of the things we're starting to see, and this is coming up in the context of Linux now, is AI generated bug reports, overwhelming companies or individuals or organizations or whatever it might be in the Linux world that are working on these distributions or working on the kernel or whatever it might be. And it's going to be a tsunami of this stuff because it turns out AI is actually very good at this kind of thing. And of course individuals will do it and they'll send in their things.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:14]:
And the nice thing about the Mythos thing is it was not just here's a vulnerability, it was like, here's how you can prove it's a vulnerability and here's how you fix it and you can test to see that this is in fact the case. And anyway, Microsoft will do, it's closer. So this is not out in the open. Right. But I guarantee you that you will see astronomical numbers in the coming months for fixed vulnerabilities on patch Tuesdays. There's no doubt about it.
Richard Campbell [00:50:42]:
We're already seeing numbers going up. I mean obviously Firefox was the most public with their increased patch rates, but even the rate on Windows Update has gone up.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:52]:
Yep. Yeah. And you know, they, they won't be as vocal about it. I mean they'll, there's a marketing case to be made. If it's like RM Dash thing is so great. It did this and it's awesome, you know, okay, that's fine. Firefox is relatively small. It's a big code base.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:06]:
But I mean compared to like Linux or any operating system, it's, you know, relatively small.
Richard Campbell [00:51:09]:
But it's not a publicly traded company and it has no money.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:13]:
Right? Yes. And, but they can get ahead of this and probably will, like sometime this year. They're going to be just pretty much proactive at some point. Linux and Windows are going to. And you know, there's already. I think Mythos found something in Mac OS as well. This, this can be a problem. These are, these are big.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:32]:
Very well.
Richard Campbell [00:51:33]:
And the other. The corollary to this is the black hats are playing with these tools to exploit vulnerabilities as fast as they can.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:40]:
That's right. Which is why it's all the more important for the white hats on the other side to be using this to,
Richard Campbell [00:51:45]:
you know, and moving fast, trying to get the patches out there as quickly as possible.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:49]:
Yeah. So. Okay, that's fine. What else we got? Oh, and then. All right, so moving into AI, My favorite topic.
Leo Laporte [00:52:01]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:02]:
I've avoided writing about this Elon Musk trial other than when it started. There's been a lot of terribleness that's come out of it as. Which is what happens when you go to trial, right. You, you have discovery, people look at emails. These people are terrible human beings. I've made this case a lot. I'm not even sure Sam Altman is a human being, but, you know, a lot of bad stuff comes about out about everyone. But the thing I kept sort of not understanding because it doesn't actually make any sense was how he was even able to bring Elon Musk to bring this to a case.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:36]:
What's the legal standing for. You said you were going to do something, but you didn't. But you're not. You don't have an ownership stake in the company. You're not an investor, you're not involved with the company. It's like you wanted to do the thing you're accusing him of actually doing. It just never made sense to me. Like, what's.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:54]:
Isn't there a bar for like a legal.
Richard Campbell [00:52:56]:
Well, he was an owner. They booted him.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:58]:
He was okay, but that's like saying, you know, I know it's been 40 years, but I wrote the version of BASIC that was included in Ms. Dos.
Leo Laporte [00:53:07]:
And you said, and I don't know why I'm in the position of defending Elon Musk, but I shall. Was that he gave him a billion dollars to start. They all along knew that they were going to go to a profitable model, but they didn't want him to participate in the profits, so they misrepresented their plans and got rid of him before they would have to give him any profit.
Richard Campbell [00:53:36]:
That's not how that happened.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:37]:
That's not happening.
Leo Laporte [00:53:38]:
The jury decided that. And by the way, it was an advisory jury, not the kind of jury that makes a decision they Tell the judge this is what we think. Judge agreed that the decision to go for profit occurred more than three years ago. So the statue of limitations had run out. So there was only a technicality. It wasn't that they didn't really rule
Paul Thurrott [00:54:02]:
there was no intention for this. But this, There was no but.
Leo Laporte [00:54:05]:
They didn't say that. They all merely said that all this happened more than three years.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:08]:
No, no. The evidence that did come out in court was that Elon Musk wanted to take it public himself and he wanted to leave his children.
Richard Campbell [00:54:15]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:54:17]:
He had his own competing for profit AI now. So maybe he has a motive in
Richard Campbell [00:54:21]:
kind of trying to fail and failing terribly.
Leo Laporte [00:54:25]:
But the jury of Dodge went that,
Paul Thurrott [00:54:28]:
no, of course they didn't have to. But it doesn't matter if you paid attention this trial at all, I mean
Leo Laporte [00:54:32]:
it is going to be appealed so.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:35]:
Well, congratulations.
Leo Laporte [00:54:35]:
They all come up.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:36]:
You know what else is going to happen though? OpenAI is going public as soon as Friday, so.
Richard Campbell [00:54:40]:
Yeah, right, whatever.
Leo Laporte [00:54:41]:
And Elon by the way is going public on Monday with SpaceX.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:44]:
Yeah, great.
Leo Laporte [00:54:46]:
Xai, this whole thing, Twitter, this has
Paul Thurrott [00:54:49]:
been, it's just, it's a farce. This is just a waste of what it has done.
Richard Campbell [00:54:55]:
Plenty of dirty laundry on both sides. So you come away looking at both these guys going, this is the leaders of AI.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:01]:
Like good lord, look I, I get bad news for you guys. Well, you guys know this but I mean anyone who's like thought these people were like the Olympic gods walking around on earth. I mean all you have to know is any history to know that the people who started our industry are terrible. The people that ran companies in between now and then are terrible. I mean there are exceptions, there always are, but most of these people are pretty terrible. So AI is just terribleness at scale in this case. So the other thing we know from
Leo Laporte [00:55:29]:
all of these trials, Epic, Google Epic Apple is the collateral damage of the discovery and the testimony always hits both sides regardless of who wins. And you shouldn't enter into these kinds of cases unless you don't put anything in writing.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:45]:
So confining this conversation just to personal technology, we knew that from Microsoft's two major antitrust.
Leo Laporte [00:55:50]:
Same thing, same thing.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:53]:
The interesting thing that came out of that was intel was sued by the European Commission similarly to Microsoft for having for similar abuses. And they settled immediately. They later by the way, went back and appealed and got the money. They paid back. They actually paid a massive multi billion dollar fine. But they did the thing which I think all these companies should do which is what I always talk about, which is settle or otherwise work with antitrust regulators to have some say in the outcome because it's, it's. Look, the bad stuff that came out about Sam Altman and Elon Musk and whoever else doesn't, I don't think registered with anyone normal in the world. I don't think most people are paying attention to this.
Leo Laporte [00:56:38]:
No, that's probably true.
Paul Thurrott [00:56:39]:
Yeah, but the.
Leo Laporte [00:56:41]:
We are.
Paul Thurrott [00:56:42]:
But the. Well, I mean, but if you want to, if you want to have an outcome for your company that you have some role in, you can't allow it to go to court. I mean, it, sometimes it works out. Of course, that's the gamble, I guess.
Leo Laporte [00:56:56]:
But like, it worked out sort of for Epic, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:56:59]:
Well, it didn't work out for Apple's. My, you know, in that case, the way I would say that is Apple mostly won that case and then so belligerent and terrible because that's what they are as a company.
Leo Laporte [00:57:09]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:10]:
The judges threw the book at them after the fact.
Leo Laporte [00:57:12]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:13]:
That ruling withstood every level of appeal imaginable. And you know, it will still be appealed, of course, but like, or not appeal, like attempts to stop the.
Leo Laporte [00:57:21]:
No, I think it's done. I think it's done because they went to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court said no. No.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:26]:
Well, the next step there is going to be a, A remedy.
Leo Laporte [00:57:30]:
Judge Roger.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:31]:
Determine what they can.
Leo Laporte [00:57:33]:
Yes, charge. Same judge, by the way, that yelled at Apples for lying.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:37]:
Well, yelled at. Reference. Or gave the attorney general a reference to an Apple executive light on the stand. Right. You know, and she's going to decide
Leo Laporte [00:57:47]:
what the percentage is. Not 27.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:50]:
Can we let them charge a negative number? Is that a thing? Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:57:53]:
And I think the, the appeals court will uphold Judge Gonzalez Rogers.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:57]:
I mean, her, this ruling, which is extreme, there's no other way to say it. Justified, I think, but also extreme has withstood every legal right, you know, hurdle so far. I mean, it's all looking good for those guys. So we'll see. We'll see what happens.
Leo Laporte [00:58:11]:
And I, and I, I think that the appeal, Elon's appeal, if he does make it, he says he's going to make it, will probably go nowhere, so.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:17]:
No, it absolutely will go nowhere.
Leo Laporte [00:58:19]:
Our long national nightmare is over.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:21]:
Right. Well, probably the Apple one. I'll just bring this point up again because I would have said this a year ago. Whatever. It's like if, you know, Apple had this 15, 30% fee structure, it's based on nothing. If they had dropped that at any point to 1020, this never would have happened. And that that fee structure is four to eight times too expensive as it is. Yeah, like they could have dropped it by a half or a third and they could have reaped billions in undeserved revenues for the rest of that company's existence.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:51]:
And that's not what they do. So I. Sorry, guys.
Richard Campbell [00:58:56]:
Well, I mean, at one time they did. It's just the height of hubris now. Yeah, like, they really are so arrogant.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:05]:
Yep, Yep. This is the, the south park episode about the prius, you know, 20 years ago. Like these self righteous, you know, we know better than everybody types like, it's just disgusting anyway. At least Elon Musk is overtly evil. You know, there's no, there's no subterfuge there. He's just a jerk.
Richard Campbell [00:59:23]:
Apple and apparently Altman lies to everybody and everybody knows it.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:27]:
We already knew this, right? I mean, like, you know, like Satya Nadella was on the stand. He didn't say anything we hadn't heard before. You know, it's like, well, it looks like you were orchestrating stuff, but yeah, he was. They put $13 billion into open AI at a time when they had $13 billion in outside investment. Like, obviously he was involved. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, okay, sorry, because the. My notes here.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:54]:
The OpenAI terribleness can never end. There's a rumor, a report that OpenAI might actually sue Apple because of the Siri integration thing they did in iOS 26. Probably.
Leo Laporte [01:00:09]:
That's another one where I, I don't get it.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:12]:
It's like these. Listen, this is the. I told the story. You know, my friend Dave Kalten used to work at Microsoft. He was talking about Dell at the time was probably the biggest PC maker in the world. In Microsoft, biggest company in the world. And they hated each other and they were fighting all the time. And he was like, these two companies deserve each other.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:28]:
And I was like, yeah, that's the best way to say it. And like, that's how I feel about OpenAI and Apple. I'm like, you know, have fun, guys. This is like, I don't know. Apple has One thing that OpenAI would want, which is access to not just a big audience of billions of people, but a big audience that has shown itself very welcome to spending lots of money all the time. So I understand why they got in there. But what Apple does not have is that infrastructure thing, which is what they really need. Right.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:53]:
And so it's, it's an interesting kind of Friction here, but we'll see if anything comes out of that. I hope they sue each other. Right. I think this would be funny. It's like Godzilla and Micro. Microsoft.
Richard Campbell [01:01:05]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:05]:
Godzilla and King Kong going at it or whatever. It's funny. So that would be good.
Leo Laporte [01:01:10]:
It makes. It makes life interesting for we who cover tech.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:14]:
Yeah, yeah, right. Most of the stories we cover kind of boring. So this is kind of cool fun if you follow AI at all and chatbots and all. The way things are going, you know that we've moved from like these conversational interfaces to kind of agencic things where these little services go off and do work on your behalf, et cetera, et cetera. You probably know that Anthropic came up with something that they called and cloud code for coders and then they came up with Cowork, which was like, oh, we found out this code thing actually works really well for productivity as well. And so they have a separate offering for that. OpenAI, of course, came up with Codex because Anthropic came up with code and. But they're using that for the productivity stuff as well.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:55]:
So it's coding, but also productivity, etc. It's part of cloud, although there's a standalone Codex app. I think it's on Mac Windows and I think there's a Chrome version too. Right. A couple weeks ago they announced this, so they brought it to mobile, but they're not doing it the way Anthropic will probably do it, meaning they're not going to have a standalone app. They're doing it through the ChatGPT app. And the way this is supposed to work is that you can check on the progress of agents you might have fired up on the desktop from your phone and then you can conversely get notified on your phone about things that the computer is actually doing sort of on the side there, or generate new tasks through the chat GPT app. So, yeah, it's like tomato, tomato, like it's a different way of doing the same.
