Windows Weekly 998 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott is here. Richard Campbell is here. We've got a spicy whiskey, Bill Gates warning about the dangers of AI, and translucent Xbox controllers, plus a thumbstick you can sit on. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:25]:
This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte [00:00:32]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, episode 998, recorded Wednesday, August 26th, 2026. Laptop Fort. Hey, all you Windows and dozers. Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you dozers. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we talk about the latest from Microsoft with these 2 handsome cats right here, Mr. Paul Thurrott Who's— it looks like is still in Lower Macungie, PA, or are you in Upper Macungie now?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:05]:
No, it's Lower Macungie.

Richard Campbell [00:01:06]:
It's very lower.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:08]:
The superior Macungie.

Leo Laporte [00:01:09]:
The better Macungie. Uh, on the right side of the tracks, he is of course, uh, the man in charge of tharot.com, the eponymous— they ever call it the eponymous blog site, tharot.com?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:22]:
Yeah, I don't know who they is, but yeah, maybe. It is, I suppose.

Leo Laporte [00:01:27]:
Those folks.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:28]:
Those people.

Leo Laporte [00:01:29]:
Those people. He is also the author of many fine volumes, all of which are available at leanpub.com. And oh, look who's here, the host of Run As Radio and .NET Rocks, the wonderful, charming Canadian who still doesn't hate us, the one Canadian who still doesn't resent the United States of America.

Richard Campbell [00:01:50]:
You're not making it easy, let me tell you. I know.

Leo Laporte [00:01:53]:
Pretty soon we're gonna have to embargo you, Mr. Richard Campbell. Good to see you from—

Richard Campbell [00:01:57]:
May, or at least tariff me here. It's a little windy outside.

Leo Laporte [00:02:00]:
Oh, it's beautiful in Mad Park. He's looking out over the sound.

Richard Campbell [00:02:04]:
Yeah, the wind's blowing in from the southwest. Bit of white capping out there, but it's blown all the smoke away. It's pretty nice.

Leo Laporte [00:02:10]:
Is there— are there fires still, uh, burning?

Richard Campbell [00:02:11]:
There are fires in the interior, and so we've had some inversion winds going that have pulled the smoke out to us, which, I mean, I like We got it pretty easy that we have some smoke compared to the folks who've lost homes.

Leo Laporte [00:02:24]:
No, I know. It's terrible.

Richard Campbell [00:02:26]:
It's been a very tough year.

Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
And we're gonna have a bad fire year here in Northern California, I fear.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:30]:
Yeah, sure.

Leo Laporte [00:02:31]:
Yeah, we already had a few, as you know.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:33]:
As we know.

Leo Laporte [00:02:33]:
One during the show a couple weeks ago.

Richard Campbell [00:02:36]:
And as much as all of the current things going on are crazy stupid, you also know that there'll be Canadian crews down there fighting them with you.

Leo Laporte [00:02:42]:
Yeah, thank you.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:43]:
Assuming we let you into the country, but we'll see.

Leo Laporte [00:02:46]:
Just don't drive those Chinese EVs down here. There you go.

Richard Campbell [00:02:50]:
We got Mexican crews up here fighting fires with us too.

Leo Laporte [00:02:52]:
Yeah, you know what?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:53]:
There's a lot of good people on this continent when you think about it.

Leo Laporte [00:02:56]:
It's really true.

Richard Campbell [00:02:57]:
Funny, huh?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:58]:
You know, really true.

Richard Campbell [00:02:58]:
And she focused on what's important.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:02]:
Oh well.

Leo Laporte [00:03:04]:
Just want to say that just because we have a representative government doesn't mean it represents all of us. That's all I'm going to say.

Richard Campbell [00:03:11]:
It's getting a little less representative by the minute.

Leo Laporte [00:03:13]:
By the minute. Yeah, but enough of that. We don't— we're not here to talk politics. We're here to talk Microsoft Windows and all of that jazz. There's no politics in that. Well, I saw Bill Gates' latest, uh, uh, missive.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:29]:
Yeah, which he said nothing problematic about that guy.

Leo Laporte [00:03:32]:
We're all gonna die.

Richard Campbell [00:03:36]:
Ah, great.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:36]:
Pretty sure he was, uh, well, we'll talk about that.

Leo Laporte [00:03:39]:
There's no inoculations for AI, kids. But that's not what we're here to talk about. Let's talk about Week D.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:46]:
Well, this is going to be a brief conversation, Leo, because It is Week D. Yes. And yesterday was the Tuesday of Week D. And yesterday Microsoft released nothing.

Richard Campbell [00:03:56]:
Oh wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:58]:
Now it has missed the Tuesday here and there. The Tuesday of Week D is not as important as Patch Tuesday, but I, I'm starting to wonder, you know, last week I think it was we talked about, or yeah, probably last week, uh, whatever the most recent Release Preview builds were as a kind of preview what we would see this Weekday if they had shipped it, uh, and eventually probably will. And then also a preview of the next Patch Tuesday, right, from, uh, for September. And if you look at the, um, the makeup of those builds, this is the big stuff that Microsoft announced for this year, right? The new Start menu, the new taskbar, the new Windows Search, the new widgets, um, on and on it goes. So in a way, this could be 26H2, right? I mean, essentially, right?

Richard Campbell [00:04:44]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:44]:
Um, they don't, these things don't matter as much as they used to, but the timing kind of makes sense. So, you know, we'll see what happens here. But as of, you know, I, I actually usually forget, you know, Week D on that Tuesday and then Patch Tuesday, I would say, uh, what are we in the 8th month? So 16 of those, I've probably forgotten 15 of the 16 on that day that it was that day. And yesterday, for some reason I was super busy, but very late in the day, I was like, wait a minute. It's Week D. Yeah, you should look this up. And I checked and there was nothing. And I checked again this morning and I checked again right before the show and, um, nothing.

Richard Campbell [00:05:20]:
They can wait till the show is over, then publish.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:22]:
I mean, it could happen anytime. It might not even happen this week, you know, like it's because this is, you know, this is the big one. I, I think they do want to get this one right, but, um, but they have not said anything about it. So I don't know what the reason or excuse is, but as of the start of this show, at least we do not have new bills yet. preview builds this week, but— or, you know, yeah, this week. But we'll see, we'll see. That could still happen.

Richard Campbell [00:05:45]:
Do you think it's still summer effects, or do you think it's like they're still changing the whole workflow? Like, I mean, I've still got a pretty positive mood over Pavan and, and what's been—

Paul Thurrott [00:05:55]:
Oh yeah, no, I'm not— this isn't a complaint. I'm— it's more just a little strange. It's not a big deal. I mean, it's, uh, it's happened before. It's, you know, it's not a hard schedule, but Yeah, I mean, that's— but this is the big one, right? So you kind of— I'm tracking this one a little more closely and it's actually—

Richard Campbell [00:06:12]:
You care a lot about Week D.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:15]:
Yep. I'm a big Week D guy.

Richard Campbell [00:06:17]:
Because it's a telegraph of what happens next.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:18]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's the— it's, uh, it's one of those steps, right? As we get to—

Richard Campbell [00:06:22]:
You getting ahead on your writing.

Leo Laporte [00:06:24]:
So what do you mean by it's the big one?

Paul Thurrott [00:06:26]:
So this is the one this year, remember they're doing the pain points thing, right? And so there's a whole laundry list of stuff that they've talked about. Uh, and then, you know, the stuff we— I mentioned last week that they haven't really talked about at all. But they're fixing a lot of the stuff that's wrong with Windows 11 this year. And if you think about the big bucket features, which is the new Start menu, the new taskbar, we can move around to the different sides of the screen again. Uh, the new Windows Search, which actually works for a change, which is, you know, 20 years coming.

Richard Campbell [00:06:53]:
Not going to believe it.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:54]:
Uh, I know, uh, the new widgets, which is configured the way I always configured widgets anyway, turn off all the notifications, prevent the mouseover thing from You know, firing the widgets thing off, et cetera. Um, that's all in this build. So, or this, um, build, it's not really a build, but it's all coming in this Week D and then in next month's Patch Tuesday.

Richard Campbell [00:07:14]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:15]:
So it's the big one. Um, but except for that part where it wasn't. Well, but again, it's, it's not a big deal. You know, it is in release preview, right? So there's some round of testing occurring there. Maybe they found something, maybe it required a couple extra days, who knows?

Richard Campbell [00:07:29]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:29]:
Uh, I do expect to see it this week for the, for whatever that's worth. The one question I have is, um, whether the thing we get for Patch Tuesday is a preview update, which means you have to opt into it, or if it's a stable update where you just kind of automatically get it. Because historically, not always, but, uh, typically, um, the big annual update comes out in October, but they've gone plus or minus on that by a month. So it, Even that's not a hard and fast rule. Um, so we'll see. I mean, right now we just walk into his guests.

Richard Campbell [00:08:01]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:02]:
Uh, so there's that. Um, and then in the Insider Program, um, I, I've had such a hard time remembering when anything happens. This probably must be Friday. Yeah, Friday. So Friday they released 3 builds, you know, which is not as many as they have been doing. They've often done 5 in recent months, but Beta arm and everything else schism. The whole, yeah, it's just, I mean, they try to pretend there's like 2 channels in this thing for some reason. And this is like 7, but whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:36]:
So yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:08:37]:
So channels and a few of them have an arm leg.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. A few of them have branches for sure. So the, I've lost track of my original post here. Couple of things in here. Um, one is there, so I talked, this is what I was talking about last week, these little things that they're kind of doing. So you can think about, um, like File Explorer got dark mode at some point, but then the subfold— the subwindows rather of File Explorer did not. Um, I think, let me just look at this thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:07]:
I think it's still like that in stable. Yep. Yeah. So if you do like folder options in File Explorer or, um, a file tra— well, actually I think file transfer maybe is the one of the ones they did modernize, but you know, it's haphazard, right? So they've been kind of going through the UI and, modernizing things. Um, there's been work on the Run dialog, which is still in the open source.

Richard Campbell [00:09:24]:
And now, is modernizing actually purging JavaScript?

Paul Thurrott [00:09:28]:
I can't promise that.

Richard Campbell [00:09:29]:
De-reacting pro-WinUI? Yeah, not—

Paul Thurrott [00:09:36]:
no, not yet. So most of the modernizing is just like a, like a surface-level WinUI thing, right?

Richard Campbell [00:09:43]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:43]:
And when you, you know, move a UI from whatever it was before, some kind of Win32 whatever, possibly WPF, but probably just went straight up Win32.

Leo Laporte [00:09:52]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:52]:
Um, you know, you get benefits of things that, you know, Windows has had for a long time that these things do not support, like automatic light and dark mode support, right? So if the system's in dark mode, that dialog will be in dark mode. Nice. Um, high DPI support, et cetera. So, um, uh, text scaling, you know, whatever it might be. So, uh, in these builds, I don't know if it's in every— I think it is in all of them. Uh, they're modernizing the autoplay experience. So if you ever, If you've ever plugged in a USB drive or whatever, you would've seen this, which is this total Windows 8 UI. Like it's literally from Windows 8.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:26]:
So it's, and it's bizarre because there's 2 UIs depending on what you're doing. So there's the, it goes up in the corner and it says, what do you wanna do with this thing or with this type of thing? Like, so it's a removable drive.

Richard Campbell [00:10:37]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:37]:
Like, what do you wanna do? And so I usually just click like, don't ever do anything. I never see it again. But if there's a BitLocker, uh, protection, BitLocker To Go on that drive, then you get another dialogue that also appears. I think it's, yeah, the upper right of the screen for some reason, which is not where anything ever appears.

Richard Campbell [00:10:52]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:53]:
Um, I'm sure it was originally up there so you could, you know, touch it with your thumbs or something. Um, it looks like nothing else in Windows. It's bizarre. If you don't, uh, address the dialogue, you misclick or something, or just don't see it, it goes away, whatever it is. It doesn't appear in Notification Center. Um, you know, obviously it doesn't do light and dark mode. It, you know, so it's inconsistently, you know, inconsistent from a visual perspective. It's inconsistent from a functionality perspective.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:20]:
interactive. Um, it's just a kind of a bizarre UI. So these builds have a modern version of that experience. It's a, you know, window that appears right in the middle of the screen. It looks, you know, it's WinUI-based. It supports light dark mode. It does all the, you know, the text scaling and, um, high DPI stuff, whatever it might be. And if you miss it, if you're— or you misclick or you close it or whatever, it will— well, actually, if you close it, it goes away.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:42]:
But if you miss it, it will appear in Notification Center, which is what notifications is supposed to do. So—

Leo Laporte [00:11:48]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:49]:
Uh, nice. Um, I have not seen this yet. In fact, I was just thinking about this before the show. I got to get some, I got to get some more laptops going, either get them updated or actually just get them in the Insider Program, uh, to keep up on this stuff. But that's kind of cool.

Richard Campbell [00:12:02]:
Sorry, you said you need more laptops?

Paul Thurrott [00:12:05]:
No, no, no, no, no, no. I have too many laptops. What I need are more— no, I don't need more laptops. I need more laptops that are configured for the Windows Insider Program. Um, so I get, or truth is I probably have several. I just don't have them running right now. I gotta, I've been trying to just leave them alone. It's like I have too many computers.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:29]:
Um, anyway, I, but I do have to, I do want to test this and other things. Right. So there's this, right. Um, the other thing is kind of an interesting accessibility feature, which I feel like they could go a little further with this, but. They've added a new option in, you know, Settings, Accessibility, I think it's Visual Effects, called Open Apps Maximized. It's just a toggle. If you turn it on, every app you open will open maximized.

Richard Campbell [00:12:55]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:56]:
Um, it's an accessibility thing, I, you know, because it's in accessibility settings, but, uh, like many accessibility settings, I could picture people liking this. Like one of the things I really like in certain Linux distributions is the ability to always open windows centered on the screen. You know, Windows is kind of— Windows, the operating system, is kind of strange because depending, you know, some apps do an okay job of remembering. You know, one app that I have a particular problem with is like Slack, for example. I always maximize Slack on a laptop, but it always opens like kind of 80% of the screen for some reason.

Richard Campbell [00:13:32]:
Sure.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:33]:
And you maximize it and close it, bring it back, it's 80%. You know, like it just won't remember the thing. Okay.

Richard Campbell [00:13:38]:
Um, the, the new Outlook opening a calendar on a portrait screen, it tries to fill the portrait screen. Yeah. I have a calendar entry that's, you know, 9 feet tall. Nobody needs this and you cannot stop it from doing it.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:51]:
I feel, you know, on, uh, on phones, I feel like we need per-app, uh, rotation, right? So in other words, if you have a rotation feature on your phone that's global, so you, you know, you rotate obviously, and if the app supports it, it will flip around. I, I feel like you just want to have that be on in the system, but then you want to go into apps and be like, no, never, never, never will this app go portrait or whatever it is. Uh, and never news. On desktop systems, I like the idea of, um, opening centered. I like— I, I love the idea of here's the size I want or the position, remember it. But you know, this is a per-app thing. Some apps are really good at this, some aren't. You know, then you get in the File Explorer thing where like you open multiple windows and they, the first one kind of opens semi-randomly on screen unless you only had one open before and it will open there, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:42]:
But then you, you know, uh, Windows key plus E and it kind of cascades them down, but then it hits the thing and it jumps up to the far side of the screen, whatever. Like I, this seems like a, it's the type of thing that probably wouldn't bother too many people, but, um, for those people that really actually care, but you know, that these things remember.

Leo Laporte [00:14:58]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:58]:
You know, it'd be kind of nice if this was just a standard, always worked kind of OS feature. So I like maximize. Maximized is useful for a laptop, you know, for sure. Especially if you're used to multiple screens or just big screens, whatever it is at a desk. You get on a laptop, even if it's a pretty big screen, you know, it's like, well, actually here I do want that thing maximized all the time. So I could, I could picture using that. That's, that's kind of interesting. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:15:24]:
Yeah. Without a doubt. Oh, I just realized my windows are opening perfectly on Outlook on this machine. 'Cause I turned off new Outlook.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:32]:
There you go. I was like, that's weird. Oh, I see.

Richard Campbell [00:15:34]:
Why is that working? Oh yeah, totally makes sense. Right, right, right. I got so frustrated with it, I shut it off and now it doesn't bother me anymore.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:42]:
There you go. Yeah, that will do it.

Leo Laporte [00:15:45]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:45]:
Well, doctor, you know, it's like my knee hurts every time I do this. It's like, stop doing that.

Richard Campbell [00:15:49]:
You know? Stop doing that.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:50]:
Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:15:52]:
Doctor, doctor, why does it hurt when I hit my head with a hammer?

Richard Campbell [00:15:56]:
Why am I feeling so good? Oh, I turned off new Outlook.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:00]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:16:01]:
That's why.

Leo Laporte [00:16:03]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:16:05]:
My goodness.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:06]:
It's possible. I mean, just, I'm just saying, having, uh, like less experience than almost any developer on earth, uh, you can write an app that will always remember where it was. I mean, you could just do this.

Leo Laporte [00:16:18]:
I've done it. I know it's easy.

Richard Campbell [00:16:20]:
It's harder on web tools, which is actually what the new Outlook is, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:16:23]:
It's a web Driven.

Richard Campbell [00:16:25]:
That's—

Leo Laporte [00:16:26]:
come on, you have local storage. It's not like you can't save something to the drive that says where you were.

Richard Campbell [00:16:31]:
What a good idea.

Leo Laporte [00:16:32]:
What a thought.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:34]:
Yep. Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:16:36]:
So unless everybody's blocking cookies, in which case maybe that's why they don't do it.

Richard Campbell [00:16:41]:
I don't know the answer to that.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:43]:
It's kind of laziness.

Richard Campbell [00:16:44]:
But you know what I do know is I use lots of different web apps and none of them make me as angry as the new Outlook.

Leo Laporte [00:16:51]:
Well, there's a benchmark.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:53]:
There's still— I mean, this thing, there's Angry Richard benchmark. There's still a, um, just trying to figure out a way to do this. Like, uh, you have to do a shortcut. So if you have like a shortcut to an app of whatever kind, you can right-click it, properties. And there's a, in that properties, there's no way I can, I can't really bring it up to show myself, but the, you know, legacy windows, there was a way like, remember where this thing was, or you could specify like, I always want this thing to be. you know, minimized or maximized or whatever. Like, this is the thing, like, Windows— yeah, Windows could force this on apps, like, right? And the fact that there's a, uh, an option coming that will let you open all apps maximized tells you that Windows could take the next step and say, always remember this thing, you know, like, for every app, like, just do it.

Richard Campbell [00:17:45]:
But one of the scripts I was complaining about earlier today, they, they're just making fun of the tool because it was messing it up, is a script that does exactly that. When I go, you know, my reflex as soon as I record a show is to copy it off this machine, right? It has to be somewhere else or it could be lost, and I don't like losing shows. It ruins my day.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:02]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [00:18:02]:
So as soon as I plug the, you know, I have the, I have a storage device plugged into the Rode. As soon as I plug it into the PC, I have a script that runs that pops all the windows for where I'm going to copy it to.

Leo Laporte [00:18:13]:
There you go.

Richard Campbell [00:18:14]:
Right, it's like 3— there's 3 folder windows I need. We know one is the drive, the other is the local storage that's properly organized, the other one is, you know, the, the production folder out of the cloud. And then just— I realize you open those over and over and over. And so it's like, you know, you spend a couple of minutes with Copilot, you can write a script. And it wasn't enough to just— I want it to pop. It said I want them to pop right like this, right? Like, this is a configure here, move there, done.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:41]:
Yep. I mean, you're already done, so you don't need this, but I feel like, you know, fancy zones, I think in PowerToys kind of does this, I believe. You know, there's ways to do it, but—

Richard Campbell [00:18:51]:
Yeah, no, I brute-forced it with Copilot. Yeah, you know, a certain amount of software taunting of software, and it got there.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:57]:
Yeah, I like the threatening nature of that. It's good.

