Windows Weekly Episode 793 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
Leo It's time for windows weekly. Paul THRASS here. Mary Jo Foleys here. So is oddly enough. Windows 1122 H two. All the details here, including a new visual effect called Micah. No, it's not related to Mica. Sergeant PC sales are down and they'll be down again next year. What is with AMD's new naming conventions and a good news, bad news scenario for halo. Infinite. It's all coming up next on windows, weekly podcasts you

TWiT Intro (00:00:32):
Love from people you trust. This is,

Leo Laporte (00:00:42):
This is windows weekly with Paul Thra and Mary Jo Foley episode 793 recorded Wednesday, September 7th, 2022. AMD's circular slide rule. This episode of windows weekly is brought to you by thanks, Canary detect attackers on your network while avoiding irritating, false alarms. Get the alerts that matter for 10% off and a 60 day money back guarantee. Go to canary.tools/TWiT and enter the code TWiT in the, how did you hear about us box? And by unify meeting from MIMO monitors, unify simplifies your work life by combining your favorite video conferencing solutions into one reliable universal user interface. Visit unify meeting.com and enter the code WW for 25% off a year's subscription or use the same code to get 25% off any of MIMO seven inch displays and by Tanium Tanium, unites operations and security teams with a single platform that identifies where all your it data is patches. Every device you own in seconds and implements critical security controls all from a single pain of glass. Are you ready to protect your organization from cyber threats? Learn more at tanium.com/TWiT it's time for windows weekly. The show we cover the latest news from apple. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding dozers. That's Paul throt <laugh> do you have any SNA left after the last couple hours? I know

Paul Thurrott (00:02:18):
I'm all stared out. <Laugh> I might just, I'm just gonna reread my top five tweets from the apple event. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:02:23):
You could, they were pretty funny. I read a few of them thro.com of course, lean pub.com for his books. Mary Jo Foley from ZD net all about microsoft.com. We're not here to talk about apple. I mean, that would be silly. This is a let's talk about windows 11.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:41):
There's nothing to say. There's nothing going on over there.

Leo Laporte (00:02:44):
Nothing going on pay. No, that's fine.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:45):
Here's a shock. Everybody. They have new iPhones.

Leo Laporte (00:02:48):
<Laugh> new iPhones. Yeah, the watch look pretty sweet though. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:52):
Which one? The one that looked like a donut or the one that

Leo Laporte (00:02:54):
The dive watch.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:55):
Yeah, like that tie a donut to my wrist and use it as a portable flotation device

Leo Laporte (00:02:59):
From Duncan. The apple watch ultra. I immediately ordered it. Paul, cuz I am a, I'm a sheep.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:06):
Is it full of jelly? What's going on? <Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:09):
Full of titanium. I heard

Leo Laporte (00:03:11):
It's it's full of, and if I crash, it'll tell the world. So that's good.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:17):
I think you crashed. Yeah. Thanks for the heads up. I'm kind of bleeding to death there. Do you think you could?

Leo Laporte (00:03:22):
Yeah. Just let's throw this along

Paul Thurrott (00:03:24):
All. Maybe do something about it.

Leo Laporte (00:03:26):
As I have mentioned before the show, but perhaps those listening don't know, I am dressed in a more casual attire today because I am heading out to a rock and roll show after <laugh> afterwards.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:39):
I wow. Is there like a t-shirt with torn sleeves under that or something you should

Leo Laporte (00:03:43):
See? You know, I'm a little disappointed cuz Lisa was doing a, you know, doing, you know how one as one does going through the closet, looking for the right thing, wear for a Motley crew concert. Sure. She had a nice torn Motley crew. T-Shirt some form of jeans that looked like they were painted on. And I said, that's perfect. She said, yeah, I'm not gonna wear that. So anyway,

Paul Thurrott (00:04:05):
She was like, then you were like, what, what are you gonna wear?

Leo Laporte (00:04:07):
<Laugh> I'm just wearing a little Tommy Bahama thing. I'm you know, they gonna look at her and look at me and go, he's just there to he's your, he, he drove her.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:17):
Well, the reason you're there is so she can sit in your shoulders. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:04:20):
Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:20):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:04:21):
Yeah. That's it. Let's talk about windows 11. That's more interesting. 22 H two. I thought there wasn't gonna be a, I'm confused. What's

Paul Thurrott (00:04:34):
Going price because they've been so clear on the messaging.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:37):
Exactly. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:04:38):
So there is gonna be a 22 H two.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:41):
There is

Paul Thurrott (00:04:41):
Lipstick on what's going on there.

Leo Laporte (00:04:43):
Did you get a big smooch from Stephanie before you came on? It's like have a great show. Paul, did

Paul Thurrott (00:04:49):
I on the clown filter or something?

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:51):
<Laugh> I think you were salivating from all those that

Paul Thurrott (00:04:54):
Looks weird. I don't don't look like

Leo Laporte (00:04:56):
He was foaming at the mouth during the show. What it was. That's what it was. We go,

Paul Thurrott (00:05:00):
What is going on?

Leo Laporte (00:05:01):
No, I don't. Well

Paul Thurrott (00:05:03):
I'm concerned. <Laugh> do I look like that?

Leo Laporte (00:05:05):
No, you

Paul Thurrott (00:05:06):
Don't look like that. I don't look anything like that.

Leo Laporte (00:05:08):
It's no, it's just in your head. Yeah. It's just in your head. 22 H two. When is you better explain this to me? If you would please.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:20):
Ugh.

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:21):
Well, rumored rumored release date is September 20th though. Microsoft has not said that

Leo Laporte (00:05:27):
Properly. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:28):
And it is to our knowledge still called 22 H two.

Leo Laporte (00:05:33):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:34):
The version there is an update that is rumored to be called the, if I get this correct, the windows 11 20 22 update. Right. Which is the update you will install to get to version 22 H two. I think that's correct.

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:48):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:05:49):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:50):
And it's it's a huge lease. Mary Jo, do you wanna lead, run through the top 37 features or

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:56):
<Laugh> I think there's something to do with taped Explorer is not there. So tap file Explorer is not there. Nope. There's something to do with the layouts. If you hover,

Paul Thurrott (00:06:13):
By the way you does it have a fantasy island was joking because no, but she's right. Actually, if you had to pick the one big feature, honestly, I would say it is it's the layout snap layouts. Discoverability feature. Yeah. Right. So if you move, start to move windows, a window around a pain will pop up at the top, leading you to maybe drag the thing to it and then you'll see the possible layouts you can use for, for snap. Yeah. Yep. That's true. There you go. Yeah. Okay. It's kind of downhill after that, but that's that's a good one. That is a good one.

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:44):
Other than that, there's not a whole lot. Right? There's you can drag and drop some more stuff onto task bar. There's like moving some there's icons. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:54):
Which is mostly, most people,

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:57):
No people care. People do care. I care.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:59):
There's a live captions feature, which I think is quite good. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:03):
Yeah. I would call it even though they're gonna call it a major update to windows 11, I would quantify it as a small update. I

Paul Thurrott (00:07:12):
Would, I would also say

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:13):
Almost like a cumulative update because it's so small. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:16):
And it's, that's a little embarrassing cause they had a whole year to get this done. Yeah. You know, the windows 10 timeframe. Obviously we had big updates and little updates, but a lot of the little updates were kind of a six month later kind of a deal and understandable. But yeah, this OS needed some pretty big updates and it's weird that they didn't address most of that.

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:37):
You know what? Maybe they're saving 'em for those rumored moments. Those like periodic feature drops that could come at any time in any way that we don't really know will when or how will happen. Maybe tho that's why they they're saving some stuff to hold it back and then drop it. Maybe, maybe.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:58):
Yep. Maybe <laugh> this is like we're having a baby. Oh, what's the it's gonna be a boy or girl. Oh, we're waiting to be surprised. <Laugh> it's gonna be a surprise no matter when you find it. Well, they have

Leo Laporte (00:08:07):
A big gender reveal

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:09):
At some point <laugh> yeah. I would assume <laugh> I would assume they will. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:08:16):
Yeah. So what are we gonna get to have file for? It's gonna be a surprise.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:20):
Yeah, no. And you know what, the other thing we know nothing about is when is windows 10 22 H two coming? We do not know that either. And that's the version that most people are running, who are running windows. So we don't know anything about that. We don't even know what's in that. Right. Like we don't have a feature list at all for

Leo Laporte (00:08:38):
That. Oh, so this is 22 H two for 11. Yeah. And is there for sure, a 22 H two for

Paul Thurrott (00:08:42):
10? Yes. Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:44):
There is. Yes

Paul Thurrott (00:08:45):
<Laugh> they actually announced. But they said well, but they never announced any features. So of course people asked, right. Including me. Right. And they said, yeah, we'll get back to you on that. <Laugh> we haven't announced

Leo Laporte (00:08:57):
That yet. Have they gotten back to you?

Paul Thurrott (00:08:58):
They have not. They have not

Leo Laporte (00:09:02):
SDK WD K and E WD. K what the hell is that? I'm looking

Paul Thurrott (00:09:06):
At your, I assume no one needs to have those acronyms to find, so we'll just move on.

Leo Laporte (00:09:10):
Okay, good. Thank you. Because SDK software development kit, I know that, yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:15):
There you go. The windows driver kit,

Leo Laporte (00:09:17):
Windows driver kit,

Paul Thurrott (00:09:19):
Which I feel like used to be called the DK for some reason it

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:22):
Did. If I'm wrong on that device driver kit. Yep. Thank

Paul Thurrott (00:09:25):
You. Okay. So WD K. Yep. And I have to be honest, I had to look up EWD K exactly. <Laugh> what is that? It's the enterprise windows driver kit. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:09:34):
Yeah. Our enterprise driver's different than the drivers for the rest of us.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:39):
There's an Ew. K Leo. I mean, come on. <Laugh> no, I don't. I've never heard of it before. I have no idea. Yeah, no, I, yeah. I mean, I, so I think this will come up on the show, you know, there's this notion of like team certified devices and teams room certified devices, I suppose, in the enterprise windows space, there is a, an extra level of certification or compliance you can obtain to, to be an enterprise windows driver or whatever. I've never, I'm not familiar with this term. I don't know.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:10):
No. Hmm. I wonder if it has to do with like configuration manager in tune stuff maybe,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:17):
Or yeah. Or, yeah. Right. interesting. So maybe there are components in a PC that can remotely manage and then centrally manage. Right. That could be, that could be right. I don't know.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:28):
But the weird thing is about these three things they're already out, right? Like they're

Paul Thurrott (00:10:33):
Already, that's available. That's the news. So Microsoft has not announced this new version of windows. Oh. But these things are available now to developers. Well, to developers, I guess in final form they're these are not pre-release versions. These are the RTM as we used to call them. Yep. Versions of these things. So this is the way Microsoft does things these days.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:54):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:56):
Yeah, yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:57):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:10:58):
Yeah. Okay. what's this,

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:01):
But the next story, the next story is the one that what's, this I think is pretty huge visual

Leo Laporte (00:11:07):
Effect, a new visual effect. What's that?

Paul Thurrott (00:11:09):
Well, I use the term visual effect because the real term is material and I'm not sure that's something most people understand. So when you think about the different mm. At window and control surfaces that could appear visually in an application, the Microsoft uses this term material to describe the, the look and feel of that thing. And they have different materials. Right? So acrylic I think was the first one that shipped with the original, well, back at windows 10, there's something called smoke, which is used. So when you have a, a dialogue that pops up on front of a window, and then the back of the window is kind of grayed out. That effect is called smoke, which I had never heard of. And then the more recent one, which is in windows 10 and 11 is called Micah. Micah is an opaque.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:01):
No, it's not. I'm sorry. It's, it's it's a, it's actually translucent, but it's only subtly translucent. And it has kind of a, a, like a matte look to it, I guess. Apparently people thought it was a little too subtle. So starting with windows 11 or only in windows 11, I should say developers would be able to choose between Micah, the classic Micah, if you will. And Micah alt, which is, let's throw a, a little bit more color. So it's subtly more colorful <laugh> I guess, and the color is bleeding through from whatever's behind. So maybe it's your wallpaper or whatever background color you have, or there are other windows behind there, you know, you can move it around and the colors will kind of shift, but it's, it's subtle. It's not, you know, obnoxious. And boy, we have spent more time on this than it deserves.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:50):
The only thing I will say about this is if you're a developer, well, I think the one pertinent bit of information here other than its existence is that mic alt is not only available on windows 11, meaning that if you target this in an app and you display it on windows 10, you won't see it. It's only supported by windows app S STK 1.1 and higher meaning it's not available to the universal windows platform. So this is a, what they call a win UI 3.0 feature. If you will, a UX feature universal windows platform only supports win UI 2.0 to whatever version. So this is kind of, you know, we're moving forward here. UWP obviously is is supported, but it's no longer being updated. So in meaningful ways with new features, so the new stuff we get, including this new material will only be available, not just on windows 11, but also only if you target the windows app, SDK 1.1 or higher,

Leo Laporte (00:13:44):
But does it have any, any way to call a satellite? If I get in a crash

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:48):
<Laugh> guys, I'm just gonna say it is no dynamic island. That's all I'm gonna say about it. That's

Leo Laporte (00:13:55):
Actually, I go excited when you said visual effect, it's just a different color. Am I right? Yes. Okay. Yep. Well

Paul Thurrott (00:14:02):
Color. No, it's a, it's a different level of trans

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:05):
It's a, it's a hue. Okay. You happy

Paul Thurrott (00:14:07):
Now? Well, it's, it's it's it doesn't happen. Any inherent color of its own. It it's bleeding through color in the, well, actually I guess it does. It supports lighter dark mode. So it, it would support whatever the window color is, but it also bleeds through color. So the colors you see there in that TIAL bar are from the background. I, no one

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:27):
Cares.

Leo Laporte (00:14:28):
Are they gonna fix the problem with nevermind. I don't, I don't

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:33):
Wanna, no. Don't even ask.

Leo Laporte (00:14:34):
I don't wanna become the Paul Thora of this show.

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:36):
You do not <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:14:40):
Catalog

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:40):
You so much.

