Windows Weekly 912: Unicornification

Summary

Summary of "Windows Weekly 912: Unicornification"

Release Date: December 18, 2024
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell
Title: Unicornification

---

1. Introduction and Year-End Overview

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte welcoming listeners to the final show of 2024. Paul Thurrott takes on a reflective role, preparing to discuss the year's most significant tech stories.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [00:31]: "This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Episode 912 recorded Wednesday, December 18, 2024. Unicornification."

---

2. Windows on ARM: Challenges and Developments

Paul Thurrott shares his experiences with a new Snapdragon-based computer, highlighting significant challenges in installing and resetting Windows on ARM platforms. The discussion delves into the complexities of multiple OEM partitions and the absence of straightforward recovery options.

Notable Quotes:

Paul Thurrott [04:17]: "I don't actually know a lot about Windows, so it took me... This one has defied my every attempt."

Richard Campbell [07:00]: "Somebody had a problem."

The trio discusses the implications of these challenges for both consumers and enterprise users, emphasizing the need for better support and documentation from manufacturers.

---

3. Year-End Tech Wrap-Up by Paul Thurrott

Paul Thurrott presents his year-end list, focusing primarily on PC-centric developments. The top story centers around Intel's struggles amidst a shifting market landscape.

Notable Quotes:

Paul Thurrott [20:25]: "The top one was Intel. Yeah, I think that's, you know, probably non-debatable."

Paul Thurrott [22:09]: "We let big tech have a pass for too long."

Other significant topics include the rise of Windows on ARM, antitrust actions against major tech companies, and the evolving landscape of AI integration in software.

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4. Antitrust Actions and Big Tech Scrutiny

The conversation shifts to global antitrust actions, with NHS and the EU actively pursuing cases against big U.S.-based tech firms. Microsoft faces renewed scrutiny, reflecting a broader trend of regulatory challenges.

Notable Quotes:

Paul Thurrott [28:06]: "Microsoft was an amazing turnaround. Right."

Richard Campbell [37:02]: "Activision story to me is the greatest non-story of them all."

This segment underscores the increasing pressure on big tech companies to adhere to competitive practices, highlighting Microsoft's strategic positioning in this evolving environment.

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5. AI Integration: Copilot and Beyond

A significant portion of the discussion centers on Microsoft's AI-driven features, particularly GitHub Copilot and the integration of Copilot into Windows and Microsoft 365.

Notable Quotes:

Paul Thurrott [28:30]: "GitHub Copilot is free in Visual Studio Code now, apparently."

Paul Thurrott [69:38]: "Everything that has the word Copilot in it is an example of Microsoft skewing the product yet again."

The hosts debate the effectiveness and reception of these AI tools, addressing issues like user experience, enterprise adoption, and the bifurcation of Copilot functionalities between consumer and commercial versions.

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6. Security Concerns and Microsoft Incidents

The episode delves into security breaches affecting Microsoft, including infrastructure hacks and associated repercussions for enterprise clients. The conversation touches on incidents like "Midnight Blizzard" and Microsoft's response to these threats.

Notable Quotes:

Paul Thurrott [34:08]: "Microsoft's only way was to be very close mouth with that."

Richard Campbell [35:56]: "They're ISO, GDPR, ESG compliant. For US Cloud, these are more than just regulatory requirements."

The trio discusses the implications of these security issues, emphasizing the critical need for robust protection measures in enterprise environments.

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7. Authentication Advancements: Passkeys

Passkeys emerge as a focal point, representing the future of authentication. The hosts explore Windows' support for passkeys, the challenges users face in implementing them, and the broader industry adoption.

Notable Quotes:

Paul Thurrott [50:51]: "Passkeys are literally the future and I would say president of authentication for online identities."

Richard Campbell [51:30]: "There's a missing link where you have a passkey and you can't always get to it for some reason."

Discussions highlight the technical hurdles and user experience issues that need addressing to facilitate widespread passkey adoption.

---

8. Activision Acquisition and Xbox Developments

The controversial acquisition of Activision by Microsoft is scrutinized, with the hosts expressing dissatisfaction over management decisions, game subscription models, and the overall impact on the gaming community.

Notable Quotes:

Paul Thurrott [38:22]: "Richard, the nihilist. This is great."

Paul Thurrott [41:10]: "Activision as an organization was never going to allow their games to be on these subscription services."

The conversation underscores the tension between traditional game ownership models and the subscription-based approaches championed by Microsoft.

---

9. Microsoft's Strategic Shifts and Product Line Management

Paul and Richard critique Microsoft's handling of product features, especially the integration and management of Copilot across different platforms and user groups. They discuss the fragmentation of features and the company's apparent lack of cohesive strategy.

Notable Quotes:

Paul Thurrott [45:08]: "Going to love that."

Richard Campbell [74:52]: "We're about to find out. If this continues."

The segment reflects concerns over Microsoft's ability to streamline its product offerings and effectively manage new AI-driven features.

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10. Conclusion and Future Outlook

As the episode winds down, the hosts reflect on the tumultuous year, plan for upcoming special episodes, and encourage listeners to join Club TWiT for additional content and benefits.

Notable Quotes:

Leo Laporte [54:27]: "That was a great rundown, by the way. Thank you, Paul."

Richard Campbell [154:28]: "We will be back next year with the next episode, the brand new episode."

The trio leaves listeners with anticipation for the next year's developments, promising continued coverage of critical tech issues.

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Key Takeaways

• Windows on ARM: Despite advancements, significant challenges remain in user experience and system recovery, impacting both consumers and enterprises.

• AI Integration: Microsoft's Copilot features are expanding but face hurdles in seamless integration and user satisfaction, especially within enterprise environments.

• Security and Antitrust: Increased regulatory scrutiny on big tech companies like Microsoft underscores the need for robust security measures and competitive practices.

• Authentication Evolution: Passkeys represent a pivotal shift in authentication methods, though implementation challenges persist.

• Gaming Industry Dynamics: Microsoft's acquisition strategies and subscription models are reshaping the gaming landscape, eliciting mixed reactions from the community.

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the multifaceted discussions from the "Windows Weekly 912: Unicornification" episode, providing insights into the year's pivotal tech events and Microsoft's strategic maneuvers within the industry.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat's here. Richard Campbell's here. Our last show of 2024. And of course as befits the last show, Paul's gonna take a look back at the biggest stories of the year. That and a lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 912 recorded Wednesday, December 18, 2024. Unicornification. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello all you winners and dozers. This is it, the show you've all been waiting for. The last show of 2024. Introducing our combatants.

[Paul Thurrott]

Finish him.

[Richard Campbell]

It's the end of the year. We gotta do something.

[Leo Laporte]

Trunks and the purple hair. Mr. Paul Thurrotthrot dot com.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hello Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello Paul. He has been blessed with a brand new computer. We'll talk about that In a moment. Mr. Richard Campbell from runnersradio.com. hello friend, sir Richard Campbell.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I don't know about the sir, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a lumberjack today.

[Richard Campbell]

I am. I however, very seasonal. Look at you and you proper clippy. You got the clippy.

[Leo Laporte]

I am wearing the I think several years old Microsoft ugly sweater since we're not able to get the new one ever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Poor Clippy.

[Leo Laporte]

Poor Clippy. Clippy Saying happy holidays and then there's an okay button maybe. Wait, it looks like you're trying to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wish someone happy holiday.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute, I'll give you a good shot for the thumbnail.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it looks like you're trying to have a good holiday.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I help? May I help you? So where do you want to talk about your new computer, Paul? Now or later?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that was good. This is the thing that's lighting up my face right now.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I sent him a nuclear powered. No, he's got the Snapdragon dev kit.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So you shipped it.

[Leo Laporte]

Did one of the few, the proud, the 200. Yeah, I hear that. Some little bird told me. Richard, you haven't even opened yours yet.

[Paul Thurrott]

What I love about that is how eagerly we anticipated this thing for like three months.

[Leo Laporte]

We kept checking the emails and then arrived.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're like eh, well no, there was.

[Leo Laporte]

Something that happened in between where they said. Was it Qualcomm said this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We're not basically we're not gonna. I think we're gonna take, we take it back.

[Richard Campbell]

This thing should have been in our hands.

[Paul Thurrott]

What did you think we thought we wanted?

[Leo Laporte]

You know. But the nice thing is that Even though I got mine and a few of us did, like you and me and Jeff Girling, they never charged us.

[Richard Campbell]

No. Yeah, I got a refund like they had charged me. But they money all came back.

[Leo Laporte]

I should check. I can't remember. Yeah, you and I ordered it roughly in the same time frame.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The day of, I think pretty much. And then we were happily watching when it. When its ship date and its delivery date were reversed. Right. Like those are. Those were good times. I miss those times.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's churning like an asthmatic.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, the idea was at the time, the Snapdragon Elite X. The high highest performing new Snapdragon in a box that you could. It was fairly inexpensive. What was it, 400, 500 bucks?

[Paul Thurrott]

I can't. 900 bucks?

[Leo Laporte]

Who was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh boy, I hope I got a refund. Yeah. That'll be $900. Mr. Thorat.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sorry, you're breaking up.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not worth $900. Well. Well, I guess it's a full computer, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

If it worked normally, you know, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor. But I did throw in the HDMI dongle.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's true. And I appreciated that. Yeah. That will probably be the longest lived component of this system. No, that's not fair.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty funny. All right, so you had a little trouble though using it. And I think that's why this is a story.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't actually know a lot about Windows, so it took me. Yeah. No. So any other computer on earth I could break into pretty easily. Not break into, but reset and get a new version of Windows on it. And this one has defied my every attempt. It's not going to be possible for me to enumerate all of the different ways in which I tried to do this. But from a high level, I was using Windows 11 on ARM recovery disks from I think three different computers. Surface, restore, image, bootable, whatever. The Windows 11 on ARM downloadable ISO converted into install media two different ways. Various forms of media, meaning various USB keys. I tested them on other computers to make sure they booted correctly.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

I tested on this computer every available usb.

[Richard Campbell]

Presume you didn't do this first. You did this because it didn't work on this, Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's exactly right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's my fault. I apologize. I said I installed. In fact, everybody watched me install it. And I just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like I said, any other computer, no problem. And yeah, that's what I thought. This. Yeah, this one, this one brought me to my knees. I don't know. That's why I said it also. And I've seen a Leo before the show. You know, he would have seen this. Anyone who's used this even for a few seconds would have noticed, you know, the boot process is a little strange. Like, when things are working, it's fine. It's actually very quick. In fact, I'm already at the desktop, by the way. But when it reboots, I have a feeling it was because I had to turn on Boot from USB in the menu. That's not documented. That's not really firmware or bios, but is sort of what it is on this computer. And I found that, I think, because I think it was trying to boot off USB but couldn't. So, you know, at one point I was like, I'll just replace the ssd. But it's like, no, you have to be able to boot from your speed to do that. Like, I still can't. I couldn't even do that. So, yeah, Leo had to give me his pin so I could just sign in and reset the computer. But now, see, one of the first things I'm going to do after the show is create recovery media with this computer and try it. And I have a feeling it's not going to work, just based on my experience.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can't imagine.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think there's not a recovery partition? No, because it was very fast. When it rains.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let's take a look. Cleo. I don't know. I don't have a mouse set up yet, but that's never stopped me.

[Leo Laporte]

And we have no information about why they canceled it.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. This thing has.

[Leo Laporte]

They never said.

[Richard Campbell]

No, they never.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have never said it.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's face it, I think the vendor botched the job so badly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, Aero Electronics, who did they make it or just sell it to us?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyone who's ever looked at disk management in Windows, whatever version doesn't matter, has never seen this. So this is a. It's a. It's a single disk. The C Drive is 410 gigabytes. There are 14 other partitions on this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what?

[Paul Thurrott]

And that does not make any sense.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paul Thurrott]

At all?

[Richard Campbell]

Somebody had a problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm afraid to touch any of these things. Some of them are very small. In fact, six or seven of them are just one megabyte big. And they're all. Not all of them, but most of them.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but most of them are labeled OEM partition. But there is a recovery Partition. Which further annoys me because all I had to do was get in with a stupid recovery disk and I would have hit that thing. Yeah. But I couldn't do it and I don't know why. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Literally delete all those partitions and see what happens.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am not going to do that.

[Richard Campbell]

See here. No fun.

[Leo Laporte]

I would suggest to just wipe the. Like, really wipe the drive.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. Is to start from scratch.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to be able to boot the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

14 unknown partitions on there.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but if you can't. If you can't boot off usb.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. How would you. How would you do it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Don't do that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Until you're bootable off usb. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder if you've now kind of narrowed down part of the reasons why they just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, the one thing. I mean, I'll.

[Richard Campbell]

Is it all the OEM malware? Is that it?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll turn off Boot. I could turn off bitlocker. I could turn off Secure Boot.

[Leo Laporte]

You know why I sent it to Paul for no charge. I paid the shipping, even.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think you actually owe me money. I'm not. I'm not 100% sure what the logistics of this. I'm not. Transaction.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all yours.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's. It's great. It's all good.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think maybe it's patches? Those little ones are patches for the processor or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've never seen anything like that in my life.

[Richard Campbell]

It's an interesting thought, Leo, that they had like each vendor for the components got their own partition.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Got their own, like one megabyte partition. They're the same size as a floppy.

[Leo Laporte]

It was shipped before final. Right. I mean, this is supposed to have been a developer kit.

[Paul Thurrott]

So let's see.

[Richard Campbell]

It was supposed to be.

[Paul Thurrott]

See where we're at.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that where Microcode would live? Micro patch.

[Richard Campbell]

It could be drivers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Or drive could be drivers.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it could be, but I was only being partly facetious. You could easily have had each OEM have their own partition so they load their files up, which is a good.

[Leo Laporte]

Reason not to install Linux on that thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is the most recent build. Well, like I said, as soon as you can figure out how to boot from usb, do whatever you want to it. After that, it doesn't matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I'm going to try. I'm going to keep working on that one, honestly. Because you want to, Richard, now that.

[Leo Laporte]

You are obligated to open yours, this.

[Richard Campbell]

Is definitely a Christmas activity. But the road caster comes first.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're not using. Okay, part two of our post mortem. Or should we say pre mortem?

[Paul Thurrott]

Pre mortem.

[Leo Laporte]

Our pre mortem. We're not using the roadcaster video that you.

[Richard Campbell]

Not yet, no.

[Leo Laporte]

And why not?

[Richard Campbell]

Was supposed to be. Because it was supposed to be this weekend and we had an outage.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh.

[Richard Campbell]

We had a big windstorm late Friday night and by 6am the power was out and it stayed out till three in the afternoon on Sunday.

[Leo Laporte]

Then. Never mind. Not anything wrong with the road caster?

[Richard Campbell]

No, nothing wrong with it. I'll never got a chance because suddenly it's like I don't have enough electricity to me to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Practically had a hurricane here. There was a tornado down in the Santa Cruz area. That was a wild win. That was the same.

[Paul Thurrott]

We had snowflake away.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, you had snow. Yours was not the same system. No, I can assure you, sir. But yeah, it was really heavy rain. And the wind. I've never seen wind like that knocked out power in Petaluma. Everywhere but us. I think every. It was kind of surrounding us. So I'm not surprised yours went out.

[Richard Campbell]

We've got an inverter that uses these pack batteries that are part of like the. The gardening system. So we have blowers and. And snippers and things like that. Then we have these batteries on. You can all stack them into an inverter. And it's good for, you know, a few kilowatts of power a minute.

[Leo Laporte]

A minute or two Rivian, which I thought that was really cool. You could plug in.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, this is what we did, right, is we used the battery packs for most of the day to keep things charged. And I was able to use my laptop and things like that. And then when it was getting low, it's like, let's go for a drive. And literally threw the whole assembly in the back of the truck, plugged it in, went into town to get some food and do other things and charged it up while we were driving. Right. And then charged up the truck at the. At the supercharger and then came home with a fresh set of batteries. I'll load it up.

[Leo Laporte]

Presumably townhead power.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, town had power.

[Leo Laporte]

What happens to a supercharger if the power goes out?

[Richard Campbell]

I imagine they're not very interesting. It's just a plug that doesn't do anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

So supernown, are we?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, some of them have solar panels, but I. I doubt.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, he's not going to have enough solar for.

[Leo Laporte]

There's not enough.

[Richard Campbell]

You need acres right. It's 2.8 acres per megawatt for solar panels. I'm working on my. My.

[Leo Laporte]

See that's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Energy. Geek out. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And a mega. And a typical power plant produces 300.

[Richard Campbell]

To 1 point to 1200 megawatts. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So you would need 3 to 1200 acres of solar panels to equivalent takes.

[Richard Campbell]

Up a lot of land.

[Leo Laporte]

On the other hand, if you allowed which which unfortunately our local power company does not because they're privately owned in their and they're profit hungry. If you allowed everybody to put their solar panels on their roof, you might be able to do that. PGE says you can only put enough solar panels on your roof to power yourself. You cannot compete with us.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I'm sorry, I'm wrong. It's a gigawatt, not a megawatt.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, big difference.

[Richard Campbell]

Only off by three orders of magnitude.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see the story? There was a story a few weeks ago. Throw out your black spatulas.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh my God. I just read what you're about to say to my wife. I was like, hey, did you hear that story? Oh well listen to the follow up.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad I didn't do it because then it turned out there was a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Multiplication error in the paper by an order of magnitude. And by all the important things that were supposedly wrong are all within safe levels now. And so they're like, well, I don't think this changes the outcome of the study. No, I think it does. I think it does.

[Leo Laporte]

Unbelievable.

[Paul Thurrott]

Science.