Leo Laporte [01:02:39]:
It's agentic. See, this is so. It's funny because openclaw had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get these guys to act in a kind of persistent, agentic fashion. But everybody says, oh, that's what people want because openclaw was such a success. So that's what people want. So that's all everybody's doing. In fact, that's what Google announced yesterday. I know we're going to get to you ever.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:00]:
Yeah. So this industry is. I equate it to. Of five year Old girls playing soccer, meaning there's a ball and you just throw it in the field, and they swarm around the ball and it doesn't. Someone will hit the ball, probably by mistake, and it goes down the field, and they all go down the field and they run around and they're all just falling. They're just chasing each other on the field until someone trips and cries and the game's over. It's. And I just.
Leo Laporte [01:03:19]:
I can't think of another technology.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:22]:
No, nothing.
Leo Laporte [01:03:23]:
There's nothing like that that has changed. So, you know, if you like. Oh, yeah, I use perplexity. That made sense six months ago. Well, today it's like you were like, cursor.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:32]:
Oh, my God, I dropped cursor. Whatever I was using, you're still using that. Cursor somehow is worth billions of dollars. It's like a Visual Studio code clone with. I'm sure they're calling it a harness now. Like, whatever.
Leo Laporte [01:03:45]:
It's a harness, my friend. It's a harness.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:48]:
It's ridiculous.
Leo Laporte [01:03:48]:
It is changing.
Richard Campbell [01:03:50]:
You know what?
Paul Thurrott [01:03:50]:
This reminds me. What did you call. You said it was a. When you said agenic. I swear to God, this is what you made me think of. When IBM and Motorola and I think Apple, but IBM and Motorola, certainly in the 1990s, were working on the PowerPC processors, you would go to, like, Comdex or I guess CES by this point maybe, or whatever. I guess it would have been comdex. And you go into this room, it was all full of, like, smoke and everything, and it was like lasers flying through, and they'd be like, powerpc, it's an enabler.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:17]:
And it was like, yeah, it's a chip. But that's what you just. You literally just put that in my brain. Like, I instantly went back, like, almost 30 years. Like, anyway, that's the AI industry. It's ridiculous.
Richard Campbell [01:04:33]:
I just. As a sideline, that conference I was just in Berlin was actually an HR conference. And I was sort of the AI subject matter expert for this, folks.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:45]:
Okay.
Richard Campbell [01:04:45]:
Just, you know, they wanted to field questions from someone with a more technical background. And HR people are usually responsible for training an organization as new tools come to play. And all of them have these massive initiatives inside of their organizations to incorporate AI. One of them said, my CEO has told me we need to be AI native by the end of the year. And I'm like, okay, so what's that mean? He's like, I hope you knew. I'm like, no, they're. They're just making that term up. That's just a thing.
Richard Campbell [01:05:22]:
But it was kind of shocking to me because, I mean, as someone who's done enterprise level deployments of software involving HR and so forth, like there's pretty clear workflow patterns and it starts with actually a stable piece of software you know how to use and that you have some training materials around and so forth and you sort of grow it out for how it's going to fit with your enterprise. And that's just not what's happening. One of the ladies talked about the fact that they just got cowork for everyone.
Leo Laporte [01:05:49]:
Like, you know, that we're native, that
Richard Campbell [01:05:51]:
product's two months old and a research only product. It's EULA says quite specifically, do not use unimportant information.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:02]:
Right. I mean this is. I'm not sure about cloud, but I'm sure it is there. But I think it was OpenAI. There's like a financial connector now for chat GPT so you can put in all your bank information but. And it's like, yikes. For entertainment purposes only.
Richard Campbell [01:06:19]:
Yeah. Remember how you were when it dropped your entire database watch when it drops your entire bank account.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:26]:
I would imagine what I was. I didn't think you were really going to say this, but as you were talking about the HR people, I was thinking like one of them was going to say something like. Yeah, so my CEO or CFO or whoever it was told me like, I need to implement whatever AI thing so I don't have a job anymore. So can you help me with that?
Richard Campbell [01:06:44]:
Well, a couple of me like they were planning 20 layoffs based on how this initiative went. It's like, how do you know it's 20%? It's like it's gonna be arbitrary.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:53]:
Yeah. These are the managers in office space who bring in the Bobs. And then they're like, they get the lens of Sauron turned on them and it's like, oh, I thought we're getting rid of the losers. You know, it's like getting rid of the drift in the middle that doesn't need to be there.
Richard Campbell [01:07:05]:
That was the other one was they had one of the big firms in saying, oh, it'll be a 40% productivity increase across the board. I'm saying, great. Did they bring case studies? Why? No, no, they didn't. You know why? Because there aren't any.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:18]:
They can't exist. Someone seconds ago. Yeah, like, and you're paying 20 bucks a month per person for it, you idiot.
Richard Campbell [01:07:26]:
Yeah, if you're lucky, that's all you're doing. It's like, I'm hoping that what your bosses are telling you without saying it out loud is I need you to get one of those big Windex spray bottles, fill it with water, put a label in the size that says AI and go squirt it on everybody.
Leo Laporte [01:07:42]:
And now we're AI now you're AI Native. Congratulations.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:45]:
You almost have literally described the Beavis and Butthead episode where they learn about AI and they think it's like a trash container in the parking lot of Beavis and Butthead. Yeah, Episode. It's new. Yeah. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:08:00]:
I mean, I felt for these people. I came away angry. Like your. Your company's abusing you and it looks like they're going to abuse their employees. Employees too. But technology is just not ready.
Leo Laporte [01:08:09]:
Well, today's the day that Meta fires 8, 000 people after copy, you know, after recording every stroke, keystroke, and every mouse movement so they could duplicate them in AI this company.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:21]:
Don't get me started. Meta, please. I gotta hate that company so much. And I, you know, they make this thing that could connect people and then they do all this other stuff and
Leo Laporte [01:08:31]:
it's like, yeah, what happened?
Richard Campbell [01:08:32]:
Could you.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:32]:
The metaverse just do the thing that is your thing? I don't know.
Leo Laporte [01:08:37]:
I'm gonna pause here before anybody before loses his mind. I'm really curious what you think about Google I O. We covered the keynote yesterday, Jeff, Mike and I. And you know, when you're there watching it, as with almost all of these keynotes, it goes, yeah, that sounds great. That sounds really good. That's really awesome. I went out and bought a Chromebook just so I can play with all this stuff.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:57]:
Oh, by the way, my back of the book thing is related to what you just said.
Leo Laporte [01:09:01]:
Okay. But yes, then you start seeing the stories filter out. That is it, you know. So I'm really curious what your day later. But don't. Don't do it yet. I want to take a break. But what you're, you know, day after analysis is always a little bit more thoughtful.
Leo Laporte [01:09:18]:
Shall we?
Paul Thurrott [01:09:20]:
Well, it could only be.
Leo Laporte [01:09:22]:
It could only be. That's right. Because you're not in the reality distortion field. I think one of the most telling things about Google I O yesterday, that's their developer conference, Right? Of course, last week they did the Android show, right.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:34]:
And they.
Leo Laporte [01:09:35]:
And they mentioned new Chromebooks coming. Not. Not even called Chromebooks. New Google Books coming later this year. So they got. They kind of cleared the deck. There was. This was going to be an AI thing and the fact that Demis Hasibis was like the most prominent person on stage, the guy.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:50]:
And pretty quick too, right? Like a front almost.
Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
Yeah. I mean Sundar was there. He seemed very low energy and kind of depressed.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:57]:
Okay. And then he just got someone who was low energy and depressed. I get it.
Leo Laporte [01:10:01]:
I mean, you know, you can't always be happy.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:04]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:10:05]:
So what did you think? They announced a ton.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:07]:
So here's the thing. I. You may be or may not be surprised. I have a pretty good relationship with Google. I, I get pre briefed on a bunch of stuff. I, I mostly ahead of the show. I mean I got the developer stuff so I had that going. But as they were, I was taking notes as Sundar and then the.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:29]:
Whoever else was on stage was speaking during that initial keynote and I quickly found myself overwhelmed. Right. And some of it is like just numbers. You know, they have 13, I think it was. Yeah. Products that have over a billion users. Right. You know, Gmail search, etc.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:46]:
They have five Gmail search, Android, Chrome and YouTube that over 3 billion users. But they had all these numbers. You know, they're talking about the processing of tokens. Like 1 year ago it was 3 point. No, I'm sorry, 1 point year ago it was 9.7 trillion tokens a month. Sorry, that was 2 years ago. Sorry. Went to 480 trillion 1 year ago and then to 3.2 quadrillion.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:12]:
Now a 7x improvement. I don't know if it's an improvement, but expansion over that period over two years. They have customers on Google cloud, which by the way a distant third in this market.
Richard Campbell [01:11:27]:
Yes.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:28]:
Over 375 of them have each processed over 1 trillion tokens over the past month alone.
Richard Campbell [01:11:34]:
Wow.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:35]:
It's just like the numbers are staggering, you know. AI overviews and search, over 2.5 billion monthly active users. AI mode, over 1 billion monthly active users. Gemini app is over 900 million monthly active users, up from 400 million one year ago. More than double, you know, because it just goes on and on. They talked about the, they said this during the earnings call, but 180 to $190 billion on CapEx spending this year a 6x jump over the 31 billion they spent in 2022. You know, they have new PPOs.
Richard Campbell [01:12:12]:
Well, I spend that money, but okay,
Paul Thurrott [01:12:14]:
I know it's insane. It's insanity. Right. So.
Richard Campbell [01:12:17]:
Well, they're all. It's also commits like there's really interesting studies going on saying how much of this money they actually spent. You know, when you're building a data center you only. The money only goes out as things get built and lots of stuff's not getting built.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:31]:
Yeah, I don't have a lot of insight into that, honestly. But it's just, I think the thing that's interesting about Google is that you can make a very good case, and I've made this case and I still believe this, that they are in many ways in the client computing space. The next Microsoft. Right.
Richard Campbell [01:12:48]:
Sure.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:49]:
Their operating system is something they use everywhere.
Richard Campbell [01:12:52]:
Their product naming strategies, looking more Microsoft every day.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:56]:
The naming is terrible. They, the, the Gemini thing is getting a little co pilot. I think we could make that argument. But the, they work with partners to get the devices out to customers. They're not like a monolithic kind of Apple type company or whatever. Yeah. So there's that and I, I was overwhelmed by this. Right.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:17]:
So on the developer front, just some of the biggest ones, because there was like 117 of these things. There's something. And by the way, figuring out what their products are now is getting very difficult.
Richard Campbell [01:13:31]:
It's very Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:33]:
It's very Microsoft. They introduced something called Google AI Studio, I think when Gemini 3 came out about a year and a half ago, which by the way was when they also announced something called Antigravity, which was a big deal in this IO as well. The point of Google AI Studio is it's a web based IDE where you can prototype application UI if you follow the Google space. If you think about like XAML in the Microsoft space as the way that you create UI for apps, they have a declarative thing called Jetpack Compose which is Kotlin based. So it's using the same programming language as your programmatic code, but it's how you write ui essentially they've switched over to that completely now. Like Android is now what they call Compose first. So the old style of using xml, which is like a XAML to make views in Android apps is in maintenance mode. That's going away.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:29]:
Android 17 has a bunch of stuff going on, but the big one to me is the Google Book thing, which is that Android apps have to adapt to large screens. They're not going to allow you to target that API, that level of API and not have an adaptive app. So it has to work right. If you have a foldable phone, it's on a little screen, you open it up, it gets big. It's not just a phone thing stretched out. Right. It does layout and all that stuff. So if you have it on Chromebook, you have it on a tablet, you have soon on a Google book, etc.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:00]:
So that's all kind of happening. So there's all this stuff, you know, they have like they're going to let people vibe code widgets right, on Google phones and eventually all Android phones, which is like the gateway drug to vibe coding when you think about it. Because we're just a very simple app surfaces essentially. Like, you know, it's kind of exciting.
Richard Campbell [01:15:21]:
Live coded mobile apps because we did not have enough iFart.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:25]:
Yep. It just goes on and on and on. They have something called app functions which they announced previously, which is basically MC Power, mcp but for Android apps. And the idea there is that you're on a phone AI is occurring and it can interact with the capabilities inside of apps like Microsoft's doing in Windows, right, Using this thing that's very much like MCP. Just like they can interact with other AIs using MCP. So it's a kind of a common interface or whatever. Anyway, there's a lot of stuff just on the. But that's just like the developer stuff, right? And I'm going to touch on that.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:54]:
This is for the back of the book. I don't want to step too much on that now.