Leo Laporte (00:14:41):
I did get a lot of calls on Sunday. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> for people said, windows says I have a virus. Oh, oh yeah. And of course I figured out did, went to me a little, little while to figure out, oh, that, that virus that's Chrome and it's okay. Yeah. And Microsofts

Paul Thurrott (00:14:57):
Updated. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:14:58):
It was a virus. Something that push that screwed up that up, right? Yes. And they fixed it, but boy, it caused a lot of consternation among my, yes, it did audience. Cuz they're not super sophisticated. Yeah. But you

Paul Thurrott (00:15:08):
Should talk to 'em about Micah alt. I mean, I, you know, I think that would

Leo Laporte (00:15:12):
Be interest in this, but did you see the new color? I like it. That you put it on notepad, Paul.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:17):
Well, this is, that's actually a Microsoft screenshot. I go to the trouble. I

Leo Laporte (00:15:21):
Like it. That they put it on notepad.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:23):
Yeah. It's it's

Leo Laporte (00:15:24):
Notepad, right? Isn't that?

Paul Thurrott (00:15:25):
Well, no, technically that's a custom cuz it's test. That's just a tag. Well, there's a, there's a whole thing in programming. Now, windows, you can, you can add stuff to the title bar area. So they're also demonstrating that there's a toolbar, whatever. They're calling it with a tab and buttons and things and it's in the, it's in the title bar area. This is something that's used to be super complicated and hard to do in windows, depending on what framework you were using. 

Leo Laporte (00:15:49):
That's nice.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:50):
All right. You can be at this topic to death, Mary Jo, if you want. 

Leo Laporte (00:15:53):
I can see that you're doing a good job of that.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:56):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:15:57):
Okay. Okay. So a material is a visual effect applied to a user experience. Mm-Hmm

Paul Thurrott (00:16:04):
<Affirmative>

Leo Laporte (00:16:05):
Surface that a set resembles a real life artifact in this case. Yes. What it looks like if you look at the world through Micah.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:14):
Yeah. Not

Leo Laporte (00:16:15):
Mic

Paul Thurrott (00:16:16):
That

Leo Laporte (00:16:17):
Thin

Paul Thurrott (00:16:17):
Micah starts. Yeah. If you hold him up to the light, this is what it will look

Leo Laporte (00:16:21):
Like. I know about Micah. Cuz when I was a kid, we'd go see the Pilgrim houses, you know, at whatever tur village or Plymouth. Oh

Paul Thurrott (00:16:31):
Yep. Service as

Leo Laporte (00:16:32):
Well. Yep. And in the old days, especially in stage coaches, they didn't have glass. So they put Micah. Right. That's right. Cause you could,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:39):
It was trans translucent, not transparent. Right, right. And that's what, this is a lot of people screw those terms up. But yes

Leo Laporte (00:16:48):
You could say driver <laugh> what type of time of day is it? Look through the Micah. It'll be pink if it's morning.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:57):
Yep. Here's a color card. You can hold up to the material and compare

Leo Laporte (00:17:02):
No relationship looks like it's Mica Sergeant or for Micah for that matter. No that's right. No. Or Foric acid. So what else do we have to talk

Paul Thurrott (00:17:13):
About? Well, this one's even more interesting. So <laugh>, if you've been following along kids with the changes to the accounts page and settings and windows 11, you know that Microsoft is starting to add your Microsoft account information there, including such things as your Microsoft 365 subscription. If you have it, they're gonna be adding your OneDrive subscription information. If you're paying for OneDrive storage explicitly. And now in the latest, I would assume this is the Dell build. They've added your Xbox subscription information. So if you have Xbox game pass, PC game pass, presumably Xbox game pass ultimate or Xbox live gold. Now that will appear there as well. And the, the idea here is the same thing. You've got these Microsoft subscriptions or Microsoft Microsoft services that you're paying for. And ultimately you're probably gonna have to go to the web honestly, but you can see the status of these things where you are the billing, you know, the billing process, how long it's gonna last, how much you're paying, what credit card you're using, et cetera. So it's not in windows 11 today. It will probably be in one of those moment updates that Mary Jo was mentioning that will come out over the next year.

Leo Laporte (00:18:20):
Yeah. Moments.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:24):
See exciting. You thought that wasn't gonna be exciting.

Leo Laporte (00:18:28):
You're right. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:18:32):
I hope that I've lived up to your expectations.

Leo Laporte (00:18:34):
Yes you have. Thank you so much. <Laugh> oh Lord. <Laugh> oh man. How are, how are PC sales doing these days?

Paul Thurrott (00:18:51):
They're doing great. Leo, wait, you mean PC sales? No, they're doing terrible. No. Well, so

Leo Laporte (00:18:57):
We expect, we kind of expected this, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:19:00):
There's a right. There is a good news, bad news thing. There actually PC sales are better than they were before the pandemic. Right, right. So that's good. In fact, the interesting thing about PC sales to me is we don't really have a full and accurate view of PC sales over the entire history of the PC industry. But if you look back over the past 15 years, there was a really clear up, up, up Crested fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, and it was just kind of falling. And the question was always, when is this thing gonna bottom out? Right? Yeah. A lot of people thought PCs were gonna disappear. That tablets were gonna take over of PCs that never made sense to me. I always figured there'd be some plateau that we would hit and we then we'd kind of be even, but actually as we move forward in time, what you see now is another up, up, up, thanks to the pandemic.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:41):
So we got two, three years there of improvements and then down, down, down again, and what they're saying is that they I'm sorry, IDC and Gartner in this case is that they don't expect PC sales to fall below pre pandemic levels. Again, that the, the new normal, the new plateau or whatever you wanna call, it will actually be kind of a higher point. And that, that up and down, you know, wave effect is starting to look more normal over time in a way, right? Because you know, again, we don't, we can't go back 25 years or whatever, but if we look back over the past 15 and look forward to the next two,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:15):
It's not horrible. But the change that's occurred this year is I don't remember the timeframe. Let's, let's say something somewhere around February or so. IDC came out and said, you know PC sales are gonna follow this year. And then we expect them to return to normal next year, you know, return the growth. And then Gartner came out a month or two later and said, you know we don't think PC sales are gonna do that great. This year, they're gonna fall, you know, fall for one year and then we think they're gonna be back. So the thing that's changed now is IDC has come out and said, okay, so actually PC sales are gonna fall more than we thought this year, but not double digit. It's still single digit number. And we actually think they're gonna fall next year too, but not as bad again.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:56):
So obviously when you're predicting the future, these things shift and we'll see how it goes, you know, over time. But and it's not just PC sales, I should say too. I don't care so much about tablet sales, I guess, but IDC also expects tablet sales to fall over the next two years as well. And for whatever it's worth PC sales, according to them should be about double what what the tablet sales are. So about 305 something million units is that this year. Yeah, this year and then 156 or 157 million for tablets. So we'll see what really happens. I mean, I think it was IDC who said they expected to that windows phone would overtake the iPhone by 2013, I think was the the prediction was that, does that sound accurate?

Leo Laporte (00:21:40):
Was that the, I thought it was somebody else, but yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:42):
<Laugh> I thought it was IDC, but I don't. Okay. It doesn't really matter, but whoever was, but

Leo Laporte (00:21:46):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:21:47):
You know, they're, they're predictions. They're not

Leo Laporte (00:21:49):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:49):
They're not facts.

Leo Laporte (00:21:51):
Right,

Paul Thurrott (00:21:52):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:21:53):
So right. It'll be worse. This is exciting. I can't tell you <laugh> that, that time of year,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:02):
Wait until you see the new naming system AMD's gonna use on a 22, 3 and future mobile kitchen.

Leo Laporte (00:22:07):
Oh, what are they gonna go? I'm I'm actually already confused by AMD's OMA. Yes. Oh, it gets worse. Do you think I was gonna say, do you think it's better? It's worse. It's not even

Paul Thurrott (00:22:17):
Better. I can't say okay. So better is, is a strong word. I will say the, the way they describe this was anyone and they meant like non enthusiast could look at these numbers and schemes and understand immediately what they meant. I said, okay. No. All right. That sounds good. No, no, no, no, no, no. So the issue is, first of all, AMD's doing great. So AMD, I, I don't, I didn't write this in my article. I, I wanna say something like they've sold 59% more rise processes this year than they did the previous year. Something like that, like they're going gangbusters. They are just like anyone else who has experienced this kind of success is moving into new product segments. Right? So like Qualcomm is creating chip SETSS for VR headsets. Now for wearables, for all these things that are not smartphones, right. AMD is making chip sets for different types of PCs, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:23:06):
So you have like ultra efficient PCs. You have like the, the mainstream PCs, you have high performance PCs. And then you have really high performance PCs that are aimed at creators and game, you know, gaming, PCs, that kind of thing. The problem is they have like oh God, they have so many product families. So if you're familiar with Intel, which is a little more common, you know, they have core I three core, I five I seven and I nine, although those are actually pretty rare. They AMD has Athlon silver and gold, which are kind of like their Pentium now, I guess. And then they have rise 3 57 and nine just like Intel has with the courtship sets. Right. Okay. But they also have like Zen and Zen plus architectures. Yeah. Yeah. There are literally thread ripper. Seven of them. Yep. Is seven different architectures.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:52):
Gosh. They have upper and lower models within segments. So they have like three and three plus they have one in one, you know, it's crazy. And then they have the form factor TDP things. Right. So within Intel, I I've been talking about this recently where U series is 15 wa P series is 28 wa H series is 56 wat. <Laugh> of course they havet. They have nine wat, 15 to 28 wat 15 to 28 wat ultra. They have 35 plus Watts and they have 55 plus Watts. And so they all have different brands. It's like E C U H five H X, you know, so, oh my God, you, you tack all this stuff together and you have a product, right. So, right. This is imaginary. This is a future product that doesn't exist. But the example they use is they have a rise, 5 76, 40 U. So the rise five, the five is where it sits in the segment, right? So it's a, a five series. So it's like a core I five equivalent we'll call it. <Laugh> seven is generation. They call it portfolio model year, but it's generation. So Intel is on 12th gen this year. They're about to transition to 13th gen. So the seven, the first number means it's a 20, 23 chip set. It hasn't come out yet, but they're, they're imagining it market segment six

Paul Thurrott (00:25:04):
Means it's the upper level of the fives cuz they have to split the fives into two. So there's 2, 3, 2 fives, two sevens and two nines. Well actually it doesn't matter roughly with the five, there are two fives. It's the upper level of the five. So there's Z X, five XX and the X six XX. This is an X six, six area. All. So architectures Zen four, at least that's four is Zen for zero is the lower model segment. <Laugh> lower model within the segment. If it said five, I don't know why it's zero and five, but if there was a five instead of a zero, it would be the upper model within the segment. And then U tells you where it sits in the TDP rating. So it's right in the middle. It could be a 15 to 28 wat part or what they call a premium ultra thin chip. So there you go. That's

Leo Laporte (00:25:49):
Now the hysterical thing is you would think Paul was making up something intentionally OBS I know OB and obscure, right? This is the example provided by AMD. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:58):
Yeah. And, and I read it off of a chart and if you're listening to this in your headsets, if you haven't given up on us by now, I don't know what you're doing. I, that would make no sense to anybody, but the product would be the rise 5, 7, 6, 4, 0 U. Right. You need

Leo Laporte (00:26:15):
Something on the wall to just say for this. You do. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:19):
So I, I will say, I don't understand Intel's naming conventions as deeply as this either. So I couldn't, well actually I just brings something up. So for example, like I can tell, obviously when you look at it, you have an Intel core, I five dash, you know, it's a core I five, right? So that, that helps right there. The problem is depending on where you are after that, you could, you get lost in the mix. I don't know all of the things for the 12th gen, but this particular computer is an I 7, 12 60 P. Now I know the P means the P series. It's 28 wa part very common these days now all of a sudden right in laptops. But the 1260 bit, I don't know, there are other I seven S probably in, in, not just use, but in HS, but probably within P it's possible, there are, or could be others. And then next to what you also get like a clock speed writing, right? So this is a 2.1 gigahertz part. At least there's less numbers. I mean, I know, I know looking at it. I know it's I seven, okay. Easy 12th gen got that. Yeah. P series. Good. I know it's 28 Watts, but as far as the other numbers, this is not a, this is not a great

Leo Laporte (00:27:24):
Example is because we deal with Intel more. And so we just kind of more familiar with this.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:28):
Yes. But it is. Yes. Yeah. No, that's fair. Yep. It is.

Leo Laporte (00:27:32):
This is crazy. But I mean, I, I almost feel like I should write a program to decipher these,

Paul Thurrott (00:27:37):
The funny well, yeah. And the way they describe it is like, oh no, no, this is this is gonna make decoding this easy <laugh> yeah. It's like, you need a, it's like, in my, in my living room, we have two giant poster. Well, they're actually on cloth fabric, but they're posters of all of the types of wine and all of the types of food and how they cross reference each other. Like, like, you know, this, wine's good with this food, that kind of thing. This is like that. <Laugh>, you know, it's like, I, I, okay. I wanna buy an ultra book. I don't care if it has integrated graphics, I want the best possible battery life. You know? It's like, you need a, you knowl seven for next year. Yeah. 6, 4, 0 E.

Leo Laporte (00:28:19):
And I want right. I'll tell you why this is good. You could just name it Penn or Ultium or something. Right. But in the name, everything you need to know about this chip is in the name. Admittedly, it's 76, 40 U, but this is like, it's in the name. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:28:35):
All there. BMW model number, right? You're like I have a, I have an xDrive four. I don't even know what the numbers are anymore. 4 35. I X <laugh>, you know? And it's like, okay, is it a co, is it a four

Leo Laporte (00:28:50):
Doors? If you, if you were aficianado that you would know, and right. I guess that's the, that's the, the, the merit in this is at least the name tells you what you need to know. It's not a brand. If

Paul Thurrott (00:29:01):
You are an AMD nerd, you're gonna love this. And now you and your other AMD nerd friends can have conversations that make sense to nobody. So good luck with that. The

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:10):
Idea that this is supposed to be for normal people is just,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:13):
They literally said that that this would make it easier for, I was like, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't think so. I can't.

