Windows Weekly 895 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)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell are in the house. Lenovo's got a rebound. Is this a bellwether for the rest of the PC market? Teams is now unified. Woo-hoo, ha-ha, woo-hoo. Epic comes to the Google Play Store. Paul gets a special delivery and some really good news for Xbox fans. All that coming up and a whole lot more next on Windows Weekly.

00:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Podcasts you love.

00:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 895, recorded Wednesday, august 21st 2024. I'm done transitioning. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And, lo and behold, look who have joined me in the magic spectral box Of magic. It's magic.

01:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Don't know how it works. Here we are sorting electrons again.

01:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, to my left, mr paul thurot from thurotcom t-h-u-r-r-o. Double goodcom, uh. And by the way, richard and I have conspired that when we introduce you, yeah, we do this you should do that every time I leave to go to the bathroom.

01:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm in really doing a little bit later.

01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, also he's a little rumble, little tummy rumble. Also richard campbell, uh, from runners radiocom on my right. Hello, richard, hello to see you both. Yeah, it's good to be here. Let's see, I guess we can just launch right into it. I was going to mention I will be in New York City in a couple of weeks and we're going to do a meetup, weather permitting. You just told me, Richard, it's rainy on the East Coast it has been yeah, it's going to be a record.

02:04
I thought, because of the rise of COVID, we should do it outside, so I've chosen Bryant Park as our gathering place, but this may have been a big mistake. What's the date for this September? Saturday, september, what day is that? Is that a 6th or a 7th? That's Saturday. Here I'll look at my calendar. 7th that's Saturday. Here I'll look at my calendar 7th 3pm, east Coast time.

02:28
It's the meetup. If you want to go, if you want to take the train up, we'd love to see you. It'll be fun. September 7th, 3pm to 5pm, and then we're going to do a photo walk. Joe, who's in our club and is a very accomplished street photographer, is going to take us on a photo walk starting with Grand Central Station and ending with the Oculus. It's going to be an amazing trip. So we invite you all you don't have to be a club member to join us in New York City, in the Big Apple. September 7th, 3 pm, bryant Park. In case of rain, stand under a tree. Well, bryant Park has those little I've only been there during the christmas thing where there's.

03:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's where you go to get the raclette microsoft used to have little um launch event thingies there, like media center was there. Oh okay, so it's appropriate stuff. You know, during the uh windows xp launch you have to get a permit.

03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No uh, just show up. I don't know these people I.

03:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was uh. It's a flash mob.

03:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't it's a flash mob, exactly. And uh, scooter x, you're correct, it's byof, bring your own flask. No, anyway, that's this thought. I'd throw that in before you get going. Let's talk windows 11. Gentlemen, I shall dodge out of the conversation until you need me well, it's so weird to be talking about windows.

03:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can come back if you need me.

03:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where did he go? What's happening?

04:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we'll probably be okay. Yeah, so there wasn't really much going on with windows until about two seconds ago. So yeah, and in there you know, classy, classy way, they announced this by adding to a blog post that dates back to June 7th, and I don't know how you'd find that out wow, yep, so they added a paragraph to a two-month-old. Oh, they do this all the time this is uh, yeah, this is the yeah. You'd see, with this blog post they've done it twice.

04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, maybe I wonder if they thought they looked at what google and uh apple were doing and saying oh screw it, yeah let's just, let's just go with it I, I feel like there was there would be a use for an rss feed.

04:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, that could alert you when blog posts were updated. Now you're just talking crazy, talking honestly.

04:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, sorry, too technical okay, so, uh, I would also point out that this is a post about recall, so maybe they're being a little ginger, like I'm kind of surprised they didn't publish this on a Friday afternoon.

05:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's kind of my thinking yeah it is about recall, but, like I said, they actually do this kind of thing all the time. Like this is in the insider program is very typical. So I don't know how you find out when things change, but this is only insiders. Yeah Well, yeah well. So remember someone was just asking me about this. You know it's been what? Three months, two months, since this was supposed to come out and in preview, right with the original Copilot Plus PCs, and then it didn't. So you know we've kind of gone over that.

05:38
But a couple of things have changed in the interim and one of the you know, the question was has always been and as time goes on is still even more pressingly like when will this happen? Right? So what they've revealed today is that's going to happen in october. Now they don't say this, but that's when 24h2 comes out for everybody. So it kind of makes sense that it it's sort of paralleling what they wanted to do originally, which was we're shipping 24h2, the original original version, with the copilot plus PCs in June. We'll have this thing available in preview and at some point in the future, you know, it will go stable. So now it's going to come out in October, as I said before. You know, in June they, when they changed their plans, it will go to the insider program first, vaguely.

06:21
We don't know how that's going to work, but it occurred to me today, and only today, that maybe one of the reasons this has taken so long because I think it was I don't know if it was Raphael, but I was talking to somebody it was like do we think that this thing has been setted? If you will Like remember, there was the sets feature they were going to add to Windows 10 with the tabs for all apps and all of a sudden disappeared and never came back and I never thought that that would happen. Uh, it's too important, it's too big of a deal. But, like I said today, it occurred to me, I think the part of the rationale is this is for copilot plus pcs. You can't open up a. Well, you could, but you could open up this insider program, um build, which you'd have to make arm builds available for, obviously, which I think they do anyway, and it would only go out to like three or four people, right?

07:06
So if they had done this in June, july, I mean, there wasn't really a big audience there, especially the subset of that audience, that would want to even do this, because one of the many things that hasn't happened yet with Windows on ARM is they don't have for all PCs recovery images so you can go back to stable or downloadable ISOs. So you can go back to stable or downloadable ISOs so you can go back to stable right. And part of the not the converse, part of the complexity there is that Copilot plus PCs have over 40 LLMs on them, local like SLMs, I guess, small machine, small language models. How are we delivering those things? You know so I think they were kind of working through all those issues. So the technical aspect of you know you have to give them an outramp to get out of there, whatever that might be.

07:54
The Copilot plus PCs are complicated because of the LLM issue and then there just wasn't a big audience. You know, right, if you read this post carefully and you have the time, it's short, we're not just talking about reading the first paragraph just the first paragraph.

08:12
Um, it's. It's curious to me it doesn't say right, this is the point. It says that this thing will be available in preview on co-pilot plus pcs, which today are only snapdragon pcs, right, right. But one of the things we don't know too about windows 11 24 h2 is, uh, next week or soon a couple weeks, they're going to announce the intel uh chips, the lunar lake chips that will have co-pilot plus pc level mpus, the amd chips.

08:43
Already here PCs are starting to ship. Are we going to call these things copilot plus PCs? I have theories about that, but does this mean that this will be more broadly available? And to you know, not complicate, but to give nuance to this conversation, I would say you know, when you go back to the security researchers that were showing all the security problems with this thing, when they ran recall and non-copilot plus PCs, those guys had x64 PCs, right? So that means this code was in the x64 versions of Windows 11, whatever in preview, which may or may not mean anything, but I mean obviously at some point point this feature has to come to everybody.

09:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It can't be you know, just for the small subset. Yeah, at some point we get there, right yeah?

09:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So a lot of you know we have more information. Good, we wanted this. It's been two months, but you know questions right, and that's, I think that's been our experience with Windows, so you know typical or whatever, so so we'll see. Um, they do mention the whole security thing. You know security is our top priority, not ai.

09:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
don't forget it's security it's all about security, it sure is, they said, while while breaking all dual blue machines for a security patch well, it was all about security.

10:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I listen, those computers are secure, they are very.

10:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can't use it for Linux. You can't use them at all. Chances of hacking them low.

10:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes, and I apologize, I didn't put that in there, so we should discuss that briefly, right? I mean, the Patch Tuesday update that went out this last week, I guess, apparently broke dual boot with certain Linux distributions, right, I think you could argue it probably doesn't impact too many people, although I like the apocalyptic headlines I've seen about it. So you know, it's like, well, you better just throw out that computer, it's useless. Now it's like, yeah, that's not how this works. You know, one of the things you could do if you had to get into Linux is, you know, see a therapist. But also you could disable secure boot, apparently, and that would do it. But I mean, obviously they're going to fix this.

10:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This isn't a this is the problem with Microsoft. It's also a two-year-old vulnerability. Like why would you rush out a patch now?

10:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, Richard to break Linux. See, this is the thing that people don't appreciate Microsoft is still trying to undermine Linux. Didn thing that people don't appreciate? Microsoft is still trying to undermine linux. Didn't you get that memo? Oh god, I know that's what the world thinks. They said they're like oh, they're doing it again. Yeah, there they are.

11:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like no guys, they're just right, bad software, just get used to that it's never a tribute to malice that which should be explained by incompetence exactly it's not malicious, it's yeah, yeah, yeah so you know and I've also seen the argument it wasn't supposed to be installed on doable machines Like how is that?

11:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yep. Is there a thing in there that prevents that from happening? The answer to that is if there is, it didn't work.

11:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, clearly didn't, and it is a small subset of users, but they're going to be vocal ones.

11:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yes, yes, that's true, true, yeah, and that's the thing that's. That's the real kind of headline here. It's just a lot of uh anger, which is understandable, but but just misplaced in the sense that it's not malicious guys, they just don't know what they're doing. I, yeah, I it's not fair to say I wouldn't say it this way. I don't mean to say they wouldn't test that scenario.

12:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They should test that scenario, right Well, it even sounds like they did and said oh, that's a problem, let's make sure it doesn't stall on that and that avoid installing thing didn't work.

12:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, they got crowdstruck. Then is what you're saying? They didn't test it properly.

12:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe Is it on by default or off by default. Which is that?

12:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Rec vault or off byte of home which that recall?

12:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, no recall, am I? No? No, this is the security patch that broke the linux.

12:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry, yeah, I'm a. I'm a, I'm behind, sorry, no, it's okay, but uh, the but, to answer your question, recall is you have to opt into the insider program to get. It's not going to be, we're not going to see.

12:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if you're in the insider program and it gets pushed to you, is it on when you?

12:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, we don't know I, I know I remember the original plan was there. It was going to be optional, but opt out. After the fact that the little asterisk they never told anybody. And then they complain and like, all right, all right, we'll make it opt in during setup, like we'll, we'll change this, we'll flip the switch there. Um, so I would imagine you'd have to turn it on. I can't imagine. Well, I can imagine all kinds of things.

13:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know I'm guessing we'll know when it happens yeah, and we'll hear about it.

13:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it happens. Yeah, they'll update a blog post from may or something, and we'll learn that way. That's how we'll find out they should.

13:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How could they not have an rss feed?

13:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I jeez, I don't know, I don't know, this is what happens.

13:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love this company when apple puts out a press release, I get notifications in 15 different well, they, the original one did have a.

13:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It did go out an rss. It's just that they updated a two-month-old blog post, so no one does. No, there must be a. I mean, you must have a way to do that. I don't, like I said, but occurs to look. It didn't occur to them to do this. How do you think they were going to you know?

13:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dare I say it's a tough computer science problem.

13:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will tell you it's not actually, but it is for them. Yeah, I mean it is for them. So, yeah, I mean, beyond that there wasn't much going on. This past week there was a pretty good looking Canary build which in Canary doesn't map to anything, so it's not clear when this stuff will appear. But there's a new version of the Windows Sandbox app which allows you to run. It's a quick running virtual machine that's based largely on well, it's based entirely actually on your computer, so it comes up really quickly. But it's a sandbox environment. You can test software etc. They're adding a bunch of new features to that uh, clipboard redirection, audio video output control, runtime, folder sharing, etc. So that's cool. Don't know when that's coming. Um, I just a couple of small things, but the this, this one kind of blew my mind. Um, fat 32, the disk format, right, wow, I want. I want to say this debuted with windows 95 this is such a big story.

14:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a huge story.

14:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love this. Well, this is so I wrote this. I wrote this up and then I had to look this up because I was like, wait what it says you can now format a disk as big as two terabytes from the command line using the fat 32 file system, like I pretty sure it was 32 gigabytes. Yeah, from the command line, like actually fat 32 file system, like I'm pretty sure it was 32 gigabytes.

15:05
Yeah, x from the command line, like actually fat 32 as a format supports I think it's four terabytes it's just that they never updated the command line tool, so I I didn't look at this, but I assume that if you put a usb flash drive or I guess it would be a disk in this case because it's so big and plugged it in and said format and chose FAT32. You had a 2, 4, what. I assume you could do that from the graphical interface, but this is referring specifically to the command line.

15:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got the story wrong. I misread it.

15:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, everyone was like oh, microsoft's finally supporting more than 32. It's like no, no, no, no, this is the command line version. I no, no, no, this is the command line version. Yeah, right, you know I'm sorry. Um no, no, don't be sorry, everyone got this wrong. I looked it up. I was like what are they talking about?

15:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this has been there forever. It's been fixed forever. But no, not in the command line tool, not in the command line. Well, it is the end it is the end of summer. The interns had to finish something. Yes, exactly that's right?

15:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um well, that's, by the way, good for them. That's kind of a nice low-level thing to fix.

16:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Somebody went down the list and went what? This has never been fixed. Here you go Off, you go Work on it.

16:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, if Windows was built correctly, everything would be built. The command line would be the single source of truth, and then everything, the GUI would all be built on that, but we talk about doing that but we don't really ever do that.

16:22
And then I think it was just yesterday they released a dev channel and a beta channel release. The dev channel adds one new feature and the beta channel takes one feature away, although it's coming back. It's so stupid. So yeah, I mean, have a lot of fun with that guys, but I guess if you left align the start button, which you know a lot of people come from windows 10, would do like richard, you still do that right, I don't, I don't really put it on the left, I put the whole bar on the left.

16:48
Yeah, yeah so if you do, why?

16:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
waste of. Why race waste the vertical space? I got lots of horizontal space.

16:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I see what you say yeah, okay, so I don't actually even know off the top of my head because I, I'm, I'm not a psychopath, but if you do that, like richard, does, the widget button does something. Where does that even go? I don't know, it must go right next to the start button or something. Yeah, so they're going to move it over toward the system tray when the start button and taskbar is left aligned. Yep, that's what we're testing. This is the features.

17:21
Yeah, and then, if you're familiar with the way, I don't remember when this happened no, it wasn't the first one, because they talked about it for the first one, so it must have been 22H2 in Windows 11. They added a feature In fact I can see it right now where you're using a microphone and there's a microphone icon right in the taskbar. So, no matter which app you're using, you can actually toggle that thing on or off right Now. A lot of laptops have that button right on the keyboard, but I'm using a desktop computer, so that's a nice feature. And I guess they're adding a Windows Studio Effects icon like that, so that when you're using a camera, you can control the effects right from there. I mean, there are actually other ways to do that, but they tested that and then they just took it away.

18:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But they're going to bring it back, so whatever inside a program um, you get to see how the sausage is made, and sometimes the sausage is ugly.

18:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right um, I think this was late last week, probably still, the earnings from the second calendar quarter of this year are still dribbling in. Lenovo had a great quarter, so this, yeah, I mean like really good, like 20% year over year revenue gains. It's real money. Yep, and the majority of this excuse me, of this company, is the PC business, right? So 11.4 billion of their 15 point, I think 4 billion in revenues came from PCs and laptops or desktops, because they make a whole bunch of everything.

18:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like too many things.

18:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So actually there is a line in here and this is interesting to me, and I bet this is I shouldn't say this probably similar at HP and Dell, Actually, absolutely similar to Dell. Hp might be a little lower, but 70% of their revenues from PCs come from commercial PC sales.

19:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, so selling into business.

19:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so it was a good quarter for that. They didn't break down laptop desktop, but the traditional breakdown is probably 75% to 80%, maybe even more. Like portable.

19:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so it's hard to say but it's also things like they make dedicated teams machines for for conference center, conference rooms and things like that, like and and they and they turn out a ton of them. Like if you go look in that space, they have like 10 different models yeah, I mean they're very yeah, and that's sort of the point.

19:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So lenovo like and I think, somewhat like HP, like I said, I think the HP mix is a little off from that, but yeah, they primarily target businesses, right, and you know what does everyone think of when they think of Lenovo, thinkpad, right?

19:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's obviously that's the beast.

20:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, for sure. Yeah, so that's going great. There were some other things Like they're from Japan, so I guess the yen was doing terrible in the quarter. So actually that benefited them because the revenues coming in were often US-based. Also, they report their earnings in US dollars, which I find to be interesting. So anyway, yes, they're doing pretty well, you mean.

20:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hong Kong. Right, they're from Hong.

20:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Kong. I think they're Chinese. No, I'm sorry, did I say Japan?

20:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You said Japan. They're from Hong Kong.

20:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's name every country in Asia. We know they're from China. I apologize, they're all the same.

20:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's hard to tell the difference.

20:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, sorry, you're right.

20:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

20:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you're not supposed to call being in China. I'll stop talking about that. Um and then, uh, speaking of HP, so I, I, I mentioned this probably last week, but I've since reviewed that laptop and so, uh, if you're interested in this kind of thing, I recommend reading the review. Not, you know, I mean, I recommend, I recommend you read everything I write.

20:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't mean it like that.

21:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, um, I I went off on a longer than usual bit about efficiency and, uh, in this case, because, like the things that they did to try to overcome the problems with meteor lake which, by the way, is not the way they would describe it, you know, no, but they did though, didn't they? They did though, yeah, and so that's what's interesting about it, right? So this computer gets really good battery life for an x64 computer, which is very interesting, and I think it's tied to all the hard work that they did to, and by that I'm sorry, I should say about 7.5 hours. In my experience, you know real world.

21:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Which is decent battery life for an x86 machine. Yeah, that's what I mean, right.

21:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I'm going to guess and say that a lot of the battery life issues. Obviously, if you actually sit there for five or six hours and the battery dies, you're using the computer, then that you know. Okay, that's the battery life. But I think a lot of the problems we see in the x64 space are battery drain because of unreliable power management states.

22:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, paras management states. Yeah, Parasitic drain.

22:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and and I don't have any way to measure that and this is just based on my, it's kind of anecdotal, you know my experiences, whatever but seeing what they did and and seeing how effective it could be it wasn't always, but you know this interest, they, they, they have all these sensors in there. So there are presence sensing sensors, but also sensors to sense like if it's in a bag and out of a bag and it's trying to be more aware of its environment.

22:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're saying it has this in-the-bag sensor.

22:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah there's literally a bag sensor.

22:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wow, because they don't want it to hot.

22:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The overheat, yeah, yeah, yeah, this hot. The issue I had in Mexico with an otherwise identical laptop if that thing had been in a bag, I mean that plane could have gone down. I mean it was like you know, it lost 60, I think it was 67% of its battery in one hour. Yeah, Somehow.

23:05
And changed the shape of your bag through.

23:06
Yeah, I don't know what could have like what on art, it's not like. You're like, oh, were you running adobe? No, no, no, 67 in one hour. That something was horribly wrong. Yeah, no, kidding. Um, so I? This is very interesting to me. There's a um, uh, you know, I still do this every day.

23:22
Right, you open the laptop, it comes on. You're like nice, and this one was not like that. You open the laptop, it comes on, you're like nice, and this one was not like that. Right, if I actually closed it, it did a better job if you left it open, which is not how I do things. But if you leave it sitting on a desk, like a lot of people might, and you walk up to the desk, the presence sensing kicks in, sees, you gets it out of the deep sleep, goes into the light, sleep lights up, the screen goes out of the light. You know that type of thing. And so by the time you get in front of it, it's like, oh, there you are and you're in and that's nice, right, but I don't do that.

23:51
So my experience was slightly different. It usually involved like opening the lid, wondering for one second anything was going to happen. And then the power what do you call it? The boot screen. You know, logo comes on, you're in, so it's not instant on. And, like you know, snapdragon. But look, if you've been suffering with these things, yeah, I mean it is. It stinks that they had to go to such lengths and maybe there's still more.

24:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
rather than addressing the core problem, which is something wrong in power management, we'll sit on top of it and go oh crap, we're in a bag. Ignore power management, do this.

24:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what they can do. It's HP, right? Yeah, the hope is I was going to say Intel will do something and I started vomiting in my mouth the hope is that Intel, they will make future-gen processors that are more efficient and actually work right, and we'll see. We're going to find out. Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake are coming, and then for these guys and for older chips that I don't know, I don't expect them to do a lot. I really don't, but I actually don't know how much work goes on from on Intel's part.

25:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then but your position here is that it's a chipset problem rather than a software problem.

25:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm basing this on look, these were both HP laptops and then my experience with Meter Lake more broadly. Lots of problems that I've identified and they were horrific. In that last HP laptop laptop, although they did fix the big ones, they never fixed battery life, by the way, um. And then this one just seeing, like knowing how much they did and seeing it in action, it's very, it's interesting. It's just an interesting, um, that you don't usually get this level of detail like, uh, from the pc maker. Again, they weren't like intel's terrible so we had to fix. They don't. They'll never say that hp has got to be their biggest partner. Right, they got to be careful with that stuff, but they, they did do a lot of work to make this thing make sense and and yeah, I mean pretty much it does you know I was so sad they made me send it back to them.

26:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is what we were doing. Ads for it is a a nice laptop.

26:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You like the keyboard too right, except for a couple of things. I actually wrote a separate article about a weird problem with the keyboard where the home key wouldn't work with different keyboard shortcuts. So I used a Markdown editor to write and I found out it was based on web technology. Just the other day because I typed I got to think about it Shift home, which is shift F12, do that in a browser, and that you know the dev, the dev environment pops up. So this was popping up for me in Typeora as I tried to select text. I'm like what, what's going on here? So you kind of I guess you could get used to anything Like if you just punch me in the face every day, I'd eventually get used to it. But that's kind of what it felt like. Yeah, so other than that, like the keyboards are just sublime, that's just kind of a conflict between the different beasts.

27:00
You know we have x amount of space. We have, yeah, exactly. Look, everyone knows about the co-pilot pc key. The one thing people aren't really talking about is new key. What new? Windows keyboards also have a like a snipping key for the snipping tool. So instead of like print screen, you're actually seeing that go away to some degree. Right, and there's like a snip key which is probably just print screen, because they map to the same thing, but now it has a name.

27:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

27:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, um, I, I, you know they're trying to, they're trying to fit what they can fit in the little limited real estate they have. And, um, I, I mean I wrote extensively my I look I've been typing on computer keyboards since there have been computer keyboards. I have strong feelings about this. There are standards and even if you have dedicated home and page down, page up keys, you should still support function key plus some arrow key to do those things. And that's what the problem with this machine was is that they had a dedicated home key that only worked if you just hit home. But if you did a keyboard shortcut, that never worked. And if you try to use it with the narrow key and the function kit didn't work either. So it was like you've that, that's on hp, like that's something they did. That was a design decision. You can tell the person who designed the keyboard does not type, you know or doesn't use these things look, I mean, are these features that most people probably don't use?

28:22
yeah, probably, but they are a standard part of the pc keyboard. I'm just saying all. This review is on theratcom, the elite book 1040 g11 yeah, it's a great laptop, though I mean yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know you get uh richard, uh, you're, are you?

28:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did you finally get your? Oh, you know what I'm talking about the. Uh, I'm guessing you didn't snapdragon.

28:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, yeah, they.

28:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I fell for the same thing you did. They updated the the. Oh, you should be getting it by right yeah, without actually shipping it right.

28:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I imagine the movie version of the story where it flashes to the customs office in british columbia and these guys are playing video games on it or something yeah, yeah you know it's like sorry it's held up in customs is is it coming from?

29:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, no, because I'm mine's. Where is it coming from?

29:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
he's, it's coming from arrow.

29:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whoever, I think it's coming from china, china so it's, you know, it's probably the case that just qualcomm hasn't shipped them?

29:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, I suspect that they. You know, they're just making up delivery dates, they don't have units. Because they don't have units, yeah, yeah I, I, yeah, well, I I'm.

29:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are many questions around the whole snapdragon thing. One of them is for some reason there were four tiers of this right, we suspect binning.

29:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everyone seems to have the one you know you don't see a lot of the other ones.

29:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not the top one either no, it's not the top one, it's usually.

29:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why we have from the water, because isn't that what's in the development?

29:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm thinking the yields on this maybe aren't great and um yeah, maybe the.

29:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just double checked. My estimated ship date now is september 18th yikes.

29:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So here, look, look I. Uh, this will come up later in the show too, but like one of the one of the little hidden side dramas in the PC industry that people aren't that familiar with, is this notion that HP's I mean IBM's Jesus Paul, intel has been paying off PC makers for years to exclusively go with their chips. Right, this is, you know, this is the incentive program they have. This is how they've undermined ARM at every step of the way. So with Snapdragon X, qualcomm, literally they have. This is how they've undermined arm at every step of the way.

30:26
So with um, snapdragon x, qualcomm, literally, they said this explicitly like we have to play this game, we're going to up our payments to these guys, we're going to make sure we get in there. They have to give the chips to those guys first. They have to. Yeah, right, they can't give it to no name chinese company that's making a dev box with zero margins, or whatever the heck it is. The chips are going to the pc makers, right? I think that's, I think that's all part of this problem, which?

30:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
would be the good news version of the problem, like that would be the good news version of the estimated ship 18 september.

30:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Estimated delivery 19.

30:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're on the same track, yeah, so here I mean. Here's the question did they get a batch and we didn't make it into the batch?

31:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did any of you get it?

31:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, you guys actually both did this pretty late. I mean, I don't mean like weeks later, but no, we didn't do it it was days later, yeah I feel like the enthusiast guys are like we're all over this, like oh my god, you know, and like you know, I don't know if anyone has reviews yeah, no, no, no one has one.

31:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So the more likely thing is that they realize hey, that delivery date, we told you it ain't happening. Bump everything a month.

31:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Keith S has put something in our Discord. I'll have to watch a YouTube video, alex, oh, there's a video. Okay, so that's why we don't have those dev kits.

31:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yet Can somebody TLDR this for us? Tldr it if you want. What's his summary? This guy no one's ever heard of. Well, I can tell you.

31:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Who knows everything about this topic. It's 10 minutes long. We're not going to find out anytime soon.

31:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It had a Snapdragon chip in it, but it was a little bit underpowered.

32:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alex tell us he has the same screenshot saying delivery 15 August, and then oh, and then he tries to cancel it and it says we can't cancel it.

32:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, it's against Chinese regulations or something.

32:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No canceling, so I will watch that as an exercise. Basically they have. The computer says zero in stocks.

32:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what Keith says that's not really why, that's just you know that's not right. Listen, if you want to fly to the factory in China and find out, I would add to your Patreon, sure, that's not right, yeah, but definitely you know you hit the point.

32:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's supposed to be a top-tier processor in the dev machine. They're having yield problems that's what I think Right and so they have to deliver to their primary customers first, which are going to be the machine makers.

32:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just reminded me of something else. To my knowledge, there's only one PC that has shipped with the highest end Elite X chip. And do you know the name of that company that makes it? Lenovo? No, microsoft, that company that makes it lenovo.

33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, uh, samsung, qualcomm's biggest partner.

33:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, right, I'm not I'm not, I'm just asking questions no, I don't mean like that, but fabs them and so they're probably just saying they're keeping them. But they are samsung, I mean qualcomm's biggest, yeah, partner. They're the only piece in there. Nothing in pcs they've had.

33:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're the only one. And what do you bet? They made the promises of those top tier chips before the real yield numbers came in, because the other thing is going to happen if the yield, if the yield on the top tier chip is like 10, you got to sell all those other processors.

33:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, yeah they're gonna go somewhere yeah, they're gonna flood the market right let's throw, let us pause to celebrate our wonderful sponsors and then we will continue on with more news from microsoft. How about that, gentlemen? Are you in agreement? Absolutely, our show today, brought to you by a company with we've been doing ads for for a long time and really love Sinkst Canary.

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35:18
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36:25
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36:56
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37:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The canary trap is actually a term from Tom Clancy's the Patriot Games. Oh really, I didn't know that the technique already existed, which was really. Hey, I think I have a mole inside of my organization so I put different versions of the same memo for different people and then see which one gets leaked.

38:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perfect, On, we go with the show. Let's go to Microsoft 365-er.

38:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, if you hated the consumer version of Teams, it's more likely that you just didn't notice it. Good news it's uh, it's in the regular version of teams. Now they've integrated them into a single app. Is anybody going to care? Nope, um, it's the thing no one was asking for. The only thing dumber than two apps, one of which which no one ever uses, is one app, half of which no one ever uses, I guess. I mean, I think it's just a protocol difference, right.

38:51
Honestly, this looks no more sophisticated than my NET Pad app, meaning you just click something and then you're in consumer teams and you click something else and you're within. They're not mixed up together. It's not like a combined inbox or something in a mail app, it's. It's just two separate interfaces in the same app that do not ever run side by side.

39:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So and they maintain separate contact lists like yep. But this is the failed opportunity that microsoft had during the pandemic to make a consumer version that nobody and nobody took on. And Zoom won that. I mean to this day, if you are associated with Microsoft in any way, you're using a Teams account. You want to talk on Teams because that's what you use, and if you're anybody else, you don't use Teams full stop. And then I have a Zoom account just for that, because you just have to deal with the reality of I can't.

39:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I don't want to apologize for them 100 here, but part of it was just a weird matter of timing. They were transitioning to teams. They had some idea, you know, for replacing skype with teams. You know, consumer pandemic happened. They were caught a little flat-footed. I mean, this was the time they should have maybe put the, you know, put the brakes on on teams for client, you know for consumer, and really push skype. And then it would have been one day we could have just updated sky client.

40:15
It's like, oh, look, it's called teams now. You know, I mean they could have done that, but they, I don't, you know, they don't always think ahead like that. So, yeah, I don't know, teams, I mean teams are successful, but it feels a little bit like windows phone 7, where they kind of release this thing and it's not ideal, and they're like we're going to replace it eventually, don't worry, you know. And they finally got that second client out and I, they got it right, you know, yeah, uh, the the 2.0 client is great. I had, yeah, I had all kinds of problems with teams before that. So so the consumer thing, though I don't know.

40:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think it's too late. They missed their opportunity there.

40:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that's too bad it feels like. But look, this is not a big failure and it's not a huge.

