Windows Weekly 913: The Best of 2024

Summary

Summary of Windows Weekly 913: The Best of 2024

Windows Weekly 913: The Best of 2024 is a comprehensive episode hosted by Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell from TWiT.tv. Released on December 23, 2024, the episode delves into significant technological developments over the year, focusing primarily on Microsoft's legal battles, AI integrations, hardware innovations, and industry leadership changes. The hosts provide insightful discussions, backed by expert opinions and notable quotes, offering listeners a well-rounded overview of the tech landscape in 2024.

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1. New York Times Lawsuit Against Microsoft and OpenAI

The episode kicks off with the news that The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement. The heart of the dispute revolves around the allegation that OpenAI's ChatGPT has been trained using The New York Times' copyrighted content without proper licensing.

• Paul Thurrott expresses his frustration with The New York Times: "The New York Times broadly makes me insane every day... they have the cookie. But the point is, anyway, I love wire cutter. I pay for that separately." [02:08]

• Leo Laporte counters the lawsuit by highlighting the concept of transformative use: "If a machine does it, it's different than if a human." [02:53]

• Paul Thurrott compares the situation to Google's previous legal battles with content publishers: "The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement... similar to what Google did with news publishers..." [04:35]

The hosts debate the merits of the lawsuit, discussing the implications for fair use and the future of AI training models. Richard Campbell suggests a possible settlement where Microsoft and OpenAI might compensate The New York Times, likening it to Google's eventual agreements with publishers: "There will be a settlement and that the New York Times will be paid for this use." [07:33]

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2. Microsoft's Copilot Pro and AI Integration in Microsoft 365

A significant portion of the discussion centers on Microsoft's Copilot Pro, an AI-enhanced version of Microsoft 365 aimed at consumers.

• Paul Thurrott outlines the rapid rollout of AI features: "They implemented everything... the GPT builder is coming but they announced it. I don't even know what to say anymore." [24:21]

• Leo Laporte critiques the pricing structure: "You're paying as an individual $20 per month... that is not worth the $20 a month..." [26:36]

• Richard Campbell and Paul Thurrott debate the value proposition, with Richard noting that Copilot Pro might be more valuable for developers: "Copilot Pro is a very targeted offering with a very clear value proposition. Almost any developer should probably have this." [30:42]

The trio discusses the challenges consumers face with the high cost and limited perceived benefits of Copilot Pro, questioning whether the AI features justify the additional expense.

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3. Supply Chain Attack in Debian: The XE Utility Incident

The hosts recount a critical security incident where a Microsoft engineer discovered anomalies tied to a set of compression utilities within a Debian distribution. This supply chain attack had the potential to wreak havoc across numerous Linux distributions worldwide.

• Paul Thurrott narrates the incident: "This would have gone out to every stable Linux distribution... but the individual randomly found it, saving what could have been one of the biggest technology disasters." [52:48]

• Richard Campbell praises the diligence of the security staff: "It was tricky to find... he twigged it when he saw the delayed performance." [53:08]

• Leo Laporte emphasizes the severity: "It's incredible... this is the world's biggest phone." [specific timestamp not provided]

The discussion highlights the importance of vigilance in software development and the potential consequences of unnoticed vulnerabilities.

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4. Lenovo ThinkBook Hybrid PC: A Two-in-One Innovation

A standout hardware discussion focuses on Lenovo's ThinkBook Gen 5 Hybrid PC, a device that merges an Android tablet with an Intel-based laptop.

• Paul Thurrott describes the device's uniqueness: "The screen has a computer inside of it that runs Android... in the bottom there's a core Ultra Intel... you can switch between the environments instantly." [98:40]

• Micah Sargent adds details on its functionality: "You can run Microsoft, it's like, you can run Android as an app alongside your Windows apps." [99:03]

• Richard Campbell and Leo Laporte marvel at its capabilities and pricing: "It's crazy town. But it's also kind of interesting... starting to look good." [102:09]

The ThinkBook Hybrid PC exemplifies the evolving landscape of personal computing, offering flexibility and dual-operating systems to cater to diverse user needs.

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5. Intel's Leadership Shakeup: CEO Pat Gelsinger's Departure

A major industry update involves Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who faces pressure from the board amid ongoing struggles to compete with rivals like AMD and advancements in AI.

• Paul Thurrott expresses skepticism about Intel's future: "The parallels between Microsoft and Intel are super strong... Intel has has nothing to do with anything." [157:00]

• Leo Laporte discusses Intel's strategic failures: "They missed the switch to mobile... And by missing that, really missed the next generation of computing." [158:20]

• Richard Campbell speculates on Intel's possible dismantling: "There's only one outcome here for Intel. They get dismantled." [162:03]

The conversation underscores Intel's challenges in innovating and adapting to market changes, highlighting the fragility of industry giants in rapidly evolving tech sectors.

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6. AI Search with ARC Search on Android

ARC Search, an AI-driven search tool, is introduced as a transformative product on Android platforms.

• Paul Thurrott explains its functionality: "It's more like a front end to search. It uses generative AI to create a nice presentation of something... [127:30]

• Richard Campbell and Leo Laporte discuss user experiences and potential applications, comparing it to traditional search engines and its integration with AI capabilities.

The hosts explore how ARC Search enhances the search experience by providing structured, AI-generated summaries, potentially revolutionizing information retrieval on mobile devices.

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7. Microsoft's Recall Feature and Privacy Concerns

A contentious topic is Microsoft's Recall feature, available exclusively on Copilot Plus PCs, which has sparked privacy debates.

• Micah Sargent highlights the controversy: "Microsoft Recall is a feature that will only be made available on these PCs... requires the minimum of 25 gigabytes." [78:08]

• Paul Thurrott defends the feature's security measures: "It's protected by BitLocker, full disk encryption... [86:26]

• Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell discuss the importance of user control and Microsoft's transparency: "They are offering it during setup and you have full controls in the system through the Settings app..." [79:56]

The segment addresses misconceptions about data usage for AI training, emphasizing that Microsoft has implemented robust encryption and user consent mechanisms to protect privacy.

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8. Whiskey Tasting and Personal Stories

Interspersed with technical discussions, the hosts share personal anecdotes about whiskey tasting, adding a relatable and entertaining dimension to the episode.

• Paul Thurrott introduces a new whiskey: "It's a new Middleton whiskey... smooth with hints of pear." [171:08]

• Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell provide tasting notes and reflections on the craftsmanship behind the product.

While not central to the episode's main themes, these segments humanize the hosts and offer a lighthearted break from the technical discourse.

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9. Closing Remarks and Upcoming Topics

In their concluding remarks, the hosts recap the episode's highlights and tease upcoming content for 2025.

• Leo Laporte thanks the team and encourages listeners to support the network: "If you like what you hear and you want to continue, please consider joining Club Twit." [summary based on closing sections]

• Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell mention future discussions, including deeper dives into new hardware and software innovations.

The episode wraps up with warm holiday wishes, reinforcing the community aspect of the Windows Weekly series.

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Notable Quotes

• "The New York Times wants to have a carve-out because they're special and they're not special." — Paul Thurrott [07:10]

• "Fair use is what the definition of fair use. Playing 10 seconds of a song is fair use. Playing the entire song and not paying the artist is theft." — Paul Thurrott [14:01]

• "We live in a world where people who don't know anything about anything have like super strong opinions about those things..." — Paul Thurrott [141:43]

• "What we as a network and what we as individuals really strive to do is to spread light, not heat." — Leo Laporte [139:32]

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Conclusion

Windows Weekly 913: The Best of 2024 offers an in-depth exploration of pivotal events and trends in the tech industry over the past year. From legal battles over AI training data to groundbreaking hardware innovations and leadership changes in major corporations, the hosts provide a nuanced analysis that is both informative and engaging. Through expert discussions and personal insights, the episode serves as a valuable resource for listeners seeking to understand the complexities and developments shaping the technology landscape in 2024.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Hello, everybody. It's me, Leah laporte. Richard Campbell and Paul Thurat have the week off. Of course they do. It's Christmas. But we decided it'd be a good time for us to put together kind of the best of 2024. The best of Windows Weekly. Next podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurot]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 913 for Christmas Day 2024. The best of 2024. Hello, everybody. Leo Laporte here. Richard Campbell, Paul Thurat enjoying their families, I'm sure right now on Christmas Day, as I hope you are as well. But we're glad you're here. For our best of episode. We'll kick things off with a story that Microsoft is being sued by the New York Times.

[Richard Campbell]

You want to talk about the New York Times?

[Paul Thurot]

I do. I love them so much. So I hate the New York Times. However, as a content creator. Yeah, every day. So I do read the paper. I should say I read it. I also read the Washington Post every day I'm away.

[Leo Laporte]

You gotta have them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't mind the Washington Post usually. Although they're tech guys. I have.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. I shouldn't even mind bother. But, but the New York Times, broadly makes me insane every day. But, but. Okay, whatever I, I, we, Whatever you think of the New York Times generated.

[Leo Laporte]

Just play wordle and okay, move on. Sure.

[Paul Thurot]

Any of it. They screwed that up. Okay, whatever. Anyway, don't get me started. If they, if they ruin the wire cutter, I'm going to murder somebody. But the point is, anyway, I love wire cutter. I pay for that separately. I see. Let me tell you my biggest scrap with the New York Times. This is, this is what the New York Times does. I pay for this thing. I also pay for the wire cutter. Right? So whatever that costs, whatever that subscription costs. If you want to play their games. Does it cost? They have the cookie.

[Leo Laporte]

But you can buy one thing that gives you everything, right? Don't you?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, you can. And every single time I log into the web, I get a full page ad that says, hey, we know you're a subscriber, but you should subscribe to everything. You know what? Screw you. That is, that's offensive. That's crazy. You have ads and you're trying to upsell me from the thing I'm already paying for. No, no, no, no, no. I hate them so much. Anyway, the New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI, which I think is be for copyright infringement. The idea is that they have basically can demonstrate very easily that they have trained OpenAI ChatGPT on New York Times copyrighted.

[Leo Laporte]

You know who else is trained on New York Times content? Me.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, we do exactly what OpenAI does with all of our shows, which is read the stories and then talk about them that. Are you going to criminalize ingesting content?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, so what? You're just. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So if a machine does it, it's different than if a human.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I think the argument here is that the arg. Actually, I don't think Microsoft and, or Open AI have made the argument because these companies talk privately trying to settle this. Right. That they are doing some sort of a transformative or. Yeah, there's a transformative process that occurs where we are, yes, we are digesting your content, but the thing we're spitting out is not your content. It's a discussion about whatever topic that was informed by your content to which the New York Times says, excuse me, look at these verbatim, side by sides where you're literally taking our exact content that we charge people to read.

[Richard Campbell]

You're making the fair use argument like what Leo does when he references a New York Times article is infer.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, even if I read a paragraph verbatim, it's still fair use.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, because you editorial.

[Leo Laporte]

Incidentally, as Mike Masnick points out, the New York Times does this to other journals too. So I, I, they want to criminalize their own behavior.

[Richard Campbell]

I think, I think you're overreacting, Leo. I think this is, I don't think.

[Paul Thurot]

That'S what this is at all, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they don't. That's an unintended consequen. They want, they want to have a carve out because they're special and they're not special.

[Paul Thurot]

They want to have a carve out because what they do is expensive and they create unique, you know, content of their own that they charge people for and they would like to be paid for this if it's going to be used for this purpose. This is actually the closest comparison I think there is for this is what Google did with news publishers big and small from around the world where they were just screen scraping and putting the results into search and publishers started suing them and government started going after them. So now there's this thing called Google Publisher or whatever that has an agreement with every content publishing house on the entire planet. And every month there are multiple blog posts about how we've reached a new agreement with Someone else who creates their own content. What the Times want is that to happen, which I think is perfect. As a content creator, I think it's perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me read this paragraph from Mike's Mike Masnik detector. The larger point is, if the New York Times wins, well, the New York Times might face its own receiving end on lawsuits. The New York Times is somewhat infamous in the news world and you might verify this or not for using other journalists work as starting point and building off of it frequently without any credit at all.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

If the New York Times successfully argues reading a third party article to help its reporters, quote, learn about the news before reporting its own version of it is copyright infringement, it might not like how that's turned around by tons of other news organizations against the New York Times. If this is a common creator's argument that somehow something I'm doing is special in a way when a machine does it.

[Paul Thurot]

No, that's not, that's not it. That is not it at all. No, the point is verbatim copying and.

[Leo Laporte]

Saying somebody under your own paywall, somebody might go to Chat GPT instead of reading the New York Times.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm saying that the New York Times has demonstrated that they spit out verbatim copy from the New York Times to.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, but it's still people that are.

[Paul Thurot]

Paying them and it's still fair use.

[Leo Laporte]

If it doesn't have any limit Times. Nobody's going to read the New York Times by going to Chat GPT.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, that's like saying no one's going to read the New York Times on the Internet, which is what people probably did say 20 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not like that. Look, go ahead and, go ahead and use Chat GPT and try to get the New York Times story. You're not going to get it.

[Paul Thurot]

No, you're not going to get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Just because the New York Times was able to configure some prompt to get that. You are not going to be able to read the New York Times on Chat GPT. That's. That's not the usage of it. Well, and if that's not the usage, then it's fair use.

[Paul Thurot]

If somebody was taking your podcast and just republishing them.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's not republishing them. That's the thing. New York Times claims it's republishing them. It's not. It's transformative use. And I tell you, it is a slippery slope. If the New York Times wins this, which by the way, they're not, because every single court has Held again and again that whatever an AI does with that content is transformative use. It is fair.

[Paul Thurot]

So I think the end result is actually going to be just that there will be a settlement and that the New York Times will be paid for this use. And that's what it really wants. And the lawsuit was a measure it had to take because they could not reach an agreement as to what this was worth. That's something they've come out and said. We tried in good faith.

[Leo Laporte]

Google has opened this can of worms by paying some journalism sites and I think actually many journalism sites and I think open AI has as well. And so unfortunately they'll vote this can of worms. I wish they had just said no, no, this is transformative use. This is no different than a human reading.

[Paul Thurot]

It's a tough thing. It's a. It's. It's a tough one. That's a tough one.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know software there, Leo. Like, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they're. No, no, they're amp. They're saying there is something specially different about a machine doing this than a human.

[Richard Campbell]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not true.

[Paul Thurot]

That to me doesn't really.

[Richard Campbell]

I think there's something specially different about a human doing it than a machine. But in general, what is the difference? Technology.

[Paul Thurot]

The. The region of Harvard was just fired for plagiarizing and if you look at what that plagiarism was, it was nothing. This is way more blatant than what that woman did. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean I appreciate these rules need to be pressed against. I don't know which way this is going to go, but if we don't have this pressure, it is going.

[Paul Thurot]

You can't wait till it's over. The problem with technology is it moves so fast and then some market disappear. It's. It's not like journalism in general or newspapers specifically have been doing great recently. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the argument. But I think that's a, that's a bogus argument. Like we have to save the creators.

[Richard Campbell]

We're also going to see both sides of this because the Japanese are going the other way. Right. Like they are more and more opening up everything is for anything touched by an AI is open to use.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's correct.

[Richard Campbell]

Real question, just a real question of what's going to happen where. What's going to happen to creators. Right. Like we're going to. The experiment is taking place.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And it could be destructive. We don't know. It's going to be interesting. But you Know the times gone through the near death experience of all news is free.

[Paul Thurot]

I have a goofy little, a goofy little blog of my own, right? So let's say I'm looking at my newsfeed and some site that does what I do says hey, Microsoft announced something today. And I go to. And of course what I seek out is the original Microsoft post. I don't want to go to base it on whatever they write. A lot of these goons don't even link to that. So I got to look search it or I think about like okay, where could it be? What blog? You know, we went that we went through this on the show the other day and I found the original Microsoft thing. And then I write a story based on what Microsoft has said. Do I owe that original thing that was in my feed some sort of credit? Because that's where I saw that this happened. Or does that not matter? You know, I mean there's a little ethical debate but I mean that's the tip of the, that's the one pixel tip of this giant iceberg of what is ethical and, or legal. And this is what's. I don't know. I think the New York Times is right to want to be compensated for their content being used.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're insane, but okay, I don't think you want that to happen because I think you would be regret it in the long run. The New York look, they created some examples. I want you to go to ChatGPT and try to, you know, get the New York Times out.

[Paul Thurot]

That's a lot of work from a third party to do that. They're not like, you know, that I don't even know the content.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I mean my point is that these are specious examples the New York Times is providing. Is anybody going to go to chat GBT instead of reading the New York Times?

[Paul Thurot]

Not today, but people go to Wikipedia.

[Leo Laporte]

To read the news. It's a very good news source. Wikipedia is not doing original journalism. Sure, that's the next thing.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not a good place for doing editorialization.

[Paul Thurot]

I could picture someone saying in the same way they would say hey, you know Google or you know, hey, whatever Amazon's saying and say I heard something just happened, what's going on? And I could picture them doing that with open AI or whatever or ChatGPT or whatever comes out of that. I mean it is what it is today, but that doesn't mean it stays that way. I mean people Google search that stuff. So this is, I mean this is another way to get to that data. You know, it's fine if it's like this. You know, AI is great at summarizing things. And you can say, hey, look, here's a bullet list of all the important points of the story. That's. That's transformative, I guess, but just.

[Leo Laporte]

The New York Times doesn't want them to do that.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I could see, if I were.

[Leo Laporte]

Open AI, I would say, well, screw you, New York Times. We won't ingest your stuff, won't use your data. They should not ever pay for this stuff. That's a big slippery slope. They made a mistake.

[Paul Thurot]

Wow. All right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the question is, how good will a machine.

[Paul Thurot]

That's like saying, they sucked in my book. And you know that it's going to spit out chunks of it. And it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't spit out chunks of it. It transforms it. It summarizes it.

[Richard Campbell]

It does not. When it doesn't.

[Paul Thurot]

But what if it didn't? That's my point.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, stable diffusion ingests a lot of different artists, and maybe it can create something looks just like Thomas Kincaid, the painter of light. But Thomas Kincaid would have no justification. Exactly. They would have no justification, because that's how every painter works.

[Paul Thurot]

I do think there's a. Like, what people are waiting for with AI generated art for it to finally spit out something. We're like, wait a minute. That's a painting that exists. Like, you know, so far. No. Right.

[Micah Sargent]

But it's that.

[Paul Thurot]

Like, what is that? A million monkeys or whatever?

[Richard Campbell]

It was always. Well, let's face it. This whole thing started with the mangled Getty logos, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're mangled. Right? They're.

[Paul Thurot]

They, you know, so they transfer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

I wonder how Getty feels about that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Getty doesn't like it. They shouldn't put their, you know, pictures online.

[Paul Thurot]

I am surprised to hear you taking this stance.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, of course.

[Richard Campbell]

I am somebody who puts his copyrighted material online.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And because I. That's how I work. I look at. We don't do original journalism here. I don't.

[Micah Sargent]

Hold on a second.

[Paul Thurot]

But you do.

[Micah Sargent]

You do.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, we don't. I mean, most of our shows, like Twit, for instance, those are.

[Paul Thurot]

We're.

[Leo Laporte]

We're reading all the news articles and talking about them.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, but, you know, but you're not sitting. You're not narrating a red article.

[Leo Laporte]

Occasionally, I'll read a paragraph from it.