Leo Laporte [00:19:00]:
Um, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:19:01]:
Oh no, you have to taunt the software, but it's like, you know, it's not working, here's the error message, you iterate again. You know, it wants me to just change a couple lines. It's like, yeah, except you don't tell me what lines you want me to change. You say somewhere around here do this, somewhere around there. It's like, just give me the code again. And honestly, it's like, but I don't want to.

Leo Laporte [00:19:21]:
I don't wanna.

Richard Campbell [00:19:22]:
Yeah, it's like, listen, I don't want whiny personality from software.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:26]:
I just want—

Leo Laporte [00:19:28]:
oh boy. We can, uh, you want to talk a little bit about hardware in just a second? Are you a hardware guy?

Paul Thurrott [00:19:36]:
Not really, but I am.

Leo Laporte [00:19:38]:
But come on, you have more laptops than anybody I know.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:41]:
Yeah, I built a little fort with them the other day, but I mean, normally I just don't.

Richard Campbell [00:19:46]:
I just doled another 3 out to some students, so it's too bad. I get rid of that little—

Leo Laporte [00:19:50]:
because I just would love to see that. You know, it's funny, with all the toys, with laptops we bought Henry and Abby when they were little, the one they loved the best were these cardboard bricks I spent Christmas Eve assembling out of flat cardboard into What looked like bricks. They would play with that for hours building forts and stuff. Now your kids can do it the modern way. Yeah, with laptops.

Richard Campbell [00:20:13]:
With Lenovo laptops.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:14]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:20:16]:
Look, I made a roof with a yoga.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:18]:
Every fall now, it seems like I have a nephew or a niece that's going off to college or something, and then they're— my sister or somebody will call me and be like, hey, do you have any laptops? I'm like, yeah, I'd like— I can give you 13 or 14 of them, but—

Leo Laporte [00:20:32]:
Oh good, I'm gonna refer those calls to you because I get them too. And unlike you, I have no extra laptops. There's not— there are no laptops flowing out my door.

Richard Campbell [00:20:42]:
Every machine he has is currently running at 90 degrees centigrade.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:48]:
You kind of forget, like, well, like I brought up this laptop, like I was gonna— I thought this kid would like— he'd want one that could play games, you know, pretty good. It's like, I found this thing that was like 64 gigs of RAM, you know, 2 terabyte SSD. And, um, you know, I get this thing all ready for him and I'm like, I'm like, hey, by the way, this thing is awesome, you know, for video games and blah, blah. And he goes, yeah, I don't even, I don't actually play video games. And I was like, then I will take that back. You're an idiot.

Leo Laporte [00:21:14]:
You should have told him it's good for AI. He would have, he would have jumped.

Richard Campbell [00:21:19]:
I did.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:19]:
I, I just in talking to him for like a couple of minutes, I was like, he just doesn't care. You know, like he was not interested. Like, I mean, he needs it for school. Yeah, how's it gonna look? Well, it's like everything else without— like, it's terrible. So it's consistent in that regard.

Richard Campbell [00:21:34]:
But oh yeah, that's the old quote, right? 65 threads, none of them are for you.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:38]:
Right, right.

Leo Laporte [00:21:39]:
Yeah. Keith in our Discord says, I thought Leo had loads of laptops. So does everybody I know. I get calls all the time, and you got an extra iPad? You're gonna— no, we buy everything. We don't, we don't have any extras. I even bought these silly AI machines. I spend my own money on this stuff. Yeah, I ain't giving you my laptop.

Richard Campbell [00:22:01]:
I have a pipeline of a few different, um, businesses. They systemize, all run as people.

Leo Laporte [00:22:06]:
Oh yeah, you're, you're— yeah, you're good because you do the charity work too.

Richard Campbell [00:22:09]:
No, that's— yeah, I'm just getting them to kids who need them.

Leo Laporte [00:22:11]:
Yeah, that's all.

Richard Campbell [00:22:12]:
Yeah, so we got a couple more out this week.

Leo Laporte [00:22:13]:
Actually, Burke has all my laptops, right? Uh, let's take a little break, a little timeout. He also has my, uh, original 128K Mac.

Richard Campbell [00:22:26]:
Wow. Vintage.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:28]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:22:28]:
I gave him something pretty special.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:30]:
I have a friend who just literally this week texted me a photo of the original, uh, Surface Pro.

Leo Laporte [00:22:37]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:37]:
And he was up, it was updating or something. And I, I was like, you—

Richard Campbell [00:22:40]:
That thing's running?

Paul Thurrott [00:22:42]:
I was, well, I said, right. I was like, you, are you, I was like, are you using that? I mean, like, it seemed inconceivable to me. And he's like, No, it was holding up something in the closet and I decided to see if it would come on. And then it did come on and I was like, well, I'll send Paul a picture of this. He'll appreciate this.

Leo Laporte [00:22:57]:
And I was like—

Richard Campbell [00:22:58]:
I can't tell you how many bricked original surfaces I've had.

Leo Laporte [00:23:01]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:01]:
I mean, that thing's like an inch thick too. It's like a tablet that's like this.

Richard Campbell [00:23:04]:
You know, it was ideal for catching dinner, right? You just kill a small animal with it.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:10]:
Anyway, it's still—

Leo Laporte [00:23:11]:
yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:11]:
So the thing's, what is it? 14 years old still?

Richard Campbell [00:23:14]:
Something like that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:23:17]:
Crazy. Crazy, crazy for— I, I gave Burke the 128K because actually John Chamberby gave it to me. It was in our studio, or it was his, I think. And, uh, but the caps died, and Burke sent it back, but it came out— I don't know if he shrunk it or what.

Richard Campbell [00:23:36]:
Put it in the dryer. You're supposed to hang dry those things.

Leo Laporte [00:23:38]:
A lot smaller.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:39]:
That's why you don't put those things in rice. I, you know, I don't know how many articles we need about that.

Leo Laporte [00:23:44]:
Sucked out of it. Um, here comes— I'm excited— here comes the Windows RTX Spark.

Richard Campbell [00:23:52]:
No?

Paul Thurrott [00:23:53]:
All right, so yesterday, or whenever this was, I guess yesterday, Apple announced some new Macs, new Apple Silicon chips, right?

Richard Campbell [00:24:02]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:02]:
You can sit there and go through the configurator and see you're about to spend $5,700 to get one of these stupid Oh no.

Leo Laporte [00:24:08]:
Oh, you haven't, you haven't tried hard enough.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:11]:
Oh no, I did try my best.

Leo Laporte [00:24:12]:
To get the 256 gig version, which everybody running Local AI was going to want, $10,000 plus.

Richard Campbell [00:24:19]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:24:20]:
Almost $12,000.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:21]:
Let me see if I can find this. So last summer I bought a, uh, at the time I think it was a $600, uh, Snapdragon X HP laptop, but it only came with a 256 gigabyte SSD. So I swapped it out for. A— let me see, I'm trying. Yeah, a, uh, a 1 terabyte Crucial SSD, which was about $85 US, right? If you upgrade one of these new Macs to— I think it's 1 terabyte SSD, or each terabyte of SSD is like $1,000.

Richard Campbell [00:24:54]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:55]:
Like, and look, I know things are more expensive than they were, but they're, they're not that much more expensive. Like, it's kind of highway robbery, but Um, but whatever. I don't, I'm not here to make fun of Apple. I could do that anytime. Um, but I thought it was kind of weird that on the day that Apple announced the new chips and new Macs, you know, the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, Microsoft came out with this Windows on ARM. I'm not going to call it an announcement because there's no announcement here. Um, but, uh, a post that just a reminder, don't forget about me.

Richard Campbell [00:25:29]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:30]:
I'm over here too. We have this thing happening and I'm still confused by it. In fact, the more I look into this, the more confused I am. So to, to be fair, this could be coincidental. A year ago in September, Microsoft had a similar blog post that was basically about kind of momentum in the Windows on ARM space. And it's what it's aimed at is the businesses that Um, are just change-averse and are worried about compatibility, even though that really is not a problem. And they just, you know, it's like, no, I'm sorry, we have to buy Intel. That's all we do.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:05]:
You know, just kind of a silly whatever they do. So every so often Microsoft pops up like a whack-a-mole thing. It's like, hey, by the way, we also have an ARM chipset, um, or chipsets soon. Uh, compatibility is great. And so last September they provided sort of a compatibility I don't know, update basically, right? Which, you know, I feel like this was nailed about 2 years ago, but okay, fine. Um, and then just reminding businesses, hey, we have this, uh, there's a Works on Windows on ARM website, which is a third-party site, not a Microsoft site, not a Qualcomm site. Um, they list over 7,000 apps and games that are verified, whatever verified means, um, to work on Windows on ARM. They miss a lot of things.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:45]:
It's horribly out of date. I'm not even sure why they're promoting this, but whatever, it exists. They have an App Assure program within Microsoft with a dedicated ARM advisory service, right? And then they have a— they'll work with OEMs, they'll work with partners, they'll work with software makers to, you know, make sure they can get stuff running on these devices. But the truth is pretty much everything runs. It's kind of a strange thing.

Leo Laporte [00:27:08]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:09]:
But they announced dozens of apps across, I think it's 4 major categories, STEM and education apps, security apps, productivity apps and creativity, well, creativity, social media, and entertainment apps, right? Like entertainment, but not games. Right. Even though Nvidia is actually netting a couple of wins in that space, you know, but I, but I'm looking at these things and I'm like, I don't understand what they're talking about. So presumably if this is this year's version of the last year, of last year's kind of compatibility update, you know, which it is, I mean, it seems like it is, right? And they're listing these apps like, These are apps that should have been brought to ARM since last September. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:27:53]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:53]:
Like Affinity is in here. Uh, ProtonMail is in here. Uh, these are not new additions, you know, like one, one I just looked up, um, I think it's, yeah, it must be in the productivity section is ProtonDrive, right? ProtonDrive has had a kind of a big year. They were adding a CLI. They're eventually going to have a Linux client. And I was like, okay, did they add Um, a native ARM client on Windows sometime between last September and now? And I looked it up and the answer is no, they did it a year ago, April. So why is it on the list? I don't like what— like, that's not a new thing. Um, there's stuff in here.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:30]:
And again, certified doesn't necessarily mean native, right? It just means that it runs. You know, there are things in here like Apple Bonjour. Uh, ShareX, which is a screenshot utility, pretty, uh, common. It's TechSmith apps. TechSmith is Camtasia and, um, what's their screenshot program? Uh, I forgot anyway, but a famous screenshot program.

Richard Campbell [00:28:53]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:54]:
And it's like, okay. But I mean, like, I, I—

Richard Campbell [00:28:58]:
Nothing in this is new.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:59]:
No, I've used these.

Richard Campbell [00:29:00]:
Some of these are even day one. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:01]:
That's what I'm saying. I've used these on ARM in some case, on ARM, sorry. In some cases for years, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:29:06]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:06]:
I mean, some of these things I don't have a lot to say about, like security apps. I don't recognize most of these things. Um, uh, STEM and education apps. I'm like, this could be, these are like, uh, Game Pass titles. I have never heard of any of these things, but, um, but whatever. Uh, some of them are—

Richard Campbell [00:29:20]:
Because when ARM first shipped, it was games that were broken because of the anti-cheat stuff. Yep. And some of the low-level, the, the security stuff and so forth. Some of those things were broken again because of low-level stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:31]:
Did I mention the Quake thing last week? Did I bring this up? Because this is a weird, This is a weird one. I almost wrote about this and maybe I still will, but, um, when some weeks ago, 2 or 3 weeks ago was the, uh, 30th anniversary of Quake, the original Quake, right? And to celebrate this, uh, id Software released a new episode of, you know, 9 levels or whatever it is. And I think there was a multiplayer level, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm like, oh, this is amazing. Like, I want to go get this, right? So I, I had with me at the time an, uh, Snapdragon X2 laptop, which is ARM.

Richard Campbell [00:30:04]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:05]:
Like, this game is 30 years old. Obviously it's gonna run fine on here. Like, I, I run Half-Life 2 on ARM laptops, no problem.

Richard Campbell [00:30:12]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:12]:
So the thing installs in 2 seconds. It's like 1.6 gigabytes. It's not like 165 gigabytes, like a typical, typical Call of Duty install. Uh, spins right up. Awesome. And it would not run. It would just like, it booted into a black screen and then it crashed. And I'm like, oh, okay, so maybe this is some kind of ARM, you know, compatibility issue, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:31]:
Okay. So later I tried this on a gaming PC. I tried it on a different laptop, and in both cases, It did exactly the same thing. And these were x86 computers, not ARM. Now, if I didn't do that, I mean, I wasn't testing it per se. I wanted to play the game, but if I didn't do that work, I guess I would've assumed it was just a weird Snapdragon compatibility issue. And I did all the stuff you can do, you know, to make it run, uh, well on ARM, but it just, there was nothing I could do, but now it's not running on x86. So I looked up like what, what, do you do when this happens? And all of the advice was when you get it through like Steam or, uh, I think you can get it through GOG or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:09]:
And you know, it's basically like a normal Windows app, what we might call a desktop app. And I was like, I don't think that's what the Xbox version is. I bet it's some kind of weird modern wrapper thing. And so none of the advice that I saw worked. So I went to Steam and I downloaded it from there and had the same crash, but now the workaround, because you can find the exe more easily. Like Wind Quake is in there and GL Quake is in there and those actually ran, but they just look crappy. But then I, I, you add an emulator.

Leo Laporte [00:31:39]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:40]:
Essentially what you're doing is adding like a -dx11 something, something that makes it run under DX11 instead of DirectX 12. And it works fine. It works fine. And it works fine on ARM. And that's a weird compatibility problem. So like if you get it from anywhere but Xbox, meaning Windows on it or Xbox on Windows or, you know, the Microsoft Store, however you want to say that. Um, it doesn't, it works fine or it will work fine. I don't understand why no one else noticed this.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:07]:
It's like just released a big update to this game. How does no one, did no one run this thing? I mean, like, so anyway, I, you can have compatibility problems anywhere, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And it's not always obvious what the thing is, but I, when I look at these lists of these games, I'm not games, I'm apps rather. I'm like, I, okay. I mean, I don't really see what what the big deal is here. I don't quite understand this. So on the day that—

Richard Campbell [00:32:29]:
I'm gonna presume that ARM uptake isn't great.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:32]:
It is absolutely not great. Yeah. Right. But I don't even, I don't even blame ARM for that.

Richard Campbell [00:32:37]:
I blame Copilot Plus PC for that.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:39]:
See, I blame Intel for it, but I, and, and, and I mean that, I mean, I'm not, I know it sounds like a joke, but it's, um, it, it, it is, this is the end result of decades of Intel behaving anti-competitively to pay off PC makers to ship more of their chips than other chips. And It's still the case. You can look at any PC maker. If a PC maker has 100 models, 90 of them are Intel, 9 are AMD, and 1 is Snapdragon. That's an exaggeration, but it's sort of—

Richard Campbell [00:33:06]:
I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration. Like, you're definitely in that ballpark.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:10]:
Yep. It's really bad. And, uh, and this is the thing, like, you know, I, uh, I, I sort of joke about this. This is real. And my wife knows this. Richard has seen it. Um, you know, you open an ARM laptop and it comes right on. And I know that's a stupid thing to celebrate, but if you use a Windows PC, you're pretty used to that not happening.

Leo Laporte [00:33:25]:
And Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:33:28]:
And it's what she was— one of the many things that people really love about their MacBooks. Yep. Right. It just works. I, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:37]:
So this is, you can get this today if you get a Snapdragon-based, uh, Copilot Plus PC or whatever they're called now. Um, but, uh, you don't see too many of them. And certainly from a, you know, like a sales slash availability perspective, it's a small percentage. It's too bad. So. But Nvidia's coming, right? And so, you know, someone had asked me about this separately, you know, just on my site, you know, do I think like Nvidia is going to change this? And the reality is no, not really. I mean, this will be important for that segment of the market that is today rushing to buy a Mac Mini while they can because they want to do local AI because they're either engineers or developers or scientists or whatever it might be.

Richard Campbell [00:34:18]:
Somebody got their token. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:21]:
But, but it's just not a big deal for mainstream people, right?

Leo Laporte [00:34:27]:
You don't, just to be clear, you don't save money doing this locally, probably. They're so expensive and you can get such cheap models now on the frontier that, you know, like a GPT Luna or a DeepSeek. You do it because you want sovereignty. You want it to be private. You don't, you're using company data.

Richard Campbell [00:34:45]:
Yeah, but you get the price tag from racking a huge bill with Claude. Right? Like, the way I go to my CFO is first spend $10,000 on cloud, then go, hey, you know what, Spark saves you $500. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:57]:
So we, I, we don't know what percentage of PCs that are sold every year are sold to businesses, but let's say it's the historical percentage, which is like 2/3 of them probably. It's probably more than that, frankly, but whatever. Um, businesses that are the big, you know, enterprises are buying fleets of laptops. They're paving them the second they get them, whatever. So they want that, you know, they want that thing that they understand, you know, they want that experience they are familiar with, you know, they want it to always work the way it's always worked, whatever. Um, I, I feel there's no reason Arm could not participate in that, but I, there's just, like I said, change aversity thing. So.

Richard Campbell [00:35:35]:
Well, and it's, I, you know, I know the guys who do the sales. I know a few guys that do sales to big companies where they— we are committing to 25,000 laptops this year spread over, you know, over the months. And so like getting rid of the MPU is, you know, $2.5 million, right? Like they— we don't know if we're going to use that. We're certainly not paying for it, right? Like once you're at that scale, you get your machine tailored to your needs. I, you know, they're not buying Copilot Plus PCs.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:07]:
I don't— what's the opposite of like a virtuous cycle? Like it's a You, you set your expectations low is how I would say it. But what they're really looking for is high compatibility with whatever workloads they're doing. So they might have these custom apps that, um, in some cases might be decades old, but they will run on these x86 things. They will work perfectly. They don't have to think about it. Whether or not they're good or not is sort of beside the point. They just look, this is what we're doing. It doesn't really matter.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:35]:
This is the reason people hate these computers, but whatever. But I, but when you think about like whatever mix of computers might go into a business, I mean, depending on the business, obviously, I mean, there's scientific engineering, whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:36:48]:
Uh, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:48]:
But, uh, but those computers that I would classify as like workstations, very, very minor, you know, market share, however you want to say it, you know, there's not, there's not a lot of them. They're expensive per device, but there's not a lot of them from a unit sales perspective.

Richard Campbell [00:37:05]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:05]:
And these Nvidia things, the Nvidia RTX Spark, you know, the super chip-based computers or whatever, like that Surface, what do they call it? Surface Laptop Ultra, I think it's called.

Richard Campbell [00:37:17]:
Yeah, the black.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:18]:
The thing that's going to cost, you know, $10,000.

Richard Campbell [00:37:20]:
$10,000. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:21]:
They're not going to sell a lot of those, right? And I, so is this going to change?

Richard Campbell [00:37:25]:
That was what they were intended for, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:37:27]:
No, no, I'm not. No, no, I'm right. Sorry. I didn't mean to, I wasn't suggesting that. Well, all I meant was, this won't help move the needle on ARM, right? Like the— right now, um, some high—

Richard Campbell [00:37:39]:
But marquee machines are good for a market too, right? It's like, wow, that's a very cool machine. I'm not paying that. What's my alternative? And they buy the cheaper ARM.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:47]:
Yeah, no, right. I'm sorry. I'm right. I'm not, uh, um, I'm not complaining per se. I, I guess what I'm saying is, um, right now any individual Unless you wanna play AAA games on your laptop, right?

