Windows Weekly Episode 804 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thora is here with lots to talk about. He's mad as heck about all those ads. They're starting to pop up in Windows. He told, he warned you, he warned you. Also, windows subsystem for Linux is now out of beta. You can even run gooey Linux apps on your Windows machine, and we'll talk about Paul's KD ratio. Apparently not so hot. It's all coming up. Next on Windows Weekly podcasts you

TWiT Intro (00:00:29):
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Leo Laporte (00:00:40):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott. Episode 804, recorded Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022. Still slippery. After all these years, windows Weekly is brought to you by SecureWorks. Are you ready for the inevitable cyber threats? Secureworks detects evolving adversaries and defends against them with a combination of security, analytics, and threat intelligence directly from their own counter threat unit. Visit secureworks.com/TWIT to get a free trial of TAUs extended detection and response, AKA X D R and by code comments. An original podcast from Red Hat that lets you listen in on two experienced technologists as they describe their building process and what they've learned from their experiences. Search for code comments in your podcast player and by Rocket Money, formerly known as True. Bill. Are you wasting money on subscriptions who isn't? Cancel your unnecessary subscriptions right now at Rocket money.com/windows. Seriously, it could save you hundreds per year.

(00:01:53):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Yes, dozers. It's time to get together. Talk with the Mr. Paul Throt here about all the least. Scrape news. Hello, Mr. T. How you doing? Very well. How are you? Very well. You had scrape for lunch, but it's Thanksgiving tomorrow, right? Aren't you? Shouldn't you be saving up for tomorrow? <Laugh>? That's a light Pennsylvania breakfast. I had it for lunch <laugh>. So a little scrape breakfast. Sounds great. That's like one meal for two meals. Yeah. Yeah. Breakfast for lunch, breakfast for dinner. What are you doing tomorrow? We are having it here. So we've got 20 ish people coming. Oh. Big Turkey grinding and whatnot. I saw the I saw, I saw your Turkey swimming earlier. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Nice. That's the right way to do it. Nice. That's gonna be good. And you're cooking it in a stove? Yeah. Yes. No, you're not digging a pit and <laugh>. No, we're

Paul Thurrott (00:02:59):
Mags. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:03:00):
Put it on the stove. That's what you have a stove for an oven.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:04):
I'd like to be in the police report this week. Let's deep fry the Turkey.

Leo Laporte (00:03:07):
Oh, man. Crazy. Do not, okay. Just the public, your annual public service warning. Do not throw a frozen Turkey into a deep pet fryer. Make sure there is plenty of room in the deep pet fryer so that the oil doesn't overflow catch on fire and destroy your home. Simple.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:23):
Also, if, if, God forbid, you have to cook it this way, do it on cement or, you know, asphalt or something. Yeah, yeah. Not on wood or inside your house or whatever. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:03:34):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:35):
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:37):
Sarah, in our chatroom says she she actually loves the, the Paul and Leo show. She says it's like brotherly love. So <laugh>, we're here, right? We're here We are. We're kind of oh. Oh. What is new in the world. Winters,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:56):
Actually, what I'd like to talk about first is what is old <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (00:03:59):
Because everything old is new again.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:02):
Yeah. And getting worse. So 10 years ago this month, I wrote a, an article in which I referred to the first ads that had ever appeared in Windows as a slippery slope.

Leo Laporte (00:04:13):
Oh, boy. That's slope.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:15):
Yeah. And now I was criticized in certain circles for this. You know, this is a, this is kind of a regular problem, I would say in any enthusiast community, that if you complain about something, you'll always get, this group of cheerleaders will pop up and say, you hoo too much. When you go marry someone else, <laugh> or whatever, you know, like, don't like it here, leave, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:04:33):
You move to and move to Denmark. Yeah, right. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:38):
You know, everyone's a winner. So

Leo Laporte (00:04:40):
What, they started putting ads in Windows, what? Eight?

Paul Thurrott (00:04:44):
Eight. Yeah. 10 years ago this month. So what

Leo Laporte (00:04:47):
Do you mean by ads? First of all, we should say

Paul Thurrott (00:04:49):
Yeah. What the first ads, right? So Windows eight, if you think back to Windows eight this was the first version of Windows to include this mobile app platform that at the time was called Metro. Oh yeah. And is now they just sort of refer to it as Windows store apps or I'm sorry, Microsoft store apps or Modern Apps or whatever. But these were, this was the first, this was the new app platform at the time. And of course, they were going for emulating what Apple was doing with iPhone, what Google was doing with Android and so forth. And so they wanted these apps to have everything that those apps have. And one of those things is advertising. So in the, in the initial release of Windows eight, these ads were only in the apps, you know, but I saw this for what it was, which was, you know, I always tell this story now because this is only a year old, but when my kids went to Mexico City for the first time, we were downtown, and there were these cops doing absolutely nothing, but there were a ton of them, and they're all blowing their whistles, <laugh>.

(00:05:47):
And my son, my son said, what is going on with these whistles? And I said, mark, listen, they didn't issue whistles to these people, so they wouldn't use 'em. They're gonna use the whistles. And they would basically stand on a street corner. The light would turn green. They set blowing the whistles. Oh, this is Hyster telling people which way they go, doing absolutely nothing. Like this is already handled quietly by the light. But that's satisfy

Leo Laporte (00:06:05):
Work, though. It really is. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:08):
So to apply that theory to Windows they didn't put ads in Windows eight, so they could put less, you know, fewer ads later. <Laugh>, right? There were always, there was always gonna be more ads. And sure enough, if you plot the course of Windows eight point, whatever, 1, 1, 1, 1 windows 10, and now Windows 11, the instances of ads have escalated. Now, in this proliferation, there's also these things that I, I, I, I think just to speak plainly, I would say are ads, but some other people might think are other things, you know, like it's okay for Microsoft to promote its other apps and services, or in some cases promote a feature of an app or service that you're already paying for, but maybe not you don't know about.

Leo Laporte (00:06:48):
Yeah. That's just an helpful tip. That's not an ad, it's a tip.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:52):
Well, but I will collect all of these things under the umbrella of advertising, because ultimately while some of them may be well meaning, even the well meaning ones are often really stupid. And what I mean by that is like, Hey, did you know you could use one drive to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I'm using it right now. How come you don't know that? Like, those kinds of things are still intrusive and dumb, and they're interruptions. Right? And we can kind of go over the semantics of what's in AD and what's not in ad, but it's everything from that to outright ads. The other, the other problem with that kind of, you know, non-ad is some people might refer to it, is that there's never any control, whether it's in Windows or Office or anywhere else in the Microsoft ecosystem to say, yeah, I did know that. And by the way, never show me this again. <Laugh>, you know the worst example of

Leo Laporte (00:07:37):
This, this is universal, though. Amazon's echo, every time I give it a command now goes and did, you know, and it gives me some stupid tip that goes on. I don't want to hear it go away. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:49):
That's even more No, you're right. And I, I I, I, another example that is very much like that is I just configured a new phone. I brought up Google Maps for the first time. I hit directions to go to a place, and it said, Hey, would you like to blah, blah, blah? No. I'd like directions I just told, I know what I'm doing, what I was doing. Yeah. So, yes, you're right. It is everywhere. I don't care about everywhere. I care about Microsoft and I care about Windows. And, and that's, this is the stuff I focus on. And look, we, again, we can quibble over what's in ad what's not Ed, but there's lot of, it's

Leo Laporte (00:08:19):
Not an ad for your local mortuary, right. Or, you know, toilet.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:23):
Well, listen, it's gonna get there. You may remember, I think it was last year, we had Chris Capella on at the end of the year show. Yeah. We discussed this notion of, I said, what, you know, why I, I would pay not to have this chunk on my pc? And his answer, which I thought was very interesting, was, if we allowed you to pay not to have this stuff, then we would be admitting that this stuff is

Leo Laporte (00:08:45):
Bad. We're doing it

Paul Thurrott (00:08:47):
<Laugh>. But that's, and I, I guess I understand that argument, but consider something like, you buy a new Kindle, and one of the options, the cheapest one you can get is they call it with special offers, which is another key way of saying ads, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the idea is you get ads on your lock screen, which honestly are fairly nont intrusive. You click past it or how we get by it, and then your experience is normal. Or you can give them, I don't know, a small amount of money, 15, 20 bucks. It's

Leo Laporte (00:09:13):
Not much British.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:13):
It's much, yeah. It's, it's not much for

Leo Laporte (00:09:15):
The life of the device. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:16):
Yeah. So, look, I I, and I wanted to say, I'm, I'm not ranting here. In other words, I'm just not going off the, you know, off the cuff about some nonsense thing. It, I understand that Windows has evolved over the years. It's no longer something that people are paying for on a fairly regular basis. And whether you knew you were doing it or not, whenever you upgraded to a new pc, you were buying a new version of Windows and up, up through, up through Windows eight, whatever, you know, at Windows eight, certainly you paid to get a new version of Windows, right? So the Slippery Slope article that I'm referencing I go back and reread it, and it, and it has this reference to Microsoft had a deal when Windows eight first came out that this thing that normally would cost, you know, $99 or $129 for a limited time is gonna be $40 for an upgrade, which at the time seem like a good price. Today, no one would pay even $20 for a Windows upgrade, but whatever. So this situation's changed. PC's last longer. Windows 10. Now Windows 11, by and large is free as an upgrade. So if you already have a, well, it's a little more complicated today, but if you have a compatible computer, you could upgrade from eight to 10, possibly to 11, probably not. But you could in many cases do that. So is

Leo Laporte (00:10:32):
Justification. We're not making money, so we gotta give you ads.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:36):
It's, that's literally the, this is something that came up in the recent conference call my earning sense. Yeah. And

Leo Laporte (00:10:43):
I don't, I think, so just to play devil's advocate, I think you can say, well, if it's a recommendation for a Microsoft product or a tip for a Microsoft product, that's something lower less than an ad for a Frisbee, I mean, it's not right or no,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:59):
I guess it, it's, it really is. In other

Leo Laporte (00:11:02):
Words, it's just as annoying to you if it says, Hey, you know, Microsoft Word is 50% off right now,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:09):
I guess don't know if I have a, a gradient scale for annoyance, but I would just say that anything to in Look Windows is a productivity tool, right? Right. You, you, you don't use it to use it. You use it to get something done. You're using Microsoft Word, Microsoft Teams, Adobe Photoshop, whatever it might be. It doesn't matter. Anything that gets in the way of that is an annoyance. And so, I guess the issue I have with this stuff is it, it changed, it's, you know, based on what we're talking about the, the suggestion bit that's built into Windows 11, actually, you can turn that off. But one of the other things that's happened with Windows 11 is they don't sync as many settings. And that's a setting that has never sunk <laugh> or has none, never synced. In other words, if I

Leo Laporte (00:11:50):
Yeah, they want you to turn it off everywhere. They don't wanna make it easy. Yeah, that's right.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:53):
That's right. So there's that bit to it. It's

Leo Laporte (00:11:55):
A, that's a dark pattern, by the way, right? That's a dark pattern. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:59):
That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. I I got an ad in teams for some Excel feature after I'd started a video meeting with somebody. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:12:10):
No, that's right. That's wrong.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:11):
And I, I posted that on, you know, I tweeted about it, and people are, well, know what you're complaining about. Maybe you want to know about this feature. Yeah, maybe I do, but maybe I don't wanna know about it when I'm in the middle. The meeting, which is the, yeah, that's just, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:12:22):
It's also more, so that's an that, so I have a scale of gradient of annoyance that makes it higher. They also makes it higher if I already have Excel, which Right. I do. Why would I, why are you a, you should know that

Paul Thurrott (00:12:37):
Also. What if you already are using this feature and or in fact, a master of Excel and Yeah, it's a little confusing giving all the telemetry data that goes back to Microsoft that they don't know that. Yeah. so it's, it's, it's dumb advertising. It's intrusive advertising. It's an annoyance in some cases that you can't turn off right now in some, you can't, I this suggest the thing. You can, of course you, you can't come up with a general statement that's true of all of it, but that's part of the problem. There's so many different ways that this thing can kind of get in your face. There's little popups that come up and, you know, did you know you could do this? It's like, yeah, I, yeah, thanks. I, I'm writing a book about this product. I do know that, didn't

Leo Laporte (00:13:17):
Know that and go away,

Paul Thurrott (00:13:19):
You know, whatever. I, I get that you're not a mind reader, but I feel like Google would've handled that one a little more effectively, although Google

Leo Laporte (00:13:25):
Does where does it appear? So it's on the, does it appear on the search start start menu?

Paul Thurrott (00:13:31):
Yep. That's search highlights is the, yeah. Is one of the best examples of this problem right now, because, and the way I've described this is, you, you go to search for a reason. You're trying to search either for files or apps on your local computer. A lot of people actually use it to search the web. I don't recommend that or do that myself, but that is a thing you can do with it. And when the search pain comes up, there's all this gunk on the side about, Hey, here's what's happening today in the world. And did you know this celebrity is getting divorced than this celebrity? And it distracts you. Yes. And I, I think the worst thing you, you can do to someone who's trying to get work done is distract them. Yep. And it, it, it is, it's so against the point of the search that it, it can be so annoying depending on your personality type or how tired you are that day, whatever it is.

(00:14:18):
I've opened this thing, been annoyed by what it was, and then forgot why I was there. Yeah. Context switch. And I, I'm sorry, but that's a huge problem. Yeah. So I have a tip for how you can turn it off. It's not that hard. But again, the next time you use a computer sign in somewhere else, it's gonna come right back. It's one of 20 things, let's say, out in the system, you know, in various places. It's getting worse over time, I think is the point. I, the point of my slippery slope comment was what, it's like the little snowball going to the down the hill by the time it reaches the town, it's the size of Godzilla and it's gonna take out, out the entire place. And that's what's happened. You know, it's gotten worse. The ads have slipped. You know, because think the complaints, the obvious complaints back in Windows eight timeframe was, well, Paul these apps are in ads.

(00:15:04):
And in the beginning they were way at the end of the a of the apps. I'm sorry. The ads would be like, remember, they were like these horizontally scrolling experiences that had 15 minutes of fame, and then they got rid of 'em. But the ad the ads in the beginning were way down the end of this thing. Like, what's the big deal? Well, the big deal was in Windows eight one, or in some interim time period, they moved up to the front, and then they were everywhere. And then in Windows 10, and now worse in Windows 11, they're, they've left the apps, they're out in the world. They're, they've escaped their cages. They've become sentient. They're in Windows. They're in the start menu, they're in little popups, they're in the task bar. In some cases they're in File Explorer. In some cases they're in settings, in some cases they're everywhere.

(00:15:44):
And it's like I said, I get it. It's free. We didn't pay anything for this. They're looking at the books. They're saying, look, we gotta make some more money from these people. How do we do that? There are different ways. I'm, I guess what I'm arguing is maybe this isn't the best way, but I'm also saying, I, we need to think about this a little more deeply and stop kind of quibbling about whether there ads or not, or that some are bad and some are good or whatever. And, and say, look, we need to come to an understanding as a community, as a group of users, by the way, over a billion users that we don't like this. And is there some way we could, could, let's do something to fix this. Like, whatever it might be. And I really, I still think that they should have the option where you pay some amount.

(00:16:27):
It could be per year. It could be part of your Microsoft 365 subscription where you don't see this stuff. Interestingly as part, in fact, I was to racing to try to get these published before we started the show today, and I just missed it. But I've written a couple of chapters for the book in the account section. So one of the chapters is Microsoft Accounts, you know, whatever the other one is work or what Microsoft calls work or school accounts. And these are Azure Active directory accounts. What a lot of people might think are Microsoft 365 accounts, or Microsoft 365 commercial accounts, you can sign into Windows with an Azure active directory account, right? So if you have I have Microsoft Office three, oh, I'm sorry, Microsoft 365 Business Premium. But if I had Business Basic or whatever the other options are, I can use that email address and I can use it to sign into Windows.

(00:17:19):
And when you do that, you actually get a cleaner experience. There are less ads, there aren't no ads. This is not no ads, but a step in the right direction. So one, one of the forms of ads that's in Windows that a lot of people don't see is ads and don't really understand, is when you bring up your start menu, there's a bunch of icons there for apps, some of which are not even on your computer. So the apps I'm referencing are things like Facebook and Instagram and Messenger, TikTok stuff like that. Amazon Prime is one of Amazon Prime Video I think is one. Spotify is one. Spotify is actually the most nefarious one. If you click on one of those icons, that app will then install from the store. It's not actually on your computer, it's just a stub. And then the app will run.

(00:18:05):
So it's there as an enticement to get you to do it. Like you see, you're like, oh look Spotify's there. That's neat. Maybe I can use Spotify. And you can, and there's a free version, right? You know, you could use it, but this is a financial transaction between that company and Microsoft. It's there as a promotion that's, they didn't ask for it. Yeah. What's that? Well, you know, look, that's fair. If somebody's paying Microsoft, there is no question. That's enough. So in the commer, when you sign in with an Azure active director account, those apps are not in the start menu. Interesting. They're not there. Interesting. That's one of the small changes. When you run Microsoft Edge for the first time as any user, you go through a little wizard it says stuff like, Hey, would you like to keep your settings and bookmarks and everything in sync?

(00:18:45):
Yeah, of course. I would. Would you like to import data from your Google Chrome without installing Chrome? Maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn't. That doesn't matter. And then the next one says, let's make the web work for you. And that is not what that screen is <laugh>. This is, let's make the web work for Microsoft. If you click yes to this thing, Microsoft is gonna track your on the internet and sell your data to advertisers. And it's gonna do it under the guise of pro providing targeted advertising for you. Like that's some kind of a benefit. It doesn't improve the search results of Bing. It doesn't make MSN work better for you. It doesn't do any of that stuff. It literally just grants them permission to track you. That screen is not present when you sign in with a Azure active directory screen. It goes, it's not there.

(00:19:27):
Now, whether or not it's tracking in the background is, I guess is a conversation we could have. But there are other differences. And by and large, it's a little cleaner. If you bring up Microsoft Edge, for example, to their default home screen slash new tab screen or new tab page, whatever you'll see a horrifically complicated page with all kinds of things in it. But one of the things is this giant newsfeed that's a lot like the widgets interface in Windows 11. And this thing is all Microsoft advertising based stuff. So it's usually kind of low quality sources of information. This celebrity did this with this celebrity. Click on a story, it's full of ads. Microsoft is getting a, a kickback cuz it's all done through the MSN in Microsoft Advertising services that is actually still there. Right? So you can turn it off, you can continue using Edge, you can turn it off.