Richard Campbell [01:15:57]:
I.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:57]:
But. But then they kept talking and they started talking about things I was not pre briefed on, right? Like the 2,000 things that are happening to Chrome, which is turning into a intelligent proactive assistant that will work and you know, like, of course it is, it's getting all hygienic. Gemini is coming to Chrome and Android Auto Browse, which is in Chrome and Desktop also is coming to Android. You're going to be able to within Chrome transfer images using Nano Banana. There are skills, AI skills that are coming to Chrome first on desktop and no doubt next year will be on mobile as well. But the idea there is that you are AI. In this case, Gemini is able to work with the content on multiple tabs and go off and do things on your behalf, et cetera, et cetera. It just goes, like I said, it goes on and on and on.
Paul Thurrott [01:16:49]:
It's crazy. One thing, I made this point somewhere recently, I don't remember why, but Google has these Google One subscriptions which are kind of morphed into Google AI subscriptions. And so like a Google AI plus, which is the $8 per month version, you get whatever you get for, you know, storage and access to models, etc. The mainstream one is the Google AI Pro, which is the one I got from buying a Google phone, but it's 20 bucks a month normally, but now it has like 5 gigs of storage. 5, sorry terabytes on Google Drive, across Photos, Gmail and whatever you want to use it for. And it's like, yikes. But then they have the Ultra plan, which was 250 per month, is now 200 per month, and that's where you get like, really expanded access. And one of the things they announced at this show was that there's a $100 tier for that as well.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:39]:
So they have a. An AI Ultra 5x and 20x. And the 5x and 20x are references to essentially the limits compared to the plus plan. Like it's 20. It's 5 or 20 times as much, you know, access or whatever that is. Those plans, by the way, 30 terabytes of like, what.
Richard Campbell [01:18:01]:
They really want you to use their AI too. Let's face it, they're the original AI guys. They're the reason OpenAI exists.
Paul Thurrott [01:18:08]:
Yeah, right.
Richard Campbell [01:18:09]:
Well, imagine if they. They. Of course, the, the whole point here is they weren't turning this stuff into a product until Microsoft backed OpenAI and it lands on ChatGPT and blows the market apart. And to that point, everybody's suffering from SEO decline because Google now presents their AI mode and you're just not getting directed to web pages anymore. So their concerns were legit. It's actually happening.
Paul Thurrott [01:18:42]:
I mean, they will continue to adjust, so to speak. But like anyone, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, whatever it was, you could throw a website up, a blog, as we would call it, and have one Google Ad on every page. You could make a business out of. It'd be great. You know, now you have to spam your site with more ads than content and it still doesn't make any sense
Richard Campbell [01:19:03]:
and you get a nickel.
Paul Thurrott [01:19:04]:
Yeah. This is the insertification of the ad business, which is, by the way, why there's an antitrust case around that they control this. Right. So they take more and more of that for themselves. But, but, you know.
Richard Campbell [01:19:14]:
Well, and I would argue they were doing this even before ChatGPT showed up,
Paul Thurrott [01:19:17]:
like, oh, yeah, no, they were.
Richard Campbell [01:19:19]:
Search was on a horrible trajectory for the past few years.
Paul Thurrott [01:19:22]:
Past many years, maybe. Yeah. Yep. But. But from the perspective of a, like an individual and you have a phone and a computer and you're out in the world, you do whatever you do. Like when you compare what they have and what you might want to. To other companies, it's actually really compelling. And that's the thing I kind of took away from this, which is that, you know, the one thing they have that Microsoft lacks is an incredible over 3 billion people just on Android.
Paul Thurrott [01:19:49]:
But they have great reach into the consumer market. Right. Their first party devices don't sell very well. They're sort of like the surface of the Android world. I get that. But you know, people use Google Photos and their phones to backup photos even if they have an iPhone in many cases. Right. I mean they, people use Google Maps, duh, they use Google search, et cetera.
Paul Thurrott [01:20:09]:
Like when you combine all of the perks here, this is what Microsoft 365 for consumer used to be. I used to describe this as like a no brainer, right. For 20 bucks a month with all this AI that works everywhere and I mean literally everywhere, not just on the Google stuff because you can just go to gemini.google.com or many of the other entry points and just do whatever it is you're doing with AI and do it from there. You know Gemini stands up very well against the best models, you know, anthropic OpenAI etc and they have this, all this, you can't get like free YouTube Premium through OpenAI. You know what I mean? Like you're not gonna, it's, it's, this
Richard Campbell [01:20:53]:
is back to antitrust behavior network effects just hey, our product's not that good but look at all the good stuff you get with with it.
Paul Thurrott [01:21:00]:
Yeah, I mean there's a whole tiger stripe conversation to be had here. But, but, but again just looking at it from kind of a mercenary perspective as a person who just like look, I'm gonna do some, I need cloud storage maybe or whatever it might be like it's kind of nuts like Microsoft 365 for consumers still stuck at 1 gigabyte or 1 terabyte sorry per person unless you get family and then you get, you know you can have six people with up to one each but you know, they quickly went to two and then they went to five and then now this 20 or 30 depending on what tier you're. It's like what is happening? It's insane. Like it's, it's really kind of incredible. So I think my Leo asked, you know, what was my takeaway from this is mostly that I was overwhelmed. There was one thing I'm going to talk about in the back of the book which is you know, I related obviously but I had found out about ahead of time. I, I was in a briefing, I saw a thing about it and I was like okay, that looks interesting. But then when they were talking about it on stage because it was a developer keynote after the main keynote, I can't remember which, where it came up.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:04]:
If it didn't come up in the first one, it obviously did in the second. It might have come in both, I don't remember. But wherever it was first mentioned, whenever they first showed it, I was like, I got to try this, you know. And one thing I have rich experience at, which is, I think someone was alluding to earlier, which is you, back in the day, you would go to a show more recently, you would watch a thing online, YouTube or whatever, and they announce something and you're like, oh, that's interesting. And you go over to your web browser in this case, and you go to the plate, wherever it is, and you're like, I'm going to try this thing. And it never works. Like, it's never, it's never. Like you just don't have that experience.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:40]:
That is not what happened. I had a fricking incredible experience. And like I said, I'll talk about that at the end of the show. But so I went from like a overwhelmed and I, I had the lightest, non busiest day yesterday until about noon and then I was frantically writing and like the guy who writes news kind of checked in on me later. He's like, is everything going okay? Like, like there's a lot of stuff going on. I'm like, dude, I don't know what's happening. Like, they just keep announcing stuff. Like I, I was overwhelming.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:07]:
I've only touched kind of on the tip of this iceberg. There's so much going on. It's, it's rather astonishing.
Richard Campbell [01:23:14]:
And it's a flood the zone kind of strategy too, right? Like you've just got to show there's so much going on Google.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:22]:
When Microsoft started their Copilot, what became copilot, right. February 2023 I think it was. You know, they stumbled out of this gate, right? This is the company that kind of invented all the stuff. They could have done this.
Richard Campbell [01:23:33]:
Google had barred. Remember Bard, They've been in that name.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:36]:
That's what I mean. Like they, this, I called this the face rake thing. It was like they stepped on the rake, it hit him in the face. They took another step, another rake happened. Like they couldn't do anything right. They looked.
Richard Campbell [01:23:46]:
And the funny part is that was, that was back to back with the co pilot demos.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:51]:
Yeah, that's right.
Richard Campbell [01:23:52]:
And if you, if you went back and watched them carefully and like counted the errors and mistakes, they were the same.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:58]:
I was just gonna, I wasn't sure you're gonna say, but I'm like, actually, Microsoft was just as bad, but Google got ripped to shreds. Because I think the expectation was Google's going to get this right there. Google and Microsoft has Bing and seriously, what are they going to do?
Richard Campbell [01:24:11]:
Yes.
Paul Thurrott [01:24:12]:
And so by, by.
Richard Campbell [01:24:13]:
But they were, you know, that was, that was. Microsoft was facing open AI. So I think there's this other resentment angle of Google had this stuff for years and never showed anything until somebody else did. So, like, what have you been up to?
Paul Thurrott [01:24:25]:
So it's all, you know, like, when Apple ended up buying Next, like, I sort of imagine, like as that kind of unfolded, that at next they had given up on this thing. They weren't doing the OS anymore. They had given it up and then Apple wanted it and they were like, blow the dust off this thing and like, come out to market with like, okay, look, it still does all this crazy awesome stuff. I feel like the. What became Bard and then Gemini was like that. It's like they, they were like, oh, we weren't going to go to market with this. Like, does anyone have any, like, what, like, people were working on this. Like, what do we have?
Richard Campbell [01:24:57]:
Well, and the argument was it was undermining the principal product. It was undermining search.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:02]:
Right. Which is why they didn't do it in the first place.
Richard Campbell [01:25:04]:
Yeah, yeah, they, they, they were going to fully innervate dilemma this thing and just sit on it.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:10]:
Right. So I, I was, I was, I'm still kind of reeling from this. Google IO is going on today. I, There was some, there was more stuff. There were more keynotes today that were, you know, lesser, obviously. But I, I was exhausted by the end of the day yesterday. Like, it was exhausting. And I, I left things on the table, so to speak, for Laurent to write this morning knowing.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:37]:
Because, you know, there was glasses stuff, there's all this other stuff, right? Google TV stuff, there's wear OS stuff, there's all, there's all kinds of. It just goes on and on and on. It's crazy. The, the only thing else, I think, where are my notes that I pulled out? Where's this damn thing? Yeah. So last week they announced Google Book without providing some details, right. Which is kind of weird. And then more information kind of eked out over time because people started asking questions, etc. But one of the things that was part of that announcement was something called Gemini Intelligence.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:13]:
Right. So Gemini Intelligence to me is a little bit like Copilot plus PC in the sense that it felt like a spec and that you were going to Need a certain level of something something. And it wasn't clear which devices were going to get it. Obviously Google Books will all have it. They are kind of the copilot plus PC of that space. But there are existing devices in the market like flagship phones, Samsung especially. But maybe the latest Pixels. There are Chromebook plus devices like the one Leo just bought running flagship.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:44]:
In that case, ARM chips that should be able to do this as well. Like, what are the. Like what's the line? You know. And one of the early rumors was that I saw someone had written like, it's possible. This is so big as a spec that like a Pixel 9 series phone won't even be able to run it. You'll have to have like a 10 or newer 10 being the latest gen. And, and there is a. I think it's just a support document on google.com that actually listed it out or someone found this somehow.
Paul Thurrott [01:27:13]:
But the device is going to have to have at least 12 gigabytes of RAM, which is a little unusual for phones. It's getting more usual. But it's literally like Samsung Galaxy S26 series phones, all Pixel 10 series phones except the A. Right. Because that has less ram. You need to flagship soc, et cetera, et cetera. It's like the list of existing devices that this will work on is actually very small. So a lot of this is gonna
Richard Campbell [01:27:41]:
be all next generation gear.
Paul Thurrott [01:27:42]:
Yeah. It's gonna be all new stuff. So I thought that was kind of interesting.
Richard Campbell [01:27:46]:
It is interesting.
Paul Thurrott [01:27:49]:
And then I could go on. It's not a Google show, but there was. I look as a. You know, having gone to so many builds and covered so many shows and everything, I was just like. It was like the Memorex I had with the guys in the chair and the stereo's playing. Yeah, he's like literally sliding back. That was my day yesterday was that guy, the chair, like, it was just. It was hard to deal with.
Leo Laporte [01:28:08]:
I, I had to take a nap afterwards. Yeah, right.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:11]:
I mean. No, that's right. It's over. It's. It's. It's information overload, you know.
Richard Campbell [01:28:15]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:16]:
I sent my.
Richard Campbell [01:28:17]:
Again, what if that's by design?
Paul Thurrott [01:28:21]:
I. Look, Leo had mentioned, you know, they did the Android, some Android 17 in the Google Book thing a week before and it was like. It's all AI and everything. Yeah. But I, I feel, I do feel like this part of it is the Android stuff might have got lost in the mix a little bit because of all the announcements if they waited. But also, I mean, just logistically how much time do we have to talk about this stuff? Like, yeah, they have to space it out. There's too much stuff. So I don't, I don't think they were scrambling to find stuff to talk about.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:49]:
I, I'm sure they had a problem figuring out. I'm sure there were certain topics where like look, we're gonna have a session. We gotta, we gotta cut this out. It's just too much. I do think they have too many products. I think they have too many overlapping products.