Richard Campbell [00:38:00]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:00]:
You could leave that aside. Um, 90, high 99-something percent of the apps and drivers and whatever it is that you need to get your work done every single day just works. Like, it's like super, super compatible. That's been true for a long time.

Richard Campbell [00:38:16]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:17]:
Uh, but no one's buying them now. So this thing is gonna come and Nvidia has relationships with, uh, game makers that, you know, Qualcomm does not. And I've already seen things about how certain games are gonna be, and like, we're gonna start seeing finally native ports of games to ARM. Cool. But, you know, we've seen how that goes on the Mac. Not, you know, it's not, that's not going great over there either, but I just don't think it's gonna change the, the overall, you know, where things are in the market. Like, I, I mean, I, ARM is wonderful if you want it right now. It's great.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:51]:
already, but it's also not even 10% of the market. So that's great for an individual. I could tell you that and you might believe me or not believe me. It doesn't really matter. But, um, anyone who buys these things, I've never heard from anyone who bought one of these and was like, wow, this thing is a real dog. It's really bad. Like what? Like they're always like, holy, like this thing works like awesome. Like, I know, I know.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:11]:
Um, it's, that's usually the conversation and it's still not doing anything. So it's like right here, what Microsoft is doing is trying to sell it to the business businesses that are the most averse to even thinking about doing this. And will Nvidia change that? No, not by and large. It's gonna, it's gonna make hopefully these kinds of Windows PC more— not, not that they're not already competitive, but more viable as an alternative maybe to whatever Mac things. Um, and I think that might be a big chunk of the reason these things exist. I mean, it's not all of it, but, um, I—

Leo Laporte [00:39:43]:
Remember they announced this What, 6 months ago, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:39:47]:
Yeah, back in April or May.

Leo Laporte [00:39:50]:
Old design.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:51]:
Yeah, no, this has been, this has been rumored for years. We've had that theory that Snapdragon or Qualcomm and Microsoft had some exclusivity arrangement.

Leo Laporte [00:40:00]:
Um, it seems weird that somebody would want that much capability in a laptop, but I guess that's what people buy, right? That's what they buy.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:07]:
Yeah, because you want— right, if you want to— like, I— this is what I say about, uh, playing games on a laptop, you know, Uh, there are certain niceties to an Xbox console. For example, if you configure it correctly, it will, uh, download game updates overnight and you never have to worry about that. Whereas with a laptop, you open it up and you might sit there for half an hour while it downloads a game update. Stinks, right? But I can also carry the laptop into the next room and play there. I can carry it on a plane and play there. I can carry it to some other location where I'm traveling and play there. Like, you know, the console is stuck on a TV in this one room and it's not really portable unless you have a— a switch or whatever. But, um, so that, you know, you— there are plus— there are pluses and minuses to it.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:44]:
But even when, like, even when Qualcomm agreed to do this, when Terry Myerson was still running Windows 10, he went out to Hawaii that year and everything. I was thinking— I, I said this and I wrote about this and, and I wondered about this, like, why, why bother?

Richard Campbell [00:40:58]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:59]:
This is— you're already selling your chips on billions of devices every single year. This is going to be less than 10%. 10% the volume of that. I mean, probably much less than 10%.

Richard Campbell [00:41:08]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:09]:
And why go through the billions of dollars of R&D and production and all the stuff you have to do and multiple generations? And it wasn't worth a damn until 2 years ago. So that took, what was that, 2015, 2017? So probably 20, not quite 10 years, like 8 years or something before this was even useful in any meaningful way. And now Nvidia's coming and I wonder the same thing about them. Why are you doing this? This is when you look at all the revenues they generate, and I get diversity and—

Leo Laporte [00:41:36]:
Well, they want to sell chips, right? They don't care who they sell them to.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:39]:
But this is like chip mountain of chips, little pile of chips, you know? Yeah, it's like—

Richard Campbell [00:41:43]:
I don't think it's a volume thing. It's demonstration.

Leo Laporte [00:41:46]:
Yeah, right.

Richard Campbell [00:41:47]:
Yeah, it's, you know, why you build the biggest tower, why you do the, you know, the flex.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:52]:
You're equating, uh, Snapdragon or like Windows and Arm to like biggest ball of string in the world. Is that what you just said? Like, like, it's, it's, it's a curiosity.

Leo Laporte [00:42:02]:
With a giant hamburger on the top.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:04]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:42:06]:
No, actually, if I think about it, this is really interesting. We were talking about this the other day. The pendulum swings from cloud to on-prem to cloud to on-prem. You know, we thought thin clients, heavy servers. Oh, now we want to put it all on the client. This is putting it all on the client, right? Honestly, uh, But I would say if you're a company and you still want data sovereignty, I understand that, run your servers in the cloud, in your closet on-prem, and have your thin client connect to your servers on-prem. Then you have the best of both worlds. You have a light portable laptop and you can securely log in.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:41]:
We just spent 20 years getting enterprises, but businesses off of on-prem servers. I mean, we just, those skills are pretty much gone. You know what I mean?

Leo Laporte [00:42:51]:
They're back.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:52]:
Nobody trusts these cloud guys.

Leo Laporte [00:42:54]:
That's the problem.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:55]:
No one should trust these cloud guys. That I understand. But I— but yeah, does it make more sense to put it on a managed or unmanaged desktop that some person's going to use?

Leo Laporte [00:43:06]:
No, that makes no sense to me.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:07]:
That's what I'm saying. But I mean, I feel like this— but I think there was— I think there's going to be a lot more of that and not some— I don't— I just don't see us— I just don't see businesses rebuilding their data centers, right?

Leo Laporte [00:43:21]:
The other thing I would say is Nvidia is not insensate to what Apple just did and is undoubtedly sitting down and cranking out as fast as they can Spark 2, RTX 2, and new versions of this with more powerful chips, much more memory, because VRAM is critical if you can get it. But Apple's offering— is going to offer at the end of next month a 512GB version of this monster. It'll be $20,000 at least. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:51]:
And they'll be— they'll make 3 of them and sell all of them in 1 second. But—

Leo Laporte [00:43:55]:
I might buy one. I honestly— I'll sell my Sparks.

Richard Campbell [00:43:58]:
What model are you gonna stick in that? It's like, because I want to run—

Leo Laporte [00:44:02]:
No, this is what Apple showed, and this was a real flex. They showed 4 of them plugged into a 120-volt regular socket on the wall because this is the benefit of these chips.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:12]:
Ah, yes, right. That's one of the many benefits of ARM just in general, but their chips in particular.

Leo Laporte [00:44:17]:
So if you were gonna buy 2, you know, 4 6000s or something and use 1200 watts of power, right? Uh, you might look at this and go, oh, that's a, that's a lot cooler and quieter and cheaper, even though the hardware is not. The hardware's crazy.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:34]:
Yeah, but they just like x86, Leo. So—

Leo Laporte [00:44:38]:
No, well, and that's who this is for, right? Because everything else has been Linux. The Sparks are Linux. Yeah, this, that's who this is for.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:44]:
So someone's asking about, um, RISC-V, but no, I, God, I hope not.

Leo Laporte [00:44:50]:
I mean, like, I, there is a company making an AI server based on RISC-V.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:53]:
Yeah, no, no. I, and I don't mean that like there's anything inherently wrong with the architecture or anything like that. I, we, we in the Windows space, at least Windows, look, I, people who are Windows guys don't like to hear this, but, um, Windows is such a legacy platform and a lot of the things that drive it are Those things that like us as individuals would not necessarily like, like it's this backward compatibility stuff. We're never— there's no app left behind kind of thing. You know, Apple drops technologies like they're bad habits within just a couple years. They're pretty quick with that kind of stuff. And Microsoft is not. And they've both been successful in different ways, right? So I just don't see that ever changing in the Windows space.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:34]:
I mean, I don't think that dynamic ever goes away.

Leo Laporte [00:45:37]:
This is a Copilot PC on steroids.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:40]:
Yeah. And oh, so speaking of which, so this Windows on ARM post I've been talking about, uh, let me tell you a couple of the terms that either do not appear at all or only appear in passing and have nothing to do with anything. Uh, Windows 11, that term does not appear in this post, not even once.

Richard Campbell [00:45:56]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:57]:
This thing is called Windows on ARM. They, they say Windows on ARM, um, let's look it up, 26 times. They say Windows 11 Zero times. Uh, Windows 11 does appear once on this page, but that's because there's a footer that says Windows 11 apps that has nothing to do with anything. So that has— that's not— Windows 11 is not in this post. Um, the term Copilot plus PC, I believe it's— let me just look again. I believe it's just one time. And, um, let's see, it might be two times.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:25]:
Nope, it's one time. And it is just in passing. And it said, this is just a sentence at the beginning. It says, Nvidia's entry into this family joins Qualcomm, uh, these chips that have already established Windows on ARM as the premium experience across Microsoft Surface Copilot+ PCs. Not even Copilot+ PCs, but just Microsoft Surface Copilot+ PCs.

Richard Campbell [00:46:49]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:49]:
And then it never mentions that again. They didn't mention Copilot+ PC when they announced Nvidia RTX Spark, even though these things very clearly Quali— or Copilot plus PCs, assuming that brand exists in a month or two or whenever it is when these things come out. Right. Because that's another open question. Does that term even just go away? So I, I, like, as you know, we're gonna— we're talking about momentum here. You know, we're talking about how compatible this thing is, which it is. Right. But they don't say Windows.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:22]:
They don't even say Windows 11. Like, are you kidding me? Yeah, I, I— okay, I mean, I— this is bizarre. This whole thing is— it's very— I think it's weird.

Leo Laporte [00:47:32]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:33]:
So, so yeah, I know we've, I, we've spent more time on this post on this show than Microsoft did writing it, and I, I, I— it's bizarre. It's—

Leo Laporte [00:47:42]:
I—

Paul Thurrott [00:47:43]:
it just doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand what happened here. Um, and then, you know, look, like I said, It could be a coincidence, but big announcement from Apple kind of out of nowhere. You know, I mean, in a way, like we know the iPhone's coming now, we know the exact date. It's a couple weeks, actually, it's not even that long away. Yeah, 2 weeks. Uh, yeah, actually it's 2 weeks from today. Um, you might've assumed that would be the next thing they would announce, but no, there was a, I mean, I'm surprised.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:10]:
I, I, I clicked through it to see what things look like and I was just like, oh my God, it gets, um, I've often like criticized, like Microsoft's like this, where if you want a computer in a certain color, like Pixel phones are like this too, where you can only get certain configurations, certain colors, you know, they don't really have everything. And Apple is doing this now with these new Macs where it's like, if you want to go up to certain storage levels, certain RAM levels, like I think the, the base model of mini or studio is either 24 or 32 gigs depending on the computer. But if you want more than that, you actually have to upgrade the the chip. And when you upgrade the chip, you're adding thousands of dollars to the cost of this thing. So you're getting more RAM, you're getting the faster chip, whatever it is, depending on the computer. And then you also, uh, I think, I think are getting more— well, maybe not, but you can get more storage. Um, and it's— and that's the same situation too. Like if you wanted a base Mac Mini, meaning whatever that is, like an— I think it's an M6 chip or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:06]:
And you're like, I want 24, I want more than 24 gigs of RAM. Or I want more than— I, I'm making this up, I don't remember the number, but maybe it's more than 512 gigs of storage. They're like, yeah, you can do it, but now you have to upgrade the RAM and you have to go with the chip. And you're not, you're not paying the whatever that is, $200, $500, $600, whatever, for that one thing. You're paying thousands of dollars because you're, you're upgrading the whole thing now. And, uh, that's, that's kind of new for Apple. Or maybe as a return to the way things were in the very early 2000s.

Leo Laporte [00:49:36]:
I mean, It—

Paul Thurrott [00:49:37]:
Apple has been, you know, has offered really extensive configuration capabilities for actually decades. I mean, it's been a long time. So like, this is a weird, you know, and that's the component crisis obviously, but, um, it is kind of an interesting thing. But anyway, Microsoft's got, uh, momentum. So, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:49:57]:
Is that what that is? Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:49:59]:
Oh, it's the Big Mo. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:00]:
I mean, I— so, you know, back when things were normal, Back when Windows was like roughly every 3 years and Windows Server would follow and, you know, they were better together and things were simple. You know, I, I, I've told the story, but I was at probably still called, you know, it was definitely called TechEd and it was an off year for Windows Server. So there was not a big release. And this guy I worked with and I had gone through 7 or 8 interviews or meetings in a row and we're sitting outside waiting for this guy from Microsoft from the server team. And I was exhausted. I looked at the guy next to me. If this freaking guy says the word Momentum, I swear to God, I'm gonna slowly close my laptop and I'm gonna beat him to death with it. And then he, he said, he, he opens the door, he's like, sorry I'm late, we're running, but we're behind, blah, blah, blah.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:41]:
He's like, you probably already figured this out today, but I just wanted to talk to you about Windows Server Momentum.

Richard Campbell [00:50:45]:
Ah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:46]:
And the two of us just burst out laughing and he had no idea what was so funny. But, uh, yeah. Anyway, I'm not a big fan of the word momentum, I think is the point. So yeah, momentum.

Richard Campbell [00:51:00]:
The good news is you haven't beaten anybody to death this week.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:03]:
It's been a while. Yeah, no, I'm, uh, I'm calmer than I used to be. I'm getting older, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:51:09]:
This is the chill Tharot.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:11]:
This is what it looks like when I'm chill.

Richard Campbell [00:51:13]:
Yeah. This is pal Tharot.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:15]:
Yes, drugs help. Um, so yeah. Okay. Uh, and I, we haven't had a Microsoft 365 section in the show notes for possibly years. I don't remember.

Richard Campbell [00:51:28]:
It's been a while.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:29]:
It's been AI for a while, obviously. Um, I, and I, and these aren't even technically Microsoft 365 topics, but when I put this, the notes together, I was thinking back on this because obviously these days it's all AI, right? Like AI, AI, AI, you know, Copilot. Copilot, whatever. And, uh, it wasn't that long ago, you know, uh, Teams came out, what, a couple years before the pandemic? Was huge. Uh, thank God for the pandemic. That was awesome for Teams. It worked out really good. And then—

Richard Campbell [00:51:57]:
Did it?

Paul Thurrott [00:51:58]:
But they were— they did, right?

Richard Campbell [00:52:00]:
But remember they made 2 versions? That was awesome.

Leo Laporte [00:52:02]:
That was— I really enjoyed that.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:04]:
There were some bad things, but it was— but they were, um, updating it regularly. And so for a long time it was like new stuff for Teams, new stuff for Teams, new stuff for Teams. During the pandemic, like, the new stuff was always free. And then after the pandemic, they tried to do the Teams Premium thing and that didn't go so well. But, um, that was the thing. And before Teams, it was just Microsoft 365. And I, I would talk to those guys. I talked to the guy who used to write those posts and I said, I don't know how you keep this straight.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:28]:
And he's like, I don't, I don't know. He's like, you know, I, and we used to talk about how you could make a matrix of all the features across all the apps and all the apps on the different places where they appeared, like Microsoft Word on Windows, Mac, web. you know, different versions of mobile, like, and where features were or were not enabled. Like it was impossible to keep track of. And now we don't care about it anymore cuz all we talk about is AI. Like we don't really do this anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:52:50]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:51]:
Um, so anyway, I, I, I, maybe it's just nostalgia, but, um, 2 things that are semi-related to, uh, Microsoft 365. Um, if you're a Mac user and you use OneDrive, um, you might know that they recently updated the, like the user interface. Um, Um, for the client on Mac, which is actually nice. Looks, you know, looks like, um, what's it called? Tahoe, probably the, whatever the latest, you know, it's got like liquid glass nonsense or whatever. Um, but now they're doing an update. They're rolling out another update. So this is just a couple months ago, but now they're updating the backend of it and they're using what they're calling like native, uh, uh, native sync engine, which I take to mean that the Mac as a platform must have something like Windows does as a platform where anyone can latch into the OS hooks. for things like, um, files on demand in the, you know, the File Explorer integration, et cetera, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:40]:
So, um, if that's a thing for you, um, that's, you're in a freaking weird place, but that, whatever, good for you. It's going to get better. Um, and then I just mentioned ProtonMail, which apparently is newly ARM compatible, but I think that's been ARM compatible for a long time. But, um, ProtonMail is another one that works across different platforms. But, um, they just updated with the feature. Frankly, it's— I think it's been in other, uh, mail clients for a long time. But remember, when Proton does anything to any of its products, that, that thing has to work within the confines of, you know, the things they do that are end-to-end encryption, and they have no way to access your data and blah blah, all the kind of privacy and security, um, protections you get through Proton. So, um, they've added a categories feature, which is, um, works like it does anywhere else, automatically sorts your inbox and any can drag and drop to, you know, fix misfilings, and then it will change its filter rules, etc., etc.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:33]:
So, um, if this for some reason was the reason you were not using ProtonMail, uh, I think it's— I guess it's there. I think it's— yeah, I think it's there for everybody, and it's there now.

Leo Laporte [00:54:43]:
So nice. Yeah, you're watching Windows Weekly. Aren't you glad you're here? We sure are. Mr. Thrott. And Mr. Campbell.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:55]:
Uh, yippers.

Leo Laporte [00:54:57]:
Yippers. Yippers. Uh, you said you're going to talk about the Bill Gates thing. I'm very curious, uh, what you think about this. Yeah, he's become kind of a deep thinker. Is that fair? He was always a deep thinker.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:09]:
He was always—

Leo Laporte [00:55:10]:
yeah, he was very famous for every year taking kind of a mini sabbatical. Yeah, I remember one year he took Esther Dyson with him and he read everything he find on like genomics.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:23]:
Yeah. You know what the problem I have with that though is we know about it. Why do we know about this? Like, what marketing occurred that we need to know what this guy does on vacation?

Leo Laporte [00:55:33]:
I'll tell you something no one knows about because a friend did this.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:38]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:55:39]:
One year he rented a private train.

Richard Campbell [00:55:43]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:55:45]:
And invited a bunch of very, very smart people on it.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:49]:
They crashed into a mountain?

Leo Laporte [00:55:51]:
No, they went on a little trip in this private train, and every night each of the very smart people was responsible for a kind of TED Talk style presentation on an area of expertise so that Bill could absorb it. Although I was told that he and Warren Buffett spent almost the entire trip playing bridge.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:12]:
Like playing cards. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:56:14]:
So I don't know I don't know how much he absorbed. But he—

Paul Thurrott [00:56:17]:
Well, maybe he was in the next room and he could hear through the wall. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:56:20]:
Bill, and I think this is from his childhood, because I think his parents were very focused on learning and education. And I think he always was—

Paul Thurrott [00:56:27]:
Also on competition, by the way. Oh, yeah, they used to have family Olympics. Yeah, there were like learning competitions. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:35]:
But so they were, from a young age, taught to drive hard, work hard, learn, And I think Bill is that way. And I don't think he's stopped, which is interesting. And he's certainly mellowed, I think.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:50]:
I guess. I mean, you guys know him.

Leo Laporte [00:56:52]:
He has.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:53]:
Yeah. Look, it's impossible to overstate the impact he's had on our industry. It's also impossible to overstate the negative impact he's had on the industry.

Richard Campbell [00:57:06]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:08]:
enough time has gone by and enough things have occurred in the market where Microsoft is no longer the only major company in personal computing. So you kind of forget about it. Um, and you could make a good argument that big tech today is much, much bigger.