(00:20:16):
But that's an example of something that doesn't change when you go to a commercial. Well, I'll call a commercial account, it's a little simpler, but so that's not a panacea. Like that's not gonna solve the problem. It's like, well I could pay Microsoft, I could pay them more for this Azure Active directory. Well, Microsoft 365 commercial account, I could sign in with that and then I'll see less of the garbage and Yeah, you will, but you know what, those suggestions still come up. Right? And other forms of advertising probably. I've only used the bodon for the past month or so. I'm not really sure a hundred percent what all the changes are, but oh, the differences are, but it's cleaner, but it's not clean. What I would like is Microsoft, please let me raise the price of Microsoft 365 family, raise the price of every one these subscriptions by $20 and say this is the ad-free version.

(00:21:01):
You know? And when I say I don't want suggestions, sync it to my Microsoft account so the next time I sign in, I don't have to do that again. I would pay for that service. And I don't know how many people would, I mean, maybe it wouldn't be a huge money maker, but you know what, when you compare what Microsoft could possibly make from these terrible interruptions that just annoy people and probably don't result in many sales, it's still gonna be more money than what they're doing now. Like, it's still gonna be a better option. Right. I just wish they would do this.

Leo Laporte (00:21:32):
Everybody's doing it. I mean yeah, but it's, we No, no, it's weird though. It,

Paul Thurrott (00:21:37):
I hate that excuse. Do

Leo Laporte (00:21:38):
You like do you like Philip k Dick? Because he one of the great science fiction authors of the

Paul Thurrott (00:21:45):
Director of Sheep and Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:21:47):
And he's, he was like, like you only in the fifties <laugh>. Yeah. He wrote a, a short story called Sales Pitch where the guy actually goes crazy at the end because he's, there's so many ads all the time. And the guy at the end is, goes crazy cuz there, there's a robot that refuses to take no for an answer. No, no. It's just like Windows. No, no, you really want the No, no. And the guy, he does so many stories about that. So this was a concern. This has been a concern forever, but it's everywhere. Yeah. I, I am now seeing, I don't want it, I'm seeing ads for the new Avatar movie on every Amazon thing that has a screen on it, all the echo shows and stuff. And partly that's, cuz Amazon lost 10 billion on Echo last year. It turns out to be a terrible business

Paul Thurrott (00:22:37):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:22:38):
But, but I don't think Microsoft's losing money on Windows, or are they? I mean,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:45):
No, but it's, it's diminishing, right? This is the, remember that Windows was once their biggest business and then it was, okay, well it's one of their three biggest businesses and now it's, it's, it's just declining and it's, it's in decline. And, and when you see parts of Microsoft that are growing almost exponentially, not really, but things like Azure that are growing very fast because they're newer businesses, you know, Microsoft obviously looks at that and says, okay, well how can we get Windows to be like that? And we've seen the results of some of that stuff. Some of it is make Windows behave like an online service, which I think is had mixed results. Although honestly, that's starting to get there. But in the beginning, that was a disaster. And you know, part of it is, is the thing we saw in Windows eight, which was, look, we have this, we see this successful thing over here. Can we replicate that in Windows somehow? Yeah. And in that case we're talking about ads and mobile apps, you know, and sort of a born out of a jealousy of companies like Apple and Google that frankly killed them in that space and did really, really well and are still doing really, really well. It bugs me that Microsoft doesn't pursue the premium route that Apple typically has chosen. And offer that as one possibility. Instead,

Leo Laporte (00:23:57):
They just doing it eventually though. I really do. Oh, totally. Apple is already getting hits for putting ads in the app store on iOS. Right. And people get mad at it and there's all sorts of privacy implications.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:08):
Well, by the way, wanna talk. So here's an interesting comparison, right? If you, I just brought up a new Pixel phone and when you bring up a new pixel phone, there are I wanna say eight icons on the home screen. That's it now, yeah, they're a hundred percent Google apps for sure.

Leo Laporte (00:24:21):
The Google apps,

Paul Thurrott (00:24:22):
They're all Google apps, but it bring up a new iPhone and count the number of screens and number of apps that are on the home screen. It's, it's something like 47. Wow. Right? And it is a crazy number of apps. It's apps like that most people logically would never want to use. Like what's their, their music editor app, whatever that's called. Garage

Leo Laporte (00:24:41):
Garage Band. You probably send Facebook on there. I would bet they, cuz Facebook used to come with iPhones.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:48):
I'm not sure about that, but I'm just, just talking. It's mostly

Leo Laporte (00:24:50):
Apple

Paul Thurrott (00:24:51):
Stuff, huh? It's, it's a spam of pages of Apple apps and you know, a lot, you know, a lot of people, apple is the the high end experience, you know, the luxury experience. Yeah. Okay. But like that, that in that one particular area, that's not really true. And I, well,

Leo Laporte (00:25:06):
They're gonna say I can channel them. They're gonna say, well, if we don't put any apps on the front page, people say, well, what the, what do I do with this <laugh>? What do I do with this phone? It's blank.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:17):
I mean, so in 2007 that was true. Yeah. And by the way, every one of the apps on the phone probably fit in the homepage. Yeah. In 2022, there are a billion people using iPhones now. Most of them have used multiple iPhones. There's almost no one coming to iPhone that doesn't understand either exactly what's on there and how it works, or exactly what's on any smartphone and how they work generally. Like there's no such thing as new people. Now, you'd have to like parachute into the Amazon and be like, look, here's a magic device. We put icons. Where

Leo Laporte (00:25:47):
Are the apps? I don't know what to do. We never figured out that

Paul Thurrott (00:25:50):
There's no one like that left. So this, it's just advertising. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:25:54):
Truthfully, if you're coming from one iPhone to the next, I never see that. It's funny that you, cause I never see it. I just have my apps come zipping over. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:03):
There you go. Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:26:03):
Fair enough. But anyway, this is the way of the world moving forward is more and more ads all the

Paul Thurrott (00:26:10):
Time. I have a link in notes and see if you can bring this up. The link where it says it's about to get even worse is a story from g a s that highlights two things that have been occurring in the windows Insider program. And the first is that suggestion thing, right? It, it's that, that link right there. So what that is is, there's, there's no good name for this thing. It's kind of the account flyout or whatever. So when you click your user account in the start menu, you see the options that are there except that there's an additional option at the top says back up your files.

Leo Laporte (00:26:47):
Oh, and that's really OneDrive's

Paul Thurrott (00:26:49):
Plug. That's a suggestion. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, okay, <laugh>, all right. We can argue whether that's an advertisement or whatever, but I think what we, I think we, what we should agree on is why is it, why is it there? Like what, what is, aren't there not acceptable ways to promote things to people? You know, for example, I'm not holding up Chromebook or Chromos as kind of the way to do anything, but when you reboot that thing because you have a new version, the first thing that comes up is, here's what's new. It's a little, it's a cute little app and it shows you what's new in the new version and you can just close it. If you don't want it, it's the right time to show it. You know? And I don't know if there is, but if there isn't, there should be a little checkbox that says, don't ever show me this again.

(00:27:30):
I don't wanna see it. They probably don't do that. But, you know, that's, to me, that's the right way to handle this kind of thing. Yeah. It's the other one that's gross though. If you scroll down to the picture of the start screen or the start menu, sorry, you'll see those two, it says common website they're doing, they're going to do for websites what they've done for apps. So if you look at the top part of that, you'll see Spotify, Disney Plus Prime Video and TikTok are examples of companies that are paying to be there. And now what you're seeing is examples of web companies that are paying to be there at C and TWITtter. This is just a theoretical thing. Like no one, I don't think anyone's, I don't think TWITtter could afford to pay for this right now.

Leo Laporte (00:28:07):
Anymore example might have been there in the past,

Paul Thurrott (00:28:09):
But Yeah. Yeah. But you get the idea. The idea is, you know, you want, Hey, you wanna reach a billion eyeballs, get your website in the start menu. They'll see it when they, the first thing comes up when they boot in. It's, it's on, it's open automatically. You know, I don't this type of improbably seeing that does,

Leo Laporte (00:28:24):
I'm not seeing recently added files. I don't see any

Paul Thurrott (00:28:29):
No, no, no, it's not, it's not yet. They, they're, yeah. This is coming. This is

Leo Laporte (00:28:34):
Coming. Okay. 

Paul Thurrott (00:28:36):
So, you know, obviously

Leo Laporte (00:28:37):
That's that.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:38):
Yeah. When you're in marketing, you can kind of spin something to make it sound positive. I, I've argued with this recommended area that what this should be is what you see in the office apps. And it'd be the Microsoft 365 app, which is just recent documents <laugh>, right? Because if this thing was really about productivity, all you would see those things that are below those two icons, which are the things I was working on most recently. Then I might wanna go back and work on, again, not a distraction. This is kind of doing the start menu. What search highlights does the search box, which is, I've come here to find my expense notes, but, oh look, there's Etsy. What was I doing again? You know, like you, it's like you get lost in something that has nothing to do with the reason you're using Windows, but the reason you brought up this interface and you're, you're being led down a path that has nothing to do with any choice you've ever made. And I just, I know writers worry

Leo Laporte (00:29:29):
About when they first set up Windows, take solitaire mind sweeper off because they don't wanna be distracted by that <laugh>. I mean, yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:38):
So here we go. I'll

Leo Laporte (00:29:39):
Go back to the Tandy model 100 and write our <laugh>, write our novels on those.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:43):
Well, you know, there were no ads in the command line. That's all I'm saying.

Leo Laporte (00:29:46):
There weren't, there weren't, and Linux doesn't have ads, although this briefly was a problem with the Buntu. They put in ads for their Buntu one and they, for Amazon, they had an Amazon icon in the in the, when you first booted in the start menu. Interesting. In the doc. Yeah. But while people got pretty upset and Ubuntu stopped doing it

Paul Thurrott (00:30:11):
Yeah, people probably forget this, but because Microsoft got an antitrust trouble with Internet Explorer and Windows 95 and also with msn, whichever way, you know, which is one of those big threats that never really congealed into anything bad. But you know, comper America online whatever the IBM thing was called, they were also concerned about msn. They went to the Justice Department, they went to the ftc, they complained and they got a concession from Microsoft where other online services would have icons on the desktop. So you could make a choice. You know, that was the thing they did. And I'm sure from Microsoft's perspective in the day, because they were so dominant, they were like, yeah, put these stupid things up there and everyone's gonna choose ours anyway. And as you know, we're all using MSN today. So that worked out great. But that was an exa back then Microsoft had to be forced to put this stuff into the operating system. Today we have to be forced to deal with it cuz they're putting it in everywhere. And it's, like I said, it's getting worse, it's gotten worse and it will continue to get worse. And I just, I looked up my, yeah, the TWITtter thing,

Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
Search slippery slope from Thrive.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:18):
So I, I tweet about this all the time. And it's funny, I actually used the exact same quote three years ago that I just used this week. 

Leo Laporte (00:31:24):
It's still slippery.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:25):
That's my favorite one. Wait, go back up. It says like, who has two thumbs and has used the term slippery slip to describe the ads and windows back in 2012. Right. This guy.

Leo Laporte (00:31:35):
This guy. And that was 2018. That was 2018. Yeah. yeah. You, you've been, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:43):
<Laugh>, listen, this is the only thing I've ever been right about. So I've been kind of pumping it a little hard. But <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:31:48):
Slippery slope. Slippery slope. Slippery slope. You say this a lot

Paul Thurrott (00:31:52):
Cause that's what it is. It's perfect.

Leo Laporte (00:31:54):
Good. It's the right phrase. It's the Mott. All right. I want to take a break. We're gonna talk about mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Windows 11. Right. And not just a little bit.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:06):
That sounds like a thing I've heard of.

Leo Laporte (00:32:08):
I've heard of it. I've heard of it. Yeah. I wonder, and by the way, Chris Capello apparently is not coming on the show with us this year, maybe because

Paul Thurrott (00:32:16):
Check on that. No, no, no, I don't think so.

Leo Laporte (00:32:19):
No, he's not, he's not sensitive in that regard. I mean, I think

Paul Thurrott (00:32:24):
He's No,

Leo Laporte (00:32:24):
In fact, yeah, he appreciates the, but I don't think we're gonna do it at the end of the year. Which is too bad cuz

Paul Thurrott (00:32:31):
Yeah. I'll find out for sure. But

Leo Laporte (00:32:32):
I, now I bought that this stupid Microsoft Clippy ugly Christmas sweater for no reason at all. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:39):
Well, it's still, it's still a nice prop for

Leo Laporte (00:32:41):
The show. I actually, it's actually, I was surprised cuz I expected it to be like kinda a cheap slip scratchy sweater like you'd get from Shinty or something. And it's actually very nice. Yeah, it is. So I will be wearing it all through December.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:54):
<Laugh>. Okay. I'll wear it once. I gotta figure out when, but <laugh>, whatever. Probably

Leo Laporte (00:32:59):
Whatever. Well, we should both wear it. We'll be TWITnsies

Paul Thurrott (00:33:01):
<Laugh>. I get so hot in these things though. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:33:05):
It would be a little, I have to say a little strange. Are Paul and Leah wearing matching sweaters? Did

Paul Thurrott (00:33:11):
You guys call each other before the show?

Leo Laporte (00:33:13):
That's a little weird. I don't wanna say anything. Our show today brought to you by Secure Works. I love Secure Works. They're a leader in cyber security. I'm sure you've heard the name by now. They fi build solutions for security experts by security experts. What do they have? Secureworks offers superior threat detection and rapid incident response all while making sure that their customers never locked into a single vendor. This is, this is the team you want on your site. Secureworks offers something really cool and open extended detection and response platform. It's called Tais xdr. And this is, boy, if you don't have it, you need it This year. Cyber crime will cost the world 7 trillion with a T by 2025. That figure's gonna grow to 10 and a half trillion last year. Ransomware 20 billion in damages attacks once every 11 seconds in, in 2031.

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Paul Thurrott (00:36:49):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:36:50):
If you choose, if you should choose

Paul Thurrott (00:36:52):
<Laugh>. Yeah, that's how I would prefer only to talk about Windows 11. 

Leo Laporte (00:36:56):
And it's fine. New advertising features.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:59):
That's right. <Laugh> the advertising engine that is Windows 11 <laugh>. Yeah. So since we spoke last week there's been one new build to the dev channel and this is our chance to see features, you know, that may or may not show up in the future. I think most of these are probably gonna show up in the future. Some of them, oddly, you know, the most people who really know there's a dev channel, there's a beta channel, there's a release preview channel you would assume because you're logical and you can think that they would, these features would appear first in dev make their way to beta and

Leo Laporte (00:37:32):
Yeah. Worked their way up, you know, and

Paul Thurrott (00:37:34):
That's not how it always works. So some of the features that they just released into the dev channel actually debuted previously in the beta channel for some reason. So I think energy recommendations might be new. This is, this is something we're starting to see throughout Windows, this notion of rethinking interfaces and putting things together in one place. So the energy efficiency settings, or I should say energy recommendation settings that are coming to the settings app will probably make a bunch of changes with just one checkbox kind of thing, which I think is kind of smart. Microsoft's pushing the Greenleaf thing a little heavily in Windows these days, but, you know, our data centers are operating at peak efficiency and you don't have to worry about us destroying the the atmosphere with all of our fumes.

(00:38:21):
 We're gonna deliver these updates as slow as we can. <Laugh>, don't you worry about that. You see it in the task manager, we talked about efficiency mode last week and now you're gonna see it in power and battery settings as this energy recommendation. And this is sort of like, like when you do a a route in Google Maps and it says, Hey, do you wanna take the most efficient route? And you're like, no, I'd like to get there today. But thanks <laugh>, thanks for giving me that choice. I think, like, I think I've talked about this a little bit in the past. I think a lot of people listening to this show especially would say, yeah, I don't, I'm not really looking for energy efficiency. I want this thing to work as well as it can, you know, but it's a choice to be able to make and I think it's a good, good thing to have in there.

(00:38:59):
That's fine. We also talked about some of the task manager stuff, I think a week or two ago. This is the search box. There's better support for windows 11 themeing. So, you know, this dark and light mode and an automatic based on whatever the theme is. So it's gonna offer that. We talked, we did talk about this. This is the thing where you can show the p i d remember the status and all that stuff. You can show the different columns and so forth. Efficiency mode is getting a little communications update. They're not actually changing efficiency mode. I'm not sure I agree with this too much. But efficiency mode today, like I said before, is really just about lowering process priority. And the point of that is to stop hammering the CPU with whatever this app process is.

(00:39:45):
 So that hopefully it comes back from being hung, but they're promoting it as a way to improve power efficiency, which yes, <laugh>, I mean technically if you're not hammering the cpu, it will take up less energy and we'll be better for the environment. But really this is a troubleshooting tool to get your you know, to get the system back from being hung. I mean, that's the point of it. So whatever there's a new suggested action. So remember when suggested suggested actions, which is curiously hard to say debut in 22 H two, but a month or two ago or sometime in the past month and a half there were only three times that this thing would ever come up. It would come up on dates and times. And that would, the suggestion to action would be something about doing a new event in calendar.

(00:40:30):
Or you could do a phone number and select that, copy that to the clipboard. It would say, do you wanna call this number? And that makes sense. So they're adding a, I'll call it a third or fourth depending on how many you think that is. They're adding a new suggested action in the future. And this is for Bing search? Of course it is. So you can select text in any app that supports text copy to the clipboard, the suggestion option will come up. It'll say search whatever the copy text was, using Edge of course, and using Bing of course. But okay, that's fine. I would imagine the way things that go and the way Microsoft, the way that things, I'm sorry. The way that Microsoft does things, we're gonna see a, an API or an SDK for suggested actions. We'll see third party suggested actions in the future.

(00:41:13):
And we'll see if anyone ever uses it. But it's kind of interesting I think I mentioned this a little while ago, but I've been writing about the accounts settings in Windows 11. There is all kinds of accounts that are supported by the system. You could have Microsoft accounts worker school accounts and offline accounts. So what we used to call local accounts, which I think of as signin accounts because you can sign into Windows with those things. You can add other signin accounts and dual, not dual boot, but you know, boot into different accounts. You can have multiple people on the same computer. You can have online accounts, which are things like email addresses, calendars and things like that, that you might use with the apps in Windows or with other apps. And those can be configured inside of your Microsoft account or inside of your work or school account. That's kind of cool. And these, the way Windows works is a little bit different depending on which type of account you're using or which type of accounts you're connecting. But this is all done through account settings. And so if you look at account settings, I should just look at it. It's

Leo Laporte (00:42:10):
Kinda like mobile, right? I mean that's what mobile does. Yeah. You, you know, you just associate all those accounts with you.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:16):
Yeah, I'm gonna be, you know, this is gonna be a several episode run on hands on Windows where we talk about this stuff. Okay. Because yeah, cuz it's, it's, it's really interesting. Like I I, I mentioned earlier that you can sign in with a Microsoft 365 commercial account. It changes things. And so that's kind of interesting, you know, but you could also just, you have your own computer and maybe you're at a school or you're at a workplace and you want to connect to resources associated with that organization, whatever it is. And you can connect a work or school account to your Microsoft account on a particular Windows pc. Some amount of policy will come down from that organization because obviously they want to protect their data. But once you do that, you can gain access to resources from that organization. Maybe they remotely install apps.

