Windows Weekly 943 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 Thorat's here. Richards has the week off, so we're very lucky. Chris B Hoffman is here, paul's partner in his Windows Intelligence newsletter, former editor-in-chief of HowToGeek. We'll talk about a very big anniversary Windows 10 is 10 years old. We'll also talk about Windows 11 and co-pilots coming of age. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 943, recorded Wednesday, july 30th 2025. Five paperclips it's time for Windows Weekly. Hello you, winners. Good to see you. Welcome, especially to our Club Twit members who make this show possible. Let's say hello to Mr Paul thurot from thurotcom. He's in mexico city, roma norte. Hello paul, hello leo paul. Uh, did richard campbell go on a reducing diet and shave his beard?

01:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, he did not. Uh, no, richard is on a, an alaska cruise which is hysterical birthday.

01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because we went on an alaska cruise with him.

01:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He just yes, that's true, um he, they had a tsunami potentially, right, yes, so he had one too right, but I mean, he was at sea so, so he just get. Then you got a little rock and unroll and I just chatted with him this morning and he's fine. I guess the captain set out to a deeper sea toward where this could have happened. Oh, interesting. They didn't feel anything. But there was a lot of kind of Poseidon vibe going on the upside down adventure.

01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I'm glad Shelly Winters is not on the trip with him. Yes, so is he. Tell us who Chris Hoffman is. I don't know when he's at home.

02:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who are?

02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you, Chris Hoffman, when you're at home.

02:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Explain yourself, sir.

02:15 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, I'm Chris Hoffman, so I'm a tech journalist. I've been writing about Hi. Great to be here, leo Great to have you. Paul and I know each other, so I've been writing about Windows for 15 years. You've probably seen some of my work at some point. I used to be editor-in-chief of HowToGeek a few years ago.

02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I love HowToGeek. We quote them all the time. Yeah, awesome.

02:36 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, that's awesome. And I've been writing a newsletter called Windows Intelligence for the past few years and writing a computer world column and I write for a variety of publications. I review a bunch of laptops for PC World. I got a fun laptop to show off a bit in, a bit Exciting. So that's who I am and you know Paul and I. I've been basically Paul Thrott's newsletter partner for the past two years and we're looking to continue that as well.

03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's right, I forgot Paul. You're on that windows intelligence or platform, aren't you?

03:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so we're going to move.

03:12
We're going to talk about this toward the end of the show again, but you have a big connection to this because when we my wife and I took over throughoutcom, newsletters was one of the tricky things for us because it was expensive and a lot of work. And it was your wife who recommended that I speak to JR Raphael, who I don't know. I didn't know personally, but I've been reading for many, many years and really like and I told Chris this story but the question he he was very open to this would start a Windows newsletter and it was a matter of finding the right person, right. And so that was always the sticky point and I actually I remember exactly where I was in the car with my wife when I got the message from him and it was Chris, and I was like, yes, it was like he's like one of the, the very few guys in our industry who I uh also really like. I like his writing, I he's knowledgeable and smart and uh, so that was just a great, that was a great combination.

04:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was lovely, lovely well, uh, yeah, because jr was a big fan of of doing a newsletter. That was like the thing he said you really got to do that, uh, so that's good, yeah, he's turned that into a business, so we'll talk.

04:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's some changes coming, but we'll.

04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll talk about that and, uh, you know, chris and I are going to continue forward, so it's all nice, nice well, uh, speaking of moving forward today is a wonderful, by the way I I apologize, I have to push a button so I can show chris's uh website. I forgot to do that, let me. Let me do that right now, so everybody has a reference point. This is where you go get the best well, it looks just like you.

04:59
I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, you don't mention paul at all on here, huh no actually he does right at the top no, no somewhere.

05:07 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
So yeah, there's the newsletter, right there, but yeah so and there's the free copies of paul's windows 10 field guides, just for signing up absolutely um so um, but in terms of newsletter, it's going through a bit of a transition. I I guess I should talk about that now. As far as Windows Intelligence, we are ending it and winding that down, so personally, I am going fully independent. Jr Raphael has been incredibly gracious and offered to hand me the list and the relationships, or at least everyone that wants to come. No one is forced to come with me, but basically decoupling from Android intelligence and I'll be launching my own newsletter. That's more personal.

05:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you have a name for it yet, or are you still working?

05:55 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
on it. I do have a name. I don't know if I want to reveal it yet I have a fun concept.

05:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't reveal it until you've registered the domain.

06:06 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I do have the domain. Okay, we haven't, um, I I don't know if I want to reveal it, although, well, I I think, I think it'll come together when you see everything when it all comes together, then we'll know yeah, mid to late august.

06:17
The last issue of windows intelligence is firing off in a few weeks in mid-august. So, um, that's transitioning and you know I'm, um, you, ramping up work at a variety of publications PC World, pc Make, all great publications, and you know, the newsletter. I think going forward is going to be a little more personal, a little smaller, just once a week, and I, you know, hope to promote Threatcom more in it and I, you know, dotcom more in it and uh, I, I'm, you know, I I'm really excited about, uh, you know, the future of that actually nice.

06:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm a big fan of going independent, paul and I both that sometimes it's forced on you, but you know it's okay, both of us okay maybe would have done something different had they not said hey, it's, it's been nice, but I'm lazy enough that I would have still.

07:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'd still be working with a white net right now if it made sense Exactly.

07:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But both of us I think I think it's safe to say Paul are very happy that we've been independent. It's been a great experience.

07:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't know how everyone else handles this, but I'm sure all three of us at one point, like you know, someday in the future, dot dot dot, and sometimes you know it happens, maybe not on your schedule. You're like you know what. Maybe this was the right thing.

07:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sometimes you have to be pushed into the pool. Yeah, exactly, out of the nest into the pool, because it's not something you know and this is actually something everybody listening could probably be aware of, because we're about to head into a, I think, an era where, uh, self-employment, especially in journalism, is going to be the only way. On twit on sunday, it was just a kind of an interesting thing, but every single of one of the people on twit was a newsletter author and independent. That's funny and I think that that's the trend. You know, for years, twit was always people who worked for a blog or a magazine. Early days it was magazines, but nowadays it's podcasts, it's newsletters, it's YouTube channels.

08:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that's a good thing we're right outside of that TikTok demographic but, like maybe I don't know.

08:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, we're very pleased to have you, chris. Thank you for uh filling in for uh richard, who has big shoes because his feet are humongous yeah, he's we're glad to have you. It is a very happy uh 10th anniversary for windows 10, which, uh, you know I didn't realize this, but the life expectancy for windows operating systems is 10 well, historically it always was, but that that was.

08:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's one of the many unique and kind of interesting things about windows 10, because when it was first announced it was not going to have a 10-year life cycle like, especially not the classic didn't they say it was going to be forever. Well, no, not, not, no, everyone got it.

09:08
It's amazing to me how many people are quoted, yeah no, what one employee from microsoft did refer to at one time as the last version of windows, but that was he's not like a brand decision maker or whatever, like he just kind of said that I shouldn't have said that in other words.

09:23
I but I. But it was a reasonable mistake to make in the sense that there were a lot of things about Windows 10 that were very vague, including this notion of support Right, and that was why it was before. Microsoft would release a major new version of Windows every three to 10 years, you know, eight years, whatever the timeframe was. But with Windows 10, they were releasing a major new version of Windows 10 every, originally every six months, which is was unprecedented. But the theory at the time was we're going to turn Windows into the service like thing and ironically or whatever, they got there eventually, but it took a while and there were several years there where we had lots of problems from all the updating, and now we are updated every day. So it's the different.

10:08 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I don't know it's a different world, different world but at least they're smaller updates.

10:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They are smaller. Yeah, so it's death by a thousand cuts instead of getting hit by a brick, I guess.

10:17
Well, they install faster, so it's not, you get the bugs faster no-transcript than Google with Android or Apple with anything, actually Getting the install of updates to be kind of seamless and quick and relatively painless. That said, I've been using the dev channel recently on a couple of laptops. Man, it takes a long time to install those builds. I think it's because they're each sort of treated like almost like a feature update maybe, but it is kind of weird. It's a weird regression. It's only in the Insider program, so it's not a big deal, but I notice it.

11:21 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, it's weird because the whole Windows as a service thing started in Windows 10. They're like it's weird because the whole windows as a service thing started in windows 10. They're like it's a service. Now it's continually updated and that was every six months, but every six months initially it was a like an os level update every six months.

11:32
It was a long grinding update. I remember, I think, the first big windows 10 update. It installed and then it actually like uninstalled some of the programs on people's computers at the time and it was like, oh, this has been installed because it's not supported. It's not supported, this hardware driver time. And it was like, oh, this has been installed because it's not supported. It's not supported, this hardware driver doesn't work. It's like well, that's nice, but I've been using this computer for six months. It's Monday morning, I have to work and you just uninstalled my hardware driver. It's like but Windows is a service, it's like you know.

11:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So where they're at now is a service is ludicrous. But, like I said, I mean they kind of they did eventually get there, and not as a service, but I mean they do it works. I mean it's again there. There will always be mistakes it's microsoft, whatever human beings are involved. But it's.

12:18
It's fascinating to me that we went from this really monolithic schedule to, yeah, we're going to do a new version of windows every six months. It's like what? But I think that's part of the history of why windows 10 is the way it is. Right, it's not just a reaction to what went wrong with windows eight, because the rapid release thing started with windows 8.1. Right, that was the first thing they talked about. They launched windows eight in whatever. That was September thing they talked about. They launched Windows 8 in September, october, 2012. By January, they were talking rapid release Over the next couple of years.

12:52
They released at least three milestones for Windows 8.0, bringing back the start menu, bringing back the start button, bringing back floating Windows or adding floating Windows to modern apps. You know like I mean. Or adding floating windows to modern apps. So you know, windows 10 in some ways was almost like a formal policy for that kind of model, but the Metro app model, as they called it, originally carried forward as UWP. But those were tied to every Windows release. So every six months there was a new Windows release. Every six months there were new APIs, new capabilities for developers. But you had to have that version of Windows or newer and all of a sudden they went from we just want everyone to be on the same version of windows 2.

13:50 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
We have seven versions of windows out there now and it's like what's going on. You know it got really complicated. Well, I feel compelled to be, microsoft's legal department for a second, saying it was never called metro. Please don't call it that. That was, that was never. We never called it.

13:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They didn't like that did they.

13:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Even I will refer to the multitudes of microsoft documentation that says the word metro but okay, it's a modern app or a store app. Yeah, store app store, app store app and store up that's kind of generic it was. In the beginning it meant something. Now it doesn't mean anything. It's just anything that's distributed through the store.

14:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It could be anything now, but but yeah, everything's in the store now, isn't it pretty?

14:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
much, that's that. Yeah, right. So in the beginning it was very specifically these modern apps, um only, and then over time, they expanded it um. First they tried to expand it through what they used to call the bridges. Remember these were ways for we. I remember bridges and I remember lakes uh yeah, those are yeah, data lakes are different, but there's all. Yeah, there were also islands. Now suffolk at those samuel islands but how can you forget them?

14:43
eventually we arrived where we are today. So I would say, through the course of Windows 10, it was a big, it's almost like a big learning process really platform-wise, updating-wise, app store and app platform-wise. And it's not perfect today, for sure, but it is in a much better place than it was in a much better place than it was. Also, I mean remember this was the name universal app was meant to connote the fact that these apps would run across multiple platforms and eventually they called that one windows. But the idea was that a windows 10 on whatever devices small, small tablets, tablets, two and ones, convertibles, laptops, desktop PCs, whatever surface hub, which was announced at the windows 10 consumer event that January, HoloLens, which was also announced at that event, Xbox One we're all running the same basic platform and could run the same apps and phone, I'm sorry, I should say phone. Phone was going to be for two seconds the volume part of this story and that disappeared pretty quick.

15:46 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
So, yeah, so do you think that the servicing model maybe is working better now due to? You know, technically Windows 10 is still supported, but they're not really updating Windows 10 like a service. In the same way, most of it's happening in Windows 11. That's a much narrower hardware band. Windows 10 had a lot of old devices that were updated to it, and if you look at some of the posts that Microsoft made when there were problems with Windows 10 updates, they were kind of making a lot of excuses about well, windows 10 is on a lot of hardware, so no wonder there are bugs and it's like well, should we be updating it that way then?

16:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But is it working better now? Maybe because there's a pair of ones? Yeah, I never I can't say I've ever considered that. But that makes sense, right, that because Windows 11 works on a more limited range of hardware and obviously more modern hardware too, which presumably is more reliable. That's not true actually, but okay, but whatever.

16:43 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, okay, that definitely could be part of it yeah, I mean, they, they improve the process.

16:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's absolutely more secure too, um, but they, they improve the updating process. You know, in fits and starts and, and you know, learn from mistakes, etc. It took, it took a while, but, yeah, yeah, a combination of factors, yeah, for sure, um, I, of course. Now they call this continuous innovation, which maybe is more adequate or accurately described as like continuous interruption, you know whatever, but, um, but yeah, and even that is something they're trying to address, right, if you have an enterprise version of windows 11 or if you're on server, um, you only actually have to reboot that pc for updates once a quarter, and the other interim months are those I can't remember the term they use for that, but they slipstream those updates in without requiring a reboot, right, and so maybe that's something that we'll get collectively right for everyone running Windows 11 someday.

17:40 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, I'm hoping for a hot patching to arrive on the consumer. Maybe that's a Windows 12 thing, maybe there will never be Windows 12. Who knows?

17:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hot patching is it doesn't need to reboot, it, just does it in the background.

17:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so if in any quarter there are three months, two of those months you'll get hot patches, and then the third of those the quarter and you'll get the one that requires the reboot or whatever. It's kind of a those the quarter and you'll get the the one that requires the reboot or whatever it's it's. So maybe they've been doing differential updating for 20 years actually, but it, does it a reboot?

18:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, what's the? I mean I I mean I'm kind of used to most operating systems want to reboot if it's a significant patch. How do you do it without?

18:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
rebooting. Um, I guess in the case of a pc or whatever platform, it's also like a billion-ish ones and zero. So there's gonna be some mistakes in there. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not really sure. Um, yeah, so anyway.

18:36
So yesterday was the literal 10th anniversary of the release of the original version of Windows 10, right so, july 29. And in my typical fashion, I completely zoned on it until that morning and I realized it was that day and I was like, oh man, I better get to do something about this. So if you go to my article, I actually added a link to the notes that wasn't there originally. At the bottom of this section I have I'm giving away the Windows 10 field guide for free. I finally figured out a way to do that, because LeanPub really wants me to charge money, but anyway, I got it, I figured it out. So now, through, I think, august 1st, you can go grab that for free at LeanPub if you have the right URL. So get a. That's why the link is important.

19:27
And then I was thinking back about, you know, windows 10, because at the time windows 10 was so welcome and so necessary, and for me personally, on a couple of levels, because I really liked the windows phone experience. I liked that team of people. They took over windows, which I thought was kind of incredible, and they said everything, or they tried to set everything right. They had what I would say is a pretty good vision for it all and there were problems with it. That, like I said, we're fixed over time like windows is a service. But, man, the more I thought about it, the more I sort of realized like there's also there's a lot of controversy in there as well.

20:07
You know, windows 8 was the first Windows operating system to ship with ads in it, but they were limited just to those modern apps that were bundled with the system, like news and weather and so forth. Windows 10 brought that out to the file system, to the operating system itself, and, as I predicted, you know, I called the ads in Windows 8 many years ago a slippery slope. Like you know, you don't put ads in Windows, so you can put less ads in Windows. Next time You're going to put more and that is what happened. So we got the you know, the sponsored bundled crap where we got advertising. We got telemetry, that was forced on us, a lot of privacy concerns although most of those were kind of made up, frankly, um candy crush. Okay, yeah, we had to deal with that for a little while microsoft now owns it was, that's true.

20:55
And and now doesn't bundle with windows, which is a little strange. But but, yep, um, you know the app platform mistakes, right, uh, which they fixed in time. Uh, or I can't say they're fixed, but they're. That situation is better. Um, windows 10 is kind of came at a weird time. You know windows eight had crashed and burned.

21:16
Windows eight had this major launch event in New York city. It was a big deal. Windows 10, I think they launched it like a bake sale at a church somewhere in Northern California or something like it was like a nothing. You know Windows 11 was less than nothing. They announced it online and they delivered some of it, you know, six months later, and then the rest of it a year later. I don't know, and we're still kind of working through that. But you know the world changed right. You know the world changed right. I mean, the world went mobile and cloud and you know Windows just didn't have the same kind of precedence within the company. So I don't know, but Chris was good enough to look at these notes and say this is a little negative. Let's put in some context.

22:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chris, you're just learning, aren't you?

22:03 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I was also going to say Windows 10X had a big launch event where we all were excited about the Surface Neo, so we know that.

22:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sad, sad. 10x had two things that were big and, by the way, I have to say, I appreciate Microsoft pushing in both these directions right. The first one was a simpler user interface, which is what we eventually got in Windows 11, which is controversial because to simplify in Windows 11, which is controversial because to simplify something complex, you have to take things away, and the people of all this muscle memory around right-click menus and whatever else instantly notice when those things are missing. And so there was that kind of outcry from our part of the world, our community. People like my wife, who I'd called normal users or mainstream users, couldn't care less. It was fine, they didn't care.