[Paul Thurot]

Sure, of course. But that's. That is fair use. That's fair. That's the definition of fair use. Playing 10 seconds of a song is fair use. Playing the entire song and not paying the artist is theft.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's just Chat GPT regurgitate entire New York Times articles ever.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and therein lies the use of this case. Those lines, right. Is it saying what is the, the problem?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, fair use. You need some kind of a definition of at what point does fair use cross the line into just copyright infringement? Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Do they and all right, and do they have to ensure that they don't. Like, could this just be an extra subroutine that says never regurgitate?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, sure. Right. It's probably, they probably have it in there and it's a screwed up like switch statement or something.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's got a bad bug. I mean like, but this is the point, right? Like we are in a new phase with new tools that can consume ravenously all the information available there and regurgitate it in various forms as long as it can. We, so now we have to modify and improve our fair use rules and say what's right, we're fair and what's not.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So one of the four tests of fair use, by the way, fair use, we act like it's a law.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not. It's the right to, it's the right to defend yourself in court, as Larry Lessig famously said.

[Paul Thurot]

But by the way, part, part of it involves actually actively protecting yourself. And that's really what the New York.

[Richard Campbell]

Times are doing here if they don't showing their intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

What they need to demonstrate. The four tests are include the effect of the use upon the potential market, what they have to demonstrate. And no court, by the way, this is a failed case, guarantee you. But what the court would have to say is yeah, people are reading ChatGPT instead of the New York Times. It's, it's hurting your market.

[Paul Thurot]

Are they, do they have to show that it's happening or that it could happen?

[Leo Laporte]

Because the effects of the potential market.

[Paul Thurot]

The purpose and character of your use.

[Leo Laporte]

The nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality, the portion taken and.

[Paul Thurot]

The effect of the New York Times has a market and that market could go down because people don't. They have to prove, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why they put all those clips in specious clips. They'd have to prove that somebody would read Chat GPT instead of the New York Times. Good luck, go ahead and try and do it.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I could you prove that no one would do it, that it's impossible that no one would say want to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you're not going to get the New York Times any more than you're.

[Paul Thurot]

Going to get honestly as it is anyway. But like I, anyway, look, I, it's a giant news gathering organization. They have enormous costs. Their business model is not, you know, doing well today for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

That's their rationale. But that's not a reason to throw.

[Richard Campbell]

Out fair use evolution of business.

[Paul Thurot]

But this is OpenAI is the spear, the head of the spear here. Right. For AI. So they're not just worried about, really about OpenAI. They're worried that if they allow this and do nothing about it that other less scrupulous places will use this as the example and say, look, you never protected your.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of history of mainstream media trying to preserve itself and preserve its business model by coming after new media. And that is just an old form of media trying to preserve its business model. It's not, it's not supporting, it doesn't support innovation, doesn't support the future. It says, well, let's go back to newspapers. Thank you very much.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know that that's their responsibility. They have a responsibility to the company to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's fine. And the courts are going to say no, we, you know, we're gonna, you're not.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, we'll see. I, I, we'll see. I, I don't think this will ever hit any courts. I think what's going to happen is.

[Richard Campbell]

That you called it. It's an extortion play. Pay us.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because we're special.

[Paul Thurot]

And that opens the, the floodgates because they were, like I said, there's a precedent with Google and I think that's the model they're going to have to, I mean look, Microsoft and open. I have kind of ridden this kind of free horse for quite a long time, you know, building up this incredible empire that no one can assail that has nothing to do with the New York Times or any newspaper. It has to do with Google and Amazon and all these small companies. Well.

[Richard Campbell]

And has been brought up in the chat and those tech giants are making billions or could.

[Paul Thurot]

Well that was in the lawsuit. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So get you. Yeah. Get your hand out now or forever, you know, hold your peace.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Or you gotta protect the shareholders. Yeah. Right. Yep. No, I really, I don't really think this is specific. I think it's more like this shows what's possible. Here are some examples. And it's, it's not like this is going to get better. No like, we also.

[Richard Campbell]

They also jumped to the biggest game. They went with the New York Times, which you should do. Name. And Microsoft. Yep, there you go.

[Paul Thurot]

Perfect. Smart. I think it was smart.

[Richard Campbell]

It's about. Well, and. And everything to lose. Because whatever the, you know, they.

[Paul Thurot]

Whatever precedent, what if they do lose? What happens? I mean, it's just the way it is right now. So whatever. I mean, you know, I. There's not. You lose whatever money it costs you to make this case happen and pay the lawyers, I guess. But it's not like the New York or Microsoft or OpenAI could like, countersue them for damages or something. I. You know, they're. So. It's this. I think this was. I. I'm surprised they didn't reach an agreement, frankly. Well, I'm sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Exactly. I'm sure Microsoft, now they're playing court step chicken.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I mean, this is what could have happened in the Epic Google case. Because these guys, you know, the, the terms that Epic wanted were what it is already doing for Spotify. Like, all it do was just be agreeable and do that thing. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

We're like.

[Paul Thurot]

But they're playing this game. We want to ride out those revenues as long as we can. Yeah. The difference between Spotify and Epic, by the way, is that games are something like 85% of the revenues that app stores make. Music is not. So that's the, that's the, that's the rationale there.

[Leo Laporte]

Incidentally. The other thing that's telling in this lawsuit is that the Times is demanding a jury trial because they know a.

[Paul Thurot]

Judge will throw it right.

[Richard Campbell]

An emotional play. Yeah. But if you only go with the facts, you're not going to win it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Well, that's their right.

[Leo Laporte]

They could, they could win it for the jury because the jury's gonna say, oh, the poor New York Times.

[Paul Thurot]

I. Yeah, I'm sure. I don't know that. I'm sure they seem very powerful to individuals. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

But having this case, having this resolved would only strengthen the ability to build LLMs because it adds certainty either way. And certainty is what you need when you want to raise money.

[Leo Laporte]

We wouldn't want to act as we did when the Internet started in favor of innovation and supporting a new technology and having the old technologies say, oh, well, wait a minute, what about us? It's like radio suing, tv, saying, well, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, hold on, that's a little too general. Because, I mean, you know, you could argue when cars were happening.

[Richard Campbell]

Microsoft. Holy cow.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean, what. Yeah. Like, what's the like, you know, we're not going to have cars because the guys that breed horses are too powerful.

[Leo Laporte]

No, here's what happens. Here's what happens. Microsoft and Google and OpenAI agree. They pay licensing fees which kills innovation where it really supposed to and needs to happen in open source. And that all you're doing is solidifying.

[Paul Thurot]

Who'S power of big tech, who's responsive. But you're talking this is very vague like New York Times, OpenAI, Microsoft, none of them have any responsibility to open source, right? They all have business models, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Why this is a terrible lawsuit. Because if they succeed either by in court or by getting a licensing agreement, the only people with disadvantages is open source AI development, which is the most important thing right now.

[Paul Thurot]

Period.

[Leo Laporte]

That lawsuit's going to go on for a while, don't you think? We shall see. It's one of many. You're watching the Best of Windows Weekly 2024 we're so glad you're here. Happy Holidays now AT T Mobile get.

[Paul Thurot]

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[Leo Laporte]

Restrictions apply on we go with the best of 2024. Let's talk a little bit about I think for Microsoft, the most important product announcement of the year, Copilot Pro.

[Paul Thurot]

I've gone through what I think of as the seven stages of guilt when it comes to AI. It is, it isn't, it's great, it's crazy. You know, but what Richard very calmly, rationally was like, nope, this is the year 2023 where we're, you know, Microsoft is going to announce things and then 2024 is going to be when they implement them. Right. And by the time I hit the end of the year I was on board with that. Yep, he was right all along and we didn't realize how right he was because less than two weeks into the year they implemented everything. I thought last year was crazy. What the, what like if you had said to me this is how 2024 is going to go down. They're going to slowly expand copilot for Microsoft 365 to bigger businesses and maybe lower the 300 license.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, smaller businesses go, yeah, they.

[Paul Thurot]

Got all the big, they had said we're going to bring this to consumers. So maybe sometime by mid year, you know, second half of the year we'll have a third tier of consumer Microsoft 365 which is a little more expensive. You know, we'll have the AI stuff. Maybe we're going to eventually allow. I mean look, there was no version of 2024 where they were going to let people like individuals build GPTs of their own. I don't even know why anyone would want to do that as a, like a normal mainstream human being. They did all of everything I said and more three days ago. Like it's all, it's out. Well the, the GPT builder is coming but they announced it. I, I, I don't know, I don't even know what to say anymore. And Well I do, I have one thing to say about this but Copilot Pro is the consumer product. Copilot Pro is basically copilot for Microsoft 365 but for consumers, right. It adds the AI features that are in all the Office apps. It gives you some consumer oriented things like the, whatever they're calling the image creator thing today. You get extra credits and extra quality and peak time usage and all that kind of stuff. And you're going to get this Copilot GPT builder so you can build your own GPT and This is the kind of thing Richard is actually doing right now. I think Leo is too.

[Leo Laporte]

I've dealt with OpenAI's chat GPT, but same. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So. And I've been. I've been thinking about how, how would I do this for myself? I have, you know, 30 years of.

[Leo Laporte]

Archives and perfect make a Paul Thurat expert system. You'll never have to write another article.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, not, not, not, not write another article, but rather one of the weird problems I have because of how much I write is, is that I can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Did I write this before?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. I'm like, did I do this or what did I say about this or what? You know, finding this stuff is actually very difficult. So that would, you know, be useful to me personally. I can't imagine anyone else would need this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

But imagine If MSDN and TechNet could have been put into system. Right. I don't know why they haven't done that. Frankly.

[Paul Thurot]

I. Maybe that is what Microsoft Learn becomes. Right. You know, we'll see. So they just announced a flurry of things. Okay, I'm sorry I mentioned Copilot Pro for consumers. Right. Which is the consumer version of Copilot.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the same price as ChatGPT.

[Paul Thurot]

So I'm $20 per user per month.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I pay right now you.

[Paul Thurot]

Have to have a Microsoft 365 subscription. You can. I have that as a consumer. And you have to. I'm sorry, I should say it has to be personal or family because remember, there's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And then. So you pay whatever you pay for that.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder if that would be better or worse or like it's the same as.

[Paul Thurot]

Let me. You know what, let's talk about that in one second. But let me just get through this list because I actually. To talk about that. I think this is. That's an important point. If you have a Microsoft 365 business account, you might do that as your own. Like you have a custom domain. You're like, I have the basic thing. You can't do Co Pilot Pro. You have to. So weird.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to do the $30 business one.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So they have the $30 business one that's available basically to all businesses. They've removed the exceptions. They've removed the baseline number of licenses.

[Richard Campbell]

ET no more 300.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So basically everyone on business can now get that co pilot is 10 bucks a month more.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is weird.

[Paul Thurot]

It is. Right. But we're going to though. But I want to get to Copilot on mobile means there's an iOS and an Android native app for Copilot, which they released and never discussed back in December. This is why. And then Copilot is appearing also in the Microsoft 365 mobile app, which remembers the all up. It's kind of like OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, I think all in one app or whatever. It's going to be in there. Well as well, if it isn't already. And then I think the most confusing thing, honestly, when I think about mainstream users and Copilot and AI, honestly, I got to say the terminology is maybe the biggest hurdle. So this notion that they're going to give individuals like a Copilot GPT builder, I'm pretty sure this is the first time Microsoft has used GPT as the name of anything in their little ecosystem. I think people associate that with open AI and chat GPT. But it's okay. Copilot GPT builder. In other words, you're going to build your own Copilot, essentially. Right? Okay, cool. All right. So why is the business version of copilot 10 bucks more per month? It's because of the Microsoft graph, right? The missing piece for Microsoft on the consumer side right now. It's why copilot and Windows 11 is so lame, is that they don't have that thing on the back end that ties together all those disparate data sources that exist in an organization. What they're trying to do is leach in all of your email through Outlook leech in all of your personal data through OneDrive, Leech in all of your activity online through Edge, and then use that as sort of a mini Microsoft graph. But the reality is it, you know, it's. It's not there, right? So I think that's why it's also the difference between what I would call like a commercially backed, licensed, supported service versus we're going to let you make cute pictures with, you know, Bing on or whatever they're calling Copilot now. You know, it's consumery, right? I. I think 20 bucks per month. Look, when you're paying as an individual 69 bucks a year for 12 months of this service and you have to pay an additional $20, not for the year, but every single month, I think you've just eliminated 99% of the people out there who are like, wait, what? That is not, that is not a. That. That's incommensurate with the cost of the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

And arguably a lot of the value isn't there because you don't have this big graph data set that the companies are taking advantage of.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

So much that might also be intentional. Like I, I feel, I'm not, I'm, I feel like they've rushed this out just to see what would happen.

[Paul Thurot]

So I think you're right and I think by making it prohibitively expensive or restrictive, which is what they did in November and now it's just expensive, they're cutting down on the number of people are going to try it and then come out and say this is garbage. Because one of the big problems for Microsoft is in their rush to AI and now their rush to implement it. What happens if they poison it? What if so many people say this is garbage that they never come back?

[Richard Campbell]

Right. This is worth a slow rollout. I mean I would point out that the $20 a month is what you play for chat GPT Plus. So it's like this is the alternative offering.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but what do you Pay for copilot? GitHub? Copilot 10. Right. See to me that's a very targeted offering with a very clear value proposition.

[Richard Campbell]

And it is expected to go up.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can't make a GPT with it.

[Paul Thurot]

But okay, but at $10, to me, code focus, that's commensurate with the value that you get. In fact, if anything, it's almost a no brainer. I would argue that, I will argue that almost any developer should probably have this, right?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, yeah, I mean one would argue it should be 20 and the consumer version should be 10.

[Paul Thurot]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the market currently says $20, but.

[Paul Thurot]

Even at 10, you have more than doubled the cost of this annual subscription. You know, for $100 per month, you get a terabyte of storage for six users. All the Office apps downloaded to as many computers as you want. All of the Office apps with their full feature set enabled on mobile and on the web and then you double that price and you get, I'm sorry, a couple of AI features. And you know, like one of the arguments I made in this article I wrote about this was that like no one uses all of Office, right? So I'm not going to look and.

[Richard Campbell]

Say you can't even list all of Office. Like it's not a good thing.

[Paul Thurot]

There are 24 new features in Office because of AI. Well, well, guess what? I only use Word. Well, how many features are there in Word four. And how many am I going to use? One of them might be interesting. Is that worth $20 a month? I mean that's a lot of money. And that's really, that's the pragmatic real world human being.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but only in the context of what you were already paying, isn't it price chat GPT is 20 bucks. This is 20 bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't also priced somewhat because it's so expensive for them to run. They have to. Well, you know what, though, I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

Think they're at break even yet.

[Paul Thurot]

That sounds like a Microsoft problem, not a customer problem. So, you know, look at it this way. Back in the, back in the day, we used to have standalone Office products that would come out every three years, right. Office 2013, office whatever. You know, all the different versions, Microsoft was like, you know, it'd be better than this because these people are only paying us like once or twice a lifetime is if we could get them on a subscription. Right. So we'll make it like, you know, we'll make it useful and we'll make it inexpensive. Well, how do we get them to pay for that? Well, we'll only put the new features in the subscription. Right. So if you don't buy a new version of Office every three or six years, you're not getting any new features. The new features are all coming through the Microsoft 365 subscription and my God, did they go to town on that. Yeah, we talked about this, how, well, hard it was to keep up a part.

[Richard Campbell]

And part of that was it was easier to develop in the cloud. You can slip small features in, you.

[Paul Thurot]

Can, I'm talking about the.

[Richard Campbell]

And you can benchmark it.

[Paul Thurot]

But I mean, I'm talking about all the clients. I mean, like every month, the Office desktop clients on Mac and Windows on mobile in the web would all be. There was some matrix of new features all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

All the time.

[Paul Thurot]

So that kind of, you know, it hits some point. There's a weird thing. Like the standalone Office user base was over a billion, probably 1.5, 1.6 billion at one point. The Microsoft 365 subscriber base is somewhere in the 3, maybe 400 million point. But more lucrative because it's money every month. So what's the next step beyond that? Stop giving them new features. Claim that these new features are AI and make that a new tier. Right. And. But the thing is, it's so much more expensive than the thing you're already paying for, whether it's on the consumer.

[Richard Campbell]

So you don't want them to compare them that way like you're comparing.

[Paul Thurot]

Except.

[Richard Campbell]

Except when you're comparing it to ChatGPT.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, no, I was Gonna, I was gonna compare it to the past. If you compare the features they've added. And by the way, it's not like they're gonna come up with that many new AI features every month now. But if you could pick any given month, you could go back in time to 2017, 2018, whatever. You pick a year, don't care. Pick a month, don't care. Look at the 117 new features they put into Office and compare it to the seven they just added and then compare the value of the relative features. And I'm telling you, it was better back then. And now, not only am I going to have to pay more to get that handful of new feature stuff, it's not going to keep coming. Now we just get to pay to have this functional level. It's like they've added not just a new tier, but a really expensive new tier.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, the development is much easier in small increments, constantly deploying, testing and adjusting and. But the downside is you don't get a big bang version number anymore.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And so it's hard to market that. It is now with more incremental feature improvements. Right. Like you want to have a party for a big version and you can't give them the features over 18 months, then go, and now we'll call that a version. Right. Like it's, it's very problematic. It's a better way to build. Build software, but allows your way to sell it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Windows suffers from the same problem, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Versus Agile.

[Paul Thurot]

It's a problem. Right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Windows doesn't really, because they're not selling new versions of Windows constantly. It comes with the machine and it was licensed through the vendor.

[Paul Thurot]

So if you.

[Leo Laporte]

I like incremental improvements. I want my. To get smarter every day.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Maybe not every day, but. Yeah. No, you're right. You're right. Later in the show, help me decide.

[Leo Laporte]

Though, if I should give Microsoft my 20 bucks or OpenAI my 20 bucks.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is actually the question you should be talking about.

[Paul Thurot]

Or. Or should you give them 30 bucks and do the commercial version? And how do those things kind of line up? What's some relative value?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So as an individual, I think if.

[Leo Laporte]

I used Office a lot, then I would probably want the.

[Paul Thurot]

So it would depend. Let's say you're a, you're an accountant. Right. So you're in Outlook, you're in teams, you're in Excel. Right. Those are your apps.

[Leo Laporte]

You can do spreadsheets.

[Paul Thurot]

So you could go up to Copilot Pro and go look down the feature list and see like. Well, okay, what, what do I get?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, if Word didn't respect me, I'm not sure I'd want it.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And since Word does not respect you.

[Paul Thurot]

It doesn't. Hey AI, could I get what do.

[Leo Laporte]

I definitely doesn't respect anybody.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a lot of anthropomorization for me. Thanks. Software has no ability to respects nobody.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Guns don't kill people, Richard. You know that. Bullies don't kill people.

[Richard Campbell]

Software developers do.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Bastards.

[Leo Laporte]

So, so which should I buy? Is there, is there an API key? For instance, with Bing Chat, do you get an API key?

[Paul Thurot]

So one of the things that's coming, like we said, was this Chat GPT builder. I. You might want to hold off and see what that looks like because I.

[Leo Laporte]

Like that's the fact that I can build a custom GPT. I also like that I can provide an API key to third parties.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And, and add my Chat GPT to that. And that is a very important feature. So this is the business version, but.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, the Microsoft ecosystem. No, I'm sorry, the, the Copilot ecosystem is such that a lot of the stuff that happens on the OpenAI site should transfer 100. Right. They're the same plugin model. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They have chat GPT4.

