Windows Weekly 899 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 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on Windows Weekly, first and foremost. Well, we hear about Paul's hands-on with the Omnibook Ultra, a new laptop with some interesting corners, and we also talk about Microsoft 365, the summit that Microsoft held with CrowdStrike and what was actually said there and what matters, plus a really wacky machine from Lenovo that, honestly, all three of us couldn't get enough of before we round things out with Xbox Corner and, of course, the tips and picks of the week. All of that coming up on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love.

00:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
From people you trust. This is TWIT.

00:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This is Windows Weekly, episode 899, with Paul Thorat, richard Campbell and me, micah Sargent, recorded Wednesday, september 18th 2024. Functional but disturbing. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where I, this week, micah Sargent, talk to two of the foremost Windows watchers of the world. We've got veteran Microsoft ins. I like to use the show description that we have the whip, the cool whip.

01:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
version of the whip.

01:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, it's interesting that you are both described as veteran Microsoft insiders. I don't know what that means.

01:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's like. That's a cool way of saying old.

01:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I know what you're doing. Oh, paul where are you coming to us from, if?

01:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
only we know I'm in Pennsylvania.

01:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All right, and in here at home, and I hear that richard campbell is, oddly enough, at home as well enough.

01:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Don't worry, you get one more week of me here actually two more weeks of me here, and then it's going to be something different every week for a month do we have to pay special taxes since it's canada, us sort of I? Don't know, I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. You know, know, if you ask too many questions, bad things happen. That's true. I try not to.

02:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Speaking of which, is there an update on your phone situation, richard, did you?

02:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, that's right.

02:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have ordered a Pixel 9. Okay.

02:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you ordered it from Google directly. So you did go home with the swollen phone and it's slightly swollen.

02:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's you know slightly swollen one corner.

02:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's slightly terroristy.

02:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know, I'm only charging it with the Q charger Cause I think it's actually a was a bad charge that did damage to it. Oh, interesting, it doesn't continue to inflate, so it's functional. Just disturbing.

02:40 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, functional but disturbing yeah.

02:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It bobbles on the table describes me. Yeah, yes, yes, functional, but disturbing, uh, so anyway, they don't even get that. Yeah, she, she, who must be obeyed, saw it yesterday and when, when he replacing that, I'm like I'm ordering it now. I, I really wanted the pro, but they're out of stock everywhere, so I'm getting the regular. Would you have gotten the bigger pro? Or no, the smaller pro yeah yeah, 6.8 is not a phone, it's a tablet. Oh, I don't know. I wish it could be bigger.

03:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the name of my sex tape.

03:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I could have gone for the fold, but that's a couple of grand.

03:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't stop doing that. Now. This is my new problem.

03:18 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This is the therapy show. So, oh, no, wait, it's not. It's the show where we talk about Microsoft, what? And now that we've said hello to our guests or to our hosts, let's kick things off with Windows 11.

03:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why not? It is ostensibly about Windows.

03:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just so weird to start with Windows now.

03:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we'll go over some of the weirdness of this year in Windows and how and when 24H2 happens, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But you know, the overreaching theme here is that Microsoft has been very vague and either vague or non-communicative about this topic. You know, and it's been kind of weird, but just yesterday they formally revealed the literal rollout schedule for this feature update. Of course they did it via a tech community blog post that had nothing to do with Windows 11. But you know what? Let's not worry about that.

04:16
The point is, someone from Microsoft went on record, right, so good. So, as expected, it will be available next Tuesday, which is week D, right In preview form, 24h2 that is. And then the following patch, Tuesday, which I believe is October 8th, it will start rolling out publicly and stable, right, so everyone can get it. If you want to go get it, go get it. If you want to wait for it, you'll get it, assuming your computer is compatible and supported, I guess would be the way to say that. As you guys know, especially Richard, who's witnessed this mania firsthand I've spent a lot of this year obsessing over this release and what it will include and what it will include, and now that I know a little disappointing, a little bit of a letdown.

05:12 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's not that important really.

05:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like when you know where your presence is hidden and you go and you look at it every day and then you get it Is that it.

05:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what it was, it always was that I'm still firmly in the camp that there was an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm until November. Yeah, because that would be the six-month window and it's impaired the update process that they probably didn't think through. It's like oh, now this is kind of a problem.

05:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I also agree with that. Yep, that's yeah. So we, yeah. This is the weird year that we had two major milestones for a single feature update release. They did, of course, add some new features between the initial release, which is that Copilot plus PC release in June, although technically in May right, they finalized it in May, they put it on a computer, shipped it out in the world. This is a whole time it's like we're gonna, we're gonna take a recall out of there with a blunt instrument, like the guy getting a lobotomy and planet of the apes, and they did that. And then you get this weird day one update um, which we'll talk about a little bit more later in the show, because that weird day one update is also occurring on copilot plus pcs from amd and intel, right, interestingly well, and therein lies the other side of this is now that there are going to be other coplus, copilot plus pcs.

06:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and curiously, I literally earlier this morning recorded a show about windows update and copilot plus pcs. Interesting, do you mind me asking?

06:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
with whom uh?

06:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
aria aria hansen yeah okay, yeah, knee carly, she got married in June, yeah, but and it's not coming out until October. Sorry, I'm you know I'm always ahead, but she was pretty good about what can we talk about when it's publishing in October versus right now? Oh, that's interesting.

06:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know I wrote a little article about some of the top level features. Right, it's not much. It right it's not much, it's really not much. I mean, to me the biggest thing is when you right click on something, you get that menu.

07:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can see the names of cut, copy paste instead of some weird egyptian hieroglyphic that nobody understands. I'm gonna push back here on you on this. I think you need to set up a 23h2 machine, yeah, and actually do a 20, because you've been living in 24h2 for so long. I don't think I can see it anymore so that's actually fair.

07:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I, I, it's true is what it is. And the reason I said that is because, in my kind of guise as consumer advocate, I'm thinking of normal people like my, my wife, right, who would right click on something and then stare at that thing for 30 seconds, you know, before she thought to mouse over something, and you know she just doesn't think like this. Right, she's smart. She's arguably smarter than I am in fact, a lot of people tell me that fairly regularly but she would not understand that interface, does not understand that interface so my emotional reaction to the context menu is I right click, I curse because I can't find anything, and then go to the icons.

07:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, right, literally. You've now built in a right click curse into the system like is this the ux intent? Like, is this where you wanted to go? I swear at you constantly now, yeah, I, I do.

08:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do the same actions over and over again and I have the same bad results over and over again, right? So the big one from the original windows 11 was right click taskbar. Oh, there's no task manager. And then over time, that was I eventually learned. Yeah, and I know of other ways. Right, you know Windows key X you can see in the menu, whatever and so I learned one of those got used to it and then they put it back because they're screwing with me.

08:40
It's obvious that this is not 80% of Windows UI development is screw with Paul, but I, this summer, have been working on that programming project with WPF, which we'll discuss very briefly. I don't want to harp on this too, too much. But because I have to switch constantly between dark and light mode to make sure it looks right in both places, right, I, I actually wrote an app to just do that switch, because it's like three levels deep and I'm, you know, with this. It's like why is this so? Why is that so hard? It's weird to me anyway. So there's a lot of we we deal with a lot as windows users. I don't think that's too surprising, but yeah, but, oh. But what I wanted to say was, as far as like things maybe they're not talking about yet or whatever. I think the biggest and best improvements in 24-H2 are actually under the covers right Massive performance improvements for AMD-based systems, especially those new Zen 5 machines.

09:33
There's a new updating style which I'm sure that person talked about on your podcast, and we can all hear about where cumulative updates. It's really funny. This never occurred to me, but when you hear the notion of cumulative updates it sounds good. Right, you? We used to have a service packs, and service packs were good too. But then when you go a couple of years between service packs, that thing becomes humongous. And now we have, like these monthly cumulative updates. And so, because they're cumulative, no matter if you skip three months and you install a new one, you don't have to install the previous three, you just get the one and it's really nice until they wait two years to update the damn system, and then the cumulative updates get humongous. So now they have this differential cumulative update, which isn't the right name. But um, and you hear that and you go yeah, yeah, that's great, that's great, and I'm sure we'll find a problem on this and then 25H2 will fix that. Who knows, but it's this kind of never-ending series. But you are very much talking.

10:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The consumer update process like over on the biz side, with WSUS and so forth, we approach it differently. Oh yeah, yep, yep. And one of the conversations we had was separating the sort of cosmetic functionality updates from the security patches. There you sort of cosmetic functionality updates from the security patches where because often when I'm talking to admins they're like I need to tech support this thing, so I don't like it when the search box moves like that costs me money and tickets, so they do spend more time evaluating that where now we're seeing very much. When it comes to security patches, you shouldn't wait, you should just push them. The chances of being problematic are low not zero, but low.

11:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the risk is high, and now we're letting CrowdStrike handle that, so they're perfect. No worries there, oh boy.

11:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That might have come up in the conversation. Yeah, I bet no.

11:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like this decoupling of things, which one big example is the decoupling of UWP functionality from specific windows 10 versions, at the time coming out with the windows app SDK. You, you hear it and you say, yeah, right, I mean it should always be like this. And just from an updating perspective, a hundred percent, where you just said, yeah, we should those monthly security updates, so should this go out, and then as an administrator or it pro, whatever you have some decision-making to do on specific feature changes, sure Good.

11:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's good, and that's exactly when I'm sorry I'm burning up the whole show Cause I have a very cool show for today. It's just not Okay.

11:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we'll, we'll, we'll talk about it again. I this this stuff's important. So, yeah, I from from a high level perspective, especially since 22, 232, 24 h2 are, you know, functionally nearly identical, or are identical in some cases. Yeah, um, you know, a lot of people, I think, are going to upgrade to this thing and be like, uh, what's new? You know it's, it's, but a lot of it's reminding me that the 22 was an os update, 23 was a feature set like an enablement package right an enable package 24 is an os update, like an enabling package, right?

12:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
an enable package 24 is an os update. I'm talking to the lady who builds it, so I'm not going to argue with her. I'm not equipped. Yeah, right I was.

12:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to say based on how much time a brand new pc will sit there installing this thing.

12:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, yes, but also I think was totally derailed by arm.

12:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I sometimes, you know, look, we debate this recall thing, we go back and forth on that, but whatever happened happened and they, they look, you know, they had to kind of reach into it and say, all right, we got to pull stuff out. Here there's a bunch of leftover junk in the form of, you know, random registry keys that don't do anything, etc. Etc. That's windows. This is the mess. But I think the silver lining to that kind of thing is that Microsoft as an organization can look at this and say, look, we need to be able to do this kind of thing in a slightly more elegant fashion, maybe. So perhaps we're going to see some benefits from that.

13:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Feature flags by default. Boys, like you need it.

13:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You need default voice, like you need it. You need to be able to shut it off and not be yeah, so you know we'll all benefit in the end from that. That's good. Well, all right, not you. Not you as a windows home, 11 home user, but most of us, yeah, okay. So there's that. Um, yeah, nothing, nothing huge going on there. Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna skip past the pc thing real quick, just because my new hardware.

13:41
But okay, yeah well, because this just ties into what we were just talking about. So part of the confusion this year is that we have this Windows 11 feature update right Capital, f, capital U, yep Major version upgrade that has been delivered in two different milestones. From a sort of mainstream perspective, the only way most people would get it back in June would be buying a Snapdragon X PC, which Microsoft branded as a Copilot Plus PC, and added some several on-device hardware accelerated MPU-based AI functions, none of which were particularly compelling.

14:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, because the compelling one got pulled.

14:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The compelling one got pulled. It's surprising to me there wasn't more, frankly. But yep, that's what we have. Nothing has changed since then. There, we still don't have recall. But now AMD Zen 5 chips are out, the Intel Lunar Lake stuff is out. Those PCs are starting to appear in the world and one of the big questions we had all summer was like okay, but will these things be called co-pilot plus PCs? Will they be just AI PCs that get copilot plus PC functionality because they meet some kind of a spec? So we got that clarity at IFA a couple of weeks ago they will be called copilot plus PCs. They are not getting those features immediately. They're going to get them in November, like you said. Hilarious, so I can confirm and I knew this already. But now that I've gotten one as well, I saw this at the show. I think I told the story a couple of times. Someone at some place came over to me as I'm typing on a computer. I said what are you doing? Oh, just nothing. What do you mean? Nothing.

15:15
I didn't even talk. What do you mean? Just looking to see what was going on there. So 24H2 on all those computers. None of the CoPilot plus PC features. Those are coming later. And then I've gotten one, since We'll talk about that in a second. But yes, you get that day one Ubi update thing which takes 15, 20, maybe more minutes. It takes a while. They give you kind of a nice looking screen to kind of deal with while it's happening. But it's new.

15:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got gigabit Ethernet and SSDs and you're still going to take 20 minutes. That's something, yeah but in.

15:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So in looking, I guess the way to to kind of say this is that, like we said earlier, everyone will have the ability to get 24h2 by the end of october. Uh, that wants it or can get it, and then, you know, by the end of the year I think we're all going to be on the same page. So if you have a capable pc, you'll have the co-pilot plus pc stuff. We should have hopefully recall in preview by that point, and I'm sure next year will be nothing like this year and will totally make sense.

16:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everything will be fine, it's gonna be, everything will be fine. It's really gonna be fine. I'll tell you, I'll put a stake in the ground here and say this workstation, this video workstation, is due for a rebuild.

16:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, well, there you go. 24 h2 is the ideal time.

16:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's got some gen 11 hardware in it, yep, so so my goal will be to build by hand new chassis, a Copilot Plus.

16:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PC Nice, and do you know yet whether? Well, I guess you should wait and see how these things fall out.

16:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm going to see what motherboard I can lay my hands on.

16:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
When are you doing this and are you putting it on video the whole way through?

16:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And where can people?

16:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
he says suggestively like I want, and I want to see every step of this.

16:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm fine, I'm. I'll put the stake in this too. Then we will do it on discord. We'll do it for the twit club. All right, that's fine I'm not I'll have this camera.

16:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I got the other camera pointed down oh yes, the rig, you are speaking my language and you gotta understand. I'm very.

17:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
OCD about building machines. I've been building computers for 30-something years.

17:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think when one is OCD, you just end the sentence at OCD. So you would say I am very OCD period.

17:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we just leave it at that. And, to be clear, I'm abusing the term be very particular.

17:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's like saying I can make fun of polish people because I'm polish, I can make fun of are you because? No, but if I was I could, and if, okay, if I have ocd, I can make fun of ocd it's fine no, I'm just making fun of myself. I like my, my machines last a long time. I'm not. I'm not polish, thank god, right.

17:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I'm just kidding um I gotta go I um, you scared him yes, you're done, but you're gonna do it.

17:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're doing a desktop, so the choices you're going to have are going to be Arrow Lake on the Intel side, which is the desktop, class H, whatever series chips, and then I can't remember the AMD Zen 5. It's like probably an AI. I think I want to say 9000 or something. The AI 300 is the laptop, and then I can't remember the numbering for the desktop. But you'll have some choice there. So it'll be interesting to see where those fall.

18:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and that's the whole thing. I have no idea when I'm going to do this. I know this machine should be rebuilt. It's getting to about that point. School's going back in, so most likely I'm going to take all this old hardware and help a student who needs a machine build their own machine from those older parts. It's a great way to repurpose it. It makes me super happy. We just replaced all the spinning, all the fans, power supply, all that stuff gets replaced. New drive in a new chassis, but the motherboard, chipset processor, all that will just stay together.

18:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have to say, Richard, I wrote up an article, one in a series of articles. I could just title these things Paul's AI Confusion 2024, but yeah, the latest one, though. I went back to the original Microsoft announcements from May about Pilot Plus PC, just to kind of see how the language went. I pulled that blog post today.

18:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I thought okay, well, I thought of you, I thought of Lee Zepatico.

19:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, interesting. So I was thinking of you when I wrote, I quoted this and I literally I was looking forward to reading this to you now, because I don't really remember this. But when they announced that Copilot plus PC was going to be Snapdragon X based for the first wave, right as I called it, they did say in the future, we will see devices based on these new amd and intel silicon chips, right, um. However, beyond that, this is the part that I I blocked this. I didn't, I don't, you didn't block it out, it wasn't important well, it isn't well.

19:34
When you hear it, you're going to say, okay, actually this is important because you've been kind of complaining about this thing yourself all year. In the future, we expect to see devices with this new amd and intel silicon paired with powerful graphics cards like nvidia geforce rtx and amd radeon, bringing co-pilot plus pc experiences to an even even broader audiences, including advanced gamers and creators. Yeah, so yeah, and this, this is this ties into this orchestrated thing that I've been talking about, um, where I believe I I think that microsoft has moved so quickly on AI that there are parts of the company that just can't keep up, and one of them is Windows. It's Windows that should be able to handle that orchestration of where AI tasks are run, and it will. This is the hardware abstraction layer. What kind of hardware do we have? Oh, at MPU Good, those things work great and that will dynamic.

20:25
You know, this is the hardware abstraction layer. What kind of hardware do we have? Oh, an MPU Good, those things work great. On that, we'll use that. But if you don't have that, well, you have this honking GPU perhaps, or whatever it might be. We'll run them on that and that may be. Someday, this will even extend to the hybrid AI stuff, where obviously some tasks are just better done or only done in the cloud, right? Yep, so I think we're going to get there. But, like I said, I read that and I said man, this is what Rich has been asking for and interestingly, they mentioned it in the throwaway line at the bottom of a blog post Ages ago. Yeah, that no one was going to see, and if I saw it, I forgot it.

20:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But there it is, there it actually is, and I totally agree that's going to have to be the mix. The other part of this, as an old hardware driver guy too, is what's the ODBC for the NPUs? What have I got to do to run these, and what if I have different chipsets? They've got to make sure that abstraction makes sense, and I haven't gotten good answers there either.

21:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that's pretty down in the weeds for most folks. I also believe that NET would be an excellent choice as an orchestrator for this kind of behavior.

21:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, without a doubt. Yeah, this is what having a runtime does for you, yep.

21:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'm kind of looking. Every time there's an announcement from that group, I look at it. You know, hmm, is there anything in there? Because they have their set of functionality they're doing for Nine and it is what it is their and they've got their libraries, like mlnet right.

21:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like you got to tell me, mlnet automatically runs on an mpu. And then the question is how are you doing that like, how do you invoke the hardware you don't own? That should run over here.

21:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that that's to me, is an excellent function for the dot net runtime. I I hope that that's how that works.

22:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and if you look at it from a GPU perspective, it's been things like DirectX right, and DirectX was a workaround for the fact that Windows didn't cope with it, although since Vista it has.

22:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which, if I'm not mistaken, that work actually came out of DirectX right, so it kind of made a virtual cycle type of. Thing.

22:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, okay, it went through a few different phases. Yeah, I'm not looking for straight lines, I'm just looking for destinations.

22:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, there's a whole thing going on here where Microsoft is trying to A raise its own profile because they're doing the AI stuff.

22:39
They want to lower costs and one of the many strategies they have for that is get as much as they can off of the cloud. Unfortunately, the offerings they've put on the client so far haven't been particularly compelling, but there will be third-party solutions in the form of creator apps like video editors et cetera, that I think will benefit greatly. But yeah, I mean, eventually we're going to get past those kind of premium ultra-thin laptops and that we don't call Ultrabooks anymore for some reason, even though it's a great name, and we're going to have to start hitting these other foreign factors. And you know, christian Amann and the other guys at Qualcomm have alluded to this or even stated it explicitly. But you know, here, in that Microsoft quote, you can see the beginnings of. You know, this is the thing we've been talking about, which is AI PCs or co-pilot plus PCs will just be PCs, and PCs broadly right, not just one class of PC, but whatever types including this desktop thing you're going to make.

23:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the same push going back to the 2000s with getting GPUs, right, yep, that everybody needs a GPU. We will emulate the GPU with a CPU, but it'll be horrible, right, and now everybody has GPUs. Heck, they're on the mother.

23:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was the. I mean aside from all the drama leading up to the release of Windows Vista, and there were complaints about compatibility, I know, but the big thing really and the drivers were a catastrophe. Yep, was this Aero Basic UI that they would give you if you didn't have a graphics card which a lot of people didn't at the time that could handle aero glass. And eventually intel got there with their integrated graphics, where it's just okay, but forced to buy a new computer. That made people upset.

24:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the cycle you know so, and here we are again yep, yep, same thing.

24:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, we'll get there, we'll get there. Uh, it's not going to help pc sales this year from all the indicators I've seen, but I don't know.

24:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I guess one, two percent growth is still growth I'm having this conversation with system ends right now, where they're like I don't feel like I want to buy this generation of machines because I need to keep them for five years and maybe the first gen isn't the time to buy. It's not the one right. It's like should I stretch another year by a lower end machine for this wave and then next year's wave, maybe something better?

24:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
or write it out with, you know, windows 10 extended support maybe, or there's, you know, there's different options, I guess.

24:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, no we. But reality is it's this time next year, right, that we have to start talking about extended support. So everybody's planning right now what their orders are for next year.

24:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hope they I mean they have one year left. If they're on 10, um yeah but this is where you're literally.

25:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the budget. Here's where how we're allocating what we're going to turn.

25:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A lot of people believe this was going to be the year for that upgrade cycle.

25:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Believe me, I'm still not convinced that that day doesn't slip again Right, Like I'm really not.

25:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, yeah, I agree with you on the first gen of anything is a dicey proposition. If you bought into the first gen AI PC, you would have gotten a media like PC with an MPU that can only run some of Windows Studio effects and nothing else.

25:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, Well said, the guy with the Studio 2. Yeah, we didn't know.

25:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We didn't know Spent a lot of money. Well, this is part of the problem with how fast things have moved. I don't think Microsoft knew Microsoft made that computer. I I don't think that they they've never been so far on the leading edge that they left people behind.

25:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they usually on the other side of that right I mean, well, so face it, if I had way, I bought, I got the machine last october. Yeah, if it would only be now really that I would be getting a different machine right. I mean theory. I could have ordered one in june, but you know that would have been a tough daily driver, yep, yep. So I'm not. I wasn't wrong that it was time to replace that machine. Like it's going to be fine, but next year is going to be tricky, yep right, yeah, yeah, we'll see.

26:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, you know, am or uh. Yeah, intel and and AMD both have these slightly elevated top scores compared to Snapdragon. Snapdragon V2 is coming out and we'll see where everything goes. I don't anticipate and I pray to God we don't see, you know, next year it's like top scores in the 60s or 70s then goes up to 100.

26:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like can we just keep it here for a while? I have heard noises that the that the 40 number is going to stay for another couple years yeah, that will be faster, but that the coding, but the actual spec will stay the same.

26:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That makes sense. To me, I to me, the only real question is whether there's a v2 spec or if we just move on, you know, and say, look, we don't even need this anymore, this is a pc you know, yeah, no, I think.

27:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think we're a of years from that yet, but that was the same when we were getting into GPUs, yep, right. So it takes time to get into the pipeline to the point where every motherboard has it and then you have a better one. If you need a better one, yeah, the same way, every motherboard has a video card on it now, which is not a great one, and if you want a great one, then you tie up a PCIe slot.

27:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go.

27:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

27:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, well, it took a long time. I mean, depending on where you were in life, you know, hardware accelerated graphics either meant, you know, quake in 1996, maybe it meant windows Vista a decade later, right, certainly by the time windows seven came out, that was just a common component. I mean, windows seven did, of course, have an arrow basic mode as well, but I would say by that year whatever 2009, 2010, I think that the shift had occurred. I mean, how long did the shift 32-bit to 64-bit take, right? The first 64-bit version of Windows Client probably came out in 2003, 2004, something like that, on XP, and then Vista 7, 8, I almost said 9, and 10 were all 32 and 64. So it wasn't until Windows 11 in 2020, right, 2021, whatever year that was that we were only 64-bit.

28:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So there's your God, that's 20 years, 20 years, yeah Well, and you think back to. You said hardware extraction layer and I immediately thought to alpha MIPS and PowerPC right which ended in 2000.

28:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It also ended in tears. But yeah, yep, yeah, I mean right. I mean the 90s were all about, well, what we now think of as alternate platforms. I guess it's possible any of them could have taken off, but that didn't happen. Okay, any of them could have taken off, but that didn't happen. Okay, so I did get the first, my first review unit. It's a Zen 5 machine. So this is the HP Omnibook Ultra. So it kind of sits at the top of their consumer line for portables. It's a not particularly compelling looking device. It's got pretty big bezels, it's kind of chunky, it's kind of heavy. It's a not particularly compelling looking device. It's got pretty big bezels, it's kind of chunky, it's kind of heavy, it's gray. You know it's not. It's not. It's not a like a dragonfly type of thing that's going to, you know, call out and be like, oh, look at this thing, it's awesome, okay.

29:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like, it's like a muslin laptop, right yeah, you make your sample suit from.

29:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, uh, right, if you don't want to be noticed on the plane, there you go. Um, you know you whip this thing up, but the thing is it does have this zen you know zen 5 thing going on and a really high-end chip as well. So 32 gigs of ram, uh, two terabytes of ssd storage you know, so it's a sleeper.

29:38
Yeah, yeah, and actually I kind of respect that, right, that's my kind of thing. So, um it broad, it's really good. I only got it, I guess, technically yesterday, right? So I don't have a lot of data and it's not fair for me to say this, but I'm going to. I woke up this morning and I opened the lid and it did not turn on. So, for example, it looks like the battery life is going to be very good. I don't know, I can't.

30:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's up with that corner cut though?

30:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so this is something that dates back to the Spectre X360s, right, which will be renamed. So the next gen Spectre X360 will be the machine under this and so like an Omnibook X Flip, I think, is the nomenclature now instead of X360. But the theory at the time was they had gone to a really sharp edged kind of design style which looked good but could also be a little tough on the you know, the wrists and stuff. And then someone at HP had the idea you know, we've got these sharp corners in the back, why don't we chop them off? We could put a USB port there, right, right.

