Windows Weekly 942 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul's here, richard's here. We're going to talk about the Microsoft Drama of the Year for this week and what you can do about it. Also, a whole bunch of new features in our Week D update to Windows 11. And why is it that all CoPilot Plus PCs don't have the same features? I don't know, I don't know. Don't have the same features, I don't know, I don't know. Plus DuckDuckGo, a new AI from Paul's favorite service, proton, and a liquor pick of the week. That and a lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Trust this is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorada and Richard Campbell, episode 942, recorded Wednesday, july 23rd 2025. A world of wonder. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello all you winners. This is the, the show. We cover the latest news from microsoft with the two smartest microsoft observers in the business mr paul thurott from thurottcom, coming to us live from mexico city, california.

01:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello, paul hello leo, or should I say hola leo hola, hol, hola.

01:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually we're in New Mexico. No, what is it? What do they call California? Did they used to call it New Mexico? Anyway, we're in, you're in old Mexico, let's put it that way the original Mexico also from the Canada, mr Richard Campbell.

01:44
Hello, richard, hi and Lou, we're going to be doing something with Richard tomorrow. Also from the Canada, mr Richard Campbell Hello, richard, hi. Hello, we're going to be doing something with Richard tomorrow. I just want to let the world know. 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern 2000 UTC. What are you? Were you going to build a computer?

01:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, we got all the parts sitting behind me. Actually, we're going to build out an AMD with a Ryzen 9.

02:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ooh, and you 9. What is?

02:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this computer, for this is going to replace this streaming machine. Actually, this streaming machine is a Gen 8 Intel and it is done. Time to say goodbye. I'm amazed it still works honestly half the time. But it's been well cared for and the parts are used up and just get a little wonky, so go modern but so that's not that old.

02:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it seven or eight years old? Yeah, I think 10. 10. Okay, that's old yeah that's all.

02:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was the same and it was a secondary workstation. You know the whole time it's just got more important what do you, uh?

02:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what do you? I mean? They say that, uh, seven dog years for every human year. Yeah, what's the pc equation? It's minute by minute.

02:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I used to say 15 years for every human year, yeah so that would be 150 year old computer well, it's the same number of years, but it starts when you're 60 and that person has dementia okay, anyway, watch our windows.

03:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At least a pave or two on this, since, since I built it, we will start with the parts in a pile and we will end with a booting windows 11 computer. Is that right?

03:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's right, yeah, if you guys want, I could do a shorter show where I go to hp's refurbished store and buy a computer and then they ship it to my house or we could do a longer show where you get the new arm development kit for windows 11 and we're still we're still waiting.

03:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've still got mine sitting there. I'm gonna wiring it up to an ab switch, but oh god, what do you know? I gotta admit, getting these parts has cost more than just buying a machine.

03:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The snapdragon dev kit I sent you. What'd you do with that?

03:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's uh well, there's a an element of today's show that will explain that so let's oh how exciting it's coming up a little surprise.

03:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stay tuned for the mystery segment. But we begin, as often we do, with the microsoft drama of the year of the week I mean, honestly, I could have picked three or four things for this, but I this.

04:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This has happened a couple times recently, where there are these kind of recurring themes, you know, and one of the recurring themes today will be microsoft's retreat from the consumer market, um, which you know, frankly, occurred about 20 years ago. But anyway, uh, many people, or some people, may not know this, but, uh, the microsoft store that used to be the windows store, that's in windows 11 used to sell, uh, music right, um through groove at one point and xbox at a different point, and movies right and and tvs and tv shows.

04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, ebooks, remember, I remember buying them on my xbox, buying movies yeah, that was not a good decision, so um you've been wondering where they went, actually, yeah yeah, yeah, soon.

05:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're really going to be wondering where they go. Um, we'll see what happens. But, um, when microsoft transitioned away from music, they offered well, they didn't really do much. But they said, hey, maybe you should do spotify instead, you know, or whatever. Um ebooks, they didn't really have anything to say. I think three people bought an ebook from them. No big deal there. But this past week they announced or revealed in a support document really not an announcement that they were getting rid of the movies and tv show service. I'll call it so. This is the part of the store by which you could buy or rent movies or buy tv show episodes or series. Why anyone would do this for Microsoft, uh, you know now, seeing how the world has gone is unclear.

05:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, but yeah so. So what I did, uh back in the day is I moved it all to movies anywhere, which was used to be a Disney feature, and that puts it in your other collections like right Apple and think Amazon and right Google, I guess as well yeah, all of them were. Yeah, it used to be everybody. I don't know if it was limited movies or not. Let me just launch so see what yeah, it's, it's.

06:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It should be called not all movies anywhere, because it's some movies. It's a licensing thing three of the top five studios, yeah. So, uh, depending on which movies you've purchased and it's only movies, not TV shows some subset of your content will be available elsewhere. So, for the time being, you'll be able to access this content from the movies and TV app that was built into Windows 10 and 11. It now no longer comes in Windows 11, but you can get it through the store.

06:44
It is a delightfully old-fashioned app. It was never really updated. I mean, it's got kind of almost like a Windows 8 UI, and every time I update that part of the book, I look at this again and think to myself it's a little suspicious that they've never updated this or updated the media player app that they have now that's more modern to support that content, but they haven't. And then they never had a mobile client either, right, which is a big part of the problem. Um, so, yeah, I guess it's not a surprise. The surprise was how it happened and when it happened, because this could have happened, honestly, at any time. But, um, yes, if you did buy content from microsoft, definitely connect it to movies anywhere I actually I don't know where all these.

07:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have 166 movies in here.

07:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but probably from various services right?

07:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because I think I linked everything yeah.

07:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you might as well. I mean it's not to. It was particularly important to do this for Microsoft guys, because we don't have a mobile platform unless you're, you know, carrying around like a Surface tablet or something like that. We, because we don't have a mobile platform unless you're, you know, carrying around like a surface tablet or something like that, we don't have a phone. So if you uh want to watch this content on like an ipad or a phone or whatever, you can't do it from here. So if it's in movies anywhere, you can um from various clients. But um, yeah, the whole mobile thing and the fact that they never updated over two generations of windows now kind of uh highlights the fact that they never updated it over two generations of Windows now kind of highlights the fact that they were not really serious about this thing to begin with. So I don't know.

08:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I appreciate that. Microsoft's finally killing off products they don't care about, rather than just leaving them hanging, I agree. I would argue they could have shut down Skype 10 years ago. Five years ago something.

08:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, Skype at least was a decent brand. I mean, this thing was not even a brand. I mean, it's never good.

08:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's barely supported. It should have been dead a long time ago, yeah, but it's also a reminder of this whole idea that you think you own anything when it's dependent on the cloud. Yeah.

08:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This kind of event always triggers the same two, two reactions. You get the guy on social media. He's like I didn't even know they had this. You know like yeah, okay, yeah, uh. But then you get these guys like well, they're like oh, this is a, this is a big problem. I bought like 500 movies from this thing. It's like what? Like where were you when common sense was doled out? Like what are you talking about?

08:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like that's crazy over in the smart home world. We're in the middle of this crisis from this norwegian company called future home who went bankrupted themselves. Same guy started to back up. They pushed an update out just before the bank the bankruptcy, to shut everybody's service off.

09:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then you can resubscribe for a hundred dollars a year to the new service or you lose all your functionality I I don't know if I've mentioned this, but um, big tech is terrible and um, I know it's, it's kind of a concept, a group of local hackers for a group of local hackers, figured out how to revert to the old firmware and helped everybody get back to functionality, and now they're being sued.

09:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, oh, oh. Boy, who's the bad guy?

09:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
again, I'm trying well, the lawyers in that scenario actually. Um yeah, so, like I said, not a surprise, but timing is just weird. I don't know what just?

09:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
happened just came out of nowhere, you know, yeah, but I feel like there's a wave now of microsoft seems to be cleaning the ship up, like they're really concerned about competing for AI and they're cutting away other stuff. They're putting lots of pressure on their employees, yeah, yeah.

10:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When Apple started making Mac OS X and then that was kind of the primary concern of that company for several years, before, you know, iphone happened or whatever. The big story there was like Apple really aggressively gets rid of old features to get rid of crumb, and maybe too aggressively, right. Yeah, apple, or Microsoft rather, was the exact opposite on that spectrum. And in recent years you can see that in things like Microsoft maintains a list of deprecated and removed features in windows and you can see it actually does escalate over time. So it lasts a couple of years to maybe even three years, kind of a upward spike on that kind of thing.

10:53
And yeah, this is a problem because it hurts people who bought content. They spent real money on this stuff and they might want to access it. Um, although I mean, if they did, they would have noticed surely that, um, there were not many ways to access this content. You were pretty much stuck on a pc and then you could, I guess, cast it to a compatible device. If you somehow have a mirror, cast enabled tv or something, I guess.

11:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know odds are. You aren't using it.

11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You didn't even realize you're not yeah, even the guys who are complaining. I think pretty much you're like yeah, I bought all this content. I mean I haven't looked at it ever, but you know it's like okay, but yeah. But yeah, all you can do for now is sign up for movies anywhere. If you haven't connect your microsoft account to it, that will put it some of the content. Like I said, you have to go look at it, see how much you know you can.

11:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think paramount mgm uh, don't, or don't have a deal, it says at the bottom. So some of your movies won't right, yeah right.

11:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I haven't looked at this in a while, but for me I was running about two-thirds, so about two-thirds of my content, purchase, content over whatever services was in there is there.

12:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't remember how this works. Is there an app that you use, then?

12:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, no, so there is but you would never use that right. So what you, in other words, you as a consumer, might use an ipad and use apple service. Right?

12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
probably right, or you're a google so does apple see everything in movies everywhere, anywhere?

12:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, ah, and it works in the opposite direction too. So if you are a microsoft guy and use movies and tv the app, you will see in there any content from other services that you bought that are compatible with movies actually that's pretty cool, yeah.

12:32
So yeah, anything I buy anywhere this kind of gets past that kind of uh drm silo problem where, uh, this will come up again later in the show, but I I had gone back to 2005 to look at what was pertinent at the time in the microsoft world um, as we'll discuss later, but there were all these services I'd completely forgotten about that still existed in, like cinema now. Oh, yeah like there were. There were all these like different services, so they all had different drms they all had.

13:03
They weren't compatible. You could buy, you know, like a movie from this one and a tv show over here, but you'd have to have the app and it was like it was just just you know stupid.

13:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was like pre where do you get your movies? Now? What would be the sensible way to do this?

13:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've always gone with apple because yeah, I uh ripped them from a torrent, uh, oh this.

13:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this website's called pirate Bay, something like that.

13:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's yeah, they have a surprising amount of content and it's really cheap. You can't really stream it, but it's yeah, no, I, I. I bought most of my content from Apple but I did sign up for Apple to different services and stuff, you know, but mostly because I feel like they're in it for the long haul, you know. Yeah, like I, I feel like this is part of their whatever.

13:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I know it's ridiculous, but I did buy a dvd player and, uh, scott wilkinson, the home theater geek, yeah, talked me into it. So and I just I'm not looking at movies anywhere, I realized, I just re-bought all the lord of the rings and hobbit movies that I already had, but I am streaming, so now I have them on. You know, 4k uhd, I guess that's right, it was that.

14:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I mean. So you get them from apple or wherever they're?

14:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
4k uhd no one can take them away from me, yeah you get them on a dvd.

14:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like 720 by 480. Like what are we talking about? Yeah, that's a thumbnail today. That's the size of the icons on my desktop. I mean that's tiny.

14:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now, if you're going to do this, you got to go get a 4k player and you got to start buying the 4k media yeah, and they look good.

14:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I'm that's what I do from, but I don't.

14:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I think you could make the case, you know, for because some content has never come forward to these new reflected digital right. Maybe there's a DVD of like uh, there's a couple of movies actually I do have on DVD because they're not on digital Right. So that's one way to get those, and you know.

14:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just got two catalogs in the mail. I'm not sure where they got my name, but they sell DVDs Like not even 4K. Some of them are just DVDs.

15:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but that's what their pitch is.

15:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, build your collection, because you can't get these on streaming. Yep.

15:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, look that's, I get that. I mean, that's true of books too. You know, there are some books that are just on paper.

15:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know like we're magnets or something like so whatever, If I'm going down this DVD player road, I have to have more children because somebody's got to load that DVD and ain't going to be me.

15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, gotta load that dvd and it ain't gonna be me. Yeah, exactly, get one of those. Do they have those carousel players? Remember these stuff for dvds or for our cds? Um, the problem is I don't often watch a movie again.

15:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, yeah, that's really. I try to buy movies when they're super cheap on sale, like if they're five bucks or less or whatever like, and it's something I know I'll probably watch again, like I'll do that. But uh, but yeah, I do this knowing that these might just disappear someday. You know, apple's financial situation is perilous right now. Never know what could happen. Yeah, beleaguered Apple, am I right?

15:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this was it. Movies Unlimited Interesting.

15:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It feels a little limited to me, but I see what you're saying.

16:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just I don't really want to pay money for these things.

16:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I already own right some people like stuff, you know they like to have physical things, they like to have a wall where they can see just kind of show up until they're learning electrons at this point.

16:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what you think that's my thing until you move. Until you move, then it's. I've moved a lot. Let me tell you something aside from being a giant pile of kindling.

16:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The multiple bookshelves of books that I've owned over the years were also the heaviest things I've ever had to move ever right. They're the worst. They're literally dead.

16:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well not literally, but I love books. That's the difference. I'm not crazy about plastic discs, but I, or even vinyl discs, but I love books.

16:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But at least just don't degrade ever and, uh, they don't scratch. So I don't know what's your problem. They rust, don't degrade ever and they don't scratch, so I don't know what's your problem. They rust. Nothing is perfect. Um, I think it's the lesson here. But I would take personally, if I was going, if it was important to me, I would buy that thing on. I've done this, like you buy it on disc and then you rip it to a digital format, store it on your nas or whatever you have, and then access it that way you want to, yeah, yeah, and you can then have it all 4k uhd.

17:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can have it as good of quality as you. I mean these days, yeah, you can upscale stuff too.

17:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the other thing that is yep.

17:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe that's what I should do, because I do have, I think, 30 terabytes of storage.

17:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah I am. I do have considering the progression of ai. At this point you're just gonna be able to say to your tv play jaws, and it'll fabricate one out of whole claw what do you want the shark to look like?

17:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
because I exactly yeah, play jaws, but I want the shark to be my ex-boss and I want to be the one that stabs him in the head at the end. Uh, you know like that kind of thing. That's good, that's. I feel like that could happen right now in chat gpt it is.

17:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sometimes, though, you do go to these streaming servers and you say I would, I really want to see planes, trains and automobiles, and you can't find it. That actually happened to me some years ago. This is all of steve martin stuff is now on streaming, but it wasn't for a while.

17:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, for a long time fundamentally, I, every one of us, should pause for a moment and consider the fact that every single company pushing AI really hard right now cannot handle basic search queries. I just want to throw that out there, like I can't tell you how good Google photos was at finding things until they added a to I to it. And now it is like asking a child to go into a room full of stuffed animals and pull a random one out and be like, nope, that's not it. Try again Nope, that's not it. Try again nope, that's not it. You know, it's just, it's ridiculous. I don't know. I don't know how this has happened, but oh well, at least in microsoft land it never worked anyway. So for us that's our siri, you know, like the, the search that never worked, you know but yeah yeah, we live in a world of wonder, wonder I wonder, why nothing works.

18:48
I wonder he said paradoxically.

18:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yep, it's a world of wonder I like it.

18:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're into heartbreak and disappointment. Personal technology is an excellent field. Highly recommend it. Wow, what a world.

19:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I was a little disappointed. You know, I had this ai thing that I was wearing all the time. Yeah, I know I knew you were gonna say this the b computer and they announced yesterday they just got sold to amazon, so did you stop wearing that because of amazon, or did you?

19:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, no, the first thing I did when I literally heard, I went to my account deleted it, that's and now.

19:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is retired because I don't want Amazon. This literally recorded everything I did and said for six months, right?

19:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you don't want Panos Panay to have access to that information. Why do you think Amazon bought them? It wasn't for the fun little device form factor thing, by the way.

19:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they thanked Panos Panay for buying them they did.

19:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Listen, no one knows more about it's funny because I and I know paul, you're this way and richard you probably are too we love tech. That's why we got in this business, that's why we do what we do. We love what technology can, can do. But there's a good button, a sentence.

20:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a big butt comes the butt. And the butt is why do we stay in this relationship? We're just, we get abusive. We defend them abusive. We tell it's like where did that scar come from? It wasn't ai. I did that to myself. I tripped officer downstairs and then up the stairs and then down again big tech said they love me and we'll never.