40:58
Well, it is a big failure, but Teams itself is very successful, obviously, it's the most successful office product and probably over 20 years Teams for consumers and also, you know, whenever we're not going to talk about this at some point it's just not going anywhere. So I guess you know rolling it into the one client maybe is a good way to let it disappear in with dignity. I don't know, maybe, I don't know it's. It certainly doesn't have the controversy of the new outlook client right, no, yes, um, which actually should be I've had people ask me if I do a show on run.

41:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
As about the new outlook client, I'm like yeah you're like no, I cover work technologies? Yeah, I don't know, that's just a men's care. Other than just not doing it, what do you want to talk about?

41:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, right, other than everyone hates it. It's like I I spent two weeks trying to find someone who didn't hate it and all I found was a couple people who didn't even try it. Yeah, you know, and uh, yeah, no, I, I'm, I'm actually really shocked by how negative the reaction is, um, from some people, or you know certain crowds, but I think it's.

42:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's also a defensive reaction. Mail is funny that way yeah. I mean he said, still using the classic Outlook client and cursing it as well.

42:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean like, for example, I would say Gmail works amazingly well in the new client and it works horrible in the old Outlook. And saying that to a Microsoft guy is like and you know, like who who cares, and I'm like why people use both people.

42:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah what do you guys use? Do you what? Do you use a web interface or?

42:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, this web. No, I use the classic outlook. Yeah, I'm, I'm super old school on that, you know, dude, I'm still. I still have memories of owning exchange server like it just was not. It was barely a year ago that wasn't that long ago.

42:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't that long ago. It wasn't that long ago. They're more like nightmares, I think. I mean, I wasn't.

42:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I. That's when I got rid of it. It wasn't using it anymore. I had moved all the mailboxes off for a long time.

42:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like the last time I used um outlook full time.

43:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Your shirt and I knew people who did that?

43:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep, now listen, I can only do therapy so fast. So, yeah, outlook, old classic. Yeah, yeah, I, I, you know I I could probably get by, okay, with the microsoft web interface. Honestly, like whatever they're calling outlook web access these days. Um, it just so happened when we switched into the company that you know was doing throughoutcom at the time. That's, that's what they had, so it's what we use.

43:27
And it works fine. It's fine and plus, I spent a lot of time. I funnel all of my email through this one account, so everything appears there. I can send and respond to email as if I was that other account. The other accounts are all basically empty because they forward and well, they probably archive, not delete. But if you go and look at the inboxes everywhere else they're just empty right, because everything's in this Google workspace thing. So I could move it up.

43:54
But this is where the stickiness of being lazy comes into effect. It's like Gmail's good, I mean, maybe something else is better, like Prot. You know we'll talk about that actually right away, but maybe. But then you look at like, okay, what's it like to like actually move email, like I don't know, it's okay, yeah, so I didn't. I never found this. But I saw one reference to the fact that loop 2.0 is out as well, and loop is, you know, of course, that notion type thing that is so much more than notion because it's microsoft and they over architect everything. But, um, you know, I'm still interested in it and I kind of looked around and I looked at it again on the client, like on the well, which is a web app, on in windows and I looked at it in um mobile, but I don't see the 2.0 version, so I don't't know, I think I have it Like.

44:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I see you haven't written an article about it, you just made this note about it and I use loop for the whiskey.

44:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh nice, okay. So using it, like I would use notion yeah and would you say it's, I mean it works, okay, it's no, it's unreliable.

45:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know that's. It's unreliable. That's why I only use it for the whiskey bit. So far, I can wing a whiskey bit if I have to.

45:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I moved everything to loop at one point. I didn't really talk about this too much, but it failed in the most basic way, which is I'm on my phone. I'm at the gym, I walk up to a machine and I have to see what the weight is I'm going to put on it. I look at my phone and it says something happened, yeah, something happened, yeah, and that's that's the message.

45:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then you're like, uh, I'm like, oh, screw this thing. You know, like that happened two, three times and I'm like yep, I'm done. You know, yeah, well, and I've had it mix up. Um, like you know, workspaces like just bad things, just it's unreliable, and so I and I've learned to just be very gentle with it, right, and I don't put stuff that's too sensitive in it, because I just don't trust it. It's, it's, it's obviously been improved right getting getting trust back is.

45:49
It's tough. So I have gone under the settings and there's an about and they have an app version, but it's a, it's a date time stamp. It's 2024 08 14 yep, which um like whatever that means. No, that means it's like from last week, or right you know no, but I mean know with regards to versions, like I did the same thing on the web, and the same thing and the other thing is like there is more stuff hanging around, right, yeah, it's definitely looking more cluttered.

46:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's you know notion could get a little heavy. I'm used to it now, so I just don't really think about it too much. I, I don't know. Think about it too much, um, I, I don't know, I could, I, you know, we, we used one note for almost this entire show mary jo and I, me by myself, and then mary jo and I, and then maybe I think I switched before you came, but um, yeah, yeah, I never opened one note on this.

46:40
I opened it yeah, because we had endless problems. We could not edit a document at the same time without it failing everywhere and having all these versions up in the corner, and I had to reconcile differences and it just happens. We put up with this for years and there was a brief period of time and I'm probably an outlier here but they had that thing that became. It was the modern outlook, or one note that became the one note for windows 10. I love that modern client it was. It was um less cluttered. It was you know, it was. I liked it and and so I was like okay with that for a while.

47:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And when I look at that kind of classic office whatever we're talking 2013, 2019- because they basically abandoned that, that modern version of one note, yep, and we went back to the old one and and I think it's because Loop was supposed to take over the space. But Loop is just not up for the job yet. I don't know when it will be, but you know I'm very careful. Most of my work is still in OneNote right Conference planning, like all stuff. That's vital and absolutely has to be reliable.

47:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I work perfectly across all my PCscs and all my other devices ever work in real time with another person in a note like is or is this just for you?

47:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
well, yeah, no, I have worked in one note.

47:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that way, but not routinely now or routinely you and I are editing notion together like it's just not a little sore from doing it with mary jo full. Oh no, it's because I have ptsd from this, like you have.

48:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We were just at like we developed a system where we would literally say hey, let me know when you're done in there. I have a couple things I want to add and they're like hey, you know, we kind of talk the day of the show and then you know 15 minutes, and now I have to manually rectify these sync errors and figure out, make sure I'm not missing something. And I did that dozens of times. You know it was just too much, but Notion's been okay. Right, notion's been perfect.

48:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Notion's been flawless. Yeah, and what happens in Loop, richard? Does it lose content, does it?

48:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
lose stuff. I've never actually lost things, but it's made me feel like I've had because I've had to go looking for it. So it's like, yeah, it misfiles things or whatever. Like I mean, it is a hard thing to do this. Well, and it missed and it was really like it was mislabeling things and then, yeah, and if I went to fix it, I made the problem worse. The trick was as soon as you're not confident, what's going on with the loop, close it, open it again and you know it literally just needs a restart, because it's not a healthy relationship, it's not reliable software.

49:06
I don't like what you're saying. I'm going to walk around the block for a week, for a day, and a non-trivial one is like the mobile client. It does not deal with partially disconnected states well. So if the internet is not flawless on your phone, it's probably not going to pull stuff up, or it's going to go into a tailspin, or you're going. If I've tried to like again doing the whiskey stuff, I'm in a store looking at some unusual whiskeys and I want to just make a few notes about them.

49:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sure, yeah, no, I'm not doing that, you know.

49:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I'll just take a set of pictures and clean it up later yeah, that's too bad.

49:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I um. Yeah, I I'm in a position now because I've used uh notion for so long. I'd have to go back and look, but I think it started with windows weekly, so that's probably the date um and you've now propagated other things into it oh my god, I use it.

49:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I use it every day, for I am not happy that I'm between one note and loop, but both of them have problems right right?

50:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep, at least you can use both at the same time vacation.

50:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use notion on our uh for the travel planning right in fact, great. Last year or two years ago, when I went on the cruise, I sent you a notion. This is one of the best things. Awesome, it's beautiful send you a notion page with our itinerary and stuff and it is, it's a great way to.

50:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't even use it to its extent. I mean, I'm pretty much plain text, right. I mean I do little headings for this show and I do headings every once in a while, but I everyone sometimes will be a pitcher, but I'm not doing like oh, I'm working on a budget, so I'll use one of their templates. You know, they have all these things like that's a whole, there's a whole thing going on there. It's like I don't care, you know, I just. I just want you to text Basically I would like like actual offline would.

50:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it hasn't been that much. Just going to clients are hard in. I put pdfs in. This is our planning for the upcoming trip.

50:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I put all that stuff in. I mean, I really, yeah. So actually in this image you can see like you have icons on each of those whatever they're called top level notes, and I actually did do that at one point. Like you guys probably see, like windows weekly has some kind of a whatever it is, yeah, you do fun, you do fun things with it.

51:03
Yeah, like, I do that sometimes, but like yeah, no, but that makes it look nice, like this is a nice looking thing, like this is not a no, and that and that boring work as a web, as a public web page, right.

51:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's uh, so for a group or that kind of thing.

51:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's great. Let me ask you, though do you pay for it? I think I do, yeah, I think so I don't pay for it, and I would if I had to. But I don't understand how I don't have to pay for this. I I use it so much. You would think I would have run into some limit where I'd say, okay, like I mean, I use you every day, like of course you're gonna pay for it. No, nope, not even once like I just don't.

51:38
I guess I'll just keep using it, I, I don't know what's happening.

51:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use it for all kinds kinds of stuff. Actually, I really like it. I like it that it's graphical. That's what I like about it.

51:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's pretty. That thing you showed is a good example. It's a hard thing to describe, but just like the layout and the padding between elements and it's modern looking, it doesn't look like something from the 90s.

51:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, to be fair, I was all excited about Loop because I thought, oh, that's going to be Notion Plus, of course I'm going to be able to put in Microsoft documents and SharePoint.

52:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, so the dream is for me because I'm a writer. Is there a way I could use this tool for writing right? And unfortunately for me, the end game usually is publishing into WordPress, to the web, and actually that was one place where I probably would have used OneNote instead of Word at some point. But it's not the same rendering engine underneath, or it wasn't then. So if you copied from OneNote and pasted it into the web, it was garbled nonsense.

52:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, man.

52:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like it was and I'm like, yep, that's the end of that and Notion. I don't remember anymore. It's been a while since I've looked. But you can, I think you have to export or something and you get probably just html or whatever it is, but it's an extra step.

52:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, notion is not. This is the big flaw of notion, as you, but they must.

52:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you live in notion, you can't really get it outside of notion well, it does have an extensibility model, and I bet somebody right now is typing. Let me look oh, there's there must be a wordpress uh thing where you can say I'm gonna going to make a WordPress blog and then it.

53:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet there is right.

53:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sure there is right. Whatever, anyway, notion works well. I want Loop to work. I'd be happy to go there. I'd like to have everything in OneDrive and have it sync and have it always be there. That would be great, although, again, notion, not too many problems.

53:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wordpress sync for, not for notion there you go has to be right.

53:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's pretty cool php nice source php. Yeah, you mentioned, uh, proton. I think a big shift in what's going on in proton and this is really this blows my mind you've been focusing on this for a while and now I'm kind of starting to think maybe I should move to Proton I don't know what it is.

53:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've been turning it on past six months, a year or something, I don't know. Like you know, Proton has actually been around for 10 years. They started with mail. I looked at it whenever that it's like, yeah, this looks good, but again, you know, switching email, you know whatever. But they've added to their product portfolio a lot, right, so obviously, calendar and the password manager, VPN, et cetera. So they've got all this stuff and then they've been iterating on these things very heavily. So for the past, you know whatever, six, nine months, I've been writing as these things come out and it, you know, they kind of keep getting better. It's really nice and I I've really fallen in love with the proton proton pass, which is their password manager. And now what they've announced is they the, the two co-founders and their first employee have endowed a nonprofit organization, a foundation, with enough shares to make it the primary shareholder in proton, the per for-profit company, to ensure that this thing operates according to their ideals forever. There are no shareholders.

54:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's no way anyone can take over. There are shareholders, but the majority share is held by the foundation. Yes, okay. Foundations end up with trustees, and trustees can go off the rails, but you're building a structure that is more resistant. We want Proton to be self-sustaining.

55:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We don't want it to be Mozilla where if Google walks away, they're dead, or we don't want it to be Torah, which they describe as government-subsidized, which is kind of interesting. I think it was Signal they described as billionaire-subsidized. Yikes, I know.

55:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it's true. That was a group of Russian oligarchs that wanted a communication protocol that their government couldn't take.

55:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So they're like look, this has to be a sustainable business. It's not. You know. They're not like everything's free. You know like they have 500 employees or whatever. It is like that. You know they have, you know bills and whatever. But then they want to invest in the thing. They want it to be profitable, but as far as the organization that owns it, they've like this kind of it's kind of incredible.

56:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it's, it's, it's very uh, idealistic scientists, they're idealistic.

56:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there were certain scientists, so yeah, and that's actually the way they describe it. They're like look, we know that businesses are put up to make profits and to grow, and and that's the point, and and you know eventually what happens is you, uh, other people invest in your company, you go public and you have shareholders and you have to answer to them and it's grow, grow, grow, more and more and more. And they're like yeah, we're not doing that.

56:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, and they're not alone. This is how the home assistant foundation is run as well. Right, like, yeah, there is these businesses, these entities that have been created by individuals who just want to make the right thing and aren't concerned with becoming the next billionaire and so are willing to say hey, how do we protect this? Like open AI. Oh wait, not all of them go well, I would also say this Right, it's all well and fine until the billions show up.

57:01
Right. The possibilities of billions showing up for a proton are so right there.

57:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It ruins everything. That's the. That's really the truth yeah, silly.

57:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, cindy lopper was right. You know she.

57:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She nailed it in the 1980s and girls just want to have fun not that way.

57:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I bet she bought obviously. Um, no, I uh, I'm I'm.

57:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I would looked at proton. I have a. I have a membership like a full board membership. Uh, it doesn't do this. A few of the things that I use with fast mail that I really want to do, for instance, okay I haven't looked at it too seriously because that's a feature issue. It could be fixed yeah, I mean, if they added that feature, I probably would move. The other thing, though, that I really believe is that the notion of having encrypted email is just flawed. It's just not. It's not designed.

57:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's designed to be an open postcard. Well, the notion of having a portable passkey is also inherently flawed. You know what I love it Could be. I love it, I also inherently flawed.

58:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what? I love it, I love it. I just think that Proton encryption, you know it's a little, it's not really ideal. So if you're going to use, if you want encryption, use Signal, use something that's a messaging platform that is really truly perfect forward secrecy encrypted and all of that.

58:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And everything they make is open source by the way.

58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, no, I, I don't trust them. I mean, you can go, you can go see for yourself, trust them, it's just no, I don't mean you. That's a flawed thing to kind of stick encryption on top of email. Yeah, uh, people seem to want it, they don't really.

58:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And when people want it, senses their email is protected, but they don't want to sacrifice anything for it, and there's no. You know, my outlook has had various forms of encrypted email for a long time and they all suck.

58:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's not, I haven't looked at it yet, but they have their storage thing, which is a little expensive. You're paying for it. It's like tipping in America. We don't understand how much things cost because everything is kind of subsidized or whatever. Yeah, and I think the storage thing is a good example of that, because when it's Google, microsoft maybe something like well, not dropbox so much, but you know it there's more expense going on there than you realize run your own and find out in a hurry.

59:09
Yeah, so it's expensive, but they, they're starting to go down the path of a google docs type thing in their drive, uh service. And you know, leo said the word notion and he said I think I think it was like, I think the notion, notion of it. I was like, ooh, notion, they need a notion. I got a notion, I want a notion, I got a notion for a notion. That's also a risk though, because as you add more features to something like that, it can get a little funky.

59:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there might be a natural size for this company and we may be at at peak proton right now, for all I know. I don't know.

59:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They may have put too many features, I don't know it's not the 1990s anymore, you know, when microsoft was like feature, feature, feature. You know right, that's all they did, all right? Uh, none of these are related to each other, but what the heck, I'll put them in one section.

59:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, so now this is your editorial piece and I like it yeah.

01:00:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just got it's kind of a it's. It seems like a subtle distinction. I hope it makes sense, but I I'll just use the Microsoft example because it's the clearest, I think, to all of us and to the audience etc. Which is that you know, and I've mentioned this before Microsoft has this thing. Well, microsoft has this thing called Office. Actually, to start, you would buy Office and and then you would use it and then it would come out with new versions of Office and you would not buy those because you already had something that worked really well and so, depending on the customer, especially with businesses, the purchase time, the upgrade time, would go out further and further. So eventually they solved this problem somewhat by coming up with something that was eventually called Office, and then Microsoft 365, which reached like no-brainer status at some point, whether you're a consumer or a business user, I think primarily for the storage you get along with those desktop apps, and they were constantly updating them.

01:00:57
I talked about how hard it was to keep track of that stuff and there was a several-year period where every month, here's what we're adding. It's like, oh my God, what's happening. And when you do the matrix of products, just talking about, like Word, for example. So Word has a desktop version on Windows. On Mac there's a web version, there are mobile clients for iOS and Android and you know iPad's slightly different. And then there's the all-in-one apps and you know it's like what was that thing? Like a dictation, support and transcript came first to the web version. You know that was like eight years ago, I think. As of today it's everywhere, but that's how long it took. It took forever. And like keeping track, that's one feature in one app in this giant galaxy of services and features like it's impossible to keep track of. But a no-brainer. You know, a hundred bucks a year. Six people get this. Are you kidding me? No-brainer.

01:01:52
But now they have AI, right Now it's co-pilot In the business space. They could do the thing they've always done in the business space and have tiers with more expensive tiers, having more features and all that kind of stuff and trying to get users to go to the more expensive tiers. That's a viable business strategy. It's worked great for them. I mean, it still does. They still talk about it. They talk about businesses adopting the E5, e7, whatever the names of these things are and spending more every month per user right, which is what they want, so that's worked out pretty well. The problem I have with the AI stuff? So that's worked out pretty well. The problem I have with the AI stuff, the co-pilot, if you will, the Microsoft 365 co-pilot or co-pilot pro or plus or whatever they're calling it. For consumers, the same thing, which is either $20 or $30 more per user per month, depending on which one we're talking about, is many fold, but these are the types of feature updates they would have just added to Microsoft 365 as part of your existing subscription.

01:02:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And have been right, like there's so many products in these stuff in M365. Yep, it's just that type of stuff.

01:02:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, also, there's not that much of it. You know it's a pretty like I talked about this galaxy of features and whatever. There's no brain that could contain all of it Copilot, pro Plus, whatever we could talk about it. Right now we can describe exactly what's in it. It's a finite series of features. It's not working two to three times.

01:03:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Copilot for M365 is a lot of things, or at least it's supposed to be. Eventually, of course, yes, it's growing right now.

01:03:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's going to. Yeah, it's going to. It's yes, it's insane and at some point it will be too much, but it's already too much. I guess this is. You could think of this maybe as an insurification type stuff, but the other problem is that thing we've talked about a lot, which is that if everything is AI, then nothing is AI, and Microsoft is betting a lot of money and a lot of money like 19 billion in the last quarter on infrastructure alone that they will be able to keep doing this.

01:03:45
This is not office suites in the 90s anymore. It is so easy to build services for cheap or free by a third party of any size that the things like if I could look at Microsoft 365 Copilot and say, okay, the one thing I'd really like to have is this feature, I can get that thing for free somewhere else right now, almost no matter what it is. Now there will be exceptions. I get that, but for me personally, I just don't. I will pay for Microsoft 365. I see the value. I am not paying for Microsoft 365. I see the value I am not paying for AI. Like I'm just not.

01:04:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, you know. I think you're getting to a broader point here, which is that large language models AI is a bad term, so large language models are a feature of a product not a product.

01:04:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, that's exactly right.

01:04:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are.

01:04:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is something I latched onto very early on, and it actually stuck which I like in my brain anyway, which is AI, is like MSG, it's a, it's um. Ai is something if it if it works well, it properly implemented is not a word processor. It's something that makes the word processor better for, maybe, spell checking or grammar checking or uh, summarizing or rewriting a paragraph or whatever it is. It's like a auto-complete in visual studio or you know, it's uh or maybe something. Like you know, I don't have this problem usually, but I certainly do. If I open up powerpoint, I'm looking at it like, like where do you get started? You know, yeah, it's, maybe it's good for that kind of thing, but that's like a wizard, that's a feature of powerpoint, that's not a. That's not something I pay 30 bucks a month for. That's ridiculous. So I don't know that's where I'm driving the line.

01:05:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean you get into this other game, which is how much time does this new tool have to save you before the $30 a month is irrelevant?

01:05:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, but here's the thing. So I got to that point. In my case it was $20 a month with the images, right? That's the one thing I've talked about. The one thing that Microsoft Copilot has done very well is that. That's like that. That, to me, made sense. You added and I tried yeah, I tried the uh, the dolly stuff from open, ai, I tried the gemini stuff, and they were both kind of garbagey in whatever ways doesn't matter, but I can get that for free now so I you know for now anyway, right?

01:06:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, this whole field is twitching. The bills are starting to come in.

01:06:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but see, here's the thing we're starting to roll out computers with powerful MPUs, a lot of these things that are running. I don't know how Grammarly works, but I'm going to assume like everything else on Earth it probably runs against some S3 instance, and they're using whatever AI up in a cloud and they're paying for that and it makes sense to them, whatever they like. Spotify have some customers who pay and some who do not, and whatever their business does or does not make sense, I don't really care. But, um, at some point the capabilities locally will be good enough that those expenses will go down dramatically and eventually they'll be back to regular software.

01:06:55
Yeah, and this is an initial upfront charge and then it doesn't cost much after that this is tied into this thing we talked about, which it seems unrelated because it's hardware, but it's related, which is ai pcs and co-pilot plus pcs are just pcs, right? Yeah, at some point we we come full circle. We don't have multimedia pcs anymore like we did in the 90s. We don't have media center pcs like we did in the early 2000s. We don't have tablet pcs, we just have a pc and it does all that stuff. Yeah and um, yeah, I you know, and yeah, I look, I have a lot of bills every month and, um, some of the the hardest to justify are, well, my phone case fixation, obviously, but beyond that is, um, my, uh, yeah, these like services. I was, there was a time I was paying for like four ai services, you know, and I'm like you know, I think I'm done with this, right, although I did order a pixel, so I'm gonna get that for free for a year.

01:07:49
There you go, and that's yeah, I will take an ai handout. That will be my next article. Uh, sir, I would gladly take an ai today for a hamburger tomorrow yeah, you, to be clear, you bought the pixel but the gemini ai well, did I? Because if you do the math on that, they're handing me 17 at the end of this transaction like it's. It's kind of crazy because you trade 20 bucks.

01:08:10
I'm on trade in 240 bucks, the, uh, the, the value of the of gemini, which I'm I have to pay for anyway. For the Google 1, 2 terabyte tier it's $100 a year. I'd have to think about all of that. I get 10% off because I'm a Google 1 subscriber already. I haven't even got. I'm getting the phone today. Supposedly they already sent me $317 in Google Store credit. Wow.

01:08:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm getting mine tomorrow. I ran the numbers for swapping in my 6 for anyone I get they were going to give me 200 bucks for the phone, so it's like I got 600 for the eight, yeah.

01:08:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe 17, 700 bucks, yeah, 700. It wasn't worth that much. Yeah, don't tell them, um, anyway. So yeah, I mean look, nothing's perfect, perfect. But I I will happily watch uh, gemini flail for the next year and then not pay for it when a year's over.

01:09:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's why marquez did a new update on that on that phone and said they're finally getting some of the stuff. That's actually an assistant showing up in gemini, but I wonder if it's still actually assistant yeah.

01:09:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I I'm not going to get that. Maybe if someone, one of you guys, remember this, but last year when they did the Pixel 8 Pro only at the time it was the first phone to have an SLM and it didn't turn into 12, 15 features, a couple of features, and then when they announced the Pixel 9 series and I don't know if it's all the phones or just the pro-level phones, but what was the distinction they made? So they already have the on-device thing, but there's another level. What was it? Oh, I know multimodal. So it's the first multimodal on device llm built graphics text.

01:10:01
Yeah, so it doesn't. It's not just the text, because I think that's what it was before. I never used it, but it was. You know it would help you with text messages or whatever. It was a couple of features, like I said. Yeah, so now they're going multimodal, of course. Right, and that's how this is going to go. I mean, at some point ai will be used by everything. It will be so widespread in the phone we it's not even worth talking about. Yeah, all we'll care about is that our photos look better, our text messages are, you know, don't have spelling mistakes or whatever. Whatever it's doing for us, right, and I think that's how this stuff goes what's uh?

01:10:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is there a feature of the uh pixel nine you're excited about?

01:10:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, there is not even one.

01:10:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like the idea that it can listen to phone calls. I do transcription, Not just a transcription but a synopsis yeah.

01:10:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, the weird thing about this phone is that on paper, the camera hardware hasn't actually changed at all. On the back, the zoom is. The front has. Now all four of those lenses are 50-ish megapixels, which Samsung and Apple are not there yet. They'll be a couple of years, at least for Apple. So that's cool. But I guess the telephoto lens is in fact a newer, even though it looks the same on paper. It's newer, so it lets in more light, it will give clearer shots from a distance, et cetera.

01:11:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
8k video meaning upscale 4K video, the big shift, etc.

01:11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
8k 8k video meaning upscale 4k video is computational, not hardware, I think in the camera. Oh, okay, yes, right, there's no. Yes, that that. Yeah, that's almost the only change. I mean for sure, yep, this is going to be. And look, we wrote this out. If you were a pixel fan, there was a period of time when you went like pixel 4, 4a, 4a, 5g, 5, 5a, where that camera hardware went nowhere, yeah, and yet they took awesome photos. So even when it was garbage hardware, they did a great job. There's a lot ahead from now with these lenses, right, so that's okay, yeah I like the design counts.

01:11:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The new cameras are pretty damn good in the nuts. Yeah, yeah, I think it's going to be good. It was cheap. I think it's going to be the fall for me. I suspect this 6 hasn't got much life left and it's starting to go.

01:12:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, maybe they'll have like a Black Friday, something, something.

01:12:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Well, that's the truth. When they first come out and this is true for Samsung too. You get the. The trade-in is low. For me, it's like okay, wait for the price. Yeah, yeah, you're smart. Yeah, yeah, I think the 9 pro I don't like the 6.8.

01:12:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So too dang big. See it's, it's not. It's basically, you know the. The current pro and the iphone pro max are both 6.7. So it's like I, I'm so blind, I I couldn't. At one point I'm like I'd have to wear, like you know, cartographer glasses or something just to see a small screen At one point.

01:12:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google shipped a six inch phone. It was so big for the time they called it Beluga.

01:12:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is this the six the Motorola one, the Nexus six.

01:12:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it. You know, I still have it and it kind of does look big because it's got bezels, Compared to the phones of the day. Like if you look at the.

01:12:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Lumia 1520 was our phone in the phone space, like that, and I love that thing, but it was like at the time it was too big.

01:13:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got it for the camera. You didn't get it yeah.

01:13:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And eventually it took a while, but I really love that thing. I ended up real. That in many ways is not my absolute favorite. It's one of my favorite top three Windows phones of all time, but compared to the phones of today, it's like that's cute. You know, it's just it's it's. Things have changed.

01:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's okay, I can do this.

01:13:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you have it? You have the? Oh, I thought you had the phone. See if it looks big to you. Yeah, let me see it. So what? What is that? What?

01:13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what is it? How are you? Oh, it is, yeah. So this is the six, the six p, or whatever I think was the name of yeah, it's. Yeah, it's a nexus, yeah, so, but it's made by motorola that's right, it's it. I mean even next to the iphone, which is technically a bigger screen. Yeah, I guess it's because of the it's still pretty big form factor, I don't know yeah, the following year they did uh, it was the last nexus is they did.

01:14:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The big one was a six, no six. What was it called? Six p? Maybe that was the six p. That might be the six. The six p was a huawei phone. Yeah, this is the six.

01:14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you're right yeah, is this what you have? No, you don't have this, richard no, no, I have a.

01:14:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have a pixel, six pixel six.

01:14:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is a nexus, that's right. Yeah, this was almost as big as the nexus 7 tablet yeah, yeah, yeah it's huge, which everybody loved all right phones, that's all right speaking of ai, we're like old guys sitting on the porch. I remember the next six yeah I used to have well the fact that you could reach over and pick it up is hilarious oh, I got it right here, I got it.

01:14:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why I was like did he just say he has it? Yeah that's amazing.

01:14:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't know usually they, you know they go to somebody. I think nobody wanted it was so big.

01:14:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they're not. I have the original iphone, but I mean that thing's, you know like what is it.

01:14:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do.

01:14:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have original half a screen you know, yeah, it fits in your nose yeah, put them next to each other.

01:14:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean the, the original iphone was probably what 3.5 inches 3g, not the uh, the original, yeah, but same, probably same size, yeah, look at it oh my god, it's so.

01:15:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Did that ride in a?

01:15:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
fun little backpack on the motorola. Is that how you used to carry that?

01:15:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
look at that like yoda you know, it's just like dwarfed by beluga that was a big deal.

01:15:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At the time it was all screen, remember. That was the point.

01:15:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it was huge, but now look it's got the lip at the bottom and the forehead at the top all screen.

01:15:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But do you really mean it?

01:15:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, it's funny well, the screen part's all screen I left this at the studio and uh, burke or somebody said you can't leave this behind, yeah, so yeah, I haven't.

01:15:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a piece of history, right there.

01:15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, you know what I have? A. They brought me the original iPod, which is up there next to the clock there, and then they brought me back that and it goes right next to it. Yeah, there you go. Yep, the Mac. Yeah, I mean, I think I have room for it.

01:15:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You go to the American Museum of or the Museum of American History in the Smithsonian. They have a bunch of these devices there now. Oh really and it's freaking me out a little bit that products I've owned are in a museum.

01:16:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're in a museum, yeah.

01:16:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
History yeah it's very funny.

