Windows Weekly 963 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.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. A look back at Windows 11 in the year 2025, inundated with new features. We'll cover them all. We'll also talk about AI. An exclusive interview, not ours, but an interview with the head of Microsoft's AI revealed quite a bit. And Paul's game of the year. You won't believe it. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:00:27]:
Podcasts you love from people you. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Ferrata and Richard Campbell. Episode 963, recorded Wednesday, December 17, 2025. I've got an apple guy. It's time for Windows Weekly. Why, hello, you winners and you dozers. Here we are, our last show of 2025.

Leo Laporte [00:01:00]:
Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell. Actually, technically, it's the last show we're doing, but we did a show for Christmas Eve in which there was imbibing and storytelling and a fire, a roaring fire.

Richard Campbell [00:01:14]:
It was.

Leo Laporte [00:01:15]:
It was a cozy. The cozy edition of Windows Weekly next week for Christmas Eve.

Richard Campbell [00:01:21]:
That was really fun.

Leo Laporte [00:01:22]:
It was. Thank you guys for doing that. Richard, I see you've got the flannels on, which means you're back in British Columbia.

Richard Campbell [00:01:28]:
The first thing I grabbed. I've got to put it on. It's the last show of the year. Gotta go with a Canadian Texas out here.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:34]:
Can I wrap my feet in some of that? My feet are freezing.

Leo Laporte [00:01:37]:
It's cold.

Richard Campbell [00:01:38]:
Yeah, it's been proper cold.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:39]:
What does it say? Oh, no, it's actually up to 40.

Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
It's cold.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:42]:
It's been freezing this week.

Leo Laporte [00:01:44]:
Very cold.

Richard Campbell [00:01:47]:
You know, the ocean keeps it moderate, so it's. It's near freezing, but not quite. Yeah, it's quite stormy around in the area.

Leo Laporte [00:01:53]:
Oh, stormy.

Richard Campbell [00:01:55]:
Yeah. We had a couple power blips and things.

Leo Laporte [00:01:57]:
So does it feel good to sleep in your own bed after all this?

Richard Campbell [00:02:00]:
Well, to be clear, the upstairs above us is totally gutted.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:03]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:02:03]:
They're reho. So I'm sleeping.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:05]:
So he's still not sleeping in his own bed.

Richard Campbell [00:02:07]:
The guest house. Yeah, the guest house.

Leo Laporte [00:02:08]:
But you're not in the boathouse. We thought you might be doing the.

Richard Campbell [00:02:11]:
Show from the boathouse. Yes, but the crew's not in this morning.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:14]:
As recently as 10 minutes ago, Leo, he thought he might be in the boathouse.

Richard Campbell [00:02:17]:
I might have to run.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:17]:
Yeah, the church in America we call.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
It the dog house, but.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:23]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:02:24]:
So ironically, I've got somebody out my window working on our front door. So if you hear a lot of loud noise and buzz, Saws. That's what that's all about.

Richard Campbell [00:02:32]:
Well, that's what I figured my line would be, is if the tile guy showed up and needed to cut tile, then I'll run to the boathouse.

Leo Laporte [00:02:38]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:02:38]:
But if it's just the kitchen guys, they're just moving boxes around. Not a big deal.

Leo Laporte [00:02:42]:
Construction. Construction.

Richard Campbell [00:02:44]:
But it looks like they just came in and did some measuring, dropped some stuff off, and they're leaving again, so I'm glad.

Leo Laporte [00:02:48]:
Hey, I. I've been reading Paul's laptop reviews all year, looking for. I. I wasn't going to buy a new laptop till next year when Apple's releasing its M6 Max with a OLED screen. Because I really like OLED. I've decided I only OLED screens from now on. I just love them.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:05]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:03:06]:
But then with RAM prices, you know, through the roof, I thought maybe I should buy now or forever hold my piece.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:14]:
I mean, the good news, though, is, like, GPU prices don't look as bad anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:03:18]:
I know I don't really need a GPU because I got the desktop. I mean, that's where I don't want a laptop with gpu. But I did want a decent laptop. And so I looked at all your reviews at the OLED choices, and I ended up getting this, which I'm very happy with. The. Which one is carbon?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:34]:
Extra carbon?

Richard Campbell [00:03:35]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:03:35]:
Oh, my gosh. It's like £2.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:37]:
It's such a. I know, it's great. It might be less than 2 pounds.

Leo Laporte [00:03:40]:
I don't know. It is slightly less than 2 pounds. I don'T understand how they get it so light. It's like there's nothing in here.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:45]:
You feel like something's going to be wrong here. But they do a lot of, you know, they hollow out all the little bits they don't need. So it's got a kind of a webby frame to it or whatever, But I'm thrilled.

Leo Laporte [00:03:55]:
And the screen is gorgeous. It's not. It's not touch, which is okay by me. I don't want to get it all fingerprinty. And as you can see, the Windows login has changed quite a bit. Oh, wait a minute. That's not Windows.

Richard Campbell [00:04:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:07]:
Bastard.

Leo Laporte [00:04:09]:
First thing, I started updating, so, you know, it comes with Windows. I started updating an hour later. I said, what am I updating for? I'm going to wipe it off anyway. So I just stopped.

Richard Campbell [00:04:22]:
I'm feeling very smug about building my machines back in July.

Leo Laporte [00:04:25]:
You were good. How much RAM did you put in there?

Richard Campbell [00:04:28]:
Oh, 64 both. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:04:30]:
So this has.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:30]:
That would be like a car payment.

Leo Laporte [00:04:32]:
I know. Yeah. This was about two grand for 32 gigs of RAM, which is enough for me on a laptop.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:37]:
And that's good.

Leo Laporte [00:04:38]:
It's a little scant on the storage. It's only a terabyte. But this is really. I know, isn't that funny?

Paul Thurrott [00:04:44]:
We've come. You know what though? I will say I. I've always kind of dialed in the minimum storage on phones, tablets, computers, whatever. But now that I'm playing video games on computers, I actually need like at least a terabyte. Like just Call of Duty by itself is half.

Leo Laporte [00:04:57]:
That's huge.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:58]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:04:59]:
So I'm not gonna. This is just an Emacs machine, so I don't really need a lot of storage or anything. And at first I put. People are asking which Linux. And it was first cache OS with i3 Windows Manager.

Richard Campbell [00:05:14]:
But.

Leo Laporte [00:05:16]:
It'S a little bit a throwback to the old days where you have to do things like type Start X and to map the keyboard you have to.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:24]:
Did it come on like floppies? Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:05:26]:
How did you. It was. It's a little.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:28]:
It was like a slackware floppy.

Leo Laporte [00:05:30]:
And the thing that was finally driving me crazy, I could not figure out and I tried everything I saw online how to make CAPS lock be control. Because I hate CAPS lock and I always want that. I hit that every time because that's where I think the control key is. So I ended up putting. I thought, well, this is a good time to try POP os. They just released the Cosmic Desktop final, you know, first official version, so. And I'm quite liking it. And I still have, you know, it's got tiling and all that, but.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:54]:
Yeah, I mean, but you kept Windows in like a. Like its own partition.

Richard Campbell [00:05:58]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:59]:
Something. No.

Leo Laporte [00:06:00]:
Wipe the whole drive. No. What do I need Windows for?

Richard Campbell [00:06:04]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:05]:
Which is. See the title of this episode, interestingly, see.

Leo Laporte [00:06:09]:
Command line, baby, Command line. But OLED with a black background in Emacs. Man, that's crisp and sharpened. Yeah. Loving it. So anyway. But that's based on your review. You reviewed it way back at the beginning of the year.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:25]:
But nothing you said is based on my review. So I.

Leo Laporte [00:06:28]:
Not the Linux part, just the hardware part.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:31]:
I don't recognize anything that I would have said in anything you just talked about.

Leo Laporte [00:06:34]:
Oh, you liked how light it was. You said it's well made. You like the screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:38]:
Yes. That machine Perennial is just.

Richard Campbell [00:06:42]:
Yeah. I don't know. There's been a bad. Carbon made.

Leo Laporte [00:06:45]:
It's Funny, because I went when I logged into the Lenovo website and it had my history and I've purchased a few thinkpads in only thinkpads.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:54]:
Is that an Aura edition? I think. Is that the only way you can get that now?

Leo Laporte [00:06:57]:
Yeah, it's Aura. What the hell is that?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:00]:
So Aura is a partnership between intel and Lenovo. So there used to be four, but now there's only three kind of unique features that are, you know, only on those computers.

Leo Laporte [00:07:09]:
That's why this Aura pamphlet is kind of thin.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:13]:
Yeah, there's not much going on there. It's.

Leo Laporte [00:07:15]:
That's it. But it does have a copilot key.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:20]:
Which will be completely useless.

Leo Laporte [00:07:23]:
You know what they do. That's nice, though. There's a little hint because it's got the copilot logo and then a little menu key logo right below it.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:31]:
So that was the old control. The right control, which was the menu key.

Leo Laporte [00:07:36]:
Used to be the menu key.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:37]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:07:37]:
And then there's a fingerprint reader right next to that, which I don't know if I'll be able to get working on that. I probably can, but I'll see drivers.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:44]:
Yeah, I'm not sure.

Leo Laporte [00:07:45]:
It's probably a synaptic.

Richard Campbell [00:07:46]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:07:46]:
I'll have to look and see who makes it there.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:48]:
No, there's. I feel like it's not cinematic, but maybe actually, because it's a. It's one of those Match on. What do you call it? Match on print or whatever it is. It's like all the logic is inside.

Leo Laporte [00:07:59]:
Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Richard Campbell [00:08:00]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:01]:
Match on.

Leo Laporte [00:08:02]:
And I like having a fingerprint reader, I really do. Because then I don't have to, you know, log in and all that stuff. Anyway, I just thought I'd report in. It did. Windows looked very nice on it as.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:12]:
It was up 50 for the brief moment it was. Yeah. No, that's nice.

Leo Laporte [00:08:15]:
I'm sorry. I'm an apostate in this show. I'm a heretic.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:18]:
It's okay. Yeah, I like your kind of a level set. It's okay.

Leo Laporte [00:08:23]:
I apologize.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:24]:
No, it's fine.

Leo Laporte [00:08:25]:
I apologize. I'm going to bow out now and let you real users, you real computer guys do the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:31]:
Yeah, the real computers. Yeah. I mean, so we're hitting the end of the year, literally. Right. So I think Leo said this up front. This is our final, like live show or streamed. It's not really the final show, but the final one where we.

Leo Laporte [00:08:46]:
Final news show. The final one where you're not drunk.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:48]:
Yeah. Normal. Yeah, normal. Show. Oop. And let me get off of these white screens. Choose Louise. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:55]:
So actually there wasn't much going on in Windows this week, but I thought this is maybe the right time to think about this past year and what of the 1177 updates we got to Windows 11 this year, which originally I was going to say 5, and it was like 10, and then I got to 12 or 13. I'm like, all right, I got to stop. I think I only got back to June or July and I was like, it's just too much. But there's a lot of stuff and some of this is just superfluous, not superfluous, surface level kind of stuff, you know, like the Start menu, the dark mode stuff in File Explorer. But, you know, actually going through this, I'm gonna, I, I have to go through this again because I have to do my end of year recap stuff for the site. But it was a big year, really. Even though, you know, Windows 10 went out, obviously, but we got.

Richard Campbell [00:09:47]:
I was still surprised by it. I thought they were going to push it back again. It's just so many seats.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:52]:
It's still supported technically and, you know, we'll see. I don't know, but maybe they wanted.

Richard Campbell [00:09:57]:
The 30 bucks each, you know.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:59]:
Yeah. You know, 25h2, not a big deal in the sense that it's identical to 24H2.

Richard Campbell [00:10:04]:
Well, it is now. I don't think they planned it that way, but that's the way it went down finally.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:08]:
Well, I mean, it's the way it's been for a couple years. Right. Like every supported version of Windows 11 is basically identical from a feature standpoint, but in this case, the underlying part of the foundation or whatever you want to call it is the same as well. Right. So it's not. This is about as minor of an update you can get year over year, but the number of actual functional updates you got is pretty impressive. And actually, as I look at this list, I'm thinking to myself, okay, so here's the next episode of Hands on Windows, but I'll just show you this stuff for here. I will say, looking at actual.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:43]:
The types of internal type features that I at one point had said, we don't really see this stuff in Windows anymore. We're starting to see more of which I like. For example, the security features, you know, that they often talk about at Ignite, like quick machine recovery and administrative protection, which is still half rolled out. And then there's a change coming to Smart App Control. I can't Remember if we discussed this, it's not in the code live yet, but the way it works now is when you first install your computer, it's in kind of like a test mode. If it doesn't find any problems, it will enable itself, but more often than not, it just turns itself off. And once it turns itself off or you turn it off, you can't re enable it. So they're actually going to change that.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:28]:
And you'll be able to toggle this thing on and off like a normal feature, which is kind of cool. And then a lot of this stuff too is kind of the Copilot plus PC stuff, right? So click to do is a huge deal. The supporting external.

Richard Campbell [00:11:44]:
I'm sure this would be the year that would have gone away and it just. Everything's an AI PC.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:48]:
Yes. This is on my list for questions about next year, right?

Richard Campbell [00:11:51]:
Yeah, no kidding.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:52]:
But yeah, there's this matrix of features, right. This is the trying to understand what's going on with Windows 11. So in addition to. Or just Windows, right, In addition to the differences you might see between say, Home and Pro and then Enterprise and whatever else, this has introduced this other sort of SKU as well, and confusing matters. Every PC is an AI PC, sort of. And we have Copilot and other AI features that don't require an MPU or that Copilot plus PC spec. So, you know, just keeping keeping us on our toes, I guess, is the way to kind of say that. But Windows Studio Effects supports external and USB webcams now, which is new.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:32]:
And that's Copilot Plus PC only because it requires the MPU. All Windows PCs do or will soon support external fingerprint readers as well with Windows low ess. So it's the first time they've ever supported any hardware, device or component.

Richard Campbell [00:12:47]:
And these are things that were supposed to be Copilot PC specific. Like when I think about making my workstation into a Copilot plus PC, I need to get one of those readers to be able to have vss.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:58]:
Yeah. If it's a desktop, that would be.

Richard Campbell [00:13:00]:
The path to recall, right? Well.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:06]:
Yeah, actually, yes. Yes. I don't see any reason why. Yes, yes, that's true. Although technically, if you have a Copilot plus PC class cpu, you should still be able to get Recall. You don't have to have Windows hello ESS to get recall. It's just that it would be.

Richard Campbell [00:13:21]:
I thought that was one of the security requirements.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:23]:
That's what I'm. I'm actually doubting myself as I said.

Richard Campbell [00:13:26]:
The bigger one here is, please let my giant GPU be treated as an npu.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:30]:
Yeah, that's not happening, but not yet anyway.

Richard Campbell [00:13:35]:
If they made me buy an NPU card to get that, I think I'd do it only on one of the machines because I think it's ridiculous, but I would do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:44]:
You'd be easier or more likely to find a utility that would make a GPU look like an MPU and just enable this stuff. You know, Like, I. I don't understand how that.

Richard Campbell [00:13:52]:
There's no reason this should already have been resolved. Like I said, I figured this would have been done by now, but somehow they're dragging it out.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:00]:
Yeah, I don't. I feel like there are forces at work here that are beyond our knowledge. You know, that there's agreements with third parties, maybe companies like Qualcomm, that might factor into. There's a lot of stuff going on here. But, yeah, I agree. I'm kind of blown away that this stuff hasn't changed yet. All right, so click to do reside Start menu. You know, it's big widgets, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:27]:
I suspect most people have not seen this yet. I'm going to look at this computer and see what this one has. Yeah, this is still the old one. I've only seen this on one computer, but the new version of widgets is actually quite attractive. And the display.

Richard Campbell [00:14:42]:
You're starting to like this.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:44]:
No. Well, the stories are all still garbage, but the default display is just the widgets, which I think is what most people imagined when they heard about something called widgets. And the Discover feed is on a secondary page and you can replace it. Not that there are other feeds, but I kind of like that they're separated because when I bring that thing up, it's like, I don't care about these stupid MSN news stories, which are terrible. The widget stuff is pretty good, so that's kind of cool. Again, but I've only seen it on a single computer so far. Copilot Vision, which I think is a big deal. I think any AI vision type thing is a big deal.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:16]:
It's a bigger deal on mobile, when you think about it, because you can point your camera at anything. You're out in the world. It's pretty useful like that. But on Windows you can use the camera with it, but it's mostly about what's on your screen. Right. So this thing plus click to do if you have a Copilot plus PC are kind of central to the whole using AI to understand what's going on around you kind of thing, which I think is a big deal. The natural language stuff is a big deal. So think about.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:42]:
These are mostly Copilot plus PC experiences other than the Copilot app itself. Right. Which you could also use this way where instead of clicking on things and doing exactly the right thing, you can just kind of talk to it. Right. And so the agent and settings works this way. Copilot PC, the semantic search and Windows Search. Copilot plus PC but all your interactions just with Copilot. Right, works that way as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:08]:
So that's kind of cool. The the this has happened in two waves. Later in the show we're going to talk about an Xbox update, but it actually impacts Windows. And Microsoft added Bluetooth LE support to Windows earlier in the year, I want to say mid year, but now they're using it in the context of the Xbox stuff. We'll talk about that later. But aside from just discoverability stuff like improved audio quality for whatever, like for game chat, which would be the Xbox thing, but just for voice calls as well. So that like that's actually kind of a big deal. We're seeing that happening on mobile OSes as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:41]:
That's good stuff to me though. And this is I guess semi controversial with some people, but the AI functionality that Microsoft has added to individual apps is often quite good in my opinion. So all those AI functions in Paint, which will vary between a normal computer and a Copilot plus PC, meaning there's more on Copilot plus PC. Some of that stuff is really good. Genitive fill, gender of erase object select, you know, it's just very useful in that kind of creative environment. Photos, same thing. The restyle image stuff is really cool. Super resolution I use all the time.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:19]:
That's an awesome way to upsize any image. So if you have these old scans of old photos, Maybe that are 320 by 240 or something, give this thing a whack because it goes up pretty high and it works really well in my experience. So that's worth looking at. And then most controversial of all across Notepad. Right. And so this one's kind of confusing to me because this one, they're actually going in the opposite direction. But most of the AI features in Notepad will work on any computer. So the writing, help writing tools, whatever they're calling that, summarize, make it longer, make a shorter turn it poem, whatever, that's all kind of cloud based ui, but cloud based AI, if you have a Copilot plus PC, you do have an option now to go in and say, actually I want to do this stuff locally.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:06]:
It's not going to be as good, but it's going to be pretty good. And it works offline, right. So it's kind of an interesting. It'd be better if it just handled that automatically, but maybe it will someday. So that's pretty good. And then snipping tool, same thing. I mean, for me, because I need the mouse cursor in many of my screenshots because I write books and for, you know, site stuff, whatever, I can't use it. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:28]:
But other than that, it's super complete. And there's a bunch of AI functionality in there now which is really useful, including things like Ask Copilot search or Visual search of Bing integration that aren't so much about capturing the screen. Saving a file, which is the typical use of this, like you're taking a screenshot. A lot of this stuff now just works. You're not actually saving the thing, you're just doing something with it and then you can move on from it. You don't have to save the file. Right. And so it sounds non intuitive, but it's.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:57]:
That stuff actually works really well. So, yeah, pretty good. So I'm going to hold it at that because I could go on and on, but, well, full screen experience, I should add that too. So that's in the process of rolling out. But obviously if you have a handheld gaming PC, you're going to want this. But if you're gaming on a laptop or even a PC and you're using a controller, it may make sense to boot into this environment. Actually, even if you're not using a controller, right, because it uses a lot less ram, a lot less going on in the background, you're going to get higher frame rates, etc. You know, it's, it's.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:30]:
It's a good thing to try if you are using a controller. The thing that's fun about it is everything works with the controller. You don't actually. There's not. There's never really that point. You have to pick up the mouse to do anything. So it seems like they've mostly solved that. So, you know, that's pretty good.