[Leo Laporte]

Science. All right, I'm sorry I interrupted you. Go ahead with your early peek at the top stories of the year. Paul Thorpe.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, so yeah, I've been doing the year end wrap up stuff as one would with it being December but I haven't gotten to this because I keep getting distracted by other things that are related to it. Like as I start writing it I'm like, oh, this is big enough. It should be a separate article. So I thought I would just kind of go, this is incomplete because it's based on the thing I started writing. I just have the list. So I thought I just grabbed 10 of them and these are 10 of the things that I kind of collected after by the way, I went to we use Raptive for analytics and I'm not saying they're terrible, but I'm not sure they're right either. So according to them, the top two articles by something page views or I guess for them it would be ad revenue or something where my reviews respectively of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and then the Pixel 8 Pro. So, you know, great.

[Leo Laporte]

And we just canceled our Android show. Oh my God.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I have wasted my life.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I think that probably has something to do with the, with virality and, and somewhere it got posted on YouTube or something and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but it doesn't help me because what I'm really looking for, what I would, you know, objectively call me or I guess none of this is objective, but what I think of as like the biggest.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we don't want objective. We want subjective. We want your editorial judgment. People don't listen to this show for some.

[Paul Thurrott]

For facts. No, we've just established that. By the way, my tip of the week is like, throw away your plastic spatulas. But for right now.

[Leo Laporte]

So just to reiterate, black plastic cookie.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is what I love about.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, love spine.

[Paul Thurrott]

The wrong word. This is what bothers me about that kind of story. The original story, widely publicized, everyone covered it. I don't watch the news. I'm normal, it's 2024. But if you did, I bet you would have seen it on the news. But the follow up or the one where they're like, yeah, just kidding, it's all wrong. Yeah, you didn't hear that one. That one did not get wide publicity. That blows my mind. But that's the world we live in. So whatever. The stupidity flows and then that's the end of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, what is it that Ben Franklin said? The. The lie travels all the way around the world before the truth can even put its pants on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I love it. Or something. Plain spoken.

[Richard Campbell]

He got it now, people. He was talking about a guy. We're going around the world, men taking a ship.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, that was all.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So really that's the, that's the problem is that the first story got all the coverage. The second story probably nobody even heard about. That's why we. That's why you have to subscribe to Windows Weekly. You get the hard hit, important information.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just read an interview with Rick Steves who had a quote from Thomas Jefferson. And this is exactly the type of thing that can get contorted today into something really positive and nice. And it's not exactly that. It's a little more nuanced. Right. He says travel makes a person wiser, if less happy. In other words, most people would condense that to like, well, you travel, you become a worldly person, you know, more, you're wiser. And he's like, no. And this is like, the more, you know, the less happy you are.

[Richard Campbell]

The corollary being ignorance is bliss.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go. You've heard it. Exactly. I'm fascinated by this. Anyway, this is though.

[Leo Laporte]

Thomas Jefferson, as you pointed out, Richard had to take a boat to get to France and it took months.

[Paul Thurrott]

I didn't even do that. He told Ben Franklin to go in his stead.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not doing this yet.

[Paul Thurrott]

He did go. He did go.

[Leo Laporte]

Your turn, Ben. I think that it is true that all that is true. But the other thing that makes you happy after you travel is coming home, doesn't it? It makes you appreciate coming home.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the worst. I hate everything about this place. And I hate everything.

[Leo Laporte]

You want to be back in Mexico?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I like it in both places, but I don't want to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

I appreciate my home. When I've traveled and I get back in my own bed, I go, yeah, it's nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But don't you also have that kind of moment where you realize nothing has changed at all and then you have that sort of side realization that, like, my existence here doesn't matter in the slightest?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I have no impact whatsoever on the Jefferson. And, like, you come back and you're like, eh, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? It's funny.

[Richard Campbell]

Paul Farrok, the nihilist. This is great.

[Leo Laporte]

And this comes up a lot is I'm thinking right now there's somebody sitting on the Champs Elysees drinking a cup of coffee. Perfect.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hot chocolate. And you know who that person is? Freaking Mike Elgin. And that guy.

[Richard Campbell]

I hate him.

[Paul Thurrott]

Screw him.

[Richard Campbell]

No, on the other hand, his risk of a pigeon. The risk of his pigeon pooping on him is much higher than us, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point. The only place I ever got pooped on by a pigeon was Venice.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Listen, I could trace my place in Mexico, right, Like, directly to a social media post he made easily 15 years ago, easily maybe more, where he was in Barcelona. And it, like, now you see these every day and you groan, but he literally is like a cup of coffee, laptop. And he said, this is my office today. And I was like, screw you, Weldon. Yeah. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's. That's why you're living. That's why.

[Paul Thurrott]

Inspirational. It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's good.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love Mike, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we all do.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll understand. I'm screwing around here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Actually, this Sunday's trip, by the way, we're going to kind of do what you're doing right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And Richard's going to be on it because You've already done the year end one. So I thought it'd be fun to have Richard on along with Paris, Martin O and some other wonderful people who I'm forgetting Micah is going to be on and it's father Robert Ballis there. So we're going to look back at the year for all tech, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that'll be a special big episode for Sunday. But let's talk about winter.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so like I said, I do these rare and rear end year end recaps. I also do the rare end recaps.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it.

[Paul Thurrott]

The rare end year cap.

[Leo Laporte]

We're looking from in the rear end.

[Paul Thurrott]

Mirror, the rear end meerkat. No, wait, the. Anyway, I'm still in the process of writing kind of the main one which is about what I perceive to be the top articles. I was going to expand them this year anyway. Each of these is a little longer and goes off in these directions anyway. But I've written these kind of side articles. So I was going to do this one yesterday and I ended up doing one about hardware and whatever and I was going to say we're going to get to it, but actually do it. Yeah, we do get to it. All right, we'll get to that later. So what I have so far, and I might be missing a couple but. And these are just like subjective, subjectively. This isn't based on hits or views or anything like that. And I probably should do these in reverse order but I'm not going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Letterman do the top 10.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it did work out to be 10 by the way. I didn't shuffle 10, that's how many I had. So the top one was Intel. Yeah, I think that's, you know, probably non debatable.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is all from a PC perspective really, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Mostly. Mostly. Not always, but yeah, mostly to be clear, it's like.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not like intel has disappeared, it's just like this is. Does not look good. The trend is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I mean a year ago at this time would we have been saying, oh, it's gonna be a bad year for Intel?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, a year ago this was going to be the year the PC rebounded. The first two quarters of this past year they grew, right? They were doing great. PC makers were growing, AMD was growing. Qualcomm always growing. They're humongous. But everything was going great. And then there were warning signs, you know, and then it went. Then you could was. Did anyone else hear a toilet flush? Oh boy. It got kind of weird there and we all Know how the spiral ended up at least so far.

[Richard Campbell]

So far, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that they end up still.

[Richard Campbell]

Be an amazing turnaround. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean in the sense that anything is possible but you're talking about rolling like a D20 and landing it. Exactly. So we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Landing at 20.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, landing at 20. I mean we'll see, we'll see. But you know, this followed a decade plus of strategy mistakes. Ignoring mobile, Microsoft especially begging them. You know it also follows this goes back to Paul Ottolini, so I'm going to call it 15 years ish of anti competitive behavior. Basically paying their partners to ignore their competitors and only bundle their pieces.

[Richard Campbell]

You did some naughty things that kept your numbers up while still not getting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean if you believe as the United States does by law that companies or people, then this is its version of karma.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a bad person.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, you're a bad person. Yeah. So okay. But if it weren't for intel, to me the biggest thing is this Windows and ARM stuff. The Qualcomm, Snapdragon X, Microsoft improving the underlying system and then having it all come together at once out of the blue. I went by writing this series on kind of the history of Windows and arm, which was going to be three and I think now it's going to be four parts. But the history just of this past year is interesting to me because as recently as last November we were like, yeah, no, they said this, they keep saying this is the one. We just didn't believe it. We had been waiting on the Nuvia based version of their chips for a couple years, I don't know. But then this past year has been a series of indications like this was going to go well. You might remember me saying earlier in the year, I keep waiting for this moment where something's going to betray the reality of this thing. And then they allowed us to go and look at those laptops in New York and we got to see actual running hardware. And I was like, oh my God, this actually looks really good. Of course then they launched and we're not going to talk about recall yet, but I started getting their review units in and of course I also bought my own Surface laptop. That's my, that's my favorite laptop by far still to this day. So that's been, you know, to me that's great. And for people in this community and for Windows, like this is a, this is an unqualified win. It's just excellent. So we'll see what the new year brings. We don't Know if they're going to be other competitors in the ARM space next year. But there will be at some point, obviously, or we think there will be.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I'm okay with Windows on ARM in the consumer space. I don't think the enterprise is ready for it yet. I haven't seen an enterprise product yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

I understand why you say that and I'm sure you're right and I think I made the case. I think it was here on Windows Weekly that the enterprise is not this giant blob. I mean, obviously different companies, different things, different companies in different places. But the iPhone, I think I used the example that got into the Enterprise specifically because. Sea level. Yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

The iPad and the iPhone were forced on administrators.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is going to work.

[Richard Campbell]

It's the CEO showing up with an iPad saying, I'll be using this, figure it out.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I think what this does though is it brings Windows up to somewhere close to where the Mac is with the ARM hardware and the reliability, the performance, the battery life, et cetera, et cetera. So the quality, all that stuff, I think there's an audience for that. I mean, we're not all slaves.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sure there's plenty of admins that are getting pressure for folks wanting Snapdragon.

[Paul Thurrott]

Laptops in the field.

[Richard Campbell]

We're just not seeing the management space as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I mean, right in the trenches. I mean, a couple of things are going to matter. One of them is, well, first of all, the management, I think what you're alluding to is they've gotten rid of some classic. Or they're phasing out some classic management interfaces and are not bringing them to arm.

[Richard Campbell]

They're never going to arrive.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're never going to arrive. And they're answer is, well, use this other newer stuff and people are like, yeah, that doesn't do everything. It's like, well, yep, we're simplifying here. Sorry, sorry. But you know, and then there are just the people who are in the trenches, the actual employees or workers, whatever, depending on the company. I mean a lot of companies have these legacy lob apps that they created in house on whatever technology stack and that stuff may not work at all or at least not efficiently maybe, or needs a revolution. Yeah, yeah. But newer, a lot of the, you know, obviously if it's web based, if it's newer, a lot of the stuff is just mobile anyway. Yeah, I mean I matter.

[Richard Campbell]

And then dotnet's pretty simple, but it has to be compilable and that's not Always the case, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So if you're, if you're back on, if you're on core, you're fine, but if you're on the original framework, you're not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? Right. No, I wouldn't even. God, I wouldn't even try that. I don't even. I would imagine. I mean, it's there. I know it's in there, but. Yeah, it must be terrible. But the newer stuff is great. I mean, and Richard covers this more than anybody really. But I mean, every. The biggest thing every year with Net today, which is the core version he was referring to, is the performance. Double digit performance improves across the board every year. It's crazy. I mean, so every version is dramatically better than the last. The last one was pretty damn good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. No, no coding changes. Just use the new version. Non trivial.

[Paul Thurrott]

Going to love that.

[Richard Campbell]

Over and over.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. Yep. Yeah. The legacy stuff, you got to do some. They have migration, utilities and stuff and that's kind of hit or miss. And you know, that's nobody's fault. But whatever. Technology moves on the other big kind of globe. Well, actually there are a couple more that are big global stories. Antitrust. Right. This is the year NHS really started to hit back at big tech across the globe, which is fascinating to me. We'll see how that changes in the year. Obviously, it's been a mixed bag for sure. You get epic winning against Google, losing against Apple, basically, or the EU especially going after every company basically, that is based in the United States is what it feels like. There's a lot of that going on. I think we let big tech have a pass for too long. And then Microsoft was. They weren't part of that group of five or whatever the number was, depending on the year ever. Right. Which always annoyed them. And so it's like, are you back in the spotlight now? How does it feel? Congratulations. Congrats.

[Richard Campbell]

You get an investigation and you get an investigation.

[Paul Thurrott]

Speaking of comebacks, you're back, baby. Good for you. Yeah. Dark Satcher. Going to love that. AI. We don't have enough time to go through this whole thing, but it is fascinating to me. We're going to talk about Copilot later in the show. Just Copilot. Right. Dear God, is this thing changed to 12 months? And I'm not talking about icons on a taskbar.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm talking about the big thing you're saying at the beginning of the year is like 2024 was supposed to be the year that, okay, let's go make money with this.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

And other than getting investment. Show me the money.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was the year let's play whack a mole with it and see if anything clicks. And I'm not sure that anything.

[Richard Campbell]

It's turned in really. The year of hurling stuff at the Wal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about the copilot stuff, like I said. But for me, I don't remember what it was back in August, July, something like that. I wrote this editorial. It was basically, look, I'm not paying for AI. I will pay for things that make me more productive and whatever tools and things I will pay for Microsoft 365 for example, but I'm not paying this other thing that should be in there. And it is not fascinating to me, but it is interesting because I think a lot of Microsoft's business customers had the same reaction, which was like, look, we get it, we're paying you a lot of money every month and everything and now you want to charge us more for this other stuff. No, no, no, no. So I think they're starting to scale back that we'll get into this a little bit more because it's fascinating and maybe Richard might know more than I do about this right now about the rationale behind some of these changes, especially to Microsoft 365 copilot.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, well, I think, I wonder if this was the play that Google could have made this year was to say, hey, you know, if you move over to Google workspaces, Gemini's for free.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So they did do that for some groups of customers, not business customers that I know of this year. Like if you bought a pixel like you did, you got a year, I believe, or at least I did. I assume you did. Of Google 1, 2 terabyte, whatever the thing's called where you get all the Gemini, whatever that's called. Gemini Advanced or Gemini, whatever it's called. So that gives you a chance to kind of play around with that stuff. I've used it almost not at all. You know, I don't. I just.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, just it primarily is a distraction for me trying to do something and it's trying to introduce itself to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

There is a lot of. This was the year of the pink and purple animation with the sparkles. It doesn't matter which one you're using. It's like we're here. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The unit, the unicornification of software.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, yep, it's a good look. It looks especially good in the enterprise. And I mentioned, you know, recall the. There's so many things that are fascinating about recall to me, but it launched with such controversy, with such anger and hatred and fear and an almost demand that Microsoft was going to kill this thing. It's stupid and no one wants it, you know, and. And then it came out and I was like, yeah, I guess it's fine. You know, it's like, it's just, you know, it's like, what? I. I don't know. What were we arguing about before? You know, the thing that's interesting to.

[Richard Campbell]

Me is that they. It's a consumer product only. Like, this is not how Microsoft does things.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. And I know.

[Richard Campbell]

And I have to wonder if the enterprise wouldn't have been happier with it, actually, because. Just stay well from an administrator's perspective, a tool that I can use in discovery for harassment and things like this. Like, it's a big deal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like there's a. There is a case for it in the enterprise. So why didn't they do it? The best thought I had is because they didn't want to use it themselves.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's amazing. I was going to say, because that would have required a lot more time and they wanted to get something out the door immediately.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and to be clear, the machines that they wanted to run it on were consumer devices.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And this is tied into the copilot stuff we're going to talk to later. There's sort of an underlying security issue here where they want to make sure they get that stuff right, especially for businesses. And I just don't think Copilot, sorry, recall, would have passed that bar for a long, long time. It would have just taken too much work to fold it into the whole system, policy and management and so forth. But the way they did it was a little bit reminiscent to me of Windows Phone 7, where at that time they were just trying to be Apple. We're going to go up to consumers first. Hey, it worked for them. I think ignoring your biggest market is a mist, but also being antagonistic to that market is an even bigger mistake. And that was the thing they were basically not basically literally saying at the time was, we're not even going to let these people turn it off. If an individual has one of your computers and they want to turn this thing on, they can do it. That's their business. And it's like, no, actually it's our business. Microsoft. Interesting turn of phrase. I think they've arrived at the place they should have been at when they announced it. They obviously were rushing it to market. They were not even going to test this thing. Right. Until they put it out to the Public because they were trying to justify an upgrade to these new computers that use local AI and made sense.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that was the original driver.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it just sort of. Everything else kind of fell by the wayside. So I don't think I have it in the top 10 here. But one of the other big stories this past year. It must be in here somewhere. No. Do I have it here? No. Maybe I don't. You know, I do. I'm sorry. It's the Microsoft security thing. So, you know, it's all AI. It's all AI. What's that? Oh, no, it's all security. We're all security. Nope, we're all security. So I think that's the shift you can see from first half of the year. Second half of the year. Yes, we're still doing AI. Yes. Super important. Dear God, we're never going to stop with that. But they're actually looking at the security stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

I got to tell you, I mean, I interviewed a lot of Microsoft people, and there's no. Almost no conversation that doesn't bump against Secure Initiative, future initiative all the time. Like, it's just, it's. It's. I don't know that it's visible to the public so much as it's certainly visible to the Microsoft employees.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You don't want to be the guy that is the cause of a Bloomberg headline involving a Fortune 50 company that was hacked because you did something stupid or whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and then. And then a company that came out and said, don't worry, we got this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. I mean, that's the thing. So security was number nine. But the Microsoft security. Remember this was not you, Richard. I know you remember, but listeners or whatever remember that this company was hacked and didn't talk about it a lot. And still, by the way, it's not completely disclosed what happened.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's not the CrowdStrike hack that you're so wounded.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, this is the Microsoft infrastructure hack that we don't have the entire story on. I didn't write about this, and I don't think we discussed it on the show, but about a week ago, there was a story that came out from Amazon about a year ago, signed a deal for billions of dollars. They were going to adopt Microsoft 365 across their infrastructure for all of their workers in the offices. And that's on pause. It's not that it's not happening, but that incident and then CrowdStrike, they were like, we need to know more about this and we need to know what you're doing. They were actually fairly complimentary to Microsoft. If you find this article, you can read it. But the guy in charge of Amazon operations was just like, look, that put the brakes on there. I mean we need to make sure that our stuff is safe. So I think Microsoft has gotten to the point now where Amazon feels fine about it.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, I think the other subtext of that to Midnight Blizzard was it was a nation state. I suspect government assets were involved. And those folks tend to be very closed mouth. So Microsoft's only way was to be very close mouth with that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah, there you go. It's not really, we say we often use the word businesses to describe this part of the business. Microsoft uses the term commercial. It's governments, educational institutions, businesses of all sizes, whatever. Other organizations.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. When the nation state. Remember the big thing they said about Midnight Blizzard was nation state involved moment. Which the subtext of that is federal agencies are now involved because it was a nation state. Right. And they set the terms on a lot of that stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

So.

