Windows Weekly Episode 905 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.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, it's time for Windows Weekly Halloween Edition. Paul Thorat's here, richard Gamble, we'll talk about Windows 11, 24h2, the preview update Arc. The browser is saying bye-bye and people are saying moo-hoo. Plus Microsoft and Google duke it out over cloud licensing. Plus Microsoft's quarterly results they had a pretty good quarter All coming up next on a pretty good show Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is Twit.

00:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 905, recorded Wednesday, october 30th 2024. Regulated goods content. Happy Halloween, everybody. It's time for Windows Weekly. Get together, you winners and dozers, put on your costumes and enjoy the show starring. Oh, wait a minute, you're in the wrong spot. There we go, paul Theriot he is in Mexico City. He is also at theriotcom, wherever you are in the world, and we say hello, hola to the man wearing the polo shirt, dressed as a venture capitalist.

01:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm dressed as a Celtics fan. Richard Campbell. Wait a minute. I.

01:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Celtics fan Richard Campbell. Wait a minute. I got to show you Richard Campbell in all his glory from NET Rocks. He's like this shirt. This is his shirt.

01:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is my Abbott shirt.

01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is in silver lame today. Yeah, you could also use that as an emergency blanket if there should be an earthquake.

01:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Getting warmer by the moment. I bet you are Feeling like a foil a foil wrapped hot dog, right mylar isn't known to be a breathable fabric that's. I like the weight of the shirt.

01:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does feel good, but uh yeah, well, actually it's probably, it's a metal thread, probably right but we were, we were outdoors in ibiza for the whole evening, so it's, you know, comfortable we'll see how I'm dressed, as I normally do I will say uh, leo, the with the hat on backwards like that oh is it you are actually?

02:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, no, hold on. Uh, you, you are. Oh, that, I thought it was the other the mask I'm. This is a different hat, I'm sorry. So you were like. The people here always wear their hats backwards, so I was like you.

02:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This that might be the most authentic mexican thing I've ever seen. This is the cyclops. It's a good look, I'm sorry, and uh, this actually is forward to right. Yeah, uh, this is the original san francisco 49ers helmet, as the leatherhead, the leatherheads, that's right that's right, welcome everybody. Um, paul, I'm waiting till you get back. I am going to. I've packaged up the snapdragon dev kit just for you. Thank you, sir. It's ready to go, and I even threw in the HDMI to USB dongle. Nice.

02:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you get the full kit. You are the largesse that I feel right, it's just Well. I mean thank you, but thank you.

02:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, you know, the same setup is now going into a Raspberry Pi and, as far as I could tell, it really is pretty much as performance.

03:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so wow, nice wow, I, I, my snapdragon is here, because there were many packages waiting for me after three. Ah, you got home. Yeah, but I have not opened it. I've, literally I've opened other things well, I'm gonna put it to work. I got a kbm switcher and things, but it's just been.

03:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's been a crazy week well, good, I would love very much to know what you think of it and, of course, paul will have his as soon as he gets home. You're going home for Thanksgiving.

03:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul, oh, I'm sorry.

03:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I thought you were talking about each other. I already had Thanksgiving. I'm a Canadian. I am going home. Thanksgiving is over my apologies.

03:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we're coming home the week before Thanksgiving.

03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They send us their used gourds and turkey car we have to my. I don't think my family could function without us there for thanksgiving. My wife does everything, so yeah, it's like literally oh, that'll be.

03:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, well, I'll make, I'll ship it so that it arrives at thanksgiving and two years ago was the first time the younger daughter took on the thanksgiving meal for the family.

04:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We all went there yeah, we're not quite there. That's sweet. I don't think my daughter could handle a meal from the local Wawa, let alone Thanksgiving.

04:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'd think my son, the professional chef with a best-selling cookbook, would be hosting Thanksgiving, but all we would get is turkey sandwiches Nice.

04:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It would be turkey reimagined.

04:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, deconstructed, deconstructed, turkey.

04:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, this is a foam, it turns out looks like a chicken nugget.

04:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I'm going to send him a note saying hey, you're the professional chef. Now what are you doing for Thanksgiving?

04:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, there you go. I do a pretty good deconstructed prime rib but that's why people are here. You want to work, let's work they're not here for our deconstructed pot roast.

04:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Windows 11, what you got for us?

05:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
anything, anything yes, uh, last week yeah, last week we were talking about week d and how 22 well, actually I think it was 22 and 23 h2.

05:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Both got the I guess it would have been 23 h2 only.

05:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry, yeah, because 22 h2 is out. It's out of support next month, so this doesn't make sense, uh. But 23 h2 did get. The preview update predicted that we would see one for 24H2 by the end of the week and we did. It came on Thursday and lines up exactly like that release as expected, right, so nice. In the nonsense that is Windows these days, this is a little, you know it's least consistent nonsense, I guess. Uh, I don't, actually, I gotta look at this. I don't, I don't see this yet. So it's going to have.

05:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean you're still trying to get 24H2 right for all of the platforms.

05:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a little bit of a problem there as well, for sure. But there's some interesting things in here and if you get it, it's slowly rolling out, including the ability I'm just looking to see if it's on this computer. I don't think it is no on this computer. I don't think it is no. It is not the ability to change what the copilot key does.

06:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's the important part Make it stop popping things up.

06:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's going to be a left arrow key in my case because I hit the keyboard like Frankenstein. You know, I don't know what I'm doing. Hey, fire, it comes out better in the typing, but when I say it it doesn't make it.

06:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll just swap it out for the ICQ. Oh noise, That'll be good.

06:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that was a great. I also noticed on this particular computer, which is the Snapdragon base computer I have here, the widgets icon is now just the icon, without any text, so I get little notifications and it animates. It just changed right now, but it doesn't give me the text, so it's just like a little square icon now instead of a rectangular one. Is that normal?

06:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never seen it before. Mine has the weather and stock price and all that Right, yeah, no, mine has the weather, but it's just the number.

06:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It doesn't say like on this screen Actually, screen, actually this is the same computer. Maybe it's just a resolution thing or uh, but yeah, it's different. Uh, I don't know why. So that's my windows experience. It's different.

07:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know why yeah, see, there's my um, there's my little doohickey and uh yeah it looks normal it's got. It looks normal. It's got temperature mostly sunny. Pops up news stories about people I don't care about a.

07:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I saw a notification there this morning I've never seen before which said air quality severe, nice Severe, which I think means you could bite it.

07:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, you are in Mexico City.

07:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you know, yes, and that can be a problem here, for sure, but honestly, on days where the air quality is low, you can typically see kind of a brown haze out on the horizon, but today was beautiful and clear.

07:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know might have been inside an oven, who knows?

07:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah right, maybe just met in my apartment yeah, it's hard to say severe, yeah, so anyway, that week d happened and we? Where are we in the calendar? I should look at this because I think patch tuesday it's usually week A next right.

08:06
Yeah well, week A, which usually is nothing, and then, yeah, so we have two weeks to go till patch Tuesday. We'll see. I expect 23, 24H2 to line up there Again. They've been doing that and, aside from that, nothing major. Microsoft had a blog post. That semi explains why 24H2 is such a big update from an updating experience perspective. Maybe the last one was just a flip the switch enablement package type deal and they actually made a lot of low level changes.

08:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's an OS update. This week's run asks talks about that very same thing.

08:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The full swap experience.

08:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's different. It's a full OS update.

08:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's the way things used to be. It's nostalgic.

08:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nice, the question is still blue screening, a lot of machines, because you know this time last week we were a bunch of very unhappy people yeah.

08:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So look, I I don't think it's a problem when there are specific issues that prevent a pc from getting the update right like this is the right way to handle it. I know some people would like to just update anyway. There are instances in which you can unplug a hardware peripheral and all of a sudden you're offered 24H2, but just be careful with that kind of thing. The problem is when it's being offered. People are having problems right, and that's a whole different level of reliability issue. So, yeah, there are several of those, unfortunately. Yes, we discussed last week um, but yeah, so.

09:26
But once this is on your disc, uh, future updates will actually be a lot smaller and will install a lot faster and they will hammer the cpu less. Uh, you still have to up or reboot the computer. That I think. Actually they might make a claim about that. Yeah, they actually say the reboot is also faster. A reboot is a reboot, I think. But anyway, we don't get a lot of this in Windows these days. They've done some low-level stuff that improves the experience. It's the type of thing you're not really going to notice too much, honestly, in day-to-day, but it's nice to see someone paying attention to that bit of it.

10:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm just hoping this latest round of updates sort of settled a bunch of that stuff off.

10:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and then we've got two builds. They both happened last week, nothing major. I'm wondering if today, tomorrow, we'll get some more in the Insider Program. Sorry, and nothing major there, but they're changing the way that Windows Studio Effects notifies you that you can use it in the tray. So instead of going through quick actions, quick settings only, or in the app some of the apps that you'll see a little Windows Studio Effect icon will appear next to the camera. They're going to do this global experience where you can, from the tray, control those effects, regardless of what app you're using. So that seems smart to me.

10:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, the thing is, now that we have finally got this big OS update, like what's next?

10:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I mean last year we were talking about this big OS update, like it might be Windows 12, because there was that option. And you know what man?

11:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really think for the most part it is. Yeah, they just haven't, I think. What are they waiting for the Mac to have a version 12?

11:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That happened last time. The Mac is on version 15, by the way, yeah, 15. Yeah, so, yeah, I suspect it's tied to AI and that if they had gone with Windows 12 with such a weak set of AI functionality, they might have gotten some bad PR from that. And I think are we talking about this a little bit? No, I guess we talked about last week this notion of AI not moving from CoPilot, but adding these agentic I hate that word experiences and that maybe the next version of Windows will add native agents.

11:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That would make sense. The next version of Windows has a front end to an LLM that then directs software behind it, right, yep.

11:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and this is for later. But on the back end there's a story we'll talk about a little bit later. But GitHub Copilot, it's been evolving. We need a term for this. It's going multi-LLM or not multi-LLM?

12:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Multi-modal, oh, multi-modal.

12:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, it's not that you can choose the model on the back end. So obviously maybe not obviously today when you get GitHub Copilot, you're using whatever lm microsoft provides there um based on copilot I believe was a variant of gpt3 yeah, oh pretty so they're going to offer different back ends. We'll talk about that later, but I I see that sort of thing coming to. I'll call it microsoft 365 copilot. Right, we're this might make more sense where and?

12:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
then we AI studio. There's like 1,100 models you can choose from it's crazy.

12:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So what we need is that thing I bring up from time to time, which is the orchestrator bit, right, and then I think Windows is the ideal environment for an orchestrator that can pick the right LLM for the right job, right, like now, it's pretty much hard-coded. So if there's a feature on your computer that does whatever it Right, like now, it's pretty much hard coded. So if there's a feature on your computer that does whatever, it's just written to whatever LLM or SLM or whatever it is that they're using. But I think in the future it's going to be more dynamic and based on the type of hardware you have.

13:13
We've talked about this notion of GPU, mpu, cpu, and there's a system, wide top performance rating that you get there, and some things are more efficient than others for certain tasks, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a whole you know octopus of things up in my brain anyway, but that's how I see it. This is not based on any insight, information, it's just sort of I. For this thing to become sophisticated, I think it has to make that shift and I think when we look at GitHub, what they're doing, this might be maybe the first step toward that.

13:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and again. We talked about right from the beginning that Windows should be the hub for this. I just don't know that. They can beat M365 to the punch, and M365 has the graph and, arguably, is where people are working.

13:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a case. If you just think about something like GitHub, it's a very specific thing. It's the perfect place to start this, because it's a finite set of information right With a specific kind of user.

14:09
Right, so it's a great place to test. It's a small audience relatively speaking, but this is another area where you could see GitHub or I guess it would be GitHub Copilot playing the role of orchestrator by saying okay, you are programming in Go or C, Sharp or whatever language and you're using this framework. We know that this particular LLM is best, most optimal, whatever it is efficient for that thing, so we're going to use that for this. And if you switch languages or you're a different developer and maybe going in a different direction, you might get another one, and it's neat to give someone a choice, but actually the better thing to do is just to always use the right thing for the job, and that's where the orchestra comes in.

14:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
For that particular. Who's got the best model around that particular skill?

14:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
set. So this is step one, but again, it has to get. Choice is good. I mean, look, having this thing at all is good, right? Google has its own thing like this. I know other companies have things like this. Openai is expanding into this, of course, but for developers in many ways, or for anyone really, and that's the point I mean, ultimately you want, whatever it is, the platform to orchestrate you having the best experience, right, and you don't have to think about it.

15:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we're always trying to figure out who's selling shovels in the gold rush, but near as I can tell they're trying to own the shovel marketplace.

15:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. So anyway, we're getting ahead of ourselves there. So Windows not too much going on specifically this week other than 24H2 did get that preview. Update 23 and 24H2 appear to be lined up again, so we'll see what happens on Patch Tuesday. But that's about it, Cool.

15:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's great. Thank you everybody for joining us for our Halloween Listen 25 hours last week was a slog, but we nailed it and I am.

15:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Crisp 17 minutes. Right, we're not there yet.

16:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think, just in the interest of moving things along, we'll do an ad here, because maybe it's a little soon, but normally I would wait. But we have so many wonderful advertisers who are just dying to give us money that I, you know, I think we should do it. I might want to take this hat off before I do, I don't know.

16:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It makes me smile every time, though, leo, I mean is it waldo laporte or?

16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, where's. I guess we just, you know, we should say uh, before we do anything, happy halloween or day of the dead, if that's your thing, or you notice, paul, I'm worthy so I have ordered more of my fabulous shirts from abrazos design in san miguel de allende. Yes, I'm wearing a lovely you would.

16:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You would fit in here.

16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say there's a lot of people wear these kinds of shirts. Oh my god, yeah, I uh, I bought six more, uh, because I love them all day of the dead or just different no, all kinds. Although there are a few day of the deads, they like sugar skulls for some reason.

17:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yes, if you can turn anything into a dulce, as they call it here, they will.

17:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why not right? Yeah, go for it. Yeah, but I just love these and I decided that. You know, I used to wear a blazer and dress shirt for these shows. I just think I'm home. I'm not wearing pants, no I.

17:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I roll out of bed and I land in front of the camera and what I think it's.

17:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also, I like the color. I want to wear something kind of colorful. Yeah, because it bugs me.

17:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Leo, I've been doing this show from home for whatever amount of time 17 years, something like that. Yeah, you've been home for like two seconds.

17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You already have this gorgeous set I know I love it, stuff going on. I have good people, that's why I have no, it's, it's.

17:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have a team crap picture behind me, anthony, you know benito and kevin king, our producer and technical director, look at this thing. That's actually that's beautiful isn't that great.

17:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's glowing, it's the logo is awesome. That was anthony nielsen's idea and then burke implemented it.

18:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, yeah yeah, I bet there's a lot of that going on and yeah in your place.

18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really great, really great team. And then, and then jammer b, uh, who know who, retired, he's moved to the pacific northwest. Um did leave. He came into the on sunday and, uh, you know, he was the guy who would, was kind of our profanity filter and he left me eight of these hey, hey, hey hey, so I'm ready.

18:32
He's here in spirit, if you know. Hey, thank you. It's time to tell you about our sponsor for this segment of windows weekly. Uh, the great folks at one password. Maybe I will take this off, because I should be serious. This is a serious. There we go. Serious.

18:48
New product from one password called extended access management. Here's the question for you do your users always work on company-owned devices? Do they always use it approved apps? They're no. No, you know there's. There's something more scary than Halloween users with their BYODs. How do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps on those unknown devices? Well, that's why we have one password. Thank you With the answer. Extended. Extended access management, one password. Extended access management Helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device, because it solves the problems.

19:32
Traditional IAM and MDM, just you know, can't touch, if you want to visualize this, your company's security as like the quadrangle of a college campus, you know the beautiful green grass with brick paths leading from building to building. You know ivy-covered buildings. Those are, you know, the company-owned devices, the IT-approved apps, the managed employee identities, everything's nice, birds are singing. It's a pleasant, wonderful place. But then there are the shortcuts, worn through the grass. That are the actual paths. People use, the straightest line from building A to building B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non-employee identities like contractors on your networks. Most security tools know about the brick paths. They only work on the brick paths. That's their bread and butter. Unfortunately, as you well know, the security problems that you face often take place on those little dirt paths, the shortcuts. That's where one password, extended access management, really works. It's the first security solution that takes all those unmanaged devices and apps and identities and brings them under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It's security for the way we really work. We truthfully work today.

21:03
Generally available now to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra In beta for Google Workspace customers. They're moving fast with a great product. Check it out. 1passwordcom slash windowsweekly. That's the number one let's see. Go this way. P-a-s-s-w-o-r-d. 1passwordcom slash windowsweekly. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. We thank you for your support by using that address, so they know you saw it here. Onepasswordcom slash windowsweekly. Thank you for letting me interrupt the progress of this slow-moving train.

21:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It would be a good movie to try to stop this train like that pennsylvania chris, not chris pratt no, we nobody's gonna stop this train, this train's glory, this train.

21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there you go. Okay, uh, let's talk about, uh, microsoft 365.

22:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah I'm curious what richard knows about this. So Microsoft, having thoroughly overhauled Teams and then consolidated the consumer and commercial clients, has proactively told people they're going to change the UI again, not till next year, just to give people enough time to freak out and lose their minds.

22:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, what's that? Get the shouting out now while nothing's happened? Yeah, yeah, um, does he won't be.

22:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't use teams as much as I used to. So when I was still part of bww media, we used teams every single day. That was how we communicated, and now that I'm not, now that I'm on my own, I have no one to talk to, so I don't need it. Um and but, but the way I recall it is, there's obviously chats, and then there are also teams and they're consolidating teams and what's called channels, which to me are kind of the same thing yeah, our teams, but maybe it's sort of a rebranding and putting it under chat. So here's the couple of things I think that are odd about this, and then you know more about this. You'll have something intelligent to say about it, which is the thing I first said, which is, I think it's interesting and purposeful. They're talking about this now just to kind of get people like you know, because people in this space tend to lose their minds over stuff. You'll think about the reaction to the new outlook as a great example, or the reaction to teams all the time as a great example.

23:20
Tim Cynova Jr, the new outlook is awful, but the other half is that Teams is the center of an antitrust issue in the EU, where Microsoft tried to fix this problem by literally removing.

23:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Teams from Microsoft 365. Yep, making it a separate install.

23:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All the MVPs got to do that this year.

23:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not good enough. They didn't give any direction either.

23:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, well, yes, year not good enough, and I didn't give any direction either. Yeah right, well, yes, the. The argument I think microsoft would make, and certainly the one I would make, against the slack now salesforce now eu complaint about this is that yes, absolutely. This thing started as a slack alike chat based productivity tool yes, however, if you look at this tool today and compare it to slack today, which looks like a, like something someone slapped at the wall and then picked up the bits that fell down and turned it into a product, they're completely different. I mean, they're not completely different, they're at a very high level.

24:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Still collaboration tools right.

24:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They are, but Teams is a much more sophisticated platform than Slack in my opinion, platform than Slack, in my opinion, and I think that this actually makes it look and seem a little bit more like Slack, and I'm not sure this is the right direction to go in right now.

24:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know how you feel in there. I mean, the bigger thing is knowing where to look for stuff, right, and they create all these different categories and now you're back to chasing around where's my stuff, and the one thing they have not been able to solve is a search that simply works across everything. I don't know why, but they just can't seem to crack the search problem. So the fact that keeper is in on that conversation is kind of it does look like the boss said guys, fix this consolidate it.

24:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, and they're just kind of doing I wonder do you think they're waiting on ai to solve the search problem, although not everyone's going to pay for that right? I don't know.

25:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know Microsoft's battled search from day one. I've never found a good search solution, right? You know, the one reaction I have when I put a search string into Outlook and I don't get response back is not that the email doesn't exist, it's that I've failed to nudge Outlook the correct way.

25:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's doesn't exist. It's that I've failed to nudge outlook the correct way. That's right and it and it's not outlook, it's everything I do. This, this happens to me in one drive I I can't tell you how many times I've searched in the file system for something that should be there with placeholders. Whatever is there. Can't find it? Go up to the website, search there and find it. Yeah guys, come on. You know, come on. So Steve.

25:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Jobs is rolling in his grave here. Let's get a fix this. But I think at the base of this, the whole thing I've looked at is just like are you guys, just because you can't fix search? Is that really what this is about?

25:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I feel like Teams is on track to become like the Xbox dashboard, meaning every month or every whatever milestone, they're just going to change the UI and be like is this okay? Yeah, you know, is this better?

26:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you know, that's how you know your feature complete when you're down to. I can add a bad feature now because I get two versions out of it One when I put it in and one when I take it out, right?

26:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, the good news here is let's call it mature.

26:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so well, the good news, let's call it mature, yeah, so this isn't rolling out till next year, it won't fully roll out until mid 2025, and that's also where I thought maybe this was uh, we're fighting the boss thing here. The boss has told us to do it, so we're telegraphing it now so that y'all.

26:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But now they can get complaints and say well, you know, and if history is any guide and I feel like it is it will be later than that, right? I mean we'll, we'll see, but it may be something that happens everything takes longer and maybe there's a better idea out there.

26:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like without a doubt, they kicked off conversation. It does hint. We don't know what to do so yell at us maybe we'll glean a better idea from it.

26:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, speaking of steve jobs rolling in his grave, apple has a fun little feature, cross-platform feature called Handoff right, where Apple kind of I don't want to give them too much credit here, but I oh, give them credit, come on Arguably have in some ways led the way to this kind of it's not that we don't have file systems, but this notion of we're going to work with documents and not think about where they are, kind of mentality right, which is hard for people like me and, I think, most people listening or watching this to kind of wrap their heads around, because we have very specific ideas about that and whatever.

27:35
But anyway they allow you to, within the Apple ecosystem, if the apps support it and of course Apple's do you work on a document on an iPad or a phone or whatever iPhone, and then you can kind of pick up where you left off on a different device, like on a Mac or whatever. So Microsoft just added this capability to its core office apps Word, excel and PowerPoint on iPhone, ipad and Mac, right, and so now you can use, can use the Microsoft tool you may want to use, or maybe your workplace enforces you to use, and it will provide that same functionality. It'd be neat if we had something like that in Windows. Anyway, there you go. I wonder if there's a world in which Microsoft could build on Handoff and just have that kind of work between Windows and an iPhone.

28:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe I'll tell you it works with one note, but it doesn't work with notion, or not?

28:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
notion yeah.

28:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's interesting, you forgot the name of loop already.

28:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'll just say it again, Richard. What is this loop you speak of?

28:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've learned now, cause you know, often, especially when I'm doing whiskey research, I'm working from the phone because I'm in the shop and I'm looking at a few different whiskeys and things. If I don't leave that phone open, when I open it on my pc, it's just not here. Yes, I yeah, yes and vice versa with you.

28:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's not just loop, by the way, but um, I but you have, by the way, you just reminded me. Uh, one note is now 20, probably 22 years old-ish, yep, and you know it has that thing nailed and it's always, but it's always been documentless.

29:12
That was kind of the point, like at some point they allowed you to actually access the file and if you wanted to, you could back it up or move around. But OneNote was designed from the beginning not to have documents like you're not saving, you don't have to, you're not control, asking anything. It just kind of works. So I mean we should be.

29:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they did nothing with it, but actually they did have that quite a while ago, so that's my favorite one note thing was when the girls figured out that that I used a shopping list and that was on the kitchen pc oh, yeah, and as soon as they saw things getting checked off, because they knew, knew, we're in the grocery store, the list grew, that's cute, that's pretty smart In the old days, kids were lazy.

29:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They would have to go with you to the store and they would secretly throw stuff in the cart. They hope you wouldn't notice till checkout time or not at all.

29:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's funny. But they found that if they put it at the top of the list, I don't get it to the bottom of the list. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah that's good.

30:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Richard mentioned Notion. So Notion has you know Notion, the app, which is also a platform. Well, let's be clear. Desperate to be a platform, well, right. So the reason I said that is you're starting to get the sense that Notion has some componentization, something something like Loop does. It's not going to be as sophisticated, not going to be as big of a platform, but they bought Cron, remember, and turned it into their calendar app and I forgot the name of it now. But they bought a third-party kind of privacy-focused email solution and they're turning that into Notion Mail solution and they're turning that into notion mail and so you see the start of this kind of light. Google workspace, slash, microsoft 365 I don't want to call it replacement exactly, but it's kind of getting there. Skiff it was, can't say I'm crazy about this. Yeah, so that's okay. I'm curious.

30:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, we used to make fun, we used to say that no program is done until it's at least on linux, until it's an email client.

31:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that was a joke. I mean, they're separate clients. Honestly, the surprise here is that they didn't just integrate the stuff directly into the main app right.

31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do they want to be like Zoho Office or Google Office? Yeah, I think so.

31:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think Google Docs or whatever you want to call that I think is the goal. Whatever you want to call that I think is the goal. The appeal of Notion is there is a lot of versatility there that you really there's things you can't do or can't do easily in something like Google Docs. And you know, keep is kind of weird, and so you have this thing that kind of acts like a. Obviously you can use it to take notes, but it's also a collaboration tool. It's also honestly, honestly, a document creation tool. They there's gonna have to come a day where they charge everyone for this, it's. It boggles my mind this far into this, yeah, that they've never once come to me and said hey, paul, seems like you use this a lot. You should be paying for it.

31:59
That's fair, by the way yeah, they never have so and I wonder if that it out.

32:03
Yeah, so some form of uh, I don't know storage. Um, I think they need a, a chat based collaboration thing. I can't believe. I just said that all out. But you know, some simple something, something, something that, like you know microsoft teams, is big and powerful, but it's also this very standard kind of microsoft solution. Of course it is Also this very standard kind of Microsoft solution, of course it is. Slack is a disaster. I can't stand Slack. Something that looks like Notion, which I think is a nice kind of clean, modern, minimalist UI, but provides that functionality, and you combine it with these things, that is interesting, well, and platform vacation is a VC trope.

32:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These folks have taken a bunch of money and they've been trying to build their product and get it to a place and sooner or later they're going to get pressure on these things. Yes, absolutely, acquiring companies is a great way to show value for the money that's been invested. It's an easy technique. It's hard to spend $20 million dollars.

33:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's easy to buy something for 20 million dollars and then consider it worth the next step, I think, which is also difficult, is replicating what's special about notion in these other apps and then also getting the kind of buy-in from users, customers, um, to actually use these things right. The trick for me is I don't understand using another app to do the thing I'm already doing.

33:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, why are you bumping me out of the space? I was already in.

33:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and we'll see. I mean, I don't know it's interesting.

33:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The world doesn't need more platforms, but give it your shot.

33:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we're going to talk a little bit about Arc later, for example, and the browser company. There is a place in this world, in our space, for people coming in from the outside looking at something and saying, you know, this thing is good, but it could be simpler. You know, it could be less expensive. Maybe it could be less locked into your little ecosystem or your gigantic you know, whatever the thing is, that they're trying to provide value with right it also gives me.

34:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They've acquired both these products. It is hard to integrate an external product into your existing product, so they may be this may be the interim phase. Oh, okay, interesting.

34:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that while they work on how do we unify these things would they turn it into, um, what's it called netscape communicator, right where it's like all the things in one thing which is actually what Phil Valdi has done too, by the way.

34:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean I don't know, but yeah, it's not that simple. We built on different stacks, like actually integrating effectively is hard. It'll take a while.

34:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This might be an age or a mentality thing too, but if you've ever tried any third-party Microsoft Office alternatives, you've seen that some of them are just one app. You know you don't get individual apps Like I want to run the word processor, I don't care about the other apps. So when the whole thing comes up I'm always like ugh, like I immediately don't like that, and there's a possibility that Notion would become a little too top-heavy if they decided to, you know, jam it all together.

35:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know what that means? Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I think once you get sovereign app status, you own some screen space. The more things you put in, the more time you have that screen space.

35:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's what Netscape. Netscape geez can't get it off Netscape. It's what Netflix is trying to do with games. Yep, you know, you see this all over. This is a form of insertification, in a way.

35:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess in a way, but it's in the old days of computing. You saw this.

35:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What was the Lotus product where they wanted to symphony symphony and it was a flop right, but the idea was it wasn't one, two, three plus other things, it was this brand new object.

35:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and it was all these things, whatever relative.

35:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What was it called I can't remember the name of it relative day. I can't remember the name of it Relative data, I don't know Some kind of special new database that Steve Jobs was working with. I guess relational database yeah.

35:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I could think over and over again of programs that tried to bundle all of this into functionality. It almost always is a flop, except for Emacs. Emacs is a winner.

36:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean you could argue, microsoft Office went this route right Before it was a true suite. First it was a bundle and then it became this kind of integrated suite.

36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there's still discrete apps, aren't there?

36:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean people still understand.

36:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm in Word now. I'm in Excel now.

36:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which was the 95 problem, when you could edit a spreadsheet inside of a Word document and the Excel toolbar would appear.

36:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it was like what is happening to this Frankenstein?

36:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I confess I still am a little nostalgic for Microsoft Works. Yeah, there you go. I thought that was. You know that was so you know what the problem with. Microsoft Works was right. Well, it's too cheap one thing and people love it, but it was not.

36:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's why I liked it. It was RTF.

36:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a place in this world for a works.

36:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I guess that's what Google Docs is right and Apple took what was ClarisWorks, which is the same as MicrosoftWorks, split it up into the iWorks suite, which is more like Office, where it's discrete apps that integrate together and those apps are pretty good and they're free with all Macs right, come with your laptop, your ipad and your mac, and so yeah, and they're good enough paint and screw you guys, I don't care. Yeah, they're good enough yeah, I think they are good enough for most people actually yeah, they're.

37:15
I think if there's anything wrong with them is they're too pretty.

37:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
People don't take them seriously, because that's right yeah I wonder if the other side of this for notion is that, as as they were heading down, starting to test, will people pay for this? And they weren't getting results. It's like, well what? If we added more to it. Now, would you buy?

37:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had said they've never tried to charge me. There was one instance where I was adding like header images to the notes and at some point they said you, you know, we don't store this for free, you have to pay for that. And I was like I just won't do that anymore, you know um? So there needs to be a better monetization um plan and paul likes images in his notes I do pay for notion.

37:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know why I pay for notion.

37:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I use it less than you do you have any idea. Huh, how much is it like I don't even I know it's like it's not much, it's like 40 a year.

38:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't even know, it's not much, it's like $40 a year or something. It's not horrible. But I think they now have tiers. Yeah, I'm sure of that. So that may cause tiers because it may be a lot more expensive. I don't know, but I'll look. I'll look, I'll see how much I pay.

38:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Isn't that funny 10 bucks per seat per month.

38:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I can't remember. I started when notion first came out. I, like you, paul, I was really bullish on it and I put a lot of stuff. I've been looking for an evernote replacement, yeah for so long, ever yep.

38:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, that may end up being evernote at some point. We'll see if they ever get it right. But I like, so you don't. You soured on ocean is that what you're saying? Like you don't like it?

38:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I haven't actively soured. I just don't use it that much much anymore, right you remember when we did the? Alaska cruise, I had a whole notion page I shared with you and it was a great way to put travel plans together and I still do that when we're going on a trip all the travel plans, because then you could share it with everybody and it's it could be a web page.

38:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It'd be a standalone web page, which people with the link I don't know if notion, if notion was the start of this, if they formalized it, if they literally invented it. But there's a thing and you see a lot in Notion notes where and you see this in email newsletters now where there's a lot of emoticons or emojis or whatever, starting a paragraph maybe, or within a header, and it's kind of become like a style, and it's to me, it's to it's Notion influenced, but maybe I'm wrong.

39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's funny because Notion doesn't have an easy way to embed graphics, right.

39:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, they don't have an easy way actually to do anything. Right, well, that's part of the problem.

39:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they do have it. They kind of prefer you have these header graphics. Yeah, that's the thing I was talking about and the icons and all that, and yeah, it's the thing I was talking about icons and all that, and yeah, it's become a style loop. Does that too right, of course?

39:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
sorry, but it's also a nuisance to but loop is also the last in a list of these things, right? I mean, loop didn't invent any of this. When you see loop, you're like, oh my god, it looks exactly like notion. You've got to be kidding me.

39:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had an advertiser. I wish they were back, because they were really good called coda. Do you ever play with that same idea? I? Think so there's a guy in our youtube chat who says he actually prefers it to both loop and notion yeah, but you always find people who this there's you gotta have obsidian is one of them.

40:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there's, yeah, people who say, well, what I want is notion, but I want it to be. Well, offline, by the way, is a valid big plane. Very want to have control over that file, maybe, and have it in my file system. Maybe. I want to have control over that file, maybe, and have it in my file system. Maybe I want to sync it through OneDrive or whatever. So, yeah, there are definitely alternatives. But, you know, notion is kind of an Apple-like thing. It's like look, we do our own thing. It works, people seem to like it. And you know, yeah, we know there's competition, but who cares? Yeah, I don't know.

40:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just had their big summit or whatever, and the CEO talked. I don't know if you noticed this. When I launched Notion today they splash-paged all the new features. They did AI early and I don't know anybody who's crazy about the idea of AI embedded in Notion.

40:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I don't like it and everywhere I see it, as is so often the case with me and AI, I always trigger it by mistake. So in Notion, you can see in the notes I've written Microsoft 365 slash earnings slash.

41:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's where it wants to go as soon as you hit slash, it goes oh, do you want to use AI? Is that what you wanted?

41:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like no, you know, this is a common character in the English language idiots.

41:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe you could have used something unique.

41:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not your control key. Yeah, so that came up for me five times this morning. Right, you know it's like no, I still don't want. Oh, whatever they're calling their ai, that's face trying to jam too much functionality.

41:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, control. J is a shortcut too, so if you look in the bottom corner of the notes.

41:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can see the little cartoony. By the way, mac, the original mac, look well one of the early mac logo faces, remember they had the two sides with the eyes. Yeah, the Picasso. It looks like a simplified version of that logo. It's kind of funny when you think about it.

41:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyhow, Okay, but we should say we use this yeah, I like it a lot. I mean Notion is sticky.

41:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's for me. Switching stuff is hard. I was on OneDrive OneNote for from the date well, the year before it came out publicly, until I don't know two, three years ago, and it's hard to move past something that you have that much data in that you've used for so long. It's hard and now I get to this and I don't know hard, and now I get to this and I don't know.

42:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'd have to be pretty damn good to um to make me leave notion at this point. Well, richard, we, could you want to make a case for, uh, us to use loop instead of notion?

42:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
nope well, yeah, no, if you like to manually make sure that something is synced then, is that the problem is reliable?

42:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's reliability is.

42:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, as soon as you're not sure if your data survived. You're not happy anymore.

42:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not worth using Every time the browser Chromium updates, it flashes around.

42:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just to remind you, it's an Electron app, it's not a confidence builder.

42:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody does. But one thing that Loop has that I think could help it and I always thought could help it and I always thought could help it and maybe it will be successful one day is the keyboard shortcuts that everybody knows from Microsoft Word all work the same. If you're used to making headings in the control, what is it? Control, alt, whatever number, that works in Loop. That's not how you do that in Notion. You have to learn a new way to do things in Notion. Notion supports markdown style, hash, hash, or you literally do the slash right, slash H, whatever it's different. You can get used to it. You can get used to anything you get used to. You know getting punched in the face every day, I guess.

43:32
but you don't want to, but then that's how I approach Microsoft Teams. So you know, it's just no, I'm kidding, I think you were thinking inside, so anyway, I will kidding.

43:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you were thinking insiders, but okay, so anyway, we'll see.

43:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, for me Notion is this thing. I use it for one thing, but I see these things, I see these acquisitions, I see them coming up with new products and you know, I'll keep my eye on it. It's like Proton is like this, like this is interesting, they're trying. Okay, that was a lot of time on, so pretty. The announcement of an app that will not be available anytime soon is the short version of that story.

44:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the Notion Mail, yeah the Notion Mail.

44:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like hey, look, how pretty it might be someday, it might be Someday they acquired Skiff, which was the security mail thing.

44:20
Skiff had a different kind of approach to things. They were actually more like proton right. They were security and privacy focused. So notion is is not not that their security and privacy you know First averse, or anything like that? But they? That's certainly not there. That's not their focus right there. Their focus is on making productivity simple is how I sort of see it. We'll see. Okay. So we talked about GitHub Copilot earlier. Just to make sure that was clear, github Copilot today uses Microsoft's whatever the backend, which it's chat GPT-3,. You say basically yeah.

44:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what it was originally and I don't know that they've moved to 4. I think it's one of the 3-plus variants.

45:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, and you know, again, for the finite data set that is this thing. This is probably fine, right, and is probably one of the more accurate AIs, if you will, in the sense that it's working off this limited data set. It's good. It seems like this is a good way to start. I don't know, it was a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago, whenever it was we were talking about Satya Nadella and his letter to share. Oh, no, that was something earlier than that. No, it was earlier than that. Sorry, it was tied to the Copilot Wave 2 announcement was saying that these LLMs have become commodities A fascinating thing to say about the company you've invested $13 billion in, but the inference here being that we're going to work with other LLMs as well and, of course, they've got their own thing happening in-house now as well.

45:42
So they've opened GitHub Copilot up to multiple third-party LLMs, or are opening. I'm not sure if it's actually happened yet, but they announced that at their own developer show. So Anthropic Cloud 3.5, sonnet, google Gemini 1.5, pro, and then OpenAI specifically, is it O1? Is that how we're saying it? 4.0? No, this new one, this little, the smaller one.

46:11
I think it's just 01, I think, is how we would say that there's 01, preview, 01 Mini. There might be all of them, I don't remember, but that's interesting and so, like we said earlier, yeah, I mean it's good to give people that choice. I guess Better would be, maybe you just do the right thing and you're paying for Copilot.

46:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, always. The question is like what does the LLM bring to the table here?

46:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, and how would you decide? I mean, you know, is it going to be a goofy little wizard? It looks like you're trying to code in C sharp. You might want to try Sonnet, you know? Okay, thanks, maybe I will. Here's an idea. Why don't you just do that for me? And I think that's like I said. I think that's where it goes earlier but or later. I look at this as the first step toward that and I look at this as a hint at what they might do with Microsoft 365, copilot specifically, and we'll see. We'll see how these things evolve. But really, I have to say I did not quite expect this.

47:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it almost seems like political maneuvering.

47:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Certainly there's been pressure on Microsoft to show that they're not too in bed with OpenAI Did you see, such as this morning in the Google call, say that well, I can't remember what the number was something like 30% of all our coding is done by AI.

47:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
First, oh, Sundar Pichai said this yeah.

47:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not Satya Sundar.

47:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I didn't see that it's kind of a shock.

47:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it certainly validates the Google GitHub copilot model.

47:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not sure that's. I don't like that. He said that and there's a couple of reasons for it.

47:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a weird thing to say, because there's still people looking at it Like I'd be annoyed as a developer if you said that about my work, Yep. I mean I've certainly been benchmarking the snot out of teams using GitHub Copilot and 20% to 30 30 productivity gains is the number these days?

48:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right, and that's more code checked in that with less remediation, yep, right like I think when they first start using it, they do a lot of back and forth, but they get better I the. The problem for google, I think, is that and this is a perception thing, I'm not saying this is the reality but they've gotten off on a bad foot with ai somehow, which is kind of astonishing, because they were there longer than anybody really, and I think they were the threat from the beginning.

48:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, Google Brain was what OpenAI was made for.

48:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, exactly. The models that we have now are just very much based on the work they did first. For sure, they basically invented this, if you will, but they've been face-raking ever since, and when you come out and say, yeah, a quote of the new code of Google is generated by AI, you're like, oh, that's why it stinks so bad. No, I think it's the automatic response, isn't it?

48:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know that I would have said this and again I think it's internally, politically it was a bad thing to say.

49:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Externally, it's a bad thing to say, like, what are you thinking? It was a curious.

49:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Send that boy to CEO school. I saw it in the headline.

49:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm like, I don't like it.

49:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah. That seemed unwise, yeah, I think so.

49:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, okay. So Apple intelligence finally arrived this week, changed the world. So we're living in an Apple world. Now Everything's different. What am I talking about? So I don't know if you even noticed it happened, but you know iOS, ipad OS 18.1, mac OS Sequoia 15.1 have the I think they're. I don't know if they're calling it this. I'm calling it this.

49:40
The first wave of Apple intelligence features. It's all the stuff we all know and kind of don't care about too too much Writing tools, like the ability to summarize long documents, useful for sure. Writing help, which most people could use for sure In all those places well, in every place, really, but let's say, in things like messages, mail, et cetera, in a web form, whatever it might be so good. This gets a lot more interesting in 18.2, which is happening in December, and Apple has been very explicit about at least four waves of this before the middle of next year. So we're going to be dealing with this for quite a while. But the one new bit of information that came out of their announcements this past week is that the eu, which was I'm going to call it region non grata and because of all their anti-trust stuff, uh, now they're saying they are going to bring it to the eu in the spring which by the way will be when it's ready so well, there's that.

50:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's also like does it pass the rules?

50:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, you know, they've obviously been actively talking to you, so I think for them to say that it suggests maybe they found that answer.

50:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, I don't know, you know I. You can't have driver's license until you've had a few accidents, so I don't know how you write ai legislation having not actually used the product yeah, we don't want the first accident to be skynet and the terminator robots, but I but yeah, I know, I mean yeah, but I've fallen into that trap. Don't give them the levers of power, yeah yeah, we'll see I don't know.

51:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So okay, so apple intelligence, whatever I I actually think they're going to get this right. I think, overall, it's, it's fine. These, these are good, solid improvements. Whatever, who cares?

51:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but I don't know if they are. I hope they do. I just reminded once again that they had to jump, that this is not yeah, yeah, I should I should be clear.

51:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When I say that, I mean the entire range of this stuff, not the stuff that just came out. Monday or tuesday. It's the the things they'll be doing in .234 over some period of time. You can see the people who are testing 18.2, which I am doing, by the way, on my iPhone. Although I don't use a lot of this stuff, like most people, I think it's getting more interesting, so this will be true over the course of it. I think I like the way sari lights up.

52:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a thing so that's new yeah yeah, you know sari's good.

52:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She's just as dumb as she ever was, but yeah yeah, yeah, but now it could be like a dumb blonde guy.

52:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, sari can be all kinds of things first time it happened, because what what happens is let me see if I can show I'm surprised I didn't set off every device in this apartment when I just said that by the way I usually know. But if you say the word seriously, it will all, and I say it all the time. So the first I'm going to press the button.

52:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, do the little animation there.

52:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nice and the first time it happened I thought I was drunk. Yeah, because I didn't know that that was good, did I just take lsd?

52:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it like what the heck my screen just throbs.

52:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's nice.

52:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's pretty, it's pretty.

52:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She says by the way, I didn't get that, Could you try again?

52:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She says that a lot. Yeah, you don't have to be mean Paul.

52:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't get that. Could you try again? I don't like you very much.

53:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't like you.

53:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we're in a loop here, Siri. Let's see what she says.

53:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll be sitting here in the morning and I talk to the news as one would when I'm reading it on my device, and then the little speaker next to me says okay, here's a morning playlist to start off your day. And I don't know, I have no idea where that came from. I don't know what possesses this thing.

53:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is really our true nightmare about. Uh ai is not right that it's going to take, bomb the world and take oh it's that.

53:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's going to be annoying as hell this happens in mexico as much as it happens out in the world at home. Right, we've all experienced this. You're out, it doesn't matter where you are. You could be walking through an airport, you could be walking on a city street. There's some guy coming down the street and you can see he's just talking to the air. He's like blah, blah, blah. And even though we intellectually understand that people have earbuds now and this is a thing, there's still that moment where you're like is he a crazy person?

53:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you never know for sure. Is it multiple personality disorder? Or is it Bluetooth Like?

54:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
when we got lunch today I had. This experience happens almost every day when I'm outside Right, so I still go through this all the time. But now we have these things that are talking to us when we don't want them to, and now we are the crazy people. Yeah, you know, because how insane is it to talk to this thing and say stop, I don't want the police.

54:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Stop it. Stop Lisa. I've noticed it talks more when it's wrong right. Yes. When I tell Home Assistant what I wanted to do and it's just doing it. It says almost nothing Exactly. The moment it doesn't know what to do. It goes on and on and on right.

54:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, dear, god, yes. This is a grade four here's what I found on the web on this. Yeah, yeah, here I got, I got something for you.

54:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like listen, if you have more to say to me than, okay, you did it wrong just stop, because with google, I'll walk up to the smart display.

54:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It'll be like a picture of me with like a girlfriend from the 1980s, and I'll be like google, do not show this photo. And it goes. Okay. Do you want us to stop showing this photo on the smart display? Yes, okay, we will stop. It's like stop talking, just freaking, do it. You know. Meanwhile, my wife's like who are you talking to? What's going on? I'm like would you hurry up? You know like like get rid of the picture, do?

55:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you, uh, do you change the voice? I change the voice. Do you change the voice? I changed the voice to make it.

55:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I changed the Siri voice for the first time.

55:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I make it. It's kind of a.

55:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't know what it here, let me play it for you.

55:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You tell me I love this voice. Okay. What's the weather going to be like in Petaluma today?

55:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The forecast is calling for rain today. Yeah that the forecast is calling for rain today.

55:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of urban kind of hip kind of cool.

55:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, you definitely switched to hipster voice.

55:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it. Hipster voice, hipster voice, it's voice three. How's your vinyl?

55:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
fortune. Weather's going to be cool today, perfect for making pickles.

55:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish it was. See if it had a little personality, that would be really cool, but it's just like an annoying nitwit. Yeah, yeah, and that's really a problem. I think it's not it is.

56:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is what mark benioff said it's clippy 2.0 yeah, you know hey, it looks like you're trying to make a uh ransom note or whatever. You know. No, I'm not, but thanks for popping up you irritating little paper clip. And you know this is. Is this not the next generation?

56:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it kind of is right yes, anyway, all this certification of all things, all yeah, yeah, everything must be made terrible oh do you like

56:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
using this product. Yeah, it's just like, everything's a little crappier like everything like everything, like everything, if I said everything, everything and glues in a loop it's just a little bit worse, which is I I know notion. Some people don't like it, some people have better I like that you change your hat every time we come back.

56:52
This is a really good hat, um, but notion to me is the one thing that flips the bit on in certification. It's the one thing that so far and, by the way, they'll absolutely screwed up this thing that I love will be ruined. There's no doubt about it. But to date, you know, it's just sitting there working. Every day we use it extensively, yeah, um, great, you know, I don't really have any major problems. Sometimes I get on a plane and I can't use the thing, but then again, most times I'm on a plane, there is wi-fi, so you know we're.

57:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you really need to use it, drop the 20 bucks, yeah.

57:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, or just open that page, I guess, before you leave. I think it keeps the most recent whatever number of pages in memory, or whatever it is, but I don't know Anywho. Yeah, so Apple intelligence, yeah, whatever. But the big thing to me is Apple finally moved to a 16 gigabyte RAM minimum on all their Macs, and by all their Macs I mean even their older Macs, including the M2 and M3 based MacBook Air.

57:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, interesting, I did not notice that, really cool.

57:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now in the PC space. You could probably buy a computer with four gigabytes of RAM if you wanted to, but you know eight gigs is probably more standard. I would say yeah With Cop if you want to do, but you know eight gigs is probably more standard. I would say yeah with co-pilot plus pc. Microsoft has specified a, uh, 16 gigabyte. That's probably why, which to me is what should be the case so I, I we're in this, I, I should think about it like planets aligning, like every once in a while.

58:18
The recommendations all make sense, you know, because I try advise people, macro windows, you know 16, kind of the minimum. I mean 32 gigs, better, I mean for most people, especially people watching this show. And if you have a copilot plus PC or that kind of class PC, gaming PC, whatever it might be, 32 is even better. You know, I went back this morning to all the books that I have still in manuscript form to see what my recommendations were over the years. The oldest one I found was from Windows Vista. Windows Vista would have worked with worked, you know, worked with 512 megabytes of RAM before I remember this correctly, and I was recommending at least two, I guess, gigabytes. Right it sounds I'm trying to say gigabytes, yeah, gigabytes, you know, three, four, whatever would be better. And remember, at that time the big limitation was that most PCs were 32-bit, right, and so four gig was it, and it would take some of that for. Sorry about that, hello For video and whatever.

59:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
HP still selling PCs with four gigs around? Yeah, of course they are Cheap, cheap, cheap, did we?

59:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just do something bad on the show that I missed. What's that? Because we just got a notice that says live visibility restricted. This is TikTok. I think. Regulated goods content Regulated goods. Do you think my Russian hat? Oh, you've got to be kidding me. Do you think that bothers them? Oh, you've got to be kidding me. Do you think that bothers them? No, no, I love it.

59:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello, it's good regulated. We would like 30% of whatever you're making on selling that hat.

59:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, I love the suggestion from Beast05. In our Club Twit Discord, we say in clipification Nice. I think, that says it all, doesn't it? That's pretty good In clipification.

01:00:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Richard found a four gigabyte RAM HP, of course he did. She's HP, come on man. So 400 bucks. So look, 16 gigs guys. That's all I'm saying. Minimum, this is it. It's 2024. Let's scroll.

01:00:26
Tell me you want to watch windows 11 boot in four gigs. Yep, oh yeah. So, um, in the vista. Well, there was an xp skew, but vista was the version, the first one that came with both 32 and 64 bit discs in the box. Windows 7, looking back at what I wrote about at the time this morning, was when that shift was mainstream and, yep, you'd be stupid not to do this. And the big thing there, of course, was eight. Whatever gigs of ram you could, you know, go up from there with a 64-bit platform was good. There are theoretical maximums that are enormous. I don't remember the numbers anymore 192, you know, gigabytes at one point, some number of terabytes now, whatever it is. But realistically speaking, you're buying a computer for yourself, so it's going to be 16, 32, 64, probably. That's probably where it's going to land Dude.

01:01:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
there are terabyte SQL servers out there Terabyte.

01:01:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
RAM. Oh no, of course I mean for people, like just for you know, for people not databases.

01:01:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just want to remind you that.

01:01:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Server 2025 supports up to four petabytes of RAM.

01:01:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and Server went 64-bit first, of course, and that's where you start that stuff.

01:01:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's also because you're storing data sets in RAM for speed.

01:01:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and you are paging between 256-terabyte RAM blocks.