Richard Campbell [00:19:46]:
It's cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:48]:
Yeah. So that's the. I guess that's most of the year. I don't know what I'm.

Leo Laporte [00:19:54]:
I was hoping it would take a little longer, but. Okay, good.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:57]:
Sorry.

Richard Campbell [00:19:58]:
By the way, I did find I can get a 40 tops NPU in the M2 form factor for about $200.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:06]:
Right. So if you did that, what happens, though, if you do that and then it doesn't enable anything?

Richard Campbell [00:20:11]:
Well, I presume it won't. Right. Like it's. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:13]:
So, I mean, do you have to reinstall.

Leo Laporte [00:20:16]:
This is a. A CO processor that goes in an M2.2 slot.

Richard Campbell [00:20:20]:
Yeah, it goes in an M2.2 slots. You can do lots of different things. You can get in M2 slots. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:20:24]:
I guess M2 is really just PC. What is it? PCI Express or.

Richard Campbell [00:20:27]:
Yeah, it's PCIe. You're exactly right. It's actually closer to the bus than the slots. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:32]:
So while we usually think of that.

Leo Laporte [00:20:33]:
As being where you put your storage.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:35]:
It'S mostly used for storage. But actually I think. Isn't that the same slot they use for like WI FI cards, essentially, in the little.

Richard Campbell [00:20:40]:
You can put WI FI cards there, too.

Leo Laporte [00:20:42]:
So is the NPU CO processor, Is it a gpu? It's not a gpu.

Richard Campbell [00:20:46]:
It's just actually a npu.

Leo Laporte [00:20:50]:
Who makes those?

Richard Campbell [00:20:52]:
There's a couple of them, but they're all using the same Kinera chip.

Leo Laporte [00:20:54]:
So it's just a Canara can.

Richard Campbell [00:20:56]:
Era is the. Is the.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:58]:
Yeah. Somebody wonder. Yeah. So it's not any of, you know, it's not the, like, whatever the hexagon or whatever they call the.

Richard Campbell [00:21:05]:
Well, because normally they're sock. Right. They're all on the die with the GPU and the cpu.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:10]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:21:11]:
So this.

Leo Laporte [00:21:11]:
Yeah. I didn't know you could buy an NPU separately. That's. That's very interesting.

Richard Campbell [00:21:15]:
Well, and they generally don't offer it because you need the right drivers and things like that. But it is a possibility, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:21:21]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:21:22]:
AMD even threatened to make one on the regular PCIe slot, which wouldn't be hard. It's all the same form factor, essentially.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:27]:
I might not just have a GPU that had both, you know. Yeah, that'd be another way to do it.

Leo Laporte [00:21:34]:
NPU's and GPU's are essentially the same. Yeah, they're related.

Richard Campbell [00:21:39]:
I mean, they're both scalar processors, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:21:41]:
Yeah. But I'm related to my brother. We're not alike at all. I don't know. I mean, your analogy is falling apart pretty quickly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:21:50]:
No, that's really interesting. So Canera C A N E R.

Richard Campbell [00:21:54]:
A K I N A R A kin Kinra.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:59]:
Like Kinsale.

Leo Laporte [00:22:01]:
But they don't sell it direct. You just.

Richard Campbell [00:22:03]:
No.

Leo Laporte [00:22:03]:
And they're now owned by nxp. Apparently they got bought. So this is probably a hot new category. I had no idea you could do this.

Richard Campbell [00:22:14]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:14]:
Not sure it's hot or new, but it's okay. New to me.

Richard Campbell [00:22:19]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:22:21]:
Interesting. Because the next question you have to.

Richard Campbell [00:22:23]:
Ask is, what if I put in two?

Leo Laporte [00:22:26]:
Yeah. And of course PCI Express is not going to be as fast as it is would be on the. On the SoC.

Richard Campbell [00:22:32]:
Yeah. SoC is the. Is the ultimate. But twos are pretty darn fast.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:37]:
What matters.

Richard Campbell [00:22:39]:
Oh, oh.

Leo Laporte [00:22:40]:
Do you want. You know what? I'm going to do an ad while you clean up the mess you've made. Once again, all the rot.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:47]:
What have I done? Let's break. Is going to be sticky now. Sticky.

Leo Laporte [00:22:52]:
What'd you spill?

Paul Thurrott [00:22:54]:
What do you call this?

Leo Laporte [00:22:55]:
Coca Cola Kombucha. Yum. It's not going to be sticky. It's going to be fruity and it's going to have good probiotics.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:03]:
Yes. There's going to be a little lawn growing on here.

Leo Laporte [00:23:06]:
I want to show you this while we're. While you're cleaning up, I have something to talk about. Our sponsor for this segment. This looks like, you know, a nice picture hanging on the wall, right? Actually, I've got the stand on it. I'll take the stand off. But this is the new Aura Inc. Digital frame. No, that's not my mom.

Leo Laporte [00:23:29]:
Although I'm sending mom one for Christmas. Our sponsor for this segment on Windows Weekly. You know the name Aura, I'm sure, but they consistently, year after year, have been picked as the best digital frames. But some people don't want another screen in the house. And they really don't want another screen on the wall. That means you gotta plug it in. It's a screen. It looks like a screen.

Leo Laporte [00:23:49]:
I mean, we've got enough screens in our lives. Wouldn't it be nice if you could change the photos on your walls every day? But it's like a regular picture on the wall. That's this. The new Aura Ink. It is cordless. It is a color. Right now I got a black and white photo. Let me put a.

Leo Laporte [00:24:07]:
Let me. By the way, I wanted to show you because black and white looks great. This is an image I took of a character in town. This is their new cordless color E paper frame. And the technology in this is mind blowing. Meet Ink, Aura's first ever cordless color E paper frame. Featuring a sleek 0.6 inch profile and a softly lit 13.3 inch display. Ink feels like a print, functions like a digital frame.

Leo Laporte [00:24:36]:
And perhaps most importantly, it lives completely untethered by cords with a rechargeable battery that lasts up to three months on a single charge. Unlimited storage and the ability to invite others to add photos via the aura frames app. It's the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for. And the images just look great. Now I have it set. You can. You can have it change every two hours if you want. I change it overnight so.

Leo Laporte [00:25:05]:
Because I want it, like to enjoy the picture for 24 hours, like look.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:08]:
At it on the wall.

Leo Laporte [00:25:09]:
That's nice. I don't want to think of it as a digital frame. I want to think of it as a photo on my wall that just happens to change every day. And with that, I got at least three months. I charged it when I first got it. I just charged it again last week. So it goes a long time. They put so much engineering into this.

Leo Laporte [00:25:29]:
It's really a breakthrough in epaper technology, Inc. Takes. There's millions of tiny ink capsules in here, transforms them into your favorite photos, rendering them in kind of this beautiful vintage tones. They put a lot of thought into this. There's a lot of design innovation. The graphite inspired bezel really looks like a real frame. The paper textured matting on this looks so good. It looks like a piece of decor, not a device.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:57]:
There.

Leo Laporte [00:25:58]:
There's a more colorful photo. See, that's off the coast of Newport. Newport, Rhode Island. And unlimited free photos. You just download the app, connect it to WI Fi. So it's a great gift for grandma. Somebody else in your family that you want to share pictures with. And they just added.

Leo Laporte [00:26:14]:
It's not in the ad because it just added it. A new feature where you can text. You have to obviously authenticate. But once you authenticate and you can send a link to people, other family members saying, hey, if you want to send images to my Aura inc. Here's the link. And now you can use text messaging, which is great because how often you know. So for instance, what I'm going to do is load this up before I send it to grandma. I'm going to set it up for.

Leo Laporte [00:26:39]:
Load it up with pictures from, you know, the family photo album. All those slides that we would only see once a year because they'd bring out the Kodak carousel and set up the screen and. And then you don't see them again for another year. She loves this. She loves this because it's great to see those old pictures, right? And she knows everybody and brings back memories. But now I can text. We're sitting around the tree opening presents. Just text pictures of the grandkids to grandma and she'll get them right away.

Leo Laporte [00:27:09]:
That's so cool. What a great gift for anyone, especially someone who's not a digital guru or somebody who just doesn't like screens. You don't want to add another screen to your life. You're adding a photo, a photo frame that just happens to change every night. It also has a really cleverly designed magnetic stand that just kind of clips in, just clicks in, and then stays in. And so you could put this on your desk anywhere, and then it can go either way. Again, it could be horizontal, the portrait, or it can be in landscape or in portrait mode, depending on what. And if you have a picture that is a landscape shot like this and you turn it on its side.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:53]:
And.

Leo Laporte [00:27:53]:
You turn it on its side, it will automatically rotate, but then you'll have borders. So I, you know, I keep it in landscape mode because most of my pictures are in landscape mode. Why have all the photos, all those great photos? I have 60,000 photos that no one ever sees because they're on the hard drive. Why have them stuck on the hard drive?

Richard Campbell [00:28:10]:
Put them on the wall.

Leo Laporte [00:28:11]:
Sleek, subtle, and stunning. Ink blends the warmth of a printed photo with the versatility of an e paper frame. And no chords, no fuss. Just your memories beautifully displayed wherever you want them. Head to auraframes.com Inc. To see for yourself. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. That's auraframes.com inc.act now they're offering a limited time holiday discount then soon though.

Leo Laporte [00:28:35]:
So aura. Auraframes.com inkinc I've been changing it for the show, but I really like the idea of changing only overnight. So that way, every morning it's kind of like, oh, what a nice picture. What fun. Really is a great gift. Grandma's gonna love it. Auraframes.com Inc. Thank you, Aura, for your support.

Leo Laporte [00:28:58]:
Paul, I presume, has cleaned up the kombucha. There's kombucha all over the highway.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:05]:
It's cleaned up as much as it can be cleaned up.

Leo Laporte [00:29:08]:
You didn't spill it in the computer?

Paul Thurrott [00:29:10]:
No, it was all over the desk and my stapler and my tape.

Leo Laporte [00:29:14]:
That's the last thing you would want to do is spill a kombucha into a computer.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:18]:
Kombucha explodes. You know, like you pour it and it's like it just bubbles out like a volcano.

Leo Laporte [00:29:23]:
Yeah, not good for the motherboard. I spilled coffee into a Mac laptop. Once I brought it into the guy.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:29]:
That could be the end of it. You know, the Guy.

Leo Laporte [00:29:31]:
It was the guy because it had cream and sugar. And the guy. I spilled it in there and immediately, of course, took it apart and, you know, dry. Tried to dry it out, brought it into the guy. He said he smelled coffee into it. Smell coffee into it, didn't you? I said, yeah. He says, I smell it.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:47]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:29:47]:
And he opened it up and. And we looked at the motherboard and it was like, short shirted all the way. You're gonna have to replace the motherboard. There's no way to. No way I can fix this. And a new motherboard for a Mac laptop. You might as well just buy a new laptop.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:00]:
Check it.

Richard Campbell [00:30:01]:
Yeah, it's everything on.

Leo Laporte [00:30:02]:
I think it's true for everything. It'd probably be true for this Lenovo. Don't spill coffee or Kombucha into.

Richard Campbell [00:30:08]:
Not a good thing.

Leo Laporte [00:30:09]:
Your devices. All right, so I've given Paul a little respite. He is refreshed. Did you get a new can of Kombucha?

Paul Thurrott [00:30:19]:
No, most of it's still in the glass. It's just that I overflowed.

Leo Laporte [00:30:22]:
Oh, you slopped it. Oh, that's. Look, I still.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:25]:
God, what a mess. This will be fine. It'll be fine.

Leo Laporte [00:30:27]:
What flavor are we having?

Paul Thurrott [00:30:28]:
I'm going to throw away this whole room. It's mixed berry sparkling fermented tea with probiotic.

Leo Laporte [00:30:37]:
Probiotic. Probiotic, yeah. They call it tea if it's not alcoholic because normally kombucha is alcoholic because that's how you. Sorry.

Richard Campbell [00:30:46]:
Like you were drinking it for the flavor.

Leo Laporte [00:30:48]:
I drink health aid and they call it a probiotic tea because I think. I mean, it's got trace alcohol.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:54]:
Yeah, we don't have any. We don't usually have juice. You know, like, I kind of want something that's like cranberry juice. Be good. Oh, but yeah, festive for the cider would be fantastic. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:31:05]:
We used to. I mean, you. Gosh, you. You could go out to the orchards where you are, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:09]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:31:09]:
Oh, yeah, we used to do that in the fall. It was so fun. We go out to Macintosh apples, which they don't put in stores because they don't wear very well. They get all.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:18]:
I mean, we have an apple guy, Leo. I don't know you have an apple.

Leo Laporte [00:31:21]:
Man, but I have a guy for that. Yeah, but we would go and you go and you get the apples. You can pick them yourself. You. You get them. They're delicious, Max, and just. Just perfect for the season. And then as you're leaving, you get a jug of apple cider.

Leo Laporte [00:31:35]:
Like a big jug.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:36]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:31:37]:
And then sometimes if you're crazy, you leave it. If you can't fit in the fridge, you put on the porch because it's freezing, and it turns into the trunk of the car. We talked about this last week, and it turns into hard ice.

Richard Campbell [00:31:48]:
Talking about apple jacket. Yeah. Yeah. Taking the ice out.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:51]:
Yeah. The one thing we never did when Richard was here that we talked about was like. Like a mulled something like a mulled wine or.

Leo Laporte [00:31:58]:
It smells so good in the house, too. You do that.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:00]:
Or like a. What do you call it? Like a butter. What is that thing? Like the hot buttered rum. Kind of good.

Leo Laporte [00:32:07]:
Just get a big pot, put a bunch of apple cider in there, some cloves, some garlic, a couple of peel. I don't know, whatever card.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:16]:
We're overdoing this.

Leo Laporte [00:32:17]:
Don't put garlic in it.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:18]:
Last week we were away, but the week before, we go to the farmer's market, we see our apple guy, and we bought a bunch of apple cider. It's like my form of working out. I just carry giant jugs of apple cider around the farmer's market.

Leo Laporte [00:32:31]:
Apple cider is the best thing in the world. Not apple cider.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:33]:
She's like, are you sure we need as much? I'm like, I'm sure we need more than this much, but this is all I can carry.

Leo Laporte [00:32:38]:
Oh, my God. Now I have a craving for apple cider.

Richard Campbell [00:32:40]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:40]:
Yeah. It's so good.

Richard Campbell [00:32:42]:
All right.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:43]:
So good.

Richard Campbell [00:32:43]:
It's also the one thing you can do, and I think I did this on the show with apples that don't taste good is they still make good cider.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:50]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:32:50]:
Or make pies. I mean, tart apples make the best pies.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:53]:
Yeah, but there's tart good for that script. If your bananas are brown, just make banana bread.

Leo Laporte [00:33:00]:
Banana bread. You know what I do with bananas? I mean, this is. I'm sorry, you want to talk about windows? Never mind. But I won't tell you.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:06]:
No. What are you doing? Good. What now? I want to know what.

Leo Laporte [00:33:08]:
I let them get really brown.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:33:10]:
On the outside.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:11]:
You let them get brown? Like. Like a madman.

Leo Laporte [00:33:13]:
Well, Lisa. Well, she won't eat a banana that has any spots at all, which I think is crazy. They're not good until they're. You gotta have spots on them.

Richard Campbell [00:33:21]:
That's when they're sweet.

Leo Laporte [00:33:22]:
When it's flecked with brown and has a golden hue Bananas are the very, very best for you I could sing a song But I won't anyway, you open them up, you cut them up into little chunks. You put them in a Ziploc bag, you put them in the freezer, and you freeze them. And you do that until you have four or five bananas worth. Then you put them in the blender, frozen, maybe put in a little bit of vanilla. If you want, you could put in some other fruit, but I don't. I just put in a little. A dab of vanilla and maybe a little liquid if you need it. And you blend it, and it makes banana ice cream.

Leo Laporte [00:33:55]:
That's so good and so good for you because it's like eating a banana. It's not like eating ice cream, but it. It scratches that itch.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:03]:
Well, now, I. I'm sure I told the story that when it happened, but we were in Mexico last year sometime. I don't remember. We went to a little abirote. It's one of those little corner stores getting whatever, you know, milk and whatever. We don't really cook at home or eat at home that much, but we're standing in line, and I was like, you know, I'd like to get a banana, but I don't want a bunch of bananas. I just want a banana.

Leo Laporte [00:34:23]:
A banana.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:23]:
Do you think they would sell me a banana? And she's like, yeah, probably. So I didn't want to tear it off. The little, you know, the little bunch.

Leo Laporte [00:34:29]:
How do you say banana in Spanish?