(00:43:01):
You can access the one drive that's associated with that account. Email and calendar obviously, stuff like that. So there's all kinds of ways you can, you know, configure this stuff. I, I think for the layperson the accounts settings interface is a little dense and a little hard to find out. There's also stuff I haven't talked about like family accounts and all kinds of other stuff you can do, but it's a little complex. But they're turning it into, this is again, part of the evolution. I think they're, they're trying to make this make a little more sense and they're also trying to make it so that you can do as much as possible from the one place rather than having to go up to the web to do so much. And yet a lot of the stuff that's in here, you'll click on it. What happens is a web browser opens because a lot of the settings that you have for your account are actually up in the web somewhere. So

Leo Laporte (00:43:46):
It's kind of interest. So it's really two different things. It's one so that that single machine now has access to all your stuff, but it's also makes your stuff more portable. Cuz you can go sit down kinda like a Chromebook, you can go sit down, log in and now you have access to stuff too. So I think this is, this makes sense. I do, I bemoan a little bit because we're seeing it on Mac really badly. The move toward putting more mobile features on desktop, you know, like, so Microsoft been down that road I guess with the Windows eight. But I,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:16):
I mean this is a kind of a side topic, but I think the mistake Apple has made so far is Apple still relies on what I will call local accounts. So the thing that you sign into on a Mac is just an account which called Paul. Yeah, yeah. Which we'd like, but it, it's also not as sophisticated and secure as an online account. So I think for normal people, you know, I I I understand like power users are gonna want like a local account. I get that kind of thing. But you know, my mother, my sister, my, you know, my non-technical friends who have a normal people Yeah. They just

Leo Laporte (00:44:47):
Want, you know, Microsoft account,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:49):
It takes every, especially

Leo Laporte (00:44:50):
With you, it syncs

Paul Thurrott (00:44:51):
It all out. Yeah. And Apple does a good job of enforcing like two A. Microsoft makes it optional, but if you, if you protect your account correctly and use that to sign into a device, it's actually a more secure way to do it. And in the Apple ecosystem you benefit from that kind of cross device sync capability, which I think is pretty cool. I'm surprised they haven't made sign into my Apple account the default option. You know, I know you connect an Apple account to the account you create, but that's kind of an old fashioned way of doing it and it's the way Microsoft used to do it back in Windows seven. And since Windows, I think since in Windows eight, we've had the ability just sign it directly with a Microsoft account. I mean, I know people, people don't like that it's forced on them now, but it is the right choice for most people, you know, anyway, I I kind of, this is a, a side conversation, but because we are using these accounts it makes sense that you should be able to manage that account in the system.

(00:45:51):
And I would say on an Apple device, you do, right? There's, you don't go to an Apple device like you're on an iPhone and you're in like the 17th level of settings and you click on something, it opens a webpage like everything's in there. And that's not actually true in Windows. And so I think what they're evolving here is the ability to manage more of your Microsoft account settings in Windows and not have to go to the web. Although there's a lot of work to do there. So anyway, in the, in the dev build, there's another step in that direction, but it's not, it's not a hundred percent.

Leo Laporte (00:46:24):
It's funny cause get it there, you know, I always forget that we have a preponderance of privacy purists and they want a local account <laugh>. But for most people, really, in fact, for me, I log into my Microsoft account cuz it's got my, all my settings, everything. It's all in there. It's fast and easy.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:40):
Yeah, right. Actually, since you brought that up, I one bit of advice of mine has changed with regards to how you initially configure a computer. I pre previous to about a month ago would've said there's a, there's a screen that says here's some privacy settings and it's like this nonsense screen of like seven options. And I would, I I used to say, look, just leave em all check, don't worry about it. Look at that stuff later. There's, there's a lot more information you can go through. The thing is, once I actually went through every single thing you can configure for privacy and Windows 11 and the things I say you should configure based on just analyzing what's, there are literally the seven things that are in that first screen. So actually if you're setting up a new Windows 11 computer, just unclick every one of those things, just turn 'em all off.

(00:47:25):
Cause that's actually most of what you want to do. This is the type type of thing. Like, you know, using unique advertising, ID let Microsoft, it doesn't say it this way, but let Microsoft track you around, et cetera, et cetera. The only one you might want to turn on would be location settings. Although, you know, privacy averse people would not want that on either. But there are reasons to have priv location settings on. But like mobile setting systems, you can do that app by app. So anyway, so you gotta stop doing that to me. <Laugh>, all these things I'm working on that are not really related to this,

Leo Laporte (00:47:57):
I'm distracting you. I apologize. No,

Paul Thurrott (00:47:59):
No, it's good. It's, no, it's okay.

Leo Laporte (00:48:00):
I just get out of your way. I'm just trying to fill

Paul Thurrott (00:48:03):
In No, no, no, no, no, no, it's good. It's good. I, it's, I'm easily distracted. But this stuff will come out in a more formal way sometime soon. So for example, I will write an article about what I just said. I will write an article about the experience of using Windows 11 with a work or school account. That's a little more editorialized than just like, here's how you do it, which is what the book typically is. It's just interesting in the process of writing this, there's new, there's new things that occur that don't get any press at all. Yeah. you know, one of the things I've complained about related to like a Microsoft account is setting sync has gone way downhill since Windows 10, well, since Windows eight especially, but since Windows it's gone down, went down to Windows 10, it went down further in Windows 11.

(00:48:46):
Windows 11 doesn't sync your desktop wallpaper your theme, which is kind of strange. They don't use the term setting sync anymore and they use the term that's so unfortunate. But there's a term they use now, which is Windows backup. Windows backup is a legacy application for doing system backup and restore. That, but now they're using, it's like Windows backup with a small bee and the idea here is that this is some set of features that are designed to sync and or backup your data in some way between computers. So like OneDrive folder sync, which is actually folder backup falls under this category. The ability to remember your apps that you have installed. So if you restore the computer later, you might or might not want all those apps to come back automatically is one of those features. But the third one is called, remember my Preferences? And this is what used to be setting sync. And it's like four things, <laugh>. And it's really, it's just not what it

Leo Laporte (00:49:41):
Remember. A couple of my, a couple of my preferences. Yeah, just a few. This is how many pages in the field guide to Windows 11

Paul Thurrott (00:49:48):
So far? It's at, it's 4 75 right

Leo Laporte (00:49:51):
Now. Oh, it's not done though. It's gonna be thousands. No, that's why. Yeah. But, but it's also good because that's why people would buy a book like that. They wanna reference to all these things.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:01):
I'm actually semi fascinated that so many little things have changed. When you think about kind of backend features like security or privacy or accounts or what else falls into this category? Help and recovery, you know, that kind of stuff. Those UIs, when you look at them in Windows 11, they're the old ui. In fact, some of the UIs date back to Windows eight, it it, they survived all the way through Windows 10. They never, never changed. And they're in Windows 11 and they're really old fashioned looking now. And yet when you dive deeper into each of these, not all of them, but a lot of them, they're actually these little differences. Like Setting Sync is a great example. The way that reset this PC works is a little different than it used to be. It looks exactly the same, but it's actually, it's a little different. They got rid of a tool that was called fresh Start, which used to be available from the Windows. Security app is gone. And because Reset this PC now does what that app used to do. Oh. Fresh Start. Lots of stuff like that.

Leo Laporte (00:51:02):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:03):
But you can still, you can do it, but you can do it. You can still do it. No, you can still do it. You can, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:51:07):
It's a different name. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:08):
Yep. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:51:09):
What was the thing? It wasn't Fresh Start then. It was where you rebooted and the whole thing. It would start over and you'd have a brand new fresh.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:17):
Yeah. So both of those did, so reset this pc, which could do a refresh or reset and then Fresh Start. And the idea behind Fresh Start was you would download the Windows image from Microsoft and what it wouldn't do is bring back all of the stuff that a PC maker put on it from by default. Now that's built to reset this

Leo Laporte (00:51:34):
Pc. That's too bad. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:35):
No, no, it's, no, it's, it's

Leo Laporte (00:51:37):
Cause it's taken the partition, right? It's not taken it from

Paul Thurrott (00:51:39):
The cloud. Well, because the PC maker, so you buy a PC from Dell or hp, Lenova, whatever, they can customize the image that's on there. So when you reset it right, it comes back with all their apps,

Leo Laporte (00:51:48):
Which I guess people want. It's like, put it back to the

Paul Thurrott (00:51:50):
Factory. Well, this is, everything in life is a double edged sword. Right? Right. So one of the things you don't get when you do this, if you cut that stuff out, is you might not get all the drivers <laugh>. Right. So, right. You'll get 'em eventually. Like you, a Windows update will have a bunch of 'em, depending on the pc, sometimes you might have to download like a Lenova vantage app or HP Support Center or whatever it's called. You know, Dell has an app and you'll be able to use that to get the drivers. Hopefully one of those drivers won't be your wifi driver. But usually not. But it's, you know, it's kind of a six to one half dozen. I mean, you, you'll, you'll lose something either way. <Laugh>, I guess it's just, you know, but at least you have the choice. You have the choice,

Leo Laporte (00:52:31):
Yeah. And they're not using Fresh starting anymore cuz that's Kid Litter

Paul Thurrott (00:52:37):
<Laugh>. Well, it's the features that made Fresh Start unique, which were mine are all available.

Leo Laporte (00:52:41):
That's the kitty litter where every time the cat takes a step, a new freshness is released or something. I reme, you see how those ads work? They work Paul,

Paul Thurrott (00:52:50):
It's like the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer wants to invent a perfume that smells like when you came outta the ocean

Leo Laporte (00:52:57):
<Laugh>. That would be good.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:59):
But then he brings it to a marketer and they says, you know, the first thing you do when you get outta the ocean is you take a shower. <Laugh>. Nobody wants to smell like that. What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte (00:53:09):
<Laugh>? <laugh>. No, that's a good point,

Paul Thurrott (00:53:11):
<Laugh>. Yeah, no, I know. It's interesting cause I thought that was a good idea too. And then you hear that you're like,

Leo Laporte (00:53:15):
Oh, oh yeah, you're right. Yeah. Hey, I'm really excited about this next item because, and I'm confused. So I really want your clarification cuz WSL is no longer a beta product. Right? It's, it's out beta. That's right. And I think you can run not just command line apps, but you now can run Linux gooey apps. Am

Paul Thurrott (00:53:33):
I right? That's right. Yep. Across Windows 10 and 11. And well,

Leo Laporte (00:53:36):
What

Paul Thurrott (00:53:38):
This is interesting on a number of levels, they, they haven't communicated this very well and it's, it's in a transitionary state, which we've seen before. So you think about something like Window Windows Power Shell is, I think the, maybe the best example. There's nothing that's exactly the same, but windows Power Shell, actually, I'm gonna get it wrong cuz I'm, I gotta make sure that's right. Yeah. So Windows Power Shell is something that comes, has come with Windows for a long time when you run Windows Power Shell, which comes up in the terminal app now on Windows 11. But I, I believe it's the default environment. It, the thing that says right at the top is install the latest power shell for new features and improvements, and it gives you an address to go to. And when you click on that address, let's see, actually no, it's not working on my computer for some reason, so I'm gonna let that sit for a moment. But it will, it lets you download a more modern or more up to date version of Power Shell that I guess is just called Powers Shell, as opposed to Windows PowerShell. So W wsl, to date, WSL debuted as a thing that was built into Windows had to be manually installed, right? Initially I think it had to be installed from a command line. Yeah. Which for a lot of people, very d for

Leo Laporte (00:54:48):
Shell. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:49):
Right. Then they made a version of it available in the store. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and I should say, regardless of the version that was in the store, that's still in the store all of the Linux distributions you could install into it were always available from the store. Right. So it's kind of a unique thing. It's like, here's a command line app that you <laugh> you, you get updates or you get you know, function or features for through the store, which is a little goofy. But now well in the past two, three months, two months, I'd say the Windows subsystem for Windows came out of beta. So it's considered fully supported, generally available. It's, it's in Windows, you know, it's just built into Windows. But going forward, they're gonna make the store version the version that's where all the updates are gonna go, right? So the version in Windows will be supported for the lifetime of whatever version of Windows it's in. So the one that shipped in Windows 11 a year ago is probably gonna be supported for nine more years. But the version that they're going forward with is the version you get in the store. And that version's gonna get all the new, whatever new features might happen. I don't know what those might be, but

Leo Laporte (00:55:54):
So I see it now in the store Power Shop. Yeah. see, I always worry with the store. Oh, good. It says from Microsoft Corporation. Okay. It's got a weird tux logo. It's not the real tux, it's like a blue tux, which is weird <laugh>. So Linux users will be gonna be puzzled a little bit by that. But then, but then if you search for Linux, you'll see other distros among a lot of other things, but you'll see other Distros as well, like SUSE and tu and yeah, it's cool. Yeah. Do you have to install a Linux after you'd install a WSL from the store? Or does it install?

Paul Thurrott (00:56:26):
So this just happened, I haven't, I haven't done this recently, so I, this is another by way, another thing I'll be writing about soon. But yeah, I, you have to have some, you have to have some command line, obviously, right? I, I don't wanna, I, I feel like Microsoft has a partnership with Ubuntu where they're,

Leo Laporte (00:56:45):
Maybe they'll install a Buntu, but let me see, windows substances,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:48):
They are the, you know, the preferred Linux provider of the Philadelphia Eagles, you know, something like that.

Leo Laporte (00:56:56):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:57):
You know what I mean? It's, it's something like that. 

Leo Laporte (00:56:59):
It's, yeah, I'm looking at the entry and it doesn't say anything about what distro you get. In fact, in the graph graphic, it shows Debian, it shows

Paul Thurrott (00:57:10):
Yeah, of course they're gonna

Leo Laporte (00:57:11):
Show one, two, it, I mean, in the graphic on the thing it shows a variety of Linux is Cali Lenox, ssa. Right. so maybe it's agnostic, but then you have to, it probably will tell you I

Paul Thurrott (00:57:24):
Yeah, but which

Leo Laporte (00:57:25):
One's first I haven't already installed yet. Right. I haven't already installed.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:28):
Yeah. Yeah. And you would've installed whatever distribution.

Leo Laporte (00:57:31):
Yeah, I already installed, I can't remember. In fact, I think I have a couple. That was one of the nice things you can install. A couple of

Paul Thurrott (00:57:36):
And actually one of the other nice things is I, I briefly mentioned that terminal is now the default, you know, terminal environment and windows. So if you're on Power Shell or Command Prompt or one of these WSL environments, you will do so inside of that terminal shell. It supports tabs. You could literally have multiple tabs in the same window each with its own version of Linux all running side by side if you wanted to do that. That's kind of cool. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:00):
Let me just type you name here and see what I've got. Microsoft's standard wsl.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:09):
Oh, interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:58:10):
Doesn't say what distro it is. I'm pretty sure it's a Buntu. It's a buntu, but

Paul Thurrott (00:58:16):
That's actually, I feel like it has to be, but I just, I don't, I hate to say that definitively since I don't know, but,

Leo Laporte (00:58:21):
Huh, interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:23):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:58:23):
But that's, I mean, it's awesome. Now how, and a gooey you would install from the store, or you install from the command line. Do you know,

Paul Thurrott (00:58:29):
I have never done this, but I assume you would do it from the command line. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:32):
Yeah. So you'd do an APT pseudo app to get install?

Paul Thurrott (00:58:36):
I was originally, so I had, I actually wrote chapters for we're gonna,

Leo Laporte (00:58:40):
I'm gonna turn you into it, like Guru, whether you like it or not.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:43):
Well, <laugh> fact, I was originally gonna add this to the Windows 10 field guide. So I, I, I wrote Command Prompt, I wrote Power Shell, and I wrote Par. And at the time, terminal was not the default. So I had to think a little thing about that. But yeah, I'd, I'd written something about this, but now that it's now I've moved forward, obviously, so it's gonna be part of Windows 11. So this is, this is too calm. I haven't spent it much time with us recently. Huh.

Leo Laporte (00:59:06):
Basically. That's interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm curious about

Leo Laporte (00:59:12):
This. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:13):
I'm sure they'll figure out a way to get ads in there. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:59:17):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:20):
Anyway, we're gonna be in a weird state here for many years because now there's gonna be the version in Windows which is an optional feature. And then there's this store version. And the store version is kind of the official version. I don't know how they're gonna, well, I, I explained, you know, PowerShell, so Windows PowerShell is the version that comes in windows. And then Power Shell, I'll just go to this thing manually. Never. Yeah. It's just called PowerShell. So it's like Microsoft PowerShell, and I could be wrong, but I believe the way that these things are parallel to each other is that Power Shell, the one that's out in the world, is the one that will be constantly updated and is supported on every supported version of Windows. Right. And then the version in Windows is, you know, windows Power Shell. And it's probably stuck at whatever functional level it was at when you install the operating system. I'm not a hundred percent sure on that one, but that's my guess. And that I think that what they're gonna do with WSL will kind of map to that, except this time will be the version out in the store rather than the one, you know, the one you get from the web or whatever.

(01:00:26):
WSL is an app in the Microsoft store. It's really cool. Once you, it's

Leo Laporte (01:00:30):
Really cool. Yeah. I'm very happy about that. But like I said, I wonder, you know, people, Linux, people always say, well, do you think this is a Microsoft's going to eventually replace Windows with Linux? It kind of feels that way slowly working its way in. I like it. I

Paul Thurrott (01:00:47):
I I would say since releasing this, since announcing this, since it's been a thing in Windows, Microsoft has also come up with something called the Windows subsystem for Android. Right? Yeah. And so that's right. That runs, but that's

Leo Laporte (01:00:59):
Linux too, by the way. That's just another look at Linux distro.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:01):
Listen to Linox play <laugh>. No,

Leo Laporte (01:01:04):
He's call me Ts <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:07):
Yeah, no. Okay. It's

Leo Laporte (01:01:09):
Interesting. It's interesting. Yeah. It's, no, you know what this is this is, this is like the accounts thing we were talking about earlier. Make it all available, make it easy. Should be, they want you to live in Windows. So what's the best way to get people live in Windows, give 'em anything they want in Windows? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:23):
The, the, the real thing that this is, is the complexity of the Windows app ecosystem, which is we will run anything you want, you know? Yeah, yeah. I, I just, I mean, I keep, sorry, I keep referencing this, but this is my whole life right now. But I was writing the Edge chapter on web apps. And if you think about how like a, a browser like Chrome Works if you get to an, a web app on the web, it will say, Hey, do you wanna install this as an app? And the point of that is it'll work on any platform. Like you can do it on Android, you can do it on the Mac, you can do it on Windows, whatever. And Edge works the same way. But if you go to a webpage that's not a web app, like my website or most websites, you can still kind of make a shortcut to it and it will work sort of like web app, but you have to be online.