22:46
But the big innovation in Windows 10X was going to be this componentized. What's the word I'm looking for when you have a Docker like a containerized architecture, right? Oh yeah, that's all the rage. Yeah yeah, all the modern apps would run in their own, you know, self-contained containers or whatever, as they do now, but every win 32 process would run in a container, and the idea there was this is the. This is the thing that they've been trying to solve in windows forever. S mode was an attempt at this as well is how do you take this thing that's inherently old-fashioned legacy code. It's insecure by design and by default. And how do we make it safe, secure, reliable, et cetera? And so this was one approach. I thought it was an interesting one. I love that they tried it and it obviously didn't pan out, because we don't have that.

23:41 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
It was also going to be designed exclusively at first for dual-screen devices. It just seems like this design, by committing everyone, gets okay, it's going to have containers, and it's also gonna be only for dual screen devices, and then it's gonna have a simplified interface, and then we're gonna do that and it's like how do we end up with this product?

23:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and that might just have been a matter of timing, because you know folding displays. We knew they were coming but they weren't ready and Microsoft wanted to get to market and this is something that would have transitioned to that there were leaks of this thing that you could just run on a laptop or whatever in a VM and it worked fine as a single screen operating system, just as it does today in Windows 11. But, yeah, that might have been just an attempt. Well, you know, it's typical, right, you want it requires new hardware purchase. Microsoft loves that, that, the industry loves that. Um, it lets them keep selling a traditional version of windows on traditional form factors while having this new thing on a new form factor.

24:34
They sort of tried that with the windows rt, remember, in uh tablets and so forth in the windows 8 time frame. But yeah, I, they tried, I like they tried, I like that they tried. I don't really have a criticism of this. I, the fact that it didn't work is whatever. Uh, it just didn't work. So they tried. I mean that's fine and uh, windows 11 is whatever it is, but I, windows 11 today is in pretty great shape, frankly, and it it felt incomplete.

25:07
It was, there were a lot of regressions when it first came up. But it's, you know, it's better. So there was something came out of it. It didn't just all get thrown away, Right? I mean, at least we have something.

25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At least we have something.

25:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, there were these initiatives, you know, like microsoft, um, faced with the success, the iphone and android and then the ipad and all that is like okay, we have to do something around mobile and they could have done a unique thing. That wasn't windows, but they went with windows for all the obvious reasons, maybe even the right reasons, and maybe it could have been okay with three more years of updates. But snowske was out. They changed directions, they went back to mostly traditional form factor interactions and so forth. You know, they tried with the app model, with the universal apps and then eventually where we are today, where they're just back to being desktop apps. You know, they tried with these containers. They tried. You know, the store, like Chris said, was originally just the store and it was modern apps and that was it.

26:10 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
And now we have very, you could probably buy a t-shirt and that thing that today they will sell anything.

26:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So well, not. Not ebooks or all these other things are not. So, yes, okay, right, no, that's true, although, yeah, yeah, that was also one of many uh scale backs that happened over time that maybe they should never have got. I don't know. I mean, when I don't know, zoom and then groove and Xbox. Well, xbox and then groove, whatever it was at the time. Maybe that made sense, but by the time that stuff disappeared, you know, maybe not, I don't know. So I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say about these. Like 10 years of windows 10. It's like I.

26:39
The user interface was clearly designed to match what was on the phone. That user interface made tons of sense on a phone, still would today. It made no sense for Windows. The very notion of tiles, where they're on screen all the time and you see them, and it's live information you get at a glance, you don't have to go into the app. Tons of sense on a phone. If something happens on your phone, you pick it up, you're like yep, I don't need to deal with that, you're good, you don't have to dive into the app, come out like whack-a-mole, but in windows it's in a start menu, so it's.

27:07 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
You don't see it, you know and they and they kneecap themselves because it was only for modern apps and people are making modern apps. So if you use a any other, if you use steam, if you use any a desktop program, and it wanted to put a live tile in your start menu too, too bad. So sad, right, you've got to be using a modern app. I'm sure that there's like Windows geeks and people who customize their start menu, but the average person's start menu, if you opened it, it was just whatever was pinned there by default. There was Candy Crush, it was viral stories, it was all that stuff.

27:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And people I mean it's interesting, right, because people customize their phone home screens, people, yeah, but yeah, and microsoft tried to do this with one of those eight to make it the screen, and it would just be there and it would be on screen and you could see things moving around, and whatever it may be. But these are different types of devices. We use them in different ways.

27:57
I think there's a lot of um, small interactions that occur on the phone throughout the day, for everyone basically, whereas with windows or a desktop operating system of any kind, you basically you kind of sit there and you're working an app and maybe you have two apps and they're side-by-side or however. You do that and you're reading and listening or reading and watching or whatever it is you're doing, but you're not doing little little things everywhere, and so it just didn't make as much sense. But ironically, the uh, the app platform that exists today, if they supported live tiles, would allow desktop apps to do tiles right, because now it works with everything. They finally did that. But yeah, you're right, I don't know. Again, I don't want to criticize them for trying, I'll just criticize them for failing, I think.

28:41 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
If you go back to Windows 8 and even going into Windows 10, the point was that, yeah, we weren't really thinking about desktop PCs, we were thinking about you were going to have a Windows 8 tablet. It may be a small tablet, you have a Windows tablet so, yeah, you're interacting with it throughout the day. You turn it on, you see the home screen and even in Windows 10, there was a tablet mode. Right, the tablet mode had a full screen, start screen, I think.

28:59
Yeah, the whole thing, it was all full screen, yeah so it was all about uh, touch and tablets and it and it made sense. There it's just people, didn't? I mean windows is a tablet operating system. I don't, and that's saying I want to talk about there too is a why. You know why do? Why does the mar and windows laptop have a touch screen? Honestly, so honestly okay.

29:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's weird you say this because this just came up with me and my wife yesterday, literally. But this is something. When this started happening, mary Jo hated it, and I used to say to her I don't understand what your problem is. If you don't like it, just don't use it. And my attitude was if it's there and I don't need it, it's fine. But maybe I and you know, sometimes maybe I'd sit there and scroll on the screen, whatever. But since then I can't stand touchscreens. I would give anything not to have a touchscreen on every laptop I own.

29:46
And so yesterday I wrote something, it doesn't matter what, but I asked my wife if she would come in and just take a look at something, because she's also a writer and I just wanted to get her opinion. So she laid down on the bed and she put a finger on the screen and she said flip it through it. I'm like what are you doing? She's like what do you mean? I'm like you're touching my screen. She's like I'm scrolling through it. I'm like there's a hundred ways to scroll this document. Why did you pick that one? But I guess she uses it. So I mean I?

30:13 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
use it.

30:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't like it. I don't want to touch the screen, I don't want fingerprints on where I'm reading and writing and you know whatever else.

30:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you're in luck because, uh, there's always. Well, you know it's harder to get a non-touch screen.

30:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's almost impossible. I know that's the thing like there aren't really that many of them like I like when it comes without touch, you know, yeah, um yeah, I'm trying to think of it, you're.

30:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're in even apple. The rumor is their next back book next year we'll have touch.

30:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the worst thing about an ipad when you attach a keyboard is it can still touch the screen.

30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's like I mean it's kind of weird. Because I use ipads, I often accidentally touch my laptop screen expecting something to happen right. So I get the worst of both worlds.

31:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I get both these fingerprints and nothing well, yeah, but you, you also use a lot of different devices. Most people would have whatever they have and they get used to it, probably, I guess, but I, yeah, I don't know. I look to be fair again to microsoft. I, um, they went to market with Windows 8 with this idea that this computer could do everything. It could be a touch device and a computer, and they didn't make it work. I mean, and it works today, if you want it to, the laptop I'm about to review today, later, is one of those convertible laptops.

31:38
The screen flips around and it's a tent, it's a presentation thing, it's whateverantic tablet, but it works. I mean, it does work. I mean. So if you want that, it's there, you can write on it with a pen and all that. But I just I don't. And I think most Windows users are come to it with kind of a work focus. Right, you're using Word, excel, a web browser, whatever it is, adobe Photoshop, and you do the thing and then everything that's important to you in life is on your phone.

32:11 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
It's more about work, yeah, so I'll give it the case, maybe for and against, because I actually kind of like touchscreens and I kind of don't, and I don't really know. I do think that they're just on two. Maybe it shouldn't be a standard feature, right, it's basically on every laptop, almost every laptop, and it's on the majority of them. And I don't know if we hadn't gone through Windows 8 and Windows 10, if we were just starting fresh in the days of Windows 11 now, I don't know if manufacturers would say, yes, we need to add a touchscreen to all these Windows 11 laptops, because that's what people want. But it's actually an indictment of old PCs. The touchpads have gotten better Now.

32:43
When I had a Windows 8, 10 PC and it didn't have a precision touchpad and it was horrible and I just I used the screen to scroll because I cannot be using that touchpad because it was so rough. But modern PCs have pretty good touchpads, so the scrolling works. So there's that. I do like, like if I'm signing like a document with my finger on the screen, that's really cool, like I don't have to put on my phone. So there's stuff. And if you have a surface pro and you want to draw, there's like so much stuff. But you know the the attack on the touch screen is like. Well, first of all it's. They're generally glossy. So if you want a matte screen for the sunlight, because it's a laptop for work, that using a bright room the touch screen gets in the way it uses more power. Uh, if actually using it, then you have the smudges on your screen. But it's just weird, I don't know.

33:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is an optimized for the everyday scenario. So the industry as a whole moved to touchscreen screens, which is why they're everywhere. Everyone just makes them. It's just what we make now.

33:43
It took a long time just to switch to 16 by 10 aspect ratio screens. These things take time, but there is some tiny percentage of users who loves, desires, needs whatever the pen and multi-touch support, because maybe they flip it around or it is a tablet and they can write it, they take notes in school or whatever they are, and that's fine. But they're not most people and for me, like I, like I said on some level, I don't mind that it's there. Like the laptop I'm about to review is a convertible laptop that I used exclusively as a laptop. Right, I'm not, I didn't. I mean, I did just to do it, but I don't really use it that way. Um, so yeah, for for me and I think for most people, it would actually be better, but you know not to have that stuff.

34:30
But then again, this is also an upgrade and I think that it's human nature is you go into the store, whether it's a car or a refrigerator, whatever you have this idea I'm going to. You're having a sale, I'm getting the cheap one. They're like yeah, but you know, for a hundred bucks more you have all these capabilities. And you're like, you know I'm probably not going to need that, but if it's there and I need it, that's really. You know it's worth it and you know, and off we go. So, uh, you know we buy more than we need and then we don't use it. So I don't know what the numbers are. No one does, I guess, outside of the PC makers, or. But I bet a very, very small percentage of people uses that stuff oh look, I just got a new phone.

35:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks at oh my god, it just opened up.

35:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That can't be a phone. It's too thin. Look how thin these are, I know.

35:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, all right, we're gonna take a break going down this. By the way, this is the samsung galaxy fold 7 and it doesn't have a touchscreen. I don't understand why. No, I'm kidding, it does. It does. What do you do with a phone that doesn't have a touchscreen? You have a BlackBerry.

35:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What do you do with it? I don't know. Use it, get fingerprints on that.

35:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't understand your objection, paul. That's all I'm saying. I'm curmudgeon. I am going to take a little break now, but we will continue this trip down memory lane, windows 10. We hardly knew. Ye, continues with our special guest. So nice to have Chris here filling in for Richard. He'll be back next week.

36:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's off on a anniversary cruise with his so many of us survives it with all the tsunamis and whatnot that are happening out there.

36:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The one foot tsunami. Yeah, our show today brought to you and I mean literally brought to you by cachefly, our content delivery network, cdn. For over 20 years, cachefly has held the track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries, and we know intimately because we're a company probably number 10. I mean, we've been with cachefly since the beginning, almost 18 years now. We love their lag-free video loading, the hyper-fast downloads, the friction-free site interactions. You probably don't know anything about cachefly or the fact that we use it. Why? Because there's never any problems and I think Patrick, our engineer, really loves that. He doesn't have to worry. He knows the downloads must roll. cachefly is the only cdn built for throughput. Ultra low latency video streaming delivers video to over a million concurrent users with less than one second latency. How about that? Lightning fast gaming delivers downloads faster with zero lag, glitches or outages. Mobile content optimization offers this is so cool automatic and simple image optimization. You upload a big TIFF or whatever and it automatically turns it into a variety of sizes, so your site loads faster, no matter what size screen your visitors are coming in on. Plus, you get and this was really important to us flexible month-to-month billing for as long as needed. So we didn't know. When we first signed up with cachefly, all we knew is we couldn't handle the demand. But we didn't know. You know it was very spiky. We didn't know what was going to happen. So cachefly was super flexible with us. They said look as long as it takes, you know we'll figure it out. And then, once we figure it out, as soon as Windows Weekly comes out on a Wednesday, we're going to get a big spike. We got discounts for fixed terms, and that's awesome too. The point is, like us, we don't get anything special. You get to design your contract when you switch to cachefly. cachefly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs and allows you and we've been doing this for years and now everybody can do it shield your site data content in their cloud. So you get 100% cache hit ratio. There's no misses. That's so nice. And with cachefly's elite managed packages, you are going to get the VIP treatment you absolutely will, just like we do. Your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring smooth implementation and reliable 24-7 support when you need it. But here's the good news You're not going to need it. It's super reliable. Beat your competition. Beat them with faster content delivery anywhere in the world. It's nice to be a winner. cachefly provides reliable CDN solutions fully tailored to your business. Learn how you can get your first month free at cacheflycom.

39:15
Slash twit. That's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com slash twit. Thank you to our wonderful partners at cachefly, to matt levine and his whole team. By the way, I was just on cachefly's uh any cast podcast. Matt did a great interview and if you want to hear kind of the history of twit and how we got started, how we found cachefly, it's all uh available uh at the any cast podcast which you can get wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, cachefly. All right, paul, it's back.

39:45
Thank you and chris have you dated a girl? No, but I've never been kissed. I don't know what's happening. This happens, uh, as you get older, paul, you'll you'll know soon enough. Uh, puberty hits again, oh good, and it hits.

40:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I did good I was hoping for like a, an acne breakout or yeah, exactly something oh, your voice starts changing.

40:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You sure breakout. It's just not good. Sorry, chris, you don't need. I'm gonna go back to my super thin oh boy. You know, one of the reasons I got uh, this is because I was really. Apple is rumored to be doing this next year and I was just. This is what this, this is the state of the art.

40:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But by all accounts, this phone is incredible.

40:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, that was the other reason. I had a bra all heady on and she had reviewed it and she said you're gonna be blown away and it's.

40:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look how thin it is, so I tried to get. My wife loves samsung phone. She used to switch. It's the only thing she makes this explicit decision. It's one of her few tech decisions, whatever, and so I said I made the case. I said you should. Your phone has good trading value right now. You could trade it in. You know you could pay. It'd be like 50 bucks a month.

40:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I did. I traded in the flip and I got on Google Fi, so I really got a big discount.

41:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, she's so cheap, man, you know she's like I'm sorry.

41:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't help you with that. I know I'm like, okay, I was kind of hoping she'd just do it. I think she would really like it.

41:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think so too.

41:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's pretty, the screen's amazing and it's cool actual phone here, which is a pixel. It's pretty close the same size as a pixel, except it's thinner. It's thinner, you know that's what's crazy?

41:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's crazy. No, that's I man. If it was a couple, even just a couple hundred bucks less, I'd probably do it, I know.

41:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I traded in the flip six and uh I got a thousand.

41:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How much did you get on trade? Sorry to interrupt, do you remember?

41:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
300 should be more. I'm sure it's more than samsung, if you pre-ordered was going to give me 700.

41:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, so you can get it down to around 500 bucks, I think I think the best I could do is like 830 off, but it's still, you know, it's still like 1200 bucks it's like it's oh it's a two thousand dollar phone. Yeah, yeah, it's tough yeah, it's tough.

42:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just, you know, I'm living the living, the dream, paul, that's all I can say yeah, attach that thing to a keyboard and a mouse. You'll be in yeah, I have to try that out because I used to use dex, so they have a new thing. But yeah, I have to try that out. All right back to the show. Sorry about the samsung chatter, although I will pair it to my windows phone yeah, and you'll get the best possible experience exactly right, which is nice, yeah.

42:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, chris, I didn't want to stomp all over this, but I mean, is there, are there any other positive elements of windows 10?

42:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
paul, you're so negative.

42:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just you know before I continue crapping on it.

42:37 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
No, I'm well, yeah, I mean like, uh, I think there's so much that we maybe don't associate as part of Windows 10. Like, the Windows subsystem for Linux was huge. And like this, we could have, you know, a whole comedy thing where we talk about what Microsoft used to say about Linux, about the property cancer that's attaching us, it's attached itself to Windows and in fact, linux is still to Windows in Windows to this day. But that was huge, I mean it. And you know, jokes aside, it was this huge embrace of, um, the developer community. And, uh, you know, I remember many, many years ago, the amount of people switching from windows to max because they're like, well, it's unix based, I can do stuff on it. Microsoft's like right, whatever, um, you know so. So that was huge.