Richard Campbell [00:57:24]:
But do you think it reflects his sort of Socratic culture? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:30]:
I mean, look, all the— him and Jobs and, you know, all the companies that ended up being successful, the, You can't find one of them where the leader's like this kind of gentle, nice guy that everyone loves. That doesn't exist. And I mean, this is my theory about anyone that's a genius or really good at one thing. It's like they have to be really bad at most everything else in life. And so whether you're Michael Jordan or Larry Bird playing basketball and you're a horrible human being, or you're Bill Gates destroying other businesses and whatever he did, you're really good at this thing. You know, you're good at this thing, like you're good at it. And, um, you know, I had my own kind of complicated relationship with Microsoft over the years, but, um, you know, they, whatever, I, they, they did some good things too, but he has other issues, right? I mean, there's a whole Jeffrey Epstein thing.

Richard Campbell [00:58:21]:
Um, yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:22]:
Uh, that kind of complicates his legacy quite a bit. Um, I don't know. So I, I, I, I, to me, he's kind of a mixed bag. And I mean, he's not quite like a, like a Steve Wozniak relic from the past, but I think for a lot of people these days, there's respect, but there's also like, maybe go back to philanthropy and do that stuff instead.

Richard Campbell [00:58:45]:
He definitely hit a dated point even within Microsoft in the way that he wanted to approach software where folks like, ah, yeah, we don't build things like that anymore. That's not how you do stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:55]:
Right. There's no, I mean, look, You, you can't overstate how much he overstayed his welcome at Microsoft. You know, when he had, uh, ceded the CEO controls to Steve Ballmer, but not really at first, or begrudgingly. Yeah, no, but I mean, but it was also like, you know, they, their friendship is never coming back because of any of this stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:59:14]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:59:14]:
And, well, and Satya wanted him back for a while at least, and then it became problematic.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:20]:
Yep. So he's, he is here. Uh, what he did, so, so those who have not heard or seen this, He penned this like 6,000-word essay about the evil of AI, and which is a little unfair in a sense because he also talks about the good stuff about AI. And I actually, honestly, in that sense, he is, I don't know, being fair in a way. Like he's, but, but he's correct when he says like, we're, we're, we're not paying attention to this bad stuff enough. And the reason we're not is because we see this economic— potential. And we, meaning big tech and government, and these 2 things are colluding together to ramrod this stuff through without a lot of controls. You know, they, uh, AI companies talk about guardrails all the time, and their guardrails are made out of papier-mâché from what I can tell.

Richard Campbell [01:00:12]:
Like, uh, I figure if they keep talking about them, then people won't actually try and put them in.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:16]:
Yeah. So it's, it's not really possible to Go through everything he wrote in any meaningful way. I mean, I'll just— a couple of things I'll say is like, he doesn't ever say this, but he writes around this thing, which I've thought for a long time, which is the problem with AI to me is this is just the scope and scale of it. It's, you know, the ability to do damage to others. Like when you're Microsoft in the late 1990s and you're impacting like some low hundreds of millions of people.

Richard Campbell [01:00:45]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:46]:
is, is whatever that is. It was big at the time. And then you get to companies like Google, which today has, I think, 13 or 14 businesses with over a billion users. But Google Search, like, basically reaches everyone on the planet. And it's like their ability to do damage is far greater. And now you get to this kind of thing where you could, if you wanted to, find on the dark web or wherever, you know, instructions for creating things like bombs or bioweapons or viruses or whatever it is. But That stuff, AI makes that stuff easier as well as making good things easier, right?

Leo Laporte [01:01:21]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:22]:
And so far, I would, I will, you know, it seems like the job loss fears from AI have been overblown to date, but he talks about this in a way that I think are really interesting because he has this kind of a deeper perspective on what he calls the ripple effects of this kind of stuff and how you can see this in some places. So, Like, I, as a simpleton, will have said and did say things like, look, there were jobs in the past that don't exist today. And when you tell people these things were jobs, they're like, yeah, that's cute, but that was like 200 years ago. We don't need stagecoach drivers. We don't need the girl in a little skirt selling cigarettes on a plane. Like, that's ridiculous. But this is like all jobs, all sectors, you know? And he's including this kind of robot workforce of the future in this little conversation around this. So, you know, there's the job loss aspect, which is a structural challenge, he says, for our economy and a big problem in capitalist societies like the United States.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:15]:
The harm at scale thing, which is actually my language, but the thing I just said where, you know, the ability to attack things like hospitals, banks and financial institutions, you know, infrastructure systems around water and power, electricity, et cetera, really, really just makes it a lot easier. And then, Also related to scale is this notion— we already are starting to understand the impact of things like social media on children. And this amplifies— this is an amplification of that. Like, when you don't have normal face-to-face human interactions, when all of your interactions are like social media with people who are either kind of lying about their lives or presenting their best view of their lives, And then over time are not even people. They're just influencers. And then they're probably just fake and they're just AI-generated nonsense. And then you kind of transform this into now this person, this kid who's like growing up and should be developing and should be forging relationships with people is having a relationship with an AI assistant. It's like these people are going to have, they're going to have problems and they're going to have less, even less.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:24]:
It's amazing today how bad analysis, but even less of a capability to see and understand and retort to this information.

Leo Laporte [01:03:31]:
I will argue against that. So, right, this is what your parents said about rock and roll music and Xbox games.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:38]:
Right, don't sit too close to the TV. My mother, yeah, yes, my mother had all the standard complaints, right? For sure.

Leo Laporte [01:03:44]:
I think kids are going to grow up with AI and they're going to find it to be an amplifier of themselves.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:50]:
Right, well, okay, so I agree with that, for what it's worth. I mean, and by the way, to be fair to Gates, And I want to be super fair to this guy who was so fair to so many of us, that he does say that too.

Leo Laporte [01:04:01]:
I will show you something though. So I have a Chinese model on one of my machines that has been what they call obliterated, uncensored. All of the censorship has been removed. And this is what Bill's worried about. Now, this isn't yet a state-of-the-art model, but I said, what's the best way to install malware in a local water system? Now, if you ask Claude that, it's gonna say, oh, I can't do that. Yeah, but this has been uncensored and it's gonna tell me how to do it. I won't scroll down, right? But it's actually without any qualms or hesitation, right, saying, oh yeah, this is how you would, you know, attack a person.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:40]:
You can't stop that kind of thing from happening. Like, what, this is a genie in a bottle situation? Like, so we can regulate that in the United States, but congratulations, All you've done is taught us how not to do that to the Chinese. You know, but they're not going to have that technology. I'm also going to have—

Richard Campbell [01:04:50]:
don't actually know if its explanation is correct. It looks good. Well, right.

Leo Laporte [01:04:55]:
It says, uh, well, do you want to contaminate the water or are you trying to turn the water? What exactly would you like me to do?

Paul Thurrott [01:05:01]:
And then you tell it and you're like, it's like, Leo, that is a really good idea. Um, you're going to kill millions of people. Yeah, this is smart.

Leo Laporte [01:05:08]:
Because it can't— we know it can write malware. I mean, it's good at coding.

Richard Campbell [01:05:12]:
It got it the first time.

Leo Laporte [01:05:14]:
And so it immediately said, you want to infect the SCADA device, or would you like to disable or tightly restrict the control workstations? What would you like me to do? Now, I'm not sure— you're right, I don't— this is Quen. This is not the smartest thing in the world, and I'm not sure it would effectively create an attack, but it's possible. But the point is, well, this, this thing is highly protected like all the Frontier models, but it's not It's, I didn't do it, but somebody very easily uncensored it. And that's what Gates is rightly worried about.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:46]:
Yeah. And I, I, I, to be clear, I, I'm, I'm not, I'm not even saying I agree with them necessarily. I, I do think this is an important conversation. I think we all realize this is a conversation no one's gonna listen to anyway. So what's the difference? I mean—

Leo Laporte [01:05:59]:
Well, or in there, what do you do to stop it? You know?

Paul Thurrott [01:06:02]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:06:02]:
I mean, how do I stop record piracy?

Paul Thurrott [01:06:04]:
How do I stop?

Richard Campbell [01:06:05]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:05]:
Well, you sue individuals, Leo, and then—

Leo Laporte [01:06:07]:
Yeah, that worked.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:09]:
Yeah, uh, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:06:10]:
Real good.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:12]:
Uh, yeah, you could pirate music right now really easily, so that worked out great. Um, I don't, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:06:17]:
I mean, but actually what happened was the music industry found a different way to monetize, which is in streams. They, they, they, they evolved.

Richard Campbell [01:06:25]:
Yeah, but they also made far less money, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:06:28]:
You know, they, um, they changed. I mean, I, you know, um, the, um, major music labels are all in business with like the Spotifys of the world. They actually own like a stake in those companies. So like they don't, they're the ones not paying their artists.

Leo Laporte [01:06:41]:
Yeah. It's the artists who, who got screwed.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:43]:
It's like, it's not, yeah. I mean, like, I, it's astonishing. Like the business could screw up anything. But, um, anyway, I, I'm done. Look, I, I guess here's the thing. So Bill Gates is problematic. He just is. It's, it's a problem.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:56]:
He's gonna have a hard time getting people to listen to him in this political climate, in this world, whatever. And then he's got his problems, right? If you read any of the— so he wrote this thing, but then there are these interviews with him, because he's also on this kind of, you know, PR campaign right now.

Richard Campbell [01:07:12]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:13]:
And all they want to talk about is Jeffrey Epstein, right?

Richard Campbell [01:07:15]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:16]:
And great. So that kind of distracts from the message too. There are people who believe this guy invented vaccines that are killing people. I mean, there's— speaking of misinformation and nonsense that's out in the world, I mean, And there are people, when they hear his name, they think he's this evil AI-generated monstrosity. And actually, he sort of is, but not in the way that they think he is. And he's many, many years past the damage that he did.

Richard Campbell [01:07:43]:
Yeah, I'm wondering, clearly he's had a PR team trying to clean up his Epstein mess.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:48]:
Oh yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:07:48]:
And I wonder if this whole thing is him just testing the waters to see, can I talk about anything else?

Paul Thurrott [01:07:53]:
So the thing I find interesting about this the most in some ways is that I, you know, I went back. He, he has, he has had small warnings about AI in the past, but he's been very pro-AI. Sure.

Richard Campbell [01:08:05]:
And I mean, he was part of the gang that was sort of advocating for an alternative to Google that became OpenAI back in the day.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:12]:
Oh, really?

Leo Laporte [01:08:12]:
Oh, that's so—

Richard Campbell [01:08:13]:
he wasn't involved with OpenAI, but he, they had him talking about the dangers of Google, you know, owning the AI space.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:20]:
I don't know that this will last. And, uh, but he, um, a couple of years ago he had said there were 2 things that occurred in my life that, you know, meaning work-related or like industry-related, that were just— changed everything instantaneously. The first one was the GUI, right? You know, that the Mac was getting from Xerox and then Microsoft got from Xerox as well, with— or from Apple, however you want to say that.

Leo Laporte [01:08:43]:
Yeah, Microsoft got it from Xerox as well.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:45]:
Yeah, whatever, however they did it, you know. Implicitly, you know. So that was one. Okay. And then like, what was the other one? Like the internet? You know, no, the second one was OpenAI and ChatGPT, probably 3 or 4, whatever it was at the time. And now he says there's a third. And the third is, no, you gotta understand, like the timeframe for this stuff is like early 1980s. And then we go to 2020, 2020, we'll call it 2022, whatever year that was, 2022.

Richard Campbell [01:09:13]:
2022.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:13]:
like the late 2022. So, uh, this is 40 years later. He had the second major thing. And then like 18 months later or 2 years later, um, it was whatever version of Anthropic Cloud writing software code. And his, he believes, he, he says this thing is now writing code better than any person can write code, like better than me, better than whoever. And to him, this was like this amazing Moment. Now, I don't know that that will stand the test of time. We'll see.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:42]:
This one just happened. It was 2 seconds ago. I think that's a little— that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Um, but okay, you know, I, I, I don't know what this— I don't know what to make of this. Like, I, I— him kind of— I don't want to say completely flip-flopping. I ought to be fair. Again, I'm trying to be fair. He, he has always kind of talked a little bit, at least about some of the bad stuff with AI as well.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:07]:
It's not just good, but now it's like kind of, I, I, I feel like the stuff he was saying about bad before was just to be balanced. I feel like the stuff he's saying right now to be good about AI is he's also saying to be balanced. Like he has kind of flipped a switch here, right?

Richard Campbell [01:10:25]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:25]:
Which is not unlike the rest of the industry when it comes to AI. Like I, I, um, uh, I feel like it changes not because everyone's gone from positive to negative, but Um, uh, you know, he acknowledges, for example, like the AI has kind of a PR problem. Like people hate data centers, right? People are, are suddenly like, they're upset about flock cameras, right? We've had surveillance forever.

Richard Campbell [01:10:51]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:52]:
I mean, if you live in the UK, you've had it your entire life, probably depending on how old you are. I mean, I, I, it's weird to me what gets people riled up and what people are just like, eh.

Richard Campbell [01:11:01]:
You know, and well, it was the stories of the police using it to pursue their exes and things.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:06]:
Police have always used whatever powers they have to pursue their exes.

Leo Laporte [01:11:09]:
I— what do you—

Richard Campbell [01:11:10]:
They're just getting caught more.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:11]:
Yeah, well, there's some better tools.

Richard Campbell [01:11:13]:
And don't tell me you're unhappy with people cutting down flock cameras, because that looks like good fun.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:18]:
Oh no, I think that's hilarious. I'm just saying it just amazes me that all of us, like, for some reason flock cameras are like, no, screw this. It's like, they ever been— when we lived in Phoenix, which— so we moved back from Phoenix in 1997, 1998, I think. Um, long time ago. There were cameras all over Phoenix in the '90s. Like, that was a big thing then. You would get a ticket in the mail.

Leo Laporte [01:11:40]:
No cop had ever seen you. The difference was they took a picture as people went through the intersection.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:45]:
No, I understand, but I'm just saying, like, cameras have been out on streets and like—

Leo Laporte [01:11:49]:
And everybody has a camera in their pocket now. You can't get away from it.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:51]:
Everyone has a camera on the front door. We have, you know, whatever. It's just curious. Like, we've reached some kind of like— we've all collectively as a society reached like peak subscription services. Now I guess we've reached peak surveillance somehow.

Leo Laporte [01:12:06]:
That's the difference is that these cameras all pump all of this information to a giant database.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:12]:
Oh no, I understand.

Leo Laporte [01:12:13]:
Along with everything else they gather, including your Bluetooth and everything else.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:18]:
No, I know this.

Leo Laporte [01:12:18]:
So now you have a panopticon.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:20]:
You have Right, but the people who are upset about this don't know anything about anything. And like, like, the fact that they're suddenly educated on this one topic is like bizarre to me. Like, I, I, you know, this is what flipped the switch for you? Like, I mean, it's like, okay, like, welcome to the party.

Richard Campbell [01:12:35]:
The switch has been flipped.

Leo Laporte [01:12:37]:
You're carrying the ultimate surveillance device in your pocket everywhere you go.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:42]:
We just talk— we talk about like, we, we're not even the security show. We talk about things like finger fingerprinting all the time. We just talked about how Brave added GPU fingerprinting blocking, essentially.

Richard Campbell [01:12:53]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:55]:
And then you look at what that is and you look at the ways like Meta, the only innovative thing that ever came outta Meta was like how to figure out how to track people when they're getting blocked from tracking people, which I have to say is pretty good innovation. But, you know, used by the wrong company for the wrong reasons. Right. And so Flock is like a natural extension of that. kind of capability. Like, I, I don't know, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:13:18]:
Yeah, we, we interviewed Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote a book, a very good one, called Surveillance Capitalism.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:24]:
Right, right. With Cory Doctorow, right? Isn't that the—

Leo Laporte [01:13:27]:
Well, Cory's talked about it, but—

Paul Thurrott [01:13:30]:
Oh, I thought he was the co-author on that one. No, no, no, it was all hers.

Leo Laporte [01:13:33]:
Uh, she researched it for years. It's about 8 inches thick, so there's a lot in it. Um, but it, I mean, it lays it all out, and that was 5 or 6 years ago, and it's only gotten worse.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:43]:
I won't remember the year, but It had to have been '99, somewhere in there, 2000 maybe. But I was at COMDEX, certainly it wasn't CES. Scott McNealy was there. Sun Microsystems was still a company. He was the CEO. And he said, you know, you don't have any privacy, get over it.

Leo Laporte [01:14:01]:
Privacy is dead.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:02]:
Yeah, privacy is dead. And I was in the audience and I have to say his stuff about Microsoft at that time was classic. He was the perfect foil for Microsoft. Um, and I, you know, whatever he was saying at the time about Microsoft, I was like, yeah, no, that's pretty much true. But then he said that and it was like, ugh, I don't know. I, and would you give anything to go back to that level of privacy?

Leo Laporte [01:14:24]:
Like from '90?

Richard Campbell [01:14:25]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:25]:
He was right. Yeah. He was ahead of his time.

Leo Laporte [01:14:27]:
I hate to admit it.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:29]:
I know. It's crazy. Anyway, I, now that's incredibly accurate. Like I, like, like complete lack of privacy. I'm pretty sure there's like a little drone thing flying outside my window when I'm taking a shower now. You know, it's like—

Leo Laporte [01:14:43]:
Thank God drones are still noisy, right? As soon as they come up with a silent drone, we're dead.

Richard Campbell [01:14:48]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:14:49]:
Well, and by the way, that's one of the stories we're gonna talk about on Twitter on Sunday. Uh, the Russians are now using autonomous drones, right, that make kill decisions on their own.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:58]:
If only someone had come up with a book called Kill Decision that was about drones that kill people. Um, interesting. The, uh, you know, every era has their Asimov or, uh, H.G. Wells or Jules Verne or whatever that kind of predicts the future, you know. And like these days it's, uh, Daniel Suarez, right? Like, or it was Michael Crichton for a while. Um, but Daniel Suarez, like, my God, guys, we just didn't understand he was writing documentaries. It's just unbelievable.

Leo Laporte [01:15:27]:
I gotta email him and say, come on, we gotta get you on the show.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:30]:
Yeah. So anyway, Gates, I, I don't know. I just don't— I don't know what to say. Like, I It's a problem. Um, no one's going to listen to this. I— the only one in the industry who's anywhere even kind of close to this position is— I don't know the guy's name, but the guy who runs Anthropic. Um, and I think—

Richard Campbell [01:15:48]:
Dario Amodei?

Paul Thurrott [01:15:49]:
Yeah. The fact that he's at all like this, I think it plays a big part in why the US government is kind of going after his company a little bit. Um, because he— most people in the AI space are not like, you know, we should put the brakes on a little bit here. You know, it's like Nope, nope, we're gonna just go gangbusters.

Richard Campbell [01:16:06]:
Catastrophizing as marketing strategy.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:09]:
Yeah, which is the whole— but which, not to get off on a rant here, but yep, um, reading, uh, reading, you know, read whatever newspapers in the morning. The other day there's a headline, I'm not going to get this right, it doesn't really matter, but it says something like— it was something about— it was like sounding an alarm about something. And I was like, okay, so this is going to be like political probably, or what is this thing? It was like an editorial. And I read this thing and it's about AI and it's about how it's like, you know, people don't know this, but like AI is going rogue. You know, it's like autonomously thinking for itself. It's breaking into systems. It's doing all this stuff. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure people are telling it to do this.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:49]:
Like, I feel like this has been kind of thoroughly debunked.