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:20):
I feel like, I feel like most normal people are like me, when you're looking for a new laptop, you don't even go by the name of the chip, because a lot of times the name of the chip is meant to obscure what you're getting. I feel,

Leo Laporte (00:29:32):
Yeah. Normal people don't are not saying chip names or

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:34):
Anything. No,

Leo Laporte (00:29:36):
Nobody's actually, why

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:36):
Is this a penny goal thing?

Leo Laporte (00:29:38):
I, blah, blah. So even

Paul Thurrott (00:29:41):
In Intel's product line is arguably simpler. I could be wrong about that, but I, I kind of think it's simpler. At least the PCs you'd go to see it best buy what, but, and yet, like I said, on a couple shows ago, there they have, they used to have you, you go, if you go a laptop, you were getting a use series, something you're gonna get a qu five probably, or cry seven. And that was kind of the end of the conversation. It was gonna be a U series. All of a sudden with the 12th gen, I'm seeing more P series than anything. This is a thing that did not exist eight months ago or six months ago. And I'm seeing a lot of H series, which is high performance, often tied to dedicated graphics. I'm seeing way more of that this year than I saw in previous years.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:21):
So U series, which used to be the mainstream choice, the one you didn't have to think about, it was just the normal chip is actually much less common now than ever before. And P series, which didn't exist ever before is suddenly the most common thing in the world. And honestly, I guess it get, you know, better performance. Maybe this new architecture gets worse performance, you know, apples to apples. And this is why they had to do that, you know, amp up the TDP. But it also, when you do that, you get worse battery life, you know? And so there's a sacrifice there. And I, this is absolutely something that normal people don't under. This is like, I, I'm not a hard, I don't even understand it. I, I, I, normal people will. Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (00:31:00):
Notand it? Yeah, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:01):
Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:31:02):
But then for normal people, they put words on the box and that's

Paul Thurrott (00:31:07):
How that matters. Well, yeah. Right. I mean, hopefully, yeah. I mean, I don't know how PC makers communicate this, like PC or HP has like an NV line that they are targeting creators. Right. Okay. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> cool. And they have H series processors dedicated graphics are optional. All right. You know, that makes sense. But like I said, like the mainstream stuff think pads or, you know, yogas, whatever they are that LA, if you look at like a year ago, like 90% of that basically, or 85% was U series this year, it's like a jumble of choices. I've even seen PCs come with a choice of you or P series.

Leo Laporte (00:31:44):
Wow. <laugh> what you, you know, you asked me, are you, do you have a H processor, a U processor? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and I, you know, I know it's an H cuz I, you know, looked, but I don't know what that means. You know what it means? Cause it's your job, but I just bought, you knows a 12th gen. Good. And then, then I decide I be better seven. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:05):
So, well, if you're gonna render a video, if you're going to work in Photoshop, if you're, if it has dedicated graphics, you could even play games on it. Yeah. Yeah, there are, you could make these AR you know, if you were in a heavy Excel user, that would probably make a difference. Honestly. Doesn't

Leo Laporte (00:32:21):
Though. I mean, there are other things that make a difference too. Like how much Ram there is people understand

Paul Thurrott (00:32:26):
That. Oh my God. Yes. I would rather have 16 gigs Ram. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:32:28):
That makes more of a

Paul Thurrott (00:32:29):
Difference. An eight gigs on a piece of you go every day. Every day. Yep. Yep,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:35):
Yep. Hmm. Oh yeah. No, this is complicated. I feel like this shouldn't be so complicated. You know, when you buy a car, depending on like, if you want a BMW probably have like multiple engine choices, but honestly having like eight or nine menu or menu engine choices on a car is stupid. Like that would just, people would just walk away confused by that. Well, I want this, okay. I know exactly the engine I want. Oh, did you want four wheel drive? Oh no, no, no. You need to get one of the other engines. Like what? Okay. Hold on a second. And then you get into those conversations where there's these things that rely on other things in the car and that's what happens to here's what

Leo Laporte (00:33:09):
You need. And AMD apparently handed these out when they did this announcement. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:13):
That is beautiful. That is,

Leo Laporte (00:33:14):
It's a, it's a wheel and you spin the wheel,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:18):
A literal Dakota

Leo Laporte (00:33:19):
Wheel. It's a Dakota wheel. <Laugh> yep. Tell you what you're getting. <Laugh> actually, that's quite clear. Well guys,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:25):
Yeah, that is yeah, no, that is, I get used to the damn convention cuz they've mapped this out at least five years and you're like this thing scales. This is what

Leo Laporte (00:33:32):
We use it's engineers. Remember? These are engineers, right? Right. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:36):
Right. That's why that thing looks like a slide roll.

Leo Laporte (00:33:38):
<Laugh> it does. It looks like a circular slide rule. That's a, there's a reference. A lot of people won't get sorry. Old. Yeah. Circular slide rule. X one fold. I didn't you, we talked about this last week.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:57):
So I, I blurted this out. <Laugh> without thinking, but yes, last week, Zen book, as I'm sorry. Asus announced the Zen book that is a large screen device like this and you said, Hey, how come the X one fold? Isn't this big? And I was like it's gonna be, and it is now it's I'm sorry

Leo Laporte (00:34:13):
About that. <Laugh> were you in embargo? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:16):
I'm oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I

Leo Laporte (00:34:18):
Didn't realize no. It's okay. Well I had read about it somewhere. So it, it, I, I am not embargoed. There

Paul Thurrott (00:34:23):
You go. I read about it as well somewhere. And that's why I said that. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:34:26):
Yeah, yeah. It was already public. Somebody did a review of it.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:28):
Good. There

Leo Laporte (00:34:29):
You go. So you you're not in trouble.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:31):
So this gets really interest somebody else. I would, I would say. So when you think about folding displays on phones, right? There are two basic form factors is the kind of the kind of flip phone form factor, which is kind of fun. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it turns into a normal phone when it's open and then it turns into a little compact case. You could fit it in the pocket or whatever. That's cool. But to me like the, the cooler one is you're holding it and it is a phone, but then you open it up and it's like an iPad mini or a miniature tablet size. And I think like that is, that gets into the, you can replace two things with this one thing category. And I think I find that to be very interesting. So if you think back to the original ThinkPad fold or any of the few folding pieces that we've seen, they're basically th they were 13 inch designs opened, but when you had them in that clamshell mode, it was kind like an 11 inch laptops.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:18):
You would slap a keyboard down over half the screen. And it would be like a tiny little, you know, Cashio keyboard size thing. Like it wasn't full sized. And it was like, okay, like, this is cool, cuz it folds, like I get that it's attractive. But as a laptop, as a usable device, like this thing is not very practical. So last year or whatever time, sometime last year I reviewed that thing and I was like, you know, this is an interesting glimpse of the future, but this doesn't replace two devices. So this is just, it, it it's smaller in two dimensions, but it's thicker cuz it's folded in half this way. Is that more portable? Maybe, but then when you use it, it's like less, it's like using a what do you call that thing? The surface, the little surface that Mary Jo Mary Jo had one of these things.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:02):
What's it called? Go surface, go the go, right? Oh yeah. It's it's a little too small, right? Yeah. So then, then not just think better or Lenovo, but also ARS looked at this and said, okay, well what if we make this thing like 16, 17 inches, right. And that way, when you fold it in the typical clamshell, it's a laptop like a 13 inch laptop basically. And you can even snap the keyboard over the, you can snap a keyboard over the full, full screen in the bottom half that's right. Yeah. So now you're, you're using a traditional form factor in the right size when you pop that thing open, it's like this a it's you can take the keyboard off and use it like, you know, Bluetooth wireless, which is neat. It's a gigantic screen. It works portrait or landscape neat. It obviously would be awesome for movies, but if you're doing Excel or video editing or all those things we talked about earlier, the creative tasks, you have this giant canvas, like actually this is, oh, this is really cool. Now I guess it doesn't technically replace two devices, but it still, well, I guess you could say it replaces an external display, you know, maybe right. Use it like a laptop, right. The go, but,

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:04):
But windows doesn't optimize for, for this, right? Like isn't that always the problem with these kind of devices like that. You know, like you set, you set it up in a certain like posture, but it doesn't really automatically recognize that you're using it in a different

Paul Thurrott (00:37:19):
Way. Should I mean, it should. It should. So yeah, because that's,

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:23):
They Lenovo optimize it cuz windows itself, I don't think is optimized for that. Right?

Paul Thurrott (00:37:28):
No, it does. No windows has its own stuff, but, but you're right. That Lenovo also adds their own utilities. Right. So if you, if you think about this giant screen, you popped it open. It's not folded anymore. Right. If you rotate it in space and you're like, I wanna use this portrait, you rotate it. I wanna use it landscape. It will adjust. Right. It does that. Yeah. It windows 11. Does this need effect when you take the keyboard off of that screen, there's an animation where the screen kind of pops in and pops out. Yep. And then it adjusts to what the new thing is. Right. So now it's treating instead of the little half a screen, you're getting the big full screen. Yeah. Even if it's folded or even if it's yeah. Folded, right. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so it, it, this is interesting. I mean, I, I think the, the, the killer here is gonna be the price.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:08):
These things are like 2,500 bucks to start, but it's first gen at this size. And I think the folding screen stuff is getting into the proven stage. I think prices are gonna come down. I think you're gonna see them move this type of thing to lower end product lines as well over time. So this is the beginning, but I, I mean, I wouldn't buy one. I wouldn't spend $3,000 in one of these things right now, but I, I gotta say 55 years old, I look at this bigger screen and I'm like, I could carry this around. Like it's the 13 inch laptop, slightly heavy 13 inch laptop, but okay. And then I could pop it out and have a 16 inch or 17 inch display. Yeah. That's, that's actually really interesting to me,

Paul Thurrott (00:38:51):
You know, and it's a full computer. It's not like low end parts and no Ram. And you know, this thing, 32 gigs of storage, terabyte of, sorry, 32 gigs of Ram terabyte of storage, three USB sea Thunderbolt, four ports. Two of those are Thunderbolt ones, just USB, you know, Doby, Atmos speakers. I mean, just for watching movies in a hotel room, something I will probably never do again in my life. <Laugh> would be, it would. Why not? Well, for like a, like a but, well, I mean, for like, I don't know if I'm ever gonna travel for work again. We'll see how life goes, but

Leo Laporte (00:39:22):
It's just, but you could watch movies another place anyway. Yeah. I like this. I, I thought this I do too. What about the crease? So this, this was shown ATFA and everybody knew about it last week. Okay. But you have one, is that what

Paul Thurrott (00:39:37):
It is? Well, no, I had the previous gen one. So the previous gen one was a 13. I think it was 13. I'd have to look it up. I think it was 13, three, so folded. It was kind of like an 11 inch thing. So I was never gonna use the thing folded, but you could open it up. There's a kickstand, the keyboard comes off and you could use it externally. You could use any B, but

Leo Laporte (00:39:53):
This you would use folded and unfolded

Paul Thurrott (00:39:56):
Probably right. Either one would be fine cuz that keyboard's full size. It's a track point. It's wireless.

Leo Laporte (00:40:00):
I'm very, very tempted by this. What about the crease though? Is it a,

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:04):
I know that's pretty, it's, that's something I'm trying to get at, you

Leo Laporte (00:40:06):
Know?

Paul Thurrott (00:40:07):
Yeah. Yeah. So I haven't seen it now for a few months. I mean, and of course I had the first gen version, but honestly I was surprised by how good that was. I didn't have it over long period of time. I can't speak to its reliability over, you know, months or years obviously. But the crease thing was not an issue. It's not like it bunched up or mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, had a visible line or anything like that. It was

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:24):
It's it's not the problem you gonna have with the surface Neo, which was two screens and a hinge

Leo Laporte (00:40:29):
In the middle with the big BES in between. Yeah, this is so price is the disadvantage. It's 2,500 bucks.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:36):
Well, yeah. So have

Leo Laporte (00:40:38):
You have to buy the key keyboard?

Paul Thurrott (00:40:39):
It's an X one, right? So if you're you're familiar, we just talked about BMW AMD and Intel modeling. So if you're familiar with XPA expat, think pad, you know, that X one is the high end, right. And usually it's carbon, which is the laptop or yoga, which is the you know, the convertible and then no, they have nano. And now this is a fourth model in the X, one family fold for, you know, the folding designs. And I, you know, they're not saying this yet, it's early days, but you know, if you think about Samsung and what they're doing with folding phones, they're basically saying, Hey guys, these are the future. This, these things will replace node in the S series over time. These things will replace all phones over time. I would be surprised if Lenovo and other PC makers didn't start talking like that for laptops, because it's, again, not, it's not two in one, but it, it it's, it's sort of two in one, like you have a normal laptop or you have this giant screen. And you know, for like, if Mary Jo and I were at a, like a work event, we're sitting in the audience, you know, we can use it like a laptop, but if we go to the press room, you could pop that thing open. And now you have this expansive display. And I, that is very interesting to me.

Mary Jo Foley (00:41:45):
I guess I worry about weight and battery life. Those are the two things I would worry about. <Laugh> yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:51):
No, you should. And you should. Right. So yeah. I, I can't speak to that stuff. I mean, hopefully I assume I'll get one of these for review at some point. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:41:58):
Very interested. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:59):
Yeah. Very inter I am too. Yep. Yep. Yeah. The other one was just a few too many compromises. I'd have to go look at my review. I haven't done that, but yeah. Few too many compromises and this one it's like, okay, okay. Okay. <laugh> you know, mm-hmm <affirmative> like, that looks pretty

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:14):
Good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:42:18):
Okay. Yeah. I'm I didn't know that it was embargoed. I'm sorry if I got you in trouble. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:42:25):
No, no, I did. No, no, no one got in trouble. I all, I, I, if you went back and listened, you were

Leo Laporte (00:42:28):
Funny what? I, no, you acted funny about it. I think

Paul Thurrott (00:42:31):
I said something like, I suspect, I think I said like Lenovo has one coming too. And that I was like, why

Leo Laporte (00:42:38):
I had seen it. So I knew that it wasn't. Yeah. Yeah. I don't. This is why I don't do embargo's or NDA. So that way when I open my mouth,

Paul Thurrott (00:42:48):
Blurting it out as the reason I will no longer be doing this, but

Leo Laporte (00:42:52):
No, but you can't blame. No, because I have no NDA with them. So

Paul Thurrott (00:42:56):
I'm yeah. You know, like a prolific leaker, Paul throwout, once you get in the blurted out, like I, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:43:02):
I swear I saw a whole article about it with pictures and everything. I'm sure you're right. I'm sure you I'm counting on it, Leo. Yeah, no, that's true. <Laugh> and isn't it true though. If you have an NDA that once somebody else leaks it and you could have learned it legitimately from another source, you're no longer the

Paul Thurrott (00:43:17):
Gray area. We usually go back to the company and say, Hey, really?