43:23
Um, winged, I think winged is still unappreciated, it's underappreciated in windows itself. I don't, whatever, you know so. So that was huge. Winget I think Winget is still unappreciated, it's underappreciated in windows itself. I don't under, I mean, I do understand, cause it doesn't make sense from a business perspective, but Winget's amazing, like I'm, I'm now like showing my like old Linux nerd credentials where I'm like, yeah, like Linux and package managers. But you know, that stuff was.

43:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but you're right and and I use winget extensively I in the course of reviewing laptops. It's awesome just to have for blasting a bunch of apps on it automatically. Um, it's improving in kind of interesting fits and starts. You know, when they added the uh, that dev um center, what was called the dev home, to windows 11, which they're now getting rid of, um, there was this notion of using like YAML based configuration for Winget and you could then use it to also configure the apps and maybe, just you know, go beyond the basics that are there today. So we're still working through that. But you know, kind of like a one line update every app on my system kind of capability, which is awesome, especially if you go to windows update check for updates, you're all good. Go to the store check for updates, you're all good. Then you go to wind get you like no, you have 17 updates. So it's good for that. You know, if you want to keep your system up to date, it's fantastic.

44:36 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I wish you could automate it because it's trying to detect what's installed per the registry and it gets it wrong and we'll try to reinstall this, even though it's already been updated and through the app itself. So it's still kind of janky.

44:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, and there are apps that I like. Discord is the one that hits me all the time on every PC. I don't remember off the top of my head of how I install it, but I cannot update it through Winget. It just won't it. So I have to. The app will have to install, so, which is fine, because every time I launch it it updates. So it works. That works out fine, but yeah, but it's still uh, it's an amazing capability built on top of actually I'm not I'm sure it is built. I was gonna say built on top of uh powershell, but actually is it built on top of partial itmo? It probably is. It has to be.

45:24 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Probably.

45:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I agree, and the less said about the Android subsystem the better. But that was something that should have been awesome and if Microsoft and Google had like an IOTA, better relationship maybe would have been, but we've moved on from that sadly.

45:47 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
If they had had it in the Windows 8 era, when tablets were a big thing maybe, but I mean to Well, they were still pushing.

45:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know we have our own thing. And you know, and Windows 8, because of the timing, couldn't ship with Windows Phone compatibility, but even back when that was happening, I made the case. You know Windows 7, windows Phone 7 has these panoramic experiences that you scroll across with the phone, but would look very natural as one thing on a tablet screen.

46:23 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
And I kind of you know that's a direction they could have gone in, but didn't you know?

46:27
Well, windows 10 is still widely blevished to this day, and many people are very intent on continuing to use it. And you know and to some degree they should be, because the windows 11 hardware requirements are so stringent that, right, you know, a lot of computers that should could run windows 11 fine aren't getting off for the update officially, and so we're. I mean, we're also like we're through the looking glass on what's happening with windows 10 and its support period. Now, I mean, microsoft has found a way to go back on its, to kind of go back and kind of not go back on its end of service plans.

46:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, the the original claim was that windows 10 would be supported for the lifetime of the device, which they never explained and changed continuously. And, you know, because of intercompany battles, at one point between Intel and Microsoft, they started arbitrarily dropping off support for processors from Intel. You know, just as out of spite, you know, but it's, I don't know, it worked out in a sense Like I think it's it's interesting that it did hit 10 years. It's like okay, actually that was maybe this is the right timeframe. You know, maybe this is the way it should be.

47:35
It's hard to say, but, um, I don't know. You can, I guess you could argue it could be longer too, but I mean, compared to mobile platforms, actually 10 years is pretty good and um, and then just the way people use computers, I mean people will be using windows 10 long after it isn't supported anyway. Um, and of course, it benefited from the same thing that windows 7 benefited from, which was that everyone hated its predecessor so much it had kind of a low bar, I mean, and but did a nice job of bringing us back to what I think most people thought. Maybe windows 8 should have been um in the first place.

48:09
So you know it wasn't, it's not all bad. I just I don't know. I was one of the biggest windows phone fans in the world and if they could have pulled it off that would have been kind of incredible. But I also look at windows 10 today being used to using windows 11, which to me feels more modern and whatever it's subjectively attractive or whatever, uh, and it just feels, it feels out of date to me, like the tiles that the squirt off everything, you know it has kind of a. It feels a little old fashion to me, but maybe that's a good thing in a way, because that you know it's, it's, it is the old thing right now. Now we are starting to move past it. So, uh, microsoft does have a replacement, that is, you know, basically the same compatibility, at least on software. And, uh, you know it looks, I think it looks better person.

48:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it just cosmetic, though, I mean, or is 11 objectively better under the hood too?

49:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, actually today, to be fair, it's both. Um, when I first launched, it was mostly just subjectively better or worse looking, depending on your opinion, I guess, but uh, but they got it there. You know, the the windows 11 hardware requirements seemed were literally arbitrary at the time, but they work toward this place where we're at today and actually now there are features that are inherent to TPM 2.0. Well, that is the highest, but 2.0 versus 1.2, whatever it was where we have Windows Hello, ess and all the secure core PC stuff. It is in much better shape today, but you have to have modern hardware, obviously, for that to be the case.

49:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there are features that I know didn't technically require TPM 2, but there are features that I know tech, you know didn't technically require TPM too, but there are features that use TPM too.

49:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It didn't originally, but now it really does.

49:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like if you copilot plus.

49:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PC could not happen without TPM.

49:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh interesting. Yeah, yeah, recall probably requires TPM, right?

49:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it requires that whole thing. It's the whole it. It's not just TPM, there's actually a chain of chips and not just specific kinds of chips. But they have to be manufactured in a monitored scenario where you can assure from the beginning to the end it's never been tampered with, etc. Etc. It's a much more stringent process than a typical PC.

50:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And also, though, I see why people say, well, you're forcing me to buy a new PC, Yep, and that, you know, grates on some people.

50:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no, yeah, but there's no answer to this right, because that's true of everything you know, when you know people believe that their washing machines and refrigerators don't last as long today as they used to. When in fact these things are technological marvels that are superior in almost every single way to something.

50:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know why they break because they're computers, yeah well, but mine plays a fun little uh song every time it completes.

50:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, yeah, I get the song. My wife just guys. Again, it's weird the word coincidence just today she's like. It amazes me that whoever designed this was like it doesn't just play a beep, it plays an entire song and it just keeps going it's a real song too. It's a real tune super excited that the laundry's done um.

51:07 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
So you know whatever but so here's an argument. Sorry, yes, but here's. Here's an argument, and I'm trying to take people's side here, because obviously we can say you know, windows 10 had so many years of support and if you bought a computer, either you could upgrade to windows 11 or you bought it prior to that. So you had like six, seven, eight years of windows support in your computer, and so you know what's the problem. You're going to have to update and it's like, yeah, but on the same. On the same time, you know companies microsoft and pc manufacturers don't make that clear up front. In fact, microsoft said it will be supported for the lifetime of your device, don't worry.

51:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not your device.

51:44 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Chris. Well, the lifetime of each device. What does that mean? I don't think it's true. You can't necessarily expect the company to support the laptop for 30 years with security updates but at the same time, microsoft isn't really the industry, isn't really upfront with this about people, affront with people about this. Maybe that's part of the issue, I don't know.

52:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's the irony I think we all need to acknowledge, which is that the people complaining about this the ones that you hear and have seen are the same enthusiasts who are, by nature, into the latest thing. I don't even understand the complaint. You know, like, if you're technical enough that for some reason you have a sixth gen Intel something I don't care what it is and it's good enough for what you're doing then who are you Like? What is this so or and or? You are technical enough to know how to get by the restrictions in windows 11 and can run windows 11 on that computer just fine anyway. So what are we complaining about? You know someone? We're just talking about how I'm a curmudgeon, but the but literally.

52:55
I look at this situation and I think this is okay. I mean, I'm not saying it's perfect. There is the issue of, you know, landfill and all those things. Those are real, it's real's real, it's whatever. But I mean this audience, the us, us, not you people out there, us, all of us. We have the know-how to work around it if we have to. We are people who, by nature, want the latest thing. Leo just got a brand new Samsung folding phone. He's not using a Samsung flip phone from eight years ago. Yeah, why?

53:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is it okay, why?

53:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is that okay? And you know, I know I feel guilty. Though, Paul, Is that good? Yeah, no, you're white and middle-aged and you should feel guilty.

53:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, I you know our children I've. You know they're going to be buried in trash because of me, but yeah but they can build a world out of that like Ready Player One.

53:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's going to be fine. No, I don't know. Look, there are real problems. I'm not saying they're right, but it's just weird to me that the complaints Like the complaint isn't the dentist, who doesn't care about computers and just needs something that just works and wants it to work for some amount of time, and whatever. It's not the people who work at the subway where they have a, or the whatever the metro is called, where you live and you have like, uh, you know these computerized screens and oh, there's a windows blue screen. Ha ha ha, you know whatever. They're still running windows 7 hilarious, um, they're not really complaining. They don't even know what's happening.

54:17 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
They don't care what are we complaining about? God's 10 years? Like the win. The linux desktop is actually great nowadays. Like, if you want to keep your hardware going, that's a great. With a win, the linux desktop is actually great nowadays. Like, if you want to keep your hardware going, that's a great thing to do. Install linux you can install chrome os flex like yeah but and but.

54:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I would say to that yep, and the very people who are smart enough and have the know-how enough to make that work and to try different distributions till they find the one that works great on the computer they have, are the same technical people who, for some reason, are complaining that they can't run Windows 11, something they don't want anyway. What are we complaining about? It's crazy, I mean. I don't mean us, I mean, like just us collectively. Like what is this complaint? It's bizarre. I don't think we're going to reach a point in our lifetimes where some desktop operating system is supported for 20 years. I don't want to run a computer that's 10 years old, could I? I mean, maybe it depends on your needs, right?

55:18 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I still have some Windows 10 era PCs that can't upgrade officially to Windows 11. Because I have them, I want to test stuff on Windows 10. And, honestly, when I use them, it's horrible. It is horrible, you know it's so much slower Like I don't enjoy it and like these are computers that were felt fast at the time, they have SSDs, like they have hardware that was high-end eight years ago, but Right.

55:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So my test case, my test laptop for Windows 10 is a Surface Book 2 that has an 8th Gen Intel processor that can, in fact, upgrade to Windows 11. But I've kept it on 10 on purpose, and same thing Every time I use it. When this computer was new, I loved it, I loved it and I use it now and I almost hate it, like it's unbearable how slow it is.

56:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh. On the other hand, I'm sitting in front of right now a uh, let's see 2016, uh laptop that I uh. So it's nine years old, it has a GeForce GTX nine 80 and an i7 in it and I'm putting linux on it and it runs beautifully. Part of the reason your stuff doesn't run well, it's because you're using windows. I know that's a not a nice thing to say on this show, but they're well, they're good versions of linux. In fact, I'm running a very modern version of linux on it, called cache eOS, which optimizes for speed.

56:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it depends on what you need, right? We'll talk about this, I think, later in the show, but when you think about handheld gaming devices and the popularity of something like Steendeck- yeah, I'm not playing Call of Duty on this thing, that's for sure Right, but it is a fact that Linux is lighter, weight and thus better for certain things.

57:08
And when you get down to a smaller device where you're space constrained and the battery's not going to be as big, the process is not going to be as good. And Valve has done work to bring game compatibility to Linux and, yes, that works, but it's not going to run games at the same or run all of the games that windows can run. So you have that compatibility thing and you know, when you just talk about just a normal PC laptop, whatever two years old, eight years old, whatever we do, what we do on those things, and for a lot of mainstream people, um, the apps that they use every day are just no, it's not just gaming notes but it's just apps, right, like I, I think, people who use linux.

57:50
This is what used to happen on mac os 10 right back in the day. It's not as big of a deal anymore, but you would always try to find alternatives to the thing that was the mainstream thing you use. So they didn't have photoshop. They don't have photoshop and linux you use like gimp or something, or they don't have a native app version of Microsoft word. So it's like I can use like Libre office or the web version of word and you kind of you do these things and then for me that would be okay. You know, depending on, again, depending on your needs. For me, I one of the things I use all the time I really rely on on demand feature that's available in one drive but also in google drive and and the um synology nest that I'm using, right and I that's not available on linux, right, and so there are things that are sort of like that. They're not quite the same.

58:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's not, it's not exactly the same, and um, yeah, but google docs, which I would bet most people now use, is available everywhere.

58:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google docs is a web app, I mean I mean google drive, like the ability to synchronize some portion of the file system to the local computer and have it always sync and remain up to date. It's not a feature, it's not a thing in linux it. There are third-party utility. Again you're always like, all right, so I want to use one, like maybe it's one drive, I want to use one drive, my files are in one drive. How do I do that? There are third-party services. They don't offer files on demand, but they. But they're better than nothing and that's what you do. And so you make these kind of compromises and, yeah, I guess you can still use that eight-year-old computer for something, and maybe it runs linux, maybe it just runs an older version of windows and maybe it works for you, maybe it does. But I I mean, I don't know what we're talking about here like what, that's not a normal use case. I mean it's not Main Street use case right.

59:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think some of it is that people don't. I think people have turned their attitude about this disposable economy.

59:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, they went in a different direction. I'm sorry, no. No, that's part of it.

59:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People say hey look, this is a 3.6 gigahertz processor. When I bought it, I intentionally put 32 gigs of ram in it, which was a lot for those days. I've got five terabytes of storage, or four terabytes of storage, in it, so it's a perfect in terms of specs. Except for that, it's an i7 6820, but in terms of specs it's fine so I don't remember the exact details of this.

01:00:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just wrote an article where I compared, uh, the laptop I was using at the time, which has ddr5x, uh, ram running at eight gigahertz. You know, whatever the speed eight thousand megahertz, whatever eight, let's call it eight gigahertz, um, the eighth gen intel chip supports ram up to half that speed. So even though you have 32 gigs of ram, right, it's still, it's still the over. That's why that laptop is so. That's part of the reason, right. So even though it has an ssd, it's still based on older, whatever pcie, whatever version, whatever it is, I don't know what, I don't remember. This one is a ddr4. Yeah, ddr4 is much slower than 5x, much slower, slower, in fact, it can be about half as fast. So that's a thing that's part of it too, right? So, anyway, there's a lot that goes into this. But again, just to have that conversation, you have to know what you're talking about, you have to be technical, you have to care.

01:00:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Most people are not going to install Linux, frankly.

01:00:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, my sister, normal mainstream user, I gave her some laptop several years ago and her husband texted me last week, two weeks ago, whatever. And it's like hey, you know, this thing's the slower thing, you know, whatever, she would never say anything, you know, do you have another laptop? I'm like yeah, I have 27 laptops. Of course I can give you something, but like, but that's what normal people do.

01:01:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like the industry. It's a little bit.

01:01:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The burden is on the industry to make it easier for normal users not to throw out your laptop every five years, not to make them easier to recycle right like if you, if you bought this thing knowing that well a it was um upgradable in some meaningful way like a framework laptop, right, most laptops. You can replace cssd most today. You cannot even add ram or replace ram. But there are different components obviously you can replace cssd most today. You cannot even add ram or replace ram.

01:01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there are different components obviously you can replace but my point is that the, the microsoft, the manufacturers dealt. They don't want that to be. They want it to be the geeks that do it because they want mainstream users to buy a new one right, of course, yeah, of course I love to say something a little dangerous, which is you know, there's?

01:02:02 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
there's this obvious tension here where every company, including Microsoft, is saying well, our number one priority is sustainability and reducing waste, and also buy a new computer, why do you want to keep using that old one?

01:02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've got to buy a new one, and it's like well, their number one priority is to their stakeholders, no matter what they say.

01:02:20 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
So the messaging is this greenwashing? It's the same thing in AI, right? Our number one priority is getting our emissions and our energy uses down. Also, we got to have started all this power for AI because that's also you know. So I was at CES a few years ago and there's a lot of this kind of greenwashing of, like the company will say we have these amazing wireless keyboards and mouse made of recycled ocean plastic, so you have the built-in battery and you plug it and we're selling these to these companies that want to be more sustainable. It's like if the company wants to be sustainable first of all, shouldn't it just keep them?

01:02:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
just keep it. Well, yeah, that that's the same. You say that. We say that about cars too, right?

01:02:56 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
so it wants to be sustainable. Why is it wireless like? Isn't it more sustainable to just have any keyboard that you plug in with usb? It doesn't have the built-in battery, you don't have to deal with that and it's like. But the point is about selling the product. It's selling the ocean keyboard, it's selling this idea of like. No, but you know it's it's marketing.

01:03:11
Yeah it's marketing right, but it's weird that there's not really a push for recycling, which recycling is its own thing, like if you think that a laptop you drive off to be recycled is going to be like beautifully recycled, like I you know, look into what actually happens with that.

01:03:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I felt well, I feel like we're kind of getting there in a way. Right, so with you know, cars, if you think about, are kind of the same thing. I mean there's an argument to be made like, rather than buying that prius or whatever electric vehicle to save the world, you just keep driving the thing you have. That way, a car doesn't have to come over in a ship from china or wherever, or a you know whatever, right. There's all these reasons. But at some points that car is old enough where actually it does make sense to get the new thing. And the question like, in other words, if you had like a 1970s vehicle with a catalytic converter that actually required regular gas and you have to do something to make normal gas work in that thing at some point, it might be better for everyone if you were using a modern car. And so the question here, I guess is the PC there yet, or have we hit that point? And is 8th Gen a catalytic converter cart? Not exactly.