01:16:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I might've brought this up, maybe it was last week. I might've already said said but where's the Windows?

01:16:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, where's the Zune Right and I said, it's in our hearts, it's not. There is a rumor and I hope this is not true that Apple is about to release an iPhone, the next iPhone 16, that is basically Zune brown.

01:16:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I saw that.

01:16:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's called bronze Right. Or somebody said I think it's ugly, oh, it's called bronze right. Or.

01:16:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or somebody said I think it's ugly, oh it's, I've seen it really ugly yeah, the brown zune was I like, I like the brown zone it was, it was uh, it was like a loafer or something.

01:16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was just. You know it had a different vibe it had.

01:16:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was. It was encased almost on lucite. It had a weird two level thing which I thought was kind of fun.

01:16:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But but this new iphone. I let me see if I can find it, because yeah, it's ugly it is, but you know it's a rumor and it could well be. Yeah, it might be wrong. It might just just wrong. I hope it, I pray they. Desert titanium. I think the mac rumors called better than desert excrement it looks like it's been buried in mud. That looks great, but that's not what it looks like. No, no, where can I find a?

01:17:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
real image of this thing um uh, it's probably linked to it in there somewhere. It's awful, it's, yeah, just like a brown, brown iphone yeah, it's just yeah.

01:17:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, here it is. This is the all four there it is next to the others it looks like it's like a leather case or something yeah which apple no.

01:17:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Longer offers.

01:17:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, this is just a leak, so we don't know.

01:17:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I hope it's wrong. I thought the titanium thing was ridiculous looking, but I got one and I actually kind of love it. I it's kind of I don't know it's goofy, but I like titanium.

01:17:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just gray, but it's uh, yeah, my, my, my watch is tight, my band is yeah nice. It's just a nice gray, I think. Yep, better than brown, I agree what else?

01:18:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
okay, all right, what else? So, a couple weeks ago sometime, we were talking about amd earnings and how their data center stuff is exploding. They did great there and, uh, it looks like they're trying to make a run. In fact, we were talking, you know, maybe these guys are trying to be the next nvidia. Well, that's official, because they announced this week uh, they were buying zt systems. Uh, which is a. They make hyperscale servers, um, for cloud computing, and ai, uh, $4.9 billion. So this is their data center. Ai. Play Good timing. By the way, guys, we're moving everything down to the client now, so I'm sure this will be great, but no, I do think that part of the market is wide open and actually this kind of competition is what will drive prices down there as well.

01:18:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we'll see. Yeah, but their performance AI, ai chip, the zt systems is actually based on the microsoft olympus platform. So they, I thought they, I wonder if they were planning on being bought by microsoft. And yep, it's a little wonky.

01:19:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That way microsoft's trying to spread themselves. You know, when it comes to this stuff like if you look at their data center chip type stuff you know they're doing some stuff in-house. You know, when it comes to this stuff Like if you look at their data center chip type stuff you know they're doing some stuff in-house. You know, but they're kind of working with everybody.

01:19:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they're trying to come up with as many options as possible, right yeah?

01:19:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's like I think it was you who pointed out maybe it was that it must have been TechEd yeah, ray, paul Ignite last November, where Satya Nadella was. Like you know, we want to thank our partners at NVIDIA and blah, blah, blah. They're great, we love them and here's everything we're going to use to replace them and then they just started talking about you know, let me drag the CEO out there to stand there while I talk about it.

01:19:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Great Okay.

01:19:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to replace those idiots and, like it was, it was a weird transition. Yeah no, it was a weird transition yeah.

01:19:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know, yeah, which is absolutely weird. Like I said, I'm kind of enjoying Dark. Satchel when that pops up it does its thing, yep.

01:20:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Did anyone else catch that red flash I?

01:20:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
don't know.

01:20:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And this isn't related to anything, but I love this kind of thing and, with the understanding, I'll never actually use it myself. But the Raspberry Pi Foundation it was almost a year ago. Last september I think. They came out with two versions of the then new raspberry pi 5. Right, so four and eight gigs of ram. The eight gig one is kind of a computer, by the way it's really quite a computer.

01:20:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's got a lot of horsepower.

01:20:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, um, apparently the prices are too expensive, because the four gig is still 60 bucks and I think the eight gig is probably 80, but they just came up with a two gig version for $50. Which is probably plenty, right, yeah.

01:20:42
I mean depending on yeah, depending on what you're doing, we don't, they just, we probably talked about this two weeks ago, months ago. Whatever they announced like a hat, a little hardware add on. You can put it on any raspberry five, five that adds it's like an AI coprocessor MPU. It is low, you know not, I don't remember the exact thing, a 711, you know top, something like that, whatever it was. But you know a way for, like an enthusiast, or even a kid, a learner, whatever, to kind of you know, play around with that stuff. So this will work with that.

01:21:12
And then the way they save money is fascinating to me. I mean obviously less RAM. You save money there. But the other half of it is they get their chips from Broadcom and the chip that they use, this ARM-based, I think it's a 64-bit ARM chip has stuff on it for other types of businesses, but for general computing they don't need that stuff. So they disable it in the silicon. But it's still there and because it's there it's more expensive. You still have to manufacture it. You still have to build the thing still more. You still have to manufacture, you still have to build the thing. So they have a new stepping, a new version of that processor. So it's not really a new processor, it's just a new version where they've actually removed the stuff that they disable, right, so now it's cheaper to make, so they actually save money, though that's pretty cool this is uh, I mean, look at the specs on this thing.

01:21:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty quirky. Dual 4k 60p h displays. Yeah, I know, dual band, 802.11ac, wi-fi, bluetooth, 5 BLE.

01:22:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, wi-fi, I think, was the big one. For a long time you had to get Wi-Fi somehow like USB probably or whatever, and now it's just kind of built in Two USB 3 ports, yep, gigabit Ethernet.

01:22:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean this is better than some laptops I use In fact, compared to Meteor Lake, this is probably pretty competitive.

01:22:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's probably more reliable.

01:22:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, unbelievable. Yeah, you strap it to the back of a monitor, right, right, yeah.

01:22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then it's just a question of what software you run on it, strap it onto a drone, put it in the you know it's, it's yeah, they could put it in all kinds of that's the point, right, it's, you know, for makers or whatever. It's cool.

01:22:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just don't have, I can't what's availability, though that's part of it so that's apparently gotten a lot better.

01:22:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It that delayed the original pie. Remember they had big problems during the pandemic, you know the cm4 oh, I could buy it right now.

01:22:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you could, I think you could yeah, I think so.

01:22:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I'd have to get all the gigs if I was going to get this thing. But you know what I'm saying.

01:23:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, yeah, I know You're talking between $50 or $80, right yeah it's $80 for eight gigs.

01:23:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Get the full load. I know If my you know Windows 11 on ARM full version, if they just threw it on this thing, which they could do. They don't. They don't, by the way, but they should. They used to. You used to be able to get these with. Uh, there's a version, but it's like it's really an iot version and it doesn't have a desktop, it's just a. It's designed. You, you run an app and, yeah, you interact with it, usually from the command line or something. It's not meant to be a general purpose.

01:23:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just gonna buy it because I figure I can strap it to one of the monitors in here and something, yeah, something will happen.

01:23:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you throw the throw linux on it with a, with a host app like that's my. My pie holes are a couple of uh, raspberry pi fours. Without the gooey install, it's just a web server to access it's good.

01:23:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I this is several years ago, but I bought one of these and a case that looked like an Amiga 500, and I put an Amiga emulator on it with all the games and I gave it to a friend for Christmas who was an Amiga fan. Back in the day the whole thing was maybe $100 or whatever at the time.

01:24:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, and he plugs it into his screen and turns it on. It does the bouncy ball thing. Gets all you know nostalgic.

01:24:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the last time he ever uses it. But you know what it was a gift. Who cares? It looks cute.

01:24:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It sits up on his thing, yeah.

01:24:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Should take up space. I am not confusing the Pico two, no, the the pie. What just came out this week? Yeah, all right, um, I I don't know if anyone noticed this, but uh, before you before we go to the google thing, may I interrupt just of course?

01:24:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, I'm sorry did I jump past.

01:24:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't mean to do that yeah, no, it's in orange and everything I know it's. It's actually obvious now that I'm looking at it. Sorry, I'm sorry.

01:24:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just ignore the ads. We don't need no stinking ads.

01:25:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It didn't sink to the cloud. Yeah, that's what happened.

01:25:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what? We've had no ads for so long that you probably just don't understand what's happening right now.

01:25:12
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01:28:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Something more important than this podcast happened. Yes, your ps came and I normally my wife would just get that, but I could hear her. She was on the phone. So what'd you get?

01:28:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what'd you get the pixel? It came already. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I know it's pretty good. That's really cool. I can do an unboxing here, wow it looks.

01:29:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, it's a phone.

01:29:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's funny anyway uh, yeah, who would have thought? Yeah, well, yours came early because it's supposed to be august 22nd. That's nice I got the text from fedex that I need to sign for something tomorrow and I think did yours come from pensacan township, new jersey.

01:29:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh you know it's funny. You say that because there was a I was just saying this, my wife, earlier today like there's so much data about where this thing was in any point in time that it's. It's kind of astonishing like I this thing has traveled more in the past 24 hours than I will in the next six weeks, like it's china to the us township.

01:29:40
No, just in the past 24 hours it's like, um, you can get this, like I'd have to sign in, but there's a detailed thing it was. It was like went to wherever new jersey and then, uh, easton and then left easton, then went to bethlehem, then went to a processing center in bethlehem, was on a truck, at 9 30 it was out. You know, it's like this whole like do we really need this much information?

01:29:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean mine arrived at 10 26 pm today at Pensacola township left in Pennsylvania 12 noon. Yeah, well it says New Jersey, but I that sounds like Pennsylvania it went through New Jersey.

01:30:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so it's um. It was picked up in.

01:30:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Belmar, new Jersey this morning. Yep, I hope that's it. It might be something else, I don't know, it could be. No, I bet that's it, because mine did too. It feels like it.

01:30:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I could drive there in 45 minutes, so that probably makes sense. That's why you got it. It took it from night, so it took it six hours to get here, but I could do it in 45.

01:30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mine's on a plane cross country right now Somewhere. Yeah Right, they should have put an Apple AirTag in the box. Oh no, touchy subject there, nice, so tell me. Well, I guess you can't really play with it now.

01:30:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, this is not really appropriate. It looks like a phone. I can tell you that. Okay, I can show you the phone.

01:30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess oh pretty.

01:30:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which one did you get? Which color did you get? Oh, the hazel. God, I love hazel. I hated that they didn't have it last year. That was the color I had for the 7 as well. It's kind of a washed out gray green.

01:31:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's good, I got a black obsidian Black as night. None blacker. Black like my heart. Yes, black like my heart, yes, all right, moving on, enough of that Google. Speaking of Google, let's talk about AI.

01:31:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, as we were. Yeah, so last week obviously they had the big, oh yes, the antitrust.

01:31:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:31:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is one of the other ones. It's not that one, but they also lost against Epic, and Epic. You may recall, I don't remember, when this was a couple of months ago, three months ago, whatever Epic submitted a filing that was like a like fan fiction. They were like, if you were the judge, like how, what would the ruling you would give? You know for the. It was hilarious, like so that's when you know you, actually, unless you're Google, because the judge was like you know what? I think I'm just going to do this.

01:32:03
Um, the only thing he kind of said no to was some of the oversight type stuff. He has not come down yet and said what it's going to be. But they had a hearing with lawyers for both companies and, my God, did this guy come after Google hard, like it's very clear he's going to be really like it's going to be bad for Google. And this some of the quotes, I'll just read a couple. They say it's going to be bad for Google and and this some of the quotes, I'll just read a couple of these it's beautiful, google wants to spread this out, it's going to take a long time, it's expensive. And he goes you're Google, you could do better than that. It's like he says this the world that exists today is the product of monopolistic misconduct. That world is changing. You know, when you build a fence to keep everyone out, there's going to be a stampede when you finally open the gate.

01:32:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you shouldn't have built the fence in the first place. It's crazy, holy cow. This is a big loss.

01:32:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google's lawyers literally said, trying to prove that they were good overseers of the store, If the American Nazi party came to the store, I mean we would say no to those guys.

01:33:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh well, good Okay.

01:33:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And the judge is like that's the bar, huh. The reason we are here is because you are the only company that has that power. Our job is not to continue that power. The fact that you would do that is whatever, but it's like we're taking that power away. So that you would do that is whatever, but it's like we're taking that power away. So that's actually really interesting. So he says look, you built a mountain of bad conduct and we're going to move that mountain, so that's what's going to happen. I have no intention of having a highly detailed decree that ends up impairing competition. The whole point of this is to grow a garden of competing app stores.

01:33:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's beautiful.

01:33:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's going to be interesting. We'll see. I don't know. I think we're probably still a few months out until AI can write his little summary. But whatever happens, there was nothing that came out of this hearing that would make Google think we're probably going to be okay. It's worse than you think, I think it's probably going to be okay.

01:33:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it's, it's worse than you think, I think it's yeah, it's not good, yeah, it's not good.

01:34:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there you go, you know it's kind of like what was that stupid? It was a stupid. Look God, I don't think the those movies that were came out of like fan faction for twilight and then it became like a big book and then they became successful movies and I don't remember what they were called. They had nothing to do with vampires by the time they came out, but it's like that. Like epic wrote this hilarious rendition of what they thought should happen and he didn't say this. But the judge was basically like yep, that's what we're doing, you know, it's just like, yeah, nice, so we'll see crazy. Um, I don't want to spend too much time on this.

01:34:40
This is not interesting to too too many people, but last week I did mention that visual studio 2022 1711 went to general availability. That was the version I had been using in preview to work with dot net nine, also in preview, and uh, what happened after the show was I spent the next 36 hours breaking every single install of Visual Studio I had because Microsoft screwed something up, and this was my first experience firsthand with something that Raphael has been complaining to me for 10 years probably, where they just don't seem to sometimes know what they're doing. So there's actually a block of XML, but there's a crucial line of XML you have to put into your appxaml file in a WPF project if you want to modernize it for Windows 11. And they changed the string a little bit. I didn't tell anybody, so, like an idiot, upgraded Visual Studio on five, six computers, upgraded to the latest version of the NET 9 preview 7.

01:35:45
And then subsequently, everything I was writing was breaking everywhere on every computer. It wasn't ARM, it wasn't X16. It was like everything. And I'm like what is going on? And I got into their GitHub-based announcement and I saw someone was complaining about exactly the same thing. So it wasn't me. And I piled on. I was like, yep, I'm seeing this in, you know multiple architectures, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I woke up the next morning to someone had figured out how to fix it. And and then Microsoft does what Microsoft does. We were just talking about this. They, they went back to a June 7th post for recall and just changed it. Right, at least they put a date and said they changed it. What they did in this case is they went back to a May post about NET 9, preview 4, and they changed the URL that they documented. Yikes, wow, it's like rewrote history.

01:36:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How do you find this? I don't know.

01:36:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the thing that bugs me is like since that day so this has been three months they've never formally written or made a video or talk, discussed anywhere anything about this, like this does make sense to take the bad url down.