[Paul Thurot]

So that helps supportability if that. If you're worried short term, you know, like at least, you know, that should be pretty straightforward. Ideally what we need is the, the AI version of Cloud Native where you could easily bring your models over to a different, like to Google or Amazon or whatever happens to be out there. So we'll see. Obviously these early stages, it's astonishing as any partnership. Right. I mean, in a way. But I don't know, I can't answer that question. I've not used the OpenAI stuff, so.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to keep my OpenAI.

[Paul Thurot]

I did start paying for Copilot Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So I could explain, you know, see how this works. For now.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm in the OpenAI camp too. I was saying before the show, it's like I'm looking at my billing on my API working through Home Assistant. It's going to come up to about A$150 a month.

[Paul Thurot]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's a day to day utilization.

[Paul Thurot]

Which is, by the way, that itself is very interesting. When Microsoft launched what was then called Windows Azure a million years ago, one of the big open questions was like, we're not really sure what the billing's going to look like here. Right. So in the early days, they were like, we're going to send you three months of fake bills based on your usage. You're going to see what we think. We would charge you and tell us what you think. But in this case, we're just as early in the game. And in that case it's making sense for you. Right. Financially, which wasn't always the case.

[Richard Campbell]

But I'm also the kind of guy who goes and looks at logs to figure out I'm not going to be surprised at the end of the month. I know better.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, I would have had a very different reaction. It was like, oh, there's a hundred bucks, you know. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

We. So when we moved into this condo, there's a gas, like fireplace. We never had one of these things. We always thought this was lazy. We like wood and you know, oh.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's the best.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, no, it's the best. In fact, my cats are addicted to it now. It's actually cats, they're. They. They creep ever closer to the, the burning slate bottom of the thing. They're like little pizzas they turn over to keep themselves from dying, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, so it's amazing out their leopard spotting. Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

But we, but the question was it's cold now, right? And we run this thing every day. We run it in the morning, we run it at night.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the cat's really expensive.

[Paul Thurot]

Get rid of. We're like, what's this going to look like? So we got the first.

[Leo Laporte]

So much.

[Paul Thurot]

No, the first bill was 100 bucks. We're like, oh, okay. No, we could do that. We can do that. It's going to be okay. But yeah, if that bill had been $400. Oh, sorry, cats, you're freezing your ass. Like, we're done.

[Richard Campbell]

You can die now.

[Paul Thurot]

Make your own heat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's kind of for. I always think of it as a. It's a cosmetic heater. It's not.

[Paul Thurot]

It actually it's very warm in front of it. Right in front of it. Yeah, it's very warm. We don't have a. There's no temperature. Some of the, like modern ones, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Think we have a heating pump. So it's a much more efficient to use the heat pump, I think than it is to.

[Richard Campbell]

We got baseboards in here, but we've been using wood. So. Yeah, we cut a bunch of trees.

[Leo Laporte]

On the property that chop those trees down.

[Richard Campbell]

So hold on, it was that or.

[Paul Thurot]

They fell down trees, Leo. I don't know. Like, you know, it's not like a bunch of them burned down this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Just take that tree and put it in the atmosphere as carbon and let.

[Paul Thurot]

It protect the whole planet. There you go. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the whole planet warms up. The cats are going to be so happy.

[Paul Thurot]

That's 2 degrees Celsius. Yeah. Actually, our stove, or whatever it's called, a fireplace works if the power goes out that we. So we may need it. You may be.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's nice to have a gas backup.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. That's kind of neat. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Anyhow.

[Leo Laporte]

Anywho. Any.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So all this copilot stuff just happened. I have my concerns about, you know, maybe they're going too fast. You know, we'll see. I'm kind of interested to see. My God, it was like January 14th.

[Leo Laporte]

Too fast. But it's too fast. It's a different question.

[Paul Thurot]

If Christmas, the holidays hadn't occurred, they would have released this thing on December 2nd like they were. They. They've been raring to go.

[Leo Laporte]

They're going fast, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So this past week, Microsoft Micro, well, let's just say back in January, I think it was Microsoft talked about this notion of bringing a custom GPT builder to copilot for Microsoft 365. And I think at the. I think they said at the time also the Copilot Pro. It is available now and with. For Copilot Pro subscribers like myself. And so yesterday I flew home from Mexico City and had sporadic wi fi. So naturally I built a Copilot bot as you do, in the air, as one would. And I was working on it again today because it's not quite what I want, but ideally what I would be able to do is say, hey, I have this website has a bunch of content on it and I'm going to ask you questions, but I only want you to look at my site. Yes. Right. Don't look anywhere else. And I can't get it to do that. But what's interesting is I can throw it questions like I wanted to copilot and I actually haven't tried this. I suspect this will work fine. Let it answer the question and say yeah, but I only want the answer to come from my site. And then it will say okay. And then it gives you the answer just from my site. Right. That works today. You can do that right now or I can do it anyway with this thing. But to make it work that way all the time, I can't figure that out and I don't know why. There are these two very broad option checkboxes in there. One is use search results and the Other one is image generation. If I turn off web results, it doesn't do anything. Like I can't even look at my website. So it's not like that would make it, you know, I very specifically designed it, for lack of a better term. That's a stupid way to put it because I didn't do much work. But to only take information from Thorat.com, but it does not do that. It says it's going to do that. I just did another version today and it very explicitly says this will only provide information from thorat.com then you ask it a question. It's like Wikipedia, the Verge, whatever wrote is. It just doesn't work that way. That's annoying. Yeah, but obviously that's not really what this kind of thing is for. A couple weeks ago, Microsoft added these custom GPTs which we've seen in OpenAI as well for things like, well, image creation, which we already had, but vacation planning, recipes and I think fitness training. Fitness training. And those are good ideas. Those are good subsets, right. You kind of cut down on the volume of information and maybe it becomes more reliable and accurate. Although careful with the recipes and fitness training. If they screw those up because you could kill yourself. But so I, Yeah, I mean, I think what I've really created here. And again, created is a tough term because I didn't really create much, but I basically just sort of said to this thing, look, I want to focus on personal technology topics. And it's. I don't know. I. I don't know that I've. I don't even know that this is a skin off the onion. It may be no different than just asking Copilot the question. I, I haven't had time to test it. But an interesting capability, this would be.

[Richard Campbell]

The thing it could do, right? Is index sight. That seems to be the logical thing to do.

[Paul Thurot]

So Microsoft does have a graphical interface. I'm forgetting the name of it. But there is a sec. There is another tool Microsoft has for developers where they can create a tool using Copilot that does exactly what I've just described. Right. So that capability exists. If you go into the interface for this custom GPT thing in copilot, it says that you can upload your website to it. And it's like, I'm not uploading my website. Here's a PDF version of the 18,000 articles I published since 2050. No, but there's something interesting here, right? I think between the capabilities that sort of exist today, not necessarily here, but elsewhere in the Microsoft stack. The stuff that we know is coming in copilot for Microsoft 365, especially the OneDrive bit. Right. There will come a time, and given the speed at which this is happening, probably before the end of the show, where I could create some kind of a custom GPT that's not just the content from my website, but I could point it at my OneDrive archive and say, here's the 30 years of stuff I've written back when I worked at Windows IT Pro, back when I wrote paper based books across a variety of Microsoft topics. Whatever it is, here's the note, the notes I took during a meeting with someone from Microsoft. And then you could point it at all that stuff collectively and say it's sort of like a. It's almost like a Paul Throt mind meld in a way. Like here's a. I want to know more about this topic, whatever it is, and have it actually go through that body of work I think might be kind of interesting, you know, and I'm gonna, I'll play with that because you know, at that point I guess I don't even have to show up every day. But you know, what might I think of this time? I know. Based on what You've written for 30 years. Exactly. Yeah.

[Kevin King]

The challenge, we'll see the challenge here especially is that its ability to properly determine what it's going to say next required this whole set of training data that gave it that ability. And then trying to take that and sort of separate it then from its index of content that you want to have it pay attention to. If Leo was here, he would be talking about the. Probably effusively talking about the GPT that he created for one of the programming languages that he uses, elisp.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, we've heard of it. Yes.

[Kevin King]

Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure. I am a big nerd and I run some Dungeons and Dragons campaign and I've actually created a couple of GPTs that are accustomed to those campaigns. And so if there's something that I need help with in the moment where the players do something completely unexpected, I'll pop that in. And then it has the context of what's happened thus far. And I think that's really cool.

[Paul Thurot]

I really think this kind of thing is very interesting. I mean that is literally the nerdiest example. But. No, but, but you create this world that has maybe a history and famous people in it and characters and events and everything. And you know, if you were Tolkien writing this book, I don't know how he did things. But, you know, I would have a hard time keeping the stuff in my brain and having a reference that you could go to to find things out, I think is fascinating. Right. I think that's a really neat thing. But whether it's a Dungeons Dragons campaign or a specific programming language or whatever it is, you're talking about something that has kind of a finite body of data. And I think that's the type of thing that AI would be good at dealing with, summarizing, providing answers against that data. Right. And, and that, I mean, I'm kind of talking about the same thing. Again, not as geeky as your thing, but, but, but, you know, a finite body of data that, you know, for me in my case has spanned, like I said, 30 years. But, but whatever number of articles, whatever number of books, whatever it is, like, I mean, there's a, you know, kind of a, there's a body of work there. I mean, it's something to, I'm really curious to. It's like when you're a little kid and you hear your voice on a tape recorder for the first time and you say I sound like that, you know, like you, I, I, I should know this information fairly intimately, but I think I'm going to be surprised by some of the stuff that comes out of it. Like, I'm just curious, you know, to see what that looks like.

[Kevin King]

Absolutely. I think, yeah, that's that. So Google had, I can't remember what it was called, but something with the word notebook in it.

[Paul Thurot]

And I was, yeah, I think it is just Gemini. I think it's just a notebook in Gemini.

[Kevin King]

Yeah, Gemini notebook.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Kevin King]

And I wanted what you're talking about from that. I didn't end up getting that. It just became kind of a search engine for stuff that I'd written before. But yeah, I wanted, I mean, I had even going back to high school documents in there from when I was in a poetry class, for example, and wrote a bunch of poetry. And I thought it'd be super cool to see if it could pretend to be me writing a poem and what that would end up looking. It didn't end up working.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, that would be the next step. Now it's time.

[Kevin King]

That's what I'd love to see.

[Paul Thurot]

I was really busy this week. I didn't have time to work on the game. What do you think I might write, given the body of work that's come before? What is the next installment look like?

[Kevin King]

Or, oh, Russia's back at it again, trying to get into the servers how would I handle this problem?

[Paul Thurot]

How would I respond to that if I were Microsoft? Not saying I am, but if I was. Yeah, well, yeah, so you said you kind of called it a search engine. I think you literally called it a search engine. Right. Search engine's kind of an interesting term because I feel like we're going to start shifting on what that means. But sometimes you go to the web and you're looking for an answer to a question and it's a fact. The date of something. What day of the week was April 21, 1985, or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

So those things are just whatever. It's like a little. You spit out a fact and that's kind of fun. But I think the summarizing bit is what's really interesting. Right. Look at everything I've ever written about OneDrive or something. And when did one. Like, what was. Like, what happened with. Remember OneDrive used to have before Files on Demand. I can't remember the name of it. There was this other thing. What was that called? You know, and to have it kind of go back and look through stuff and then say in April 2020 you wrote this. And then in 2021 it was this. And then it changed this in 2022. Just like that. Kind of a bullet list or not or whatever. Just like a summary. I still think there's great value in that. This is going to be very interesting. I think it's going to surface things that we're just fragile enough as humans we kind of forget or it's going to draw these kind of comparisons that we never connected ourselves.

[Kevin King]

Yeah, the comparisons especially. But also what you're saying there. I remember reading a couple of books about memory and human beings, and the argument made is that our brains were never designed to be these deep storage devices that our brains are very good at processing and very good at in the moment. And so getting all of that stuff out of our brain and down somewhere even frees them up more.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, my God.

[Kevin King]

That they're good at. So that would be cool to have.

[Paul Thurot]

How many times you walking down the street, you kind of catch something. Peripheral vision. You look and it's just. It's like it triggers this. I remember something now. Yeah. Or you smell something or, you know, whatever it is, and you're like, oh, my God, like, I just had this, you know, or you see someone who's not the person, but it reminds you of somebody, and then you suddenly, you know, those. I think AI is going to provide this moment for us, you know, if you will. I Mean, as we search our little collective histories here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

I considered making this the top story.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Because I was going to ask you why you buried this one because it's certainly a storm in my heart.

[Paul Thurot]

I. Yep. I. This may be one of the biggest stories of this year. And I know it's just, you know, beginning of April, but randomly and coincidentally, totally lucky. A Microsoft engineer who was working on benchmarking a Debian distribution in a virtual machine who's not a. Not a security guy, wasn't looking at source code, nothing like that, discovered some anomalies in the performance, tied them to a set of compression utilities.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why you think this is why OCD is good in our business. Because no one else cares about 500 millisecond latency.

[Paul Thurot]

And he's like, no, that ain't right.

[Leo Laporte]

In your essence.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, most people would have been like, eh, whatever. Yeah, he reported it. This was a. These were. What's it called? XY or whatever, the utility xc.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, Z.

[Paul Thurot]

It's a compression utility.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't really see. No, it doesn't usually have a user facing it.

[Richard Campbell]

It is a perfect supply chain.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a really cool.

[Paul Thurot]

So here's. This is. There's so much about the story that's astonishing, but this would have gone out to every, basically every stable Linux distribution in the world. And it could have been one of the biggest technology disasters of all time. But the thing that blows my mind the most, like literally is that the individual or probably nation state, right, that is responsible for this was playing the long game two years. They invented a.2 and a half years. I think it was of like a pretend Persona who ingratiated himself into this community, started making contributions, started to be trusted and then just became part of it. And then he unleashed hell. And it would have gone out to the planet except this guy randomly found it. And it. That is. I. This is. This story is still unfolding. There's still much more information I think that will come out of it. Much like the Microsoft, you know, hack thing from a couple of months ago, whatever. But I. This is. It's just awesome. But it's also scary because now of course where your brain goes is, oh crap, now we know anyone could do this. I mean, well, you know, it's not a random kid. No kid's gonna do this for over two years. But the fact that someone played that game for that long and was successful suggest to me and probably to others that there are other people could be doing this or other whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I mean the open source side is one thing because of course code was visible. So once you scrutinize you found it right away.

[Leo Laporte]

Visible but obfuscated. They tried to hide it.

[Richard Campbell]

They did a good job of it too. It was very tricky to find and I think that's what actually twigged him was when he went looking for why is this delayed? He couldn't see anything and it was just too clever. Then the hair stood up on the back of his neck. That's strange. I better call somebody. What about, I mean a classic, the real sort of mole approach. Become a Microsoft employee, spend two years until you're contributing to it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Card keying your way in the building inside of Azure. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin King, do you have anything you want to tell us? My friend, you came to us.

[Paul Thurot]

Was it two years ago?

[Leo Laporte]

Two years ago with no history? No, no track record.

[Richard Campbell]

Monitoring has been disabled.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually I found XE on my Mac. A lot of people with Homebrew would have it installed because it's a utility.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just a question of whether it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Going to be updated and there is a fix that downgraded it to the old version so that. But you may have it if you have WSL running on your Windows machine because it's not something you would install but it's something many other tools.

[Richard Campbell]

It's in a package. It is a proper supply chain attack.

[Paul Thurot]

Including OpenSSH literally saved the world. This is incredible, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

Andres Freund who is a German Microsoft employee, do we know what he does?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, he works on Debian for Microsoft. Okay, this is the thing, it's hard to explain. I don't actually know what he does but think about how big Microsoft is. Think about how much Linux is happening up in Azure. It's probably related to that to a lot of people who think about Microsoft on the outside. It's not what we think of when we think of Microsoft and of course they must. They have these people. Right? Well and listen if this doesn't fix Microsoft's reputation with the open source community, nothing will. If this doesn't do it, I mean what do we have? What could you do to solve this problem?

[Leo Laporte]

I do like it that so he says he found an obfuscated script which was executed at the end of a configure but he was able to unobfuscate it and one of the things it does is it copies a file called BAD3 corrupt LZMA2. So you know. Okay, just a little tip to hackers.

[Richard Campbell]

Better name no no, no, no. There's actually.

[Leo Laporte]

That file. Oh, because it's a test file.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

So it isn't from the bad guy.

[Richard Campbell]

No, well, it was from the bad guy. The bad guy modified an existing test file so you would ignore it. It had always been there. No, no. There are many sneaky levels of clever here.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Gibson did a whole half hour on it yesterday.

[Richard Campbell]

It deserves every minute, the whole.

[Paul Thurot]

And I think he touches on it again in the future. I think we're going to learn a lot more.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we've been talking about supply chain attacks on security now for years. I mean, this has been a problem. There were a bunch last week on NPM and Taipi. It just happens a lot on Net Rocks.

[Richard Campbell]

We talk about the sort of corporatization of open source, where all the big players are now there and there's a lot of paid employees working in open source as well, and the effect that has on the community as a whole. But one of the things you talk about is this burnout of the maintainers.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the real problem with xe, which is. It was one guy, he had some mental health issues. He wanted to get out of it.

[Richard Campbell]

And here was. And along came the. Along came this perfect solution. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing.

[Paul Thurot]

That's like the scene in the Omen where the nanny shows up and they're like, we didn't call a nanny. And it's like, no, the agency sent me. It's all good. And then two years go by. The kid's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

The devil.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. You know, it's the same. It's. It's this classic scenario.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it perhaps Satan?

[Paul Thurot]

It's all for you, Damien.

[Leo Laporte]

What a great movie, by the way. I love that movie. Good on Andres Freund. You got good, man. I hope he got a promotion out of all that. You're watching the best of 2024 for Windows Weekly. We're glad you're here. And Happy Holidays.

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[Leo Laporte]

Let's talk about the new Copilot Plus PCs. They came with something that not everybody was too excited about, so we can, today at this event we call Windows Weekly, summarize the totality of build. Why don't we start at the beginning with Monday's Surface announcements and this new Copilot plus PC. I know, by the way that there's a space after plus, but not before it, so I'm thinking they pronounce it. You can tell me. Copilot plus PC.

[Richard Campbell]

PC.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

That is one of the many confusions that we will discuss, because, you know, there's a lot of fog of war to this. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You wonder if the product is just Copilot Plus.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you sure the fog of war is not Declana? Kilty. I mean, I'm just asking.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm.

[Richard Campbell]

I. I haven't whiskeyed that hard this week yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I got out early last night.

[Micah Sargent]

Did you see the dive bar we ended up in last night?

[Richard Campbell]

No. Well, the. The cavern you started at. I left from there and went to write my piece.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. So a quarter. Quarter.

[Paul Thurot]

Quarter.

[Micah Sargent]

What's the word I'm looking for? A.

[Richard Campbell]

A block away.

[Micah Sargent]

A block.

[Paul Thurot]

Thank you.

[Micah Sargent]

We went. This little dive bar was about as seedy as you could be. There was a shaman who walked in with a staff with a human skull on the top of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Richard Campbell]

This is excellent.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it got weird.

[Richard Campbell]

Too bad. So you're Drinking some thick blue liquor. You know that happened.

[Micah Sargent]

They, despite the look of this place, could make a paper plane.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah, the cocktail.