01:04:14 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
But people don't necessarily trust the lines Microsoft draws. So it's a perfect moment to talk about Copilot Plus PCs and all the wonderful new AI features that definitely need an NPU. Definitely cannot be done on a desktop PC or anything with a GPU. You need to get rid of your computer right now and buy a Copilot Plus PC because you know to do this AI stuff you're going to need the NPU. It's very important.

01:04:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no way, so we only have a couple hours, but maybe you can digest that conversation down to those feet. What are those features?

01:04:47 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
It's like recall. Recall, which everyone wants, yep, everyone loves, yep, can't you know? The worst thing about recall is how boring it is. There there's been a year of drama. Microsoft bet the company on this feature, like bet the company's reputation, because it was this massive uh blow up. And then recall finally arrives and I was using it for months before it's released and it's just so boring it's terrible like no, it as as an experience is bad, and I'll tell you why.

01:05:08
Like, one of the obvious things is like if I'm, you know, scrolling through stuff really quickly, if I'm going through emails, if I'm going through a web page, if it is actually taking a screenshot every five seconds, it doesn't capture everything I saw, so I can't actually rely on it. You even have the full database of text.

01:05:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look I I don't know if this is empathy or what the word is, but, like I, I sort of, on one level, understand that some people might find this useful, that I don't know if they're visual thinkers or something I don't remember, but we all think of things or remember things in different ways, so maybe those people are out there where they're, like I was looking for green pants. I always use the example like that. It might be good at finding that in your history, right, whereas if you searched, you don't even know what store you were at or whatever. Maybe, maybe it makes sense. I find it to be pointless for my needs, but I feel the need to point out that Google, apple, the companies that are making platforms all have some tool like this now and none of them have generated any controversy. It's not on by default, it's on 0.01% of computers and of those computers, probably 0.01% even use it.

01:06:17 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Well, it goes to show the lack of trust people have in Microsoft in general and the lack of you know. It's like, oh, it's going to be local, oh, that's going to be local, and all these other things on my Windows PC are suddenly cloud Like, like my desktop suddenly is opted into being a cloud sync. But I'm supposed to just understand that that's going to be local.

01:06:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but you have a green leaf icon in Windows updates, so you know it's fine.

01:06:39 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
And, of course, when they announced it, they said hey, enterprises, you're not going to be able to turn this off with policy that's up to you. And it's like well then we wonder why people got upset.

01:06:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I know, I, yeah, right, I, uh, I haven't tried this yet, but, um, google, I think it was Google. I lose track of this and I actually cut this out of the notes, cause, who cares? But there, there are approximately 117 new AI features released every single week across all of these platforms, so it's hard to keep track of this, but the point of recall is that it's capturing information that's on your screen so you can go back and search, because that AI capability is pretty well understood and pretty efficient and it works pretty well. It can do image recognition or image to text recognition, etc. Well, it can do image recognition or image to text recognition, et cetera.

01:07:31
But that requires local AI for some reason, whereas the other solutions to do this I don't know if it's Perplexity or Google, I'm sure they all will do it, if they don't do it right now will work side by side with whatever's on your screen. Yeah, why do I need local AI for this? It appears to just work. So I don't know, this is a cart before the horse situation, but I do think the click to do stuff is actually really interesting. It's going to expand. If anything, it's going to bog down this simple Windows 11 UI with all these giant menus of actions, but that's kind of cool. I also don't understand why it requires local AI. That should just be everywhere.

01:08:25 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
You need the NPU to detect when an email address appears on your screen because other. If we don't have the NPU, there's just no hope for, there's just not possible. Okay, that's why they say, right, we have to, you can detect, we can. We now have the technology with the NPU to detect what a phone number looks like I listen.

01:08:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, that is. I still use applications that do not accurately control a text box to reduce so that it only accepts numbers.

01:08:55 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
You know which is crazy when you think about it also, even if you have the npu and you open notepad, the npu can't do anything in notepad. You're gonna have to spend that credit from your account on that one this is, you have the copilot plus pc. If you open microsoft word you hit copilot. No, you need copilot pro, not a copilot plus pc.

01:09:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So copilot plus has nothing to do with copilot even excel running on a 64-bit processor does not have enough cells in it to show the matrix of ai features that are in Windows 11. So you can see what you get with what, because it's really confusing and in many cases it's not obvious looking at it why you have it or why you might have it on one computer but not another. So the best example of this is Paint. Oddly, because if you open that app, depending on your computer, you'll see some number of features under a copilot menu. There's others that are outside of that menu too. Some of them come through your Microsoft 365 copilot license if you subscribe or whatever. Some come through being a copilot plus PC. Some are just there for everybody.

01:10:02
I mean, I feel like I know a lot more about this than most people and off the top of my head I don't think I a lot more about this than most people and off the top of my head I don't think I could rattle through an accurate list of what you get with what it's confusing. So, yeah, that's a unique Microsoft problem. They're really good at that. This is the company, remember, that had Windows Vista Home Basic, home Premium, ultimate, pro, enterprise. I'm probably forgetting some. I don't't remember they had all these different versions and it's like guys, come on, so yeah, when windows 11 is simpler, but that's. You have to take that in context too let's take a little uh time.

01:10:40
I just want to everybody. I didn't intend for this to be an extended rant, but I don't know. Well, okay, I guess I don't know no, it's good no, but at least we have the co-pilot button or the keynote. Thank you for reminding me of that little piece of nonsense these are important topics. These are important topics.

01:10:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching windows weekly with paul thorat and our special guest chris hoffman from windows intelligence. Chris hoffmancom, you should go to that website chris b hoffmancom. Yeah chris b, don't forget the b, that other chris hoffman. Was he a hockey player? What is he? Something else like a porn star or something? Porn star anyway, chris b hoffmancom.

01:11:19
You know, the b is silent, so we call him chris uh, anyway, chrisbhoffmancom, do bookmark that because there are changes a coming and you'll want to have the right information. So that's all I can say. This is Windows Wiggly, with Paul Therot and Chris Hoffman sitting in for Richard Campbell. I'm Leo Laporte, we're so glad you're here. On, we go with the rant, don't let me stop you.

01:11:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, actually most of this stuff is pretty good yeah there's some positives.

01:11:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was a good version of Windows.

01:11:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll try to balance it out a little bit. Microsoft has been a solid adopter of Rust across the span of their platforms. They're putting it all over azure. They're putting it all over windows and server. Um, the surface team doesn't get a lot of credit for this, but they've redone. All of their uh drivers are now written in rust, as well as the firmware, and microsoft makes that available to anyone that wants it, meaning pc makers, and of course you can imagine hp, lenovo, dell, whatever, like, yeah, microsoft, that's cute, but it's something to look at because there's there's something to rust, obviously. So now it's starting to document how a third party driver writers for other hardware devices can switch over to rust as well, either partially or completely, whatever over time. But that's a solid move, I think, for the industry. So that's good. I like that.

01:12:53
There's also you know you would spend this with the Samsung device there's the link to Windows app, which is built into Samsung devices, but other Android and iPhone users can download from the store Different levels of experiences there depending on what type of device you have. But on Linux I'm sorry, linux on Android, at least now Linux Android. There's a new version. I've not seen it in person yet and it's killing me because I really want to try this out, but they're they're turning the link to windows app, which is the phone part of this connection, into a kind of a simpler new app which, if you're familiar with or have seen or used the that kind of little sidebar thing that goes on the start menu now in Windows 11, it actually to me it looks just like that and it's more of a hub for doing things between the phone and the device, because there's some level of functionality that again differs by device. But you can do things like copy and paste, like Apple users can use between their devices, or just share files, uh, uh. Or receive files like a place to go and see you know what was in the clipboard from the windows PC, but on the phone, or what file you've shared from the windows PC to the phone, like there's this. You don't have to go all over the phone to find those things, right. So to me this looks really nice and I'd like to see it in person. I don't have my phone here, but yeah, I've been checking every day and it's like I still, maybe because I'm in Mexico, I don't know, it's just I can't see it.

01:14:21
Let's see a couple of bills and nothing major, although there is one term in here I want to highlight. So dev and beta channels of the Windows Insider program are getting the same functional updates. Dev is on 25H2, beta is on 24H2. There's that settings agent feature. They're rolling out. That was on Snapdragon before, it's on x86. Now, if you have a copilot plus PC, click to do improvements, windows search improvements, you know know that kind of copilot plus pc type stuff.

01:14:49
The fun one in here, though, is called the scoob. So windows users, a lot of the scoob now. Scooby doo, yeah. So this one is funny to me, because I've never heard this term before, and in fact, if you look it up in the windows user interface it is not called this. But when you um, by default, if you don't change anything, you install a cumulative update, you're probably going to be prompted with that full screen experience.

01:15:15
It looks a lot like Windows setup, where it says, hey, you should finish setting up your device, and you're like I already. I did finish setting up my device. What are you talking about? But it will give you some options there. So that thing is they're referring to it now as the second chance out-of-box experience, or scoob as a for, as opposed to the out-of-box experience which is one of the two major parts of windows. Setup. Um in the windows, um in windows settings. If you go into I think it's yeah, system notifications, additional settings you'll see an option there. It says suggest Actually, that's not the right one. Let me get the right one. This is the way to turn that off from happening. It says suggest ways to get the most out of Windows and finish setting up this device. That's the Scoob.

01:16:02 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Can I complain about that name? Like second chance? I've seen that thing so many times over and over my computer. That's like the 20th chance experience?

01:16:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, and it's for me. This is one of my problems. So, because I have to see what real people see, I would turn this off, like I would just turn this off personally, but but I need to see what it's doing, right. So the one thing you will see over time is it actually changes, like they've changed the language, they've changed the layout and stuff and so, um, they're actually they don't usually call it out, but this time they're calling it out, so what they've done is put a and I think I used I must have used that screenshot, right.

01:16:36
The one, yeah, so they have the three big options which are the way they describe it is if you're doing yourself a favor, but really you're doing a favor for Microsoft, like every one of these things could be tied into Microsoft benefits. You're going to back up your app and settings. You're going to use your recommended browser settings right, bing is a search engine, edge is the browser, and then you're going to import automatically from other browsers and by other browsers they mean only Google Chrome and the idea there is that you sign into your Google account and if you use Google Chrome on a different computer or that computer and you're adding extensions and saving bookmarks or whatever. It will sync that back to Edge so that when you do use Edge it looks and works a lot like Chrome and maybe you won't notice you're using Edge.

01:17:22
This is the theory, but yeah, look, if you're not, me or Chris strongly recommend us turning this off. It's useless. I have no idea what the point of this is. It's like an extra step before you get to the desktop. For some reason, when you reboot, sometimes it's kind of there.

01:17:38 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I love how it comes up and says you've got Microsoft 365.

01:17:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay thanks, no kidding, thank you. Thank you for telling me. No, it's crazy, like it's crazy. Congratulations. You would benefit from this, you know, if you would just click this box and give us more of your private data. You have no idea the benefit you would get from that. So cool, yeah, you're right, I have no idea. There is no benefit.

01:18:02
There have been two Canary builds since we last spoke. None of them have new features, so there's not much to talk about there, but both of them are fixes and then just little things that we've seen elsewhere in other parts of the Insider program. So on this computer I'm running here, for example, this check yeah, for some reason well, not for some reason If you don't have a Copilot plus PC, they move the search box to the middle top of settings and, uh, now you can get that in canary. So that's how exciting that thing is. Um, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, hold on to your hats.

01:18:35
Um, this just happened this morning, but adobe released beta versions of a premiere pro after effects, audition and media coder that are native on windows 11 and arm. Uh, or windows 11 on arm in beta. They took their time just now. Yeah, well, these they're. You know, they did photoshop pretty quick. Um okay, yeah, I don't know why this took so long. Actually you could actually run all of these apps in emulation. That would be okay if you're a heavy video editor. Obviously that's not an ideal scenario.

01:19:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I think they did it for the Mac a lot quicker than that, but maybe I'm wrong.

01:19:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but the Mac very quickly became ARM. You know Windows. It's still a very small percentage, that's true. The fact that they're doing it all is actually a positive sign.

01:19:24
Opera God love them sued Microsoft for antitrust issues in Brazil and, of course, the big question there is why Brazil and the truth is it has complained to the United States and it has complained to EU. In fact, opera was one of the companies that kicked off the complaints that turned into the Digital Market Act. But Brazil is one of those markets where Microsoft behaves even worse than usual and Opera actually has a higher than usual market share and they would be doing even better if Microsoft wasn't preventing users or at least hiding or doing their deceptive dark language, whatever all this stuff they do in that country. So they're trying to get the Brazilian antitrust regulatory body, whose name I can't remember, to get Microsoft to stop that. And I look at this stuff and it's all the stuff you already know. I am using Edge, but it prompts me to use Bing. I am not using Edge edge, but it runs edge, even when I, you know, when I click, like search highlights or something in widgets or whatever um it's all this, it's the same stuff.

01:20:32
But they also have deals with pc makers in brazil, uh, where they pay them not to bundle other browsers and to use edge, which in other countries is actually not possible. So they're doing things there. You know, it's like riding a bike, I guess. I don't know what they're doing, but oh yes, what a world we live in. So that's good, um, and then, uh, chris, this is well, you should, you should talk about this. I'm curious.

01:20:57 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I'm curious about your take on this, actually well, you know it's funny there's there's now just this constant drumbeat of negative recall news because it's this great. I don't want to criticize the developers, but it's not, it's just observing. Like if you're an app developer, of anything privacy related on windows, you now just can come out and say we care so much about user privacy, we are blocking recall, and every few weeks there's another story like this. It was signal and it was brave, and now I think it's ad guard and there's going to be a constant drumbeat of stories about this. And you know, some of it's true.

01:21:27
Like I think it seems fair that I think signal's original point was saying like microsoft doesn't give us an easy way to block this. They said they were going to, did they? I don't remember, maybe they did, but like well, as a user you can opt out of apps. But at there the developer can just say, like you know, we're using the drM to block this from being captured. But you know, is there a really good developer experience? Say, hey, don't, you know, capture my app, please recall? I don't know if there is, but I don't know, if there is actually Should there be?

01:21:55
Apparently Microsoft doesn't think so, or apparently they just don't care about Reclaimer because, like, whatever. But you know, it's just this weird it's a like recalls, weird.

01:22:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It should become the poster child for privacy concerns. And yeah, no, I mean. Well, I will say, to date, the three examples that you cite which are the three examples are all, in their own way, privacy related right, brave markets, the privacy of the browser, etc. So you could make a case that the, the audience that would use brave, would want to block this thing. Um, it's also the audience that would never enable that thing in the first place. So I'm not, you know. Again, this is one of those weird discussions. It's like the, the, the audience that would care about this, is like yay, someone's, you know, blocking recalls. Awesome, that's what I want, you know. It's like yeah, but you're not, not, you're not going to use recall. So what's the difference? Like, um, but no, it's. To me, this is fine, it's the way it should work. I, there should be a simple api for any app developer to. Just that would guarantee that this thing is not yeah, I mean uh recorded, yeah it's?

01:23:01 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
it's messed up because I think signal's pointing out like by doing the drm thing we're going to break accessibility software, but Microsoft doesn't give us another way to do it. And it's like should Windows really work like that? I don't know.

01:23:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean we can kind of debate the specifics. An app should be able to have an interface that opts out of that. There was a discussion around Brave is doing it by default and it's like, well, wait a minute, is that the right thing, or should you allow the user to control that? I mean, they do allow the user to control it, but their default position is it's going to be off, like it's not going to work with recall, and you know, again, I think for that product it's like, okay, that makes sense, but however it works, whatever the interface is, whatever the APIs are or aren't, the user should have this choice, and they do. I mean, if you use recall, but again I don't know, like, recall, like the type of person who would use recall, is, by definition, probably non-technical. Thus, they're probably not going to go in and go through every little interface and settings and and and do those things I don't. You know, are you?

01:24:13
Somebody emailed me over the weekend and said, and they used a really extreme kind of example which I'm not going to get into, but let's just imagine that you are an individual, you have a computer and you want to do something that you don't want other people to know about. It could be banking, like something private like that. It could be porn, it could be your Googling how to kill somebody. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter, that's your issue. It's whatever. I don't want recall recording that, right? I mean you're not using recall, right? Like any of those scenarios. And if, in the case of I don't know, maybe banking, definitely porn or whatever it is, you were probably using like a private window of some kind in a browser, those things are not recorded by recall by default.

01:24:50
Anyway. Recall is only on Copilot plus PC PCs, and so it has a stringent level of security that does not exist on normal PCs. That's also helping to protect that data. You know, for someone to get at your snapshots, they either have to physically put you in front of the camera if that's how you're signing in or force the pin out of you or move your hand onto the fingerprint reader, whatever it is, and you get bigger problems when that's happening. Right? This isn't a recall vulnerability, this is just a physical access common. This is common. We've all seen the know. It's like sci-fi thing and they cut the guy's hand off and use it to go through the door or whatever. I mean like if that's the problem, the fact that your recall history is now available to that person is not the least of your problems. But man, it's. You've got bigger problems, that's all Well.