(01:02:03):
Obviously. You can make a, you know, the shortcut sits there in your task bar. It will, it looks sort of like an app, you know. But actually Edge More recently has done something completely different from the way Chrome does this. And so Edge now actually lets you install, I'm gonna say install cause it's not really installing anything, but it lets you install any webpage as if it were an app. They're, they're trying to blur the lines between what is a real web app, you know, like a PWA or whatever, and what is just a webpage. And honestly, from the perspective of a user, who cares what the difference is, right? I just want, I go to the, you know, thero.com website every day. I don't want it in a browser tab. I want it on my task bar with it's cool little icon. And it opens in a window that looks like a, like a regular application. Who cares what's going on in the background, you know? And I think Windows generally is kind of like that. You know, there are web apps, there are native desktop apps, there are store apps, there are Android apps now, you know, like who cares where it came from? I just want the apps.

Leo Laporte (01:03:01):
And they all run. They all run. And it's nice

Paul Thurrott (01:03:03):
They all run. Yeah. I mean, there, there's some complexity to it, but Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:03:07):
Well, but that's under the hood, that's complexity for Microsoft. It is user kind of,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:13):
Yeah. I mean, so the example I would use is this happened with Chromos. So one of the goofy things about Chromos, they allowed Android apps in, and now you get into a situation where you're like, okay, well, so what's better? The web app or the Android app. So Microsoft Worried, for example, has certain features on the web app that are not on the mobile app, but the mobile app version has certain features that aren't on the web app. They can both access the same backend OneDrive storage, and you get access to the same documents. You can make a shortcut to both of them in your, whatever the Chrome start menu's called. And they sit by side by side, they have similar icons, you know, and if you make the argument, you're like, you don't have to worry about, you don't have to know anything about what kind of app it is. You're like, okay, but now there are two Microsoft Word icons, so which one do I use? You know, so you kind of run into that possible complexity. And I, you know, we haven't, I don't have a good example of that yet, but if, if for example, the Microsoft Office apps for Android ever became available through the Android app store for Android, the Amazon app store for Android, it's possible we could have that situation in Windows, right? And then you can have free versions, the web, the Windows, and the Android version, you

Leo Laporte (01:04:23):
Know, it's great fun. They all are kept up to date though, automatically by the store, right? Sure. That's nice. It says Lenox will be kept up to date by the wsl will be kept up to date. That's, that's great. Will the Android apps also be

Paul Thurrott (01:04:37):
Yeah. Automatically. Not by the store <laugh>. So by the Android store. By

Leo Laporte (01:04:43):
The Android

Paul Thurrott (01:04:43):
Store? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's a little bit of

Leo Laporte (01:04:47):
Complexity. I understand that. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:04:49):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's called by the Microsoft store, right? It is cool. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:04:53):
Who cares? It's good. Who cares what store? Some store

Paul Thurrott (01:04:57):
You know, there are people who care, but yes, they, yeah. Well, it's like drivers, you know, you ever do this little, I was just doing this day, right? You you bring up an HP computer in this case. Yeah. You get whatever drivers you get through Windows Update, you install the HP support app. You run that, oh, you get eight more drivers. Great. You go back to Windows Update, oh wait, there are three more drivers. Wait, you go back to hp. I hate that. You know, you get, you get into that whole game

Leo Laporte (01:05:18):
Use oem, updaters, but everybody does it now. So what's your recommendation? It feels like I should just be able to do Windows update and not do the, I I'm on a Dell here. The Dell update or

Paul Thurrott (01:05:28):
The ht So it depends on, yeah, so you have, if there are computers where all of the updates come to Windows update, that's an ideal situation. Yeah. That's an, I that's an ideal situation. I understand that Dell and HP and Lenovo need to have the support app because there are other reasons that you may have to interact with your customer that aren't just driver updates, right? There's other things going on.

Leo Laporte (01:05:46):
There's, for Dell, there's a service tag and all

Paul Thurrott (01:05:48):
That. Yeah. There's no reason not to do that. There's also, but the, the thing I think that most people don't really think about is there's a quality bar for Microsoft for getting it into Windows update and also kind of a necessity, right? Does this need to be in Windows update right now? Or is this something you'd like to do? Whereas like the, the OEM might be say, look, I we're putting this thing out, you know, we want them to have this version and a Microsoft's testing, like Yeah, we're okay with this other version. And that's where you get into the conflict because

Leo Laporte (01:06:17):
This is classic problem with Windows. Every driver, there's a W H Q L version, there's a reference driver from the, from Nvidia, there's a manufacturer's OEM driver, and there's a Windows driver. It's like, and some, and they all have different versions. And there some work and some don't. And

Paul Thurrott (01:06:35):
H

Leo Laporte (01:06:35):
Ls always the older one, but sometimes that's a better one. Yeah. Look, so Dell, Dell says, I have three updates.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:43):
What's the Dell app called? I can't remember the name of that.

Leo Laporte (01:06:45):
Dell Update.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:46):
<Laugh> Dell. There you go. Okay. Must be the, was the name was confusing.

Leo Laporte (01:06:50):
I, yeah, they're all recommended, but I don't, you know, unlike Windows, so

Paul Thurrott (01:06:54):
They re that's recommended. Yeah. So in Windows Update actually, there's a place for recommended updates that are not gonna happen automatically. Most people don't really <laugh> kind even look at that stuff. But it's, it's depending on the pc, you may see that stuff. Optional updates, it's called. Right? You can go into optional updates and that's what that is. It's kind of optional. Like it's not necessary. Yeah. Yeah. You would, you would hope that whatever that driver was, if it was necessary, especially if there was a security issue, that it would appear in Windows update. And if Dell has their own thing, it should appear there too.

Leo Laporte (01:07:27):
You know? So that's another question I have, which is people sometimes ask on the radio show, and I say, you know, always look at the optional updates cuz they are drivers and I presume yeah, they're optional, but I presume if there's a driver update, you should apply it. Yeah, I always

Paul Thurrott (01:07:43):
Do. Anyone looks at optional updates? Nobody does anymore? I don't

Leo Laporte (01:07:46):
Think so. Wait, where do they

Paul Thurrott (01:07:48):
Update?

Leo Laporte (01:07:49):
Okay,

Paul Thurrott (01:07:50):
I I, I always run through whatever Windows update offers and then I go to the PC app and as I just described, that bites me in the butt sometimes. Cuz then you get into that little game where you go back and forth, back and forth. But

Leo Laporte (01:08:01):
I'm gonna do it. Let's see, I'm gonna do it. Yeah. Give, it's given me an update for a Dell doc, which I don't have. So unless this is called a doc, it's just a US

Paul Thurrott (01:08:11):
Yeah, yeah. Yep. That's good.

Leo Laporte (01:08:15):
If I if I suddenly go off the air, you'll know it's because I <laugh> I'm rebooting my, my Dell tole. Yep,

Paul Thurrott (01:08:24):
Yep. Every piece to Maker has stuff. There's a Dell peripheral manager that handles things like webcams and Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:08:30):
Yeah. So you really can't ignore the OEM stuff though. You really have to do it.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:36):
It depends on the pc, you know, by the way, one of the, one of the great advantages of a Microsoft Surface device Yeah. Is it all goes through Windows does update, you know

Leo Laporte (01:08:44):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>,

Paul Thurrott (01:08:45):
There's a Surface app. Sure. I mean, that gets updated from the store

Leo Laporte (01:08:48):
Because the OEM is market Microsoft. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:50):
Right. And, and that's one of the, it's a good example of them actually living by example in this case. Like say, look, this, you could do this, you know? And would, I mean, how awful would it be if Microsoft created Surface

Leo Laporte (01:09:03):
Updated? That'd be hysterical. This is the Microsoft Updater.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:07):
What's everything you need to know right there?

Leo Laporte (01:09:09):
Is this the argument against installing a generic version of Windows on an OEM system that you should always

Paul Thurrott (01:09:16):
No. Cause you can always, you, you can always get this stuff. So if you blow away, I guess the, the que the, the argument is what's more important to you? So if this was my mother, I would not say in the old, you know, go to Fresh Start, blow away all this stuff and get a clean install. And then she comes up and she's like, I can't get online. Right? It didn't even have a wifi, which is by the way, is super rare. That's not gonna really

Leo Laporte (01:09:36):
Happen. No. It'll plug and play all that stuff. And,

Paul Thurrott (01:09:39):
But, but you could still run through all of the drivers. You can get Windows, there's Update, go in a Device manager, another activity no Human being would ever do. And see there are one to three devices that are not correctly configured with drivers. And you have to figure that out. And so the easiest way to figure that out for a normal person is just install whatever the OEM app. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:09:59):
That's why Fresh Start now goes to the oem. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:02):
Version. Yeah. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:10:04):
So I should <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:10:05):
Right? Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:10:06):
Uhoh, did I put words in your mouth?

Paul Thurrott (01:10:09):
Well, I don't, yeah, I don't want, so Fresh Start is gone and it's, it's reset this PC that will, can be customized by the PC maker. You can override that customization, which is what using Fresh Start used to could do. And if you do do that, you may find, cuz you should, the, the problem is like, I get why you would wanna do that sometimes is crap on there you don't want, but you might not get all the drivers and then you're kind of on your own to Google them or Google the name of the Dell update program or whatever it is. Get that thing installed and then use that to just install the drivers. You can do that. I mean, it's just, it's just how much, what's more important to you, you know, or how do you wanna spend your time? Or how worried are you that you won't be able to get this thing up and running? It just depends on who you are as a person. You know, you have, you have the choice, but you just, you know, hopefully you know how to get back out of it if you do the wrong thing. I guess

Leo Laporte (01:10:59):
<Laugh> does your mom okay. It did it three outta three, no, three outta three successful didn't have to reboot even though it said I might have to reboot. So now let's do Windows update just outta curiosity.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:11):
And they're gonna be like, I don't know what you, you just did, but the system is

Leo Laporte (01:11:14):
Screw, we gotta do that. That's terrible.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:16):
Check the file system. We got the,

Leo Laporte (01:11:20):
It's so much Windows is so much fun. It's just so much fun. I enjoy it so much.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:26):
I, I feel like if I ever found some medication that would fix what's wrong with me, I would never use this again. You know? But

Leo Laporte (01:11:34):
I just had a security intelligence update, which they used to call definitions, right? That's right. Yeah, that's what that is. And there you go. You're good.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:41):
I'm

Leo Laporte (01:11:41):
Good. That's good. I'm good. Yeah. Just let me, you know, I know you're not supposed to, but I'm gonna check under under optional updates. No, nothing. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:49):
Nothing. No, no, that's fine. Nothing. So that's, that's what you should see. Like if you think about it, those were recommended updates from Dell, meaning they're not necessary updates. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> if they were necessary, they should have been in Windows updates. So Windows update checks and they say, look, you're already meeting our, our minimum bar for all these drivers. You're fine. Yeah. Right. So that, that's the way it should work.

Leo Laporte (01:12:07):
You're good. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:08):
It doesn't, doesn't always, but that's the way it should

Leo Laporte (01:12:10):
Work. Yeah. I think, you know this actually is a reason to choose an OEM one OEM over another, maybe. Yeah. Yep. Because this is handed properly.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:21):
I have a little less experience with Dell, but I would say between HP and Lenovo, they're pretty consistent experiences. They have, you

Leo Laporte (01:12:28):
Know, those are the three names, different apps. In fact, somebody just asked me on a Sunday on the radio show. Yeah. And I said, Dell, HP Lenova.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:34):
That's right. I

Leo Laporte (01:12:35):
Think does a good job. Yeah, good is good. There's lots of, you know, MCI or msi, there are lots of good ones, but

Paul Thurrott (01:12:43):
And there's lots of bad ones. Like for example, Samsung, if you want to, if what if your idea is Windows is not cluttered enough and I, and there are not enough ads in Windows get a Samsung,

Leo Laporte (01:12:52):
Those more ads <laugh>, I, yeah, we can do that.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:57):
Oh my God, it's unbelievable.

Leo Laporte (01:12:59):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:12:59):
There's a case for Fresh Start or the, the pc, we reset this pc, I guess. Yeah, anyway, there's lots of different choices. Razor is out there, you know, whatever. But you know, Microsoft too, I mean, honestly, I, I, we'll see what things look like. I feel like the reliability issues with Surface have quieted down. I I don't have any recent Gen Surface PC or anything, but I would like to be able to recommend these computers. I, I, I think they're great looking devices. They don't get updated very often from kind of a look and feel perspective. But you know that this is what you want. You want that Pixel Google type ex or apple type experience. Like the hardware in the software maker are the same. It's clean, as clean as it can be. There's no extra junk on it. You don't find a lot of extra software utilities on there. There is a Surface app that's not a big deal. Just for the unique features of the surface, like the pen or whatever it might be. I, you know, ideally in an ideal world, you I would be able to recommend that without qualification. But they have, you know, they have a history <laugh>, so they're getting there. I think

Leo Laporte (01:14:11):
They're getting there. Yeah. new Qualcomm Snapdragon that is gonna change your life. <Laugh>. It is the year of the arm pc. Woo.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:28):
Well, and by the year we mean 2024. So <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:14:32):
Some year, any year would be good.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:34):
I don't remember what year they announced Windows 11, or sorry, windows 10 on arm. It might have been as early as 2015. I, but it was somewhere in the next year or two probably. And we've talked about this before. It's never really lived up to the promise. I, I think just getting Windows running on arm is an incredible feat and it can only get better. But that's kind of a low bar rate. We know that Qualcomm bought a company called Nuvia that was making performance oriented arm chip sets for PCs and also for data centers. But we, we care about the PC space here. We knew, we know that the idea behind that purchase was to, you know, adapt their existing Snapdragon chip sets to make them better for running on PCs. The fear of course, is that as they do that, the advantages of Snapdragon of arm in general start to disappear a little bit. Meaning that the 24 hours of battery life goes down to 12 or 10 or eight, and as the performance goes up and that, inevitably what we end up with is what we already had, which was like an Intel pc. But we'll see, you know, I don't mean to be cynical about it. We'll see,

Leo Laporte (01:15:40):
Is this the first Nuvia chip nuvia slash Qualcomm chip?

Paul Thurrott (01:15:44):
We're kind of assuming that's what this is and, and the reason, but yes, I, we assume that that's what it is. So earlier this year, I, I mentioned earlier on an earlier show Christiana on the CEO of Qualcomm said 2024 will be the year for Windows Andar therefore killing all sales of Windows devices in the meantime. Oh God. But whatever. Okay. and we, we know that they have adapted, I don't know, five, six generations of Snapdragon ships to work on Windows PCs. And that the latest version is the best as you would expect, but also because of platform improvements that Microsoft has made that this thing is starting to come together, right? So it emulates 64 bit apps and 32 bit apps. There's the, I don't know that anyone is doing this, but app developers, you already have an app in the store, or sorry, you already have an app in the world.

(01:16:31):
It doesn't have to be in the store. Microsoft Office, for example, you're like, look, I'm not recompiling this for arm, but I would rewrite parts of it for Arm, the parts that need to be, especially, and other parts can be emulated. They created technology to do that. We can mix and match source code bases and all that kinda stuff. So they've, they've done what they can do, but there's only so much we can do with, with the chip sets we have. So we've been waiting on this new Via thing and it's always been like next year, next year, next year. This year we found out it was the year after next year. And Snap or Qualcomm rather just had their big Snapdragon event this PA last week. And they announced, you know, new chip sets for phones. They announced new chip sets, I think for like he, you know, headphones or IOT devices or whatever, all kinds of different things. They didn't announce new chip sets for Windows, except actually they did talk about it a little bit. They talk about something called Orion, which I read is irony, but it's o o it's with

Leo Laporte (01:17:32):
A Y, right? It does look

Paul Thurrott (01:17:33):
Likey. Like y o Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:17:35):
No, that's bad.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:37):
Yeah. So we don't know if that's gonna be the, the, the marketing name or you know, sometimes chip sets just have, you know, family name. So like, maybe that's just the family name. It, you know, they might still call it Snap. And I think Snapdragon has a pretty good brand recognition, whatever. It's oddly it's not just for Windows, right? They're gonna use the cpu, they call it CPU is a tough phrase, but they're gonna use this chip set

Leo Laporte (01:17:59):
Soc. It's an soc

Paul Thurrott (01:18:01):
Soc. There you go. In smartphones, digital cockpits, driver systems. Systems. What's

Leo Laporte (01:18:07):
A digital infrastructure? You mean like an airplane cockpit digital

Paul Thurrott (01:18:10):
Pit? Yeah. Yep, yep. Wow. So what that tells me, that's a weird way to describe it. It's a

Leo Laporte (01:18:15):
Cockpit.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:16):
Snapdragon today works across a wide range. Yeah. You know, they customize it for these different use cases, right? So obviously if you buy like a pair of headphones, it could be a little Snapchat, Snapdragon chip set in there. You buy a smartwatch, there's immersion for that. If you buy a, an in-car system or you buy a car that has an in-car system, there's probably a version for that that we know there are versions for tablets and, and smartphones. We know there's versions for Windows. So maybe they're changing the brand. I, you know, I'm not really sure. 

Leo Laporte (01:18:42):
That's at disadvantage though, when you make a chip. See this is where Apple has such an advantage. They're making chips for specific hardware. They're not making digital cockpits yet. Maybe they will to make some sense. Well, Uber general is problematic. We talk, we

Paul Thurrott (01:18:55):
Talked about, well, no, sorry, I should say they do, they do make them for specific markets. Like they actually do do that. They have different, in other words, if you buy a snap drag, if you buy a a smartphone today, it's not the same chip set that's in your headphones. It's not the same chip set that's in the Windows pc. They might have some common, you know, core background or whatever. They're gonna have different layouts of efficiency and power cores. They're gonna have different wattage, you know, power requirements, et cetera. I mean, they are different. Yeah. but the way they're describing this is

Leo Laporte (01:19:26):
Probably not,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:27):
I don't, yeah, I don't know. It's so vague what they're doing. But really what they've done is basically put this thing in a holding pattern. So sometime next year they will reveal more information about this, including a timeline. My suspicion is that this thing gets formally launched a year from now, like I've said in the past. It will be called whatever it's called. It will be new via based, we're assuming by the way, arm and, and Qualcomm get their stuff together. Cuz those two are cross suing each other over this Nuvia acquisition and licensing costs. And we'll see how that goes. That might play some role in the timeframe. I doubt it. But, you know, that might be part of it. And we'll see, we'll see. I mean, we keep hoping for this future. I I someone, I dunno if it was IDG or Canals or one of those companies said, you know, by whatever year, 20 24, 20 25 arm will be 30% of the PC market. To which my cynical self said, yeah man, Apple's gonna be going to town then because 29% of it's gonna be Max <laugh>. I don't, you know, well, we'll see. I don't know. I we'll see. We'll see. I know. We'll see.