Leo Laporte (00:43:21):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:43:21):
Publication leaked it. And sometimes we'll say we were asking to stick to this agreement because it, the leak that might have come up might not be the full thing. And yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:43:31):
It's, mm-hmm,

Paul Thurrott (00:43:32):
<Affirmative>, you know, they, they still try to have surprises or

Leo Laporte (00:43:36):
Whatever. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:43:36):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:37):
You try to do the right thing. Right. I mean, basically,

Mary Jo Foley (00:43:39):
Right. No, sometimes we

Paul Thurrott (00:43:40):
Can't even on a podcast.

Mary Jo Foley (00:43:42):
No. Like sometimes we can't even say we're under NDA. Right. Like I think, oh,

Leo Laporte (00:43:45):
A

Mary Jo Foley (00:43:46):
Device we had and we, and Microsoft was like, you cannot tell people, you have this, like, right. You can't even hint that you have it.

Leo Laporte (00:43:52):
I think more often the case than not.

Mary Jo Foley (00:43:54):
Yeah. But we like when, when you'd say to us, so are they gonna announce this next week? Like, it's that like, some people are saying that we couldn't even like answer because we're like maybe knew, right. <Laugh> right. It's gets a little weird. Yeah. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:44:11):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. 

Paul Thurrott (00:44:17):
I, oh, and speaking of complicated version numbers.

Leo Laporte (00:44:20):
Oh, <laugh>, we've been having fun with this one. USB four version two

Paul Thurrott (00:44:28):
Person, 2.0 0.0 point

Leo Laporte (00:44:29):
In there is that 4.2 point. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:32):
I think <laugh>, I think that 2.0 might be important because this is actually pretty big jump. So if you're familiar with you know, Thunderbolt three to Thunderbolt four and USB four, both of which are I gotta be careful like 40, 40 gigabit per second data transfer, right? Like Thunderbolt three was 20. There are various versions of USB three something that are five, 10 or 20, right? Yeah. USB four version two, which is not Thunderbolt five, by the way, <laugh> is going to be 80 gigabits per second of data transfer using a USBC connector. The interesting thing here, other than the stupidity of the names is that it will actually be able to achieve those speeds with previous generation cable. So if you have a USB four compatible cable, it will Del apparently deliver 80 gigabits. If you have a USB four version, 2.0, port on a computer.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:29):
So the name is terrible. I USB five too, too simple. <Laugh> you know, why, why can't, why can't these numbers just be big? We're also getting to the point we were at with us B a where we have multiple speeds and capabilities now that are possible through this port, the USBC port. If you think back in the day, they used to remember certain PC makers would color the port to indicate what it was like. I think Lenovo used yellow USB ports for USB two. Maybe when it was brand new or, or blue, I think was one of the colors. I, we, I just described a PC. Yeah, actually it was the fold. So here's a, the fold we'll come with three USBC ports. Two will be Thunderbolt. Three, one will be USB 3.2 gen two like what <laugh>, what is going on? Why can't they all be the same? There are reasons, but like that stuff is kind of weird. And so it will, that will always be weird because now with USBC, you could have, let me see if I'm counting is right. 3, 4, 5, and soon six different things. That, that could be something like that. It's complicated. So you see, and you thought AMD was dumb, but see, AMD's just fitting

Leo Laporte (00:46:45):
Right in

Paul Thurrott (00:46:45):
There. <Laugh> they're right. This landing, right where everyone else

Leo Laporte (00:46:47):
Is, you, the USB group says, don't worry. It'll all be obvious because they'll be icons on your laptops and your cables that will tell you what's what, yeah. Just like it's been all along.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:00):
Yeah. So let me tell you how that works. Sometime between the age of 40 and 50, you, you lose the ability to see those things. <Laugh> they,

Leo Laporte (00:47:07):
They're not there, Paul. You, you're not, it's not, you, they're not there.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:12):
So once you make something like a, like a, a light gray, one point font on a dark gray computer,

Leo Laporte (00:47:18):
You

Paul Thurrott (00:47:18):
Can't say it heads up, you can't see it.

Leo Laporte (00:47:21):
You can't see it. I'm just looking. So

Paul Thurrott (00:47:23):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:47:23):
This, this Dell has no indications at all. What that type C connector is. You have to know.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:29):
I don't, God forbid I

Leo Laporte (00:47:30):
Move this thing around. And the cables,

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:31):
Remember Microsoft did the accessibility kit where you could color code. Right. Which thing went into which port, right? I'm like, that makes a lot of sense.

Leo Laporte (00:47:39):
Yeah. But they don't. Nobody's stupid. Nobody

Paul Thurrott (00:47:42):
Does it look, it's, it's probably not a, a big deal for most people, but you could run into a deal where you plug in a, even a phone and it won't charge at full speed on one port, but it will on the other or something

Leo Laporte (00:47:54):
Like that. Trust me. It is a big deal. For most people. People are extremely confused because some cables work some don't right. Some ports do things that others don't, it's extremely, extremely

Paul Thurrott (00:48:06):
Confusing. It's I, I do this almost every single day. I'll plug something into something and I just wait and see what happens. Yeah. <Laugh> you know, is it

Leo Laporte (00:48:14):
Gonna work? I, no one knows. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:16):
Mystery. This will be fun. Could

Leo Laporte (00:48:17):
Be maybe it'll work.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:19):
Maybe not. Something's interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:48:20):
Yeah. It's it's a wonderful world. I think I have a diagram here that might,

Paul Thurrott (00:48:29):
This is what, you know, this is only a small chunk of why the tech industry is ridiculous and needs to be hemmed in. Yeah. But I remember someone making an argument about a smart TV and how great it was. Like, you could have a computer in your TV, you know, have you ever used a computer? Hey, and by the way, now that we all have computers in our TVs, does anyone remember when TVs used to have an on off button and you turned it on and it just came on. Now these things booed up. It's like, there's a bios thing that happens. The screen resolution changes. This menu comes on. It does all this stuff. It's just a display. You know, we're letting we let the idiots win the war. Like, what are we doing?

Leo Laporte (00:49:07):
Here you go. Here's there it is. Here's this little simplified. If they only put these logos on you'd know, or you just look for the lightning or here's from ADA fruit, here's a description of everything you need to know about USB <laugh>. This is terrific. See, and this doesn't include USB four type two. Right? So throw that out, start all over. It's all, it's a new world. Thi

Paul Thurrott (00:49:37):
This, this turns into a problem for nobody. Well, for normal people, it's probably not a problem, but if you're a power, usually, you know, you, you buy some computer that has Thunderbolt four port. You're like, well, I'd like to drive two 4k displays, a 60 Hertz. Yeah. Have fun with that. It it's supported <laugh>, you know, but have fun doing that, you know? And there's ways obviously hit a

Leo Laporte (00:50:00):
Dock. I torn my hair out. Yeah. With, I mean, we had a Dell display that was looked like it was a type C Thunderbolt, but it was a USB display, us SBC display. So I had to find that particular kind of cable, which is unusual. Sure. And I had, you know, I mean, normal people come up against this all the time. Nothing works actually.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:23):
So I'm using a, I'm using a 4k USBC webcam that I just got from HP. I have connected it to a HP conferencing monitor, which I love it basically has a built in USB hub of some kind. So there's two USB airports on the side. There's two up in the back. There's other ports, you know how hard it is to get up and you can't see what's going on up there. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> my first, the first thing I tried to do is say, well, if I wanna get 4k on this thing, I wonder if I have to use a certain speed USB port. I do <laugh>. And if you don't, you'll get that thing where it says USB device not recognized every once in a while, which is exactly what I want with a device I use every single day. So then I had to go to the documentation for this monitor to figure out which of those port are, if any, that speed and I, that, that user guide does not have that information. So I did that thing I described earlier because I literally do this all the time. I'm just like plugging and see what happens.

Leo Laporte (00:51:17):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>,

Paul Thurrott (00:51:17):
You know, and it's just, well, first find the, find the plug in the dark. That's like, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you know, angle, <laugh> like this, trying to get under the thing that I, you know, this it's, this is what we've done to ourselves in our

Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
Business. <Laugh> I think it's a way of the world, just to look at the variety of mask, wearing choices. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:51:37):
You know what we're wearing this we're ed, there's gonna be an insurrection. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna keep you guys busy.

Leo Laporte (00:51:42):
Elon Musk told his lawyer hold off on the TWiTtter thing. I wanna see if there's gonna be a world Wari. Putin's given a speech tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. We live in a here. This is a sign on the MTA in Boston. This is an actual sign masks are encouraged. Subway way too optional. It says it's on the it's on the New York subway. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:52:02):
That's that's

Leo Laporte (00:52:02):
Actually have the same thing. How do we,

Paul Thurrott (00:52:04):
That that is,

Leo Laporte (00:52:05):
Yes, you do you cuz it's only over his nose. Not his mouth. Yes. Let's respect each other's choices. This is, oh, ours is like, this is how not to do. Yeah, no, but no. And in Boston mask or encourage, but optional and you know what, respect everybody. Else's weird mask choices.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:23):
You know? I don't think anyone is respecting anyone else's choice. I think what's happened is we've just given up. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:28):
That's my opinion.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:30):
I used to hate you for not wearing a mask. No, I'm just gonna take a nap. You're tiring me. I'm exhausted. I just, I can't get into it. I just don't even

Leo Laporte (00:52:37):
Care. I was noting at the apple event which was held indoors for the first time in two and a half years. Very few masks and no masks on any of the apple executives. None, zero.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:47):
So actually, did you notice this? I have a little theory about this apple event. If you look back at the last whatever number of events that they did during the pandemic, there were all these like whiz bang, like zooming through space, and now we're gonna go down floors and B blah, blah, blah, blah. They did like these really quick, quick transitions. They were still all around the campus. Yeah. And all around the planet actually.

Leo Laporte (00:53:07):
And was one on a rock. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:09):
But they got rid of those quick, those big transitions. And I'm thinking they're starting to dumb these things down. So because they're gonna be back on a stage someday. Oh. And I think they, they went so high

Leo Laporte (00:53:19):
Tech work, you back to the the,

Paul Thurrott (00:53:21):
The presentation quality was so high. <Laugh> I think they, I, I don't know how you go back to a guy on a stage without it being

Leo Laporte (00:53:28):
Weird. I think maybe you don't honestly, I think, I think maybe this is, this is it for, I think,

Paul Thurrott (00:53:34):
But they really, they, they tone, they tone that down dramatically.

Leo Laporte (00:53:37):
Like yeah, no, you're right. Yeah. You're reading the tea leaves. He

Paul Thurrott (00:53:42):
Is. I mean, listen, I like a, like a slow motion. Craig figure federate as much as anybody whatever's name is, but

Leo Laporte (00:53:47):
Oh yeah, they didn't do that.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:48):
Did they? The NIC man thing.

Leo Laporte (00:53:53):
This one was, you know what that was for the developer conference and their geeks and they like those kind of jokes. This was think also a little more buttoned down because it was for the general public. Maybe, maybe that's the other reason. All right. Okay. Fair enough. Hey, I want to take a little break and talk to you about a honey pot. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:54:11):
Not a literal honey pot. I,

Leo Laporte (00:54:12):
It is well, there's no honey in this honey pot. Well, unless you're a bad guy, in which case you may go, Hey, there's something good in there. This is a Canary Canary from thinks, this is our sponsor for this segment. This is a little appliance. We just, you know, it's plugged into the wall for power and into our ethernet. And it shows up on our network, not as a Canary, it shows up as a, in this case, I've configured it to be a NA, but it could be anything you want. It could be a router. It could be a switch. It could be a scattered device, SCADA device. It could be a Linux box. It could be a windows server. You could have all the ports turned on like a Christmas tree. You could have just select ports. Th these are identical. This one's set up to look like a Sonology nest.

Leo Laporte (00:54:55):
And it's the Mac address for Sonology. It's got the DSM login to the real thing. Attackers don't look at this and go, oh, stay away. No, they go, Hey, there might be something on there. The other thing you can do with this, this is the thinks to Canary is create Canary tokens, little trip wires. You spread around your network, files, PDFs, stocks, Excel, files. That look again, that look valuable. Like I have some Excel files on our network. I won't tell you where that say things like payroll, information, employees, that kind of thing. A hacker sees that they cannot resist. They're gonna open it, but here's the beauty. The minute they do, you get an alert with all the details. This is a big problem. Now is is a comp you know, breaches her every day. There's another breach. And often what happens is, oh, we were breached six months ago.

Leo Laporte (00:55:48):
We didn't know about it. We do now. Oops, sorry. On average, it takes a company 191 days, 191 days to realize there's been a data breach. That's why you put these all over your network. This is defense in depth. The attackers are sneaky. They're prowling around. Why do they live on the network so long? They wanna look for everywhere. You do your backups. They wanna exfiltrate any information they can. When they broke into Sony pictures, entertainment, they got all sorts of information. And then they triggered the ransomware, right? This is the new way of being they'll look at active directory and see what file servers or file shares. There are, this Canary can be on your active directory. They'll look for documents. They'll try to fault passwords against network devices and web services. They'll scan for open services on the network. They will find your canaries.

Leo Laporte (00:56:38):
And then when they attack, when they investigate, they give themselves away. That's beauty. The Canary tokens work the same way. They try to open the file. You get an alert. And by the way, an alert any way you like it, no false alarms, just the alerts that matter via email or text message you get with Canary, you get a console. They show up there. If you want, you can use slack. They support web hooks. So you can use a whole bunch of different stuff. They support syslog. A lot of people like that. There's an API. You could write your own, roll, your own data. Breaches happen. You know, they're gonna happen. You've got the perimeter defense, but you also need this defense in depth, a, a honeypot on your network. The thanks Canary built by people who have trained companies, militaries, and governments about how to break into networks.