[Richard Campbell]

And you, you think we haven't heard much in the public. You should see a person like me poking at the various teams saying hey, you want to talk about this like a. No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I know they didn't want to talk about three VMs out in the world you want to talk about.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they really don't want to talk about.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

And that to me says they've been, they've been given instructions from hires up that thou shalt not speak of this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Now you know there's another side of this. And I've dealt with this dealing with, with real classified stuff where the, the second stage pass. I don't want to talk about this is please don't talk to me about this anymore. I need to report every time anyone asks me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Which is. That's a very normal thing when I'm dealing with military and government folks. It's like here's how serious we are. I need to report that you asked.

[Paul Thurrott]

Me, by the way is your door gets a knock.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Then you start having difficult con.

[Richard Campbell]

You get an interview.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Why are you asking?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that could know that could definitely be it.

[Richard Campbell]

Well and I, I don't think they come that heavy into the tech giants for the most part. But I think at the senior level the tech folks are real aware and say and pass down really don't talk about this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

We gotta say the Activision story to me is the greatest non story of them all. This time last year, my friend's like, next year is going to be Activision, man.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was a non stop charact karaoke party. It was going to be awesome.

[Richard Campbell]

It stopped even being fun, teasing you about it. That's how badly this went.

[Paul Thurrott]

Even to this day, I'm not happy about it. You know, it's still, it's just. Yeah. Yep. This is another example of like Microsoft in this case or in the Xbox. Org. When they talk, they seem to think that they're making progress and things are going great and that we've done this and this and this. And I'm like, I don't, I don't know if you think that's what we think because that's not how it looks to us anyway. Do you remember tied to this?

[Richard Campbell]

Do you remember Queen Elizabeth using the term annus horribilis?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, of course they do. I guess after the castle burned down and.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, Princess Diana dying.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, most of the folks I know in gaming 2024 was anis horrible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. And that. Okay, so I was just going to say tied to this were the layoffs, the studio closures.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then the subscription price hike thing, which is an ongoing issue still to this day. YouTube Music or YouTube TV just raised YouTube TV when it came out the gate. I don't remember how many years ago was $37 a month and it is $82 a month to start. Now that's how big it's, how big it's gotten. Now it's not their fault. They're not ripping people off. They're getting the same treatment that cable TV networks got, which was that the big content creators coming or content makers coming and saying, oh, did you want the popular Disney Channel? Well, you need the 117 other pieces of Cruft and you're going to pay for that too. So I'd like to see something change. I don't know that Google has the power honestly to do anything about this. The one advantage that they have, the one advantage that all of these or most of these services have is at least you can walk away when you want to. You're not stuck on it like you are with cable. But yeah, subscription price hikes for game pass across the board and then the big one before the Activision games or before Call of Duty I guess started hitting the service disappeared. They just got rid of it like they got rid of that day one perk that most people were getting. So that's kind of tough. The one thing I don't kind of agree with when it comes to the community is the overall strategy. This is not new, but this year it came to a real head and Microsoft didn't help matters by making an advertisement for tv. That and I think a couple of now where it's like this is an Xbox and this is an Xbox like one of them was a Sony PlayStation. It's like, guys, get it, get stuck. You're just poking the bear. What are you doing? And that is tied to them not having what I believe to be like ARM based consoles ready and the hardware platform isn't quite there yet or whatever it is. But we were in a weird holding pattern like the end of Die Hard 2 and the fear is they're going to run out of gas and crash into the ground. So. So we'll see what happens there. But yeah, this, I thought this was going to be celebratory and this year has not been great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, I mean we've had the usual sets of titles release. There's been an update to World of Warcraft, there's, you know, the new Call of Duty, but there's been no new marquee anything. Yeah, maybe it was a little optimistic to say that they would because it takes a year to care to get your hands around a beast this large, much less to activate some teams. And at the same time they were clearly, you know, the bean counters have arrived and squeezed everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

This probably is not the central issue, but I think one of the issues is that Activision as an organization was never going to allow their games to be on these subscription services. They had a really healthy market of several marquee titles every year or every so often. Big, big, big, you know, and they didn't see any reason to change that. And they certainly didn't see any reason to architect the games in such a way that it would make it easier to do that. So that might have been part of it, I don't know. But Call of Duty, the new one, seems like it's worked out great. I don't know money wise, because you never will. They'll never say that. But as far as revenues, whatever, but it's certainly very popular by some metrics. The most popular one they've done at least by players or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

And one would argue that Microsoft's acquisition spree makes sense in the context of what you just described. That yes, they started going serious on Game Pass and there was going to be subscriptions for all the. Your subscription is going to cover all these things. They knew they were going to get squeezed in renewals and so they tried to buy as much as possible so that they couldn't. They could try and keep the price under control. And then they didn't anyway, because why not take the money?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Spend all this money not just on Activision, but these other studios they purchased and then only sell that stuff on the Xbox. I mean, the math doesn't work, you know, so. But this is not a chicken egg thing. They bought those studios knowing that this was where they were going. This is not new. This is the thing I was trying to say earlier. People are like, wait a minute, you're trying to tell me, like the PC is not an Xbox. It's like, well, you know, I mean, I play Xbox pretty exclusively on the PC, actually, literally exclusively on the PC. And I'm not saying the PC is an Xbox, the term is kind of weird. But you know, the platform is cross platform. So. Yeah, sorry, sorry if that bothers you. I guess. I don't know. And thank God for Xbox because they make Windows look a little better by comparison.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, Xbox itself didn't. You know, it's not like they had a bad update or anything. Like, Xbox has just been Xbox. It was last year that you were really making fun of the launcher. Right? Like the launcher changed a bunch of times on Xbox and not necessarily for the better. It was almost like, which intern version should we use this time?

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. This is, this is a problem they had run into on the Xbox One and actually on the Xbox 360. But I remember in the Xbox One, they literally hit a wall where there was nothing they could do to make it run faster. It was as fast as it was ever going to be. So the only thing that was left was to reduce the number of steps it took to get something done. And it's like, guys, you failed. Like you're just. If this is what we're talking about.

[Richard Campbell]

But that core statement, there's nothing we can do to go faster, means you're wrong.

[Paul Thurrott]

You just gotta meet Windows 11. I don't know what to say anymore. I think I could be wrong. But I think Richard coming on the show coincided with me kind of saying, hey, I think there were three versions of OneDrive for some reason. And that situation persisted for a year.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then they did all the copilot moving around the UI and changing what it was and changing the app and blah, blah, blah. And that's still going on to this day. Windows is in a tough place. It's been that way for a long time. It's not the center of the company, everyone knows that. But it also doesn't really fit into this world that Microsoft is part of now. It didn't fit in. It doesn't fit into cloud computing per se, certainly not in a central way. And it doesn't fit into AI per se. I think the only role that makes any sense at all other than some kind of niche NPU speed up. I don't know. Video.

[Richard Campbell]

I understand that Windows has not figured out how to update itself yet since. Since the change. Right. Since the Locust went to cloud.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They tried in Windows 10 with the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Continuous square in the round hole thing. They just can't. They're trying, but they can't.

[Richard Campbell]

But you can't think in terms of Windows 11 was a plan because we know it wasn't. Right. They needed a response to the Mac so they did the thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

But now there's no Windows 11 is the perfect Microsoft product. There's a technical problem that they want to solve and they have an idea and it's good until you. The implementation did not work, but it's a good idea. And that problem is we have this legacy software code that is writing all over memory that's causing security problems. What if we put it in a container, we segregate it from the rest of the os? We already have this sandboxing occurring with all our modern apps and then we'll take this legacy thing forward. It'll be good. That thing was called Windows 10X and yeah, it didn't work. So what we got was they stripped out the awesome technical bit and they just gave us the Fisher Price UI part and they called it Windows 11 and it was like guys, come on. And they shipped it in a horribly incomplete state. It didn't even have everything they talked about just three months earlier. It took a year for that to happen. And I would say it wasn't until this past released when they did that big architecture change under the covers.

[Richard Campbell]

24H2 is the first time they've tried to pass a new OS as a patch.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. Well that's the reality, right? Yes. But again the problem is I keep talking about this now this has been a recent thing for me, although I think this has been the case for a long time. There's those two sides of the Windows team, for lack of a better term. The architects in the white robes up on Mount Olympus dictating from on high how things shall work. There are video sets like throwing features at it and they have no idea. They're doing drive bys and they have no idea what they're doing. And every month they're introducing new features, but they're also introducing problems. We're going to go into the new year with the File Explorer menu that goes off the top of the screen. I. Guys, I could fix that. I mean, I don't understand a. I don't, I will never understand. I don't really even care how it happened, but I don't understand how you can't fix that. We're not talking about an architectural change here. We're talking about a menu.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But they somehow this is beyond them. So they were going to throw recall without testing it. But this thing, you know, so we.

[Richard Campbell]

Know they have feature teams. The real question is, do they have an overall like vision team these days?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, I don't think they do. Yeah, I don't think they do.

[Richard Campbell]

The gay balls or the, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

These people have all moved on.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The what?

[Paul Thurrott]

So I don't know what to tell you. It's gay ball. No, Gay ball used to run the running very carefully. The Gabe gay ball gave it all.

[Richard Campbell]

Gabe's old.

[Paul Thurrott]

We miss him greatly because otherwise it.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounded like they have gay balls and I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Gay balls.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's not saying that.

[Richard Campbell]

I think you're the only one who thought that, Leo. Pretty sure, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, I just want to clarify.

[Paul Thurrott]

The only software company that makes Microsoft look good, Sonos. Nice job, guys. That was. That was good.

[Leo Laporte]

The worst. That, you know, somebody software up there.

[Paul Thurrott]

So the thing I remember most about this, other than they didn't fire their CEO somehow, is I was using an iPhone at the time, so I didn't really run into this problem. I hated the old Sonos app, the one that people are nostalgic for, still was a piece of crap. It was horrible. So I would just use whatever app I wanted to use and I use airplay and it just works with whatever speakers you have. It's fine. So when all this broke down, I was like, oh, I should go look at this app. And the first time, well, I was going to say it was beautiful looking, but actually it wasn't because the first time I tried to run it on the web and on mobile, only half the UI would come up. Like it wouldn't load properly. And I was like, okay. So this. Okay, I can see there might be a problem with this. And then a couple days later I finally got into it and then I was like, okay, actually this is a really nice looking app that does not work in the slightest. And didn't have basic music player features that. Once again, I hate to keep saying this. I could write like change the order of songs in a playlist. You're playing songs right now and you want to move a song up or down or take it out or whatever, or add a song. That stuff was not there. This is not AI or like high end functionality. They shipped this piece of junk. They didn't leave the other one in market. I don't know, it was the stupidest. Anyway, whatever. Apparently their new soundbar is pretty good. But I'll never find out because I will never buy anything with the word Sonos on it ever again. Those guys can go screw themselves. I am disgusted by how they handled this. It's gross. Even Microsoft has more credibility then just responding to things. I mean it's terrible. We talked about security already. I mean just the two big events. I love that at Ignite they referred to the crowdstrike thing as the incident. That is so beautiful. That to me is the name of like a paperback thriller you buy at the airport because you're out of stuff to read and you're like, oh, maybe this is pretty good. And then you find out it's about computer nerds. It's kind of disappointing, but you're stuck on a flight. Then the tenth one is passkeys. Passkeys are sort of like PWAs in the sense that I feel like they're kind of flying under the radar and there's all these people that really doubt it's ever going to work or take off or whatever it is. But passkeys are literally the future and I would say president of authentication for online identities. And now that there is a formal specification for making them portable and work across platforms, it's going to explode. And even Windows is going to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Does Windows support passkeys?

[Paul Thurrott]

Windows and the Microsoft account both sort of support passkeys is the way I would say it in the shipping version of Windows 11. Today there's nothing there you can do with it. You just get one automatically when you sign in with a Microsoft account. But in the future you'll be able to associate passkeys with that on your computer, move them onto your phone, you know, move them around however you want. So third party password managers are already doing this. Google is doing it in Chrome and whatever their system is called. Everyone's doing it. Apple passwords is signed on for this. They're going to.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I mean the biggest problem you got with passkeys right now is you go to the wrong Website, like an Amazon site. And Amazon's going to ask you to set up a passkey. The browser is going to ask you to set up a passkey. Your password manager is going to ask you to set up a passkey. And if you're really lucky, Windows is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Going to ask you too, right? And there's a missing. It's not a missing link, but there's something broken in the chain there where you do have a passkey and you can't always get to it for some reason, even though you're using that browser maybe, or that operating system or whatever. It is. Like, this happens to me a lot, and it happens to me the most with Google accounts, although I have to say, I don't know why, but last week or so, I just did it on this computer. On this computer, I'm using Brave. I brought the browser up and I had to sign into my Google account because I have Gmail and Google Calendar set up in there. And it got the passkey that was in Brave that was synced across the world or whatever, and I didn't have to do anything. It was great. But on a lot of computers, people say, okay, yeah, I want to use passkey. And it throws up a QR code. I'm like, I can't scan a QR code with my computer, idiot. And then so you're like, okay, I'll try my phone and phone. And it's like, no, that's not going to work. And then like, can I just type on my password? Yeah, you can type in your password, you freaking jerk. And by the way, then you're going to need your Authenticator app. And then you realize in a way how ponderous that is. Because once you get used to passkeys, that thing that people were complaining about with two FA and authenticator apps suddenly is true to me. Now I'm used to passkeys and I love when they work. But right now, this still, Passkeys got a way, way better this year. And it was because of companies like Dashlane 1, Password, Bitwarden, Proton that all implemented. Portable passkey is, for lack of a better term, right? The ability to use these things everywhere. So once you get that thing into the password manager, it doesn't matter what device you're on. It's there, it's nice. But definitely check out my Galaxy S24 Ultra review. I guess it was big stuff. I don't know why.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Richard, we should steal this list for Sunday. I think this is a good.

[Richard Campbell]

Totally. I've been making. I Actually was making notes from it.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think what I'm gonna do on Sunday's Twitter, which is our year end recap. And it's not just obviously PC news.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think many of these stories will be in there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean by month. So we'll have a. I mean crowdstrike and the antitrust stuff in there for sure. World, Worldwide, everything.

[Leo Laporte]

And I hear there was an election in November. I don't know, we'll have crazy talk. Look that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Mexico elected a woman president, which was just a beautiful thing for democracy. Yeah, I'd love to see that happen. What did we do again? I can't remember. Was it something different?

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to pause here. That was a great rundown, by the way. Thank you, Paul. I really, I mean it's reminded me what a crappy year this was.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love reminding myself in case I start feeling good about, about myself. It's like just in case, just here's what you did. Here's how you spent your time this year.

[Leo Laporte]

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Back in the year makes you wiser.

[Paul Thurrott]

And feel the more time that goes by, the worse it is. Wait, for what?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we will come back, talk about Windows and a lot more in just a bit. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, as always, a must watch. This is the last show of the year and Chris Capicella doesn't work at Microsoft anymore. So there's.

[Richard Campbell]

Should have gone and found him anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

You should have just to say, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Chris, he knows what he's saying now.

[Leo Laporte]

Now that you don't work there.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think he can. I tried to get a special guest for this one, by the way, and it just didn't work. But maybe washing her hair. No, no, I was going in a completely different direction actually.

[Leo Laporte]

That's okay. All we really need is Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell that makes this show. I honestly believe that we have a great year ahead planned for you starting. So what's next week for Windows Weekly will be a best of. So we've taken some of the stories that you just talked about and actually we've got the clips from those episodes and we'll, we'll show you that Kevin King's been working hard on that. Thank you, Kevin, for doing that. The following week is New Year's Day, so Christmas Day is the best of New Year's Day. I'm not going to make you guys work because you'll be hungover.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm going to Be in pain that day.

[Leo Laporte]

Pain. Instead of Pennsylvania.

[Richard Campbell]

So we will do back up on the coast. So I suspect I'll have no power. That's a 50.

[Paul Thurrott]

50.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we just. We'll just give you a day off. So you got three weeks. After this, you don't have to do a show. And we'll be back January 8th with the next episode, the brand new episode.

[Richard Campbell]

Of we're still going to do this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

No, actually, there's some very good news.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, finally.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I've been complaining about advertisers. For some reason. They just woke up this week and they've all come in at once. So what? We thought we were gonna have to do some cutbacks, to be honest, for the New year, and we don't have to. That's the good news. Also, the club woke up and we have a bunch of new members. Welcome.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

So thanks to new club twit members and advertisers returning many of the names you know already, we are very happy to say I will not be working.