30:46
So there was a gen or two where the other side had the power button and that side had one of the USB-C ports. And that way it kind of slightly obviates one of the complaints when you have all the USB on one side, which is, if you're right-handed, that's where all the cables are coming off, so you're charging it, and now you can't. You know it's in the way. So it gets it out of the way by angling it out the back. So I like that. But goofily, the other side, the one you can't kind of see right there, there's nothing there, it's just an angle. It's like an angled just chopped off the corner there. So I kind of wish that they had put something there.

31:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They put the power button there.

31:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So when you go to reach for your USB key and grab it the wrong way, you sleep the machine. Yeah, exactly right, right, so anyway, it's, it's okay, um, but yeah, the performance on this thing is fantastic and I I am also concurrently looking at a uh, it's a meteor lake u series, which is garbage, and um, I did the same thing two mornings in a row but on the two different computers. I think the first one is still working on it and the amd one was like done and it's like this big visual studio thing and it was like really nice. Um, I've loaded up a bunch of games. Those all run fantastically, um, and so this is another.

31:53
You know, this is an advance over that little uh laptop we talked about probably last month. Yeah, as far as the graphical um quality of it or performance, it's really good. So, yeah, it's. This is the, this is the, the double-edged sword of the pc industry. We get all this choice and you can kind of optimize for what's most important to you. I, I based on ryan shroud and others. I talked to it ifa or ifa, whatever it's called. Ifa, uh, intel and amd aren't going to have quite the efficiency, battery life of uh snapdragon, but they're going to be in the ballpark.

32:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

32:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But they are going to have the performance and they're going to have the compatibility, of course, the 100% compatibility.

32:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll leak another word from Aria, which she says she's running on a Snapdragon machine. She says I have to work for a full eight-hour day without my power bar, without my power supply, and in teams almost the whole day. Right, and the battery made it.

32:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and that stuff's good because a lot of teams will run off the MPU.

32:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I bet for the video stuff at least A lot of teams just runs in Electron and sucks down the power of everybody's news.

32:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's true. It's better than it was. I don't know.

33:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you talk about meaningful thresholds right, a meaningful threshold is I. I worked a day without my power brick yeah, oh, that's a meaningful threshold.

33:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I agree 100. Yep, yeah, the uh, you know it's, it's still, you know, not quite macbook air, uh, yeah territory. But in the ballpark, as I say, say now, yeah, it's there.

33:26
We'll see with this one. I think it's going to be. It's been a day right Again, I can't really say it does have Windows Hello. Ess, this is the more advanced form of Windows Hello required for recall. But also this emerging spec that's sort of like TPM chips back when Longhorn and then Vista was happening were sort of like tpm chips. Uh, back when longhorn and then vista was happening were sort of you know, unusual and they were that another thing that took a while to come in. But now all pcs have these things, we have secure boot etc. Yeah, um, something.

33:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think that's just going to transform the security landscape for the pc well, I think it's one of the strengths of windows arm, like if I again and my min role talking to these guys, it's like you know how we have a wrestling match about TPM and all that. You know what. You don't have a wrestling match on Pluton. You don't have a choice. They only come one way. Yes.

34:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Although I don't know enough about this to speak intelligently to it. But Intel, if you watch that presentation I referenced a bunch last time talked about how they also put their own thing on there. So it's Pluton and Intel, something, something, and it's like guys, seriously, but I God love them, they're trying, I don't know, but yeah, this is, you know, microsoft's like look, we're going to push this thing through. It got some pickup before this, but now, with Copilot plus PC, it's a requirement and it's and it's part of that broader windows, hello, ess, the, the underlying security compliance stuff that I think is so important. So, um, good anyway.

34:53
So I'll, I'll, I'll check in again on I'm going to, we're going to Mexico in about two weeks and, uh, with a stop in Dallas on the way. But I, um, this will be one of the computers I bring with me and, um, we'll see. I hope I have high hopes, but you know realistic expectations, I guess. Um, we haven't actually talked about this one in a while, but 2024 especially, but I would say even since the release of 23h2, so maybe from september last year on, so for one year has possibly been the biggest year ever, or biggest 12-month span ever for Microsoft, deprecating features in Windows and it's actually been a few months that we've seen anything major. It's certainly been a few months since I've written about it, but they just announced the other day kind of a sweeping set of legacy DRM services which all date back to ServerLite Windows 7. Wow, the classic Windows media player probably those play for sure type, you know services we would have had back in that era are all being deprecated then 2009, 2010.

35:57
Yeah, yeah, some of this I'm sure is even earlier than that, really, but but, yeah, I mean. So, some of the stuff that's a little more um, uh, well known, I guess it's been deprecated, like the steps recorder. Uh, wordpad is one people often point to, but there's been some underlying stuff to ntlm direct access, which dates back to windows server 2003, part two or whatever that was called, or, yeah, I think, um, you know, stuff like that has all also been deprecated in the past year, and I like to see microsoft be a little more aggressive on this stuff. This is, uh, something they've not always done particularly well, so that's nice to see. And then I didn't, just didn't know where to stick this, so to speak, also the name of my no and uh, and I clicked I guess I clicked on the wrong link there too, but I have the wrong link.

36:47
But Android 15 has been finalized. Google does quarterly feature drops on Pixel, so you'll see that, like I do, and then they release interim Android capabilities as well, on whatever basis, and one of those is going to be this windowing capability in Android 15 post-launch. So if you have a tablet, you'll be able to do what you can do now on Chrome OS, which is determine whether an app is run full screen or windowed and if it's windowed, whether it's Snap side-by-side or if you can stretch it out and arbitrarily resize them. Android's a little bit the Wild West when it comes to that kind of capability, unfortunately, but because of folding devices, because of tablets, especially Pixel tablets, actually, google's been trying to push this for the past few years and it's getting better. So it's not perfect, but they're starting to do more of that. So that's kind of interesting.

37:46
I just this is kind of a you know, because we have these capabilities in Windows that we probably don't think too much about. But you know, mac the latest version of Mac OS just added a Snap-like capability. Chrome OS literally just added a Snap-like capability. Android is getting this windowing and basic side-by-side not real Snap, but basic side-by-side not real Snap, but basic side-by-side capability. That took a long time. I mean, this stuff has been in Windows since. I mean some of it's Windows 8, even Windows 7, I think yeah sure, the good stuff didn't happen until, probably, windows 11.

38:19
We have Snap Roops and Snap Layouts and all that stuff now, so it's still more sophisticated. But these competing platforms are starting to wake up, I guess, and get there. So that's happening.

38:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's cool, though, that's a good thing?

38:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think so. All right, that's it for Windows. Micah, where are we?

38:40 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, my phone is phoning. It is time for us to take a quick break. My little shortcut buttons weren't working. I'm sitting, m m, m m and I was just typing m's into the chat room. Uh, so I'm here now and I want to tell you about better help. Who are bringing you this episode of windows weekly? We were just talking about therapy.

38:58
Um, let me ask you a question what's something that you would love to learn? Is it gardening, maybe? Or a new language? Or maybe how to finally beat your best friend in bowling? Certainly, for me, that's one of them. It seems like every time I roll that ball, it's just a random thing each time. Sometimes I do very well, sometimes I don't.

39:17
Anyway, as an adult, the question is if you make time to learn new things as often as you'd like, or was that something that you lost in childhood? Kids are always learning and growing they're like sponges but as adults, sometimes we lose that curiosity. Therapy can help you reconnect with that sense of wonder, because your back-to-school era can come at any age. I have, in the past, made use of online therapy. I've talked about that plenty on the show that that is my means of getting therapy, and it's always been a very helpful thing. Going in person can sometimes mean getting stuck with a person who doesn't quite line up with what you're looking for, and being able to easily move on to a new provider that is better for you is. It's very freeing and it makes the experience better because you are matched with someone who, as the kids say, matches your vibe, and I think that's one of the great benefits of something like BetterHelp.

40:24
If you're thinking of starting therapy, why not give BetterHelp a try? It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. That's another big thing. You may have a 9-to-5 or an 8-to-8. Who knows? And so finding some time to actually meet with a therapist that's on your schedule is great too. You fill out a brief questionnaire that'll get you matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Rediscover your curiosity with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelpcom slash windows today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp H-E-L-P dot com slash windows. All righty, we are back from the break, and that means it is time to talk about Microsoft 365.

41:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know we make New Year's resolutions. I have made an episode resolution that I'm going to correctly unmute myself every time we come out of the ad. So far, so good. One for one, that's all I'm saying I'm very proud of you.

41:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're sticking to those resolutions.

41:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Pretty sure you were unmuted while you were pouring the water. God damn it. It's okay.

41:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's okay I wasn't going to do all the touching to it. Well, I.

41:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I, I, I unmuted it early, realized I had done that and then remuted and re unmuted. So so yeah, I can't the stuff that happens during the ad. That was not part of the resolution.

41:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That wasn't your territory, that was on me.

41:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can only control so much here, sorry. So, richard, I'm hoping you know more about this than I do, because I spent yesterday in a well, I guess, state of confusion is kind of my new thing. But Microsoft announced what they had referred to previously and I think maybe during the event as well or virtual event as the wave two of co-pilot innovation Right before they went out with this, slack showed up and said hey, look at me, look at me, we have stuff too, slack, right. So Slack already has some basic AI capabilities. Slack has an app model similar to Microsoft Teams, probably not as sophisticated I don't know or care, frankly, but there's something in there and I don't know.

42:44
Half an hour, I think, before the Microsoft thing went live. Wow, they're like hey, we're going to have this new thing, we're integrating with third parties. So it kind of sits somewhere between like a true Slack based app and then a firstparty AI service. But we're working with companies like Adobe and others to create what we're calling a term Microsoft had used for years and years until they came up with Copilot agents right, ai agents that will act on your behalf, and these things can work off of your company's data, they can work internally, et cetera, et cetera. You're like, okay, nice. And then Microsoft, 30 minutes, came out and said hey, remember, we used to call those things custom, or, yeah, custom GPTs or custom co-pilots. Yeah, we're going to call them agents again, just kidding.

43:29
So they're all agents and, honestly, in the same way that co-pilot terms yeah, it's a pretty good term, it's, it's one, if you're in the microsoft space, uh, agent bought, I guess these are, you know, kind of go back and forth a little bit, but it's, uh, it feels familiar, I guess, um, the the two things that struck me about these announcements, these were, these were all for the business end, right, so it's not really my purview per se, but a lot of this is going to come to Copilot Pro on the consumer side, et cetera, et cetera, although they did strip away that custom GPT capability remember that used to be there earlier this year.

44:09
So, lots of stuff, right, this is the ongoing theme with Microsoft and AI. It's like, ugh, lots of stuff. This is the ongoing theme with Microsoft and AI. It's like, you know, like lots of stuff, but it also seems slightly less dramatic, by which I mean you kind of go through the list of what they did and you're like, yeah, okay, like you know, like this, just, you know, it's almost like they got the message from Apple and they're like, you know, maybe we need to be a little more pragmatic here, you know? So do you have any?

44:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do. Coincidentally, last week I was running my next gen AI conference, so I had Eric Boyd, who's the CPP in charge of AI experience for Microsoft, as a keynote and he dug directly into that. In fact, he brought one of his senior engineers along and they were demonstrating some of these more advanced what they called agenic systems.

45:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry, did you say hygienic, agenic, agenic.

45:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Agents Not eugenic. No, not eugenic, which is a little entirely true, but they used the term agenic system. Okay, I mean, the funny thing is everybody I've talked to who's trying to get a GPT to deploy is effectively building this themselves, because they're constantly struggling with quality prompts and quality responses. They are building a test harness around that so that they now evaluate the response to do it again and when they walk through this whole experience, what they call maker checker patterns, yeah, so what's happened with the shift in the tooling now is to sort of describe the policies of the company, like, hey, we make equipment for warfare, so we're going to use these terms you would normally squash, or you know that that kind of stuff, along with, uh, the idea of stimuli being not just a a handwritten or typed in prompt, but might be an incoming email or some other event in the system kicking off one of these agentic systems that then does a generation cycle, checks it, modifies it and iterates X many times. This is actually a threshold.

46:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Common app model Really.

46:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean just applied to that weird at all, except that it's your.

46:26
What you're doing is you're coping with this non-deterministic behavior of these machine learning models, like I've done a bunch of shows on the run outside, we're just talking with the old school machine learning models.

46:37
I've done a bunch of shows on the run-out side where, just talking with the old school machine learning folks that says you test, you test, you test, you test and then you deploy, right. But it's this point of we test to the point of consistency, of reliability. We don't worry about testing once it's in the field. And this approach seems to admit that as long as you're using this software, it's self-testing, it's constantly reevaluating itself and running again so that it can tolerate ongoing change. So, uh, bikino was an hour long like, but a lot of that was the preamble of here's how we positioned ourself and so forth. But really that last 10 minutes which was all about the tuning of the prompts and managing jailbreaking and applying company policy so that now you can use this automated iterative method which and I got to think the the person that was in the audience that's way down this path, building around, just went.