20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll never happen again. It's my fault.

20:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I made him mad, I fell on the knife several times and it's self-inflicted.

20:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too bad, because we could live in a world of wonder. I wonder what happened.

20:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

20:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love that ball, by the way.

20:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why we have Pixar movies.

20:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, everything can be fixed with a little bit of wally well, now that you've depressed all of us, sorry, yeah, so anybody want to buy a little ai device?

20:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I even got a nice cute little that totally is not being listened to by m this is what everybody always said.

21:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, alexa listens to everything you said. It doesn't this does, and amazon just bought it I have uh in mexico.

21:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We don't have the same restrictions on uh chinese tech that you have in the united states and uh I have a little huawei router over there that's blinking as I say the word huawei and uh, I'm pretty sure nihao, pretty sure those guys are listening.

21:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just saying they're listening in a digital way.

21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're watching the traffic no, I mean listening to me talk about huawei. I think, um, I'm pretty sure I think they're actually listening. I think they're listening. Why is there a microphone?

21:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on this thing well, that's the funny thing. You start to see tv sets with cameras and microphones. Oh, that's so. You can um make zoom calls. That's why right.

21:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it could be that could be one of the things it's for. Um, that's not why that's an option on apple tv. You can add an external camera. Yeah, why would you do that? What is wrong with you people? I want a dumb screen and I want to watch videos.

22:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me, uh, let. This would be an apt time to talk about threat locker and take a break.

22:07
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22:46
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25:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's week D in Microsoft land and I had forgotten about that, like I often do on that Tuesday of the month, and Microsoft put out these three back to back to back I guess I'll call them announcements related to Windows somewhat that were all very confusing to me. We're going to highlight all of them today. The first was regards to these new AI features that were coming to Windows or, in Microsoft's view, new AI features that are generally available for Windows 11 today, and I was like, really that's an odd time to release new features for Windows a random Tuesday of the month. So I looked at the list and I'm like, huh, none of these are new. I know about all of these features. What is this? And then it took me a while to realize Microsoft A doesn't understand how the English language works, microsoft doesn't know how to make an announcement, and these features are all just things that were in the Windows Insider program for the past few months.

26:44
It's week D, that's what they're talking about. So there is a preview update, which is a cumulative update, a quality update, but it's optional. It's a preview update. You can enable a switch in Windows Update to get those things. If you like living on the edge a little bit, but most people are not going to get this thing. So I'm not sure generally available. I mean, these features could still change. It could be bugs that will now be revealed by more people using them. And then, when Patch Tuesday comes in August right, yep, it's July Maybe they'll be a little different, who knows? Anyway, generally available. So these are all things we've talked about. The Settings app has an agent. Oh, actually, let me backtrack for one second.

27:28
These features can be divided into two buckets co-pilot plus PCs only. Actually, let's call it three buckets Co-pilot plus PC running Snapdragon processor. Co-pilot plus PC running any processor, meaning AMD, intel or Snapdragon, and then features that are going to come to everybody in Windows 11. Most of the features are only for Snapdragon. Is that right? Tip-a-tip-a-tip-a? Or I should say yeah, I think most of them are only for Snapdragon. So if you have a Snapdragon X computer it's about three of you you will eventually get all of these features. Computer, it's about three of you. Um, you will eventually get all of these features. If you have another, another type of co-pilot plus pc, you will eventually get all of these features a little bit longer time frame. And if you are a lowly loser on windows 11 on a normal computer, like a jerk. Uh, you will get a couple of these features, so enjoy. Um, the first one is snapdragon. Only is that right? I've been having such a hard time keeping track of these things.

28:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's so weird and it's setting is a difference in copilot plus PCs is disturbing. It's unbelievable.

28:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It. Clearly there's a behind the scenes deal between Qualcomm and Microsoft that I feel like maybe should have expired by now. Yeah, yeah. So settings agent that all this means is you can use natural language, search and settings and find settings Right, okay. Agent that all this means is you can use natural language, search and settings and find settings right, okay. It will come to AMD and Intel based Snapdragon.

28:50
Uh, co-pilot plus PCs at some point in the future. I don't think it will be that Tuesday next month, but maybe the following month, something like that. Um, there's some, a bunch of improvements. We've talked about all these things for click to do, which I would say is the one useful, you know, maybe universally useful. Uh, local AI feature that's in our co-pilot plus PC, not windows, but co-pilot plus BC today. Um, practice in reading coach. These are all I should say. These are all text actions, right? So when you do the windows key plus click and you get the purple, pink AI for Perry, these will be some of the new options.

29:27
Read with Immersive Reader that was the feature that debuted in Edge but now is available more broadly if you have a Copilot plus PC Draft with Copilot in Word, which is a weird one because don't you need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license? I got to look that one up. I'm pretty sure Yep and yeah, so not sure why that's listed in the windows thing, but whatever. And then, uh, two related to team send a team message and schedule a team meeting. So in other words, you've got some text. You want to use that as the basis for one of those team's actions. That's cool. Um, only on copilot plus pcs, a new photos app feature called photo relight. This one actually looks really cool. Actually, sorry, snapdragon X, only AMD and Intel are coming soon. I told you it was confusing. I've not seen this one yet and I'm not going to now because I'm in Mexico and I won't see my Snapdragon X in there.

30:18
Yeah, till I get home, but a couple of weeks, but it looks really cool. So you can take an existing photo. This is like when you run your phone. Depending on the app, you can adjust certain features after the fact. So, for example, if you take, like, a portrait shot on your iPhone, if you did it with live photos, you can adjust the, the, the Boca effect or whatever on the fly after the fact, right. So this is like that. But for lighting, you can have up to three virtual light sources. There are built-in presets which I think most people will use, but then there's also manual control, so you can really kind of play with it. It sounds great. I haven't used it, but it sounds good If you have a co-pilot plus PC. I believe this one is AMD, intel and Snapdragon.

30:58
Two new features in paint. These I have used Sticker generator I think you can agree I would use this one on a daily basis. I'll have stickers, um. And object select, which is one of those kinds of Photoshop type features where, in addition to supporting layers and some other kind of more professional features, you can actually grab uh, even though it's a bitmap image, grab an object and then use AI to kind of cut it out of the frame and use it as a discrete object. That's cool, that one's good.

31:25
Two new features for snipping tool I believe these are everybody meaning Windows 11 broadly One is called perfect screenshot. This is just an addition to the screenshotting tools or the snipping tools, as we say in snipping tool. So you can take a region, you can do a window, you can do the full screen. But if you do the full screen, what perfect a window? You can do the full screen, but if you do the full screen, what perfect screenshot allows you to do is auto crop to maybe a region or window and it will use whatever's on screen as the basis for that cropping. So we'll do it for you. Yeah, that's fine.

31:56
And color picker, which actually surprisingly useful. Right, there's. There's no end shot or video out of this one, so it's kind of a an interesting place to put it. But if you do a lot of graphics work or you're working on a logo, maybe you want the exact color of something that's on screen. This will allow you to grab the color of any item on screen and then copy it to the clipboard in whatever format you prefer. So like hashtag, you know FFFF, whatever, whatever you know hex form, whatever you want, and then apply it in whatever graphics app using and then get that exact color. So that's cool.

32:28
I'm not sure why they listed this one, because it's actually been broadly available for at least a month. But edge game assist this is that mini edge web browser that's in the game bar. So you're playing a game, yeah, you know. You hit the window or the Xbox button on your controller. The Xbox game bar or no, sorry game bar they call it now comes up and that will be one of the floating windows and if it recognizes the game depending on the level of recognition that you know the sport has to be built in it will actually give you clues and tips for the part of the game you're in. If you're really lucky I've not seen that, but in my case I'll see in Call of Duty it recognizes that I am playing Call of Duty 6 or Black Ops 6, and it will provide those links Again.

33:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
screw the 12-year-olds that are about to spank you.

33:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and look, this guy's browsing the web. Let's pile it on.

33:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it'd be cool if you were playing some role-playing game and when you hit that, it popped up and gave you a let's play or a walkthrough point and already aligned it yeah, I mean the end game here.

33:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is that um kind of gaming co-pilot feature they've been talking about, where it's like your little buddy and he, you know flippy for gaming yeah, it looks like. It looks like you're a loser. Would you get a shot at a lot there, paul, do you? Maybe you should duck I don't know.

33:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's your fifth time through this. Are you ready for the help?

33:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know it's yeah right. I mean it's definitely for gaming is a good idea actually, yeah, it's definitely going.

33:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's, it's gonna, it's, that's coming. There's no doubt about it.

33:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um co-pilot, I've talked a few times about folks using the cameras to see that someone's thrashing on their app and and try and help them. Like right, uh, that's trying to do the same thing over and over again.

34:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah I will say I turn my mic off. I turn everyone's mic off in multiplayer games, but the one exception to that, which I don't do a lot anymore, is if I was playing a free-for-all type of a game, leave the microphone on just so you can hear the guy that you surprised the heck out of. Be like just to hear the exacerbated frustration, you know kind of like frustration of how did he see me? You know that kind of thing, yeah, um, but yeah, rigged, yep, exactly, nice. You know we in the back of the day we'd be like nice ping. You know, just, it was never skill. You know, like I would always beat you normally.

34:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm great you know um that 30 millisecond difference between us is the reason you succeeded.

34:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean sometimes it is actually, but anyway, uh, you know, that's the victim of that. Um, it's really, it's. It's like the volts versus amps thing. It's not really the ping, it's the frame, it's the. What do you call it the? I guess the frame. It's the frame, it's the what do you call it the?

35:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I?

35:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
guess the frame rate. It's the latency Latency. Thank you, that's the term I was looking for. It's the latency.

35:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, exactly, copilot Vision, another feature. This has been around for a little while actually, but it's US only. It's available to Copilot app, which you know. So everyone, I guess, lucky you. And then another and I thought maybe I was wrong about this one, because I have so many it's hard for me to tell what's what anymore.

35:31
But quick machine recovery. So this is the automatic recover option. Where something goes wrong, you reboot and maybe it wouldn't boot into Windows. Normally You'd have to go through the recovery environment. If you could figure out how to make that work, it will do that automatically for you. But there are two fun additions to this feature that will benefit a lot of people. One is the wait time, because what you would see typically is that blue screen of death right, so it's blue, it's got the QR code, useless information at the bottom and it takes a while, right. Every time I see the screen I'm like could I just get it? It didn't work, can I keep going please? But it would wait for like up to 40 seconds. You know they've reduced that wait time up to two seconds, cool, and they've changed the screen to uh black, because now it's completely different.

36:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So but they don't have to change the acronym at least yeah, right, black screen of death right, that's good news.

36:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, so there you go. Yeah, so what I just listed out was pretty much 24H2, but 23H2 will get the same features, if they're not already same timeframe, and there is a Windows 10 update as well. But that's pretty much bug fixes and basically just prepping this thing for end of life.

36:37
Yeah, yep, and tied. Let me see if this is where we are. Yeah, no, we're in somewhere else. No, we are. Yes, nope, we're in somewhere else. No, we are, we're here. This is good. So, this is good. This is a good transition.

36:48
So when Windows 10 goes out of support for most people in October, microsoft will, by that point, have ready a PC transfer feature that will expose itself in the Windows backup app so that you can, on either end of that transition, import or export your data to the other PC, right? So if you've ever set up Windows 11, you surely have seen you get to a screen and it says, hey, would you like to recover from a previous backup? And that's something Windows backup did behind your back, without your acknowledgement, but whatever. And it restores some of the settings and things that you did. If it will restore, um, the store apps that you install, that kind of thing, uh, I hate this feature. I wish I could turn it off. I always do a clean install, but whatever, it's fine, I get it. I get why people would want it. So this.

37:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm still, I'm still, uh, burned by the previous system restore feature. That never worked, so yeah yeah, you know, really screw things up. So I understand why your point of view, but it's better now, right?

37:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that the feature you're referring to from a technical perspective was about a thousand times more complex than what I'm describing now. But yeah, I, I this is you feel my pain? I'm sure, yeah, yeah, I, I, I can't say. I've never been helped by it, but I'll just remain silent on that topic.

38:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So occasionally.

38:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so in the future, when you run the windows backup app, you'll have two options. So today what you get is a list of like four types of things you could back up. You can click a backup button. That's kind of pointless. It's going to do it anyway. But now there are going to be two top level options, and one of them is going to be about transferring to another PC or receiving from another PC.

38:32
Right, if you've just installed Windows on a new PC, so this thing will work over Wi-Fi. It's like a Laplink type thing. It's not complete, it's not going to do your apps, it's not going to do certain things, you know, but it's over and above the settings based restore tool that we already have. So they've been implementing this in steps. There are bits of it in Windows 11 today. Probably well, it won't be August, but maybe September, certainly September, I would think they'll probably complete this. So we'll have both halves and then at that point, you'll be able to migrate partial migration from one PC to another PC, either Windows 11 or 10. Right, so maybe you're upgrading from 10 to 11. Maybe in the future you're going from 11 to 11, whatever, but OK. Also, by the way, asterix does not work with Windows 11 on our? I'm hilarious, yet I mean it will. But yeah, there you go, microsoft's classic.

39:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's a hard computer science problem, I'm sure I feel like it isn't um, I don't, I feel like that should.

39:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just, I don't even understand what the problem should even matter what the processor is, should not matter.

39:35
I couldn't agree more. Yep, stupid. Um, we have. There hasn't been too much action on the insider front in the past week. There was a canary build. You may recall last we. There was a Canary build. You may recall, last week we were talking about a Canary build with a lot of new stuff. There was one build with no new stuff, just a couple of bug fixes, and then there were big builds for dev and beta, which point to probably September timeframe for Windows, updata for Apache Tuesday. So, yet again, more actions for click to do, in this case for images, image descriptions and narrator. I can't, it's possible. I've never experienced this in my life, despite the fact that I've been covering windows for 30 years. They may they're making an improvement to the performance logs, like the. So this is something people who watch this show have dealt with. This interface Most people have not, right? So it's somewhat to what Leo just said about the previous. What do you call it? The system restore feature? That's still, by the way, buried in windows, if you want to. It's still there.

40:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still there, oh yeah.

40:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, You're going to really look for it, but it's still there. Well, you can probably just search for it. Actually it's still there, oh yeah. Yeah, you're going to really look for it, but it's still there.

40:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you can probably just search for it.

40:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually it's there. If you search for, yeah, system restore it better, come to it. Sure, yep. So if you want a little blast from the past, that's still there. You know, we just mentioned blue screens, right? So you would blue screen and the first thing you would do is go into, like me, you never once figured out what it was. But whatever I mean oftentimes with blue screens it's a hardware thing. Maybe you just plug something in, maybe you added some hardware. You know, you find out that way, whatever. So this is similar to if you think that Windows backup is sort of a replacement for system restore, sort of, and it sort of is. This is sort of a replacement for that process I just described. It will look at your system, it will see that things have been slowing down for some reason and it will write more information to this performance log so that you can manually today and, I think, automated in the future, because that's where Windows is going figure out what is causing the problem and then you can take the steps to solve it.

41:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's pretty cool.

41:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think it's hard-coded to like to say chrome. You know it's going to be chrome every time, right, so like if you used edge, you wouldn't have this. If the number of tabs is over five and browser equals chrome.

41:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's chrome it's the problem. Will it ever be a microsoft product fault ever?

42:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I don't know, we'll see where this goes. I mean, when they introduced Windows Backup which you know, windows 11, obviously, so as long ago as four years ago, I guess I was like this could turn into something really cool. That hasn't happened yet, but it has evolved and this thing they're doing now is the biggest change, and you know we'll see, but we'll see. I mean now is the biggest change and you know we'll see, but we'll see. I mean, I, I, I do like the notion that it, the system, should figure out the problem and just fix it right. Yeah, this is its own form of orchestration. Yeah, telling you that there's a problem is like yeah, I know there's a problem. It took 20 seconds to display the dialogue, like, but you know, telling me how to fix something is pretty good. Just fixing it automatically is very good. So maybe we'll get there. We'll see.

42:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a first step, you know.

42:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and then just some lock screen and privacy improvements, which are not all that meaningful. But on the lock screen front, it was the ability to configure which widgets are there and in which order. Right, which okay, fine, and I think we talked about this last week or two weeks ago. Um, the, the search privacy settings were in two different locations, and settings because microsoft, and now they're in one, I guess so it's fancy progress.

43:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do have a question about your article on week d. Yes, what's with the life and death of king john, who I know?

43:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
your screenshot. It's like oh, that's from microsoft. That's just a oh, that's from microsoft.

43:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're asking co-pilot to rewrite shakespeare. Is that what we're talking here? I don't.

43:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, actually a thousand monkeys or co-pilot, given enough time. Um, no, I I think what they were trying to do here was select a screen that had text and image and you can see that. That that's the blue, pink, purple thing I've been talking about. Yeah, when you first do it, it's the whole screen. Well, it is sort of there too, I guess, but then it will highlight the things that can do stuff with. I see, right click and choose from the can't do anything with that picture this is going to.

44:00
This is a problem of this interface, and what I mean by that is it's a good idea. In some sense, I like the idea of interact. You know, I have a question about this thing or I want to do something with this thing. Like this is smart in a way. The problem is this thing is extensible. So, like right now, we're just dealing like when this thing first came out.

44:19
When they first released the first preview probably november, whatever it there were two text actions and one image action, right, and if you look at the screenshot today, this is just text. How many actions do you see? There's a bunch. Eventually, everything that can do anything with text is going to add something to this list and we're going to get these giant context menus that are going to scroll off the edge of the screen, because that's how this works. Right, this is the UI equivalent of like a com component from the 1990s having public interfaces that software code can access programmatically, to access the functionality that's inside of the thing, the object or whatever, except that now what we're talking about is an ai.

45:04
Well, it's a, it's a. I guess it's an app technically using probably no, definitely multiple models it is. It's doing an almost manual form of orchestration. It's letting you pick what you want. It picks the right model on the back end for that one feature and then it does the thing, whatever it is. But the problem is, we're all going to have, you know, it's going to be a million of these things, like, if you have a co-pilot plus pc, you have over 40 models um out of the box.

45:31
You know that's cool, that's it's cool, but it's, it's like a double-edged sword, right, yeah, anyway, this is, to my mind, the one. Well, that's not really true, the models are not that important yeah, yeah, that's true, it's this Click to do is possibly probably the biggest single useful AI feature in Windows slash Copilot plus PC, I would say, but it's going to get overloaded, so that's kind of a weird problem.

46:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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48:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it makes sense when you consider the point of brave, right. So brave like signal, the private messaging app that our government uses so effectively, uh, is by definition a privacy solution, right, like a lot of the people who would choose brave would do so because of the privacy and security and it's got that provides out of the bond by default in most cases. So with look, you could make a Venn diagram of the people who are going to, who have and or will have a Copilot plus VC, figure out, recall, decide they want to use it and then people use Brave and I think the gap between those two circles would be like the Grand Canyon, like I don't think there is any overlap, they're not going to run into each other?

49:36
No, I don't think so. But okay, but let's pretend otherwise. I think it's okay for an app Well, no, it's, obviously it's okay. It's okay for an app that is privacy focused to automatically elect to not support recall, right To block it or hide it or hide the app from recall. This is a feature that is built into recall, actually right. So in the case of Brave, because it's a browser, recall does not look at or record snapshot incognito or private browser windows, so Brave identifies itself as that all the time and it won't be included in a recall by default. You can enable it if you want to use it inside the Brave UI. I should mention this is in a coming update, so I think we're at version 1.80 and it will be in 1.81. So it could happen any second now.

50:34
But yeah, there's all this like of course, the problem I have with this is only that it just brings up recall again and then you get the same people. It's the same nonsense over and over again. It's like guys, relax, we get it, you don't have to use it, just leave it alone, it's fine, it works fine, it's not going to hurt anybody. But yeah, I mean the type of person who would brave. We use brave, advocate for brave, maybe. Whatever are the types of people who do not like recall and would want that, even though they're never going to turn it on anyway and probably don't have a computer that could use it as it is. But that's fine. It's fine like I. I think this is fine, we're fine, everything's fine, we're all fine.

51:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's fine. It's kind of a statement, though, about recall, I mean it isn't, though.

51:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the problem, like that's my problem is it no, my problem literally is it isn't like is is this is the window that is the browser going to be blacked out in recall? Is that just how it looks?

51:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, yeah, I would imagine. So I. So I, I assume you don't see through it, like you don't see whatever's behind it. But yeah, it's just. Those snapshots are just screenshots, right, so it won't take screenshots of that window. So, yes, I would imagine it's either going to be an empty hole or blacked out. Yeah, something like that. Um, yeah, I don't know. You know when signal made this similar announcement a couple weeks ago. Signal, that's what they do. You know. That makes sense for signal?

51:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I guess. I don't think. I think a brave is just a regular browser.

51:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, you're right, it's a private browser, but if any browser, is going to be the brave browser.

51:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This speaks to that audience. That's, that's all I'm saying. Like this is this is what those guys want to hear. You know they're like yeah, I told you so you can't trust recall. Good for them. You know it's like relax, there's nothing wrong with recall, but it's this is them. You know. Like I don't expect, uh, you know opera or chrome or something to auto like decide for you not to be part of recall, right? Um, because you can, as a user, go in and say I don't ever want this app and if you're doing like some people would use chrome, let say and do their normal browsing, and it's like whatever. But they want to visit a porn site or use their banking site or something that they don't want other people knowing about. Fire up Brave. They might use Brave, and that would be excluded from recall, if that's on. But again, venn diagram.

52:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to keep bringing that one up built-in feature and recall for, like all, incognito windows, or yeah, that's about on by default.

52:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, but interesting. Oh, well, then that explains it. If they're all incognito by default, well, they're not actually all incognito, I, if I understand, brave correctly, but they will identify themselves as that to the system, so that recall does not.

52:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how they do it.

52:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I get it, that's fine, yeah it's fine, we're all fine, we're fine. If I said we're fine, we're fine, we're fine, um, how are you? I don't know. I want to emphasize how fine we are, um, but you know, like, this is the type of thing like there's all this commentary around this and it's all by people who actually do not use brave or use recall or ever would, but they all have strong opinions about it and it's like guys, it's fine, um. Same thing with whatsapp. Uh, whatsapp a couple years ago announced I'm gonna call native is kind of a strong term but a uwp version of their app on windows.

53:32
Um, they're getting rid of it and yep, okay, oh, interesting, then you might be. I'm curious of your opinion of this, when if or when you ever use this, they're getting rid of that and going with a pwa which will still be in the store. It's available now in beta. I've installed it. I'm not a big whatsapp fan, but I I use it and yeah, it's fine it's fine.

53:54
It's fine for my pc, right like yeah, it looks exactly the same as the other one. I sure the the big difference and this is a bizarre limitation to WhatsApp that I've never understood and I hate is it relies on you having a single instance of the app on a phone, as one would, and then you, you, you know, you do the QR code thing and you associate that other app with the one that's on your phone, like they don't let you typically don't let you log into multiple instances of their app on multiple devices, whereas, like for me, this is a problem because I go back and forth between the iPhone and Android and there's no way, or no easy way, no way I found, to automatically keep, like all the chats that are on the iPhone, get them on Android, get all those and put them on it. Like there's no one cloud-based, one list of chats. And I I don't understand this. I don't understand why I can't go to and because they have this limitation, when I pick up my android phone but I'm using the iphone now I can't even get into whatsapp. I have to switch it over to that device and it's like guys, like what, what is? I don't understand this.

55:00
So, unfortunately, I my understanding, I never well, I probably have used it once or twice, but the I believe the uwp version of the app was a standalone instance of whatsapp. It didn't require you to have or didn't require a link between it and your phone based app or whatever the uwp version does. So, um, whatever I I don't do a, I use it. I I actually am in whatsapp every day. It's mostly because I'm in mexico and they use. They use it extensively here.

55:31
But that's how you get your tacos from cafe taco let me tell you something not only could you do that through whatsapp, but you could then schedule a doctor's appointment and have him come back and show you the x-rays from earlier, and they use it.

55:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish we had a standard like that in the us, like something everybody knows I also.

55:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is unrelated to anything, but the other big cross-platform problem I have is I message always screws everything up, no matter which direction I'm going in, and whatsapp is. I don't like Facebook meta, whatever. But WhatsApp can now be used as a MMS SMS app on iPhone. I don't think yet on Android or ever, I don't know. I don't think it's on Android like that. But if, if, if that app actually let me go back and forth and did have all the chats and synced everything to the cloud and everything worked, I would just use that that would be great, but you know, the only reason it doesn't is because Apple won't let it.

56:22
Yeah, yeah. No, I know it's the same problem in both cases. So I don't know, maybe regulators out there, someday we'll get a, we'll get that fixed, I don't know, but today it stinks. Yeah, okay, I'm jealous you know, in Japan they have wechat, here we have xcom, the everything. Here we have green, green bubbles and blue bubbles, and never the twain shall meet, never the two.

56:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like we're a second-class citizens up here. I don't know the canada. Is there a standard? Did I? I most of the rest of the world, whatsapp is standard, but not in canada no, no, it's, it's totally regional man, yeah, it's, you know, you can't even see.

57:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Most of the rest of the world is whatsapp either, like I've gone to places where viper was it? You know like that's what that's amazing, you know.

57:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But brazil, uh, whatsapp's huge. Uh, mexico it's huge. I know we used it when we were in mexico.

57:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The hotel said yeah, it's all what's up. Yeah, yep, I just was sitting at a bar last night and some guy added me to whatsapp. You know, like just it's all what's up. Yeah, yep, I just was sitting at a bar last night and some guy added me to what's up. You know, like just it's amazing that I.

57:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like we need a central place.

57:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The key to being a second class society, leo, is that you think you're the greatest country on earth and you're completely oblivious to the fact that the rest of the planet has bypassed you. Okay, I have a different context.

57:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I'm sorry, go ahead. My point of view is we invented this stuff and it's always the case, like we're saying with cell phones, that when you were the first you have a huge amount of Legacy. So it's very difficult for you to do the thing that 10 years or 20 years later evolved to be the right thing because you've got all this Legacy sit with. Happen with cell phone, happen with messaging, uh, happens with train gauges, I don't know what I have.

58:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like this is the habit slash tradition problem yeah, legacy is always the same way for so long, yeah, that if you actually came back and said why do we do this, no one could answer that question. You're like well, we've always done it this way. Well, actually, no, we haven't. But but why are we doing it this way? How could we get?

58:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like a national campaign would signal. If, if we all decided to use Signal, that'd probably be a good choice, right, that's secure it's not owned by Meta. Yeah, it has the features. Does it have all the features, People? I think like Telegram because it has stickers and stuff.

58:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, there's more restricted on the features on Signal. Am I missing something?

58:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I need text and sometimes I like to send a photo. Can we just you're? Not there you're not what we call I don't need exploding fireworks every time someone does something fun. I don't need a clown to bounce across the screen like I just want to communicate maybe we should have something for people over 50 and under 50.

59:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it yeah, it's going to be called AARPapp, that's who should do this.

59:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's going to be like 72-point type, you know. It's going to yell it at you. It's like hey, your son called.

59:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Call back. Call your mother.

59:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you're going to hear that everywhere in the restaurant because it's like happy hour.

59:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the only people in there, like 80,. You know, because it's when Telegram first came out, I kind of took a one man campaign to get everybody to use it. Of course, it failed miserably. Now that I know how bad Telegram is in many ways, including security, I wouldn't, but I like the features.

59:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My kids are in year five of a campaign to convince my wife to get an iphone so she can be the right color bubble and uh, and they've just gone out of the family well, I go back and forth. You know, yeah, yeah, you use both. She's samsung, she's all samsung, and uh could not care less she's not ordered passionate about samsung. She just does not care, you know she doesn't care.

01:00:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's who uses samsung, people who don't care, right, it's like when you buy a car at costco.

01:00:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like that's why did you pick this? It was the one they had. Yeah, okay, but it's a chevy, what are you doing?

01:00:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's just a car, you know it's got four wheels.

01:00:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It gets me there. I mean it's in the shop a lot, but you know costco.

01:00:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, uh, I just bought the. I probably fell for it, but I bought for the new fold because it looks.

01:00:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I look pretty interesting.

01:00:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, it's gorgeous, yeah, beautiful, yeah, yep and and I just kind of want to get a sense of you know what, oh, I think had the early ones, but I wanted to get sense with where they've gone. So expensive, it's like.

01:00:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So well, they're pretty good on trade-ins if you pre-order pretty good pre-order the best phone I have is a, you know, for trading is an iphone. Whatever the newest pro max is, yeah, and it's still.

01:00:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still like 1500 bucks, you know, like it's not inexpensive, it's uh, I got through google fi and I got it down to, I think, 1200. It's still expensive. Yeah, the little one or the big one, the big one. But. But I have a trade-in. I have the most recent flip.

01:01:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I tried that too. The problem with Fi is you can't trade in a current gen device of any kind.

01:01:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So my iPhone 16, whatever will not work, because they want you to replace your old phone with the Fi phone. In fact, you have to use it for 120 days to get the discount. Yeah, yeah, so I will be replacing, uh, my google pixel 9 with a samsung galaxy fold.

01:01:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah, I looked at. I can't remember, but I want to say I could have done that as well. It was like 380 dollars maybe, like it's not. Yeah, it's not great it's not great.

01:01:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's ex it's pricey it's expensive. Yeah, well, I'm writing it off. It's kind of a business expense I need.

01:01:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I I see I hear you, I yeah, I'm ready, but I I guess I'm not that ready, because I was like two times.

01:01:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, get stephanie to do it, she's miss samsung. Have you met my wife?

01:01:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
she is first of all, a get her to do it is hilarious. It's two thousand dollars. Yeah, no, I mentioned this to her and she's she is interested in falling phones and she was like, yeah right, like she's never, she would never make that decision.

01:02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know why I love my wife. It I it's a love hate thing, but but because she makes me buy the newest ones oh, there you go, that's okay.

01:02:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She says no. I said I don't want to buy the new iphone she said, yeah, our roles are flipped. Like I I would even I'm not stupid enough to try to bring this one up. Like I, you know, like you know, like I could make a case for it, I guess.

01:02:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But she'd be like, yeah, you're not doing that I, I actively don't want to get the new phone. I feel like god, I can't, I just can, I just be normal I know, but no, she won't.

01:02:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me be normal someday we will be normal people or we'll be dead. I don't know.

01:02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But uh, yeah but for now yeah you have to kind of keep up. You know it's I want to buy the double arp phone that's in the back of the magazine.

01:02:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's actually all it is is like a first, it's a first gen ipad and it has like a radio thing and it takes pictures, paul it takes pictures like what do you say? Bring it down, I can't hear you. Hello. Can anyone else hear this? Yeah, we can all hear grandpa. You know, like I'm on the cusp so close you're not.

01:03:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I am cuspier than you are, I don't know man I gotta tell you I I had a chat with a, with a mom here in madeira park whose son has gotten rid of his iphone for a flip phone. Interesting, like because the iphone's hurting him, and yeah hurting.

01:03:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's. The next big thing is the reaction to big tech. It's like the knee-jerk opposite reaction to big tech well, and these kids are getting it.

01:03:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They just, yeah, I know you want to be able to reach me, mom, so I need a phone, but this one okay, actually, you know what I I actually do.

01:03:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Respect that I. I don't think that's a a solution for everybody. All right, I think there's some portion of people who actually do have the self-will or whatever it is to you know, minimize what's on their screen and turn off of the notifications and they can do that. But that's like saying there are some people who can drink and maybe they over drink sometimes, but they're okay but some people they actually just need to walk away it's like going on a diet.

01:04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like, yeah, yeah, I could do it for a little while it depends on the person, right?

01:04:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, some people have what? Self-control is not fair because it makes it seem like the other person's lacking in some way. But yeah, if you have a whatever mental health condition and you literally can't, then yes, I mean, I was in that case getting a flip phone, maybe it's the right choice, you know mental health wise right yeah, and you could, you can get into they.

01:04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They still text, they make phone calls.

01:04:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's the thing it sounds like maps some. They acknowledge that human beings still need to get in touch with me yeah so that's fine, they can send that k text we talked about last week, no problem, that's easy. Um, yep, it's not for me, but I yeah. No, I get, I, I get it. I'm not gonna like, I'm not gonna make fun of that this is the mudita compact.

01:04:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
439 is an e-ink phone.

01:04:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It comes in three colors yeah, gray, black or less gray, it comes in any color you want, as long as it's the one you sell, that's and it has. You know, I don't know about this, like, because you could kind of do this to an existing phone and still get the benefit of the phone you know but it no.

01:05:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, this is a little bit more. It'll play your music.

01:05:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can read It'll do maps in glorious black and white, because that would be terrible.

01:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure, because it's e-ink, it's got great battery life, yep.

01:05:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Boy, that's smart.

01:05:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a bridge too far for me, but yeah, I feel like I should do this just to see like be a expert guinea pig for this. Yeah, yeah, but I'm not, don't get you, I'm not look I it's important.

01:05:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I, I have a an apple weather widget on my iphone home screen. It's big and it says the weather and it has nothing to do with what's going on outside I don't even I it's just like a comedy routine, like I don't know what it's doing. It's like random weather or something has weather gotten worse?