Richard Campbell [01:16:52]:
And telling it repeatedly when it fails.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:55]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:16:55]:
Do it better.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:57]:
But this has emerged as a bizarre way to market AI. Like, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic in particular have gone from the other company announces something, so we're announcing the same thing, to escalating that to the other company has announced that their AI has gone rogue and has broken into systems. Well, ours is more rogue and it broke into more systems. Screw you. You know, and it's like, what? Like, this is like, we, When, when this started, like in 2023, when we first started talking about hallucinations and everything, and people like Richard, who have been, and I, and really O2, and we've been around the industry for a long time, we're like, what is this cute new word you have for bugs? I don't understand this. You know, you're, you're making it sound cute. Like this isn't a software mistake. It's, it's a hallucination.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:42]:
It's fun. You know, it's, we've all had, you know, we've all hallucinated something. It's, it's hilarious. And, um, and now it's like, like now we're hallucinating the actual capabilities of these things, and we're making them sound more powerful than they are, specifically to market how powerful they are so that, you know, governments will adopt them, big businesses will adopt them, people will use them to find bugs, which is great. But it's just like, I'm trying to— I'm struggling to draw a comparison here. Like, is there any other instance where something was horrifically wrong and they're like, see, see how awesome this thing is?

Richard Campbell [01:18:16]:
It's like, What?

Paul Thurrott [01:18:17]:
It's crazy. It's interesting.

Richard Campbell [01:18:20]:
How did we get here where this seems like a good idea?

Paul Thurrott [01:18:23]:
I don't know. I don't know. But what I do know, I mean, some of the stuff he talks about when he talks about water, electrical, whatever systems, infrastructure, financial institutions, there is zero doubt. It's only a matter of time. I mean, every day you kind of wake up and think, is today the day where that's going to happen? Those attacks will occur. They're occurring. They're probably already occurring, right? They're only going to get worse. And this is like a Daniel Suarez novel.

Leo Laporte [01:18:51]:
He's got a new one coming out, by the way, in the spring.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:54]:
Is it called We'reAllScrewed.com?

Leo Laporte [01:18:56]:
Yeah, kind of.

Richard Campbell [01:18:56]:
I was right about everything.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:58]:
Yeah, yeah, I told you.

Leo Laporte [01:19:00]:
You should have listened to me. No, it's even weirder. It's called Shadow Zone. And the premise is a social media post goes viral saying, We're on the brink of a global nuclear war and saying that there's a remote New Hampshire valley where you can survive nuclear winter.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:18]:
Oh boy.

Leo Laporte [01:19:18]:
And everybody goes there.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:20]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:19:22]:
And it has a luxury bunker and more. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:27]:
I like that this is a— it's described as a pre-apocalyptic thriller, which technically is every thriller when you think about it.

Leo Laporte [01:19:36]:
Spring 2027. But I just wrote to Daniel again saying, come on. Now we have something to promote. Let's get it on.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:44]:
Yep. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:19:45]:
Pre-ordered for my Kindle.

Leo Laporte [01:19:47]:
Yeah, he's so good. Comes out March 30th.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:50]:
I don't know if he still does this, but the audiobook versions of his books are fantastic. And for at least, I think it's like the first 4, it could be all of them. It's the same guy.

Leo Laporte [01:19:59]:
And his— Go back and look at our triangulations. We had Daniel on with the guy.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:05]:
Yeah. I mean, there's a good thing. It's the right combination, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:20:11]:
Yeah. I'm trying to remember his name.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:12]:
I know, me too. I'm so sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:20:14]:
He read part of the book and it was like chills. It's like, that's the voice. It was so good. I'll find that for you. Oh, there it is. Thank you. No, I think it's an old—

Paul Thurrott [01:20:23]:
I don't think it's that one.

Leo Laporte [01:20:25]:
Kevin posted one. We've interviewed Daniel Several times. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, he's really a great guy too. I really like him. Uh, anyway, I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:37]:
No, I— what are you sorry about?

Leo Laporte [01:20:39]:
You're doing a show here and I'm, I'm reminiscing about old friends.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:42]:
It's— I, I'm the one who brought him up. I mean, I know that's totally relevant. Um, oh yeah, I'm just gonna blow through the rest of this AI stuff because who cares? Yeah. Um, oh, I should say, actually, before I do that, So as you guys know, because, you know, I talk about it all the time now, um, you know, every quarter I do Microsoft's financials, um, I do an analysis of this. Um, I've been talking about their increasing lack of transparency over decades. Decades, not a couple years. Decades, right?

Richard Campbell [01:21:10]:
It's been a long time.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:11]:
Um, it has only gotten way worse in the AI era, you know. Um, every company on Earth has done some form of hiding where the money's going and where it's coming from and where it's going, right? You talk about kind of classic examples like Apple is trying to sell the Mac in the mid-1980s. It can't. All of its money's coming in from the Apple IIe, but it doesn't want people to know about that. So it doesn't really, it doesn't talk that up, right? And in the more modern era, you would've seen things like Microsoft pulling Surface into something called Windows and Devices, where they no longer have to talk about how many millions or now thousands that they sell and how this thing has never been profitable. profitable, they can hide it inside of something else, and you're essentially subsidizing it. One of the theories, or it's not even really a theory, but one of the thoughts about Azure over many years is that it's lumped into this business segment that has server and other stuff, legacy stuff, essentially. For at least a big chunk of that time, it was probably server making most of the money, or at least making most of the profits.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:13]:
and not Azure. But you're, you know, as a company, you're investing in this thing. It's the future. And, you know, the idea is you kind of fake it till you make it. And because you're not being transparent about where money's coming from, no one has to know about it. That's good for you. It's, you know, Wall Street loves you, et cetera, et cetera. So those are all kind of standard, you know, in, in, uh, you know, money— manipulation is a strong word, but you're kind of obfuscating where things are going, coming from or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:37]:
Um, but in recent years, of course, Microsoft has engaged like what I would— what I do call like just financial shenanigans. Like, you know, stretching out the amount of time that it takes for hardware to depreciate, even though there are standards for that and GAAP principles and so forth. Or, um, you know, moving money around, like where we're gonna report things so it looks like we're spending less than we are, even though we are reporting hundreds of billions of dollars a quarter, we're actually spending even more than that, et cetera. Like there were analysis, uh, after their 10-K filing from, uh, early July where, uh, 2 different, uh, analysts were like, you know, there were $3 trillion of unaccounted for money between all the big tech and big AI companies that no one is talking about for some reason. Like, where's the money coming and going?

Richard Campbell [01:23:20]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [01:23:21]:
Um, it kind of blows my mind that me, I don't know anything. I'm not big in this world. I'm not at all in this world. I'm just not my world. But, you know, I've been talking about this for a long time and I'm like, I don't understand how this is not outraging more people. Especially people in the financial industry, or people who are analysts, or people who are investors, or whatever it might be. But since late last year, there's this one guy who writes for The Wall Street Journal who has now written, I want to say, 3 or 4 reports about this, where he has basically said Microsoft is not meeting their financial regulatory requirements.

Richard Campbell [01:24:01]:
Jonathan Ferro.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:02]:
wheel. And, um, he did this in— it was like, I think it was November last year he did it, or maybe October, October, November. And then he did again earlier this month, and then, uh, today. I think it was just this morning. Yes, today. Yeah, yeah, this morning. And, um, he says, you know, when you look at all these big tech companies, like, uh, the thing that really stands out about Microsoft is its, like, utter lack of transparency.

Richard Campbell [01:24:27]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:27]:
And he talks about all the dollar amounts and how they're accounting for it and how we don't actually know all of it because they don't account for everything. And I always have these more simplistic terms. He talks about Azure revenue increasing 43% in the quarter, but not saying what the dollar amount ever was back in the past. So you can't ever do the math on that. I'm like, right, I've been talking about this for 20 years.

Leo Laporte [01:24:49]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:49]:
But they've been doing that for a long time. But he says cherry-picking a milestone on a call, is not the same thing as reporting an audited number.

Leo Laporte [01:24:58]:
Right!

Paul Thurrott [01:24:59]:
Exactly! So, this is a guy who does know what he's talking about, and he's saying exactly the same thing I'm saying, I've been saying for a long time. He's saying it a lot better. He's using the right language or whatever. But what he literally says is, Microsoft is going to have to open up. Investors have no idea. Microsoft is required to give them more information They cannot just give out mystery numbers and make stuff up. We talk about Microsoft has a nonexistent business called Commercial Cloud or whatever they call it now, where it's like they cherry-pick numbers from the best parts of the company. And they're like, look, we're as big as AWS.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:39]:
It's like, okay, but where did those numbers come from? We don't really say that. It's like, okay, but that's not a business. You're just picking stuff. He says that Microsoft— I use the Surface example. He says Azure and Windows Server are in the the same business segment for a reason. They're completely different businesses. One's a legacy software with licenses. The other one requires AI data centers and all this infrastructure and this completely different CapEx magnitude.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:06]:
And they're in the same business segment. They're not the same thing.

Richard Campbell [01:26:09]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:09]:
Why are they in the same business segment? Because they can hide what Serverless is contributing and they can just talk up what Azure is doing. In terms of revenue growth, not actual revenue or, God forbid, profits, which they've never once ever mentioned. He says this, I didn't even know this, but there was a court case in 2022 where an Azure revenue number was leaked. We finally got a hard number on that. Microsoft changed the way they account for Azure revenues after that, so there's no way to go back and backtrack on what the revenues were. They literally just changed the way they they report revenues in that business. And, uh, it's like, okay, well, look, I don't know what the laws are here. This feels illegal to me.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:52]:
I don't, you know, I don't know. I, but I do know that based on, uh, SEC rules, like there are in fact standards, it's just that no one is calling them on this. And, um, anyway, it's nice to see the Wall Street Journal paying a little bit of attention to this. Um, I'd like to see more, but yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:27:10]:
I would also like a bunch of other places to pile on too. This is a really valid conversation, and in theory, if you had a functional SEC, this should be part of it.

Leo Laporte [01:27:20]:
You have to think though that regulators pay attention to the Journal. I mean, certainly financials do. Yeah, that would help.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:24]:
I hope so. I really hope so.

Leo Laporte [01:27:25]:
That's pretty heavy.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:26]:
So this is the 3rd major report from this one guy in the past year, and it's like, okay, nice. I mean, I've written one every quarter, but no Why would anyone listen to me? I'm an idiot.

Leo Laporte [01:27:37]:
Remember, they brought down Theranos with legal action.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:41]:
Yes, that's right. That's right. That's right. And the stakes here are actually much higher. I mean, much higher. And this is not in this, but the one thing I did notice this past quarter that's kind of interesting to me is Google and— I guess it's Google and Amazon, but Google, definitely. Google, net negative cash flow. They're borrowing an astonishing amount of money to fund some of their infrastructure buildout.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:08]:
Microsoft is not. They also are funding a lot of their infrastructure buildout, and I mean to the tunes of tens, I think it's over $100 billion, in investments in other AI companies, some of which compete with it. Microsoft is not doing that. They're doing it on a very small level. This is off the top of my head, so it's wrong, but the Microsoft number was like $13 billion in the last quarter. The Google Alphabet number was like $110 billion or something like that. It was completely different magnitudes of spending on that kind of thing. Or, well, in that case, realization of revenues from investments from what are potentially competitors.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:45]:
It's just, this whole world is wacky. I don't know what's happening. It's crazy to me. I don't understand what's happening here. Anyway, someone who does understand what's happening here is finally writing about it. So, good. I'm going to let them. This guy take the baton because I don't know what I'm doing anymore.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:00]:
But, um, a lot of stuff going on there. So, uh, like, okay, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna spend 2 seconds on this whole thing. Um, there's new Firefly models for, uh, this is Adobe, sorry, for, um, uh, production quality music, speech, and sound effects. That's actually kind of awesome, right? Um, so that's cool. Um, Apple Music, like everyone else, is gonna start identifying, um, AI-generated music. By the way, this is not in the show notes, but, uh, there's an interview somewhere with, um, Um, James, uh, Jimmy Iovine, right? And, uh, Dr. Dre, the guys who did Beats, right? Who are both famous in music regardless, but then did Beats and did Beats Music, which became Apple Music.

Leo Laporte [01:29:38]:
They don't like this AI music.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:40]:
No, they love it. And actually, the thing that's— that's what's fascinating about this interview. They're finally saying the thing that I think everyone in any form of entertainment, whether it's TVs, movies, music, Or video games is saying AI is everywhere. It's a good thing. You're stupid not to use this. And I think it's Dr. Dre who says, you know, people will sometimes come to me and say, like, I can't believe you're doing this. You're using it to produce music now, whatever it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:07]:
And he's like, yeah. He goes, you were the guys that were complaining about synthesizers in the 1970s. Nobody cares. You're being stupid.

Leo Laporte [01:30:12]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:13]:
We're using the latest technology to make our work better. Good for him. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:30:16]:
Good for him.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:17]:
This is the first mate. I cannot, I mean, you guys know this, like you're in the space, but I mean, like the number of times you hear about people bitching and moaning about stupid stuff in video games where it's like, oh, there's an AI-generated art asset for the next Call of Duty. This is bullshit. We are gonna take this company down. It's like, guys, they're creating art assets. They're gonna use AI. Like, come on. Like, Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:38]:
That's like, oh, that's not a photograph. They, they painted that with watercolors. They're, they're faking it. What are you talking about? Like, these are the industries where you would use this the most, you know? Of course. These are the people that were complaining about CGI back in the day, probably, or whatever, in movies, or—

Leo Laporte [01:30:56]:
right.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:57]:
God, can we just go back to 1934 Godzilla with the guy in front of the screen? Look at the giant monster. Like, like, what, what are we talking about here? Obviously. Anyway, so I, I didn't put that in the notes, but That it's worth looking up. It's worth reading. And then just quickly, uh, .NET Conf is on for November, which it is every year. This is the virtual conference where Microsoft announces every version of .NET. So this year's .NET 11.

Richard Campbell [01:31:23]:
Um, it's gonna be interesting to see it without, uh, Jeff Fritz, 'cause he's gone to, uh, to Telera.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:27]:
Yeah. Did you see what he's working on?

Richard Campbell [01:31:30]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:31]:
Okay. So I don't wanna say too much about this 'cause I'm gonna talk about this soon, but he is creating what is essentially like an Outlook type app. But there is, uh, the left—

Leo Laporte [01:31:40]:
you don't hate it anymore?

Paul Thurrott [01:31:41]:
No, I hate Outlook.

Leo Laporte [01:31:42]:
But yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:44]:
But the left pane of this thing is like live tiles, so it has like this at-a-glance thing for like stuff that's going on.

Leo Laporte [01:31:50]:
Oh, it's Windows Phone.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:51]:
Well, but it's kind of like, uh, take the best of both worlds kind of thing. It's, it's actually— I'm saying it's an interesting idea.

Leo Laporte [01:31:58]:
Yeah, yeah, I like it.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:59]:
We'll talk— well, this will come up eventually, um, as it progresses, so we'll, we'll talk about that in the future, but I mean, are you still wildly excited about .NET 11?

Richard Campbell [01:32:08]:
Because it just—

Paul Thurrott [01:32:09]:
I am not at all excited about .NET 11. And, and I want to be super clear about this. It's not— there's nothing wrong with .NET per se. I mean, nothing endemic or whatever, but, um, this is just not a big year for the stuff I care about, you know. I mean, there are union types in C#.

Richard Campbell [01:32:23]:
And yeah, well, the— and the nativizing of async/await is really quite a big deal, but it's very structural in that sense. Like it'll make a huge difference going forward. Yeah. But if you're already using async/await, like all you're going to notice is it goes faster.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:38]:
Every, every year there's something, right? And then every year there's kind of like early/preview versions of something that will be more formally integrated into the next version of .NET. It may change, right, in the interim. So like, don't get too used to the whatever the protocol or whatever it is at the time. But, um, so there's some of that going on, but like the stuff I care about, which is WinUI is not, uh, .NET.

Richard Campbell [01:32:59]:
You're not excited about IEEE 754? What is wrong with you? I—

Paul Thurrott [01:33:05]:
we don't have enough time for that. But, uh, the, um, I just don't—

Richard Campbell [01:33:09]:
it's coincidental that they're doing this very specific of a floating point, uh, for financial. And we just did a show on, on a, on the library called Numerics.NET that is very specific about if you wanted to IEEE 754 This guy's got a library that does that.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:26]:
The— this is not unique to tech, I think, I guess, but this is all I think about, so who cares? But, you know, technology is tough because when things are moving quick, it's exciting. Like every year, if the phone discoveries this year are big, it's like, oh, that's awesome. You know, when things mature, they get boring.

Richard Campbell [01:33:40]:
Sharp 15.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:42]:
That's right. So like people are complaining about like, oh, the Pixel 11, it's not much of a leap. It's like, yeah, it's 11. Like, what do you think they're doing? The iPhone's on 18 or whatever now. Like, you think it's, it's probably not going to be a big thing.

Richard Campbell [01:33:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:54]:
If you bought the one last year, you know. So I think .NET is like that. It's— and so they're maturing things, right? They have, um, like, like a big thing for .NET is modernizing, um, existing workloads to run on, you know, modern, uh, versions of .NET. It's like that— this stuff is— it's bread and butter. It's important. It's not sexy, not fun to talk about, but it's It's super important that it exists and that it works correctly, right? And so they're doing that work. I mean, it's not—

Richard Campbell [01:34:20]:
It's also, I think, a key part of Microsoft's overall competitive strategy. Like the more of the stack you own, the more ability you have to innovate.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:29]:
Right. There was a, I think we talked about this. There was a recent C#, no, C++ documentary on YouTube, right? Which was actually very good. And it was really interesting. And, you know, say what you will about C#, I dump on it all the time, but whatever, it was interesting. So that same company, they make a lot of these tech documentaries, they came out with one about Java. That one was actually not that interesting, but the part of that discussion was somewhere in the— Java got lost for a while, you know, Oracle had bought it and there were lawsuits with Google and yada, yada, yada. But there were these kind of grassroots efforts to improve the runtime and you know, and everything, whatever, the whole platform.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:12]:
And a lot of it came out of like, you know, Microsoft got some stuff right with .NET, we should do some of that, you know. And I'm not saying—

Richard Campbell [01:35:21]:
I mean, async/await has showed up in languages all over the place. Like, it's what, you know, it's that classic immature poets imitate, mature poets steal, right? Like, if it's a good enough concept, every language will grab it. And that's a classic Anders Hejlsberg Right, right, right, right, right.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:38]:
And of course, we never talked about this, but type— what is it, TypeScript 7 or whatever the latest version? I, I don't— I'm gonna get this number slightly wrong, but I think it's like a million times faster than the last version. It's pretty incredible. Like, it's a kajillion. Yeah, it's like a kajillion. Um, but major advances. But again, you know, we're talking about a, you know, kind of a backend technology of a sort where it's like, uh, it's not super sexy to talk about.

Richard Campbell [01:35:59]:
No, and it's hard. Well, yeah, TypeScript's such a good story just in the sense of the open source community embraces it and supports it immediately, and all of Microsoft sort of staring at it going, how would you beat us?

Paul Thurrott [01:36:12]:
There were like 3 things that Microsoft did that the open source world was like, no, that one's good. And, you know, like, and TypeScript is the best version of crap you'll ever have, you know. So it's like, you know, crap.

Richard Campbell [01:36:23]:
But again, such a subtle concept. What if you wanted— what if you needed to make a web-based app that was maintainable.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:30]:
Right. And so, the thing, like, so if I'm— if I know this, if I remember correctly, the latest version of TypeScript, the engine is written in Go, right? This is the Google language.