47:32
Ah, wasted so much time.

47:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this is the AI, is the grenade in the room, you know, because before, I don't know, february 2023, I guess that is how Microsoft used to talk about these things. It was ML, it was bots, it was, you know, and you would sit through keynotes at whatever event and say, yeah, okay. I mean yeah, Okay, and it wasn't particularly exciting, but they, you know, they, they came out really strong, too strong maybe in some ways.

47:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and it speaks to the tooling. They've literally rethought the architecture, and so tooling's been rethought too. Product names have changed again, I know, so yeah.

48:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was worried they were going to change the name of Copilot, although I guess, technically Microsoft 365 Copilot, they've gone back to that original name, right, it's supposed to be Copilot for M365. Yeah, yeah, it's just as silly, but it's funny though. If you look at the individual, like just the Office apps, you know, aside from Agent Builder, a way to create these experiences, right, which, whatever kind of a dev type capability. If you look at what they were adding to Word, excel, powerpoint, you know the classic, whatever teams, outlook, et cetera, it you might be forgiven for wondering, was this already there? Like, how is this new? You know, um, all of them have like these abilities to summarize everything, right, so if you have, um, you know meetings, know meetings or emails, yep, we're going to summarize that stuff. Um, uh, copilot for excel is generally available. If you go back to the beginning of copilot for microsoft 365, which I guess technically was about a year, almost a year ago, right, seems, seems like a million years ago, that was the one that wasn't kind of in stable yet, but now it is um. And then, yeah, just across the main apps, that the one that has always been the most compelling to me, the one that has always spoken to.

49:22
What I think of as like the personal microsoft graph for individuals is the co-pilot in one drive, right, right, the ability to have this thing. Assume it's going to take a while, like indexing a drive or something. Examine the content in your one drive and then use that as the grounding for future prompts about whatever topic. Right, because in my case I have decades and decades of work archives in there, everything I've written, books, you know, um, I, I often struggle to find my own content, right, whether it's on the web or in my own archives, and and to me it would be really neat to, um, I can't, this is one I can't wait to see.

50:02
So this is now available, but in the business sense. So I gotta, I gotta figure this one out. But, uh, um, but it does exactly what you want. Natural language prompt, summarize, you know, find files. Yes, right, Thank you. So that's the one I'm excited about. But I don't know the stuff that helps you write, the stuff that helps you make a powerpoint presentation. I get it, I mean, and I, I appreciate it. I think those kind of helper things are probably how this stuff is really going to be defined, but I'm looking for something a little more profound you know, I'll give him this.

50:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He brought an engineer who coded on the fly, in fact, yeah, across the keynotes. Well, what's the complaint with these ai technologies? All of this is smoke and mirrors. It isn't real. That's right, and so I think they're listening enough to go no, we're, we're going to show you how we do it and what we're doing.

50:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's something they lost at their developer. Show up through build probably 20 2005 I think live coding demos on stage. You know they became well because you also they can you can crash and burn too, right? Yep, I know, but that shows a certain confidence I love and they and that that audience loves, and you know. After that there were still live parts to it, but they were really just copy and paste, like flex the code, and it was like guys, come on.

51:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know if you've ever been in backstage of like a build or an ignite or tech, they, they, ever since the famous bill gates blue screen right they have always they've always had a mirror, so there's another person doing the same demo at the same time. That can be cut over to instantly, right, right, and I've been there when they cut over, like where, the, where the demo was imploding, yeah, flip, and it was so quick, unless you were watching for it, you wouldn't even know.

51:45
Nice, but yeah, I mean it's what makes those freaking keynotes so expensive, like, literally, you're duplicating everything, duplicating all the staff, right, and they, you know they're that heavily scripted, which is the opposite of real right, yep. But I'm also very conscious. I mean not my keynotes, but when you think about building a Nike keynote. Those things are for shareholders, they're not for customers.

52:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, well, yeah right. New cycle driving interest driving investors yeah, of course.

52:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think purely that's why they seem so bizarre because they're for shareholders.

52:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the complaint about Apple. Like on their opening developer show, they'll have, like this consumer keynote and everyone's like what are you doing? Like this is a developer show and it's like you know who doesn't care about developers guys, investors. So you know, no offense.

52:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll have your developer keynote tomorrow or later today, whatever it is, but you know we got to do the dog and pony thing and that's the thing is. I like a day two keynote where you can, you know, have somebody doing a little code, admittedly with plenty of guardrails and in sessions, I think you should fly without a hat as much as possible it's what's fun and heck. Recovering from failure is 10 times more interesting anyway, I live for those moments.

52:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I once forgot to turn off my phone. My phone rang. I looked at it and I said I'm sorry I got to take this. You know, like you know, obviously, I'm in the middle of giving a talk.

53:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was like two builds ago where Hanselman had a handheld mic for some reason and he was trying to type with one hand and Scott Guthrie walked out on stage, took the mic from him and held him and then looked at him and said I'm trying to provide value here, I love it. And wrecked the room Like it's what everybody remembers from that keynote. Now is that moment where you know the boss of all things shows up to hold the mic.

53:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Plus the fact that I just upstaged you is like you know, frosting on the cake here, hilarious yeah is like, uh, you know, frosting on the cake here, hilarious yeah, really awesome. What people will remember from your talk was right, so that's a in the microsoft space, that's a win, you know, especially when you're talking about a scott hanselman who's like everybody's favorite keynoter these days. Yeah, which is interesting because he's uh, he's a character that guy uh speaking of him real quick, I just um his.

53:52
He has a podcast, uh hansel minutes, and he has an interview with a guy from Qualcomm about the ARM hardware and all that stuff. It's not very long, it's probably less than 30 minutes. Totally worth listening to. I kind of cherry pick his shows, but that's a good one. Recommend that, okay, so.

54:08
Yeah, so we're not giving this Microsoft 365 call pilot stuff enough space, frankly, but there's almost too much going on there and I'll probably spend a lot more time on it when we see what, if any of this comes down to consumers. It's worth looking into. There's a ton of it. But on the flip side of this world, microsoft also makes what they I think they still refer to as the perpetual licensed versions of Office, and the latest version is now available for businesses. Long-term servicing channel LCSE 2024.

54:45
You know, if you're kind of a Luddite or you have a specific need, you know a computer that can't be connected to the internet or needs to be on a PC that's unchanged for several years, whatever it might be, they don't want customers using this, but they see the demand, so they make these things so every unchanged for several years, whatever it might be, they don't want customers using this, but they see the demand so they make these things. So every three, four years, whatever it is, they come out with a new version. I think 2016, 2019, and now 2024. So that's been the kind of cadence there. If you follow along with Microsoft 365 and all the new features, all the new features are going to be like blast from the past, like the new features are going to be like blast from the past, like the new default theme that we've been using for three, five years. Whatever is one of the major new features in this thing? You know some accessibility tools you can like comments and replies and documents that you're collaborating on with others, dynamic array support and charge for Excel. It's like Excel now supports floating point math.

55:33
You know it's like it's it's stuff from the past, but that's the point, right, you've got this thing. That's kind of fixed in time. It's not going to change. It comes with very little in the way of new and many things that are not included. Like you know, the storage, uh, the co-pilot compatibility can't use that with that um, etc. But oh, and, multi-pc licensing is not available, right. So you, you put it on a PC or a Mac if you get that version and that's where it stays right. They're purposely limiting it. There will be versions for consumers in the coming weeks, so those aren't available yet, but if you are a commercial customer you can get that now.

56:13
And I somehow don't have a link on this next article, but let me see if it's still in the cache here. There it is. So Microsoft last month, I think it was was talking about how they were going to have a security summit with CrowdStrike and others in the industry with the goal of Racinevic was running it right. Oh, that I don't know. That's interesting. Um, uh, yeah, they want the industry to kind of agree on how we're going to move forward and not put everything in kernel mode start using the apis they provided you yeah, so I just love that staged photo.

56:48
Yeah, here's the thing hilarious first of all, I was told there was not a tarp in the room, so if you stepped in and you were like the guy from crowd strike, you didn't have anything to worry about there. That's important. That's important, that's good, just for being certain you're going to be okay. But Microsoft put on a kind of a positive face to this. If you read this carefully, you'll see two things. One is that they didn't really agree on anything other than changes need to be made.

57:15
If you read the quotes from some of the people from the companies who were there, some of them are almost negative, right. So the ESET quote is the most interesting to me, because that quote is not actually attributed to a human being, it's just an ESET quote. The other ones all have a person attached to them, but it says you know, we support modifications to Windows to demonstrate measurable improvements to stability, on the condition that any change must not weaken security, affect performance or limit the choice of cyber security solutions. What that means is we don't want Microsoft to do what they usually do and just give it self-capabilities that we can't have.

57:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, which I think is very fair. Right, it's like it's fair, but-.

57:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Follow your own rules. Okay so, but it goes on. So I'm sorry, sorry to interrupt, but it remains imperative that kernel access remains an option for use by cybersecurity products to allow mobile carriers. I know that's the problem. So, david Weston, who I don't recall I don't think I've met him personally, but I do. I like the guy in kind of a remote way. He seems like a plain target to me. I maybe I'm uh, positive discussions, blah, blah, blah. But you know, even he sort of talked about look, we have these plans, we have ideas. I think Microsoft would, and the industry maybe vaguely would, like to move past this type of issue. But it may be just the way Windows is architected, it may not be, I don't know, we'll see.

58:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the whole problem is here as long as be. I don't know, we'll see. Well, the whole problem is here as long as you have that option. Yeah, you know, this is something that linux pushed really hard on. It's like the only thing in the kernel is kernel code kids, that's all. There is yep, and microsoft would have to be adherent to that but Well, listen, here's the problem.

59:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This just came up randomly, but it was as far ago as I believe it was NT 4.0. In fact it was. It was NT 4.0. They sort of compromised on that position that long ago. It was 30 years ago. Yeah, sure, because NT was big and heavy and slow compared to mainstream Windows on X86 hardware. So they were looking at ways to speed it up on x86 hardware.

59:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so they were looking at ways to speed it up and one of the best ways they could find was to put the graphics subsystem in the kernel, in the kernel, yeah, and then that's one of the things that bit us in vista, yep uh, so you know, we've been kind of threading that needle ever since windows was windows I guess and the debate every time is well, the machines are more performant, we don't need that, we can afford the performance.

59:52
Hit now because we're that fast, right, yeah, quite reliably I would. And in the midst of the crowd strike thing this all seemed very doable. But now, what? A month or so on, people are past it, right, you know folks in the discord are commenting on that text, saying this sounds like gobbledygook, because it is right, they made the happy noises they need to be that have to say you know, we, we think security is really important. I think there's no intent to change anything, not a chance.

01:00:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I have to wrestle with my inner cynical being. But yeah, I 100% agree with that.

01:00:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I mean it's not like Microsoft doesn't have security initiatives going. Sfi is going full swing and it seems to primarily be impacting the folks that build demo apps for out in the world, where they need to get secure identities right and all of that sort of thing. So it's not like there aren't security initiatives going on. But this pushing stuff out of the kernel mode it's not the priority. It should be done, but there's not a crowd strike every week.

01:01:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're going to think I'm joking when I say this, but it's possible. It sounds naive, even as it comes out of my brain, that AI could help solve this problem in a sense. I mean, I think one of the big pushes for kernel mode is just this ability to act as quickly as possible, yep, uh, by analyzing signals and and and you know, going after it. Um, it seems like ai maybe is good at that, and I think, maybe, maybe, something something I don't know.

01:01:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. I mean, we don't look at these new large language models as performant technology.

01:01:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, that's true it's really not yeah, I want to run in my kernel well, if you had an mpu on your server, it could go right. I know, I'm sorry, I know, even, like I said, even as it did, even as it was forming as ideas in my brain, I was fighting it um you know, I arguably the best way to secure windows might be to abandon the windows kernel and make windows a shell over linux you, sir, are a heretic and I will see that you're burned at the stake for that.

01:02:01
No, um, yeah, I mean that's. That's come up a lot too right over the years.

01:02:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean I'm not saying anything original here. Like that's an approach. It would also address the issues with networking. Like there's a bunch of solves here and for the most part it doesn't matter anymore. Coding makes coding wise. You know, we deployed a linux on the cloud for a reason. It saves 20 to 30 percent. That's right, like there's no two ways about it.

01:02:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yep yep, and to your point earlier about just processes, computers being so fast now that it kind of obviates a lot of the old complaints. I always think back to the complaints about managed environments like java or dot net and you know the early 2000s. One of the big complaints there was the same thing. It was just like look you're, you're sucking up cycles here with this runtime, yeah, but today, so whatever runtime, whatever it is that you know, we tolerate electron there you go.

01:02:52
Because it's tolerated, compatibility of it you don't rely on it.

01:02:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's everywhere, you know and it's a beast. Yeah, but you know what? Because, in the end, what's more important is reliability and consistency.