Leo Laporte (00:57:28):
They know they took that knowledge to build the Canary. They're deployed all over the world. One of the best tools against data breaches. If you go to canary.tools/love, you can see all the love, many CSOs, CIOs, it professionals. Who've given the Canary over the years on TWiTtter, lots of positive tweets. You can also go to canary.tools/TWiTtter and get some, I'll give you an idea on the pricing. If you let's say you wanted five, you know, some banks might have hundreds casino, operations, places where you've got lots of places to protect small business. Like ours might have four or five in the network for 5 7500 bucks a year. You get the five canaries, anything goes wrong. Somebody sits on 'em, whatever they replace. 'em Immediately, you get your own hosted console. You get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance for the whole year.

Leo Laporte (00:58:20):
And by the way, if you use the code TWiT in the, how did you hear about us box? You'll get 10% off that price and you'll get it forever for as long as you use canaries. And you will always want to have Canary in your network. I'm happy to have this, that you don't even notice it. Truth is as long as nobody's roaming my network, I'm not gonna get any alerts. So it's nice and quiet. We know you're gonna love it, but if you're not happy for any reason, you can always return your canaries. They have a two month money back guarantee for a full refund. So you got two whole months to try this Canary, C a N a R Y canary.tools/TWiTt. The offer code TWiT for 10% off for life. Just put that in the, how did you hear about us box? Really love this canary.tools/TWiT. Every network should have a few canaries. Don't forget the offer code TWiT so that they know you heard it here on windows weekly on we go with the show. Let me see. What's what do you want, want to talk about next, I took us kind of far afield with that mask thing. <Laugh> how about hollow lens?

Paul Thurrott (00:59:28):
Speaking of things that cover your face.

Leo Laporte (00:59:30):
Yes. Yeah. Last we heard the army had what? A hundred thousand unit order. Then they, then they expressed some dissatisfaction

Paul Thurrott (00:59:40):
Five, 5,000,

Leo Laporte (00:59:42):
5,005,000. Okay. But it was a billion, monthly billion dollar order, right? Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:59:45):
Issue. They originally did 120,000 headset order.

Leo Laporte (00:59:49):
Yeah. It was huge. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I thought. Yeah. Billions, billions of dollars now when 2 billion.

Mary Jo Foley (00:59:55):
Wow.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:56):
22. So, okay. That's over. That's the over

Leo Laporte (00:59:58):
Years. Over. Over 10 years. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:00):
Right, right.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:01):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:03):
So yeah, the last we heard in the fall was the army. Wasn't too happy about the status of these IVAs headsets, which are based on HoloLens. These are for combat they're pushing back.

Leo Laporte (01:00:14):
Right. These are like,

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:15):
Yeah. They're for yeah. Training combat they're. 

Leo Laporte (01:00:20):
I saw a

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:20):
Picture. It basically meant for

Leo Laporte (01:00:21):
A personal of a training, this having to wear one of these <laugh> it doesn't look comfortable, but I guess they wear night vision goggles too, right? Yeah. This is a heads up display to give you a situational awareness. Right, right. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:36):
I'd like to see, I'd like to see a demo what this experience is like, because

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:40):
Me

Paul Thurrott (01:00:40):
Too, these are not off the shelf. Haul lens. 

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:43):
No

Paul Thurrott (01:00:43):
Headsets. Right. They're they're customized.

Leo Laporte (01:00:45):
You can see his eyes through the military, you know, the, I guess they would, for him, it's like he's wearing sunglasses with a heads up display. Right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. Something like that.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:53):
Yeah. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:55):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:55):
It looks pretty big.

Leo Laporte (01:00:56):
It looks like he's got a connect straps to his forehead. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:00:59):
Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:02):
Yeah. I dunno. So we'll see. I think this is just okay. The army didn't hate it. And they're taking it taking shipment of 5,000 of them. And then they'll get back to us and tell us what they think in a formal way about the platform. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:01:16):
Like I said, though, so last year the conversation was, this is not meeting our needs. And I, I sort of wondered if this wasn't falling apart, but they just are, they're about to receive their first batch of these. So, and, and the army has cleared it. 

Leo Laporte (01:01:32):
But there is an ad. I think, I remember from last time there's an advocate inside the army. Who's all in on this and he's pushing it. Right,

Paul Thurrott (01:01:42):
Right. But it's based on field testing and supposedly

Leo Laporte (01:01:46):
Hated

Paul Thurrott (01:01:47):
Are positive so well that's right. That's that was the story last year. But originally, yeah, this has been a, like, this has been cleared because of positive results from field testing, supposedly. So yeah. I dunno. We'll see. Maybe this will work out. All right.

Leo Laporte (01:02:01):
We'll see is right. I still I'm. <Laugh> I feel like there might be a little corruption or something that the

Paul Thurrott (01:02:07):
Cheapest statement,

Leo Laporte (01:02:08):
There's a guy in there. It was cleared by the assistant secretary for acquisition Douglas, Bush. Right. I've cleared it for

Paul Thurrott (01:02:16):
Delivery. Douglas, C gates, no relation. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:02:20):
I just, I don't know. I, I, I just hate to have to wear something around somebody's shooting at you and you gotta wear this thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:30):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:02:32):
I'm sure they wouldn't. They won't do it if it's not a useful tool, let's put it that way.

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:38):
Hopefully not. I

Leo Laporte (01:02:39):
Hope not. Microsoft 365. What's the latest

Paul Thurrott (01:02:45):
Mary Jo. I cannot believe you have not written a story about the exciting new team's rooms news.

Leo Laporte (01:02:50):
<Laugh> no,

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:51):
I've been remiss. No. Someone else on ziti net wrote it. Actually. I think <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:02:55):
So I texted, I texted Mary Jo last night and I said, is this new? And then five seconds went by and I wrote it back and I said, I know how Google works. I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:03:05):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:03:06):
Like, I, I, for some reason I naturally thought trouble to, she says,

Leo Laporte (01:03:11):
She'll know this. Yeah. She's married. Joel, Google. And

Paul Thurrott (01:03:13):
I was like, who am I? Don't like, what? Seriously? You must see my text and be like, seriously, dude, you like, <laugh> like, anyway, but I had

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:20):
Do that. I'm not gonna answer him right away. Cause I know he's

Paul Thurrott (01:03:23):
Just give, give it a second, give it a second. You can watch the, the Dawn people

Leo Laporte (01:03:26):
Do that on TWiTtter all the time. I'm too lazy to Google this. What do you think? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:30):
Yeah. And it's like, you send him a, let me Google it for you. URL. Yeah, because I have heard of teams rooms, obviously. Yes. But I wasn't sure if you know, the pros skew, I guess we'll call it was a thing, but that actually is new. So yeah, I guess what, what has happened and may you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe what's happened here is they've decided to go with basic and pros skews. The basic skews are free. They're for small businesses, you can acquire up to 25 licenses. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and then the paid skew, the pro they're expensive. I think they're 40 bucks a pop per

Leo Laporte (01:04:03):
Month. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:04:03):
They're per user

Paul Thurrott (01:04:05):
<Laugh>. And so teams rooms, as I understand it is a, is a, we're gonna call it a holistic ecosystem of software services and hardware. Some of which come from third parties that are certified for this. And the idea is instead of going to a, a special meeting room, that's set up with a surface hub display and is designed for this kind of thing. You can turn any meeting space into a hybrid meeting space that involves people who are there physically and people are connecting remotely. And they're, you know, as Microsoft does with teams, they try to make it as good as possible, no matter how you're connecting. Yeah. And the way you would do that, I think typically, and this is the thing I'm a hundred percent not sure of is you would have some device that's designed for this, like a portable teams room mm-hmm <affirmative> thing that you could bring to any meeting room or whatever, and then turn

Mary Jo Foley (01:04:52):
It into yeah. Like a conferencing system. Yeah, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:04:55):
Yeah, yeah. But it's not locked to that room. Like you could actually carry it around if you want

Mary Jo Foley (01:04:58):
To. Right. And all the, and they have a lot of partners that make teams rooms, devices. That name is so terrible. Teams, rooms, both things ending with an S yeah. So that the basic and pro are the new names replacing what used to be standard and premium. Right. So they had these two skews before. And I, I, I was reading a, write a very good writeup about this on cloudy with a chance of licensing.com a site from that is

Paul Thurrott (01:05:28):
A, that is

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:29):
Awesome. A site about licensing by my friend, rich Gibbons, a

Paul Thurrott (01:05:33):
Hundred percent chance of licensing by the way.

Leo Laporte (01:05:35):
Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:35):
<Laugh> and he's got a nice little checklist there showing what you get with the basic versus the pro. And you're most people are gonna have to get the pro because you can't use teams phones with, with the basic, right.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:49):
The number one bit of feedback I've received. And I don't have a lot of enterprise guys on my site, as you might imagine, but there are guys who do this stuff for a living and they, what they've been saying is stuff that used to be free has now shifted over the paid half of the, the wall.

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:02):
Yes. Yep. And so, so they're gonna make a lot of money, right? Because people are gonna be like, oh, I can't, I can't use this basic skew. I have to use the paid skew now. And before you can do this more cheaply, and now you're gonna have to go with 40 bucks a month. So it's not, it's definitely not something for everyone, not even many small businesses, I feel like will go for this. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> we'll see. But

Paul Thurrott (01:06:23):
This is so in keeping with that website name, which is beautiful by the way this is what I've been calling a licensable moment. And I've been talking about this in the, not that the pandemic's over, obviously, but in the wake of the pandemic, for lack of a better term, Microsoft has taken things that were kind of free during that time period. Right. And is now breaking them down into licensable moments, like things that can be licensed as paid services. And this is, this has become one, right?

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:54):
Yep. Great.

Leo Laporte (01:06:55):
It's a licensable moment.

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:58):
<Laugh> like a teachable moment. Yeah. Except with licensing. Yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (01:07:01):
Right. That's exactly right. <Laugh> Microsoft is also killing its scheduler meeting coordination service.

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:10):
Yeah. Could perhaps, I mean, as, alright, in some ways I'm surprised about this, but some I'm not scheduler started out as something that a lot of people really loved call calendar.help. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> people were like, wow, this is really cool. Like, instead of going back and forth over email with somebody trying to figure out a meeting time that we could both make, you had kept, you could have had Cortana be your front end. And, and by

Paul Thurrott (01:07:33):
The way, Cortana is the important bit of this because cor

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:36):
Yes, it is. Cortana

Paul Thurrott (01:07:37):
Was still an ongoing concern at the time. It was, it was a long time ago. I was actually, she

Leo Laporte (01:07:42):
Actually say hi, Mary Joe wants to make an appointment. Do you have any openings?

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:46):
Not say it, not say it, but do it, do it by text. You would, she acted like a personal assistant that would say that's right. Okay. Leo has these hours open, you have these hours open. What about this for both of you? Really? So we

Leo Laporte (01:07:58):
Do this with Calendarly and we embed links. Yeah. This is very popular. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:02):
And Microsoft product, you tell how

Paul Thurrott (01:08:04):
My company

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:04):
Does this product that does this. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:08:06):
Sorry to turn my company does this poorly. We had, we have to schedule something for a webinar and we get emails from some people. Some people only email some of us, us that we get together in teams and we discuss it. And then we discuss how we're gonna reply. And then we go to email and we reply to the entire group to make sure everyone gets it. And then one of the people will say, I can't make it on that date. And we just do the whole thing again. And we're like, we literally just went through this. Right. This kind of a service would be very valuable. And it's weird to me that they're getting, they're not making this a permanent Microsoft 365 thing.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:37):
So what they say, this is how they tell, told people about this. They put a little item in the message center in Microsoft 365 and it says, mm-hmm <affirmative> Hey, by the way, we're killing this in SEP on September 1st, 20, 23. That's the only place they have said this. Okay. Scheduler costs $10 per user, per month. So it's, it's expensive. Right. But a lot of people said I was willing to pay for it. Right. Because

Paul Thurrott (01:09:01):
Yeah, this should just be built in. Right? Yeah. I mean, so back back before dealing with people outside of a company was a concern, which was never. But if you just pretend for a little bit that all we care about is people inside of a company. Obviously there are features inside of outlook that will show you a shared, you know, a shared calendar view to help you pick a time. Like that's nice. But the trick is always, you have to make meetings with people in the world. And yeah, this is where things get tricky because then you get these permissions issues. Everyone uses different mm-hmm <affirmative> calendar solutions, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But this is useful. Like this is,

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:34):
It

Paul Thurrott (01:09:34):
Is necessary. I would even say, right.

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:37):
So two things about this. There is a feature in outlook called find time, like you can read about this, find time.microsoft.com it's in outlook. It's much more manual than the scheduler service was. Right. But it does basically the same thing. Also in the items saying they're killing the scheduler service. Microsoft said, by the way, we're thinking about taking some of the features that are in this and folding 'em into other products that we have. So you could see them folding that service pieces of it anyways into things like bookings, that bookings feature functionality that they have for Microsoft 365, or you could see them putting it right in calendar, right. In the calendar service. So yeah, we'll, we'll see what they do with it. I, but I wonder <laugh> that's

Paul Thurrott (01:10:23):
Sorry, go ahead. Good.

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:23):
Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I feel like right now there, like I've said this on the show recently, when we were talking about ki Kaizala being eliminated, also the group messaging service, there's somebody right now going through Microsoft products going yes. How many people use this?

Paul Thurrott (01:10:38):
Actually, that's a really good example. Not that many

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:40):
Because right. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:10:41):
So I was literally, the thing I was wondering was whether the expense of this was tied to the back end on Azure or whatever it was. And literally because so few people are using it, which is weird to me cuz you think this would be really useful. Well, I guess it's cuz you have to pay for it. That this thing didn't justify its existence.

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:58):
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like though they're bell tightening across Microsoft, they're looking at products like we have 5 million different things in Microsoft, 365. Could we do what? 4 million instead of 5 million. Right. And maybe we get rid of some of the services people aren't using and we're gonna save money and we're gonna reassign the people or fire them who have been working on these products. <Laugh> right, right, right. So yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:20):
Hmm. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:21):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:22):
I think this is a good idea. I mean, I just, it should just be part of

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:26):
Outlook, some other stuff, right. It should be in outlook or, and, or other Microsoft services that are in Microsoft 365. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:11:35):
Yeah. Right. Hmm. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:39):
Hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:11:40):
Yeah. Yeah. And I'll put in a plug for Calendly. 