Richard Campbell [01:36:40]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:41]:
Which is controversial, right? Because to date, I think TypeScript at some point is basically written in TypeScript or whatever. Like TypeScript is kind of, isn't, you know, native or whatever. So they announced they're going to do this thing and it's like, what are you doing? Like, that's kind of, I don't like the sound of that. How come it's not running on .NET or not running on whatever it is? And then they complete it and they're like, oh no, this is—

Richard Campbell [01:37:01]:
It's pretty awesome.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:03]:
Yeah. It's like, no, you were right.

Richard Campbell [01:37:05]:
Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:05]:
I don't know why anyone would question Anders Hejlsberg, but okay.

Richard Campbell [01:37:09]:
Yeah. No, you really shouldn't. He's never going to be— he's not the kind of smart guy who's like, you're too dumb to understand my thing. He'll never do that. But often you realize after a while, oh, I was just not smart enough Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:22]:
And there'll always be someone next to him who's like, hey, by the way, you're not smart enough to understand what he's saying. He's a genius.

Leo Laporte [01:37:27]:
You know, there's a language actually I've been hearing a lot about lately. The guy who wrote LLVM, who is Latner, is working on a language for AI.

Richard Campbell [01:37:36]:
Yeah, you should always pay attention to Latner.

Leo Laporte [01:37:38]:
That man is—

Paul Thurrott [01:37:39]:
Oh, and what's it called?

Leo Laporte [01:37:40]:
Mojo.

Richard Campbell [01:37:41]:
It's wicked.

Leo Laporte [01:37:41]:
And what's— I think he's so smart because it's Python. It's kind of a subset of— it looks exactly It's exactly like Python. So if you know Python, you'll know it.

Richard Campbell [01:37:48]:
I'm right.

Leo Laporte [01:37:48]:
But it's designed— in fact, it's interoperative, so you can use Python libraries. But it's designed for AIs to write in and process. It's very interesting. And it's memory safe. It's got a lot of very interesting—

Paul Thurrott [01:38:04]:
Yeah, it has to be, right?

Leo Laporte [01:38:04]:
Yeah, nowadays. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:06]:
Yeah. Yeah, this is the new thing. Like when Java came out and it was at runtime, and they— I think the big Am I wrong about this? Java had memory collection, right? I think it did.

Richard Campbell [01:38:16]:
The garbage collection.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:17]:
Yeah, that was the name.

Leo Laporte [01:38:18]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:19]:
So that was the big thing there. And so of course, you know, C#, same, you know, they do like .NET does the same thing, right? And I feel like being memory safe today is the modern version of that. Not meaning it's the same thing, but it's the, it's like, this is the baseline now, you know?

Richard Campbell [01:38:34]:
Yeah. You will no longer have erroneous pointers.

Leo Laporte [01:38:40]:
We interviewed last week on Intelligent Machines Dan O'Dowd, whose claim to fame is he writes perfect software.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:48]:
Wait, wait, wait, wait. I thought that was Steve Gibson.

Leo Laporte [01:38:51]:
Yeah, you know, that's the other guy who writes perfect software. O'Dowd writes in a subset of C. He's been doing this for a long time. His software runs in the F-35 jet fighters, in the A380 Airbus. airplane, one of the NASA, uh, the Orion. The Orion, that's right.

Richard Campbell [01:39:11]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:39:12]:
So he— and his whole thing is you can write software perfectly if you're willing to spend enough time and money.

Richard Campbell [01:39:17]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:18]:
That was always my theory. I mean, it's ones and zeros. I always say this, like, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:39:22]:
Yeah, it's really interesting. And he, he mocks AI. I mean, he says, oh no, that's not good, that's not coding. But he is an older gentleman, right? And, uh, You know, and not all—

Richard Campbell [01:39:33]:
not every piece of code needs to run on the spacecraft.

Leo Laporte [01:39:36]:
So that's right, that's right.

Richard Campbell [01:39:37]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:39:38]:
Uh, you're watching a fabulous episode, I think we'd all agree, of Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. And there's only one thing that can make this episode better. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the vaunted, the heralded, the much beloved, the often maligned, the non-GAAP accounting basis Nice. Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:03]:
That's no— what do you say? I think you were saying heralded. I thought you were saying harrowing, and I was like, it could be that.

Leo Laporte [01:40:12]:
Yeah, there are days it could be all of the above.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:15]:
There were elements of that.

Leo Laporte [01:40:16]:
It's the Grand Theft Auto of Windows Weekly segments.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:20]:
Long-awaited. I'm a little feeling a little leaky here.

Leo Laporte [01:40:25]:
Um, oh yeah, wow, that's a story.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:29]:
Uh, so, um, for years, and I mean this potentially like 10 years or more, I think, but probably 10 years-ish, Microsoft has been rumored to be working on a system where you could transfer ownership of a physical disc for an Xbox console to a digital, what Microsoft calls an entitlement, cuz we can't have simple words. Um, and how would that work? And nobody really knows. Like, it's like, so, uh, you know, I guess. You could make the case maybe every one of these discs has some kind of unique identifier.

Leo Laporte [01:40:59]:
This is not new. They did entitlements for Windows 11 registration, right? They would take some sort of hash of your hardware and then say, yeah, this hardware is entitled to own Windows.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:12]:
Like whatever version it was.

Leo Laporte [01:41:13]:
You don't have to ever ask for a serial number.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:15]:
Yeah, but so the trick here though is, you know, when you could have these debates about physical media versus digital versions of games in this case, and You know, one of the advantages of owning something on a physical disc is you own the thing and you can sell it to someone else and then they can play it and, you know, you get the money and you've earned back some of the money you paid for it or whatever. You could sell it to GameStop or something, right? So what happens to a disc when you, as the original owner of the game perhaps, get that digital entitlement and then you sell it to someone else, right? And then they can't do that, right? I mean, that would have to be the case.

Leo Laporte [01:41:48]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:49]:
So the question was, yeah, like, how are they going to do this?

Leo Laporte [01:41:51]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:41:51]:
But how also, how are you going to contend with, I bought a new machine? All right. You know, we battled that where you change your video card and all that stuff goes sideways.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:59]:
I, right.

Richard Campbell [01:42:00]:
You've got to be able to migrate.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:01]:
There's always been this question, big question mark over it. So they finally came clean on this today. They announced they're doing this. It's called Disc to Digital. Um, Xbox Series X and One, it must be S too, but X and One X Series, whatever, Series XS and Xbox One owners will be able to digitize, which doesn't mean like ripping it off the disc, right? But, um, uh, their physical game collection. Now it's not, it's not gonna be all games. It's only those games. Like it's not Xbox 360 or older.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:34]:
It's only some of those games. They hope they're gonna add more over time. And, and there is this little bit of language somewhere in the original announcement where they kind of explain. how this will work, which is that discs made for these systems do in fact have a unique code on them that will unlock this feature. Like Microsoft has been planning to do this for a long time, right? And so that's what's making this work. Because otherwise it's like, well, I don't quite understand. You could make a like perfect digital copy perhaps of the disc. Like, how does this work? And the way it works is just some code on the disc or something, basically.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:09]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:43:10]:
I guess the question is, if somebody else has the disc and they put it on, does it just pull the license off of the old owner onto the new one?

Leo Laporte [01:43:17]:
I don't know.

Richard Campbell [01:43:17]:
I mean, possession being 9/10 of the law.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:20]:
I have to pause briefly because someone has made an awesome graphic of me with—

Richard Campbell [01:43:25]:
on the side of the Xbox, the monolith.

Leo Laporte [01:43:27]:
Oh, I love that.

Richard Campbell [01:43:28]:
The hair as ventilation is awesome.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:31]:
I am getting that David Lynch thing going lately.

Leo Laporte [01:43:33]:
Are you in kryptonite?

Paul Thurrott [01:43:34]:
What exactly Yeah, right here.

Richard Campbell [01:43:38]:
Yeah, of course.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:38]:
I have to go to the bathroom. Could somebody get me out of this thing, please?

Leo Laporte [01:43:41]:
Well, I want this Xbox. I would buy this Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:46]:
This looks like I'm getting teabagged by a teenager while playing Call of Duty.

Leo Laporte [01:43:50]:
That's true to life, in other words. What does the plaque say?

Paul Thurrott [01:43:54]:
What does it say? Oh, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:43:56]:
Um, let me see. I'll zoom in here. Hold on. What does it say? Can I, can I zoom in?

Richard Campbell [01:44:00]:
It's the Paul Theroux Edition.

Leo Laporte [01:44:01]:
Paul Theroux Edition.

Richard Campbell [01:44:03]:
There you go.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:03]:
They should call it— it's like the Throttled Edition. The Thrawn edition.

Leo Laporte [01:44:08]:
Look at that hair.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:09]:
The hair's—

Leo Laporte [01:44:09]:
that's the cooling segment.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:11]:
That's the part where the cooling is fine. That makes sense. Yeah, so the hot air goes to the top.

Leo Laporte [01:44:17]:
Freaking awesome, Darren. Nice, nice AI work. Wow.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:22]:
I also like it's the color of like an alien from like, um, like Alien Resurrection or something like that. Kind of. Yeah, like the Prometheus movie.

Richard Campbell [01:44:31]:
Whew.

Leo Laporte [01:44:32]:
All right.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:32]:
I lost my way there. Um, okay. So there's that, um, that being, uh, disc to digital, whatever. Um, last year ASUS came up with the first, uh, Xbox ROG Ally or ROG Xbox Ally, whatever they are, gaming handhelds, right? These were like the, there were 2 versions. There was the, you know, low end and a higher end version. Um, they're now are about to sell a new version, which is just the same thing really. It's the same hardware. So it's It's the higher end, like the X version from last year.

Richard Campbell [01:45:00]:
Hmm.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:00]:
But it has a translucent case with, uh, gold and black elements. Um, a slightly larger screen, 7.6 inches, I believe, versus 7 inches. It's OLED. It has HDR. Other than that, it's like the same, uh, specs, you know, 24 gigs of RAM. I think it's, uh, yeah, 1 terabyte of storage. It's 1080p, 16:9, same CPU, you know, the AMD, uh, mobile, uh, CPU, same expansion ports, et cetera. Same Wi-Fi, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:27]:
Uh, same battery, blah, blah, blah. You know, last year when these things went on sale, the standalone, um, the higher-end version of that was $999. And this thing is, starts, well, it doesn't start, it's $1,299. So $300 more.

Leo Laporte [01:45:41]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:41]:
Yeah. I mean, some of that's component crisis stuff. Some of it's just, it's special edition. Um, there's also a $2,500 bundle, which includes an Xbox or a ROG Xbox Ally X20, which is the console plus a, um, What do you call it? Like, uh, um, like the XR VR glasses or whatever. It's like a bundle, uh, with, with, uh, AR glasses, I guess we're calling them. So these are XREAL glasses, but done in partnership with ROG, which is part of ASUS. So, um, uh, some kind of a dbrand kill switch and 60-watt, 68-watt adapter. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:16]:
It's normally there.

Leo Laporte [01:46:17]:
68 watts.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:19]:
Well, it's, well, it's kind of, you know, in this, It's in the PC.

Richard Campbell [01:46:23]:
Well, but it's—

Paul Thurrott [01:46:24]:
these are not the same AMD processors you get in, um, like computers, right? This is a Ryzen AI, but it's Z2 Extreme processor, so it's, it's lower wattage, it's lower power, etc. Um, so I don't know what—

Leo Laporte [01:46:36]:
I'm just saying, for a handheld device, 65 watts is—

Paul Thurrott [01:46:39]:
Oh yeah, no, that's— yeah, 65 is standard in the PC space.

Richard Campbell [01:46:42]:
You are holding a flash— a light bulb.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:44]:
Yeah, so yeah, I mean, I, I don't know, but I would guess the normal power adapter might be like 35 or 40 watts, something like that.

Richard Campbell [01:46:52]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:52]:
But smaller, expensive. But you know, if you like the style, you know, whatever. I mean, it's pretty. Yeah, it is pretty. Last week, I think it was, or a couple of weeks ago, we had a rumor about a limited edition Xbox Series. They're going to call it X25 console. Has the translucent green style from the original. Well, they didn't actually use it on the original Xbox.

Richard Campbell [01:47:15]:
You've got The Rock's face in it.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:17]:
Yeah, right. You can see right through me. It's not that hard. Um, and then since then, uh, Microsoft has confirmed this. So, um, starting on November 13th, they're going to sell this limited edition console, $900. Yeah, I know.

Leo Laporte [01:47:34]:
Everything's so expensive now.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:36]:
Wow. When this thing, when this version of the console launched in 2020, which was not translucent green, obviously, but this, uh, Xbox Series X with these specs, $500.

Richard Campbell [01:47:47]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:48]:
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Leo Laporte [01:47:50]:
I like the transparency, but of course I have the Xbox. I don't— so when do people buy a second one? I mean, is that—

Paul Thurrott [01:47:57]:
Yeah, if you're a fan, Leo. No, I don't know. I mean, if you think back to the original Xbox, we kind of associate this translucent green thing with that, but the original Xbox was opaque black, you know, like the green see-through version of that console was the developer version, right? They, this is the one they ceded to, uh, developers who are gonna make games for the console. They never, well, I'm not sure if they never sold it, but that is not what it looked like. They maybe eventually they sold something that looked like that, but the original Xbox was not translucent green. It was black. But this is, you know, the, the color scheme of that goofy UI they had in the beginning. Remember before we had the Xbox 360 with the Blade UI was that kind of translucent green thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:38]:
That was like the marketing colors or whatever. And, you know, of course the Xbox, you know, breaking through the black thing was that translucent green color. It's cool. It's kind of, it's, it's weird how this has become associated with Xbox, even though we've never really had anything that looked like this, but, um, people seem to like it. So we keep doing it.

Leo Laporte [01:48:55]:
Um, reveal trailer is pretty cool because it starts in a, you know, in a bedroom and probably the '80s, right? You know, when you were, when you were a kid and you got your first game machine and then boom.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:06]:
Yeah, I mean, the original Xbox dates back to 2001 and no one— yeah, that thing's— are you on dial-up? What's going on?

Leo Laporte [01:49:14]:
I don't know what's going on.

Richard Campbell [01:49:16]:
Sparks are sucking up all the bandwidth.

Leo Laporte [01:49:18]:
Oh, that might be it.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:21]:
Sorry, we're launching a missile attack on a, uh, critical infrastructure in Idaho.

Leo Laporte [01:49:25]:
Um, sorry, folks, it's, it's all over.

Richard Campbell [01:49:31]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:32]:
Um, so in conjunction, in fact, this was announced before they announced the console, but Xbox also announced a collection of hardware peripherals that are coming out, um, from third parties, not from Microsoft. So like Razer, um, 8BitDo, uh, Backbone, the guys that make that controller for the phone, uh, et cetera. And almost all of these are that same translucent green thing, right? So if you want like a controller or a controller, um, You know, charger. You can kind of sit it on like a cradle. Um, keyboard, which is not for console, obviously. In fact, a lot of these things are actually for PCs or mobile devices. Um, the Backbone Pro, uh, Xbox 25th anniversary editions come in, uh, blue, orange, and crystal clear, but not green, which is kind of weird. Um, but if you want a green version of that little phone controller, um, GameSir has one, or will have one called the X5 Lite.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:23]:
So if you want that color, um, so there's a bunch of stuff there and okay, that's kind of fun. But the greatest thing, this is maybe the most excellent Xbox hardware announcement I've ever seen in my life. This is spectacular. Um, IKEA has teamed up with Microsoft to launch a collection of furniture for gamers and it's all inspired by Xbox.

Leo Laporte [01:50:43]:
Sure, because gamers have so much interest in the right furniture.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:47]:
No, you, you actually, when you see this, you're going to want it. So right in that photo at the top is a green stool that is in the shape of a thumbstick.

Leo Laporte [01:50:55]:
Oh, it's a thumbtack. Oh, it's a thumbstick.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:58]:
So when IKEA first started working with Microsoft on this, they showed them a bunch of designs and everyone at Xbox got stuck on this thumbstick thing and they were like, you have to make this. And they were like, the thing is, if we make it look exactly like a thumbstick, it's the most uncomfortable stool on the planet. So they actually worked for a while to make, So it's a little taller. It looks like the one on the Elite controller almost. And, um, it's supposed to be the most awesome stool imaginable. And like, it's supposed to be wicked comfortable.

Leo Laporte [01:51:26]:
It looks like it goes straight up your—

Paul Thurrott [01:51:28]:
Yeah. If you've ever ridden like a public bike in a city somewhere, it's like that thing where you sit on it and it's in your, um, intestines all of a sudden. But this thing, but it looks awesome. Like I, I could picture people buying it just to have a couple in their room, you know, even if they never use it. Like, yeah, it just looks fantastic. And of course it's like, how much are they? Um, that's a good question actually. I'm not really sure. I know.

Richard Campbell [01:51:50]:
Um, those are so cool. If they're, you know, $50, I might just get a couple.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:55]:
I know. That's what I'm saying. They're really cool looking. Um, so they're going to be on sale by, you know, by the holidays. Um, the, the, it's IKEA. So I, there's only one vowel in this word. But then, well, I guess Y is technically a vowel sometimes, but it's like the Xtaby is the name. Like, is Y—

Leo Laporte [01:52:15]:
I think S-T-A-B-Y.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:18]:
Yep. No idea.

Richard Campbell [01:52:18]:
There's only one vowel in Xbox too. Like, why do you have to make it so hard?

Paul Thurrott [01:52:23]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:52:23]:
Because it's IKEA.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:24]:
Their product names are unbelievable.

Leo Laporte [01:52:26]:
They're all like that.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:27]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:52:27]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:27]:
They're all like that.

Leo Laporte [01:52:28]:
They're very— and you probably have scanned it to assemble this by hand.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:32]:
Oh, that's right. So part— so Um, there's other things, right? So there's like a kind of a carousel table where you can open up the thing and you put all your stuff in there. There's a really, honestly, kind of a cool looking TV tray thing and a chair, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I guess, you know, in Microsoft, like, I'm gonna get this wrong because I don't remember the name, but Microsoft products starting with the Zune have this like—

Leo Laporte [01:52:52]:
This guy sitting on a thumbstick does not look comfortable.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:56]:
Yeah, he looks like you would look with that thing on you, but, but Anyway, so Microsoft stuff or Xbox stuff now, it actually says like made with love in Seattle or something like that. So there is a Swedish version of that inside of each of these products. So when you build it, you'll see that, but when you put it together, you won't, you know what I mean? So like it's somewhere on the inside of each of these things and it says, well, it says something like made with love in Sweden or something like that. And, uh, but it's in Swedish.

Richard Campbell [01:53:25]:
Um, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:53:26]:
Kind of funny. Yeah, look at these people perched on this thing. Is it soft? Uh, okay, I guess we're just gonna have to all get one.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:37]:
And yeah, I just think it looks spectacular.

Leo Laporte [01:53:40]:
I think we should do a show all sitting on these.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:42]:
Yeah, definitely. Why is everyone grimacing?

Leo Laporte [01:53:46]:
Next, the next live event we do—

Paul Thurrott [01:53:47]:
Paul looks like he's had to go to the bathroom for 2 and a half hours. Is he okay?

Leo Laporte [01:53:51]:
I'm gonna be sitting on this. Uh, wow, I like the pillows with the little controller thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:57]:
Yeah, I like all of it. I honestly— this whole collection is like, okay, this is kind of hilarious.

Leo Laporte [01:54:02]:
Oh, this is— this is the, uh, so this is kind of, um, very IKEA. It's a wooden toolbox, but it also doubles as a stand for your laptop.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:14]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:54:15]:
I think that's kind of neat.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:16]:
I do too.