01:36:49
Yep, but but then have a little note, says you know, this is why, whatever I guys come on. So yeah, and I also I've been running it there are these limitations with WPF that have actually existed for decades and I'm kind of hitting that wall. So I engaged with Raphael to try to get over the hump. But he actually went in and looked at the bug reports and he was like everything that you told me has been reported as an issue and they've never fixed it, like they actually have known about this for a long time and I don't understand how they could possibly ship this thing in November now, like it's clearly it was. They just took this community project.

01:37:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is in August.

01:37:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it's halfway. We're halfway, though. Yeah, there's been no movement. The only thing they've done in those three months is move, change that URL, change the well, the XAML, not a URL.

01:37:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But whatever it's a line of XAML. I don't know so it wouldn't be the first time they've slipped stuff out of the release Right. That stinks because I was really.

01:37:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I really wanted this like and you know, look, you can flip the switch, get the buttons, and this like theme and blah it's gonna come, it's just gonna be. It might be later I mean, we don't know for sure. But dude, come on, man like I, I don't know.

01:38:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's usually another dot net conf in the spring and that's then they sort of pick up stuff that didn't make it to the november event. Yeah, somewhere in april. So it wouldn't surprise me if they do that yeah, if that's what it is, that's fine.

01:38:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What I don't want to hear is, like you know what this is more work than we thought. Dot net 10, baby. Like guys, please come on. Like I spent so much time on this this year, yeah no, they this, they needed this.

01:38:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This this isn't going anywhere.

01:38:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't, I wouldn't expect who knows I'm I'm just surprised there's been so little communication like and by so little I mean zero. Well, summertime like, come on, man, like this is, but like you did a podcast about this.

01:38:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, there's more information in that podcast that microsoft has released, combined like yeah, well, that's because we had joe finney, and if any knows his stuff and was able to, I'm gonna talk to him I, I, if just to vent, yeah, just to have him be like yeah, the pain. Yeah, no, you're not crazy, that's pain. Yep, yep. I spent two hours babbling at rafael yesterday. Honestly, I have a tough time finding the wpf lead. I should spend more energy on that and say like who's, who's leading.

01:39:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know who is it. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. Oh well, I should do better. I apologize yeah, no, the problem is you, richard. Yeah, you know, when I look at the stack, I think to myself if it wasn't for this little guy over here in the Jenga thing, this whole thing would be stable. No, it's not.

01:39:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, just because you said it, you know, back in the build time frame. Hey, we're you know WPF is a full citizen and it's going to be good it we're you know wpf is a full citizen and it's going to be good.

01:39:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like that's the point it's.

01:39:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Where are those guys, you know?

01:39:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the thing is, it's not going to be. I mean, even if they fix the things I've talked about, like, or I didn't even talk about them. There's so many things, but this is like stuff that's been broken for a long time. That is not related to windows 11 theming it's, but it prevents it from working properly. Right, yeah? Or uh, just something like yeah, I, my app will conform to the theme, but I can't flip a switch that says, actually, I want this app to be in dark mode even though the OS is in light mode. That's not a capability. They're just sensing the theme and using it, which is great. I mean, it's better than nothing. But a real app would also offer that. And that issue was reported in December of 2023, when they first were working on this behind the scenes, and no one's even looked at it. It hasn't been assigned to anybody, it hasn't been updated. It's just sitting out there unfixed.

01:40:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, not a big deal Still unfixed.

01:40:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Except to me it's the big freaking deal. Three other people care about this. I don't know Anyway.

01:40:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, all right, before we get to the highlight of the show. Yeah, whiskey, no xbox, that hurt, but uh, let us, uh, let us pause, shall we? For a word and for another sponsor, unbelievable our show today, brought to you by oh, this, this is a good one. Big ID, you know data security is everything right, but now you've got to fortify against even bigger problems. All custodians of data, especially modern CISOs, need proactive solutions. But there's good news Big ID. With Big ID, you can trust that your most valuable asset, your data, is secured. As a CISO, your job is to ensure the promise of AI doesn't become a nightmare security pitfall.

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01:44:41
The Xbox segment this is an unusually big xbox section. Good, I'm just gonna take a walk, I'll be back. No, I love this stuff because I'm sitting across from my xbox.

01:44:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm ready, I want to play yeah, so microsoft showed up at this big game show and um in, but it was in germany. It's in Germany, but not Berlin. Like where is it? I can't remember, it doesn't matter. Somewhere else in Germany, stuttgart, no, hamburg, frankfurt, what does it matter? Who cares?

01:45:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway, it's in Köln, you're talking about Köln, thank you, yes, right.

01:45:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, thank you. So earlier this summer they didn't announce, or did they? No, I don't think they announced, I think it just appeared in their support site. But they're basically replacing Xbox Game Pass, which was the biggest one they had, with something called Xbox Game Standard. This will basically be the same offering, a little more expensive, and you won't get day one games right, which was the big kind of sticking point. And then they've been kind of quiet on this ever since.

01:45:48
So as of today, I think today, if you are in the Xbox Insider program, you can test Xbox game standard. You actually have to pay for it, interestingly, but you only pay a dollar before it goes. I think it's probably going to go live in october and, um, this is like I said. It takes over for the xbox game pass tier. So this core at the low end, which is 9.99 a month, that's the old xbox live gold uh, where you get like a catalog of 25 games.

01:46:12
Um, the standard tier, the what used to be xbox uh game pass, is the, the new kind of big one, I guess. Hundreds of games, uh, multiplayer online actually that's new, by the way uh, discounts when you buy things, etc. But $14.99 a month PC Game Pass went up just a little bit but is unchanged $11.99 functionally. And then Ultimate is unchanged as well, and it went up to $19.99 per month. So these are the new tiers and also tiers of the other kind, because they got rid of day one, and separately. I don't think this is Tiers of the clown, yeah. Tiers of the clown yeah, tears of all time definitely a clown in my case. Um I, I don't think this is in our story, but they were saying that, depending on the game, it could be up to one year before a triple, a title will appear in game pass, uh, after its general release.

01:47:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's the the general strategy and that's them just trying to make sure they get the money from the game that they should reasonably expect for a tier one game yeah, the thing is it's reasonable, right.

01:47:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, people ran the numbers, they were like we're never going to make money on this, and then they just kind of rolled this out without really explaining themselves, and I also feel like they could have given out a couple little perks to make people feel a little bit better about it, but it just didn't say anything, which is kind of the problem. Um, because it is gamescom, uh, they showed off a bunch of games and they were playable, right. That was kind of the big deal, like if you went to the show, you could walk onto the show floor and like play all these games. So, um, you know, doomed, dark ages, the new indiana jones movie, um, etc, etc. There's a bunch of stuff. This. Uh, if you were bored of walking around a planet in Starfield, they're giving you a truck.

01:47:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So no, you can drive around. The game never finishes.

01:47:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, yeah, right. When do I win? Oh, I die, I see.

01:48:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Drive forever in the truck. At least you'll have a truck.

01:48:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you have a truck, yep. The big news in some ways, is that the Indiana Jones game is going to be available on PlayStation as well, confirming rumors and fears and triggering another round of angst.

01:48:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This doesn't look that good, is it just me? It's not a Halo problem, but I see what you're saying.

01:48:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because he looks vaguely like the actor, but not really. So it's not, it's, it's, yeah, it's. It's weird how I I every once in a while there'll be a close-up of his face at some angle where you're like, oh yeah, no, I can see it now, but a lot of us we know, we know him so well that yeah, this looks like a different person yeah so I don't know. Yeah, what are you, what are you going?

01:48:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to do. I don't know, Did they get? Get at least Harrison Ford's voice.

01:48:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He'll only look right. No, they didn't. Um, he'll, he'll only look right on PlayStation. So you know, um, no, I don't. Uh, so I whatever discussed this. He was at the show, obviously, and he kind of said, look, we just want more people to be able to play more games in more places and that's better for everyone. And yep, I mean, yeah, but this is like people are freaking over this kind of stuff. So we'll see, we'll see what happens. So we remember there were what three games I think they did before, I guess it was four across nintendo and playstation. And now this has been rumored for a couple months and, uh, even though at the time they first announced this, they said, no, this is xbox. Um, starfield looks really good. Actually, this, yeah, starfield does look really good. Yep, yeah, just drive over the flag on the moon and cackle like a man, man and drive ruin it for everybody.

01:49:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh, low gravity driving so much fun yeah.

01:49:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean that looks like halo warthog stuff.

01:49:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was going to say it's a very warthog yeah.

01:49:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, which is great. I mean, that's fun, all right. Anyway, there's that. And then what else we got? Oh, so Microsoft also earlier this year, announced that they would be releasing I'm going to call them console refreshes, for lack of a better term. I'm not sure they're just the same thing again, I don't know, but they're all digital. Yeah, there's an Xbox Series S, all digital, white, looks exactly like the original One terabyte. That's double the storage, robot, white, $350, basically. And then two Series X machines, one of which is all digital, so that's a first for that, also in white, same form factor as the current X, $449, in one terabyte as well. And then there's a two terabyte black, actually galaxy black, special edition xbox series x with a optical drive for 600, and that one has kind of a fun xbox green back plate and the controller has the green back as well.

01:51:04
It's beautiful digital meaning no drive, then yeah, yeah, so I, some guy had mastered on our twitter or whatever these stupid things are, who was like so they get it's all digital, but you know it's like the. It's not like the analog. You know disc was, or the um, you know the optical disc was analog and I'm like right, yeah, it's physical media versus digital. Like, yeah, he's like, so if you put it on a hard drive, I mean, isn't that?

01:51:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
also physical. I was like why do you talk to these? Why are you?

01:51:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
in this industry. I don't anymore.

01:51:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I muted that guy, but like I, well, and hopefully they are switching to ssds inside of the xbox I'm sorry, those are their sscs.

01:51:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That are yeah this is what I'm just so it's the, it's the xbox.

01:51:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No spinning media edition. There you go.

01:51:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, that's it, that's a good way that was. I'm gonna give you his address, so you can say that's a better. That'll clarify everything I was just I listen, I get being pedantic, but try not to be stupid about it. Like I mean, I mean, you know like what, come on, come on, uh, okay. And then they also released a bunch of new Xbox adaptive accessibility accessories.

01:52:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, I just pushed a button and got very tiny. I'm sorry. I'm going away.

01:52:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I didn't see it, but I assume that's what I was saying.

01:52:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:52:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, look, this stuff is just cool, right, there's an amazing range of peripherals that they have One of these things they're giving out 3D printer designs for the thumbsticks so you can adjust the height and width if you want to or need to. Right, I mean, this stuff's cool.

01:52:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This whole line has been a hit.

01:52:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, it's incredible, you're both small.

01:52:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you're both small but the xbox is big. I think they stumbled into this almost by accident and they just run with it as soon as they. It's like what if we made an adaptive controller? What would it look like? And then they took all the feedback and just went wild. And then I think, it's amazing there's.

01:53:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's some work, uh, like this. That's in the Surface business. They're doing something like that and actually the new Surface, the Pro keyboard, the Flex keyboard and, I think, one of the normal keyboards there's that opportunity for the bigger keycaps, right, so the letters are bigger, it's good for people with low vision and, of course, they're backlit, so they're bigger in the dark too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this stuff's great, but I mean Xbox so far has really led the charge here at Microsoft.

01:53:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like this is the rare area where those guys in the design lab like they need a medal, like they're just doing such good work. Yeah, the nice thing about the whole 3D print approach to this too, is you can do it on your inexpensive little PLA printer at home until you get it right. Right, and then you ship that file off to a service and it's like I'd like this in aluminum, please, all right, you know whatever material you want. Yep, really neat. Yeah, it's very cool.

01:54:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, I love it, I love it, so that's cool. And we just it was just the other day, so it wasn't like it was last week, but we're, we're, we're past the halfway point for August. So now they've announced new Xbox game pass titles and you would think this would be awesome Gamescom, et cetera, et cetera. It's, it's, it's not. They're going to bring Call of Duty Black Ops 6 preview, the open beta to people who are on Game Pass. I think it starts on the, but it's later in the month.

01:54:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is smart. This gets people to sign up for Game Pass if they get exclusive access to something.

01:54:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so two months ahead of the game, you'll be able to play some of it, like it won't be the whole game, obviously, but multiplayer, online, whatever it is Neat, multiplayer, or online, whatever it is, um, neat, you know. And there was a period of time there where they do this every year but, uh, with the exclusivity thing they had with sony for a few years there was like playstation and wait two, three weeks and then, okay, xbox guys, uh, pick up the, uh, the leftovers, you know, welcome in. So now it's going to be on xbox right away, which is cool. It has been on xbox right away for a couple years, I should say. But because, you know, microsoft uh owns it now. So obviously it's, so it's more equal, it's equaler. I'm a writer, um, so yes, it's equal to something.

01:55:26
Yeah, um, you, uh, you guys may recall, as part of their negotiations to acquire Activision Blizzard, they opened up some of their gaming service stuff Xbox Game, pass games, et cetera to other services. And one of the big ones, one of the big beneficiaries, is GeForce Now, which does streaming, obviously, and obviously they do streaming, and now they're just simplifying the process of signing in streaming and, um, now they're they're just simplifying the process of signing in, right? So if you're playing an xbox game, you can link your xbox account to edge geforce now and then you'll just be right in. So that's going to start tomorrow. Um, you don't have to sign in to your microsoft account every single time you start streaming the pc version of an xbox game, right, like? Which is the way it worked before, apparently. So that's good and you know game streaming.

01:56:13
I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm sold on that personally, and actually I should have put this in the antitrust section. But Epic Games threatened and then did launch their mobile app store. Thanks to antitrust action around the world. It's available now on Android and iPhone and I think iPad too. Actually iOS, you know.

01:56:32
But on Android you can get it anywhere, right, because it's android, but in on ios you have to be in the eu because interesting because reasons yeah, and there's a complicated little process you have to go through, which you know epic has kind of lashed out at uh, google, for at least I. I live in the united states so I can't test the apple bit of it, but I did throw this thing on my samsung galaxy s24 and it does look like you're permitting it to install malware. I mean, it's like the language that google provides is like yikes, you know, but you know, if you've ever sideloaded a game on um android which you've been able to do for years? Uh, you might be some. It's probably the same language, right, is? It's a little? Yeah, so it's a little nicer looking. It's like there were pains that come up, like before you had to go into, you had to do something to like it like multi-click something switch to developer settings.

01:57:21
Yeah, it's it's not that scary like you actually do, it's kind of a but, it's also a it's all this.

01:57:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is this language about protecting the user or about scaring them off? Scaring them off, yeah, yeah. So back to the antitrust thing oh, by the way, it's a really scary

01:57:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
thing to do. The only explicit security that occurred during this entire process is when I had to sign into my account. That took like I had to go through 2FA for that. I'm like what are we worried about?

01:57:48
here, Tell me why we're in danger exactly. Yeah, like I mean I mean my epic account, to be clear about that, like I mean they have, their account is secured really well. So, yeah, it's like for your security. Your phone currently isn't allowed to install unknown apps. You can change this in settings, thanks, not click here to change. You know. Like you know, they're trying to make you not do it.