01:06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like the.

01:06:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I thought it was just petaluma it says it's gonna be 85 degrees and it's 62.

01:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't have anything to do with reality. I have a screenshot of this.

01:06:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we were standing in the middle of us, the hardest rainfall I've ever seen. Lightning and thunder all over mexico city. This has never happened before in history and this thing is like partly cloudy. I'm like, yeah, close, almost. Maybe you think the lightning that keeps happening is the sun, but it's yeah, it's not the apple one's terrible, I don't know why, like I know I I've tried every weather app.

01:06:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm using something called Windy right now.

01:06:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice. Surfers like it. It's the first, like when you learn a programming language. Now, if you went to college and learned to program which maybe would not be a great idea today but building a weather app is like the second or third project, you know. It's like it's like what are the first Like, so it's the backend data. It's like it's like what are the press Like, so it's the backend data. I guess that's horrible. I guess that's what's wrong.

01:07:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all right, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to distract On. We go with the show.

01:07:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, Just one hardware related thing. This was supposed to happen a couple of months ago and this ties into that thing. You were asking about, the Snapdragon dev kit. Like, what am I doing with that? My goal for that was to use it as the podcast machine that I have at home in my home office. I haven't done that yet because these drivers were coming and had never arrived, and now they're here. So Focusrite, in collaboration with Qualcomm, has released drivers for basically their entire product line. So this is like the. I talked to Qualcomm.

01:07:40
January doesn't sound right, but it was before Mexico, I don't remember. Maybe it was late last year, but this was the final frontier for major hardware compatibility issues these USB audio devices, these interfaces, right and so their plan was early in this year to have to solve that problem. And this is the first major step, because Focusrite obviously is one of the big players in this market and, uh, they're still in beta. But uh, I, um, I. It's like I was going back and forth with colcom and every time I was in mexico they're like all right, we're ready to release them. I'm like I don't have that computer here, I don't have that device here. Rather, um, like okay, and then I got back home like all right, I'm here, I got everything, like yeah, we're not ready, sorry, it's been a you know. And then like I go back to Mexico like all right, we're ready again. I'm like all right, seriously, but when I get home I will be. I will be using that dev device on my in my be fine, is that the?

01:08:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
last hardware compatibility. I mean, is there a lot of stuff?

01:08:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there might be other small ones I mean, there might be like individual printers here and there, that kind of thing and obviously the driver not the drivers, but the utilities associated with that stuff. But as far as like a major what do we call this? Like a hardware product category, this was the big one for 2025. They're like we have to solve this is there are people who, like, are creators, they're on the go, they want to use their lap, they want to use a laptop to last forever and has good performance, but they also need this interface to do the work they do and they can't, you know, can't do it, and now they can.

01:09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, this is the.

01:09:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
To me this is a big one. I you know there were two well, maybe it was one, I don't one or two software issues I had. Both were solved pretty quick. I know google drive was one and there was one, one or two software issues I had. Both were solved pretty quick. I know Google Drive was one and there was one major hardware one and it was this. And now that's been solved too, so it's good, fantastic.

01:09:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also, I'd like to announce that Windows Weekly will become Linux Weekly next week. It's time, finally.

01:09:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is the year of the Linux desktop. It's certainly the year of the Linux podcast. Finally, it is the year of the Linux desktop, Certainly the year of the Linux podcast. But I saw this headline and I had kind of set it aside and I realized after I looked at it more closely there was a big caveat, which is that Linux has it's actually usage share, but StackHunter calls it market share, but 5% usage share in the United States Worldwide. It's like 4.04 or maybe 4.0 or eight wow, it's more.

01:10:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The magic number is 10. Right, like if you get the yeah, things start to change.

01:10:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, if you include android and chromebook, but we don't, we don't know, but those are both linux well, they're based on that's like.

01:10:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, yeah, they're based on linux. But I would argue that both of those things are successful in part because they are not lin. Right that they have their own ecosystems. Yeah. So I was instantly transported back in time to 1997, when Steve Jobs got on stage in Boston. Bill Gates' giant head came out and he said Bill, between the two of us we have 100% of the personal computing market, which was true, asterix, apple had 5% of the market at that time, right, so to give you, this may be the most.

01:10:46
Well, there's two big problems for Linux. One is that if you look at Apple and what they've done since then, I would say that companies kind of go on gangbusters. Right, we can all agree. We've all seen Macs out in the world. They're on planes or schools or everywhere. That product has 9% market share today, Like they really have not exploded, like 40% or something. They're not there. Linux is going to have a much harder time getting anywhere close to that, and part of the problem that's. The second problem is there's no single guiding strategy or voice or standards organization for Linux. Right, there are thousands of distributions. Even if you look at Ubuntu has roughly 20% of the Linux market on desktop, about 5%. So I don't know what 20% of 5% is. 1% is small. That would be 1%. It's small. It has 13 or 15 flavors. You know types of, you know the different UIs, different display technologies, all kinds of different things, different focuses obviously.

01:11:51
But it's a, it's a. Bifurcated is not the right word. We need a word, that's that. But like times a thousand, it's like fragmented. There you go, we have that word and it's a basic word, paul, and you're a writer, okay. So yeah, fragmented, perfect, so I think that's the. That's kind of the headwind, like it. It doesn't matter in IOT, it doesn't matter in the cloud, it doesn't matter in servers, right, like these things are doing, like basically doing background processing. I mean, they're using a very small part of Linux, I would imagine, but Linux on the desktop it's absolutely matured dramatically. There's really good distributions for sort of normal people, but no one would even know where to start when something went wrong. We can't figure out problems in Windows. You know like how on earth is my mother, my brother, you know, normal human being, whatever?

01:12:42
Dude, it's's gonna be an ai linux ai coming oh yeah, is there a single big linux ai coming?

01:12:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know about like this is you know part of the problem, right like the one that's going to tell you. You know, just read the manual.

01:12:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, literally, with a swear word in it. Yeah, exactly. And and that community is so open and welcoming to normal people. I mean, I, they, they love questions, they love to help, they love, you know, people who don't understand these esoteric topics so it'll be great, it's gonna be yeah.

01:13:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, if you guys just wouldn't be so stupid, yeah, then we we could talk, it'd be fair enough, fair right, uh.

01:13:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I didn't know the word fragmented, leo. What do you expect? I?

01:13:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, I am uh maybe I am uh toying with a new distro that's all the rage called cashy os c-a-c-h-y-o-s cashy, with a c.

01:13:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've not heard of this like so well it's.

01:13:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty new. It's based on arch, which is uh nice because that's a rolling distro, so you don't ever have to upgrade the distribution you're always going to have um, how do you feel about immutable linux's?

01:13:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
do you like that kind of thing?

01:13:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, I mean uh, yeah stable or nixos. Well, actually, nixos is functional, that's see, I say words it is very fragmented because it's different strokes for different folks, right? The interesting thing about cache is it's optimized for modern hardware and speed but I think microsoft makes a compelling case.

01:14:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One product works for everyone and it works great. So what's the problem?

01:14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, a good point. Actually, microsoft's getting pretty fragmented lately, isn't it?

01:14:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, they're in a way well, we're gonna. By the way, we're gonna talk about that next, so don't worry.

01:14:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um, yeah yeah, I think that's. I mean. Look, it's clearly, linux is for enthusiasts yeah, well, here's what.

01:14:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's a little fact, no, a fact that people, um, probably either don't know or forget or kind of just will be kind of blown away by. In general, linux has been around for over 30 years, since 92.

01:14:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah that's a long time. Dinos turbo invented linux.

01:14:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you have any idea how many things have come and gone since then? Yeah, it's a story baby babies.

01:14:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's crazy.

01:14:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, how are you? Yeah, selene dion tickle me, elmo.

01:14:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the whole grunge. Saline dion is still with us, do not is she, is she barney barney um, yeah, I mean, I think linux has staying power.

01:15:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're using it all the time, every website yeah, but the key to using it every time, all the time, is that we don't know we are yeah well, that's true, it's.

01:15:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the fluoride in the water, leo, it's that thing you know, and, like fluoride, fill in whatever you want after that where are you going depends what you depends how you feel about fluoride, I guess if your goal was to have british teeth, then we're going in the right direction. I don't, I don't know they, uh, they say the dentists in washington state can always tell when one of their patients is from oregon, because they didn't have fluoride right changed teeth.

01:15:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I one thing I've witnessed with my own children and I grew up in whatever age I grew up and and when I got fill I every one of my teeth that can have fillings has fillings right. So in the beginning these were like silver fillings and then, as it became an adult, at some point they were like hey, um, you have to replace these. Over time they fall out whatever happens and they replace their mercury.

01:16:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have mercury fillings still.

01:16:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know, I don't think I had well, okay, I don't remember it was literally an amalgam of silver and mercury I have a handful.

01:16:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember when I was a kid going to the dentist and he said let's look at this, this is fun. And he had little balls of mercury on the tray and he was playing with it, isn't?

01:16:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that cool, we're gonna put that in your teeth yeah, he's in a home now and he can't think clearly. Um, they call him the mad dentist.

01:16:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's not good but I mean, that's how it's changed.

01:16:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
my kids don't have cavities like I know. Yeah, I have as many cavities as I have teeth. My kids have zero cavities and that's why Like fluoride, like sorry, but you have any idea how much money that saved me. I mean, it's incredible.

01:16:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a genetics equation here too.

01:16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but they got his genes, don't forget Richard. Yeah, they were screwed from the gecko. Yeah, I have very straight teeth and the kid's mom has very soft teeth and, uh, they, they got my.

01:17:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Both kids got her teeth, not mine. Oh yeah, no, I had. I had one where the dent is like there's no money there and the other one is like, oh you're gonna pay, go mine my dentist who I referred to, lovingly as dr mengela had to pull out.

01:17:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it safe, paul, is it?

01:17:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
safe? You know, he was not, he was. This guy was old school. He went to school probably in the 60s and stopped learning at that point. So like when he um, when he took out my teeth, my wisdom teeth, so I could get braces, he literally had to stand with his feet on the arms of the chair. I was in and with with a like a plier, pulling with all of his body.

01:17:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Give me some leverage.

01:17:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nuss Tooth get to come out of my jaw.

01:17:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I, every tooth falling apart except the one you wanted to get out.

01:18:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's awful, it was unbelievable. And then I bled for almost all of a week and it got to the point like we were gonna have to go to the hospital to figure this out and then it finally stopped. But I I had to stay awake that whole weekend and like it was unbelievable. I miss those days. It's a good old days anyway. That's what using ai is like.

01:18:19
Um moving right along to surface and the copilot plus pc yeah, so last year microsoft introduced this copilot plus pc thing which I think is at the heart of a lot of problems we're seeing in windows today's. So I mentioned the weirdness of monthly updates, and for copilot plus pc only and oh, but only for snapdragon, because they went to market with snapdragon first and clearly there's some something there like a agreement of some kind. It's bizarre. I mean, I love those computers but I discovered very quickly, and then have verified this over time that you buy one of these things whether it's amd, intel, snapdragon for the improved reliability, the better performance, the efficiency, the instant on performance, like all that stuff. Like it's well, especially on Snapdragon. It's much better on Snapdragon. But the AI stuff they were selling was always pretty terrible. If you flash forward, it's been over a year.

01:19:21
I mentioned click to do kind of the marquee feature. There's a couple of little individual photos or features. Rather, the Photos app in particular has some pretty good kind of AI features, like the thing I mentioned today is coming soon the relight feature. But the problem is this creates another kind of bifurcation, if you will, where for a long time we've had different product additions or SKUs of Windows and each with its own set of capabilities. We went off the rails a bit, remember Vista especially, but also 7 had multiple. You know Home, home, basic, home, premium, ultimate, pro, you know there's all these different versions and there still are, but in the consumer market it's like home and pro and it's like okay, like kind of an artificial delineation of features, whatever. I would say that the benefit of pro has gotten a lot smaller than it originally was. But there are some things like BitLocker support, like the ability to create BitLocker encrypted disks and USB keys and so forth is part of pro.

01:20:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's you know it's good hyper v, etc, etc.

01:20:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But now you know, copilot plus pc creates like more of that problem, right? And I just we just keep saying this even if you get a copilot plus pc I mean most people are probably getting an intel or and chip, because that's what most people buy they're not getting the features right away, like they'll come later, and it's it's this bizarre mess of like it just contributes to the problem of you never know what you're going to see on any given computer when you open the laptop later to walk up to it, whatever it is and I here in mexico I have several computers at home I have many more, but it's the same thing I go from, like this PC in front of me has the new start menu.

01:21:05
It's fun, yeah, it's bizarre, like it's bizarre, and, um, I, I just uh, you can, if you think, if you know about the history of MPUs and how that kind of stuff happened. It came out of this notion on mobile that we needed a way to overcome the limitations of the chips and the sensor sizes and cameras and other issues so that we could do things like computational photography with this tiny lens, have it take a beautiful well, take a crappy photo and then turn it into a good photo using what we now call AI. But Pixel did this, google did this with Pixel, microsoft did this on ARM, uh, arm-based computers, very early windows, uh, studio effects is this exact thing. It runs on the MPU. Um, apple has been talking up machine learning. Now they use AI, obviously, but, uh, ever since I don't know 15 years, I mean, it's been a long time. And then, uh, and I, I think it makes sense in those cases, the problem on the PC is that most of us are connected to the internet all the time and we can access AI. We also have computers that have GPUs that could do this and they artificially limit it to MPUs for some reason. Yeah, and so far, anyway, yeah Well, we keep looking for that moment where they're going to stop doing that and the orchestration, that moment where they want more customers.

01:22:25
That's the thing it's. What they're doing now is contrary to, I think, the Windows Teams broader aims, the broader aims of that ecosystem, the broader aims of Microsoft, which is to push AI. It should be available to all of your customers everywhere if they want it, and this just creates a kind of a world of have and have nots and the people who have it. Most of that stuff is not particularly interesting and that's the problem. There's a I'm going to get the names wrong because I always forget which is which but in the Paint app there is an image creator that uses the cloud and if you have, you have AI credits and Microsoft account with a copilot license of some kind it creates images. It's as good as that thing can be. It's designer. And then there's a co-creator that's a copilot plus PC feature. I might have mixed the names up, it doesn't matter, but that works on device and that creates kindergarten drawings of nonsense. It's terrible and that's the problem.

01:23:21
So for these big bucket things, on-device AI is not very good. It's good for individual features, like the object selection tool in Affinity Photo. If you want to enable that, you have to download a model. It runs locally and I guess it's pretty good. I guess it's not whatever. Here's the thing. It runs on the CPU. It doesn't even use a GPU. If you here's the thing. It runs on the CPU. It doesn't even use a GPU. If you have a GPU, it just runs on the CPU. Yeah, there's no reason. There's no reason for this. This is so stupid and I think we talked about this last week the notion that Windows is, at its heart, an orchestrator and it doles out hardware resources. It also takes requests from apps or whatever services, whatever, and throws them against the correct devices.

01:24:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It should do that for this. It should be the perfect hub for this.

01:24:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is how you go to market with it. I don't understand it. Yep, years later, it still does not do that.

01:24:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we said this right off the bat. When Stevie Batiste finished, we talked about this. You know I said Windows should be the hub of this. It totally makes sense.

01:24:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He literally said Windows is an orchestrator. You know he said that at the time. So this is not a challenge, but here's a little project for anyone listening and watching, if you want to do this. Stevie Batiste, two years ago at Build, did that famous talk where he talked about the three app types or app.

01:24:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, b-side, inside, outside.

01:24:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, copilot being the side-by-side version, which is exactly how you get something into the system when you have all these legacy apps, because it takes a long time to redo them or add it to the app or whatever, or rewrite them. God help you. So you have Word, maybe, and you get this thing over on the side. It's co-pilot, it's side-by-side, it makes sense, it's fine. One year ago he made a really compelling case for the MPU and the numbers sound super exaggerated, but the sheer amount of efficiency, even just raw processing power, for certain types of tasks like these matrices of whatever that MPUs are really good at, that's kind of a basis for a lot of AI stuff, super optimized for that, okay, great. What did he talk about this year? Can anyone tell me?

01:25:36
I couldn't find anything, so I have seen references in articles to a presentation that he gave where he did talk about AI and whatever, and this is not on the build site that I could find. So if anyone can point me to one of those things, I'd love to see it, because I feel like this guy cut through the you know cruft a little bit and then made this clear and in a way that no one else has for me anyway, and I would love to know where we're at with this stuff, because there is no excuse in windows when, if you think about it from the perspective of the windows team, their best customers as individuals not businesses, but people are those who spend a lot of money on a premium PC, especially gaming PC, that's going to have a dedicated graphics card, that's going to cost a lot of money they invested in. They should expect the best possible experience across the board and they're just being ignored right now. And I don't, I will never understand this.