01:03:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'll go slower to work more reliably yeah, and and the the slower that we're talking about is not even perceivably slower, is the point I mean, yeah, you know, so that's a, that's a, that's a showstopper right there. Anyway, no, so we'll see, we'll see. I've lost my. I'll train a thought, richard, thank you. So what are we doing here? Oh yeah, so just Apple. We talked about Apple last week. That stuff's happened. The iPhones are coming out this week. It was very interesting to me to watch the coverage of this stuff, mainstream press, you know Washington Post, new York Times, wall Street Journal, whatever tech press, et cetera the difference between this kind of spectrum of ways in which AI is being pushed out into the world. You've got Google and Microsoft at one end, just like you know whatever, and then you've got Apple, like this scientist in a lab coat, you know, just kind of like slowly measuring, you know, metering it out, and we'll see.

01:04:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm still surprised they announced it. I think they had to. They were forced into it. They are now finding out what they committed to is way harder than they think.

01:04:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no version of this story where Apple doesn't have a September event for iPhone. Could you imagine the ramifications of that? Yeah, that's huge. So, yeah, this thing will sink or swim, I guess, based on the quality of what they're doing. But it's notable to me that they shipped five or six whatever major platform OS releases. They're shipping new hardware not across the whole board, but new iPhones, obviously some other things, but Apple Watch, I guess, but it's big. And then also just the complexity of what they're doing. If you're in the beta program, public or private, you can test 18.1, 18.2. You have a choice of things, you can be in different spaces, and they're also supporting an iOS like iOS 17, point, whatever if you just want to get security updates. And so Apple has found themselves in a place that will be very familiar to your typical Microsoft IT admin. It's kind of interesting, right. They've turned into like this uh, complex, um, kind of provider of platforms.

01:05:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So there you go, anyway, that's happening um, I'm waiting for a knock on the door from dave cutler for my whole linux as the kernel thing.

01:05:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like any a very angry 80 year old man's going to come for any moment now a very excited 80 year old is going to say well, I'm glad you mentioned this. This is actually what I've been working on for the past four years. You know I'm kidding.

01:05:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You never know. That guy's still working, it's his stuff.

01:05:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, and his whole aim in life was to destroy Unix. Right, linux didn't exist at the time, or maybe it just started happening, but we'll certainly know. When he started NT it didn't exist. So you know his goal was we are going to kill Unix. It's hard to say Unix, like Linux, just comes out of the mouth. But yeah, I don't know how, I don't know if he's softened at all. It doesn't appear to have much.

01:06:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you've seen any of his recent no, no, he's done some videos and things. He's definitely still Dave Cutler, yeah, but he's on level. He is, I know too, and he's still close to the office. He could still kick the crap out of me. That guy is amazing um yeah, nothing but respect, uh.

01:06:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then I just wanted to throw this out here, not because I want to talk about my stupid app anymore, but because, um, because rc1 pushed, rc1 pushed and I, you know, I look for I can feel it coming, you know, like, I know when the like in my brain, not logically, but just I can feel it. It's been a few weeks. I'm like I'm we're right in the verge of the next milestone and uh, ever since, uh, preview four, you know obviously five, six, seven. And then now I think rc1. And every time I look and I'm like, oh, come on, it's gonna be something, it's gonna be something, gotta be something. There is nothing. And so it is now very clear to me that whatever lame capabilities I got back in May, are it?

01:06:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Which you have to question is what got pushed back Right, what didn't make it? Because they know they're going every year, so they take bigger bites than they can ever hope to deliver, and then there's a pruning in that sort of August time frame to what they can actually deliver in november. So, you're, you're right. What you see is what you get in rc1.

01:07:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, barring a catastrophe, yep, this is it right, right, yeah, and if there is a catastrophe, it's going to be less. It's so less so, not the other way around. What we got as a, like, a wpf developer is better than zero by a wide margin, but my god, it's so incomplete. It almost makes it more frustrating. It almost would have been better if they did nothing, you know, rather than raise our hopes. Um so, anyway, I've been racing to document what I've done so far. I'm not going to talk about in great detail, but progress has been made.

01:07:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
man, progress has been made, that's true, yeah, and then that commit was only earlier this year. I know the NET 10 cycle will be the first very WPF-centric cycle. You better be right man In the Maui context.

01:08:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I spent so much time on this this summer. I don't even want to think about it, it's just horrible, I think that's on you, man.

01:08:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really do.

01:08:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think so too, we were doing.

01:08:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
We'd had an ad for some kind of a therapy thing earlier.

01:08:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I believe I maybe I should look into that. I, uh, I certainly need it. I think anyone who develops software probably needs some form of therapy. It's, it's hard work.

01:08:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, um, we are going to take a break, not for therapy, but for another therapy moment. Yeah, yeah, you take your therapy break. I'll tell you about the next sponsor. It's Thinkst Canary, bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. Thinkst Canaries are honeypots, these little devices that can be deployed in minutes. If someone is accessing your lure files or brute forcing your fake internal SSH server, your Thinkst Canary will immediately tell you that you have a problem and you don't have to worry about a bunch of false alerts. Just choose a profile for your Thinks Canary device and register it with the hosted console for monitoring and notifications, and then you sit back and you wait.

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01:10:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just have one thing to say Suck it, haters. I did it again. I unmuted myself.

01:10:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
He's here, we can hear him I didn't hear water poured or anything.

01:10:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am almost a fully functioning adult. Yay, I could pass for a human being sometimes.

01:10:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe next up you'll get your lower third and square it away.

01:10:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It'll be exciting actually the one thing I really got to do is figure out this link problem. I have a notion where I click on these links and it's like some other story. This is.

01:10:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This happens way too much but the first part's always fine, it's later on.

01:10:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you're getting tired or something I don't think, I, I, I know this sounds bizarre, but I, I don't think it's me, I, I, I think there's a there's, I think there's literally a right click bug in windows. I, I, I. We talked about this a little bit, right.

01:11:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's possible.

01:11:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know Anyhow. Okay, you've heard the news. They're not doing so great, but they've had some good news this weekend. Some bad news too, but mostly good news, and that's a nice change. The good news was Pat Gelsinger met with his board of directors, and my belief is that Intel will almost certainly have to spin off this foundry business and this gets us into an interesting area where the thing that used to be intel is now these two different things.

01:11:39
And, if it's successful, the foundry business is obviously the bigger opportunity, which I think is why they don't want to get rid of it, right? So what they've done is they building off of the efforts they made several months ago to financially report the foundry business as if it were a separate company. Right, they separated it out on their quarterly reports. They're actually going to formally make it a subsidiary, so its own company. Now the leadership at the foundry business is not changing and they do report directly to Pat Gelsinger, of course. But I think the separation of church and state is designed to do a couple things. It allows them to pursue their own funding uh, separate from intel. But it also maybe reassures some potential customers that, uh, the foundry is not going to share technical details of chip designs with the parent company, kind of thing.

01:12:32
I think that might be a little bit of an issue yeah, the problem, people, the problem for me is this is what amd did, like 15 years ago, with global foundries and it was a catastrophe right I mean, I that's got to be laying on gelsinger's mind yep, oh yeah, no, I I look what I broad strokes and, just speaking, you know, vaguely, from a high level, this plan for intel to kind of re-establish itself as a chip maker, and then, you know, sign on to build high level. This plan for intel to kind of re-establish itself as a chip maker, and then, you know, sign on to build chips for other companies, that does make sense. I mean, we do need alternatives. Um, from a national security perspective we've talked about this we need some in the united states. Right, that are us businesses.

01:13:10
So, um, yeah I, I don't know, I, I, I we'll see. I mean, there's been mixed signals on how far along the company is with its next gen, what they call the 18a manufacturing process. Um, originally intel was going to do some of their lunar lake on that process and some third party through tsmc. They're doing all of it on tsmc and then they were going to do all of Arrowlake on their own. But now they're doing that. They're starting on TSMC, right?

01:13:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's not great, and to me there's two basic metrics here. It's just does the foundry business get other customers which sounds like that's what's happening and does Intel start producing chips with a different foundry?

01:13:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so they've already. So that was this, would have been probably late last year. Uh, galsinger said look, uh, we, while we're building out this capacity to stay on the leading edge, or to maybe get back on the leading edge, our own chip designs will be built by other companies, like we're gonna have to do that sometimes. Right, so they are, they're doing that, right. So if you get a lunar lake pc, that thing was built in Taiwan or the chip was right or?

01:14:17
well, I should say part of it was Because, actually, they build the chip there, then they send it to Intel, and Intel actually puts some of the stuff on top of it, if you will. So there's actually some manufacturing that occurs at Intel, like they put it in a box. No, there's a little bit more to it than that, but so, you know, that's look. That's always been the kind of tough pill to swallow, um. The problem is, though, as time goes by and they they're not reaching that capacity, um, where they want to be.

01:14:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know things look bad, but well, and then you throw in the chip sack, which then looks like a bailout for intel, rather than what it was intended to be, which was to repatriate certain technologies yep.

01:14:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the total? These numbers are kind of tough and these are off the top of my head, but the total investment that Intel is putting into building out their chip fab capabilities is quoted as being about a hundred billion dollars. A chunk of that will come from the US government in the form of loans and subsidies, right, and we've known about, I want to say, roughly 10 or 11 billion so far. Part of the good news this past week has been a further I think it was 3 billion, up to 3 billion in direct funding from the CHIPS Act. Right For creating these leading edge kind of semiconductor fabricators in the United States and Ohio specifically. So you know it's a big bet, right, and the good news, the other piece of the good news is so we've got the government putting in more. We've got AWS, who is already partnering with Intel on various chips, including special design Intel Xeon processes for their data centers. They've chosen Intel to build what they're calling their AI fabric chips on this Intel 18A manufacturing process. Right, so that's, I mean, look, a big American company betting on another big American company at a time when the US government is looking at these big american companies both negatively and positively. Maybe there's some pr to that too. But yeah, it's good, it's all good. So there's that and that's, that's fine. Um, and then the other.

01:16:27
The bad news was sort of an asterisk, because this is not, this is just based on a report from reuters, which, I would just remind you, is not bob's weLeakStuffcom, it's Reuters, like they're actual reporters and journalists, right? These are the multiple sources you know, et cetera. But apparently Intel went after PlayStation's Sony's business for the PlayStation 6, right. So AMD has been making the chips for, I know, the PlayStation 5. I want to say also the previous-gen console. I'm not sure how far it goes back. I think AMD also makes the Xbox chipset right.

01:17:01
So the chips that are in the Series X and S, I believe, are also AMD. Good for them, right for going after this. Yep, they ended up not getting the contract and there's been a lot of pushback from people on this and it's interesting to me how people kind of argue about this, like as if this story was somehow like fake or whatever, and to me the big deal is they went for it. I think that's important because from a business perspective, it's right for Intel to try to get that business right. From Sony's perspective, it's right for them to kind of look at the competition. You never know it could come in more technical prowess, lower cost, et cetera. We don't actually know, external to Sony, how happy they are with AMD. For all we know they have a terrible relationship. Maybe they're not happy with the chips they've made so far or the chips they anticipate making for the next version right. So I think it was smart for all these companies to kind of at least look at this. According to reuters, the problem was not technical.

01:18:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was just about money so, um, apparently just the price cheaper, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fair enough. I mean, usually these deals are more complicated than that. They come into things like yields and return policy, you know all that sort of stuff like yeah, it's complex. Yeah, uh, you know how quick can we do.

01:18:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You rev to the next chip's version, right, but all that has a cost assigned to it, so you can call it money, yeah I mean, look, there are fans of all these companies who think whatever they think and you could look at, you know, maybe radeon graphics, like in an amd laptop even, and integrated graphics, and say, hey, look, these things are way better. Like Intel's really far behind in that area. It's fair to say that from an integrated graphics standpoint, intel is in pretty good shape, but compared to the Radeon stuff, no, like it's NVIDIA and Radeon, right? I mean, those are the two big players there, so does some of that factor into it? Does amd have better graphics chipsets for the next gen playstation?

01:19:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, you know, maybe I mean, we don't know right, this is just based on and I'm catfake coming from the twitch stream mentioned tsmc's operations in arizona now making the yeah a16 chip which is for the iPhone 14.

01:19:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, just be careful with that, because they're not making all of them right.

01:19:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, they're making.

01:19:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're making some limited If they're making any.

01:19:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That means there's a fab working, you know in North America and that's like four nanometer process. Man, that's pretty badass, that is good.

01:19:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is, you know, when relations between China and the united states were falling apart and people were calling on apple to move as much as they could out of that country to wherever else, you know, maybe vietnam or india, um, wherever they could go, um, and then you realize this doesn't happen quick. You know, you can't just. You can't just say, yep, we're leaving china. Um, a lot of the capacity is there, the people with know-how. They've spent years and years building out that stuff in partnership with those companies. So it's hard. You can't just pick up your ball and go to a different court. I mean, it's not that easy. So, yeah, you're right, the fact that they were able to get that going in the United States is actually pretty yeah, and again, there's always problem.

01:20:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The challenge here is not building a fab, it's not getting the APL gear. That's not the problem, it's trained people. Yeah Right, like it is not easy. There's only so many fab factory engineers. It's hard work and it's a very specialized business. So the fact that they've got anything working at all is a good sign, because now it's like now the training pipeline starts to grow, there's a place to work and you can start expanding. So you know good on them to actually get to the point where a fab is making anything.