01:58:08
Yep, um, the gameplay is great. I mean I, you know, of course it does. It's a fortnight, I should say um, and there aren't that many games yet, but uh, fortnight, rocket league, sideswipe and fall guys, which is brand new, are all available on both stores and they're opening it up to third parties, of course. Of course you know apple will probably cancel the developer account. We'll go back and forth, but you know it's happening, so enjoy that. Um, before I, that happened, I, I, we might have talked about this a little bit, but I had been playing um, like modern triple a games on this normal laptop with an amd chipset in it, and I do have this new ipad air and I'm thinking, you know I, I mean I've seen call of duty mobile. I've gone in and out a couple times like there must be like triple a games happening on this platform right you know, and and there are, and it's not.

01:58:54
You know, I don't think Nintendo well, nintendo really make that kind of game, but like, uh, you know, sony and Microsoft don't have a lot to worry about there per se, but uh, Call of Duty mobile, for example, or Call of Duty Warzone mobile, these games have evolved pretty dramatically and these tablets can display graphics as good as any console at high frame rate and you attach a controller and it just works. And the games themselves are sophisticated. They're not the same games you play on console or PC, but it's very clear that if they wanted to and I think they might there's no reason. In the same way that today you're an Xbox, you could play against a PlayStation guy, a PC guy, we're going to be playing against iPad and iPhone guys. There's no doubt about it. You know, um, it's there, like it's kind of amazing. It's. I will say the. The selection of this kind of game is actually better on the iPad than it is on the Mac. Nice, for example, not the low bar, but but it's, but, but it's, uh, it's.

01:59:53
It's the type of thing that I think would take off and I, as I was saying to brad the other day like if you're on a plane. You got four hours to kill whatever. You could read, watch a movie and play call of duty, you know, like I mean or alien isolation, or whatever these other games are like. There's a bunch of them. So anyway, just something to look into. If you, you know you have an ipad kicking around you're not doing anything with, you know, throw a controller on it. I think you might be surprised, yeah if you like playing with controller.

02:00:18
Yeah, oh yeah, yep, you can look when I made the transition from keyboard mouse. Well, first of all, I made the, the transition from keyboard to keyboard mouse, because of quake, right and quick look, and you know you can, yeah, you can use one and look around as you run straight, that kind of thing. You start getting killed by those guys on the pc and you're like I have to learn this. It was hard, yeah. And then when I transitioned from that to a controller with the 360, so 2005, 2006, that was hard. You know I'm done doing this, I'm done transitioning. So I'm, there's no way I'm gonna sit there and you know, play with a, I can't. I mean, I played fortnight on a phone. I had to, like I had to be this close to it, like I can't do it. But the ipad screens, in fact, if anything I got, I'm done. Transition, that's not what I meant. I'm never done transitioning. Now the you could connect this thing to a display, I mean like a big, you know, like this could be something, something we'll see.

02:01:13
So anyway, it's a hell of a processor, right, I mean, yeah, and then if you have an ipad pro, it's even better. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, I apologize, I should go find. Somebody reminded me of this in the discord chat and I actually had put this. I've been so kind of sick today I haven't written as much as I wanted to. So this was on my to-do list, but Atari has announced a new version of the 78 video game console, so this is yeah.

02:01:39
So for collectors or people who are into this stuff, this is kind of well-known, but for the general public, a lot of people are not aware that this existed. So obviously there was a 2600, the classic of ECS, and then there was a 5200, which had arcade quality graphics, but that horrible controller and the cartridges were incompatible. So to play 2600 games you had to get an adapter right and Atari Chain Chains, jack Trimel, bought the company and they started releasing some. They did the XE game system and they did some new 8-bit computers, but they also released this thing which had been sitting there for a while called the 7800 and it cartridge compatible 2600. So we play all the old games 20 well, 2600 old games. Um, a decent controller without a keypad on it, but not the classic atari joystick, although that worked fine. And now the the company that is atari today is releasing a new version of this console, just just like they did with the 2600.

02:02:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's got that sort of nostalgic retro. I like it.

02:02:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's modern too right, yep, I mean. So it comes with this kind of controller that looks a little bit like a simplistic Nintendo controller that I think Atari sold in Europe a million years ago but not here. But you can get a normal Atari controller. You can get the paddles right. It actually plays the cartridges. So it's not like a Raspberry Pi with an emulator although it probably actually is but it actually plays the cartridges as well, which I think is the selling point, and they're selling Well from a retro perspective.

02:03:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But cartridges nobody has old ones, you have to buy new ones.

02:03:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, I a retro perspective. But cartridges, nobody has old ones. You have to buy new ones. Yeah well, I mean you can. I mean, obviously they're out there like people collect these things and so forth, but yeah, but they're actually selling brand new cartridges and in some cases they're. There's a bunch of atari 2600 games those all play. There's a new atari 7800 games, including, like I think it's, the crystal quest game, which is like a sequel to a game that was a big deal in the 80s, written by the guy who wrote the game. But it's brand new. It's actually a new game. This is kind of cool.

02:03:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I might actually I mean, why make a cartridge when it could have been a USB key, much less just NVM on the machine and loaded from the, so I would have to go look at the specs of this thing more closely.

02:03:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I said, I meant to write this up today, but I wouldn't be surprised if this thing also supported what you just described.

02:04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:04:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because there is this whole. Let me just like yeah, it's used that, yeah, so it's, the charging cable is USB-C, right, and it doesn't actually say but yeah, obviously HDMI out out is. You know, that's the big, that's the big trick. If you buy like buy a legacy console from the 80s. Yeah, try and plug composite video in, good luck. Good luck, you know there are adapters for that, of course, but anyway you'll pay more for a good upscaler than you will for the console just get the thing, yeah, just get the.

02:04:28
You know, just get this new thing now, you know so this is. This is of interest. I need to look into it a little bit more.

02:04:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not the guy for this, but then I never was right yeah.

02:04:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I played on my PC. I worked at Toys R Us at a time when they sold this this was a thing, and that XE game system was there.

02:04:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I remember having pallet loads of NESs during Christmas and just handing them as fast as we could sell them. In the case Ours came in cages.

02:04:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They were locked up.

02:04:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They were rolled cages High security.

02:04:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like this is serious. Well, this is Canada so it wasn't that big of a deal. Oh yeah, that's right, you don't have crime. That must be nice. I lived in the Boston area, so it was more. It was an exciting time but you know, obviously, Atari, they went on from this to do the links, which was honestly a pretty cool thing. Yeah, the handheld deal, and then the Jaguar right, which you know was had its moment, you know it was up against serious competition at the time.

02:05:24
Yeah, it was. This was all so and Sony was out by this point, and Sega was kept going.

02:05:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was a tough time, tough name yeah.

02:05:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They were passed by. Still classic games, Just saying.

02:05:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Without a doubt. Oh, I'm sorry, I was just playing a little Diablo.

02:05:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, that game looks great, right. Yeah, that's a fun little game, not a little game. It's a fun big game. Yeah, if's a fun little game.

02:05:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not a little game, it's a fun big game. Yeah, if you just don't pay them any money. That's the key on this.

02:05:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the reason I mentioned AAA is, like a lot of these mobile games, are this in-app nonsense, lots of ads and it's flashy, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I do think there aren't many. But like, if you buy for or alien isolation, right, a modern 3d horror shooter type game, um, you get the first couple of levels for free, and if you want to buy, it's like 15, right, and that's it. There's no zoo, zoo, zoo. We're in, you know whatever.

02:06:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice let's take a break. And then the back of the book, a tip, an app pick, run his radio and french liquor, liquor, liquor coming up just a bit. You know, if you've been listening to this show over the years, you probably have come to a realization.

02:06:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul needs help actually I wasn't sure where that was going fortunately there is a sponsor that can help.

02:06:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, help is in their name Better help. I am a big fan of psychotherapy, of counseling. I think I've had a therapist my whole life. I needed a therapist my whole life. I have to do a show with Paul.

02:07:07
What are your self-care non-negotiations? This isn't about me. What's happening? Maybe you never skip a leg day, right? Maybe you never skip a therapy day when your schedule is packed with kids' activities, big work projects and more.

02:07:21
You know priorities. Your priorities kind of take a back seat. That's not great. Even when we know what we need to be happy, what we need to do, it's hard sometimes to make time for it. So this is why I highly recommend, if you're thinking of starting therapy, making it convenient, making it easy, making it affordable with BetterHelp Better H-E-L-P it's entirely online, so that means it can fit into your busy schedule, could be convenient, flexible, really important. I tell everybody this uh, my kids, for instance you can switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. The therapist understands.

02:08:04
Finding the right therapist is is even more important than finding, you know, a suit that fits or shoes that fit. You want to find somebody that meets your needs that is as smart as you are, that is caring in a way. You want them to be that kind of thing. So what's nice about better help? They don't charge you to switch therapists so you can try. It's a great way to try a bunch of different ones till you find the perfect therapist for you.

02:08:26
But the real point here is don't skip that therapy day. Maybe we should think of it as coaching or life coaching or just somebody you can talk to. It's so nice. You can do it easily, affordably, conveniently with BetterHelp. Never skip a therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelpcom slash windows today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp B-t-t-e-r. Better help h-e-l-p dot com slash windows. This is a a sponsor. I can really get behind because I think more than ever in this day and age. Uh, it's a stressful time for everybody, but better help is there to help you make it better. Helpcom slash windows.

02:09:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, paul, I gave you a moment for a mental health moment and now it's time I need a mental health week for your tip of the week, sir yeah, so I I've been meaning to update my book Windows Everywhere for quite a while and I've written a ton of stuff for it, but I've never integrated it in, and so I've started putting parts of it on the site first, so we can kind of do like a first draft, and I think this is going to be a three-part series that will eventually probably just be a chapter. It's pretty big, but about the history of Windows and ARM. So the first part's up today and it's kind of interesting. There it is the little Surface RT looking thing yeah, oh my God the RT.

02:10:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had one of those, In teal no less. Oh my God, a teal RT. Yeah, those were the days. Mine cracked almost immediately, so fortunately I didn't there was.

02:10:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There was a period where I literally walked around my house collecting dead rts to be recycled, because they were given to us a bunch too.

02:10:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I had must have a half a dozen of them I had, I think, four at one point and yeah, they just yeah, they meant well, you, you know.

02:10:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was was this the first Windows on ARM?

02:10:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, wow, there's a. Yeah, windows RT was the name of it, it was Windows 8, but on ARM NVIDIA at the time. But you know, intel comes into the story a lot, in fact at every stage. Qualcomm played a role in the beginning and they never actually shipped anything on Qualcomm. They obviously became a bigger deal. But yeah, it's interesting to me. Anyway, I don't know.

02:10:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think this will be great. How many parts.

02:10:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
do you think you're going to this? One's probably going to be three just for this part of it. Yeah, three parts. Yeah, it's long. It's long. It's like the whole chapter is probably 18,000 words, like it's big. Yeah, um, okay, so, uh, then the app pick is start 11 was just updated today with to version 2.1. There's a couple of features, but the big one is, coincidentally, native support for arm, so if you have windows on arm, you can run this thing natively and get a start menu that doesn't laugh at you behind your back that's what you want made by our friends at stardock now I know you need therapy.

02:11:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not laughing at you, Paul.

02:11:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not laughing with you and that is throw it. Apple Podcasts is available on the web, which is a big deal if you're an iPhone user and you like that app and that's the only place you can use it. You have a PC or whatever. It's not there, it's never going to be, but web app kind of solves the the problem there. If that's what you want, so it's. Yeah, it looks nice, it looks like, you know, like an apple app.

02:11:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We talked about this yesterday on mac. Very quickly, apple's doing strange things, like they're now. They have.

02:12:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They just put maps on the web yeah, I know right, it's like what's the? What's the point? Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, they suddenly got a web developer maybe this, this is the other thing, summer's almost over.

02:12:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's get all these things on the web Before the interns leave, let's Yep, but I think everything should have a web interface. I think that makes it easy.

02:12:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, that's the tabula franca. Right, it's the starting point for everything.

02:12:28
Ladies and gentlemen, there is a fabulous run as radio in your future richard campbell yeah, this, uh, this is episode 946 and I actually recorded it back at ndc oslo, which was in june, and one of the many stops I did in june I got to sit down with two professors uh, they both um daniela and ramina. Uh, both uh were at um, the nor Norwegian University of Science, but they currently work for a company called Visma, which is short for visual management, so this is Norwegian, like accounting software and things like that all SaaS products. So they work in the security side of things. Dr Kreuzes is the is the professor side. It's sort of the senior person. Romina is one of her protegees, quite brilliant in the way she was approaching researching and threat modeling of software in the cloud. So getting a picture of how we can build and manage the threat, build cloud-based software and make it reliable.

02:13:27
The issues are different and obviously security retrofitting is very difficult and costly to do, so better to do it ahead of time, and so we sort of ran down some of the tooling available and the approaches to finding potential attack threats for your software, and this is hoping that the sysadmins collaborate with development to do a better job of assessing the security risks of software Before it's deployed. And now you're scrambling under a threat or under a potential attack. So a lot of conversation about the supply chain threat. So you know hygiene of the software that you're using from the different sources. Often that's open source software and so this is a set of practices around controlling versions so that you know that you're not getting a hacked version of a library that you're counting on and just having the confidence that that sort of thing can be managed. So it's tackling a tough problem and the toys about it. But it was good to sort of get that picture around the thinking of helping to make software more secure before it's out in the world and at risk of being exploited nice.

02:14:37
Yeah, now I want you to exploit me with some brown liquor so, uh, the other weekend and I I had to say, like this bottle's almost done.

02:14:45
That's how much I like this stuff a couple weekends back we did a weekend in the city, stayed at a friend's condo downtown and we went to a very nice French restaurant and they had some French whiskey and I'm like, what, rick, really Whiskey? Like you get cognac from France, why would you get whiskey from France? And this led to a little digging around and I'm like, oh, there's a whole line of them and I tried a couple and they were pretty good and I found that my local high-end, rare whiskey store had exactly one. They had the americ, the sherry cask, and so it sat. I, I put it on my desk to stare at when I'm in here and then start reading and digging.

02:15:23
And of course, the more time I have to read and dig, the crazier the story gets. So let's, uh, let's talk crazy story here, because this is a whiskey made in France, specifically in Brittany, which just begs the question why we use the word Britain in France. In fact, brittany is the English word for that area. The French say Brittany, or like almost britannia, and the bretons say brish, because they're celts. So the history of of the bretons, well, it makes sense.