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:43):
Yeah. Calendly works really well. It works really well. I use that a lot. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:47):
Yeah. And it has a, I think we can still, we still using in the free tier cuz it does enough anyway. But yeah, your method sounds horrible, Paul, I think you really need to look at it. So something better than that.

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:00):
It might be time for some automation. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:02):
Well, but as you guys sort of pointed out on the side a little bit, I mean those automation tools cost something. Right. Right. I mean they're

Leo Laporte (01:12:10):
Not, well, ly is free. I can't remember for a certain number. Yeah. There's a free tier. Yeah. CA look at that. Yeah. C a L E N D.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:18):
I just, the amount of the amount of time we spent going back and forth to try to figure out a time is unbelievable. And eventually you just have a, a, a conversation internally where you're like, look, whatever they say, can we just do this? Like we just, we gotta get this done. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And for one, you know, for some of the guys that live in Europe and it's like, well, this is 10 o'clock at night for me. It's like, yep. Right. We hear you. But

Leo Laporte (01:12:37):
Yeah. You know, that might be, yeah. That Calendly does not change that by the way, there still will be time zone issues. I'm sure, sure. I really want to get another ad in here. So if you don't mind, I will. Cause I want to go see Motley crew. Actually, this is appropriate because it's about teams. If you use teams, it's very rare that any company or person uses just one meeting solution, right. We use zoom. We're using zoom right now. We use Google meet. Occasionally I have to use teams. The problem is the UIs are different in all of them. Invariably, when I joined the Google meets, I hang up the very first thing I do because the hang up button is the same place as the unmute mic button on zoom and it's red. So I go, oh I need unmute my oh no, I guess not.

Leo Laporte (01:13:33):
And they're used to that. Now when I joined the meetings at company meetings, the li will show up briefly, go lean over to push a button and then disappear. <Laugh> there is a better way unify meeting from MIMO monitors. I know, you know, the name MIMO monitors. They make these great little USB monitors, seven inches, 10 inches. They're really cool. Little side displays. And by the way, that's kind of how unify meeting was born because what a great way to have your meetings going all the time or your calendar. If you're not in a meeting saying when your next meeting's gonna be this com, this is brilliant unify simplifies your work life. But combining your favorite video conferencing solutions, teams and zoom and Google meet into one simple user interface, that's consistent across the board. It's, it's an intuitive software solution that simplifies your work life by combining all those solutions into, into that single uni universal interface.

Leo Laporte (01:14:30):
So no more hanging up every time I sign in, right? Whether you're working full time in the office or you're remote or your hybrid. And this part of the problem too, is, you know, we're, we're in all these different places. Unify keeps your video conferencing simple and intuitive. You can navigate between all your meetings easily, without worried about worrying, about needing to keep track of the different apps or which app you got or which commands you need to use. It's you leave it on. It's always on your desktop, but it's never in your way. It displays your calendar at all times. So you can see your daily schedule, but also all your upcoming video conference calls. When it's time for meeting the calendar's right there, you just tap it. And the app opens the appropriate software in the standard unify meeting UI. So it's, it's really, it's, it's a simple thing that makes your life a lot, lot better, best way to do it is on a second or third display so that you have, and I think this is brilliant.

Leo Laporte (01:15:25):
You have your normal display you're working with and a little seven inch MIMO monitor on the side where unify meeting lives all the time. It's always there. So you've got like a little conference, little calendar display and your conferences are there. And by the way, when you do it that way on a second or third screen, you also see the original video conferencing applications UI on your primary screen. Cuz sometimes you do want to, you know, do something that's specific to that app. Unify runs on windows, it's PC compatible. You can just get the software only for 35, 88 gives you a whole year $35, 88 cents. But if you buy any MIMO monitor, it's free. So I like that. So try unify for your team at work or try it yourself. Unify it's U N I F Y meeting M w E T I N G unify meeting.com unify meeting.com.

Leo Laporte (01:16:19):
Do the code WW. You get 25% off and that is either 25% off a year's subscription or 25% off of any MIMO seven inch displays. That makes it really attractive simplify with unify. Thank you. Unify and MIMO monitors. We really are thrilled unify meeting, go to unify meeting.com, offer code WW 25% off really takes a lot of the pain out of all of these different platforms and so forth. Okay. Now it's time for the Xbox segment with Mr. Paul. Well, <laugh> I don't, I won't make you, I it's either that or the apple watch segment, which I'd be glad to do <laugh> all right. Let's go forward to Xbox. So like going on this week.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:08):
Okay. In fact, there's some breaking news. I haven't had a chance to look at too closely yet, but as expected, the first regulator has come back on the Microsoft acquisition of activation blizzard and said, eh, we think we need to make some con concessions here. And one of the concerns was that Microsoft would in an anti-competitive way, make games not available to competition like the PlayStation, right. Which is what Sony is worried about. So Microsoft's reaction was as I'm sorry, I should say who it was. It was the UK CMA, which is the competition. What's that called the competition and markets authority. It's their antitrust body. Well, it's not all they do, but basically they're antitrust body. So Phil Spencer, and I think Brad Smith as well, both kind of came out and said, look, we can agree to keep this, you know, these big game, not just call duty, but some of the other big game franchises on PlayStation, I thought it was a little weird.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:07):
<Laugh> how specific they were. I think it was Phil Spencer said. So we have an agreement in place where we're gonna keep these games on or, you know, act division as an agreement that they're gonna put the games on PlayStation for X number of years. We will agree to keep them on PlayStation for five more years after that <laugh> it's like fi so wait a minute. Are you suggesting that after five years you're gonna take them away. So we'll see, I think this is gonna be some back and forth on this, but this is the logical and obvious response. I think that Microsoft was waiting for someone to say this so they could make this as an offer. They didn't wanna come out with it in advance because then Sony would say, well, five years isn't enough. Let's go to 10, whatever it is.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:46):
So I, it doesn't make sense for Microsoft not to make call of duty and other big activation blizzard franchises available in PlayStation. It just doesn't make sense. Yes. They're gonna be on Xbox game pass. Yes. They will be on Xbox cloud gaming, which is the game streaming part of it. That's big, you know, but Sony could come back and say, look, we want you to be on PlayStation. What's they call PlayStation now I think their version of the game pass. And you know, and maybe the agreement there is we do that on the same terms that you do for other big blockbusters that may appear on game pass, something like that. So we'll see what happens, but this is the process working as far as I can tell, it's nothing to be freaked out about. I think everything's gonna be fine. So, but this was, to me, this was like obvious.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:29):
Like we were gonna see this someday. So this has happened. And there we are. At least TWiTce in the recent weeks, there's been some mention a rumor of a white version of the elite controller. And I've talked about how terrible it looks and now you can see it for yourself, cuz Microsoft has announced it. It's not actually a next generation elite controller. It is in fact, a new lower end elite controller. It's in the series two, which is the current series, meaning it doesn't have that screenshot button in the middle, which I don't quite understand, but it's called elite wireless controller series two core because we can't have simple names and it's actually really different from the original elite controllers because it doesn't have all the replaceable parts. So if you think about the way an elite controller is today, you have like paddles, you can add or take off, you have four different kinds of thumbs sticks.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:18):
There's two different kinds of deep pads. And then there's a thumbs stick adjustment tool that lets you kind of raise or lower that. And this gets rid of almost all that. So it comes with the us BBC, a cable USBC cable, sorry. And it comes with a thumb stick adjustment tool. And that's it. Other than that, it's basically an Xbox one wireless controller, which is weird to say it has the kind of radar dish looking deep. PADD that is one of the two styles from the original lead controller. It has the elite controller style grips on the on the wings or whatever that is. But it just has a standard set of thumbs sticks, albeit ones that can be adjusted. So what you, the difference is the lemme see if I can find the exact price of this. The original elite controller I believe is originally was I think it was 2 99.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:09):
They're actually lowering the price of that to 1 79. And then the core version, which is the new one is 1 29. So it's about double the price of a normal wireless controller does not have the, like I said, doesn't have the screenshot tool, which I think is weird, but it has the nice scripts, the nice deep pad and adjustable thumbs sticks. So it's kind of a, an interim controller. I might actually consider getting one of these. If I can get it in black, I don't like the white, but the elite wireless controller series too, the, the normal one is I think only in black. And I think this one's only in white and I, that I also do not get, but anyway, there you go. So it happened. It is coming out. And when is it coming out? It is coming out in it's available for pre-order.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:58):
I don't, I don't see the exact date here in front of me. I'm sorry. But I sometime in the next, you know, two, three weeks, I would imagine certainly in time for the holidays, so nice, nice or not nice. I don't like the white <laugh> Leo and I, we always talk about this two years ago, sat in on a Microsoft live event where they talked about all these news games coming out, they showed up this really terrible version of halo, infinite that they were gonna release in two months. We couldn't believe how terrible it was. Then they delayed it for a year. And then they've spent the last year adding features that didn't come out in the game when it was originally released right now. It's well, September actually. So back in August, we were supposed to see campaign co-op including split screen and they have now canceled that not gonna happen. So network co-op is gonna happen in November split screen co-op we have two or four people on one screen gone, couch mode, we call it. Yeah. So I look, I understand that's gonna be hugely disappointing for a lot of people, but I have to say, I don't see it as big of a deal for this kind of game. I think for kids games and stuff, we wanna play side by side that we

Leo Laporte (01:23:05):
Do. It's hard when you split the screen to play halo. I think it's just not enough screen.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:09):
Cause if you, if you don't like playing halo and like a yeah, whatever that is li 10 inch screen, I mean, it's, it's kind of, I don't know. It's not a great experience, honestly, but

Leo Laporte (01:23:17):
Anyway has to be the right game. They must also have metrics that say, nobody cares if they make this or not. Right. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:23:23):
There's gonna be a lot of griping about this one, but including by people who are never gonna use it. Right. I mean, that's part of the problem, but here's the thing, there's a lot of stuff that was supposed to be out by now that still is not like forage. Right. Which is the tool you used to create. Multiplay levels has been delayed. And I think it's gonna be in beta soon, I think maybe in November, but I wouldn't be surprised that that got pushed out yet. Again, there, there is a mismanagement occurring here with halo, infinite that I find a little troubling. Yeah. And it, you know, it's like two years later guys, like we still don't have the full game. And the other thing was, if you think back to what it actually did launch, which is about a year ago, almost a year ago, they were talking about having, if I'm not mistaken, quarterly seasons, they said the first one we're gonna delay.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:07):
Cause we have this stuff. We want to get out that, you know, we didn't get out for the original release. So I think they delayed season one until may. They're delaying season two until I think November, January, I don't remember what the date is. Like. They haven't been able to get onto their own schedule actually. Yeah. Season three has been, I'm sorry. Season three has been delayed until next March guys. They haven't been able to do anything on time. <Laugh> like, I there's something weird going on here that I don't quite understand. And I don't know if it's like 3 43 industry, which is now in control of halo is they're the problem. Or I don't know what it is, but it's a little disturbing. So a lot of stuff that's been promised it should have been up by now is not, we'll be out sometime over the next several months. That's all I can say. And then whether halo, infinite ever gets on the normal or preannounced season schedule is your guess as good as mine. We'll see. I don't know. I don't know what they're doing. It's taken a long time. Do

Leo Laporte (01:25:00):
You play a lot of it?

Paul Thurrott (01:25:03):
No, I don't. And I gotta go back and I, I keep meaning to today. Cause you used, stuck on all the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's I, I, I liked it. I liked how much of a throwback it was to the original halo games. And I liked the style of it. The look of it. Yeah. I was very specifically playing campaign. Like I never really got into multiplayer, which has been a problem since college Duty's been a thing. Right. So I'd say ever since it was probably call duty too, where I started trying to convince my friends, we need to play call duty instead of halo. Right? Cause we were probably playing ha even original. It was probably halo too at back then. But I, I, to me, this is the best game since halo three, if that means anything to anybody, I think the first three halos are classics and are we're super replayable and I think they kind of lost their way, but I haven't replayed it either. So I

Leo Laporte (01:25:50):
Don't know. I think it's a nostalgia thing. People go, oh yeah, I remember that game. I loved that game and then yep. They don't really play what happened to the TV show. Wasn't there a halo TV show that's there is.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:00):
Yeah, no that's happened. It

Leo Laporte (01:26:01):
Happened. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:02):
It was okay. It was okay. Like it's like Mandalorian style, special effects, that kind of thing. It was okay.

Leo Laporte (01:26:09):
I feel like there was a lot of hype before it came out. As soon as it came out, it was like, oh, nevermind.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:14):
You just put this thing in my head that I think maybe is a good comparison. You know, if you go back a million years ago, like when star wars first came out or you go back to the eighties, whatever blockbuster movies came out, movies would be in the theater for a long time. There were big events. And sometimes if there were big enough movies, they would come back into the theater. Right. And then there was some long period of time before it would ever show up on like HBO back in the day and eventually would come to home home machines, right. The VHS or maybe DVD eventually. But those timeframes were all like really dragged out and those movies would be, they would make money over like a long timeframe and today big blockbusters make all their movie in the first week.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:51):
And then they're out on, you know well direct to video or well digital video sometimes day in date. But oftentimes just like a few weeks later, like the new Halloween movie that's coming out, this October is gonna be on paramount plus the same day. Wow. Like it's completely different. So like when halo was out the original couple halos, those were big events. They lasted for a long time and people played them for years and halo. Infinite is probably the most expensive, the biggest, best, whatever halo ever. But it's, I feel like it gets compressed down. Like it's not, it's just not the big event that it was over a long period of time. Like these earlier games were, I think it's just the way the world's changed or maybe 3 43 industries is terrible and they really screwed it up. I don't know. It's one of the two, but I feel like there's some, I feel like entertainment has really compressed, you know, that timeframe we spend on it. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:27:44):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:45):
I don't know. And part of the reason is things like game pass and subscription plans, which Microsoft is <laugh> expanding. Cuz of course they are. Yeah. I don't know. Like I, I I'm, I've been playing like an old version of call of duty. So for me, this one game is actually lasted for years, but that's only because to me the more recent games have been terrible. So I've been kind of stuck using an older version of the game, but I don't know, I find it better. I like the multiplayer of this four year old call duty game better than I like. Hello infinite. Multiplay yeah. If that means anything. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
And if you want co-op mode, there's always Mario cart. Come on. Just, you know

Paul Thurrott (01:28:26):
Yeah. You

Leo Laporte (01:28:27):
Don't need halo

Paul Thurrott (01:28:29):
Or peacock. I said paramount plus.