Leo Laporte (01:20:32):
We

Paul Thurrott (01:20:32):
Did a story, I like the idea of

Leo Laporte (01:20:34):
It yesterday on Mac Break Weekly about one of, one of the things Apple did, which is really interesting, you know, of course they have to mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they have a emulation layer called Rosetta two. So they can run Intel software on the New Max with the a with the arm. Oh, this

Paul Thurrott (01:20:49):
Is, I

Leo Laporte (01:20:49):
Know what this is. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. So there is, so Intel on the X 86, when you do an an ad or a sub, they set two flags that don't exist on arm. Cause arm is, is is reduced instruction set. It's not so, so the, the parity flag and the just flag are set and those don't exist on Arm. So normally in an emulator, what you'll do is an ad or a sub will take five or six instructions cuz you have to do this extra stuff to, to emulate this. Most apps never use the parity bit, for instance, but some do. So mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and, and Apple, in order to, to make Rosetta faster, built that into the hardware. So it's a single instruction on Apple silicon, whereas in every other arm chit set it's five.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:39):
It would be amazing if that's why they're fast.

Leo Laporte (01:21:44):
According to this, and this is, this is a, if guides posted a master

Paul Thurrott (01:21:47):
That on simple, simple,

Leo Laporte (01:21:48):
It's that simple. But because this ads and subs are done all the time.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:52):
All right. So, but you understand how far back this goes, right? So the the, oh yeah. The interesting thing about the story to me is this means they can emulate like the very first Intel 80, 80, 60%. It's

Leo Laporte (01:22:03):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:03):
Right. I mean that, because that's how far back that operation goes. Exactly. That's, that's,

Leo Laporte (01:22:09):
That's it also explains something we see sometimes, which is that RO software runs better on Rosetta two on a Mac than it does on an Intel mac. Like it's faster on Apple sil. And we just assume, well, this is a much faster chip, but maybe it's because of this optimization. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:24):
So there's a lesson to be learned here for Qualcomm. Herb else is gonna be putting arm on Windows, right. Or Windows on arm, I guess. They, I hope everyone's, I of course they are, but hope they're paying attention to this because it, it should have been clear to everyone as soon as the M one came out that they did something right. And it feels like magic and

Leo Laporte (01:22:45):
It's little things. It's,

Paul Thurrott (01:22:47):
Yeah. And I don't look, I don't use a Mac, but I will tell you I have Max, but I mean, I don't, I'm not like a Mac guy, obviously, but wouldn't that be a revelation, right. All these years. No, but anyway, so, but when you run Windows on Arm on Mac right now, that runs better on an M one, M two, whatever. Yeah. Than on any physical hardware you can buy.

Leo Laporte (01:23:07):
Exactly

Paul Thurrott (01:23:07):
That. I mean, whatever Qualcomm is doing with this Nuvia stuff, the bar has to be not a core I five level of performance. It has to be, you gotta beat emulated on M one. If it's not faster than that, just don't even bother releasing is it's really, that's that's an incredible accomplishment on Apple's part. Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:29):
It's a very tiny thing that makes a huge,

Paul Thurrott (01:23:33):
And I don't think people who don't have never used this believe it. It just doesn't sound possible. Like when you say that's why some people say that, like some Intel app's better on m what people <laugh>, you know, and like, it sounds like they're just making this up. Yeah, yeah. But no, like, this is, I know that's what, that's why it's

Leo Laporte (01:23:50):
Crazy. Yeah. It's real

Paul Thurrott (01:23:52):
Wild. That's what people are experiencing. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:56):
But that's, but also is why it's gonna be a challenge. I mean, for Qualcomm to to duplicate this performance is not gonna be, it's not trivial.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:04):
Oh yeah. By the way, the, the industry's not standing still for the next two years. Qualcomm. So good luck, <laugh>, because, you know, Intel is revving their chips. They're gonna figure it out eventually. I mean, they're slow moving, but they're gonna get there. Apple isn't exactly sitting still, they're revving their stuff every year. I mean, the, the bar, you know, they're struggling to get up to whatever level, but the bar keeps going up and up. And I, I'm, I'm nervous about them ever being able to pull this off, but I'd love to see it happen for sure. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:24:32):
Yeah, I don't have you run windows and Arm on a Mac? You probably haven't. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:37):
Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's fantastic.

Leo Laporte (01:24:38):
Parallels. Does it Now VMware does it as well. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:24:41):
Right. It's

Leo Laporte (01:24:41):
Pretty fast. Yeah, it's great.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:42):
It's, no, it's not pretty fast. It's really fast. Faster

Leo Laporte (01:24:45):
Than on an r pc.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:47):
<Laugh>, this is what's, this is the problem. So I, I just sort of, I flew through this and it's not worth going into great detail, but through some combination of hardware improvements on, on Callcom side and more important, I think the platform improvements that Microsoft has done, emulating 64 bit codes. Huge. Right? They have made Windows more viable on Max because no one buys a Mac to run Windows like Windows. They don't care about the Windows. They care about an app. You know, I need it because I need, I wanna use a Mac. I've always wanted to use a Mac, but I have this one Windows app I have to use for work and I, I can't switch. Well, guess what? That one Windows app now runs faster than ever on a Mac. And it's a huge problem because most of the apps that run on Windows just run fine on Windows and Arm or run slowly. But now most apps now run fine on Mac that shouldn't or otherwise aren't compatible with these new whatever Apple, silicon systems. So they have Apple <laugh>, Microsoft Rather has inadvertently really helped Apple here. Apple did the, all the work they did to make the M one incredible. And now Windows and Arm is better. Well that means that Windows can be better on a Mac and that, and it, it's better than it is on a Qualcom pc. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:26:03):
That's not good. <Laugh>. That's crazy. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:26:06):
Not good. It's a weird problem. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:26:07):
It it, it's kind because one of the things that max did in the early days was they had bootcamp that would've let the u dual boot back into Windows.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:15):
Yeah. But dual booting. Dual booting is one thing. I, you know, virtual PC or what was the thing? Well parallel. So

Leo Laporte (01:26:21):
Whatever parallels are Yeah, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:22):
Yeah. You'd used something, it was slow, but at least you got the thing going. It was fine. But when Intel when Apple went to Intel, that made that stuff way more viable. And now you can have the coherence mode where you're just running the app and you, you hide windows.

Leo Laporte (01:26:35):
They lost bootcamp. People were very upset and, but it sounds to me like they shouldn't be because this is better.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:40):
No one wants bootcamp. Yeah. You wanna run the Mac and you want the app or the two apps, whatever it is that you want. You're not running. Like I said, the idea isn't to see the Windows task bar and all the junk. It's to run the app. And I they magically, but

Leo Laporte (01:26:53):
Microsoft shouldn't care about this. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:55):
But they do care very much about it because as you might have noticed, <laugh>, they're not exactly friendly toward this environment. Yeah. I guess it's technically supported,

Leo Laporte (01:27:03):
But you're buying Windows. Well, no, you're not. You are. Buy Windows won't let you buy Windows cuz it's, they won't put out Windows on arm.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:10):
Right. So

Leo Laporte (01:27:12):
I guess is this that exclusive, do you think it's still an exclusive deal with Qualcomm? Is that

Paul Thurrott (01:27:16):
Yeah, I think that might be, well, yeah, yeah. You can run, obviously can get the insider of preview program version. Yeah. Yeah. And a Windows Key will work and a Windows keys work. So you can, you can activate it if that's what you want. I bet a lot of people aren't. I think that's kind of the problem. Like, people run this thing, they never see the screens about activation. They're just running an app. Like who cares. Right. It's like, you know, you're not gonna, you can't customize your desktop unless you pay for it. I don't care. I I don't,

Leo Laporte (01:27:41):
Don't care.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:43):
Yep. Doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:27:44):
Matter. That's interesting too. Yeah. So Microsoft, this is then they're missing the boat. They're missing an opportunity because

Paul Thurrott (01:27:50):
I think, so

Leo Laporte (01:27:51):
They, if you are running, if I'm running a licensed copy that I paid for Windows on a Mac,

Paul Thurrott (01:27:56):
That's good, but you know what? So I should just, it's

Leo Laporte (01:27:59):
Just another oem.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:00):
They are. Yes. But this is like, why doesn't apple put iMessage on the Android? Or, you know, the problem is when Windows runs better on a Mac, which people used to always say, and it was never actually true. But now actually with, with on the arm, the arm version Windows does run better on the Mac then it does on actual hardware. That's, that gets into a weird place cuz Microsoft really wants this thing to fly. But if the best situation is on Mac, then people are gonna walk away from Windows. They're gonna like, well the Mac's already better. Like, just use the Mac. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:28:35):
What do I need it for? Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:37):
Right. That's the problem. I think that might be the holdup.

Leo Laporte (01:28:41):
All right, let me let's take this good place to take a little break and then mm-hmm. <Affirmative> come back with more of Windows Weekly, the Paul Thro edition.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:50):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:28:50):
Okay. Paul. Paul is running Mary Jo Foley in emulation. You might notice that's

Paul Thurrott (01:28:55):
Right. Yeah. Right. Starting a little slower than in real life. But you know

Leo Laporte (01:29:00):
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(01:30:58):
You can just look in your podcast player for code comments or go to red hat.com/code comments podcast. Or if you go to our show notes, TWITt tv slash ww we're gonna put it there too. Code comments if you, if you like talking about how software gets made and you wanna learn about the process I know a lot of you read Paul's great articles on throughout.com about this stuff. This would be a great podcast to listen to Red hat.com/code comments podcast or search for code comments in your podcast player. We thank 'em so much for their support. We love to promote other podcasts that do kind of what we do, do that geeky stuff. This is a great one. Of course. It's from Red Hat. No surprise Red hat.com/code comments podcast have ever considered doing a software coding. We did one podcast, we did something called Coding 1 0 1. Robert did it father Robert. And it's, it was great. I loved it. You know, sometimes though it's hard to make a podcast a commercial success. And I think the problem with coding is there's, it's, it's like gaming. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:32:12):
Just, it's so specific.

Leo Laporte (01:32:13):
It's so specific. There's a lot of slices. I think maybe for the club, once I, you know, I'm retiring from the radio show at the end of the year. Yeah. I was thinking maybe I have a little more

Paul Thurrott (01:32:26):
Space. What's going on there by the way? So this is, this was what you teased last week.

Leo Laporte (01:32:29):
Yeah. So retires a bad word, but 

Paul Thurrott (01:32:34):
It is in a way I'm not doing it anymore. <Laugh>. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:32:37):
I'm quitting. But, but, but it is retiring in a sense cuz I've been a radio guy that's, you know, that was my career for 46 years, 19 years as the tech guy on the radio. You know, where you have a transmitter and a tower and you have call letters. I'm still, we're still gonna do the tech guy. I'm gonna do it with Micah. We're just gonna do it as a podcast. We don't need a transmitter towers. We can, you know, who needs that anymore? I think the radio audience has changed. Who listens to, do you listen to the radio ever?

Paul Thurrott (01:33:05):
Nope. No. Only only by mistake. <Laugh>. And then I'm always, I'm always unhappy when I hear it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:11):
And what we notice is a lot of people just listen to the podcast. So Yeah, it's hard for me cuz I, you know, radio is my, how I got into this whole thing. I love radio, but I'm still really doing it. So retirement, it's not exactly retiring from talking into a microphone, it's just retiring from talking to a microphone connected to a transmitter that goes up into the air and comes to you that way. So yeah. And it'll be the first time in my life that I, this is where I'm really retiring. I don't have a day job where I don't have somebody, a boss. Yeah. Yeah. I'm my own boss. Right. You've done this your whole life.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:44):
Yeah, sort of. I mean I've

Leo Laporte (01:33:47):
Always do do you do a w2? I mean, do you have a

Paul Thurrott (01:33:49):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:33:50):
Right. So you work for a living. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I I can, I can not show up <laugh>, right. I can come in my jammies <laugh>. I'm not gonna do that cuz now I have the audience is my boss. But, you know, so it's, it's gonna be a change. Anyway, December 18th is the last radio show. Then we go into Christmas and the New Year's and we'll do December. I mean, sorry, January 7th will be the first ask the tech guy. I'm gonna do that with my And

Paul Thurrott (01:34:16):
How it's be a weekly show.

Leo Laporte (01:34:17):
Yeah. On Sundays. It'll be the same time as the Sunday radio show. And, and finally, and that's the other big deal is I get to have brunch for a change. I might come down to Mexico City and have some of those delicious brunches. You've been, you've been eating. I, Hey

Paul Thurrott (01:34:30):
Look, I have some, I have some ideas.

Leo Laporte (01:34:33):
Oh good. You know, that's the other thing. I could travel more cuz it's radio show needs a lot of infrastructure, but right. I mean, I could be any, you could look when you were in Mexico City, you're in Pennsylvania, it doesn't matter.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:45):
The internet connection in Mexico is better than the one I have here. And if everything goes accordingly, we'll be there a lot next year. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:34:52):
Yeah. We'll see. Good for you. Good.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:55):
That's, we'll see. But that's the, that's the idea. Good. I love that. Let's move on to PC sales. How are they going? Yeah, they're going great, Leo, I'm glad you asked. <Laugh>, so how do I say this? There was a period of time where things started to go south and companies were saying, yeah, but you know, it's still better than pre pandemic levels and that talk has stopped <laugh>. So not because they're not still Oh yeah. The expectation now is that it, it's sort of like this nuvia thing. It's always, it's pushed out. It's pushed out. And so what what companies are starting to admit is actually this quarter that we're in now, which is a holiday quarter, is gonna be a bloodbath. And depending on the company, depending on their business model, some of them are saying, look, it's gonna be horrible for like, for long, long time.

(01:35:54):
So HP just announced their quarterly and annual earnings, their quarter ended, their fiscal year ended on Halloween appropriately. And basically what they said, actually their CEO said in a separate interview we don't expect it to make a comeback during our coming fiscal year, our current fiscal year. So they think it's gonna be bad at least through this time next year. In the most recent quarter they did actually. I mean honestly they did. Okay. Kind of revenue wise as a company, this is a company, remember that makes PCs, that's their primary business and they also make printers and other hardware. So I think their PC business, I'm trying to find the exact number here is, I'm gonna say it's two thirds of the company. The print printing business is smaller obviously, but they had like an 11 percent year over year fall in revenues in the quarter.

(01:36:50):
Their annual revenues were actually just about even they were down a little bit less than 1%. But that's gonna change right in the com coming year cuz it's been going downhill. Quarter of a quarter, PC sales declined. 21% portable PC sales, which is most of them declined 26%. Revenues from consumer PCs fell, fell. 25% revenue from commercial PCs fell 6%. Not good. So they're gonna lay off a bunch of people over the next two fiscal years up to 12% of the workforce. That could be up to 6,000 people, which is horrible. But this will help them obviously save money and, you know, better position themselves for the future. But this is a good example. The, the world's second biggest maker PCs. This is basically all they do. I yes, I, I I know they do printers, but you know, Dell as a slightly diversified business, you know, they do data center and other products Lenovo also, HP is pretty much pc. So this, this is an interesting peak into how the market is really going, I think. And it's not going well. So this is the first time I, we, like I said, we, you've kind of had that conversation, like, we don't expect this to come back to anything better than pre pandemic level. So this is gonna be another level setting. I, we're, we'll see historically our, our

Leo Laporte (01:38:15):
Network and, you know, those kinds of computers still selling well, is it just desktop computing and business computing or

Paul Thurrott (01:38:23):
It's Yeah. Consumer end. It's just consumer, yeah. No, it's consumer end, consumer end commercial, everything. Consumer sales fell dramatically worse than commercial. But even the PC revenues from commercial business customers were down 6%.

Leo Laporte (01:38:36):
So it's just a, this tech shrinkage is going on. But, but it's interesting that they're saying it's beyond what Covid brought

Paul Thurrott (01:38:45):
Related to this. The CEO of AMD was interviewed on CNBC and she said that PC cells are down more than we expected. There's a cycle of correction, which is what you basically just said, and that they're focused on kind of the long term. But the quote, the, the figure that came out of this is that PC sales overall, this is probably from a single company like idc. I don't know what the source of this is, but it's probably IDC or Gardner felt 20% in q3, which was the worst. It's fallen year over year in over 20 years. And these companies all expect it to be worse in this quarter, which again, is a holiday quarter, which makes that kind of crazy. So we haven't bottomed out yet. I don't remember now, you know, cuz I've read quotes from everybody in every company and I'm forgetting who said this, but depending on the company, some are expecting things to improve by the middle of next year. But I think that advice is gonna, I think we're gonna see that shift. We'll see what happens. But I'm hoping, I'm hoping we can normalize this sometime in 2023. Obviously if <laugh> welcome to just release to you Orion, we'd be saved. But in the meantime we're doing what we can do.

(01:39:59):
So there's that

Leo Laporte (01:40:00):
End of, I think Mac sales are up though, right? I'm trying to remember.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:05):
The thing is,

Leo Laporte (01:40:06):
When you're low <laugh>, when you've got 2% of the market <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:40:11):
Boy. Yep. So I have to look that up cause there was a caveat I talked about with that. So let me, lemme just look that one up. Patients end of October,

Leo Laporte (01:40:21):
Six

Paul Thurrott (01:40:21):
Colors here. Yeah, he's the, actually I think this is where I got, I got it from him. Yeah. So at the end of October, apple, you know, announced their earnings. The Mac was up 20. Okay, this is the, this is it. So Mac was up 25%, which sounds incredible, but it's not that incredible because in the previous two quarters they couldn't meet demand because of all the supply chain issues. That's right. They get all caught up. That's right. Yep. So actually they were rough. They were roughly flat actually, which by the way, in the scope of the industry, fantastic. Yeah, it's better than, but I think what we're gonna, I think we're gonna see Yeah, we're gonna see that adjust too. But anyway, that's, I knew there was a kind of an asterisk on that. I just,

Leo Laporte (01:40:56):
So what do you attribute this? Are people not just not buying computers or buying mobile devices instead, or,

Paul Thurrott (01:41:02):
Yeah, I think what happened was there was an over buying of PCs during the pandemic because everyone's like, oh my God, we're stuck at home. We gotta get work done. I can't go to an office. I need this stuff. In many cases, businesses were buying them for people. They were probably saying, look, go to Best Buy, get whatever you can get. Everything's sold out. Just buy whatever you can get. You know, usually there's a, a you know, some amount of PCs that are kind of in the channel. They're either on the way or they're sitting in warehouses or they're on store shelves not being sold, whatever it is. And that kind of dried up during the pandemic cuz everyone needed this stuff so badly. People couldn't, you know, in many cases were afraid to even or couldn't go into an office, take a computer and bring it home. You know, they, they just, the, their employer said, look, buy a pc. So this happened. This, this is, this will always bother me because it, it, it really reveals a lack of sophistication. But I use this example, cause again, I, I follow Microsoft, but during the pandemic era buying spree Microsoft cfo, Amy Hood came out and said, oh my God, we didn't realize how great, you know, PCs were, they're, they're back and this is fantastic. We're gonna focus more on this stuff. And it's like, guys,

Leo Laporte (01:42:07):
You,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:08):
You must have known this was temporary. Like this is, so we're kind of seeing the dark side of the overbuying that occurred earlier. We already have a market here where people don't need to upgrade for many years now. They all just upgrade. The whole world is upgraded. So those PC sales probably would've been spread out normally instead of over like a half a year and a half or two years. That that might have occurred over eight years. You know, people are all bought up, they're done. We don't need PCs now. And it's going to, it's just gonna have, well, we're seeing the effect. I mean, there's the PCs that might have naturally been sold over time, were bought and no one needs them anymore. So I, the question is always when it shifts, you know, when this normalizes, when we, I think of it as a plateau. It's kind of a reverse plateau, but, you know, when does the fall it stop?