Paul Thurrott [00:34:32]:
I think this is banana.

Leo Laporte [00:34:34]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:34]:
It's interesting. It's good. Yeah, I'm actually not.

Leo Laporte [00:34:36]:
Seems like a Spanish word, but who knows?

Paul Thurrott [00:34:37]:
I think it is. I think it's just banana. Banana or banana. Yeah, it's probably the same word. Anyway, the old lady in front of us finally gets up to the counter and she. I didn't hear what she said, but what I saw was the guy take the top of a thing of aspirin, take one aspirin out and give her the aspirin she paid for. One aspirin. I looked at Stephanie, I was like, get a banana.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:58]:
Like, we're definitely. I'm definitely going to be able to buy one aspirin. I just want one banana. Aspirin, like, aspirin, like what? Okay. Banano.

Leo Laporte [00:35:09]:
That's how you say it.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:10]:
Banano. Banano. Or platano.

Leo Laporte [00:35:15]:
Platano, which is a plantain, which. Yeah, but I bet the bananas in Mexico City are not like the bananas here. They're. They're more.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:22]:
They're often just plantains. Although. Well, no, but the banana I was talking about in that store, that was just A banana. That was a normal banana. Like as I know, a banana.

Richard Campbell [00:35:30]:
So it wasn't Cavendish.

Leo Laporte [00:35:32]:
A Dole.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:32]:
It's a dole. Is that what it is?

Leo Laporte [00:35:35]:
Is that where they are? Cavendish.

Richard Campbell [00:35:36]:
Cavendish, yes. Which replaced the Gros Michel when the last blight went through. And now the blight's wiping out the Cavendish as well.

Leo Laporte [00:35:42]:
Yeah. Because we have a. We have a monoculture of bananas. Yes, you need to have.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:48]:
That's what big banana wants you to think.

Leo Laporte [00:35:49]:
Big banana wants a banana monoculture. Ask your banana man about that.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:55]:
Let me tell you, they don't have a banana man, sadly. But try it. Maybe in Mexico I could have one. I not here.

Richard Campbell [00:36:02]:
You could try a red Dhaka. Like there's some pretty cool bananas.

Leo Laporte [00:36:05]:
Oh, there's so many better bananas than the dole.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:08]:
All right, so we've lost 90% of our audience. Let's so. La la la la. So over a year and a half ago I went out to New York. I think it was early May, sorry, early April, maybe late March. And this was going to be my first hands on experience with what, you know, Snapdragon X Elite. And I was worried about it because they had announced this in October. I kept waiting for the other.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:35]:
Every generation of this thing has been terrible. There's no way this is going to stand up to what they were saying. And it was better than I thought. I walked away from this very excited. But one of the things I was really surprised by was we got to play games on this thing and this was never going to be the thing. I never understood this control. There was a racing game, I think Baldur's Gate was one of the games. And they all seemed to be working great.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:03]:
And I was like, okay, that's, that's a surprise.

Richard Campbell [00:37:06]:
And emulation too, Right?

Paul Thurrott [00:37:08]:
Yeah, they're right. That's what. Yeah, that's what's amazing. Right. And so when we got back, rather when we got the actual copilot plus PCs, the first gen versions, the first wave of them of course installed a bunch of games. It doesn't work at all. It's terrible. So it's the one thing about Snapdragon X which I'd never expected it to work anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:27]:
That was that most to me, the kind of cardinal sin of technology which is it's not consistent. Right. Every once in a while you'd find a game that worked fine, but most games didn't. And even those that could work, you had to do a lot of work to make it work. And it was just too inconsistent. Right. And so Even though there were a handful of games that worked pretty well, I was like, okay, you're not going to buy it for this reason and you're not going to also see it's.

Richard Campbell [00:37:51]:
Mostly anti cheat problems. Right? It was avx and stuff like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:54]:
Well that and you know, just. Yeah, I mean that's a big chunk of it for sure. But it's not just that. Although yeah, maybe it's hard to say I mean at the time. So obviously there are these technologies built into Windows, Auto super resolution, et cetera. We can run the game at a much lower res, kind of make up for the emulation hit. But it looks great to you. So even though it's running at 1366, it looks like it's running at 1920 maybe or something like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:19]:
That's the theory. But it was just such an inconsistent experience. Just not something I could recommend. And I have, I mean in my case personally, I have obviously these other computers floating around so I can use other computers to play games. No big deal. And I don't, you know, when I travel and stuff, the battery life and all the other good stuff about Snapdragon outweighs that. It's not a big, big deal. But there have been a lot of improvements since then.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:41]:
Right. Qualcomm partnered with Epic Games to bring Fortnite to Windows 11 on ARM. Also the anti cheat stuff. Right. Theirs is called EasyAnti Cheat. And then there was additional work done on the Prism emulator by Microsoft. I think it's called AVX compatibility which is one of those things that just brings in a whole class of games.

Richard Campbell [00:39:04]:
Coming at it from both sides. Right. Like there is improve the emulator to tolerate more stuff. There's fix the underlying code so it doesn't conflict in the first place. There's do ARM based compilations and actually make it a native game.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:17]:
This is the big thing. Yeah. And that's, that's going to be. I feel like Microsoft's going to have to make that part of what I'm going to call the Windows Xbox or Xbox P, whatever you want to call that, like the spec. Like if you're going to publish a game to this thing, you have to at least compile it for ARM or something. We'll see if they force it on people. But later in the year though. Well, a.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:39]:
The Fortnite shipped right. Fairly recently, I guess it was. Qualcomm came up with something called Snapdragon Control Panel which isn't as good as I thought it was. But the primary use case for this thing is make sure you have the very latest GPU drivers and AVX support, which will help with the performance of games. You can also use it to tweak games, but it's manual. It's not like an automatic process. You know, a lot of like AMD or Nvidia software will see what the games that are in your computer and like optimize them for the. Whatever the graphics chipset is.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:09]:
And it's kind of a neat thing. We don't really have that on ARM yet. Hoping we will.

Richard Campbell [00:40:13]:
But it reminds me of all the shimming you could do for Windows compatibility back in the day too. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:19]:
I think they're still doing it. I think that's. I mean, honestly, it's probably the same technology. It's probably the same BASIC subsystem is doing it. But Microsoft also enabled people with Windows 11 on ARM PCs copilot plus PCs to have the full Xbox app experience. Right. So the way that it worked until, I don't know, three, four months ago was you only got the, if you had a, at the time, Game Pass ultimate subscription, you would see the games you could stream and that was it. They were working anything, but you couldn't see anything else in your library.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:52]:
Now you can see the full library. And there again, I was hoping for something a little more automatic. Maybe there should be a button somewhere it can click and say, just show me the games that I know are going to work on this system. So maybe I have Game pass to get them through there. So I did something stupid like I installed the latest Call of Duty at the time and that took half the day. And guess what? It didn't work. You know, it didn't even run and.

Richard Campbell [00:41:11]:
It was 500 gigs or 300 gigs.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:14]:
Well, now it is. Yeah. So the base game is 300 gigs and then it's about 500 with. If you install two and Modern Warfare two and three. Yeah. Incredible. It's just incredible.

Richard Campbell [00:41:23]:
It's a lot of disk space.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:24]:
Yeah, it's just, just astonishing. So I thought, you know, I'm going to try this again. You know, I've been talking about that win 11 debloat software. I applied that to my first. I reset my Surface laptop, did a bit, a normal install, use Windows 11 DeBloat to literally clean it up, which worked great, works fine in arm. And I'm sitting there staring at this thing. It's got like a terabyte drive, it's got nothing on it. I'm going to install some games, I'm going to See what's going on here and see if anything's changed.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:54]:
And from a high level, I will say it's still inconsistent. This is the problem. I wish that Snapdragon software or Windows itself, or just the Xbox app or whatever you want to say would automatically optimize for these chips and just make it as good as it could be. Right. Or at least give you a screen. We can, you know, just something. But it's not automatic. You have to really play with it.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:13]:
And yeah, you know, again, it reminds.

Richard Campbell [00:42:16]:
Me of shims like you, you don't. You can't really have a plan on how to do this. You have to try, just try stuff and see what happens.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:23]:
Right. And unfortunately, because these things are games, sometimes those things take a while. Right. You know, you have to game run this utility, make a few settings changes or one, you know, go back and rerun the benchmark thing that might be in the game or whatever. Like I did this. I spent the better part of an entire day just doing what I just described. Fortnite, by the way, works great. Like it works great.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:45]:
No problem. Yeah, just normal. I had never. I mean, I played Fortnite, but just to kind of see it. I've actually been playing Fortnite. I think I mentioned this maybe last week. One time I actually came in third. It was the closest I've ever gotten.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:59]:
Still one time I came in 18th, but I usually get wiped out pretty quick. But I kind of like it. You know, it's cartoony obviously, but whatever. But that works great and it looks awesome on that screen. There's something about the screen. It must be HDR or whatever, but it's just gorgeous. Like it's super rich, contrasty, really nice. That works great.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:16]:
Control, which by the way, they just announced a sequel is coming soon. This was one I had tried that day in April or March, whenever that was a year and a half ago. So I knew it worked and it still works. And of course it does. Of course now it's running on a Surface laptop full res, so it's like almost 2,500 by 1650ish, you know, because it's three by two display, but 30, maybe 30 to 40 frames per second depending. I at some point played with the resolution and tried to improve the frame rate and all that stuff. But it's, you know, a single player game. It works fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:52]:
It's nice looking. You know. The beefiest game that I got to work well on, this is that Callisto Protocol game. Yeah, this is a third person, I guess Adventure shooter kind of a thing. It's atmospheric, a lot of good sound effects, etc. I had tried this, I guess last summer, a year ago summer, and it was unplayable, basically. I think it was just bad. And when I ran the benchmarking on this, it said that it's running at like 18 frames per second.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:21]:
I'm like, okay, this is going to be garbage. But when I ran the game and you can leave the counter on the screen, it was like 30 to 35. And again, it's a single player game, so actually it's pretty good. I suppose it could be like an action sequence where maybe it slows down a little bit, but it looks great. And this is the game where I noticed there's like an Auto sr, which is the auto super resolution feature. There's actually a widget in the game bar now for this so you can see if it's on or not. You can control it from there. That was actually pretty useful.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:51]:
And I bumped it down to 1920 by 1280 and I think it was. I think it was in the 35 to 40 frames per second range. So honestly. So it looks good and it runs well and, you know, good. I had recently installed pubg. This is a game I hadn't looked at in a long time. But if you are into this kind of thing, you know that it was out before Fortnite. Big thing, like battle royale games, huge.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:16]:
And then Fortnite happened and it's not as huge, but I was looking. I don't remember where I came across it, but I saw some screens from this. I'm like, this is actually really good looking. It's like a realistic kind of Call of Duty looking thing. And I was like, it's not like cartoonish. It's not like Overwatch or Fortnite. I was like, okay, can I give this a shot? So I played this on some of the intel computers. You know, it's fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:37]:
It does not work. It just doesn't work at all. It took whatever amount of time to install, but does not work. And so the final one, I already knew Call of Duty wasn't going to work, but I tried Battlefield 6, so I don't remember.

Richard Campbell [00:45:51]:
That would be better.

Leo Laporte [00:45:52]:
It's huge.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:53]:
Well, so Battlefield 6 is interesting because it's, you know, competing with Modern or with Call of Duty. It's better looking. You know, if you play this thing, it's astonishing, like how realistic the graphics are in multiplayer. Like it doesn't make any sense. It's beautiful. It's not really. You know, I'm so used to the way Call of Duty plays. It's not exactly the same and it's expensive.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:17]:
You know, I bought it on sale, you know, Steam, I think it was Steam. Steam, yes. Like on Steam or maybe Epic, it doesn't matter. But they were having a sale and I was like, all right, I'll give this thing a shot. Yeah, it does not run, so there's nothing I could do to make this thing run. It just didn't even come close. It never got off the desktop. So you know, if you kind of add that all up, it's like, I guess I'm shooting three for five.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:39]:
But of the three that worked, I mean honestly, they all kind of over performed if that makes sense. They look and play better than I thought they were going to. The games that didn't run, especially Battlefield 6, like that's, that's no surprise. I mean this thing is not designed for that. It's a, it's, you know, kind of a high end game. But so I would say the needle is moved. It's moved in the right direction, but it's still in the same general space. Meaning it's just not.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:06]:
You don't buy this computer for this. Right. Although by the way, if you like Fortnite, that's an awesome experience. So if that's kind of your game and that's like all you care about or you care about like maybe lower end games where it doesn't matter. Honestly, it's pretty great. Like it looks gorgeous, but it's still a very kind of iffy experience.

Richard Campbell [00:47:29]:
It speaks to. Is the ultimate solution here. Just they have to make him native.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:33]:
Yeah. No, yes, 100%.

Richard Campbell [00:47:35]:
So because I think this is the direction Steam wants to go in anyway. Right, right. Steam's not.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:41]:
Yeah. So yeah, they want this thing to run natively like well or to run I should say because they have their own. What's their. The thing they have on Steam is SteamOS is.

Richard Campbell [00:47:52]:
Yeah. Gabe Cube.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:53]:
No, but what's. No, the. I mean the emulation thing, they have like a wine based emulator that works great.

Leo Laporte [00:47:58]:
Why is it called Proton? They have a new for it though.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:00]:
I can't remember. So yeah, so there's something I believe, believe it's called Fex which is doing this for ARM and for. You know, this will bring it to Android. It will bring it to those, you know, the glasses thing or the, the headset thing they just showed off. But it could benefit Windows on ARM as well. Right. And so any like let's face it.

Richard Campbell [00:48:14]:
If Gabe decides you don't get to put BE in the Steam Store until you.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:18]:
Oh, yeah, no, then it just happens.

Richard Campbell [00:48:20]:
It's over.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:21]:
Yeah, that's right. That's right. So that will be a good day. But we'll, you know, we'll see. And then. This is not something I wrote, and this is something I will again expand on at one point, but in keeping with our earlier little conversation about some of the better things that occurred to Windows in Windows this year, when you think about the next year, which isn't that far away, suddenly what is it that's coming? What's the big deal? One of those items is that thing you brought up, which is like, we have AI PCs. We have PCs. We have copilot plus PCs.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:56]:
Like, just stop, stop. Just make it easy. The easiest way. Well, the easiest way is the way that won't happen, which is just intel amd whomever put mpus in your. All of your chips just do the.

Richard Campbell [00:49:13]:
Full, you know, 40 plus and an MPU that fits into an M2. That's every desktop. Not that hard to put in.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:21]:
Yeah, actually. So that laptop that you have, I.

Richard Campbell [00:49:25]:
Believe Studio 2 has an MP unit.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:28]:
Yeah, I believe it has, but I believe it's an add on like Microsoft put it in. But that is an add on because.

Richard Campbell [00:49:33]:
That, it's like a. It's like a 26 tops one.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:36]:
It's.

Richard Campbell [00:49:36]:
It's undo.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:37]:
I mean, it's pre copilot plus, but it's. I think it's technically essentially like a desktop chipset. And it's, it's like the one chipset that has like an add in or did at the time they don't need.

Richard Campbell [00:49:48]:
Or it might be it's just an M2 slot or something like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:52]:
Oh, yeah, maybe. I don't know. But anyway, Microsoft did that, right? So if you were to open this thing up, you'd be able. I think you'd be able to see that because it's not integrated onto the chip. Yeah, but Microsoft did that to get the MPU in there. So. Okay, there's that. Oh, no, I'm sorry, there's not that.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:09]:
So I should say one of the things thinking about this coming year is whether that will change. Right. Will there be. Will that brand kind of go away or will they just keep going with it?

Richard Campbell [00:50:21]:
If they open a nightmare scenario, then everything's a Copilot plus PC.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:26]:
Well, right, but here's one little negative possible outcome. There's a Copilot Plus PC V2 spec that has an 80 tops MPU as a requirement or something. Right. And then we have a further dividing of this market where you know, now we have some things that only run if you have 40 more, but some only run if you have 80 or more. And like I.

Richard Campbell [00:50:51]:
And again, if I can, God help us, there's 1500 sitting in that 50 80, right. Like, I know, I know.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:57]:
I'm just, I'm just trying to, you know, the way my brain works is I always go right to the, the worst possible scenario. So that, that's a possibility. I feel like it's less of a possibility now because it hasn't been super well received. So God help us, if this thing had taken off in a meaningful way, we might be looking at this, right? This would be like we're going to have PCs, we're going to have different levels of copilot plus PCs. Guys, please don't do this to us. But I just, you know, again, want to throw that out as a possibility, but I don't think that's going to happen. We know 26H1 is coming and this is going to be a lot like the 2024 Mid Year Copilot Plus PC launch where it's going to be for that Snapdragon chipset, in this case the X2 which is coming out in the first half of the year. And then there'll be a 26H2 I'm sure they'll call it, which will be for everybody and there'll be additional stuff but it'll be just like 2024.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:49]:
Again, we know that agentic features are coming to Windows. Will they work? We'll see. I will say, you know, as we talked last week, a little bit the agentic stuff is the 5G lie of AI. I mean it's like the most exciting use case. It's the most interesting. It's most far away from being reality. Like it's so the, the delta between the marketing and the reality is in a different planet. Like it's.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:16]:
Yeah, just so we'll see. You know, it's going to have to work. Well, guess it doesn't have to work, but it will probably work at some point. But will next year be the year for Windows? We'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:52:27]:
Yeah. And then just because we've got pavan two years ago now or a year and a half ago now, he's unified teams. It's just a question of how long it takes to get everybody aligned and actually push out a version. And the pressure is high. They have to do something in the AI space. Like they've gotta go. Yep. Oh, you can't see how you get through 26 without a Windows 12.

Richard Campbell [00:52:49]:
An AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:50]:
And that's the big. That's the big one. Although I feel like it's possible we've been talking about that for two years. You know, I don't remember. I'm not good at that. But it was. It's at least a year and a half, but it might be. Might be close to two.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:04]:
But now the 10 is gone, essentially. Windows 11, what? That first version came out in 2021. Right. Mid 2021. So we're. Yeah, we're actually only four and a half years into this, so I don't know. We'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:53:19]:
Remember when you used to put out an OS every other year? Crazy time.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:23]:
They used to put out an OS every six months. I mean, technically, right. Depending on how they want to measure it.