[Micah Sargent]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

And Tatooine milk, it sounds like.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. Yep.

[Micah Sargent]

Anyway, it got weird and you ran.

[Leo Laporte]

Into a funny looking guy with long hair. It looks like I'm looking at your Insta here.

[Micah Sargent]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the Wizard.

[Paul Thurot]

No.

[Micah Sargent]

I didn't get a picture of the shaman.

[Paul Thurot]

I was afraid.

[Micah Sargent]

I didn't want to steal his soul.

[Leo Laporte]

Clearly later in the evening.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Somebody's more enthusiastic about this photo than others.

[Micah Sargent]

He loved it. Be quiet.

[Leo Laporte]

That's former Twitt employee Alex Gumpel, who's now working in. In the. In the TV station across from the space he works.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah. We were right across the street almost from there and up the street from his apartment. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Funny. What I found was fascinating about the whole co Pilot plus PC is like. It's like they're afraid to say Windows on arm.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did they not really mention that? Well, they mentioned the Snapdragon Elite.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

They don't want people to think of it. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I guess so. Because it has not gone well the previous times.

[Micah Sargent]

They've attended some bad, good vibes to it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Here's the thing. So in the history of Windows, obviously there's been different ways to differentiate, different versions, whatever. You know, We've had product SKUs for a long time. NT Workstation, NT Server.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Micah Sargent]

Windows XP Home. Windows XP Professional.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

We still have Home and Pro today. We went off the rails for a while with many product editions for a few versions. But so there's that. We've also had these kind of specialty versions of Windows. Right. Like Media Center Edition, Tablet PC, Ultra Mobile PC, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Media Center.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. I mean, so Copilot plus PC.

[Paul Thurot]

There's a lot of questions.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, it just feels to me like they're trying to force ARM into existence and so wrapping it in a Copilot blanket, they think it's going to be better.

[Micah Sargent]

It's also a strangely limiting way to roll out exciting new features because you have to. There's going to be a 24H2. Actually, there's going to be two 24H2s, but let's not get too convoluted here yet. Yeah. And when you get a copilot plus PC, you will get 24H2 with additional copilot plus PC features that will never be made available to anyone else.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

Which is. And this is why I'm still trying to reconcile this, my brain But I guess I'm going to say my educated guess at this point is that that this will play out like Media center and tablet PC. That in the beginning you're gonna have to buy a special kind of PC to get this stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

And then at some time it's gonna be on everything. Yeah. They'll just roll it into Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

And part of that's going to be the hardware is going to advance. So everybody's going to have that.

[Micah Sargent]

That's right. Yeah, exactly. That's just guessing because they're not going to talk about that.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I mean, like, there's a question of could we get a Snapdragon on a motherboard and build a PC with it?

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, that is like, like I said, there are many questions. That is absolutely one of them.

[Richard Campbell]

So although not that Qualcomm has ever done socketed Snapdragon, it's always been soc like directly on the board.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Micah Sargent]

This is a new world.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

We don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

But the fact that Asus is making a machine gives me the possibility that Asus might make a motherboard.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. I don't know how these systems differentiate from each other internally. Right. I think it was eight or nine of the top PC makers and Microsoft are all making their own computers based on this platform. Are they. Is there some common component to all of the motherboards that's, you know, and then some additional stuff that some companies are doing on the start. I. We don't know yet. Right. It just happened. We'll see. I. Anyway, this event was Bill or a lot of people expected this event to be a Surface event, basically. Obviously it was kind of a. I guess we'll call it the co pilot plus PC launch event. It was only Qualcomm, intel and AMD will eventually release chipsets that will allow PCs to be called copilot plus PCs.

[Richard Campbell]

So I guess the Ultra doesn't qualify.

[Micah Sargent]

It does not. Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

So the, the, the differentiated there. The problem for the Core Ultra is the npu.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

Right. So the NPU has to deliver at least 40 tops to qualify that one, I think. Was it 13 tops if I'm not mistaken?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

The Qualcomm current chipset is 45 tops. Intel has already said we will have a 40.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, actually it's not even a Moore's Law problem then. This is just a fabbing problem. Make a better fab. You'll be good.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

So both AMD and Intel will deliver by the end of the year. We're going to, we'll get to a Bit of that in a moment. But for now, the first gen, the first lot, the launch lineup is all Qualcomm based.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

And it's pretty good support there.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean, I think the first gen Qualcomm, maybe there were two PC makers at the launch. There was only one decent PC based on the most recent chipset today, which was Lenovo. I think that, I believe they did.

[Richard Campbell]

Also mention the Snapdragon for devs. A little. A little.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, we're gonna.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we'll get to that Mini PC unit, so.

[Micah Sargent]

That's insane. That thing's looking good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think I'd like one of those.

[Micah Sargent]

I do too.

[Paul Thurot]

I might.

[Micah Sargent]

That might become my, my office, my home office computer.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

So I, you know, just coming into this, I will say there was a lot of secrecy on Microsoft's part for some reason. Well, I get it. But they provided the press with, with a bill of materials that did not include anything related to Windows at all, which was very notable. And then we showed up on Monday and they kind of revealed it to a room full of people, which they did not live stream. So we were all allowed to kind of live tweet it or whatever we did.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

And then they have, then they, at the end the event announced to the world what they had done. And then I think you can. Well, no, I know you can. You can go watch the video now if you want to see the event.

[Richard Campbell]

And you've ordered one.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I ordered one.

[Paul Thurot]

I literally sent me the screenshot. Yes.

[Micah Sargent]

Of Betty is up on stage and he says, and you can preorder now. I went service.com. done. Yeah, yeah, I thought, I thought. I'm sure there were people who thought I was joking when I said I was going to order one of these as soon as I could. But he worked. I was not joking. So the, the two Microsoft devices look good. I mean, they're as expected, right? No surprises there. The third party PCs that they announced, you know, very in quality, I would say. These are premium PCs, all of them. The base price is technically, I think 9.99. But the cheapest one I'm aware of is a, an Acer Swift, which is 1050, I think to start minimum specs, 16 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage.

[Richard Campbell]

Not enough of either.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. And those are tied to the requirements of the onboard SLMs, of which there are up to 40. I know, it's just crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

What's an SLM?

[Micah Sargent]

Small Language Model beyond device.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Okay.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. This is a weird thing. And Then we'll get into some of the features. But one of the big ones, one of the controversial ones, also has its own pretty heady storage requirements.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

So this is part of the differentiation and probably part of the excuse slash reason why they're not just giving it to everyone because, well, because of all reasons actually I just remembered one. I have a little list of the people that Microsoft upset the other day and I forgot one of them. I'll just add that they upset everybody but we'll get to that. So yeah, hour long event, a bunch of AI features like we expected. The big question we had wanted to answer was would this be enough to trigger a round of upgrades the likes of which we've not seen?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, everybody needs to buy a new machine. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And I'm, I'm gonna.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't you think that's the goal?

[Micah Sargent]

It is a goal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

I don't think they met that bar personally.

[Richard Campbell]

You know they didn't show off software, they just gave me a lot of promises.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, they showed off some, you know, features. It's this stuff is, is hard. I, I, you, I think you were, you were the one who originally kind of said you know, AI is not a, there's no killer app, there's a bunch of small things and depending on your needs, depending on who you are, depending on the types of things you use a PC for, you might have seen something in that event where you're like oh I have to get this thing right. And I think for people who are creatives this might be of interest. Road warriors obviously for the battery life.

[Richard Campbell]

Because there is just two things right. There is the co pilot features but it's also Windows on arms.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is battery life efficiency, quiet and.

[Micah Sargent]

A lack of drivers. If you have anything esoteric.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And what software will like look from the somebody asked you, you're going to do a dot net ROCKS on Windows on arm. It's like it's going to be a two minute show. It's like it runs. Thanks very much.

[Micah Sargent]

Years ago would have been I guess 2017 or whenever they announced the first version of this for 10. I said you know if this thing is successful it will just be the most boring release in the history of Bangkok because just it should just work. There should be no drama. I think they're mostly going to meet that bar. But there are always those people who have specialized devices of whatever kind.

[Richard Campbell]

Well it's a great question. When you talk about that device it's just like how do I print?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, well that stuff's all built in the basics, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Which should meet most people's needs. But, yeah, if you have a crazy 3D printer with specific software or whatever it might be.

[Richard Campbell]

Palace Scanner.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Any number of things where you're.

[Richard Campbell]

Going to bump into some issues.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

But, you know, they're shooting for the mainstream with the first version, and I think. I think it's there for that audience. I actually do believe that the efficiency stuff, battery life, the relative silence we're going to get to that will really appeal to people. That people have maybe looked over at the MacBook Air a little bit and said, you know, I kind of like some of the stuff that's going on there. I'd like that in Windows, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things the MacBreak weekly team pointed out is these do have fans. I mean, how quiet are they?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, so it's. So I have good news there. I mean, the bad news is, yeah, they have fans, by the way. They all have Fans. This is 100% across the board. It's a personal embarrassment to me that I never thought to ask Qualcomm or anybody about this. Not just yesterday, but before yesterday. I spent five hours.

[Leo Laporte]

The heirs that they're emulating have no fans. So they really are silent.

[Paul Thurot]

They don't get hot. That's right there.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. So here's the thing. The good news is I, Ryan Shroud, who, formerly of intel, who was now a partner in a kind of an analyst firm, was commissioned by Microsoft to discover what was really going on with these computers and compare them to the. To its predecessors. I'm sorry. They used the Surface laptop for the tests, compared it to the previous gen Surface Laptop and also to the MacBook Air M3 and these. I've known Ryan forever. I trust him as much as you can trust any human being. He's reliable. This thing either kicked the crap out of or basically broke even with the MacBook Air on everything. Almost everything. The one weird one was using Chrome. The web browser native version was more efficient on the Mac. But I think part of that has to do with. It's been around for a long time and the Windows version is not. And also, this falls into that category we had talked about before, where, you know, it doesn't have to actually beat the thing, it just has to kind of play the game, you know, be in the ballpark.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

And it is in the ballpark. Like, you know, you know, no one's gonna sit there and look at Chrome back and forth and say, wow, it's loading those web pages. 001 seconds.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, somebody will. But we're just going to ignore them.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, people buy a. People are shopping for Mac OS or Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they say, okay, I'm a Mac guy. What hardware is there? I'm a PC guy. What hardware is there? They don't say. You know, they might say, I like the MacBook Air. What's comparable in a PC? And this would be fine.

[Micah Sargent]

I think there's a. I think there actually is a market of people who have had bad experiences on Windows and are starting to look around. So this is an opportunity. Yeah, well, that's what I mean. So this is an opportunity for Microsoft. Say, look, yeah, we know you want these qualities that you like to see in the Mac. Do we have them over here?

[Paul Thurot]

So.

[Micah Sargent]

But that's why I don't think it.

[Leo Laporte]

Has to be did in benchmarks. It has to be comparable.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it will. As it turns out, it beats them in Bitcoin.

[Richard Campbell]

Being also questioned. Benchmarks full up anyway.

[Micah Sargent]

No, no, but that was the point of my conversations with Ryan over the past couple days were very enlightening. In fact, I'm probably gonna do an interview with him as soon as I can. So he can kind of just, you can all hear it from him. But he also has just sort of real world anecdotal experiences and he's like, I never ran into any issues. So if you look at a MacBook Air and you close the lid and look at the very back of it, you'll see there's a, there's an area to vent heat at the back. It doesn't vent heat through the bottom, which is one of the problems on a lot of PCs, because if you want to do put it on a soft surface like a bed or a couch or something, it can't.

[Richard Campbell]

That gets sealed off. Your lap gets hot in a hurry.

[Micah Sargent]

Battery kicks in, you get that funnel effect we're also dealing with.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, your CPU gears down like. Yeah, all those things.

[Micah Sargent]

So the, the laptops, these laptops all do have fans. The Surface devices, at least I can't speak to the third party devices, is very, very quiet. The Surface laptop, the one they're comparing to the MacBook Air. And my God, did they compare it to the MacBook Air.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

Someone should make a clip of just them saying MacBook Air. And I bet they said it 150.

[Richard Campbell]

Once was a time where they never said they're competitive product names.

[Micah Sargent]

Now they're saying it too much.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we get it.

[Micah Sargent]

You want to beat this thing. Geez. Anyway, it Vents exactly the same way as the MacBook Air. So it does not have. You don't have that problem. It's going to be fine. He said he has the, the DBA measurements under load, not underload. Etc. He said this thing is silent.

[Richard Campbell]

But it does have a fan.

[Micah Sargent]

Does have a fan.

[Richard Campbell]

Fan that thin. Like it's got to make noise.

[Micah Sargent]

So I. MacBook or Mac people, Apple people will appreciate the comparisons to the MacBook Pro. And most of those people will tell you because it has a fan. Fans.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

It comes on sometimes, obviously in the load, but it's, it's very quiet.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And it's, it's apparently landing in that area.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. So very quiet.

[Micah Sargent]

Very, very quiet. So that's good. I almost, I was, I was not happy when I discovered this. I. For whatever it's worth, I went into that showcase they had afterwards. I picked up the laptop, I looked under it, I looked all around it. You don't see any dots or vents or anything. I'm like, nice. And I just presumed it was solid. I walked out of there and yeah, I thought it was. No, no fan. And I was wrong. So that's, you know, that this is the thing I've been talking about, I think for seven, eight, whatever months. You know, I'm waiting for that shoe to drop. I'm waiting for that day when some bad news comes out and ruins the whole thing.

[Paul Thurot]

And we got right up to the.

[Micah Sargent]

Launch day and I finally got that bad news and it was the fan. And it did have that moment of doubt for me. But I think it's fine. I think it's going to be fine.

[Richard Campbell]

I wish seem like that bad of news, really. Yeah, yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And yeah, but it was that kind of scary moment, right? It was like, oh, come on, really? You're gonna just ruin this on the day it launches. So yeah, I. Okay, so we should talk about recall, which is the controversial feature. So Microsoft Recall is a feature that will only be made available on these PCs.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

Copilot plus PCs.

[Paul Thurot]

It required.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, it requires the minimums for a copilot. You know, it is going to suck up a lot of storage space. I think the minimum is 25 gigabytes. You can configure it to do different amounts based on the storage you have. Obviously it will stop doing it if you use up all the storage, etc. Etc. It's opt in. It's all on device. There's nothing going to the cloud or off the PC ever. It's protected by BitLocker, full disk encryption and this new Windows, hello, biometric technology, ESS that they're announced. They've announced 24H2. I get that people don't trust Microsoft. You are talking to someone who has. Or I am talking, I guess, but.

[Paul Thurot]

You are looking at someone or hearing.

[Micah Sargent]

Someone who very much does not trust Microsoft in some ways. But the way this was presented and the way they've described it, and there's a lot of good information about it, I don't see any issues from a privacy perspective. But. But I also knew as soon as they started talking about it, because I know my audience, and especially guys in Europe or whatever, where I was like, oh, man, people are going to freak over this. And the BBC published a very incendiary and I think irresponsible article in the guise of, let's let everyone just.

[Paul Thurot]

Microsoft says it's no problem.

[Micah Sargent]

And here's an insane person ranting about all the stupid things that could happen with no evidence whatsoever. And apparently he didn't even look at the announcement because he has no idea how it works. And, you know, like, privacy nightmare. And it isn't. It just isn't. It doesn't mean that things can't go wrong, you know, obviously bugs, whatever. But the technologies they're using to protect this data are well understood, have been around for decades, proven. Do you trust Microsoft?

[Paul Thurot]

That's up to you.

[Micah Sargent]

If you don't, here's an idea. Don't enable it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's. Turn it on.

[Micah Sargent]

It's offered to you during setup and you have full controls in the system through the Settings app. Switch it afterwards to. You could. Yeah. And you know, look, we all have things maybe that we do in our computers that might be embarrassing. You can pause it, you can turn it off of specific apps, you can turn it off for specific websites and it will. Those things will never be captured. So, yeah, just. I. It's impossible for this thing to happen and for there not to be worries and complaints and freakouts. And I get that, but I just. This has been a kind of a sad but predictable overreaction. It reminds me of when they put Cortana on the PC because we had Cortana on the phone, but not that many people had those phones. But when they moved it into Windows 10, I started getting people freaking out because they ran Cortana and it said, this thing wants access to my calendar.

[Paul Thurot]

Like, yeah, it's a personal assistant. It has to have that.

[Micah Sargent]

If you don't trust it for that.

[Paul Thurot]

You can't use the product.

[Micah Sargent]

That's what it's for. And this is that, but maybe exponential.

[Richard Campbell]

Extra dumb.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So let's start with recall. I, I gotta tell you, Paul, and you can, you can, you can confirm or deny, but.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Last week where you were, you were saying, hey, wait, hold on, recall, it's not even out yet. Just hold your horses. And then shortly thereafter, Microsoft said, yeah, okay, we're gonna make it opt in and we're gonna make it more secure. I felt like Paul must have known that.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I did not.

[Leo Laporte]

You did not have early Advanced?

[Paul Thurot]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

Just reading the room.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean, look, nobody has more complaints about Microsoft than I do. Right? I mean, but the one thing I will say about them that I guess is semi positive is they do respond to this kind of feedback, you know, and look, this AI stuff is super important to them. They want to get it out in the world, etc. Etc. But, but you know, you get pushback from a certain customer segment, which is their commercial customers, and yeah, you're going to make some changes. So. No, I didn't know about this, but I knew, I knew. I mean, I knew they would respond. Right. The thing is, the clock is ticking and this creates kind of an interesting conundrum timing wise because of the rollout of these Copilot Plus PCs on which you'll get this feature. Right. So I will say their response came late on a Friday. Typical. I guess I could have predicted that one, honestly. Maybe I should have. The only substantive change, honestly, was that opt in bit, because they told me it was opt in at that event. And the way they've been describing it since is optional. So. Optional.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm not sure how that's different.

[Paul Thurot]

It's different because it's going to be. Well, it would have been enabled by default and then you could optionally turn it off.

[Richard Campbell]

That would be opt out rather than opt in.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, both of those things are optional too. So they describe it as optional as, you know. Well, this is, it's a dark pattern. I mean, in a way.

[Richard Campbell]

The sort of negative option billing, that's the dark pattern.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, the dark pattern was the wording of the screen and the out of box experience that, that didn't say yes or no. It said this is what's happening. If you don't like it, turn this on yourself.

[Richard Campbell]

Or do you want us to turn it on for you?

[Paul Thurot]

Asterisks. We are turning it on for you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

So yeah, I mean that's important and honestly that's not unprecedented, but we live in a world where Microsoft is auto enabling things like OneDrive folder backup even after you've explicitly said no multiple times. Right. So last week we talked about dark patterns or two weeks ago whenever that was and I'd written an article about this and you know, the use of language to make it look like if you allow us to track you more, you'll have a better web experience when in fact if you allow us to track you more, we're gonna, we have more information to sell to advertisers is the real reason we're doing that.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe those advertisers will tomart you with ads of things you've already bought.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, so look, I, I very much disagreed and still disagree with all those people who bitched and moaned about this ahead of time because that did not represent the shipping code but it specifically on copilot plus PCs. But you know what, this is like some, you know, sometimes you do the right thing and have a bad outcome and sometimes you do the wrong thing and you have a good outcome.

[Leo Laporte]

So do you think what Microsoft did is, is adequate?