Leo Laporte (01:42:59):
It'll, so it'll come back. You think it just, it'll start to trickle back.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:02):
Pcs. PCs, were never gonna go away. They're not going away. Now they're, they are important devices. We need them for work. 

Leo Laporte (01:43:08):
It might be laptops, not desktops.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:10):
Leo, I've got 20 PCs in my office,

Leo Laporte (01:43:12):
I'm gonna have to buy. I know, but they're all laptops, right? They're, and that's, I mean, that doesn't matter. That counts. Yeah. Yep. That's fine. And, and, you know, anyway, no one's buying tablets. I mean, I I have to say they're not taking over much as Apple would like that to be the case. Nope. Yeah. So it's either a mobile, a phone, or a pc. And and that's the other problems. These PCs last much longer. There's not, there's nothing driving you to get a new PC anymore,

Paul Thurrott (01:43:39):
You know, which is cra you know, again the a problem, which doesn't sound like it could be a problem, but you make these things are now more reliable. The, the hardware lasts longer. That's why mic, it's part, part of the reason why Microsoft artificially changed the harbor crimes for Windows 11. You gotta force people to upgrade, which is a goofy thing to do. I have a perfectly working computer here. Why would I, you know? Right. we'll see, I'm curious about next year. I want, I, I really want this to rebound not just for the PC industry, but for the world. I mean, this is a, a nightmare. So hopefully you would think seriously coming. It's the world time. It's bad for us. Well, it's bad for us, but I mean, with all the awfulness of Covid, if you could have said, listen, every in two years, everything's gonna be great.

(01:44:26):
We're gonna come out of this. You could get Covid, but you're not gonna die from it anymore. It's just like a flu or cold. It's no big deal. Everything's gonna be great. You like, that sounds great. Oh, there is one thing though. There's gonna be a huge recession and all that buying excitement in euphoria is, has has a dark side you don't even understand. It's got, it's gonna be a nightmare. It's like, so which one of these is worse? You know, obviously people dying is worse, but I mean, it, it's terrible to come outta something awful and have to face something awful. You know? It's too bad we could, we couldn't have bought a couple years. Could we have a couple years of no drama? Is that something, is that too much to ask? But yeah, it's too much to ask. So here we are.

(01:45:08):
Anyway, we'll see. Obviously keep my eye on that. And then just real quick cuz who cares? But Microsoft <laugh> has made Windows 10 version 22 H two broadly available. It means what this means is that it's it's being offered to the biggest set of PCs that could possibly get it. This is gonna largely be two groups of PCs. I think it's gonna be PCs and businesses who are gonna hold off as much as they can. And then also PCs that don't meet the bar for Windows 11. Right. the weird drama around this one is that Microsoft has never once said what's in it. So I think we can safely assume now that it's broadly deployed, there is nothing in it. You know, meaning nothing new. There are of some minor things, but if you look back over the history of the previous few Windows 10 releases, what you'll see is nothing dramatic. And they didn't even think enough of this one to even tell you about it <laugh>. So it's kind of weird. I believe this is the first time ever. But it's out there. So if you have a computer that if you're an individual and you're listening to this, you're running Windows 10, you cannot upgrade to Windows 11 for whatever reason. You almost certainly have this by now. And if you don't check cuz you'll probably get it very, very soon. So.

Leo Laporte (01:46:24):
And that's a good thing. Enjoy. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:46:27):
I think so. I mean, it's fine. You know, we get

Leo Laporte (01:46:29):
A chatter user 75 22 says, I was just offered 22 H two today. You're on Windows 10 75 22. Just offered it today.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:38):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well that's probably because of the, the cha the status change. I think they've un un open the flood gates there, so it's, I wish they talked about it. Yeah, it's unblocked. Oh, I'm experiencing my beautiful Intel PC problem. I won't bo you

Leo Laporte (01:46:56):
With, shall I and need you. The list of upcoming stories. We're going to Microsoft 365 Land

Paul Thurrott (01:47:03):
<Laugh>. Yes. Yes. This is kind of cool. You know, my son is, is deaf. And one of the things we did with him was he got a, a Coate implant when he was about a year and a half old, and then a second one when he was probably about 10. Cool. And he did well enough with that, with those that he never needed to learn sign language, you know. And you know, it wasn't like a purposeful thing on our part, but we just deaf wanted

Leo Laporte (01:47:27):
To, there are deaf advocates, you know, the Oh yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:29):
College

Leo Laporte (01:47:30):
Folks who would say you deprived him of his native tongue in effect.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:36):
Yeah. That's ridiculous. My son was born with herring and was deprived of hearing, so whatever we go. Yeah. I I'll go, you know, we just wanted to have him to have a normal experience. Right. So what they call this is mainstreaming. You take a kid with some kind of a a handicap and you, you matriculate him into the public school system or whatever. And in his case, he had a completely normal experience. Like he didn't have to go to special classes or do anything like years great. And speaks clearly and everything went great. And then he went to college and he ended up going to i t which has an incredible deaf program and surrounded himself with deaf kids. And now my son is fluent in sign language and like that's, he just learned, just learned it from being there. Like, that's so cool. Yeah. Just immersion. Right. And it's cool except when him and his buddies are around and they don't want us to know what they're talking about.

Leo Laporte (01:48:24):
<Laugh>. You should've learned it. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:26):
Yeah. So I've been, yeah, we never learned it cuz we thought, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:48:30):
Don't have to. Don't. Anyway,

Paul Thurrott (01:48:31):
Yeah. So that's been kind of amusing. But it, it's, it's been interesting for me being in the tech industry watching as accessible technologies have occurred. Right? One of the early things that I felt very strongly about was captions and in video of all kinds, right? And I used to, you know, there's, there are laws that control how that's supposed to happen. In the early days of digital video, a lot of those videos didn't have captioning or had the, like, the worst imaginable captioning. And I would complain to these companies and you know, whatever, that is much better than it's ever been. But, you know, flash forward to 2022 and accessible technology is everywhere. It's really rather incredible. And so Microsoft has done a lot of stuff. You know, there's the auto live captioning in Windows 11. It's a great example. You get auto live captioning on Android as well from Google. It might, I dunno if that's pixel only or if it's built today. I think it's

Leo Laporte (01:49:28):
Everywhere now. And Apple does it now too.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:29):
Okay. Apple does it too. So that stuff is fantastic. And that's really neat. So Microsoft just added a new feature to Microsoft Teams, which is a new sign language view for meetings. And what that does is allow people are deaf or hard of hearing or whatever, or maybe you are interpreting for someone else. And you could have a sign language view. So it's a person doing the sign. Like it's, it's basically live captions for sign language, right? And it's just, I, this is incredible to me. And I, you know, I, my hope is that my son never needs this, but the fact that this is available and obviously not just for him, I mean, I'm thinking of him cuz he's my kid, but the fact that this kind of thing is just a feature now of teams to me, is just astonishing. It's, it's very it's very exciting. So that's, that's really neat. So, you know, again, as we move forward, the accessible capabilities that we see throughout the tech stack is, it's just awesome. So I love this kind of thing. I think that's really cool.

(01:50:33):
 And we used to call this thing one outlook. What we now know is that it's a PWA version of Outlook for web, you know, for the Outlook web app basically. But this thing is out in the world now, it's public. Microsoft is live with it, it's limited. When it first shipped, it was only it would only work with a single account. Now it works with multiple accounts. These are what I would call Microsoft accounts. So you can have multiple, like outlook.com, hotmail, live.com, whatever accounts. Eventually in the future, they're gonna support Gmail and, you know, third party account. So this, it's kind of, you know, it's, it's <laugh> it's interesting watching a like an email app adopt things to other email apps have that it's 25 years, but, you know, but, but okay, but we're getting there. We're getting

Leo Laporte (01:51:18):
There. It's interesting. It's a pwa that's interesting choice.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:23):
Well, you know, it wasn't that long ago. Well, maybe it was a long time ago At some, at some time in the past. I kind of made the argument that Microsoft should just take outlook.com, turn it into a PWA and make it the new outlook. But when you look@outlook.com, you realize like for that to work, it has to support multiple accounts in the way that a native email app does. Like you sign in with your account and you, you either have an integrated inbox view or separate views, doesn't matter. But it has to just kind of work. You can finagle it a little bit. Like anyone who forwards emails to el.com and you can send emails as another email address. You can do that. It's a lot of work. It's not something I would ask a normal person to do. But I I, I thought this years ago, all they have to do is what I just described. And honestly, that's, that's what this app is. It took 'em, you know, five years, 10 years, I don't know. That's all it is. So it's getting there. It's interesting that outlook.com and Outlook on the web are both not, they both are. Neither of them support offline. Obviously this thing's gonna have to, for this to be viable in any way. But it's happening. You know, that's all I can say. I mean, they're getting there. Give 'em some time. It's Microsoft. It's not like they know a lot about software

Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:52:35):
I never did this before.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:38):
I Yeah, you want, you say you want to use your email offline.

Leo Laporte (01:52:42):
It's what, I don't understand this what is it, Monarch, this whole Monarch thing, what they're doing with with Outlook. The strategy doesn't seem clear to me, cuz it seems like what they would wanna do is unify everything instead. They're kind of not.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:59):
So I, to me what this is is a little bit like Windows 11. Right. They know not everyone's gonna want it. It's simpler, prettier maybe. But you've got these old timers who use this esoteric feature that they only get in the desktop line. They need it, they want it, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So like, okay, don't worry, you know, we'll support that for, you know, period

Leo Laporte (01:53:18):
Of time. Kills you time.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:19):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:53:20):
Every

Paul Thurrott (01:53:20):
Time. But I think, honestly, I don't, I don't use this thing. I mean, I would use it. I actually, I'm kind of interested in this, but I think making the break with the past is important. You kind of just have to do it. Yes. You support the old version for whatever the timeframe is, and at some point you just say, look, it's time to move on. You know, apple has always been very good at that. Maybe a little too good actually.

Leo Laporte (01:53:41):
Well, in mail, they're just as bad as Microsoft. I gotta say they Apple. Okay. So they just don't have as many products, you know, they don't have a big office suite with and

Paul Thurrott (01:53:50):
So forth. Well, I mean, apple seems better about dropping legacy technologies.

Leo Laporte (01:53:54):
Oh, they're great at that. But, and maybe something about mail makes it hard, but well,

Paul Thurrott (01:54:00):
Apple, apple, apple Mail is missing. Remember the lips they used to have for a next meal where it would like talk back to?

Leo Laporte (01:54:07):
Yeah, they don't have that <laugh>, they don't

Paul Thurrott (01:54:08):
Have that. So they dropped that. See, I dunno what you're talking about. It's completely different.

Leo Laporte (01:54:13):
<Laugh>, they, they of course they have, they have a web-based mail iCloud mail, right. And they have, which is, I mean, all of this is kind of low feature. And they have Apple mail for iOS and they have Apple mail for it desktop. But they're all kind of, they're more like, you know, outlook express level.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:31):
Yeah. But by the way, that's what most

Leo Laporte (01:54:33):
People, most people need.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:34):
It's fine. It's, it's okay. You know? 

Leo Laporte (01:54:38):
Yeah. There's

Paul Thurrott (01:54:39):
Actually

Leo Laporte (01:54:39):
Look a very rich ecosystem of, of male clients on both iOS and Macs. I'm not sure why that is, but there really is.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:48):
Yeah, there is. Well, why are there so many Markdown editors and Notetaker apps? It's kinda like that for some reason. It's a, yeah, it's just a fertile,

Leo Laporte (01:54:55):
But there aren't that many. I think Outlook has really squashed third party mail clients on, on the Windows site. Because they,

Paul Thurrott (01:55:02):
To me, like all you have to do is use Outlook to know why there could be something better. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:55:07):
I used to Pegasus Mail for a while. I like that a lot. Oh my God. Of

Paul Thurrott (01:55:10):
Course. Yeah. U Dora back in the

Leo Laporte (01:55:11):
Day. Eudora. But all those are kind of, you know,

Paul Thurrott (01:55:14):
Yeah. They're all gone. I, I really liked outlook Express back in the day at one point. And then it was like internet mail and No, that was what it was originally. It was internet, mail, news and calendar or something. And then,

Leo Laporte (01:55:26):
Oh, Pegasus is still around. It's free now. It came out in 1990.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:31):
<Laugh>, I use, I just use web clients and I consolidate to one account. Don't,

Leo Laporte (01:55:36):
I think that's everybody accounts, that's part of what's happened is pretty much every, because of Gmail, pretty much everybody just uses the, that's web

Paul Thurrott (01:55:42):
Brass to their It works fine. Yeah. And the Gmail mobile client is fine. Yeah, it's fine.

Leo Laporte (01:55:47):
Fine. It's all fine. I want better. I want fine. I want great

Paul Thurrott (01:55:51):
<Laugh>. Well, the problem is Outlook isn't even fine. You know, like if you like, like I've consolidated on Gmail. Well try, I'm gonna try Microsoft Outlook because I you know, use, I use Windows. You can figure Gmail in that thing. We could record this show, come back next week. And it's still not done syncing. It's, it's that, it's horrible for that kind of stuff. It's just, it just betrays how old school it is. When you try to do something with a modern email, you know, service. It just doesn't work well for that.

Leo Laporte (01:56:18):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:19):
Okay. It's okay. It's okay. Don't, if you have outlook concerns or complaints Mary Jo's email address,

Leo Laporte (01:56:26):
It's mj you've done a great job in the Mary Jo Emulation department. I think you're, you really, you're really getting it down. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:56:32):
Good. I'm just saying she wants to listen to this feedback, so, you know. Oh, no, that's all I'm saying.

Leo Laporte (01:56:39):
We talked about yesterday, I was surprised and I thought, well, I'm gonna have to ask Paul Swift key, which Microsoft bought. It was really a great keyboard on Android. Yep. Microsoft bought it. It showed up on iOS, Microsoft yanked it from iOS. Right. And it just appeared the other day, what's going on? Do you know why they

Paul Thurrott (01:56:59):
Yeah, they brought it back. They, they heard so many complaints. They're citing, populated. Let me ask you a question. What man would trust this keyboard? Now <laugh>, you're telling me don't get a text if they thought so little of it. Don't get a attack. They canceled it. And a couple of lot of people complained about like, all right. Their quote is, we're investing heavily in this keyboard. Stay tuned. Really? It's like, really? They're gonna add new features. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't, I would not, I can't say that I would trust it. I will also say, and maybe this is a little out of date, but I, my my experience, and I've not done a lot of this more recently, but has been that third party keyboards on iOS in particular are little bulky, you know, they don't really work very well. Yeah. Sometimes it will flip back to the old one or

Leo Laporte (01:57:43):
Whatever it does. And you almost have to always go back, like in passwords, they won't let you use a third part. It's very annoying. I gave up. So if you

Paul Thurrott (01:57:50):
Can't, basically Yeah, yeah. If, if you're not gonna get that kind of native experience, like why bother I gave up. It's probably better on Android. But on Android it is, well actually we've gotta talk about

Leo Laporte (01:58:01):
This. But the thing is, you have g board, you have a lot of great Android. The Android, you got great choices.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:05):
So, so I try, I did try Gboard on iOS. The problem is, the reason I want to use it is because voice recognition on Apple is horrible. Right? Voice recognition on Google is amazing. It's amazing. So they have a gboard for iOS. The problem is when you use the, the, the microphone, it flips to a different app. You record into that app, and then it goes back to the app you're in. And it past it in. And that process is time consuming and it cuts you off. If you ever use voice transcription on Android, you could, you could, you could dictate a novel into this thing. But when you do it on iOS, you're like, Hey, the other day, I, I, and it goes back. You're like, and then you go, you know, you have to keep doing it. It's horrible. Anyway, if you are a Swift Key fan, it's back. 

Leo Laporte (01:58:49):
Good for you. Congratulations.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:51):
Good for you. Yeah, exactly. You know, it is good for you. What else do we have? Da da da. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:58:56):
You know what else we have, sir? Don't pretend. Don't pretend there's no Mary Jo Foley here to bang your gong. It's Xbox Time

Paul Thurrott (01:59:06):
In shop. Contrast to the previous three weeks. I only have a couple of oh no. Couple stories. Yeah, so, well, it's another week. So we have another example of Phil Scher saying, seriously, <laugh>, we're gonna support Call of Duty. What are you complaining about? So they literally went to Sony and said, look, we'll, we'll sign a contract. You they'll do it for 10 years. 10 years. Sony did not reply. Did not reply. Because Sony, of course is engaged in, you mean legal processes by

Leo Laporte (01:59:37):
Around the world. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop you right here, cuz I, you're gonna get emails and you don't want emails. Oh

Paul Thurrott (01:59:41):
My God. I wrote Phil Sch, did

Leo Laporte (01:59:42):
I say Phil Spencer? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:44):
Oh my God. Okay, so sorry. Phil. Phil Shiller just canceled his TWITtter account. I think he was in my head.

Leo Laporte (01:59:50):
He did, he canceled his TWITtter account. Apple did too. I was they deleting their old tweets?

Paul Thurrott (01:59:55):
I can't, those two people could not be more opposite in my brain with regards to credibility. <Laugh>. If they

Leo Laporte (02:00:02):
Try Phil Spencer, not

Paul Thurrott (02:00:03):
Phil Spencer. I'm so sorry. I'm gonna go do 10 pushups. Okay. So Phil Spencer went to Sony and offered them a 10 year deal on Call of Duty. And they ignored him.