01:01:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because how many 256-terabyte RAM?

01:01:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
blocks do you really need?

01:01:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I there are. So there are actually two workloads for that. There's the sql server thing that you said, and then there's people that use chrome and have lots of tabs right so chrome tabs how much slack are you using?

01:01:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's funny, a lot of slack I know you probably use drag and dictate back in the day, paul I know david was convinced that was my future yeah, his indexes that way. He wouldn't write the book that way, but he would use the dictation to do the index, which is actually quite clever started getting pain in my hands and I thought it's over.

01:02:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to be sitting there like a cripple and I'm going to be dictating books, and that's so right it got much better, not when the cpu speeds went up, but when ram went up, because it had to use the.

01:02:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It had to use memory for its dictionary.

01:02:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So by the way, related to that, I don't know if you guys saw this and I can't remember which AI it was. It might have been an OpenAI thing. They were talking about how this thing actually works better. We know that if you can cut the data set down, it works better. They found that if you just let it work for a moment, it actually works better. So instead of coming back instantly, it will say give it a second Hold on and it actually is more reliable and accurate if it does that.

01:02:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the new reasoning.

01:02:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just run the loop again, like we're going to do it. You know, just run it three times, let's think.

01:02:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, there is a prompt that people use all the time that helps. Which is what like when you say give a code, say is there anything you could improve in that code? Or look at your answer and see if there's anything you could improve in the answer. So this is what you say to a child where?

01:03:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you say something like is that your final answer, or you really want to go?

01:03:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
with that. Yeah, that's that's.

01:03:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're wearing that, huh is that you know, I mean that's, you're wearing that for breakfast, but when you go to school you're going to change, right, yeah, they, you know that kind of conversation.

01:03:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's nothing like a belly shirt at breakfast.

01:03:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I mean dragon the dragon? Didn't the dragon, naturally speaking stuff, actually come out of ibm research originally, wasn't that?

01:03:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it might have been that they were. It wasn't boston. It might have been that they were. I thought so at uh ibm and then moved out. But uh and then nuance bought everything. Yeah, and then it's. And then who bought nuance? I just probably microsoft tried microsoft right.

01:03:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I think, did they get it? Yeah, they did, I think they did, I think they did yeah so it's all within microsoft.

01:03:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the point, my point being that there are some things the computer does, that having a lot of ram is very helpful, and I'm yeah, I'm sure ai is in that say like speech recognition is in that category, the more of the model you can keep in ram the better it's going to do.

01:04:13
Uh, all of apple's ios devices new ones are eight weeks, which is a big jump for them. Yep, remember they used to say when they were shipping eight gig max. Well, eight gigs on an m1 is just as good as 16 on Windows.

01:04:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I still have people parroting this back to me and it's like no. No, it's not true. If you buy an M1. Macbook Pro and you're just playing with it a little bit. Yeah, it's fine, but day to day, every day, and then for the next three to five years, no, so I did buy.

01:04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did order a new Mac mini. I hesitated for a long time, but I finally did. And I thought well, put 64 gigs.

01:04:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you get a pro chip? Because the correct amount of RAM is always more.

01:04:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's always and you can't add later, of course, this is where Apple gets you right, so every eight gigs is like another 200 bucks. It's 800 bucks or something for the 64 gigs.

01:04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's ridiculous, but that's how they get you, but this is.

01:05:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a word for this right. You go into the dealership to buy, because you started in Africa car, and then you buy the you walk up with.

01:05:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know, double the price, whatever Not to further digress, but you do need to ask me sometime about an African gray parrot dragon, naturally speaking, and X10 controllers, because that was an experience.

01:05:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think you have to tell that now, richard, you can't leave us hanging His name was Timmy.

01:05:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He was my buddy's bird and we got one of the Dragon Natural Speaking boards plugged in. This is in the late 80s and we used X10 to control the drapes and the lights. And, sure enough, timmy learned how to use it almost immediately, and that's when you found out the bird liked to go to bed early.

01:05:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Close the drapes. Close the drapes.

01:05:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's about 8 o'clock the drapes are closed. The lights are off. It's like time to go to bed.

01:05:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the type of video that I watch on Instagram regularly, like the one where the guy takes a picture of a chimpanzee and the chimpanzee picks up the camera from the flipping through the photos. Yeah, yikes, yeah, like animals are smarter than you think.

01:06:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, eventually, we, we, talked to me cause he, we, we gave him a radio so he could turn the radio on for himself. Uh, he only listened to one program, and that program was a religious radio station. It was the Canadian equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. That was a very right wing.

01:06:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a right wing gray.

01:06:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what it was he liked that? One show he liked that one voice and he knew when it was on.

01:06:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he knew what time it was and at 10 am he would turn on and he would listen for the hour and he'd shut it off.

01:06:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Time for Limbaugh, exactly, wow. And daylight savings time reeked havoc Build a wall.

01:06:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's amazing the parrot really was. I mean, that's not instinctual, that's intelligence, right yeah?

01:06:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
right, that's the thing, this stimulus response stuff. Right, without a doubt. He quickly learned that he could use his sound to get what he wanted.

01:06:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It felt good. So you make this sound and something good happens and you learn quickly.

01:07:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He could ask for water and we'd give him water. He liked being sprayed down, so happens, right, he could ask for water and we'd give him water.

01:07:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He liked being sprayed down, you know. So who doesn't, and it's me?

01:07:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
the right wing parrot. I think there's a show there I think it's actually on, but that moment where you're fighting with the bird to be able to watch tv for another hour like where.

01:07:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How does my?

01:07:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
life right like why am I fighting with this bird trying to open that, turn the lights back on?

01:07:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, this is the I mean we just talked about that with the I, I, we. I've had that experience with children where you say something like mark, don't sit on your sister's head, is a word like a sentence I never need to never anticipated coming out of my mouth.

01:07:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know like it doesn't make any sense, but all right, let's talk about arc and then we'll take it. Yeah, just real quick. So well, this is a man. You go on the Arc subreddit and people are PO.

01:07:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Arc is fascinating. I don't know that there is a more divisive application in the world than Arc, right.

01:07:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a browser.

01:07:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it's a really nice browser man, it was a nice browser At a very high level, if you just sort of say, and everyone would agree that, look, the browser is the most important application on your desktop computer or your phone.

01:08:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the most Windows on your desktop.

01:08:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, okay, why are they all exactly the same? I mean, even when we talk about things like Brave, because they have all these great built-in security privacy, fundamentally it's the same product. Or Vilvaldi, which lets you customize it to infinity, or whatever. I mean. At the end of the day it's webpages, tabs. It's the basic user experience.

01:08:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's only so many variations Unchanged for 20 years. Yeah, it still looks like Netscape deep down.

01:08:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I do like the idea that someone it's not going to come from the established dominant players right is. Rethink, like, like this is important. Maybe we need to get this right. And so this thing they've come up with arc is on the one. It's. It's so different, it's off putting. There are some people, many people, I would say probably most people look at this thing and be like nope, no, I can't, it's too different. And even me, I, I as a you know, a sort of power user, whatever, there are things about it where I'm like oh, I don't, you know. But there are also some people we don't know what the percentage is, but let's say it's 10 to 20 percent who see this thing and go oh yeah, this is the only way, this is it. I am never leaving this thing.

01:09:17
So the thing that's leaving you, yeah, well, no, well, no, I mean, we'll see. It's not going away or anything, at least not yet. But um, you, this company, it's like eight guys, whatever has some vision for maybe whatever the future computing could be. They see it through a web browser, a web browser-like product. They see that as the platform. Yep, okay, that's fine, I get it. They're like look, we made this thing, we threw some features in there. It like look, we made this thing, we threw some features in there.

01:09:45
It's too convoluted, I can't go. Someone who works there, the CEO, I can't go to my mother or my sister or my cousin. And they're like no, it's too complicated for me. She's like okay, so what am I going to do? And so they've been polling users Like here are the three big bucket features If we had to get rid of and overwhelming, it was like don't get rid of any of them.

01:10:04
What are you talking about? Like, people love all of those features, the people who love arc, which is you know. So they, finally, I mean, I guess, I guess I give them credit for this like, they're like you know, we're gonna have to start over, you know we have to make something different. And uh, obviously ai something, something I don't know, whatever it is, but it has to be simple, you know, know, and it has to just work. And, by the way, within God, like Google. I swear to God, within days, this story comes out that Google is doing something that sounds really similar in Chrome with something called Project Jarvis.

01:10:34
Right, this notion that the browser becomes he didn't say it this way agentic, right, and works on your behalf and goes out and does things. So what could a browser do? Look for, like, the lowest price in a product you've been shopping for, or alert you when something, something happened. Whatever it is like you like. There are topics you care about, like let me know when's, you know, microsoft's earnings drop. I need to know when that happens. That kind of thing. Um, so there's no doubt that browsers will evolve and will involve along those lines to some degree. Um, it's just fascinating to me that they built this thing. That's very I would call it opinionated, it's very specific and they're like it didn't resonate with enough people. We have, whatever number of millions of users, whatever it is, but anyway, so for now they're keeping the original around. We'll see if that becomes tenable over the long term. I don't know.

01:11:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This may be what Richard was talking about. They took venture capital money, and for a VC to be happy, they've got to get 100 million users, and ARK is I mean you got me using ARK.

01:11:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They quadrupled over the past year. But you can do the math.

01:11:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're not going to reach a billion users, not 10 times yeah, so I mean, I use it because I love it and you got me using it and then you abandoned me. But anyway, I'm not bitter as I do, um, but I love it and you know, I'll show people one of the things I that I really like about it here. I am on your uh, on your show notes, and if I click this story instead of opening, a new page above.

01:12:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know page it opens above. I know I love this. It opens above it.

01:12:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then, when I close it, I'm back where I was. There's little things like that.

01:12:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's got the sidebar. It's got spaces.

01:12:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a perfect example of something that's scary to some people Like yeah, I understand Like what is this, but once you get used to it, I will be sorely missed if they decide to.

01:12:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They built in things like that work between Google Calendar and Gmail, like that right, when you don't have to go into the app. It opens the thing. It just pops up Whatever it might be like the meeting or whatever.

01:12:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it supports all the extensions.

01:12:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wonder if Google abandoning Manifest V2 and moving to V3 and thereby breaking, I mean I they're gonna have a tougher time fighting that than say brave or opera for sure right, it's a tiny arcs.

01:12:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Only brave solution was to say okay, well, we're going to build the equivalent of you block origin into the browser you ever used it. It's not very I mean it's not as good.

01:13:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you run that against the uh, the privacy sites, it's the whatever's in there. Now you still need an extension. You can't use the stuff that's built in.

01:13:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Arc would have to in effect put uBlock Origin in Arc, Otherwise they're a Chromium browser, so they're going to have to do, ultimately, what Google says.

01:13:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, there are other ad blocking things that seem to work pretty well.

01:13:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uBlock Origin has released a light version.

01:13:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, if you're technical enough to uh use arc, I think you can handle the uh the extension. Yeah, actually that's a good point most.

01:13:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I'll be honest, I don't care because I do use ublock origin, but I also have next uh dns, which does much, much the same thing still works. I mean, we'll see well, you don't even have to do as an extension, you can have it as a as a dns replacement.

01:13:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, there you go. Yeah, you can use like a pie hole, and then that's true yeah, yeah, then it's everything.

01:13:49
Yep, there are people are very salty about the browser company, oh yeah, yeah, and in both directions, I gotta say. The way they market themselves, the way they talk, I find a little it's a little too hipster, something to me like it's a little. But then again I look at the product. I'm like, damn, they're doing something right. They've also been very open about look at some point we do need to make money and obviously they're looking at subscription something, something. They've been honest about it. I do appreciate the transparency there.

01:14:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe they'll come up with something really cool, because they're going after 100 million users.

01:14:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm fascinated by what they're going after 100 million users.

01:14:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm fascinated by what they're doing so far, yeah, and I think mostly the upset is that people put a little effort into converting to ARC, now have a whole investment into ARC and are a little disappointed that maybe they've invested in something that's not going to work.

01:14:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you've gone and engaged only the most interested audience Exactly. They want something different and as we know these broke.

01:14:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Surprises are going to be vocal. They're vocal. Welcome to our problem.

01:14:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I always just say to people take it away.

01:14:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When we get hate mail, which we do from time to time. That's just a passionate user who loves what we do and is passionate.

01:15:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have a good attitude, Leo. I like that.

01:15:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have a hard time with that don't have a problem with love or hate. It's meh, right. That's what you're trying, that's what you don't want somebody who cares so little they don't. They say yeah they drift out there, yeah I don't, I don't most people are like that.

01:15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
obviously that's true. All right, let's take a little, uh break, don't say meh, because corporate earnings are coming up and I know you can't wait. The least meh of them all, the most meh of them all, and I suppose, in deference to this sponsor, I should doff my. Do you like this though? This beautiful Russian cape? It's good.

01:15:34
We'll see how the election goes next week and I might be wearing this more. We'll see, I don't know. Our show today brought to you by. We love these guys.

01:15:44
I talked to him last week or two weeks ago and I had never heard of us cloud. They said, leo, we're the number one microsoft unified support replacement and they explained why and I went oh, this makes a lot of sense. Us cloud is the global leader in third party. This is third-party Microsoft Enterprise support, but it is beloved by its clients. 50 of the Fortune 500 use US Cloud. Why? Well, for two reasons. Switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% on a true, comparable replacement for Microsoft Unified Support. But the other reason is it's better.

01:16:27
Us Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack, 24-7, 365. They respond faster and, by the way, financial SLAs for response time, something Microsoft will not do. They respond faster. They resolve tickets quicker for clients all over the world. You're always talking to real humans not just humans, but the best and most accomplished expert level engineers. They go the extra mile to recruit really good people. Average of 14.9 years and that's for break, fix or DSE. Their teams are 100% domestic, so your data never leaves the US. I mentioned the financially backed SLAs on response time the initial ticket response average is under four minutes. And you know what, when things are breaking stuff's going, yeah, it's so nice to get that call back within four minutes from an engineer who's really good or multiple engineers who really can solve the problem In 2023,.

01:17:26
Last year, 94% of US Cloud's clients reported saving one-third or more when switching from Microsoft support to US Cloud. From Fortune 500 companies and large health systems to major financial institutions and federal agencies, us Cloud ensures that vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every single day. And big brands and little companies, governments they use US Cloud. Yeah, they save money. But I honestly think, because it's so good, the results are so good. Big brands like Caterpillar, an HP, aflac, dun, bradstreet, under Armour, keybank, even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs.

01:18:16
A director of information technology gave us a great quote, he said and within an hour, us Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. So not only did they bring the right guys to the call, but they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I had experienced in Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier, we made the right choice and when it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud, iso, gdpr, esg compliance not just regulatory requirements, but real, true strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. These standards foster trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders. They attract investment. They ensure long-term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. It's like just getting a stamp of approval.

01:19:06
Visit uscloudcom. Book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. I said don't focus on savings. He said well, that's important to a lot of people. I said focus on quality. That's uscloudcom. Book a call today. Get faster, better Microsoft support. Yeah, okay, I'll admit it. For for less uscloudcom. We thank him so much for supporting windows weekly and, uh, you support us when you go there and if they ask, you say oh yeah, I saw it on windows weekly, that will.

01:19:36
That will help too. All right time to talk earnings. How did mic?

01:19:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
do Much money. Microsoft is announcing their earnings later today.

01:19:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, wait until the show is over before they know I'm thinking it's going to be after the show.

01:19:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it looks like it's going to be after the show.

01:19:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we do have some other companies. Yeah, actually Apple's doing it tomorrow.

01:19:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Apple's is tomorrow, and then Amazon will be in the mix somewhere in the next whatever three days, something. Before that, though, there's been a years-long fight in Europe between the major cloud vendors, and mostly Microsoft and Google, and it's been kind of fascinating. I don't cover this space explicitly, but I do get Google Cloud reach-outs regularly, and this, I don't know, it was a couple of days ago, yesterday, two days ago, microsoft responded publicly in a very aggressive way, and I'm reminded of. I had a friend at Microsoft, dave Calton, many years ago. He was talking at the time about Dell and Microsoft and about how terrible they were to each other, and his assessment was these two companies deserve each other, and I think this could apply here. Right, and so what you've got is these three big American big tech companies, right, amazon, microsoft and Google, google being the smallest of the three. Right, trying to win customers, trying to whatever, and we've talked I think we've glossed over this a little bit in the past.

01:21:03
We talked, maybe, about this notion of egress fees, right, right, make it hard for people to leave when antitrust murmurs like what is this, and maybe I'm getting the order wrong, but I want to say late last year, maybe December last year, amazon got rid of egress fees in Europe and probably worldwide. Google followed in January and then Google immediately complained that microsoft had egress fees, which I thought was hilarious. Yeah, it was like two seconds later. You know, um, and you know the argument against that's only all this year.

01:21:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know like, okay, I know it's hard, but it's the end of october, but all that egress debate was this year, okay, so there's.