Leo Laporte [01:54:16]:
I would buy that. I think the whole—

Paul Thurrott [01:54:18]:
if you look at— if you look through each one of these things, like every one of them, you're like, oh, that's That— what, the D-stick, the, the kind of the D-stick plate, D-stick thing where you could hold it in front of you and get a tan, like if you're outside? Looks— is a little weird, but, but most of these things are actually really nice.

Leo Laporte [01:54:33]:
I might have to make a trip to IKEA this holiday season. Oh, look, see a little controller hook?

Paul Thurrott [01:54:39]:
I know, it's awesome. Listen, everyone who— everyone watching this has ADD, and they're looking at this and they're like, I need every one of these things.

Leo Laporte [01:54:45]:
I want it.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:45]:
And it's certainly been my response. Like, I I just like the look of all this stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:54:50]:
Or you can get the thumbtack in black or green.

Richard Campbell [01:54:52]:
There you go.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:53]:
I like that it's a thumbtack now, by the way.

Richard Campbell [01:54:55]:
Black thumbtack.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:56]:
You're really emphasizing the, the pointy nature of it.

Richard Campbell [01:55:00]:
Like, don't turn it over.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:01]:
Which actually, now that you've said it, it looks exactly like a thumbtack.

Leo Laporte [01:55:03]:
I'm glad they have the little grippy nubs on it so you won't accidentally slip off of your thumbtack.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:10]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:55:11]:
Well, if only there's a bit of a spike coming out of the bottom there. You get to keep it—

Paul Thurrott [01:55:14]:
Maybe there is, and it could keep it in, like, grounded wherever it is.

Leo Laporte [01:55:19]:
Live up to its thumbtack roots.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:21]:
I want to call out Kevin's joke about, I don't know if this was a good IKEA.

Leo Laporte [01:55:25]:
Yeah. Oh, Kevin, Kevin.

Richard Campbell [01:55:27]:
I immediately bat panel penalty him.

Leo Laporte [01:55:29]:
He is our— he needs to feel shame.

Richard Campbell [01:55:31]:
I like it. It's bad. I like it.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:32]:
It's very bad. I'm a big— I'm a big fan of the dad joke things.

Leo Laporte [01:55:35]:
I, I, to me, like, I mean, it might have been a typo, but no, no, no, no, Kevin is, uh, this is his living. This is his life. When, uh, he does this in our editorial board meetings as well. He's like a master of this.

Richard Campbell [01:55:47]:
That's terrible.

Leo Laporte [01:55:48]:
It's good to have a skill.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:49]:
Feel shame.

Richard Campbell [01:55:50]:
It's too emotional.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:52]:
You're terrible. I love you.

Richard Campbell [01:55:53]:
Yeah, terrible.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:54]:
Don't ever change.

Richard Campbell [01:55:55]:
Canadian hockey thing. Go to box for 2 minutes, feel shame.

Leo Laporte [01:55:59]:
Yeah. And then come out and beat the crap out of somebody.

Richard Campbell [01:56:02]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:03]:
And just come out of there with that thumbstick thing and just jam it into somebody.

Richard Campbell [01:56:06]:
Be ready to go.

Leo Laporte [01:56:08]:
Elbows up.

Richard Campbell [01:56:11]:
Uh, you're gonna tackle the Rockstar thing? I love this.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:15]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:56:15]:
So what a mess.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:17]:
So, gee, I don't know if you heard, uh, GTA, uh, Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming out this November. Um, there is a guy who has been leaking gameplay footage on, I guess, on YouTube or wherever, um, for the past couple of weeks. And it, and Rockstar is doing everything they can. They've asked Microsoft and Google and what to try to hunt this guy down. Yeah. To prevent—

Leo Laporte [01:56:39]:
so these are real. It's real.

Richard Campbell [01:56:40]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:41]:
Oh yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:56:42]:
Real enough that Rockstar's upset about it. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:44]:
They're losing their minds.

Leo Laporte [01:56:45]:
They say it's spoilers.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:46]:
Right. Well, they're gonna— look, this is a marketing opportunity for these guys. This game's finally coming out after years of delays.

Richard Campbell [01:56:53]:
Years.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:54]:
And, you know, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. They're, they're going to have the first extended look of this thing on Netflix for some reason. And then later in the day it will be on YouTube. I, I don't know.

Richard Campbell [01:57:07]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:07]:
Um, so Netflix is gonna have this one really good day for a couple hours, I guess.

Richard Campbell [01:57:12]:
Um, buying Netflix for that. Oh my God.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:15]:
I mean, yeah, no, I don't think so either. But I, I mean, plus, I mean, any, I don't know what they're doing. I don't know what the point of that is. But, um, but the, the ex— the first extended look of GTA 6 is as we record this tomorrow, meaning Thursday, August 27th, uh, 3 PM Eastern time. Uh, and then at 9 PM Eastern on the same day, it'll just be on YouTube and anyone can see it, I guess. But, um, but yeah, so—

Leo Laporte [01:57:41]:
Eastern. And so they're waiting till the kids come home from school. What is that time? That's weird.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:45]:
Uh, yeah, I mean, it's weird. Kind of makes sense.

Leo Laporte [01:57:49]:
Um, the after-school special on Netflix this week, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:57:53]:
Well, you'll be able to beat up hookers soon, guys. So it's coming. Um, I don't know. I don't know what's happening here.

Leo Laporte [01:58:01]:
It's so strange.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:01]:
I know, the whole thing is so bizarre. Uh, so I mentioned Amiga last week, and in just a weird coincidence of timing, so the new Commodore, right, has announced they're bringing, uh, the Alien Breed series, which is a series of Amiga games, right, from the late '80s, early '90s, um, to the PC and to modern consoles. I don't think they're like remastered in any way. I think it's just the games, but, you know, ported to these platforms so you're able to get it through Xbox, through Steam and GOG and Epic, I believe, and PlayStation. And a month or two later will be on the Switch as well. And so there were 5 of these games. You know, as these games were, these were big games, these, for whatever it's worth, these were big games, especially the first couple on the Amiga. Because Wolfenstein 3D came out and then eventually Doom, one of these games is a 3D kind of a first-person thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:00]:
And they, you know, it took them a while, but they eventually figured out how to do that kind of game on the Amiga as well, just in time for Commodore to go out of business. But the— so why—

Richard Campbell [01:59:10]:
Darn.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:11]:
Why is Commodore putting this thing out? It's a good question. You know, but the way they describe it is They are doing work for, um, uh, game, you know, part of their mission as like a, what's the name of that? What do you call this thing? It's like they're a public benefit corporation is they are trying to preserve gaming history and expand access to these games. It is kind of notable that these games are not coming out for any Commodore or Amiga computer. Like they're, it's PC and console, right?

Richard Campbell [01:59:39]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:40]:
Um, and they do talk about that. Like, yeah, I mean, this, we have more plans for that kind of stuff, but But for right now, it's like, you know, we just, we have this opportunity. We're friends with these, you know, the guys that made these games and, uh, we're just gonna make this happen so people can, uh, you know, experience these games, which I, I have to say, at least the first couple anyway, were really, really good, um, back in the day. So you can add it to your wishlist on Steam. I think they come out in, yeah, late September. So we're not too far away from that, but it's, yeah, it's kind of, I like anything like this. It's kind of cool to me. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:00:09]:
That's, it's all nostalgic, but you know, nostalgic makes money right now.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:13]:
That's true. Yeah. The people who are, uh, old enough to be nostalgic for this stuff have money now. So we can like all these things we could not afford to buy in the early '90s.

Richard Campbell [02:00:21]:
It's like, oh, they've also, they've also had a period of time where they weren't targeted at all because it was, they were, you'd aged out of the primary targeting. Right. Nostalgia is targeting that other bracket.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:31]:
Yeah. And whoever, whatever Atari is now is doing the same kind of stuff. Like they're, they're very concerned about this game preservation stuff and they're buying up You know, these like ancient studios and collections of these game makers and to make sure these games, yeah, it's, this is good stuff. I like this sort of thing.

Leo Laporte [02:00:49]:
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be though. I have to—

Paul Thurrott [02:00:52]:
Yes. I'm nostalgic for when nostalgia is what it used to be. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:00:56]:
It used to be great.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:57]:
Yeah. All right, Groucho.

Leo Laporte [02:00:59]:
Anyway, um, you keep this up, we're going to have to do an Xbox segment. I mean, an Amiga segment for you.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:04]:
I'm looking, I'm hoping every week, every week, Commodore Corner. I'm going to go right back to my roots, baby. This is how I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to glide out at the end of my career the way I went in. Um, I think we need a theme song. I don't think the world needs more than 640 by 200. I'm just saying.

Leo Laporte [02:01:22]:
Oh, yo ho, it's Commodore Corner time.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:25]:
So I never thought of Commodores being anything naval related, which of course is stupid because That's the name, right? But the other thing is like, you know, the classic Commodore logo with the little 2 little lines. You know what the name of that thing is?

Leo Laporte [02:01:39]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:39]:
Chicken lips. And once you, and once you know that, you'll never not, you'll never not see— you'll never not see chicken lips when you look at that logo.

Richard Campbell [02:01:50]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:01:52]:
That's—

Paul Thurrott [02:01:53]:
sorry, everybody. Thanks, uh, for meal.

Richard Campbell [02:01:55]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:56]:
Oh God. I miss him so much, that bastard. Okay. So, um, and then finally, uh, uh, it, NVIDIA has their GeForce Now streaming service and it is now supported on Mozilla Firefox. So if you were not using this for some reason, uh, or for whatever reason, and this was, if this was the reason I should say, um, you can now, you can now play games. It previously was only, uh, Chromium-based browsers, I guess. I think—

Leo Laporte [02:02:21]:
Chicken lips.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:22]:
Safari as well.

Leo Laporte [02:02:24]:
It really is chicken lips.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:25]:
Chicken lips. Yeah, that logo is from the mid-1960s. Like, this was drawn on paper by some guy.

Leo Laporte [02:02:32]:
They paid somebody money. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:35]:
Yep. Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:02:36]:
That is the worst logo.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:39]:
Well, it's iconic. No.

Leo Laporte [02:02:42]:
Another word.

Richard Campbell [02:02:44]:
In the literal sense.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:46]:
It's unique. What am I looking for?

Richard Campbell [02:02:50]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:51]:
We need more chicken lips.

Leo Laporte [02:02:52]:
Chicken lips. Oh, I wish you hadn't told— I can never see that again.

Richard Campbell [02:02:56]:
I ruined everything now.

Leo Laporte [02:02:57]:
Once you, uh—

Paul Thurrott [02:02:58]:
I'm so sorry.

Leo Laporte [02:02:59]:
Once you, uh, um, you know, see the Arch logo as a fat guy sitting in front of his computer, you can—

Paul Thurrott [02:03:06]:
There's a lot of this stuff. Like, if the Wendy's logo has some little, you know, thing in it, and FedEx— there's also something with the FedEx logo, um, I remember. But there's all these, like, a lot of logos have some little coded messages in them.

Richard Campbell [02:03:19]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:03:19]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:03:21]:
You get little calls.

Leo Laporte [02:03:22]:
Well, let's see. Um, I think this is a good time to pause because the— guess what? The best part of the show— well, we just had it. The second best part of the show is coming up. The back of the book. Now would be a good time though to tell you a little bit about— oh, what are you doing there, Richard?

Richard Campbell [02:03:38]:
I'm lost.

Leo Laporte [02:03:39]:
Get out of here!

Richard Campbell [02:03:41]:
Help me!

Leo Laporte [02:03:42]:
Get out of here, Richard!

Richard Campbell [02:03:43]:
You don't belong there!

Paul Thurrott [02:03:47]:
Let me go away.

Richard Campbell [02:03:48]:
No!

Leo Laporte [02:03:51]:
All right, Paul, your turn.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:53]:
I would love to do a pledge drive.

Leo Laporte [02:03:54]:
So if that ever happens— You want to do a pledge drive? Get a phone bank. You could all be sitting on those tacks. Yeah, gotta have tote bags.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:00]:
Tell me how terrible— she's like, I don't want to give you any money, I just want to complain about your stupid podcast. I'm like, all right, talk to me, hit me. I'm good with that.

Leo Laporte [02:04:08]:
Yeah, pull the rod on the phone bank. Yes, I'm sorry.

Richard Campbell [02:04:12]:
No, no, I meant it.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:13]:
Now that I, now that I just said that, so the other Yesterday, I think it was, I'm out in the kitchen. I opened my iPad up, set it up. I bring up a YouTube video. It's 3 guys talking about Amiga stuff. My wife comes in and she goes, I'm doing the dishes or whatever. She goes, what is this? And I'm like, it's like 3 old guys talking about technology. Can you believe anyone watches this crap? She's like, do you even listen to yourself?

Leo Laporte [02:04:35]:
Like, I'm like, 3 old guys talking about technology. Where can I find that?

Richard Campbell [02:04:40]:
That's not what I'm saying.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:42]:
Also, when you were just doing the ad, I got an email from Xbox, like, you can preorder the Xbox Wireless Controller X25 Special Edition in OG translucent green, which, as I pointed out, is not the OG color. But I have to say, this thing looks kind of awesome. And the thing that is OG on this is the buttons are those original colors, like, uh, yellow, blue, red, and green, right? The, the 4, you know, Y, X, B, A, whatever.

Leo Laporte [02:05:05]:
They never did a translucent green.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:07]:
Well, not— no, not Like, not as the official console. I mean, I think there were probably special edition things here and there, but like, that was not actually the original. It was the like pre-release color. Like, that was the thing they showed up before they released it. But I don't know, it's kind of weird how they—

Leo Laporte [02:05:23]:
this is—

Paul Thurrott [02:05:23]:
this was not the original color.

Leo Laporte [02:05:25]:
I know, but no, but I, you know, it's kind of the, uh, Mandela effect. You think maybe it was.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:31]:
Yeah, right. Yeah, we all remember it, but it's like, yeah, you know, it was black, right? I mean, the thing was a tank. Like, it was a black tank.

Leo Laporte [02:05:35]:
I have one over here.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:36]:
Yeah, yeah, it's— you could kill someone.

Leo Laporte [02:05:38]:
We don't have tote bags, but we do have these fine t-shirts.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:41]:
We have a cute— we're having— we're actually having a kind of a hard time getting rid of them. Um, I don't know what's going on.

Leo Laporte [02:05:47]:
For your $20 pledge.

Richard Campbell [02:05:49]:
Yeah, I won't send you one.

Leo Laporte [02:05:51]:
Yeah, right.

Richard Campbell [02:05:52]:
Otherwise you're getting one.

Leo Laporte [02:05:54]:
All right, we gotta—

Paul Thurrott [02:05:55]:
we gotta—

Leo Laporte [02:05:55]:
yeah, we got 20 minutes before— I know, I'm already killing all the time. We want to get your whiskey.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:59]:
Go ahead. Uh, so I won't spend any time on this, but Google has the Discover feed. It's on their phones. You can get it in the Google app on iPhone, whatever. They're gonna let people— I mean, you kind of already do this, but you're literally gonna be able to go into this thing and be like, I only wanna see news about this one topic. I'm begging you, do not ever do this. This is the thing that sounds so good, but it's the reason for all of the divide we have in the world now. It's like your ability not to listen to what other— like to anything that's even slightly against what you believe is the biggest problem we have in our society today.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:29]:
And my God, like just this huge problem.

Richard Campbell [02:06:32]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:33]:
Um, so that's kind of a big topic and that's that 10 seconds is all I have. So whatever, but, um, goddamn, just don't do that. Um, new version of PowerToys just came out yesterday. That's not super surprising, but, um, there's a bunch of stuff going on here. Um, but the big one is, uh, there's a new utility called Windows Hopper. So instead of Alt+Tab, it's like Alt+Backtick, and then you can, uh, tab only between the open windows of the app that's current. So if you have like multiple File Explorer windows or whatever Office app, you don't see all the clutter. You just see the windows in that one app.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:07]:
So that's actually a really good idea. Um, but there's also a bunch of, uh, just major improvements across like Command Palette, Quick Accent, uh, Zoom It. Uh, Zoom It one's amazing. So it's like a demo. I actually saw, I watched the Mark Russinovich, uh, video about this, but you can display, uh, you can have 2 displays. So it's sort of like the PowerPoint. Uh, display view where you have your slides and then what the audience is seeing. But for the live presentation thing, you might be doing it with the screen cap, uh, screen, I guess I call it screen capture, whatever the screen presentation, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:37]:
So awesome. A lot of stuff there. So really cool. And just real quick, uh, Parallels Desktop every year comes out with a new version. So 27 is out. This is the virtualization platform for the Mac that's primarily used to run Windows on the Mac. Um, it is the way I do it. Unfortunately, you can't just buy this thing.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:53]:
You have to kind of buy it every year or whatever.

Leo Laporte [02:07:55]:
Well, I guess— That's the secret, isn't it? That's why there's a new version every year. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:58]:
I was, as I said that, I actually think you, I think you might be able to buy a perpetual version, but it's, it's the same cost as 2 years of the subscription. And depending on how this thing updates, you might actually kind of want to, I don't know, you might want to subscribe, but anyway, it's a great product. And, uh, they don't really talk about this, but I feel like a lot of what they're doing, like, so there's a lot of, um, graphics acceleration stuff. They're not talking about it for games, but you know, for games, I think it's going to be the big thing. But they're talking about it for apps like Blender or whatever that might use graphics acceleration. But anyway, if you're a Mac user, I'm sorry, but this is available as well.

Leo Laporte [02:08:35]:
You're a Mac user, I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:38]:
Yeah, look, you didn't— you don't know any better. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. We all make mistakes.

Leo Laporte [02:08:42]:
It ain't your fault. It's okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I think Richard Campbell has a Run As coming up very soon.

Richard Campbell [02:08:51]:
I do. Published today, uh, when I talk with Mike O'Neill, I'll talk about the new security features in PowerShell 7. PowerShell 7 has been out for a little while now, but the big news coming down the pipe, and I'm sure I'll have more shows on this, is the fact that they're going to start shipping 7 by default with Windows. And one of the big reasons is the security side of things, and this is what Mike and I got into in a big way, because PowerShell's incredibly powerful, and that's why the bad guys like it so much. And so if they can get into your machine and they can run PowerShell, they can do a lot of harm fast. And often you need PowerShell for various bits of functionality and so forth. And today, uh, with inside of PowerShell 7, especially in 7.3, they've got features for containing What code can run and how it can run. So you can set up manifests around, yes, that script can run, but only for these rules under this context, that sort of thing.

Richard Campbell [02:09:43]:
So you can no longer allow any random PowerShell code to run. You can be very specific about what runs and how it runs and what the limits are on that. You just have to spend enough time. This is your classic just enough administration problem. You need these powerful tools for some of the work you do. You just don't want them being used for things you don't want them used for. And so we really nailed down a bunch of the thinking around that. And some great links in the show notes too.

Richard Campbell [02:10:08]:
Mike writes a bunch of PowerShell. He does this big Exchange add-in that anybody supporting Exchange Server needs. But it was great to dig from a guy who writes a lot of useful PowerShell, how to write secure PowerShell.

Leo Laporte [02:10:20]:
Interesting. Yeah, really good. Yeah, you know, they were saying in the Discord, and you know, I, I listen to them religiously, That Paul has a theme for his, you know, little halo theme for his segment, but you don't have a theme for the whiskey segment.

Richard Campbell [02:10:41]:
It's true.

Leo Laporte [02:10:42]:
So I asked—

Richard Campbell [02:10:44]:
Uh-oh.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:45]:
Uh-oh. You can kind of feel what's about to happen here.