[Paul Thurot]

There's no way to know. See, here's the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

So still haven't seen it? We don't really.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well, right, we'll talk a little bit later about some of the Apple stuff, for example. So in both these companies cases you make these claims, you're doing this thing and it will get out in the real world and things will happen. We used to experience this back in the day when beta testing versions of Windows was a formal thing that was well constructed and done over a long period of time and everything seemed great and then the thing got out in the world and all of a sudden there were problems. No one saw during the beta or anticipated or whatever. So no one can claim it's going to be fine and we'll see. But this is too important for Microsoft not to get right. And I, I, you know, I hope, I mean, I don't know, I hope they move quickly to fix whatever problems may come up. But the big thing to me, like I said, is just making it opt and that's how this should have always been.

[Richard Campbell]

Certainly the way the IT person looks at it is tell me it's off by default or that I can make.

[Leo Laporte]

It off by default.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So by the way, the IT story here is actually really interesting. It can allow recall on a PC that they manage. They cannot automatically just turn it on. They can just say you can't have it, but it's up to the user if it is allowed by it to use it. It cannot control it.

[Micah Sargent]

After that, it's this.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Even though that's, you know, it's the business's PC and it's, you know, we talk about all that legality and whatnot. But it's, it's interesting. I, and look, like I said that.

[Richard Campbell]

It demands Windows hello is an interest. I mean, that is an interesting barrier.

[Paul Thurot]

Not just Windows hello. Right.

[Micah Sargent]

But ess.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see. Yeah. You know, one of the, one of the promises of Recall was that you would sign into a PC where someone was using Recall with a different account and it could be an administrator account. And, you know, if you've ever done this on your own PCs, you know, you could browse the file system, go into that person's account. It will give you a little warning like you don't have the rights to access this. And you say, click, whatever, give it to me. And then it spins a little while and you get in. And one of the promises with Recall was that that wouldn't work with the Recall database, that this thing was private to that user. It was like basically per user encryption. Right. And one of the things they changed, although again, this matches what they said originally was user counts on these PCs will be encrypted per user. So you can't do what I just described with recall. Right. You can't, as an admin, get into that part of the disk. Yeah. I mean, that's what you said you were doing so great. You know, I think a lot of what they announced on Friday was like. But you already said you were doing that. Like, I, you know, this was what you said you were doing. So it's kind of hard to say how much actually changed. But, but the, again, the big one opt in is that's such a huge victory. And it's when we. It's the type of victory we haven't gotten in Windows. I can't even think of another example. I mean, much at all. Yeah, it's been, it's been definitely sloping in the opposite direction. You know, there's been more and more and in fact, there's. I don't know if this is in the notes, but the 24H2 does more of this as well, where for individuals, they're requiring more and more Microsoft account to do anything. You know, they really want to push you in this, down this path. And that's true.

[Richard Campbell]

Account, an Entra account.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm not sure about the Entra comp it, but I mean, you know, for example, some of the copilot plus PC features. You get, you know, free co create and paint forever, you know, unlimited number of images. But you have to sign in with a Microsoft account, you know, well, try.

[Richard Campbell]

Using a new Windows 11 PC without a Microsoft account.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean I would. The reason I signed in with a Microsoft account personally. Well, there's a bunch of reasons, honestly. It does the auto encryption stuff and whatever, but there are in fact Microsoft products and services that I use that you have to sign in to use like OneDrive, right? Or you want to. You could say, look, I'm going to use a local account, I know what I'm doing. Like I'm going to secure it properly. But I want to use, you know, whatever it might be, an Outlook app or Microsoft Office or OneDrive, like I said, or the Microsoft Store, you could sign into those apps, just those apps with your Microsoft account. And to me it's like, well, if you're going to do that, just sign in, just sign in once. Like, why would you, why go through that? You know, so anyway, I. Look, no matter where you took a stance on the recalled debate, this is nothing but good news. There are additional protections they're enabling. This is the type of stuff I feel like they would have enabled over time. They were really, you know, they, you know, reasonably, but not surprisingly, really tried to push this notion, like, look, this thing's a preview. It's not going out to that many people. We were going to use this time to gather the feedback and make improvements to the product. There will come a day in the future where recall is rolled out to many, many more computers. And by that point we expect it to be where it needs to be or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Right?

[Paul Thurot]

So I don't know, you know, I guess like everyone can just kind of, you know, I did it, you know, whatever stance you took, you can feel good about it. It's fine. It's all good. So I would like to direct everyone's attention to something rather incredible, which is for some reason, for some reason today, yesterday actually, but today the Wall Street Journal published a story about how Qualcomm Snapdragon X based PCs can't play games. This is not timely. Why, why would Yang Ji, who I think we all know from the Wall.

[Micah Sargent]

Street Journal, that celebrated journalist, write a.

[Paul Thurot]

Story about a three month old processor right as intel is launching new processors. And intel has this exact marketing message. I mentioned this earlier, how they were beating this exact thing to death. Why would they do that? I mentioned earlier, I'm just throwing out ideas that intel pays a Lot of money to make sure that Qualcomm and well, AMD mostly. But now Qualcomm doesn't get any free rides anywhere. And I find this to be very suspicious. So here's one of the things I find suspicious about this article. It never mentions amd. According to this article, there's only intel and now there's Qualcomm. And Qualcomm is terrible. Qualcomm does not play games. Half of the games that they tested did not run smoothly on Qualcomm. It's it. This is like a, a bizarre hit job from a business publication whose readers would never consider these computers to begin with. Why would they have written this story? I find this to be rather incredible. Like I said, you could search the article. How many times they say AMD?

[Micah Sargent]

0. How many times they say Qualcomm?

[Paul Thurot]

If our memory serves, 14. Lot of, a lot of dumping on Qualcomm in here. And they, you know, they talk to experts who I believe were supplied by Intel. I might work for Intel.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm not, I'm just throwing out ideas.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know what happened here. Like I have no idea why this publication would write this article.

[Micah Sargent]

It makes no sense.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm just saying it happened exactly as.

[Micah Sargent]

Intel launched their new process.

[Leo Laporte]

This paragraph is like an ad for Intel.

[Paul Thurot]

That's what I'm saying.

[Micah Sargent]

It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Intel aims to introduce its own chips for PCs with copilot plus AI functions in September. Computer makers expect widespread sales of those intel powered models next year. At that point, gamers could purchase one of the intel devices and avoid the Qualcomm. Here's the thing, this is appalling.

[Paul Thurot]

I think both, both of you guys.

[Micah Sargent]

Will have, will have experienced this where.

[Paul Thurot]

You get up in the morning and.

[Micah Sargent]

You check your email.

[Paul Thurot]

There are some number of PR outreaches, some of which are so ludicrous you might read them aloud to your wife or your spouse and you'll say, you're never going to believe this, but apparently Philadelphia is the second handiest city in the US And I don't know why.

[Micah Sargent]

I got that PR on each day.

[Paul Thurot]

Hilariously, so did my wife. So we both got that one. But you ignore these things. I block them and I mark them as spam.

[Micah Sargent]

Or if it's a legit something something, I just ignore it.

[Paul Thurot]

But I think intel reached out to Zhang Xi there and said, hey, we got a story, I might want to look into it. And they took the bait.

[Richard Campbell]

They also took a bunch of the copy because this is word for word.

[Leo Laporte]

What is it from an intel press release?

[Paul Thurot]

It's, it sounds, does it not sound like it was written by Intel?

[Leo Laporte]

Seriously, Larry, she at a 39 year old gamer in Shanghai said he'd wait for Intel. He doubted serious gamers would even consider.

[Micah Sargent]

PCs powered by our ARM is silly, am I right? They make toys with arm.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't, you can't play a lot of AAA games on a Mac either.

[Paul Thurot]

I just, yeah. Oh yeah. So they mentioned, let's see how many times they mention Apple. Once.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

How many times they mentioned Mac?

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, three times actually.

[Paul Thurot]

It does say although loyal following among.

[Leo Laporte]

Non gamers Max 2 enjoy a loyal following.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm sorry.

[Micah Sargent]

Actually Mac is only twice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So yeah, this is, this is a hit shot. I, I, this is a bald faced disgusting hit job.

[Leo Laporte]

I honestly long suspected the Wall Street Journal of really being.

[Paul Thurot]

It's there for everyone to see. Read it for yourself and tell me what you think because it reads like, like a, like a YouTube influencer would do something like this or like a blogger trying to make a name for himself or something like this is disgusting. And it's in the Wall Street Journal. It's not Bob's blog. You know, it's gross. And look, by the way, the central point is correct.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean actually copilot plus PCs are terrible for games. Like everyone who's reviewed one of these.

[Paul Thurot]

Things has made that point.

[Micah Sargent]

Point.

[Paul Thurot]

But why would you, it's, it's, why, why would it need to be written like it's this. Nobody has these things. Nobody's like, I'm just gonna see what little lake looks like.

[Richard Campbell]

And I was about to buy it, then I read this article and.

[Paul Thurot]

Are you kidding me? Crazy. I've never.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you Wall Street Journal for saving me. I was, I was gonna try to pray, play Sea of Thieves on my, my Qualcomm PC and, and by the.

[Paul Thurot]

Way, as a gamer myself, I read the Wall Street Journal for this kind of hard hitting facts about games because those guys, I mean they're experts, you know, that's who I go to. What, what, what is this? It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we do love a good Paul Thurant. I wouldn't want to be the target of his rants. However, I hope you're enjoying Our best of 2024 for Windows Weekly. Lots more to come. Happy holidays from all of us at twit.

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[Paul Thurot]

We.

[Leo Laporte]

Continue with our Best of with. You know, this is one of the things I love about the PC marketplace. There are so many manufacturers, there's so many opportunities to do interesting things. Paul surprised Micah and Richard with a new Lenovo device that was. Well, the best I can call it is wacky.

[Paul Thurot]

And then this. I didn't know where to put this. I'm not even sure this is worth discussing. It's just insane and I feel like it kind of deserves some attention. I don't do like I can't really do a hands on thing, but I do have this laptop here so there's this big heavy thick looking thing that is a Lenovo think book that is like Surface book in that the screen comes off, right? The screen comes off.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I saw those pictures.

[Paul Thurot]

The difference is that the the screen has a computer inside of it that runs Android and it's a Snapdragon gen whatever with 16 gigs of RAM and its own UFS 3.1 storage. It has its own webcams. It has its own everything. It's its own thing. And then in the bottom there's a core Ultra intel, you know, I think 60, 32, gig of RAM, whatever, SSD storage. And these two things are separate computers and you can kind of, you can, you can hit a button on it and it's really quick. It just switches between the environments and.

[Richard Campbell]

This is wacky.

[Paul Thurot]

It's crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

This is wacky. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And I kind of want one. Now that you've described it like that is weird enough that it makes me happy.

[Kevin King]

The name is even wackier.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. The name is, is unnecessarily weird. It's, it's, it's not even clear if this is the full name, but it's. Yeah, think so. They experiment with ThinkBook for some reason. This is something they've been doing for a while. Gen 5, meaning there were four gens of not this thing but a previous Thinkbook plus design that had different screens and different configurations. Hybrid. I think the full name actually includes Station is in the name. Because there's more going on here, right? Think so.

[Kevin King]

Gen 5 hybrid, station and tablet.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So it, first of all, it's a laptop.

[Richard Campbell]

Even a Microsoft guy's like, dude, you need to work on the name.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. The previous gen versions of this, there was a, there were two versions that had like an E Ink display on the outside.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay, interesting, right?

[Paul Thurot]

It's really thick, you know, E Ink tablet, I guess. And then there was a couple of versions where they had an 8 inch tablet sized screen on the wrist rest which you could use in a dual screen configuration either as like a Wacom style, you know, writing surface, or just as a second screen. Which was stupid and made no sense. But. But I give them a little bit of credit for experimenting. So now we have two computers, right? Each with its own resources, ram, storage, cameras, blah blah, blah, whatever. You can detach them while they're detached or attached. You can use one or the other. This thing can be used as a standalone Android laptop.

[Richard Campbell]

This is not an all in one. This is in everything in one.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So I, I'm struggling to figure out how I could just show this to you. But in addition to all that, you can integrate the two environments in interesting ways. So this software in here, that Lenox.

[Richard Campbell]

So they can see each other like they have a shared storage space.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. So if you've ever used a virtual environment, you've probably seen something like Apple does this with or Perilous does this on Apple where some of the folders are mapped so that when you copy to the desktop and the Windows environment, it copies to the desktop on the Mac they could do that kind of thing. You can run Android, the Android environment in a Windows as an app alongside your Windows apps if you want to do that. It's crazy. It's crazy town. So it's expensive. Like north of three grand expensive.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh geez. But you are buying two computers in one.

[Paul Thurot]

You are buying two computers.

[Richard Campbell]

I've never met a perform an Android tablet. Didn't cost you much.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And I hate to be this guy but I got to say the thing that's really compelling here is going to be when Apple does something like this with iPad MacBook.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't imagine them doing it, but.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. But there's a stand. Oh the PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Be there for it.

[Paul Thurot]

There's. There's a stand that comes with this. It looks like a. A weapon you would use in the middle ages to disarm like a mounted knight on a horse. And you, you. It's kind of a weird setup. You. You detach the screen and you put it on the, the easel thing, the stand.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

And then you have a. An external like 27, whatever 29 inch display. You connect that to the base which is a keyboard with a trackpad.

[Richard Campbell]

This is absolutely the mode I'd be using it in half.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's crazy town. But it's also like. This is actually kind of interesting.

[Kevin King]

Yeah, you're right. It went from are we jumping the shark? To suddenly. That's a cool looking shark.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So with Surface Book the computer was all in the screen except for in the higher end versions where there was a GPU separately in the base.

[Micah Sargent]

But other than the base.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. So you had two G. You had two video processors, one in the screen, one in the base. And was when you're plugged in the.

[Paul Thurot]

Base more performance in the screen. The good GR.

[Richard Campbell]

The DGPU was but only one cpu.

[Kevin King]

When it's on the easel stand as a. As a external monitor. Is that going. Is that wireless or is that wired?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's. You can do either one actually.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's actually acting as a monitor.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not a monitor.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. It does all.

[Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Kevin King]

This is interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

This is insane.

[Paul Thurot]

You kind of run out of. There's so much like. There's so many different configurations. It's kind of weird. Is it loud? I'm fly to Mexico with this thing in my bag. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

When you never hear from me again.

[Richard Campbell]

It's because.

[Paul Thurot]

It's because someone in customs pulled me aside and they saw this thing and said. Yeah, I don't care.

[Kevin King]

They said, where we draw the line.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Megapixel cameras to happen here. This is not happening.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a shell chip set in that tablet. Then it's just a phone, really. You know, it's about the same size as a phone. Yeah. It's got cameras in. On the back. I mean, you could pass as a phone.

[Paul Thurot]

It's crazy. It's a. It's the world's biggest phone.

[Kevin King]

You did say you wanted a bigger phone.

[Richard Campbell]

I do adore how wacky Lenovo is. Like, I really wacky.

[Paul Thurot]

This one. It's. This is one of those crazy as a fox moments where you're like, this is. Is crazy enough. It might just work.

[Leo Laporte]

Just might just work.

[Paul Thurot]

It just like.

[Richard Campbell]

They clearly run a division of Nutters that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

The fact that this made it to production, they didn't just make one and put it on stage.

[Paul Thurot]

Remember how crazy Surface book was and how we laughed? Listen to me. Hold on. You're gonna. You're gonna try to interrupt, but hold on. You're gonna love this idea. Like, it's. It's. It's crazy, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's hilarious, though. So awesome.

[Paul Thurot]

Wow.

[Kevin King]

This is cool.

[Paul Thurot]

But.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Kevin King]

Is it. How loud has it been for you?

[Paul Thurot]

The fans, you mean?

[Kevin King]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

It hasn't been. Oddly, it's been fine. I mean, I. Well, I mean, right now it's probably.

[Richard Campbell]

I totally understand why you didn't know where to put this. Because we don't have a section in the notes called crazy.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it's completely silent.

[Paul Thurot]

It's crazy. Yeah. Crazy time. That's the new. The new submit. The newest segment.

[Richard Campbell]

Crazy time.

[Kevin King]

And it's all just Lenovo stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

My big complaint about this thing as a tablet. The tablet is humongous. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

It's also a 16 by 10 display. So in portrait mode, it's, you know, it's tall and thin.

[Richard Campbell]

That's nice.

[Kevin King]

I do like 1610, though.

[Paul Thurot]

I do, too, for.

[Richard Campbell]

So it could be a tablet or a portable. A wireless display.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. And it can also be an Android laptop if you want. Right. There's literally this button on the keyboard that switches and it's instantaneous.

[Kevin King]

I love that little switch button.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's crazy. So if you wanted to. If you, you know. So Android, like I said earlier in the show, is getting this windowing capability. This thing could turn into kind of a productive Android laptop, which Is a mix of. You all understand but don't make sense together.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. You know, like, you know, now I'm starting to feel like the name isn't long enough.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I know. You're right.

[Kevin King]

You're absolutely right. ThinkBook Gen 5 Hybrid Station and tablet.

[Paul Thurot]

Really doesn't cover enough. I know. It's so weird. I don't know what to say about it. Anyway, keep on keeping on.

[Kevin King]

That's what I say.

[Paul Thurot]

I wanted to mention it because it's nuts, and I just. I applaud.

[Richard Campbell]

We need to celebrate this. Just.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because it's so wacky.

[Paul Thurot]

It's so crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

I love it. So that keyboard is actually a computer. You can plug it into a display. Off you go.

[Paul Thurot]

You could just. You could take the keyboard with you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And just use that as a computer. Assuming you had a display.

[Micah Sargent]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Somewhere, you know, at work or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Take. Get a. Get a VR goggle set with a HDMI plug. Plug it in. Be sitting on. Sitting on the plane with VR goggles and a keyboard in your lap.

[Kevin King]

Oh, man, that is really interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

It is laughable. Just throwing it out there.

[Richard Campbell]

Fabulous.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. It's crazy.

[Kevin King]

Go Lenovo.

[Paul Thurot]

Sometimes. Sometimes things happen and you're like, no, there's no way. Like, there's no way this is right. You know, like, this is you. You check the date. Like, is it April 1st? Is someone screwing with me? And I opened the iPad. I went to the. The news app.

[Micah Sargent]

I was.

[Paul Thurot]

As I was doing this, I was saying something to my wife. So I'm. I'm in the middle of a sentence, like I do on the show sometimes, and I'm like, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just staring. She's like, are you okay? And I'm like, it says that Microsoft is reopening Three Mile Island. Like, does that combination of words make sense to you? And so Three Mile island is, of course, the infamous site of the nuclear disaster 1979.

[Richard Campbell]

I've done a whole piece on this. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

In Pennsylvania. Right. So, of course I'm excited for this.

[Micah Sargent]

Thing to come back because this place.

[Paul Thurot]

Needs to be a nuclear wasteland. And that. That thing is. Apparently, there were two.

[Richard Campbell]

There are two reactors on the Three Mile island site.

[Leo Laporte]

And one of them's still okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, one of them. Well, one of them is one of those ones.

[Richard Campbell]

Reactor 2 was completely cleaned up. They removed the entire core assembly. 100. Oh, no. It's not usable.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh.

[Richard Campbell]

But all of that.

[Leo Laporte]

And it won't be for 100 million years.

[Richard Campbell]

But the corium has been removed. The radioactive materials.