01:25:42 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I'm going to make a prediction, and sorry, I'm going to make a prediction and sorry, I'm going to predict that recall is going to be going away, because the only people I see talking about recall are people beating up on it and maybe tech journalists like us trying to do like it's a black mark, almost like microsoft isn't out there with like. One year after the launch of recall and now that it's live, here are some user stories of the people using recall in business. To help them with their mobile plus species.

01:26:05
Microsoft is like no, no, no. Look at click to do.

01:26:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, as soon as the words came out of Yusuf Mehdi's mouth, I was like, oh no.

01:26:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't used it, it's just your device.

01:26:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wasn't worried about it. What I was worried about was that Microsoft has a certain cluelessness about how they're perceived in the world.

01:26:26 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Like Google, does this all the time.

01:26:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like like Senator Pichai, will get on the stage and say the world trusts us with their data, and I'm like I don't think you understand what the world thinks of you.

01:26:34
That's not the case and I feel like it. As he was talking about it, I was like, oh, this, I can see the complaints coming already. I didn't actually see the depth of the complaints that were getting. That did come, but, um, they could have done a much better job of communicating this. But you know, as I pointed out at that time before they started delaying, this thing like this is only going to be available on these pcs that are, windows at the time were on arm only. Like they're not going to be very many of these and even if someone made the explicit choice to buy that kind of computer, most of those people are not going to enable this to begin with. And, um, you know, they were initially going to have like a what was essentially a public preview, but only on those computers over the course of the second half of last year and that just turned into a private thing and they made changes. They didn't make that many changes, but whatever, they supposedly won't improved it.

01:27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They won't kill it, they'll just change it?

01:27:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think it matters? I don't think it matters that much. I'm sorry.

01:27:34 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I think again, it just goes to how people feel about Microsoft, how people trust them, and this is going to be a big issue. And I think we started talking about Copilot in a bit and Microsoft's plans for Copilot and's place in your life does it have a place in your life?

01:27:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
does it, oh it hopefully will.

01:27:54 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
According to microsoft, I use chat gbt a lot perplexity.

01:27:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use even more right. Uh, I use it for research. We have a friend who has a disease, an illness or symptoms that nobody's been able to figure it out, and we're going to try to oh there you go and there's lots of things people use AI for. I use it for research all the time, yeah.

01:28:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The selling mistakes.

01:28:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know it makes mistakes and you know.

01:28:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, the selling of AI is tough. The we I sort of alluded to this earlier when, where is the AI in these features in paint or whatever in windows 10? Like, where do you get this stuff? And like, and the the inconsistency of I might have a computer and I have whatever features. Because whatever computer I have, I go to my wife's computer. She's like, how do I do this thing? I'm like you don's worse now with AI. Yeah, recall, it now is just one of whatever, a dozen or more kind of co-pilot plus PC specific features, but it's the least useful of them to me.

01:29:00 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I mean, I personally have you tried the image generator in the photos app, because you might change your mind after that.

01:29:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have. So I mean, this is one of those things I was saying. I'm not going to remember this exactly, but if you use I'm going to get the names wrong probably but in paint, not the photos, but in paint. If you use the image creative feature there, I think that's the one that's AI based. It uses AI credits. It's ridiculous, but it will do these kind of high quality pretty good. But then there's the co-creator, which I believe is the Copilot plus PC one. It does the same thing.

01:29:34
You can do other things. You can draw a little sketch and it turns into something better looking. But whatever, it doesn't matter how you do it. If you do it exactly the same way as with image creator, what you get is a cartoon drawing that in no way approaches the quality of what you can get in a normal web based AI or whatever. It is internet based, and that's one of those limitations of local AI today. It will get better, but it's still not as good. So it's like oh great, I paid all this extra money, got this extra feature, and it makes garbage If I'm a normal human being sitting down in front of windows.

01:30:04 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
How am I supposed to know that? Oh, the one in photos is bad because it's local, but the one in paint that's good and it's going to use ai credit. It's a lot better because using a cloud-based model couldn't paint, but not in photos app. I you?

01:30:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know it's like listen, every one of us has done this at some point or another. We we are. We have run into some problem in windows. We debug it or figure it out and we find the. We find a solution. We figure it, we, we solve it, and I always think I don't know how a normal person would do this.

01:30:32
Like you know, I mean I'm in, I'm invested in this. This is my life. I spend more time on this than I spend on my relationship with my family, and how does someone who just this is like a tool. I use it to get work done, I don't care care. Why is the screen flickering? Why is the performance so slow? Why does you know? Whatever, whatever the problem is right. Good luck, you know. So it's like finding an AI feature in a single app on Windows 11. This is beyond anything these people are capable of. It's not them, it's not their fault, it should. This is stuff that should just work. I'm sure copilot will solve all these problems. He says stupidly yeah, probably not.

01:31:12
Okay, um, there's some hardware related stuff around windows. I I'm just mentioning intel earnings in here, because we've been mentioning this stuff and intel, as everyone knows, is kind of circling the drain at this point that's going to continue. Sadly, they actually had a decent quarter if you look at it in isolation, and that was because of the coming end of life of Windows 10. And there's been a lot of buildup of stock in these PCs that can run Windows 11. And short-term benefit, that's going away, like they said, as soon as this current quarter. That's over. But the big issue and there's a lot of issues in there they're cutting back everywhere. But they had eliminated I don't remember the number of jobs in June maybe 5,500, somewhere in there but their plan now is to eliminate about 24,000, 25,000 jobs calendar year 2025, so that they will be about 25% smaller overall by headcount by the end of the year than they were a year earlier. So there's going to be more layoffs. So yay, or whatever that is.

01:32:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is so depressing.

01:32:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, it is. Well, yeah, but again you got to remember important. Look, I don't want it's not like I want intel to die or go away or whatever. I desperately do want x86 to die and go away, but I but I think it's important to remember how horrible this company is, or was at least.

01:32:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, it's not that they didn't earn it, but I feel bad.

01:32:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's tens of thousands they had a decade and a half of chances to do the right thing technically and do the thing that microsoft had been bugging them and then begging them to do for so many years and make their chips more efficient and better for mobile and see the world as it was evolving at the time and address it, please. Yeah, um, and you know, remember when Microsoft kicked off Windows 10 on ARM, you know, terry Morrison said I don't. He's like I don't care if ARM wins, I just want the damn Intel stickers off the laptops. You know, like, I just want to see, like, if the outcome is Intel actually makes more efficient, more reliable chips Fantastic, that's all we really want. We just want the computers to work fantastic, that's all we really want. We just want the computers to work. You know, the laptop I'm about to review and Chris is going to talk about a couple here too, are is in, is in some ways fantastic, but it's an Intel core ultra series two, whatever.

01:33:36
Literally like it is the most unreliable, annoying, aggravating experience, because you never know when it's going to fail you. You just know that today, sometime it will. You never know when it's going to fail you. You just know that today, sometime it will. Maybe more than once. It's fundamentally is broken and that's the best these guys could do. I mean, they'll do better this year, I guess, but it's a nightmare. It really, really makes me sad that it's not better. Not because I have a love of Intel, but this is all they did. They ignored cloud and mobile for the most part. Could you get this right? No, I guess you can't. I don't know, it's too bad.

01:34:18 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Okay, yeah, obviously Intel. You know, from a mobile perspective, I see it's common from mobile perspective, you know the power usage was battery life was bad for so long. I mean I've had so many suspend resume issues, which on a laptop is just such a mess. I mean maybe it's better now, but a few years ago it was so bad. No, it's not better, so did.

01:34:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul, he called it the hot bag thing. You think that was Intel's fault.

01:34:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was Intel's. Well that was a combination of Microsoft. It was.

01:34:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Intel and the operating system not handling it right.

01:34:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it was a lack of experience on Microsoft's part, not understanding that this is what happens and it's up to them to fix these problems.

01:34:58
Like they saw this and said oh, you have a flaw in your chip, right. And Intel was like yeah, we do, you're right, you're supposed to patch it, so you're going to fix this right. Yeah, we do, you're right, you're supposed to patch it up, so you're going to fix this right. And they're like no, we're not fixing it Right. And to the other PC makers that was just kind of cute. They're like this happens every time, it's just that you don't really hear about it because we just do it. Microsoft was new at it.

01:35:14
Yeah, yeah yeah, that hotbag issue was very specific to Surface and Microsoft. Whatever you see on Intel PCs today is you open the lid. You just used it, maybe two hours ago or last night, whatever and you open it and what's it going to do? It could be anything. Could you go through a full boot process? It could come right on. That actually does happen sometimes. It's wonderful when it does that, because my Snapdragon X-based PC does it every single time. It just works. That's reliable, it's consistent.

01:35:47
This thing, it's like I don't know what I'm going to get. I'm on battery life on this thing and the performance drops. If you run benchmarks, you'll see like Intel trips to the worst for like performance drop off on battery. But the numbers that you see are in no way resemble the real world problem, because this happened to me this morning. It happened. It was especially bad last Friday when I was writing this enormous article. But the performance drops to the point where the computer is literally unusable on battery and I had to close every app. I had to plug it into the wall and I eventually I just rebooted because it was never coming back and it's just. It's the lunar lake in particular's just. Lunar Lake in particular is just. It just has so many problems and it was just rushed to market and it's something that just spans. It spans. All I've reviewed was it 25, 27 laptop, whatever it was last year. The Lunar Lake ones are the worst. They're just all of them as a one, as a group or whatever.

01:36:45
I feel like I've had a better experience so no, I've had better experiences too, but that's the point. Like it's inconsistent, like it's it depends, you know it's. They are the least reliable of the modern chipsets. There's no doubt about that anyway.

01:37:00 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
So anyway, speaking of cool hardware, yeah this is a cool one. Yeah, so I'm reviewing for PC World the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, which I don't know what it's called. So this is the rollable.

01:37:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What? But it just looks like a normal laptop.

01:37:19 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Show it rolling. Okay, here it is, there it goes. I love how it does it. Oh, it's getting bigger yeah, that's what she said. That is filthy, filthy, huge. Where is it coming from? It's inside the hinge I love it.

01:37:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're saying it's a grower, not a shower, is what you're saying?

01:37:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, so how um?

01:37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is like a 14 inch you can use that in your review if you want.

01:37:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just yeah but what's the delta, though? Like what do you? What do you gain there? Like three or four inches, or whatever. What's the?

01:37:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh it's pretty, it's cool, yeah, and it's nice to have that extra piece in a mouth.

01:38:03 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
You can see the creases.

01:38:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can see the folds where the folds are.

01:38:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that's all right. Yeah, but that's just the reflection.

01:38:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's normal. I have that length of a that's cool, that length I mean.

01:38:14 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, it's like you can see the you know part there. So you got a chunk like. Personally, I just think this is cool, like this is just the kind of product that as a reviewer.

01:38:25
You would see at ces and you'd be like whoa, when's that coming to market? And the company would be like that's not coming to market yeah, exactly. Lenovo has managed to release the proof of concept and anyone can go buy it, which is wild. I don't know if you should go buy it if you think it's? Cool you should go buy it. Is this the average computer for the average person?

01:38:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, well, but it's no. But this is interesting, this solves problems, right, like I know a lot of people and again these are, you know, technical people, whatever who often travel with a second display right, a USB-C display, and this is a way to have the same thing in a sense, if you don't mind it being tall rather than wide Right. And also, I don't think Lenovo gets enough credit for this kind of experimentation, gets enough credit for this kind of experimentation the thinkbook, thinkbook line, which is supposed to be for small businesses or whatever technically, but is where they do a lot of this experimentation. Right, there have been a lot of paul, I'm demoting you to the little screen.

01:39:15 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
No, it's fine it's like a reasonably normal looking laptop. I mean it's yeah is it?

01:39:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's hard to tell because the camera might be a little wide. Is it a? Nor is it really. Is a normal or it looks a little bigger.

01:39:29 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I mean it's going to be a little thicker, but some of the think books are a little but even like no, it's a 14 inch laptop.

01:39:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it's a standard aspect ratio or whatever dimension.

01:39:38 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Pretty standard, I think it's. I should have looked that up, right, but it's like a, I think I think that's pretty standard, yeah, so yeah, but I mean, yeah, the, the think book, or, sorry, the yoga book, that was the yoga book. Nine I, they made the actual dual screen laptop.

01:39:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, right.

01:39:52 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
You did it last year and it was wild. I said it's so cool I don't know if the average person should buy that laptop too. Because that, because I was like man right, the one of the worst things about that experience was because my it didn't really work. That windows wasn't really built for a dual display thing that constantly shifts, like windows isn't really built for this either, like they have, like some custom software that's doing resolution changing as you hit that so, like you know that, that's a little bit.

01:40:22
Some of the issue with some of these experimental computers is that windows isn't really designed for them and yeah, like 3200, 3 300 is a lot, that's expensive, right?

01:40:32
however, again this is not the laptop for the average person. However, to be able to buy the tech demo laptop from ces for 3300 is wild like these. How can they even produce it for that much money? It's not going to be a high margin. It's not going to sell a bunch of units. How can you even produce that in a factory at that scale? For you that little, I don't know. But it's just really cool that it's out there, right? Um, I agree, this isn't like praise of lenovo. I just. I just like as a computer user, I just I think it's okay to praise lenovo.

01:41:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, look, someone has to do this kind of work. You know HP used to do more of this than they do now. Microsoft well, microsoft likes to think of itself as a form factor generator, but most of that stuff has been terrible. No, look, they've had more misses than hits, for sure. But I like that they're doing it. And you know, that dual screen thing, which I reviewed last year as well and actually when I get back home I have the other than whatever the newer ones is exactly the same, the form.

01:41:31
Nothing has changed from hardware. You know it's, it's cool, it is complexity to it, right, because you've got a keyboard that doesn't have a trackpad built in, so you have a mouse and then you have this origami thing that works as a stand and you got to have all this together and the pen goes in the loop and you know you're carrying around a lot of stuff. But if you but, but if this matters to you, if that, that dual screen, is what you want, the fact that that's available, like you said for this thing, I think that's the important thing. Like, I think it's really cool that you can buy that if you want it.

01:41:59 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Uh, most people don't I used it while traveling and I was able to set up a dual monitor system while traveling, and that was wild. I mean, yes, you can get a portable monitor, which is one of the issues, but it's just I don't know. It's just cool. I love just weird and interesting products like that and that's one of the cool things about shows like CES. But normally you're just reading. You're either there in person or you're reading the news about it, but the fact that you can actually buy it is well, I didn't read this, but there was some headline.

01:42:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sure people will recognize this when I say it, but it was like I'm I'm upset that you know pcs have gotten boring. I wish it was better. And it's like you're not looking hard enough. I mean, you can buy a. If you just need a standard laptop for work whatever those are there it's fine. But this stuff is available if you want it. This you know. There there innovation occurring. It doesn't mean that we found the future form factor that everyone will use or anything like that, but I think it's great that they're doing it at all.

01:42:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, it's like the key, the yoga it's. You know, it's even like the touchscreen conversation we had earlier.

01:43:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I don't like it. I don't want it, but I also don't like, hate it so to the point where I'm like I don't think anyone should have it. No, it's fine. Like, if you want it, it's great. I love that you have that option.

01:43:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think Microsoft should have kept the Nia?

01:43:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No no, no, cause that was really. That was supposed to be 10 X and obviously 10x didn't happen and there was no. There's no work in windows 11 that makes that make any sense, really, yeah, I don't know. I yeah, I feel like companies have maybe more experience in this area, like lenovo, hp, dell, etc. Um are the right place for this kind of work because they volume uh agreements with uh hardware component makers, etc. They can, they can go to these companies and say hey, we're thinking about something crazy. Could you make a whatever for us? Whereas Microsoft would go and they'd be like you sold three computers last year. What are you talking about? We're not doing that.

01:43:56 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
The problem, though, is that Microsoft needs to do the system integration. I have reviewed a Lenovo handheld Steam Deck competitor with Windows many months ago and it was absolutely horrendous with Windows, just the software is a horrendous experience, and the problems with issues like this is that they're hacking on with manufacturer utilities the auto-resolution change and the multi-screen transformation on the dual-screen device so Microsoft needs to do more to support them really, at least on an Android device device.

01:44:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Android is nominally open source and it can be customized and, you know, at a low level, but windows is like well, you put your driver on top and it's like yeah, I mean, well, I don't know the weirder the device gets, the more flaky and janky it can get yeah, so in the android space, samsung is the one that was doing things like dex is kind of comes out of that, where the live notification stuff and you see those two, like I always said with dex, like that should have been, but that should be an os feature, like that should come from android, and now it will, I guess, and you know so, eventually in this year, whatever. Um, yes, I mean, microsoft does something like create snap for windows and and then improve it over time. So the version of windows 11 is pretty good, but they still don't accommodate the stuff you were just showing off and the dual screen stuff very well, and Lenovo has to build on top of that. So there's also the kind of software complexity. It's folding what do you call it Folding laptops where the whole thing is a screen. You can put it in clamshell, put the keyboard on top. It has to recognize that the keyboard's there and all those interactions. And clamshell, put the keyboard on top. It has to recognize that the keyboard's there and all those interactions. There's a lot of complexity to it. So that's the trade-off with versatility. I guess is the complexity.