[Paul Thurrott]

At McDonald's next week like a certain healthcare shooter. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what's funny is my first job was working at McDonald's. And to this day, whenever I see McDonald's with a help wanted sign, I make a note of it in my.

[Paul Thurrott]

Mind, like, yeah, like, I am totally qualified for this.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm ready.

[Paul Thurrott]

I worked at Burger King and I. This is before, like, McDonald's had nuggets, but no one else said anything like that. And we used to cut everything we had up into nuggets. So we make like, fish nuggets. Veal nuggets. Remember they said big veal sandwiches and then also chicken nuggets out of the. They had a chicken loaf or something. I don't know what the hell it was.

[Leo Laporte]

But did they. Did they flame broil those burgers to order?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we used to. We used to buy them from the company to have them for, like, fourth of July cookouts. Those hamburgers are great. Oh, like, they're really good. Like the Whopper. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, now I want a Whopper junior. That's my favorite.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, those were. Those were. And I'm sure still are, but. Yeah, those are.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll be right back. No, we gotta. We got a show to do. And I am here for the duration. Our show today, brought to you by a wonderful sponsor who will also be rejoining us in 2025, I'm happy to say. US cloud. And it's a sponsor you ought to know about. I have to Say when they first came to us and I met with them and I talked to them, I said guys, I've never heard of you. And they said that's why we want to buy some ads. Because we are the number one Microsoft Unified Support replacement. But a lot of people like you, Leo, say who? US Cloud. I'm going to say it again. The number one Microsoft Unified Support replacement. A global leader. I would say the global leader in third party Microsoft Enterprise support. They are supporting 50 of the Fortune 500. And there's a reason, there are a number of reasons. But the number one reason, switching to US Cloud could save your business 30 to 50% on a true comparable replacement for Microsoft Unified Support. Now I have to say, comparable. Yeah, it's good as is. Better. It's better, it's faster. It's better. US Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack 24, 7, 365 days a year. They respond faster than Microsoft and they resolve tickets quicker than Microsoft for clients all around the world. And you're going to always talk to a real human, a real human engineer based in the US And I asked them, I said, well, so what's the deal with your people? Where do you get them? They said, well it's, we recruit and we offer great benefits, great salaries. That's why we have expert level engineers working for us with an average of 14.9 years experience. And that's for Breakfix or DSE. So they're 100% domestic, the best engineers in the business. Your data never leaves the US. Oh, there's one other thing Microsoft does not do. US Cloud offers financially backed SLAs on response time. They guarantee it. And initial ticket responses average under four minutes. Man, it's nice when you can get somebody on the line. Smart, competent, can help you. You know, when everything's falling apart, that's when you need it. And all of this for less. In 2023, 94% of US Cloud's clients reported saving 1/3 or more when switching from Microsoft unified support to US Cloud. So from Fortune 500 companies to large health systems to major financial institutions, yes, even federal agencies, US Cloud ensures that vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every single day. And I'm talking big brands like US Cloud supports Caterpillar, they support HP, Aflac uses US Cloud. Dun and Bradstreet, Under Armour, KeyBank, even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs. That should tell you something. We have a great quote from a director of information Technologies who shall remain nameless. But boy, I saw this interview and I thought, wow, can we use that? He said. And within an hour, US Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. Not only did they bring the right guys to the call, they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I had experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier. We made the right choice with US Cloud and of course, fully compliant. When it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud. They're ISO, gdpr, ESG compliant. For US Cloud, these are more than just, you know, regulatory requirements. This is important to the company. There are strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management, even corporate reputation. These standards are important to US Cloud because they foster trust and loyalty among their customers and stakeholders. They attract investment, they ensure long term sustainability and success in a global market. That's why US Cloud's the best. I was, I came away so impressed. I want you to go right now to uscloud.com, book a call with them. I think you'll be impressed. To find out how much you can save and how much better their support is. That's US Cloud. To book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less. It's better to. I hope now you know the name US Cloud, you'll remember the name and you'll visit uscloud.com we thank him so much for supporting the show. And we thank you for supporting the show. If they ask you, you say, oh, yeah, Paul, I saw it on Windows Weekly, the Paul and Richard guy, they're great. If they say it's good, it's got to be good.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Just help us out a little.

[Paul Thurrott]

Those guys, those guys.

[Leo Laporte]

I sat on those guys show. All right. Hey, I wanted to ask you a question that's unrelated to your coming topics, but it is Windows related. Yesterday, Steve Gibson, a week ago, Steve Gibson had said, oh, you know, Windows 11 doesn't support TPM 2.0. There's, there's.

[Paul Thurrott]

It requires.

[Leo Laporte]

Requires it requires it, he said, and, and I'm sorry, vice versa, will not support 1.2. You have to have TPM 2.0.

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and then he corrected it last week or yesterday, I should say, said, okay, technically Microsoft says, yes, if you want to use Windows 11, you should have TPM 2. But it will still. You can still install it, right? And all they're saying is, as they've said before, we can't guarantee support if you're using an earlier Version.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's right.

[Richard Campbell]

With Windows 11 saying, you need to have TPM 2. And then we all pushed on need to have. And it's like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's what happened because Steve joined the push a week ago, but yesterday he amended it to say, well, it turns out it'll still work.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have to jump through hoops, though, to install it without TPM2?

[Paul Thurrott]

Nope. Nope. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so just install.

[Paul Thurrott]

All you got to do is spend 9.99 in the Windows 11 field guide.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's all in there.

[Richard Campbell]

Everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Pub.com it's not hard, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, good. Thank you for. For that. I just wanted to clarify. Appreciate it.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's like, news happening as we're doing the show, so I put some stuff in.

[Richard Campbell]

What's the news?

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll get to it. GitHub Copilot is free in Visual Studio code now, apparently.

[Leo Laporte]

And worth every penny.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's worth every penny, yes. Well, actually, I think I told the story last week or whenever that I had used Anthropic Cloud, in my case to have it create a C class that I had created myself manually and it came back with the same code. And I was like, nice. It's a nice proof point.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm as smart as an AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am very. Exactly. I can hallucinate with the best of them. Well, I want to use it on my Net Pad project. I want to. Maybe I could use it to get over some hump. So this is very interesting to me. I'm definitely going to take a look at this increasingly.

[Leo Laporte]

So I have to say the AI is proving to be really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I think the pair programmer stuff is. I think it's good. I think it's a good use of AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve was saying that too. Yeah, I think he's coming around. He was, you know, he was a little skeptical.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do they have AI on Windows 2000? I can't remember.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry. He's Windows 7 now, my friend.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's right. I'm sorry. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

He is up to date with the latest.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow, that dirty glass interface.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know. He does somewhere have a Windows like an animal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Windows. So, yeah. Well, I almost did this as the first story, as a joke, but I realized I just didn't have the energy. Microsoft deprecated a feature in Windows that I'm pretty sure very few people have ever heard of. It's called Suggested Actions. It was in the web until they deprecated it. Then I just removed it. Nice, but very limited feature, very hard to make it kind of come up. You would be surprised if you saw it and then wonder how you made it work. But basically if you type in a phone number and you select it, you'll get a little pop up that will let you do things with that. So depending on the apps you have installed on your computer, it might say something like call this number with Skype or whatever. Same thing for dates or times. In that case, it would bring up in the old days the mail or Calendar. Well, I guess the Calendar app. Now it works with the new Outlook app and I guess probably with third party apps that register for those kind of things. But it will make a new meeting for this day or time, that kind of thing. This has probably been around for about two years. My anticipation was that they were going to expand it with other similar features. They never did. I think me and no one else ever used it because I had to write about it for the book. And then they were like, okay, apparently there's this one guy in Pennsylvania using it, so maybe we just get rid of it. You're right. So it's been deprecated. They're not going to update it anymore and it will be removed in a future version of Windows, probably 25H2, I would imagine. Okay. The other thing that has happened since we started this show is there's a new build in the Insider program in the dev channel. And this is the channel that's testing their recall and copilot plus PC features. Right. So if you have an AMD or Intel powered copilot plus PC meaning AMD's N5 chipset or Intel Lunar Lake, and I would assume our lake, I guess. Right. I think you want to put your computer and ruin it in the Insider program. This is a great idea. You could do that. And so Windows 11, unless you really need it, you probably don't know about this feature either, but it has live captions with real time translation. Awesome feature, but it only works English primary language, and you have a secondary language that you're listening to and it will translate to English. So they're testing, mixing and matching this with multiple languages, meaning that you could be native to German or French or whatever language and it will do the real time translations for you as well. There's a whole list of these things, mostly European, but also Asian languages. So this is happening soon. They're testing it now in the Insider program. Actually that one I think might be Snapdragon exclusive for now, but it's going to come to everybody. Obviously that's about it. So I think that's the big one. But they're just basically, you know, they're building out the recall click to do all that stuff. You know, these kind of local NPU features across Snapdragon and then X86. So that happened. And then there was a build, or there were builds both to, I think, dev and beta on Monday. And nothing major there either. There's. There, there's a feature coming in Windows 11 that's going to allow you to access the one camera everyone has with two or more apps at the same time. You can enable that and then this kind of a debugging mode where you can put a camera in like a basic mode and turn off most of its features basically. But nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

Remember when we thought the Copilot plus was going to be resolved in 24H2?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't remember. I don't remember anything. What do you mean?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and much less that it's a fragmentation of the feature set, like, when's it after 24h2, ARM is just going to be a fellow citizen alongside all the other processors and so everything will ship together.

[Paul Thurrott]

Everything that has the word Copilot in it is an example of Microsoft skewing the product yet again.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

In other words, go back to Windows xp, the first NT version for consumers. It was XP Home, XP Pro, XP Enterprise. You know, Office always had these SKUs, server multiple SKUs, et cetera, et cetera. Copilot has become like another SKU, right? Another added charge, another set of new features. And it complicates things, right? So people who get a computer that has Windows 11 home are like, oh, I think I might want Pro. Like, well, why do you. What do you need? Like, what are the missing features? You have to kind of sit there and figure it out. It's like BitLocker management, BitLocker to go as well, Hyper V, et cetera. There's a couple of things, right? But then Copilot plus in this case adds this other layer of hardware, accelerated local AI features, like additional features in Paint, in photos, in nothing else. Who knows? I don't know. Some other things. There's some other ones, but yeah, it turns what should be a simple conversation into kind of a complicated conversation, you know. But yeah, it's only going to get worse. I mean, this is the divide now between the NPU enabled current, sort of, and future with the past. And then intel and amd. Well, intel certainly, but I assume AMD are still going to release new chipsets, right, that don't have MPUs. It's a bizarre world, but here we are. ARM v. Qualcomm started the trial on Monday. It's supposed to go through Friday. I have not heard a single thing since the trial started. I did a write up, kind of going over the history of this thing. I don't know that I have any new news here per se, other than I just want to highlight the fact that a lot of people seem to have big opinions about this, like Qualcomm's wrong or arms, you know, screw arm, you know, whatever. And we just don't know the details of their contract. Right. And so this is something that might.

[Richard Campbell]

Come out kind of astonished this made it to court.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, me too. This should have been.

[Richard Campbell]

We're going to learn more about everything because they actually allowed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, so this is that, this is why I'm kind of, I'm hoping to see reports about day to day trial stuff because I don't know if they're going to try to redact this or if it's going to be private or how they're going to do it, but things tend to come out, you know, when big companies go to court. There's been disclosures all over the place. This happened to Google with the amount of money that they're paying Apple, for example. That was not supposed to be public information that came out during that trial. So we'll see. But basically a jury is going to decide if Qualcomm is violating ARMS contracts licenses and if they are, then a judge will decide what the penalty is. I suspect it's not going to be destroying every Copilot plus PC that's ever been made. That seems a little extreme to me, but we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

I would at least be surprised. At some point a judge looks at these two and go, you need to figure this out. Grow up. Yeah, it's this kind of dumb.

[Paul Thurrott]

This has come up in a couple ways this year when you think about it, because ARM went public sometime in the past year and ARM is a company, ARM holdings that has never made more than a billion dollars in revenue in a quarter.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but also what a 98% profitable. I know, but like it's a billion dollars, but it's cash.

[Paul Thurrott]

Their designs are used to, to make the chips that power 90 something power.

[Richard Campbell]

The majority of computing devices in the planet. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I know, and they're looking at that and saying, hey, hold on a second, what's going on? Like it seems like we should be getting a little bit more of the pie. Right. So they, they have the they have a new ARM V9 design that has higher licensing fees, et cetera. They're expanding into other product types like Qualcomm has already done for themselves. Right? Like IoT car, PC, et cetera. Qualcomm notably uses the V8 design, but they also don't. Even though they're by far the biggest licensee, they pay them very little because they make their own stuff. So they use a very little bit of the ARM IP and then they go and make their own variations and do their own thing. In the case of Snapdragon X, obviously they bought a company, but it was doing the same thing. They are not using the higher license fee v9 and may not ever or may not for a long time. But to me, they remind me a little bit of Samsung to Android where it's like, we're doing so much of this now. At what point do we just say, we don't really need you anymore? I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I want to say in the last quarter, you know, ARM holdings was probably 8,900 million dollars in revenue, and Qualcomm was somewhere between 10 and 12 billion. So like about 10x, right? A little bit more than 10x as far as revenues go. And, you know, ARM holdings is like, we just have like 1 billion of that or, you know, something. I mean, you know, it seems like you're doing okay, but anyway, we'll see what happens. Like I said, we don't know the inner workings of the contract. They've both been very. Well, I will say this.

[Richard Campbell]

We're about to find out. If this continues.

[Paul Thurrott]

We are going to find out.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all going to get disclosed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Qualcomm has said, look, we've gone over this a million times. We are not violating this agreement. We're in the clear. We're not worried about this in the slightest. And then you talk to ARM holdings and they're like, well, we did have to make a note in our financial earnings that if we lose this case, we're not going to grow as fast as we want to next year. So we're not counting on winning the case. And it's like, well, those are two very different outlooks.

[Richard Campbell]

I guess disclosure's got some very strict rules around it. You have to kind of take, yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm not saying that means anything, but yeah. So, Kev, thank you for screwing up my third New show news story. This has also happened, but the image creator. Yeah, no, that was the third of three that have happened since we started.

[Leo Laporte]

The show was amazing. That's amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Image Creator is Now using Dall E3 or the latest version, I guess, because I think they were already using Dall E3 and it will work now through Bing, the search engine, and also in the sidebar of the Microsoft Edge browser. So I actually, I use Designer for the images I do on the site. I'm actually really happy with it. So there you go. I'm like an Edge user now. I've turned into a, like a dork. I don't know what's going on with it. Okay. I don't know how many people know about this. I was going to kind of do this as an app pick, but the truth is I'm not sure it deserves it. So I write in Markdown. I love Markdown. I struggle to find a Markdown app that I love, especially on Windows. If I was using a Mac, this would not be a problem. A lot of apps are great, including one called IA Writer, which I paid for. IA Writer, yes. On Windows it's a lot like arc. It's not quite as good as it is on the Mac. You can tell it was designed for the Mac. It doesn't quite run as fast. It's not the same. And they just announced a new major release and you can sign up to get on the beta, which they describe as a public beta. It's actually kind of a private beta because you got to join a waitlist. So I actually got in super excited. But it's still kind of slow. It's not quite there. So maybe it will get even better. But it is better than it was. But it's still not quite there. So. And part of it might be. I don't think it's native on arm, so maybe that's part of the deal. I got to start testing this on a few different computers, but I was thinking this was going to screw up my end of year app list, but I think I'm going to stay where I am. So it's out anyway. You may have seen a story about Chrome OS adding something called Safety Reset. This is a way you can non destructively reset the system. In other words, you're not deleting any of your actual data. And sometimes you have to do this right. We do this in Windows. The way that works in Chrome OS now is they have a feature called Power Wash which resets the whole thing. You get to sign in again. You know, it's a little easier to come back on Chrome OS because everything, you know, the Power they'll kind of come back. Yep. But this thing is non destructive, happens in line and just so if you don't know. Speaking of features, I think a lot of people don't know about Windows has a feature that does this. Right. So I think most people are familiar with Reset this PC which began its life as Reset this PC and Refresh this PC which are two different features. Now it all goes through Reset this PC but you can still do a refresh where you basically reinstall the operating system but keep your data and your store apps and that's actually all you can do. You have to reinstall the desktop apps. But there's a new feature, I think it's in 20. I don't know if it was 24h to to begin with or if they put it in just before then. But there's also a way to reset the system using Windows Update which. So you basically you download a new version of the same version of Windows you're using now and it reinstalls and it also can clear up a lot of problems. So we do have things in Windows that work pretty well for this kind of thing, if you care. I don't. I didn't have this in my top 10 list for the year but Vision Pro kind of came and didn't, you know, whatever. Microsoft laid off about a thousand people in their Windows mixed reality team. Hololens kind of sitting there on life support. You can hear that, you know, beep sound, you know, whatever. We'll see what happens.

[Richard Campbell]

They have a set of customers so.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I know they're not going.