Richard Campbell [00:53:28]:
But the Windows 10 twitch doesn't count. That was a particular moment of crazy.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:34]:
Well, yeah. Every generation of Windows since Adon has had its own little. Well, even Vista, I guess it had its own little special brand of crazy. But I don't know. I feel like, honestly, despite all of the controversy in our little world, right. This is not a controversy out in the world world, but in our little world around the agentic stuff in Windows and nobody asks for this and all that, nobody wants this, all that kind of stuff. This is in many ways the least controversial of the controversies that have occurred over the years as far as how it's going to impact people, plus or minus or pro or con or whatever. And maybe this should have been on my list of things that were good this year.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:19]:
One of the good things is they finally woke up to opt in. Off by default. Opt in. Yes. This is the way many features should be in anything's arguable. But inarguably in my mind, this is the way all these big AI features should be. You can be told about it, you pick it. If you pick.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:42]:
No, it leaves you alone. Right. Microsoft's not good at that. No, no.

Richard Campbell [00:54:46]:
It seems like they really want that feature out there and they feel like they own your operating system.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:52]:
Yeah. And look, I see their point of view to a small degree because remember back in the day, so to speak, when you think about Office turning into a bundle and then a suite where you had these individual apps and whatever, and then it became, well, there were server Office servers, right. Back when we still had a lot of on prem infrastructure. But eventually that goes to Office and then Microsoft 365. And one of the benefits of these things is that once you know that the user is always going to have access to every one of the things that we make, it makes it easier to make all those things work better together because otherwise you're doing a lot of if then else's right. Like oh, so you have Word. Great. Do you have Excel? No.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:38]:
Oh, then you can't do this thing. I was going to tell you about. Like it's when you, when you have it all, you know. And look, there's anti competitive person, you know, aspects of this. I understand that. But you know, one of the little benefits is if you have everything, it's easier for the developer, you know, Microsoft in this case to, you know, enhance all of them together.

Richard Campbell [00:55:58]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:58]:
You don't have to worry about whether or not they have parts of it. Little, you know, parts. And so yeah, the thing is not.

Richard Campbell [00:56:05]:
Going to build for a copilot PC when there's just few machines around. Like it's just.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:09]:
Yeah, right. So you get. Right. So you can kind of see the problem. Right. And so I agree, for example, that recall should be off by default. They can promote it and they do. And you should decide whether or not you want to use this feature and then apply that to whatever else.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:25]:
The problem is at some point, if this is a system level feature and as a developer maybe you're going to support this app for whatever reason, you have a subset of the audience that can even get it and now you have a subset of that audience that enabled it. And so why bother? And that's the other side of that coin. Right. Because there's two sides to this. So it's like the right thing for the consumer, for the user. Just not Microsoft strong suit. But they were kind of forced into it. Good.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:58]:
But it also cuts their ability to kind of make this thing work better with other stuff. Right. So you know, whatever. It's the right, it's still the right choice. But just want to be cognizant of that. All right. And that's all I got because literally there was no news. We had one build all week and it was a canary build that just added features we've already talked about that are in other places.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:22]:
So nothing exciting.

Leo Laporte [00:57:24]:
Talk about bananas some more. Or apples if you want to look. Fruit, kind of.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:29]:
I do know the name from Apple in Spanish. Banana. That one. Surprise. That's plenty of plenty.

Leo Laporte [00:57:35]:
Or banana. Banana, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:38]:
What is Apple would be.

Leo Laporte [00:57:40]:
Oh yeah, that's right. That's kind of unpredicted Unpredictable.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:44]:
Yeah, but that's just. It's, you know, it's one of those Spanish 101 type terms. Like, you'll.

Richard Campbell [00:57:50]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:50]:
You know, you'll get it. You'll get it the first week, you know?

Leo Laporte [00:57:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:55]:
What's my name? Do you like apples? Yep. How do you like them apples?

Leo Laporte [00:57:58]:
Sugar beef. It's my sugar bee. There's so many apple varieties. I think. I think Richard's got to do an apple talk. You actually have been doing a little one.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:07]:
Well, you gotta. If you're gonna do that, you should talk to our apple guy because he has this giant truck with all these bins and depending on.

Leo Laporte [00:58:13]:
Does he have a horn? Is there a special song?

Paul Thurrott [00:58:15]:
Yeah. No. He'll literally say, like, my. You know, my wife's picking through. And she. He'll say something like, what are you gonna do with those apples? And then she's like, I'm gonna make a pie. And he's like, oh, you might want to try the. You know, the gravity.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:27]:
I've already fallen asleep this. I got this far into the conversation. I've already. I'm looking, you know, somewhere else. But he likes the apples, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:58:38]:
All right, break time then. And then we will talk about AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:42]:
Yeah, I'll just spill my drink again and we can get going.

Richard Campbell [00:58:45]:
Paul, spill a drink in the rhythm.

Leo Laporte [00:58:47]:
We do have Xbox news. We do have tips and apps, and we even have a dark beverage, which looks kind of interesting. Yeah, yeah, I'm very interested initially.

Richard Campbell [00:59:00]:
All the way from Tasmania.

Leo Laporte [00:59:01]:
Yay.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:03]:
The other devil.

Leo Laporte [00:59:05]:
Tasmania. The. The island is divided into north and south. And in the north, they drink one kind of beer. In the south, they drink the other kind of beer. It's not a big island.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:14]:
They drink the blood of those who live in the north.

Leo Laporte [00:59:16]:
Yeah, but they definitely have a beer rivalry going on, which I thought was kind of interesting.

Richard Campbell [00:59:23]:
Down there.

Leo Laporte [00:59:24]:
Under no circumstances will they drink Fosters. I just. No, no, don't even bring it up.

Richard Campbell [00:59:29]:
Not even Australian.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:29]:
It's Australian for beer.

Leo Laporte [00:59:31]:
No, it's not. It's definitely not. Our show today, brought to you by Framer. We're a little punchy, aren't we? Because it's the holidays, I think. Yeah. Framer is a. You probably know Framer as a web design tool. But you know what? It's so much more now.

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Leo Laporte [01:02:27]:
What's going on there? What's going on? Are you.

Richard Campbell [01:02:33]:
Battling the dog?

Leo Laporte [01:02:34]:
Oh, there was a. There was a. There was an animal in there we didn't see in the picture.

Richard Campbell [01:02:38]:
Yeah, just down below. No, I was leaning in on the dog.

Leo Laporte [01:02:42]:
Oh, sweetie. What kind of dog do you have?

Richard Campbell [01:02:44]:
It's a little. It's a poodle cross.

Leo Laporte [01:02:46]:
Oh, poodles make very good crossbreeds.

Richard Campbell [01:02:48]:
She's. She's a sweetheart. Yeah, but not my idea. I didn't want a dog, but I was outnumbered one to one. So.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:56]:
Yeah, I lose those fights too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:03:00]:
I'm. I'm liking our cat. I feel like a cat's pretty easy.

Richard Campbell [01:03:04]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:03:05]:
I was a dog guy and I brought a dog.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:07]:
I like both family, but I love.

Leo Laporte [01:03:09]:
Dogs, but they're a lot.

Richard Campbell [01:03:11]:
Wouldn't keep cat up here with the coyotes around.

Leo Laporte [01:03:13]:
Oh yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:03:15]:
A little bit too hazardous actually. I'm afraid for her too. She's not big enough to deal with a coyote.

Leo Laporte [01:03:19]:
Something that could defend itself.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:20]:
Carried away by an eagle or something.

Richard Campbell [01:03:22]:
Yeah, we at one shot. You should have gone up a tree and if you didn't, it's too late.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:26]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:03:29]:
So let's talk about AI, shall we?

Paul Thurrott [01:03:33]:
Yeah, I mentioned before that I'm a fan of sorts, I guess as much as I can be of Mustafa Suleiman. Right. It's the guy who runs. He came from, what was the guy almost said Inception, Inflection.

Richard Campbell [01:03:51]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:52]:
So. And DeepMind before that, Aqua. Hired by Microsoft to start.

Leo Laporte [01:03:56]:
He was one of the founders of DeepMind, wasn't he? I think he was.

Richard Campbell [01:03:59]:
Oh yeah, it's him and Dennis.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:02]:
Yeah, this is a great interview with him in Bloomberg. Really long one and in fact there's a podcast version. I think that one is even longer. It's actually pretty amazing. One of the things I like about this guy, and it occurred to me as I just started writing this, that he reminds me very much of Phil Spencer. Right. So that guy runs Xbox. Super plain spoken.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:24]:
And he'll just blurt out the truth all the time like he can't help himself. I love people like this. Mustafa Sulaiman is probably a lot smarter. He's probably one of those kind of genius types or whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:04:34]:
But point out this guy's already sold through two different AI companies where everybody else is trying to get one. DeepMind got acquired by Google and Inflection got acquired as well. Clearly he's doing something right.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:47]:
He's doing something right. But more importantly, because most of these people are like these kind of cold, dangerous seeming robot types, he comes across as a real human being and this is the big thing for me. He's well spoken, but he's also kind of plain spoken and just honest. And I like that. So I'm not going to go through this whole interview. It's long. If you're interested in this topic at all, you should just go listen to or read it. But one of the first things they asked was about this agency thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:15]:
And I've kind of. I just made my case a little while ago. This is the furthest away from this. His description of this is so far from the Microsoft marketing it's almost hilarious. So literally the first thing he says is, yeah, it's not there yet. He says we're still experimenting with that. It can do it doesn't always get it right. It's in dev mode is the way he called it.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:38]:
It's not generally available yet. When it does work, it's the most magical thing you've ever seen. When it doesn't work, you just bought something you didn't want, you know, and it's like, nice. So. And you know, he explains why it's going to be okay and you know, the little protection spilt in and so forth. So I like that. That was the first thing I was like, okay, nice. This is kind of, you know, there's obviously the artificial general intelligence goal that, you know, OpenAI has.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:04]:
He prefers something called. I think it's like super human intelligence, I guess, or even super intelligence. But the idea is that the human part of this is important, that this thing should exist only to serve humans. It's not something to replace humans. This is that kind of copilot type thinking or whatever, right? That literally it's your co pilot, not its copilot. He also makes the case because this is argument that AI is moving so quickly and it's crazy and it is. But he says he's like Microsoft, it's been around for 50 years. We're careful.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:38]:
90% of the S&P 500 uses us for email OSS everyday productivity. You know, we can't.

Richard Campbell [01:06:45]:
I'm pushing on the moving fast thing too because it isn't actually moving all that fast. But everybody's very interested in making people believe it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:55]:
So we're gonna. Okay, so we're gonna get to this. I'm kind of. This is fascinating to me in a way. Yeah, I guess the difference between, well, a difference between AI and what came before AI. So by which I mean OS and productivity app features, right? Spell checking, grammar checking, et cetera. These things were not in the news. So if Microsoft added like 18 new features to Microsoft 365 one month, it wasn't on CNN.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:24]:
No one was talking about it. Right. It was just part of our little world right now this is a big deal because it's crossing that kind of business consumer divide. It's big with consumers. There's so much money involved and a lot of companies.

Richard Campbell [01:07:38]:
That's the bigger issue is there's way too much money.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:41]:
There's a lot of Drama. You know he talks about that, right? And you know, he is a little more, I'm going to use the word sanguine, Sanguine, sanguine. Than I am. Sanguine, sanguine. Thank you. I can write, but I can't speak. But he also says, look, the clock's ticking on this. We need to watch this.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:00]:
He's pro regulation, which I love. He's like, there's a lot of money that had been promised in multiple directions. But he also said, he says, look, it costs 90% less today to ask a question of the best AIM models in the world compared to two years ago. So that's interesting. Now it's still astronomical. That's like saying you could have bought a Lamborghini, but now you have to settle on a Ferrari or whatever. Whatever. It's expensive.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:27]:
But that's an interesting perspective, which I kind of like. He talks honestly about where Copilot is compared to, say, Gemini 3 and ChatGPT, although this is before the GPT 5.2.

Leo Laporte [01:08:40]:
Is Copilot still using OpenAI's models or is it all Microsoft?

Paul Thurrott [01:08:44]:
Mostly, yeah. They're starting to enable this.

Leo Laporte [01:08:50]:
Okay, so you choose the model when you use Copilot. What's the default?

Paul Thurrott [01:08:55]:
Well, not typically, but that's where it's going. Right. In other words, if you think about how GitHub Copilot works, how a lot of these AIs work, you either get a picker or ideally, what it would really do is just use the best one every time. I think that's going to be.

Richard Campbell [01:09:10]:
The general approach is a funny concept, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:09:13]:
Yeah, but he just says, look, he's like, Gemini 3 is great, but it has some niche skills that ChatGPT doesn't have. Thus Copilot doesn't have. It's very fast. But he also says, you know, Copilot has features that Gemini 3 doesn't have too. And he goes, you know, he's like, we're really good at vision. You know, the thing I mentioned up top, you know, so, okay, you know, I mean, it's whatever. Like I said, I like that he's pro regulation, talks about job loss. You know, I.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:46]:
Well, the article that I wrote about this, I kind of mentioned this kind of overblown fear that AI is stealing jobs. And of course, you can't say any or write anything online without someone coming back and saying, you're wrong, you're an idiot. Here's why. Or maybe that's just me. That's my experience. But the original. Wrong again, Monkey Boy kind of a thing. I made a joke about deep bone.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:10]:
I called it deep bone thrombosis at the time. And someone wrote me and said, that's not funny. Am I know someone to die to that? And I said, well, then we can't have humor because that would be true of anything, I guess.

Richard Campbell [01:10:19]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:19]:
I mean, everything I do will offend somebody, so whatever. But I had written that, you know, the AI job loss thing I think was. Is. Is kind of like not fud. But it's like a. But it is a. It's like a sewing fear kind of a thing, you know?

Richard Campbell [01:10:34]:
Well, and it comes straight out of science fiction too.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:37]:
Yeah. Like, I think people are pitching robots, like literally doing their job at a desk. Like, you come in one day and saw a white shiny robot. There's like, you know, you're not necessary anymore, Paul. We get this. The guy that does this now. Anyway, so someone wrote in and said, well, that's not true. I said, I work at this company.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:51]:
And they fired three developers. And they said the reason they did it was because AI could do their job. And I said that was your boss making a horrible decision. That was not AI selling a job. That was someone just being an idiot or being malicious and they were going to fire them anyway. And just using that as an excuse, which is the other thing we're going to see a lot of.

Richard Campbell [01:11:10]:
So we often do. And there's been plenty of those. There's also been mass hire backs when. And it didn't work out that well.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:16]:
Yeah. And so you guys can all welcome or have your happy future where you're not actually an employee of that company anymore, but you're a really high paid external consultant or whatever. Right. So, I mean, that's the one possibility. But anyway, I don't want to go through every single thing he said, but here. Anyway, but it's this. I wrote a longer piece about this from my site, but go back and read the original or listen to it on a podcast. It's a Bloomberg thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:44]:
He's an interesting guy. He might be one of the few good human beings in this part of the world, so to speak. The other one was that woman who used to be The CTO of OpenAI, who left and formed her own company. What is her name? Thinking Machines. Mira Moradi. Yeah, she's another one. She comes off as like a human. I don't say enough.

Richard Campbell [01:12:09]:
I don't know why that seems to be such an anomaly, but yeah, you know, the bigger weirdo factor is billionaire.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:17]:
Yeah, it's well, it's. Right, so AI is the perfect nexus of terrible. It's like billionaires, the smartest people on Earth who are usually really socially awkward or just. Which is that inhuman thing. Like when Sam Altman is like, up there with his stupid, I am a human. I have a love interest. No, you don't. No, you don't.

Richard Campbell [01:12:37]:
But Altman, Zuckerberg, Musk, like, they're all pretty strange. And they were all billionaires. Like every. I've met a few. Every one of them weird. Where scientists can be awkward, but often are, you know, pretty straight up. Like, you get it. They, they speak in a different language, but they're not that odd.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:56]:
Yeah, it's like autism 4K, you know, it's like the more advanced version. It's just. I don't know. That's. That's, that's who this part of the world.

Richard Campbell [01:13:06]:
I think if we had fewer billionaire spokesperson people, we'd be better off.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:10]:
We'd probably be better off we had fewer billionaires.

Richard Campbell [01:13:13]:
That's not true as well, you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:16]:
Which, by the way, is one of the things he talks about as well. Universal income, you know, is something. You know, the Star Trek future where it's like, but what about the jobs? I'm like, you know, work is called work for a reason. It's something people don't like for the most part. I mean, you know, I don't know what we're worried about exactly, but. But anyway, we talked about this last week, I guess. Okay, the Microsoft copilot news this week is hilarious and perfect. Apparently if you own a certain newer LG smart TVs, you woke up one day and there was a copilot app on your.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:51]:
Whatever the home screen thing is at the bottom there.

Leo Laporte [01:13:53]:
So annoying.

Richard Campbell [01:13:54]:
Didn't we just talk about having the option. Oh, my God.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:59]:
They can't put a copilot key on your remote. So what they thought they would do is gouge a hole in the middle of the screen instead. And that's what they're doing. So that's too bad. The good news is I know someone who has one of these TVs, and he's like, it's just a. Just goes to the web. It's like a. Basically like a web page.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:15]:
It's like there's nothing to it. It doesn't do anything.

Richard Campbell [01:14:18]:
It's not a thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:18]:
But it is sitting there like a wart that you want to just dig out of there, but you can't. So hopefully there'll be enough.

Richard Campbell [01:14:25]:
So it's occupying screen space. It only just goes to the web and it doesn't really do anything. Anything.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:30]:
So when you're taking up space, you're useless and now you're in the way. So you're perfect. It's perfect.

Richard Campbell [01:14:35]:
Really. It's just an. It's an anti branding exercise. You know, we haven't felt enough hate lately. So let's throw an icon on your TV against your will so you can hate us some more for all you.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:47]:
Foolish but well meaning people who bought a smart TV and then decided to sign into whatever stupid account that company has. Congratulations.

Richard Campbell [01:14:54]:
Yeah, you know, I have a smart TV and I configured my PI hole to block its ability to call home.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:02]:
Yes, this is one of the smartest uses for that kind of thing. I know I'm going to sound like an old guy, but I just want a screen. I'm old enough that I remember when you had a screen and you pressed the power button and the screen just came on. It didn't have to go through a boot process. There weren't, you know, it wasn't like.