01:45:33
But again, most people will look at that dual screen laptop, the Yoga 9i, slim 9i, whatever the name of it is, and say, wow, that's really cool looking. I don't want to need that, but I love that it, you know, or whatever it's there. But one out of every hundred or something will be like oh my God, that's what I've been waiting for. You know, like I like that they can get it. You know you're not going to get this on the Mac side, that's for sure, right, and you see a little bit in the Chromebook and or two-in-one devices, but also it's just a lot more limited from hardware choice. Most of it's just laptops, you know. So at least we have it, it's not all bad.

01:46:13 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Flexibility is good. Yeah, that's the way of the PC, yeah.

01:46:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, let's take a little time out. Yeah, because we all are in agreement. Now this is you're watching uh windows weekly. Look at that. Uh. I know you're saying what happened to richard. He got thin and beautiful. No, no, that's chris hoffman.

01:46:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're both beautiful on the inside they're both beautiful on the inside.

01:46:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard, thank you for some sorry, chris, thank you for filling in chris b hoffman, don't confuse him with the action figure. Well, the Gilmore C Hoffman. He is, of course, the former. I didn't realize this, but this really cool editor and chief of one of my favorite sites. You helped it grow quite a bit.

01:47:03 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yep Took it to the acquisition and then, well, it's time to move on yeah, who acquired? Evilcorpcom no well, uh valnet, as you know, is owner of. I don't even, I can't even are they private equity?

01:47:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is it one of those private?

01:47:19 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
equities, polygon, android police make use of um so many I can.

01:47:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can list out, so they're all you know like I mean, I used to work for a company that was penton event. Penton had, like agricultural companies, they had, you know, the shipping and logistics. It was like what is this company?

01:47:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's just well, how to keep so good, but it was better when you were there. Let's put it that way how about?

01:47:43 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
that. Uh. Well, anyone, anyone being under that corporate structure is going to have trouble having the voice it had before. I think.

01:47:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's very hard. So it was independent up until the acquisition.

01:47:58 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, we were independent up until the acquisition. We were one of the last few ones, so then that was.

01:48:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what's happening in the world.

01:48:08 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, so I chose to leave. I had a job offer to stay on, but I I like to. I like to keep saying that I I didn't, I didn't want to really run it for velnet, and I wish everyone the best luck there. I I hired a lot of amazing people that are still there and, uh, best luck to them well, they've got great seo right.

01:48:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I keep, they keep showing up in my uh searches and my, that feels, uh, inertia and vestigial based. But yes, uh, but yeah, absolutely it's also uh part of the new uh google zero movement, where you're not getting. You're showing up in the search results, you're showing up in the ai, but you're not getting any traffic.

01:48:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen I'm happy to be like a little asterix in a description. You go down and it says maybe I helped golly it's all I ever wanted, oh golly.

01:48:54 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Anyway, windows intelligence is the current uh incarnation, although that's about to change as well um, that that that's about to wind down and transition into my personal newsletter and I'm still all over the place. I do a lot of work for pc world and, uh, some other publications and I'll be reaching out to more and nice, yeah, so I'm I keep wanting you and waiting to blurt something out that would be like something new that I haven't heard.

01:49:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's called my next and it's going to be no, remember that when the verge, when they when, please, I don't, when the guys left, uh, gadget, and they said, we don't know, we're gonna call it, we'll call it my next thing or something hard horse, yeah, exactly, yeah, parkour, crazy, we're gonna call it parkour, uh, anyway, um, good luck with that, chris, and uh, everybody should go to chrisb hoffmancom to stay up to date on what chris is up to.

01:49:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
paul, I don't have to explain, you know paul, you could not explain, so don't even try.

01:49:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's okay as the kids say I y k, y k. Uh, this is, this is windows weekly. Glad you're here. On we go with this edition of Windows Weekly. Let's talk about AI. Have we talked about AI? Have you started using Comet?

01:50:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, so I got in. I joined the wait list. I think somebody told me actually they added me. You can, you know, point people Jeff.

01:50:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jarvis went to their PR firm and got a journalist version. He's been sent me an invite, so that's how I got in. Maybe he sent you one too, I don't know.

01:50:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What do you think? It was someone else, but I am actually really impressed with this. So this is.

01:50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perplexity, which I love, but it's their version. You know, I almost wonder why I need a browser, because it's really kind of perplexity in a browser, right?

01:50:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, so, but that's the point of this stuff, right? In other words, months ago I had written this thing and I think it was partially based on what the browser company was going through, like our had arc had become too complex and it wasn't what they were. It wasn't the good basis for what they wanted to do. They, you know, have since switched to dia and they're trying to make that happen. Whatever. Um, this is a bigger players, yeah isn't it?

01:51:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it is.

01:51:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But so I, I can't. I don't have a full comparison to make yet, but I I can tell you one way where, or um, it's not so obviously chrome, that's one thing that's well, depends on what you're looking at if you, once you bring up the menu, you're like oh no, this is chromium. Yeah, it's good, but here's the thing. So look, browsers are going to change. They're going to change so much that someday someone's grandchild is going to say why do we call this thing a browser? We don't browse. What is that? What is?

01:51:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh yeah, now that. Yeah, so they've changed the font and everything, but these are the same menu items as in chrome. It's, it's, it's very clearly.

01:51:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Chromium, you know, but whatever, that's fine. That, by the way, this, this is the point when microsoft switched edge to chromium. Ever so competition, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, no, no, no, we need, we need a standard at the rendering engine level, where you innovate is on top of it, and this is maybe the ultimate example of that right so it does.

01:52:06
Yeah, you want a browser that works everywhere well and it just works the way you're familiar with, but then can put stuff on top of it, right. So there you remember in well, leo knows better than anybody. But with arc, you know that was one of those things. Nine times out of ten people like, oh, this is too, this too much, there's too many things going on, it's's too different. But how did they do this? They kind of hijacked is a tough term, but the standard like control T, control L, controls. They remapped and did different things and so it was a different kind of experience. And so when you control L here and go to the address bar and you type in a thing, unless you explicitly choose it from the drop down, it's going to go through perplexity, right. So you still have that opportunity. So it says ask perplexity or ask google or whatever terminology, and then this is the search I got.

01:52:56
Yeah, but, that search that you get that's perplexity right.

01:52:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is the other, chris hoffman chris thomas hoffman. He's a zimbabwe and actor and voice artist. I can views them all the time, so honestly, I. Or it could be the, the superintendent of the Elk Grove Unified School District, chris R Hoffman. Or it could be Chris C Hoffman, who is the managing partner of the San. This is hysterical. I'm finding all the other Chris Hoffman's, but you know what? You're number one, the tech journalist. You're number one, the tech journalist.

01:53:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So I have to say, until now I've been kind of on the sidelines with this type of thing, because Google is adding AI everywhere, microsoft is adding AI everywhere, but they also have these established browsers that they don't. You know they're not going to get too radical with these things, right? So you have to turn to third parties, like opera talks about neon, but I don't have access to that. The browser company has Dia, but it's only on the max. I can only use it sporadically.

01:53:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a good search result for you. I think, yeah, yeah. No, look at the sources. It's all your stuff. I mean all your stuff. I mean x is a little high on there, but instagram I'm on there.

01:54:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm on there, are you?

01:54:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you still use x, okay? Yeah, I mean I have to.

01:54:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is just the reality. What's that? Well, it's like why not build uh iphones in america? It's the same problem. I unfortunately, you know, I can't really just do that, um so anyway by the way you remain influential in the time thing, despite my attempts to undermine my own credibility interesting little, uh little subtext subtweet there.

01:54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You, you remain influential, yeah, you know kind of. Yeah, now I gotta see what they say about me now. Now I really want to know, right, I, I barely remain influential leo, who's that? Oh, look at all this stuff.

01:54:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're an accomplished author. I'm accomplished, see, I'm an author, but you're an accomplished author.

01:54:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zippity-doo-dah, that's what I accomplished. Oh, deep knowledge. I have a deep knowledge.

01:55:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You do have a deep knowledge. This is actually the thing I think that's most impressive about you. No, I mean it, how much you know about how much Like this is a. No, I mean it, this is a really rare.

01:55:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is a picture I wish did not show up when you searched for me. You look like Gabe Newell there. What's going on? I know what the hell.

01:55:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was must.

01:55:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Must have been at my heaviest, and this guy is not me.

01:55:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, oh, that's the player portfolio okay, must be a soccer player, okay, but but this is just like a search result, like the yeah, but it's perplexity, so I can do this. Yeah, but if I know you're saying, if I do?

01:55:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how do I tie a shoe?

01:55:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not saying this, what I'm what I'm saying is no what are you?

01:55:47
saying what I'm. What I'm trying to say is that everyone who has talked about an ai powered browser has used the phrase this thing will do things on your behalf. Right, it will accomplish that. And oh, the mcp stuff. This is agents and and whatever else.

01:56:03
But for that to work, either they have to manually, through some kind of screen scraping or whatever you want to call it facility, kind of force it on whatever website or whatever, or over time, things will be re-architected and we'll have these kind of back-end services that just do this by default, like Windows software.

01:56:24
And you can see it in the settings app right now. And what does Levin is changing to meet this exact need, right? This is the way. This is what's happening behind the covers. So, as a programmer, you could write an app that changed one feature that exposed is exposed to the settings app, or you could even have the settings app launch to the exact page and highlight that feature, right, so they're making it more. I'm going to call it componentized, because I don't really have the language for this, but it's happening. This is going to happen everywhere. So one of the things that's really cool in here which does not work with Dia, by the way is you can go to Google Maps and say give me a walking route from my current location to and I'll just name a restaurant Mexico City somewhere.

01:57:01
And it interacts with the page and does that, it creates it for you. Like it doesn't move the mouse around, it's not controlling the mouse, but the box highlights text, goes in, it hits the enter, it goes. The thing happens, the map changes like it actually is controlling that web app and if you type that into the same exact query into dia, it's like, yeah, that sounds like it'd be a really cool feature. Uh, you have to. You know you'll have to do that inside google map. There's nothing on in the page I can see that helps me do that. Like it can't yet do that, so I'm sure it will someday. I'm sure they'll all do this someday.

01:57:36
But like I was kind of going through all of the examples that um, uh, perplexity provides, like the types of things you can do with comment, and I was like okay, yep, okay, that's pretty good, you can, without being on Google calendar, you can say give me a summary of my week schedule and it's here it goes. You know you have to give her permission, obviously, but that's this thing will is already integrating with web. I'm going to call them web apps, web services, whatever, and to a degree that is starting to get kind of interesting, you know. And when you see that happen, when you do that for yourself, it's like huh, like you can see. Now you can kind of see it Like they've been talking about it, but this is the first time I've experienced it anywhere where I'm like okay, and you know, perplexity as a search, search engine, I guess, uh, it seems like it's pretty good, honestly, like I've been so far I, I've been using it.

01:58:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean I use kaki still more. Okay, because one of the things that happens when you use an ai search engine is frequently, when you just want a site, you get a lot of, uh, extraneous stuff and it's, you know, all the sites up there and sources like if I were searching for you, if I did it in kagi, I'd get your site right away. I mean, it just feels, yeah, yeah, this feels a little complex. The other thing that perplexity has done which is interesting is, uh, at least in the mac I don't know what they're doing with the windows, but on the mac they've added an mcp server so same same they did that windows too.

01:59:07
So I have an apple script, mcp, installed in my uh so I can now type a command to perplexity. Let me see if I can describe this without being confusing. I could type a command perplexity. Perplexity can turn it into apple script so I could say open my calendar and and remind me that I have to call my dad because it's his birthday today, which it is happy birthday, dad. And it will. It will use the apple, it'll write an apple script that will then, on apple, open up the calendar and add that yeah, that's pretty cool. That's really cool. That's what you're talking about, that agentic ai.

01:59:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah this is also. This reminds me of the beginning of like what. What was it called in the beginning? Dde, and then Olay and then Com. You know the idea that you know very simply, on a single computer you could copy in one app and then paste in another app and it has to handle the different. You know how maybe text is formatted, or if it even accepts text, or if it's images or whatever it might be, and then you kind of move that to multiple computers on a network, whether it's local or the internet, and then this is you know. Now we have this. If you have these things that are exposing interfaces, like you can control it with AI.

02:00:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At the time, microsoft said and this is Longhorn era, you don't want to work with apps. Well, era. Uh, you don't want to work with apps. Well, you want to work with data, you want to work with documents and we'll figure out what app to use. That's the dream. It's, that was the dream, right, and that's that's orchestration.

02:00:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just described it right. That's the, that's the. I think this is the. The goal, uh, the ultimate goal of this stuff is that, exactly what you just said, but that, whatever the situation is, whatever hardware you're on, whatever you're asking it, it will determine if it's local or out in the cloud and whatever. And, uh, you'll ask whatever I, I need to buy a plane ticket to whatever place during whatever time period, and let me know as soon as this happens. And hey, this thing just went on sale and it's 100 bucks off, or whatever.

02:01:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the, you know, and you get to go do it.

02:01:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's your assistant now yep, like your personal assistant. And then, having said that, of course I write about this. And then people are like, well, I mean, are you comfortable giving perplexity access to your google account or whatever it's like? Are we seriously having this conversation again? This is like when cortana was added to windows 10, it was one of the features right of it was like, well, I went to turn this thing on. It was like it needed access to my calendar, to my contact. Like, what is this? It's your assistant. Like, the point of the thing is that it works with that stuff. If you're not comfortable with that, do not use that thing.

02:01:39
Like that's what it does. It has to work with your data. That's the point. So, yeah, am I comfortable? No, but I accept that this is. I want to see if it works.

02:01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chris, are you a big AI user or not?

02:01:51 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
at this point. Yeah, I've been doing a lot with it. I think I've been. I don't have access to Comet yet. So in terms of agentic browsing, no, I did enable co-pilot mode in Edge earlier and I was about to talk about how that isn't really the same thing at all. But yeah, I think like long term the dream, though, in terms of comfort, in terms of privacy, long term the dream is you know local ai, you have your local ai that runs on your device, and that's long term a dream. I mean like that. That isn't the current copilot, pc plus pc with his mpu, but yeah, maybe you know, and maybe in five, ten years that will just happen on your device and you won't have to say are you comfortable with uploading that to a server?

02:02:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think so. I feel like it's going to be a common. I don't. I'm not sure the end game is just everything is on your device because we're just gonna. We're connected all the time, right. So, yeah, like some things will be better or faster if whatever the you know term. But the point of AI orchestrating this is that you ask it a request and it's whatever, like whatever resources you have, it will find the best way to do that. If it's local and you have an MPU, maybe that's what makes the most sense. If it's local and you have a GPU, maybe that's what makes sense. It will just, it should just do it for you. But right now we have all these kind of hard-coded solutions that it's like like the things we were talking about in paint, like, oh, do you have a copilot plus pc? Then you have this stupid feature it can only work this one way. That should work. Multiple ways, right. Like that should work, no matter what kind of computer you have. Um, but yeah it's a mess.

02:03:22 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Companies might self-host their own models in their own data center or stuff like that. Right now it's like you know. Perplexity is just what it is.

02:03:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, that's funny. It's like a, yeah, grounded AI as the new on-prem server, you know, kind of it's something to it for sure. So anyway, if you do, if you've signed up for the wait list, you get this eventually. Whatever it is, I have to say I'm not, it's not perfect, I don't mean that and whatever. Mostly it's just a browser, but I there is a future here where it's like you're going to be talking to your computer, you're going to be just talking, and it will pick up that you mean it to do something and it will just happen. That's that browser.

02:04:08
And then just the interaction with online services, which is the real power here, because if you think about it, like when you search, like you might be looking for a simple answer. It's like what's the capital of some state and is the answer. Whatever search engines do that. But sometimes you want something more complex, sometimes you want something deeply personal, whether it's like a relationship or health issue or whatever it is, and it will talk through this with you and maybe point with the right thing. I think someone mentioned earlier this notion of AI helping doctors find diagnoses that they would not have come to on their own. I've read a lot of stories about that. My own son's life was saved 27 years ago by a doctor who said this is going to sound crazy, but this looks like bacterial meningitis, a thing we have not seen in 20 years or whatever, and it was and if that?

02:04:52
guy. If he had got any other doctor would have been like he has a cold, he's fine, and he would have died, so like that stuff. Yeah, like that stuff is that's life-changing, like that's amazing. I mean so look, I know it makes mistakes, we get it, but so do human beings. I mean, um, it's going to get better. So I'm this is fascinating to me Like I think our whole world is about to change. Unless you're using Microsoft edge, you know good, good, please.

02:05:24 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
It's so funny. I saw the news earlier. I went in and I flipped the switch and I put it in co-pilot mode and then I said let's go, let's navigate Google Maps just like in Comet. Yes, I can.

02:05:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How does that work I?

02:05:35 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
mean it's just the same. I don't understand how it's different. The blog post said something, but it can do some tasks. It didn't say what they are. Um, it just seems to be the same.

02:05:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like it has the copilot and it can see the browser and it's well fine, but you're missing the major way that it's different and I I'm surprised that you missed this, because it's so obvious. They move the copilot icon from the top right to the top left actually I.

02:06:01 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
There's something I love about it, which is that when you flip that on, your new tab page becomes copilot, so all the viral headlines are gone and that's the.