[Richard Campbell]

To sell any new projects. They're keeping the existing hardware for the existing customers because stuff does wear out.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you. But apparently Google is looking at this market and like, yeah, we got to get a part of that. And so they announced Android xr, which I assume, I guess probably he's competing with Meta Quest or something. But Apple Meta Google now all these companies, what they really want is to come up with glasses at some point. The only interesting thing to me about Android xr other than the obvious references to Google Glasses and Robert Skogebel taking a shower. Dear God, don't ever put that in my head again.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a lot. You got a long memory, my friend.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, just come on. Have you seen this video? How could you can't. It just ruins everything. I can't even have normal relationships anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

So didn't he actually. This didn't. Didn't the Google guys actually comment on that too?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, this time with no Scoble. You know, we've been descobled. So anyway, I found it interesting. They're going to market with Samsung. They're going to have, you know, big stupid VR headset like you would. But they're already talking about the glasses. They're testing glasses. They're recording developers. They're going to be glasses. Like this is. They're like. We think now we're in the point where we get to, we can get to mark with something that makes sense. And so you'll look like kind of like a, like, you know, like the lead singer. Collective souls got the big thick, you know, black glasses or I guess Roy Orbison or Buddy Wall.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll all look like nerds, but we'll all be nerds.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you know, the whole, you know, it ruins my biggest tear now, which is like a four eyes, you know, like now everyone's going to be, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Have artificial intelligence in these.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Now I can be all mad. Like, you don't even need those glasses. You're just wearing them so you could have AI. You're such a jerk. I have an actual stigmatism. No. So anyway, they're, they're heading there. That's cool. I mean, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

And to be honest, to be fair, Vision Pro production was halted because they sold all the Vision Pros they wanted to sell. I mean, they sold half a million. They're not.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they got to a place where it's like, are you going to do another run?

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, yeah, they couldn't make more because they bought all, all the len. All the screens Sony was capable of making.

[Paul Thurrott]

I appreciate, Leo, that you're an Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm defending them. Well, it's just that there was kind of the sense of, oh, it's a failure because they're not.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't a failure. They did exactly what they wanted and the Next Generation, they're going to do it. I mean, whether it's the. I look at, I'm a vision.

[Richard Campbell]

The Next Generation is an interesting thought because you just got these people who spend 3500 bucks.

[Paul Thurrott]

See, this is what we say about HoloLens 3 though. But I, yeah, for Apple, to me.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the money to pursue.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was. But it was a statement of intent. Right. They had the money to keep going on cars. You know, they could have done all kinds of things. But when you look at what they say, okay, we are going to do this or no, we're not going to do this. I think that was part of the, the Rationale there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's interesting. I mean we'll see. We'll see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean my head's already big enough. I don't need anything else weighing it down.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, that's my attitude. I don't want to wear that thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. Yeah. I'm like a baby. I can't keep my head. Like, you know, like I'm all over the place. Like, you know, but, but, but I.

[Leo Laporte]

Think that, I think, I guess our consensus on Break weekly is it was a developer product, but Apple has no genetic material that allows it to release a developer product.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

They can only release product products. So they did release it as a product. But really they're, they're seeding in a category in a long term play that they are planning to put. But if you wanted dollars in.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So you would probably be talking about the next one. Right. Like the real thing here is if it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Unfortunately it's probably a couple years off.

[Richard Campbell]

If it was a hit, they'd be finding a way to make more.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't a hit, but they couldn't sell more than 500,000 period. That's what Sony said. Sony said we only can make this.

[Richard Campbell]

Sony could also make more.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. But we don't follow Apple closely enough to understand the weirdness of this company. So like one of the things I was reminded of. No, I mean like I have to remind myself of this.

[Leo Laporte]

You're weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there was a headline. You would have. You'll be all over this. It was like Apple is going to make another magic mouse. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm like, oh, okay. That name's familiar to me. I don't remember when it came out or how old it is. I thought it might be the one where you plug it in on the bottom.

[Leo Laporte]

It is.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it is. That is what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

This thing is several years old. They've never updated it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like 10 years old.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the new one according to Mark Gurman is not coming out for several more years. It might be, yeah. It's a rumor.

[Leo Laporte]

But here's well qualified rumor source. Still a rumor. Apple is anything but.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the point. This is a company. Or they do this with displays too. They put out it, they did it with a Mac Mini. They put a product out, it sits there in the market forever. Eventually someone's like, hey, do you think they'll ever update this thing? What's going on? And then like a million years go by and then one day all of a Sudden they're like, hey, V2, you know, so like that's exactly it. That is uniquely Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Like a horrible keyboard. The butterfly keyboard.

[Paul Thurrott]

For belligerently insisted belligerently that this was exactly the right thing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

And they finally.

[Paul Thurrott]

What I want is something that literally removes your fingerprints as you type and it's so painful that your fingers are bleeding and you're crying. But you have to get through the article.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody knew that this is awful.

[Paul Thurrott]

But Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you know, but you had to know they knew. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a DNA problem. It really is. Their DNA is never apologized, never surrendered.

[Paul Thurrott]

What were they trying to. What was the point? It's slightly less painful than typing on glass. Is that what like. It's like in Die Hard where the guy's walking on broken glass and you're like, that's. Make that a keyboard. Can you make that a keyboard?

[Leo Laporte]

I think to some degree a lot of this was Jony, I've to be honest. And now he's gone.

[Paul Thurrott]

And also. But Steve Jobs pushing this too. The whole thinness above all else. Right, right. That kind of thing. Slim iPhone next year. Fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anyway, just. I'm not the guy to defend Vision Pro because I've said from day one this is a terrible.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think you've done a wonderful job of defending Apple and Vision Pro, but.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not convinced that Apple's giving up on Vision Pro. I guess.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't think that. No, no, I didn't mean to say that at all.

[Richard Campbell]

They never tell us. They just.

[Leo Laporte]

We won't know.

[Richard Campbell]

It'll be 21 more thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I bet. Finally, Blackmagic just released a camera they developed with Apple that's designed for shooting content for vision Pro. It's $30,000.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So it goes with the Vision Pro.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have it on layaway. It's at Walmart.

[Leo Laporte]

But it may be the kind of a critical turning point because there hasn't been that much use for the Vision.

[Richard Campbell]

For a half a million devices. You're going to make a dedicated camera?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I mean. I mean there's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean that you just level the market. That market is rather small. But they spend money, right? Maybe, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't. I think that this is all really an investment in the future. I don't think the Vision Pro as it stands is. Is intended to be.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

The fact that doesn't make it makes it interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to wear it. I mean, That's. I'm with you, Paul. It's. Who wants to put that in their head?

[Paul Thurrott]

I. I want that thing and then my CPAP at the same time. And then, like, noise canceling headphones, and it'll just be like a hyperbaric chamber. I'm like the Elephant man now. I am heaven.

[Leo Laporte]

I honestly, honestly, I don't. I. I have said at day one, no one wants to strap a computer on their face. I don't know if Apple knows that or not, but I think I still believe that.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're obviously shooting for the glasses. Right? They had.

[Leo Laporte]

Once you get to something lighter weight. Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

With augmented reality, not VR. So you're not isolated, but you're.

[Paul Thurrott]

One day we're going to be crapping on glasses because they'll have inserts for your contact lenses and then, you know, whatever the.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it going to be in my lifetime? No, but someday.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know, Facebook meta showed off the Orion, and now. Or the computer's in a box, you know, off your face like that. That was a good move on their.

[Leo Laporte]

Part, but that's also just like, frankly, Google.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sandra, guys, I don't know about your eyesight, but if I can read, like a menu at a restaurant, I'm doing good. I don't. The rest of it is just gravy. I couldn't. You know, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

You got your Nokia phone for that.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, you're sitting there, you're like. I asked my wife.

[Richard Campbell]

This is augmented reality.

[Paul Thurrott]

Passed her head, like four feet away so I could read it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I really. You always know when you're in a restaurant with old folks, because everybody's got their word.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's when you go. Like when you're. When you're in your 30s or 40s, you start using the light on your camera. Yeah. When you're really old, you take a picture and then you zoom it in.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Degrees.

[Leo Laporte]

I gotta stop the early bird's place.

[Richard Campbell]

I definitely like augmented reality to read menus like. That makes perfect sense. Yeah. I will wear this thing as long.

[Paul Thurrott]

As I can get the menu image to text. Right. And have it. Just make it text. Yes, that's good.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, now throw the AI in. So you just hold the menu up and then the software says, you want the fish?

[Leo Laporte]

No, don't even say that. Just. Yes, it says what you want.

[Paul Thurrott]

You just say. Not to get off on a weird tangent, but the iOS 18.2 has the visual intelligence thing in the camera. Have you tried this?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's actually really good.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. It's Kind of like Google.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just pointed to stuff in my apartment. It's like you want to buy another one of those? And like maybe like, it's like, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I do that now for Amazon if I, if I want to order something or whatever. Yeah, well that's, that's, that's, that's going.

[Paul Thurrott]

To hit, that's going to hit for normal people right there. That's, that's useful.

[Leo Laporte]

And Apple's smart. They're not pushing it too hard. You know they're not, no, but it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

That'S a good one. Like I, they've gotten dumped on a lot for whatever Apple Intelligence. But I was looking at that this morning walking around the house and I was like, oh my God. Yeah, I mean it's, it's, that's pretty accurate.

[Leo Laporte]

Honey, why are you taking pictures of the furniture?

[Paul Thurrott]

Why are you taking pictures of other women? I'm looking for something like this, but less expensive.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Newer model. Yeah, I love it on Amazon when you go to buy.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's Apple Intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

Newer model.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a break before we get in any more trouble with our spouses.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul Thurot.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Paul Thurat, not me. And then that's Richard Campbell. Not me. I'm me. I'm Leo laporte and you're watching Windows Weekly. We are really glad you're here. Our show today, brought to you, and I mean literally brought to you by Cashfly, our content delivery network. That's what they do. For over 20 years, CashFly has held the track record for high performing ultra reliable content delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And we're one of them. And those 80 countries are important to us because we host our content. The podcasts, audio and the video on Cash fly, right? And then when you go to listen to our shows or watch our shows, when you go to our website, when you use your podcast app, it's downloading it from a server that's near you if, if not in your country, in a country next door. So it is, it is bringing the content closer to you. That means faster downloads, that means fewer problems. We've been using Cachefly for almost the entire time, almost 20 years now. We love their lag free video loading, their hyper fast downloads, the friction free site interactions. Cachefly is the only CDN built for throughput. We really like that. Ultra low latency video streaming can deliver video to over a million concurrent users with latency of less than a second. Lightning fast Gaming. It delivers downloads faster, but also you can use it to game online with zero lag glitches or outages. And anybody who's serving images on the Internet will love Cashfly's mobile content optimization. Automatic simple image optimization so your site loads faster on any device because it says, oh, how big is the screen? Yeah, I got a copy for you. Flexible month to month billing for as long as you need. That was important to us because we didn't know we were just starting out. How much is, how much bandwidth do we need? They worked with us. And then once you know, you get discounts for fixed terms. The point is you design your own contract when you switch to Cashfly. We did and it was very important to us. Cashfly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. They allow you to shield your site content in their cloud. We do that. That means we get a 100% cache hit ratio. You never a cash miss again. That means you get our content faster and easier. And with Cash Fly's elite managed packages, you get the VIP treatment. Your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 24. 7 Support when you need it. I can vouch for that too. Learn how you can get your first month free right [e-mail] TWIT. You've heard it for years. Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by CacheFly at C-C-H-E-F L Y.com TWIT. Thank you, CashFly. We're going into another great year with Cash Fly and we're very, very happy. Back to the show we go. And now it's time to talk. Well, we usually talk about Microsoft 365 around this time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless you want to talk more about Apple. Because I'm ready.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let's fix them. Yeah. So iPad. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Or how about that Samsung Galaxy S24.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's happening?

[Leo Laporte]

No, let's stay with this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let's stay with Mike. So Ignite was last month, but my account. What's that?

[Richard Campbell]

And we didn't go.

[Paul Thurrott]

And we didn't go. Yeah, you didn't go. Maybe you should have gone. There was a lot of announcements, approximately 11,000 of them. I have spent an unbelievable amount of time watching videos from Ignite, including some developer oriented videos, interestingly. But in the last week, there have been a couple of curious announcements about Copilot for commercial customers and Microsoft 365 copilot. As it turns out, these things are commingled. So last January Microsoft announced that some PCs, that's how they worded it. We're going to start having a new Copilot key on their keyboards in the. There's 11 months since then, every single computer I've reviewed has had a freaking Copilot key. And I install PowerToys now on every computer I use. So I can use PowerToys Keyboard Remapper to turn that thing off because it makes me insane. I hit that by mistake all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

It's crazy. You just disable it entirely or do you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just make it do nothing. Exactly right. Or, by the way, so keyboard remapper in PowerToys is actually a little hard to use for me. Maybe it's just a user error. So if I have to, I'll have it use be the left arrow key, right? That's the thing I'm hitting or left. I mean, to hit same effect. So I turn it off. So there was a curious little bit of news last week, Microsoft. I had to read this one five or six times to be sure I was seeing this correctly. Microsoft told customers, commercial customers, that the copilot key on PCs is designed to invoke Copilot in Windows. However, since then, we have changed the way Copilot works in Windows and we have separated it from Copilot for commercial customers. That stuff's all going under Microsoft 365, right? So the new Copilot app that came out a couple weeks ago in testing, which is the native app, which is really just a web app with a native wrapper, whatever, only works with Microsoft accounts. It doesn't work with Entra ID accounts, which is kind of confusing to people. It's like before, you could sign in with a commercial account and you could access your commercial stuff through that app. Now what they're saying to businesses is because of this change, we're telling you now, you should remap that key to not load that app. We're recommending you load the Microsoft 365 app, which sounds stupid, but it turns out there's a reason for that. Or just turn it off. The few companies that were actually using it, I guess. And then they recommend uninstalling that app, the one that comes with Windows, and just using the Microsoft 365 app, which apparently has some Copilot stuff in it. Or you could just go to the web, right? So I was like, hold on a second. It's like 10, 11 months after you announced this thing. These computers are everywhere now. And now you're telling business on the.

[Richard Campbell]

Consumer Side, I can say it's not huge in the enterprise, but yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, fair enough. Okay. So it turns out that there's an enterprise data protection feature that's part of Microsoft 365 that they're going to implement across certain interfaces. One of those will be the Microsoft 365 app. It will not be the new Copilot app. So they're doing this kind of segregation between the consumer and commercial.

[Richard Campbell]

It makes some pretty Serious promises to M365 users when it comes to all the copilots. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, this is the fear, right? I mean, it's one thing if, like, I don't know, recall takes a picture of my credit card or something, but it's another thing entirely if Copilot blats out your private information from your company.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, specifically, Microsoft said it's like if you use our enterprise copilots, that will never happen. In fact, we will indemnify you if any of it does ever appear and you get into a situation. We're going to cover the legal costs on that. Right. They've made a pretty big bet. And then Copilot key.

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you're an admin in a commercial Microsoft 365 organization, go to the message center today and you will see two new messages in there related to this and that Microsoft 365 app, which if you use Windows 11, you've seen it, it's pre installed. It looks kind of like a Fisher Price front end. It Was like Windows 11 not feature complete or didn't work the way you would expect it to work in the beginning. So it has links to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, whatever. But when you opened apps from, I'm sorry, if you opened documents from that app, they would open in the web app. Even if you had Office installed in your computer, it's like, what? So actually that's been fixed, by the way. But from the beginning it was kind of a strange app, kind of fisher pricey. Turns out one of the 11,000 things they announced at Ignite was that app is going to be renamed and rebranded as the Microsoft 365 copilot app.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And Copilot Experience is going to be there in the side rail just alongside the other apps. And this will be the one protected by Enterprise Data Protection. And it's got a new icon. And so if you're familiar now, it's kind of like a circle, like a purple circle. It's turning into the Copilot icon, but it says M365 at the bottom.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, so just out of curiosity, because this machine is a domain, domain is an AAD joined machine with M365 and so forth. And I haven't run the 365 admin app and agent, so I just click, you know, I click the Windows key because I don't have a Copilot key. And typed in 365. And there's the 365 app. This would normally be my administrative tool. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, there you go. Yes, right. Actually, yes, yes, yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Ran it and it's now popped up and says. It just says Microsoft copilot, not 365 copilot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

And says PIN Copilot. For quick and easy access. Use Copilot in the apps you use every day by pinning it to M365, Outlook and Teams. And then you have a choice between ask me later, do not PIN, or pin and continue.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like that you get to opt out of that. So that's fascinating for two reasons. One, it's treating you like an imbecile, which I think is hilarious. But two, the reason they're doing that, I think is because most business users, especially IT admins, if they ever launch that thing, would be like, oh, I don't want to run this. And they're saying, hold on a second, hold on, this is going to be it. So they're actually just, I guess the stuff that used to be in the Copilot app in Windows 11 or on the web will now be in that app alongside your other Microsoft 365 stuff. Like I said, if you click on one of the app icons on the side, or if you open a document and you have Office installed, it will actually now open in the right app, which is how it should have always worked.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm kind of surprised they're asking me, though. They should. They.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're asking you?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Why are they asking me? Like, it makes me concerned that they're asking, like, so should you go an update to Outlook?

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you go. This is tied to the previous story. So if you go to the message center and you look at this two messages. Because one of the other one is related to something called Microsoft 365. Copilot chat, I think is the name of it. Is that right? It's like the chat interface that too is being integrated. This is like the chat that's grounded in information from the web and your data inside the company, whatever. Like, that interface is going in there as well. So this is like now the new front end. For, I don't know, whatever the copilot stuff. And so if I, like, tied to the I will not pay for AI thing that Microsoft's customers coming back and saying, hey, hold on, what are you doing here? My understanding is there's going to be a new baseline set of functionality that all customers will be able to access. There'll be copilot functions in Word, for example, that you'll be able to get, even though you don't pay for it. Extra, you'll run out of credits or tokens or whatever the term is if you use it too much. And then they'll ask you to pay. But some of this stuff will be free. Well, you're already paying for it. You know what I mean? Some of it will be part of the thing you're already paying for. I think this is them kind of adjusting the mix, if you will, which brings up a weird Steve Ballmer memory. When he was talking about Windows 8.1 and it was a slightly different blend, he was talking about coffee. He's like, we came up with this coffee and it was a little too strong. And now we're going to make a slightly different blend. And that blend is actually going to have a start menu in it. Right. That was the way he described it. It was weird. Anyway, I think that's what they're making the same adjustment. I think here with Copilot. Copilot. We've talked about this a lot. There are too many products named Copilot. Last year there was 100, and I don't remember the number. 117, 170, whatever. You know, of these things.