01:21:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's also been. You know, all these companies have all these antitrust investigations, so it's kind of hard to keep track of this stuff. But there have been these industry groups that are made up of mostly European cloud companies, which are all very small. You've never heard of any of them, yeah, and rallying against Microsoft's egress fees in this case, or whatever it is. Microsoft settled with them. Microsoft is now accusing google of organizing that trade group and, in fact, controlling it, and it's the.

01:22:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The accusations are insane, like I I presumably they have the evidence to back it up they link to the evidence they do have.

01:22:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's crazy. Well, google has reached out to me since I wrote about this and what they've said and I've kind of added a quote from them, I think, is the way I handle it. But they point to two specific instances where Microsoft points to something to say. This is how Google is doing something Secretly to say if you actually go there and look at it, you can see that we are explicitly part of this thing. They say we are secretly part of it or something it's not secret we are secretly part of or something you know.

01:22:47
It's not secret. It yeah, I mean microsoft's uh complaint against them is basically that google is waging a proxy war on microsoft. Right, google wants, you know, to gain ground on microsoft in the space. Obviously that makes sense competitively, um. But the way they're doing it is to complain to antitrust regulators to rile up local european cloud vendors who maybe don't care to pay them if they don't show enough enthusiasm?

01:23:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that's, I think, the line. That's the question I was going to ask, like it's all fine to you know, loop folks in and rile them up, but the moment you're paying for them, yeah, so turfing one of the right right.

01:23:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, what is exactly what? That's exactly microsoft's charge. So, according to to Microsoft, this trade group in Europe of cloud vendors settled with Microsoft. The case was going to end. They went to the European Commission and said forget it, we're not doing this anymore, you don't have to worry about this lawsuit. Google offered to pay them lots of money, hundreds of millions of dollars. They declined it. Wow, yes. And then Microsoft publicized it. So it's, I've just it's ugly some some little fun to look at.

01:23:53
You know, it's, uh, there's nothing better than godzilla and and uh king kong squaring off against each other one of them's, mothra, I'm pretty sure one of them yeah, um, the problem here is I have this naive desire for these companies to maybe look. I want they compete in certain areas. I get this, but I feel like this kind of thing ruins any chance of these companies ever doing anything together and it's I don't know the answer to that they always.

01:24:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, they're still all on the same chromium board, right, I know, but that's such a small bottom line, I know, but they're all small bits those guys do get along, um, doesn't I?

01:24:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hear about that. I mean that that part of microsoft and that part of google so far has been going great remember it's google. If as long as it's not search, it's just not that important, yeah yeah, anyway, one of the beautiful lines in this microsoft document let me see if I can find this is uh, yeah, they said by our count, google has at least 24 antitrust investigations against it. At a time when google should be focused on addressing legitimate questions about its business, it's doing this instead, right?

01:25:03
that is a big glass house that's brutal that's brutal, you know in that at that level of a, of a company that big, that is, that's bare-fist fighting like that's crazy you don't talk like that.

01:25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they're not even suing each other. No, it's not the irony of it. It's not like they're in a court case together.

01:25:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Incredible even apple didn't sue google for this mobile stuff. They went up to samsung. Yeah, you know, like you don't? You just don't it's so direct it's amazing.

01:25:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't tug on superman's cape. It's crazy. Yeah, I know it's nuts anyway, I just I did.

01:25:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's notable for that. You should read this whole thing. It's notable for that. You should read this whole thing. There's a lot of very direct accusations in there, so that's humorous, interesting yeah.

01:25:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Meantime in giant pile of money land. Yeah, exactly.

01:25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to live there, I want to go there.

01:25:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, google speaking of Google or Alphabet, right, the parent company just announced their earnings. Google speaking of Google or Alphabet, right, the parent company just announced their earnings. I will say, you know, google, like Apple now, and like Microsoft, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago is trying to be more diverse, right? Knowing that if you have one giant product and a bunch of small products and something bad happens to the giant product, you're screwed. Historically, their revenues from advertising were 70% to 80%. Right, it's been going down a little bit.

01:26:31
So this past quarter was 66%, if my math is correct, big quarter for Google Cloud. It's like Microsoft, like Apple. Actually, you don't really know where the money's coming from exactly, except in some cases. I mean, we know the advertising money, right, we know what portion of that is YouTube, et cetera. But the way they break up the company, it's kind of hard to say when they say something like, for example, subscriptions, platforms and devices, right? So we've just lumped in Android, pixel, nest, google One, you know it's a bunch of things Chrome OS, you know, and all the associated stuff. So what part of what comes from, you know, we don't know. I mean very vague things. There was a report from a third party I don't necessarily trust. That said, google probably sold more Pixels in that last quarter than it ever had, and all they said about that was very vaguely. We saw strong demand for the pixel 9 series. Nice, like, just nothing. So it's kind of hard to say nine right here. Yeah, yep, I just yep.

01:27:35
I just went back to my, uh, my nine pro actually yeah, that rounded corner thing's starting to bug me oh, interesting few apps with like, with like close buttons in the corner and only half of it's visible, so this is a bigger problem on pc, by the way, because, uh, when you maximize apps, they it shoots up into the corner, you know the round corner of the screen. Um, yeah, well, I guess you're describing the same problem, but it's more common, I would say, on desktop than it is, uh, on mobile, but it's an issue I never even thought about that, yeah it's kind of weird and and if you're microsoft you make something like surface um laptop the.

01:28:09
The curve of the screen and the curve of the outside of the lid are different um angles or whatever or different. It's hard yeah because it's microsoft. They can't get the little things right and uh yeah, they should.

01:28:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That apple would just die. Oh my god, look at a, look at a.

01:28:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
MacBook Air. It's perfect. It's 100% perfect, yep. Yep, that's the model, guys, sorry. Amd also announced their earnings a little bit less than Google, oddly, like less than one-tenth as much and, by the way, interesting. So AMD $6.8 billion in revenues right, this is a company that earns a profit of under a billion. It's small in this space. It really is small, it is small.

01:28:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Quarterly yeah.

01:28:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The one thing for AMD is a quarter, but still it's small. Still I don't know, I'd take a billion. It's a tiny player in data center but growing rapidly in this market, trying to compete with NVIDIA, which is going gangbusters. It's a tiny player in PCs and it's trying to make some inroads there, and now Qualcomm has come along and probably more in the future, windows and ARM type things, and so they're there. They do well.

01:29:19
I think this is later in the show. Yeah, I'm going to talk about this later, but sometime this week I'll publish my review of the first Zen 5 based laptop that I've used. It is awesome, like without qualifying anything, it's awesome. Now, the battery life is not as good as we see on ARM, of course, but it's very good for an x86. Whatever it's in. The graphics performance for things like games is off the charts. It's just, it looks like a standard business laptop, but it is a wolf in sheep's clothing, you know. So they're doing something right. Yeah, you know, um, but they're small, I mean I I worry about them a little bit.

01:30:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they get lost in the mix, you know they and uh do exist because the military wanted their second source for intel. Yeah, they?

01:30:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they said they weren't super clear about this, but my understanding of this, they talked about supply chain constraints. Um, it's not 2021 again, so what? What are you talking about? And I think what they meant was, because NVIDIA is making chips at such volume, they get preference over at TSMC and they just can't get in the queue, and they would have sold more if they could have made them.

01:30:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's kind of an interesting problem as well, and it speaks to the issue with separated foundries. One thing about vertical integration is you have control of your own production.

01:30:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, used to have their own fabs too, by the way.

01:30:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, this is the thing everyone did right, but they modernize the way intel hasn't, and now intel looks like the dinosaur.

01:30:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That may be broken up, yep, but you know supply training I blame um tim crook for this, by the way I when he was still cf no, he's the c when he was still CFO.

01:31:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, he was a CMO, he was COO. When he was COO, he would do things like buy up all of production and block.

01:31:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But he got Apple. Apple stopped making their own stuff. He offshored everything, found the cheapest place. You know China was the big one for now. Now India, vietnam, wherever else they're going. But that was him, that it was. And look it's. It's saving money makes sense. I mean, it's kind of hard to save money.

01:31:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was also get. He got a lot of innovation out of it. But he also bought, like he. When he found the guys making the high density ram, he bought. He bought all of it. Oh, they did all this stuff. I mean the original. Uh, nobody could compete.

01:31:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Toshiba made this tiny I think it was two or 2.5 inch hard drive. It's a hard drive, Not even an SSD. They had no idea what to use it for. No one wanted it. No one could use it for anything. And Apple happened to be working on the iPod and someone said you buy every single one of year and they sopped it up.

01:32:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So people are. Other companies that wanted to compete couldn't find no drives left. No, it's brilliant and it means it's another way of competing and it's questionable.

01:32:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One like that's good ftc wto fodder, yeah, um, but it is. I mean, you're not dominant, right, that's the thing. You're apple until you're entering a market that, for it, did not exist at the time.

01:32:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean barely the mp3 player existed, it just was. It did, but not at the time. Well, it was barely the MP3 player existed, it just was not?

01:32:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it did, but not at Apple. So what was the problem with an outside player? Yeah, I'm with you. No one else Creative could have said we need the drive. They didn't even bother. Yeah, I'm with you.

01:32:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little different with the TSMC buying all the three nanometer production from TSMC for a year, yeah, it's tough and there the constraint primarily is people operating the machines.

01:32:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right Like this is the issue they're having trying to set up those machines in the US. You've got to find people with tiny fingers.

01:32:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My little three nanometer fingers are hard to come by Well we'll watch tomorrow Our friend Jason Snell on the MacBreak Weekly show does color graphs?

01:33:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apple's tomorrow? Microsoft is late today, I think.

01:33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I said, after the show it looks like it's honestly, these days it's just become a drumbeat of success. It's very rare with these particular companies you have to really look for it to find the problem. Because by the way AMD.

01:33:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mentioned supply constraint. I mentioned how small they are compared to these other companies. One thing I didn't tell you, by the way their earnings, like net income, was up almost 200% year over year and their revenues, which is maybe the more meaningful number, still double digits, 17%, like they're doing great. Their revenues were, in fact, a corporate record. It's just that they play in a pool with these gigantic fish. It's kind of tough. It's too bad AMD couldn't find a market where they could just kind of take it.

01:33:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's hard being a badass minnow in a pool full of sharks yeah, I know.

01:33:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're in a tough spot, but they seem to be doing good work.

01:34:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What they aren't is headlines about their corporate governance and their misdirection and things like that. They're actually doing good things. One of the bits of the business it might have been.

01:34:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The only part of their business that fell year over year was gaming, and, if I understand this business correctly, gaming is made up of two parts. One is the money they get from Xbox Yikes, of course it is.

01:34:26
And then the other, I believe, is their graphics cards and things like that, right, but as we'll discuss later in the show, I mean, we're getting to the point. Obviously there will always be need for dedicated graphics cards, especially maybe even in the data center or whatever, but in the PC space it's fascinating to me that they're they probably call it something different, but their integrated graphics are unbelievably good right now and it's just, it's just astonishing, like how good it is. I'll get to it, we'll talk about this.

01:34:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let us take a little pause and cause we. I hate to. I like to have the Xbox segment live in a world of its own.

01:35:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it does in a way live it has a sting, it must be.

01:35:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Shangri-La, if you will oh yeah, kevin, get the halo sting ready the you're totally not going to be sued for this sound well we play it backwards, all is dead, it gets us off the content ID. Look, I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out what TikTok thought was contraband. I'm hoping it's your hat.

01:35:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would give you credit if it's the hats.

01:35:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm wearing the hats for.

01:35:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
TikTok. There's a monetization thing happening here that we don't approve of.

01:35:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's not happening, which is what's beautiful about it. Specifically to keep the TikTok audience watching. I love it. They need something, God knows. We do stream now on eight different platforms, including TikTok, youtube, twitch, kik, xcom, linkedin, facebook, of course, our ClubTwit, discord and TikTok. If you're not in the club, please do join the club. We'd love to have you. Seven bucks a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows, access to the Discord, which is a great hang with some really fun, interesting people, and it goes on day and night. You don't have to be watching a show to be in the Club Twit Discord.

01:36:24
That party is ongoing and we also do spend. By the way, when I say party, I mean party. They really like the animated GIFs thing. That's a big part of what they do. Yes, I have many hats. What they do. Yes, I have many hats $7, twittv slash club twit. Oh, and there's one more thing that's pretty darn cool. We now have a referral program for club twit, which means if you want to get a free membership, all you have to do is tell a friend and for every friend you get to join the club, you get a free month of club twit, and that could be forever if you have enough friends. So, um, I would suggest you go to twittv slash club twit, sign up, join the club. It supports us, it keeps, keeps us going, does not go into my pocket. Uh it, uh it. It helps us pay paul and rich and and all of our team. Kevin, um, keeps the lights on and all of that and really makes a big difference, uh, to our bottom line. We don't do it because we we, uh, we want to set up a paywall of any kind. We do it because we need to, we need to, we need to help the revenue out in these tough times we have. Literally, I don't want to scare you guys, but we have sold no ads for 2025. Everybody, every advertiser, is like let's wait and see what happens, let's wait and see what happens, and but that's a problem because we still have to pay everybody. So what you do helps us a lot. Thank you to the members of Club Trip. Now I'm going to take off this silly panda hat because I have to get serious, because we have a serious sponsor today. This is a great sponsor.

01:38:10
You've heard us talk about the idea of zero trust security. It might have been google. That was the first, certainly the first place I heard of it where they just you know traditional perimeter security, uh, you block everybody, keep them out, but then you assume if they're inside the network they must be good guys, right? Yeah, no, obviously not. So zero trust is a way of handling that. And, of course, the easiest, best way to do zero trust and look around and you'll see people agree is ThreatLocker. It's affordable. It's really really effective. If you're worried about zero day exploits, supply chain attacks, if those threats are keeping you up at night, worry no more because you can. Really this is the best way to harden your security threat locker.

01:38:56
Worldwide companies like jet blue trust threat locker to secure their data, keep their business operations flying high. Their data, keep their business operations flying high. The key is it's a proactive and this is really essential here deny by default approach to cybersecurity. That means every action process, user is blocked by default until you authorize it specifically, categorically, and there's, of course, a lot of granularity in there. Threatlocker makes this very easy. Plus, they provide a full audit of every action. That's great for risk management, for compliance, and the support team is fantastic 24-7, us-based. They will help you get on board and beyond, stop the exploitation of trusted applications within your organization. Keep your business secure, protect it from ransomware.

01:39:50
Organizations across any industry can benefit from ThreatLocker's ring fencing. Ring fencing is very cool. It isolates critical and trusted applications, puts them inside right from unintended uses or weaponization. It limits attackers lateral movement within the network and it really works. Ring fencing from threat locker was able to foil a number of attacks that were not stopped by traditional edr. I'll give you an example the cyber attack, the solar winds orion cyber attack. A lot of people use SolarWinds, orion People who use that and ThreatLocker ring fencing foiled the cyber attack. It stopped it cold. Another good thing because you know we now work in heterogeneous networks.

01:40:36
Threatlocker works for Macs, too Windows and Mac. Get unprecedented visibility and control of your cyber security quickly, easily, cost, effectively. Threat locker zero trust endpoint protection platform offers a unified approach to protecting users, devices and networks against the exploitation of zero day vulnerabilities. Get a free 30-day trial. Learn more how threat locker can help mitigate unknown threats, brand new threats no one's seen them before. That's why you can't use a traditional EDR. The best way to do this is to say, hey, you can't get in until I say so. They can mitigate unknown threats and because there's a complete trail of everything you've done, completely ensure compliance. It's so cool. Visit ThreatLockercom. Visit ThreatLockercom. Threatlockercom. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly. You support us when you go there and if they ask, say I saw it on Windows Weekly, threatlockercom. And now it's time for the sweat locker. I mean the Xbox segment with Mr Nice.

01:41:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All sweat hugs. The the xbox segment with mr nice all sweat hugs, the sweat box.

01:41:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like that. Is that the backwards version?

01:41:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love that yep it gives it a little something extra yeah, I just played it backwards on my keyboard it sounds, oh it.

01:42:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm getting flashbacks to catholic church as a child nice you know, repent your sins. I love it kind of, I love it.

01:42:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it anyway. What's up in the xbox?

01:42:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah so, as we careen into the end of the year, I've been trying to decide whether what's happened with windows this year is worse or better or not. As bad, maybe as what's happened with Windows this year is worse or better or not as bad, maybe as what's happened with Xbox Right now. It's kind of a toss-up, but every year at this time at this month, satya Nadella writes a letter to shareholders and it's mostly about momentum and a little bit about hinting about, maybe, where things are going to go in the future. So when I saw that, I said, you know, let me just see what he had to say about gaming and Xbox. And you know, not that much, as it turns out. But he did kind of encapsulate the Xbox strategy today in a single sentence, which is we are bringing great games to more people on more devices. Now, if that were true, I guess I'd be really excited about it. But it's fair to say that Activision Blizzard was the culmination of a game studio buying spree also the apex of that, I would say. And now they have that in place, they've got the subscription services, which makes Xbox make sense within the Microsoft of today. I'm sure there's AI stuff coming, don't worry, we're not going to forget about Xbox. Richard has talked about this notion of using AI to create gaming environments and storylines and everything. It's going to be kind of an interesting thing. He talks about having 20 franchises now between Activision, blizzard and stuff that Microsoft already owned, that have generated over a billion dollars in lifetime revenue Halo, gears of War, diablo, warcraft, elder Scrolls I think Call of Duty makes $1 billion every 15 seconds, so that's probably why it didn't make the list but also Candy Crush on mobile, right.