Richard Campbell [01:15:19]:
A little Easy talk, Mr. Thurat.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:21]:
Honestly, just a screen, like a thumb screen. It's like the Leo's laptop. You said, you know, it doesn't have touch. I'm like, right, it's.

Richard Campbell [01:15:26]:
It, it's a laptop Ethernet port on the screen. You had concerns, right? Like this.

Leo Laporte [01:15:33]:
I don't. I think, you know, this is a big kerfuffle now because Firefox is adding AI and I think companies have got to start realizing just sprinkling things with AI is not making many artists.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:46]:
So we're going to, we're actually going to talk about this because this is the right way to roll out AI functionality. There's no one answer, but there are different approaches and I'm going to talk about one that I think actually is in our space. I think is a good. Is like the right way to do it.

Leo Laporte [01:16:03]:
But you'd agree, stuffing it on your smart TV.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:06]:
Microsoft stuffed it into Windows 11 and then moved it eight times, then rewrote the app two more times, made it.

Richard Campbell [01:16:13]:
Bounce a couple of ways. The thing was to put it into the App Store and if people want it, they could install it. It's not that hard to not.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:22]:
You did that. No one would.

Richard Campbell [01:16:23]:
Well, of course they wouldn't because it's terrible. But that's the whole point, right? Like you should be good enough for people to select you and if you're not, well, you get what you deserve.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:33]:
So that type of Thing only happens when you have an actual fair market with competition and regulation to keep the bad behaviors in check. And Microsoft does not exist in those worlds. So this is a be true to yourself thing. Inevitably pretty much. I mean any company with enough power and market size is just going to start squeezing the vice. I mean it's just the way this has always happened. This is why we have regulations, why antitrust exists. There's no such thing as negative option billing.

Richard Campbell [01:17:06]:
Right where you have where prices are going to go up unless you call us and tell us not to to do it to you. It's just not right. This is what regulation is all about.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:14]:
Yep. Yeah, I know every, I don't see this as much anymore but a couple years ago, every time I wrote whatever article but whatever it was some government something it's always like you know, we don't want governments designing user interfaces. It's like eh, that's not really what's happening. But then again now we have like Google Quick Share can share to airdrop. It's like maybe this isn't such a bad idea. So I don't know. There are good examples in both directions obviously. Bunch of OpenAI stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:47]:
In the past week I've only written about a few of these things but they did come out with their response to Gemini 3 which is GPT 5.2. They came out with their response to Nano Banana Pro. I think just yesterday they announced there's a new feature of ChatGPT called Images which in the sidebar and it's an images experience and it looks pretty great.

Richard Campbell [01:18:07]:
By the way, the code red response. Right. Altman freak out.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:12]:
And then my personal favorite because I always like the kind of Godzilla versus King Kong thing. Disney invested a billion dollars in OpenAI. There's more going on here we're not 100% sure about but part of this deal is people using ChatGPT can use Disney characters and when they're making images and stuff. This was something that was illegal before two seconds after announcing this, Disney sued Google for doing exactly what I just said. Because you can go to Gemini or Nano Banana Pro, whatever and say I would like something that looks like Mickey Mouse but it's me and it's a Christmas thing or whatever and it would make a Mickey Mouse thing which is technically not supposed to be allowed. Well, Mickey Mouse actually is that.

Leo Laporte [01:18:53]:
No, no, some Mickey Mouse's are some Mickey.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:56]:
Okay, but you get, you get the idea there are hundreds and hundreds of Disney characters. This is, you know, they're the Nintendo of entertainment or video.

Leo Laporte [01:19:04]:
Hard to make the deal while this stuff is still in copyright.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:07]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:19:08]:
All they got was stock, I guess, though. I mean, I don't know. I'm not sure I'd want open air stock right now.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:14]:
It's a. It's a bet, you know, I mean, better spin the wheel. We're going to see one of those things is a million bucks or whatever, you know, I guess the others are, you're doing bad. But I don't, I. You know, that was a part of that Suleiman interview. He was asked they this person only did this three times, but said, I'm going to give you the names of people in this industry because he knows it. You know, they all know each other. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:39]:
It's like to say what the word of phrase that comes immediately to mind. Right. Dennis Hassabas, the guy who co founded DeepMind, you know, great scientist, exceptional. Elon Musk is a bulldozer. And then Sam Altman, he says, courageous. But then he says written as like a paragraph of text. But he really qualifies. Everything he says about this guy, it's like he may well turn out to be one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:05]:
If he can pull it off, it will be pretty dramatic, which is not quite damning with faint praise. But you really.

Richard Campbell [01:20:13]:
A lot of qualifiers.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:15]:
Yeah. Yep. So. And, but there you go again, like, accurate. Actually, though, that's my point. Like, this guy's honest and this is an example of that. This is Microsoft's. Well, one of Microsoft's biggest partners, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:28]:
And he's like, you know, we'll see. And also I'm writing the software I'm working on will replace everything they're doing, you know, so there's that, you know, kind of thing. Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:20:39]:
Are they still friendly partners?

Paul Thurrott [01:20:43]:
I don't know that they were ever. I mean, they must have been in the beginning, I guess, when they were. So one of the things that. Okay, I'm going to read this entire interview because literally he touches on every one of these topics. So I should have said this. Actually, this is one of the more important bits to this. There's a part, I guess I didn't know or I didn't explicitly know. Maybe I'll say this and you will say those.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:06]:
It was obvious I didn't.

Richard Campbell [01:21:07]:
But.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:07]:
But to me, this was not obvious. So Microsoft invested in OpenAI. It went up to about $11 billion. Part of this partnership, which was mostly very secret, was that OpenAI had to do everything through Microsoft infrastructure and Microsoft got everything they Made everything right and they own some percentage, we don't know. But there was. The theory is it might have been 30, 33%, whatever. But there have been two major changes to that relationship in the past year. One was earlier in the year when they restructured their partnership, which allowed OpenAI to seek other cloud infrastructures if Microsoft was asked first and said no.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:46]:
And now they've partnered literally with every player in the industry, including some I've never heard of. Right? So they wanted way more compute, I guess, than Microsoft was willing to provide. Then in October, OpenAI restructured. So they have a for profit company that's owned by a nonprofit company, kind of like mozilla. Microsoft owns 27%. I'm like, okay. But then the way he describes it, because he's working on this thing that will replace what OpenAI is doing. He doesn't really talk about that too, too much, I mean, which makes sense, but that's essentially what he's doing.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:18]:
And he described some bits of this partnership I didn't know was the case. So until OpenAI restructured and they restructured their partnership yet again, Microsoft was not allowed by contract to pursue AGI or superintelligence independently. The deal was OpenAI would do that, Microsoft would get it and they would have this infrastructure, you know, the hardware, and Microsoft could just do what they were doing. But part of that new agreement was, okay, you couldn't get infrastructure somewhere else, but we're going to do our own thing too. And that was part of it. I thought that was kind of interesting. So whatever happens, as of today, Microsoft still has a license to every single thing that OpenAI makes through 2032. So whatever they come up with GPT 5.2, like I said a day later, Microsoft said, hey, this is in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:18]:
It's in Copilot. They get everything right. And so there's no six months or year they don't get it. They get it immediately. They own it. Or they own the right to it. They license it. They have that license.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:29]:
So interesting. I didn't know that Microsoft was prevented from pursuing this stuff independently. So that was new to me. But maybe that was common, maybe that was common knowledge. I don't know. Oh, yes. So just because we've talked about it, Opera Neon, which is their agencic browser, is now sort of generally available. I think this might still be a wait list, but I think anyone can get it 20 bucks a month.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:54]:
So you either want this or you don't. It's Like Comet. Well, no, it's not like Comet, because it's literally, I think you can only use it if you pay. Well, it's like Comet, but you still have to. You have to pay, I guess is the way to say it. And then, because this is somehow talked into this early, somehow Google announced something yesterday which is basically like that Outlook, you know, you open Outlook and it's like, here's your day, here are your meetings, here's what's going on, whatever. But for Gmail, it's not built into Gmail. They're doing it as a Google Labs experiment.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:34]:
It's called cc, like CC bcc, like for email. And the email it produces looks really cool. You can totally customize it. You interact with the natural language. You can email the thing back or just email it and suggest changes and say, I want this, but I don't want this, or, I want now I want this, whatever it is. And it's just like a little, you know, here's your day thing. And that's neat. And I was thinking, you know, they have all these things that people largely have not heard of, like Mixboard, right? Or notebooklm, which somehow has gotten pretty popular.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:05]:
But these are like things that Microsoft would just put into what they had. Typically. Like, in other words, if Microsoft was going to do something like NotebookLM, which actually they have, they would build it into something they already have. In this case, they build it into Copilot. But you could imagine them building into say like OneNote or maybe even Loop if they were going to keep going with that. So Google has this kind of, you know, obviously Google does AI and they have AI everywhere, but they also, when they. You can kind of tell with these things, it's like, okay, we think this is going to be a good idea. The CC thing will absolutely be a future Gmail.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:39]:
It's just obvious. But we're going to experiment with it first, you know, and it made me think, like, with all the forced copilot usage and all the changing of UIs and all the stuff Microsoft's been doing, it's like, you know, maybe this is a better way to roll out AI, right? Somehow I think both of you at one point or another on the show said something like, you should be able to go to that thing and get it if you want it, but you should never be bothered by it if you don't want it. It's like, yep. And that's what this stuff is, right? Like. Like, I don't even know how you'd find out about this stuff like you Google just does these things. They're experimenting. Like I said, I think CC is an obvious one. It will become a part of Gmail in my opinion.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:22]:
I don't see it.

Richard Campbell [01:26:22]:
And I'm really pleased that they're at the place where they're now doing that, that says the Gmail team is now taking what's happening over on Gemini seriously enough that.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:35]:
The fascinating thing to me is they're not just pulling the trigger on Discovery. All right, we're putting this now, we're going to put this in Gmail right now, right? And it's like, no, let's experiment with, let's see how it goes. You know, we're going to get feedback there might, we, we might make changes, whatever, right? They don't do this with everything. I should be clear about that. But I like the feel of this. And oddly, as I started to look into this and I was looking at, you know, things like, well, what else does Google have, you know, that might be considered this kind of a lab type experiment or whatever, I was reminded that back in September, Microsoft announced something called Windows AI Lab. Right. And Windows AI Lab is what Google Labs is to Windows, oddly.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:22]:
And the idea is you'll be, I don't, I've never seen it. I'm not even positive they've ever done anything like it. But you might get a little pop up in like the Settings app and it will say something like, hey, maybe you'd like to try some experimental features in Paint or Photos or whatever. You can sign up or you can say, I'm not interested. The button that doesn't exist in any UI anywhere in Windows, by the way. And it just leaves you alone. What an idea. What an idea.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:51]:
Actually, that might be in the. Maybe it's in the Settings pane for Paint or whatever. So I'm not sure. I'm going to run Paint and see if I see this. I've never seen this. Like I said, I never, I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I'm kind of saying it doesn't exist. Like I don't, you know, it's a good idea anyway. So even Microsoft, I'm sorry, not Paint, Notepad, even Microsoft has.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:13]:
At least part of it has come to this. Maybe we should try, maybe this should, these should be experimental, right? I mean, I think, I think things like agents right now should be really experimental, right? Sure, yeah. I don't see this in here, but.

Richard Campbell [01:28:24]:
Well, I think, you know, part of the frustration that people are have is simply Presenting these things as products when they clearly aren't products yet.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:32]:
Right, that's right. That's right.

Richard Campbell [01:28:35]:
And if you just showed them as experiments, they were so that we could be experimental with them and set our expectations.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:41]:
I always, you know, this is another one. Like, remember, I think it was, it was Qualcomm. This would have been three, four years ago, longer, I don't know. But you know, Cristiano Amora is on stage, he's talking about 5G. It was still coming at the time. And he says, this thing is going to be so fast. You're going to be boarding a plane. You're standing in line to get on the plane and be like, oh, I forgot to download a movie to watch on my phone.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:03]:
And you're going to go to your phone, whatever it is, Netflix, whatever, find the thing you want, click the download button and nothing will be done downloading before you hand the guy the ticket. Now, I'm not saying no one has ever not done that or whatever. I know I will now hear from the guy that has. But the truth is, if you didn't download something before you got on a plane, I get bad news for you. You're probably not getting it right? Like, even if you have WI fi on the plane, you're probably not getting it. So that always seemed like this wonderful dream. Like it's going to be like instantaneously fast, you know, which is why we need 6G now. But I feel like a lot of the AI stuff is a little bit like that.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:35]:
It's been sold as too futuristic and too exciting and too much. And then you see what it is and you're like, okay, so I made a watercolor picture of a banana and you're like, I mean, it's cool. It's, you know, it's nice. But I mean, it's not. But it's not curing cancer, right? Like, so I think the hype has outperformed the reality.

Richard Campbell [01:29:58]:
Oh, no. And it's thing, I think it's part of what's turning everybody off. It's just like, enough, enough.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:03]:
Well, it's incessant. I mean, it's just incessant.

Leo Laporte [01:30:05]:
Remember that great chemistry demo they did at Ignite?

Richard Campbell [01:30:09]:
I thought that was really cool. That's the thing is there's such excellent ones like.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:13]:
That's right.

Richard Campbell [01:30:13]:
Let's not ignore the fact that DeepMind has solved protein folding.

Leo Laporte [01:30:20]:
Right?

Richard Campbell [01:30:20]:
And has published 200 million, you know, completed protein folds. After 60 years of effort, it was a, by humans was able to produce 150. Right. Like, right.

Leo Laporte [01:30:32]:
Remember, it was folding at home. People were throwing in their extra CPU.

Richard Campbell [01:30:36]:
Folders to help and they managed to get one. One.

Leo Laporte [01:30:39]:
So really, is that all they got? Is that all folding at home? God.

Richard Campbell [01:30:42]:
One.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:30:43]:
It was a computationally challenging thing.

Richard Campbell [01:30:46]:
Incredibly difficult. Yeah. But, you know, once again, it's like there's certain classes of work that generative AI does astonishing job on, and this.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:53]:
Is one of them. Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:30:55]:
And it's incredibly important.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:56]:
Not so much. Yeah. So you may. What's the name of this company now? Grammarly. Which I. Not Grammarly. God. These are different companies.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:08]:
I'm sorry. Duolingo got in a little bit of trouble, sort of when the CEO said, yeah, we're not going to hire any more of these outside. You know, we're going to have employees, but we're not going to have any more of these consultant types. We're going to use a lot of AI and it's going to dramatically increase the volume and quality of the content we have. And that content being language courses of various units and sizes, whatever. So I'm using this app. I've been using this app for probably, actually it's over a decade, actually. But whatever the time frame for Spanish.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:39]:
And so I had gotten up to level 130, and so Duolingo at some point realigned their courses so that. Well, first expanded their courses and then realigned them so they match up with whatever the international standard standard is for language learning. So you can go in and say, well, between 121 and 130, you're like a G6 or whatever the terminology is, and you should be able to understand, you know, basic phrases and talk to people, you know, fairly fluently, whatever it is, is. So I. I was thinking, it's Spanish, right? So this is going to be like one of the most popular ones. I have. This thing's. It's going to be infinite.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:11]:
There was a time 10 years ago plus, where I finished French and finished Spanish later, and. But now those things have expanded to the point where I've never. I couldn't live long enough to finish these things, except I finished Spanish. And the thing is, as I told Richard when he was here, I'm like, I don't know Spanish. I know some Spanish, but. But I'm like, like, I'm like. I'm like, I don't know how.

Richard Campbell [01:32:29]:
What.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:29]:
But. So it turns out their language coverage of Spanish is not complete. If you go and look in their little guide to it, it's from 130 to 1 to 140 will equate to whatever the number system is for the standard. But they don't have those courses, so I'm like. But you have AI. How is this. Oh, Siri. Why did you have to.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:50]:
Seriously, Siri just came out.

Leo Laporte [01:32:52]:
Seriously.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:54]:
She's like Atari. I don't. You're always apologizing, sir. Just. Just be you. You're stupid. It's okay.

Leo Laporte [01:32:58]:
The word for apple is manzana. Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:02]:
The word for banana. Stop talking. What are you doing, you insane person?

Leo Laporte [01:33:08]:
Stop. I'm.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:10]:
Anyway, it's the.

Leo Laporte [01:33:11]:
It's funny because it's the AI you least want to talk to, which is.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:14]:
The one that's always piping up. I know the most. Someday, maybe I'll want to talk to Syria that day.

Leo Laporte [01:33:22]:
Gemini is going to be the default. It might be good, but I don't.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:26]:
Have anywhere to go now. Like Duolingo. There's no more courses, so I would have to go in and configure it. I have to say I want to throw away all my progress and just start Spanish over, so I can be like Bayamo Pablo again and go back to lesson one or whatever. And that's bizarre to me because there should be infinite Spanish lessons. This should be the one. One of the five that they just have a million thing.

Leo Laporte [01:33:53]:
Yeah. Of all the languages in all the.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:54]:
World, that blew my mind. I guess I'm going to learn chess. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:34:00]:
Is that a language?

Paul Thurrott [01:34:01]:
No, but they teach chess and math and music, and they teach.

Leo Laporte [01:34:05]:
Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah, no doubt.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:10]:
It's all terrible. I'm sure it's just frustrating.

Leo Laporte [01:34:12]:
You see that? Coursera is buying you Demi.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:16]:
No. Wow, that's interesting.

Richard Campbell [01:34:17]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:34:18]:
That's a big.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:19]:
If you had said Corsair was buying you Demi, that would have been even more interesting. That would be something. But Corsair's buying Udemy. Interesting. I guess that makes sense, right? I mean, 2.5 billion. That makes no sense. Really? They have that many? Wow. How is it worth a lot of money?

Leo Laporte [01:34:34]:
You know what the two letters are that make it worth 2.5 billion? AI yeah. Coursera to buy Udemy, creating a $2.5 billion firm to target AI training.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:47]:
They should rename AI to AIOU. You know, I love it. Sorry. E, I, E, I, A, I, O, U. I don't know how to say it, but, yeah, one of those things.

Leo Laporte [01:34:59]:
I love it. I've taken courses on both. I don't. There's not that much to distinguish them.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:04]:
Right, yeah. Right, yeah. And what's the big one, though? Because I still did.