[Richard Campbell]

Not that we're. No, we knew there was a bunch around. There's only maybe a dozen that became public.

[Paul Thurrott]

But now there are features that are Copilot. Like, it's getting a little weird. So I don't use, you know, I don't use Word or Excel or that stuff with Copilot. And I don't know what that looks like. But there were now dozens of features that are just Copilot features that are in these apps. And it's like, yikes.

[Richard Campbell]

So I did finally get to the message center, because I can't get to the message center without agreeing to either pin or not. I've gone on the web, no messages for you. I'm very afraid to click that pin and continue. Wouldn't surprise me. Knock me off the show in the process. Right. Like, that feels like something that's going to break everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So what do you say?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, UI changes to the M365 app, this is not, you know, they're disguising a. You have to do this or you won't know what happens as a choice.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, you want to keep up to date with your organization. Right. I mean we're not holding a gun.

[Richard Campbell]

To your head with no sense of consequence. Yeah. Of the. What will happen if I actually click on this? Like, I don't even know.

[Leo Laporte]

No one knows.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is not. Yeah. So the, the change isn't happening, isn't start. Isn't going to roll out till January. So it's not happening right now. But I think what they want to do is get you set up with this thing. So this like, well, the app, you're.

[Richard Campbell]

Deeply concerned that they're asking me to agree and not just rolling it out as an update. Right. Like, what is this?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, as an admin, you should be able to go in and determine whether or not you even see that. Right. Like, I think that's a, that is or is going to be a, an option. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This is not really dealing like a, like a admin approach to it either. This is like there's some kind of legal thing I'm not telling you here, but just agree with me.

[Paul Thurrott]

So like everyone else listening to the show, the first thing I do every morning after I use the bathroom is load the Microsoft 365 Message center and I see what's going on.

[Richard Campbell]

First you open your laptop and see if it self starts right place you get the giggles. Right. That's the first thing. That's really the first thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, I happened to see this and I was like, I was like, what's happening? I had to go back and watch the keynote. So Rajeshah during his segment blew through this in like two seconds. But he had a picture of the app, he had a picture of the icon. He's like, it's happening in the next few months and this week, today or yesterday, they put a message or two messages and they're saying, yeah, it'll be mid January, so buckle up.

[Richard Campbell]

This was. You remember they also talked about sort of this like wave two of Copilot. Yeah, that's what this really is. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It almost feels like wave three, you know, like it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, because what was wave two like? They said there was going to be some things and we never really felt like was anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. That's a good point. I always, I took it to mean the agent based stuff, but actually that in some ways hasn't really even hasn't really.

[Richard Campbell]

That's more wave three. Right. That's the now talking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Part of.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but I think that's just this realignment. But I. I mean, I think you're. What you bang squarely into is there's a big risk here for them with the. Because inside of. On the admin side of things, we're having a problem with users using their personal LLMs, their chat GPTs and so forth at the office. And so the answer has not been to try and block it all. That's virtually impossible. It's to give them a path. It's fine. If you want to use this, please use this one. It protects the company and yeah, then Microsoft made it hard for us to use. Right. The fact that the copilot key would go to the non secure version of Copilot.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like there's a tiny percentage of businesses that rolled out and managed Copilot to any degree whatsoever. But because some of them did, they had to kind of deal with this in a way. Like if they just came to market like this from the beginning would have been a different story. But now they just look spastic again. They moved the copilot icon three times. They changed. They made it different things. It was a sidebar resizable sidebar window. There was an app, there's an app. And now they're doing it again. Are you kidding me? Like, you couldn't make this up. They look like they have no idea what they're doing. Well, I have no idea what they're doing.

[Richard Campbell]

Satch has also bifurcated the AI story with having Suleiman running the consumer side of things. Like now I'm starting to wonder if that's what we're asking.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is tied to that. Yeah. So now we're going to see the difference between. Yeah, that's a good point.

[Richard Campbell]

We get two different groups working and.

[Leo Laporte]

The enterprise software doesn't fit the org chart.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I think your software is fitting the org chart. And that's why it's weird.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why it's weird.

[Richard Campbell]

This is Conway's law in action. Oh. You built two totally separate AI teams, one for consumer and one for enterprise, not recognizing that a lot of consumers are also working enterprises. Gee, I wonder what's going to happen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that interesting?

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not only an enterprise employee, I'm also a consumer.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is just. The only thing I can equate this to is there's a feature in Word that started only on the web that allowed you to. You could upload a video or an audio and it would make a transcription which is just very common but at the time was not very usual. And my wife and I, either one of us would run out of. There was some invisible system of credits. So we would go to each other and say hey, could you do this for me? And if that didn't work I would load up my commercial account and do it from there. But that's what people who use Copilot are going to start doing. They're going to be like, oh, I guess I ran out of my tokens on my whatever account. Now I'm going to go over to my work account or my whatever it is and like just keep, you know, like it's like where can I just. I just want to get this thing done. I'm trying to make a funny picture of Tim Cook. Why won't anything let me do that? You know, that kind of thing. So I don't know. It's just. At least they're entertaining.

[Richard Campbell]

It's interesting. But yeah, no, it's. This was probably not non trivial crisis internally.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh my God.

[Richard Campbell]

You've got early adopters who've been working hard to trying to deal with this issue of not using insecure LLMs and Microsoft gave them a path to use it that the obvious path, that key was a problem. Like that's pretty awesome.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, it's perfect. It's just. It's perfect.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You couldn't. If you wrote this script someone would say nope.

[Richard Campbell]

But you also.

[Paul Thurrott]

No company is that dumb.

[Richard Campbell]

You have presented me with the perfect case for why there's not a Dell Latitude with a co pilot key.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like that's why it's all. It's just purely consumer hardware so far. It's like how do I advise administrators about is it time to start buying these machines? It's like now if they haven't made a Latitude it's for a reason. Because the guys who work on Latitude are very careful about how enterprises work and that. I mean I'd be a linchpin on it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like, I mean I think there are HP and probably. Yeah like the. I don't have it here but the, the latest X1 carbon has a copilot key.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That's not really an enterprise either.

[Paul Thurrott]

We all have that cousin we're not super proud of. You know the Copilot keys like that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the same.

[Paul Thurrott]

Here's my daughter, she's a failure.

[Richard Campbell]

But now, now I'm confronted with a, you know the, the administrator who's got a thousand machines to bring in, they're all going to have copilot keys on it. And installing power toys and configuring each one of them is not on the ra. That's not the thing I can do. It needs to be a policy.

[Paul Thurrott]

The stupidest thing in the world. I mean, there are. I'm sure there are. No. Well, so I should say first of all, you're going to be able to do this from policy. That. That's.

[Richard Campbell]

You would hope.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. No, they've said this though. They have said this, but yes, it's. I don't remember. I think if you look this up, the, the co pilot key maps to function key 22 or 23. It's like it's not, it's not on the typical keyboard, you know, so it's kind of a weird one.

[Richard Campbell]

But do you have this key? I do not know.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like I've never seen a number that high. That's. That's a curious one.

[Richard Campbell]

And so my second row of functions.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take. We're going to. I want to talk about AI because you know, that's my favorite subject right after Vision Pro. But I want to take a little break here if you don't mind. And just people that this is Windows Weekly and that guy right there is Paul Thurat. He's in the middle if you're watching this.

[Paul Thurrott]

If there should be a firing squad, I'm not saying there will be one, but if there is one, one in.

[Leo Laporte]

The middle and then the guy on the right is Richard Campbell. Runasradio.com we're so glad you're here. Winners and dozers, all right.

[Paul Thurrott]

After investing billions to light up our network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch. Keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800.

[Richard Campbell]

See how you can save on every.

[Paul Thurrott]

Plan versus Verizon and at @t mobile.com keepandswitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card.

[Leo Laporte]

Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service ported. 90 plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required.

[Paul Thurrott]

Card has no cash access and expires in six months.

[Richard Campbell]

There's joy to be had in finding the perfect gifts for the ones you love. And Saks.com's holiday gift guide can make it easy. Whether it's surprising your hard to shop for sister with a Chloe bracelet bag or gifting your partner a memorable scent from Gucci that matches their personality Saks.com's hand picked guide can help take the stress out of the holidays. Like adding instant cheer to your home with bright decor or giving yourself some comfort by bundling up in a scarf coat from Tatem. Find gifts guaranteed to bring joy to everyone.

[Leo Laporte]

This [e-mail] that was just a little pause. So we can, if we feel like it, stick an ad in. And I appreciate it. It does feel that way, I'm sure. But we do, we do direct ad insertion. I don't know, I could, I could just, I could. You know what? I'll put one of my, my own ads in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Antifreeze isn't permanent. It wears out. So every fall my baby here gets a fresh feel of Preston Antifreeze.

[Leo Laporte]

On we go.

[Richard Campbell]

My baby here.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a conspiracy theory that we insert ads, ads like that to compel people to join the club so they get ad free versions of the shows.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, if your ads are bad enough, if their go up, people will pay.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we don't do that. But just, you know, look at, we're trying to squeeze every penny we can out of this sad sack.

[Paul Thurrott]

A penny at this point, it's a penny.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you know, you know what, this was a good week. Weirdly enough, all the advertisers that said or nevers didn't, they ghosted us basically for a month. I finally just kind of woke up and said, oh, oh, wait a minute, a year.

[Richard Campbell]

Budgets.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're gonna spend this money.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't have any clear answers here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know what it is. I don't understand business. I really don't. But the good news is we will be back next year.

[Richard Campbell]

Keeps the lights on.

[Leo Laporte]

These lights, you know, they're not cheap, let me tell you.

[Richard Campbell]

Keep those lights on.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, on we go with Windows Weekly AI the topic for the next.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, this is quick because most of this is not particularly Microsoft related, but Grammarly, the AI writing assistant, I hate to hate.

[Richard Campbell]

You use it anyway though, don't you?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, I've been using something called language tool for the past few months, which I actually like quite a bit. I find my relationship with Grammarly is it annoys me and then I turn it off and it's kind of like, like a yipping dog.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I've definitely had the experience of it. It's. You're not happy with the sentence. Okay, show me your new version. You show me the new version goes and it says, I'm not happy with this one either. It's like, okay, we'll show me their version. That's the old one. What are you doing?

[Paul Thurrott]

I. I've had it switch. It's like, okay, I accept it. That it goes. It says, well, what about the thing? It's like, that's the thing. I had originally switched back. It's like, well, what about this? Like, guys, come on, we get it. You know, you gotta go, yeah. I also don't like that. I just, I have certain styles that I use when I write and it doesn't have a thing that's. Stop nagging me about this. Like, I. I'm not changing it.

[Richard Campbell]

No. You know, the IDE would understand that you're writing in different styles at different times. Now, let's face it. The real reason you use Grammarly is to get a weekly affirmation email that says, boy, you write a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, there's all sorts of good stuff in that email. I love that email. Yeah, you use the passive voice 16 times, stuff like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would say you're passive aggressive, but you just pass it. Yeah. So they're buying a company called Coda. I've never heard of, but Coda makes an app called Coda Docs which is just like Notion. And they've created something called.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's just like Lou.

[Paul Thurrott]

Something else. They've created an AI assistant. So they basically merged. So the CEO of Coda is going to become the CEO of Grammarly and they'll keep doing the. Each of them will keep doing. Well, the one company will keep doing all the products they have been doing.

[Richard Campbell]

Almost like a reverse takeover. That's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's kind of weird. Except maybe they said, maybe the CEO Grammarly said, I'm tired.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they. Apparently those guys are buddies and they know each other and he's cool with it. But of course you would say that. I don't know. It's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

There are many ways to solve this problem, and some of them are involving checks with two commas in them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I think it was a, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, stepping down is real easy. When I had.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was imagining it was like kind of a rock, paper, scissor thing. But yeah, that would be.

[Richard Campbell]

How about you could be the CEO or the giant pile of money.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, would you like board still? He's still on the board.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah. Okay. I wasn't sure about that part of it, but yeah, so that's interesting. Interesting. I think if you haven't looked at these things. Google just announced something called Veo, or I guess it's Veo.

[Leo Laporte]

Veo is pretty amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Holy moly. These are all amazing Imagen 3, which has been around for a while, but they've updated it and these are their models for creating videos and images, respectively. And then they have these tools on the web and Google Labs that let you use this stuff. These are really nice looking, actually. These are really good. They also announced an app called Whisk with an H like Whisk, which looks like a consumer product to me. Also in Google Labs for now, which is a way you can give it two images and it will do kind of like a remix thing on it, which sounds like a Microsoft thing. But the idea there perhaps is you have a photo, a literal photo of a human being, and then you have maybe a cartoon or a color or whatever it might be. And then it will make a kind of mashup of those things and you can do multiple images and have it.

[Richard Campbell]

Come out with something that's subject style, scene. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody on Reddit posted this video comparing all of these video generators for the prompt. A pair of hands skillfully slicing a perfectly cooked steak on a wooden cutting board. Faint steam rising from it. And is up here. And I would say Veo by far is the best looking of these.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So that's what blows my mind is.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that looks real.

[Paul Thurrott]

One of the big stories with AI.

[Leo Laporte]

And I apologize to any vegans watching this because it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's great. And that video is fantastic. So, yeah, you. God damn, that looks.

[Leo Laporte]

Makes you want steak, doesn't it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what crap you thought you were making.

[Leo Laporte]

Sora. This is OpenAI's, which is, you know, hey, at least it's got five fingers, but it's a little odd.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know, this one.

[Richard Campbell]

Runway, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Google steaming. All right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Steaming a little.

[Leo Laporte]

Looks like it's smoking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. It's going to blow. Google has kind of come back, don't you think? Yeah, they feel a lot of stumbles.

[Leo Laporte]

Very impressive compared to all these others.

[Paul Thurrott]

There was a lot of face raking with this company that looks like ham on the ins.

[Leo Laporte]

Some of it's really disgusting.

[Paul Thurrott]

That one's weird.

[Leo Laporte]

But, you know, if. Again, I apologize if you're not a.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but that's. These are honestly, by and large, are amazing quality.

[Leo Laporte]

These are generated from a text prompt.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Unbelievable.

[Richard Campbell]

That's really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Google has. I don't know which one is it? They have another one. You can just give it a picture and it makes. Oh, no. I guess maybe it's OpenAI. Doing that, where you give a photo and then it makes a minute long.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

What a world we live in. What a world. What a world.

[Richard Campbell]

Stranger.

[Paul Thurrott]

See? Pretty. Next year at this time, we're going to be talking about an app where you give it a photo of something and then it makes it like a video game out of it, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that exists.

[Paul Thurrott]

OpenAI. We'll do that. Excellent. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Both Steve and I have been using OpenAI's, and actually we were talking a little bit about OpenAI's newest model, 01, which is a reasoning model. And during the show, I did it, and it said, I've been stuck on advent of code problem from day seven, you know, 12 days ago.

[Richard Campbell]

What are we at 18 now?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But I was stuck. And so I thought, as we were talking about, well, let me just give it, you know, a text description of the problem. And it wrote code that works.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, oh, now you're unstuck. Enjoy. It was a little weird. Much like when computers play chess, sometimes they make moves that are not human.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they never make moves that are human.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're not humans. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not human. But. Well, most of the time they're moves that a human, a very talented grandmaster, might make. But sometimes they make moves to where the grandmaster goes.

[Richard Campbell]

You just described the difference between a decision tree model and a neural net model. Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Decision tree model will tend to do the grandmaster's move based on a deep set of knowledge where a neural net model is totally derived. It might. You might anthropomorphize it into the grandmaster's movement.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's not how it's computing it.

[Leo Laporte]

Although I have to say, at that level, grandmasters are not necessarily fully calculating. They also have kind of the gestalt, the intuitive impression.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, they definitely. It's exactly like when I play Call of Duty. Leo. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't think. You just.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have. You have these patterns and paths that you follow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you repeat and repeat and repeat. And then a year goes by and you're like, what did. Where did my wife.

[Leo Laporte]

Where did my life go?

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, it's weird.

[Richard Campbell]

I see you are doing the Pana Passa move.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Fascinating.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway. Yeah, but look, that meat looked good. I'm just gonna say he knows what.

[Richard Campbell]

He wants for lunch.

[Leo Laporte]

VO2.

[Paul Thurrott]

I already wanted that for dinner today. Now that I've seen, I'm gonna show that to my wife.

[Leo Laporte]

Be like, hey, that's how you get her. Does the trap door have good stuff?

[Richard Campbell]

Not gonna be doing that. Not gonna be doing that to the vegetarian wife. It's not a good.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, you can't. In fact, I. Again, I apologize. Because if you're vegetarian. That must have looked horrible.