01:20:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And now Intel can start stealing those employees away, since they're in the United States. It'll be fun, lovely, no, it's all good. And then this I didn't know where to put this. I'm not even sure this is worth discussing. It's just insane and I feel like it kind of deserves some attention. Um, I don't do like, I can't really do a hands-on thing, but I do have this laptop here.

01:21:06
So there's this big, heavy, thick looking thing that is a lenovo think book that is like surface book, in that the screen comes off, right, the screen comes off, right, the screen comes off. Yeah, I saw those pictures. The difference is that the screen has a computer inside of it that runs Android and it's a Snapdragon Gen whatever, with 16 gigs of RAM and its own UFS 3.1 storage. It has its own webcams, it has its own, everything. It's its own thing. And then in the bottom there's a core ultra intel, you know, I think 60 by 32 giga ram, whatever, ssd storage, and these two things are separate computers and you can, kind of you can, you can hit a button on it and it's really quick. It just switches between the environments, and this is wacky it's crazy, this is wacky.

01:21:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yep, yep, and I kind of want one now that you've described it Like. That is weird enough that it makes me happy.

01:22:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
The name is even wackier. I know the name is is unnecessarily weird.

01:22:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's, it's it's not even clear if this is the full name, but but it's, yeah, think book. So they experiment with think book. For some reason, this think book, for some reason. This is something they've been doing for a while. Gen 5 meaning there were four gens of not this thing, but a previous think book plus design that had different screens and different configurations um hybrid I think the full name actually includes um. Station is in the name because there's more going on here right, so gen 5 hybrid station and tablet, yeah so it.

01:22:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
First of all, it's a laptop, like even the microsoft guy's. Like dude, you need to work on the name exactly, um, the the previous gen versions of this.

01:22:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There was a, there were two versions that had like an e-ink display on the outside. Okay, interesting, right, it's really thick bit, you know e-ink tablet, I guess. And then there was a couple versions where they had an eight inch tablet sized screen on the wrist rest which you could use in a dual screen configuration, either as like a wacom style um, you know writing surface, or just as a second screen, which was stupid and made no sense, but I give them a little bit of credit for experimenting. So now we have two computers right, each with its own resources ram storage, cameras, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Um, you can detach them. While they're detached or attached, you can use one or the other. This thing can be used as a standalone android laptop.

01:23:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is not an all-in-one. This is an everything in one yeah, so I, I, I.

01:23:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm struggling to figure out how I could just show this to you, but, but in addition to all that, you can integrate the two environments in interesting ways. So this software in here that Lenovo supplies.

01:23:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So they can see each other like they have a shared storage space.

01:23:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. So if you've ever used a virtual environment, you've probably seen something like Apple does this or Perilous does this on Apple, where some of the folders are mapped so that when you copy to the desktop in the windows environment, it copies the desktop on the Mac. They could do that kind of thing. You can run a Android, the Android environment, in a windows as an app alongside your windows apps, if you want to do that. Um, it's crazy, it's crazy town. So it's expensive, like North of three grand expensive, oh geez.

01:24:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you are buying two computers in one you are buying two computers. I've never met a performing Android tablet that didn't cost too much.

01:24:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I hate to be this guy, but I got to say the thing that's really compelling here is going to be when Apple does something like this with iPad and MacBook.

01:24:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can't imagine them doing it, I know, but there's a stand I'd be there for it.

01:24:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a stand that comes with this. It looks like a weapon you would use in the middle ages to disarm, like a mounted knight on a horse and you you. It's kind of a weird setup, you. You detach the screen and you put it on the, the easel thing, the stand right, and then you have a an external like 27, whatever 29 inch display. You connect that to the, the, the base, which is a keyboard with a trackpad absolutely the mode I'd be using it in half yeah, it's crazy town, but it's, but it's also like, hmm, like this is actually kind of interesting yeah, it gets.

01:25:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're right. It went from are we jumping the shark? To suddenly that's a cool looking shark.

01:25:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, so with surface book the computer was all in the screen, except for in the higher end versions where there's was a GPU separately in the base, but other than that In the base.

01:25:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that's right. So you had two video processors one in the screen, one in the base and when you're playing, in the base you had more performance in the screen, the good graphics.

01:25:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The DGPU was in the base, but only one CPU.

01:25:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
When it's on the easel stand as an external monitor. Is that going? Is that wireless or is that wired? Yeah, it's wireless.

01:25:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can do either one, so it's actually acting as a monitor. It's not, yeah, it's actually a display. Yep, okay, yep it does all this stuff.

01:25:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, this is interesting.

01:25:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is insane.

01:25:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love it. You kind of run out of. There's so many different configurations. It's kind of weird, is it loud? I'm going to fly to Mexico with this thing in my bag. So when you never hear from me again, it's because someone in customs pulled me aside and they saw this thing and said yeah, I don't care. They said where we draw the line is the megapixel camera on the back. We allow narcos to happen here.

01:26:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is not happening. If there's a shell chipset in that tablet, then it's just a phone Really. You know, it's about the same size as a phone.

01:26:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:26:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's got cameras in and on the back. I mean you could pass as a phone. It's crazy.

01:26:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a, it's the world you did say you wanted a bigger phone.

01:26:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do adore how wacky.

01:26:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Lenovo it's. This is one of those crazy as a fox moments where you're like this is crazy enough, it might just work.

01:26:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just might just work it just like they clearly run a division of nutters. That yep the fact that this made it to production. They didn't just make one and put it on stage.

01:26:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Remember how crazy service book was, and how we laughed and laughed. Hey, listen to me, hold on, you're gonna you're gonna try to interrupt, but hold, you're going to love this idea Like it's crazy you know, yeah, it's hilarious, though it's awesome.

01:27:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, this is cool.

01:27:01 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But yeah, is it? How loud has it been for you?

01:27:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The fans, you mean yeah, it hasn't been. Oddly, it's been fine. I mean well, I mean, right now it's probably.

01:27:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I totally understand why you? Didn't know where to put this, because we don't have a section in the notes called Crazy. Yeah, it's completely silent.

01:27:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's crazy, yeah, crazy time.

01:27:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's the new segment, crazy time, and it's all just Lenovo stuff.

01:27:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My big complaint about this thing as a tablet. The tablet is humongous, right? Yeah, it's also a 16 by 10 display, so in portrait mode it's you know, it's tall and thin and it's nice, um, I do like 1610, though I I do too, for so it could be a tablet or a portable, a wireless display uh, yes, and, and it can also be a, an android laptop, if you want. Right, there's literally this button on the keyboard that switches, and it's instantaneous I love that little switch button.

01:27:56
Yeah, it's crazy. So if you wanted to, if you you know so, android, like I said early in the show, is getting this windowing capability. This thing could turn into kind of a productive android laptop which is a mix of words that you all understand, but don't make sense together you know, like you know.

01:28:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now I'm starting to feel like the name isn't long enough yeah, I know you're right, you're absolutely right.

01:28:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Think book gen five, hybrid station and tablet.

01:28:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Really doesn't encompass. That didn't cover enough. I know it's so weird, I don't know what to say about it anyway keep on keeping on. That's what I say I wanted to mention it because it's nuts and I just I applaud we need to celebrate this, just yeah, because it's so wacky, it's so crazy.

01:28:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love it. So that keyboard is actually a computer. You can plug it into a display off you go.

01:28:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could just you could take the keyboard with you, yeah, and just use that as a computer, as we had a display right um somewhere you know work or whatever.

01:28:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Take, get a. Get a vr goggle set with a hdmi plug. Be sitting on, sitting on the plane with vr goggles and a keyboard in your lap oh man, that is really interesting.

01:29:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It is lappable just throwing it out there, fabulous. You know it's crazy, go lenovo, lenovo while we all celebrate lenovo.

01:29:14
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01:32:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we need more stings, full stop, right, I agree I agree, I would love that we have a theme now.

01:32:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the sad trombone song that was fast.

01:32:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You said the words out loud.

01:32:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Things are going to happen also three and oh, on, the muting thing. Anyway, yeah, um, good job. Yep, I'm just, I'm nailing it today. It's unbelievable. So, uh boy, we're having a good time here, but unfortunately, microsoft has laid more laid off, more employees in the gaming division uh yeah, they just keep dribbling this out. You know again. The big issue I have here is just the constant nature of this. I do understand that when you subsume a company of this size, there are going to be redundancies and unnecessary employees.

01:33:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So this is 600 from the gaming division. Well, not necessarily Because there's so many different groups, right Like where Is that ZeniMax? Is that so yeah?

01:33:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we don't know. It kind of behooves them, not to say, I guess, although I would imagine some of these people are probably going to go public at some point and talk about this.

01:33:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But what they did say was no games were canceled and, to be clear, microsoft's doing anything original here. There are layoffs across the gaming industry.

01:33:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has become very yeah, I mean, I made this point some months ago. If you look at the number of employees that Microsoft's laid off and compare it to elsewhere in the industry, it's not. It's not substantial.

01:33:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
yeah, it's not up there.

01:33:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Every job counts and all that. But I guess most of these were corporate supporting functions, not um game developers or, uh, game publishers or whatever. So there were no games canceled, there were no devices canceled, right, kind of interesting. They would say that, uh, and no experiences being canceled, um, unless your experience being a an employed person counts, I suppose. Um, so, unfortunately that's happening. I I wish they would get on top of this. It's um, you know, it's almost been a year like I wish we could, you know, figure it out and be done but anyway, but nope, not the way no I'm almost beginning to think it's programmatic that they that a steady stream of minor because they also meantime have what?

01:34:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
3 000 jobs posted right, like at some point that you say, hey, like these two things don't go together. Well, are you just terrorizing your employees?

01:34:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, well, jeez, I gotta hope that's not that.

01:34:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, it's still better than the corporate culture and activision blizzard, um, but yeah, I, I don't, yeah, I don't know, but this is here's my argument is, before the pandemic, we were moving towards like the unionization of software developers, like they were really getting their chops on this whole. We need a better deal. And the pandemic sort of wobbled all of that and they overhired and there was all these sorts of things.

01:35:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I more feel like they've gotten addicted to layoffs, like it's just a good way to keep the thumb on the employees so microsoft has been semi-unique in this space for being pretty good about unionization attempts, with one very recent exception with raven software we talked about back at the, probably about a month ago. Yep, um, but they've you know they. They've recognized uh unions in the united states and elsewhere. They've you know they've recognized unions in the United States and elsewhere. They've you know, they've come out and said, look, we're going to respect these efforts, we're going to allow them to happen. The Activision Blizzard Quality Assurance workers voted to unionize this year, et cetera. So I mean it's you know, I think a lot of this well, at least for this round anyway, is more uh, tied to, you know, the redundancy thing, the kind of back-end business, not the developers, not the game publishers, that kind of thing.

01:36:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah I don't know the answer to that and obviously they don't make any of it clear, so yeah well, they don't.

01:36:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that just behooves them not to, I guess in a way. But yeah, um, this is. This goes back so far. I have a hard time remembering this, but back in the x xbox 360 days, holy man, I know there was a. Uh, there were, there were a couple features related to, like, the social aspect of gaming, right, and so one was this, uh, friend request feature, which they got rid of. I don't even remember Xbox One, maybe Something like that, or at least in the Xbox series.

01:36:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, they were just copying Steam, who had it from the very beginning and still has it.

01:36:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a rich history of that. I remember when they did the Kinect and they came out with whatever the version of Microsoft's Miis were for the little cartoon little guys. Some of us still have those graphics on our accounts. We've done this for a long time. Anywho, they are apparently bringing this back and so in a true social network if you think about how something like Twitter or whatever works you have friends, the people you actually have connections with, and you both decide together.

01:37:11
we're gonna um, you know be friends and share you know, share information, and then you have followers, right, and the followers are people who could kind of see what you're doing and you as an individual might be able to a well, a, configure that but also determine what those people see. Um, xbox used to have that too, right, and you could kind of picture people wanting to follow others right to see what their escapades are in certain games or whatever. But, um, they don't have that, that's another one they got rid of. But, um, they are testing bringing back this. Uh, friend, well, not friends, I mean, obviously they have friends, but um, uh, but friend, uh, friend requests. Basically, so, uh, yeah, so what's old is new again. And then my favorite story of the week Microsoft has announced three more games coming to Xbox Game Pass in the second half of September. Are there any of them you've heard of? How many of them are Activision Blizzard games?

01:38:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think none that would be a given.

01:38:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
None yep.

01:38:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can't even tease you about it anymore, right? I just don't even. I'm losing my mind.

01:38:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean next month We'll have three, yeah, yikes. So I don't, god, I can't remember anything, but I know Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which is the thing I pay for, is 20 bucks a month now. I think for most of that year it was probably 17.99, I'm guessing. I would like my money back, please, because seriously, what is happening?

01:38:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But anyway, wow, like my money back please, because seriously, what is happening? But anyway, well, um, they never promised those tier one games would show up in game pass.