Leo Laporte (02:00:16):
They ignored him, but

Paul Thurrott (02:00:18):
They didn't even reply. They

Leo Laporte (02:00:19):
Wanna still rattle the cage. They don't

Paul Thurrott (02:00:21):
Want, they don't wanna say yes to something. They want to get what they can get through regulatory processes. Exactly. So that's fine. You know, Phil Spencer had said a week or two ago, you know, it's, he said, we can't write a contract for forever, but, but it is forever. If you, if you keep making Sony PlayStations, we will keep making Call of Duty for that thing. So

Leo Laporte (02:00:41):
Anyway, that's kind of funny. Yeah, why so you, I mean, a judge is gonna know they're gonna scher if a Scher Yeah, Spencer. Now I'm doing it.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:51):
Yeah. See, see how

Leo Laporte (02:00:52):
Easy it's Spencer goes to court and they say, Mr. Spencer you know, you can't buy Activision because you're gonna kill. He said, I offered a 10 year contract, I don't know what you want. And it's, and it's on public record, so it's not gonna carry any water that he, that Well, we don't know what they wanna do. They're, they're saying it.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:10):
Well, I mean, honestly, if I was Phil Spencer and this pro this process was approved and the acquisition went through, I'd go back to Sony and say, yeah, we're gonna do, I think we're gonna go year by year for a while. See if that's a, you know, I think that's how I'd handle that one. I, you know, I would've given you 10 years. But I guess

Leo Laporte (02:01:28):
Now I don't worry about that tried. I tried, but, you know,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:30):
Okay, obviously they're gonna keep making

Leo Laporte (02:01:32):
Call of Duty. That makes money.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:34):
Yeah. So if you think over the various console generations on Xbox, I, I would, and you think about the controller in particular, I would say there were probably four major controller designs over the years. There was the initial one, the giant one. It had a name like Big Boy or Big Be or So there was that really big one, which was honestly too big even for me with Big Hands. There was the S controller, which was a smaller version they initially made for the Japanese market because all those people complained about the initial giant controller. And then there was the version for the Xbox 360, which was based on the S controller. And for some reason it's still perceived as being one of the better designs. And then there's the version that they did for Xbox One, which is carried forward to Xbox Series X and S, which with minor improvements, as far as I'm concerned, those are the best controllers that Microsoft's ever made. However, there is some vocal contingency out there that still wishes We had Xbox 360 controllers that would work on the, you know, current gen consoles and PCs for some reason. And now Microsoft has licensed their Xbox 360 controller to a third party company called Hyper, and they're making a wired controller.

Leo Laporte (02:02:44):
It even has the X and everything. It's

Paul Thurrott (02:02:47):
Cool. Yeah. Here's what's fun. The name of this is the Hyper Xenon. And do you know what Xenon is in Microsoft Lore?

Leo Laporte (02:02:56):
No.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:57):
It is the code name for the Xbox 360. Oh, I'm not mistaken. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:05):
Look at you going to marry Joe Foley on

Paul Thurrott (02:03:08):
Us. See? Yeah. I had a seance last night, so I can pull that one outta my butt

Leo Laporte (02:03:12):
Code name and all

Paul Thurrott (02:03:14):
<Laugh>. Oh, the Duke was the original controller. Duke, that's right. And actually the Duke came back too. In fact, it was hyper that released a replica of the Duke.

Leo Laporte (02:03:22):
So is this a pretty close? It looks pretty, looks

Paul Thurrott (02:03:24):
The same. Looks it looks the same. I, I think the one difference is below the circular Xbox button is a third button that is the share button that is on the newest controller. So they added that. Yeah, you need that, which is pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Nice. Actually, that's my new baseline. I, I wouldn't buy a controller unless it had the share button, but that's neat.

Leo Laporte (02:03:44):
That's cuz you,

Paul Thurrott (02:03:45):
I don't want

Leo Laporte (02:03:46):
Prestige 11, my friend. And you would like to share your

Paul Thurrott (02:03:49):
Success? I am. I think I'm prestige one or two. I don't remember. That's

Leo Laporte (02:03:54):
You're just starting over two. Just starting over.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:56):
Yeah. Something like that. I'm having a hard time with my KD though. I'm still, I'm still kind of 1.0.

Leo Laporte (02:04:02):
What's a kd

Paul Thurrott (02:04:05):
Kill death ratio. So <laugh>, ideally you want more kills than deaths. I'm, I'm literally 1.00.

Leo Laporte (02:04:10):
Wow. He dies as many deaths.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:12):
Die as many. Yeah, exactly. I am a complete waste of time, basically. 

Leo Laporte (02:04:15):
Oh. Mine would be negative. So you're better than, yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:20):
It's

Leo Laporte (02:04:20):
Okay. I'd be completely upside down. And I killed death ratio.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:25):
Yeah. I was, to begin with. I've been riding it back up a little bit,

Leo Laporte (02:04:28):
So, yeah. I can't

Paul Thurrott (02:04:29):
Believe

Leo Laporte (02:04:31):
People, you know, they wonder why Americans are so violent. Well now, you know,

Paul Thurrott (02:04:37):
See, I disagree with that. I get it all out in the game. Yeah. I go out in the

Leo Laporte (02:04:40):
World. You're, you're a gentle giant. You don't, you're nice.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:42):
Yeah. I mean, I, I will unload in the back of a guy's head in the game, but like, in real life,

Leo Laporte (02:04:47):
No, never.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:48):
Hardly ever. I'm a teddy bear. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:04:49):
Teddy.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:04:52):
<Laugh> 1.0. KD ratio.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:56):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:04:57):
It's not bad, but it's not good.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:59):
Exactly. Just random. It's baseline. It's, it's the minimum. Yeah. Is what we're looking for

Leo Laporte (02:05:06):
Here. I'd be I'd be a you know, minus Yeah. Three.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:11):
Oh no, I have, I have games that are horrifically bad. I have games where I'm like, oh, that went pretty well. And then I, it ends and it was like eight and 23 and I'm like, oh, that's not that happen. Yeah. You know, like, that never happened to me in earlier games. But this one, you know, it's

Leo Laporte (02:05:25):
Hard. It's a hard game. A hard one. Yep. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. It's Harry. All right. We have the back of the book still to come. I'm just gonna scan ahead. I don't see any alcoholic beverages, unfortunately. Yeah. But we do have tips and the like mm-hmm. <Affirmative> the first word from our sponsor, the good folks at Rocket Money. Now this is something everybody listening can, I think, identify with. Do you have on your bank account, on your charge cards, recurring subscriptions? You've completely forgotten about. You know, you do, you know, you do. People really underestimate actually what's going on with a subscription thing. Rocket Money surveyed Americans to ask them. 80% of them said, yeah, we have subscriptions we've forgotten about. But they, they were asked to estimate, well, how much, you know, about how much a month is it? And they would estimate about, well, it's about 80 bucks a month.

(02:06:23):
When it turns out, when they checked it's more like $200 a month in subscriptions. We are in a subscription economy. Rocket Money, formally True Bill. So in fact, that's how I got introduced to them. I've been using True Bill for years. Rocket Bottom turned it into Rocket Money. Made it even better by the way. I might add, but I love this. And you will love this. You need this, it what you connect your accounts and then it has a, it's besides doing budgeting and giving you all, you know, your net worth and all the useful stuff you would get, which is very grit, you know, it's just better than a checking account. This is, you know, or, or your, your savings statement or whatever. Cuz this is everything. But it also has a, has a tab, recurring payments. And you could see all the things that every month are coming outta your checking account. You will be blown away by this. I found not so long ago in the 2020 election cycle, I made a contribution to a candidate. And I didn't notice the little checkbox that says do this every month. And I, I forgot about it. Rocket Money found this and said, you know, you're giving this guy a lot of money every month. The election was two years ago.

(02:07:36):
They, it was thousands of dollars by the, by the, you know, after two years. So I stopped it. Thank you. Rocket Money. You just saved me a ton of money. We all have something, you know, a newspaper you subscribe to, you never read a streaming service. Maybe you got a unused Amazon account. Whatever Rocket Money finds it. And then this is the best part. You say cancel that. And it cancels it for you. It cancels it for you. So there's, you know, one of the reasons we have all these subscriptions is, oh yeah, I'll get around a I'll cancel. I know I'll cancel that. No, this is easy. Lays it right out. Says how much you're spending, cancel, cancel, cancel. It's that easy. Rocket money. I mean, there are a lot of reasons you want to use this. It's a really great financial app to keep track of what you're spending, do budgeting, figure out what your net worth is.

(02:08:27):
All of this stuff. But this just this recurring expense alone is, is worth it. It's waiting gold. Almost, almost literally. I don't know how much it saved me, but it, I don't even wanna know. It's a lot. Get rid of useless subscriptions right now with Rocket Money. Now it's iOS and Android. I know you are smart. You could go right to Rocket Money in your App store. Please don't go to Rocket money.com/windows and that'll link you over to the App store. And the only reason you do this to let them know that you saw it here, please, I beg of you, it makes a big difference for us. And it can save you. It probably will Hundreds a year. Save me more than that. Rocket money.com/windows. Cancel those unwanted, unneeded forgotten about subscriptions right now. Even like you're paying TWITce for some things. Rocket money.com/windows.

(02:09:18):
How many music services do you subscribe to that you don't listen to? Rocket Money? That was a big one for me too. Rocket money.com/windows. We thank of so much for their support of Windows Weekly and Paul Throt appreciate it. Paul mentioned, and I want to circle back. You mentioned something you're gonna do in Hands on Windows and I bet you some people listening when, what's that? So I just wanna mention that because it is not one of our traditional podcasts. Paul does it in the Club Club TWIT. And every once in a while, maybe every third or fourth one will put it out publicly. So cuz somebody just emailed me, say I only see it every few weeks. No, Paul does one every week. We put out the, like, something super useful. We put it out on YouTube. But if you want 'em all, you gotta join Club to, and it is well worth it.

(02:10:08):
Seven bucks a month, you get Hands on Macintosh with Mike Sergeant Hands on Windows with Paul Thro, the Untitled Linux Show with the Jonathan Bennett, the GFIs Stacy's book clubs gonna be Project Hail Mary in January. Also in January, Lisa and I are doing an inside TWITt that will be for club members only. You get ad-free versions of everything, including the stuff that's club only. You get access to the Discord, which is the place to hang. I mean, I love the Discord. You, you also are subsidizing our Mastodon, our, our forums, our irc the club really is from our point of view, kind of critical to our financial success going forward. It's getting harder and harder to sell podcasts advertising, I'll be honest. And I see a day not too far off when it's really the club that's supporting everything. So if you want to help out, and I know you look, we had somebody say, I want to do it.

(02:11:04):
I'm on a fixed income. And we said, no, no, no, no, no. Please. I understand seven bucks a month for some people is a, is a real hardship. I don't that's fine. We still do all this stuff for free so you can get it. In fact, if you just wanted hands on windows, you can get that for just $2 99 cents a month. Any show you can buy for 2 99 a month. But if you've got the money, couple of lattes a month, please go to TWITt tv slash club TWITt. It makes a huge difference for all of us. This year, this next month, Lisa and I are not gonna take salaries. We're not gonna take draw because times are tight and and you know, we, we, it's more important that you get paid and the lights stay on and the, and, and the staff gets paid.

(02:11:46):
And, and so that's fine with me. But really you know, we need some help. I hate to say it, but we do Club TWIT TWIT tv slash club TWIT seven bucks a month. And I thank you in advance. We really appreciate it. Makes a huge, huge difference. Cause we wanna, I wanna keep doing this. I'm, I I think it's a really important thing to do. That's actually one of the reasons I stopped doing the radio show, is it was upside down. We were sending them money instead of me getting paid <laugh>. Okay. And that was, that wasn't a really good arrangement. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:12:21):
Yeah. Not a

Leo Laporte (02:12:21):
Charity. Yeah. Well, what happened was initially I got a nice salary for it, but they couldn't sell ads anymore. Yeah. And we were selling ads on the podcast and we gave them a cut on that. So ended up checks were going out, but not coming in. It's time for Paul's back of the book and the tip of the week number one.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:41):
Yeah. So Microsoft is having a Black Friday sale. Shocker. There's some good stuff in there. But the best deal I think is on the Xbox Series S, which is now available for $250, which is $50 off. You can get, you know, controllers for some off. There's games up to 67% off, et cetera, et cetera. But $250 for Next Gen Console. Fantastic. this is the console I use. I've been playing playing the latest call duty on it looks fantastic. The only potential issue here is games are really big and this thing only comes with 512 gigabytes. I almost said megabytes, <laugh> of storage.

Leo Laporte (02:13:23):
That would be scant,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:24):
That would be something <laugh>. So, you know, there's, there's storage you can buy for it. Like, you know, they have storage cartridges. You can do that kind of thing in the future if you're worried about that. But I have, I typically have three games on there. These are huge games. So I think like Flight Sim, the latest Call of Duty and Halo Infinite are the three games I have right now. But

Leo Laporte (02:13:46):
Your mileage, I saw your picture. Is it in Mexico that you have the s I saw a picture. No, it's here. It's here. That's what you use. Yeah. Is it, that's what I use. It's not as fast though as the X, right? Or no?

Paul Thurrott (02:14:00):
I think it's as fast. I mean, I, I, the differences are actually fairly minor. The way that Microsoft described it, and I think this is a little bit of overreach, is that the, the s is optimized for 10 80 P at 60 mm. And the X is optimized for 4K at 60.

Leo Laporte (02:14:16):
But actually, okay, I wanted 4k, that's why I got the

Paul Thurrott (02:14:19):
Y but you no, the, the s can do 4K and actually lots of games play in 4K just fine. Oh, we'll also do 1440 P, et cetera. But but that's the way they sort of vaguely describe it. I, the thing is, this is probably an oversimplification, but when Microsoft created these two consoles with slightly different processor GPUs, very slightly different and probably different, different ram you know, storage obviously. But you know, they made a, they made a requirement for developers that they had to target both, right? They had to take advantage of the unique capabilities of each console. And again, oversimplification. But I think when you do that, what you find is that games will run great on the s because they have to. Right. if anything it's possible they're not taking full advantage of the X, which is again, a bit of a stretch. But I, I found almost no difference moving.

Leo Laporte (02:15:10):
That's interesting. Now I feel bad. So as low as,

Paul Thurrott (02:15:13):
No, no. I mean the, the X is more futures, you know, proof and all that kind of stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:15:17):
Yeah. But 250 bucks though. Wow. Two 50 bucks. You can, that's great.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:20):
It's incredible price. Yeah. and you know, you might wanna look at what, whatever else they have, they have not just games, but you know, the surface products, various surface products are on sale. Some are last gen. You, you have to really know your stuff. Like the big sale on Surface is Surface Laptop four. That's not the, that's not the latest version. Right. That's the version that's about a year and a half old. But but whatever definitely check that out. But if, if you're in the, in the market for a next gen console and haven't bought in yet I have nothing but good things to say about the Yes. I've never really, other than not being able to just have a bunch of games sitting on it that I'm not gonna play anyway. I've never experienced any

Leo Laporte (02:15:58):
Issues. Can you use an external drive or can you add internal storage?

Paul Thurrott (02:16:02):
You can add internal storage. Yeah. It has to be licensed by Microsoft, you know, that kind of thing. But

Leo Laporte (02:16:07):
I did that on Michael's. PS five, it's pretty simple. You have to go to M two and it needs a heat sink. So I got it and then I said, no, no, you have to have a heat sink. So I ordered a heat sink and you paste it on and then it's, it's pretty easy to screw it in. And yeah, it has to be a certain speed and all that. It added two terabytes. I mean it was a nice, nice,

Paul Thurrott (02:16:29):
Okay. So it's a little easier on micro on the Xbox, but only because they limit it more. So you can't just buy an SSD and plug it in. You have to buy a licensed product. It looks like a cartridge, basically. You plug it

Leo Laporte (02:16:39):
In. Oh, but that's easier. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:16:41):
It's easier. But it's potentially more expensive I guess. And I believe the only size right now is a terabyte, but that brings it up to 1.5. It's,

Leo Laporte (02:16:50):
Yeah. Cause I screwed up. I don't know if it's the same on the Xbox on the PlayStation five. I got him an external drive. It even looks like a little tiny PS five was cute cause that, but you can't, you can't run games off it. It's not fast enough. So, so

Paul Thurrott (02:17:03):
She should say like previous Gen Xboxs, you can actually add a USB three hard drive to this too. But you can only play previous gen title.

Leo Laporte (02:17:11):
Oh. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:12):
Okay. So you can't put like a new gen game on it. But if you have previous gen games, those will play fine

Leo Laporte (02:17:17):
Off. Yeah. Cuz I have a USB drive hanging off of my Xbox, my

Paul Thurrott (02:17:21):
Xbox a long time. Yeah, yeah. I right. Same. And I had a, it was a green, it had an Xbox logo on it. It was probably like a, a Seagate drive. It was probably a terabyte I would imagine. I don't,

Leo Laporte (02:17:30):
Oh, I just did, I I just got a cheap old <laugh> external drive. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:35):
It's fine. All it has to it just USB three anything.

Leo Laporte (02:17:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:17:38):
Exactly. I just happened to get, that's, I just, you know, I saw the Xbox while

Leo Laporte (02:17:41):
I said Yeah. So it must work. Yeah. Worth

Paul Thurrott (02:17:42):
10 bucks. Yeah. <laugh>. So and just real quick, I, although we had some issues here, I guess I, I did make two Black Friday purchases. I've written about this a little bit on the site. I'm gonna write a little bit more. But I was on a Google wifi, which is a wifi five based mesh network here for the entire five years we lived here. And I just this past week upgraded to a 60 network using Euro Pro 60.

Leo Laporte (02:18:06):
Oh, you're gonna love that. I think you're gonna really

Paul Thurrott (02:18:09):
Like that. Like that I, it's unbelievable. Yeah. So I, I very rarely, you know, a lot of tech industry events, you'll hear the phrase and it just works. You know, I've never really experienced that in my life. This is the rare example where honestly for the most part it is, it has just worked. I had a little difficulty with Sonos, but that's Sonos. They were always terrible. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:18:28):
God, I have nothing but trouble with Sonos no matter what.

Paul Thurrott (02:18:31):
Yep. No, but it's worked great. And I, it, the speeds are incredible. Like we it's

Leo Laporte (02:18:37):
Not cheap. Right. How much for the three unit? Well

Paul Thurrott (02:18:40):
See, I got it on sale. So it's normally 6 99. Yeah, I got it for under, it was, what was the price? It was $400, but I also had some stuff I could apply to Amazon, so I ended up paying like under 300 bucks.

Leo Laporte (02:18:51):
Oh, that's great. Awesome. Oh, well worth that upgrade for sure.