[Richard Campbell]

It just looks. Looks great. But you know what? I want to steak. I cook it outside.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wonderful. And they hate their lives because they're making a huge mistake.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or you make mistakes. See what I did there? Okay. Sorry. I'm here all week. Okay. Xbox. Kind of going out with a whimper in a way. Although I have a little bit more later in the back of the book. There is a big sale happening, not just at the Microsoft store, I should point out, actually Epic Games was. And Steam was, and maybe both still are having a sale as well. But you should go look at these things. In the Microsoft case, they have PC and Xbox games, obviously. Sort it by price. You'll be surprised when you go down to the cheap ones. There's some good stuff in there. It's worth looking at. There's other stuff going on there, but Microsoft has apps and Surface PCs and yada yada, yada. But honestly, the game stuff is really good. Worth knowing about. And then there's this other announcement that I have to say still confuses me a little bit. But Microsoft announced that they were bringing more PC games into the Xbox app on Windows. So I use the Xbox app on Windows a lot because I have a game pass subscription. This is how I install things like the latest Call of Duty or one of the Doom games or whatever it is. And you can use it as a launcher. It's whatever. When I saw this, what I assumed was they were integrating with Steam and Epic and whatever else Google Games, but that's not what this is. I guess there are a bunch of games that offer Xbox Live features like Achievements or Play Anywhere, whatever the feature might be. And so it's bringing in those games that haven't historically been in the Xbox app. So there are apparently 400 of them so far. And a lot of these are coming out on these little handheld systems now. Like we have like Steam Deck and those kind of things where there's a whole new group of casual games that have Xbox features and stuff. So they're starting to work with third parties who are implementing Xbox features but not going into the store for some reason. So, yeah, okay. I mean, good to know about, I guess, but not like a huge game changer. I'm doing it again, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

That's just a big old pile of puns, aren't you?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. I am a writer. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

AI won't do that for you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, it probably will actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Probably do it now. I've never tried that prompt. You can only respond to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would only want. Want puns.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that would be interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

It'd be terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be interesting. All right. We got the back of the book coming up. Is that it for Xbox? It seems very.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I know it's not much. Okay. It was a. Was a slow week.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, there's lots of sales on Steam and things. But I will look at them and go, there's a five dollar game I'm never gonna get around to playing.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember back in the day, I. I bought an Atari 400 because I was tired of dropping quarters at the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Local Chuck E. One Star Raiders.

[Leo Laporte]

And there was a store, and it was kind of one of those hole in the wall stores fly specked with. It was they just sold video games and it was like they were all jumbled together and almost all of them were terrible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wait, you open Providence, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but this was in. This was in usa because I was gonna.

[Paul Thurrott]

You would appreciate that. I used to go to Lechmere.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Leechmere.

[Paul Thurrott]

And just to play Star Raiders on the Atari 400.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's Buster and Charlie's or something. Buster. And Lisa said the other day, she said, oh my God, there's a Buster and Charlie's coming to Petaluma.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I thought, oh, God, what the hell?

[Leo Laporte]

Why do you care?

[Paul Thurrott]

So we discovered Best Buy when we went to Phoenix. And it was like, oh, this is like Leechmayr done right and national. But you'll appreciate it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's more like Leechmere. It was just. It was all tumbled in. Games were falling.

[Paul Thurrott]

But Leechmare went out of business a.

[Leo Laporte]

Lot, hoping for a great game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'd look at the COVID The COVID we. Spectacular.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah. They always had like. Like nice money on the art.

[Leo Laporte]

It's been all the money on the art because the game was awful. It's very hard to find a good game.

[Paul Thurrott]

I got a game on a. For the Commodore 64 that was on a cassette.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You could control, break it or whatever and just see the basic story. It was basic. Yeah, it was written in basic. Classic.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how that was in those days. Hey, before we go on with the back of the book, the best part of the show, the show part that you all look forward to every day, I want to give us a Little plug for Club Twit. Now, I got to tell you, there are some real benefits to joining Club Twit. It's seven bucks a month, okay, so it's practically free. Just don't have a coffee today, don't go to Starbucks today, and you're paid for. But that whole month you're going to have ad free versions of all the shows. You're going to have access to the Club Twit Discord, where you will find some very fun and interesting people posting fun and interesting images like this. This is Paul wearing his I love Microsoft Teams night shirt. It looks like this is clearly AI generated.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is clearly a deep fake. I don't know what's happening here.

[Leo Laporte]

It says, hello, Microsoft, can you direct me to someone in your organization who knows what the hell you're doing? I think credit to Joe Esposito, I think for that one. I'm not sure. But yeah, he's really good at putting in this stuff. The Discord is. I don't think we sell it enough. For instance, if you're listening to the show and you're in the club watching and chatting, you get a lot of additional content, including animated GIFs. Kev Brewer Pretty typically will post the links that you're talking about. I don't know what this is.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is almost turned into like Joe Esposito as a service.

[Leo Laporte]

It is Jass. We call it J E A S S A I A S. Anyway, lots of fun. Grep the benefits. Oh, I love these guys. Anyway, we do very much enjoy the Discord, but that's just one. You also get the Twit plus feed, which includes shows we don't put out in public. Tomorrow. We've got actually a very big day tomorrow in the club. Thursdays often are. Let's see, we have Micah's crafting corner in the morning. Tomorrow Micah is doing. He's building like a tiny kitchen, like a dollhouse kitchen. I think that's what he's working on. But you could do anything. Crafting, coding. It's just a great hang every third Thursday with Micah and the gang. That's so much fun. And then in the afternoon, we're doing Stacy's Book Club, a book that I really liked. Jason Snell recommended it. The new one from the guys who wrote the expanse, James S.A. corey. The new one's called the Mercy of Gods. It's a new series there beginning. It's fantastic. So you can watch that. The production of iOS today we're doing coffee in there. We're doing photography. It's just all sorts of stuff that is the stuff that kind of we're interested in, that grabs our attention and I think it's a lot of fun. So anyway, that's one reason to join the club. Ad Free Discord special stuff on TWiT plus feed oh, and the warm fuzzy feeling you're getting at this time of year by supporting the efforts we're making to give you great stuff. Great content shows you can hang out with fun people to be with, but also informative stuff that tells you things you need to know in your job or just in your life. You know, it's our mission to make technology accessible, to teach people about technology so they can use it for themselves in their lives and their work in their play. And I think we do a pretty good job of that. I want to keep doing it. Thanks to you we are. We have a great membership and we'd like to get more. My goal is to reach 5,000 more members by the end of the year. We're very close to that. Thank you. And because of that, we don't have to cancel any shows or lay off any more staff this next quarter. We were worried we might have to, but the club members came through. Thank you Twit TV Slash Club Twitter Scan the QR code in the upper left corner of your screen. We thank you in advance for the support you give us here at TWiT TV.

[Paul Thurrott]

After investing billions to light up our network. T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800.

[Richard Campbell]

See how you can save on every.

[Paul Thurrott]

Plan vs Verizon and at&t@t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit.

[Leo Laporte]

Service ported 90 plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months.

[Richard Campbell]

There's joy to be had in finding the perfect gifts for the ones You Love and Saks.com's holiday gift guide can make it easy. Whether it's surprising your hard to shop for sister with a Chloe bracelet bag or gifting your partner a memorable scent from Gucci that matches their personality, Saks.com's hand picked guide can help take the stress out of the holidays, like adding instant cheer to your home with bright decor or giving yourself some comfort by bundling up in a scarf coat from Tatem. Find gifts guaranteed to bring joy to everyone this [e-mail] Mr. Thurat, back of.

[Leo Laporte]

The book means we want something from you. Maybe a tip of the week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I've kept keep working on my kind of end of year wrap up up stories I guess. So since last week I did one on books and audiobooks. It's been like a week since I've mentioned Steven Snofsky. So I will point out that he was my favorite book of the year. Still is.

[Leo Laporte]

You reread it every month.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was reading it today. I read it, I think part of this book every day.

[Richard Campbell]

I reread Lord of the Rings. But you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. No, I did that for many years.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is of similar length actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep. As similar as more poetry. That would be my question. There is no singing Tolkien used to be my Tolkien but yeah, not anymore. But today I did one of those article. Or was it today? Yesterday. I guess yesterday it came out of it was going to be part of something else and just turned into this thing. But I have sort of been saying for the past few years like I feel like I review like roughly 12 laptops a year.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Except that I reviewed 20.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's way too low.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I was like oh, that's more than I would have thought. And I still have like four or six more to go that they won't all happen by the end of the year, but nice. So that's not just, you know, something to look at.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh dude, you're killing me here.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's wrong?

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't like your iPad air?

[Paul Thurrott]

Huh? No, no, it's, I, I, it's fine for what it is, but it's not the right one for me. I should never bought that. It's too big, it's too heavy. Oh, should I just need a small one? I just read. All I do is read. You know, I don't know why what I was thinking. Yeah, so that was a mistake.

[Leo Laporte]

But look at all the phones. You review too. You are just a mad.

[Paul Thurrott]

I do too much work.

[Leo Laporte]

You do too much, Paul. Yeah, that's, that's you just do too much for us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, that's worth looking at. And then my wife and I just not tech related but we finally put out the first preview version of the book we've been working on. Oh, nice. Basically Mexico City, Eternal Spring. The novel. The novel. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Soon to be a lifetime special event.

[Leo Laporte]

So if you're a premium [e-mail] you can read it right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, you can read that. Well just. You just read the article about it. So I. This read like suffering. This is. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And Lean Pub has the preview. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This was a. What I discovered on this journey was that my wife and I have very different writing styles and we're lucky that we didn't kill each other.

[Leo Laporte]

So she's a writer though. We should.

[Paul Thurrott]

She's an award winning writer.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know how she won an award based on what I've seen. No, no, she's fantastic. We just.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and you use your emoji heads, your genmoji heads.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

I told you we're gonna do the emoji heads. Thank you, Apple Intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I gotta get this before I go to Mexico City. That's for sure. Is it mostly about moving to Mexico or is it about.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's mostly just a guide to the place, you know. Yeah, just, you know, like, you know, like. Like a Rick Steves book. Except for Mexico City because he's a jerk and doesn't like Mexico.

[Leo Laporte]

Does he not like Mexico?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, he likes Mexico.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, he just writes about Rick's like.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything except his wife apparently, who's a little pissed that he spends all his time on the road.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well confessed to that. They did get divorced. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was part of that interview I just read that was kind of interesting. It's worth reading. It's. You know, sometimes you make these decisions in life and you're like, well, you know, something's different or this is what chose me. I don't know, you know. Which is what you say when you're mental, I guess. But. But I chose me. I certainly understand. I love that phrase. I didn't choose this career. Chose me. Did it? I think we could be okay without you, honestly. But yeah. And then the app pick of the week is a game. So Indiana Jones in the great circle. I finally got going on this and.

[Richard Campbell]

Get lots of love in the world. In a time of hated games.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the one where it doesn't look like Napoleon.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a big game. I actually, I went to one computer, didn't have enough space. Went to the second one, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Sort of looks like Harrison Ford.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I will say this. The opening sequence is. Is the opening sequence from the original Raiders movie. Right. So that's kind of fun. You know the story so you can go through it. It's good. The voice that does Harrison Ford. Perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Not Harrison Ford. Although.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's what I mean. The voice who does him at the event. So he sounds like him.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's definitely, you Know, supportive.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, but they were.

[Leo Laporte]

He's at the game awards.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But I don't think they were allowed to use his.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Well, there are moments in this game where the character looks exactly like him.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then he turns his head like a quarter of an inch and it looks nothing like him. You know, and there's also that awkwardness thing, like it's him or another one of the human beings where they're in a room just talking. You know, there's a lot of talking. There's a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't like a lot of cut scenes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I know. It's a little. It's a little slow. It can be slow, but, like, there's a good example. Like. Like it looks a little off, like the dimensions of the different body parts or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you know what? It's. It's a good kind of game.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all that matters.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is. It seems I've only done the first. I finished the first two. I don't know, we call them, like, levels or whatever. Yeah, it's pretty good. Like, I. I'm happy to play something else and actually kind of like it, you know, like, I suffered with, like, Halo Infinite last year, and I wanted to scrape my eyeballs out with a fork. But this is. This is a good one, so.

[Leo Laporte]

And only 111 gigabytes.

[Paul Thurrott]

You got to have enough space. You could straight. I haven't tried streaming, but it is on PC, Xbox and Steam. It's on Xbox console, obviously part of Game Pass ultimate and PC. And like I said, you can stream it, so. Yeah, it's pretty much everywhere except Sony. Sorry. Although it's coming to Sony PlayStation next year, too.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. Thank you, Mr. Paul Thurat. We turn now to the estimable Richard Campbell for his part of the back of the book. Starting with Run as Radio, this week's.

[Richard Campbell]

Show actually recorded just before Ignite, sort of a dancing with releases there. This is Microsoft Vice President Yitzchak Kesselman. Brilliant, brilliant guy. And it was the. We had a conversation about a new feature in Microsoft fabric, which is what they call, quote, unquote, real time intelligence. And I opened the conversation with the real thing, which is. So what do you say when you say real time? What do you mean, so. And it's an important conversation from a business context perspective too, because, you know, generally speaking, if we're talking about daily sales, you only reconcile to the day, or maybe you might get down to hourly. So the. Rick Real Time is still behind. It's just how behind. So like is there an ROI for taking action inside of a particular time window? We talked about factories that where jigs are getting out of alignment, you're mismanufacturing product. And so being able to stop it within five minutes saves you money versus stopping it within an hour. And so because it's complicated to make real time stream data and actually act on it. And the parts here were a combination of power BI and a combination of the whole back end services around fabric to allow you to get telemetry and continuously report on dashboard. So impressive stuff and certainly stuff I've rolled my own on for many years when I had customers who wanted to do this sort of thing, I. That factory scenario I'm describing is one I worked on ages ago and where it literally was minute by minute costing you dollars. Those things were when they got to qa be mismanufactured. So can we assess them on the fly. And so this was about building sort of the bits and pieces to allow you to connect all the parts together. So you walk through that back end hub, different kinds of dashboards. And in a term he used called activators, which really about can your software send you an email saying, hey, there's a problem based on the telemetry it's gathered, you know, how do you notify folks to get rapid action? So a very practical show about a new set of tools. This is Microsoft, I think, in a lot of ways at its best. But they've built out the fabric platform and now they're able to layer on these new capabilities to allow businesses to act quickly without making huge investments.

[Leo Laporte]

Excellent. Did you bring anything to share with the class this week?

[Richard Campbell]

I always do. And actually this was a fun one because it's Christmas, so I went for a gift. Oh. So this was a present given to me some time ago. It's been sitting in the closet now that I've sorted out the whiskey closet after moving. And so. And it was one of the ones I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to. When I got it, I think I. I thanked whoever gave it to me very nicely and thought it might be fun to bring it down and try it out. And then I actually researched it, you know, like I really got to figure out who gave this to me because they spent a lot of money.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, this is Mithuna, which is the Indian mythological character that's the equivalent of Gemini in this, in the Zodiac. And this is actually part of what they call the Zodiac series. So we're talking about an Indian whiskey, which I've not done before. And I want to lead off very much with, hey, you're talking about one of the cradles of civilizations, the Indus. Indus Valley was a famous Bronze Age culture, although it even starts before that. It's one of the six places in the world where agriculture emerged on its own. There's no evidence that it was brought there. They had their own crops. So the alluvial plain of the Indus Valley runs from northwestern in today what is northwest India and through Pakistan. But it's from the foothills of the west side of the Himalayas is this large river in alluvial plain that drains into the Arabian Sea beside the city of Karachi. A place, place I've been. And so we know from our stories here that anytime you have agriculture, you end up with alcohol. Right. It's a natural byproduct of that. And that area has grown rice and wheat and sugar canes and grape for millennia, many millennia. It's one of the first sugar cane comes from New guinea. And it propagated. There's evidence of it propagating into areas of China and into South Asia, like this area 8,000 years ago, like. So I guess as early as you get when you talk about agricultural cultures, like arguably the Fertile Crescent is maybe a thousand years before that. But this is super old school. And so let's be very clear that there were not as much as there are foreign entities that were in India for a long time. They did not introduce these people to alcohol. They had their own own. That being said, whiskey came to India during the British Raj. So when the Brits were in India, they brought whiskey there in the early 1800s.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a ethnic hard liquor for India prior to this? I mean, what. What do they drink?

[Richard Campbell]

They mostly beer, so. And not typically grain based because grains did not grow particularly well there. It's too tropical. So the big product would be sugarcane. The natural alcohol for them would be derived from rum, from molasses. Okay. But the evidence of distillation is a different can of worms because you need Alambic stills, if you talk about early stills and so forth. So they probably made a variation on the sort of showed you like 15 to 20% derived from sugarcane. It's very plentiful. It is not a food. Like, there's a real significant discussion about taking a food grain like wheat and making it into booze rather than feeding people when you have a nation that populous. And so for the most part, a lot of that alcohol was resisted just because it's a waste of food. Right. Again, you get back to you need agriculture to have an abundance of food, to actually want to store it in a way. And converting it into alcohol is a way to store.

[Leo Laporte]

Store it.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, they're the, the. You're also going to bump into some interesting political elements about what you would consider indigenous people to India. When you're talking about Indus Valley cultures and, and going up into Tajikistan and Rajdhan like that, all those areas, there have been people around there for a really long time. And so the conversations about who was first and where they came from and so forth is complicated. And. And then it's easy to stick your foot in it at being a Westerner. So I'm speaking carefully for a reason that it's a big deal exactly who's from where and who controls what. You know, Kashmir is still a conflict zone to this day between India and Pakistan. And this is right in the. That's the upper foothills of where the. Where the area we're talking about here that was. Is the Indis Valley. So this is, this is as far east as Alexander the Great God. Like these are. This is a very historical part of the world in a culture at the moment that doesn't focus a lot on its history. It's focused on its future because there's a lot to do.

[Leo Laporte]

But it is in some ways the.