01:44:06
So this kind of made me think you know people who love Xbox, xbox fans did not anticipate this year, you know, it's fair to say. But what's the goal? Like, what's the point? Like what are we waiting on here? Like what's the thing that's going to happen? Like, where are they going with this? Right, when say, uh, as the console maker, that you're going to bring more games to more people and more devices, you're explicitly or implicitly saying that, um, console is not the primary platform you know the primary platform anymore, although they have bragged about this next gen thing coming down the pike. That's going to blow all our minds and everything, and I have my suspicions that this thing might be arm based if they can get it there. Right that that's part of it.

01:44:48
Brad has speculated that they might farm out Xbox hardware to third parties like they do with PCs, right that you might have you know some number of PC or hardware makers that will manufacture Xbox consoles in the future. Maybe some of them will be mobile in nature, like Steam Deck, stream Deck, steam Deck, steam Deck sorry, cloud gaming right, which is limited right now to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which is 20 bucks a month. It's very expensive. It's not necessarily the greatest experience, although I'm actually going to talk about that in a minute as well. I'm surprised there isn't a standalone Game Pass SKU right. So I guess you know we can only speculate. I guess that's sort of oh, I should add to.

01:45:32
I'm sorry I forgot the other piece of the puzzle. There's mobile. They've talked explicitly about bringing a mobile game store of some kind both to Apple's and Google's mobile platforms. Now the Google one has been pushed back because of the successful attempt to stall that by appealing, which makes sense, and of course the Apple stuff will probably happen and we'll see what that looks like in the EU. Only, although I think eventually those things all kind of follow along together, does Xbox make more native mobile games? Is it going to be all cloud gaming, where they bring console class games to it like a streaming type thing? You know, I don't know, but at the beginning of this year I was really excited about xbox and at the end of the year I'm just trying to hold it together, you know yeah and no.

01:46:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
just not much has happened. Like I don't know that, I compare windows and Xbox fairly there Windows has actually done a real heavy lift. Get 24H2 out the door. Yep, you almost undermined its value by calling it a service pack. You know it was a major update to the OS.

01:46:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess I mean it from sort of a chaos perspective. In other words, like you head into this year and for Windows this year is really kind of an october to october thing. You think you've got a handle on what we're doing and then this year happens. You're like I guess not, you know, no, no, and that's the whole thing is this time last year.

01:46:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like we've had six months of fighting over this acquisition that sony did their very best to make it sound like the world was going to end if it went through, and now it's been a year and really nothing.

01:47:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, not a thing I won't remember the judge or the exact which you'll remember is that, after it happened, nothing happened and that's what one of the I think was the judge in the gamers lawsuit said uh, you know he's.

01:47:21
Basically you just said a year from now, what's going to happen is you're going to play the game you want to play on the platform you want to play and nothing will have changed yeah well, and of course I don't even know that's true, because we haven't even seen much in the way of major cross-plat moves.

01:47:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What we've really seen is essentially nothing. I mean, the good news is, blizzard has shipped diablo. They have shipped updates to world of warcraft, like it sounds like parts of the company are still functioning, but where's a new marquee title? Where's a shuffling of that? Where's releases on other platforms, like yeah, nothing's happened.

01:47:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so this is part right. So the final sentence of satchin adela's blurb about xbox and gaming was mentioned that they did bring four of their he called them fan favorite titles, which means not our biggest titles, but you know, see if these etc. To nintendo switch and sony playstation for the first time, and we will continue to extend our content to new platforms.

01:48:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So maybe it was a dabbling year, like they're just sort of trying.

01:48:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we know um, the indiana jones game that's coming out, I think, right at the end of the year, is going to come to PlayStation. There'll be more of this stuff. Okay, fine, I know that upsets some people, having played Call of Duty for many years and watching it go from, in my case, from being Xbox-only online experience to Xbox plus PlayStation online experience to today, xbox plus PlayStation plus PC plus game streaming, by the way, or cloud gaming as Microsoft calls it. So things change. I mean, I do like the big tent aspect of the Xbox vision. I think it is what makes sense for the brand and for the product line or whatever. I think getting out of hardware would make a ton of sense, even though I know that upsets people, but that has nothing to do with Blizzard per se.

01:49:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would go back to the Blizzard thing and say it is super normal in an M&A acquisition to be hands-off for the first year.

01:49:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and actually, if you look at aside from the fact that the latest Call of Duty game has come to Game Pass first time a new major release did has come to Game Pass first time a new major release did has come to game streaming, these are things Activision wouldn't have done on its own, explicitly said we will never do. This has unrolled. This game just came out Friday, so it's not even been a week, but this has unrolled just like it feels like previous Call of Duty releases. Right, if you didn't know, microsoft had a hand if you didn't know.

01:49:44
They spent $68 billion on this thing. You wouldn't really know anything had changed. And you're right. I think that's the point. They don't want to promote that part of it, because why would they? What does that have to do with anyone playing on PlayStation?

01:49:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't care about that no, and I think it also takes a while to get your hands on the company, to actually see how it functions, to yep, you know, get through those mechanisms, yeah, and then you know, then changes could be happening. I mean, I would wonder if, yeah, so first quarter next year is going to be the beginning of shake up I think we're going to see, because we've just seen murmurs of this um, they're going to redo the original halo.

01:50:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Of course they are right. It's almost certainly going to be on PlayStation, right, it has to be. I mean, and that's going to really upset people, but it has to be right, it has to be. I think this is not based on anything, but I think they need to bring more of their IP to mobile directly, like, not a Halo-like game on mobile, but Halo on mobile. Right, the actual Halo, and I don't know that there's. No, there's been no indication that some studio that Activision owned had some secret title that was going to be amazing or that Microsoft bought them for that reason. But I think part of it was obviously just the inertia and momentum of their successful franchises, the ability to get it in, inroad in mobile and then to use those assets for lack of a better term to help them bring their existing ip to mobile or to other platforms as well.

01:51:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, they're getting that kind of expertise and we are, um, just you know, noticing. Uh, chocolate milk. They're saying console gaming is getting meh. It's like we're due for new hardware, except that there's no justification for new hardware. There are so few games that press against the limits of the current generation consoles because it simply costs too much.

01:51:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you have to make a multi-billion dollar title to spend the money it takes to press against the limits of those machines one of the things that came out and all that leaked stuff about xbox about a year ago, 15 months ago, whatever it was was this notion that they wanted the next at the time, wanted the next console to be arm base. Yeah, and if they can pull that off, there is an interesting thing there because it opens up a handful of things. One is obviously a more efficient console. Consoles right now are like nuclear reactors sucking down energy. Right, they're horrible. So that would be interesting. I think that Microsoft, with their whole developer base, can pull off this thing where it benefits Windows as well, specifically Windows and arm, where developers can create a game for the xbox platform, if you will, and thus make it easier for those games.

01:52:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, microsoft, if they, if uncle satcha rolls it out, he can simply say everyone, thou shalt all make arm versions for windows of all of these games.

01:52:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, compiling but it has to be ready. That's the thing. So we'll see. I I think there's a mobile play here too, with which microsoft has never bitten on that either, literally, is a portable xbox or a stick.

01:52:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you want to say stream deck, a steam deck type thing, which is actually a pc, obviously, but you're hinting at the bigger issue here, which is we're at a sea change in game development. We're at the early stages with this next generation of generative ai and, but it's just. And a new piece of hardware is a two-year development cycle and a five-year production commit.

01:53:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can't make that commitment right now you need to wait, that commitment already had to have been made. That is kind of the point, yeah, and you've just been disrupted, like anything you came up with two years ago.

01:53:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
if they've done that and maybe they have, you've got to check it out. Well, we don't know, we don't know. Because it doesn't have an MP unit.

01:53:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you're right. I mean, yes, you're talking about a truly contemporary gaming machine.

01:53:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, arm, yes, next generation GPU, but also an NPU, of course. Yeah.

01:53:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But at the time of the leak, if I remember correctly, that decision to go ARM or not would have already occurred. It's just that we got a leak that was a slice in time from previous to that, so we don't know there's been no hint outside of this of what direction that might go or when it could happen whatever, other than you know Sarah Bond kind of vaguely saying the next one is going to blow your socks off, however she put it.

01:54:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But there's also a strong case for get out of hardware. Put out a reference design yes. Everybody make these. We'll make games for everything.

01:54:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They desperately want that. But they also understand that that might be the bridge too far for their user base today, that they have to get there in baby steps. In the same way that this Call of Duty release, which I'm going to talk about, a little bit feels like it always did and it's kind of a proof point, like see, we're not going to screw this up, it's going to be the thing you always wanted, or the thing you wanted again a year later, I guess, because it's literally the same thing every year. Um, we didn't screw it up, right, it's the. We did a good job with mojang and and minecraft. We did a good job with github. You know, like we're going to do a good job with this like and kind of make that proof point and then we can get to the next step, which is going to be this thing, which I just, in my own experience, has been very difficult convincing this fan base whose lives are all based around the console that, like you know, this life doesn't mean the consoles won't still exist.

01:55:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just they'll be sold by Acer and half a dozen other companies. Right, yeah, but they'll all run all you want. You'll buy whatever console you want. It has the game you want on it. But what if every console has the game you?

01:55:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
want on it. Here's the thing. So if you think about the pc space how it's been for decades, right, what you get is this range of capabilities and different companies competing with each other and trying to outdo each other in whatever ways, right, and so there are ways you, as a volume pc maker, can save money on components. There's a way if you uh go with amd, like, your laptop gets really good graphics capabilities or whatever it might be.

01:55:45
The thing that's kind of unique about ARM that I've noticed this past summer is like these laptops are all the same, like they're all the same and they're the same in a good way. Right, they all get really good battery life, the performance is incredible, the efficiency is off the charts, like the reliability is better, like the whole thing is really good. And that speaks to me of what needs to happen. If and I'm just making this up again it's not based on anything but this notion that microsoft could farm out the hardware as they do in the pc space, you almost need that platform to make it work, because otherwise you're just selling them. Uh, you know, today's devices are based on amd, by the way, the same thing with playstation, actually. Um, you're sent, you're basically giving them what is in effect, I guess a reference board or something, and saying well, just pack your fun around it and do whatever you want.

01:56:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and the upside to the way consoles are done is that that hardware is several years old, which means that a current generation or next generation ARM set should be able to emulate it at full bore. So you get your game compatibility. You know you can move forward with contemporary games that way. But the bigger issue to me will be how do you reduce the team size and still get to all of the, generate a lot more of that content, so that, uh, the, the machines are always pressed to their limits and you are getting maximum resolution, maximum assets, because they're generated on demand yep and we'll see.

01:57:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm like, I there. All I have is this, a paragraph of text from sachin adela allegedly that doesn't say a lot, but it really got me thinking. You know, we're coming off a pretty tough year. I feel like a lot of this is holding pattern, stuff that might or may not be related to ARM slash AI waiting.

01:57:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My friends that are in the gaming industry are all fairly terrified. They've had a bunch of layoffs, they've had and, more importantly, silence. There's not a lot of new games being initiated and I think it's because we're in the midst of a retooling of how games are made because of generative ai. Yep, and you know me, I'm an ai cynic like I push hard on this stuff. But yeah, the when you you don't need precision for games, well, you don't have to worry about hallucinations.

01:58:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're making up stories, yeah it's already a made-up story.

01:58:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're good, it's already crazy.

01:58:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This will be perfect for nintendo.

01:58:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like a purple mushroom, but the costs associated with making this content are massive and you have to make these hundred million dollar plus bets a year before you make a dollar.

01:58:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Xbox went from a seller on x86 to power pc back to, I guess, X64. At this time over two gens now, Each platform and sequence powerful enough to emulate the previous generation. We've just seen, arguably maybe inarguably the biggest. One of the biggest accomplishments with this latest Snapdragon X Elite chipset from Qualcomm is its emulation capability.

01:58:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a window here, yep, so it seems like it's lining up to me that's only taking care of the old things. The question is can you make a new game that people are going to care about enough to drop 500 bucks on a new console?

01:59:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As long as it's called hello Richard. Yes, no, I don't know. Yeah, so again, just, there's not a lot of I want to be clear about. I hope I was clear as I spoke. There was we spoke to when it most of this is speculation. Just wondering because it doesn't make sense in a way that Microsoft would come out with these console refreshes they are now selling. I mean, they're fine for what they are, but at a time when Sony is putting out a PS5 Pro which, admittedly, is going to sell 17 or 18 units, it's not like it's going to go gangbusters.

01:59:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, I already have friends who bought it, but again, it's a piece of art, right it's also a holding pattern machine.

01:59:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, yeah, it's current gen. I mean, yep, but you know they did. Xbox One was this well, and Xbox 362, but I would say even more so, Xbox One is an example of an Xbox generation where they kept constantly revved on the hardware and not just for cost reduction, although that's always part of it, constantly revved on the hardware and not just for cost reduction, although it's always part of it going from the original tank to the xbox one s to the x. With this kind of steady ladder of technical improvements and you know we're I guess the new one's a little less inefficient.

02:00:20
I mean there's really not a lot going on there so.

02:00:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But none of these decisions were Uncle Satch's. And now that it's Uncle Satch's call, he could easily say this is a low-margin business and we are not going to be in it. Go make an ecosystem that will take that risk. And we now own enough game brands to guarantee a sufficient number of games for the entire ecosystem.

02:00:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, right, that's the power they have. On that note, it is sort of mission accomplished, in the sense that they do have a wide body of successful games and game franchises to work on.

02:00:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They get to pick what consoles succeed. If that suite of games comes to that console, that console succeeds. If they don't, it doesn't. Not that they would ever not go, but the point being, they now hold gravity over the whole market that way, right.

02:01:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just wanted to quickly go through this because I have not I should say now I had not played Call of Duty in almost two years. This latest game is now available on day one right on pc or pc game pass, game pass ultimate, with including cloud stream, cloud gaming, which is the streaming service. Um lauren, who writes the news at throtcom, was telling me that he had played briefly last friday and said honestly he was surprised by how good the performance was over the cloud gaming, the streaming part of it. Granted, he has a one gigabit, whatever connection. Symmetrical fiber yeah.

02:01:51
Yeah, it's not quite symmetrical, it's like one over 700, but it's very good. I have a pretty fast connection here but it's still slower on the uplink part than it is on download Right. But I decided to give it a try. So I will say I was surprised to discover the single player campaign is playable, like legitimately playable, and that gave me the inspiration to try playing it on cloud streaming. Which is unplayable is a strong word, but I, because I played three or four games and I finally, like I finally got like a positive KD and I kind of quit, but I got destroyed the first two games?

02:02:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not sure. Yeah, it's just like you had an urge to be teabagged. Is that why you went?

02:02:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
there, it was pretty bad. I hadn't been, I hadn't been punched in the face in a while.

02:02:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've been smacked by 14 year olds lately, Like okay.

02:02:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that was, yeah, that top I was talking about. So I have to say so. This is the latest. This is the Zen 5,. Right, this is a higher end chip. It's a off the top of my head, I'm going to get the name wrong, but it's a Ryzen AI, whatever the highest seven or nine series, hx, like, nice, like with the, you know really nice integrated graphics. Yeah, this thing runs Call of Duty multiplayer the latest game at 120 frames per second, at minimum resolution. It's awesome so it's only latency.

02:03:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that is the issue.

02:03:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, this is now I've installed it and I'm playing it. Now there's no latency issue. I won the first game I played. I have a positive KD again Like nothing happened. So I played four or five games and that experience was off the charts.

02:03:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hardware makes the player. Is that what you're saying? I think you're saying that that's not what I'm saying.

02:03:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm saying that the hardware allows the good players, best characteristics to come out. Um, most obviously, that even a good player would be hampled by bad lag and latency he's almost halfway to the master race.

02:03:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, there you go.

02:03:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're making some progress, but here's the thing. Actually, I mean, I have it here. I'm just going to show you this laptop because it is unexceptional. Thumbnail underway.

02:03:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Here comes the thumbnail.

02:03:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just a silver nothing, nothing. It's just an HP. You would see this on a plane and you wouldn't look twice.

02:03:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You wouldn't know, but I'm telling you, this thing is unbelievable. This makes me a Call of Duty, god.

02:04:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, no, it doesn't make me. It allows me a Call of Duty god to fully express myself in the game you do need a Silver Lame shirt.