Paul Thurrott (02:18:54):
Yeah. Yep. Yep. Long overdue.

Leo Laporte (02:18:56):
And you have a big enough place that you wanna have the base station to, because

Paul Thurrott (02:19:01):
I needed four nodes with the old one. I got three works here. I went to the furthest corner of this house to test the speeds. We actually get download speeds that exceed what the ISP tell us were paying for. Oh wow. Wow. Over wifi, which is incredible. I think the fastest I got was like 5 75. I'm paying four for 400 over 40. And I, I can hit 40 going up and I can't go past 40. But I, I got, I've gotten in the 500 s consistently and I have a lot, lot of, because you know, because of what I do, I have a lot of six and even six E

Leo Laporte (02:19:30):
Devices. Well I was gonna ask you that. So you do have some six E

Paul Thurrott (02:19:33):
Oh, I have several, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:19:36):
Laptops and such

Paul Thurrott (02:19:37):
Laptops. Laptops supposedly. Yeah. I supposedly, I don't think this is true, but I, I I was just looking, I looked this up. I, the other thing I got was a Pixel seven Pro finally. Same thing. Hugely on sale, elevated trading.

Leo Laporte (02:19:52):
No kidding. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:19:53):
Yeah. It was worth doing. But I looked the specs up and supposedly this, I don't think it does, it said it has a 60,

Leo Laporte (02:20:00):
It says it does

Paul Thurrott (02:20:01):
Wifi. Does it? Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (02:20:03):
8 0 2, 2 11 ax.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:06):
Is that six E? Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (02:20:08):
<Affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:08):
Okay. That's, and I gotta say, I, I had enough problems with the six Pro that I went to the iPhone and I've only had this for a couple of days. Iphone,

Leo Laporte (02:20:17):
Honestly. Six. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:19):
Yeah. But this has worked great. I mean the pixels

Leo Laporte (02:20:22):
Been very nice. Very nice. It's been really good. Yeah. Yeah. You get this new six megahertz band or six gigahertz print. Right. And that's right. And, and I, you know, that's part of the reason you need this is cuz it's such congestion. Maybe not for you, it, you don't live in an apartment building, but,

Paul Thurrott (02:20:38):
Well, no, but I have so many <laugh>, I have

Leo Laporte (02:20:40):
So

Paul Thurrott (02:20:40):
Lot of stuff like for me being able to kind of segregate the devices that way really helps. Yep. yep. I have a Sono Snap thing going on for Sonos cuz Sonos, you know, terrible. But but my God, everything else, like the, the wifi stuff has been, and even on, you know, like I'll work up in the bedroom and I'll, I'll publish like a new version of the book. And when I, when I just downloading the PDF from that corner of the house used to be this like, dude do do do doo doo, you know, and now it's just like

Leo Laporte (02:21:09):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (02:21:10):
It just goes and it's like, man, I haven't, I haven't experienced that kind of thing in a lot the, so

Leo Laporte (02:21:14):
That's been the are you gonna buy the $99 a year Euro Pro subscription?

Paul Thurrott (02:21:19):
No,

Leo Laporte (02:21:19):
Not, no, you don't.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:21):
I'll probably put next DNS on it, but

Leo Laporte (02:21:23):
Yeah, exactly. You can do most of the stuff that you would do. The one thing, and I don't, you know, I, I got the Euro Pro when I, I we don't use Euros anymore. We use ubiquity, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I got the Euro Pro for something. It wasn't, you know, of course parental restrictions, but you can use next DNS too for that. I feel like it was better QoS or something. The Euro does shaping. So it notices, in fact you should get better speed over time as it notices. Use patterns and stuff. Okay. Interesting. And I can't remember if you get that with, without,

Paul Thurrott (02:21:54):
I just wanted to funnel everything into this little Xbox and screw the rest of the network <laugh>. Yeah. You know, when I play Call of Duty, so

Leo Laporte (02:22:01):
Scooter X and the chat room is saying that you need to turn on WPA three.

Paul Thurrott (02:22:06):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:22:07):
Oh, for, for wifi six and six E, which is an issue if you don't have a, I'm not, I think everything you have is new, so you probably support,

Paul Thurrott (02:22:15):
I'm not sure if that's true. So I do have six E because you can see it's on six E. Lemme look at that app. Okay. So it's working. I felt like, I felt like I felt like WPA three was not on, but let me, okay. We don't have to do this right now. I'm sorry. I'll look at it. But I thought

Leo Laporte (02:22:34):
The other thing I really liked about I, and they used to be a sponsor, they're not anymore, but I really liked about them was their support was fantastic. Whenever I had problems, like if you have Sonos issues, you'd call him, they will stay on the line as they say, okay, I'll try this, can't try this. And they, they were really good. I don't know if that was a few years ago, but

Paul Thurrott (02:22:52):
<Laugh>, I had to switch sims over. I'm on T-Mobile. Yeah. And they're having a thing now where you can't do self-service, E sim, trans transfer. I think that it's just a temporary condition, but I think there was some kind of a scamming thing or something, whatever. It doesn't matter. Right. So I had to call 'em. So they're walking me through it and it took a little while. The woman was really nice and then she goes she goes, right, I'm making the, it just cut off <laugh>. And then my other phone came up and I'm like, well I guess it worked. And then she called me back, she says, Hey, I'm sorry about that. We got cut off. I'm like, yeah, it works. Got cut off cuz you transferred my sim. What do, what did you think I was calling you one

Leo Laporte (02:23:24):
<Laugh>?

Paul Thurrott (02:23:25):
Like, what? You know, I'm like, it worked.

Leo Laporte (02:23:27):
So it worked. It's working. I don't hear you anymore.

Paul Thurrott (02:23:30):
It was really funny. I was like, well I guess that was the end of that. But then she called me back. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:23:34):
No, that's nice. That's

Paul Thurrott (02:23:34):
Good. Yeah. I thought that was nice.

Leo Laporte (02:23:37):
Second tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott (02:23:39):
Yeah. So I'm making this slow boil, move over to Macon as you. Yay. Tell if you've been,

Leo Laporte (02:23:44):
Are you go? Are you gonna be, where are you gonna live? Which host?

Paul Thurrott (02:23:47):
I'm on you. I'm I'm on,

Leo Laporte (02:23:48):
You're on me, you're on our TWITs. Good. So you're at

Paul Thurrott (02:23:51):
The right. I have done almost nothing. So don't even try to look me up. And I'm not there yet. But I mean, I'm, that's, I did sign up for it,

Leo Laporte (02:23:57):
So. Okay. And did you get my, you get my acceptance? Yep. Okay. But you haven't finished it, so.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:03):
No, I know.

Leo Laporte (02:24:04):
No, no, no, no. Everything's not, don't apologize to me. Just apologize to your fans.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:09):
There you go. So <laugh>, in the meantime,

Leo Laporte (02:24:11):
I'll approve you the minute I see you come across the transom. I

Paul Thurrott (02:24:16):
Literally woke, woke up it, it must have been Thursday or Friday last week. Cuz it was after the show. But I woke up one morning and I was like, oh God, what if TWITtter, like, what if it literally disappears? Like what if they have so many technical problems and no one can solve them now? Like, what? You know. So I looked and like, what can you do? You know, and you can download your TWITtter archives now, hopefully. Right? So the way you do it is you have to, you go into TWITtter settings and you, you request it. And I was, they told me they were, they're gonna, they zip it up or whatever and then they'll email you back. I have never been emailed back. So it's possible that whatever part of TWITtter does, this may not be there anymore or something. I don't know. But if you do have a big TWITtter archive, you might wanna look into trying to do this. At least I'm trying to do it myself.

Leo Laporte (02:24:59):
It's worth starting now. Apparently it's taking longer than 24 hours for

Paul Thurrott (02:25:03):
A lot of people. Oh. It's been way longer than 24 for me. Yeah. so it's something you can do supposedly. I saw, I think it was Dennis Leery or some comedian actually made a book out of his tweets.

Leo Laporte (02:25:16):
Steve Martin did.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:17):
Steve Martin did. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Okay. We helped him

Leo Laporte (02:25:20):
Because he, he is was at the time the funniest guy on TWITtter, Steve Martin to go. And and, but he was saying, well, how do I, I can't, I want all my old tweets so I can write this book. And Gina Trpa at the time had an app. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I hooked him up with Gina Trpa, she set it up. He was able to get all of his tweets in a form that he could then publish as a book. And so yeah, that was, love it a couple of few years ago. But yeah. And, and they're by the way, well worth reading. They're very funny.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:51):
I use so I use a like a homepage replacement thing called Momentum, which I love. And one of the links on there that I have is for TWITtter Advanced Search. Cuz I use it so much and I use it to find my stuff because I, something will happen and I'll say, I, I had an interaction with someone about this, but I, how do you find that on TWITtter? And the way you find it is to advance search <laugh>. And if I could have my, you know, archives offline, that would be even better. There

Leo Laporte (02:26:18):
You go. Yeah. Gina stops doing that because TWITtter killed their API access. Right, right, right. So she, but they had a really nice little tool, so now you're dependent on them and God only knows what's happening. Steve's book was called The 10 Make that Nine Habits of Very Organized People Make that 10. The Tweets of Steve Martin not a great title. Wow. It's 10 years old now.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:43):
I think it was Steve Martin who had the joke. It was like he was gonna write a book and it was like, how to make a million dollars in real estate. And he is like, first get a million dollars.

Leo Laporte (02:26:52):
<Laugh> Elon stole that joke that you wanna know how to become a millionaire. Start as a billionaire and buy TWITtter <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:01):
Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:03):
That was my, yeah. Yeah. I How to turn, how to turn Billions in Assets into $10 million in cold hard cash. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:27:10):
I, you know, I'm hoping that TWITtter does not die.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:14):
Yeah, no, me too. Me

Leo Laporte (02:27:15):
Too. Unfortunately because of all the moves, it's not a pleasant place to be right now. And I think you'll find ma on is not exciting, but there's a lot of more interesting, exciting. Yeah, I don't

Paul Thurrott (02:27:28):
<Laugh> what talking about it's, it's like CompuServe wasn't very exciting. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:27:31):
There's great conversations though there and more and more people use, there are a number of tools that will allow you to go to TWITtter and scrape everybody who has put a ma on account in their TWITtter bio. Add your ma on handle to your TWITtter bio, and then use that tool and you can import that into Macon allows you to import followers. So as a CSV file. So, so

Paul Thurrott (02:27:58):
That's a CSV file.

Leo Laporte (02:28:00):
That's Yeah. Isn't that

Paul Thurrott (02:28:02):
Csv is the cockroach of file phone, you

Leo Laporte (02:28:04):
Know. Oh yeah. Well that's a's open source. So of course that's incredible what it uses. What else? What else would it use? It's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Well we look forward to having you. When you, the hardest thing with Macon is it's not TWITtter and people go, well, what, where do I, how do I sign up? Do you have to find a server?

Paul Thurrott (02:28:24):
I know. I, I will say signing up is the hardest part. And I think that all of the, this is how you go to Mastodon articles are just that like this. And, and depending on your bench, you'll recommend a certain subset of whatever they are. And it's

Leo Laporte (02:28:38):
Somewhat important you choose a local server with, with a group of people you like. Cuz that's, those are your, that's your community. And then you could follow anybody anywhere else and, and you can move. But I think you belong on TWIT social if you anybody listens to show belongs on TWIT social TWIT.social I'm getting close to closing it down to new members just because it's starting to get expensive.

Paul Thurrott (02:29:02):
I like that. It's more exclusive by the way. It

Leo Laporte (02:29:04):
Is. That's fun. Once you're in, you're in, man. Yeah, that's right. Can't kick you out. Nice. No, and I do kick out anybody. I'm very aggressive in the moderation. Fortunately hasn't been too bad. But we, we, we kick out any, anything that's not family friendly and it's not in inclusive of all people. You know. Yeah. I don't want any hate anything. Love it all baby. Well, that's the other problem with Mastodon is for a long time, and I've been running a server for a few years now, it was, there's a couple hundred people and it was somewhere that people who were harassed on TWITtter would flee to. So there were a lot of trans people, a lot of gay people, a lot of people who were people of color who were, you know, harassed mercilessly on TWITtter. So it's a more gentle environment.

(02:29:52):
And so it, you know, people need to be a little gentle cuz there poor people who owned this place until about two weeks ago are going Who let all these people in here <laugh>. Yep. But it's been okay. It's been okay so far. It's been really, it's been a lot of fun. I will look for you. Okay. I will look for you. Yeah. And yeah, get your TWITtter. The other thing the second piece of advice had Bo mentioned this is delete all the connected apps. That's to me more of a concern because if TWITtter security fails, those apps are, you know, a portal in and you might want to really go through those over the years. We've all turned on a whole bunch of those. Mm. And I would just turn off everything you don't need. I also unauthorized all my desktops and stuff so that, you know, people would have if I wanted to get

Paul Thurrott (02:30:40):
Oh good lord. I have like 50 of them. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:30:42):
Yeah. And there's no one button disconnect.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:45):
Don't even exist. Yeah. Gleam

Leo Laporte (02:30:47):
Ify. Yeah, me too. I, yeah. Fix, yeah, fix fee. You

Paul Thurrott (02:30:52):
Can deliver it. My top tweet. It's a, it's

Leo Laporte (02:30:56):
An archeology.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:58):
An metro TWIT,

Leo Laporte (02:30:59):
Metro TWIT

Paul Thurrott (02:31:01):
Xbox game bar. Well, that one's covered. Discus, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Instagram. Oh, no, that makes sense. Some

Leo Laporte (02:31:07):
You want

Paul Thurrott (02:31:08):
Maybe. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:31:09):
I I killed everything. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:31:12):
<Laugh>. Geez.

Leo Laporte (02:31:12):
Yeah. I killed it all. I'm

Paul Thurrott (02:31:14):
Gonna, I'm

Leo Laporte (02:31:14):
Gonna, yeah. It's a bit of a, you got a lot of, it's a click fest, you know, but that's good. Good stuff. It's worth doing. Just another

Paul Thurrott (02:31:21):
Security stuff I'm happy of. These are, it's

Leo Laporte (02:31:22):
Like, what does this Oh God. Yeah. I, no, I had some from 20 years ago. Well, not 20, but well, yeah, almost

Paul Thurrott (02:31:29):
2016. Yeah. You

Leo Laporte (02:31:30):
Know. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:31:31):
Let me try to find the oldest one. Metro TWITtter is from 2011.

Leo Laporte (02:31:34):
You loved that. That was the best TWITtter clients for revenue

Paul Thurrott (02:31:38):
Sign. Yeah, that was great

Leo Laporte (02:31:40):
Actually. You can use it on Windows still. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:31:42):
No, I'm getting rid of it Doesn't matter. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:31:46):
Mr. T, we have come to the end of this fabulous program. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> I thank you so much for you do double the work now cause you don't have Mary Jo Foley, but I appreciate, its Sure. I appreciate if you wanna know what Paul's up to, there's several ways to do it. He'll be on Mastodon, he'll be at Thro that social soon. He'll also he's still on. Or you gonna still tweet? You'll tweet, right?

Paul Thurrott (02:32:13):
Yeah. I mean, I'm gonna see how it goes. Right. That's the point. I mean,

Leo Laporte (02:32:16):
This is just your back, your exit in case

Paul Thurrott (02:32:19):
It might just become a new thing. You know,

Leo Laporte (02:32:21):
Like I, it's fun. I

Paul Thurrott (02:32:22):
I like it. I use each social network for a very particular purpose. Yeah. And I'm curious to see if ma it on,

Leo Laporte (02:32:28):
We would love a little bit of Paul snark. It would really, <laugh> well would be really nice.

Paul Thurrott (02:32:34):
It'll be more than a little, but yes, there'll be some of it for sure.

Leo Laporte (02:32:38):
Turn on the advanced web interface, then it looks like tweet deck. It looks like this. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:32:42):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:32:43):
Just so, just so you know. And there you go. It's funny. It's, you're gonna like it, it's not TWITtter. It's something else, but it's a good community. Just like our forums. So TWIT.social is the mastered on TWIT.community is the discourse forums, of course there's the irc.tweet.tv, and there's a website, TWIT.tv. This shows there at TWIT.tv/ww. You can download all the previous episodes. There's also a YouTube channel called Windows Weekly appropriately enough. And there's a livestream. One of the reasons I don't, I feel like I'm not leaving radios cuz we stream everything live. This is just like live radio. At Live TWITt tv. We do this show on Wednesdays 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 1900 utc. You can watch us or listen live and chat live if you wish. In our discourse, discord disc, anything <laugh>, irc, all of the discs. Paul's website, thru.com is a great place to go.

(02:33:43):
He does a morning podcast for String Daily every morning with Brad Sams he also has the best premium content money can buy. Really good stuff. So become a member. His book, the Field Guide to Win 11 is now out on lean pub.com. And if you buy the Field Guide to win as 11, you'll get the field guy to win us 10 as a bonus. So this is a time to do that. And of course Paul joins us every week when we get into December. I think Rich Campbell's gonna stop by a few times from run radio. 

Paul Thurrott (02:34:16):
Yeah, I gotta talk to him, him

Leo Laporte (02:34:17):
Actually get rich in here. See

Paul Thurrott (02:34:18):
What the schedule is.

Leo Laporte (02:34:18):
Yeah. we're not replacing Mary Jo, but it'd be nice to have some more voices. I'm sorry that Chris Capella's not gonna make it. But sometime in the next month, both Paul and I will wear matching clippy sweaters. That will be something to <laugh> to watch

Paul Thurrott (02:34:33):
For. Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:34:35):
Thank you Mr. Thurrott. Have a wonderful week and great. Have a great Thanksgiving. Yeah, you too. The Turkey is O'Brien.

Paul Thurrott (02:34:42):
It is. What are you doing? Are you

Leo Laporte (02:34:44):
We're going to Debbie's we're going to Lisa's sisters. Oh, nice.

Paul Thurrott (02:34:46):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:34:47):
That's great. First time in years. We haven't, we haven't done it. I love Thanksgiving. I love, we always would do a bunch of, you know, ham and a Turkey and stuff, but no, she's doing it, so that's fine. Kinda spread around the, the joy, the cheer.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:01):
I used to do bagels and beer on Thanksgiving morning, but now I I like that live here. So I I know it was good.

Leo Laporte (02:35:07):
Was was that when you were in the frat

Paul Thurrott (02:35:10):
<Laugh>? No, when I lived in Boston, it was a group of friends.

Leo Laporte (02:35:13):
Oh, bagels and beer. What? And then you don't play Xbox and pass out. That sounds like fun. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (02:35:19):
Passing out is usually how it ends. Regardless.

Leo Laporte (02:35:21):
Always, always. All that l trip to fan. Thanks Paul. Have a happy Thanksgiving. We will see you right here next Wednesday on Windows Weekly.