[Paul Thurot]

You get tested, you have cancer, you have an operation and they use like a little ice cream scoop and they scoop it all out and they're like, we got it all. Do you distrust that or just, you know, like. I don't know. I'm not saying. I don't know what I'm saying.

[Richard Campbell]

By Core Reactor 1, they were running it, it got a license, it continued operating.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, no, that's right. In fact.

[Richard Campbell]

But it is an older generic reactor and it's just expensive to operate. So they turned it off.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. And it wasn't that long ago. I want to say it was 2019 possibly.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. Just a couple of years back, if you go in.

[Paul Thurot]

So the name of this company that owns it is Constellation. They're going to change the name of the facility, by the way, because of course they are. And it will have some awesome, you know, like Crane Clean Energy, you know, whatever. Crane was the guy who stuck his finger in the dike so everyone didn't die or something. But, but okay, but if you read their announcement, it's actually really interesting. It's clear they're still upset they had to turn this thing off. Off. Like they're really, they're kind of mad about it.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Paul Thurot]

They, they lash out at other forms of clean energy.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurot]

And, and the basic claim was something to the tune of whatever wind and solar has done in Pennsylvania for the entire duration that it's existed, we will surpass that energy savings or energy generation in one month, you know, or whatever. I'm paraphrasing, but they were basically just.

[Richard Campbell]

A gigawatt power plant. Like it's a lot, it does make a lot of electricity. It takes a lot of wind turbines to match that.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So they're going to spend about $1.6 billion to get this thing restarted. There's, you know, we talk about the CHIPS act a lot. There's actually an Inflation Recovery act, which I would not normally know a thing about and still don't really. But there'll be some funding from the government that will help. Microsoft, of course, has signed a 20 year contract so that if this thing actually does come on, they're going to be there for a long, long time.

[Leo Laporte]

And what are they going to use it for?

[Paul Thurot]

Paul, what do you think they're going to make? Windows Phones? No, they're going to.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S for AI.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. They're going to power over 700,000 homes. Oh, no, they're not. They're going to power one AI thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, one data center.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it's going to do.

[Richard Campbell]

How to make your technology look like an overlord in one easy step.

[Paul Thurot]

I. There.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny because Pennsylvania is the state of coal, but there is another nuclear plant that is also running.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, Pennsylvania has a brighter new future, Leo. We're also the state of fracking, so I don't know why you're still stuck on coal.

[Leo Laporte]

Natural gas and coal.

[Paul Thurot]

We've moved way past, apparently, nuclear power. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But, you know, I. I had the same reaction as you, Paul.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Pardon the pun.

[Leo Laporte]

And we talked about it on Sunday on Twitter. I was convinced that this is a good thing and that nuclear power is. Is safe and clean and we need it, you know, desperately need the generation. I feel like it's kind of sad that we're putting all of this power into crypto and AI, which I'm not. I'm not convinced.

[Paul Thurot]

Which is actually a problem for that federal funding because that, of course is designed to, you know, for things that will provide, you know, electricity or whatever.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

To human beings, to cut. To civic citizens, not. Not to a single private company. Right. Or a public company, but, you know, a non. A non citizen or non state sponsored thing. So I don't know. You know, we'll see if it happens. Apparently this thing's in pretty good shape. They just. They had inspected it years ago anyway. They did. You know, they, of course, are doing that regularly. You know, it's not like they drink there and, you know, tag inside and stuff. Like it's, you know, it's been.

[Richard Campbell]

Any attempt to rename it would not go well.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Chernobyl's back, ladies and gentlemen.

[Paul Thurot]

But that one's got to be Google because they're super evil. Yeah, Fukuyama's coming back too. Everything's gonna be great.

[Richard Campbell]

Fukushima.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Fukushima. Sorry. After they made Godzilla, they're. Yeah, they're gonna bring that one back and then, you know, Sony can use it.

[Richard Campbell]

5 and 6 are just fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So. Yeah. Anyway, I guess there are a couple of other nuclear power plants in the United States that were in the process. Process of being decommissioned and they might. One or two of them might come back too. So fun. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Another one in Pennsylvania. Susquehanna.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean, you get a book in the state and just make the whole thing unlivable. It's perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Back to the show. And now we give Paul Thurat the stage because it's time for the long awaited, much loved Xbox segment.

[Richard Campbell]

Xbox D.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wait a minute. He's got It. He's got it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, the backwards Halo, but not Halo. I don't have anything bad to say.

[Micah Sargent]

So awesome about Xbox this week and.

[Paul Thurot]

I even have two Xbox related back of the book entries tip and I know. Yeah, I know. Is this a live performance?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. It's a small audience but enthusiastic.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Well, there you go. That's the Halo audience. There were rumors of this a couple years ago and then a couple years before that, but Microsoft revealed in a very convoluted way that they are shifting Halo to the Unreal Engine 5. They were using their own in house rendering engine previous to this. This was a huge problem because they had to maintain it, keep it up to date, support it, make sure it was set, all the features, all the big guys had and then they would hire people and no one knew how to use it. So they'd have to spend time and money training those people on the engine.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't build your own engine. It's a mistake.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. And okay, they showed to do a proof of concept. They created a project. It's not a game, it's not going to turn into a game. But they basically just recreated Halo worlds and environments, I should say, and characters and vehicles and things and damn, it looks good. And this has come up a bunch but Leo and I live covered an event where they announced Halo Infinite, the current game. And it looked like an 8 bit super NES port. It was like the saddest looking. And I thought what they were going to do was that thing at the beginning of the wizard of Oz where it's in black and white and then black and white, glorious color. I thought it was going to go into glorious 4K and then, yeah, then it ended and I said isn't. I mean, couldn't the original, you know, ID engine from Quake do this? Like what is, what is happening here? So it got better. You know, they delayed it a year and whatever, but they then spent the next year and a half kind of dripping out the features that all were supposed to ship in the beginning. But this thing, you got to look at this video.

[Micah Sargent]

It's awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Unreal Engine is, let's face it, really unbelievably gorgeous.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

Now let me play a little bit.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, play a little bit. Yeah, go back. You have to dive into it to find the scenes from the environments and stuff. But just I'll say while you're looking for that as part of the. You know, obviously with Halo it's sort of like Star Wars. We have these different eras and we have the Bungie era and we have the 343 era. If we were to take a vote, I think we'd all agree the Bungie era was a little bit better.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is a behind the scenes kind of thing. Oh, look at that. This is unreal Engine.

[Richard Campbell]

That's unreal.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks real.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Yeah. I love the light blooms.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy moly.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

So I guess they've got the drawings, the artwork and then they're showing how they rendered it. Wow, this is amazing. Oh, Halo never looks so good.

[Paul Thurot]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I want to get, I want.

[Paul Thurot]

To jump in that this is only part of the problem with Halo.

[Micah Sargent]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

So I mean, well, you have to have a good. But you want to, you want to modernize the engine or you know, get a modernized engine. In this case, I guess it has to look good for starters. And so this looks good, you know, it looks good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So they're not ready. It's not coming out anytime soon. But they're working on multiple Halo titles. They are actively hiring, by the way. In sharp contrast to the rest of the video game industry, they've renamed the studio from 343 Industries to Halo Studios.

[Leo Laporte]

They should call it 344.

[Richard Campbell]

That would be fun.

[Paul Thurot]

Steve Jobs, it's what's next.

[Leo Laporte]

One more. It's one bet.

[Paul Thurot]

To me, the problem with Halo wasn't so much how it looked. Cuz Halo, if it looks pretty good, it's fine. It's that it's boring and the same old thing over and over again.

[Leo Laporte]

At least it should be pretty. If you're going to be boring, be pretty.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I refer to it as a cure for a video game addiction. It certainly worked for me. So it's like the patch but for video games. So yeah, I mean they have to get story right. They have to, you know, we'll see what they do. But they've been on this real monolithic path for a long time and I think it's fair to say, you know, Halo 4 or 5 and now Infinite, you know, like not great. So we'll see what they come up with. But the, I mean, looks great.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll look good.

[Paul Thurot]

It's gonna look good.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll look good. I want to show you something thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, did you get your shipping notice?

[Leo Laporte]

More than a notice, my friend.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

How does that happen?

[Leo Laporte]

The Snapdag and dev kit is here. Did you, Richard, get.

[Richard Campbell]

I got a ship, I got my shipping notice, but of course I'm not home. It's got across the border.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I, can I unbox it?

[Richard Campbell]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Richard Campbell]

Please.

[Leo Laporte]

This is exciting. I'll. I'll show you.

[Paul Thurot]

I didn't expect to do this until February.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it was saying January.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay, January.

[Leo Laporte]

They want for YouTube. I have to do a little thing. Yeah, okay. Got it. Our YouTube thumbnail requested by Kevin. This is the. Let's see. I guess I should put it under the. I have a special camera for just such occasions. First time we've used it. First of all, look at this envelope. What is this? Is this something exciting in here? An invitation.

[Richard Campbell]

It says, thank you for being a developer.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome. It does. It says, congratulations on purchasing the Snapdragon dev kit. Get ready to take your development skills to the next level. I wonder if they support Lisp. And then here.

[Richard Campbell]

Does anyone.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually. They do. I could put Lisp on this. There she. There she is. I actually pre unwrapped from plastic. So this is. It's kind of like a Mac mini. Let me get the box out of the way. Way here and I can. I have it set up so I can plug it in while you guys talk about other things.

[Richard Campbell]

That's fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

To answer the question.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Let's look at some. Let's look at that HDMI port.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yeah. So you asked a question about the HDMI port. To answer that, there is no HDMI port on the case. But look what comes in the power supply is a USBC to HDMI adapter.

[Paul Thurot]

I bet if you open the box, you'd see a port though.

[Micah Sargent]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

I will. I'll take it apart. I don't want to do that on the show today, but I'll take it apart. There is on this side a opening for the fan. In fact, you can see inside, there's a little copper cooling, he thinks.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Heat sink on the back, there's Ethernet. There's the power adapter. It has a big brick.

[Paul Thurot]

This thing looks like a utilitarian router.

[Leo Laporte]

It does, doesn't it? It's black. Black? Yeah, Vanta Black. It's got two usb. A type. Type threes.

[Richard Campbell]

But no covered up HDMI port.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

They may.

[Paul Thurot]

But I'm wondering if it's not a piece of hard plastic.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but it would show we'd have a seam or something on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there is something on the front that maybe is related. Okay, so here's the front with another. Another Thunderbolt.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's Thunderbolt. It just says two on it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's HP USB 4/4.

[Leo Laporte]

USB 4.

[Paul Thurot]

They just don't have the certification.

[Leo Laporte]

On off switch and then this, which is a weird cover.

[Paul Thurot]

It looks like a micro sd or.

[Leo Laporte]

It is, it's micro sd, but it's weird that they. They're covering it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Why would you do that?

[Leo Laporte]

So I wonder if that has something to do with. I don't know. I don't know what that is.

[Paul Thurot]

That's weird.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they have the light for power underneath. More. More venting.

[Richard Campbell]

All we know for sure is that their shipping scheduling software does not work.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Evaluation only Not FCC APPROVED FOR REV resale.

[Micah Sargent]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well remember this was the issue was they didn't get FCC approval apparently for the hdmi.

[Paul Thurot]

So maybe evaluating it.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo, that's why I am only. Well, it is exactly what I'm doing. I'm evaluating it. So I have. I have a cake. You know, I have attached the HDMI and I've got a keyboard and a mouse and I'm ready to. To do this. In fact let me. Let me get my HDMI cable. Cable over here. Plug it in to their adapter because who knows, maybe this is a proprietary. No, it's not braided cable though. It's nice. It's a nice enough. I'll put that in the front of it.

[Richard Campbell]

They definitely went for the fancy adapter.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So this is exciting. I'll plug it in and fire it up and. But so yeah, presumably yours is awaiting.

[Richard Campbell]

You when I get home. I. When I do a three week trip, I do hold mail. Mail. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's smart.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's just too much stuff. And generally, generally speaking, I. The local post office, they'll keep stuff for a week for me. Like I just tell them I want to be away for a week. Don't clog up the boxes.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But at some point they need to start sending stuff back. Unless I put in a hold mail.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the brick. Reminds me of the. Of a Lenovo brick. And it is unfortunately proprietary. Well, not. It's not.

[Paul Thurot]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

You couldn't call it proprietary. It's a. It's of a plug.

[Paul Thurot]

You could probably buy a replacement. You could buy pretty easily. But yeah, you'd have to figure out exactly what it's not as military.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a. This comes from the well known Hunt Key company. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

I love those guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It actually is labeled on the back 19v DC. So yeah, obviously it's not. It's not proprietary, but I wish it were my do I wish it were type C powered? I mean maybe not, maybe I not.

[Paul Thurot]

You wouldn't want to take up a port. Honestly, that's Right.

[Leo Laporte]

On a laptop, maybe, but not on a. Not on a desktop. Yeah, I don't mind.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Brick.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know. Those are. I bet the USB power supplies that are that big are kind of expensive still.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, 200 watts is about the limit on PD, so it's coming in at 180. That's pushing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, good. I will. I'll fire this up and we'll do the cool. The welcome experience. It'll be just like a normal Windows machine. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Micah Sargent]

Should.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean, it should be.

[Leo Laporte]

Who knows?

[Paul Thurot]

Actually, you'll probably experience the extended out of box experience where it installs the latest feature update whether you want it or not, before you can touch it. That's.

[Micah Sargent]

That's.

[Paul Thurot]

It's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good. That's a good thing, right?

[Paul Thurot]

It's a required thing. It doesn't matter. It's. It's like a prostate exam. Leo, you know, we know you don't like.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not a good thing.

[Micah Sargent]

It's happening, but you need.

[Paul Thurot]

So, you know, it's all right.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't mean to hijack the show, but I just. So excited. We've been talking about this since we ordered them in July. Yeah, the last.

[Paul Thurot]

I can assure you this will be the most interesting thing we talk about.

[Micah Sargent]

Today.

[Richard Campbell]

Once I get home. We could do an all Snapdragon show, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I'm using Snapdragon right now.

[Leo Laporte]

I ended up sending that Snapdragon dev kit. I never. I turned it on. You saw me, I ran it, I installed it, and I thought, what am I going to do with this? And then I found out I got it for free because they recalled all of them. I was one of a few hundred people who got. You know, they never charged me for the dev kit. So just to follow up on that story, I packed it up, bundled it up, and mailed it out to Paul. And I think Paul's going to talk a lot. I hope Paul's going to talk about it in 2025. You're watching our Best of 2024 with Windows Weekly. Paul Thurut and Richard Campbell. We're glad you're here, and I hope you're having the happiest of holidays. Well, I hope you're enjoying this best stuff. It's always fun to do these, and I have to tell you, it's a lot of work. And I really appreciate our team, the people who work so hard. Anthony Nielsen, our creative director. Our producers and editors, Benito Gonzalez, Kevin King, John Ashley. They work so hard to put this all together for you.

[Paul Thurot]

You.

[Leo Laporte]

All of our hosts, our contributors do. And of course there's the office people who do work in continuity, like Viva and Sebastian. Our CEO Lisa Twit is a big effort and we think what we're doing is really important. I hope you do too. I hope you enjoy the company and learn from the information. And if you do, I'd like you to consider joining our club because frankly, in 2025, that's the only thing that's going to keep Twit going. If you like what you hear and you want to continue, please 7 bucks a month consider joining Club Twit. Twit TV Club Twit. You get ad free versions of all the shows, access to our Discord special programming you don't get anywhere else. But really the main thing you get is that warm and fuzzy feeling that you're keeping Twit going. We need your help. I hate to beg, but we really do. Twit tv. But enough of that on with the show.

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[Richard Campbell]

This.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul's gone into this a couple of Times Now. In 2024, one of his favorite AI searches. Let's watch.

[Paul Thurot]

ARC Search is now available on Android, right? So it was open beta for about six weeks now. It's broadly available. And the big thing here is it's not like a straight up web browser, but it's more like a kind of a front end to search. So you can just, you can just do a search and it will go to Google Search or whatever you configure. But the big thing is their browse for me capability where they generate use generative AI to create like a nice presentation of something. So when you have a, a question like who is. You know, fill in the blank. This person or what is like, like what is a latte? Or whatever they get, you know, it's a nice presentation.

[Richard Campbell]

What is latte?

[Paul Thurot]

What is latte? Which is a question I often ask at Dunkin Donuts when I order a latte and they say, would you like some sugar with that? And I'm like, excuse me. I said I would like a latte. Do you not know what a latte is?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you not know what Duncan is?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, because, you know, I just, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, if I see where you.

[Paul Thurot]

I feel like if I wanted sugar in this, I would have asked you for that. But that's a.

[Richard Campbell]

Not that he has strong opinions about that sort of thing.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I think things, mean things and you know, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

This is where, this is where you go wrong right there.

[Paul Thurot]

Fire. Yeah, that's, that's probably true.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

All right. Yes. I'm sorry. From Duncan, Donna's perspective is real quick, the reason they do it is because they make a latte for someone and then they go, there's no sugar in this. They're like, yeah, you didn't ask for sugar.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Didn't you order a latte?

[Paul Thurot]

That's, that's why you ordered a latte. Latte does not have sugar.

[Leo Laporte]

This is our put sugar in a latte. But it is not a request.

[Paul Thurot]

You could, but then you really thinking.

[Leo Laporte]

Frappuccino is what I think.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Frappuccino. Just code language for milkshake. For adult.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Growing up, it's like milkshake.

[Paul Thurot]

Can I have six different forms of sugar in a glass? Yes. We actually have a name for that.

[Leo Laporte]

How many pumps would you like?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, would you like. You've been asked that question. Something is gone.

[Richard Campbell]

I'd like the large Frappuccino and a shot of inside anything.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm walking out the door, right? There'll be no pumping.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it. You're a coffee, Pierce. Do you get good coffee in Mexico?

[Paul Thurot]

I'm so sad you asked me this. So I spent. So there is good coffee in Mexico, but we spent 20 years doing home swaps in Europe, and every. With one exception, I think they all had, like, those little espresso machines.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right, right.

[Paul Thurot]

I wanted one of these for 20 years. And I begged my wife, and she said, no, these things are an ecological disaster. We're not doing this. Blah, blah, blah, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So, you know. You know, she's smart. So we got to Mexico, and I was like, listen, listen, I want to get a Nespresso thing. Can we just get an espresso? And she's like, all right, screw it. Yes, you can get an espresso. I hate it. I hate it so much.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not good coffee.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not good coffee. So we went through every single. They're all, like, city names and stuff. There's a. There's a. A kaleidoscope of colors. We went through every single one of them, and we only found one. I like. It's called. It's Milan. I think it all comes from the same Keurig. I know. It's the stupidest thing. Yeah. So. So we go and buy. We have to, you know, get more. And we bring the capsules back, which, you know, smacks. They throw them in the trash, and then they're like. Like, what would you like? Well, like, we would like 36 boxes of Milan. And they're like, you don't want it? I'm like, no, just Milan.

[Leo Laporte]

Just the one flavor.

[Paul Thurot]

I hate it so much. Funny, I wanted one for.

[Leo Laporte]

So get a bambino. Get a Breville bambino. You can make real espresso.

[Paul Thurot]

But what would I be like if I was happy, Leo? You don't want me content.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's true.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, it's better. I gotta be honest. Better.

[Leo Laporte]

You're miserable.

[Micah Sargent]

Better, you're miserable.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but you're right. No, you're right. Right. There's better coffee. But.