Leo Laporte [01:35:12]:
I thought Coursera was the big one.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:13]:
There's a big one. There's another one. I don't know how I'd find this. I get emails from them. I've taken courses at this other one that I can't.

Leo Laporte [01:35:22]:
Well, there's LinkedIn. Learning is huge.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:25]:
I would never use anything that had the word LinkedIn in it.

Leo Laporte [01:35:28]:
It's a Microsoft company.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:30]:
That's terrible, though.

Leo Laporte [01:35:31]:
I hate it so much.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:32]:
What is the name of this thing?

Leo Laporte [01:35:34]:
I've done courses from MIT on.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:38]:
Yeah, no, it's.

Leo Laporte [01:35:41]:
What was the name of it? I can't remember now.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:43]:
God, it's bug. I can't believe. I can't think of this.

Leo Laporte [01:35:45]:
EdX. That was the one I. I used.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:47]:
I really like. I feel like I've used all of these things at some point. Right. Like.

Leo Laporte [01:35:50]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:51]:
Why?

Leo Laporte [01:35:51]:
I did some programming courses on EDX that were good, but that was because it came from uc. The British uc. University of British Columbia. Ubc. Excellent, excellent courses.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:02]:
This is going to bug me now.

Leo Laporte [01:36:04]:
I'm taking MIT Open Courseware courses on. But I'm doing that on YouTube, so I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:11]:
This is very strange.

Leo Laporte [01:36:13]:
The big four, according to somebody, are Udemy, Coursera, edX and LinkedIn. Learning.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:20]:
So.

Leo Laporte [01:36:20]:
I don't know what you're thinking of, Paulie. Oh, master class, maybe?

Paul Thurrott [01:36:24]:
No, this is very strange to me. All right, I'll figure it out. I can't. I don't understand why.

Leo Laporte [01:36:33]:
I don't think HubSpot's one of them. Gum Road. OpenAI cookbook log. No, no, these are not. What am I? It's the best online learning in 2025.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:43]:
I feel like. I will find this. I will find this beat code.

Leo Laporte [01:36:54]:
I don't know what you're thinking of. I don't know. Are you thinking of, like, the brick and mortar ones?

Paul Thurrott [01:37:02]:
No, no, this is an online thing. I've actually paid for courses for programming. I think it was early iOS and Android stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:37:10]:
Khan Academy. Teachable.

Richard Campbell [01:37:13]:
I love.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:13]:
You're like. I've heard of all of these things and none of them are that thing you're.

Leo Laporte [01:37:17]:
You're thinking of.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:18]:
It's crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:37:22]:
Well, I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:23]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:37:23]:
Why?

Paul Thurrott [01:37:25]:
What's going on? I'll find it. I swear to God. This isn't just in my brain, but it is right now, just in my brain, which means I can't access it. I don't know what's going on top? Anyway?

Leo Laporte [01:37:37]:
Okay, okay, okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:39]:
Have we pretty much sandaled the. Yeah, I think so.

Leo Laporte [01:37:42]:
The AI segment. Have we done the AI segment? AIs in everything, including.

Richard Campbell [01:37:47]:
Are we gonna let the AI segment go? That's really the question.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:50]:
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff I didn't put in on purpose.

Leo Laporte [01:37:53]:
Well, that's fine because there's a whole show coming up in about, I don't know, an hour.

Richard Campbell [01:37:58]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:58]:
Yep. Udacity.

Leo Laporte [01:38:01]:
Udacity. Why didn't I think of that one?

Paul Thurrott [01:38:03]:
Well, why didn't I think of it? That's the only one. This is the one I've spent the most money on.

Leo Laporte [01:38:07]:
I've spent money on Udacity, too. I actually like Udacity a lot.

Richard Campbell [01:38:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:38:11]:
This. This week on Intelligent Machines, we are interviewing CJ Trowbridge on AI, sustainability and resiliency.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:25]:
So that'll be a short conversation, huh?

Leo Laporte [01:38:27]:
I know. They're a YouTube. YouTube did their graduate degree in artificial intelligence. Ethical artificial intelligence, also in oxymoron. That'll be interesting. Yeah, well, you know, we're trying to. I want to cover the whole range of topics, and I think one of the big topics right now of AI is sustainability is can we afford it? Can we do it? It's killing RAM prices. It's killing all power prices.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:57]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [01:38:58]:
Apparently, I saw a story this week that all of the skilled construction workers are employed building data centers, so you can't get them to build bridges anymore.

Richard Campbell [01:39:09]:
We're creating another supply chain crisis, essentially.

Leo Laporte [01:39:11]:
Yeah. Infrastructure issue.

Richard Campbell [01:39:13]:
And a lot of this is pre order. Like it's. They don't even have the gear. Right. Yeah. And you have to wonder, like, if when the bubble finally bursts, like, how much of this just won't ever appear. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:39:28]:
In any event, we also. I should mention, as I did earlier, that there will be a very special Windows Weekly next week because it's going to be not. Yeah, it is going to be Christmas Eve. So actually, there'll be nothing. Come to think of it, there'll be nothing. It'll be very special in that there will be a hole in your podcast app where Windows Weekly used to be, because I can't make people work.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:54]:
We're going to recharge.

Leo Laporte [01:39:56]:
Recharge, rest, relax, recharge. And actually, I don't. I shouldn't, but I'm gonna. Because I enjoy it. We do have the special recharge logo. Creation of Joe our. Where'd it go, Joe? Did you take it down? Creation of our res. Here it is.

Leo Laporte [01:40:18]:
This Is a special badge just for you, Richard Campbell. Some days the brown liquor segment starts a little early. This is as you were actually playing with a dog, but we actually thought you'd passed away, so.

Richard Campbell [01:40:29]:
Yeah, I hadn't died yet.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:30]:
Not quite yet. I did have that effect on people.

Richard Campbell [01:40:33]:
You know, I'm getting better.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:37]:
I'm sorry, you're still talking like, okay, I get it.

Leo Laporte [01:40:41]:
But for New Year's Eve, we are going to do a fun holiday special with Richard and Paul sitting around the fire sharing stories. That was a lot of fun. I enjoyed doing that.

Richard Campbell [01:40:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:40:53]:
All of our shows are doing best of us, but we're doing some different things. Intelligent machines. We're going to take what I think are the most, some of the most important interviews we did of the year. Ray Kurzweil, Emily Bender, Mike Masnik, Pliny. It'll be very interesting. We're going to do for security now, we're going to do a legendary episode, the vitamin D episode. We're going to bring that out. People haven't heard that in a while, so it's going to be a little different.

Leo Laporte [01:41:23]:
And then we are Sunday doing a special twit, which is going to be a lot of fun. You guys have done our holiday shows. Steve Gibson will be back. Paris Martineau and Micah Sargent. We'll sit around and probably look back at the year. Micah covers all the tech news and Paris covers intelligence and radioactive shrimp. And Steve Gibson covers security.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:47]:
So probably look, radioactive shrimp.

Leo Laporte [01:41:49]:
That's her. So her beat at Consumer Reports. She's an investigative reporter for food safety and she broke the story of radioactive shrimp and lead in your protein supplements.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:00]:
Yeah, but is any of that worse than Copilot? I'm just.

Leo Laporte [01:42:04]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:05]:
Just asking questions.

Leo Laporte [01:42:07]:
No. All right. We do have the Xbox segment, we have the brown like you segment. We have lots more coming up. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Ferrat and Richard Campbell. Our show this week brought to you by OutSystems, the number one AI powered, low code development platform. This is actually very cool. You know, in business there's always been this conundrum, build versus buy.

Leo Laporte [01:42:33]:
When you need custom software, do you go out and you buy an off the shelf piece of software that sort of fits, sort of does the job, but something everybody in your, you know, area is using, but maybe you can make it work or do you do as we did to our dismay, build your own at great expense, great loss of resource and you know, you know, honestly. And we spent more money maintaining the darn thing than we did Create it in the first place. Our sales system. It's a good system. It works. We're glad we have it.

Richard Campbell [01:43:06]:
But.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:06]:
But.

Leo Laporte [01:43:08]:
Build versus buy, that's always been a tough one. Well, now there's a third way. Thanks to Outsystems. Outsystems creates custom software using low code plus AI. Now there's a match that really works. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps, AI agents on the Outsystems platform. And there's a lot of reasons for it because Outsystems is all about outcomes. They're very focused on giving you an app that changes how you do things, makes it better.

Leo Laporte [01:43:44]:
Helping teams quickly deploy apps and now AI agents as well and delivering results. And they have the success stories. Go to the website, you'll see they helped a top US bank deploy an app for customers to open new accounts on any device. So it's mobile and desktop. It delivered 75% faster onboarding times. They helped one of the largest brewers in the world, the one with the green bottles, you know how they are. Deploy a solution to automate tasks to clear bottlenecks, which delivered a savings of 1 million development hours. How much would be a million? How much do you pay a developer now? Multiply that by a million.

Leo Laporte [01:44:22]:
That's a lot of money. They even helped a global insurer accelerate development of a portal and app for their employees. So this was a intranet app which delivered a 360 degree view of customers and a great way for insurance agents to grow policy sales. They did it all without systems. Outsystems platform is truly a game changer for development teams with AI powered low code. This is, you know, of course, I should have known. This is the way to do it. Teams can build custom future proof applications because you can always adapt them.

Leo Laporte [01:44:56]:
Right? They could build AI agents as well and they could do this as fast as buying an app. But the great thing about Outsystems is it's a platform. So you get built in, table stakes, starting point, fully automated architecture, securities built right in. All the integrations with all the tools you use built right in. You get data flows, you get permissions, you get all this stuff that you want, right? And that's. And that's the starting point with Outsystems. It's so easy to create your own purpose built apps and agents. There really is no longer a need to consider off the shelf software solutions again.

Leo Laporte [01:45:31]:
And please trust me, do not start from scratch writing your own either. You need Outsystems. OutSystems, the number one AI powered low code development platform. Learn more at outsystems.com TWiT that's outSystems TWiT. We thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. All right, back to little Paulie Thurat and Ricardo Campbello and mobile gaming. We're going to do kind of a gaming on gaming here, little gaming wave.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:11]:
I know that Epic Games and Tim Sweeney are controversy in some circles, but I think we all.

Leo Laporte [01:46:17]:
They're jumping up and down right now.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:18]:
Dead of thanks one huge against Google. Google appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. It was not interested.

Richard Campbell [01:46:28]:
That was the case where the judge in the regional area said, you guys need to settle this.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:33]:
Yeah. He said, listen, you don't want me to rule in this case, you should talk. You're going to talk to a mediator. And he did. Nothing happened. He's like, all right, well here we go. Went bad. So the thing that's most amazing about this honestly is that after the fact they settled.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:50]:
So Google actually no, it's even better. They extended this thing out more years. They applied it worldwide. Epic is like, they're a great partner again. Thank you. And now Fortnite's back in the Google Play store in the United States. Like they're just getting along great. It took five years of billions of dollars of legal battles, but Google finally saw the common sense that I've been trying to ask these companies that were so terrible to just sort of understand and learn from Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:19]:
Like, you know, if you fight this thing, you might get an outcome you don't like. But if you work towards settling it and work with these regulators in particular, you can at least have a say in your future.

Richard Campbell [01:47:31]:
Yeah, you don't want case law around this. It eliminates your choice of.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:37]:
Yeah. So Apple did better against Epic until they did what Apple does, which is belligerently not do anything that's required of them under the law. And the judge dropped the hammer on this company back in, I don't know when it was July or mid year, I don't remember. It was the most incredible legal thing I've ever read in my life. She was like, all right, I'm just taking everything away. You're not going to be able to get any fees. You're not going to look. She's like, we're just going to give them everything they wanted and we're going to apply it to the whole market.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:06]:
It's like, like, good job Apple. So they appealed that and they lost. So there's this one thing that I think People have widely misunderstood is that Google or Apple was trying to charge a 27% fee on purchases that were made outside of its App Store, which is like insanity. And they were saying, the panel of judges that issued this ruling said, you know, Apple should be able to recoup something when their intellectual property is used. And the judge can think about that, that she can ask the two companies to do it, or we can just say what we think is fair. It's going to be closer to zero than it is to 27, I can tell you that. But if you listen to Tim Sweeney, his thing is like they can never do what they're doing. It's not what you think it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:52]:
It's more like maybe per app there's a $1,000 to $2,000 fee because there are human beings involved. It's a one time thing. It's not like a per app thing. It's like if the purchase occurs outside the App Store, Apple doesn't get anything. Like that's the way it's supposed to be. So Apple could have charged 10%, that's all I'm saying. And no one would have said a word. This never would have happened, you know, and it's greedy.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:15]:
So I think that's beautiful. So there's that. I guess that's technically gaming related. The Xbox December update came out yesterday. It's a small one in the sense that there's only two updates and.

Richard Campbell [01:49:30]:
I.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:30]:
Was going to say, yeah, neither are directly related to the console at all, but they're both pretty good ones. So the Xbox mobile app, so the app for Android, iPhone or iPad added the ability to buy apps or games rather back early in the year because of the various legal issues around the world that these companies have had. But now they've added a store tab directly to us. It's make it a lot easier and nice. The other big one, and this is that Bluetooth LE thing I was talking about earlier. If you have an Xbox wireless headset, you have a firmware update to install and it's going to lower latency, better battery life, super wideband stereo, voice broadcast audio capabilities, like really, really good stuff. And specifically on a Windows 11 PC. And so whatever, it's good.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:21]:
Makes sense it would be a small update at this time of year.

Richard Campbell [01:50:24]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:24]:
Microsoft announced no new games. No, this is like a system update.

Richard Campbell [01:50:30]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:31]:
In January, Microsoft's going to have another Xbox developed direct event. This is where mostly third parties, but not all third parties come and show off whatever games are coming in the future. This is one of those vague ones because they're like. Well, we don't really have any specific games. There's a lot of stuff, though. Of course there's a lot of stuff. Playground games will be part of it. These are the guys who do, folks.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:51]:
One of the fours, I think. The Forza Horizon games, I think. But remember, you know, Halo Campaign Evolved. Is that the right name? Campaign Evolved, Yeah. And there's also like a new kind of origin story kind of a thing for Gears of War that are both coming out next year, too. Those are, you know, historically, any of the biggest Xbox games, our biggest Xbox studio game, and Microsoft Studio games. So I would imagine they're going to be part of it. So.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:19]:
So once we get past the holidays, we'll see when this happens. Do we have a date on this one? I don't think we do, no. Just January. So not a lot of details yet, but there's stuff to look forward to after the holidays. And, man, I almost didn't write about this because I know just by writing it I'm going to manifest that it never happens. But supposedly. Well, we have been getting rumors about A Half Life 3 Finally. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:52]:
20 years, literally 20 years later, 21. Whatever. Years later. Now the rumor is it's going to launch with the Steam machine, which is that little kind of consolidated PC type thing they announced about a month and a half ago.

Richard Campbell [01:52:05]:
Gabe Cube.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:06]:
Gabe Cube. The problems here are many. One is that because the cost of RAM has been going up, this thing was already going to be more expensive. People kind of wanted. Yeah. So it might be delayed. And what this game needs is another delay. But I guess if you're talking 21 or 22 years.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:22]:
What's the difference?

Richard Campbell [01:52:23]:
Yeah, what's the difference? Just wait.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:25]:
What's the difference is I literally would drop everything I'm doing to play this game all the way through.

Richard Campbell [01:52:30]:
And this is the brilliant thing about. If you actually want to make a new console, come out on the market and actually have a splash. Yeah. Oddly enough, you need an exclusive title. And if that exclusive title was a new Half Life game, you might just pull it off.

Leo Laporte [01:52:47]:
Can't get better than that.

Richard Campbell [01:52:49]:
But you'll ruin it if you overprice the machine and overprice, you know, and. Or strip it down or.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:54]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:52:55]:
People would pay almost anything for. I know, Half Life three. I think.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:59]:
I feel like I'd pay a thousand bucks to play this game right now. I could just have it right now. I'd do it.

Leo Laporte [01:53:04]:
So, like the assets and like. Like the Code was just kind of like frozen in amber somewhere and.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:09]:
Well, I hope not. Right. I hope it's not a 2004 era Half Life 2 engine game. And I, I don't think it will be.

Leo Laporte [01:53:17]:
I mean but I mean it's got a. Some of it had to have been done 20 years ago. I don't know if they started, you know, and along comes.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:25]:
There have been different, you know, pushes to make this happen obviously.

Leo Laporte [01:53:29]:
Is it the same studio? Are they even alive? Are they around?

Paul Thurrott [01:53:34]:
Oh yeah, no.

Richard Campbell [01:53:35]:
The folks that work at Valve don't leave. It's an unbelievably great job.

Leo Laporte [01:53:39]:
It's hard to get in Steam, isn't it? It's the same company.

Richard Campbell [01:53:42]:
That's right, same company.

Leo Laporte [01:53:43]:
So really this is their own in.

Richard Campbell [01:53:45]:
House and they, and they run a super flat organization where you pretty much decide what project you want to work on. So the reason the Half Life didn't come along is because they all moved to other projects that were making them more money.

Leo Laporte [01:53:58]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:53:59]:
It wasn't even more complicated than that. Right. Like that was the reality was that massive multiplayer games was making was just so much more money.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:07]:
We've gotten a lot of things we didn't want and we didn't get this one thing we really want. And I find that to be more than vaguely upsetting.

Leo Laporte [01:54:15]:
I'm really curious, like is it on floppy? Like the work they had done is.

Richard Campbell [01:54:19]:
Like putting on big hard drives.

Leo Laporte [01:54:23]:
I mean sitting on hard drives somewhere, keeping it up.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:27]:
The portal games have kind of come and gone since then. Right. There's the Left 4 Dead games and you can see the, I got it, say DNA or whatever of the, you know, Alex, the Half Life VR game.

Richard Campbell [01:54:40]:
But they also had written themselves into a corner like this prospect that you were going to. Yeah. Go to the alien world and so forth.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:48]:
You mean the prospect Nova.

Richard Campbell [01:54:49]:
They were in trouble story wise.

Leo Laporte [01:54:54]:
So here's my theory. They have all the. They have assets and they have a story and they have a storyline.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:00]:
They're going to use AI to upsize it and then write the story.

Leo Laporte [01:55:03]:
They'll upsize it. They have an updated engine. I presume that. I mean the Half Life engine's gotten better and better and better, right?