Richard Campbell [01:29:04]:
You're sure describing Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:06]:
I know, that's what I mean. The next Microsoft. I mean even just in the Android developer space, you have the Google AI Studio thing. You've got Android Studio obviously, and all the agents and AI that goes on. There's an Android CLI now. You can go from Google AI Studio or Android cli, start there and then push that into Android Studio and go do the, you know, get all the debugging, whatever you get in there. There's more like, there's the anti gravity. There is like I, I can't, I can't keep it in my head.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:37]:
And this is not my primary focus in some ways either. Right. And I'm, it's, it's difficult anyway. It was, it was a lot. It was a tsunami I think is the only way to say that I didn't have a place to stick this phrasing, but Microsoft announced yesterday, which. I can't find my article, but it doesn't matter that they. Where is this thing? Oh, there it is. They've released the fourth version of their Azure Linux distribution, which is for Azure, obviously.
Paul Thurrott [01:30:09]:
They announced something called Azure Container Linux which is an immutable version that's optimized for containers of a Linux based OS for Azure. Of course this generates stories like, oh, Microsoft is making Linux distributions now. Not exactly. Yeah,
Richard Campbell [01:30:25]:
yeah. And they've got new.
Paul Thurrott [01:30:27]:
Sorry. I mean they're not, you're not going to go to like fedora.com or ubuntu.com or azure linux.com and maybe install this on your computer. I mean, I don't even know if you could. But it's not a dirty secret. They're very upfront about this. But the majority of workloads that run on Azure are running on Linux. And the reason is Linux compared to the Windows or whatever. Windows Server, whatever it might be is lighter weight.
Paul Thurrott [01:30:52]:
Right. And it has cost less support from developers. Yeah, exactly. So they have a version of Linux that's optimized for these cloud and now AI workloads that run on Azure. You know this makes sense. So literally like two thirds of the way Microsoft says this is the customer cores in Azure run Linux and a lot. They don't say the number of percentage but chat GPT. Chat GPT is scaling across over 10 million compute cores on Azure and serves billions of queries every day.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:29]:
Crazy. Just the scale of. It's incredible.
Richard Campbell [01:31:33]:
It's big.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:34]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's big. So okay. And then some quick, really quick dev things. Apple opened up the schedule for WWDC so we know it's going to happen there, you know, to some degree meaning schedule wise like the keynote. The platform State of the Union is their developer keynote. That's the real keynote as I think of it. They obviously have sessions and whatever they're doing there, who cares. That is June 8th.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:04]:
Build 2026 is June 2nd. So it's the week before it's in San Francisco I think think I know is two days. How many days? You said four.
Richard Campbell [01:32:13]:
No, it's two days. Yeah but it's two days.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:15]:
I, I was. Okay. I thought it was two days. Yeah. I think both of those new other shows are two days. So that's, that's. This is the developer season for build. This is late usually it's in May I think they had trouble finding a
Richard Campbell [01:32:26]:
place and usually longer.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:28]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:32:29]:
Well maybe this is a very funny build. You couldn't register for it. You had to sign up for the operation opportunity to buy tickets and they literally were pre screening who could get in.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:38]:
Right. Yeah, they invited me and I, I thought about it. I. If it was in San Or Seattle, I, it might. I made him. Made a better case and maybe more effort but I didn't know we have, we have a. We're doing something with the kids and I. It's not actually that week as it turns out.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:56]:
I thought it might have been but
Richard Campbell [01:32:58]:
I'm in Stockholm and.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:59]:
Yeah, it just doesn't make sense. Yeah, I don't. I Build has always been my favorite Microsoft show.
Richard Campbell [01:33:05]:
But yeah just this is not the same.
Paul Thurrott [01:33:07]:
It feels. Yeah. Yep. And then last week I didn't mention this because there was nothing to talk about but Microsoft released. I think it's the fourth preview release of. NET 11 and I've kind of made this complaint. I don't know what I'm complaining about over there in the corner but I've never seen like a point to this release. Exactly.
Paul Thurrott [01:33:26]:
Like every milestone they talk about. Well, this has been updated across whatever. NET platforms. None of it seems major to Me, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I didn't mention it last week on the show. But then since then they announced that Maui is switching to the core CLR runtime, which is the runtime that almost all of. Net uses. I think there's one Blazer component that is still running on the old runtime, but Maui, this is a little bit of history.
Paul Thurrott [01:33:52]:
This is amazing to me. Maui is running on something called the mono runtime. This literally dates Back to like 2002, 2003. This is Miguel de Casa as the.
Richard Campbell [01:34:01]:
Net framework. But yeah, this was the open source version.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:05]:
Right. Credible. Right. So they're switching to the more modern
Richard Campbell [01:34:08]:
run because it was the cross plat version first.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:11]:
Right, right, right. Yeah. That's interesting. So that's good.
Richard Campbell [01:34:15]:
Well, and fundamentally, Maui is where Xamarin forms. It is up.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:21]:
Yeah, that's right. Z. Right. So yeah, Xamarin forms becomes. Well, they buy Xamarin and Xamarin forms becomes Maui. Yeah. They seem to have lost a lot of momentum, unfortunately with Maui.
Richard Campbell [01:34:32]:
I. Yeah, yeah. No, you can't argue there. And I got to tell you, with all the shuffling around of leadership inside of core AI where devdiv now lives, I don't. I think people are pretty. The folks that aren't part of the battle for who's leading what.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:48]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:34:49]:
Oh, look, I adjusted my camera. That was funny. Yeah. Because I just don't know how inspired those folks are. Like, it's just. Just been a crazy time ever since
Paul Thurrott [01:35:05]:
mobile has been a thing meeting in the modern smartphone era like the iPhone plus or whatever. You know, there is a need for. NET developers to be able to write C code that ends up on mobile. There's an obvious need. There is a role for this product. I think there's some weird overlap now with Blazor that maybe confuses matters a little bit. But this is like Silverlight was this Silverlight was essentially C Sharp and a WPF Lite kind of a framework work.
Richard Campbell [01:35:42]:
You know, running it was originally WPF everywhere but.
Paul Thurrott [01:35:46]:
Right. Wpe. Yeah, that's right.
Richard Campbell [01:35:48]:
Yeah. Because if you have a dumb code name, you get a good product name. But if you have a product name, you can't have both.
Paul Thurrott [01:35:56]:
That's right.
Richard Campbell [01:35:58]:
Yeah. But those were far more inspired times with the dev did that knew what they were trying to do.
Paul Thurrott [01:36:05]:
I just feel like they. They should have just by nature have had some percentage of the market. But things like react native happen this flutter. Obviously there are other things. I don't really care about the space too, too much. But looking at it from the perspective of what I think of as a Microsoft oriented developer because C is not just Net necessarily, but Net. We'll call it net.
Richard Campbell [01:36:31]:
C sharp.
Paul Thurrott [01:36:33]:
Net is all C sharp. Of course, the Windows app, SDK, UWP, etc. Also uses the C Sharp language.
Richard Campbell [01:36:40]:
You know what your problem with Maui is? It's trying to unify mobile development and Windows client development and then you stop and say, why am I building a Windows client?
Paul Thurrott [01:36:50]:
I know, especially like a really constrained mobile app, silly Windows thing. Like look, there are, there are certain apps where that does make sense, of course.
Richard Campbell [01:37:01]:
But yeah, it would be few and far between. And if that is. Is that important, then you're making a WPF app.
Paul Thurrott [01:37:08]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:37:08]:
You don't want constraints.
Paul Thurrott [01:37:10]:
Right, right. Which is I think going to be the problem for Flutter because they've expanded to desktop and web.
Richard Campbell [01:37:15]:
Flutter has done a great job on Android and iOS. Yep.
Paul Thurrott [01:37:19]:
And less so on desktop.
Richard Campbell [01:37:21]:
Now they're struggling to get to that and it seems to be the way like we. You realize the only people who want this are the developers because we want to write one code base runs every everywhere. The customer couldn't care less. They just wanted to run on their thing.
Paul Thurrott [01:37:35]:
Right, right.
Richard Campbell [01:37:36]:
And so the fact that we're jumping through hoops trying to make something designed for mobile to run on a desktop, it just may be a mistake.
Paul Thurrott [01:37:45]:
I think this is the make a
Richard Campbell [01:37:46]:
web form, make a web version of your client, or make a standalone Windows client.
Paul Thurrott [01:37:53]:
So trying to combine them is just working fully formed in my brain. But I feel like one of Microsoft's big strengths with developers historically has been kind of no developer left behind mentality where we're going to bring these guys forward. You know, we're going to bring you, we're going to, you know, things will
Richard Campbell [01:38:08]:
change like guys about that.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:10]:
Well, but they did in a way. I mean, you know, I mean I. Right.
Richard Campbell [01:38:15]:
I understand from a code basis.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:18]:
No, I know. In other words, like you, you know, C Sharp, you know how those libraries are going to work. So maybe it's a new, you know, you move from, you know, whatever it is, like it doesn't matter from WPF to Windows app SDK. And it's like it's not the same. No, I mean there's similarity. Like you, you. The. The way forward is there.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:37]:
I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm just saying there is a way. It's, it's. And I feel like Maui is in some ways the last dying gasp of that. It's like it's Too bad. I. I really feel like this should and could be today a first class mobile development environment and I. I just.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:56]:
You don't really. It just doesn't get a lot of momentum or interest. I don't know. Okay. In other depressing news. You'd have to be really well into the Microsoft world to even know who this is but Guy Samar Somas Soma Sagar. Right?
Richard Campbell [01:39:14]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:39:15]:
So much
Richard Campbell [01:39:17]:
I'm pouring whiskey now because I have to toast a man. He was at a remarkable.
Paul Thurrott [01:39:21]:
He was one of the good guys and he same age as me. He was born like. Like three, four months before I was born. Went to started work at Microsoft working on OS2. Quickly moved over to one of the
Richard Campbell [01:39:33]:
test geniuses for Windows.
Paul Thurrott [01:39:35]:
Right. And he was on the NT team. He shipped I don't remember the number 8 or 9 versions of Windows over time led the developer effort for many, many years. That's how many years that to me
Richard Campbell [01:39:47]:
is one would argue was instrumental in getting open open source into Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott [01:39:51]:
Yep. And is a very indirect way. There aren't many people like this at his level but is a curious combination of technically smart and a good guy which I know sounds stupid but.
Richard Campbell [01:40:06]:
And he was never a great stage guy. Like that was not his style. But if you were one on one with him and I had that chance a number of times you couldn't say no to him. It was impossible. Like he was just so appealing. We did NET rocks interview with him many years ago and his PR team handled him carefully because he wasn't a natural glib kind of guy. He's very thoughtful, he takes his time and he's not a performer. And so they wanted to script the conversation which super normal PR always pitches that I never go for it.
Richard Campbell [01:40:42]:
And ultimately we. We came to an impasse on that as Soma called the bosses I'm doing it without a script. And the first 20 minutes of that interview was very for him.
Paul Thurrott [01:40:53]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:40:54]:
Until he forgot he was an interview. He was an interview.
Paul Thurrott [01:40:57]:
You guys are all talking about things you all understand you're all in this world.
Richard Campbell [01:41:01]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [01:41:01]:
Becomes normal. You know.
Richard Campbell [01:41:02]:
And so we actually managed to construct a new intro in the course. We did a big recap at one point and made that into the intro to listen just because you saw the best side of the guy. The guy was so brilliant and so into what he was doing and how he helped people be successful. Like I was really glad to capture that part of the story. And he had all the time in the world for me. I was super Generous. So. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:41:25]:
No, I'm devastated to see you so much. He's a good man.
Paul Thurrott [01:41:29]:
Yeah. So he's. He passed away this week. We don't know how or, you know, what happened yet.
Richard Campbell [01:41:34]:
I'm not going to speculate.
Paul Thurrott [01:41:37]:
No. I. I wasn't going down that path.
Richard Campbell [01:41:39]:
I'm just.
Paul Thurrott [01:41:39]:
But it's. It's sad. And, you know, he. What was he. He left Microsoft and went to.
Richard Campbell [01:41:44]:
He went to Madrona.
Paul Thurrott [01:41:45]:
Madrona.
Leo Laporte [01:41:46]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:41:46]:
And. And I used to have a. I used to meet with him almost quarterly at that time. Every time I was down there, we'd have lunch or something. And then I. Then he went to Medrona and I pinged him right away and I'm like, madrona. He goes, yeah, I got to take it a little easier now. I'm just a limited partner.
Richard Campbell [01:41:59]:
I got down there at lunch and. And I look around at what he's doing and I'm like, dude, you don't know how. So the partner, because I.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:07]:
His name is.