02:06:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the best I've ever seen for now, right, like yes, I mean, you could do that work to make your new tab page simply. You could, um, you know, replace it with something else, which is what I do. But yeah, I same thing. I, when that thing comes up, I'm like nice. The only thing I would like is the ability, like on Momentum or use Bonjour, to just arbitrarily add shortcuts that are just down there all the time. You know like it will see what you're browsing and add some. But I would, it'd be nice if you could configure it. But yeah, that thing comes up and it's like the cure to the normal new tab page.

02:06:45 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, for sure what's what's weird to me and we'll talk. Maybe we'll talk about that when we get to um, co-pilot in general. But they're saying, oh well, co-pilot is going to help you cut through the clutter in your online life. It's like edge is the most cluttered browser I have ever used, and I used to use it in the early days when it was project spartan, and I just eventually had to switch because the new tab page, the menu, the shopping features, every little thing, the sidebar that comes up by default and it has the MSN game link and it's like I can't. I just can't use this. And they're saying, well, don't worry, it's going to cut through the clutter in your life, don't worry, you're going to have an AI generated feed of good stuff you want to see. It's like, well, I know exactly what you think about generated feeds, that I want to see Microsoft, and I'm not sure I'm on board with this.

02:07:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're describing a Microsoft service that, when it's fully realized, will be a paid service that will solve a problem with a free Microsoft product that they created, you know, and it's like. It's like when Microsoft was selling antivirus software in the early two thousands, you know, to consumers, right, one care it's. It's like, guys, you're solving a problem you created, like the, the cure should be free. Like it's it's your fault, you know, um, but yeah, you're correct.

02:07:56
Yeah, so I I do find it coincidental, and I'm sure it is really, but that microsoft, the day after I got comet, was like oh, we have a ai browser. So I feel like they've been working on this for a little while. They've got a long way to go, for whatever reason, every day there are AI announcements, but they didn't really preview this. This wasn't one we heard about at Build and they're like here it comes. And then eventually it came. It just showed up out of the blue and, like you said, it doesn't feel like it's much, but I think it's because it's the basis of where they're going. It's not there yet right.

02:08:32 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I mean I think they just it. It's not ready yet, it doesn't have all the features, but launch it, launch it. We need to get the hype out there. Everyone else is launching I browsers. This needs to be an ai browser and if you actually go look at like the google play store ios app store, they call edge an ai browser. Like they have that in there for like the Google Play Store iOS App Store, they call Edge an AI browser. They have that in there for the SEO Edge AI browser. They've been calling it AI browser for a long time.

02:08:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just a browser.

02:08:53 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
It's just a browser. Well, I mean, they did beat Google in a lot. Chrome just got Gemini integration, yeah right.

02:09:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but this is what happens with these giant monopolies, these big tech companies. Right, they're protecting something, they want to push forward with this thing, but they also don't want to step on the thing that's working for them, right, and that's why Microsoft and Google and Apple, I suppose, with Safari, will be slower moving than these little companies, because they're protecting empires, you know, and if you're looking for something really innovative, it's going to be the browser company or opera or perplexity or whatever, right, I mean, and maybe those things are good enough that they influence these bigger companies to then do things like that. I mean, microsoft does talk about this stuff. I mean, if you know, they were early on with I mean they were early on with MCP, they were early on with it. If anything, they were too early with this stuff Agents, and they talk about it.

02:09:55
Microsoft had built, not this year, but a year ago, talked about adding local AI capabilities that developers could use in their own apps, and they only delivered the first preview of that in January this year. It's still not available generally to everybody. You have to use a pre-release version of that sdk, like it's. You can't actually ship code with it. So you know, they have like this dream. They have this idea. They have, you know, but they it the.

02:10:20 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
the reality takes a long time to occur, and part of it might just be that microsoft's such a big company, you know well, I mean honestly I I'm gonna maybe push back against that a little bit because I think you know I had that's a take I had in computer world recently in my column is like microsoft, actually bing chat was the first ai search engine. Microsoft was an early investor in open ai and actually when bing chat launched it had a GPT four model that was more powerful than what you could get. Chat GPT at the time, like Microsoft, was ahead of everyone in consumer AI at that point. So it's not trying to catalyze this, it's like. But the funny thing is, the sad thing is, if they want to be ahead, they were ahead and then they kind of just yeah, I don't know what.

02:11:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, look, microsoft kicked this off. There's just no doubt about it. That day in February two years ago, yusuf Mehdi and they went with the Bing brand. To begin with, it was just like what. If you look at that announcement, it was like advancements for Bing and Microsoft Edge. And you're like what? It wasn't until March that they took the Copilot brand that they had from GitHub and applied it to Microsoft 365 Copilot. And then by the end of the year they had 117, I think the number.

02:11:32
Donna Sarkar supplied me with co-pilot branded products or services. Right, I mean, and this is, you know itself, kind of a unique Microsoft problem where they don't brand things very well, but when they do land on a really good brand like Windows, they tend to beat the death out of it. You know, like they just use it and use it and use it. And then, of course, I think Microsoft knew Google, openai, of course, and then other companies were going to race to catch up and surpass them. So that's partway explains the chaos of all the releases, of them putting Copilot into Windows before that major release of Windows, to ensure everyone had it right Of changing the architecture, so to speak, of the Copilot app in Windows 11 has changed at least three times that I know of, and probably more right, probably more so it's sort of like Windows 10X.

02:12:25
I have to give them a little credit for trying, a little credit for moving quickly, because they don't typically move quickly, right, I mean this is. It's amazing to watch this. It's sad in a way, because they've created a lot of churn and uncertainty and you know little things like that situation I mentioned in paint, which is not like a huge issue, but there's like features everywhere and it's like do I have this, do I get this with this? How do I have to pay for this? Like what?

02:12:54 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
you know like it's hard to know what's what, but that's what happened.

02:12:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're moving fast, you know. Yeah, it's a mess, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, but I did the same as you. I turned, I flipped the switch and I was like, okay, they moved the icon. Cool, that's fun. Um, what does this thing do? I'm like it doesn't really do that much, right, I mean, it's cleaner. I like the new tab thing. This is a stupid thing, but I do like it. I don't know, have you you? Well, I don't know if this is available yet. So they announced a like. They're gonna add expressions meaning like humans, like when I react to you saying something or whatever, to co-pilot, which you know raises the ugly specter of clippy coming back. Right, you know one of them's going to be a paper clip and you know people are going to choose it, you know right now.

02:13:45
It's got reasons it's like yeah, I mean, it's the current design they're showing off, it's just a prototype, but is like a blob, because we're having trouble, um, I don't know, visualizing our new god here. You know, apparently it's a marshmallow with a fun little face, you know, but I, I don't know, maybe this will make it more personable, or something I don't know.

02:14:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was Casper the Friendly Marshmallow.

02:14:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, it's just so weird.

02:14:18 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, there's like two angles. There's the new feature which I don't have access to. Only a few people have access to it. I don't have the appearance toggle I haven't used it but there's the appearance thing, which is they're going to give it a cute face in voice mode. And then there's what Microsoft's AI CEO is saying on podcasts about how long term, co-pilot is going to be your buddy. It's going to age, it's going to live in a room. It's going to have a face. It's going to remember you over your life. It's going to be a continuous observer and participant in creating new culture alongside you. It's going to have a lasting, stable presence with memory. It's going to be designed to be your life coach, your productivity assistant and your teacher, wrapped up in one. I'm just giving quotes now.

02:14:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It can be a tomato with a blue mustache, Unfortunately uh, it has dementia and you know, look, I'm sure it will get there. Um, chris, you weren't around for this, but like a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, we were talking about you know just the ways in which Copilot has been failing so far. I mean, things could change, obviously, but you know, part of the problem Microsoft faces is that, for whatever reason, chat, gpt, especially OpenAI, has just such a good brand, like people know about it, use it, they choose it over the thing that might be built into what they have already. It has achieved that magical thing where it just is like a hit with normal mainstream users. For some reason.

02:15:43
I would think that if you're a fortune 500 company Microsoft 365, like you're going to use copilot, obviously, like it's the one that's going to integrate the best with all the stuff you're using. But there's indications that that's not happening either. So I don't know they've got to be hitting. I'm not saying it's desperation moment yet, but like they're clearly just throwing stuff at the wall at this point, like, oh, we got an ar, you have an ar browser, we have an ar browser. Oh, you know, like, like, like Google announces, like the audio overview feature, basically podcasting, you know, for whatever the thing is, and Microsoft was like we have a podcast thing too. It's like, of course you do, like, of course you do, you know. So I don't know, maybe they'll, maybe it will land. It's hard to say.

02:16:24 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
The bizarre thing if you read the stories yeah, because you know there's stories about, you know, companies, employees just want chat gbt, they don't want copilot, they don't want that. And it's like, if you read the stories, it's like supposedly microsoft thinks, well, people are going to want a different consumer ai at home. They're not going to. They're going to want a different ai at work and a different consumer at home. So but first of all, it isn't true, because people are choosing chat gbt in both cases, statistically speaking. Second, second of all, if that is true, why are you calling them both Copilot? Because people have the Copilot for Microsoft 365 at work that will be that brand and then people have their little Copilot at home, which will be their little life AI friend, which is what Microsoft is doing. And if they want a different one at home, they shouldn't be called both Copilot. I don't understand the branding.

02:17:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you've called both co-pilot. I don't understand. This is yeah, uh, this is you. You've triggered so many memories here, but I I'll just use one simple example.

02:17:15
It's always a similar problem, which was microsoft, on their whatever blog microsoft 365, what it was called at the time would come up with like hey, here are like five new features coming to one drive. You're like, oh, interesting. So you're reading through it and you're like, okay, what is this? And then you realize like halfway, realize like halfway through, they're talking about OneDrive for business, not the one that consumers have. But they never really differentiate them, even though they have basically the same name. And it's like guys, like some features would be here, some would be there, whatever. That kind of thing's always been a problem. But you also touched on an issue I just kind of glanced by earlier today, which was Microsoft is a browser that nobody seems to want to use.

02:17:52
For the most part it's Chromium. It's basically Chrome. It has Microsoft stuff in it instead of Google stuff. So compatibility, performance, whatever. It's going to be similar. They're doing nice work, honestly, on some of the stuff with the UI and redoing it and whatever. But okay, who cares? But literally there's an option built into windows that it will steal data from Chrome. Every time you launch the browser it will sync with this backend thing because they want you to think this thing is Chrome. You know and I, they have the open AI stuff, they can use it. They're going with the same brand across.

02:18:25
You know, business and consumer and everyone's like yeah, we don't care, I don't want the thing, that's like it. I want you know, like, whether it's good, bad or indifferent, like I'm not, I don't know that anyone could honestly say chat GPT is better at XXX than copilot today. But if they could, tomorrow, it will be different, two weeks from. You know it will be different. It changes all the time. So, yeah, it's the same strategy. So this came up last week, I think. But it's like what do you keep? What do you call it when you keep doing the same thing and you expect different results? You know, I mean, they're really, they really are in that way, using the same playbook, and that playbook has not worked for them with edge for sure, and it hasn't worked with them with copilot against open AI either, and it hasn't worked with them, with copilot against open.

02:19:10 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
AI either. Yeah, that's such a good point, Like you know, if, oh, if I use Chrome, convinced me to switch to edge. Well, it's almost the same as Chrome, but like, well, what's the difference if I, if someone uses chat DVD, convinced me to switch to copilot?

02:19:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's like well, it's basically the same, whatever. Now it's like, okay, I'm listening, what do you got, what do you got, you know? But that's the thing it's. It's, these things are gonna, they're all gonna kind of land in the same place, aren't they? I mean, uh, you, and because of the fast nature of this and mcp and the interoperability that all these ais are doing, you could be this random person who's like I do use one drive and I use Microsoft word and I use I have a Microsoft three 65 subscription, but I also have Gemini and that's what I use with word and with one drive and it works fine. It will work probably the same way, and then you can mix and match in any direction you care. For. I don't. I think it's just all going to kind of work.

02:20:11 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, we just live in.

02:20:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry.

02:20:14 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
But the other problem is like if people are someone's really into it and they're paying for the subscription, it's like an average person is not going to pay for the $20 a month chat GBT and the $20 a month copilot and then the $20 per month Gemini subscription. Like it creates a like I, I, someone say I chose Chabotique because my, my friends use that. I pay for the subscription, why am I going to use a different one?

02:20:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're also not going to launch the same query against multiple AIs to see which one's better and then keep doing that for the foreseeable future in case it changes. You know most people are just going to use the thing. You don't notice it until it doesn't work right or until it annoys you so much that you want to move on to the next thing. But everything's moving so fast right now I don't know that they're all in the same place with the same workloads or whatever. I don't know. I don't know. It's complicated. Anyway, they're trying. I God love them. It's a, you know, it's like that old, it was that meme thing. It was like you know Safari, firefox and Chrome. It was like we have, you know, we support BWA. Is we support, you know, web to whatever it was, and it's like internet explorer. At the time I think was like yay, internet. It's like they're trying.

02:21:31
You know like they'll get there, Maybe they won't. All right, what do we got here now? So long term co-pilot plans. This is where it's all going to come together and the future is going to make sense.

02:21:44 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yes, yeah, I was like rambling about that already, but right, I mean. The plan, according to Microsoft AI CEO on a podcast, is this is going to be your life coach and it's going to be involved in every part of your life. It's going to interweave fiction your real life. It's going to be very soon my AI will join this conversation. My co-pilot will be in my co-pilot. Our co-pilots might be in this podcast in a few years. Right Talking, oh, I'm talking.

02:22:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you talking about, Chris B Hoffman?

02:22:12 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, exactly so that's. But that's this co-pilot vision they have of it's going to be your buddy. The consumer version, the work version, that's a totally different thing, although it has the same name, but the consumer version is going to be your buddy, right? And I don't know, do people want the Microsoft-branded AI friend? Let's say they do want an AI friend. Let's just agree with that. Everyone's an AI friend. Do you want the one from Microsoft?

02:22:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want. The one that says Scarlett Johansson is the one I want. Yep.

02:22:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like Elon Musk is going to give you that I don't know if there'll be a differentiator.

02:22:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to be honest, what's the differentiator going to be?

02:22:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that's the problem, right, my, if, my look, microsoft has strengths and we should just acknowledge that, and a lot of it is in full featured productivity solutions like word and excel and all that stuff. Right, and so if you're in that space, a consumer, but more likely a business, uh yeah, there might be there either are or will be advantages to co-pilot, etc I guess you know there is the tyranny of the default.

02:23:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If, if you're using Windows, it might just be Copilot because you're using Windows. Except that we've already been defeated.

02:23:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Chrome has broken through that with web browsers. That's the primary success of that product to me, like they've gotten people to get off of the default and on Macs too, by the way, although not to as great of an extent. And then OpenAI I feel like they've done it already with AI. Same thing I. Um.

02:23:34
Switching is either hard or perceived to be hard. It doesn't really matter, but either way, uh, paying for it or not, most people make that choice. They use it and unless it betrays them in some major way, they're not going to be looking around. You know they found the thing that works for them, right? They're not going to be looking around. You know they found the thing that works for them, right? I don't know. I usually well, I mean, like, when do you turn off notifications on your phone? Do you install all your apps and then go into the settings interface and be like, okay, that's off, that's up. Or do you wait till you get an annoying thing and you're like, no, you get rid of it, right? I think that's just kind of human nature. So, yeah, the pop up that Microsoft will absolutely display Actually sorry already is. I took some screenshots of this for Copilot, where it's recommending things you could do for you is the moment where you're like nope, you know, because what is that? Get out of my face. I'm doing something.

02:24:35 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Especially on new laptops, which all seem to have the co-pilot key. I'm sure that the internal metrics are saying co-pilot launches are going way up on these new laptops because you can just bump the key but maybe that's not actually helping. Yeah, maybe that's not actually helping. Maybe potentially that's not actually helping your brand if you're accidentally hitting the copilot key all day, going like, oh, I'm closing it, I don't know maybe just a thought.

02:25:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't, I'm sorry. I'm trying to this guy in discord. I'm trying to understand what he's trying to say here. Copilot is going to be the most used AI in Windows because it's the default, like Edge is the most used browser because it's always being sarcastic. I'm sorry, he's being sarcastic, sorry.

02:25:16 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Okay.

02:25:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry, right, I'm like that. We've already pointed out that that's not the case. Yes, okay, sorry, you do get it. Okay, look, look. I don't dislike or want Copilot to fail. All I can do is tell you what's happening so far, and it's not great. So I guess we'll just see. I don't know, we'll see.

02:25:38
So Google, like Intel, and actually, by the way, before we're done with the show today, most likely Microsoft, will announce their earnings very soon as well. But they announced their latest earnings and I have to say I guess anything could change. But as of now, $96.4 billion in revenue in one quarter, that's amazing. What was the profit on that? $28.2 billion? Too many Christmas, yep. So profits were up 19%, revenues were up 14%, I think the figure yeah, 65% of the revenues came from advertising overall across all their properties.