Richard Campbell [01:55:09]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:55:10]:
So really they have an engine. It's really taking the existing engine and taking the old assets, somehow updating them, maybe finishing the story. They must.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:21]:
That's fine with me. What you've done just described as something I would pay money for, something that would be great.

Richard Campbell [01:55:27]:
And we're also not talking about Half Life 2 episode 3, which never came. We're talking about a half different.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:32]:
Which also is a. Come on. These are games. I'd have to really think about this. Like who have you. Which brand have you seen live the most? It's kind of hard to remember, but Half Life and Half Life two and then the add ons like Blue Origin and then the. This like Black Mesa. The kind of modernization for most of the portal.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:55]:
Portal games. I played all of these things through so many times, so many times. And obviously at this point, the original Half Life doesn't live up graphically, but as a story, at least the first. There are three that you were referencing that.

Leo Laporte [01:56:10]:
This is. Paul, I love it. That you republished from 2004, your original half Life to review. You republished it in 2018, seven years ago.

Richard Campbell [01:56:20]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:56:22]:
So you've been living in hope ever since.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:24]:
These games were just fundamental. I mean they're, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:56:28]:
Oh, they were absolutely, absolutely.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:30]:
Oh my God. But you know, Half Life two, I mean, you know that. Not really there, but you can make.

Leo Laporte [01:56:35]:
Oh, you did this when the orange box came out. That's why this is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:40]:
But it's, it can look a lot better than this. Like Black Mesa looks better than this. As does the, you know, they did the remastering, I think this past year. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:56:49]:
So you spend $500 million, get artists in, just create new assets. You've got all the art will have to be redone.

Richard Campbell [01:56:59]:
Two ways about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:00]:
Half Life is like Star Wars. I owned it in every format available every time. And Half Life, the world moves on. So PC, we go to Xbox 360. Yep, Xbox, absolutely. They do the remastered version. Black. I'm playing this game again.

Leo Laporte [01:57:18]:
Beatles album ever same thing. I'm going to buy The Pink Floyd. 50th anniversary.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:23]:
I wish you were here. Like the Anthology 4 comes out, you're like, thank you. There's nothing new on here. I don't care. It's 18 hours long. I'm listening to all of this.

Richard Campbell [01:57:31]:
The only other game I ever found as replayable as Half Life 2 was fallout new Vegas. Interesting. And actually a lot of those Fallout games, well, they're New Vegas because there was so many ways to end that game. Like they feel kindred.

Leo Laporte [01:57:48]:
They feel like kindred spirits to the original Half Life too. I mean they're very much the next thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:54]:
They actually don't hold up quite as well. But the first three Halo games, the single player campaigns were other games I had played many, many times again and again. But I think the problem is once you get into really good multiplayer type things, at least for me, the single player didn't. You know, because it could be anything at any time. You know, even though you're playing the same levels over and over again, like the. The circumstances are going to be a little different every time. Whereas if you play through Half Life 2 today, there aren't five different outcomes. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:23]:
Like you're gonna play through Half Life 2. It's not like on rails, but it's also a story. Right. It's a. You know, it's. Whatever it is, it's a story. It's that one. To me, the Half Life 2, especially to me, really holds up.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:35]:
But.

Leo Laporte [01:58:39]:
Oh, well, I hope you're right. I mean, you have good reason for believing this.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:44]:
No, other than.

Leo Laporte [01:58:46]:
Well, no, it would be a brilliant marketing move. I mean, it would sell those steambots.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:51]:
Sorry I didn't write. I didn't pull this out of thin air. There's a game journalist who has. Sources have told him this is happening. They'd given them very specific dates for the release, but it's been pushed back. And he says, you know, I'm glad I didn't say anything about the dates. Not just because I would have been like wrong, but because he thinks this was a phishing thing on Val's part. They were trying to find out who was leaking information.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:13]:
I mean, obviously this is a big deal, but I, you know, again, why wouldn't they just announce it right now? You announced the box. It's going to come with this game. Are you kidding me?

Leo Laporte [01:59:22]:
Because they don't.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:23]:
You could take pre orders right now, sight unseen, you know.

Richard Campbell [01:59:26]:
Yep. I think I'd even order one. One.

Leo Laporte [01:59:30]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:30]:
And I'm buy one of these things.

Richard Campbell [01:59:32]:
Just to play Master Race. And I'd still. Game's too good.

Leo Laporte [01:59:35]:
During COVID I bought a big PC just to play Valheim and it saved my life. During COVID Hundreds of hours. Yeah. So really good game. It's worth it. Think of how. I mean that type of game, like per hour.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:50]:
What's the. Is there like an Assassin's Creed game or just like a. I don't know what it is. Like a dun. Like what holds up like the type of game you just walk around. It's just like Minecraft. It's just stuff like everywhere. Like you just keep walking and there's new stuff like you'll never.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:05]:
You don't ever hit the edge of the world, you know, it just keeps going like, what's the best of Those games.

Richard Campbell [02:00:11]:
Like, yeah, I think Assassin's Creed Odyssey was like that.

Leo Laporte [02:00:16]:
Where.

Richard Campbell [02:00:17]:
I remember one point, I was just ignoring the game. I literally followed an old woman who would walk to the market, buy the stuff to make bread, go back, like.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:26]:
Live her life, and you're like, it's.

Leo Laporte [02:00:29]:
Like traveling through history, traveling through time.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:32]:
Yeah, that's great.

Leo Laporte [02:00:33]:
I did that, too. Yeah. World of Warcraft, never. You never get tired of that?

Paul Thurrott [02:00:38]:
Yeah, never.

Richard Campbell [02:00:39]:
Well, those guys work really hard to keep the story moving, too.

Leo Laporte [02:00:41]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:00:42]:
Like, they keep making new games.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:44]:
Inside of World of Warcraft is Activision. Right. This is the same.

Richard Campbell [02:00:47]:
Yeah. This Blizzard, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:00:49]:
This is the Blizzard. Oh, I'm sorry. Blizzard. Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:00:53]:
Same now, buddy.

Richard Campbell [02:00:55]:
It's all the same. Microsoft, all the way down.

Leo Laporte [02:00:58]:
Microsoft now. All righty.

Richard Campbell [02:01:01]:
Anyway, if they want that C machine to work, this is how you do it. This is the title.

Leo Laporte [02:01:07]:
Well, you know, Gabe knows that. You know, he knows that.

Richard Campbell [02:01:10]:
Gabe's no fool, man. And I don't know why he wants.

Leo Laporte [02:01:12]:
It's really whether it's doable. All it is is whether it's doable.

Richard Campbell [02:01:15]:
I just don't understand why that hardware.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:18]:
Is not a thing that makes sense to buy.

Leo Laporte [02:01:20]:
No. Whether Half Life 3 is doable, whether they can actually do it.

Richard Campbell [02:01:24]:
Well, have they got a story that's worthy? Because that's a tough franchise to step into.

Leo Laporte [02:01:28]:
Yeah. You wouldn't want to put out a dud.

Richard Campbell [02:01:31]:
Well, it's like the Wachowskis trying to deal with making another Matrix film. Like it was, essentially.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:36]:
Until they blew it all in the first one, and it was like.

Leo Laporte [02:01:39]:
Yeah, there was nothing left.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:41]:
Well, happy Gilmore 2. Nailed it. I mean. Yeah. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:01:45]:
You know, I'd never seen Happy Gilmore, so I thought I watched that first. Yeah. But I couldn't bring myself.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:52]:
Then you watch them back to back.

Leo Laporte [02:01:54]:
Another one. Yeah, there is, but it's One was enough. I was satisfied.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:59]:
I always confused his movies. It's the one with the Bob Barker, and he's like. He attacks him on the golf course. It must be because it was the golf course.

Leo Laporte [02:02:06]:
That's Happy Gilmore.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:07]:
Yeah. Oh, my God. It's the best. Also, the Steve Buscemi character. He calls to apologize for being a jerk in high school. He's like, oh, I didn't. Never thought anything about it. Don't worry about it.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:15]:
And then he hangs up, and he has this list that says, people to kill, and he crosses that guy's name up. This is so excellent. It's just. Yeah. It's one of the most it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It's just beautiful.

Leo Laporte [02:02:26]:
Well, I guarantee you somebody who is working On Half Life 3 is listening right now and kind of they're just chuckling to themselves. Yeah. So message me on signal. Nobody will know.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:02:43]:
Don't use your work phone. Leolaporte.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:45]:
I'll give you my credit card number right now.

Leo Laporte [02:02:47]:
Just let us know.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:48]:
I'm not asking for a gift.

Leo Laporte [02:02:50]:
Tug your ear if we're on track.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:52]:
Yes, exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:02:53]:
Give us just a clue, a hint.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:56]:
Just a little something.

Leo Laporte [02:02:59]:
We will take a break and come back with the back of the book in just a little bit. You're watching Windows Weekly, last episode of last official. Now this isn't really the last episode, but the last News episode of 24.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:13]:
We're really having a trouble describing the situation. You know, I feel like we should.

Leo Laporte [02:03:17]:
It's the penultimate episode of 2020.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:19]:
It's the penultimate, but we've recorded it. The ultimate.

Leo Laporte [02:03:24]:
We did it out of order this is. This is actually Road.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:29]:
Yes. This is. This is. Thank you. This is our Abbey Road.

Leo Laporte [02:03:33]:
This is our happy road.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:33]:
That's exactly that. Now we have figured out that's how.

Leo Laporte [02:03:36]:
It'S do the show.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:38]:
That's exactly it. This is my Maxwell Silver Hammer. Yep, I knew I'd get there.

Leo Laporte [02:03:46]:
Our show today is brought to you by Cashfly, not only our sponsor but literally, literally, quite literally brought to you by Cashfly because they're our content delivery network and they have been practically since day one on Twitch. For over 20 years CashFly has held a track record for high performing ultra reliable content Delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And we know how good they are because we've been using Cash Fly for almost I think all of that time. 18 years, 17 years. We love their lag free video loading, their hyper fast downloads, their friction free site interactions. I am a of approached practically weekly by other CDNs saying Hey, we can give you a deal. And I just say no, I got Cash Fly. I got Cash Fly.

Leo Laporte [02:04:37]:
Join companies like Adobe, Microsoft, lg, the NFL and many more that rely on Cash Fly. You know most CDN providers kind of hold you back. You know you can only do what they let you do with Cash Fly you get a tailored solution and perf I, I will vouch for this performance obsessed partners. So your CDN becomes your competitive advantage. Cashfly's proof is in the petabytes. Events stream smoothly to millions of concurrent users worldwide. Online games start 70% faster. They scale instantly they play without lag.

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Leo Laporte [02:06:26]:
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Leo Laporte [02:07:01]:
Thank you, Cash Fly. Now, the moment you've all been waiting for. The back of the book.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:11]:
Well, since this is our ultimate penultimate Abbey Road episode, yes, I thought I would kind of think about the tip and App of the year. The app one maybe is iffy, but Tip of the year is unfortunately. I just talked about this last week, but it's definitely this deinsurdify Windows 11 stuff. So whether it's tiny 11 builder, if you're doing a clean install, win 11 debloat after the fact. And then the combination of Rufus, Ms. Edge Direct and Explorer Patcher just to get rid of all the other stupid stuff going on in Windows. And between these things, this works. Now there's a long term question I'm getting there where there's the possibility, maybe even the likelihood that some future version of Windows or some future feature update to Windows will reverse some of this stuff.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:04]:
Right. And so the idea, I probably talked about this a year ago. It's been a long time. But I've been thinking for a long time about creating my own like sort of tweaking utility. And I've taken some steps toward it. But the key feature of this thing would be that you could either have it running in the background, but more likely you would just run it maybe on first, you know, every time you boot the computer and it would examine your configuration and compare it to the one you configured through the app. And if it wasn't correct, you could tell them a. But you could also just fix it.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:36]:
Right. And so I kind of want to do that. I'm surprised no one really does that. The closest we have is win 11. DeBloat has the ability to export the configuration changes made so you can import them and then reapply them, which is okay, but I would like to not bother like if the system configuration hasn't changed, just leave it alone. But anyway, this stuff makes a big difference. So I'll keep looking at things like this. But to me this was a big deal.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:07]:
So there's no reason to accept the defaults of Windows 11, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And then this is a real recent one. It's game too. It's. Maybe this is a little unfair, but Fortnite, in addition to Epic, getting Fortnite back into the App Store, getting it back into the Google Play Store. Like I said, it's available on Windows 11 on ARM. And I have to say there's something about this game I actually really like. So I'm trying Battlefield.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:34]:
It's not quite the same as Call of Duty. Call of Duty has jumped the shark in some ways. Fortnite is a little cartoonish looking, but you get in and out of these games really quick. It's not as cartoonish as is. I still don't have Beavis and Butthead running around or the Chucky doll thing and you know, like, you know, like, like, like that's in Call of Duty. Like they've, they've really, they've, they've done weird things to it. There is, you know, Fortnite has some weird stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:10:02]:
I think they did those Weird things because of Fortnite though. I mean, that's the irony of it.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:06]:
But they have the, you know, the dancing stuff and. No, it's, it's what I like about it is how first of all, much smaller game, but it's, it's good action, it's similar gameplay.

Leo Laporte [02:10:18]:
Have you referred to pubg? Because it's really. That's what happened is PUBG did that Battle Royale in Fortnite. I think. Oh, we should do that.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:25]:
I'm going to spend more time with Pubg and also with Warzone, by the way, which I have not played recently. This is the one, the Battle Royale that comes with Call of Duty. So I feel like there might be something in there because for me I'm probably not going to spend a lot of time playing like the games I play normally in the new Call of Duty. I just don't like it and I'm tired of it and I got to try something slightly different. So yeah, it could be Warzone, my ppubg. Like I said, I did install that on a couple computers. But the thing I like about Fortnite is it's the smallest of the games. It's the quickest to install, the quickest to get in and out.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:57]:
It plays great and it plays really well in Windows and Arms. So even if that's what I have, I can still have this game. Like whereas I cannot play Battlefield, PUBG or Call of Duty on a non reasonably high end modern x64 computer. So it's very good. Yeah, I'm surprised to say. I know I'm going to. What's that dance call where they do the thing? They shake their.

Leo Laporte [02:11:20]:
Yeah, the.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:23]:
I'm a little behind. I feel like this was big about 10 years ago.

Leo Laporte [02:11:26]:
Yeah, you were a little behind.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:27]:
So. But remember, this thing's been banned and blocked everywhere and you know, so it's making a comeback or whatever. It's. It's got to be the top three games of all time or it's a top three game. Current games even, like, it's still really big.

Leo Laporte [02:11:42]:
Huge.

Richard Campbell [02:11:43]:
Huge.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:44]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:11:45]:
It wasn't flossing, it was the one from the Fresh Prince.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:48]:
Yeah, flossing. Flossing is close enough.

Leo Laporte [02:11:50]:
Flossing is one of them.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:51]:
Yeah, but this is like a long time because like this was not like three or four years. This could have been 10 or more years ago. I don't remember.

Leo Laporte [02:11:58]:
Let's put it this way, there are adults who played this as kids.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:02]:
Yeah, thanks. I didn't feel old enough already. Yeah, sure. Of Course, my kid thinks the world was in black and white one time and then we had a Wizard of Oz moment where everything turned the color amazing. It wasn't quite like that.

Leo Laporte [02:12:17]:
Richard Campbell run as Radio One of.

Richard Campbell [02:12:22]:
My sort of last regular shows of the year as well because the last two are a little more playful. I find on the holiday season people want to goof around, but that is not this show. This is Michelle Bustamante, who's one of the best security people I know, but much more on the architectural side. She paints a really great picture of how to think about how Zero Trust has evolved and what you've really got to approach as a CISO or as a company leader to think about security in a contemporary way because the bad guys are only getting better. And so this was an intense conversation about dealing with modern authentication, thinking through the cybersecurity frameworks from NIST and other related. And just like how the cloud helps, how it endangers, how do you get all these things in place and actually end up with something fairly maintainable for better or worse? In my beginning of the 2026, what's going to be like to be assisted min the biggest topic is security because the exploits are still vast. And so this move to where the cloud is forced us to think Zero Trust. And that's really beneficial because along the way we've come up with deeper and more significant security policies.

Richard Campbell [02:13:35]:
And Michelle's just one of those great thinkers in this space. So it was a face to face conversation. We were at a conference together and just got to talk for a while and, and I hope folks value it.

Leo Laporte [02:13:45]:
Michelle Bustamante I think Zero Trust is a fascinating subject.

Richard Campbell [02:13:49]:
So huge.

Leo Laporte [02:13:50]:
I will be listening show 1015 for Run as radio@runasradio.com now have a look, have a lock.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:59]:
Have a look.

Leo Laporte [02:14:00]:
Today it's time for some brown liquor.

Richard Campbell [02:14:05]:
So I picked Tasmania. Yeah, this is a Tasmanian whiskey. We've talked Tasmanian before, a few times. Starward, hellier, you know, we've had a few, but. And I kind of felt bad because Lark, Lark is the original Tasmanian whiskey. It's a bit mythological how original it actually is. Like this man, Bill Lark, who's still around today, although he's largely retired these days, his company's not his own anymore. Supposedly put, you know, Tasmanian whiskey on the, on the, on the map and it's not entirely true.

Richard Campbell [02:14:40]:
Like all mythologies, it comes from more complicated things than this. We've talked about Tasmania before. You know, they, they named for Abel Tasman who was a Dutch explorer went through there in the 1600s. Although he didn't name it after him, he named it after the governor of the Dutch East Indies whose name was Diemondslan the so it was long for a long time and even the British called it Van Diemen's Land. And I told a little bit about the William Bly story as well. When Bly was a navy man he was always a navy man but when he was actually doing surveying he surveyed Tasmania in 1792 and then when he became the governor of New South Wales he was that was the only coup that ever happened in Australia because Bligh was that kind of guy. And at one point he actually went went to Tasmania for a couple of years waiting on his ship, trying to find a way to get his governorship back before he finally went to England in 1810. The original town more or less for for Tasmania is Hobart Town in the southeast in Sullivan's Cove, which is actually the name of one of the whiskeys there.