Richard Campbell [01:42:08]:
I know what to do at lp.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:10]:
He comes from the. Whatever the version of Makanji is in India. It's like the smallest town imaginable. And his first name is unpronounceable, I believe, even to Indians. Yeah. And thus the Soma thing. And I won't. I don't want to explain.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:25]:
I was. It was him. And I can't say who was there, but I jokingly said to the other person, I said. I said, do you have a hard time every time you see this guy not going, soma, Soma, Soma, Soma so much. And he goes, dude, this is what he said. I'll never forget. He goes. Every time I was like, that is amazing.
Richard Campbell [01:42:47]:
But one quarter, I go down to visit him again. He's the managing director. He's running all of Madrona.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:54]:
Wow.
Richard Campbell [01:42:54]:
And it has ever since.
Paul Thurrott [01:42:55]:
Because you see what you had, like, in other words, he must. He got in there and they were like, you know, and he knows everybody
Richard Campbell [01:43:01]:
and everybody loves him. And. And he's moved the whole place forward. Like, no two ways about you. You running an investment fund and you've got a Soma Sagar. You should put that guy in charge, like. And that's what happened. Right.
Richard Campbell [01:43:12]:
So, you know, and I feel for Madrona, like, that he's been their leader for a decade.
Paul Thurrott [01:43:16]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:43:16]:
It's going to be a challenge. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:43:19]:
He's. That's.
Richard Campbell [01:43:20]:
Yeah. His family's lovely. He was a great man. I'm really. I'm really sad and I know a lot of People are in the same boat.
Paul Thurrott [01:43:26]:
Yep. Yeah, it's too bad.
Leo Laporte [01:43:30]:
59 years old, very young, very young.
Richard Campbell [01:43:33]:
Lots to do.
Leo Laporte [01:43:35]:
You know, it's very impressive when somebody can be in that position and. And nobody has a bad word to say.
Paul Thurrott [01:43:42]:
No, that's the thing. I mean, look, you could be infamous and we're gonna remember you.
Leo Laporte [01:43:47]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:43:47]:
Right. Or you could just be awesome. And he was awesome.
Richard Campbell [01:43:53]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:43:54]:
You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. And we tip one out to Soma. We're glad you're here. More Windows Weekly. Now time for the Xbox segment. Paul Thurrott.
Paul Thurrott [01:44:10]:
Yeah. And once again, there's a lot going on. So this just happened as I was preparing for the show. So Laurent wrote this up. I didn't have a chance to really look at this in too much detail, but Asha Sharma, the CEO of Xbox, has announced more leadership changes inside of her team and sit down, Richard, if you didn't see this. She has brought over four more executives from core AI. Oh, no, sorry, that was from before. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Paul Thurrott [01:44:41]:
Brought over two more. Two more. Sorry, two more. That was four before. So Christopher Dring. Nope, that's the person who announced it. Sorry. Matthew Bell Ball.
Richard Campbell [01:44:52]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:44:52]:
Will be the chief strategy officer of Xbox. And Scott Van Vliet. Vliet, okay. Is the chief technology officer.
Richard Campbell [01:45:02]:
And both these guys at least have backgrounds in gaming because the four she brought from Corey, I did not. And that four freaked me out. The fact that she's brought in people really serious about gaming is a relief.
Paul Thurrott [01:45:16]:
Well, yeah. So the second guy, he previously was an Azure cvp. He worked at Amazon. General manager of apps, games and Alexa. But yeah, I mean, at least he's in there. And then I guess this is the third one. I'm sorry. So, Chris, why don't we try to say people's names? Schneckenberg, Vice President, Partnerships and Business Development.
Paul Thurrott [01:45:36]:
Xbox is being promoted to corporate Vice President, Partnerships and Business development. That guy worked at Activision Blizzard for 12 years. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:45:44]:
Gaming guys.
Paul Thurrott [01:45:45]:
Yep. According to Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, World class team being assembled foreshadows serious dedication to the future of gaming for Windows, Xbox, Minecraft, Call of Duty and the many world class studios. Jesus. Who wrote this? In the Microsoft family.
Richard Campbell [01:46:03]:
But it was you.
Paul Thurrott [01:46:04]:
No, it's very nice. I mean, that's like. That's not his usual kind of plain spoken style, but that's nice. I mean, so it's nice. Okay, I got a bounce back just happened. I. I don't know a lot about this Yet I just kind of saw this. This is really weird, but we've had two controller leaks in the past week.
Paul Thurrott [01:46:21]:
The first one is The Elite Series 3 controller, long awaited. The last one I think was 2019. 2018, something like 2019. I owned the first one and loved it. But they're super expensive. If you drop one of these on the ground, it explodes into a million pieces because all the pieces come off. Right? That's by design. But I eventually broke one of the sticks and I just couldn't bring myself to spend whatever, almost 200 bucks on the second one.
Paul Thurrott [01:46:44]:
But it looks like they're doing a third gen. Well, they are doing it, they're working on it. And the big thing here, other than small visual redesign, you know, slight changes there. But the big one is in, in keeping what we're seeing across a lot of consumer electronics these days. The battery will be replaceable. So it's going to be like smaller built in battery than previous gen, a little bit, but you can replace it, right? And that's, you know, so that's good. It's at least more sustainable. The other one's an oddball.
Paul Thurrott [01:47:15]:
So this one is called. It's like a cloud connected Xbox controller. It looks like a bar of soap with Xbox buttons and sticks stuck into it. It's very strange. It's, it's kind of, it's. It's like. And someone in the comments on my site was like, why, why can't it just look like a controller? Which is a fair question. I don't know.
Paul Thurrott [01:47:35]:
I mean I, I have big hands, right? And so if you think back to the original Xbox, Xbox, the first one, one of the, the DO controller, the original controller, like one of the biggest complaints about that was too big. I loved it, like, it was awesome for me. But when they went to Japan, they actually had to make, I think they just called it an S controller, just a smaller, you know, S for small. And that became the controller. So by the time we got to the 360, that became the standard controller and basically you could trace the lineage of the normal Xbox wireless controller back to that. I mean it's basically been the same size, but this thing is smaller. It's weird looking. It looks like a, it looks like a Sega Master System or something, or Nintendo nes, you know, but rounded like it.
Paul Thurrott [01:48:24]:
It's very, I don't know, it's weird looking. Anyway, I don't know if this is coming to the market or not. But one of the things we know Microsoft to be working on and One of the things I called on Microsoft to make when Stadia had come out was that this might be that controller that connects directly to the cloud. So if you're doing cloud streaming, this will offer you a better latency kind of experience because it's like one fewer. Like, it's connected directly to the game. It's not connected through your device, which is connected to the game. Like, that's one of the reasons Stadia actually had pretty good experience until Google killed it. And I think if you buy an Amazon Luna controller, it works the same way.
Paul Thurrott [01:49:04]:
So I can't explain why it looks like a bar of soap, but it does. And it is the second half of May, so we're starting to get a new wave of games across Game Pass. The big one being Forza Horizon 6, which just became available generally, I guess, this week. Right. For everybody. Right. So you could buy it now, it's out. But if they're actually doing this day one on Game Pass, which is, you know, they're not always going to do so.
Paul Thurrott [01:49:39]:
Well, it depends on the tier. Right. So if you have Game Pass ultimate or PC Game Pass, you do get Forza Horizon 6. And then there's a bunch of other stuff. I think the key one, we can all agree is Pigeon Simulator.
Leo Laporte [01:49:51]:
Who doesn't want to be a pigeon?
Paul Thurrott [01:49:54]:
I mean, I like to crap on people as much as the next guy,
Leo Laporte [01:49:57]:
but is that part of the game is, like, who?
Paul Thurrott [01:49:59]:
I don't know. Okay.
Richard Campbell [01:50:01]:
I don't know. Simulator. And that was pretty.
Leo Laporte [01:50:06]:
I enjoyed that. Yeah, that was fun. And there was Untitled Goose game.
Paul Thurrott [01:50:10]:
Yep. I think Train Simulator is more my speed, personally, but
Richard Campbell [01:50:16]:
all right.
Paul Thurrott [01:50:17]:
And then. Yeah. Oh, and then if you haven't. Laurent, he writes news normally, but he asked, he said, hey, you know, we don't review a lot of games. Do you think it'd be okay if I reviewed Forza? I was like, dude, of course, you know. So he got it early and he wrote an awesome review on myself. Check that out. Yeah, it's really good.
Paul Thurrott [01:50:34]:
And now I'm like, no, he can do this. He's going to be doing more of this.
Richard Campbell [01:50:38]:
You just ruined his job.
Paul Thurrott [01:50:39]:
Yeah, I'm sorry. Did you just ask me to do more, you idiot? Yeah, no, that's fine. No, it's really good.
Richard Campbell [01:50:46]:
I found says all the fort is really fun to play for like an afternoon. Right. Enough to get through a few matches and stuff. But the last time I.
Paul Thurrott [01:50:55]:
So it must have been Horizon, it was Forza Horizon 5. Right. So the last one I remember, I Played this game for about a week and better part of a week, probably not a full week. But my wife came downstairs and she goes, what the hell are you doing? And I'm like, it's Forza. It's a racing game. She goes, all I can hear upstairs is. And I'm like, yeah, that's pretty much what it is. I'm sorry.
Richard Campbell [01:51:23]:
Still screaming, tired, the whole thing.
Paul Thurrott [01:51:24]:
She's like, all I hear is this droning sound that never ends. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I think that was the one was in Mexico, right? The last one and then this one. I don't remember where this one is, but somewhere else. Okay, so the Xbox team being more transparent, yada yada yada, they've launched the player voice feedback hub. Probably a mistake, by the way. And I think. I don't know if this is like literally the.
Paul Thurrott [01:51:50]:
I think it is. The number one item of feedback was you need more exclusives. Love it, guys.
Richard Campbell [01:51:58]:
Love it.
Paul Thurrott [01:51:59]:
Frick's sake.
Richard Campbell [01:52:00]:
Tell the judge. Tell the judge.
Paul Thurrott [01:52:03]:
God damn.
Richard Campbell [01:52:04]:
But the customers told us.
Paul Thurrott [01:52:07]:
I know. Well, so ironically or coincidentally probably is be more accurate. There is a rumor that Sony might be moving their single player games which lately have been also being brought to the PC and in some cases even Xbox. Right. Making the single player experience games like the. The games that are just like a interactive story, basically keeping those as PS5 or PS whatever exclusives and because the
Richard Campbell [01:52:37]:
argument for being on all the platforms was to maximize the player base in multiplayer and you don't need that.
Paul Thurrott [01:52:43]:
Yeah. Like I would say for a user. That's right. I would say maximizing the amount of money you could make in some ways. Right. But I guess by selling more to people maybe on PC or whatever. I don't remember the numbers. But you know, PC as a gaming platform's about as big as console together.
Paul Thurrott [01:52:59]:
So it makes sense that Microsoft, Sony, whatever, would want to put games on PC.
Richard Campbell [01:53:05]:
But just. Yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:53:07]:
I mean, we talked about how poorly Sony and Nintendo are doing right now. We know Xbox has been doing terrible as a, you know, console business for a long time, but it's not like
Richard Campbell [01:53:14]:
they were making money on the consoles in the first flipping place. Just sell more games. That's where the money is.
Paul Thurrott [01:53:20]:
Right. So I will. That's not official, but we'll, you know, we'll see what they do. And then. Because Sony always copies Microsoft. Just kidding. Actually, they're doing the opposite. They announced, they did announce, they will raise the price of their PlayStation plus subscriptions in certain regions by one to three dollars depending on this, you know, one or three month span, whatever.
Paul Thurrott [01:53:44]:
They cited ongoing market conditions. I struggle to understand how a component shortage would factor into a subscription service or whatever, but whatever. I mean, so like in the US for example, like a one month PS plus essential subscription is 10 bucks. Now it's gonna be 11, you know, so the three month version is going from 25 to 28. You know, it's not like a. Not a big, big deal, but you know, prices are going up, so. And I will never stop celebrating. Epic kicking Apple to the curb.
Paul Thurrott [01:54:22]:
But as of, I think it was today or yesterday. Fortnite has made its triumphant comeback to the Apple App Store. Five years after they were booted up by Apple. The one exception is Australia. I don't actually know why Australia.
Richard Campbell [01:54:38]:
They're the ones leading the charge for keeping kids off social media. So maybe Apple.