Leo Laporte (01:28:31):
Oh yeah. Peacock peacock. Paramount plus. Oh, sorry. Yeah. That day and date thing didn't work out so well for Warner brothers HBO, they've kind of moved away from that. That, that hurt the movie theaters were pissed.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:42):
Yeah. I liked it cuz I

Leo Laporte (01:28:45):
Like to go. Yeah, we loved it. We didn't have to go to a movie theater. Exactly. <laugh> that's why the movie theaters are pissed. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:28:52):
Yeah. All right. Well we can't all be top gun. Anyway, <laugh> so, so true. There, there have been rumors over the past few months about something called X. Well actually what did we call it? I guess it was called Xbox game pass family plan. So Microsoft has confirmed, this is a thing they're publicly testing it in Columbia and Ireland. Those two huge markets. Right? Columbia, Columbia, and Ireland. Wow. Yeah. Okay. and, but the interesting bit here is the price because the Euro right now is worth actually I think it's worth less than a dollar. So we've reached a point where like Euro prices are the same as us prices and the price on this is 2199 per month. And it allows you to share your Xbox game pass ultimate subscription, which is normally 1499, just for you with up to four friends or family members, meaning they don't even have to be in your house.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:42):
They could be out in the world like my kid is, or they could be my friends. And that gets really interesting. Because that's not that much more expensive. Like if you think like 1499, like how much would you have to go up for this thing to make sense for five people, apparently you go up about five, six bucks. <Laugh> like, that's not that bad. And that is really interesting. So if that's gonna be the pricing, I think this is, this is gonna be like a no brainer. This is gonna be like the X, what do you call it? The Microsoft 365 family of Xbox. Right. cuz you can share it with a bunch of people, including friends, which is crazy, but they're literally calling it friends and family. So there you go. Cool. I think there's gonna be a limitation to how many times you can swap friends out.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:24):
So you're not doing something like every weekend, you're gaming with five different guys or whatever, but still that's that's really cool. We also finally got our first list of Xbox game pass titles that are coming this month, across console, PC and cloud. My favorite <laugh> is called you suck it parking <laugh>. And as I joked on TWiTtter, if is it a real name? Prestig this game you give, you get a Pennsylvania license plate because these people have no idea what they're doing. Suck it. Parking. That is literally the name of winner. That's the name? Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Train SIM train SIM world three looks kind of cool. I like, I really like the idea of tra in fact, I'd like to get little big screen from other side of my office and just put like a train simulation thing on it and just let it drive across the country or whatever it does, you know, I guess you can put it different places, but that's kind of cool.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:18):
I don't really recognize most of these games, unfortunately, but this is the first set that's coming over the first half of the month. So obviously there will be more and I don't really talk about this too much. In fact, I don't write about this too much either, but one of the things that always happens every month is that some games leave Xbox game pass, right. And starting next week there are gonna be several games that are going away. The big one, there is a plague tail innocence. So that's, that's actually an awesome game. If you're playing that you might wanna wrap it up. You gotta bump <laugh> one more week, but if you are an Xbox game pass subscriber and you wanna buy a game, that's leaving the, the catalog. You can get a 20% discount because you're paying for the subscription. So if you have to keep playing, you can, and I missed one. What was the last one

Leo Laporte (01:32:03):
Noise reduction for X body? Xbox party chat.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:07):
Woohoo. Yeah. So if you are familiar with anything that's going on in the world today, you may have heard there was a pandemic and in the wake of that pandemic tools like zoom and teams and not Skype, but everything that's not Skype have gone gangbusters. And one of the big things that Microsoft and is other companies are adding to their products. There's all this AI based, you know, noise suppression, you're in a busy coffee shop maybe, or a dogs are barking, whatever it is you get rid of that kind of stuff. Also I review a lot of PCs and I will tell you one of the big changes. We've the big shifts this year, not just the P series Intel processors, but five megapixel or even higher 10 or should say 10 80 P or five megapixel webcams. Now, so instead of the old seven, 20 piece of garbage that it's always dark and blurry, really nice quality webcams and then nice quality microphones, all this stuff because everyone's doing hybrid meetings, but you know, one of the places where noise freshmen make a lot of sense, Xbox party chat, cuz I don't know if you ever get online with anybody, but they're chewing food.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:02):
They're singing to themselves. The dog's barking in the background, right? So this is another way another area where AI based noise suppression makes a ton of sense. And so Microsoft is actually released this. So there's a new update out for Xbox series X and S that adds this feature. So if you play with others you don't have to be as annoyed by them as you usually are.

Leo Laporte (01:33:23):
What a relief. Thank goodness. I don't want to take a break here cuz we just took a break. So why don't you do your tips and app pick and then we'll break before Mary Jo's enterprise pick of the week. This gives Mary Jo a full 10 minutes more musicing

Paul Thurrott (01:33:37):
And 

Leo Laporte (01:33:38):
Okay. I think everybody can get on so much. You

Paul Thurrott (01:33:40):
Very welcome. Mary Jo went for a walk around the building. That's fine. It's

Leo Laporte (01:33:42):
Fine. Yeah. I was gone. No one noticed <laugh> no one noticed. All right, go ahead. Let's start with the pick of the week tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:50):
Yeah. So this is about the privacy controls in windows 11 that you should think about and worry about. And the reason is when you set up windows 11, like windows 10, you get the screen where they have these really non, granular global, you know, things that you can kind of check or not check those things. Don't do anything it's better just to leave that alone, get into windows, you know, get to the desktop, you know, do your configuration, all that stuff. And then as part of that process, take a look at the privacy and security page in settings. And what I've done is I in the, in the windows 10 field guide, I actually went through the whole thing and it is a nightmare. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of options in there. Most of them don't do anything or they're just super obvious.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:31):
Like they're obviously, if you want to go through all of your device, privacy settings to say, I don't want whatever apps to have access to the camera, whatever it is like that stuff's all pretty obvious. But is there anything in there that actually makes sense? For example, could I turn off telemetry in windows 10 or 11? No, no you can't but there are options you should look at. I don't know if I want to go through every one of 'em honest, well, this is only seven or eight. So the couple I point the several that I point out are there's an option for, you should just read the article to get the whole list, cuz this is hard to describe where these things are, but by default windows will show you personalized ads using an advertising ID that identifies you uniquely to advertisers so they can learn what you do and then give you better ads.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:12):
Turn that off. Yeah. Don't ever do that. No, that's don't ever do that. Yeah. Yeah. and by the way, if you're, if you care about advertisers, for some reason studies have shown that they don't care ads you or is effective. Yeah. The effectiveness of ads doesn't matter. No. So here's an idea. Don't let them track you and don't worry about that stuff. <Laugh> and don't ever think that you're gonna see things that are like awesome because you like a certain, it doesn't work that way. It's not, this is just about tracking you. So turn that off. There's also, I, I turn up, this is a big thing for me, but show me suggested contents in the settings app and also other se settings related to suggestions, go into settings, search for suggestions and turn off every single one of those things.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:51):
Like these are just little ads for other things that Microsoft offers, whether they're apps or services or features of windows, just turn it off. It's noise. It's ridiculous. You get these little things that pop up at the corner like, Hey, did you know, we offer a valet service for, you know, yeah, nobody cares. Diagnostic data, can't turn it off. That's the telemetry data, but there is an option to turn off optional diagnostic data. So we kind of forget about this, but back one of the concessions, you know, that Microsoft made in windows 10, the privacy theater, you might recall me referring it to referring to it as was they separated the diagnostic data into required and optional by default. Optional is on. You can turn that off so you can minimize the amount of data that Microsoft gets about your PC. You can't turn it off.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:37):
Tailored experiences is the section with all the personalized tips, ads and recommendations. Again, turn that stuff off. Feedback frequency. I recommend turning this to never because Microsoft ignores you feedback. So why would you deliver it to them? They're not gonna pay attention to it anyway. Just don't worry about it. Don't be prompted to give feedback when something goes wrong. Microsoft does not care. I can, that I can guarantee. And then the final one is cloud content search. And this is tied to that thing. We were talking about the other day last week with Jensen Harris and search highlights, which is that by default windows search, which is built into, well, it's not in the start menu, but it's through start or through its own interface, personalizes its results based on what you have in one drive outlook and other Microsoft services. I, I don't understand people who go to windows search to search the web personally, but you can actually turn off the personalization bit so that you, it only delivers results from your PC. And just turn off your Microsoft account, <laugh> in the, in search, right? So those are the big ones. And you have a list in your on your blog of all of that stuff. Yeah. So this was actually an excerpt from the windows 11 field guide. Oh, nice. It's it's much shorter than it was in the windows 10 field guide because honestly documenting what every single one of those options does is a thankless task that doesn't help anybody. It's better just to kind of focus on the stuff that really

Leo Laporte (01:37:59):
Matters. I leave it all on because I,

Paul Thurrott (01:38:02):
Or leave it all on. <Laugh> just, don't worry about it.

Leo Laporte (01:38:05):
So Keith five, 12, who's very good. In our IRC recommends a program. I don't know if you've ever heard of it called O N O shut up 10. And it is it is a,

Paul Thurrott (01:38:16):
This turns off telemetry. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:18):
It's a free program. It basically combines all these settings into one UI. And so it's free program that you go through and you could just go, I mean, okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:28):
So I'm actually fascinated by this because last week we talked about next DNS. Right, right. And I think, I, I think I mentioned that I talked to Rafael about this and I was talking about putting this on the network router and, and how would that he, he said, and I don't, I'm not gonna get this exactly. Right. But he said that that kind of thing has a negative impact on the telemetry data. Oh yeah. Transmission theory. Yeah. Well, no, but that it actually causes windows to start using up cycles and stuff, cuz it, oh you just keep trying like it can't stopped trying.

Leo Laporte (01:38:57):
So if you're gonna use that, you might want to use this

Paul Thurrott (01:39:01):
Turn off, because if that does what I think it does, cuz in my head, what I was imagining was, you know, it's, it's your basic you, you basically fool the thing into thinking it's doing the right thing and then it just doesn't send the data to the right place. Like honestly, like that type of solution

Leo Laporte (01:39:16):
That's better would be very

Paul Thurrott (01:39:16):
Interesting. Like if that's what that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:39:20):
Soo shut up 10 from O Ando software dash shut up 10 o-software.com.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:27):
I'm gonna look this one up after the show.

Leo Laporte (01:39:29):
So that's interesting that FFA said that I, I, I would like to find out if that's true, cuz I do put DNS next DNS on my router. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:37):
I'll ask him to clarify.

Leo Laporte (01:39:39):
And I have, I have a few windows machines. One of, you know, I had one, you know, I had that alien where that I was a windows machine first and I got it for gaming it's Verizon and stuff and I reinstall windows on it the other day. So I could pre play stray and it was so slow as to be unusable. I thought, well maybe in time it'll get better. It never did. It would take, you know, 30 seconds to open a program by that time you'd have clicked the income five times. So it would open the program five times, things like that. Right. It was just really molasses slow. Once you've gotten a game, it was completely playable and fine. So I'm wondering maybe, maybe that's what was going on. His windows was trying to send out telemetry and being thwarted. I don't know. Right. Or it was some bad. This is interesting. Something that was really

Paul Thurrott (01:40:24):
Weird. Yeah. Oh no. Look, I'm gonna look at this. I'm curious about this. Okay. Yeah, I I'll look

Leo Laporte (01:40:29):
Anyway, but oh shut O and O shut up 10 plus

Paul Thurrott (01:40:32):
Pluses. Maybe that'll be my pick next week for the app. Yeah. Take

Leo Laporte (01:40:35):
A look at if it works. Yeah. Thank you, Keith. And then you have an app pick of the

Paul Thurrott (01:40:41):
Weekend. Yeah. So people are probably familiar with power toys. Power toys has been resuscitated for windows 10 and now windows 11. It is, I don't know the exact number, but it is several utilities, right? They all run from kind of a central interface, but I'm not a huge fan of, but the utilities are always on top awake, color picker, fancy zones, imagery, sizer, keyboard manager, power, rename, power toys, run, shortcut guide, video conference mute, which made its way into windows 11. And then there are various file Explorer add-ons and mouse utilities. So starting with version 0.62, which just came out yesterday. I think there were three new tools. So that was kind of a surprise. And Mary Jo, I don't know if you know this, but I sort of assume this was all made by Microsoft employees. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but actually a lot of these are just made by enthusiast developers who submit this stuff and they, I don't know who accepts this, but I, a lot of these, I didn't know outside of, yeah. I didn't know those

Leo Laporte (01:41:33):
Was in house stuff. Huh? It

Paul Thurrott (01:41:34):
Did. Yeah. Yeah. So there are three new tools screen ruler, which is <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:41:40):
Useless described. Okay. Good to

Paul Thurrott (01:41:41):
Have quick and easy way to measure pixels and you screen actually I would use that quick accent.

Leo Laporte (01:41:44):
I would use that, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:41:46):
Yeah. Quick accent is a way to write letters with accents easily. That is

Leo Laporte (01:41:50):
Actually I need that to do yes. Yes mm-hmm

Paul Thurrott (01:41:52):
<Affirmative> and then text extractor, which is a way to basically use something like OCR to take the text out of a graphic and place it on the clipboard as text. And that one was, I should know who that was. I'm embarrassed. I didn't actually maybe find the article that one was written by a guy. Yeah. Joe Finn, that might not be his full name, but he is he contributed to that from outside of Microsoft. So he's a reader. He's probably a reader of your stuff as well. He probably hopefully watches the podcast if he does. Thank you. If he doesn't he mentioned it in the comments to my article, but

Leo Laporte (01:42:23):
I'm looking in the GitHub to see if they give credit in the

Paul Thurrott (01:42:27):
Github. Yeah, they do. Yeah, they do.