02:26:15
But they have, honestly, a strong cloud business. They have a strong workspace business. They have pretty good it's kind of a nebulous thing, but like subscriptions and devices and something else which is, you know, pixel and Google One and whatever else they have for consumers. So, yeah, I mean search double-digit revenue growth. These are a little more vague, but you know, they have AI overviews, ai mode, et cetera. Those are performing well. They don't have numbers for that, of course why would they? But yeah, I think Google's going to be okay, you know, for the short term. I mean, there are things that can happen to Google that will change this, of course, and including some antitrust issues that you may have heard of. So we'll see what happens, but I would say, at least so far, there's no indication yet that the rise of, like whatever, chat, gpt and et cetera, has impacted them in any kind of negative way yet. So that's actually really interesting to me.

02:27:12 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I think the big thing is they have to compete, right? If we were talking about this five years ago, we'd say, like what's going to replace Google? Now we say what's going to replace Google? It's like, well, there's some plausible things if Google doesn't get us back together, Right?

02:27:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know they have to compete and they've been frantically trying to turn Google into an AI search engine as well and doing all this stuff. And they I mean they had a lot of this early on but didn't put it out because it was going to harm that business, right, you know. So they played a major role here. I feel like, by any objective measure, they're up there. I think they're actually in better shape than maybe some people think with AI or whatever. But yeah, I mean, you know, apple, infamously, was good about saying, okay, we've got this one dominant product, finally an iPod, like what could replace this and it's like, well, a phone. Okay, so we need to do that. We need to be the ones that replace the thing that we have.

02:28:04
You know, Microsoft was not necessarily great at that, although they did find other successful businesses. Obviously, that company is doing pretty good too. So there's that. But yeah, I mean Google could. Maybe it works out that Google replaces search, you know, or changes search, enough, just like browsers are changing. That it becomes where we get answers, right, because if the Google AI stuff is in search or you go to Gemini and it's some kind of a chat bot experience, whatever, if it's the same thing. You just have your choice of how you're going to get those answers. I guess so we'll see but let's hustle through the.

02:28:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we only have about 20 minutes left in the show.

02:28:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, God, how did that happen?

02:28:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, at the two and a half hour.

02:28:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm so sorry, I didn't realize that. Okay, oh, we were uh, just real quick.

02:28:53
yeah, I can do some quick stuff. I'll just quickly. Um satchin adela sent out an all-employee email discussing the company and, ostensibly, the layoffs and kind of the rationale for it. There was no rationale for the last, but microsoft thought about enough about it. They published on their website so we could all read it and yeah, it's Satya Nadella. It's a lot of words but not a lot of content, so I'll just leave it at that.

02:29:19
In the Xbox gaming space, gamerscom is coming back in August. It's an annual event in Germany. Microsoft always goes or Xbox goes. They will be there.

02:29:28
The big news for me is that they're going to show off and let people use hands on the ROG Xbox ally gaming handhelds for the first time, so that's going to be interesting. Just for that, there's a July Xbox update that is actually just for the PC. I think that might be the first time they've ever done that. And these are just two big bucket features that we've been talking about for months, that they've been testing in the insider program, the Xbox insider program the ability to stream your own games on the PC, including console games, which is well, that's what the game streaming is console games, pretty much. And then cross-device history, which is just an extension of Xbox Play Anywhere where you can move from device to device and I think this is, you know, the Xbox ally gaming handhelds point to this. They're clearly moving toward making Xbox just be like, essentially a PC platform. So, and then Chris has some less good news about that.

02:30:21 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, I just wanted to throw that in there because you know I already saw this happen with the Lenovo Legion Go S that I reviewed is like that if the big push is for Xbox gaming PCs, they're not hitting the price point of the Steam Deck. So the Steam Deck is. I don't know what's going to have to happen there. But if all these Xbox gaming PCs are coming in hundreds of dollars above the Steam Deck, I don't really know how they're going to grow a market there.

02:30:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the operating system that's used by these ally gaming handhelds is Windows, but it's also cut down so that it doesn't have all these background processes going, and the Xbox app is the front end UI, not the shell, or is the shell, I should say. And so this is a way to, you know, get, make Windows, you know, smaller, lighter, whatever fewer resources, so make it more competitive with Linux in that way, which is important, but while retaining the compatibility right. I think the reason you might spend more on a Windows-based gaming handheld would be game availability, because the Steam Deck is Linux and it's whatever subset of games that they offer, but Windows is Epic and GOG and Amazon and whatever like. Wherever you get games, it's just games, right, and xbox, of course, um. So that's the idea. I mean, whether it's feasible or possible, we're about to find out, right, because you know I haven't used one, but I will see if these new um, um, what are they called? La gaming handhelds, if they, if they pull it off, I don't know, I don't know, competition is good.

02:31:54
Yep, yeah, and it's good for Microsoft to be in this space. People have been clamoring for an Xbox game gaming handheld since there was an Xbox right, I mean yeah.

02:32:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, so that's what this is the ally, yeah yeah. The ally, yeah yeah, but you didn't like the legion so much that go just the window.

02:32:12 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
You know they hadn't done the they. They still haven't, I think, released the version of windows.

02:32:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's kind of oh, I see so the os was the windows desktop experience, and it's right, that's not good, yeah, that's not good is that what the one do?

02:32:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they give you a choice like you can buy it with windows or with you can now buy it with steam os, so like literally coming, you know it's not just oh, do you want the steam deck or do you want a windows pc?

02:32:36 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
it's like, do you want the same pc with windows or steam os?

02:32:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, you know that's interesting. All right, we're gonna take a little time out. Uh, when we come back back of the book, uh, we're gonna get some tips and picks and I think we're gonna do a beer pick for, for a change, people are saying, well, there'll be no whiskey, oh no, but there will be beer because, frankly, you can't get through this show without alcohol I refuse to believe anyone spends a lot of time in windows and is not an alcoholic.

02:33:05
I this show and all the shows we do are brought to you by our great friends in the club. Our club twit members. Bless you and thank you. They pay 25. We're. Look, we didn't make 92 billion dollars last quarter, so, I'm sorry, 96.4 billion dollars last quarter, so so much as I wish we had. We do all right, we have advertising but, truthfully, advertising alone doesn't cover our costs Only about 75% of our costs. For the rest, we go to you, our fabulous audience, and we're really grateful to our supporters in the club. What do you get? Well, you get for 10 bucks a month, you get ad-free versions of all the shows. I think that's a pretty good benefit. No more plugs for this or any of our products. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is full of animated GIFs and other fun things. It's also a great place to hang even when there aren't any shows on. So these are people chatting about Windows Weekly right now, but there are other things going on in the club, including special events. In fact, we've got some big events coming up Friday our AI users group. I've invited Alex Lindsay to come and show us how he uses Midjourney, but we'll see what we do there.

02:34:27
We record many of the shows, like Paul's Hands on Windows, that you don't see video if you're not in the club. You only get audio. But in the club you get the video. You also get the live recording. Same with Home Theater Geeks, this one coming up August 4th. I bet you, scott will want to talk about the value shootout. We have a new best TV in the world, king of tvs, and scott likes to talk about that. Our home theater geek himself, ios.

02:34:55
Today, our stacy book club's coming up a week from friday. Very good book called this is how you lose the time, or read it if you can. Uh, we'll be talking about it on friday and I'm trying to get jason snell to stop by because he also thinks this is one of the best books out there. Right after it's photo time with Chris Marquardt, our assignment the word classic. Not too late to take a classic picture. Upload it to Flickr.

02:35:18
We will be covering the Pixel 10 announcement August 20th. And just a little heads up from now on we do all the keynotes in the club only so that we don't get takedowns. Google didn't do it, microsoft didn't do it, apple did it, so we just thought it'd be safer to do it in the club. I'll be sewing during Micah's Crafting Corner, but you could do any craft you want. August 20th.

02:35:43
These are some of the things. Oh, and don't forget, micah's going to do it, he's going to be our dungeon master and he's planning to run a one-shot adventure in the club on Friday, july 24th. What that's wrong? Oh, next year. Oh, okay, he wants a lot of time to plan this adventure. In fact, he's giving you some time to take the poll about how we should do this. All of this by way of making the club be a great destination for people who care enough to support what we do. It's your reward. If you're not in the club, twittv slash club twit. Please join. We would really love to have you. Now it's time for our tips of the week. Let's kick things off with mr paul thurot.

02:36:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, you're both in this one yeah, we, yeah, we both have a, a tip and a pick, okay, and then of course, we're both in the yeah. So I we've already kind of talked about this, but chris and I are going to continue partnering on newsletters, so I will support him the work he's doing. So it's going to be fun, and so I guess, uh, it won't be till mid-august where this this is is all comes together. But we'll get together before then figure out exactly how this is going to work. But, yeah, stay tuned. So that's something to look forward to.

02:36:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you subscribe to the newsletter now, will you automatically get subscribed to the new one? Yes, okay, so don't, you don't have to. If you're actually, you should go right now to Windows Intelligence and subscribe you should, and then that way you'll have it and you won't have to worry about where it's going, because you'll go with it.

02:37:15 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
That's right.

02:37:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yes.

02:37:21 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yes, yeah. And then, in terms of tip, I also wanted to mention, since we're in time, but click-to-do and everything, the snipping tool on Windows 11, the OCRr feature in there is so good and still almost no one knows about it. Um, you know, you can just hit print screen or windows shift s, I think, and then just, you know, select some text and copy paste and anything. And it's funny because that's one of the key features of click to do if you, if you have a, uh, you know, copilot plus pc, but it's really useful, like on windows 11 pc and also in windows 10, you can do that with a power toys text extractor if you download power toys. So you know, the intraday ocr is like one of my favorite things, honestly on, even like a martin smartphone where you can kind of select text and it's like yep, you know, I think, don't, don't miss out on that feature, because that's you can also just right click on an existing image and open with snipping tool and do the same thing.

02:38:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's it's, it's become incredibly versatile. It's really nice. The app pick is also sort of a tip. I had gotten into perplexity comment right on through the wait list, started, wrote about it and someone wrote in and said this is going to sound strange, but if you have a Samsung device, download the Perplexity app from the Galaxy store, sign in. However, you sign in and you'll get Perplexity Pro, which is $20 a month, free for a year. What I was like come on, there's no way. I already paid for it. I did it. It worked. It's weird because it doesn't say it doesn't be like hey, congratulations, you got, you know a year. It doesn't say anything, but the Propexly app shows pro and the thing. And then you get an email that says hey, you're you signed up for a year and I'm like wow, so I, my wife does it yeah.

02:39:01
It's. I look this could be limited to the United States or something, or it could be limited to whatever, I don't know, but I I know of at least five people now have done this and it's pretty silent about it. But it works fine, like it works great. So I wouldn't normally go to the galaxy store, but you know exactly why not?

02:39:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's wild.

02:39:23 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, it's crazy and yeah yeah, I also did that a while ago and it works and it's a reason to use a galaxy store, which is rare. But uh, on windows, like I love auto dark mode so much you can grab it from the store. Like I don't understand why this isn't integrated windows. It's integrated in other platforms. It's integrated with the nightlight I think it's called nightlight feature, um, but you know I I like dark mode sometimes. I don't always want it in dark mode. I usually want it in dark mode if it's night and it's dark, so it will just automatically, you know, work with sunset and flip back and forth. That's just the way it should work, with a toggle and settings.

02:39:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know you cannot agree more. I think the only reason it doesn't is because it's still kind of half baked. There's still too many windows that are not modernized or whatever. But yeah, this is such an obvious feature. It's excellent that you can do it this way.

02:40:15 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Woo-hoo.

02:40:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then Chris has a beer pick to take the place of.

02:40:21 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
So it's halfway between Well, maybe not halfway. It's related to a brown liquor.

02:40:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you have a Mary Jo wig that you could wear?

02:40:28 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
We haven't had beer in a long time so I used to live in eugene, oregon, and there's a brewery out of there called ale song and they do a lot of bourbon barrel age beer. So this is, uh, both a beer and, well, it is a beer but it is related to liquor, so it's part way in between, um, and I don't know. I just really like bourbon barrel age beers in general, and this beer you'll have to pretend it says Rhino Suit because most of them are called Rhino Suit, but I didn't have the Rhino Suit in my basement. But it's basically the same thing.

02:41:01
And I wanted to talk not about the tasting notes but about just the cool story that I think I may have heard from them when I was there.

02:41:15
Like, why would you call a beer rhino suit? And you know the story they say is when they were starting up a business. You know they were talking to a friend who's a winemaker and he said well, running a business is about putting the people put walls in front of you every single day and try to stop you from doing things and what you have to do when, when someone puts a wall in front of me, I put on my rhino suit and I just break through that wall over and over and over and, uh, they thought it was a funny story and they called their first beer rhino suit because it was about, I mean, it's it's about business and it's about honestly, anything in life about, you know, breaking down barriers and stuff like that. So I apologize to anyone who's expecting a lot of tasty notes, although it it does taste very good and like it's dark and rich and whatever. And if you are near the you know Pacific Northwest, uh, alesong is great, so I would recommend picking that up.

02:41:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice.

02:42:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I just got a Microsoft 10 K email Cause I get alerts that means they're probably are about to, or just did release their earnings.

02:42:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, we have a whole three minutes left. You could yeah, I could cover this extensively you know if edge would just work?

02:42:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, they did so. Microsoft revenues of 76.4 billion, by the way, 20 billion less than google. That's amazing percent. That income is close though 27.2 billion, up 24% year over year. And then I can't. I'm not sure how much I could do, like off the fly, but just reading this yeah, windows OEM and devices revenue up 3%. Xbox content and services, re Activision up 13%. Yeah, you got the idea. So, yeah, fundamentally, productivity and business processes, which is Microsoft 365, biggest business again, because remember they pulled the revenues out of Windows for that part of it. Revenue, intelligent Cloud almost $30 billion. More. Personal computing is still stuck in the $13 billion range $13.5. So, yeah, I think they're going to be okay too.

02:43:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in the 13 billion range, 13.5. So yeah, um, I think they're going to be okay too. Yeah, yeah, but interesting that uh google has done so much. Yeah, better, tomorrow we get the apple.

02:43:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, results so that amazon is going to have to happen within the next couple of days too I don't think anybody's going to approach 90.

02:43:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was it?

02:43:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
92?, 92., 96. So I think Apple well, apple could be up there. Amazon will be over a hundred. I mean they'll. You know, amazon just didn't. They just have their prime day thing. I was at that quarter right. So there'll probably be. These companies are all going to be okay, guys, don't you're worried, but it's a load off my mind, these little american mom and pop stars.

02:43:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, they're gonna be okay.

02:43:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, I picked a good time to invest in technology, ladies and gentlemen, yep, uh, bad time to become a microsoft employee, but you know other than that you know, but that's why the stock goes up.

02:44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, yeah, employees hit door, stock go up. I know I I'll never understand this world ever oh well, I hope they have options as they leave. Yeah, yeah, ladies and gentlemen, we have come to the conclusion of this fabulous episode of windows weekly. Chris hoffman, thank you, yes, thank you he lives in new england new england. I live in old mexico I also live in old mexico, but we call it california now um, chris.

02:44:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, I'll start to interrupt. They want it back um, so I don't know.

02:44:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They can have it as far as I'm concerned I would like to be a part of the proud turns out there's some lingering resentment. Uh over, you took our state. We still have the missions. All the Spanish missions are still here. Chris is, of course, at chrisbhoffmancom. Don't forget the B, Otherwise you will get the Zimbabwean actor or something else. I don't know what you're going to get, but if you go there and I would recommend you do sign up for the Windows Intelligence newsletter, which features Chris and Paul Thorat You'll also get free copies of Paul's Windows 11 and Windows 10 field guides, just for signing up. That's a pretty good deal. Chris and Paul are migrating, but if you sign up now, you will migrate along with them. That's the good news. Are you? Are you going to change the name, Chris?

02:45:35 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
Yeah, the name is changing, chris, what?

02:45:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is that name?

02:45:40 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
I could say it, but it'll be so much better once it all is released at once.

02:45:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think he's chosen a good name and a good format, and we'll see what.

02:45:47 - Chris Hoffman (Guest)
But I think it'll be. I think it'll be a lot of fun I'm very excited.

02:45:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, chris, I appreciate your filling in. Richard will be back next week, but chris hoffman and we really appreciate it, chris thanks so much this was so much funcom.

02:45:58
Paul thorat is at thoratcom and, of course, leanpubcom for his books. Everybody should go and sign up to the windows intelligence newsletter, and then you will never lose track of these two, as much as you might. Try, I know, try as you might, we do windows weekly on wednesdays uh, right about 11 am. Pacific 2 pm eastern, 1800 utc. Watch us do it live if you wish. If you're in the club, of course, you get behind the velvet rope access in the club to discord, but you can also watch it. It's open to the public. The unwashed masses may wash, watch and wash at youtubecom, twitchtv, xcom, tiktok, facebook, linkedin and kick. We're on all of the platforms, and if you chat with us on those platforms, I'll see it here in my unified chat screen, so that's a good way to participate in the show. After the fact, though, of course, you can watch the show or listen to it at any time. Download a copy from twittv slash www. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video Great way to share clips. But of course, the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way, you'll get it automatically.

02:47:07
As soon as we're done, and if your podcatcher allows reviews. Please give us a five-star, a plus thumbs up review. Give, whatever it is, five clippies. Whatever it is that they, whatever they use, you give us, you give us all of them. All right, thank you very much for your participation and we thank you for being here. We'll see you next time. Win winners and dozers on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.