[Leo Laporte]

But there. And I'm sure you can go out and get good coffee out there.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, no. This fantastic, one of the highest rated coffee shops in the entire city is like, two seconds from her.

[Micah Sargent]

It's stupid.

[Leo Laporte]

Mexico is the home of coffee and chocolate. I mean, there's really good stuff there.

[Paul Thurot]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I'm going to ask you about a little rant that Mr. Stephen Gibson.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, good. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Did yesterday, but I'll wait till we get to.

[Micah Sargent]

Now.

[Paul Thurot]

I want to guess what it was about.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think it was about?

[Richard Campbell]

It's going to be.

[Paul Thurot]

Was it about Windows as an open platform? No, that was, it was about Windows resiliency?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurot]

Was it about recall and click to do?

[Leo Laporte]

It was close. It was about the connected.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, the experience. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Experience.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I want to get some more. Once you, when we get to that, just say, what did Steve think of that? And I'll let you.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I want to get your input on it. Because Steve was irate, but I'm not sure.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't think he understood the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I think.

[Paul Thurot]

But I don't think he understood what was really happening, which is kind of the problem there. But okay, we'll get to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I want to talk about.

[Paul Thurot]

But meanwhile, we can get to it right now. Do you want to talk about it right now?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So the idea is Microsoft 365 has a new kind of a remit.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not, it's not really new, but they.

[Leo Laporte]

Not new. Okay, but, but let me pull up his show notes because that's probably the best, the best thing to do here. And I can.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean, actually. Well, yes. Right. To find out what he said. I, I, there were. Well, you know, this is, honestly, this ties right into my tip for two hours from now, which is about as vague as that gets. But it.

[Leo Laporte]

He called the amounts disconnected experiences. I mean, some idea of where he's going. Microsoft silently enabled AI training.

[Paul Thurot]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

For Word and Excel did not.

[Paul Thurot]

That didn't happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He gave the impression, I think he got the impression that they were going to use your content for training their LLMs. And I.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's, I had to say to him, I don't think that's what they're doing.

[Paul Thurot]

They're not.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

That's it. And I look, just as a general statement, and you've heard me say this before, there's so much to complain about. With Microsoft, we don't have to make anything up. You know, there's so much to complain about.

[Leo Laporte]

He said in Microsoft's documentation, it says connected experiences that analyze your content. Connected experiences that analyze your content are experiences that use your Office content to provide you with design recommendations, editing suggestions, data insights and Similar features.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. It does say that. That's true. That's accurate. Yeah. Well, you know what? It doesn't say use it to train AI because it doesn't do that. Yeah. It doesn't just.

[Leo Laporte]

It also says that it will preserve. It will delete stuff for the most part. Most connected experiences don't retain your content after performing their function to help you accomplish a task. And this is, I think another thing that kind of tickled his thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Sure. Yeah. But.

[Leo Laporte]

But there are a few exceptions. In those cases, Microsoft retains the content for as long as your account exists and it's used to support, personalize or improve that connected experience.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. This is what Microsoft has been doing for probably 20 years. No, I mean it.

[Leo Laporte]

I mentioned, I said any spell checker has to do this. Any grammar checker has to do this is literally.

[Paul Thurot]

Here's the problem. Like you, you have this flowchart and the flowchart, the first question says, is Microsoft using your data to train its AI, yes or no. And if you choose, yes. There's this whole litany of problems that comes down.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

And we've done this.

[Leo Laporte]

Businesses don't want that.

[Paul Thurot]

No one wants it, but that's not really the point. I mean, no one wants it, but that's not right. But there is no path where we go down that direction. So the complaints that pile on top of that are meaningless. They're not doing it. So look, I, I wrote about it. I mean, I. And by the way, for whatever it's worth, I. The way I wrote this was not. Microsoft is not training copilot AI on your data. It's Microsoft says it is not training copilot AI on your data. That's how I phrased it now because we.

[Richard Campbell]

How would we know?

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, right. So. But the problem is, you know, people kind of lose their minds. They like. If you are not familiar with Microsoft 365 and you hear this phrase, Microsoft connected experiences. And like Leo just said, there's this new thing and it's like, what? It's not new. This is not new. I don't know what triggered this exactly. I feel like every time there's like a spell check change to a privacy agreement, they have to just retell users, hey, this is what's happening. But I think what happened was people did not. Look, Leo just read a part of the Microsoft Learn page that describes Microsoft's connected experiences for Microsoft 365.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

It has absolutely nothing to do with training AI. It has everything to do with online features like Document, collaboration, spell check and spell or grammar, style, type, stuff, preferences, stuff preference.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, like personalizations you're most likely to collaborate with. These are the words that you think are words, that kind of thing.

[Paul Thurot]

So this episode required me to do things I don't like to do. Like go read Microsoft's privacy statement, go read Microsoft's services agreement. Just, you know, because you never know, they might have slipped something in there. They're pretty evil. Yeah, but it's pretty straightforward. And the way it plays out is if you're a business, nothing to worry about, end of discussion. We're. If you're a consumer, Microsoft does use the interactions you have with Copilot in Bing, in MSN, in the Copilot app in Windows 11 and oddly, in the interactions you have with advertising. In other words, if you click on something for like a preferences based thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

They do actually train its AI on that. However, you can opt out of it if you want to. It's actually a pretty straightforward process. If you pay for Microsoft Copilot, I always get the name of it Pro, which is the consumer version of Microsoft 365 Copilot. They do not train anything that you do. They leave you alone. So that's the end of the. That's it. That's the whole story. So again, not to ruin my tip for later in the show, but basically this. What this reminds me of is sometime about a month ago, Chris titus is on YouTube with probably a million views by this point. Microsoft is secretly installing and enabling recall on everyone's computers. No, they are not. No, they were not. No, they will not. I will not do that on a train. I will not do it on a plane. I will not do it anywhere. It's fake, it's not real. But people, you know, we live in this world where people who don't know anything about anything have like super strong opinions about those things and they see something, they see some phrase like connect. I'm not saying that this is what Steve did. I think Steve is reading other people who have complained about it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's probably what's happening.

[Paul Thurot]

There's some Linux site that went to town on this and literally it was like, why do you use. Like why not just call it what it is, AI training. Why use other words? This is unethical from a trillion dollar corporation. How is this even legal? It's like I can't debate that. It's just that they're not doing it. Like you're going nuts on something that is not a thing thing and so I look, like I said, I there. There's so much real, you know, badness in the world. We should focus on the real. We don't have to make stuff up.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I also feel like our job is not to spread heat, but to spread light. And there you go.

[Paul Thurot]

That's.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, that's a good one. I like.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's tempting because of course, heat generates hits.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And heat is profitable. And so especially on YouTube. It's one of the reasons I'm not thrilled about the rise of the YouTube influencer.

[Paul Thurot]

Because.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they're strongly incented to generate heat.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, it's presentation.

[Micah Sargent]

And.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't care about our audience. I mean, we don't care about our audience. Hey, dog, did you know what?

[Paul Thurot]

Microsoft is screwing you over this week? It's like, dude, relax.

[Leo Laporte]

We care more about our audience than whether we're going to get the hits and the likes.

[Micah Sargent]

Here's what I care about.

[Paul Thurot]

I care when I sign into Windows and all of a sudden OneDrive is automatically backing up these folders. That was very annoying not to back up many times.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So, like, that to me, is malicious.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

Anti consumer certification.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

This whole scrapping of all my preferences because you updated the os, not acceptable.

[Leo Laporte]

I've seen that happen on other operating systems.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it happens to my, you know, I update my. I update Android and Android, boom. All the notifications are reset, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but, yeah, so I, that's. I, you know, I, I really want to say that what, what we as a network and what we as individuals really strive to do is to spread light, not heat, because it's complicated enough for everyone to figure it out.

[Micah Sargent]

I think of it as.

[Paul Thurot]

We don't always get there, but the goal is to be helpful, not to get in your way. And when you lie to people or you just misunderstand something and then you waste their time by going on this crazy rant and you publish it wherever you publish it and people read it and they spread it and, and that's how we get to where our country is right now. So you could be part of the problem or you could just think for yourself. Think clearly. My reaction to this was Steve, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T think he was malicious. No, he wasn't trying to get hits. He's not that guy.

[Paul Thurot]

I know, I'm sorry. I want to be super clear about that.

[Leo Laporte]

He just didn't understand. I said to him on the show, I said, you know, I don't think it's doing that. So let's check with Paul and Richard and find out tomorrow.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I'm not criticizing him. I'm sorry. Some of this stuff, too, is just a fog of war type of thing. So this, your show happens when it happens, that show. And you know, we're still in the early days of what's happening here. Microsoft has been very clear in this case, like, excuse me, this is not what's happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they have because of their relationship with OpenAI and the general concern. And by the way, OpenAI seems to be a little bit more likely to suggest your stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

Little more likely. Ask the New York Times. How likely.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think Microsoft has to bend over backwards to be clear. And they are. They say it explicitly. We do not collect customer data to train our LLMs, period. And they have to say that because businesses are very skittish about business data getting.

[Paul Thurot]

Actually, that's a good point. And the reason I took it upon myself to go back and reread the relevant sections of their service agreement and privacy statement was businesses. Yes, but what about consumers? I am at least. Well, that's the point. And I got to be honest, like, I quoted from it, I think, in my story, but there's a passage there where I was like, I had to reread it three times. Like, hold on. I was like, what are you saying here? It was the bit about Copilot Pro, but eventually I kind of parsed it and I was like, no, no, no. Okay. They do not. They are not. The only instance in which Microsoft trains LLMs on customer data is the thing I said before, which is consumers only. And it's Bing MSN Copilot app and advertising. It's not while you're using Microsoft. So to get into Microsoft Word with Copilot, you have to pay for it. And once you pay for it, they're not training their LLMs on you. So it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

And, and to. And to be clear, even if you don't pay for it, they are not training their LLMs on you.

[Paul Thurot]

They're not reading OneDrive and. And training their LLMs, nor.

[Leo Laporte]

Nor looking at your actions or the PowerPoint your. You're creating.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they are looking at it to help you to suggest images and so forth or, you know, clippy style. But they're not ingesting it for. To train their LLMs.

[Paul Thurot]

No, they're enabling. Well, they're about that. They're using. Well, how do I say this? They're using your data like this is, you know, okay, let's go back in time a little bit When Microsoft added Cortana to Windows or baby to Windows Phone, that was first. But I don't remember the. I don't remember. When this complaint come up, some guy said to me, let me get this straight, I'm going to sign into this app and then it's going to have access to my calendar and you know, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, it's a personal assistant dude, if that's what you want, it has to have access to that data. You know, like he was outraged by this common panic.

[Leo Laporte]

Instagram changes their, their terms of service and so forth and people go, oh my God, they're going to sell our pictures. But they have. I think it's a misunderstanding about what permissions a piece of software needs in order to do its job. And what it does need to do is read your data.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm not going to get this correct off the top. So this is like we talked about this last week to some degree. There's this notion that there's two Windows essentially, right? There's the team that's responsible for the underpinnings, the resiliency stuff, the security foundation, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then there's the clown car people throwing features out every month without even testing them, right? So we have to deal with that as Windows users. But the credible part of Windows, the responsible adult part of Windows, you know, they take this stuff so seriously. You get into a weird situation like you clean install Windows 11, you look at Windows security has a yellow bang on it and you go and you look at it and there's one to three things that are not green. Check, mark, everything's great. And I'm not going to remember exactly what these are off the top of my head, but one of them is like, one of them can be like, reputation based protection is not enabled by default. And you can enable it, but when you do, you have to go through a UAC prompt. And the reason is for that thing to work, it actually has to understand what apps you're using, which is a violation of your privacy. And you have to agree to it because you agree that it understanding the apps you're using in an anonymized state. It's not like Paul is associated with these apps, but rather people are running these apps. That's how it protects you. It uses heuristics and AI to look at the behavior of the apps and whatever, but it won't do it unless you let it, right? And there's two, like I said, one to four settings in Windows that are like that, sorry, Windows security, where you have to go in and manually turn them on because it won't do it on your behalf because it requires this little iota of anonymous data, anonymous personal data. And that's in this case, how serious they take that. And so we should sort of acknowledge that that's the reality. I mean, look, we just talked about this there. They're also auto enabling, Funnel backup and OneDrive and a lot of people. So just the yin and the yang, you know, so there's a little bit of both.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's also definitely in the world a mistrust of big tech right now. And I think that that also plays into this. People are just assuming that they are.

[Richard Campbell]

Bad actors, which they've earned.

[Micah Sargent]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, oh, they earned it.

[Richard Campbell]

Did.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't say they haven't earned it. But if you're. If I think if a company deserves skepticism, don't do this. That the, the onus is on somebody else to say, well, let me prove that they can't.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And so unfortunately, these are the, the conversations or debates or even arguments, I guess, that I get into with people, which is like, you know, I read this article, I explain it, I point to the documents, I quote from them, and people says, well, you know, that document's not worth the paper it's printed on. Okay, look, I can't help you with your basic distrust of this company.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

This belief that it will violate the law by not doing what it says it's going to do in a legally binding contract. I guess I. If you believe that, I want to see the proof.

[Leo Laporte]

If you say that I want to see the proof, I want to see the evidence.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I. Well, so this is the way arguments like this is the way these are proven negative. Yeah. Or they'll point to the thing I just said. Well, they said, well, they started enabling this folder backup thing. Isn't that the same. Isn't that the same thing? And it's like, no, they never explicitly like. And also, this isn't a violation of my privacy. Also, this is like claiming that forcing me to wear a motorcycle helmet or put a seatbelt on is in some way a violation of my civil liberties.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that is. That is okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Common sense. Right? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to get crazy there. I'm sorry, I turned.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's not go too far.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, you're right. I'm sorry, but.

[Micah Sargent]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

I was right. I'm just about to compare Gates to Hitler. I was just Going right there. All right, so it's like a slippery slope. This is how the conversation ends.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, but you know What? This, remember 20 years ago everybody said, oh yeah, no, the government has a back door and two windows.

[Paul Thurot]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

That was commonly accepted. There was never any evidence.

[Paul Thurot]

Sounds right, you know, of course, but we. No evidence. Now we're. Now people outside of Microsoft have viewed the source code. The source code is leaked.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

There's no backdoor. I mean, whatever. The NSA can't even get into a frickin iPhone. Do you think they. Come on, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

And the reason I believe Microsoft, as I've said, and I'll say it again, it would be against their business interests. Their better.

[Paul Thurot]

You know why I believe them? Because their AI is terrible. And if this thing was reading my data, maybe it would work, you know, this much, it wouldn't suck so bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this would kill the sales of Windows if this, if people found out they were doing this. It's too risky. There's no point and there's no advantage. You don't want to read a bunch of customer garbage that's not what you want to ingest in your ll.

[Paul Thurot]

So the complaint that I, the one complaint I keep remaking in this show and for the past year, this thing about folder backup. Right. Not that they've ever given this response, but if you could imagine some future class action lawsuit. We're sitting there on the stand, some guy from Microsoft is explaining why they did this and he said, hey, let me read you the 17 customer stories I have from people who wrote me and said thank you. I would have lost this thing I put on my desktop, but you backed it up to my OneDrive and I got a new computer and bang, it was back. And you can at least that issue incenses me just as a technical person who wants to configure a computer the way I want to configure it. It.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

However, I have to recognize that in many cases, maybe even in most cases for typical consumers, mainstream users, whatever, that they actually benefit from this policy.

[Richard Campbell]

Now, well, we get back to this whole idea that you're not a typical consumer.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. No, but I try to, but I do try to see the world through that lens. I try to think that clearly about this topic. And my response, my overall take on this is you could try to enable it, but you should let me say no. And if I say no, you should respect that choice. You know, I go through a really complex series of steps to configure word the way I want it. And then as soon as I'm done with it and I save a file to the desktop, which is where I want to save it, it says, whoa, wait a minute, dude, no, you really, you got to back this thing up to OneDrive. What are you doing? And it's like you just saw me do it. Like I didn't misclick one button. I did 17 steps to get to this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it wasn't an accident. I'm not fumbling my way through here.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, or in that instance, in that stupid yellow strip that comes up, give me an option that says, yep, I got it. Yeah, don't tell me this ever again. And then it goes, are you sure? I am sure. And then let me go. No, but it doesn't do that. So to me, that's the bad behavior. Well, that and the automatic enabling of something I literally said no to seven or eight times. But whatever, I, I do agree it's maybe the best configuration, the recommended configuration for maybe most people. Certainly many.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think that they're not doing it.

[Paul Thurot]

That's not what we're talking about, right? Like we're not talking about that. We're talking about something that's not insane. But it is insane. Like it, like you said it would be, it would be a net negative to Microsoft's business because it would be found out. You can't get away with anything anymore. Microsoft can't secretly be training this stuff. It would be found out. Someone would do a search or whatever it is or use copilot. They'd be like, huh, it's spit back something I wrote the exact thing I typed in this document from 13 years ago or whatever. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's too many disincentives. There's no real incentive to do it. It doesn't make sense. And they say explicitly, they don't do it it to me, case closed. And I, and there's people in the chat right now saying, oh, you know Microsoft's doing it.

[Paul Thurot]

That, that's what I mean. I don't like that. Because if that's where you're at, then just don't use Microsoft stuff. I mean, then walk away. Like you have to just look, if you just don't trust that the company to that level, that they can't literally cannot be trusted.

[Leo Laporte]

Linux, you got Linux, you got to.

[Paul Thurot]

Well use something else. Use a Mac. I mean, can use whatever you want either. No, I, I, I'm just, I don't care. Like use a, use, use an abacus. I don't care. But you know as long as it's not made by the Chinese. Those aren't Chinese. Damn it. Anyway.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it back door?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, that's right. What's inside the beat? What the hell does it.

[Leo Laporte]

Those beats have transmitters.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know. I can't solve all the world's problems. I have my own problems, but I. But this one, I. Look, I. I guess my point was I have a healthy distrust, as a strong word, but a wariness, certainly of Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

Skepticism.

[Paul Thurot]

Skepticism. Thank you. That I did the work. I looked. Did something change? I don't see anything in there.

[Leo Laporte]

So, Paul, you want to kick us off with the top story? The intel blockbuster news.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Apparently they announced new GPUs. Everyone's been looking forward to these and. Dear God. I'm just kidding, who cares? So.

[Leo Laporte]

What'S the big news?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well, yeah. Apparently on Sunday the Intel board of directors gave Pat Gelsinger a no win situation. You could retire or we'll just fire you.

[Micah Sargent]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because he said he retired as of now. As of right now, which usually is a sign. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

A real retirement has a replacement in place.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I have a cardboard box with all my things in it and I'm retiring. Bye.

[Paul Thurot]

Bye. Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is actually, I think it is kind of sad because Gelsinger was brought in just a few years ago. He is a designer. He's been there. He was under Andy Grove back in the day, knows he's an engineer, knows Intel's business, and charted, I think, the proper course, which is separating this, and this is what Ben Thompson's been talking about all the time on strategy. This integrated business into fab and foundry. But I guess it wasn't moving fast enough for the.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I don't think he's the one capable of doing it. It's a disruptor's play. Right. And really there's only two outcomes here for Intel. Actually, there's one outcome. They get dismantled.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean, you get dismantled.

[Richard Campbell]

Are you going to keep the name or not? That's it.