01:38:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just implied it from everything they did well, based on previous statements and then the fact that the company that made those statements purchased another game studio. Yeah, I did sort of assume, because they did say it well, apparently you assumed incorrectly. Mr thurant. Yep, just pray we don't miss.

01:39:13
Assuming wait, what do we do not change the deal yeah, um this is kind of a random note, but, um, if you do play overwatch 2 on xbox, overwatch is, I think, a blizzard game, so it's owned by microsoft. There's a bunch of bonus parts on there. If you're a game pass member, yeah yeah, it's a, it's a fortnite type or a, you know like a fast moving. It kind of reminds me of um unreal tournament like a fast moving shooter kind of thing?

01:39:38
yeah, but it's blizzard's version of fortnite yeah, it's cartoony graphics, uh, but very fast, you know um so you should if you're into this game and, uh, I, that's fine and it's a competition game right Big eSports game.

01:39:51
Yeah, yeah, right, right, exactly that kind of thing. And then I of course have linked to the wrong story yet again right here at the end. But if you recall, and I bet you might remember, this is probably I feel like this was late last year. But Unity, which makes this game engine the most popular one in the world. You mean that one? Yeah, those guys. They announced this kind of runtime fee for game developers.

01:40:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That went over like a lead balloon. Oh yeah, 20 cents a user.

01:40:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they were like this is going to bankrupt us Like we can't actually do this, you just destroyed the business.

01:40:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that was literally this time last year.

01:40:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just look at that yeah, this time last year. I just look at that yeah, you're right, it was this week last year. That's hilarious. So they kind of went back and forth on this. Uh, the ceo had to apologize. I think they might have fired the guy they did, um, and in fact I think he might have been an ex microsoft guy, but anyway, it doesn't matter. Um january, they laid off a bunch of people and then, uh, at the one year mark of announcing this, they were like oh, we're just kidding, we're not doing that anymore they finally fully backed off from it.

01:40:54
Yep yep, so I guess that's a good outcome. John richie tellio yeah that was the guy he's over. That's uh actually, and he was. He was ea before he was unity. Okay, yeah, okay, I was. Yeah, I don't recognize the name, so I was wrong about that, but, um, I was. Yeah, I don't recognize the name, so I was wrong about that, but yeah, so this is just, oh, boy. Anyway, I guess it's okay now.

01:41:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's been a wrestling match all along about how Unity survives as a company grows. That kind of thing Like this is the whole mono game. Like these guys started out as a Python shop and then Miguel Diaz convinced them that NET was was the way to go. They were the point to see sharp deliver like it's an important story and I swear to you half the games made these days come through unity and some really good ones, better ones than you know you think this is a way you can write, you can make modern games.

01:41:45
Yeah, that's right but they and and I think there's it might be just it's not like they make no money. They do. But I think they look over at multi-million dollar titles made on Unity and go, hey, where's our cut.

01:41:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We want a piece of that, yeah.

01:41:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:41:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I think customers would have accepted some structure. That made sense.

01:42:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, frankly, but it's also a way to present it to sort of walk into, like we want to be fair here and engage in conversation, even if you have an intentional outcome. I compare this to when Maker's Mark was running low on bourbon and said, hey, we're going to lower the ABV of Maker's Mark and everyone went. No, don't do it, so they raised the price instead. Hey, we listened to you. You told us what you wanted. Now you can pay more and it fixes the problem. Yeah, don't ever listen to what customers ask for.

01:42:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a huge mistake you know you can listen.

01:42:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Tell them what they want.

01:42:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I used to work in banking a million years ago and our kind of saying was like the customer is almost never right, wow, well, because they would always come to work. Name the bank Well, they're out of business now, well, no, new out of business now, that's? Oh Well, no. New England used to have a protected banking region, so eventually they lived in the national banks. So they were all bought up.

01:42:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
They didn't go bankrupt, is that like where they've got people with swords and shields standing outside.

01:43:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it was just something probably dating back to the 1700s.

01:43:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That for whatever reason Deploy the trebuchet.

01:43:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you were in the new england region, you could buy and merge with banks there, but not external. Oh, I see no nationals. Yeah, so now it's all.

01:43:16
It's all like everywhere else in the country now, but yeah, try and be yeah, but people would always come to you like, because it's money, it's your money, right? They'd be freaking out, you know like where's my money. And then they'd be like well, you took it out here and you, you did this with it here and they're're like oh yeah, sorry, but they come in upset because it's like something you did and it's like no, we're not playing with your money.

01:43:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Right, we're not touching your money. I mean we are, but again it's $1,700. Yeah, yeah, anyway, you don't have to keep it in your mattress, but all right, anything else you want to say about Unity? No, all right.

01:43:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In fact, I hope to never speak about Unity ever again. Oh, come on, if I'm going correctly, you know.

01:43:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You are watching Windows Weekly this week, hosted by yours truly Micah Sargent, as well as, of course, paul Therot and Richard Campbell. We are going to be back in just a moment with the tips and picks, but I do want to mention a fun little thing called Club Twit. At twittv slash club twit. For just $7 a month you can join the club and when you do you gain access to some pretty awesome benefits. Every single Twit show with no ads, just the content. You gain access to the Twit Plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else Behind the scenes before the show, after the show, special club twit events get published there as well.

01:44:34
Um, and access to the members only discord server a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club twit members and those of us here at twit also. Some special events take place there. Later today I'll be doing my next uh sort of hang out for micah's crafting cornerting Corner. We have been slowly but surely building what is called Jason's Kitchen. It's a little miniature set here and we've built it piece by piece, so we are working on what is happening?

01:45:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What is happening?

01:45:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This sort of sink situation going on, are you?

01:45:08
building a dollhouse. What is happening? It's kind of like a dollhouse, but it's just one little piece of a dollhouse. I like it. So that's Micah's Crafting Corner. You come with your crafts. It's just a cozy hangout time. You work on your crafts while I'm doing my sort of happy trees moments as we build these pieces together. And you heard it here first Apparently, and you heard it here first Apparently sometime soon we're going to see Richard Campbell build a PC in the club, so goodness knows when.

01:45:36
but yeah, goodness knows when, but it will happen or else, and so you should join the club at twittv slash club twit Again, just seven bucks a month. Paul and I both do shows for the club as well, so you can regularly tune into those and get the video versions of them. Thank you for being a member if you are one, in which case you're probably not hearing this unless you're watching live, but if you aren't, we'd love to have you. And now we are back for the back of the book the tips and picks of the week.

01:46:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You'll have to see when this comes up, but I did an episode of Hands on Windows which I recommended. They call the Microsoft Paint Masterclass.

01:46:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I don't know if they're going to go with that name but I hope they do All right.

01:46:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So a couple of tips. Bill Gates has a new documentary series coming out on Netflix. In fact it might have just come out. I have mixed emotions about this one. I'm going to try not to be super controversial here, but there was, I think, a three-part Bill Gates documentary on Netflix a couple of years ago. That I found to be an incredible bit of history rewriting on the part of someone who almost single-handedly destroyed the industry by himself. So, uh, I think he's trying to rehabilitate his image in his kind of philanthropist years um which I get, but I think in the post melinda yes, who have?

01:47:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you been hanging out with bill phase. You definitely need some brand.

01:47:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep you need some, some help. Uh, I I just remind people like this the name, what's I can. I can't remember. I think it's called what's next with Bill Gates. You know, right, this is the guy who wrote the book the road ahead and didn't mention the internet, basically right when the internet was happening. So I don't know, I mean maybe. I mean he's Bill Gates, so I'll probably have to watch it, but I don't know, and I yeah.

01:47:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And considering the relationship between Bill and Reed Hastings, I suspect when he says you know I'd like to do he's going to get it.

01:47:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, yep, yep, what's next? I'll tell you what's next. He's getting a Netflix series. That's what's next. There you go, yeah, and then just randomly something, something it's happening online. Amazon's having their big Prime Day deal day thing back September, or, sorry, october 8 and 9. So if you pay attention to amazoncom which you probably do, if you've ever bought something online which you have, uh, start looking at amazoncom right now, because there's already stuff I was like don't lie to me, don't lie to me I hate amazon so much yeah, I have, I.

01:48:05
I. I probably have an amazon package arriving at my house every other day at this point, yeah same.

01:48:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My problem is in October I'm pretty much on a remote road for a month, so if I start ordering stuff, it's going to sit for a long time.

01:48:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They need a scheduler for this, right yeah that'd be nice.

01:48:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Hold this until the 15th of this month.

01:48:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hold it in some local facility until I click the button or whatever. Yes, actually. So one of the nice things about mexico, by the way, is I can get amazon there. Um right, it's not 100, obviously, of the stuff, and some stuff is more expensive but some stuff is, you know, cheaper too. It's kind of cool, uh, and we do get next day there.

01:48:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's crazy at least, yeah, I'm living. One of the nice things about living up on the coast here is that we have a mailbox. They don't deliver normally, deliver to the house, yep, so I can't. I can't. That's actually good, because that it will be safe and a thing yes, well, this is I can literally tell um the postie lady karen to say, hey, don't put her the postie lady yes, the lady you described her as the postie lady.

01:49:06
Well, in canada we tend to call them posties because, because up, because up here we don't go postal like some countries uh, did I say that out loud, always too soon.

01:49:16
A well-deserved egg, but go on, but I have. I have asked her hey, I'm going to be gone for a month, just hold my stuff and I'll come and get it from. Oh, that's great, yeah, and it and that's fine, because then it doesn't tie up space on the. We had, you know, the. The mailboxes are only so big, so there's parcel boxes but they're shared kind of thing. So what'll happen is you in your mailbox, there'll be a key to open that. So to tie that up for a month because I'm on the road would be rude. So it's like, hey, just hold these, I will be back. And uh, I usually. And she's a and she's a grohl fan too, so I have on occasion just sort of dropped a six pack off on her. So nice, I love living in a small town. Man Can't tell you.

01:49:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've always had good relationships with the postal, ups, fedex, whatever deliveries delivery guys. The one here, though. I like the guy a lot, but he, he knows it's me, so he'll. He actually beeps as he drives up, cause he, so you'll hear him come. He'll be like beep, beep and it's like dude. What is this Like? I'm a Pavlog dog.

01:50:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm like oh my God, oh my God, new PCs, new.

01:50:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PCs. I could be out in the world and hear a car beep and I'm like, oh my God, I'm getting something that's amazing.

01:50:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really I hate that't go running out all excited.

01:50:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I should tell you. I'm sorry I forgot. The point of that joke was I have walked outside of my house and no one was there, because someone was just driving by and beeped randomly and I thought I was like, oh my God, here it comes and I'm like, where's the dog?

01:50:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Waiting for his master to come home. I'm so hungry. That's amazing, that's sad.

01:50:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what I've become. Okay, car horns make.

01:50:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Paul drool.

01:50:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So noted.

01:50:51
Yeah, I'll tell you what I wanted to. I have twice tried to do an episode on hands-on windows. Speaking of that podcast, about Explorer Patcher. It's one of many utilities you can use to kind of help de-insertify Windows right, and so in this case it's specifically for uh, explorer. It does a couple other things, mostly about explorer. Um, it is a technical app. It really it screws through the system a little bit.

01:51:20
Um, one of the bits of advice I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna, I'm gonna put this in the book, not the explorer patcher bit, but this other bit of advice, which is, if you've been around a while, you will know and recall that there was and still is a utility in windows called system restore, right, and whenever they introduced this, I want to say it might have even been xp, but whenever this came to light it was a, it was a front end to a kind of a back end command line scriptable capability to windows it had for a couple years previous and what it gives you that kind of vm like capability to go back in time, right, and so, um, you know, back in the day before nt became the normal version of windows, like you could install a bad driver and not be able to boot windows like it would never get in yep and so, starting with windows actually millennial, millennia, millennium edition and then with xp they added driver rollback etc. But if you think you're going to be doing something dangerous in Windows, you can just run start search and find it. It's. It's still the classic system properties control panel with the multiple tabs. That dates back a million years. But you can actually enable a system restore. You can dedicate some amount of storage to these backups. If you will make a restore point, make a restore point and if you screw up your system, like if you install this app and somehow it screwed it up although I've had pretty good luck with it um, you can then restore it to that point and restore system.

01:52:40
Restore is important because you get to it from the recovery environment so you can boot your computer with your um installation media or, if you made a standalone recovery disk, um, you can get to it from outside of windows. You can actually roll back Windows to a previous point in time from outside of Windows. I'm just learning the language, it's fun, so you should know about that and I think a lot of you anyone listening to the show probably is like oh my God right. You probably haven't thought about it in a while. It's still there, right, so you can still do this. I recommend trying it before you do Explorer patcher.

01:53:13
But what this will let you do is go back to previous versions of Explorer, and multiple versions. You could go back to the version from Windows 7 if you wanted to, which is classic, literally. But the version I like is actually the version from windows 10, and the reason I like it is it has a kind of a ribbon, but it's collapsed by default and it doesn't have any of the annoyances of back up this folder. Back up this folder. Back up this folder because in windows 11 it sits there like a little animated thing if you're in desktop documents pictures at least and made, yeah, probably, just click me, click me, yep, and it makes me insane and I actually really like not having it there. So this is one way to do it. It's not the only way, but it's something to look at.