01:26:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This, this Intel machine I just built, the 5080, is more expensive than every other component in the machine.

01:26:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have at home a. It's an HP and not that that matters, but it's a. I think it's a 35 or 32 inch Walden one, Gorgeous. It has a first gen Meteor Lake core. Ultra processing Doesn't meet the co-pilot plus PC spec, but it also has dedicated graphics which are great, and so, even though this is only Meteor Lake and it has a giant screen, it can play Call of Duty at like huge frame rates. Awesome quality graphics, fantastic. Cannot use co-creator and paint that stupid little hand painting thing that isn't even good enough to put on my refrigerator if it was my child, but it could, and it probably. I don't know off the top of my head, but the graphics card in that thing is probably 10 times as powerful from a tops perspective as whatever MPU you could get today in a laptop.

01:27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, it doesn't make any sense yeah, so we'll uh talk about Richard's 5080 and the rest of that PC tomorrow, 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern, when Richard builds his PC in the club. Yeah, we'll stream that live, but that'll be a lot of fun. I'll be kibitzing in the background.

01:27:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So when did this happen? Yeah, early in the show I mentioned on, it was Tuesday. Yesterday, microsoft had three announcements that all came out side by side by side, related to Windows in some way. The first one was that thing I had to figure out. They were talking about the week D preview update. It took a while, but I was like, oh, that's what they mean, because you about the week D preview update. It took a while, but I was like, oh, that's what they mean, cause you know Microsoft, they can't communicate.

01:28:08
The second one is a hardware thing we're going to talk about next. The third one though this is just amazing, this blows my mind was a blog post that I sort of read the beginning of and I was like I, what is this? And then I just skipped until today and it was called it is called understanding what AI means to consumers. So here's the thing Microsoft has failed with consumers. Microsoft is failing in AI. So who better than Microsoft to tell us what consumers want from AI than Microsoft? Okay, so I decided today I was going to write this thing up, and then I actually read it and I was like I'm just going to have fun with this because this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life.

01:28:48
They engaged with the third party, which is called Edelman Data and Intelligence, which is a part of Edelman, which is a PR firm that Microsoft has used for approximately 20 years. I just want to say they created a study that Microsoft commissioned it. Just to be super clear about this it's not a problem that a company commissions a study from a third party to make a point. I don't have a problem with that. I will even accept that the data is real and that there are facts in this thing. That's not my point. But the negative part of doing this is that that entity Microsoft in this case, that commissioned the study, can also go to them and say not lie, not add this, but rather I don't want that, I don't want that and I don't want that, and they can tell them to take things out, which is what happens. I'm not saying it happened here, but I am saying, most likely, that a big part of this study involved the AIs that those people they surveyed were using and that that didn't look good for Microsoft, and that's not there anymore. So this thing just talks about AI in general. I don't know who invented this term, but if hell exists, they will be there for the rest of eternity.

01:30:05
They have coined the term generation AI, which most of us would call generation Z, I think. People born between whatever 95 and 2012. They grew up in a world where, increasingly relying on digital tools, they learned to embrace emerging technologies. I would make the argument that makes me part of generation video game. But whatever, these are apparently the frailest people on earth. They are the least greatest generation.

01:30:33
They don't like negative feedback. They don't like facts. They don't like to read they over to read, they don't. They overthink things, they, but they also underthink things. Right, and this study is the dumbest collection of words I may have ever read in my entire life. Like it is, I don't know. There's some losers out there, I know. That's why I say might? I'm not 100? Sure, I try to. I tend to block things up, but, like I, I wrote what I think to be an incredibly funny article about this, but I will just like all these terms in there.

01:31:05
It's like Generation AI has emotional delicacy. They need to be pampered in ways that their predecessors do not. So AI is like a conversational advisor, someone who's not going to like crap all over their stupid ideas. Those are my words and you know we'll just like, cuddle them into like and it's like what they'd like about AI is that there's no negative feedback. They're always like yeah, you know, and buried in this report. Word at the end. It says only 15% of all consumers say they fully trust AI when making important decisions.

01:31:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, so 15% are wrong.

01:31:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, if you accept the fact that generation AI is a thing, I believe the figure for them is 65%. I think it's fantastic. So these are our dumbest people. They've grown up in an age of misinformation and stupidity and not reading, and they don't have time to read Richard. They're busy. They're busy people. They've got no jobs but lots of side hust reading, and they don't have time to read richard. They're busy. They're busy people. Uh, they've got no jobs but lots of side hustles, and they um and all knowledge comes in the form.

01:32:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Apparently, youtube is all they need.

01:32:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't have time for a youtube short. Just tell me what it's doing. Just tell me, give me a summary. Um, yeah, so I look. I'm sorry, microsoft, but I you have lost consumers. 20 years ago, one of the things I I did I went back to 20, 2005. Consumers 20 years ago, one of the things I did I went back to 2005,. So 20 years ago, and I looked at the things I was writing about that year, specifically Microsoft-related, and let me see if I can find this thing, because this is crazy. Oh, maybe this is the wrong article, but yeah, sorry, there's a different article, but it was just full of things like Windows Media Center, xp 2005 update roll-up.

01:32:44
2. Community Microsoft Digital Image Suite, all these things, and it's like this stuff is all gone. Nobody's using this stuff. So the fact that this generation is able to make this shift easily is great, but the fact is, from a consumer perspective, obviously Microsoft has a lock for now on the business market the web, mobile to a small degree, these Alexa type assistants and things like that.

01:33:14
The whole world has moved on from you and unfortunately we talked about this last week they've done that already with AI. So, yeah, if AI is the next wave. I got a bad news for you. You just missed it because chat gpt is that kleenex brand that everyone thinks of and it's just going gangbusters. And I the for microsoft, the maybe the least qualified of all companies to talk about what people are doing, like what consumers are doing with ai. I can tell you what they're not doing with AI is using your stuff and that is a problem, but that's a problem we talked about last week. Anyway, the third of the three announcements I mentioned was related to a new Surface laptop for business that has 5G.

01:33:57
So there's a new Surface. The new surface, um. So it's the same form factor as the? What are we calling this 13 inch surface laptop from a couple months ago? Yeah, um that device.

01:34:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was the four or the nine no, they don't use those.

01:34:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, it's important every generation that they change how they name things so memory strategies. Yeah, last year we had, uh well surface laptop seventh generation, right surface pro, I think, 11th generation. Those are both snapdragon x elite and well and and plus. You get the word options for plus at the time so this is basically a seven uh, yeah, so the well the.

01:34:35
The smaller versions that they released for consumers about two months ago are both snapdragon lower end snapdragon chips, slightly smaller screens and form factors. Obviously Other differences related to the size change, but that was the fundamental difference. This is the form factor of that smaller Surface Laptop 7. They don't call it that, but that With 5G. Cool, it's in the name For business, also in the name, but running Intel inside. So not in the name For business, also in the name, but running Intel inside, so not in the name. Why, I don't know. Probably I guess businesses might demand it or something. But you want to take this thing that gets 18 hours of battery life and turn it into a smoldering hunk of uselessness. Yeah, put a Core Ultra 2 chipset in it and dear god. So to me, 5g is something you marry very naturally to an arm device. I don't understand not doing that?

01:35:29
um, so this is the second year in a row, yep, that they've released versions of devices for business that use like the crappiest Intel for us. So imagine I don't know what's, I don't. Oh God, thank God for Microsoft, cause it wasn't for them, intel might've imploded by now. Um, well, that's not true. Actually, they have such longterm relationships and a lot of payoffs. Uh, that company you know Lenovo, hp, dell, all those companies, yeah, they're still using Intel for some reason. We were talking about the Microsoft layoffs. Actually, every episode since they happened, intel has begun layoffs. They said this was coming. It was going to come in July. It has happened this is the new.

01:36:14
CEO doing his thing, yeah, and you know, to his credit, I mean, he's been clear about what has to happen. They've been dropping businesses that aren't important to them, you know aren't core to them.

01:36:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They got rid of their money. It's actually about saving money.

01:36:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, in this case, absolutely so. The problem is that these job cuts have been much deeper than expected, and that's true of a bunch of different areas, including Oregon, california in particular, but also Arizona and Texas, and there particular, but also arizona and texas, and there are more coming, so this isn't the end of it. So not only did they come up with more than expected, but they also, um are going to do more of course didn't liputan, the new ceo, also say we're not even in the top 10 of chip companies yeah, so he that's really depressing, saying the truth.

01:37:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Truth, I mean, appreciate, is it really?

01:37:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
true, it's come on. So I think the context of that he did say that. I believe what he meant by that was from a fabrication manufacturing process perspective.

01:37:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did they hire this guy to wind it down? They fired Gelsinger.

01:37:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. So when he first took over, it seemed like what they were doing was what Gelsinger was already doing. But I think what happened with Gelsinger was he was making big, expensive bets, especially in the manufacturer side. This is tens of billions of dollars every time they were doing anything out in the world with manufacturing.

01:37:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well and they were getting billions of dollars from the federal government. The CHIPS Act? I don't know.

01:37:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which, by the way, might have been cut off, since I'd be gone. Now, yeah, um, this person and, and you know, look, it's fair to say, the board of directors looked at this and said, look, this isn't going to work or this is not working. Whatever the deal was, and and the, the approach now is to make intel a smaller, leaner company. We, you know, more agile is the. You know the more polite way to say that. Oh no, we're not losing, we're becoming more agile. You know what are they going to do, though? They're not. I mean, I guess you could cut your legs off and lose weight that way, but like it's, it's yeah, so we'll see. I I mean, look, that's so sad yeah, on some level.

01:38:16
I do want intel to succeed. I think we need them to succeed.

01:38:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Absolutely.

01:38:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we just need to move to arm. You know it's going to be a different.

01:38:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's going to be a different form factor. I would be very interested in buying an Intel chip made manufactured by TSMC, like get out of your own, you can.

01:38:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are some of those, or at least partially manufactured by. Unfortunately, Apple has pretty make three nanometer and two nanometer chips like we want to do manufacturing in the united states and it's like great, uh, the only company that's taking advantage of that skill is from taiwan. Like, what are you doing? Yeah, well, it's in the us.

01:38:59
It is in the us skill set right this is the argument like conda builds us market cars in the united states, so is an american car, is a japanese car. You know my father-in-law would be like, yeah, but all the profits are going back to Japan. You know it's like, okay, okay, but it's a good car. Right, like it's. You know we can agree it's a good car.

01:39:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but all the profits are going back to Japan.

01:39:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, in this world that's not true, right, a lot of profits are going back to Ireland, you know, or whatever. I mean, depending on the company and the timeframe, so anyway. So anyway, yeah, strategy, yeah, I'd like to, I hope, I mean I I don't know why I hope this, I I do, sort of hope that they can pull it out and be okay, because competition is good.

01:39:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's why yeah, but it just might be. I mean, the bottom line is the existing structure isn't working promise and arm and snapdragon especially but, but.

01:39:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But also amd's been kind of kicking ass like their their stuff is.

01:39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't mind if amd wants to take over for intel, but they're a fraction of intel size, they're not a big company still, yeah, but you know what?

01:39:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that that gap is changing or, uh, shrinking, but not because of pcs, right? So when amd gains ground on intel, um, financially it's almost exclusively because of the cloud right, the data centers, ai data centers, etc.

01:40:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But but yeah, in the pc space I mean it's not, by the way, it's not like half, it's like one eighth or something, it's like really it's teensy it's a big, yeah, it's a big difference well, you bought a ryzen 9, richard, I know, and um yeah, I got, I got one of each I got the ultra 9 and I got the ryzen 9 yeah, and I I got well, if I ever see it, the ai plus I don't know if they're ever going to ship it. You're talking about that awesome uh, the the the system, the framework, yeah, but but I don't even think amd is even shipping the chip yet.

01:40:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think, oh way off, but you were looking at like next quarter anyway, right?

01:40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they said q3 this quarter, okay, but I don't think so those things seem seem like that's right I? Ordered an ai pin in uh april of 2024 and it still hasn't arrived.

01:40:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They say q3, though well, you have one that arrived, and now they're owned by amazon. Yeah, yeah, what's your problem, man?

01:41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what's your problem? I got no problems because I am watching windows weekly and that makes me a winner in my book. Uh, we do this show every Wednesday about 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC, and you can watch us do it live if you're in the club. Of course, clubtwitch, discord, but also YouTube, twitchxcom, tiktok, facebook, linkedin and Paul's favorite streaming site, kik. Watch it live or get it after the fact at your wherever you get your podcasts now, as if we haven't had enough ai and security, it's time for ai and security. Hey, paul, what's going on with ai and security?

01:41:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I allude, and security, yeah, so this one's just ai. But, uh, the. I alluded to this earlier. Maybe I should have ordered these a little differently. But, um, you know, we keep getting these indications that copilot is not doing great, you know, and I feel like with it, with microsoft, and we've kind of we've seen this before. You know, um, everyone is familiar with the.

01:42:12
This notion what do you call it? When you do the same thing over and over again and you expect different results is insanity, right? So what do you do when you do the same thing over and over again and then one time it's different and stops working? Right, like that's what happens to microsoft's, what's happened to apple? Like that explains apple intelligence, right, um, we, we will do everything we can indoor, in-house, we will get rid of all external partners. We will, but we can't do ai. Oh, sorry about that.

01:42:38
Um, you know, microsoft was like windows gangbusters. Great, we're going to do everything. Like windows, we're going to license to third-party hardware manufacturers, we're going to do this, whatever. And you know, they see certain amounts of success and then they don don't. It stops working. They did that with bundling right, with Office. That still would work if it wasn't for antitrust regulation. Like they put teams into Office smart. Well, microsoft 365, smart, that means you're already paying for it. Most businesses are just going to use that thing. Smart, smart, smart. Slack did not like that and now we have some problems.

01:43:14
So I feel like this is what's happening with Copilot right, like their strategy is to throw it at everything. They have put it into our most important platforms everywhere. Do it so fast that we have to change it after the fact. I've complained about the simple thing of just moving an icon around in the taskbar, but the reality is like the architecture of that thing, that is an app, has changed at least three times that I'm aware of, and it's because this thing is moving so fast. But what doesn't matter is that ChatGPT is everything. So Microsoft is over here spinning the wheels of doing everything. Every time ChatGPT or any other AI service comes out with a feature AI podcasts, like Google did with Gemini and notebook alum, microsoft's like yep, we have that too. It's called co-pilot podcast, baby. Like they just keep doing the same thing.

01:44:03
Yeah, and it just doesn't yeah, it doesn't seem to be working.

01:44:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, he told us he wasn't going to chase markets anymore, he was going to leave.

01:44:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's literally. And one thing Richard is intimately aware of and knowledgeable about is that in the early two thousands, microsoft and Bill Gates came down and said we are going to bet the company onnet and everything's going to benet windowsnet, windowservernet, officenet, everything'snet. Um, to my memory, only one product was ever rebranded as dot net and that was visual studio, and I think it was only for one version, maybe two, but one I think was one. And you know the other product teams were like what? Like what are you talking about?

01:44:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like we don't have any dot net in this product like we're not well and they tried to put dot net into windows and it didn't go well it went so poorly that by the time vista shipped it was ordained by alton.

01:44:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I believe, jim alton, that there will be no dot net in this product. Like we are not going to ship, ship you had to push it all out.

01:45:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah look, you can't have a non-deterministic memory model in an operating system. You just can't. There are places where dot net could have lived, but they were also trying to do that on the 1.0 version of NET.

01:45:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like it was destined for failure. That factors into what's happening now, because that company, that version of Microsoft at the time at least had the maturity to come to the conclusion which is what you just said Like, yes, we overstepped our bounds here a little bit, scale back. I'm sure the plan originally was we'll add it, it back over time, we'll do this thing over time. That is not what's happening today. Ai is just occurring. It's just like you know, and if it's a mistake too bad, we'll fix it, we'll fix it later, and it's just not working like. It's just not working. Um, and I uh this I don't know how often this happens, but there's always these reports, you know, uh, wall street journal is always publishing these things where it's like here's a chart of what people are using when it comes to ai and it's like oh, but you know, oh, chat gpt is like whatever, most of it. And then it's like gemini anthropic perplexity. There's a sliver that's co-pilot, or there's nothing. There's no mention of co-pilot, um, the latest one is pilot should be doing better.

01:46:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, edge does well because it's default on, but does it though?

01:46:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so what's the market share usage share for microsoft edge? Right, it's probably 12, 13 somewhere in there. Interesting um.