Paul Thurrott [01:54:46]:
Oh, Apple apparently is breaking the law in Australia. So I don't know. Well, it's hard to say. But anyway, so it's good. You know, Fortnite is actually a very good game, by the way. I, I was, I. This has been several months now, but I was, I played it quite a bit after not looking at it for years and yeah, I was surprised like how good that game still is or is. You know, it's actually better than it was.
Paul Thurrott [01:55:10]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:55:11]:
Done a lot of stuff. It makes them so much money that they.
Paul Thurrott [01:55:14]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:55:14]:
Are keeping it up.
Paul Thurrott [01:55:15]:
Yeah, it's, it's.
Richard Campbell [01:55:17]:
It also doesn't seem to be as toxic as Roblox.
Paul Thurrott [01:55:22]:
Well, it's. You don't take the teabagging as personally when it's a cartoon. You know, like if it's, if it's a guy dressed up like a US Marine and he's tea bagging, he's kind of. It's hard not to take that personally. But it's like a cartoon sprite or something. You know, whatever these things are.
Richard Campbell [01:55:39]:
When it's a polychromatic turtle carrying a rocket launcher. Okay.
Paul Thurrott [01:55:43]:
Day, right, this goes back to. That was the Red Blue, Red team, blue team stuff from Halo early days. They used to have those awesome videos
Leo Laporte [01:55:52]:
like, oh, those are so good.
Paul Thurrott [01:55:54]:
One of them, which was like the guy like the, like a new player, like killed someone and then was teabagging the guy, but then he fired his rocket launcher into the ground and killed all his teammates and they all yelled at him. It captures the multiplayer experience so perfectly. Yeah, dude, you do. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:56:15]:
That's your finger on the trigger, man. Hey, let's pause briefly for station Identification. Then we'll get to the back of the book. Tips, picks, whiskey, all coming up.
Paul Thurrott [01:56:29]:
The usual.
Leo Laporte [01:56:30]:
The usual. Little Paulie Thorat and his tip of the week.
Paul Thurrott [01:56:36]:
Yeah, so I've been doing these kind of focus Month things. I was focusing on like Switcher articles in April, but then as we got into May, I was like, this is too big of a topic. I'm going to keep going with this and kind of expanded it out into applications and services. So I had written this thing about markdown editors last week or whatever and of course in the back of my brain I spent all that time writing these various versions of like Notepad, as Net Pad or when UIPad, et cetera, in different frameworks and languages and so forth and struggled a lot with the multitab, multi document stuff, whatever. But people have asked me multiple times like, you should, you're going to turn this into like a markdown editor. Like, why don't you make your own markdown? You know? And I'm like, yeah, you know, that's, that's been in the back of my brain, you know, for, for a while. But I mentioned, you know, Google IO thing and as I'm watching the keynote, they're talking about AI Studio and how AI Studio, which was designed to be like a web based IDE for prototyping apps, the UI for apps can now create native Android apps. And I was like, really interesting.
Paul Thurrott [01:57:49]:
So throwing caution to the wind, like an idiot, I went, I wrote the simplest prompt imaginable in AI Studio. I would like to create an Android desktop app version of a full featured markdown editor similar to Typora. It should run perfectly on a large screen device like a Google Book. And it's okay if it works on a phone too. And it took 158 seconds and it created the most full featured markdown editor I've ever seen in my life. Not a native Android app, by the way, it's a typescript web app. But I don't know if that Android thing is not there yet or I missed it or something, but the point is I didn't spend time on this. I wrote the quickest thing imaginable.
Paul Thurrott [01:58:30]:
I went back to watching the keynote, I checked in on it, it popped this thing out and I was like,
Leo Laporte [01:58:37]:
oh my God, you did this last night or today?
Paul Thurrott [01:58:40]:
Yeah, yeah, last night during the show. It took him like two and a half minutes. So I was like, okay, this is interesting. And then I was like, well, okay, let me get it closer to what I want. So there were four panes there's like a. A lot of apps. A little like a notepad, like a notion or Obsidian will have like a navigation pan on the side, and then it will have like a text editor, like a text view, and then like a preview pane, like side by side. Like, a lot of markdown editors do that.
Paul Thurrott [01:59:09]:
This thing, this, like, full featured Gemini co writing pane, like, full of, like, things to generate text or fix text or whatever. And I'm like, all right, this is too complicated. I just want, like, an editor. So I got it just to spit it like a. Like a two pane, side by side view. And I was like, okay, that's pretty good. But what I really want is like a. What you see is what you get, like single view, just like an editor.
Paul Thurrott [01:59:31]:
So it looks like the preview, but you can edit it. And then it did that, and it did it in the context of the thing it already created. So you had to go into the preview mode only. And then you could turn it into what you see is what you get. You could edit it. And I was like, okay, this is insane. So I tried a few times to do the native app version, and I never got it to do like a Kotlin jetpack, compose, whatever. But I was like, all right, well, you know what? Don't worry about that.
Paul Thurrott [01:59:55]:
Who cares? Like, a web app is fine. Web app will run everywhere. So this morning I got up and I was like, all right. And I actually wrote a more detailed description of what I was looking for. And it's just a couple of paragraphs of text, really. It's not that long. But. And God damn it, it created this thing.
Paul Thurrott [02:00:13]:
And I gotta tell you, this is pretty good. It's not pretty good. It's freaking really good. It's actually still more than I need. You can see it for yourself in the article I wrote. You can go use it yourself. You can open documents, you can export and save documents. You can use keyboard shortcuts to do formatting of any kind.
Paul Thurrott [02:00:31]:
There's a little floating toolbar for formatting. There's a full menu system with all kinds of stuff going on. And like, I'm sorry, but this is insanity. I just spent the better part of a year, probably more than a year, trying to do like, multi document, multitab, whatever in the. When you. Well, originally in WPF and then in the Windows app SDK just for a text editor. Didn't quite get it there. I got.
Paul Thurrott [02:00:56]:
I got closer than I actually understood at the time. But I used AI to get it over the top. So it took a month or maybe two months to kind of put that together and finally put it to bed. And this took 15 minutes. 15. I mean, look, I could spend another 15 and make it perfect. I just. I was blown away by how good this thing is.
Leo Laporte [02:01:14]:
Yeah, it's pretty amazing, isn't it?
Paul Thurrott [02:01:16]:
It's astonishing. So, you know, like I said, the typical experience keynote at some industry event, they're like, blah, blah, blah, you could try it out yourself. And I'm like, all right. And it's always like, yeah, no, this is garbage. I was like, no, this is unbelievable. Like, this is what. So I would. I'd like to make a native Android version, frankly.
Paul Thurrott [02:01:34]:
I'd like to be able to push it into Android Studio and work on it further, et cetera, et cetera. But the way this thing is right now, I mean, again, I would. I'd still play with it more and, you know, whatever, but it's like, this is like, this is really good.
Leo Laporte [02:01:48]:
Now, this is a web app, right?
Paul Thurrott [02:01:50]:
Yeah, yeah, it's a react app. It's incredible. It's incredible.
Leo Laporte [02:01:55]:
Did you. Does it post. When you do it this way on GitHub, does it post the code or not?
Paul Thurrott [02:02:00]:
It can. You can connect. I did. So it is on GitHub. I didn't make a IT public yet. I'm gonna. I wanna play with a little bit, but you can actually, I include the link to the app. Like, you could just go run the app.
Paul Thurrott [02:02:10]:
I mean, you can see it.
Leo Laporte [02:02:11]:
Probably the reason I always do that is not because I wanna distribute it to the public, but because I want people who say, oh, that's interesting to be able to start with the code. Cause that's the other thing you could do. You could point your AI to Paul's GitHub and say, okay, this is a starting point, but I wanna do it this way.
Paul Thurrott [02:02:31]:
Okay, so it is in GitHub. It's private right now.
Leo Laporte [02:02:33]:
That's public for that to work, but.
Richard Campbell [02:02:36]:
Right, but you don't have to.
Leo Laporte [02:02:37]:
I'm just saying.
Paul Thurrott [02:02:38]:
No, I know, but I was kind of jokingly to say you're looking at this from the perspective of a developer. Like, the thing that's amazing about this to me is like, AI progresses so fast that you say, like, soon you will be able to do. And by the time you finish saying that sentence started occurring. So like I've said to my wife, this has come up a bunch recently because I to bore to death with this kind of stuff, but, you know, it's like, you As a non program and non technical person will be able to create like little apps all by yourself, you know, personal. She could do this. Like she could do this right now. Now she wouldn't know how to edit the code. I mean, I don't either.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:12]:
It's typescript. I don't, you know, I. But I mean I've obviously spent time doing this kind of thing. But like you just keep talking to it till it's exactly what you want, then you're done. It's.
Leo Laporte [02:03:23]:
I love it that it's a web app. This is it.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:26]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:03:26]:
It's crazy. I love it.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:32]:
It's crazy. I think of all the time that I spent on Netpad when you iPad, whatever, and then on. All the time it did not spend creating this thing, which is approximately 100 times better. And I want. I mean, I'm not going to hurt myself, but it's like, this is like. Yikes. I mean that's amazing. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:54]:
Sorry. But this is amazing.
Leo Laporte [02:03:55]:
Yeah, it is pretty cool.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:57]:
So.
Leo Laporte [02:03:58]:
So I can view it?
Paul Thurrott [02:03:59]:
Yep. Well, you're already, I mean you're technically already viewing the. What you see is, you know, I mean this is already like rich. Yeah, yeah. Crazy.
Leo Laporte [02:04:12]:
Nice.
Paul Thurrott [02:04:12]:
Yeah. Supports different themes.
Leo Laporte [02:04:16]:
I love it.
Paul Thurrott [02:04:17]:
I know, I know.
Leo Laporte [02:04:19]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [02:04:20]:
There's stuff in here. There's a focus mode. Never asked for that. And by the way, actually that's an important point not to drag this out, but the. This just came up recently too. One of the things any, anyone, even if you were non technical, you grew up in the 80s, 90s, whatever. One of the things you always hear is like computers will do exactly what you tell them and only what you tell them, you know, Meaning that you as a programmer, if you don't tell it exactly what you want, you're just going to get what you told it to do, not what you meant. You know, that kind of thing.
Paul Thurrott [02:04:49]:
AI is actually kind of the opposite of that.
Leo Laporte [02:04:51]:
Knows what you meant.
Paul Thurrott [02:04:52]:
It's inferring from what you wrote, it's assuming. So in this case, what it did was it implemented features I did not ask for because they're common in markdown editors or whatever. Right? So the first version of Zap had that sidebar thing, which I do not want, or the focus mode, which I will never use and did not ask for. Or there's a couple other things that I remember off the top of my head, but there are like features in this that are there because other apps have these. And it's like that is. Yikes. I mean it's Crazy. I just, you know, again, not a professional programmer, but as someone who has spent time doing this.
Paul Thurrott [02:05:30]:
Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't think any one person said this, but many people have said this. You know, the role of the developer doesn't go away, but I feel like developers almost become program or project managers where most all, I don't know, the code is going to be generated by AI and you should know it, you should know the code, you should understand how it works, etc. But you're really kind of guiding the thing from whatever beginning, wherever that means if it's a new app or to where you want it to be, meaning whatever features you're going to add over time, etc. And that's what I see right here. It's insane. So I'm blown away by this.
Richard Campbell [02:06:10]:
You know, the job as a developer was never to write code, it was to solve problems.
Paul Thurrott [02:06:15]:
There you go. Right, okay. Actually, you know, that's. You're a smart guy, Richard. I don't think you enough credit for that. You. That's a good point. No, I mean, it really is a good point because I think in some ways, no, not in some ways, we do this just as human beings.
Paul Thurrott [02:06:28]:
We do this all the time. This is the change diversity thing. We get so used to doing things a certain way, we stopped thinking about it. And then we get affronted when there's an improvement or just a change. Right. Like a lot of traditional old school people my age would look at this kind of thing and be like, that's not, you know, whatever. But you know, you, you, I. Someone in the Discord referenced this Heil sandersburg interview on YouTube.
Paul Thurrott [02:06:55]:
I watched twice already and you know, one of the amazing things that his career kind of doesn't parallel did it. I mean you used to in Ms. Dos, write in an editor of some kind, exit out of it, go to DOS command line, type your little commands to compile, link, run the thing, find out what the problem is, exit the app, go back into the editor. And so you. We go from that to an integrated development development. We could do all those things in one place. And then of course we go to GUIs where that comes better with, you know, more complicated or capable environments, etc. Etc.