[Paul Thurot]

He seemed to think that, you know, intel was better together. Right? Yeah, but. Well, that's the wonder. I think we're going to learn more about this over time. I don't think we've seen the full story here yet. I think Bloomberg, somebody reported that this transition was, or this recovery was happening more slowly than hoped for. But yeah, I mean, intel made some major strategic mistakes over the years that led to such things as Apple choosing ARM for its iPad, which, you know, that could have been an intel business.

[Leo Laporte]

Incidentally, we talked about this yesterday on MacBreak. What a brilliant move it was for Apple to say, hey, we gotta find something besides Intel. The same thing they did with PowerPC in years past. There was an interview with the chairman or not interview, it was his autobiography. The chairman of TSMC who said we started this conversation in 2011 with Apple.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, I mean Intel. From my perspective on the Windows side of the fence, the big intel crime which has been ongoing for 20 years, years is ignoring repeated pleas from Microsoft mostly to create more efficient CPUs for computers to make these things real time, more device like. Yeah, they did and that sort of proves my point. You know, the low power chips they made are and were, you know, garbage. So that was the beginning of Apple's transition away from Intel. Intel, you know, compared to the Power PC consortium like the Motorola, IBM, whatever it was at the time, you know, was well done and the right move at the time. But then Apple saw that intel wasn't keeping up with where it wanted to go.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, look, Microsoft has analysis on this that you needed the mobile market to justify the cost to modernize your fabs. Right, yeah, to go to extreme, which is incredibly expensive.

[Paul Thurot]

But they didn't really scale.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, but scale failed.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they sell billions for that. To make sense.

[Paul Thurot]

They tried to get it. They had wireless chipsets for a while. They had ARM chipsets by the way, for a while. Which I think X scale might was XKL ARM chipset or not? I don't remember. Maybe not. They tried different things but it was always kind of half hearted. They were always like look, more megahertz. The biggest innovation that they've had in the past decade most likely was their, you know, move from two to four cores for the base core chipsets, you know, like. Which was nice because it didn't impact the battery life at all, but was not.

[Richard Campbell]

They only went multi core back in 2000 because the P4 was such a disaster. Right. And it was the, the Israeli mobile chipset. Their version of the P3 was outrunning the P4 anyway.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, this is, you know, that's.

[Richard Campbell]

Where Core Duo came from.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. So the, the look, at least they had something to fall back on. They owned this little company in Israel. They had a good new architecture, it worked. They got lucky. But they got outmaneuvered by AMD with the move to 64 bits. Were embarrassed by and enraged by the fact that Microsoft adopted x64 and then they had to put it into their own chips which didn't like to See that. But then the next 20 years happened. They just haven't kept up.

[Leo Laporte]

The irony is the board probably cares more about intel being kicked off the Dow than any of that.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean it is pretty.

[Richard Campbell]

Gotta fire the guy who got you kicked off the towel.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's like.

[Paul Thurot]

But he. Okay, but was he or was it not his predecessor or two. Right.

[Micah Sargent]

That led.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean this is a few years ago.

[Paul Thurot]

He adopted a mess. Right. So maybe you guys will have a better example than I do. But the only thing I can think of that's like this where once proud big company failing in a big way and they bring in a fixer. Nokia, Stephen Elop and Yahoo with Marissa Meyer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

And in both cases those did not go well. You know, Yahoo was sold to Verizon, could have probably succeeded as a smaller company, but didn't. And then Nokia. What happened to Nokia? Nothing. So no, I mean they're still around, but who cares? So look, this is what happens sometimes you get disrupted. But the parallels between Microsoft and Intel are super strong. Microsoft had this other thing to turn to when what used to be their primary business started stagnating and then declining, which was in their case the cloud. And intel should have and could have made that transition as well and didn't. And they weren't there for mobile and they're not there for Iot. And remind me what else is? That's everything. Everything AI. Well, which is data center slash. Yes. I mean, so right now intel is still through inertia, the big fish in the smallest of platform ponds there is the PC. And that market's not going anywhere. It's just. Sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Their approach, which is the vertical indication approach, makes sense because they started it. They basically invented this business back in the 70s and 80s. But vertical integration only makes sense if you are continuously innovating.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And the one thing you can't say about intel is they've been innovating.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that what happened really is they got out, innovated.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that really bottom well, because they haven't innovated at all. Right. They really just keep on.

[Paul Thurot]

I just said four cores. How is that not event? No, so no. Just kidding.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You could argue they, they. The troubles go back titanium, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And they were saved by the little ISRA skunk works.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The guys, the core guys.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, first they were. Yeah. They were forced by Microsoft essentially to.

[Richard Campbell]

Adopt that David Cutler wrote his Windows on Windows paper that basically said this is the way.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, and that was the end of that debate. You know Nobody argued.

[Paul Thurot]

That was my, my entry into this world. Well, one of my, one of my entries I guess was in 1998. I went to what was then the NT 5.0 Beta 2 workshop in Seattle and I asked Yusuf Mehti who was on stage setting up or whatever at the time, before the show, before the event, you know, hey, where's Dave Coulter? And he was working on, he said 64 bit stuff. It was like 64 bit stuff and at the time it was digital. What's the digital chip? Oh boy, I can't remember. Well, digital before they were acquired was where it had a 64 bit chip. It was one of, of a few that Microsoft was looking at it. I know. Is that the Alpha?

[Leo Laporte]

Alpha, that's it, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Alpha, yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you. NT before Windows 2000 supported Intel Alpha Power PC and.

[Paul Thurot]

Power PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. With the hardware.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, it was multi architecture. Even the, the, the software itself, the front end was multi architecture. It was supposed to have, have multiple personalities, was a POSIX Environment, OS2 Environment, Windows Environment. And then by the time it kind of came out, they were like, well, you know, Windows. But yeah, it was always designed to be this thing, you know, this thing that was not what Windows was. And then it became Windows. But I don't know, I don't know what. There are too many missed opportunities here for intel and to miss the.

[Richard Campbell]

Admittedly they got punished every time they tried to innovate. Right. Like the itinium was a train wreck.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but that was just a bad design.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I'm with you, but you know the other spin on this is every time we try and paint outside the x86 lines, we get spanked for.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean one of the, you know, I'm going to get the story a little bit wrong, but at the time there was a Microsoft engineer who had gone to intel, they were working on the Itanium stuff and they said, hey, how long do you think it will be before this will be small enough, enough that we could put it inside a laptop? And they were like, oh that's, it's never going to be that small.

[Richard Campbell]

That's not.

[Paul Thurot]

They were like, that will never happen.

[Richard Campbell]

Why would you ever want 64 bits?

[Paul Thurot]

And then they're like, why are we working on this then? I don't understand. Like that should be the point. Right. You know, the world at that time they could see was heading toward, you know, mobility. And that's really been the thing for Intel. I think it's been a lack of.

[Leo Laporte]

Mobility or you Know their inability failed over that. Right. That missed the, the switch to mobile.

[Richard Campbell]

Mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

And, and by missing that, really missed the next generation of computing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, this deeper point that Bob Thompson made about how much it costs to switch to extreme ultraviolet and that unless you've got a billion chips to sell, it's just not worth it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what TSMC did. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's what TSMC got by winning that contract.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. But see the big difference. Well, not the big one of the many differences is that intel was going blame Apple. No, they did the right thing.

[Richard Campbell]

They went for the best chip they could buy, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, they did the right thing. That's not the issue for intel though. Pack Ellison's your plan. Like Leo, I believe it was the right approach for the company, given the kind of cards he was handed. The one issue I see that. One of the issues, I keep saying one issue. One of the issues I see is that intel would have been put in this position where they were partnering with their competitors. Right. For this thing to work, its competing chip makers, designers would have to come to it to build their chips. That's not true of companies like tsmc. I mean, I guess it's technically true of Samsung, but that's an awkward position, like to be like, hey md, hey buddy, how would you like to give us your designs? And we could, you know, put them, we could make them for you. You're like, oh, I don't know, I hope that doesn't sound safe. Like, you know, like, oh no, there's a Chinese wall. I mean, it's just maybe those need to be separate companies. Right. And, and when you look at intel as it is today and you split it into those two obvious halves, it's pretty obvious which has the bigger potential. It's the Foundry business, assuming they can get it right. And that's the company that, you know, the part of the company that got the CHIPS Award and is the future of this thing. So there's a lot of talk now about getting the platform right, meaning x86, but that's a small thing. I mean, fundamentally it's the bigger thing. Is the founder Foundry and I man so much investment, so much money and I don't know that they're ever going to get there.

[Richard Campbell]

No. And, and so then the question is, you gotta, you're gonna cut up the business. The question is, are you gonna do this, you know, in 1980s junk bond style where literally just gonna sell it off for parts?

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Or are you gonna create? Is there some Piece that's gonna hang onto the name. Is the name valuable still?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And, and what you're describing is not a technical discussion or issue, and it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Why you have the wrong CEO.

[Paul Thurot]

It's just business.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, a professional corporate finance CEO makes needs to take charge and make serious financial decisions. I always, you know, assets that are left.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I, I'm in this business or in this industry because I care about technology. I care about the hardware and the software and the. All that stuff. Right. But because, I mean, I've been around for a long time. You have to deal with the company side of it, the business. I, I report on earnings every quarter for multiple companies. And I can tell you just, like, kind of anecdotally, from my own perspective, you don't hear a lot from the board of directors unless something has gone horribly wrong.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Those guys are like a shadow society, right? Like, in other words, like the star chamber in the background. Yeah. No, but I mean, for them to come out publicly, for you to actually get quotes from chair people.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, you.

[Richard Campbell]

This something.

[Paul Thurot]

Something has hit the iceberg.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, it is just supposed to be the representative of the company. The board is supposed to hold their feet to the fire, and when something's gone wrong, is the only time you're.

[Micah Sargent]

Gonna hear from them.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, one of the reasons I wanted you to come into the studio is I knew you would probably bring some fun with you.

[Richard Campbell]

I always bring whiskey with me.

[Leo Laporte]

He brings the fun.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a rule.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you got?

[Richard Campbell]

I got a find. No question about it. You want to grab the bottle there, we can tell the story. So, I mean, we've been going through a bit of a story arc. Even with Micah, when you were off and having some fun, I ran across some really terrible whiskies. There's a big wave of new whiskey companies coming up, and after having some bad experiences, Studies in really bad new whiskey companies, I wanted to have a good experience, and this is one of them.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Irish.

[Richard Campbell]

It's Irish.

[Leo Laporte]

I like Irish whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Clonakilty. Clonakilty. It's so weird. It couldn't even be a technology product name, right? It could be, but Clonakilty is a town in Ireland on the very southern edge of Ireland on the Atlantic Ocean in Cork County. And they were best known for the some of the best black pudding you could get anywhere. But that's changing now because of the Scully family. So the Scully family owns a barley farm outside of Clonakilty, which they've owned for arguably 200 years, nine generations. But they didn't get into whiskey until 2016. So they are one of the new age whiskey makers, longtime family. They have some interesting ideas about how to approach whiskey a little differently. They built their facility out, was up and running by 2019, which means there's no whiskey in there from them. Right. 2019 is too young.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It takes longer than that. In fact, most likely they're buying their whiskey at this point from the new Middleton distillery, which we talked about when we did the Irish episode a while back. That is the distillery that makes Jameson, Telemar, Dew, Red Breast, all of the.

[Leo Laporte]

Spots Green, some of my favorite Irish whiskeys.

[Richard Campbell]

Very good whiskeys.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They did hire a master distiller fellow by the name of Paul Corbett who worked on Tealing and Tipperary, which are both Irish whiskies. So he kind of knows what he's doing. They do have good equipment. They've got the triple pot stills. But their big play has been to build a rack house right on the, on the Sea cloud cliffs. So 200ft above the Atlantic there's this gigantic rack house. And they do the pallet style. So they're using pallets with standing barrels. And so their initial releases, and I'm going to focus on the US releases so you have a chance to get them, these are all going to be Middleton whiskies. And then what they've done is they finish them at this new rack house. So maybe it's got a little hint of sea air, but consistently you'll see the same descriptions where it, it is bourbon aged but something finished. So the double oak, which is about $50 that you can get here in the US is finished in a different kind of oak barrel. The port cask spent its last year in a port barrel. These are all the things that a young distillery could do. Right. They're buying 6, 7, 8 year olds whiskey from the distillery, from the rack houses which all been aged and used bourbon casks. And then they're doing a year in their own rack house to give it a bit of its own character and start to. While they are making their own whiskey, running their stills as hard as they can and starting to rack new make so that a few years from now we're going to see this so we get a chance to see Klontak Hilti in its transition period. They're also making a vodka and a gin because those you can make in a day, right? Like those don't need aging. So they're, they're trying to get a bit of pipeline of income while they are letting their whiskey that they're making themselves mature.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is not yet from their barley field. No, it is from.

[Richard Campbell]

Not yet.

[Leo Laporte]

This is darn good whiskey makers barley field.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean I've got nothing bad to say about New Middleton. Those guys know what they're doing. They make some very, very nice whiskeys.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the whale tail on the label.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And they, they are big on supporting sea level life. They make contributions to some conservatory organizations. They talk about, they talk about some stuff. Like I was reading some of the details of the way they're making their whiskey. And you know that when it comes off the still on that third distillation, Irish whiskey tends to be very high. 87, 88, even pushing 90. And so you don't barrel it that high. It's too much of a solvent. It'll rip stuff out of the wood. It'll make everything. Everybody's sad. And so you cut it with water. You'll take it down into the 60, 65 range before you put it in the barrel to start lifting some flavors from the barrel. And so they've got, they have this idea they call gentle cut where they're introducing water slowly to it, I guess. I mean, I don't know why the whiskey would care. But they went, you know, I study.

[Leo Laporte]

Bottles, be gentle with my whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

I study bottles pretty carefully. So see, they even put right on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Gentle cut. And now it's chill filtered.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, non chill filtered, non chilled. That's removing the flocculation from the product. Right. So I mean this cask, number 3512 was probably the. That's the barrel that they got from Middleton.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And they, that which obviously had been aged in bourbon for X number of years.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not cask strength though.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's at 52.4.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little high.

[Richard Campbell]

So. So that's pretty high. So I think they cut it. They cut it. They came out of the barrel in whatever state it was in. They threw it in a rum cask. Now they don't specify exactly for how long, but probably a year. That's pretty. That's kind of typical.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not very dark. It's kind of a light finish.

[Richard Campbell]

That also means they didn't put any caramel color in it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I like that frankly.

[Richard Campbell]

And I mean you'll get more color if you put it in a port cask because the port parts some color too.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like rumors.

[Richard Campbell]

It's kind of Rumish, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

A light rum, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So I hear there's some Glencairns around.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we could.

[Richard Campbell]

So this.

[Leo Laporte]

Give it a shot.

[Richard Campbell]

So there are three whiskeys.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

In the us, I mentioned the double oak and also the port cask. They also have what they call a single malt Bordeaux. So they finished it in border barrels.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

This is none of those.

[Leo Laporte]

What is this?

[Richard Campbell]

This is a. This one you cannot buy. This is what's called. Called a private barrel select. I got this from a specialty shop which has done the rum finish. They are partnering with a lot of other distilleries and breweries to make special editions in the US to try and get introduced to the US market early with these special editions before their main production starts. So they're doing all the marketing things to establish a market. But let's see what we got. Sko. Oh, I got. It's an Irish kind of a cereal nose.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it. And that's. That's my tasting note. I like it.

[Richard Campbell]

It's yummy. No bite on the front.

[Paul Thurot]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, Just got it, came in there. I almost got a bit of fruit going on. Like a little pear.

[Leo Laporte]

Very smooth.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Very light. And then a heat going down. Like when you. When you actually. When it gets down, you're like, oh, I've drank whiskey. Not only that, but I've dropped. Drank 54%. This is remarkably gentle.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I know.

[Paul Thurot]

For that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, it's quite good.

[Richard Campbell]

We're not prepped for this. Or this. Sorry. 52.4. I would normally, at this moment, take a little bit of water, maybe two drops, put it in there and see what happens.

[Leo Laporte]

Gently.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Just to see where it goes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we can do that now because.

[Richard Campbell]

It'S over, because the show is over. So I got.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, Paul. He looks so left out.

[Richard Campbell]

Quana Kilty is new into the US market. Market. You can find a few bottles around. They're running in the $50 range.

[Leo Laporte]

It's quite good for 50.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that's great, knowing that it's actually one of the new Middleton whiskies, which are all very good and they've done their own finishing Middleton.

[Leo Laporte]

It definitely has.

[Richard Campbell]

That has that kind of little Jameson, you know. Although I'd say less heat than Jameson.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, it's quite good.

[Richard Campbell]

So as much as I. I mean, I always thought I'd only introduce the whiskeys that I loved, I have now brought a few to the table that I'm like, don't buy this and this, but this is one I'm like, this is new to me.

[Leo Laporte]

I would keep this around.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's very drinkable in the.

[Leo Laporte]

House for anybody who came over and wanted to.

[Richard Campbell]

And it makes me happy that there are new whiskey makers making good new whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

No kidding. And when they start actually making their own whiskey, we'll have to see what they make.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Very curious. Would that make a difference if they have their own barley and their own distillation?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I think there's no substitute for five years in a barrel in their warehouse.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the finishing. It really matters.

[Richard Campbell]

So the finishing makes a big difference. But the islet, because they're so close to the sea consistently, they talk about those sort of salty notes, those kinds of flavors, as opposed to highlands that are further from the sea. This is one. Most Irish warehouses aren't near the sea. This is pretty much the only one that close to the ocean. So they may have something unique.

[Leo Laporte]

Sea air and it's consistent temperature, probably it's stabler.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. So they have a possibility.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And. But it's gonna. We're. We're five years away from knowing.

[Leo Laporte]

No peanut butter flavor, though.

[Paul Thurot]

Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Can't taste a chocolate anywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't taste cinnamon. It just tastes like whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. Disturbingly like whiskey. He's hung up, hasn't he? He's so annoyed with us.

[Leo Laporte]

So pissed off. He says, I have nothing to do with it. That's Richard Campbell. He brings whiskey whenever he comes. And it's always nice to see you. It's been a while.

[Richard Campbell]

Been a while.

[Leo Laporte]

You. You haven't been in this new studio.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's the first time in the new studio. Last time we saw each other in person, we were on a cruise ship.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the cruise. I forgot. Yeah. Where we all got Covid. That was fun.

[Richard Campbell]

Including my wife.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Richard. So nice to see you. Safe trip home. Not too much of the clonakilty before you leave, although you can have lunch in the other room. I appreciate that. I think that'll help. That Clonakilty was very good, by the way. I still have a little. If you want to come over and celebrate the holidays with. With us. We're so glad you did celebrate the holidays with this best of Windows Weekly. We take great pride in the show that Paul and Richard put together. It's just such a great show, and we're so glad you watch. We're glad you could watch today. Now, I got to tell you, next week, it's New Year's day, and Paul and Richard will probably still be celebrating. So we're going to wait a little while. But we will be back with our first show. When is our first show of 2025, Anthony? Is it January 7th? I look at a calendar. Plus, it's the 8th. We're checking now. Math is hard. Anyway, we will be back next Wednesday. How about that? With a brand new. Not Next Wednesday, a week from Wednesday. How about that? With a brand new Windows Weekly. Have a great holiday. We're so glad you could be here, so glad you watched, and I wish you and yours the best of the holiday season and a wonderful new year from all of us here at the Twit Network.

[Paul Thurot]

Bye.