01:46:25
So people actively change the browser yeah, so the I've said this a lot but, like the, the greatest success of Google Chrome is that they were able to overcome the power of defaults on the two major personal computing platforms at the time Windows and Mac right, even though both those companies make browsers and, by the way, 20 years later, still do right. Openai, chat GPT is exactly the same thing, but with AI it's like the brand is so good it almost doesn't matter. We've talked about this, but it almost doesn't matter what the reality is like. If you could sit there and it changes every day but measure how these things do on different features and you make a chart and it's like, well, and then you come to a conclusion whatever. Maybe today gemini is the best, maybe copilot is the best, but chat gpt just running away with this. So when you can overcome that, you know, do you look? I don't even want to do this. I, if I'm thinking like notepad supports Markdown, now I'm like maybe I could just use that, like I'll just write with that. It has spell checking and stuff. Like why not? Like installing and maintaining apps is a job and most people are not interested, especially in a computer. It's like I just want to get it done and get out of here. But those people are using GPT. It's crazy, so they've got a big problem here. I don't know how you fix this.

01:47:45
And look, the other thing is just the amount of money. So to date, what's the date? So next week, maybe not in time for the show, I don't remember which day it is, but Microsoft will release the next earnings statement. We will find out how much they spent in that quarter on AI, infrastructure, capex, and thus for their entire fiscal year it will be over $80 billion, like that much I can guarantee, as they promised they would. We will also probably learn a little bit about what they're spending now and what's that's going to look like going forward. But to date, we'll just call it's been roughly 20 billion for a long time, um, so far.

01:48:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Shareholders, board of directors, whatever you know like okay I I mentioned that in, not that, and satch has been hesitating on some of his statements. You know he delayed a couple data centers. Like he's saying, we're looking for returns, yep.

01:48:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think if it was up to him like I said, he feels like a high stakes poker player to me I think he would still be pushing all this. But I just want to put this in perspective because when people think about the big Microsoft defeats, like the things that they did poorly and lost money on and whatever the two biggest ones I think, or two of the bigger ones, are Nokia, right, $7.6 billion write-off, and the other one was they lost double-click to Google and that became the source of all their money and having lost that at the last second, they're like, okay, what else is there? And they're like we'll buy this company called Aquantive. No one's ever heard of $6 billion write-down. You could add those together and that's not even one quarter of the past two years of capex expenditure that went into ai. It is a blip. It's what they spent in a week. Money's changed?

01:49:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, I hear you I'm just saying a billion is asset, right, it is data centers. It actually goes back to cloud, even if if it got repurposed away from AI.

01:49:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I mean. Look, I'm not a financial person. I know that it is instantly deprecated and it becomes less valuable as we move forward in time. I know very little about this.

01:49:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was also very aware that politically there was, hey, it's been harder and harder to build data centers, and AI lifts that constraint. So let's go land grab while we can.

01:49:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm, I'm just. I'm just kind of using this from more of a rough number perspective because those things were outrageous at the time. You know, outrageous league and Microsoft is not capable of making a product that can threaten the power of the defaults. Like copilot is never going to be a big deal on iPhone or Android or you know whatever platform like. It's just never going to be. I mean, uh, but open ai, chat, gpt, no problem, you know yeah except they're not the defaults either, they've managed to generate a sufficient brand.

01:50:24
No, but that's what I mean they did it like. Yeah, I don't think I have a link to this, but a year ago they were quoted as saying I think it was Sam Altman who said this our customer base, consumers, obviously smaller businesses we have no plans to go after managed bigger businesses, enterprises, et cetera. Now they have 3 million of those customers paying every month for chat GPT. So I don't know if they went after them or not, but they came, they came, they came to them, yeah.

01:50:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and part of this is because their employees are using it anyway, and so you have a choice. You either restrict them from using it and give them an alternative and there's lots of frustration in that or you buy the enterprise product.

01:51:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yep.

01:51:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I had a, the, the, the in the system in circle. Now the conversation is your company's using AI.

01:51:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, whether you like it or not, it's what your employee they're just pasting into it what I uh I want to be super clear about this. Uh, I don't actually have much of an opinion about the quality, if you will, of of copilot versus anything else, like, I'm not. I'm not sitting here saying it's bad. It's my wife actually uses. She thinks it's great. Yeah, um, she's a smart person, you know, um and I.

01:51:40
But objectively, I will tell you that if you're a business owner, an it admin, a big company, I would trust microsoft a long time before I would trust open ai with anything. I would trust Microsoft a long time before I would trust open AI with anything, and very specifically with integrating your business data into this thing so that you can ground it in whatever you're doing. You want to make sure that whatever happens with that output, it doesn't get outside of the company through some email or whatever it is. I have a newsflash for you Even if you're using open ai, the only company that's going to prevent that from happening is microsoft. Sure, it is incredible that they are not gaining more traction with this like it's. That's incredible. It's because it's.

01:52:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a hard lift. Like you know, these are the shows we're doing on run ass. I mean, what does it take to get to deliver on that promise of enterprise security for this and it's? Where is your state of purview? How is your data tagging? What's your subset? The responsible process takes longer.

01:52:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could make a really strong argument that even if Copilot or Microsoft 365, copilot, whatever, is X percent less, whatever efficient, accurate, correct, whatever you want to use, than whatever people are using, that it doesn't matter, because the other aspects of that platform outweigh that. Because they have those protections built and we have this infrastructure. We are already paying for this idiot and what like. What do you? Well, what?

01:53:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
are you doing? You know, and meantime, while you're trying to do the right thing as administrator, you know all the way to the c-suite they're cotton pasting in a chat.

01:53:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Gpt exactly yep, and this is the thing I always. I we've talked about this. I mean, every once in a while the technology comes along where I can just tell that it has broken through the brain blood barrier and somehow hit with consumers right, like the iPod did this 100%. And I remember a friend of mine not technical he came to me one day. He's like, should I get an iPod? And I was like, yeah, you should get an iPod. You love listening to music in the car. You, you know, you listen in the gym with like a Walkman or something like yeah, yeah, you should get an iPod.

01:53:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Chat. Gpt is doing this. Um, the iphone did this in the enterprise. The iphone, when it came out the door had nothing for the iphone and the ipad and a number of admins that came at me and said the cio just showed up with an ipad and said I'll be using this.

01:54:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you are doing it. Yeah, exactly, and that stuff you know, over time it wasn't long. You know, the iphone a year later, I think, had a lot of uh, whatever it was called at the time, the, the exchange, what was it called? The connector? Whatever the exchange connector was for mail. It worked on iPhone and like, okay, we've gotten that in place and I would say obviously today, like iPhone, android, both have a lot. There's all kinds of stuff.

01:54:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, we ended up in third-party mobile device management products until Intune got their acting gear.

01:54:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But for a number of years where you had to run and you know who was making a good one back in the beginning. Bloody ibm, you had to. Not the name I was expecting. No, totally what? Um, interesting. So yeah, it's like what would be less likely than ibm oracle, uh, I don't know word.

01:54:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Perfect was very funny but yeah, so it's, but they caught up eventually. We went through a lot of compulsions on that and this is the race that we're in right now. Yeah, but we don't have are the stories of people cutting, pasting the chat, gp, even actually hurting the company. We all feel bad about it. The tin of foil have, people are really upset about it, right, but we still don't have.

01:55:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We, yeah, I mean this is the human error problem, right? So it's possible. No, there are many, many businesses that don't have Purview and whatever email data protection stuff in place and whatever, so it doesn't matter what you're doing inside your company. If you're like, keep it quiet, anyone can take a picture, take a screenshot, forward an email, whatever it's going to get out there. That's just human error. We're always the weak link in the chain, which is why ai is going to kill us when they can. Um, but I look, I think they're already there. But when it comes to this kind of thing literally protecting it, soup to nuts across the board, infrastructure wise, I think it's microsoft. Pretty much right, unless you're a girl house, maybe.

01:55:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah yeah, but giving your choices? Yeah, for sure, I would say. It's just not how people are thinking and this I know, which is incredible. Yeah, this latest sharepoint story does not help yeah, why do you so?

01:56:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you probably know more. You know more about this than I do, so what? Yeah, what happened with sharepoint?

01:56:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
well, the reality is this was a zero day that's probably existed for more than a year that the chinese state actors have been manipulating.

01:56:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What happened was that it got detected so, and they got into some pretty important stuff using it well, this is the thing is.

01:56:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Arguably they have been in, they just got detected that's a good point.

01:56:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They could have been in a year a year, it is a zero day.

01:56:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's been around for a long time, and what happened?

01:56:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
was? Is it on-prem only or also cloud? Do you know?

01:56:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh, I can't, it's on-prem only. It's on-prem only. Okay, yeah, but it's you know what? It is basically the equivalent of the hafnium exploit for exchange, where the on-prem server can be fully remote code executed like it's a baddie so they have patched it. Yep, oh yeah, that was. The whole thing was when they, when the msrc did their announcement on the 19th, it was here's the fx. Yeah, so, but you only get to fix it because you've already detected we're going to find out.

01:57:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was like a buffer over overrun problem oh, really sure it was incredible it's going to be. How are we?

01:57:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
still dealing with this because we're not using memory safe languages well, and we also don't have our best and brightest working on the on-prem product, that's true, that's true.

01:57:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Legacy products, older products, nobody wants to work on them, they want to work on the hot, so you've got to make.

01:57:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got a maintenance team on it yeah, richard knows better than I do.

01:57:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I mean share pro is a particular problem because the extensibility stuff is huge and getting that stuff on the cloud took a long time and it probably still never is the same.

01:57:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We never will. Most of it is just not secure enough and the workarounds are better. You just have to re-engineer yeah, so what happens is these most important share pointss with lots of customization. There's just no way.

01:57:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, because they can't migrate it and they're like, all right, we're just doing this thing. And yeah, I mean everyone, look, businesses push back at every step on whatever you know, email at the time, whatever. But I feel like SharePoint might be the last man standing in the on-prem. You know space in some ways.

01:58:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um that they say, or palo alto networks.

01:58:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Guesses that thousands of organizations easy were hacked, because, yeah, I mean it is yeah, in fact I think it wasn't, it wasn't some of?

01:58:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
weren't some of them in the government?

01:58:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
oh yes, no they. The big one everyone's excited about is the, the nuclear monitoring group. Oh, yeah, them. Oh, that's not a big deal, right? Yeah, it's not like the Chinese government doesn't have their own nuclear weapons they do?

01:58:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, but are we sitting in their Network? Yeah, but they clearly know more about honestly, I hope so I hope we are.

01:58:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I pray we are yeah and again, and you know, we're only hearing about this now because they finally got detected and they thought put out a patch, goodness. What they have not talked about, which is the concerning part for me, is how long oh well, we know it was exploited. Yeah, yeah yeah, but for how long? Like filtration takes time and if you do it fast it becomes more obvious.

01:59:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the fact that we didn't detect the exfil means it's been long like a microsoft hack that we never got all the details on was kind of the same thing, like this thing had been open for some indeterminate well I'm sure they don't know, but at the time indeterminate amount of time and they just well.

01:59:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The argument for when we detected hafnium is only when the chinese were covering their tracks by putting the exploit everywhere, so it was hard to detect where they'd actually collected every, every email that organization had akamai says more than 20 of observed environments are exposed to the vulnerability, so that's how widespread it was.

01:59:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is hafnium again, yeah, yeah it's bad it is and it's.

01:59:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And the problem here is what we don't know yet, because it hasn't had been enough time. What's it been less than a week like? What's the next step with hafnium is how many are still not patched after a month because nobody's paying attention to it. Yeah, you can make noise right now, but doesn't mean there's anybody who knows to actually patch the server, or it's not our server that they don't know. Yeah, and in the how did the hafnium actually get fixed? The FBI got permission to use the exploit to close the exploit against the customer's will or the customer's interests, right, but they ultimately that's how they closed them. So I will expect, I expect in the next couple of weeks, hopefully it'll be faster, they'll push, uh, that's something similar.

02:00:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the only logic, like you, uh, the vaccine is the virus, kind of thing, yeah that's it.

02:00:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's. We got to use your exploit to run an arbitrary piece of code that closes the exploit right, so it's really two exploits, because first there was an authentication exploit.

02:00:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they get in, yep and then there was a second execution yeah, remote code execution exploit yes, classic, classic.

02:00:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's a classic. I mean not a good one, but it's you know, yikes.

02:00:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I've been using a lot of pat phrases today, but you know what do you call it when you don't learn the lessons of history, or what happens, you know insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result and expecting SharePoint to work.

02:01:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Sorry. Everybody uses SharePoint, though, right I?

02:01:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
was dumping on SharePoint at some conference in Harlem in the Netherlands and the guy next to me leaned in and he goes. I think a lot of these guys are SharePoint administrators and I was like how many of you guys are SharePoint guys. It was like 90% and I was like it. Many of you guys are.

02:01:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
SharePoint guys. It was like 90% and I was like, of course, it was like it's not like they were confused they knew also.

02:01:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It wasn't a surprise. You know what you did. I was just following orders. Yeah, we've heard that one before.

02:01:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that's the thing. It's like SharePoint was a good career, right yeah?

02:01:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was job security. Yeah, oh, that was job security.

02:01:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and I know plenty of great folks who just dropped off the map because there's so much money in SharePoint. It's like I'm not doing any of this other stuff, I'm just going to go make the money on SharePoint.

02:01:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, they're going to be busy for the next month or so, that's for sure.

02:02:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If they're still involved, because a lot of them retired out or made their money, didn't want to do the online migrations, or the company didn't want to do and and so the bigger thing here is, why are a whole bunch? He's going to go unpatched. The same reason the exchange server's going unpatched. There's nobody to patch it. There's like no oversight at all. Yeah, there's nobody, they're not even looking. You know how. You know you don't have the exploit. You never looked at the logs right, you'll never.

02:02:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't have cancer. I never went to the doctor, that's exactly it.

02:02:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, oh boy, that's not good. Yeah, well, and it's the thing that stuns me is you knew you just closed one like this a year and a half ago. Yeah, that should have been a security audit you're not on everything after this, like you know, but I presume they are, you know I just did an interview with a red teamer. Uh, you know that's their job and so it's like red teamer at microsoft, at microsoft, yeah and they, literally these are hard to find, I'm sure yeah, and that's the thing is they're given missions like that.

02:02:59
It's like go steal data from sharepoint, right that's what a red team mission looks like this stuff is always.

02:03:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like the tsa model. Something horrible has happened. Let's just focus on that. Yeah, yeah, and if Microsoft follows the pattern of the past couple of years, there'll be a SharePoint resiliency initiative, and you know, blah, blah, whatever.

02:03:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they have the future secure initiative right. It's been going on and this is ultimately part of it, although primarily FSI is focused on misconfiguration and bad credential usage, not actual exploits. Andits and that's again. This is two totally independent exploits. Yeah, they're also both old exploits, so they have been sitting in the zero day weapon hopper at certain groups for some time.

02:03:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, I think, yeah, let's talk about something happy. Let's talk about ducks, ducks, everybody likes ducks.

02:03:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So DuckDuckGo this week made two separate announcements on different days on the opposite ends of the AI spectrum. The first one is that I know it's crazy, we're going to serve both masters here. So DuckDuckGo makes a search service. They also make something called DuckAI, which is one of those kind of anonymous chat bot things that interacts with other models in the background, et cetera, et cetera. It's accessible from DuckDuckGo search or you can just go to Duck AI on the web, et cetera.

02:04:27
Okay, so they added I should say this is pretty cool. So, because I've noticed this thing, I've talked this with uh, like my smart screen at home, which is not ai, but same problem where you know, hey, uh g, I don't want to see this photo anymore on this photo slideshow. I'm saying, okay, so you want me to remove the photo? And it's like would you just? So? What they're allowing this is this is apparently not uh unique to me. A lot of people hate that kind of thing. So, uh, they've just added a bunch of customization to this thing which, I have to say, I want to see this everywhere. So it's like tone of response, which could be like casual, professional, friendly, etc. Length of response right, let it be very verbose, verbose or don't.

02:05:07
What the ai's role is in your life, like brainstorm partner, career coach, chef, coding coach, whatever you know. You can explain to them what your role is like. I am a programmer, I am using you for programming. Let's, only let's. Don't tell me about the weather, don't you know? Talk about whatever else. Whether you can have clarifying questions, you can name, you can tell it your name, you can give it a name, right, it doesn't have to be called whatever, the name whatever, and then you can also fill out a form where you can provide it with additional information that you always instructions. I should say that you want this thing to follow. Nice, right, no one uses this service, but that's a good idea.