02:15:59
They make whiskey, then that's cool obviously right, you're known for their ciders, but uh yeah no, and it's, and this and this distillery makes a ton of ciders, but yeah, this literally goes back to the fall. You know the way the roman empire started to shrink and pulled out of britain in the fifth century and in came the anglo-saxons. Right, they now, the anglo-saxons, had already been invading uh before that, but when the romans pulled back, it really went, uh, you know, violent, and so, uh, a lot of people died and many of them fled. I did sit down and read a Beattie, which was an Anglo-Saxon monk who wrote the ecclesiastical history of the English peoples in 730 AD. So he was writing about combat that happened 200 years before Beattie, by the Anglo-Saxons, while being Anglo-Saxons. So his context was very much well, the Anglo-Saxons were chosen by God and so they were simply purging the inappropriate. So this was essentially three tribes of people from the Northwestern Europe. So the Angles come from Angale in northern Germany, the Saxons come from lower Saxony, also in Germany, and the Jutes, which are from Jutland, which is now what we call Denmark, and they settled across England, the Angles, oddly enough, east Anglia, the Saxons in southern England, the Jutes you generally find the Kent and the Isle of Wight, although everything's mixed around and literally that name is where the name England comes from. And if you think I'm trying to make a tidy summary on this, you know you're talking about 200 years of people moving back and forth. But a lot of those original inhabitants that welsh, the cornish, the celts, many of them fled england and ended up in northwestern france and brittany and normandy, as in the normans. The historical name of this area in brittany along the coast is called is america, and you will notice that this bottle says Amaric.

02:17:58
So what do we know about Brittany? Well, it's like France, it is in France, so it's a great growing region. They're well known for their butter and their fleur de sel. Our andouille sausage originates in Brittany, although the Britain version of that has tripe in it. There's also an and you would say the Normandy version of and has tripe in it. There's also a new one. The Normandy version of Andouille is a little bit different, but really the Andouille you know is from Louisiana, yeah, and although from French people who have been moved around it for a bit.

02:18:24
It is a good wine growing region but it is a bit further north, so they stick strictly to the whites and their famous wine is called Muscadet, which is not Muscat. Muscat is the sweet dessert wine, muscadet is a dry white specific to this region, although typically further from the coast, down in nantes. And yes, lots of apples, lots of berries, huge cideries and a handful of distilleries, and it happens to be that the one I could get my hands on is the one of the oldest distilleries that was built in that part of the world. So Leon Waringham set up the Waringham distillery in 1900 in Lannion, which is in the far northwest part of Brittany, in an area called Côte de Granatose, which is the pink granite coast. So the rocks, the shores in brittany have a pinkish hue, and so that's why they're known as the pink granite coast. His original product was not a whiskey, it was called elixir de amonique. It is a uh, it's an armature.

02:19:29
yeah right just and and, by the way, 125 years later you can still buy a 500 ml bottle for about $25. Same family still owns it, although there are several other families that have now gotten involved. I found a great ad from the 1930s from them that gave them a list of all of the products they were selling. They made three kinds of triple sec triple sec being distilled orange peel, and so they had a Mandarin Origins, and a triple sec Salvatore. And a triple sec being distilled orange peel, and so they had a mandarin origins and a triple sec salvador and a triple sec eclair. Don't know what the difference between them all. Um, they also had a product called grog american, which was probably a rum. Yeah, uh, creme de cassis, black currant liqueur. Uh, mint eclair, which is a mint schnapps, and the rum savannah, which is also, you know, another kind of rum. And then the various schnapps. They did a mint schnapps and the rum savanna, which is also, you know, another kind of rum. And then the various schnapps they did a mint schnapps. They did a cherry brandy and a goulard de thon, which is cherry liqueur. So the cherry brandy is about 40% alcohol. The cherry liqueur is like 18, 19%. So fast forward a couple of generations.

02:20:29
In the 1960s, paul Henri Waringham, who is the grandson of the founder of Leon, partners with Yves Lezure, who the Lezure family is also a longtime family in Breton, and they start making meads, so what they call Couchanet, which is made from fermented honey, again like a strong beer, 14% alcohol or so, although they do refer to them as the milthic Celtic drinks in a callback to their Celtic heritage. That being said, of course apples are from Kazakhstan, but don't tell them that they do commit to. So it's the Le Zuer side of the family that says let's make French whiskey in the 1980s when, uh, and it's right, the timing is very obvious. It's right about the time of the classic malts in in scotland which created that resurgence in whiskey after the slow times of the 60s and the 70s, when united distillers did that classic malts collection which included lagaboulin and craggamore and a few others. Um, that really kicked off a wave of whiskey. And that's right around the time that the lazure sorry, could we make a whiskey in breton.

02:21:42
Their initial product a few years later was called wb breton and it was a blended whiskey, so they used 25 percent of malt whiskey, which was still young at that point, the first few years they do whiskey without the e, so they're very much following the scottish process. It was at least three years old, but they were doing the french thing. So it's french barley, although it was 75 grain whiskey which was made with french wheat. So fine, by 1988 they have their first single malt. It's man only so good. Um, and then at the same time the son, gilles Lazier, starts playing with apple brandy. So they're doing more distilling. He makes a version that he calls the traditional name for distilled cider, which is what you do when cider is getting old is you make Lambic, and if you make it in Britain then you call it Lambic Breton. But he called it fine Breton because it was better apple brandy.

02:22:34
But the whiskey business gets really serious in 1993 when they actually build a set of french stills to the scottish standard, so a proper pair of uh, wash and uh and high spirits stills, particularly for making whiskey. Now the area that they're in is very Scottish, that is to say it's along the coast. It is stormy there, lots of rain and so forth, good growing environment. It happens to be that the water source in Lagnon is very low in lime and of course no iron and things that would normally be a problem for making distillates. And of course, and they use French barley, although this distillery does not do their own maltings, they buy it malted but they do their own grindings. The stills are not large 6,000 liters for the wash still 3,500 for the spirit still their new make. It comes at about 70%, although they do cut it to 63.5 because they do a lot of barreling in bourbon casks.

02:23:33
This particular edition, the sherry cask, does exactly that. It spends actually this particular edition only aged in sherry casks. We're not really sure how long, but it's probably only three years, considering the color. That's fair. There was many other editions where they do bourbon for a few years and then finish in sherry, very traditional to the style. And they do some french oak as well, virgin french oak. So that's unusual.

02:23:59
The um, if you look at the color of this, this is an ambered whiskey. This is not too too much. They're not doing any coloring. This is how the whiskey actually went, and the reason that bottle's almost empty is because, boy, it's good. Now I'm jealous. The thing I can't shake and I'm trying to decide if it's my mind or it's actually the taste is there's cognac in there somewhere, like. It's got that cognac feel. It's got a fair bit of burn, but it's not fruity in that same way, the same citrus notes and so forth. Now cognac's in the southwest of france. It's quite a bit further south, it's just north of bordeaux. Um le chatarine is the is the area like the province in france, it's the next province down from brittany and that is where cognac is made, obviously made from grapes, right?

02:24:49
The cognacs are a derivative of armagnac, which was the traditional way that you preserved aging wine. When it was in barrels and wasn't going to be good for much longer. You wanted to use the barrels for other things. You would an Armagnac maker, would come to your winery and would concentrate down the wine into Armagnacs, typically only in the 40, 50% range. You'd let it, actually let it sit till it was 40% Cogn, much more sophisticated. It's a dual distillation process and it's made to the purpose.

02:25:17
But so I yeah, I can't figure out if it's just my head or if it's really that there's something about the way they make whiskey there that a like all spirits. It's like you know it's french, it's got a character to it that obvious. Now these are fairly hard to come by in the US. I did find that Total Wine had one of the regular Amaric single malts available for about $75, which is pricey, but it's unusual wine. This particular version, the Sherry Cask, I've only found in fancier stores for a bit more money, about $85. The one I'm going to have to find now, which I think I'll do while in Europe, is the Amarik Double Maturation, because they start in virgin French oak, local oak, and then finish it in sherry cask. So that should be the most French edition of this particular whiskey. But there's only a handful of distillers there and they mostly make liqueurs. I mean, the bulk of the business of this company still is liqueurs. Meads, apple, brandy whiskey is kind of the third string there, but it's very good I aren't.

02:26:30
French oak casks used often in in whiskey everywhere, isn't that no, no they're normally used for wine, uh, and for cognac, okay, uh, and they're expensive, right and they're, and the french are very sticky about not selling them too. So it's hard to um, to get away with, uh, with selling, with, with getting them. You just can't come by them very easily. The French you know to the point where this distillery has actually gotten VOC, like the appellations for protecting the methods, not just for the way they're making their whiskey but also how they make their apple brandies. Oh, interesting, and so I mean. But a lot of that domain mindset came from France in the first place. This idea of cognac can only be made in cognac and champagne can only be made in champagne. All of those original. It all starts in France.

02:27:22
It's not surprising they jumped on this. Not at all, even though they're essentially copying the Scottish whiskey process. They are using French barley and they are using, occasionally, french barrels, and so they want. This is our own thing, like we've made it our way. It's not surprising for the french, but it has, without a doubt, it has a character to it. You know they're not going to do long agings. It's there for further south in scotland, so they're going to be warm, which means their losses in angel share are high. Uh, so you're not going to get a lot of 20 year olds here, but, and you'll notice, none of these have a year appellation. There's a couple of special editions that are like tens, so that's not how they're selling these things.

02:28:00
What they're doing is making very nice whiskey with its own unique flavors and imminently drinkable. Not a stitch of peat, just you know. No smoke in there it's. I swear to you I would put this beside a cognac and you'd have a tough time. Now that's true of any spay interesting, right and sherry finish in general. Like I have often done tastings with people that were, you know, annoying me with their pretentiousness, and so I'd stick a cognac in the middle of it and see if they could tell. And almost never, because it's mostly you're tasting the wood anyway, right, so it's very hard to pick up. This one would be doubly so. Like I'd put this in the line of cognacs and see if you could figure out that it was a whiskey. It looks like cognac actually it does, really has that color and it drinks so much.

02:28:45
So cognac yeah, interesting, I want to try it, that's great um, yeah, I know, I'm afraid I do this every week where, like, I really have found something interesting and say you know, now you have the problem I have, which is that I have a lot of bottles of half finished whiskey these days and I've been home for several weeks now, so the stack is to the point where she who must be obeyed is looking at me like what are we going to do with all this? We will drink them.

02:29:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would have thought, if you're home they would be thinning, not growing.

02:29:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you would think. Except that getting a new bottle every week is I'm going to only drink so fast I would say this one's probably not going to make it out of the office. Yeah, I think you're right. We're leaving for Copenhagen on Friday, but I think this one will be empty. But of the half a dozen bottles I've done while I've been home in a row, only two never made it out of the office. This one and and um, okay, that's high praise, just, but.

02:29:38
And the other is like they, I still got some of the gark and in the canter, back there, the writer's tears went upstairs, the, the german, went upstairs, you know, and she's enjoying them, but they, you know, this was a stunner On a normal pace. Yes, yeah, the Laird of the Fin Tree did not make it out of here, right, the Legente did.

02:30:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is the Richard Campbell test.

02:30:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If it gets out of the office, and one of the reasons this thing's in trouble is because I got it. I hinted at this last week because it was already staring at me and I've had time to write about it. I ended up reading a freaking 1200 year old document about the history of the bretons. For crying out loud like I love that though I think that's great, that's.

02:30:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what's interesting. There's history in all of this stuff there is every region.

02:30:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Every speaks to the terrar you know, there's just like part of the nature of the whiskey of a given area is the people who made it. And these are interesting people, you know. They are in many ways original english before the anglo-saxons right, yeah, and they, and they hold the. It's fun. I poke through the variations of the language, not just breton but gallo, and like there's a half a dozen of them that are down to maybe a hundred thousand speakers left and a lot of them, have you know, are seriously influenced by french. But the number of times you see three or four names on something that are just a different variance of the local language there. But those breton signs that have the french name underneath it dude, that's gaelic, man like, truly it's. The celtic influence is there and it's strong and it's part of the, the style that they have there how cool, how cool.

02:31:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My uh daughter studied in ren in high school. She spent a year in ren, so I know they were, I know the region, I love it.

02:31:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a beautiful region, it's a beautiful part of the world, without a doubt, and it but it's its own unique thing. Once again, there's complexity there, and all too often we just hang out in Paris. When we're in France, right, right, and if you're not, you're headed to the south of France, which I mean nothing wrong with either of those places. No absolutely not. Yeah, please, please, go to Bordeaux and then go north, go up to the coast and see something different again.

02:31:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We love the whiskey and we love your recommendations. You see, lennox Lizard picked up the 12-year-old Beaumont from last week and loved it.

02:32:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not too much smoke, just a little. Just a little.

02:32:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're drinking something that's why I want to try the Amarick? Because I'm not a Pete fan, I'm not a Smurf fan.

02:32:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is your. You know, this is a French spay through. That's what I want. No two ways about it, that's what I want.

02:32:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard Campbell. Thank you so much. Runnismradiocomnet rocks You're off for Copenhagen.

02:32:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll be coming from Copenhagen. I think I'll be able to get a space on the venue site because it's a festival. It runs late, so it'll be the evening there and I have a hankering. I will have a Danish whiskey in hand when that happens Hopefully, with a Danish of some kind to eat.

02:32:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's from there, right I?

02:32:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
hate to say this, but it's actually from Vienna. Just call it a Danish, because they like to confuse me Any more than the French column, french fries.

02:33:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just like the Pennsylvania, dutch or German. Things are confused. Why do we have words? Why no one?

02:33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
knows, come on, but you're a writer, you should know.

02:33:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Obstacling meeting is what words are all about.

02:33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul Thurott, thurottcom T-H-U-R-R-O-T-Tcom. As you can see, I'm a premium member, so should you be, it's well worth it. You can also get Paul's books from the leanpubcom website, including Windows Everywhere, kind of a history of Windows through its development platforms and languages, and then, of course, the field guide to Windows 11, now with Windows 10 built in Leanpubcom. Paul, are you going to be home next week or are you going to Mexico Next week?

02:33:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will be home. Okay, yeah, I go to Berlin the week after that.

02:33:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Is that IFA or something.

02:33:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's going on in Berlin? Yeah, IFA. Actually, I'm going to New York, New York first. That shouldn't impact you. I think I'm going to be in. Yeah, I think I'm going to be in Berlin for at least one show.

02:34:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're a traveling bunch here. I'm going to New York in a couple of weeks. Micah will fill in for me on the 12th and the 19th, so we'll continue to do the show wherever we are. I will be at Bryant Park on September 7th, 3 to 5 pm for a meetup. If you're in New York City, come by say hi and then we're going to go on a photo walk with Joe Sure. That'd be a lot of fun.

02:34:29
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02:35:01
A very special thanks to all of our club twit members for their support in making Windows Weekly possible. This week we do the show and we stream it live. Again, thanks to the club, we now stream it live on seven platforms. Let me see if I can do this. Many of the club members are watching on Discord, but we're also on youtube. That's actually nothing new youtubecom, slash twitch, slash live, twitchtv, slash twit kick, facebook linkedin and xcom so many ways to watch us live.

02:35:29
There's hundreds of people on each of the platforms, I think, which is, if you want to do that, you should start around 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC on Wednesday. That's when we do Windows Weekly and, of course, if you can't be there live even if you can you probably should download a copy. That way you have a copy for yourself from the website twittv. Paul hosts it on his website, therotcom. We also on YouTube. There's a video channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. That's a great way to share clips if you are so inclined. Or subscribe on your favorite podcast client and that way you'll get it automatically every week and you don't have to think about it. You just have it whenever you're in the mood for Windows Weekly. Thank you, paul, thank you Richard, thank you, great to see you. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.