Leo Laporte (01:42:28):
So you could find out there.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:30):
Yeah. That's how I, yeah. That's where I actually saw it the first time. Yeah. And then I later found out one of those guys is someone I, you know, know virtually through the site. I downloaded this from the Microsoft store yesterday. I did not get the three tools for some reason the three new tools. But right before the show started, I got an update to power toys, which I didn't have time to install. I suspect that's where the, I think they might have screwed up the store release. But if you get the, you can get this from GitHub or from the Microsoft store. And if you get it today, it should have the three new

Leo Laporte (01:42:56):
Tools. I install this on every windows machine for primarily for the reason that I can then turn off caps lock, which drives me nuts. Oh, that's

Paul Thurrott (01:43:05):
Funny. Yeah. So I, I didn't, I don't include this in my post-install checklist thing, but I, one of the things I do I've saved from like eight or 10 years ago is a registry script. I guess you'd call it. That does exactly that. It turns off the caps lock.

Leo Laporte (01:43:20):
Yeah. Drives me nuts. Yep. And then of course there's so many other little, you know, useful things. It's nice to have yep. Get the latest power toys and it's free. Yeah. It's still around. It's actually back right. That discontinued it for a while.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:33):
It's bad. That's right. Yep. It would disappeared for several years. And now it's

Leo Laporte (01:43:36):
Back. Yeah. So let's take a little break. And then Mary Jo Foley with our enterprise picks of the week and Paul is gonna be back. We can't get rid of him. It's a cocktail, not beer this time. That'll be fun. But first I wanna tell you about our sponsor Tanium. The industry's approach to cybersecurity says Tanium is fundamentally flawed. It management and security point tools only offer a small piece of the solution needed to protect your environment. Many of them say, oh, we could stop all breaches when they simply can't. It's not true making decisions based on old data, stale data, trying to defend your critical assets from cyber attacks, with tools that don't talk to each other. That's just no way for an it team to navigate today's attack surface it's time for a different approach. It's time for Tanium. Tanium says it's time for a convergence of tools, endpoints and it operations and security.

Leo Laporte (01:44:33):
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Leo Laporte (01:45:39):
And it does it all from a single pane of glass. That's awesome. Kevin Bush, the vice president of it at ring power Corp said, Tanium brings a visibility to one screen for our whole team. If you don't have that kind of visibility, you're not gonna be able to sleep at night. Sounds like he's talking about his own experience. Maybe yours too. With real time, data comes real time impact. If you're ready to unite operations and security teams with a single source of truth and confidently protect your organization from cyber threats, it's time you met Tanium to learn more, visit tanium.com/TWiTt. That's Tanium T a N I U m.com/TWiT. We thank Tanium so much for supporting windows weekly. Now we turn to Mary Jo Foley in the well-rested Sorachi <laugh> for a enterprise tip of the week or pick of the week.

Mary Jo Foley (01:46:36):
Yes. So Microsoft has a video product called Microsoft stream and it's for creating managing uploading, downloading videos for corporations. So, you know how, if you're, if you're in a company they wanna send out to all the employees, a video on something they would use stream. So there's been a mobile version of the stream app, but Microsoft has completely redone it. So they've released a beta version this week for iOS and for Android of the stream, the new stream mobile app, and this beta gives people using stream access to both stream classic and the stream version that's hosted on SharePoint. You also, it's got a whole new UI. It's got a personalized home feed. They, Microsoft has an improved video viewing experience, but there are a lot of things that are not in this yet, like video recording, uploading and offline downloads, which are pretty major features. It sounds from Microsoft's blog post this week that they intend to go GA with this without those big features in it. But they've committed to add most of these features, if not all of them sometime in 2023. So if you're somebody who uses stream in your corporation, you might wanna go check out the new beta of the mobile version of the stream app.

Leo Laporte (01:48:03):
It's funny how times have changed. I, for years would go every month to HP down in Cupertino mm-hmm <affirmative> with a friend and we would record interviews with the executives and stuff as mm-hmm <affirmative> as cassette tapes.

Mary Jo Foley (01:48:18):
Oh

Leo Laporte (01:48:18):
Wow. <Laugh> that they would then distribute to the, you know, all, all the, I guess all the sales personnel had, you know, fleet TAs with cassette players and they would distribute it to everybody, you know, thousands of copies of these tapes. Yeah. And expect them to listen to it in their car as they're on their way. Right. You know, to appointments or commuting. Now it's all video, which makes a lot sense, you know? It does. Yeah. Yeah. They built a huge studio just to do this stuff in Southern Silicon valley. Yeah. Enterprise pick number two.

Mary Jo Foley (01:48:52):
Yeah. So this is Microsoft taking advantage of a company that they bought last year called PI five PI five does content delivery, network services and software. So Microsoft has come out now with a product called Microsoft E C D N which is enterprise content delivery network. It's basically for M the way Microsoft's positioning it is it's for improving live streaming of large corporate webcasts and virtual events for people who use teams live events. So right now you can buy this product as a standalone or you can get it directly from Microsoft if you have a volume account or via a Microsoft partner, but it's available now, it's called Microsoft E CDN. And if you're somebody who uses a CDN and you wanna use it with teams lives events, you may wanna check this out.

Leo Laporte (01:49:47):
Okay. PI five, a CDN E CDN, whatever E CDN, whatever an E CDN is. <Laugh>. Now we have to bring Paul and Stephanie back into play. Yes. Because it's time to get drinking. Paul and Stephanie spent a, a good amount of time drinking wine up in the Aron. It looked like according to you.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did.

Leo Laporte (01:50:12):
And a lot of apples up there. Mm mm <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:16):
Yeah. So Stephanie calls this apple squared, speaking of not being able to type accents easily, I couldn't figure out a way to <laugh> do a, like a super script. I guess we call it. Oh yeah. It's right. It should be apple. It's apple to the second. Yeah. You know, mm-hmm <affirmative> I tried so many ways to get that to work. I could do it in word, but I could not figure it out in in notion anyway four pats for four parts, apple cider four pats. Geez.

Leo Laporte (01:50:43):
Four pats. Pat's yeah. Yeah. What pats of vodka waa?

Paul Thurrott (01:50:50):
Four parts of green, apple vodka,

Leo Laporte (01:50:52):
Green, apple vodka. Yum. Yeah. One of my favorites, Yu,

Paul Thurrott (01:50:56):
One part lemon and then egg white egg white.

Leo Laporte (01:50:58):
This sounds good.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:59):
Egg white has become the go to for my wife's cocktails. This is what adds that kind of creamy top.

Leo Laporte (01:51:04):
You know what? This would probably taste a little bit like a go sour kind of right. Oh yeah. Yeah. The official drink's

Paul Thurrott (01:51:10):
Interesting per you say that.

Leo Laporte (01:51:11):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:12):
Yeah. We we knew a Peruvian chef who used to make that for, oh, I

Leo Laporte (01:51:16):
Pretty regular. Oh, they're so good.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:17):
In fact, he used to add Pico to he would make like a tuna Taito and when it was done, the food was gone, but the liquid was still there. He would pour the Pico in there and turn it into a cocktail. Oh yeah. Just

Leo Laporte (01:51:30):
Tuna cocktail. Mm that's really good. Always thought cocktails needed more fish.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:35):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> well, the tunas gone. It's just the, the sauce or

Leo Laporte (01:51:38):
Whatever. Yeah. It doesn't taste the little fishy from the tuna. No, no. It's little una, right? Oh, you got the umami in there.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:45):
Tuna is mostly neutral. I would say anyway. Sorry. So shake all the ingredients without ice to foam the egg white to foam the egg white. That doesn't make any sense. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:51:54):
Yeah. To foam the egg white. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:56):
In other words, you don't. Yeah. You do the egg white separately. Yeah. Add ice and shake again. Strain serving a martini glass and garnish with, wait for it. An apple slice. Probably a green apple

Leo Laporte (01:52:06):
Slice. If you stick at apple martinis, this is the thing now, man,

Paul Thurrott (01:52:11):
I used to I used to have a lot of my man friends make fun of me for ordering PIIs a lot, but you know what?

Leo Laporte (01:52:17):
This

Paul Thurrott (01:52:18):
Is, this is God's drink.

Leo Laporte (01:52:19):
Yeah. It could've been worse. He could have been wearing a Cosmo. Exactly. No, that's

Paul Thurrott (01:52:23):
Okay. There's nothing wrong with a good Cosmo.

Leo Laporte (01:52:25):
No, I think they taste's great, but you know, I

Paul Thurrott (01:52:29):
Don't know. It doesn't look manly holding that little stemmed glass with two fingers, but you know what

Leo Laporte (01:52:34):
<Laugh> you gotta go for the, our teas are manly. Yeah. I follow an Instagram TV. Apple teas are gross. Apple donut. What do you call it? Account the donut tour. And it's cuz I guess this time gets very active in the fall. Mm-Hmm I guess this time of year up your way. There's a lot of apple cider donuts. Yes. Is that right?

Paul Thurrott (01:53:00):
Oh my God. Yes. So we used to go to Vermont and get apple cider it's in the fall. Oh, there's nothing like a thing that goes off a little assembly line dips in the oil comes out, gets tossed in that apple, whatever is that cinnamon dust or whatever. Yep. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> oh God. It's

Leo Laporte (01:53:14):
Heaven. Something about that flavor. Yep. Yep. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah. So dust, let me see if I I'm trying to find his account. I feel like it's snow. Pumpkin spice guys. Oh no, this is the original.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:26):
No, no, no. This is, this is, this is an actual spice. <Laugh> not a, exactly a concoction of the, the beer industry or whatever

Leo Laporte (01:53:33):
I have to, Hey, don't play the beer industry for that. <Laugh> well,

Paul Thurrott (01:53:36):
God, you

Leo Laporte (01:53:37):
Blame Tarbucks

Paul Thurrott (01:53:38):
Every beer company on earth makes I

Leo Laporte (01:53:40):
Blame Starbucks, but it's given fucking spice something, a lot of scope for new Yorker cartoonists. So it's good. <Laugh> seems to be a new Yorker cartoon about pumpkin spice every week. <Laugh> I'm still looking for the apple cider. Turn out. Forgot. Well, sorry. I'll have to leave that as an exercise for later. If I can find it. I'll show you next week. So many delicious apple cider dogs. Mm,

Paul Thurrott (01:54:08):
Nice. Yeah. On the road to I think it's water Berry. It's where what's that Vermont ice cream company, Ben and Jerry's right past Ben and Jerry's on the way to stove. Vermont is an incredible apple place with apple

Leo Laporte (01:54:24):
Decided donut. It's amazing. I missed that when I was a kid. We'd go apple picking this time of year. Yeah mm-hmm <affirmative> and then and then they would always have their own pressed cider that we'd pick up these giant gallon jugs of right. And then if, if, if I could have my way, we would leave it on the back porch to turn into apple Jack. Cuz it would, it would ferment over time. And then, and then as the snows came, it would freeze. Right. And the slush was all water. And what was left was highly alcoholic <laugh> yes. At least for, at least for me at the age of 12, it was highly alcoholic. Yeah. That was my little thrill <laugh> well, that's it for windows weekly. I, I have a date with Motley crew, so I'm gonna get outta here. All right. Paul Thra has a date with his book, the field guide to windows 11 <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:55:14):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:55:15):
Yeah. How's that coming along making any progress. He

Paul Thurrott (01:55:18):
Is coming along. It is coming along. I worked, I worked on it over the weekend when I was away. Oh, nice.

Leo Laporte (01:55:22):
Believe that you're dedicated. Go to lean pub.com. Get that, get

Paul Thurrott (01:55:27):
It out in the world. You can see how dedicated, but it will happen. It'll

Leo Laporte (01:55:30):
Happen. You can also go to his site throughout.com become a premium member. You'll get all sorts of extra great content. Highly recommended T H U R R O t.com. Mary Jo Foley is writes for Z net@allaboutmicrosoft.com and she's filing regularly and together they form the dynamic duo known as windows weekly. I'm sorry to have kept you waiting with the apple event. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:55:59):
We do blame you

Leo Laporte (01:55:59):
Leo. It's all my fault. I thought they'd be better an hour. I didn't anyway. Glad we could get there. I hope you have a wonderful week. We invite you to watch the show every Wednesday around 11:00 AM Pacific when there's no apple event, which is pretty much most of the time. That's 2:00 PM Eastern time. Thank goodness. <Laugh> you know

Paul Thurrott (01:56:18):
What though? Usually that it wouldn't be on this day, but I think because of

Leo Laporte (01:56:20):
The holiday. Yeah, yeah. That's right. You moved it usually it's on Tuesday. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> usually it all works out, but this, yeah, we

Paul Thurrott (01:56:25):
Don't usually bump into

Leo Laporte (01:56:26):
It. It's a little weird. Yeah. 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern 1800 UTC. The live streams which are both audio and video are@live.Twit.tv. After the fact, you can also get the show at TWiT.tv/ww. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to windows weekly, or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. If you wanna chat with us during the live streams, irc.Twit.tv or club TWiT members in the discord Mary Joe's in there too as MI if you're not a member of club TWiT seven bucks a month, let add free version. So am by the way, Paul Paul is in there today. Yay.

Leo Laporte (01:57:06):
Paul

Leo Laporte (01:57:07):
Also has a unique show called hands on windows. It's only available to club members right now as we grow the show. That's what, one of the things the club does for us, it gives us the wherewithal that do new shows, which do cost money before you're big enough to get advertising. And so we have hands on windows with Paul. We have hands on Mac with Micah. We have the untitled Linux show with Jonathan Bennett, the GI fizz with Dickie Bartolo, Stacey Hegenbottom's book club, a bunch of shows that start there. And one hopes we'll get into the public eye as this weekend space did with Ron pile. So you get those shows right now and the TWiTt plus feed with lots of other content and all of that for seven bucks a month, or you can just buy hands on windows by itself for 2 99, all of the shows are available at free. If you just want one show for less than three bucks a month, go to TWiTt, do TV slash club TWiT. It's all explained there. That's the place to go. And we thank all of you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks Paul. Thanks, Mary Jo have a wonderful week and I will see you next time on windows weekly. Bye bye.