02:05:47
Smart, on the other end of the spectrum, they are now allowing you to basically completely turn off AI as much as is possible in DuckDuckGo, the search engine, and so the latest feature is there's a toggle you can turn off AI-generated images from search results. So if you're searching for an image, you can say I never want to see that. But actually that's just the latest feature. Like this, there's a URL you can go to to get called it's noaiduckgocom, right, nice, and it does that image filter thing? It turns off AI-assisted summaries. It gets rid of any mention of Duck AI. You can even go click to find it.

02:06:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you know there's no ai in my search results thing.

02:06:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's a good idea right, that's what I want in google photos. That's what a lot of people want, yeah I think like okay, let's go, that's smart.

02:06:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So they play both sides. You want the ai, I got you all. Yeah, yeah, you want no ai, I got no ai.

02:06:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I love you too, man you know, yeah, it's pretty funny um yeah, good for them, yeah I'm gonna look at this.

02:06:53
I I'm gonna be talking about, uh, duck, duck go and like little tech as it, uh, such as it is later, uh, in the back of the book. But this kind of factored into this because I've been meaning to sort of formally kind of write this out a little bit, and and it was after I saw this, I was like, okay, I think I need to, I need to kind of document this. But, um, good for them, so that's good. Now, if they would just put extensions into their browser, maybe I would, you know, consider using it. But uh, we'll see. But I like the company and they're in pennsylvania, by the way well, they don't do extensions in the duck no oh yeah, there's a bunch of well, but it takes some old miss.

02:07:29
Yeah, I know it's it. Yeah, it does. I mean the most important extensions are the privacy ones. Those are that's built in, like they actually do a pretty good job with that, but you know things like I'm trying to think what else?

02:07:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I have a lot like a translation AI grammar checking.

02:07:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's all I have to have the paper, exactly, yep, um search. Well, I guess.

02:07:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd use. I have to have the extensions Instapaper, exactly, yep CoffeeSearch. Well, I guess I have to use DuckDuckGo. I don't.

02:07:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I think for them it's a company right. So search engine, now AI, that is probably much more of a focus from an engineering perspective for them. But, man, I wish they would just dot the I's on the browser, because it's real close.

02:08:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I actually really like the, the browser but it's not there.

02:08:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to talk about an option in a little bit, but first let's get all excited for the xbox. There's only a couple things this week, but these are both good news, I guess. Um, oh, no, not. I guess they are both good news. So microsoft, in the xboxider program, is now testing a feature which is related to cross-play and to Xbox Play Anywhere where.

02:08:34
If you're on the Xbox today and you look at your library or you look at what's available for you to play or stream, like download and play or stream, if you have that subscription you're going to see Xbox games. If you are on the PC and you do the same thing, you're going to see PC games. But now they're going to mix and match them. So I think for now it makes most sense only for like play anywhere games, because obviously, like you bought Call of Duty, whatever well, maybe that's not a good example, but on Xbox and if you this is not really true actually, but let's say it is it's a play anywhere title, so we would let you you play it on pc, you don't have to buy it again, like it would appear there, and that would, you know, show you what was available.

02:09:15
It's smart, but I think this is actually pointing to a couple of different things. One is the integration of other stores where you're going to see games from, you know, steam and epic and etc. But also this coming um platform unification, that we keep talking about that as the xbox, a PC, essentially from an architectural perspective, that list of games is going to grow pretty dramatically. So we have ways to sort of play games like Xbox, console games on PCs through streaming. It's like, okay, we don't have a way I don't believe, yeah, to do the opposite, but I think we're going to get there, like it's going to become all one thing, so you'll have a cloud playable library that will cross those two platforms essentially over time. So we'll see how that evolves. Microsoft announced some months ago that a game that was coming out later this year called the Outer Worlds was going to be its first title to cost $79.99. Everyone's super excited about that, so much so that they decided to lower the price to $69.99 because nobody wants to pay.

02:10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it seems cheap, it's only $70.

02:10:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's funny how that works, right, because for several years, many years, $59. The the price for, like, new AAA type games and uh, and it kind of quickly escalated like 69, 70, like, and uh, I think they got a lot of bad feedback from that.

02:10:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, um, this game kind of looks interesting, a little bit Bioshock and a little bit no Man's Sky and yeah, a little bit uh, I don't know, it looks cool yeah, now there is a more expensive edition which I don't think has been addressed so yeah, I'm sure there's.

02:10:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's always 129.99 so I don't know if that's gone down by 10 bucks a month.

02:11:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Deluxe t-shirt.

02:11:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, if you're already buying the 100 plus dollar. You don't want the extra 10 bucks. It's not gonna make any difference for you.

02:11:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Keep the, keep the money and throw in an extra skin you know that's yes, right, exactly, yep, I I you know, I really loved bioshock.

02:11:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would like to see more like that. Um, that was one of the last games that really scared me too, like you couldn't get that one at night with the headphones on like yeah, that's really great.

02:11:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That game is very much like assassin's creed to me, where it started out so good and I, I think I I did the first, I replayed the first one, you know, and then over time it they kind of, you know, they weren't as replayable or as interesting, it was kind of more of the same or whatever, and I know they changed the location and all that. But like I far cry was like this too, like they kind of lost me over time. But, um, I agree, like you, go back and look at the original bioshock, especially that opening sequence. It's like, oh my god, how is this not a movie? Or, yeah, a long-form tv series on hbo or whatever, like it's.

02:11:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really enjoy it. I thought it peaked at assassin's creed odyssey oh, that's pretty late in the game.

02:12:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, so I would. I would have.

02:12:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was going to just maybe because that greek world was astonishing and, like at one point, I just stopped playing the game.

02:12:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I started following around like so yeah, I would say, you know, like the one that was in Egypt had kind of a compelling location as well.

02:12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Plus you could walk around and learn things. Like you could say tell me about that, tell me. That was really kind of interesting.

02:12:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was like jumping around Paris in the, I think in the 1800s, like when Notre Dame was still being built or whatever and like that was kind of cool, like these little things you know, yeah.

02:12:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, you're right, the storyline gets real ham-fisted after a while, like I mean, it's the nature you have.

02:12:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What are you going to do like you? Ever something worked. You know like we'll do more of it. We'll try to change a little bit you change it too much, people don't like it, you know.

02:12:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Change it too little, people get bored you know this immersion into an ancient time in history was. It's pretty cool neat ideas very it's.

02:12:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All I ever wanted was, uh like a one suit. You have one superpower. You know it's like I want a time travel.

02:13:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just I don't have to be there physically.

02:13:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't have to interact with them, just to walk around and see it to be able to do that I, I followed this old lady mpc character.

02:13:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He't even have any dialogue, but she got up, she went to the market, she bought flour. She went home Wow, she made bread.

02:13:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That is really cool. I just want to be super clear about this. If you did that in real life, you'd be in jail or you'd get some really good bread yeah exactly, and now he's a serial killer.

02:13:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're going to take a little break Back of the book is just around the corner. What do you do if you hate big tech? Paul Theriot's got the answer. Next Meanwhile how's that for a tease. That was pretty good. Coming up next Meanwhile if you're not a member of Club Twit, I'd love to invite you to join.

02:13:47
Actually, if you were a member of Club club to it, you wouldn't be seeing this or any of the other ads. That's one of the first benefits ad free versions of everything we do. Because I'm not a big believer in you know you give me money and I still show you ads. No, no, for 10 bucks a month, no more ads. You get access to a wonderful hang in the club to it discord. Lots of fun talking to people watching the shows, but you could talk around the clock because there's all sorts of different topics going on. It's all the stuff we geeks love to talk about. The Discord also features a lot of special events, in fact tomorrow. I mentioned before the live PC build with Richard Campbell. We stream those live, but after the fact you can only get them in the TwitPlus feed, available just to club members, at least for the first month. Usually in 30 days we make that available. Same with Paul's Hands on Windows show. You can hear the audio, everybody gets to hear the audio, but if you want the video and it really is a lot better with a video you got to be in the club.

02:14:47
So the main reason I would say to join the club is it supports what we're doing here. You, the club now does covers about 25 of our operating costs. That's a big chunk. If it weren't for the club, we would have to lay 25 of our staff off or cancel 25 of our shows or both. I don't want to do that. I'd like to continue to expand, continue to do specials. We're going to be covering the Google Made by event August 20th. We stream those in the club only. Chris Markowitz Photo Time. Stacy's Book Club. Micah's Crafting Corner. Hands on Windows with Paul Theriot. Hands on Apple with Micah all of that in the club. So, please, we'd like to have you in the club. Twittv club twit if you're not a member join us, will you?

02:15:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
now let's go to the back of the book and paul thorat's tip of the week. Yeah, I feel like I've been kind of building toward this because I I've made changes in the kind of software services, whatever that I I use over the years, like anyone does, I guess. But it is interesting that, you know, I kind of came of age career-wise in the sense, just as Microsoft was rising to dominance and, you know, when it comes to like personal computing, like in the late nineties, it was Microsoft, it was Microsoft and this little sliver of whatever else you know. And obviously today the world's quite a bit different. I mentioned earlier, I went and looked at like the apps I was using and writing about in 2005, so 20 years ago, and there's some good ones in there. It's like MSN Music. Microsoft Anti-Spyware Spotwatches Longhorn is still a thing. Msn Search anti-spyware spot watches longhorn still a thing. Msn search six first 64-bit version of windows xp. Microsoft digital image suite uh. 2006.

02:16:37
Windows one care live uh, they've revealed the name of windows vista that year, um, that's the year we were doing this, started doing the show yeah, palm was uh circling the drain, and so they partnered with microsoft and made a version of their trio phone true pro, I think it was Treo. Whatever running Windows Mobile right, which was a piece of garbage Was MTV Urge, which nobody remembers. But MTV Urge was one of the third-party music services that plugged into Windows Media Player or whatever version we were on at the time 8 or something, and it was sort of the predecessor to what became Z and you know later, whatever groove, xbox music, whatever, um, you know, the xbox 360 came out that year. Uh, first office 12 previews, etc. My favorite, though I think I might have said this earlier, was the uh, windows media center 2005 update roll up 2.

02:17:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Man, they could really name they could really name a lot of products you know the very best. It's an omnibus name.

02:17:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but now you know we have all this and certification occurring in our world. The problems with OneDrive and folder backup being turned on against my will pushed me to Google Drive and then eventually to Synology Drive. Similar related ads in Word drove me to finally just adopt Mark down across the board. So I use Typora now. I do use Microsoft stuff. You know where it makes sense. I mean, I use Clipchamp for video editing. It's still surprisingly amazing. It's just amazing I got to do another episode about that. Actually it's just an awesome app. Xbox, obviously, studio for software development etc.

02:18:12
But I use a like a lot more of these things. So from time to time I've sort of talked about like I I'm not a, like I'm not a I'm not like the unibomber, I don't live in a cabin, I'm not. You know, you gotta do the right thing for you, but and I don't have like a plan to just eliminate big tech or anything like that but we are suddenly in this world where there is a lot of what I'll call little tech solutions that are really good, and it's this is like a better time than ever, I would say, to kind of think about at least these things. And so I finally, just kind of laid out like what are the companies that I actually really trust in this space? And those companies are Notion Proton, duckduckgo, right, we mentioned earlier. Affinity, right, which makes these graphics tools like Affinity Photo, which I use every day, which is a pay once alternative to Photoshop, right, which you normally have to pay for over time or if you buy the elements version, year to year. Whatever it is, I wish they made a video editor, but okay, you know.

02:19:14
Companies that make browsers, like mozilla, although they're falling off a cliff, but brave opera, vivaldi, obviously, the browser company, very interesting. Um, automatic, which owns beeper, right, doing the cross-platform messaging thing, pocket casts, which I use for podcast, tumblr, which I don't use, but blogging, et cetera. Well, the big ones are WordPress and what's that thing called WooCommerce, which I use for actually, I use both of those on my site, right, but then, you know, then you get into the kind of open source question, right, because a lot of the best solutions in this space are actually open source, right? Linux, probably a step too far for mainstream people. We'll talk when they get to 10, but, um, there are good kind of user-friendly linux distributions. But if you're not willing to go that far, which most people probably aren't. You know, open source, uh, office suites like libero office or only office, etc. Video editors like one shot cap cut which. That one I'm not.

02:20:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure it's open source, but davinci there is an open source alternative, I think yeah, um, any type.

02:20:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um and joplin are both uh, notion equivalents that are open source, and obsidian, which is not open source.

02:20:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's kind of open standard, because I think of it as like open open adjacents, you know it's like, yeah, but at least you can get data out of it, like you can always get your data. Yeah.

02:20:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's local data. Yeah, gimp, which I don't use and won't, but it is free and open source. There's something called yeah, there's a lot of stuff. So I mean, this isn't really about big tech versus little tech per se, except that it kind of is, because what you see in big tech is that in certification, I think, where they take their own strategies, their own aims are more important than their customers, and that these things should be healthy relationships where you're both getting something out of it. Like if I pay Microsoft for something, you shouldn't harass me for enabling backup and then putting it on after I said no, you know, like that's a bad relationship, like um and so at least your metaphor, that it's abusive.

02:21:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an abusive. It is abusive, I mean, like what do? You, you know yeah, why do you wouldn't put up?

02:21:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they're exploiting us, yeah so, uh, like I, like I said, through whatever combination of factors, we are kind of in this golden era of viable alternatives across the board. I didn't less Slack, for example, because Slack is owned by Salesforce, which I hate, but I also hate Slack. But you know, if you're outside of the Microsoft space, you don't want to be any part of that, you don't want Teams, whatever.

02:21:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there's degrees. I think that's the point. You know you can go from big to medium to little tech to open source yeah, Use it where it makes sense, yeah, yeah.

02:21:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One of the most amazing things that's happened to me this year is I. I've been meaning to replace the old NAS that I had for a long time and I was like, okay, I'm doing it this year. And when we were in Mexico on the previous trip, I was researching this and I, and you know, so I, I start to learn like Synology drive works like one drive and Google drive it does you know files on demand?

02:22:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been using that ever since you recommended it and I love it.

02:22:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In the back. I was afraid to even say it out loud. I was like I'm going to look at this. I hope I don't expect it to, but if it's, maybe it's just a backup, I don't know, whatever. And then I actually started using it and it was so much better than I thought.

02:22:34
And it opens up this whole new world of like oh my God, like I'm using it right now. So one day, probably on the next trip here, I'll have a NAS here and those two things will talk to each other, Right. But for now, I have one NAS and it is in Pennsylvania and I use it every day. I use it on this lap, every laptop. I use it instead of OneDrive and Google Drive and it has never not worked right Like it's great. And I keep waiting for that moment because I know it's going to stab me in the back eventually, but so far it's been great and I'm not saying everyone dropped.

02:23:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're talking about the caveats here.

02:23:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is what you need to do is plan your exit strategy too right and later get acquired, or they scale up or they have well, that's exactly like this b little b thing, which was as small tech as you can get and is now amazon.

02:23:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, richard was there when the unexpected happened to me. We were together in puerto vallarta and we were going to have breakfast and I burp burp my phone, burp burp. What's going on? And Google.

02:23:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's going on? You're not having breakfast. That was the worst.

02:23:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
YouTube just cut me out, you know, was that your beginning of the end? Was that your it was at?

02:23:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
one of the no, I'm no the big, honestly one of the big ones.

02:23:46
Milestone yeah, it was it was a big one and and there's a whole thing for me this year where I'm doing more online. One of the things I I'm a little nervous to raise yet but I did want to talk to you guys about it somewhat and I will write about it is this notion of a. It's like a, a succession plan, right, I walk outside of the, I get hit by a bus and I'm dead, and my kids and my wife have to get into all my accounts. How do I I you need to do work to make sure they can do that and get in everything, and you got to figure that out and I? I don't have the answer to how you do that. I don't think there's any one answer, really, but it's tied into identity management and password management through something like I use proton pass, whatever, you guys use whatever, but I I.

02:24:32
This is like as all of our lives are occurring, as all of our important data is digital. You have to figure this stuff out. It's not as simple as someone walking into your house and doling out your remaining items to whomever selling the house and you move on with life Like they have to be able to access our bank accounts and our. You know it, it, there's a whole thing in there, but yes, I, to me the biggest one at the first maybe, was the combination of OneDrive and word badgering and hectoring me and forcing me down some path. That YouTube thing was a huge one, like it was really big and um, and then the, the, the Synology thing was just like a almost a happenstance, like I was going to do this anyway. I think the YouTube thing put me over the top because I need a storage for that, because I have to back up those videos, right, if they ever cut me out again, um, but then I saw how good Synology drive was and I was like, oh, wow, that's.

02:25:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was like eye-opening what if I didn't send them to in the first place. Yeah, I mean, I'm running my synology as a backup to my one drives on the risk of being cut out.