[Richard Campbell]

Cradle of civilization in many respects.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And. But I also deeply appreciative, as someone who's traveled very heavily, that, you know, agriculture emerged in the. In South America with quinoa and tomatoes and beans and corn.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

And it emerged in. In the Far east with pork and chicken and rice, and it emerged in the Fertile Crescent with grain, with the grains of barley and wheat and and so forth. Like, it's not a unique experience. It didn't come from just one place. It came from many places and different times. I mean, again, spanning thousands of years, without a doubt, but very much prehistory, Neolithic, Chaleolithic and bronze is when you get all of these agricultural entities. And this was one of them. I just didn't want to come storming in talking about whiskey in India without acknowledging the fact that there's been people there for many thousands of years and they made lots of things. They were very, very careful, capable. But if you're going to talk about whiskey, you end up talking about the English, which, again, is touchy. So the Indians liked whiskey and they made their own. They just didn't make it from grain because grain was very valuable. You know, it was food and so they made it mostly from sugar cane. So what? When For a long time when you talked about whiskey from India, it was more like rum. They often used it. They would even use molasses to make neutral spirit and make a kind of blended whiskey with a little bit, bit of imported single malt in it, like 10 or 15% which would not qualify as a blended whiskey by Scottish standards or your EU standards at all. But a lot of those issues start to get resolved as you get the opening up of India into the Western world. And so by the 80s, grain production starting to expand substantially. And the first, first real whiskey style distillery is a company called mret, which I probably should have opened with, but I didn't have a bottle handy and I did have this. So Amrit made their first kinds of whiskey in the early 80s and as grain production expanded there was the culture of single malt there. So they mostly just made blends. Their popular whiskey going back to the mid-80s is a thing called prestige blend. But by the early 2000s, which really corresponds with the modernization of, growing, of hybridization of grains growing well in the Indian subcontinent. So I just really want to associate this with food that they. It wasn't until the early 2000s that you get the kinds of wheat and barleys and things that grow extremely well in their conditions and they make a lot. And so now it's not a really rare product that you have to be careful with with. And the same company, Emorett, that had been making these blends from the 80s launched the first single malts. But they actually launched it in Glasgow in 2004 and sold it in. While they were aging it in India, they only sold it in Europe for the first few years. They didn't actually try and sell it into the Indian market until 2010, which is weird, you know that you're not actually selling your own product. But you can understand why that's where the cult, the culture of single malt comes from Scotland. So they focused on that, that to sort of introduce that idea into Indian as an Indian product. And to be clear, when you talk about total volume sold of whiskey style products, India is the largest market in the world now. It also has the largest population in the world and it also has a very insular liquor market. The importing terror. To import whiskey into India, I think you pay 150% tariff on top of that. So they've protected their own alcohol market fairly heavily. And there is about a dozen distilleries in India today. And all of the big players in the liquor industry, Diageo, Suntory and Seagrams all have entities in India today. They have bought in or have somehow gotten involved. And so it's. There's a reason that the India market is as massive as it is now. This particular whiskey, which is made by a company called Paul John, which is literally named for its founder. Paul P. John, who's from Bangalore, founded the company in 1992. Didn't come out of nowhere. He is the son of a plantation owner and liquor baron from Karnataka, which is the province right beside the little province of Goa, which is where this is from. And they own three different distilleries in India, largely through acquisition. They also make wine and brandy. They have their own lines in that area as well. And they get that when they acquire the Chitali distilleries from the Maharajan government, which is another province in southern India. A lot of these businesses where government started and operated and they've gradually sold them off into private enterprise to scale them up. And that buying that distillery allowed them to make enough neutral spirit to really start making large scale blends. And so production qualities, quantities go up. They're mostly making blended whiskies. They don't get into single malts a little bit later. And just to round out the sort of story of the John Paul Distillery Company, in 2017 they sold 51% of the ownership to Sazerac, which is the American group group out of Frankfurt, Kentucky that makes primarily bourbon. But then those are the guys who make Eagle Rare and Buffalo Trace and.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they make some good stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Bunch of a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bunch of.

[Leo Laporte]

Was there a Paul John?

[Richard Campbell]

So here's a Paul John. He's an actual person, he's still alive. I'm going to get the company only started in the 90s and so this is not a long term company in.

[Leo Laporte]

That sense like a well known.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, he's fairly famous and he's very quite the. His whiskey line is quite respectful. This is nice whiskey and it is very different architecturally from Scottish whiskey. Starting with different barley. They use a six row barley that they grow in the hills of the Himalayas. Again this is when we get into the tailoring of grains to an environment. You're dealing with the Indian subcontinent. It's quite a bit hotter and wetter and so the, the typical two row barley doesn't grow that well that there particularly barley. And it, it's different, it's a different grain. And so it has a lower alcohol content because the protein and enzyme counts are so much Higher. And so when you make wart from six row barley, you get about 5% alcohol from the wart rather than 7 or 8%. The typical, what they call burrs beer when you're making it from two row barley. So it's a different barley, it's local barley like it's Indian barley. Legit. They are using mostly a Scottish technique but with locally made equipment. So stainless steel mash tons, wood washbacks and copper stills that are designed like Scottish ones but again made locally. So they have reflex bulbs, they have long rising lie arms for long reflux. There's only one pair of stills in the the John Paul distillery in Goa. This is. So it's a 15,000liter wash still and a 9500liter spirit still. Still relatively small, but they do come in at the classic numbers. They come in at about 63% for their initial new make the clear spirit before they're going to age it, but they will cut it with water before they barrel it. Because you're living again in the Indian subcontinent where it's very warm and humid and so they tend to lose water faster than alcohol.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting. The angel share is a little watery.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's also, it's also large. Like we talk about 2% losses to Angel Share in Scotland. They're talking 10% loss. And but it'll also be more water and alcohol. So the ABV can actually rise. You don't want to get too high. It gets really bitter. Right. As the alcohol level increases, it'll pull more phenols from the wood. And so the argument is that it ages three times faster than a year in wood in India is like a one year. Three is like, it's like three years in India, it's like three years in Scotland for one year in India. So they don't tend to put age declarations on these whiskeys because they age so quickly. And again, people don't like low numbers. Their rack houses are cool, they're not actually cooled, but they are concrete, steel frame, low stack like four barrels high. And again they don't stay in very long. They mostly make blends. They make a couple of popular single malts at a reasonably price. And that is not this whiskey. This idea they call the Zodiac series, which would argue that there's 12 of them. I've only found two in the Zodiac series and really this is the only one. The Mithuna seems to be the one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like a serial killer hunter there. It's like I've only found a few.

[Leo Laporte]

In the I really enjoyed the Zodiac series. Yes, it's quite good. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

But again, you're talking that seven row barley and then sort of typical distillation method. Unpeated, no chill filtration. I'm wondering if they put color in it because it's really dark. Like that's surprisingly dark. It was aged American virgin oak. Nobody says for sure how long. They think it's only a couple of three years. And then it's got a finish in bourbon casks. Again, classical inexpensive approach to doing things. Those would be 250 liter casks. Maybe only a year in that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So let's have a taste. 58%. So there's a nose to. This is heady. Right. It's a strong alcohol flavor. There's no two ways about that. But then really fruity.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like the.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the reasons they call it Gemini kind of comes at you two ways. Like it's. It's so potent and yet it's really nice on the tongue. It's very warming. This is good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like you traveling to Goa.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But you wouldn't. It's $300. Oh, yeah. If you can find.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a great gift.

[Richard Campbell]

It was. And it's exactly how you're gonna get it. So the original production was from 2018, I think. I got this one in 2020 or 2021 again as a gift. And it's just sat on the shelf. I hadn't tasted it. I had no idea. It's not going to become your favorite whiskey. This is an ideal gift. This is some. You want to give someone a whiske they've never had before. That's special. Right. And you like them a lot because you're about to drop three bigs on them. That's a lot of money. So I hope you like them because if you can find one, it's really gonna be experienced. But, you know. Will I get another one?

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

Will I drink this one slowly? Yeah, you bet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you ever figure out who gave it to you?

[Richard Campbell]

I haven't.

[Leo Laporte]

No idea.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. People give me a lot of whiskey, man. And normally when I.

[Leo Laporte]

When I tell you it was me.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm pretty sure it's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Me. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

And one of the things, you know, sometimes someone gives me a very nice whiskey that I. And I know whiskey pretty well. So it's like, well, that's an expensive whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you very much. And put it aside. I did not know with this one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I just put it On. Oh, it's an Indian whiskey. That's cool. Put it on the shelf.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

But giving a bottle of amaranth and so forth, then they sort of take it off. And I look at it and I start. I start to research and I'm like, oh. Oh, my special. Oh. I mean, arguably, this is about as expensive as Indian whiskey gets.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like, do you have a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Bottles like that in your.

[Richard Campbell]

In your beginning to wonder?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you might want to look into the. How many bottles are in there?

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

100. 100. Is it like a wine closet or.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, it's in the. It's in the wine cellar. Color. But they're stacked.

[Leo Laporte]

Keep them on the side or you keep them.

[Richard Campbell]

No, there's. Yeah, you keep them up. Right. You don't need to. You don't need to lay whiskey. That's because it doesn't need to worry.

[Leo Laporte]

That you do that. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's foil sealed and stuff. It's irrelevant.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

That being said, like, you can. Most of these bottles, and this is one of them, it does have a cork in it. Right. Like, the base of it is actually cork. So I have had a whiskey bottle dried out, dried cork tour. And now, you know, and I have. Because of the wine tools, I have the kit to extract the damage and filter and d. Yeah. Surprise. That's a surprise for me. Like, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Merry Christmas.

[Richard Campbell]

Nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

I have nothing to go.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's an odd duck. No two ways about it. Somebody went to great lengths to find me a very unusual whiskey. Enough that I didn't know it was that unusual.

[Leo Laporte]

But I made friends.

[Richard Campbell]

I thought I'd share it with all of you. I don't like flashing expensive whiskey on the show. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I wouldn't. I wouldn't hesitate. I was gonna say we are living through you, Richard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Vicariously.

[Richard Campbell]

When I haven't been back up to Scotland for a while, but I often go and grab like a ton. 1509 or something. Rick. Really? Where you have to go to the distillery to get it. And they are not inexpensive, but they are very, very special. And I think you've tried one of my 1015. I did.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the thing that remember is you are not. This is not a buying guide. This is a tour of the greatest whiskies in the world. Or the worst. Yeah, I just did.

[Richard Campbell]

I. The past two years of doing this, the industry has been shifting, or at least I've been more aware of how it's changed. And I'm a sucker for craftsmen. I like people who work hard to make a thing they care about. Doesn't matter where it is and when I. And you've only seen me angry about whiskey when I found people who are not that. Who are, you know, being pretentious about making a terrible product. That's expensive. Expensive, right. And I'll happily indict them when I find it. But when I find someone who's made something really great, I really want to celebrate it again.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of us are enjoying them through you. I'm not going to run to the store and buy Mithuna, but we enjoy it through your stories and. And your tasting and all that. So don't hesitate.

[Richard Campbell]

Been a lot of fun for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Break out the good stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Been a crazy year. That's kind of how I felt when I realized what I had in my cupboard here was like, oh, that's not a bad way to end the year. Something special.

[Leo Laporte]

I have donned the sorting hat so I can tell you who's naughty, who's nice, and Slytherin for the lot of you. I just want to say what a year this has been with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, and I. I think I speak for all of you winners and dozers. This is. This has been a great show for the year 2024 and will continue to be a great part of our network into 2025. And we're very happy. Happy about that. I hope you both have a wonderful holiday.

[Paul Thurrott]

You too.

[Leo Laporte]

And a happy New Year. We will next week be doing the best of.

[Paul Thurrott]

So wait, we're not doing this until January 8th?

[Richard Campbell]

January.

[Leo Laporte]

Three weeks off, dude.

[Paul Thurrott]

God damn. I'm gonna forget how to do it.

[Richard Campbell]

You're gonna have to phone me. I know. It's gonna happen on Wednesdays. We're just gonna phone each other and talk about stuff just to get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that could be a club.

[Richard Campbell]

All I know is I missed two shows in a row this year, and it really upset Paul. Kind of was in a state.

[Leo Laporte]

This is his social life. I mean, let's. Let's get this straight here. No, we. What are you doing for. For the holidays, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

We.

[Paul Thurrott]

We've.

[Richard Campbell]

We're staying at a friend's apartment who's out of town for the week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you mentioned that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. My. My youngest is. I think I've sort of said obliquely. My youngest is pregnant, due in March. First grandchild.

[Leo Laporte]

This be your first.

[Paul Thurrott]

This be the first grandchildren.

[Leo Laporte]

How exciting. You must. You guys must be thrilled.

[Richard Campbell]

Grandmothers are Losing their minds.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't see what the difference is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, my grand. The grandmothers are losing their mind. So I'm trying to stay calm because nobody else is. But yeah, I'm super.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they know if it's a boy or girl?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's a girl.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's so great. Well, I expect many pictures.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I mean, I try and I. My daughter is a far more private person than I am. So one of the conversations when this was coming up, we really don't want this on social media. I'm like, listen, I make a lot of shows, so it's, it's hard.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to tell you, it's been hard for my family over the 45 years I've been doing. I've been broadcasting 50 years. Broadcasting, because when you're on the air that much, it's hard not to talk about your life, the people in your life. And there haven't been a lot of secrets. I have had. I've been talked. I've had the talking to from almost every member of my family saying, would you knock it off?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Usually in the form of dad, dad, I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very proud of you guys. Anyway, have a wonderful Christmas with the family. Richard, how about you? Paul? You're going to be up here?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we'll be here through New Year's and then we go to Mexico in the middle of January and one of.

[Richard Campbell]

Those weeks is going to be with us in Mexico.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we're going to meet up with Richard and Stacy and PV, as we call it.

[Richard Campbell]

I love tv.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're going to have a great time. That's a wonderful part of the country.

[Richard Campbell]

So, yeah, we'll be doing the show together from the deck of third floor suite.

[Leo Laporte]

How wonderful.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I guess I could arrange us to be having massages during the show. That would be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

And then I said.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, like a dog, like just kicking my leg, like in the back.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, have a great Christmas, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Love to your family, too. And, well, I guess we'll just all see each other in the, in the new year.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, for sure. You're gonna do something fun, I presume. Everybody consolidates on you, Leo, for. For Christmas. You're the hub.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, gosh. Why would you assume that?

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe I'm wrong. Okay?

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe I'm not a hub hub. I'm a spoke.

[Richard Campbell]

So you'll be going somewhere. You'll go somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Christmas Eve, we're gonna make. I am gonna cook and we're gonna. I ordered a lovely Turkey from the poultry capital.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So they are descending on you.

[Leo Laporte]

So some. A few will descend. Not very many. And then we're gonna. We, Lisa and I, we've. We become big at opting out. And so Christmas Day, we bought tickets to go see the new Nosferatu movie in the theater.

[Paul Thurrott]

And keeping with the holiday spirit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, vampires. Christmas says. Wait a minute, we're having Christmas at our house. We'll be there after the movie.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll see what the runtime is. I don't know. We'll see how we're doing.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not. We know we had the house that everybody came to and it got old. You know, every so often we do a Christmas out of the country just to break up the pat. People get a little entitled after a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think that's kind of what happened.

[Richard Campbell]

We're going to go to Costa Rica and then, you know, and then.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've always wanted to fly on Christmas Day. That was my thing. Like, no one flies on Christmas Day. Let's just go, you know, at the time to Europe.

[Leo Laporte]

How was that, Paul?

[Paul Thurrott]

I never did it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the day to fly is. Is the 4th of July because you can see fireworks all the way across the country. It's kind of fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Even turns out if you fly over Syria, you can see that any day.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you just are in Mexico, any day of the week, you can see that. It's just. It's just the way it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, my father.

[Paul Thurrott]

Celebrate life.

[Leo Laporte]

Have a wonderful few weeks off. Have a happy holiday. We'll see in the new year. January 8th. We do the show every Wednesday except for the next two Wednesdays at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time. That's 1900 UTC. You can watch us live thanks to the club. We now have eight different streams. Discord for the club, TWiT members, YouTube, Twitch, Kick X. TikTok actually might not be TikTok in the new year. We'll see LinkedIn and Facebook. That's the. That's your choice. But you don't have to watch live. We do welcome the hundreds of people watching live right now. Hello, everybody. The best thing to do really is to just download a copy. You can get it from the website, Twitter, TV, WW. There's a link there to the YouTube channel. That's where you can select a little clip. If you want to share that with somebody else, we'd appreciate it. Great way to share the show. Or just subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get a copy as soon as we're done. Makes it easy. It's free and it's fun. So thank you everybody. Thank you. Especially the Club Twit members. I hope you all have a happy holiday. We'll see you next year. Remember, best of next week on Windows Weekly. Take care guys.

[Paul Thurrott]

You too.

[Leo Laporte]

I do want to ask a little tiny favor from all of you, not just Club Twit members. Every year you may remember, we do a survey of our audience. We want to get to know you.

[Richard Campbell]

A little bit better.

[Leo Laporte]

It helps us with sales because we can say, you know, as we often do, 70% of our audience are it decision makers that that kind of thing. It's a very quick survey. Shouldn't only take you a couple of minutes. Twit TV survey this is the new 20242025 survey. We're starting a little bit earlier this year than we usually do. It just helps us and it would be a be doing us all a favor if you if you did it so in between shows, maybe Twitter TV Survey thank you so much.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now AT T Mobile get four 5G phones on us in four lines for.

[Richard Campbell]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Richard Campbell]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Richard Campbell]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Richard Campbell]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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