Paul Thurrott [02:07:29]:
And you know, we were happy to make those changes. I mean, but some of us weren't, right? I bet there were people like, oh well, I would never not do this with Edlin. Why would I? Why would I want this all in one place? Like, that's Silly. And it's like, well, no, that's progress, you know. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:07:44]:
Why did you take your hand off the keyboard and put it on the mouse? That's crazy talk.
Paul Thurrott [02:07:47]:
Exactly. Right, right, right. Through child for. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:07:52]:
The only problem with this particular change is the name and the excess amount of money that's been stuck into it. The combination of those two things has made everybody extra stupid.
Paul Thurrott [02:08:04]:
Yes. So I mentioned this earlier just in passing, but you're going to see stuff like this everywhere. But one of the first ones is going to be that kind of ability to create your own custom widget, which they announced a week ago. Go at that Android show thing, whatever that was. This is going to be something that works across devices. So you could create a widget that is on your phone, obviously, but you could have one on your Android auto screen, on your car, et cetera, et cetera, and it will be created conversationally. Right. This is not you constructing a script.
Paul Thurrott [02:08:36]:
It's not using an automation tool. And if, then whatever, then whatever it is tool, it's not like that. I mean, it is doing that kind of thing probably in some ways, but you don't need to know that. And that's, it's powerful and simple and it's gonna, it's gonna be everywhere. Like, this is gonna be very common.
Richard Campbell [02:08:55]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [02:08:56]:
Anyway, very exciting. I, I, what I expected was I would go into this fail and then say, okay, screw it, who cares? And I, it worked so well. It was like. And then, you know, it wasn't exactly what I wanted. But then I, you know, I added, I did.
Richard Campbell [02:09:14]:
But that's part of the reality, right? It's like you get to that point where it's like, now make it the thing you actually wanted.
Paul Thurrott [02:09:20]:
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. It's. I joke about this sometimes just with people. I'll say something like, would you do what? I mean, not what I said, you know, but that's like, that's good what this is doing. It's crazy. Anyway, so that's. Look, just go look at it. It's amazing.
Paul Thurrott [02:09:37]:
I'm kind of blown away by this. And I think this, you know, like I said, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. And then just for apps, real quick, start today released something called descapes 2026. I enjoyed that They've suddenly switched to your face naming for this one product. This is a way to use local AI and this will run off a cpu, gpu, whatever. You have to either create new images for your background, but also to Edit images and do all that restyle stuff that's getting very common these days and local. I don't know what models they're using. I'm going to talk to Brad tomorrow and find out.
Paul Thurrott [02:10:10]:
But I would imagine it's probably FI or something that runs on your Windows machine. Right. But you know, you have an image, you're like, I like this but I want something close, that kind of thing. It's only 10 bucks if you want to buy it. And it's available on sale right now during the launch period for seven bucks. So it's not particularly expensive. So kind of a cool thing if you like to customize your desktop. And then Firefox 151 came out this week on mobile and desktop and they've added a bunch of stuff across both.
Paul Thurrott [02:10:43]:
So they added the free VPN with 50 gigs of data. Now it does location selection like a normal vpn. You can say, I want it to be here. They're going to make that more granular in time. It's available in Canada, it wasn't before and I think it's coming to more markets soon. The AI kill switch, which unfortunately is not called is in desktop. That's been there for a couple of months. It's now available on mobile as well.
Paul Thurrott [02:11:07]:
Shake to Summarize was a big. I don't know why I just made that. Shake to Summarize was a feature they brought to Firefox on iOS, I think end of last year. They actually won some awards for that by the way. It's available now on Android. There's a one click reset of private browsing. So instead of closing the private browsing window and restarting another one to clear out your cookies and history and whatever else, you can just click a button to do that and some other stuff. So there's.
Paul Thurrott [02:11:33]:
Yeah, bunch of stuff across the board. And that's it. There you go.
Leo Laporte [02:11:38]:
Very nice. Let me see.
Paul Thurrott [02:11:42]:
You can make your own apps. You don't need apps, just make your
Leo Laporte [02:11:45]:
own, make your own, write them all everyone's doing. They wrote a operating system yesterday. Just, you know, that was the other.
Paul Thurrott [02:11:52]:
I know they wrote. And then they were like, it's not an OS unless it runs Doom. So let's make it run doom.
Leo Laporte [02:11:57]:
That was kind of cool. They wrote a video driver.
Paul Thurrott [02:11:59]:
I'm like, stop it on the fly. Yeah, Seriously. We live in an insane interesting world.
Richard Campbell [02:12:05]:
It's crazy interesting times. It is.
Leo Laporte [02:12:08]:
That's why Run his radio is always so important.
Richard Campbell [02:12:13]:
Well, at least for the administrators. So show 1037 the one we did, I did with Richard Hicks a little while ago actually. But we, we knew this was coming. It was very much a time to release because we're talking about Secure Boot. So for those of you who haven't been following along, Secure Boot is an update to EUFY to allow to resist root based malware. So it's a whole mechanism for certifying where updates come from, patches to eufy, your BIOS configuration, that kind of thing. And when it was set up, they, in 2016, when it first came to pass, they put a 10 year certificate on it. And look, it's 2026 and this certificate expires next month, June 2026.
Richard Campbell [02:13:00]:
It's the very first original one. And so there's been a big push for a while now inside of Microsoft to just update machines to point to newer certificates. And now that we're getting close to the end of the road, there's been a bunch of tools put out there to allow you to check that your machines have gotten the update. And if your computer is current in any way, you know, a gen 10 or above, and if it uses Windows Update, you've already got it. You can try in the links there, there is a client for, for checking to see that your registry update's been done. For Secure Boot, you can just say yes or no. Easy to check, but if you haven't, it's not like the world's going to burst into flames if you haven't done this because the reality of course is that the certificate will be invalid and that means you won't trust any place for updates. And so if there is a vulnerability to your UE that shows up, you won't be able to get patches for it.
Richard Campbell [02:13:57]:
And that could turn into something very dramatic.
Paul Thurrott [02:13:59]:
A question about this.
Richard Campbell [02:14:00]:
Yeah, buddy.
Paul Thurrott [02:14:02]:
So I had two people ask me questions about this last week and my understanding of the plan here is that Microsoft is going to roll out these updates through Windows Update. You'll just get it, it happens. It's already done. Yeah, yeah, you can go into Windows Security and you can see, you know, green dot, you're doing good.
Richard Campbell [02:14:17]:
Yep.
Paul Thurrott [02:14:18]:
What if you don't get it? Like, I don't, I don't mean like you've explained, like it's a year from now, if something happens, whatever. But I mean, do you, do you or did you. Was there any discussion about whether this could ever come from like your PC maker, your motherboard maker? Like if you, for some reason it's not there, is it going to be made available Somewhere else. Do you know?
Richard Campbell [02:14:37]:
No, I mean, and it's coming through the Windows pipeline so you can go download it. You can do it yourself. It's not.
Paul Thurrott [02:14:43]:
Oh, you can.
Richard Campbell [02:14:43]:
Science. Yeah, okay, but and the reality is a vendor can make it impossible too. Most vendors, if you bought machines during recent years have already moved to new certificates. So new, new computers will never have this problem in the first place.
Paul Thurrott [02:14:58]:
I've been trying to find one that does not have this new certificate and
Richard Campbell [02:15:02]:
I, yeah, you know, I think anything, anything that's gotten 24H2 is already fixed pretty much.
Paul Thurrott [02:15:09]:
Okay.
Richard Campbell [02:15:10]:
So it's just, yeah, I, I, I'm not, I'm looking for and have not heard from like an administrator is like, oh no, I have 150 unpatch machines. And now.
Paul Thurrott [02:15:20]:
Yeah, that's what, that's what I was like right. As this thing kind of winds down to the end date, it's like what happens when that date is passed? You know, Microsoft will know through telemetry X percentage or something. I'm thinking it's going to be so small it's negligible.
Richard Campbell [02:15:34]:
But you know, and that's always the goal. Right. The goal coming in like this is that it becomes a non event. And we've, they've pulled it off a few times lately.
Paul Thurrott [02:15:43]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [02:15:43]:
And I've made shows about this. You know, the same with the certificate, the strong certificate requirements for active directory.
Paul Thurrott [02:15:49]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [02:15:50]:
Which was a little literal showstopper. And last year they deliberately triggered it to try and get sysadmin's attention and you could fix it with a registry change. Right. So they thought they got enough people fixed, there was only a few left. It's like, let's even get their attention by they put this update in and it would break something. If you haven't dealt with it then you could switch it back and it's like, okay, we're going to make it permanent in September. And when September or October finally rolled around, nothing happened. And it's like, and it was Steve Siphus I was doing that one with and he's like, perfect.
Richard Campbell [02:16:20]:
That's what I wanted. Nothing happens. Everybody's fixed. It seems like those challenges just get the guy's attention. The thing that's evil about this one is when the date goes by and you're unpatched, nothing happens.
Paul Thurrott [02:16:33]:
That's what I mean, that's the thing. Like there may come a time in the future where this is more of a problem, but in the short term for certainly you're not going to notice anything. It's not like, it's not like, oh, your firewall doesn't work anymore. Sorry. No.
Richard Campbell [02:16:46]:
You know, now what's going to happen is there's going to be a vulnerability and you're going to go try to up these machines and you're not going to be able to. You're going to have to go fix assert first and then do it.
Paul Thurrott [02:16:58]:
Hey, you can't even run Call of Duty right now unless you have an updated tpm, so. An enabled TPN I should say. Yeah, yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:17:08]:
Anyway, sorry, you know, Rich, Rich Hicks is one of the best. He's the guy Microsoft calls for a bunch of like remote access and stuff like that. And he's just been all in on this particular problem. And you know, actually we've had a lot of certificate discussions on Run as lately. Because the biggest problem with modern certificates, even in the browsers, is the revocation strategies just don't work. And so if you have a bad cert's been exploited in some way, there's no good way to fix it. And so right now the current plan is to shorten the lifespan of search down to 47 days. Wow.
Richard Campbell [02:17:43]:
So that you'll have to automate replacing certificates. Which means even if the revocation doesn't work after 47 days, it's not being used anyway. At most.
Paul Thurrott [02:17:51]:
Okay.
Richard Campbell [02:17:51]:
It's all part of the game, right.
Paul Thurrott [02:17:54]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [02:17:57]:
Many a tear has to fall, but
Paul Thurrott [02:18:01]:
it's all right in the.
Leo Laporte [02:18:04]:
You know what I'd like to do right now?
Richard Campbell [02:18:06]:
What would you like to do, friend?
Leo Laporte [02:18:08]:
I like to have a little drink.
Richard Campbell [02:18:10]:
Well, is that one of my very favorite places? Right. Because I'm. I'm back in Alkmaar with my buddy Remy. And Remy, if you recall, because I've been here a number of times before, he has a favorite whiskey shop here in Alkmaar and the gentleman that used to run it wanted to retire and so Remy bought it from him.
Paul Thurrott [02:18:30]:
Nice. And.
Richard Campbell [02:18:31]:
And has done very well. More than doubled sales over the years. He's never been in retail before, but it's been a thing he's been doing with his son and they've been having a lot of fun with it. Built a great website, have been really collecting on it. The whole point he's had with with the whiskey shop here in Alar is if you can buy it at a regular whiskey store or regular liquor store, we don't have that. Only things you could find nowhere else. And this thing, Draft Daft Mill. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:18:54]:
You definitely can't find anywhere else. This needs a Very special bottle. Daft. What a great name, huh? And it's truly one of the rarest things you can imagine, because it is a single estate whiskey maker. All right, let's start at the beginning. We're going to the Lowlands. Do you remember the Low? You know, all the different regions of Scotland? This is the Lowlands. It's the southern and eastern part of Scotland.
Richard Campbell [02:19:19]:
So this is sort of the flat terrain, more temperate compared to the Highlands, where the weather is more extreme and more certainly more mountainous. The general area, if you draw it out, there's this area called the Highland Boundary Fault, which stretches across the mainland of the UK from Helensburg on the Firth of Clyde in the southwest, across the Stonehaven in the northeast. And I was just in Stonehaven in January. That's where we saw the amazing tides and stuff like that. But, yeah, really lowlands for a reason. No higher at any point than 200 meters or maybe 600ft. It's just mostly the Central Lowlands, which is just river valleys and rolling hills, and also the rivers of Clyde, Forth and Tay. And then on the southern end of most of that is, as they call the southern uplands.