Richard Campbell [02:15:47]:
And of course this is back when it was a colony operated by prisoners. So there were 19 crimes that could get you sent to Australia and this is one of the places there. But being the southernmost piece of land in Australia, it has very good weather for growing barley and all the other ingredients to make good stuff. In fact it even has its own peat. And so they of course were making whiskey there and every other kind of alcohol you do as as well as beer it's also safe to drink because we don't actually understand water wall of quality quality. And a governor Lachlan Macquarie, this is the same guy refused to help Bly back in the at the time of the coup in 1822, says well they're making everybody's distilling here anyway without any regulation so we might as well tax it. So he sets up a permission system, a licensing system and the first, first legal distillery in in Tasmania is in 1822, which is a couple of years even before like Glenn Livid started it up because the excise tax in Scotland is until 1823. So shortly there are dozens of licensed distilleries in and around Hobart.

Richard Campbell [02:17:06]:
This eventually Van Diemen's land becomes independent from New south Wales in 1825. And a few years further on the next governor in charge, a guy named named Sir John Franklin has a wife whose name is Lady Jane. And in 1839 she famously says I would prefer barley to be fed to pigs than be used to turn men into swine. And convinces her husband yeah, brilliant. It's brilliant. To outlaw the distilling of spirits. And so there is literally a full prohibition on making any kind of spirit on the isle of Tasmania from 1839 for quite some time. Okay, there was still Van Diemen's land.

Richard Campbell [02:17:45]:
It doesn't become officially Tasmanian until 1856. That rule will change a few decades on. In 1862, they start allowing whiskey production in there again. And it'll continue to scale up until the 1900s. The primary act of control is 1901. It's called the Distillation Act. And one of the rules that it had subsequently changed was that the minimum size of a still was 2, 700 liters, which is not, not huge in commercial standards, but it's big enough that it makes all kinds of home distilling illegal. Right.

Richard Campbell [02:18:18]:
You would never have a still that big. That's, that's, you know, even too big for a garage. It's massive. By the 1930s, the British distillers get heavily involved in making whiskey in and around Australia. And Australia has protectionist policies in place, which means importing whiskey gets really expensive. So this is how the British distillers get involved is they start doing blended whiskies in Australia specifically for the Australian market. But because there's no competition, because the imported whiskey is way too pricey, the whiskey is pretty bad. Like it's, it's a.

Richard Campbell [02:18:51]:
It's cheap blended whiskey and it's kind of a mockery of whiskey for the most part. So that by 30 years on or so in the 1960s, when protectionist tariffs finally get lifted and imported whiskey gets a little more reasonably priced, nobody buys Australian Whiskey. And by 1980, literally there is no whiskey being produced in Australia at all. And that gets us close to the sort of famous story of Bill Lark, that while fishing with his father in law in 1992, he sort of wonders why nobody makes single malt whiskey in Tasmania. And he finds out about the 1901 restrictions. And he advanced, had been dabbling in making spirits himself. And he had a 20 liter still, which is far smaller than a 2700 liter still. And so he goes to the government to basically have the rule change.

Richard Campbell [02:19:42]:
Now, he wasn't the only one. And again, this is where you get into this sort of mythological story. A few years earlier, there was another distillery called the Darwin Distillery, very small scale in 1989 that made a deal with the government to get a grant around barley production in Tasmania. Tasmania had their own strain of barley called Franklin Barley. And so they were starting to distill that into whiskey even though they weren't licensed for large scale production. But it was those folks that with Bill Clark went to the government and said, hey, can we get rid of this restriction for 2700 liters so they could do small scale production. It really kicks off the craft whiskey production in Tasmania as a whole. Now part of their challenge here is the banks don't like the distilling business.

Richard Campbell [02:20:33]:
It's basically impossible to get loans. And so all these little distilleries essentially bootstrap. They start at very small scale, just what they can afford to pay for. Maybe they get a little bit of investment in. And so the whiskey business in Tasmania is really small scale. And Bill and Lynn Clark sort of earned their reputation as the godparents of the Tasmanian whiskey business because anybody who starts one, they're there to help, including working with Sullivan's Cove and a bunch of the other distilleries there while they're making their own whiskey as well. And again in tiny batches. I saw a photograph of the distillery in 2006 and every.

Richard Campbell [02:21:11]:
It's truly rustic whiskey making. They're winning awards in the by the late 90s. But small stills, open ferments. They wanted to make smoky whiskeys, but they didn't use peat to dry their malt. They did that through the brewery. So they would actually after the malt would then smoke it with peat. All their cuttings done by hand. No big controls over any of that.

Richard Campbell [02:21:34]:
They're only aging in 100 liter barrels, tiny little casks with quarter casks essentially. And so typical production for distilleries including Lark at that time is in the hundreds of liters per year. Not barely even thousands of liters. It's just really small. By 2007, the family is directly involved. Bill's daughter Christy is taking over general manager, will then become the master distiller and basically run the place. Which is good because by 2010, while traveling in Scotland because Bill Bilkle arc had made all these relationships with these other distilleries, Bill suffers a stroke. He survives and actually recovers.

Richard Campbell [02:22:14]:
But the writing's sort of the wall on the wall at that point that he needs to step back. He can't push himself so hard anymore. By 2012, there's about eight different distilleries in whiskey in Tasmania making Whiskey. And in 2013, Bill and Lynn sell off 75% of the company to a group of undisclosed investors. This seems to be a common thing in Australia. It's all sort of quiet, including the dollar amount it was Somewhere between one and five million dollars. Bill stays on. He's the brand ambassador, but he's not directly involved in production anymore.

Richard Campbell [02:22:48]:
There's other folks involved in that, but they also figure out that because it's been such a small operation, even though he's been going for the better part of 20 years, he has about a thousand hundred liter barrels resting and it's just not a lot of whiskey. They were that by 2014, they're making 17,000 liters a year. That's it, right? Like that's more than. That's less than what many just Scottish distillers make in a day. You know, big distilleries make millions of liters, and here he was making 17,000. So they don't even have a lot to. To scale up with. But something important happens in 2014, and that is Sullivan's Cove, one of the other Tasmanian distilleries.

Richard Campbell [02:23:35]:
Their French oak edition, which was finished in in in a wine barrel, wins world's best single malt at the World Whiskey Awards. So while in general it was received that Australian whiskey was terrible, suddenly this is phenomenal whiskey. And like the eyes are on Tasmania. And that also brings. Brings the money in a big way. And a group called Montech International starts doing. Starts acquiring shares of Lark from any investor they can lay their hands on and starts putting money into Lark. They scale up the operations a bit, put an 1800 liters wash still in a 600 liter spirit still.

Richard Campbell [02:24:11]:
That's bigger, right? And then recognizing they just don't have enough whiskey from Lark itself, they acquire, with Bill's assistance, another distillery called Overeem Casey. Overeem and Bill Lark were friends, and it was about time that Casey wanted to step away from whiskey anyway. So it was an opportunity basically to get Overeem in there. That gives them more capacity. So they try and build things up. Montec in 2015, renames themselves the Australian Whiskey holdings because they recognize they got to keep doing more acquisitions, but they also start to take far more control. In fact, daughter Christy, who's now Mary Christie Booth Clark, is quote, made redundant. Of course, her response to that is within a year she'll start her own distillery in Hobart called Killara, which is still going to this day.

Richard Campbell [02:24:59]:
Things get really ugly in 2016 for this group for AWH, where they've been acquiring other distilleries that are in distress, that many of them have not done things properly. And so they're angry investors. There's missing money. Like they kind of get them into a big scrape and so that by 2019 there's almost nobody of the original Lark people involved with AW There are a bunch of serious fraud investigations on. It's like $10 to $20 million missing. And it leads to a big battle at the board level and new leadership comes and takes control and starts to try and make things right, get investors properly compensated, sort things out, bring other money in. They also rename the company back to Lark distilling. So sort of focus on their, their origins a bit more.

Richard Campbell [02:25:46]:
The Overeem distillery actually goes back to the Overeem family. Casey's daughter takes it over.

Leo Laporte [02:25:52]:
But they.

Richard Campbell [02:25:53]:
Still are battling with quantity and. And so having now invested or taking control of a bunch of different distilleries or having relationships with them, including Nant and Sullins Cove and so forth, it leads to this particular whiskey or this line anyway, what they call Symphony. So Symphony is actually as much as Bill Clark founded Lark on the basis of why isn't there single malt whiskey in Australia? This is a blend, and it's a blend of Tasmanian whiskeys. And they started these in 2020 and they've made a bunch of different versions and the label color changes each year. This is the gray label and it's a blend of a bunch of different Tasmanian whiskeys. The belief is that this, this particular version is made from Bothwell, Nant and Overeem. Each are aged about five to six years. Some are finished in bourbon casks, some in sherry casks, some in port casks.

Richard Campbell [02:26:45]:
The 2020 editions of these have gotten really precious and can sell for more than $1,000. This particular one I picked up at a little liquor store not far from the apartment we were renting when we were in Coolangata for 160 Australian for a 500mil bottle, which is pretty pricey. That's about 100 US for, you know, a bottle. It's that like half a third smaller. Well, normally they're 750s. Right. So we're about a third down. This should be.

Richard Campbell [02:27:14]:
It would make sense that at a 750 this be $150 u. S. Yeah. And I have not tasted it, but this is award winning. This is literally one for Australia's best blended malt in 2025.

Leo Laporte [02:27:26]:
So he's tasting it now, ladies and gentlemen. The first time, first taste, yes.

Richard Campbell [02:27:30]:
Well, okay, so the nose is super gentle.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:33]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:27:33]:
There's not a lot of alcohol smell. This is only 40%. It's quite low for a whiskey in general. Got a little bit of heat in it, but fruity. It's interesting. It's almost complicated. Like, there's too many flavors in there. They don't talk about how much of this is just grain spirit.

Richard Campbell [02:27:51]:
But this is considered a blended malt. So there may not be any grain in this at all. This might be all purely single malts put together. So this is good. It's tasty. Right. It's an interesting whiskey. It's expensive.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:08]:
It's.

Richard Campbell [02:28:08]:
For what it is, Right. Quite, quite expensive. But that's pretty common with Australian whiskeys. One of the problems that Australian whiskeys have is that their excise taxes are very high. And for small producers, that's extremely difficult. Right. Like we talk about, in some cases, a 750 has a $30 excise tax on it. So they pretty much have to be in the hundreds of dollars for that to even make sense.

Richard Campbell [02:28:27]:
Where typically in America, a bourbon excise tax is like five bucks, so they're spending a lot on that. And although now since about 2016, the Australian government has done refunds for small producers up to a certain amount to try and reduce that tax burden, but they're still trying to restructure all. All of this. So as much as this is an interesting whiskey and it is definitely a blend, it's kind of gotten away from the origin story, but it's about all that's left of Lark distilling. This. This original vision that Bill Lark has had is kind of gone. You know, it's no longer Lark Distillery. It is the House of Lark.

Richard Campbell [02:29:05]:
And what it is is a relationship with all these Tasmanian distilleries, including their own, to compose their own types of whiskey. If you're going to really pursue a single malt, you might want to look at Solomon's Cove or Hellier or, you know, a couple of the others that are there as well. Lark is trying to play the Godfather game to some disgrace with a different entity that's maybe trying to be a diageo, but hasn't gone as far as that.

Leo Laporte [02:29:34]:
Oh, I thought you were talking about make me an offer I can't refuse.

Richard Campbell [02:29:38]:
Yeah, I mean, Bill Lark is without a doubt, he's the first person from the Southern hemisphere to be put into the Whiskey hall of Fame in Scotland.

Leo Laporte [02:29:49]:
Oh, that's interesting.

Richard Campbell [02:29:50]:
And by everybody's measure, a nice man, but maybe not a businessman. And so his business kind of got away from him, and, you know, for his own needs, he had to move away. And the folks that took it over have put it into an interesting situation. Maybe that's how they write the show. Yeah, but this is an interesting whiskey, and it's a taste of Tasmania while not being what you'd consider a classic whiskey of any kind.

Leo Laporte [02:30:16]:
Yeah, Very good. Tasmanian Symphony number one.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:21]:
There you go.

Richard Campbell [02:30:23]:
For 20, 25, the gray bot. The Gray Label version.

Leo Laporte [02:30:26]:
The Gray Label.

Richard Campbell [02:30:28]:
So, yeah, I think that'll probably get drank over Christmas, you know.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:31]:
It's a beautiful bottle, by the way.

Richard Campbell [02:30:32]:
It's a gorgeous bottle, isn't it? It's deliberately the flask look sort of flat.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:37]:
Yeah, Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:30:38]:
I like that.

Richard Campbell [02:30:39]:
A nice aesthetic. But I always worry about aesthetics because that means maybe the product inside is not as good.

Leo Laporte [02:30:44]:
They spent all the money on the glass.

Richard Campbell [02:30:46]:
They spent some money on the glass.

Leo Laporte [02:30:48]:
That explains why my Louis XIV was so expensive.

Richard Campbell [02:30:51]:
Okay, well, there's also a threshold when you spend. When the cognac's that good and it's a cut crystal bottle, you're gonna pay a bundle.

Leo Laporte [02:30:58]:
I saved the Baccarat bottle. I'll be putting cheap.

Richard Campbell [02:31:00]:
Where you remember that. Remember that event 20 I had out of Moldova, which I don't let. I go there today. Like, that's. That was maybe $100 for what would have been a $2,000 bottle of cognac, because they just make good product and they don't spend that money.

Leo Laporte [02:31:17]:
And you put that in the Louis XIV flat bottle.

Richard Campbell [02:31:19]:
Yeah. And there you are. Right? Yeah. And that, to me, is the fun of this, is that often we find great things made with people with far less pretense. And I would argue this is the most pretentious Tasmanian whiskey you could possibly imagine for a place that otherwise is completely unpretentious. House of Lark. Like, where are you that you think that's a good idea?

Leo Laporte [02:31:41]:
I love Tassie. You know, it's funny. They're on roughly the same latitude as we are, and they feel very much like Northern California in some ways, and they have kind of that nice, relaxing feel. I felt right at home there. I really enjoyed it.

Richard Campbell [02:31:57]:
Oh, yeah. It's fantastic.

Leo Laporte [02:31:58]:
Yeah. Well, thank you, sir. Mr. Richard Campbell, native New Zealander, blessing us now with his presence in Northern America. He is out of British Columbia, where he is at Mad park for the holiday season. Paul Thurrott is in beautiful Pennsylvania, and he's very happy about it. You call this your Beavis and Butthead moment?

Paul Thurrott [02:32:25]:
And I was. I couldn't get that thing over my head. And my daughter was like, oh, my God. I've never seen you look this sad. My. My. My son just walked over and hugged me. I was like, I don't.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:37]:
Like, I can't Continue. I can't do this.

Leo Laporte [02:32:39]:
He bought a child's poncho and his head is too big. Paul Thorat is at therot.com you'll find his books at leanpub.com Richard Campbell is at runnersradio.com that's where you'll find his podcast run, his radio and dot net rocks. And they join us. Normally, if this weren't Abbey Road, they'd be joining us every Wednesday at 11:00am Pacific Time.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:02]:
Solo stuff, man. This. We're not done yet.

Leo Laporte [02:33:04]:
The outtakes are so good. 1900 UTC. You can watch us live in the club Twit Discord.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:10]:
We'd love to. To play his own songs. Can you believe it?

Leo Laporte [02:33:14]:
He keeps having Lisa come in, sit.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:18]:
Over there in a corner like a weirdo chick.

Leo Laporte [02:33:26]:
What was I? Now it's all gone out of my head. Oh, yeah. If you're in the club, please watch us in the Discord. Otherwise, YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kick. But that's only if you want to watch live after the fact. You can download shows and listen at your convenience. We have audio and video at our website, Twitter, TV, WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly.

Leo Laporte [02:33:46]:
And of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically the minute it's available. I believe that concludes the penultimate episode of the year, the last one we're going to be recording on next week. Again, we've got a very special Christmas Eve. No, no, we got nothing very special Christmas Eve because we won't be here the following week. We will have our New Year's Eve special episode and then we will be back live.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:17]:
If I knew New Year's Eve, I would just one little baby diaper thing and, you know, instead.

Leo Laporte [02:34:22]:
I liked your Santa beard. It was something. It was festive.

Richard Campbell [02:34:27]:
It was a look.

Leo Laporte [02:34:28]:
There was a look.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:29]:
It was warm.

Leo Laporte [02:34:30]:
So again, no show the 24th special show New Year's Eve, the 31st. And then we'll be back doing this January 7th. Will you still be in Mad Park, Richard Kim?

Richard Campbell [02:34:39]:
I will be in Mexico.

Leo Laporte [02:34:43]:
Yeah. You know how to. You know how to live, man.

Richard Campbell [02:34:45]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:34:46]:
Paul, will you be in Kunji or will you be going back?

Paul Thurrott [02:34:48]:
Yeah, I think we fly to Mexico that Friday. Okay, I remember. And then we'll actually. We're going to see him and.

Richard Campbell [02:34:56]:
Yeah, and then they're coming down Acapulco as well. So you'll get. The next one will be the two of us together drinking tequila because that never went wrong ever.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:04]:
Nice well.

Richard Campbell [02:35:09]:
We get a little time in Mexico City together, but I'll get back in time to. To do a show for Med park before London.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:19]:
I'll just be in Mexico the whole time. I'm not going anywhere, so that's going to be that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:35:24]:
We look forward to all of the future episodes, and we look forward to.

Richard Campbell [02:35:28]:
All of your.

Leo Laporte [02:35:30]:
Having a great holiday. We really appreciate your. Your help, your support. You're listening. It makes a big difference to us. We love our club members in the Discord. Thank you for being here, Richard.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:41]:
You.

Leo Laporte [02:35:41]:
You flew 200,000 kilometers in the. In the year.

Richard Campbell [02:35:45]:
Yeah. Yep. 200 days on the road, you could.

Leo Laporte [02:35:50]:
Have flown to the moon.

Richard Campbell [02:35:51]:
Yeah. A few times. Over 20 cities or 20 countries? 60 cities. Wow.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:56]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:35:57]:
That's amazing. In one year. That's. That's remarkable. Well, stay home for a little bit then.

Richard Campbell [02:36:03]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:36:04]:
Thank you, everybody. We appreciate you being here. Have a wonderful holiday. If we don't see you before the new year, we'll be right back here on January 7th with the new live episode on Windows Weekly.

Richard Campbell [02:36:16]:
Take care.