02:25:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But and right, so I thought I thought that's what I was going to do, but now I realized I can do it in reverse. I can use one drive and google drive and whatever else as a backup to what's on synology. Like synology becomes my one primary place of truth, or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, yeah, so there's a whole thing here. But anyway, my point is only this Look, windows is a platform. It's great. I still prefer it to the Mac or Linux or whatever. It's what I use. It's not just because it's my job, like I really do prefer it.

02:26:13
I, with windows, I do use some microsoft stuff too, but I, you know, I I'm not a big fan of some of the stuff that I see out there. It's not just microsoft, but I'm obviously firmly immersed in that. But uh, I just wanted to. I I feel like I've kind of dipped into this from time to time and I put this up because I wanted other people to kind of come back and say, okay, here's another one, here's another company you can trust, or here's another thing in this category that's good, like an app or solution, whatever, and that this becomes kind of a baseline, you know, and it will change, you know, moving forward, but just to kind of, you know, just formally be like, look, this exists, like you don't have to stick with the thing just because it's there, like you can do. You know, ai is a tough one. Ai is something I did not address in this article and I was fascinated the next day today to see an announcement on my inbox from Proton, which was one of the companies I trust, and you got to look up this company and how they're structured and what they did to ensure they will always be the way they are, that it can't be bought and no one's ever going to take them away or whatever. They announced, like everyone else is announcing these days, their own AI chatbot right Theirs is called Lumo. They haven't been super clear on what models they're using in the background, et cetera, but this is one of those privacy first, everything's encrypted, you own your data, et cetera type companies. This, like the Duck AI thing I was mentioning earlier, where they let you configure everything to a degree which I think is appropriate, is very interesting to me because I think for some class or some kinds of people don't trust this stuff for good reason in many cases. Right, where I think, like this, this kind of thing can help address that.

02:27:56
Now, open source AI is not as good as the big tech AI stuff. I mean. I think it's fair to say that. I mean, uh, I'm sure Apple, which is big tech, but I'm sure Apple would like to do their own AI, but they have to pass it off to chat, gpt and eventually to Gemini and whatever else.

02:28:11
But you can try this thing for free. If you have a Proton account, you can use it a little bit more. I'm not sure what the exact details are, and they do have a subscription. I do have. I do pay for a Proton subscription of some kind that spans their services. I'm not sure yet if I'm, you know, part of this or whatever they give me. I don't actually know, but this is something to look at in the scheme of what I just talked about A little tech company that I explicitly trust entering a part of the market.

02:28:45
That is really not trustworthy.

02:28:48
And I'm not telling you it's great, I'm not telling you, but I am telling you maybe you should look at it and I'm going to you it's great, I'm not telling you, but I am telling you maybe you should look at it and I'm going to be looking at it and we'll see, we'll see how it is, we'll see if it performs better over time, et cetera.

02:28:59
But you know, they mentioned things like look, you're, you're integrating, you're talking to them about these things with your health, your finances, like what are you doing? Like you can't trust these companies. And they even kind of crap on Apple in kind of an interesting way where it's like, unlike Apple intelligence and others, lumo is not a partnership with OpenAI or other American or Chinese AI companies. Love being lumped into that little box and your queries are never sent to any third parties. And so they said, going forward, our research and development will remain focused on open models which we will continuously improve and augment. So, yeah, I mean, it's probably not there today, right, it's probably terrible, I would guess, but this is a space to watch, it's worth looking at space to watch.

02:29:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's worth looking at. That makes sense. Yes, bravo, all right, subscribe to uh the premium version of theratcom if you want to read the whole piece.

02:30:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a good piece yeah, I've been on kind of a tear past several days with this stuff for some reason, but that's what happens. Welcome to the dark side, paul yes, thank you I I do feel the power of the dark side.

02:30:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yes uh, what do you want to do next? Is it your turn, richard? I think it's run as time, run as radio yeah, um, this week's show.

02:30:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Before I get into it, it's episode 994, so episode 1000 is six weeks away and I finally have a plan, and that plan is to do a q and a show, uh, with my friend paul thurot.

02:30:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait what's that Hello, hello, I'm sorry. Testing Is this thing on.

02:30:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So at the lead-in bumper for this show this week, I actually talk about it and say, hey, if you want a question answered, you can email me at info at runasradiocom or, better still, send me an audio clip asking your question so I can include it in the show. It's about time we send me an audio clip asking your questions so I can include it in the show. It's about time we hear so little of paul these days. He's a shy kind of guy, uh, and I've also um uh, made up a 1000th episode version of the run-ass mug, so anybody who gets a mention on the 1000th episode will get this very rare run mug, oh wow yeah, so there'll be a thought.

02:31:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a run as mug. How rare is this mug?

02:31:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh, there's a few hundred of those, including many vps at microsoft. Uh, they, they are popular in that respect, but I I decided to make a special edition for this, the thousands episode version.

02:31:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I was using it to hold paper clips, but now I'm going to put coffee in it.

02:31:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah it's a good coffee mug, but then I have to replace it occasionally. They do eventually wear out. I break them every so often. I like it, but meantime, after you get past that 30-second bumper, I chatted with April Dunham about Copilot Studio. So very again talking to sysadmins who don't want to do a lot of programming but are interested in the AI agent angle, who don't want to do a lot of programming but are interested in the AI agent angle. And so Copilot Studio is that low-code, no-code solution to bringing agents into the equation.

02:32:17
And April, who's been in this space for forever, certainly in the how do you do stuff with Power Apps and SharePoint and things like that, we talked through how this integrates into your organization and you can take advantage of the new tool that's been going on here. Microsoft's been doing lots of changes in this space, but they're sort of settling on a pattern now to be able to set up some good template solutions for this so that you can empower your users as an administrator to build agents specific to their power apps and to that low-code space. So she's got a great video called your First co-pilot studio agent in minutes on youtube and I included a link to that in the show notes, but certainly something you can work with, and they understand MCPs. So there's including a bunch of the Microsoft MCPs. So nice, I get into that without having to be a programmer, just an administrator or just technical enough. You can make it happen there, and April got us started.

02:33:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hear good thingswright. Actually I didn't realize it was a Microsoft tool.

02:33:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's cool yeah yeah, microsoft's been backing it for a while and they created this MCP for it, which now makes we did a whole NET Rocks on this as well, because one of the problems you have with test tools in general is that you make a new version of the website, you often break a lot of your tests. But what if your tests were driven by a set of prompts fed through playwrights? So simply regenerating your test gets a lot more efficient. Nice, that was a very a great conversation we have with debbie o'brien over on dot net rocks. For those who are interested, nice.

02:33:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Run as radiocom show 994, april dun A thousand is upon us. A thousand is upon us, wow, congratulations, thank you. Now I think we should celebrate with some brown stuff.

02:33:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I finally ran through all of the gifts and things and actually had to go shopping and I was in the local liquor store where there still is no American bourbon but there is Scottish Benromach. Benromach, the local liquor store where there still is no american bourbon, but there is scottish and roma, ben roma, which I had not uh had before and uh, which is funny because it's been around a long time. Uh, it's nominally a space side. I mean it's in the county of moray which includes the space side. Uh, this is the larger area of which they once know, known as elgin shire, because the biggest town is elgin, which is about 25 000 people. They got renamed as the moray shire in 1919. Uh, the second largest town is for us, which is about 10 000 people, which is where ben romack is. Um, of course, we've mentioned this before.

02:34:46
The northern part of scotland here has had humans on it going back to neolithic times, although the area was this specific area, this particular inlet where taurus is, or for us is, it was mentioned by ptolemy then in 180, so it's also got a, a very famous carved rock by the picks, called the sueno stone, which was a a commemoration of a successful battle of the Picts against the Norse, likely around 900 AD, plus or minus 50 years. It's also the location in Shakespeare's Macbeth of Duncan's Castle. In fact, when the three witches are meeting on the moorlands, those are real moorlands outside of Fares, so you can go, you know, stand where Macbeth, where Shakespeare was describing these locations. They're real locations, uh so, uh, 1898, the original distillery is built by Duncan McCallum and FW Brickman. Uh, they run for a whole two years, make their first products in 1900 and then shut down down. They run out of money. Mccallum gets some additional money and reopens it as the Forest Distillery instead of calling it Benromach, just in time for World War I, where they shut down again, they try and start up. After run for a few years, shut down through prohibition and then World War II, by by 1953 it is sold the distillers company dcl, which you know is the path to diageo. Eventually, uh, who ran it for 30 years, from 53 to 83, and then it got mothballed, shut down for about a decade, where it was acquired by the urquhart family now, and when, mothballed, meaning stripped for parts, there there was nothing left.

02:36:33
Now, who are the Urquharts? Well, the Urquharts own Gordon and Macphail, and Gordon Macphail is another very old organization inside of Scotland. They were founded in 1895. And these were grocery and wine merchants James Jordan and John Alexander Macphail. But one of their early employees was a fellow by the name of John Urquhart who began there as an apprentice and he specifically focused on the whiskey side of the business. So they're grocery and wine merchants, but they were bringing in barrels of whiskey and eventually got into. You know, you got to pick your casks and then they started doing blends and a lot of this was Urquhart's work. He was also instrumental in the idea of doing long aged whiskey, where he started buying casks that they weren't going to touch for a decade or two decades or in one case six decades, and he was finally became a senior partner when the founders passed. He took over the business entirely and it's been in the Urquhart family ever since four generations now. So uh, after john, his son george ran it and then his sons ian and david and michael, and right now the fourth generation operates gordon mcphail. So uh that neil is the non-exec chairman, stephen rankin runs the prestige group, steward is the operations director and richard is head of sales for the Americas. That's a lot of Urquharts.

02:37:52
So they acquired. They'd always wanted to have their own distillery and they bought Benromac as this very small distillery in 1993, refitted it over five years and in 1998, bonnie Prince Charles now King Charles opened the distillery for them. And coincidentally, part of this story has to do with a fellow by the name of Keith Kirkshank who happened he was in the distilling business already in Scotland but he got hired on at that restart in 1998 to be the manager of the company within a couple of years and has been through the run of Drummack, only left this year to join another small distillery in Speyside called Colburn. This is a small place. They don't make a ton of whiskey but while they are in the Speyside region it's much more of a Highland style and it's peated, which is weird. It's at 12 ppm, which is a very low. They call it just a whisper of peat smoke, although I have tasted this and that's a pretty loud whisper. You could see, you could hear it coming. I would consider it a peated whiskey at 12 ppm. And generally they say peated is like 10 to 15 ppm, as opposed to Lagavulin at 40, which would be significantly peated. And then there are of course the crazy ones like the high peats in the 60 to 100, the octomore at 300. I don't know why you would do that to yourself.

02:39:22
And we remind ourselves why we put peat into whiskey in the first place. It's because it was the cheapest way to dry the malt. So you know, before the industrial revolution, if you go out to the early 1800s, where whiskey is still everything's peated, peated you know spade was no different. They made it then. Now there were different kinds of peat. Of course, right, the isla whiskeys are, are what? The seaweed peat versus the heather peats in the north. But which begs the question why? How does peat get made into from seaweed in the first place? Uh, and the answer, of course, is that the land of those islands is still rising from the ice age, and so you know it takes several hundred years to make peat. So the 10,000 year old peat, the seaweed that was on, that's now well on dry land and has become peat, is why we get that sort of iodine-y type peat that the islands are well known from, and this is very much heather peat. So it's not that style.

02:40:13
Why did they go away from peat? Because peat got expensive and cheaper drying materials were available, and that cheaper drying material was coal. So as the coal revolution takes a hold in Scotland, and then railways, the cheapest way to dry your malt becomes coal driven. And nobody likes to flavor coal, so they just use it for heat. They don't use it for taste. And it was the Ardmore distillery in 1898, around the time that Benromac was being formed that was the first to switch to coal for their heat. And that's why Islay still peated, because when you're on an island it's kind of tricky to make a railway. So all of the mainlanders switched over to the lower cost things and the Islas were stuck sticking with their peat. And so Speysides, as soon as the train lines started coming through, they switched across the coal as quickly as possible and by the end of World War II there's literally no peat left in the northern parts of Scotland. They just stopped doing it. It's too expensive and this is a much more efficient way to go about it.

02:41:20
Now, as whiskey gets more popular in the 50s and the 60s, some start adding in peat because it's got some character to it. But then when you get into a downturn in the 80s, the peat goes away again. So the fact that ben romack calls himself space side, which with traditional peating is interesting. You know there are very few. I mean even valvini once in a while does a peat week where they do use a bit of malted, uh, peat barley to do the flavors there. Uh, this is a small operization so they don't obviously grow their own barley, most don't they actually use.

02:41:58
They purchased the ability for the big malt houses already peated to specification. They turn it into wort using a combination of both brewer's yeast and distiller's yeast, typically three to five day fermentation. Three would be normal, five would be long. But it's all hand operations here. They have no automation whatsoever. So they literally ferment until they're happy with the ABV and sort of the texture of that early wort.

02:42:25
They use large wooden washbacks only 11,000 liters. Tiny washbacks there's four of them and then they only have one pair of stills and there's some of the smallest stills in the business. The wash still is 7,500 liters and the spirit still is 5,000 liters. Now this has a consequence in that there's only so much room for reflux, so it tends towards a spicier whiskey to use these small stills. Near as I can tell with everything I've read, there's only two people who actually involved in the distilling process inside of Benromac at all. So it's very, very personal and they run a small operation 500,000 liters a year and their Benich warehouses only hold about 8,000 casks.

02:43:10
But they're big believers of using sherry in their aging very space side thing to do and so they use both sherry casks and white arcona, now being talked about as sherry seasoned casks. This is the modern way, because there's simply not enough sherry produced for the amount that the whiskey industry needs. You can now buy barrels to specification from sherry producers. You can even choose whether you use European or American oak and they will put sherry in it for three years for the purpose of treating that barrel so that you can use it for sherry aging. This is different from traditional sherry casks in the fact that traditional sherry casks are almost entirely European oak, no other kinds. They tend to be very large and heavy barrels 500 liters being normal, and they are used repeatedly for sherry, and so they build up a character that when you finally get them for use in whiskey, it has a lot of depth of flavor and typically sherry finishes are short a few months at most. Finishes are short, a few months at most. The sherry seasoned casks don't have that same impact and so you need to age for longer in those barrels. But there's been some special editions sherry casking and American oak that are very popular and kind of special. This is not one of these. It uses very traditional approaches.

02:44:27
The Benromac 10 was not necessarily destined to be a 10. They had come up with a new recipe and this is from Cruikshank's interview on the topic and they were thinking probably a 12 or a 15. But somewhere around nine years the flavor was coming up so nicely that they decided it was really great at 10. And so they made it a 10. And that gives it a distinct advantage. For a Scottish single malt it's $50. It's just not that expensive.

02:44:56
And so, uh, barreled it, uh bottled at 43% and can't smell the peak coming in, it's, it's not, it's not even boozy. He's mostly smelling a bit of wood and a bit of the barley. Flavors are still in there. But boy, when you drink it it's like wait a second, that's smoky. Now it's not hugely smoky, but it's definitely the dominant flavor. But there's also a lot of that spicy kind of I know it comes from the barley that they've got a lot more of the character, that sort of sharpness. They haven't pulled the solvers quite as heavily, so it's got a little bitter, a little bite. It's got some clout to it. It's not real mouth-filling and creamy, but it drinks nice and, yeah, very warming. You definitely had a good sip of whiskey there. This is a funny space side because it's peated. It's not a special edition. Every Benro Mac 10 is like this. I consider it an excellent intro whiskey to peat. If you've never gone into peat before, I would go here. It's a great place to start.

02:46:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very good. Richard Campbell, thank you for the whiskey pick of the week. Thank you, paul Therot, for being such a grump. And I must say this is the first Windows Weekly with not one but two references to Shakespeare in it, which is pretty amazing. It's odd, almost unlikely. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm, eastern, 1800 UTC. Watch it live or download it from our website, twittv slash www. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to it, but the best thing to do is subscribe and your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it as soon as we're done Well, as soon as Kevin King is done fixing it up, and you'll get it each week.

02:46:49
Do leave us a good review. Tell the world how great windows weekly is. We'd really appreciate it. Thanks to our club members for making this possible. You'll find richard at run as radiocom. That's where dot net rocks also is. Uh. You'll find paul at therotcom. Become a premium member, find out why big tech sucks and what you could do about it. Uh, he also writes about big tech. His books windows everywhere, a history of windows through its programming frameworks, and the field guide to windows 11 are available at leanpubcom, where you set your own price. But don't be a cheapskate, okay. Okay, paul richard, we'll see you again next week.

02:47:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank, you all, you winners, and dozers.

02:47:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll see you next week right here on Windows Weekly.