02:04:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think, yeah, yeah, a Call of Duty, god thing.

02:04:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just saying yikes Like pretty good. But maybe, more to the point, I have been very critical of cloud gaming because I've gone in, you know, many times, back when Google Stadia was a thing I could play I think it was probably doom 2016 at the time successfully on that platform, but not on uh, well, that wasn't available. I'm sorry. So you know it was. I'm sorry, yeah, but not on whatever. The doom game was at the time right On cloud gaming. It just the lag was too much. Doom game was at the time right on cloud gaming. It just the lag was too much. It was bad. And I know Microsoft is throwing more resources at it now and trying to. You know, they want this to take off and work and they did something right. I mean, the single player experience is playable. I mean I know that sounds silly, of course, that should be the minimum you are.

02:04:58
But it worked. Online play, you know not as much online play, you know, you know it's not not as much, but um, but I got in there you know, it was okay. So that's good stuff. And then, uh, the laptop review sometime within the next week I'll have that it's it's going to be overwhelming.

02:05:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You do? Yeah, you love it. Is it a meteor, like what AMD discrete?

02:05:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
graphics card. Yeah Well, it's. No, it's. They call it something else. It's integrated graphics, but it's, let me look at it, it's not a Radeon.

02:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's something.

02:05:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's AMD Ryzen AI9 HX375.

02:05:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's the top of the line.

02:05:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Radeon 890M graphics yeah, I would, and how much was that little, by the way.

02:05:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just looked so you can get it right now on sale for under $1,000.

02:05:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would have said $1,200 all day long. Oh dear God.

02:05:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And if you saw what I paid for that Mac Mini.

02:05:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know it's a good hat upgrade though, leo, I know 32 grams of RAM, are you?

02:05:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
trying to sell something. Leo, what's going on?

02:06:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a real Panama hat and, as all real Panama hats are, it's from Ecuador. Nice, Seriously that's where Panama hats come from, confusingly, ecuador, nice. So I got this when I was down visiting Machu, not Machu Picchu, the Galapagos, galapagos.

02:06:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What, what's that?

02:06:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Galapagos, galapagos, galapagos, galapagos.

02:06:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know if I like this home experience thing they're trying to do here. It sure seems like just let me show you new ads.

02:06:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I saw this and I my heart dropped because I thought it was the Xbox console interface. And then I realized it was for the PC and I was like whatever, oh, in the home experience it was the Xbox console interface, yeah.

02:06:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I realized it was for the PC, I was like whatever. Oh, in the home experience it's about time.

02:06:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Welcome to the home experience. We haven't shown you enough ads yet. Yeah. Where will the ads go?

02:06:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know you want to play a game, but we'd like to buy something else first. Yes, well, the good thing about here in the corner.

02:07:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Download. What am I seeing up here in the corner? Download Microsoft Edge mobile app. Why I'm on a laptop? What are you talking about?

02:07:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the nice thing about the Xbox app on Windows is that you don't need it. It's not like you know, it doesn't have to launch. It's going to be there in the background or whatever. But when you install games they just go into the start menu. You can just launch the games.

02:07:22
It doesn't get in your way too too much good but anyway, this is what I use the um, what do you call it? The game bar to throw up the frames per second count. I could watch that and, oh, that's neat locally installed on that laptop, man, it was like 120, 130 frames per second and I'm like you gotta be kidding me on multiplayer like that's good, and you're sniping 360s. When you're watching the single-player cinematic sequences, the frame rate is like 700. You know it's stupid because you're not playing a game. It's not doing any work.

02:07:56
It's just stupid. It's unbelievable how well this thing works. So your review is coming up, yeah it should be pretty soon I was waiting to.

02:08:04
I had put some other. I played some other games on here, similar results, but because Call of Duty, I belatedly. I should have thought of this last Friday, but the other day I was like wait a minute. I got to install this game so I was surprised by how good it was. I had pretty good results this past summer with that little. I remember the $700 IdeaPad running the previous Gen AMD stuff Again integrated graphics. But this is much better than I thought it was going to be. It's kind of interesting.

02:08:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, I didn't realize it. Happy birthday, paul. Yesterday was your birthday.

02:08:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you, christian, for filling me in yeah, I'm old enough that I don't really yeah.

02:08:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know what you mean.

02:08:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't know which birthday it is anyway. No, it doesn't matter. Well, people, if you were to ask me, like, how old are you?

02:08:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd be like Really, what year is it? I don't you know. Just hold up how many fingers.

02:08:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't have that many fingers.

02:08:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Leo, that's.

02:09:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks like the Microsoft results might be out.

02:09:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, while you're scanning those, why don't? You feed it to some AI and get some summary points. You could give it Apple Intelligence. Maybe not, I don't know, Don't they wait till the? Market closes. Well, it would be. Market closes. It's supposed to be 13 minutes ago.

02:09:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, a while from now, but I don't know till the market close. Well, it would be market closes. It's supposed to be 13 minutes ago, yeah, a while from now, but I don't know we'll see.

02:09:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All right, they usually wait till you finish your show like that.

02:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Clearly they're watching, yeah um, this episode of windows weekly brought to you by melissa. I'm gonna leave the hat on on for Melissa because they got some class the fabulous, trusted data quality expert. They've been there since 1985, longer than we have With Melissa's launch of their new address validation app in the Shopify app store. I mean, this is kind of complicated. So if you're a Shopify Plus merchant, you now can use aissa address validation app directly from the address expert. That means when customers are entering their addresses, when you're mailing stuff, the address will be correct, no typos.

02:10:15
Key features of the melissa address validation app include real-time address validation, as one would would expect. Customers are immediately notified. They're in the store right doing the shop pay. They're immediately notified if the address they enter contains errors or needs correction, which is great for you. It eliminates shipping delays, reduces return rates. You want to get the goods and services to your customers and you want the right address. This helps them do that. It also has global reach.

02:10:46
The app validates addresses in over 240 countries and territories, which I think is pretty much all of them, standardizing them according to local postal regulations. That's cool too. It's got enhanced address correction. Even if Google auto-suggestion is enabled, melissa's app can ignore it and correct and standardize addresses, adding missing components like postal codes, ensuring compliance with local formatting rules. Ignore is not a good word, enhances it right. Make sure it's right. It's CAS and CERP certified. The address engine is certified by the united states postal service and canada post, which means your validation and north american addresses are right on. You can get smart alerts which provide a warning on the thank you page as your customer is checking out if there's a potential issue with the shipping address means even at that late stage, customers can update the information before the order is processed. Shopify Plus, merchants can easily install the Melissa Address Validation app to improve customer satisfaction and avoid the costs associated with returns and re-deliveries. And of course, of course, in this respect and everything else you do with Melissa, you get secure encryption for all file transfers and an information security ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework. You get adherence to GDPR policies. You get SOC 2 compliance.

02:12:15
Of course, it goes without saying, melissa's the best you can get started right now. You can use it on-prem, you can use it in the cloud. They have a secure ftp server. You can upload and download contact lists, supplier lists, address lists too, and if you want to try the api. You can get started with 1000 records clean for free right now. Just go to melissacom slash twit. You can do it all in the browser. M-e-l-i-s-s-a melissacom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support and for doing such a great job over the last few decades. Melissacom slash twit. If paul won't say, why should she, why should melissa?

02:12:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um, so just real, I don't want to eat into, eat into, but I just real quick, I'm just looking at this, so yeah, so they did release this oh good, okay, it's weird, it's not? On their main investor center. It wasn't when I first looked yeah, yeah, what.

02:13:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the?

02:13:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
deal very similar to google. So uh, net income 24.7 billion on revenues of almost 66 billion. Oh wow, both up low double digits 11 16 the net was 27 billion for a quarter. Yeah, it's a high margin.

02:13:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Holy moly $27 on 66, and Google was $24 on 68, something like that.

02:13:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they're very close. It's hard looking at this quickly, but two things, well, a couple things to stand out. Pc revenue to Windows is only up 2%. Xbox content and service revenue up 61% because 53 points of which is Activision Xbox. We're not going to find this in different places. Xbox hardware revenue declined 29%. It's old. Nobody's going to buy it. It's not doing good.

02:14:01
The thing I think it's this quarter they're changing the way that they report their earnings and so they're recasting earnings each quarter until the end of the fiscal year so that things line up. And I thought it was going to be this quarter where we were going to see a drop off in revenues in more personal computing the part of the business that has Windows and Xbox and Surface, because they were going to pull out commercial revenue and put it into Microsoft 365. But I don't really see that. It is lower. I'm trying to find where I can find that.

02:14:34
If you look at the three big business units, more personal computing is the smallest. It always is $13 billion. It's been roughly $15, $16 for the past few quarters. So if that does represent that drop-off, it's not as big as I would have expected. Intelligent Cloud is well. There you go. This is what happened. Okay, so Intelligent Cloud, which has been their biggest business unit, is now their second biggest business unit $24.1 billion, and their biggest is the productivity business processes, which microsoft 365 primarily um 28.3 billion. So that those that must be it, it must be the. I have to go, I'm gonna have to go through it and, of course, look at their post-turning teams. Obviously it's it's definitely teams.

02:15:16
It's the team's consumer specifically. Yeah, so we'll look at this in more in-depth next week when I have a chance to really go through it. Plus, they're going're going to have that call which they have every quarter, which hasn't happened yet. And we'll get there. Anyway, that just happened Wow.

02:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, yep, there you go, all right. In other words, good news for Microsoft. Do they separate out AI revenue or costs?

02:15:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but they do talk about how much they spend, so I'm going to look at that too, like the cost of AI, so to speak, the investment that they make you know, when you make $27 billion, $9 billion a month, you probably can afford a little AI. You can, but investors aren't going to put up with that forever right At some point you want to.

02:16:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At some point it has to have returns. But even if it costs a billion dollars a month.

02:16:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sure, if it's making five, what do you care? Yeah?

02:16:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, if it is making five, yeah I don't think it's making anything yet right.

02:16:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the thing it's investing for the future.

02:16:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's all upside from here I, I call that throwing away money or flushing it down the toilet. But yeah, I mean, if that's, renting a nuclear reactor different terms I mean whatever we could all right.

02:16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So when I bought this hat, it's all upside it's all right, it paid for itself.

02:16:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's how I would have said it.

02:16:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the power thing is a really interesting factor on this we got a oh, huge expense yes well, and they um, sorry, I'm gonna digress and we should get to the back of the book.

02:16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because he's Mr Nuclear. Now we got Mr Nuclear. Yeah, not nuclear Mr Nuclear. Okay, let's get it straight, it's clear. I think Tim Waltz I hate to say it I think he said nuclear.

02:16:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what? I'm okay with it. He's speaking to the people. He's a man of the people.

02:17:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's a man of the people we like that.

02:17:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Alright, let's do our tips of the week just quickly when I get back from Mexico, I'm going to take another look at the Raspberry Pi. This is starting to get interesting again. I've always loved this part of the market. I know that Raspberry Pi started as an educational thing, but and that's a big part- it's huge it's great.

02:17:19
I'm not dumping on that, but I think there's kind of an enthusiast aspect of the pc market that we don't really see in the same way we did in the early days, when we called them home computers, you know, and people would write their own programs and things. And so, um, just in the past week they've started selling ssds, which is hilarious, right, because typically the storage on these devices is sd based, and they also, and they also are selling a faster they call it an AI kit, but it's a hat that sits on top, connects to the main board, and I don't remember the exact numbers, but the original one was maybe 13 tops, something like that, and I want to say this new one is 28, tops something.

02:17:59
So inexpensively, 26 tops, so you can experiment with this with AI and this is. This is really cool. I, I love what I love raspberry pi I. It's just something I've never. I don't need it, you know, but I it might be a time to take a look at this thing again.

02:18:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And, by the way, this is a computer that could could run like full-blown windows if they just let it um well, and there's plenty of versions of raspberry pi's now that don't use sd at all, that actually have emmc and like better options for that, so uh, well, so this one you care about should not have an sd.

02:18:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This boots off. Uh, you know that. The mini flash, whatever you call it.

02:18:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, that's an sd card yeah, it's a micro sd, micro sd, yeah, yeah, but you're saying you could have better memory, yeah if you actually want a reliable one.

02:18:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you don't rely on SDs, so how would you do it via USB?

02:18:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they've got USB ports on them, just boot off USB.

02:18:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They usually have an SD as well, but you use that to do updates and things, but your main operating platform is something more reliable than an SD. Yeah, the SD. This one's booting off of that, yeah and that's its main operating drive, and so, yeah, you want better storage than that if you okay, but and so how would I do that? Though well, you'd need a different unit, you need one of the one of the sm styles. Like there's different formats that use different storage.

02:19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is the base.

02:19:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, obviously I've got a couple of pie holes. My home assistant is running dedicated hardware. She doesn't use any SD, but since the new mast is up in the corner of the property, I'm going to be adding an ADS-B antenna and an AIS antenna. And those actually under the hood, they're Raspberry Pis.

02:19:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, they're literally edge compute devices for tracking ships and planes, and things so cool yeah I just got it just because it's cool and it's cheap, and I just want it and I don't have it.

02:19:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not connected to anything they're using the uh, the wayland display engine, now instead of x uh that's that pdp is a raspberry pod. Yeah, sure.

02:20:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
PDP-11 emulator.

02:20:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a couple of years ago now, but I gave my friend a Raspberry Pi whatever it was at the time for, probably inside a little case that looked like an Amiga 500, but just running an Amiga emulator in every game ever made.

02:20:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's fantastic. I find them as just great edge devices. They're reliable as long as you don't rely on an sd card, so out of sync in our discord says the raspberry pi 5 has a pcie connector I have no idea. So that means, yeah, that's what I just, that's what I just said did you just say that, yeah, is that?

02:20:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
on the board is that why I don't see it? But they, they connected they. They now sell their own ss like nba.

02:20:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they have a hat yeah, an m.2 hat, um so, but that's on the board. I so mine's in a kiss case right now. So I don't, I wouldn't see it, I'd have, and is that a five?

02:20:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
or is it a four? It's the latest whatever, the new one is a five.

02:20:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, you could tell, because it has uh usbc to hdmi ports I mean you, I mean this thing has evolved Like in the beginning you had to be connected with Ethernet or get a card or whatever USB connector, and now it's just, you know, the stuff gets built in, it gets better, the processors get better. Obviously it's neat, it's fun. Very happy. I think we're missing this in the PC space these days.

02:21:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, like I said, it's about as fast as the Snapdragon DevKit and a little bit smaller, yeah a little bit smaller and the FCC is mad at it. And it has a working HDMI port. Two, two.

02:21:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, I'm tired of you guys crapping on it.

02:21:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what's happening here, Okay. So yes, I agree with you. You take a look at the raspberry pi.

02:21:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Take a look at it and then I just for some reason for many weeks happen and I've got nothing for an app pick, and this week I had like eight or nine or ten. So I'm just I'm not going to describe all browsers they're all browsers, a lot of our browsers.

02:21:58
So chrome just came out with the major release, this awesome stuff going on there with, uh, they call it personalizing performance, but you should look at that if you're using Chrome. It's definitely very interesting. Vivaldi brand new interface in their new version 7. Opera I think it was last week did their release on desktop Now have new versions on iOS and Android that do, among other things, the stuff you would want to do on a phone, like image recognition using ai for free through aria. So that's nice.

02:22:26
And then firefox 132 just came out maybe even today, yesterday, say whenever and there's a, there's a random like windows only feature that I, I'm curious. I looked this up. I couldn't find anything. Um, native support for microsoft play ready, encrypted media playback, which sounds like something from the 2005s or whatever. Yeah, um, I don't know what that means, but okay, uh, I guess they didn't list any of the sites that actually use this technology. So I don't know.

02:22:53
Maybe if you're on windows and go to netflix, it's uses. I have no idea, but um, kind of interesting. Um, adobe fresco, which is like a PC paintbrush type app, but modern, designed for computers, or an iPad that has a pen or like a smart pen, used to be mostly free and there was some premium stuff they had under a subscription is now totally free, so you might as well take a look at that. Proton VPN is now, if you have to pay, have a paid subscription, but it works. There's an Apple TV app, so actually I just installed that today, so I'm using that on my Apple TV here in Mexico, and then I don't know anything about this particular one and I don't quite get it, but Fantastical Calendar is apparently a really well-regarded standalone calendar app on Mac and I want to say, ios, probably there's a version available for Windows now as well. So there you go.

02:23:45
I think I did that in about a minute. I use.

02:23:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fantastical on the Mac.

02:23:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You do interesting. Now you have it on Windows as well.

02:23:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, honestly, operating systems come with their own calendars and probably for most people that's fine, it's efficient, yeah, fantastical. It's more about UI. I don't have. Nobody wants to meet with me, so I don't have any of that meeting.

02:24:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know how much time you spend in your calendar app either, right?

02:24:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, mostly it's just I want to enter stuff fast and then I want it to let me know.