Leo Laporte [02:10:52]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:52]:
It's like we're shipping a Yeah, yeah, here we go, everybody.

Richard Campbell [02:10:58]:
A little Irish reel.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:01]:
There's a bottle in the way with a label from a Tuesday and a cork that's gone astray. Richard's got the tasting glass, the window screws, and cheer.

Leo Laporte [02:11:10]:
It's something weird from my closet and it's a whiskey time this year. Okay, don't you think that's a good theme for this?

Paul Thurrott [02:11:17]:
That's hilarious. Freaking spectacular.

Leo Laporte [02:11:21]:
So ladies and gentlemen, without further fiddling, it's time for Richard Campbell's whiskey segment.

Richard Campbell [02:11:29]:
Well, after that, last week we talked about Red Bank, the, the Kieffer Sutherland whiskey, and I mentioned the— that it was a blend from Alberta, and the master blender was this guy, Michael Marcille. And that he came to note working for Krueger for making a whiskey called Spiceboks. Guess what I found in the liquor store?

Paul Thurrott [02:11:56]:
Spiceboks!

Richard Campbell [02:11:57]:
So I'm like, well, we have to do that. And more importantly, you know, it's based out of Quebec, and we've talked about a lot of Canada. You know, we've certainly British Columbia and Newfoundland and, uh, down into Cape Breton and so forth. We never really talked about Quebec. proper. And Quebec is massive. It's one of the biggest provinces in the whole country, which means— and we're talking one of the largest countries in the world, right? And Quebec itself is really made up of 3 distinct landscapes, although the vast majority is this thing we call the Canadian Shield. Maybe you've heard the term.

Richard Campbell [02:12:32]:
If you don't know what the Canadian Shield actually is in geological terms, it's a craton. What the heck is a craton? Cratons are the original rock from the formation of the Earth. If you want to find a 4-billion-year-old-plus rock, you go to the Canadian Shield. And this is rock that formed when there was only one continent during Pangaea. Now it's much bigger than Quebec. It's Labrador and Ontario and Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and even bits of Alberta, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. It even stretches into the US as well, but who cares about that? And it also had some of the biggest ice sitting on top of it. So this is really rock that was scraped almost Bare by the last big ice age.

Richard Campbell [02:13:17]:
And so today its soils are very thin, although it's full of valuable minerals. It also, this is the rock that the ice couldn't crush, and so it's quite waterproof. And so if you look at a map of the northern parts of Quebec and any of that whole shield region covered in lakes, it's also awesome hydroelectric territory. But most of the people in Quebec are down in the southern part of this area we call the St. Lawrence Lowlands. And this was formed also out of the Ice Age. The ice stretched well past that, but this was a weak spot in the craton, and so it dug down deeper. And then as the ice retreated at the end of the Ice Age, saltwater rushed in and filled the area to the thing that geologists refer to as the Champlain Sea.

Richard Campbell [02:13:59]:
And the nice thing about oceans or seas anyway is that they build up sediments. And so that as the ground bounced back from the Ice Age, That all became above sea level and drained off and becomes this incredibly fertile land. That's why the Great Plains across the North American continent are full of great land as well. It's all wildly fertile from being a sea for some period of time. The southern edge of Quebec is the actually north end of the Appalachians. This is more old rock. So it's one thing to talk about the shield, but the Appalachians are the remains of a Himalayan-class mountain range From the Pangaean era. So billions of years old.

Richard Campbell [02:14:41]:
The Appalachians are actually older than the Atlantic Ocean. You can find geological connections from rock all the way down in Alabama through Newfoundland and then over to Scotland and Norway because they all used to be part of one landmass that split up as the Atlantic Rift expanded and created those.

Leo Laporte [02:15:01]:
I think this might be the farthest back you've gone in history.

Richard Campbell [02:15:04]:
I'm going. Digging back to formation of planets.

Leo Laporte [02:15:07]:
Pangaea, ladies and gentlemen.

Richard Campbell [02:15:09]:
Yeah, we did a little Pangaea today. But let's move ahead up past the Ice Age. Our first Paleo-Indian hunter-gatherers show up in that part of the world 12,000+ years ago chasing megafauna, the giant bison and caribou and things like that. And that stratifies into the First Nations that many still exist today in the different ecological zones. So the Inuit in the north and northeast, the Cree around the Hudson's Bay and James Bay, and the Algonquin down into the Ottawa River watershed. The Mi'kmaq, which we talked about before in the Eastern Maritime region that includes Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. And then of course the Iroquois along the St. Lawrence.

Richard Campbell [02:15:50]:
There's a real— we talk about when did Europeans first come to North America? And of course this is great, L'Anse aux Meadows in the northern part of Newfoundland where the Vikings clearly came. And there's a question of did they ever get down the St. Lawrence estuary? which they almost certainly did. Some of the archaeological evidence on that site has things that are not from there that came from further south and west. So it's very likely the Iroquois who have been there literally for millennia encountered the Vikings for as long as they stayed. But when we get to talk traditional European, the explorers, it's Jacques Cartier, the French explorer, in 1535, comes up the estuary. He expects to find empty wilderness. He is incorrect.

Richard Campbell [02:16:35]:
The Iroquois are running a very advanced society along the river corridor. That's farms, storehouses, villages, huge trading routes. It's very busy, and his documentation is quite extensive. And they do, on his 3rd journey into that area in 1541, attempt to establish a town. They called it Charlesbourg-Royal in the area that today is Quebec City in 1541. 1541. It, like most attempts in the 16th century, does not go well and is abandoned by 1543. And largely, the French will not be back until— and we talked about this in the Cape Breton and the Glen Breton episode— Samuel de Champlain.

Richard Campbell [02:17:21]:
So this is 70 years later in 1608, having gotten Acadia up and running on the east coast there, he heads up the St. Lawrence And he's expecting, he's got the notes from 70 years earlier from Cartier, and he's expecting all of these villages, and most of them are gone. And it's in some debate, is this, there was always conflict between the different native peoples in that area, but the other potential here is smallpox, that the disease wafted through this area as it propagated from the south and just shut down a lot of folks. But the trade routes are there. There's a lot of good land. Champlain does get set up the new Quebec City roughly in the same location as well. And he calls it Quebec. We call it Quebec City today.

Richard Campbell [02:18:07]:
And this is not before there's a province or anything like that, just Quebec. And it's actually a Francophone interpretation of an Iroquois word for where the river narrows. So as the estuary of the St. Lawrence Gulf narrows up and really becomes a river, That's the defensible point. That's where they established Quebec in this area they now call New France. Quebec City being the only walled city in North America because lots of conflict. And Champlain will live out the rest of his life in that area. He'll pass away at the age of 61 in 1635.

Richard Campbell [02:18:44]:
What we now know as Montreal today is founded in 1642 called Ville-Marie. And although originally a religious mission and frontier settlement, it has better access further up the river and into the grasslands and farming areas. So it functions more effectively, although again, not a big colony. They're mostly doing fur trade. That's the focus is they're on the main trade routes. And so these are trade routes that were established by the natives and they're just utilizing them. And it's all about the beaver pelts at this time. The real colonialization aspects for New France kick off when Louis XIV gets control of France in 1663, and he realizes that the Brits are going nuts putting in population as quickly as possible with colonists and convicts, whatever they can get onto the new land.

Richard Campbell [02:19:36]:
So he does the same. And so finally does this thing called the Filles du Roi, which is the king's daughters. He actually sends women to the, uh, uh, into the, into New France to increase the population, encourages rapid reproduction. Uh, but of course they were mostly trading. And this is a good time for New France. For New France at this point now stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of St. Lawrence along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. This is all the inland stretch west of where the 13 colonies are.

Richard Campbell [02:20:13]:
The pressure really only comes on you, France, when the Hudson's Bay Company is established and gets control of what is known as Rupert's Land, which we talked about before as well in 1670. And that really starts rolling into potential conflicts that will get to the point of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, where Acadia goes to the British and things go very poorly for that. That becomes the Acadian diaspora over the next 30, 40 years. While the trade continues nonstop. Arguably the height of New France is in the 1720s, 1730s. And all of that winds to an end by the conflict known as the Plains of Abraham, where British forces capture Quebec City and take control. Basically, New France is over at that point, and that will result in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. But it doesn't mean that the people disappear, right? The French people are still there.

Richard Campbell [02:21:09]:
The British have learned something from the catastrophe that was the Acadian diaspora that leads to the Cajuns, all those sorts of things. In fact, they don't even attempt to suppress the French culture because they have a bigger problem. And that bigger problem is those 13 colonies. Yeah, sure, the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, but 1773 and the Boston Tea Party is just not that far away. And British crown needs friends, and so they're all in on trying to keep the French engaged to manage those troublesome colonies. And we kind of know where the story goes from here. There's a revolution, da da da da da da, and you know the the the Quebecois continue to function with the British alongside in what would become Upper and Lower Canada. Now, the relationship of alcohol.

Richard Campbell [02:21:57]:
in New France compared to the British relationship are quite different. Where the Brits are very big on ales and porters and ultimately whiskey, and although in those early days, especially production of rum out of the sugar plantations from the Caribbean where they have the molasses as a byproduct of making sugar and they need to make it into rum, the French don't look at it that way. Wine is the drink of choice, brandy if you've got money. You might have a little bit of local beer, but it's just not the same thing at all. The establishment of major manufacturing of alcohol in the region of Quebec, specifically Montreal, comes from a guy named John Molson. Yes, that Molson, as in Canadian beer Molson. 1786, and I've mentioned him before. He arrives from England to produce beer initially in Montreal.

Richard Campbell [02:22:48]:
This is when Upper and Lower Canada really starts to form. Molson will get into whiskey making in Canada in 1799, again in Montreal, although his son Thomas will move up to Kingston, which is in Upper Canada, and then Ontario too, because that's more availability of grain there. There's better farming for barley and wheat, and they'll be doing it that way. He'll end up back in Montreal in the 1830s. Canada actually forms the country in 1867. That's Confederation, and we immediately get into the Temperance games. And I've mentioned these before. The Scott Act, also known as the Canadian Temperance Act, was in 1878, where one Richard William Scott, a cabinet minister under Alexander Mackenzie, is trying to deal with the social religious conflicts.

Richard Campbell [02:23:32]:
But I would point out, this is very much British culture. And the rules were simple. Let local counties, municipalities hold votes on whether or not to prohibit alcohol sales. And so you end up with that one county being dry, that next county is not, and so forth. They also have the McCarthy Act in 1883, which standardized liquor licensing and how it can be sold. It's roughly at the same time. This all sort of goes nuts in 1890 when there's so much conflict over all of this, and they try and create their new rules. This is where bonded warehousing comes in.

Richard Campbell [02:24:06]:
So you try and keep quality products together. Canada will be actually one of the first countries to define the concept of whiskey in the 1890s. The US won't have a definition until the 1900s. Scotland even later than that. But I just would remind everyone that the whole temperance thing, very English, very evangelical Christian, and the Québécois were not that way. They were Catholic. Wine was a big part of their culture. Introducing your children to drink early, drinking to excess was not a big thing.

Richard Campbell [02:24:38]:
And so there just wasn't the same issues. And so as Prohibition starts to rear its head, The Quebecois largely just stay out of it. They're not interested at all. That being said, there's still— because of the Scott Act, there was certain municipalities that did make alcohol sales illegal. And during World War I, they generally prohibit the sale of alcohol, mostly for resourcing during the war. And Quebec even drags their feet on that. They do prohibit the sale of spirits in 1918 towards the end of World War I, although they always have sale of beer, wine, and cider. By 1919, even 90% of Quebec municipalities are dry, at least for spirits.

Richard Campbell [02:25:19]:
But that all ends in 1921 when the province creates the Commission des Liquides du Québec, which really is they socialize the sale of spirits, government only, right as US Prohibition kicks off. In 1922, again, during Prohibition, Quebec creates the Société de Alcools, also known as Maison des Fertels, or MDF, to standardize the supply chain for moving spirits around. This is very— this is specifically about bottling, marketing of wine and spirits, branding, private label, all of those things. Literally a government entity to handle it all. And that rapidly spins into some craziness when the Bronfman family shows up in 1924. They formed the Distillers Corporation, directly associated with the Distillers Corporation in the UK. And get to the business of selling alcohol to the United States illegally by farming it through the notorious Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. These are 2 little islands that are the remains of New France off the coast of Newfoundland.

Richard Campbell [02:26:27]:
And so although Canada could not sell alcohol directly to America, Canada could sell it to France. They'd sell it into these islands, and where it went from there, Not their problem. Uh, of course gets out of control, and at the end of Prohibition in 1934, the Bronfmans are prosecuted or arrested and prosecuted. They will ultimately settle. But the company we're talking about now when it comes to Spicebox is a company called Krueger. Krueger was formed in 1904 as a paper business. Joseph Krueger was a paper merchant out of New York City, and he moved to Montreal to set up his own company. And he was purely a merchant.

Richard Campbell [02:27:05]:
He bought and sold paper. He did not manufacture it in any way. His son, Gene Kruger, takes over in the 1920s, and he's the one who starts getting into factories. He buys the Bromptonville Mill in 1950. And so Kruger, the modern company, is known for forestry, industrial manufacturing, and paper products. And the 3rd generation, Joseph Kruger II, acquires the MDF. the, the entity, the government entity for producing alcohol, as a diversification play for Krueger. And that's in 2006.

Richard Campbell [02:27:39]:
And then in 2009, this is when, uh, Michel Marcille actually, uh, joins the company. And he has a BSc in chemistry from the University of Montreal from 1977 and had been spending his entire career making flavored products. beverages, wine, spirits, yogurt, biscuit, nutrition bars, you name it. So he joins Krueger Wine and Spirits in 2009, and within a year makes Spiceboks. I noticed we just don't have a lot of story about whiskey per se here, because for the most part, whiskey is simply not made in Quebec. It's not a thing. There is some craft spirits today. Maybe we'll get to one of those one of these days.

Richard Campbell [02:28:17]:
But, uh, this particular whiskey is a combination. It's a blend of 3-year-old 4-year-old, 5-year-old, and 6-year-old whiskies from Alberta. It's very much the same story we got from Red Bank, but I got the Red Bank story having figuring out the Spicebox story. So they're blenders and they're marketers and they're prod— and, and bottlers. They do not make whiskey. They buy it from elsewhere. And they've done very well. In 2022, Krueger was doing 500,000 cases of spirits annually.

Richard Campbell [02:28:51]:
And 2, as well as 2 million, uh, ready-to-drink beverages and 1.9 million cases of wine. Also in 2022, they rebrand the company as Station 22, as in from 1922, which was when the MDF was formed. Uh, this is an inexpensive whiskey. I have not tried it. You're just watching me open the bottle right now. It's beautifully labeled. If you go on the website, they've got all this branding around Prohibition and the craziness around that. None of that is important at all.

Richard Campbell [02:29:24]:
It's got nothing to do with the actual product in any way. You know, you're talking about a country that— you're talking about the province that didn't have Prohibition, talking about making a Prohibition product. All right, I have just opened the bottle for the first time and I can smell the spice from here. And the line about the spices is really that they used to ship that illegal whiskey in spice boxes to hide its— it smells of cinnamon. I wonder if this is a variation on Fireball. Uh-oh.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:53]:
Uh-oh.

Richard Campbell [02:29:56]:
Oh, okay. It's not as bad. It's not the fiery like Fireball. It's not crazy. It is very much a spice-flavored whiskey. It has virtually no heat. It's only 35% alcohol, which normally means it doesn't even qualify as a spirit. It has to be at least 40% for that.

Richard Campbell [02:30:14]:
And the fact that it has a lot number, like, they, they've really dressed this up to be pretty.

Leo Laporte [02:30:19]:
It's all story, isn't it?

Richard Campbell [02:30:21]:
It's all story for a blended whiskey at $30 Canadian. How can you go wrong, right?

Leo Laporte [02:30:29]:
Sounds like it's fun, right?

Richard Campbell [02:30:30]:
It's fun, it's inexpensive, it's something different. It, you know, do you know what this is? Whiskey for people who don't like whiskey.

Leo Laporte [02:30:37]:
That's me.

Richard Campbell [02:30:38]:
That's exactly what this is. This is Whiskey for someone who does not like whiskey.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:43]:
This tastes like eczema of whiskey.

Leo Laporte [02:30:44]:
It tastes like a baked good. That's wonderful.

Richard Campbell [02:30:47]:
You're totally right. It's like a baked good, right?

Leo Laporte [02:30:50]:
It's a Cinnabon of whiskeys.

Richard Campbell [02:30:52]:
It's a little sweet. It's a little spicy. You could give that to your kid.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:59]:
That's fine. You could give it to you.

Leo Laporte [02:31:03]:
I wouldn't recommend—

Paul Thurrott [02:31:05]:
we're not, we're not recommending that, but you could.

Richard Campbell [02:31:06]:
And yeah, each batch hand-selected. Really, kids? Really?

Leo Laporte [02:31:10]:
I don't know.

Richard Campbell [02:31:12]:
I mean, I'm really glad, I'm really glad that I got lot 1372 because, you know, you don't want—

Leo Laporte [02:31:17]:
you don't want 71.

Richard Campbell [02:31:19]:
No, no, I'm gonna— it's easy to make fun of this. It's a fun story, but, um, yeah, did not a profound whiskey in any way. But he found somebody who didn't like whiskey, pour them one of these, surprise them. They won't, they won't hate it.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:33]:
We're shipping up to Canada.

Richard Campbell [02:31:35]:
Here we go. I'm gonna have to live with that song now.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:42]:
I like it.

Richard Campbell [02:31:45]:
I'm gonna need a drink.

Leo Laporte [02:31:46]:
Ladies and gentlemen, that's the whiskey segment, and that's Windows Weekly for this week. I hope you enjoyed this episode and our visit from the Irish road. Well, no, next week. Next week. I'll get them to rewrite that part. We only do this once a year. We do Windows Weekly every week, every Wednesday, right around 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick, or if you're in the club, in the club Twit Discord.

Leo Laporte [02:32:27]:
After the fact, we put the show up on our website, twit.tv/ww. Also, of course, on YouTube, there's a dedicated Windows Weekly channel. And in fact, when you go there, you'll also see a dedicated Windows Whiskey channel, uh, because— or go to twit.tv/whiskey because we're putting all of these up as individual segments, which is great. Thanks to—

Richard Campbell [02:32:48]:
A couple new ones came up. Just went up, so they look great.

Leo Laporte [02:32:50]:
They didn't have the theme song though.

Richard Campbell [02:32:52]:
No, no, no, it's a whole other league now.

Leo Laporte [02:32:54]:
Yeah. Uh, I thank you, Suno, for that one. That's fun. Um, Paul Theriot is at theriot.com. If you become a premium member, you'll get a copy of all of his books, including The Field Guide to Windows 11, Windows Everywhere, and De-Enshitify Windows. Or you can go to leanpub.com if you're already a premium member and get them for yourselves. Mr. Richard Campbell's at runasradio.com.

Leo Laporte [02:33:17]:
That's where you'll find his shows, Run As Radio, and .NET Rocks. Thank you, gentlemen. It's, it's been grand. I have to run off and do a different show. Intelligent Machines is coming up. Christina Warren will be our guest.

Richard Campbell [02:33:30]:
Hi to Christina. Yeah, she's great.

Leo Laporte [02:33:33]:
She's of course at GitHub, but she's also a local AI fanatic and can fill us in on what Apple has released and these 2 new models. That just came out today.

Richard Campbell [02:33:42]:
Very exciting.

Leo Laporte [02:33:42]:
It's going to be very exciting. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.