01:53:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's free I got enough trouble with attention. Don't push it, you know?

01:54:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep yeah, it's like we let you work in your flow. Oh, unless you're not doing what we want, then we just do this to you all day long, and you know, uh yeah, we're trying to do seizures yeah, exactly, so anyway there you go awesome all righty.

01:54:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now it's time for the run, as radio tell us what's going on well, and I talked a little bit about a show that's not coming on coming for a few weeks from now, but this week's show um is with eli holderness, and we were talking about asymmetric encryption.

01:54:30
And so Eli is a proper mathematician, like, got the degree educated in the space but has moved very much into compute, needless to say, mostly spends time in security because encryption, you know, is a math problem, without a doubt. And so she, uh, they are speaking all the conferences and they started doing a particular uh talk on encryption and we got into a conversation about it. I'm like I should just make this show Because I mean, these days we use symmetric encryption primarily right, this is TLS, this is SSL, like what we're used to, and there's been a big push in the industry to get away from having these big jumps where we have to replace one technology another to try and smooth things out. And on the other side of this is this expected threat from quantum computing for decrypting all kinds of things, and so moving off of prime number driven encryption is, in general, like nist is pushing on on this. It's an upcoming force, and so this is where we ended up going.

01:55:32
If you're a geek in this space, you'll enjoy this conversation, because we totally geeked out but at the same time I kept pulling it back to as an admin, here's what you can think about, because there are good solution paths being built for moving to new encryption types in the immediate future, the next few years, that you largely won't be disruptive, but they will be resistant to the emerging threats to various kinds of encryption. So, even though we spent a lot of time explaining what asymmetric encryption is about, for most part you won't need to know. It'll just work. For most part you won't need to know it'll just work.

01:56:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And now it is time for a blast from the past, a trip into the past this one I've had at least I.

01:56:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, I'm ecstatic well it's. It has gotten very funny on how we do a whiskey you've never heard of, because people keep bringing me weird whiskeys and I love them, but uh I this is the last of the classic malts. I felt like it was just time to. It shouldn't have been last. It's a great whiskey and it's the Talisker 10, which is on the Isle of Skye. It's located in a little village called Carbust, which is on the Mingus Peninsula on the Isle of Skye.

01:56:50
The Isle of Skye is the largest of the inner Hebrides island, it. If you ever see a picture of it or you look at it on on google maps, you'll see it sort of looks like a wing, although it does have a non-trivial set of mountains on it. This is this is it's important to remember that this was the land going back 20,000 years when Daggerland was still exposed, before it became the North Sea. So this is all connected together and people have been there for a very long time. Some of the earliest documentation of it goes all the way back to folks like Ptolemy in the Romans. He actually drew a map of it and it was named Skittis, which is apparently a Celtic word for winged, because if you look at the land it looks sort of wing-shaped.

01:57:37
There's plenty of evidence there that there were humans going back to the Mesolithic period. For those who are not up on their ancient history, this is Mesolithic meaning Middle Stone Age, as opposed to the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. Well, that actually means the Mesolithic were probably the last of the hunter gatherers, so this is seven to 17,000 years ago. So tail end of the ice age kind of stuff, as opposed to the Neolithic, is really when farming starts to emerge, at least in that part of the world, although there's evidence that and this is what's found in some of these sites in sky that the Mesolithic were starting to make pottery as well as stone tools and the like. So and humans persisted in that area the entire time as the ocean rose up and cut off those islands and made them into islands. You go all the way through to the Iron Age. You have the Picts. There's writings about the Isle of Skye in Ireland from 700 AD and the Vikings, of course, control this area. We've talked about the Hebrides before, all the way down to the Isle of man, all sort of resolved back into what would become the Scotland with the Treaty of Perth in 1266. What do you need to know about Skye? This is the land of the clan mcleod yeah, the movie but dunvegan castle has been the seat of that clan and is still an operable castle going back to the 13th century. So they, like I said, the lineages are long there and of course, being in scotland means they went through all of the troubles with the English forced immigration, turning all the land into sheep farms, the famines pushing people into the other countries In the middle 1800s when the Talisker Distillery was founded.

01:59:22
There's about 20,000 people living on Skye by 1970, there's barely 7,000. Today it's around 10. It may be an island, but there is a bridge, weirdly named the Sky Bridge, that connects it. On there there's also a ferry available and the business there these days is primarily tourism-centric. So lots of nature, walks, great mountain climbing, scenic views. Talisker has been the only distillery on there. It was the only distillery started back in 1830. It's been there a very long time, although in 2017 the Torab Hag distillery opened up, and so now there's, I think, just three or four right.

02:00:02
I already mentioned Rasse, which is a little island right besides Skye, so it nominally doesn't count, but it's roughly in the same region. There is a whiskey called the Isle of Skye. It is not made on Sky. I've talked about it on the show. It's actually made in Glasgow. Let's not confuse those things. So Hugh McCaskill leases the land from the McLeod clan in the 1830s. He does not name it for the villages in. He names it for his estate, talisker, and there's a bankruptcy. There's some changing of hands. In 1880 it gets a major rebuild. Then we come into the 20th century. Distiller's company buys it in 1925. This will eventually be acquired by Diageo and of course has been owned by Diageo since the very beginning.

02:00:46
Their distilling process was unusual. There's strong Irish influence because up until 1928, they were triple distilling. Which unusual? There's strong Irish influence because up until 1928, they were triple distilling, which is very much an Irish thing, with smaller stills. But in 1928, they switched over to follow the Scottish convention of twice distilled a low wine still and a spirit still. Famously, in 1960, there was a major fire that burned the entire distillery to the ground and there was a big push to literally remake the original five stills in every detail. Took them a couple of years and they still use those remade stills from 1960 to this day.

02:01:20
So two wash stills, about 10 000 liters each, which are quite small, relatively speaking, straight lie arms, which is unusual. So the swan neck comes up and it just goes straight out the. They have three spirits still. Also unusual, they're smaller, 7,500 liters. They don't have a reflex bulb. So one of the characters that we talk about in the Talisker whiskey is quite spicy and is an argument. It's because there's less reflux, so more of those sharper flavors stay in with the whiskey over time. Use stainless steel, mash tons of wooden washbacks. This is very sort of standard stuff and in the case of Talisker 10, at least, they age entirely in bourbon casks and this, as I mentioned before, is one of the whiskeys of the classic malts of Scotland in 1988.

02:02:05
This was a United Distillers promotion and normally I wouldn't talk so much about marketing stuff, but this keeps coming up because it literally changed the path of whiskey. So whiskey did very well coming out of World War II in the 1950s and 60s. But as the economic doldrums of the 70s came in with the OPEC crisis and while runaway inflation, people turned to cheaper drinks. The other thing that happened, especially in America, was that soft drinks became very cheap. The advent of liquefied sugar, of high fructose corn syrup, cut the price of soda in half because they didn't need to use real sugar anymore, and so the highball became the drink right, a Bacardi and Coke, that kind of thing, all pushed by spirits manufacturers, and whiskey sales dropped tremendously through the 70s and the early 80s.

02:02:57
And then in 1988, this promotion came out and what United Distillers was doing was they made a package essentially of eight whiskeys. They called them the Classic Malts and they were supposed to be all from different regions. Called them the classic malts, and they were supposed to be all from different regions. The fact that Talisker is by itself on Skye is that for the most part, talisker has always been referred to as just part of Islay, because it's also a peated whiskey, like all of the whiskeys are in Islay. That's not how United Distillers referred to it.

02:03:23
United Distillers broke down these eight whiskeys into, or these seven whiskeys into seven regions. So there was a lowland, which is generally recognized region, that was the Glen Kinshi. There was a space side, cragganmoor, which you've obviously talked about. Then there was Lagavulin, the Isla, and then there was they messed with the highlands. They created two different regions of highlands. So the Dalwini 15 was considered a highland, but so was the Obon 14, which is also highland. So the dalwini 15 was considered a highland, but so was the obon 14, which is also highland, but they called it west highland, which admittedly it's on the west side of the highlands, but so is dalwini. So, okay, uh, they didn't mention campbell town, which is generally a recognized region, but, yeah, distillation and own distillery there. So just leave that out.

02:04:05
And then, of course, they called the talisker 10 the sky whiskey, whichly it is, and it was, at that time, the only one, and it had been for like 150 years until 2017 when some of these others started opening up. At the time of the promotion, talisker was producing a million and a half liters a year of whiskey, which sounds like a lot, but within a few years that doubled. Today they make three and a half million liters of whiskey a year, so the change was astonishing. The growth in the marketplace and, oddly enough and this was not expected by United Distillers, they admitted it much it was the peated whiskeys that did best. Both Lagavulin and Talisker just took off and became this huge product and for the most part, talisker really just made a 10. Only when it was bought by Diageo. When Diageo took over in the 90s, they start making others. They made an 18 for a while though it's periodic In the early 2010s, when whiskey was doing so well that they simply didn't lay up enough.

02:05:07
Like you can't make a 12 year in less than 12 years, so when you start to run low, what do you do? So they started producing specialty versions without year notifications. Like, if it has a 10 on it, it means that's the youngest thing in the bottle, right? But when they call it Storm, it's a four-year-old man and you don't want to put a four on the bottle. So you get these very young whiskeys where they don't want the names. They just blend them together to get a flavor profile that people like. So there are a bunch of unusual versions.

02:05:36
In fact, diageo has taken over that whole concept of the classic malts. They still release them, but now they do customized versions of them where they'll take the regular whiskey but they'll do like a six month, finishing in a sherry cask, so you can only find it in the collection. Uh, normally these were sold together. So the whole idea one of the reasons was so effective. It's like, hey, you can order this as a block and you'll get a good price on it. And so you get these seven different whiskeys on your shelf all at once, called the classic malts. And it's what? Again, because they presumed the craggy more was going to be the hit and the lagavulin ended up being the hit. Um, they, they got bars to take on whiskeys they wouldn't ordinarily take on, and it worked. Uh, so you can go find the more expensive variants like this. There's the.

02:06:22
The new, a release literally this year, is called talisker the wild explorador. It's 140 bucks, don't buy this. What the it has no year on. Like, what are you doing anyway? The by the 10. The 10 is lovely. Uh, it is colored right, they have a consistency thing. It is chill.

02:06:46
Filtered it's 46. Actually the market is 45.8. I'll call that 46. It's not a strongly peated whiskey. You know what I really like about talisker? It tastes like it's on the ocean. It's got that little iodine nose, like that's that sense of the sea, a little bit of saltiness in the palate and then and you really don't smell the peat going in but a little smokiness shows up later you're like you had a fire on the beach. That's what it's like drinking that stuff. It's strictly aged in bourbon cast, so there's nothing fancy there and yeah, but it's it's clearly from an island and you can find it at bevmo for about 75. It's absolutely worth having on your shelf and if you're Pete curious, this is a good place to start. I'm listening.

02:07:39
A lot of people got confronted with an Ardbeg or a Lagavulin the first time they tasted whiskey and say I don't like whiskey. And to that person I hand them like a Dalmore 18 and ruin their lives. Now you love a $200 bottle of whiskey because that thing drinks like smooth caramel. But when you want to start flirting with other flavors and people say, well, I'm kind of afraid of Peet's, it's like yeah, try the Talisker 10. Don't do the Ardbeg 10. The Ardbeg 10 is like I really have an urge to lick a forest fire, like Ardbe big will deliver. But do you want to come in slowly?

02:08:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
come in with the talisker all right well that brings us to the end of this episode of windows weekly. I already mentioned club twit during the show. I'll just remind you twittv slash club twit is how you go to sign up for $7 a month. Richard Campbell, of course folks can check out your podcast Run as Radio, anything you want to pitch this week.

02:08:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know we're putting out a show every week. It's normal. We just wrapped up our Next Gen AI show last week. We wrapped up our NextGen AI show last week and now the ad you're going to see every so often on Run, as is for our Fabric Conference in April. Go to fabricconfcom. Look, it's going to be the second show we've done the second annual. We sold it out 4,000 people. We are planning for 8,000 for next year.

02:09:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Wow, awesome.

02:09:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, yeah, expect it to be massive. The excitement around the product is astonishing and really happy with what we got done this year. So, we're stoked to really go all out for next year.

02:09:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Cool, that's amazing. And for you, paulthorat at thoratcom, anything you'd like to let us know about.

02:09:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not really Got a lot of book updates to do in the next month because of this stupid Windows thing I was talking about earlier. But I don't know, Not really slash www.

02:09:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Whenever we publish the episode, you'll find those there. The show records live every Wednesday roundabout 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. I will not be back next week. Leo will be back, so you can tune in to watch the show live at that point and, of course, available later on as a podcast that Kevin puts together in a nice neat package. I am. There's one thing I was going to say that I'm now forgetting.

02:10:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Was it that I was five for five on the mute thing? Five for five on the mute, that's exactly what it was, congratulations.

02:10:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So yes, thank you everybody for tuning in and we well they will see you again next week for another episode of windows weekly bye.