02:24:17
I just want it to pop up and tell me when something's yeah, yeah, when, um, yeah, when the garbage has to be taken out yeah, my wife puts things on my calendar, so that can be irritating um the folks who do fantastic cal are up to now on apple house right yeah, well, I don't know if you heard, but windows is like the next big thing so I guess it's going gangbusters you know, I think this is a real vote of confidence for the future of uh of windows.

02:24:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean ia writers on windows. Um, I mean, it's just the whole world's going windows.

02:24:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's crazy, it's amazing is it in the store, this fantastic cal? I have no idea.

02:24:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, in the store, of course it is I'm on theratcom, I'm checking anything could be in a.

02:24:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't write the article, I did I don't, I know nothing, I I disavow all knowledge of this.

02:25:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah I'm not even sure this is real. I could have just said words that are just completely made up from flexibits.

02:25:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go. I have a subscription to flexibits for the mac. I guess it would apply to this.

02:25:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll check is this all they make? Do they make other things? Yeah, they have fantastic.

02:25:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have card hop, which is a contact manager that you don't know as well, and they have their icon. No Flexibits, they have other stuff. Yeah, it's a good little company, but it's like a Mac company.

02:25:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's weird to see them do stuff like this, I know, which makes them immediately suspicious, frankly.

02:25:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What are you up to?

02:25:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, what's going on here?

02:25:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's the?

02:25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
thinking here, Jigs, jigs. What are you up to? Yeah, what's going on here? What's the thinking here? Chicks, cheeks, it looks just like flex.

02:25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fantastical on the yeah on the map. How did that happen?

02:25:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is there some new cross-platform?

02:25:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it's called swift well, you know, like arc arc is written in swift yeah, is it?

02:25:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, that's right even on windows I like swift. It's a good language, I don't know, but it's it's not very Even on Windows. I like Swift, it's a good language.

02:26:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't use it, I know, but it's not very mainstream on Windows yet.

02:26:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it's not wildly portable across platforms.

02:26:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there is an open source Swift, so I don't care. I don't care. We are going to now switch gears and talk about Run as Radio.

02:26:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Mr Richard Campbell, the update goddess herself. A carly. Now aria hansen congratulations recently married uh and her third return back to my show to talk more about what's been going on with update, although specifically around updates with arm for windows.

02:26:39
So we talked a bit about co-pilot plus pcs and just you know the PCs and is this going to eventually be just another Windows device? And Aria got into that. Yes, there's a transition time here with a special version of 24H2. There's a bunch of features that will only surface if you are a Copilot plus PC, which all things we've talked about here as well, and their goal is it updates exactly the same. They're just at the time when we recorded this, which was a few weeks ago, and even up to today they're still not there yet. Like it is a battle to try and get to that point. But um, they, that's her intent. And then she. We dove into a bit about the insider program. Apparently there's four channels in the insider program and she called, she ranked them in order of likely to blue screen, from canary to dev to beta to release preview in the reverse order of like, if you're really, if you're really looking for a blue screen, you know go to canary.

02:27:38
But yeah, it'd be a great conversation, as usual. You know there's always things going on on the update side, especially for business. They're phasing out the old update server, so that was a concern. But yeah, copilot plus PC just going to be a PC one of these days? It isn't yet, but it's going to be and that's certainly where we came down to.

02:28:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's time perhaps for a little trip to Okanagan.

02:28:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we're going back. It was about three months ago that I came back from the Okanagan Valley with stories of well, not only the crisis with their wine, because they had that big freeze that killed all the grapes, and they're still recovering from all that but I had a chance to visit the Okanagan Spirits Craft Distillery, which has a visitor center in Kel, kelowna, where we were, and then further north, up above the, the north part of the lakes is where their main distillery is, in a place called Vernon. These are the folks that started out making because they are in fruit region. They made fruit brandies, kirsch and the likes, grappa, that of thing, including and vodkas and gin, but they eventually got into making whiskey as well. And while I was there, I took the opportunity to enter the lottery and the lotteries was for an opportunity to buy the Laird of the Fintree edition, and I won the opportunity to buy a bottle, you won the.

02:29:04
Laird of the Fintree. I was very, very lucky, and so actually I ordered two bottles, and when I got home from my travels, there they are, I got two bottles.

02:29:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's the.

02:29:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Laird of the Fintree. Now, only one of these is the lottery edition. The reason they have the lottery and it's right on the label there is that they only make 5,000 bottles, and it's right on the label there is that they only make 5 000 bottles, and so I got bottle 1893. That's really cool, yeah, and this is a great little marketing play for a small organization like this that they only are going to produce so much. So great way to pump up your mailing list. And, yeah, you, I had an opportunity to buy and I immediately bought and then they fed, came back, you know, the next day and said would you like to buy more? So I think they did, say 30 000 people signed up for the lottery, but I don't know how many actually stock up, pulled the trigger, get now again.

02:29:54
We talked about laird of the finchery three months ago with their what they called the bsv pipe. So, first off, laird of the Fintree is actually. Fintree is a location. The Fintree Delta this is the set of lakes that are the Okanagan lakes have rivers running between them and there is a delta area, and the Fintree Delta was owned back in the very early 1900s by a one Captain, james Cameron Dunwaters who called himself the laird of finntree delta, and he did import a private label whiskey from scotland which he then labeled as laird the finntree. So that's got nothing to do with this, although it apparently they've matched the label design I love the design.

02:30:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's an old school like, like 1910, 1920 style labeling.

02:30:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And so the one that I talked about three months ago was that BSV pipe, and this is a different edition. So the following classic Scottish whiskey style this is entirely barley and barley from British Columbia. That's part of their claim to fame. And then they do an aging for five years in American oak and that's virgin American oak. They have other additions where they use Jack Daniel barrels, but in this case it is actually raw oak, so five years in that, and then they do a finish in something else. So in the case of the BSV that we talked about last time, bsv pipe is actually a kind of port and so they're doing a port finish, very classic. This is actually a Qu of port and so they're doing a port finish. Very classic. This is actually a quails gate fock, so quails gate is a very popular distillery.

02:31:31
Now we are going to get said that word very carefully. What is f-o-c-h? Yes, so uh, quails gate is a very well-known uh winery in the Okanagan Valley. There's more than 100 of them. This is one in the top 10. And the Foc is a particular kind of grape. It's a French wine hybrid grape that was developed in the early 1900s.

02:31:54
So this is a hybridization of the Vitis ripiera and the Vitis ripiteris. These were considered inferior grapes, but they're very hardy, so when you're going to make wine in the colonies, these are the kinds of grapes you would take along. And it's actually named. The grape is named for Ferdinand Falk, who was a Supreme Allied Commander in World War I, the general.

02:32:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think yes.

02:32:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Ferdinand Falk Field. Marshal Falk, that's right. Supreme Allied Commander, right. So the grape arrived in North America in 1946, primarily on the East Coast because it was tended to be growing in colder areas. So in the US, places like Minnesota and Ohio and Colorado, and in Canada, in Ontario, quebec and Nova Scotia and BC Okanagan Valley. Now the funny part is this it's a good grape, by the way. I've drank the wine Quails Cake Fock, one of my favorites. But it's not that popular.

02:32:52
The French barely grow it because they're really against the hybrids. They stick strictly with Vitis Vininera, which is a sort of classic wine grape, and to the point now where there are EU rules about what grape you're allowed to grow in these areas, right. So in the 80s a lot of the hybrid grapes were removed to replace with the classic grapes, right. And then, and that name, the venice venera, covers a huge reign. I'm literally looking up the names, from a brusco to the zirphandel, which is the austrian version ofinfandel. This is the grape that has been made. They've literally made wine for 8,000 years, like there is evidence of winemaking with this grape, with these kinds of grape, in 6,000 BCs. So the fox is an odd duck, but the good thing about that grape is that, depending on how you treat it, you get an array of wines and you can get these big, rich wines, which is the direction that Quailsgate goes in, which makes it a good finishing barrel. It adds a lot of layer and if you look, look at the color on this, for a five-year-old right, they're not doing a chill, filtration or coloring or anything. This is a lot of this has to have come from the wine.

02:33:59
But remember, I bought two, so this was the lottery bottle, of which there was only 5,000. I got one of them, but this, my friends, is the cask strength. Oh baby, but they're both lot 11. So this is a weird opportunity. These are two exactly the same produced versions of whiskey. One has been cut with water to be 42. That's the lottery edition, and this is what they call the black label cast strength. You can compare them, is it 56?

02:34:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
interesting. What order should we drink them in?

02:34:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, but I like this idea, and by we I mean me, because I mean but so one's cask strength 56 alcohol and one is 42 and one is the nominal strength of nominal.

02:34:50
So let's start with the 42 because it should have a little less cloud and I won't pour too much because I'm gonna have to finish this to put the other one in. They use a synthetic cork. All the air just filled with whiskey smells. So, um, pretty medicinal, like a big alcohol note up front, oh, but nice on the mouth and there's that fruitiness from the wine like, wow, you know. The fact that this was this alcohol smelling for the 42 makes me vaguely frightened of that 56. Yeah, no kidding. Second swallows are always better. Yeah, no see, that sort of leathery kind of. You know, this is a beautiful. I'm not even gonna finish this, I'm gonna go grab another glass. Yeah, I think I have another yeah, save it.

02:35:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, fortunately you have an entire set there. He's ready, he's ready to go. So now, paul and I are just jealous as hell.

02:35:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I got two bottles here, but I did this with the Glenmorangie the other days too, when we were in Poland, and we had the original and then we also had the Nectar Dior, so you can pair and contrast. Now I think the color on this is a little bit darker.

02:36:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh it is. Yeah, look at that, it's rich looking.

02:36:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, definitely. So, you know, because in the end, if it's 42% alcohol, what's the other 58%? It's water, right, right. So here we go. This is the 56. One man, two bottles. You know what? That's not even more alcohol. That's not more alcohol smelling, granted, I've had a couple of sips already, so I'm a little tuned. But, okay, yeah, now definitely more alcohol, like you get that sort of shot, but not mean Not, hey, you just drank a really strong. Oh, it came on later, though, hello. Okay, we're on later, though Hello.

02:36:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, we're going to wrap it up now that little bite in the cheeks you get when it's a little astringent.

02:36:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh that's good though. Boy oh boy, mr Campbell is consuming Normally, you would do a calf strength, first because it's going to fill you up and then save that. I think I'm going to put the, the 42, the right, the lottery edition in the decanter. Ah, but they cast strength's going to sit for special occasions because that's always a a fun starter. But you know, it comes to to the sort of truth of the flavors are from the wood, they the that, the grain and that that alcohol. That's, you know, pretty state, pretty standard.

02:37:26
It's from the wine barrel, yeah, yeah that wine barrel lifted it all up and made this thing, and I wish I'd kept a bit of that pipe back so that I could have had a little of the of the port finish one as well alongside this, wouldn't that be interesting, but it was entirely too, tasty and somehow the bottle ended up empty.

02:37:41
I don't know. Anyway, I I thought that'd be fun. You know it's great to have this waiting for me and the fact Interesting Try those. But it was entirely too tasty and somehow the bottle ended up empty. I don't know. Anyway, I thought that'd be fun. It was great to have this waiting for me and the fact that you can try two versions of the same. This doesn't happen very often, so I was delighted for the opportunity. You guys all got to see it. Lovely Price for the lottery edition $95 Canadian. Not sold outside of Canada, sorry. And then the cast strength at 56% is 115 Canadian. So I think that's like $20 American. No, that's not true. About 25% less. But yeah, they're not exporters. Find a friend in BC who can get it for you and bring it down.

02:38:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'll be delighted with what you get.

02:38:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is one of those little distilleries that stays under that 100,000 liters a year threshold, so they pay less tax and so they generally only sell direct. They don't try and get into stores. They have relationships with different whiskey clubs and they do these lotteries and things. That's how they make their living and they can keep a little bit more money. And so a small team of people working in a little town in Vernon and a single distillery make a living making 50,000 bottles a year.

02:38:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How far away is it?

02:38:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Four hours drive from where I am. Oh, so it's a bit of a yeah, or we could, you know, hop a little local jet up there in an hour, right.

02:38:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The 2024 Laird of Fintry Black Label Cask Strength Single Malt Whiskey yeah, with a name like that.

02:39:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know somebody had too much time on their hands. That's a big label.

02:39:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm glad you had this Wednesday time on your hands, folks, for joining us for the Windows Weekly program, that there is Richard Campbell, our whiskey guru. He also hosts a couple of podcasts called Run as Radio and NET Rocks. People love NET Rocks, the show you do with Carl. Yeah, I agree, that's a fun show too. Two great shows. They're all at runasradiocom. Paul Thurott is, of course, at thurottcom T-H-U-R-R-O-doublegoodcom. His books are at lean pubcom, including windows everywhere and the field guide to windows 11. We three, we brave, we few. We gather every wednesday morning, 11 am, pacific 2 pm eastern time. Next week we will be on standard time, so that means that we will be at 1900 utc. So, uh, come by, you can watch us on. As I mentioned, all eight streams discord for the club members, youtube, twitch kick, facebook, linkedin, xcom and now t tock, which explains the hats.

02:40:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Unless we get banned forever from hat gate.

02:40:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They might've known you were going to whiskey, cause they will block, they will, they, don't they? Just they don't promote it if it's got a whiskey in it.

02:40:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, so next week's Tunisia, so we'll see how the bandwidth is there. Is that where?

02:40:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you're going Well, yeah, Tunisia. So we'll see how the bandwidth is there.

02:40:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that where you're going? Yeah, tunisia, wow.

02:40:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you doing in Tunisia? Keynoting what's the conference?

02:40:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The Tunisian Developers Conference. There's only one.

02:40:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How interesting Boy. You really get to go places.

02:40:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's cool oh yeah, no, they booked me a tour of Carthage. Yeah, the city that the romans cartago delenda est.

02:41:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So we're gonna hang out in carthage. And is there much left? No, they salted it. They destroyed it.

02:41:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's been salted but, I mean it was a famous enough city at the time that there were carvings of the huge circular harbor and things, and the remains are still there Very famous.

02:41:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If I'm muted, it's not my fault. Can you hear me?

02:41:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we can hear you. If you want to watch this live, I invite you to do so. But I hope you will also subscribe, not because it costs money, but because that way we can't really count the downloads on the live version. So a couple of ways you can get the show. You go to twittv slash www. Paul has a copy at his website, therotcom. You can go to youtubecom. There is a Windows Weekly channel with all the video. Great for sharing clips and so forth. But honestly, for us, and probably for you, the best way to get the show is subscribe in your favorite podcast player or, as some say, follow us. That way you'll get it automatically every Wednesday Did I say Tuesday? I meant Wednesday? Every Wednesday after the show has been produced, we're Wednesday at 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. Just to clarify that. Have a great Halloween. Do you get trick-or-treaters in Mexico?

02:42:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, oh yes, we do.

02:42:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, do you bring down some good American candy for those youngsters?

02:42:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, Candy is so readily available here.

02:42:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't even know why they want it. There's lots of sweets.

02:42:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I always pay for American chocolate when you're in Mexico, we sit in restaurants and people walk by trying to sell us candy. It's crazy, yeah, yeah.

02:42:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We had up here in the rural areas. Nobody's coming by this place. It's too far, but the community hall has a great party that everybody goes to. We have a blast.

02:42:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll have a wonderful Halloween and good luck on election day. I hope your man wins, or person.

02:43:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We just had our provincial election Did you. We had a week of recounts. We had three districts that you know. Vote spread was like 12 or 20. Tiny.

02:43:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those local elections, every vote counts.

02:43:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Make sure you vote. Yeah, and it literally swung. The incumbents got a majority by one seat. Wow, but only after three recounts of three important districts. Holy moly, yeah, it was close it was really something. Well, you don't have anything to worry about on Tuesday. Well, you know how much rioting there was over it.

02:43:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
None, you're Canadian. Come on, what are you talking about? Sorry, rioting, there was over it.

02:43:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
None canadian come on, what are you sorry? I'm sorry. Did I step on your ballot? I'm sorry. As soon as it's that close, they do a manual count of everything you know.

02:43:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's civilized set of procedures.

02:43:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Civilized place up there, but at least one of the two of them, actually the uh, the newcomers were ahead before the recount started and then it flipped over.

02:44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, they didn't declare victory, did they? They?

02:44:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
waited. No, everybody held their breath and said let's just see how this goes. Let's be civilized. Yeah, I like that. They will be the loyal opposition.

02:44:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's good too. Yeah, I was watching a show yesterday and they said let's do a loyalty toast. And they all said to the king you don't do that anymore in Canada.

02:44:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That doesn't sound good. That being said, we do have a lieutenant governor here who basically said you should form government now and he's like okay.

02:44:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, it's part of the ritual. Whatever you want, I got the mace, I got the other thing, whatever.

02:44:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's called the crook, I don't know what it's called the scepter, scepter Mace and scepter it has to be a scepter, yep, what else Is there anything else?

02:44:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Join the club. We'd love to have you. Twittv slash club. Twit on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.