Richard Campbell [02:19:59]:
Although, remember, no higher than 200 meters, which has got more lands and stuff like that. This is all the big cities. This is Edinburgh, this is Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Stirling, not that they're all that big. And Daft Mill is in the how of Fife, a How in Gael, of course, meaning a hollow or tract of flat land. So this is the how carved by the River Eden and near the village of Kilissi. It's called Daft Mill, after the Daft Burn. Again, Gaelic, a burn is a stream. And there's parts of the Daft Burn, because of the shape of the land, that appear to run uphill.
Richard Campbell [02:20:40]:
So that stream is clearly daft. And so the fact that the mill uses the stream means it must be. If you use the Daft burn, you must be a daft mill.
Leo Laporte [02:20:50]:
Oh, yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:20:51]:
So that's where it comes from. And up above that area there is the Lamont Hills, which is where all the royalties, so forth. And this has been productive land for literally millennia. Archaeologists have pulled out Neolithic sites, Bronze Age sites, all the way through Khaleesi, the nearest village, is also famous for Khaleesi man, which is a sandstone pillar about 9ft high, 2.7 meters or so, with a carving of a naked male warrior carrying a shield and a spear. And this is likely 1500 years old. This is the Picts. And this is at the time that the Romans were trying to Control Scotland and failing against the Picts. And so this was a kind of an artifact that was.
Richard Campbell [02:21:34]:
Was built at that time to terrorize the Romans. Now, the peculiar chunk of land we're talking about in the how of Fife has got lots of land records. The earliest ones show the Kinloch family had control in the charter to the mill and the lands that were already there from the reign of Alexander III. So that's 1245-1285. Then there's records of it handing, passing to the Sandalins and then to the walkers. So in 1701, the Walker family, so fast forward here 500 years or so, established the Daft Mill and Pitlairn. And also on the property is this stone water tower. It was built somewhere in the 1800s.
Richard Campbell [02:22:17]:
Nobody's exactly sure when it has a Dutch look, so they presume it was built by the Dutch engineer that was working in the area during the development of the railway, which the Walkers were investors in. And famously, further to north here is the Tay River Tail rail bridge, which had a collapse in the 1800s. As one, a great story, but a little off the beat for this particular one. The current family that controls it is the Cuthbert. So grandfather Cuthbert actually was a sharecropper for the walkers. But in 1984, the sons, Ian and Francis were able to buy the property. And so they are the fourth owner in 700 years or so. And it is about a thousand acre working farm.
Richard Campbell [02:23:00]:
So they rotate crops of barley, potatoes, carrots and broccoli, but they also work beef cattle as well. So synergistic farming, very normal. And it's important to remember that these guys are primarily farmers. And so they do have barley as one of the rotational crops, and they sell most of that barley to whiskey makers, mainly at drinking. So that's McAllen and Highland Park. And as is noted in one of the pieces I was reading at the time, back in 2005, they were selling barley at about 70 pounds per ton. And so there was this idea that, you know, we could make that barley more valuable by making it into whiskey. And so to make more money on barley, they started, they applied for a license to be able to build their own spirit production facility, distillery, out of some old vintage buildings in the area.
Richard Campbell [02:23:51]:
It took them a couple of years to get that license, but they got their first spirit make in 2005. So of all the barley they produce, they only keep 100 tons for themselves, which they send to Chris Maltings and Eloa to do the malting, which means they get back about 80 tons of malt. And they use that over the course of the year because they don't make whiskey all year round. They're farmers. But there is a couple of periods after the barley harvest. So after they do two harvests of a year, a winter harvest and a spring harvest or a summer harvest. And so from November to February they make some whiskey and from June and July they make some whiskey. Otherwise they're just farming all the time, which is much more the like the way the farming that that barley based Whiskeys were made 200 years ago, you know, in the 1800s.
Richard Campbell [02:24:34]:
Two harvests a year in between. You make whiskey to do that. Francis Cuthbert is the. Is the whiskey maker of the brothers. The Ian is quite a bit shyer and he's very quotable and I will quote him here when he says when it comes to distilling, there are three of us doing it. Me, myself and I who taught me. I think it's just genetic. All Scotsmen have it in them to make whiskey.
Richard Campbell [02:24:59]:
So his approach, this is a very small facility is remember he's got 80 tons of grist. He loads a ton at a time into the mash tun with a copper top on top. They take water off the well that comes out through that water tower to make a very clear wort. It's part of their design. They use a pair of 7500 liter stainless steel washbacks. That's tiny. They do a 72 to 100 hour ferment using dried yeast, no cream yeast here for those who are squeamish. And then off to a 3000 liter wash still and a 2700 liter spirit still.
Richard Campbell [02:25:33]:
Those are stills from Forsyth. Virtually everything else in this whole facility was made locally. But the stills do come from foresight.
Leo Laporte [02:25:41]:
Nice.
Richard Campbell [02:25:42]:
Yeah. The spent grain is then given to the cattle as as high calorie feed. Even the spillings and so forth are not bad fertilizer. They also use that on the ground as well. So nothing is wasted. Everything was made from the farm. Everything goes back into the farm.
Leo Laporte [02:25:59]:
Place must smell like whiskey though.
Richard Campbell [02:26:01]:
Well, for a few times a year, every year. But tell me the downside. Newmay comes in at about 75%. Of course they fill it 63.5 because they're filling bourbon casks and they get their bourbon cast from Heaven Hill. They also have some sherry casts and they have all their Dunn storage on site. So as I mentioned, they started in 2005. They did not make their first bottle until 2018 because they're not in the Business of trying to make money off the whiskey per se. When when Cuthbert was asked about that, he said, why'd that wait so long? Because I didn't think it was ready.
Richard Campbell [02:26:40]:
And so yeah, he. They kept laying up barrels every twice a year and it was only when they got to over 12 that he finally decided to do a bottling. His first bottling in 2018 was only 250 bottles at cast strength. And you had to enter a lottery for the opportunity to buy one at £200 a piece. And it disappeared very quickly. So this, they do all their bottling through an external bottler. Berry Brothers. Berry Brothers and Rudd.
Richard Campbell [02:27:10]:
And so that's what this is. This is battled by Barry Brothers and this is their 2012 edition. So this was distilled in 2012, bottled in 2026. And I think it's already gone. Although in this case there is 3,475 bottles. So the production is a little bit bigger. So then this actually comes from five first fill Sherry's hogsheads. These are Oloroso and Pedro Jimenez.
Richard Campbell [02:27:34]:
Seven first fill Heaven Hills barrels. So that combination of 12 barrels produces the 3,475 bottles. They actually did a distillation on December 25, 2012. Like Christmas time. What's that? What you do for Christmas Day? Christmas Day, I distilled whiskey and then, you know, 13 years later, I put it into a bottle at 46% and sold it for €100. Very reasonable. It's about 115 US and I've already had a couple of tastes of this. As a toast to Soma.
Richard Campbell [02:28:09]:
The color on it is spectacular, but that's of course a sherry casking, so you'd expect nothing less. I defy you to think this is a lowland. It could be a spay. It's big and rich and sweet and clear. It's just perfect. And it's not exported in any way. You have to come to Scotland to get this. Barry Brothers is a.
Richard Campbell [02:28:33]:
Is a great producer. They do a lot of custom bottles and so forth. But in the case case here, you're talking about a single farm estate whiskey bottled through a bunch of pros, only certain. Even here in the Netherlands, there are 10 stores that carry this and one of them is the whiskey shop in Alkmaar. It is both a combination of the craft distilling wave that we've seen and the oldest school whiskey possibly imagined. Barley grown on a farm, sold from the farm, essentially. And it's a delight. I love that this exists.
Richard Campbell [02:29:09]:
It's hilarious. It is called Daft Mill, but it's just.
Leo Laporte [02:29:12]:
It's the real deal.
Richard Campbell [02:29:14]:
You make a trip to Scotland, you pick up. You got a friend who loves whiskey. You got to get him one of these.
Leo Laporte [02:29:18]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:29:19]:
It's going to be a pain in the butt to find, but if you find it, it's going to be so special because it's in a time of these ultra industrialized whiskey producers at massive scale. These. These guys, just not that guy. They're farmers, and for 100 tons of the grain they make a year, they put into barrels and once in a while, make a batch maybe once a year. That's all they do.
Leo Laporte [02:29:39]:
Yeah, I mean, this is. You don't get rich doing this. If you make 341 bottles a year, even at 100.
Richard Campbell [02:29:45]:
3,500 bottles a year.
Leo Laporte [02:29:47]:
500. Okay.
Richard Campbell [02:29:48]:
Yeah. So. And at 100, and then the retail is $100. So 100 pounds, so that's 35,000 of which they're getting maybe 20 of that. So, no, it's not a huge amount of money.
Leo Laporte [02:29:59]:
No, you do this, but it's a thing.
Paul Thurrott [02:30:01]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:30:02]:
And then. And it's just another element. It's worth more than what it would be just sold as grain. So they are making some money. But it's really. Yeah, it's lovely. It's still lovely that it exists. It's just.
Richard Campbell [02:30:15]:
Once again, I'm educated. I have a moment where it's like it's more than one way to make whiskey out there. And some of these. These ways, or the old ways, they're making Whiskey like it's 1826 again.
Leo Laporte [02:30:25]:
How cool. Daft Mill. You can't get it, so don't try.
Richard Campbell [02:30:29]:
Yeah, but if you ever get a chance, if you're ever in the right place, get somebody who's carrying Berry Brothers. Look for it. This single farm estate. It's very special. They make a cast strength that. That will be only like 100 bottles. Those are much harder to find. But this is their main release each year, the winter release.
Richard Campbell [02:30:45]:
And it's. It's beautiful.
Leo Laporte [02:30:46]:
Perfect. Nice.
Richard Campbell [02:30:47]:
Perfect in every way.
Leo Laporte [02:30:49]:
Thank you, Richard. Richard Campbell, runasradio.com Where do you go? From the Netherlands.
Richard Campbell [02:30:56]:
I'm going home tomorrow for a week, then I'm back to stock.
Paul Thurrott [02:31:01]:
You slacker crazy.
Richard Campbell [02:31:03]:
But. But the week I'm home, I get to go talk to two different high schools. So I'm really looking forward to that.
Paul Thurrott [02:31:08]:
See, I would be looking forward to crawling under the bed and falling asleep
Richard Campbell [02:31:11]:
for a week, but, you know, for a few minutes. But compared to Richard talking to kids about AI, you only get to do this a few times a year. It's really, really important.
Leo Laporte [02:31:21]:
I hope they don't boo you. Like the college crowd has been booing people like Eric.
Paul Thurrott [02:31:25]:
I don't think he's going to be like, rah, rah AI, Am I right? Anybody? Cricket?
Richard Campbell [02:31:30]:
Not that guy.
Leo Laporte [02:31:31]:
And if, you know, if I were those kids, I'd be very, very interested in what you have to say because there's a lot of uncertainty as they.
Richard Campbell [02:31:38]:
And I want to hear what they want to say, you know, that's one of the reasons I'm up there, is to see where they're at. What do they see now?
Paul Thurrott [02:31:44]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [02:31:45]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:31:45]:
Thank you, sir. Thank you. Paul Thurrott. He's@therot.com Become a Premium Member. For all the goodness T H U R R O T T.com and his books are@leanpub.com of course, if you're a premium member, you can get all the books as part of your membership, which makes it even more desirable. And together they form the dynamic duo of Windows journalism every.
Richard Campbell [02:32:10]:
Well, I know I'm dynamic.
Leo Laporte [02:32:12]:
Dynamic. Every Wednesday at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live if you want. If you're in the club, of course. In the club, Twit discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. After the fact on demand versions of the show at twit.tv. There is a YouTube channel dedicated to the video or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client to the audio or video or both and get it automatically as soon as we're done of a Wednesday. Thanks to John Ashley filling in for Kevin King, who's on vacation this week. Producer extraordinaire.
Leo Laporte [02:32:53]:
Stay tuned if you're watching live. Intelligent Machines is coming up. Our guest will be the CTO of Dashlane, one of the big password managers talking about AI. He is. He is doing a lot of vibe coding himself, but he also his team of 100 is using AI and what AI and what the future passwords are. It's all very interesting.
Paul Thurrott [02:33:17]:
There is no future passwords. Leo get the memo.
Leo Laporte [02:33:20]:
Well, I think he knows that. So how do you run a password company where.
Richard Campbell [02:33:24]:
Well, it's not.
Paul Thurrott [02:33:25]:
Because it's not. It's not just pass. It's pass keys and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:33:29]:
Help me manage my pass keys.
Leo Laporte [02:33:31]:
He's very much, you know, an advocate of that. So we'll talk Frederic Rayvin coming up in thank you, gentlemen. I will see you all next week on Windows Weekly.
